This post is really late, and while it's not particularly big, I'm just pushing it out the door now as I no longer have any motivation to work on it.
I'm sorry.
We have 4 Agriculture dice a turn, and three turns left. Just to meet our Plan Goal by doing only the Freeze Dried and both Stockpile projects, we need on average 11 dice. (Using an AA/Erewhon die for XL Stockpiles.) However, just this will leave us at only +12 Food. (+26, +4 Fertilizers, +6 Freezers, -12 Stockpiles, -12 XL Stockpiles.) Bringing our Food back up again requires 3 dice in either Mechanization or BZ Aquaponics. Therefore, we already need Free Dice to meet the Plan Goal and keep feeding everyone. We need 3 dice in either Mechanization or Aquaponics, pushing us to 15/12 dice for Agriculture.
(Unless we do any CRP project. CRP makes our Agricultural Numbers Go Up more efficiently than any other project, but are likely to cause very large narrative problems due to tasting like CRP.)
I'm personally taking the variant idea of:
1) Using Free dice on Agriculture,
AND
2) Getting to do
significant "make good food" options,
BUT
3) Accomplishing this in large part by doing a single phase of Infrastructure CRP.
Yes, people will be unhappy about the prospect of ever having to eat that CRP, but we can very simply point out that no one will have to eat CRP until the last fungus bar is eaten, and that we will go on working long and hard to ensure that we never,
NEVER have to eat the last fungus bar.
Oh, and good news?
Here, have some butter instead of the usual GDI-issue margarine... which is widely suspected of being made from tiberium.*
Best way I can think of to have our cake and eat it too.
____________________________
*(I am pretty sure we COULD actually have a chemical processing chain that starts with tiberium, then makes that into long-chain oils using something very similar to whatever process we use to make jet fuel, then makes
that into something you can spread on your bread. Fuckin' depressing, but there it is. Whether GDI
does have this depends almost entirely on how paranoid people are about using material products transmuted from tiberium. Given that we live in buildings made with steel that's made from tiberium, and use computers whose rare elements are made from tiberium, and so on, the paranoia may not actually be high enough to stop this from happening)
And like, IDK how to tell you all this, but if we have two problems, we can work on both simultaneously. I know many people want to finish everything in Q3 so Q4 is "free", but the narrative problem here isn't going to wait until December 31st like the Plan Goal will. (Waiting to do things so they fit in our mechanical view of things, rather than the narrative's view, has caused us problems before.)
I'm more than a little concerned that ELFS in particular may not take effect instantly. It represents a
HUGE ramp-up in the actual amount of food going into the existing granaries. I'm strongly hoping to get our food surplus up high enough
this turn in Q2 that we can take ELFS with confidence in Q2 or Q3, so that that food is actually "in the bag" and properly stored by Q4.
Because remember, the narrative
includes the part where people explicitly and directly care about us meeting the Stored Food target. It is not just some dumb thing we care about to make Number Go Up.
By all evidence, GDI's population
actually wants us to do that. It is something they voted for politicians to do, politicians told us to do it, and GDI did not repudiate that policy at the ballot box in the 2059 elections, either.
So putting off fulfillment of the Stored Food target in order to supply the masses with yummies a few months earlier is not necessarily a case of "giving the people what they want."
ECRP is going to be necessary for meeting our Food Reserve Plan as we only have so many dice. At least only as reserve. My suggestion is complete the Ranching Dome to offset the narrative effect of the CRP alongside the Sports to win back the PS. That, and combined with the Food reserves we wil get from Freeze Dried Efficiency will allow us to complete the plan in short order.
That's my plan- except I don't think we need to go full-bore on CRP. One phase is enough.
Also. It is sadly an unpopular opinion to drop the Frigate Yards for this plan for now to direct the remaining plan to URLS, ASAT and phase 3 and 4 of OSRCT alongside the Need for Enterprise.
We
really need that fleet. We need those ships.
Badly. Just because no one has specifically extracted a promise from us to build the Seattle yard, doesn't mean we don't need the Seattle yard.
The reason we were forced to renegotiate the Karachi promise is because we couldn't
keep the promise, and we couldn't keep the promise because we had not previously laid the groundwork (building a large, strong navy) required for us to succeed in fulfilling the promise.
The promise has been delayed, but we'll be in the same position (only worse) if we continue to half-ass the measures required in order to keep it.
Ignoring the Seattle yard to concentrate on Plan goals is short-sighted, because we have a future Plan goal that will in no small part hinge on the class of ships that come out of the Seattle yard.
Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 2)
(Progress 0/250: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
Blue Zone Aquaponics Bays (Phase 4)
(Progress 75/140: 10 resources per die) (+6 Food) (-1 Labor, -1 Logistics)
(Progress 0/140: 10 resources per die) (+6 Food) (-1 Labor, -1 Logistics)
(Progress 0/140: 10 resources per die) (+6 Food) (-1 Labor, -1 Logistics)
Vertical Farming Projects (Stage 2)
(Progress 65/240: 15 resources per die) (+4 Food, +4 Consumer goods, -2 Energy)
Ranching Domes
(Progress 0/250: 20 resources per die) (+8 Consumer Goods, -4 Food, -2 Energy, -2 Labor) (+5 Political Support)
All these need are a maximum of 4 dice a piece, easy to do when done in the correct order, add in the Chem Fertilizer which is another +4 food, and freezers which is a guaranteed +5 and efficiency that is RETROACTIVE to all stockpiles, it makes our stockpiles both less intensive on food and much cheaper in food costs in bulk.
We do not need CRP unless TW4 kicks off or something truly horrific happens.
You're not adding any new information here.
The big problem isn't sourcing the Food at this point. It's that
building the stockpiles requires us to do like 800 Progress worth of construction work or something like that. Even after we source the Food and do ELFS, we still need another +8 or so Stored Food to go into stockpile. Which is a pretty big project that requires rolling a lot of dice.
The reason doing CRP is valuable is that with one or
at most two Infrastructure dice, we let a single 80-point Infrastructure project free us from the need to do about 475 Progress worth of granary construction. Which frees up those Agriculture dice to do something else.
We can easily put in enough dice in Q4 to have a 99% chance to finish the last required phase of Stockpiles. (Which is likely to happen anyways unless we put in a ton of dice there to finish in Q3.) And any extra progress isn't wasted as it's a repeatable project. Given that next Plan is likely to also have Reserve requirements, we can use any extra progress anyways.
Yeah, but in the process of doing so, we sacrifice a lot of the dice surplus that would otherwise be available to let us build high-quality food projects.
Again, that's why I'm coming out firmly in favor of
Emergency Caloric Reclamation Processor Installations (Phase 1),
and only Phase 1.
Because that will be contributing only to our literal bottom-of-barrel emergency food stockpiles that we will hopefully never eat, that no one would normally ever eat or want to eat...
And it frees up so much resources for us to make things people
will eat, and will love.
)
