If next turn the Reduction in plan commitments still cost around 25 Political support for the 4 bureau dices we shouldn't shy away from starting Shala and Columbia before we're done with Enterprise. Even if it isn't the perfect planning that we had for our orbital station building we have already done a lot to optimize it. It's still points toward our plan goals too so we don't even need to find extra dices to put there.
No, actually, we do. The big bottleneck for our Orbital plans is that we committed to
finishing Enterprise along with the moon mining. The "must build 6000 points of stations" is already fulfilled by finishing Enterprise, so work done on another, entirely different station isn't actually contributing to our promises.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong about the conclusion, but our ability to complete the Orbital goals is still
very tight, and any effort to work on
Shala or
Columbia would have to be supported by Free dice.
Why are we reducing commitments?
Looks like we can still hit everything.
Karachi may be impossible due to the military situation, including
but not limited to the bad naval situation caused by our failure to build warships well in advance.
The Consumer Goods target may be hard to hit depending on exactly how things play out, because our expectation of hitting the target was always contingent on the private sector not collapsing into burning rubble. I haven't run an analysis on that.
@doruma1920 has,
here, and thinks we're okay, but I'm not sure I fully understand their assumptions, so I'm not sure what to make of things.
The Capital Goods target
should be hit (and we need the Capital Goods!), but may be tricky given the need to shovel a
LOT of dice into fusion power to keep all our war factories humming along and build new ones.
And the Stored Food target... well that one's just a massive monkey wrench in the works, from the point of view of us trying to feed the refugee wave.
See, when that requirement was imposed, it was the legislature asking us to prepare GDI to refight the
previous Tiberium Wars, where Nod went on the rampage, fucked up agriculture, and left us all eating fungus bars. The idea this time was to stash enough canned beans and vegetarian spam and whatever that we wouldn't be forced to resort to fungus bars. And what we would have had to do to fulfill that dream of never eating a fungus bar again was to grow a huge amount of surplus Food (+40, maybe +30 with the freeze-drying plants in place?), and build giant repositories to store a jillion tons of canned beans and whatnot, then store the surplus Food in those repositories.
Which we could have done, and in theory could still do...
But there's a problem. Or rather, good news that complicates the plan.
...
See, instead of the Fourth Tiberium War starting with Nod rampaging all over GDI's territory, like GDI planned, GDI had the brainwave idea to Uno reverse card that arrangement. How about
we go on the rampage all over
their territory, instead? And so far, it's mostly mostly working, unless of course you are Stahl.
Which means two things:
1) The plan to stockpile a jillion tons of canned beans is now probably redundant.
Nod is on the back foot in the wider world as a whole, they are not forcing us to dig into stockpiles of canned beans. By the time this war is over, Nod will be all tuckered out and unlikely to be
able to force us to dig into giant food stockpiles, at least in the immediate future. While stashing all that food away still wouldn't be a
bad thing
as such, the grim reality of war experience that motivated the legislature to tell us to do it... has changed. War. War has changed. Vegetarian spam repositories may not be required.
2) Refugees hunger for beans.
We have an unknown but potentially
huge number of Yellow Zoners who are about to become Green and/or Blue Zoners. Like, we don't even know how many. Could conceivably be fifty or a hundred million. Partly, that's the people whose homes we straight-up conquer back from Nod. Partly, that's the people who come to us now that the front lines have advanced and are all like "please let us crash on your couch where there is Internet access and no loose tiberium under the sofa cushions." But all those refugees need Housing and Food, which means our numbers go down, which means to make our numbers go back
up we need to keep our Housing and Food surpluses strong. Now, Housing is kind of its own problem, but with Food? Food for refugees competes
very specifically with Food to be shoveled into the stockpile. Remember that +30 or +40 Food surplus we'd need to gobble up to turn into Stored Food at a 2:1 (maybe 3:2 with freeze drying plants?) ratio? Yeah, that would feed a
lot of refugees. Dunno how many.
...
So when all is said and done, we could be a lot more confident in our ability to feed the refugees (and also in our ability to do Cool Shit like build the third phase of
Wadmalaw Kudzu Plantations for universal +1 to all dice, or invent the poulticeplant), if we
didn't have that Stored Food requirement hanging over us.
