- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I didn't say that's what you thought.
But that's what I would have to think, to think that putting ranching domes on the to-do list ahead of "get to about 75% completion on the Stored Food target" is a good idea.
I would have to think something like what I believe about the frigate yards- namely, that the frigates have such a powerful immediate impact, or short-term impact, that it is necessarily to prioritize them even over some of the things we specifically committed to doing.
Instead, I view them as "what we want to do next after this," or if not strictly after hitting the Stored Food target, at least after we've gotten close enough to the target that we can say with confidence "yes, this will be done" and people will believe us. Because...
Because the legislature absolutely insisted on extracting a promise from us to fix the first problem, but made no special effort to extract a promise to fix the second.
Given that elected politicians are necessarily better plugged into the question of what their constituents actually want and believe than we are... That strongly suggests to me a responsibility to treat "more food storage" as higher priority than "higher food quality." Because "more food storage" was treated as the high-priority thing, was something where the legislature offered us no choice and demanded action from us by a set deadline, and made the idea of renegotiating that deadline infeasible, even when the situation had changed drastically.
I feel as is this shift to "we need to do Ranching Domes now" reflects a sudden surge of conviction among part of the quest voterbase that they have a clear idea of what the people want, to the point where the actions and stated priorities of the NPCs who in-character should know what the people want is being ignored or dismissed as the rest of the voters being somehow blindly fixated on "number go up" and "spreadsheets."
...
When we went to the legislature to renegotiate the Plan targets and said "we can't do Karachi because of the war and the naval situation," we got, well, we had to double the scale of the project to buy four more years of time. But the scale of the project was never the problem, the problem was always just getting boots and bulldozers on the ground to do it at all in the face of military opposition. It was a relatively painless concession for us to make.
When we went to the legislature to renegotiate the Stored Food plan targets, where there was at least as much justification for doing so as there was for Karachi... We got the response "you will have to far more than double the scope of the project to get even two more years out of us, let alone four."
Which is tantamount to the legislature just scowling at us and saying "no, no fucking way, we will compromise on a lot of things but we will NOT compromise on the importance of stockpiling a trillion cans of beans for a rainy day."
I think we need to consider very seriously why they are choosing to take such a stance, on the assumption that they are intelligent, knowledgeable people who are reacting more or less rationally to popular sentiment. Even if we think that the politicians, or for that matter the public, are irrational to want this... they clearly do.
I think some of us projecting onto GDI's public a good deal of anger and discontent about the lack of dairy products or chicken or what have you. Perhaps more than they actually feel. Perhaps an amount that reflects us, mostly our First World selves who are privileged to have easy access to those things, who have not had the experience of being survivors growing up in a world endangered and disrupted by tiberium and warfare. We would resent it greatly if those things were suddenly taken from us, the idea of doing without is shocking.
But in-character? They want those things back, but it's been nearly fifteen years if not considerably more since they were ever available in quantity. They don't feel the loss the same way we do. They experienced the loss as part of a massive war that was blatantly the fault of Kane and the Scrin, and they seem to have moved on to the point where they can take it philosophically.
Whereas the fear of it all happening again, that is very real and they're not over it in any way. I have a vivid memory of a GDIOnline post during Steel Vanguard that seemed to me to read something like "wow, I was expecting this war to be horrible and totally disrupt my life like the last one did, and I was kind of weirded out when it didn't do that very hard."
So I think the picture has to be understood in those terms- that paradoxical as it may seem to me, they want enough preserved food to feed all of GDI through a year of total agricultural collapse MORE than they want actual proper butter and to replace their existing bizarre margarine substitute created in a chemical plant from tiberium feedstock and squirted with synthesized artificial butter flavoring.
I think that we should be using the politicians as a barometer for the public's opinions, and the barometer has spoken very clearly about which of those is important enough to them to hold our feet to the fire about.
...I thought I already did tell you.
Ranching Domes, which will more than offset the political costs of a single phase of CRP. Potentially other projects as well, since the dice savings from CRP will considerably more than offset the dice costs of doing the ranching domes.
Meanwhile, if you say "but we're already gonna do ranching domes without doing CRP," my response is "then this course of action will free up Free dice so we can do things like be confident of completing Enterprise and also still have time to make some progress on the station bay or the Leopard II yard before 2062Q1."
I'm going to engage with that on two levels.
On one level, I don't think we can completely eliminate the PS cost of the CRP option with a reasonable amount of "but do this first" food (that is, 8-10-12 more Stored Food, the maximum we can get without extreme investment of many many Agriculture dice in granary-building, and enough that the CRP becomes overkill anyway). I think it more likely that all we'll accomplish is to lower the PS cost to -5 for the first phase and -5 more for the second phase. Because it's not like CRP is wanted, or is going to become wanted. I just think that we should do it anyway to make room for other actions.
On another level, the problem I see is that everyone is very clear that we are seriously down to the wire on our ability to hit the Stored Food target. Everyone's plans are involving Free dice, we're getting a bit desperate. I strongly suspect we're going to be in a position where if we follow the trajectory some here favor, we're going to be rolling like three "build granary" dice in Q4 and panic-mashing the ELFS button at the last minute... and my gut feeling is that somehow, it won't be enough. The massive transfers of food to existing stockpiles under ELFS will turn out to take six months to fulfill, or we'll roll unlucky on the granaries, or something. I'm trying to future-proof our position here a bit by making an admittedly unpopular but very pragmatic decision now, to clear the decks and grant us more flexibility for next time.
I suppose it would be tenable to just go ahead with the non-CRP parts of my plan this turn and put CRP off until Q3, then... but since I'm holding out some hope of us being able to do Chicago Phase 4 in Q3 or Q4, I'm not sure I want to commit to that. I definitely want to have both ELFS and CRP done before the Q4 turn start, though... and since ELFS could conceivably take two turns to do a single phase of, that's an issue.
