REACTION POOOST! (belated)
Housing: +40 (27 population in low quality housing)
Food: +22 (+10 in reserve)
Health: -1 (-8 from Wartime Demand) (-5 from Refugees)
These are indicators I've been watching. Last turn they were:
Housing: +34 (17 population in low quality housing)
Food: +14 (+10 in reserve)
Health: +2 (-7 from Wartime Demand) (-3 from Refugees)
So Housing went up... but we constructed +8 actual (low-quality) Housing, and wound up with +6 more
surplus housing in total... even though we now have 27 units of population in low-quality housing instead of 17. I'm a bit confused about what that means. It
sounds like we're not going to end up in a position where our Housing surplus evaporates overnight in the space of 1-2 turns and leaves us feeling foolish about not having constructed like seven phases of extra apartments as a precautionary measure, but I'm a bit nervous.
Food... yeah, we're at +22 instead of +14. Given that we seem (?) to only have increased actual production by +6 I'm a bit confused here too, but it's certainly not a bad thing or a bad sign.
Health went from +2 to -1, which is of course bad, but we'd be in the positives if we hadn't rolled badly on
both +Health projects, and it's a problem we can fix, not something we're stuck with for several turns. Even if the refugee/wartime penalties to Health get
significantly worse in 2060Q3 than they are now, the +10 Health from the two projects we have cooking should be more than enough, and doing the extra +2 Health for -4 Capital Goods project would just be icing on the cake (which personally I'd rather postpone until after
Nuuk Phase 3 clears).
Militarist: 754 seats (200; 304; 150; 100)
Developmentalists: 1038 seats (470; 268; 250; 50)
Before, this was:
Militarist: 754 seats (250; 254; 150; 100)
Developmentalists: 1038 seats (500; 238; 250; 50)
The Homeland and Reclamation mini-parties don't seem to have shifted, which surprised me a bit. The big note here is that a bunch of Militarists like us
more, apparently, despite the naval fuckup, probably because we're delivering elsewhere.
Military Confidence
Ground Forces : Very High
Air Force : Decent
Space Force : Decent
Steel Talons: Low
Navy: Low
ZOCOM: Decent
Ground Force confidence is down to merely 'Very High;' Navy confidence is down to 'Low.' That last is basically a symptom of what we already knew, and we're already working on it as best we can. No cause for panic here.
Brotherhood of Nod
Of the warlords in the remnants of Mexico, Jose Luis Mondragón is probably the most well known and capable. With Gideon relatively far away, Mondragón has chosen to strike out on his own. While not as politically skilled as Gideon, he has been one of the more technically adept of the warlords, and a source of many of Gideon's walkers. He is just as unlikely to negotiate as, like Gideon, he is heavily influenced by the Black Hand.
With his position trapped between the encroaching Red Zone and the Initiative controlling his coastlines, he is a cornered rat, one that may well lash out if pressured. However, he is not expected to launch into a death or glory attack at this moment, as that seems to have been one of the division points that led to his split with Gideon.
Well, pressuring Gideon just got interesting- the man's lost a chunk of his power, even if the security situation in North America as a whole hasn't really improved.
In the great north, there are dozens of minor warlords. While the region is mostly barren and relatively poor in Tiberium, it does have one thing that the Brotherhood of Nod desperately needs. Massive volumes of empty terrain. Jessica Majors, one of the most experienced mining hands in the region, has rallied them to Krukov's banner in the name of better working conditions and greater appreciation for their work.
I'm a bit confused. Is Waters operating out of the Canadian Yellow Zone, or the Siberian Yellow Zone? References to fighting in and around Seattle and Calgary suggests the former, so... well, Canadian, probably.
This sounds like a consequence of us cutting through the Yellow Zones to the Red Zone boundary around the Great Salt Lake and in Wisconsin. Gideon's territory isn't just a hilariously long strung-out ribbon now, it's literally cut into three, with only air and subterranean transport options left if Nod wants to move between the three areas in the American South, Canada, and the Southwest. This
de facto breaks Gideon's power over the other two fractions, which apparently cuts him off from a lot of his high tech
and a lot of his industrial-tiberium base.
Waters signing over to Krukov is worrying, but the two are actually separated by a considerable stretch of distance and are unlikely to be able to stay in contact except by under-the-ice submarine travel across the Arctic Sea. That doesn't permit extensive transfer of bulk resources, though we might see Waters hulk out if supplied with copies of Krukov's production tooling and trainers to help her build heavy mechanized units.
Shells
With current levels of shell production GDI is rapidly depleting its shell stockpiles. Much of this is expected, as GDI is engaging in rapid, sweeping offensives across huge swathes of the world, and so deploying hundreds of additional batteries of guns at any given time. While the supply of guided shells will be depleted in five to seven months, the supply of standard shells is substantially better, with approximately ten months until depletion. While reductions in the pace and intensity of offensives will slow the rate of depletion, Ground Forces Command does not believe that to be advisable at this time.
Primarily this is a result of the massive expenditures associated with global offensives, and far from a new normal. Under regular circumstances, where the Initiative is not trying to fight on every front and against every foe, current production levels will maintain and rapidly increase the stockpile.
Other consumables are in a similar state. While stocks are being depleted rapidly, they are at a point where significant action can make a substantial difference. Additionally, while not particularly viable at this time, there has been some effort put towards offering up a plan to spin off a section of the military procurement bureau to focus entirely on the various consumables needed by the military.
Hunh.
Okay, I think we're gonna
have to push some more shell plants this quarter to avoid running out in 2060Q4 and causing Steel Vanguard to hit a choke chain. Ground Forces' revised preferences confirms this.
Ablatives and missiles... I'd love to do more with them, but the Air Force needs us to at least
try to get the ball rolling on the Firehawk Drones, and the Navy needs all of the everything about three years ago and will
really need more hulls in the water in the aftermath of the war given the beating they'll take
now.
Hm. Preferences... Talons is acknowledging that things can wait. Air Force wants wingman drones, no surprise there. Navy is screaming for hulls and help of all kinds, ditto.
The dispersed rail network has also rapidly added to capacity. With GDI's train production units working at full speed, there is simply more rail being laid than they can swiftly build cars and engines to fill. These swarms of new trains shall travel across new stations, crossroads, junctions, and most importantly, lines, which have given GDI not just the ability to rapidly move between the points of civilization on a map, but to many places at the uninhabited edges of the Blue Zones.
Bit confused about what this means- it sounds like we may actually get a "build more train factories" project soon. I imagine that continuous expansion of the rail network is being matched by production of rolling stock from the factories we built some years ago, but eventually we're bound to hit the limit of what the existing rail depot and roundhouse-type infrastructure can maintain and replace losses for, requiring further expansion of production.
One of the first beneficiaries has in fact been Erewhon. With its limited need for support, the first isolinear fabricator has been dedicated to its needs, and has started slowly replacing silicon and germanium with pieces of isolinear quartz. While this has not improved its overall stability, it does seem to have given it marginal improvements in its ability to conduct operations.
Hrrrm. Well, stability is what I was worrying about. I hope that continued isolinear installations
do stabilize Erewhon, because I'm not sure what else we can do in a reasonable timeframe.
The Developmentalists see the clear purpose of the station as a prototype, an asset to be leveraged to claim the Solar system as a whole, favoring conversion into a shipyard, building both fusion and gravitic drive ships, but also as a birthing point for large chunks of station components. Enterprise may be the only one of its kind, but, fundamentally, as a station high in Earth's gravity well, it can do things that are difficult or impossible down on Earth.
Their main opposition however is the Militarist party, seeing Enterprise's more immediate uses. Most notably its ability to support further development of the OSRCT concept that has proven its validity repeatedly in the last six months of heavy action. With the current war their immediate focus, they see it as a means of providing GDI with an incredibly rapid means of reinforcement, building orbital support satellites, combat equipment, and advanced equipment that is difficult to manufacture properly on Earth.
All interesting- but we should probably delay bay construction in favor of moon mining and Phase 5 of the station itself. It's iffy whether we'll be able to spare Free dice, what with the war.
[ ] Orbital Cleanup (Stage 9)
With much of the largest and slowest of the debris collected, all that remains is the increasingly small and fast dust and sand remaining in the orbitals. While still significantly problematic, it is unfortunately much less profitable to mine, as there is not enough material left to save launches.
(Progress 85/85: 10 resources per die) (20 resources) (Unlocks Low Orbit Support Satellites)
(Progress 85/85: 10 resources per die) (15 resources)
(Progress 32/85: 10 resources per die) (10-15 resources) (Unlocks Orbital Power Stations) [78, 31]
This is good. We should probably halt orbital cleanup operations; we need the dice to meet our Plan commitments, and the last bits of cleanup are a great candidate for what to do with Orbital dice
early in the Fourth Four Year Plan when we're short on Resources and just trying to get our options to open up.
Notably, the support satellites will be a lot more practical and economical if we finish this project first. I'm envisioning the support satellites as something to be done
in 2062, after we've done the ASAT/OSRCT work we promised in 2061, and preferably after we clear the orbitals to profit from the -20 Progress cost benefit.
Current Firehawk doctrine calls for Launch on Contact, firing off dozens of missiles at long to extreme range, rather than trying to close into more effective ranges. Substantial expenditure of missiles, even assuming hit rates of below five percent under some circumstances, is a cheap cost to pay compared to the losses of men and aircraft involved in the relatively close range engagements produced by the TAL. Simply splashing the laser across a section of the hull is not enough to produce instant lethality. It does have a burn time, and holding a point on an incredibly maneuverable fighter is quite difficult, leading to shorter engagement ranges as they hunt for kills.
However, it is a substantial upgrade in lethality on the average. While Barghests make it problematic, they are actually a relatively limited part of most battlefields. Over three quarters of the targets out there are Carryalls and Venoms, both of which suffer badly against the new TAL. Carryalls, especially, have effectively no defense and are not nearly maneuverable enough to avoid taking critical damage. There have been times, such as the battle preceding the assault on Cheyenne Mountain, when a mixed force of Venoms and Carryalls simply absorbed every missile fired on them. Today, that problem is substantially less real; a Firehawk can loiter in the battle space to recharge its laser before making another gun run. While the effectiveness of the Firehawk does substantially decrease after the first missile attack, it is not nearly as useless as it was before.
Okay, just saying,
let's not panic. Yes, Firehawks get shot down more often against Barghests under these conditions, but they take down more Barghests. If the loss rate among Firehawk pilots becomes a problem, the Air Force can just order the pilots to start disengaging like they used to. The fact that they
haven't suggests that the Air Force
wants continued combat at this relative rate of attrition, and expects it to be beneficial in the long run as the Barghests get thinned own and taken down.
Firehawk drones are of course a huge immediate priority for us, but we shouldn't panic in response to this.
In combat, there are two key problems, one inherent to the design, and the other a flaw that can be remedied. First, it congests the attack space. With every additional airframe, the flight paths to ensure that a gun run is safe, and not backstopped by, for example, a squadron of Firehawks, becomes substantially more complicated. With the Initiative relying on filling airspaces to ensure enough volume of fire in order to kill highly maneuverable Brotherhood fighter craft, battles rapidly become highly complex and tightly choreographed dances in the sky, ones that Wingmen complicate by being typically fairly tight to their paired aircraft.
Second is actually that pilots want significantly more customizability on their control interfaces. As the Apollo was never built with Wingman drones in mind, it lacks many options pilots want, especially when an Apollo and the Wingman are carrying more than a total of three munitions options. It is not a problem that requires more than software rewrites and a patch is coming, but it is a symptom of the extremely rushed schedule to begin bringing the aircraft into service.
Yeah, well, I'll still count this as a win, especially since the control patch is coming. Although I'm surprised the congested attack space is such a problem, with the aircraft coming together in tight pairs. In most cases a viable flight path would be the same for both airframes, with the drone sticking to the piloted aircraft on the way through the battlespace.
Or so I'd think.
"Brothers and Sisters: By order of the High Commander of our order, the <indecipherable> now will use the following guidelines for kill-counts with regard to GDI drones. To the best of our ability, <indecipherable> the drones separately. Kills that cannot be confirmed as either drone or piloted will count as 1/2 of a kill, rounding down to the nearest whole integer. This will slow kill-count inflation, and focus our energies where they belong. Slay the GDI meat, and ignore the distracting metal that attempts to flutter around in your sensors."
-Intercepted transmission, South American Yellow Zone.
Well, that's... heh. A good sense of the strategic big picture, but a sign that they're getting to us. And of course, as drones start inflicting more losses on the enemy, they are very much
not just "fluttering around in sensors."
Politically, while the Navy is severely unhappy about needing them, it does recognize that they are needed, especially with the ongoing losses to raider groups, and more importantly the loss of multiple cruisers and other heavy assets in naval battles this quarter. The necessities of war require such vessels, in order to free up carriers for more dangerous routes. While, for example, the northern Atlantic routes are relatively secure - with most of the danger coming from trans-Arctic submarine attacks which are often suppressed by the ring of GDI airbases and masses of low-flying V-35s doing anti-submarine operations - and can be serviced by the conversions, other routes are far less safe. The riskiest routes are the runs from South America to Australia and New Zealand, followed shortly thereafter by the runs across the Indian Ocean, both to the Middle East and Australia, and will need proper carriers in large numbers to properly protect convoys.
Well, at least freeing up flattops along SOME of the routes (especially the North Atlantic and North Pacific) runs will help SOME.
As the production lines have finished their refits, the first neural interface systems have begun to hit field units. While so far only a marginal number have been deployed to the field, the units that have gotten the refits, mostly in the deeper Blue Zones, are quite happy with them. For one, they have begun requesting about half again as many units as previous copilots are now able to pilot a mech on their own. This is especially the case for Titan companies, as the integrated system now allows a mech to be adequately fought without a second person assisting. While there are still significant advantages to having a pair of operators, the Talons current thinking is that those best apply to the commanders rather than the rank and file. So, in the proposed system, a squadron of Titans would remain an eight man unit, but with six mechs instead of four, with the Commander and the Second operating in the rumble seat to manage the unit as a whole, while the pilot drives.
Interesting- though that's gonna take a while to implement, at least we HAVE the production lines fully spooled up for what it's worth.
"Had a guy coming back from a long patrol in a Wolverine decide he was just gonna go to bed after reporting in. So he tried to walk into the CO's office and make his report, forgetting he was still in the Wolverine."
-Anonymous
Lol.
