I skimmed over the last discussion pages and wow, it got... pretty tense...
To be fair, it rarely gets this heated here, usually the discussion is far more amiable.
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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
I skimmed over the last discussion pages and wow, it got... pretty tense...
To be fair, it rarely gets this heated here, usually the discussion is far more amiable.
Decim
On again, off again lurker.
- Location
- St. Louis, MO
That, or the overall success of GDI (the last roll was 80-ish to 15 and we won 11 out of 20 rolls overall) in fighting Nod and continuing to push has hugely extended supply lines through attrition, combat losses, garrison support, refugee support, and integration of the newly taken populations and territory.
War is a gigantic strain on the economy as sudden unexpected demands throw things out of line. It could be that we're facing needing vastly more housing, logistics, food, and basic consumer goods just to keep things going. Things that we were mostly set on achieving in good order, but now we aren't thanks to the War. Knowing that the Regency War is far from over, things will only get worse.
That said, take my speculation with a grain of salt. I could very easily be way off base here.
If the Legendary Insurgent had survived to become part of Kane's inner circle he'd be Kane's right hand man and we'd be facing a properly coordinated, unified NOD years ago and we'd be in deep shit. We'd be seeing none of the jockeying we've seen with the warlords to become Kane's right hand because Kane would already have one.
Instead of a few Masterstrokes at the same time we'd be seeing *all* the Masterstrokes committed at the same time in a coordinated fashion for example.
Not necessarily.
Kane's goals are not really aligned with the NOD's at wide.
His inner circle serves his interests alone, and if he deems it necessary to lay low for now, the commanders of his inner circle, including possibly the Legendary Insurgent will lay low as well.
I actually expect for Reynaldo to be "done" for this war, only to emerge later as left hand of Kane, with Legendary Insurgent being the right one.
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Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We don't actually know what the various DCs on that action are gating (Ithillid's keeping it deliberately vague until we actually do the thing); could be number of goals we can enter negotiations over, could be how favourable the deals we strike end up being, could be something else entirely. In my case at least, I'm putting all dice on it because I want to hit that top DC for insurance, so we get the most value out of what is going to be a politically expensive action.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Ehh, not as much as you'd think. We're still up around +16 Capital Goods or so, which is enough for our stockpile to ride out any disaster short of, say, Gideon nuking North Boston. Anything less than that, we can grunt and power through without too much trouble, I'd say.
And Nuuk Phase 3 is coming along soon, if not necessarily this turn, so running the surplus down a bit isn't so bad when we know we'll bring it back up soon.
[cracks math teacher knuckles]
Here's what I do, when I need a number Derpmind doesn't have.
I go to anydice.com . I type in the following sequence:
Xd100 + Y + Z + 15
X is the number of dice I intend to roll, Y is the combined dice bonus on all those dice (depending by field), Z is the existing progress (say, if it's a 50/200 project than Z=50), and +15 is because that's the range where projects complete on omake bonuses.
Then I push the "AT LEAST" button and hit "calculate."
...
Then I look down until I see the line that corresponds to "dice result of at least C," where C is the Progress cost of the project. If all these things are done, then anydice has used certain statistical theorems to calculate the probability of Xd100+(modifiers) rolling at least the target number. Which is what you need.
Of course, Derpmind has long since automated this process and has her own spreadsheet for it and everything, but if you want to do it bespoke, that's how I do it when I do it bespoke.
To be fair, Doc Granger had the support and good wishes of Director Granger, who was kind of an apolitical caretaker government type and painfully acquainted with the stern necessities of survival. A more political man might well have used Doc Granger as a scapegoat and tried to find a replacement in an attempt to do well out of the 2052 elections.
And our current head of state seems like a nice woman, but I don't know if she's that nice.
You may well be right, but it does bear remembering that Seo is operating in a time when GDI's population feels like it has options, choices, and some amount of hope. That tends to make people more willing to raise trouble over things they don't like.
In fairness, if we're that low on Political Support, it's probably because we renegotiated Plan goals... in which case we've already paid the price to get ones we think we can meet, and if we still can't meet them we deserve to take the heat.
What were the rules on when we actually get to put dice into our reverse engineering gacha results again? Because I just remembered we got portal tech in the last one and I'm personally gonna be voting for whatever meme plan dumps everything into that when it's available. Like that time we did the orbital inhibitor satellites and responded to a minor no name NOD attempt to poke it with a sustained 24 hour bombardment on their everything.
I would like to wait for the exact numbers in the first place.
Currently we can get all the goals pretty reliably, so I really want to see just how much damage there is before committing to any renegotiation.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Wait, if we want to renegotiation Plan goals because of the way the war is changing the situation, shouldn't we wait a few more turns for a few more Masterstrokes to fire off? Otherwise we'd get blindsided and potentially fail even the renegotiated Plan. It'd be better for there to be less potential for unpleasant surprises.
Durabys
Miaow! Break the Chains!
- Location
- the land of the Boii
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I am pretty sure that after the entire Qatar fiasco he told the Legendary Insurgent detailed intel about his long-term goals: Getting part of Nod off this rock and then use them and Space!GDI to kill the Reapers.
AKA: No more accidental betrayals from that direction. I mean, Kane is probably pretty sure that the Final Endgame is going to fire off within 2-3 centuries at this point. Which is well within Nod's Transhuman tech to prolong one's life, like the life of the Insurgent. I fully expect the Legendary Insurgent and Stahl being Nod military's Chief of Staff and Chief of Ground Forces equivalents in the ME sequel.
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Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Renegotiating earlier is more responsible. If we wait until the last available moment to say "actually we can't meet these goals" it looks sloppy on our part, whereas if we do it earlier with the war kicking into high gear then it indicates that we're taking things seriously and accounting for the worst outcomes. It's like explaining missing/late homework - if you only tell the teacher on the deadline they'll be all "why didn't you tell me earlier, we could have worked something out," where if you had told them earlier there would have been the possibility of pushing back the deadline or something. In our case then, doing the renegotiation earlier is more likely to be met with leniency, especially if we're making the case that we have to stay focused on the war effort and that some of the goals aren't tenable right now. Nod's very clearly bloodied our nose already, so I don't think anyone on our side is under the impression that they're just going to roll over.
Like I said before, I'm not confident that this war is going to go quickly or painlessly, so I'd prefer to prepare for the worst.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hm. I guess I can see it- though given how many of our Heavy Industry dice are being invested in fusion power and Nuuk (big projects with rollover), the cumulative +3's would pay for themselves within about 26 or 27 dice, as I recall- which if we were spending at maximum rate would pay off before the end of the Plan, but that's admittedly unlikely. Likewise, we've been averaging ~12 Military dice per turn, so the AEVAs would normally in theory pay for themselves within only 2-3 turns... except that in general that's subdivided among a jillion little individual projects, where it really only matters that you have a +3 if that means the difference between completion and being just short of completion.
I dunno.
Ehh. Well, in my case I was hoping to postpone the completion of AMA until Q4 for the same reason you were hoping to postpone the completion of Nuuk- budget constraints with Energy/Cap Goods being tight. But I can respect the mindset. We do have some wiggle room.
In Light Industry, I think you see mechs and power armor as more likely to be on the docket for Q4. Come Q4, we're still going to be deploying wingman drones of some kind, there will still be shipyards to build; I'm not optimistic about finding room for a zone armor factory. The demand may not justify expanding the supply. Whereas we know very well we'll be buildling tons of fusion reactors to eat up any superconductor output we can manage.
In Agriculture, well, we're on track to be at about +20 Food minus whatever our first wave of refugees eat. That's a thick enough cushion that I'd rather throw some dice at the kudzu plantations now while we can, and to get the +10 PS sooner rather than later. We have to do it, so we might as well do it promptly.
As for Orbital, you're um... I don't think this is a good strategy. We know, deterministically, as a matter of basic fact, that we're going to have to do at least three more phases of "big moon mines" (regolith and/or heavy metals). There are only two phases of rare metals to work with. It is desirable to frontload the more cost effective big mines now, rather than be forced to complete them in the last turn or two of the Plan. This way, they pay for themselves better, whereas the rare metals mines are not going to pay for themselves even if we start them now.
What I would envision is something like, making three simplifying assumptions:
1) That we can get two more phases of each kind of mine to pay off with the expansions to Enterprise being twice the scale of the Enterprise Phase 3 infrastructure that only lets one phase pay off.
2) That, just for the sake of roughly sketching out a plan, we talk about what the outcomes look like if all dice roll their median result. However, I'm planning to slow-walk projects to economize on dice anyway, to be clear- so the plan still looks sort of like this if rolls go well or poorly.
3) Cost reductions to new phases of mines thanks to completed phases of mines are ignored, for the sake of being slightly pessimistic.
2060Q3:
-[] Lunar Heavy Metals Mines (Phase 2+3) 145/760 (6 Dice, 120 R) (Phase 2, 2% chance to Phase 3)
Assume median results.
Heavy Metals Phase 2 clears. Rollover 219/375 on Phase 3.
2060Q4:
-[] Lunar Heavy Metals Mines (Phase 3) 219/375 (2 Dice, 40 R) (61.7% chance; one die couldn't do it)
-[] Lunar Regolith Harvesting (Phase 2) 50/330 (3 Dice, 60 R) (25% chance)
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 1) 0/160 (1 Die, 20 R) (1/2 median)
Assume median results.
Heavy Metals Phase 3 clears. Rollover negligible; median result clears on omake power.
Regolith Harvesting Phase 2 at 279/330.
Rare Metals Harvesting Phase 1 at 76/160.
2061Q1:
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 102/1535 (3 Dice, 60 R) (3/17.5 median)
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 1+2) 76/305 (2 Dice, 40 R) (99% chance of Phase 1, 8% chance of Phase 2)
Assume median results.
Enterprise Phase 5 reaches 346/1535 Progress.
Regolith Harvesting Phase 2 clears. Rollover 25/??? on Phase 3.
Rare Metals Harvesting Phase 1 clears. Rollover 69/145 on Phase 2.
2061Q2:
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 346/1535 (5 Dice, 100 R) (5/14.5 median)
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 2) 69/145 (1 Die, 20 R) (66% chance)
Assume median results.
Enterprise Phase 5 reaches 753/1535 Progress.
Rare Metals Harvesting Phase 2 clears with minimal rollover.
2061Q3:
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 753/1535 (6 Dice, 100 R) (6/9.5 median)
Assume median results.
Enterprise Phase 5 reaches 1242/1535 Progress.
2061Q4:
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 1242/1535 (6 Dice, 120 R) (99.9% chance)
Now, aside from any possible math errors, I see two objections.
One is "but Simon, what if we roll poorly," to which I can only say "then we need to apply Free dice." If all the rolls were 50's or 51's, this is what we could do. If we roll systematically badly on the moon mines, we have to slow-walk them out farther, which eats into Enterprise dice and requires Free dice expenditure. Enterprise is the best "buffer" for the risk of unlucky rolls because it is the largest project, the one where the law of averages is most likely to step in and keep things from being too bad..
Another objection to this is that there's some potential for wasted dice if we throw six dice at Enterprise at the tail end of the Plan. But that would be present anyway if we were instead slow-walking a mining project, because the problem with slow-walking a mine is that by definition the probability of completion in any one turn is never all that certain until and unless you get to the very end and can complete on bonuses alone. That's the entire point of slow-walking. I'd rather not have to gamble on, say, an 80% chance of the last moon mine completing and fulfilling our promise in order to have a near-certainty of Enterprise completing in 2061Q4 like we promised.
Anyway, that's how I see it. First do the moon mines, slow-walking the projects to completion as appropriate, and prioritizing the bigger mines first. Which is because they have better return on resource investment, do more to make Orbital a self-funding category, and (we are told) tend to be more impactful on the overall cost lowering of other lunar mine phases (which I didn't factor into the analysis since I can't calculate it).
Then we do Enterprise with the remaining dice- and we have enough, even without Free dice, if we have merely average levels of good/bad luck.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Maybe, but if Kane's goals revolve around "lay low," then why is he compromising his own future bargaining position with GDI by allowing Nod, his dogs of war, to run off the leash and assault us? If he's conserving his strength for a decisive blow, then this isn't the way to go about it. If he's trying to pivot to a strategy of cooperation so he can get the TCN built, then the Regency War is needlessly antagonizing us.
We can easily hit them IF we don't find out that our refugee wave is going to be scarfing down -10 Food, -30 Food, or -50 Food. The problem is that we don't actually know, and a population increase of this scale is unprecedented and therefore hard to calculate in advance.
We don't know how many new mouths we have to feed. And OOC, we don't really even know how many points of Food it takes to feed, say, 20 million more people.
The food storage requirement literally eats up about -27 Food between now and end of Plan, and forces us to commit a lot of Agriculture dice to physically building the storage repositories. This isn't a problem if the refugees' food requirements are small relative to the scale of our production (-10), and it's probably manageable if their requirements are medium-sized (-20 or -25), but it could be a big curse for us if their requirements are large (-40 or -50).
Well, let's think about it. What are our remaining Plan commitments?
Stuff in space only gets harder to do if Nod hits our stuff in space through the existing ASAT grid. Not impossible, but not my first guess.
Military development projects are pretty easy to do; Nod can't stop us from designing railgun munitions somewhere. They probably can't stop us from building kudzu plantations or arcologies or whatever, either. It's not that they can't inflict damage in those areas, but they would have a hard time stopping us from keeping our promises, were we determined to do so.
The most likely current plan targets to be deeply threatened, in my opinion, are:
1) Karachi (for obvious reasons, such as the naval situation being terrible).
2) Tiberium mitigation/processing/harvesting (but we have a lot of ways to make those up, soooo)
3) Stored Food (if the refugee wave eats so many Foods that we can't spare enough)
4) Consumer Goods (if the economy crashes and the private sector can't hold up)
5) Capital Goods (if a major factory gets smashed and that counts against us)
Speaking from experience, the problem comes when the student explains a problem in advance, gets an extension, then something else happens* they have to ask for another extension, and another, and another.
The danger for us is that some Bad Shit happens and forces us to compromise on Plan goals, but then more Bad Shit happens and we have to do it again and again, renegotiating in smaller steps over and over.
It might be better to at least wait until, say, 2061Q1 or so, when hopefully most of the warlords will have shot their respective bolts and we can make a more realistic and full assessment of the damages.
Well, I do not know, of course, but any inkling that he is active, even as a moderating influence, would raise alert levels of GDI in the stratosphere, potentially resulting in danger for his inner circle.
He also may be injured, or not being at 100% while doing whatever it is he is doing while being "dead".
And him returning and purging illoyal NOD warlords who did not keep faith in him while he was away is a pretty typical modus operandi for him, is it not?
I may be also completely wrong, of course.
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- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
Kane isn't "dead" at the moment though. As far as GDI is concerned Kane swopped in, stole the giant alien datebase and just vanished into thin air.
They have absolutely no idea where or what Kane is doing at the moment. The fact this is called the "regency" war by both sides, do imply though that even if Kane is alive, as far as GDI is concerned, he isn't "active" at the moment.
(I do also think, that even GDI wouldn't put Kane as confirmed killed even if 15 snipers shoot him at once.
Important to remember that for as long as everyone has been alive and even their ancestors Kane has been alived. Survived fatal wounds twice at least
The messiah lives..I think for most people even blue zoner's this is a fact of life at this point. Apples are red, ocean is blue, Kane is immortal.
A sense of cultural belief that they may beat Kane, but they can't kill him, not permanently.)
They have absolutely no idea where or what Kane is doing at the moment. The fact this is called the "regency" war by both sides, do imply though that even if Kane is alive, as far as GDI is concerned, he isn't "active" at the moment.
(I do also think, that even GDI wouldn't put Kane as confirmed killed even if 15 snipers shoot him at once.
Important to remember that for as long as everyone has been alive and even their ancestors Kane has been alived. Survived fatal wounds twice at least
The messiah lives..I think for most people even blue zoner's this is a fact of life at this point. Apples are red, ocean is blue, Kane is immortal.
A sense of cultural belief that they may beat Kane, but they can't kill him, not permanently.)
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
This is why my headcanon is that Dr. Granger did his best to establish as a meme within GDI something along the lines of:
"If we don't beat tiberium, we're evacuating everyone into space. Everyone. Except Kane, who can get out and walk."
Because how else do you credibly threaten to spite an utterly immortal man?
"If we don't beat tiberium, we're evacuating everyone into space. Everyone. Except Kane, who can get out and walk."
Because how else do you credibly threaten to spite an utterly immortal man?
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
I don't recall increased demand from refugees counting against Food targets.
The goals were to increase production by X, not meet a certain +X threshold.
Although, Food in Reserve functions differently.
Somehow, I suspect the Food Reserve target is not going to be the problem...
It is also possible that sabotage doesn't specifically count against a goal, as long as the project in question was completed.
We'll obviously still have to address the resulting problem, but I don't think the parliament would consider it a failed goal.
The only issue should be if we have to divert spending away from uncompleted goals to fix up major issues.
We know it OOC, but is there in character knowledge that it was Kane who stole it and not "a warlord"?
Serious question here, because I do not remember any in quest information about it.
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- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
Well, GDI know it was the marked of Kane and a fully serious force that went in and stole it.
And while it's possible that some warlord managed to borrow the marked of Kane, in such huge numbers(like, that was every single marked of kane) atop having an extremly scary commanded(legion) means that the most logical solution is Kane.
He's only one who's gonna be able to raise such a huge, high quality force in aftermath of the third tiberium war, were most NOD commanders would be licking their wounds.
Even if it was another commander, Kane could just come and take it from them. Not like warlord could hide they got the Tacius, given it was the hyper loyal marked of Kane that actually did the stealing.
So, for GDI while they don't know 100%, every sign point towards the shiny bald head of Kane
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, the problem is that Food grown by our projects and eaten by refugees is not simultaneously available to be converted into Stored Food.
Right now we're at, I forget but let's say +20 Food. Suppose we convert all of that into Stored Food, with options that total (-20 Food, +10 Stored Food).
We get +10 Stored Food in the inventory, putting us 60% of the way to our plan target... but now we are at +0 Food.
Then a bunch of refugees show up saying "we're hungry" and we go into negative Food.
...
The point is that we don't have an actual Food target (in which case there wouldn't be an issue and feeding extra Food points to refugees would be fine). We have a Stored Food target, which requires us to do things that actively reduce our Food surplus, and thus potentially compete for Food with the refugee wave that will also be reducing our Food surplus.
One thing that might be appealing is to renegotiate the "add 20 Stored Food" requirement into a "just add +40 Food" requirement. In that case, we basically just do the phase where we build a ton of actual Food-producing farms, but skip the part where we build repositories and all those beans disappear from the shelves and go into giant bunkers instead of feeding refugees.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Is that worth -20 PS? One understandly failed goal would probably cost us a lot less.
To me it sounds like there's far too little information to make any kind of decision about this.
To me it sounds like there's far too little information to make any kind of decision about this.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, personally I favor waiting a few turns until the situation starts to clarify before renegotiating Plan goals anyway.
But remember that there are at least two goals where we can foresee problems: the Stored Food target, and Karachi. And the Consumer Goods target may be tough to meet as well, and then there's God knows what problems from Nod sabotage.
It's not just one thing.
Mr. Mica
Capitalism cannot fix Global Warming.
- Location
- Earth
According to doruma1920's Preliminary Four Year Plan Required Dice as of the start of Q3 2060, there are 6 Agricultural dice available that can be used for extra food before it is needed to dip into the free dice pool.
[ ] Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 1) (Updated)
While GDI's current agricultural methods are not particularly labor intensive, a widespread deployment of additional mechanization and statistical analysis should allow for the reduction in overall labor committed to the agricultural sector, and allow that workforce to be allocated elsewhere.
(Progress 0/150: 15 resources per die) (+8 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
(Progress 0/250: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
[ ] Vertical Farming Projects (Stage 2)
With a first wave of vertical farms completed, a second wave located in less critical cities can begin. While these next waves will be marginally less expensive than the original batch, a result of some efficiencies in the learning process, they are of roughly the same scale and distribution as previous designs.
( Progress 65/240: 15 resources per die) (+4 Food, +4 Consumer goods, -2 Energy)
While GDI's current agricultural methods are not particularly labor intensive, a widespread deployment of additional mechanization and statistical analysis should allow for the reduction in overall labor committed to the agricultural sector, and allow that workforce to be allocated elsewhere.
(Progress 0/150: 15 resources per die) (+8 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
(Progress 0/250: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
[ ] Vertical Farming Projects (Stage 2)
With a first wave of vertical farms completed, a second wave located in less critical cities can begin. While these next waves will be marginally less expensive than the original batch, a result of some efficiencies in the learning process, they are of roughly the same scale and distribution as previous designs.
( Progress 65/240: 15 resources per die) (+4 Food, +4 Consumer goods, -2 Energy)
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Pretty sure ithillid wont make us failing a plan target better PS wise than negotiating the goals down, this would not be very mechanically satisfying. Similar should we renegotiate lunar mine goals to station goals as in "We cant use PS to convince the politicians of stuff to farm PS", but idk, we will see.