Corps Starch isn't something I'll vote for until the next plan, and only after we've got a significant buffer of Ranching Domes, plus Vertical Farms and Aquaponics. People want and need a verity of food stuffs, and the less dependent we are on one type or food another, the better we'll be able to handle things like blights and farm disease.
Consider that in terms of amount
produced as distinct from surplus, GDI must be making something like 100-200 or more Food. Almost all of it with aquaponics, as far as I can tell.
An attack that somehow knocks out
all our aquaponics, or even, say, half of it, will cripple our agriculture. No reasonable number of phases of
Vertical Farming or
Aquaponics Bays can fix this. Nor can we just crank up the Food surplus to, say, +80 or whatever, because there's a very real tradeoff between using Agriculture to make Consumer Goods (read: "foods people like") and using Agriculture to make Food (read: "bulk edible calories"). Given how intensely the demands among the quest voterbase for what would formerly have been called luxury foods are ramping up, it's just not plausible that we'll be able to boost the Food surplus that high before efforts to do so are interrupted.
Meanwhile,
Ranching Domes doesn't do much to protect us against blights. It in some ways
interferes with that, because the food being fed to animals cannot be fed to humans. The animals have to eat
something, and we don't have limitless acres of (guaranteed-tiberium-free) land for them to graze or for us to harvest hay off of land not being cultivated for feeding humans. There's a reason
Ranching Domes is modeled as "+8 Consumer Goods, -4 Food" and not "+4 Food, +4 Consumer Goods" or something. The domes will diversify people's
diets in that they have more protein options alongside the existing fish, shrimp, and sometimes chicken; note that aquaponics produces plenty of fish, so GDI hasn't been on forced vegetarianism all this time. But while the domes do something for food
diversity, they don't do much for food
security in the face of massive sabotage for our society as a whole.
Fundamentally, we should be treating the problem "how do we ensure the people will have enough to eat in the event of total disaster" and the problem "how do we provide an enjoyable diet including many luxury foods" as more or less separate problems. There may be an argument for
Vertical Farming rollouts on a large scale next Plan if the vertical farms run on fundamentally different principles such that a bioweapon that affects our standard aquaponics would not affect the vertical farms... But I'm not sure that there is such a difference. I'm not sure we
can diversify our production methods themselves that easily.
The solution to the problem "how do we ensure that people have enough to eat in a disaster" is to (1) make food production redundant with large surpluses, and (2) have big storehouses of
something, anything, because if there's some kind of multi-year famine and crop failure, you may be assured that
eventually people will be glad to have
something, anything to keep body and soul together.
The solution to the problem "how do we provide an enjoyable diet" is to build Agriculture projects that yield Consumer Goods. There is
some overlap between this and "make food production redundant" thanks to
Vertical Farming being a project that yields respectable amounts of both things... but it's not that much overlap.
Either we need E-CRP, or we don't, but we shouldn't set an arbitrary list of conditions like "you must complete ten other Agriculture projects first." The circumstances in which we need E-CRP are unlikely(ish) to arise. But if they ever do, we will be glad we had E-CRP instead of having literally nothing. Because while people
hate to live on a diet of E-CRP, they
cannot live on a diet of moldy rice stalks or whatever literal garbage we throw into the CRP processors as feedstock.
So as a summary:
To complete our Plan Goal without using E-CRP or CRP as several people suggest, we would need 14 Agricultural dice or about 1 Free die per turn on average.
To complete our Plan Goal without using E-CRP or CRP and complete the Ranching Domes and Vertical Farms, we would need 19 Agricultural dice, or 2-3 Free dice per turn
To complete our Plan Goal without using E-CRP or CRP, complete the Ranching Domes and Vertical Farms, and keep our current Food Surplus, we would need 24 Agricultural dice, or about 4 Free dice per turn.
This.
And importantly, those last two phases of
Strategic Food Stockpile Construction (Phase 5+6) we need to hit the Stored Food target without E-CRP are by far the most expensive two phases, with a projected combined cost of 475 Progress. In other words, about six dice.
So we can knock all these figures down by -6 dice with a single phase of E-CRP:
To complete our Plan Goal using
E-CRP Phase 1 at the cost of sacrificing our existing Food surplus, and forcing the people to eat fungus bars (but not CRP), we would need 8 Agricultural dice, potentially being done by Q3 even with no Free dice expenditure.
To complete our Plan Goal using
E-CRP Phase 1 and also complete
Ranching Domes and
Vertical Farms Phase 2, but at the cost of being back to fungus bars, we would need around 13 Agricultural dice, or 0-1 Free dice per turn
To complete our Plan Goal using
E-CRP Phase 1, skip
Ranching Domes and
Vertical Farms Phase 2, but maintain our Food surplus, we would again need around 13 Agricultural dice, or 0-1 Free dice per turn
To complete our Plan Goal using
E-CRP Phase 1, complete
Ranching Domes and
Vertical Farms Phase 2,
AND keep our current Food Surplus, we would need 18 Agricultural dice, or about 2 Free dice per turn.
...
In short:
1) It is highly desirable for us to
both keep up a solid Food surplus to feed the refugees,
and to complete at least
Ranching Domes and hopefully also a phase of
Vertical Farms.
2) Doing so without E-CRP requires an average investment of
four Free dice per turn into Agriculture. This is, while not
completely unreasonable, is definitely going to require major sacrifices in other areas, and not just in the sense of "military fetishists have to sacrifice precious guns to have more butter." Other things like projects to develop stronger and more reliable fusion plants, build electric vehicles for the masses, complete space projects, or expand Consumer Goods production by non-farming means might have to fall by the wayside.
3) By contrast, doing so
with a single phase of E-CRP requires
two Free dice per turn, which means significantly less sacrifice for other programs.
4) While doing this is likely to be at least somewhat unpopular, bear in mind that
by design, E-CRP food is never meant to be eaten by anyone. It is not something we will ever be forcing someone to eat except in scenarios where if they happened
right now, everyone would already have starved to death. The E-CRP will be Stored Food units #24 through #28. It would not be used until units #1 through #23 are already eaten. Right now, and for the entire duration of the quest, there
is no Stored Food unit #23. Any crisis sufficient for us to have to eat #23 would, at any time from 2050 up through 2060, mean that no one in GDI had had anything to eat for weeks or months. E-CRP should not be viewed as "this thing we're gonna make people eat." It should be viewed as "this thing that might extend life in a case of uttermost disaster, by that little extra margin, but that we will hopefully never use."
