Note that we have since the moment we had Fortress Towns we have had people living in Fortress Towns.
We should not read 'this many in poor housing' as 'everybody fills housing from top quality on down', it should be read as 'everybody who wants good quality housing and isn't willing to put it with only decent quality housing in return for a well paying job gets good housing'. There are tons of civilians who work for the tiberium department living in Fortress Towns because that's where GDI wants the civilians who live in the GZs to live, and if necessary commute to their harvesting stations.
Yes, but every person who
is living in a fortress town because it's close to their job (usually in the tiberium sector) is a person who
isn't living in an normal Blue Zone town. Right now, if we're at below +20 Housing, it means that we don't have enough space to give everyone a home that isn't in a fortress town
even if we wanted to, which I consider to be when we start hitting emergency. The refugee wave is not presently an emergency, mind you... But on the other hand, the total influx of refugees may increase rapidly in the future at some point, we may get surprised, and we may struggle to keep ahead of housing demand if we don't start really working on expanding the buffer.
I'm hoping to be wrong here, but I'd like to start moving on thickening the Housing buffer sooner rather than later.
You aren't wrong but I definitely feel that we need to complete one more round of fortress towns to try and cement our territory gains.
Our offensive might be winding down but nod counterattacks might be incoming.
We don't want them to reclaim any lost territory and fortress towns seem to be the best way to secure it.
And if we don't build them that's two turns of gains with no fortifications. If our troops move off our borders are wide open for raiders or whatever else.
Yeah sure, the point is, realistically, we have three things we want to build in 2060Q4: fortresses, railroads, and apartments. We can only really make meaningful progress on about two of them. I vote for fortresses and apartments. Void says "but railroads!" I say "well, I guess railroads are more important than fortresses then."
My main point is that apartments are #1 on my list at this point because I don't think continuing to throw six Infrastructure dice per turn at the war effort is enough of a must-do crisis to justify continuing to ignore the Housing issue.
"Low-quality housing" for GDI still means it's a sealed, filtered domicile - you can live in it without a hazard suit, there's electricity, there's reliable running and clean water, and so on. The main factors are lack of privacy (depending on the type) and lack of non-essential amenities. The worst that can be said about low-quality housing for us is it might not be better than what people had before - but Yellow Zones are going to be incredibly variable in living conditions depending on location and level of Tiberium contamination among other factors so that isn't a universal standard; and regardless, a lot of these people are coming in without previously having had reliable food security or clean water.
Low quality isn't "tenement slum," it's "bunker."
Yeah, but I'm very unhappy with the situation. And the fact is, we're likely to have major Infrastructure projects in 2061 that distract us from being really aggressive about the Housing issue, as aggressive as we might like. So I'd rather get a start sooner.
Another point is that if we start housing people in fortress towns (when we dip below +20 Housing, or +24 with the new round of fortresses)... Well, those fortress towns are still susceptible to Nod attack. And Nod attack might take the form of, say, tiberium shard missiles like the ones Gideon used. I'd be a lot more comfortable if we were actually building housing in the deeper Blue Zones (even commieblocks or communal housing).
The commieblocks aren't decrepit, they were build within the past decade and GDI's approach to government is 'it better work well'. Those commieblocks may not be roomy, they may not be very comfortable. But they will be well designed, well build and well maintained. Shared spaces are kept clean, the infrastructure in and around the commieblocks work and get people and things to where they need to go.
Eh. My own take is that the commieblocks were built very quickly in emergency situations where the need to get people out from under canvas was desperate. While GDI doesn't skimp on building codes and designs, it is very likely that maintenance on
unoccupied commieblocks gets deferred compared to places where people actually live, for instance.
I consider this to be rapidly approaching an emergency situation, just as much as Health though not yet more so. And unlike Health, this isn't an area where we're bottlenecked by the limits of the available projects. We know exactly how to get a lot more Housing in a hurry, we've just been choosing not to do it for the sake of the war effort.
It's time for us to redirect priorities.
We're at a raging -19 Health malus because GDI is pushing out in the middle of a war. If anything, having 20+ Health after the war's consequences trickle off is the absolute minimum we should accept. Nod hasn't exactly been noted to be shy about hitting health infrastructure and facilities; if anything, Nod has been noted to prefer to target health infrastructure and facilities even in the midst of battle. I would not be one bit surprised if during TW3 GDI's Health indicator shrank by 30 to 50 points as a combination of wartime casualties, internally displaced populations and Nod deliberately leveling hospitals, clinics and hospices. 2050Q3, the third turn of this game, gives an indicator of -2 Health, and that is after the Treasury funded a +4 Health rating project, another project we do not know the impact of but involved reconstructing the civilian health care infrastructure, along with the efforts of Granger's predecessor trying to keep the economy going in the middle of a world consuming war that saw major offensives in GDI's urban areas.
If there is a place we should be happy to have a 30 to 40 point surplus indicating extensive slack in our capacity, it's Health. If anything, we should be pushing Services to develop a ton of new proposals, including proposals that gives GDI more slack because there's a 100 million refugee wave incoming at minimum. That's gonna eat up some permanent indicators.
And no, I didn't say 'we must maintain +10 Health at all times'. I said 'we should try and maintain at least 10+ slack in all areas, and preferably more in all places just in case things go horribly, horribly wrong'.
I can certainly agree that large surpluses in all indicators is good.
The problem is that at some point, piling up a surplus
under specific conditions will necessarily entail shorting some other area. For example, suppose next turn we get a wealth of +Health projects opening up in Services, but we also get the Scrin research gacha project opening up. Are you going to say "put off the Scrin research thing until we have a
really thick Health surplus?" I'm guessing you would not advocate that course of action.
So it becomes a bit of a balancing act as to how much we want to prioritize which numbers going up, is what I'm saying.
[]Plan Fleet in Being
* Infrastructure ( 4/ 6 Dice) [ 40 Resources]
-[] Blue Zone Apartment (Phase 2+3+4) (28/480) [-4 Logistics, +18 Housing]
--[] 4 Dice (40 Resources)
This is not a very good time to be leaving Infrastructure dice fallow. We've actually got a lot to do in Infrastructure, it's just that most of it is things common sense is telling us to do, not things the Plan commitments tell us to do. This is normal for Infrastructure, because it's a field where the legislature
usually just waves at us and says "you there, sort this out." Sort of like power plant construction; the legislature doesn't give us quotas for power plant construction, they just expect us to make sure nobody has to go through brownouts.
Also, you may at some future time wish to consider formatting of plans in such a way that it's clear when you're dealing with a "stretch goal." It is relatively unlikely, for example, that investing even four dice on apartments (as I, too, have suggested doing) will yield +18 Housing
in a single turn.
* Tiberium ( 7/7 Dice) [ Resources]
-[]Tiberium Processing Plants (Stage 2) (20/200)
--[] 2 Dice ( 60 Resources) (+600 processing capacity, -4 Energy, -3 Logistics)
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory
--[]Bissau (0/70) (+5 resources, -2 Energy)
---[] 1 Dice (10 Resources)
--[]Porto (44/70) (+5 Resources, -2 Energy)
---[] 1 Dice (10 Resources)
-[] Intensification of Green Zone Harvesting (Stage 6) (46/100)
--[]1 Dice (15 Resources) (+5-10 Resources)
-[]Red Zone Containment Lines (Stage 6) (54/200)
--[]2 Dice (50 Resources) (+10-15 Resources)
We should probably finish the current phase of
Yellow Zone Harvesting, in my opinion; this would help us secure and establish the outer boundaries of the territory we gained in the recent offensives, and that translates directly into "so how much land can you turn into Blue Zones?"
* Orbital ( 6 /6 Dice) [120 Resources]
-[] GDSS Enterprise (102 / 1535)
--[] 2 Dice (40 Resources)
-[]Orbital Cleanup (Phase 11) (32/85)
-[] 1 Dice (10 Resources)
-[]Lunar Heavy Metals Mines (Phase 2) (146/385) (+20 Resources per turn)
--[] 3 Dice (60 Resources)
Bad ideas. First, we have
really tight Orbital requirements for the Plan. Spending any dice on anything that isn't a Plan target is almost sure to be a bad idea here. This is a little different from how things worked in the first and second Four Year Plans, sadly.
Second, three dice on
Lunar Heavy Metals is likely to be overinvestment in the project, and again, we can't afford to waste dice. I recommend two.
- Wingman Drone Deployment
--[]Firehawk Wingmen (215/450) (-1 Labour, -6 Energy, -2 Capital Goods)
---[]1 Free Dice (20 Resources)
I think you are underestimating the importance to the military of finishing the Firehawk drones
quickly. This is not a low-priority project just because it isn't one of the things we promised to do as a Plan commitment. It's right up there with the frigate yards (which, as I recall, are
also not a Plan commitment).
Most plan drafts on offer put about 3-4 dice on this project, even at the cost of not being able to spend quite as many dice on shipyards. There are reasons for this.
