- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
Not sure I will like it or hate it.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Ah I see where the problem is now. You've never played Privater or Freelancer or Dark Star One. Cause in each of those games the main character pulls of at least one of the whole transport massive amounts of cargo, re-setting planetary trade routes and fighting space battles that sometimes get up to the point of space navy warfare. Privateer's end game alien gun especially comes to mind for it's high bang for it's buck.
Also Simon, Kane doesn't need to go into space, if his problem of leaving Earth was simply not having a space ship he would have already built one. What Kane needs is the energy from mastering all of the Tiberium of a converted enough Earth for some reason known probably only to him and maybe his inner circle.
As such he doesn't need Space Ships, he needs another round of Kessler Syndrome to make us stuck on Earth as Tiberium encroaches on everyone forcing us to work towards some form of TCN. Anyways we need that portal tech development as soon as possible so Kesslering us becomes a lot less viable.
I don't recognize this reference and I can't seem to find it online. Please elaborate.
See here:
As I understand, reducing the dice invested would trigger penalties, but increasing investment when another die is freed up would be fine.
And Free Dice would be allocated turn-by-turn with no issues for shifting them around.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I understand it quite well, but since I didn't specifically recall having discussed the matter with you before, I wanted to be sure you'd read my earlier arguments before I re-made those same arguments. They took me quite a while to write, all told. As a matter of basic time preservation, it's natural for me to point back to them if a single person hypothetically wishes to ask me the same questions several people already asked me. So I did.
We all mistakenly take things like an attack sometimes. I do it. You just did it. It's okay.
The obvious analogy here would be to the last time this happened, when we developed the OG Hewlett-Gardener Process (I'd been misspelling it, sorry).
The H-G process was developed in 2056Q1, by my count. I suspect it's no concidence that we implementing the new version 4-5 years after implementing the basic form at scale. There was no increase in any cost associated with Tiberium Processing Plants Phase 1 from before the H-G process was developed to after. I checked carefully.
I will therefore be surprised if there is much (if any) increase in cost associated with improvements in the same process. A small cost (200 Progress to 250, -4 Energy to -5 or -6) would be awkward but we could accommodate it. I'm not too worried.
Based on past precedent, I think we'll be fine.
Well, on the one hand, that means that we don't have to worry about it sending the cost of the plants through the roof. On the other hand, it does lower the sense of urgency. On the tiberium-mutated third hand, this is exactly the time when it makes sense to pursue projects that aren't urgent. I'd personally still like to pursue the research before the end of 2061, and I feel no pressing need to hurry up the processing plants since it's only a 200-point project.
I'm pretty sure we'd get a 33% chance from seven dice, going off Derpmind's work.
Now, I'm not going to pursue that because:
1) I have to concentrate my efforts somehow; I can't write eight plans and keep them all good to my own satisfaction.
2) I'm concerned about where to find the extra money to fund 210 R worth of Tiberium budget.
3) I think that if we are going to pursue such a course, we should push for a higher chance of success, because otherwise we get a "worst of both worlds" scenario where we spent a big chunk of the discretionary budget on something that will not be paying back to us for long enough to meaningfully offset its startup costs. We end up with less R on net than if we'd just done literally nothing instead... and given that we're not exactly going to be short on Plan goals that need doing next year, that's an issue.
People worry right now about the consequences we're facing because we didn't activate all our Agriculture dice all the time earlier in the Plan. Well, one of the reasons we didn't is that Resources were scarce and we had a lot we had to do. Deliberately putting ourselves in that position again in 2062 isn't a good idea, because it sets us up for regrets when the projects we have to triage as "not quite so urgent" simply don't get done as fast.
I respect the idea of trying to surge Tendrils Phase 2 to stockpile income in 'Q3 and 'Q4 that we can then use to activate all our dice in early 2062. It makes sense. However, I do recommend that if we do it, we go whole hog on it with a plan that spends 8-9 dice on Tendrils, to be sure we actually get to collect the money during 2061.
Well, first of all, we'd obviously need to get massively far ahead in Capital Goods to feel comfortable spending twenty points of them this way. It's very much not out of the question, but it'd be quite a bit. It could be some in-game years before we feel like we're +20 Capital Goods over where we need to be, since we're looking at a megaproject's worth of Capital Goods there.
That's just me expressing my sticker shock, mind you.
...
Basically, it sounds like you're proposing that for large-scale megaprojects, we flip from a model of manually allocating dice to fixed very long-term allocations. This is reasonable. It does, however, interface strangely with a few other issues:
1) It would become problematic if we had to suddenly pivot and change focus in an emergency. Hopefully we'd have an option to manually shut down long-term allocations or resize them using Bureaucracy dice or something.
2) For some of the megaprojects, the sheer scale of the project sits poorly with the 2-4 year planning horizon. This has always been an issue, really, with the biggest of them, North Boston being the obvious example. It's not a unique problem that only matters here, but it's something to consider.
3) Many of our projects occupy a sort of liminal space here, where the phases are individually small and granular but where we're predictably going to be spending a lot on them for a long time. Fusion power has been a great example for the past in-game year or two; apartments are another. It'd be hard to balance dice allocation to such a project given that the desire to vary the rate or add additional dice to support an urgent project could be significant. I'm not entirely sure what to do about this; it sounds like an interesting and very complicated exercise to keep all the options mechanically balanced.
And who is responsible for the present state of affairs in which it is virtually unknown, supposedly? Who? Who?It's called "fabric softener", you uncultured machine-empire heathens.
Kane: makes fabric softener universally unavailable, sneers at people unfamiliar with it.
I can see my way to doing that. My personal neurosis is that someone will decide in 'Q4 that ohh, we can get it for just a little sprint of four dice instead of two!
And then in a sudden flush of misguided altruism, we complete the phase in a rush and effectively sign away 70-75 RpT of next Plan's Treasury income, which was metaphorical seed corn we were kind of going to need in 2062.
Still, it's a reasonable approach.
One thing I'd like to observe is that the thunderdome issue is mainly because people tend to disagree about what is a priority. Long Term Systematic Planning Organization won't fix that; that's in the nature of people needing to decide what to do and getting psychologically invested in outcomes, in a game where we can never do anything and thus people always feel like they're falling short and Failing The People in one or more ways.
The other thing is that update ballooning is driven by several factors. But the biggest one is one you can only really track yourself: What takes you the most time? Reducing the total number of allocatable dice by ensuring that some fraction of our total dice are "locked into" long-range programs or independent bureaus may help, but I don't know how much it will help. Among other things, because the megaprojects we blow like 8 dice on in a single turn mean you only have to write a single segment.
Which is easier to write the update for? Orbital, when we spend eight dice on like one moon mine and a space station? Or Military, when we spend eight dice on like four to six different projects?
You may want to be thinking in terms of how to deliberately incentivize fewer projects per turn, even if individually those projects have high Progress requirements and consume a lot of dice. And in your shoes, I certainly wouldn't want to incentivize spending on more numerous projects per turn with 1-2 dice apiece, because that means having to write twice as many blurbs per turn!
- Location
- Africa
@Ithillid I have another idea , how about creating a new resource called "Major project Resources"(MPR) , it would be a pool of points that would work like the Long Term Systematic Planning idea were you assigned points instead of dice , these points represent the government's ability to carry out major projects and they would be used to carry out really big projects with the more points used the more Rpt consumed and the faster the project gets done , to grow the MPR pool there are several ways to go about it , the first and likely most relevant for this quest is any any new dice above the total pool of 60 gets converting into a new point , there are other ways that the MPR pool could grow likely to become relevant during the sequel quest , those are for every 100 points of cap goods per quarter or every 100 logistics points per quarter you get a new MPR point , representing the government's ability to call upon or mobilize major industrial assets and resources as it needs for mega projects without disrupting its day to day operations
examples of such projects in this quest were we would use MPR would be Nuuk , Boston , all the space stations and eventually Kane willing the TCN
this MPR system will really come into its own though in the sequel quest though were the sheer number of big projects will make MPR points likely more important that dice since we will likely see projects like establishing a ship yard complexes that would need us to set up yards for ships from as small as corvettes to as large as super dreadnought and we would likely be needed to repeat the projects as well to ensure our naval production ability isn't all in one connivant to take out place , another MPR project that we would end up doing multiple times would be colonization support as new colonies would need a lot of infrastructure , medical services , defenses , industry ,terraforming and agriculture on a planet wide scale all of whom when finished allow for more specialized projects depending on the planets own qualifications and local conditions , these would all be much more practical to be done using MPR rather than dice
there are also true Mega projects which would take a great deal of our MPR pool for their duration which will not be short but would have massive returns when complete , an example would be something like The Ring Of Iron from 40k a massive yard complex ring that rings around an entire planet allowing us to push out/refit/repair multiple major fleets at a time with each production run
also my idea pushes for the MPR pool resources rather than dice because this whole thing was brought about by the need to limit the dice pool to something the QM can effectively manage , so I made the idea for this system to remove the issue of someone deciding that the RNG could overcome the over 60 dice malus if they throw just enough of them in just the right way to keep things from getting too complicated
If anyone has any input to add , it would be appreciated
examples of such projects in this quest were we would use MPR would be Nuuk , Boston , all the space stations and eventually Kane willing the TCN
this MPR system will really come into its own though in the sequel quest though were the sheer number of big projects will make MPR points likely more important that dice since we will likely see projects like establishing a ship yard complexes that would need us to set up yards for ships from as small as corvettes to as large as super dreadnought and we would likely be needed to repeat the projects as well to ensure our naval production ability isn't all in one connivant to take out place , another MPR project that we would end up doing multiple times would be colonization support as new colonies would need a lot of infrastructure , medical services , defenses , industry ,terraforming and agriculture on a planet wide scale all of whom when finished allow for more specialized projects depending on the planets own qualifications and local conditions , these would all be much more practical to be done using MPR rather than dice
there are also true Mega projects which would take a great deal of our MPR pool for their duration which will not be short but would have massive returns when complete , an example would be something like The Ring Of Iron from 40k a massive yard complex ring that rings around an entire planet allowing us to push out/refit/repair multiple major fleets at a time with each production run
also my idea pushes for the MPR pool resources rather than dice because this whole thing was brought about by the need to limit the dice pool to something the QM can effectively manage , so I made the idea for this system to remove the issue of someone deciding that the RNG could overcome the over 60 dice malus if they throw just enough of them in just the right way to keep things from getting too complicated
If anyone has any input to add , it would be appreciated
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think in a lot of cases, it's because dice represent "Treasury attention" and not "all labor."
Shock-level investment in a project doesn't necessarily translate into the project being exactly half finished, then totally abandoned for a year, then finished. It may represent the top-level Treasury bureaucracy dumping like a jillion credits into a fund to get the job done, then walking away while construction crews slowly chug away at the project, then realizing "oh crap, we need an additional quarter jillion credits to get the job done" and coming back a year later to top off the big fund before the project runs out of money and has to lay off the workforce.
I'd say the obvious solution is just to make it cost a Bureaucracy die and -25 Progress to the target megaproject every time you do something like that.
Doing it once in a while is routine operations. Annoying but sometimes necessary. Doing it often becomes its own punishment and is almost never worth the trouble.
The biggest offender there was Chemical Precursor Plants, I think. That wasn't so much "tiberium ate it" as just "you left the shells of the chemical plants standing for two years" or something.
We don't usually do that though; most projects get seen through to completion at a more or less steady pace once begun, or get stopped at a logical stopping point like North Boston or Chicago.
Since I have not played those games, I cannot comment on how realistic they are about what you can and cannot do with a single ship small enough to be reasonably controlled by a small number of individuals and easily concealed.
Yes. That's my point. His real long-term goals require resources on the scale of nations, and concealing a space fleet capable of acting on that scale would be impractical, so he continues to and/or has to pursue those goals by means other than building a space fleet.
As such he doesn't need Space Ships, he needs another round of Kessler Syndrome to make us stuck on Earth as Tiberium encroaches on everyone forcing us to work towards some form of TCN. Anyways we need that portal tech development as soon as possible so Kesslering us becomes a lot less viable.[/quote]Honestly, Kesslering us becomes a lot less viable just from us having shimmer shields on our big space stations to protect against meteor impacts, combined with orbital lasers to vaporize problematic bits of debris. We don't have the orbital lasers yet, but it's something we could achieve in the reasonably near future: a single 240-point or so Military project under the Space Force category.
We cleaned orbit up once before, and we could do it again as long as Enterprise was well protected by the ASAT network and a good orbital defense grid.
It's a self-contained reference. Kane is directly quoting a line that, as far as I can determine, originated with the Broadway musical titled 1776, written by the named man (Peter Stone, if I recall correctly).
The line is attributed to, I believe, John Adams, but so far as I know there's no evidence he ever actually said it. It's the fictional version of Adams within the play who says it.
My one concern is, as noted, the smaller projects. When it comes to stuff that costs 200 or 300 Progress, not being able to manually assign dice to complete the project in a single quarter can greatly complicate planning, to the point where it would take significant increases in efficiency to offset the inconvenience of not being able to just mash the "GET DONE NOW" button.
First, you're assuming you know what Kane wants based on the games, when we are pretty certain that his goals in-Quest are at least somewhat different. You are almost certainly working from partially-wrong premises.
Second, regarding the Millennium Falcon, it's more like a souped-up 1960/70s roadster that requires far more maintenance time than most sane people would think it's worth... but the performance makes it worth it to a smuggler, even if it's a mechanic's nightmare.
Edit: but this is now completely irrelevant to the quest, so probably should be dropped.
As I understand it, this would apply to all projects, not just the big ones. As regards your concerns:
1) I believe that in an emergency, we might well get decreased penalties for putting a project on hold. We would always have that option, though.
2) I don't think it would do all that poorly with the plan cycle. Sure, we would need to actually figure out how to do long-term planning, but I consider that a benefit, not a drawback.
3) Again, I'm not sure I see a problem here, because if we allocate dice to a project that finishes in 1-2 turns, it doesn't change much. Maybe I'm not understanding your concern?
The issue that comes to mind as a problem that I can see, is if we hit the last turn of a project that we assigned 2+ dice to, but it only needs 1 die worth of investment to complete - there might need to be a special case where it automatically frees up allocated dice that aren't needed.
Ah. I don't see how that would be a problem, since we would allocate dice for a phase/stage, and then when completed, they would be freed up. So, if we allocated 3+ dice for Fusion Plants, they'd be available for use again in a turn or two. Or so I understand it.
- Location
- New England
I like the proposed "long term project" changes, as it means that the completion of projects to which a commitment has been made doesn't rely on the thread's drosophila-like attention span. No offense to any individuals, but groups of people are gonna do what groups of people do. As long as there's the option to detach committed dice in an emergency, it should be fine. I've seen this mechanic before in other plan-quests (as "contract the work to an outside organization"), and it's worked pretty well there.
The main problem I see with this is that it prevents the excitement of potentially seeing a critical success or failure on a big project.
As far as a soft dice cap, yeah, do it.
Edit: I don't see how any of those changes would reduce the size of the updates, though, unless there's a plan to not bother writing updates for "auto-progressing" projects.
The main problem I see with this is that it prevents the excitement of potentially seeing a critical success or failure on a big project.
As far as a soft dice cap, yeah, do it.
Edit: I don't see how any of those changes would reduce the size of the updates, though, unless there's a plan to not bother writing updates for "auto-progressing" projects.
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- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
While the idea might be a lot better from a DM perspective, i feel like it might be kinda bad for the sake of making less thunderdome, because it kinda put's dice's into lock, which means everyone will absolutly want to have the project they think is most important into plan.
And secondly, it does remove a lot of flexibility, with like, we can put 5 dice on a project, discover some military project need surge funding now, so we adjust it down to 2 for the next turn, before finishing it with 5 on the third turn. So, this will lead to everyone fighting to get the best amount of dice to what they think is best, on whatever project. And that might lead to subtle blaming "Well, i didn't think 4 dice was best for that project", when we get an emergancy.
If this is better for QM perspective, it should most definintly be done, since well, the QM is doing most of the work, but if it's done out of desire to reduce amount of player argument, i feel like it could easily backfire, due to the static nature meaning, everyone sorta need to have their ideas voted for,
Though, i'm by no means a questing expert, so i might be totally of the mark here
And secondly, it does remove a lot of flexibility, with like, we can put 5 dice on a project, discover some military project need surge funding now, so we adjust it down to 2 for the next turn, before finishing it with 5 on the third turn. So, this will lead to everyone fighting to get the best amount of dice to what they think is best, on whatever project. And that might lead to subtle blaming "Well, i didn't think 4 dice was best for that project", when we get an emergancy.
If this is better for QM perspective, it should most definintly be done, since well, the QM is doing most of the work, but if it's done out of desire to reduce amount of player argument, i feel like it could easily backfire, due to the static nature meaning, everyone sorta need to have their ideas voted for,
Though, i'm by no means a questing expert, so i might be totally of the mark here
- Location
- New England
I think I agree with this point - I don't really feel like there really needs to be a reduction in player discussion. A QM is not obligated to review every individual post, especially as we're looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of posts between updates; most of them bickering about allocating one die here vs there and constructing fantastical scenarios based on throwaway discord comments or random thoughts that occur in their heads. Or, in my case, random joke shitposts. But if people want to spend their time doing that, that's their call.
That being said, I sympathize with the QM, given how many tags I've seen the poor guy get in the course of a single page.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Basically, the issue is that when you have projects that only cost 2-4 dice apiece, you're not saving much time or energy with this method, because there's no "it saves a lot of time when you don't have to re-discuss how many dice to allocate every turn" because the allocation is only done once or twice anyway.
And if you do this on all projects, you're effectively abolishing the entire concept of "rolling dice for project completion" on any level anywhere in the game. Which is fine, but then we could just do that and rename dice to "points" or something and roll no more d100s or d50s or anything like that. Just have every "point" allocated increase a project's Progress by a flat 50+bonuses and 'simplify' matters... Except that this wouldn't actually make anything less work for Ithillid, as far as I can tell, because we'd still be looking for updates on projects and he'd still have to write them.
I do think this is correct. Making it so that the consequences of winning or losing an argument are locked in for several turns (real-life months!) is not normally the sort of thing that makes the arguments less salty when they happen.
- Location
- The Underdark
This would not apply to the smaller projects. Basically, this is entirely for the projects that are above the 600-800 point range. Beyond that, you do have significant ability to press the "Get done now" button even with the modification, because free dice don't lock. So if you want to get a project done quickly, you put big numbers of dice into it, and then on top of that pile on 5 free dice, and Erewhon.
The big things are interpersonal relationships, big battle scenes, and my work/social life. The first is something where I can cut back on them, but I am also trying to get better at writing them. Second is basically not going to be a major thing for the rest of the quest, and then the last is something where I have IRL stuff to do, and don't want to change that.
- Location
- USA
I'm just kinda confused about how this would help.
It's still the same amount of dice being put into projects, right? We would just have 4 or whatever each turn locked on a Mega project.
I'm not saying it wouldn't help or it's a bad idea. I just don't understand how it helps.
It's still the same amount of dice being put into projects, right? We would just have 4 or whatever each turn locked on a Mega project.
I'm not saying it wouldn't help or it's a bad idea. I just don't understand how it helps.
Legion0047
Retired Shadowrunner.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- God Emperor
It makes it actually possible to long term plan.
Part of it is probably that we would have to actually finish mega projects. Boston and Chicago have remained unfinished for a very long time. And considering there are cap-stone bonuses to finishing mega projects, the fact that we would be more likely to finish them means we would actually get such bonuses.
At one point I remember people were discussing there being a escalating bonus for actions the longer they were being done for. If there's solid planning estimates for mega project completion then we might be getting something like that too?
The dice still get rolled, as I understand it. It's just that we get the tradeoff of locking in effort and resources in exchange for a reduction in how much it takes to work on a project. And allows Ithillid to go "progress on [Project] continues, as predicted/behind/ahead of schedule".
It makes it necessary to long-term plan.
- Location
- New England
- Location
- The Underdark
I am talking on the scale of the Regency War, where I am trying to write 6-10 major battle sequences often with lots of moving parts. Smaller scale operations, and individual big battles are still going to be happening decently regularly, just not on the scale that the big war where you would get 3, 4 part updates every month.
- Location
- USA
We long term plan now.
We've been long term planning the whole quest.
We just have stuff happen that we need to react to that throws parts of plans onto disarray.
I don't see how locking dice onto projects helps. That seems like it would actively hinder our ability to react to things.
Like say we research some piece of tech. But we get a project out of it that could really have a big impact. So currently we drop a bunch of non essential or flexible projects to focus on the new thing, knock it out, then go back to what we were doing.
With the new system (if I understand it correctly) if we wanted to focus on a new project we would be penalized for taking dice off the mega project.
How? It's the same amount of dice going into projects. Some would just be locked.
As for increasing participation I feel like this might make it worse. We would have fewer dice to play with so fights over priorities would get a lot more intense since there would be a lot less room for compromise. Currently moving a few dice around isn't that big of a deal because we can address multiple priorities at once.
Reduce the available dice to 1 or 2... moving stuff around becomes much harder.
I can appreciate the cost reduction of mega projects by locking dice onto them.
THAT'S a interesting mechanic that adds a great cost benefit analysis onto things. I fully support that. Is it worth losing 4 dice for whatever turns for huge savings? That's a great way to promote planning and discussion.
Does that help update speed and participation? I don't know how.
Oledoms
Friesmancer
I like the idea of this. While the loss of one or two dice is a hassle for a few turns. It is quite efficient in most part. just have a few questions regarding the setup
Is this only available for large setups like Nuuk and Boston or will it include unlimited Power and Food like Fusion Power Plants, Tiberium Veins and Aquaponics? I know there is power automation option on both in the future but this seems more efficient
Also is the CP for this extracted in main or the reserves.
- Location
- New England
For the ones that are purely "make numbers go up", we already have some options, such as the alternative power plant production department that eats a die but gives +x power per turn (I forget the exact #s); I fully support more of these, because there are only so many times you can read (and write) "you built more apartment complexes" before it gets boring. I would prefer to retain the possibility of critical success/failure for such projects as well, however.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
In all fairness, that hasn't really been that much of a problem. When we have a big megaproject that needs doing, we generally invest, even if it'll take multiple turns to see results. If we don't do that, it's usually for a reason. For instance, the reason we haven't finished North Boston Phase 5 even though it's been like sixteen-plus turns since we cleared Phase 4 isn't because "we are unable to long term plan." It's because it's a huge investment of dice and budget and we've felt (with some good reason) that we could get better results in other ways.
The closest we've had to a true "inability to long term plan" is with the OSRCT project, where we've put it off completion until pretty close to the last minute... But again, there was a reason for that. We were told we'd hit a point of diminishing returns for the duration of the war, as I recall, and the urgency of the war itself meant that we had like four branches of the armed forces yelling at us to finish certain critical projects. OSRCT got put off because it didn't seem to line up with the military's immediate needs, while things like wingman drones that weren't originally even on the list of Plan targets were presented as much more urgent.
Yes. On the other hand, we had reasons for that. It wasn't just some act of mindlessness or timidity on our part; we honestly concluded that there were more pressing things to do than "finish" Chicago, even with an unspecified eventual capstone reward for finishing it. We're approaching the project now from a different perspective, but we had reasons.
Much the same is true of North Boston; the last phase is a hugely dice-hungry project at roughly thirty dice, despite the very high bonuses we have in Heavy Industry that effectively make two dice do the work of three. It provides lots of Capital Goods, but Nuuk has roughly twice the return on investment now, so unless the capstone bonus is really good, it's going to feel like we sacrificed a lot of time and effort to get it done for a questionable benefit to the overall Plan.
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to complete all phases of a megaproject, but we shouldn't treat the fact that we sometimes do not do so right away as some kind of in-game defeat caused by bad play. You could equally well turn it around and say "the Treasury is trying hard to make sure that the projects it completes actually meet the needs of GDI's security, GDI's ability to defend against tiberium, and the general welfare of the citizenry, as opposed to just obsessively pouring the budget into giant industrial projects that have uncertain correlations to the things that are needed"
My observation was more in the vein of "if we did this on ALL projects, including the small ones, it would effectively abolish 'rolling dice,' or it would make attempting to long-term plan incredibly annoying."
Because the "sure, just hand me 3 dice/turn for 10 turns and it gets done" kind of thing only really works for giant projects. For the tiny ones, you're left Tetris-ing in all this complicated stuff anyway.
Yeah, that's a valid issue. Having stuff like the stabilizer constellation pop up unexpectedly and trying to pull it off with a maximum-effort surge is kind of interesting, and it'd be a bit harder to recreate that dynamic under the new rules.
Like, in my recent plan drafts (which have done pretty well in terms of voter support), I've sometimes been considering stuff 8-12 turns in advance because we have project deadlines that need to be considered that far in advance. The stuff that I do that isn't integrated into a long range plan tends to be there either because it's one of a large number of projects we could potentially fund and we might as well choose this one, or because I'm responding to an emergency.
We're not actually restricted by an inability to plan ahead in the game world, except insofar as the game world itself tends to disrupt our plans with both good and bad surprises, which I see as a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, I do think this would become a problem. Knife fighting over the handful of dice left over after we commit to finish North Boston Phase 5 or Reykjavik Phase 5 or Chicago at, say, 3-4 dice per turn... could get messy.
It's only efficient if it actually provides a net mechanical benefit. The quest hasn't really been suffering from an inability to plan ahead and get projects done on time. Projects that haven't been done on time are usually the ones that wouldn't benefit from the dice-lock (because it doesn't affect small things), or projects we had a damn good reason not to do at the time even if theoretically it would have nice effects.
Another big issue for this is that our needs in those areas aren't actually constant.
Sometimes we'll want to do a lot of vein mining. At other times, we have no pressing need to do so and other issues like efficiently abating the Red Zones matter more.
Sometimes we're slamming out a phase of fusion reactors practically every turn because we have a ton of very power-hungry war factories to build in a hurry. Sometimes, we don't need Energy at quite such an intense rate. Locking ourselves in to a fixed trickle of resources to "enable long term planning" isn't necessarily an improvement, especially if this particular Bureaucracy option comes with a permanent loss of Free dice, when Free dice are supposedly the exact thing you'd need to have any flexibility within this system.
- Location
- The Underdark
The benefit of locking dice is that it makes a pretty wide swathe of big industrial megaprojects noticeably cheaper per die. With the nuuk exemplar, I did not directly draw attention to it, but it took the project from being a 20 resources per die project to a 15 resources per die project.
Now, what I am thinking is that I am going to leave the project in, keep discussing the precise mechanics in the background (maybe have options to do both locking dice for a cheaper project and having an option to do short term shock effort at a higher cost) and push the update in a half hour if that is not a problem.
- Location
- USA
I think locking dice into a mega project for cost reductions is really interesting and I support that.
It promotes committing to big projects but at a cost of dice that actually makes a debate of cost savings vs flexibility really viable. That's interesting and could really promote discussion on what projects we can or can't spare the dice to go for.
My only concern is the stated goals of making updates easier and promoting participation. I'm not at all sure if it advances those goals and in the case of participation I feel might make it worse. But that's really all I'm worried about.
It promotes committing to big projects but at a cost of dice that actually makes a debate of cost savings vs flexibility really viable. That's interesting and could really promote discussion on what projects we can or can't spare the dice to go for.
My only concern is the stated goals of making updates easier and promoting participation. I'm not at all sure if it advances those goals and in the case of participation I feel might make it worse. But that's really all I'm worried about.
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- Location
- USA
If you are taking suggestions for things like the department of energy maybe one for LCI that is -1 dice +X consumer goods per turn and is all about producing more of what we roll out- The benefit for us would be that once we do a new consumer good type project we would get a slow expansion over time, while this also takes another dice out of rotation