Heh, hostile? I figured that's just the normal thread temperature.
Nah, it's been more intense than average.
On the one hand, there's a big "weather front" of "we need to be good stewards" and "respect quality of life issues and take them seriously" and people have actually been getting quite worked up over that lately. And on the other hand there's pieces of bad news that are being interpreted as "we can't do this or it would be Wrong" and other bad news that presents us with practical problems. And sometimes people get pretty worked up about the intersection of practical problems and "can't do this or it would be Wrong."
Alright, let me be clearer about Kane's scene.
@Ithillid asked me to write the concept. I did so. I came up with the idea of Kane fucking with InOps because it's funny.
We got this scene as a prompt of a look at the "other side". That's it.
Yes. And it's really good. And I think it was very insightful of you to say "Feel free to stress-test the proposition that
Kane of all people was speaking purely on the level when he knew GDI's top leadership was in the audience." That was all really good all around.
Everyone, I have noticed that this thread is getting very hostile very quickly. I know I dropped a lot of stuff on you all at once, and it is already a highly stressful setup. Let me just say that things are going to be fine. You won't be able to tackle all the different directions I am pulling you in. That is intentional. There are compromises and tradeoffs, and not everything is going to get done. And that is okay. The game won't end. the Initiative won't overturn on your heads, just because ranching domes (for example) get delayed. There are a lot of important things, and dozens of factors to consider.
I like a lot of my posters. Some of you, and you know who you are, do a lot of work to help me make this entire affair functional. Can we extend a bit more trust that everyone is trying to pull towards issues that they consider critically important, and try not to fight?
I generally believe this to be quite true, and will try.
I mostly just lurk in this thread (hence the name) and write funny little snippets, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.
I think that doing some Vein Mining (instead of Red Zone) for a quarter or two to give ZOCOM some slack might be a good idea. It'll give them time to reorganize and to get more zone armor. At the same time it'll still give some good income and increase abatement. I'm personally worried that the underground tiberium will be the silent killer that destroys everything.
The thing is, in the normal course of things we would do
NO serious mining this late in a budget cycle. it does not line up with our incentives, and Parliament knows it.
Remember, Parliament has
chosen the four year reallocation cycle. If they wanted to just skim 10% of our budget off the top every year for stability's sake, they could do that. They choose not to, and they have their reasons, but it creates a very distinct and cyclic situation where for Treasury to remain fully functional as an organization, it has to take 6-12 months every four years where the bulk of its energy is concentrated purely on efficient tiberium mining at the expense of other concerns such as abatement, research, industrial projects, and infrastructure construction. This has already happened twice and we have not been censured for it. Everyone in Parliament is either a rookie or a veteran of one or more Four Year Plans at this point. It is not a matter of somehow "cheating" that we do this.
Remember, roughly two thirds of Parliament approves of the Treasury. The actual proportion of Parliament whose support we would even
want is less than a third, as well, because we are universally disliked by Initiative First and they make up about 8% of the legislature. Add the ultracapitalists from the FMP who frankly the thread would not approve of in any case, and probably only about 20% of the legislature is truly "up for grabs" in that they object to our current practices for ways we would or could want to change their minds about.
Parliament knows what we're about. They've designed the budget cycle accordingly. They could change it at any time, but choose not to.
...
Treasury's budget is about to be slashed, at the end of this year, to a level so low that it will be unable to function in the manner the people of GDI have grown accustomed to expect. They have grown accustomed to us being able to fund massive infrastructure projects, factories whose output can change the whole world, great agricultural projects, scientific research, tiberium abatement programs, space stations, and a mighty war machine
all at once. We simply will not be able to do that soon. And every quarter that passes while we
can't do that means we fall further behind on the public's expectations. Fewer funds for growing delicious food. Fewer funds for advanced technology to improve our way of life and hold off the threat of Nod superweapons. Fewer funds for railroads and housing and consumer goods production and every other material thing.
Right now, our incentive is to catch up on expensive per-die Tiberium projects that do not necessarily produce immediate income payoffs. Inhibitor construction. Refinery construction. Tiberium options that prioritize abatement over return on resource investment. Last plan we put a lot of Tiberium dice into planned city construction around the end of the Plan, as I recall. Same principle. Remember that the duty of the Tiberium department is not
ONLY to provide income to GDI. It is to keep tiberium at bay and to construct the infrastructure that does so, which does not always mean the same thing.
Soon, at the start of 2062, our incentive becomes "Increase your income by about +200 to +400 RpT
very quickly. Everyone is waiting for you. Everyone in all of GDI has many expectations of you. Everyone is demanding things of you, things you cannot provide unless you perform at the level such an increased budget allows. They'll be disappointed if you don't."
This act of giving up so much of our budget is not theft, and is not self-sacrifice. It is simply the normal ebb and flow of post-TWIII politics in GDI. It is what will happen.
It behooves us to plan accordingly.
...
The fact that ZOCOM is anxious about their ability to secure more Red Zone operations, to the point where the thread is extremely wary of the wisdom of attempting
even one such operation, only further constrains our options. We will still be expected to greatly increase our budget in 2062, the sooner the better, just to provide everyone with the things they expect from us. Spinning off dice into separate projects will not help us much, because we will probably still be expected to fund those departments, or will have to make significant political sacrifices to get that responsibility taken off our list.
So we need to ask ourselves in advance,
where is the money coming from?
A heroic effort at vein mining can potentially help a lot, as you discuss. A full meme plan investment into vein mining would cost a majority of our likely post-reallocation budget (~280 R), but would give us something close to 1250 Progress on vein mines, which is probably enough for a full six phases and +150 RpT of income in a hurry.
However, even this will take 2-3 turns of full-bore investment to bring us back up to something like the levels we might hope for, where we can afford 20 RpT projects in all areas. Such as Karachi in Infrastructure, myomer factories in Light Industry, Nuuk in Heavy Industry,
Ranching Domes and its successor projects in Agriculture,
Columbia and
Shala in Orbital, and any number of military projects that are all greatly desired to reduce casualties and give us a better chance of defending ourselves against Nod's worst.
It would be quite desirable to have the option of, with just a few dice invested in 2062Q1, surging an additional +100 RpT of income- notice that this is fully competitive with
four phases of vein mining and
ten dice of investment. And there is one way we can do so, just by replacing existing harvesters with new ones that work more quickly and require fewer replacements, with little or no extra strain placed on ZOCOM in any way.
But doing this with
Tendrils Phase 2 would be wrong, perhaps. Unethical. Selfish.
But see what I said above. Treasury is not an alien entity greedily withholding its funds from the government. Treasury is part of the government, and its budget is controlled in such a way that to fulfill the expectations placed upon it, it
must do something like this (broadly speaking) every four years, to build up the funds it uses to build the rest of the Plan.
I think we should take this idea seriously.
Again.
Red Zone operations.
Tendrils Phase 2 slow-roll. A bunch of extra 2062 fallow dice.
Pick any one of the three to have happen.
Let's at least begin to get mass deployment of zone armor running and see what that does, both for red zone deployments and for taking the pressure of the tunnel fighting. Let's see if we can do a few thing like the Backpack Rocket Launcher or Infantry Recon Support Drone research, or the alternate zone armors, the Defender or the Lancer, and get those deployed. Let's take the pressure off so when we go into the red zone we have slack, we have reserves, we have high morale, instead of forcing people to give 110% to try to cover everything.
Or at least that's what I'd prefer to do.
My own priority will be on squeezing in 1-2 Zone Armor factories because it seems pretty clear that ZOCOM's main problem is numbers, not gizmos.
Defender Revision becomes desirable as a way to bring down the cost of the remaining factories, and better ZOCOM weapons don't go amiss, but we're very hard pressed for dice in these next three turns and I don't think we can fit it all in alongside the
very important naval laser refit, which is going to be very hard to fit in between now and the end of 2063 otherwise... and Karachi, you may recall, is on the horizon.
