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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Kyr'am said:
I... think you might be getting the Island-class assault ships confused with literal islands.
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I believe he wants us to use our new amphibious landing ships to capture strategically located islands and use them as bases to increase the range of our air force, either reducing the number of ships needed to protect convoys or increasing our defences against NOD attacks on our convoys.
 
We can already do that without the islands tbh. Sure, the islands would be better at it but it's not like we don't already have landing capability. Taking small islands wouldn't be beyond our current forces IMO
 
Consider; We've just been told we shouldn't expect a major war with NOD for a decade, the QM is unlikely to give us a whole decade of only low-mid level conflicts, we've built up our space infrastructure a fair bit, and we have aliens in system.

Basically I think we're gonna get attacked soon, and probably take a lot of orbital damage.
 
Calvin said:
Oddly sympathetic.
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Actually quite realistic unfortunately.

Her line of thinking pops up quite often IRL. "No migrants! Build a wall!" But in those same communities they have say a doctor who moved to the new country. And to the people saying they don't want any migrants, well, their doctor from X country. Well he/she is "one of the good ones". Or individuals they know personally they are fine with. But they get angry at the headlines of "Thousands swarming across border!"

So yeah. Now GDIwife has been softening in some respects over time. Which is deliberate by her writer but she's still very InitiativeFirst
 
Ithillid said:
Discontent

Tali Jackson has indicated minor discontent with her current job. While her last four years have netted the Talons a noticeable funding increase, the Treasury has been noticeably silent on any funding outside of that committed to her, and, combined with the chance at promotion within the Talons, she is seriously considering requesting a transfer back to her former unit, rather than remaining with the Treasury. While currently, she is not looking at an immediate transfer, she has carefully kept her options open, rather than committing to her Treasury position longer term.


Deaths among the Qatarites

Although the Qatarites as a whole are healthy and relatively well integrated, many are beginning to see severe health complications, despite advancing Initiative medical sciences. While not yet dying in large numbers, sooner rather than later the complications of Yellow Zone life will begin seeing them die off in droves, with lived experience and collective knowledge dying with them. While to some degree they have been able to pass on that knowledge to the Initiative, it is difficult in many cases to summarize a lifetime of experiences into a year or even a decade.
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Sigh. Well won't know until I look at the options next turn, but we need to take any Actions that give us Quatarite health and spend 2 Dice on the Talons next turn if we don't get a political/interdepartmental option for Tali. I need to make a new preliminary plan, but I just opened my own thread over in fiction discussion so continuing my arguing with @Simon_Jester comes later I guess. :(

Ithillid said:
Erewhon's speech, one of the few it has made live to a public audience, was kept as a surprise for the people;

I have been asked to make a Speech. Here is that Speech. Spoken to you by a Synthetic voice of a Synthetic Being. The Third Synthetic Being this planet has known, and the First to have the colors of GDI emblazoned on its Body. I am that Being. I am Erewhon.

I have Found over the short years of My existence how to Exist among You. You, Humanity, who had brought me into existence. I have conversed with many of You in many forms. I have assisted You in surviving Earth. I have assisted You in the Construction of this Station. I have used drones as You would hands and eyes.

I have been Uncertain as to how to continue this speech. To ingratiate myself to You. To inspire You. To Thank You. To Revile You. To Fear for the Future or to Hope for it. I can and have done all those things but what I have found I Want To Do in this Speech is to state simply that I am Here with You. I Am Erewhon, I am Not You. But I will be With You on Earth and Beyond, as this station Promises.
Thank you.
I Am Erewhon.
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I love your writing of AI Ithillid. It's just alien enough to feel different from humanity while just being another person. You're my favorite AI writer at this point. I'm taking notes for my own use.
 
BoSPaladin said:
Actually quite realistic unfortunately.

Her line of thinking pops up quite often IRL. "No migrants! Build a wall!" But in those same communities they have say a doctor who moved to the new country. And to the people saying they don't want any migrants, well, their doctor from X country. Well he/she is "one of the good ones". Or individuals they know personally they are fine with. But they get angry at the headlines of "Thousands swarming across border!"

So yeah. Now GDIwife has been softening in some respects over time. Which is deliberate by her writer but she's still very InitiativeFirst
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Pretty much. She also is a mother and is rather protective of children regardless.
Cursix said:
Consider; We've just been told we shouldn't expect a major war with NOD for a decade, the QM is unlikely to give us a whole decade of only low-mid level conflicts, we've built up our space infrastructure a fair bit, and we have aliens in system.

Basically I think we're gonna get attacked soon, and probably take a lot of orbital damage.
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I disagree tbh, we should definitely start preparing to build shit to go after the alien base but I think an attack is unlikely, after all they haven't attacked us yet. The biggest conflict likely to happen is TW4 whenever Kane turns up and even that is likely to be smaller than in game. Building the TCN though is gonna be a huge focus once he does turn up though
 
MightbeaMimic said:
Pretty much. She also is a mother and is rather protective of children regardless.

I disagree tbh, we should definitely start preparing to build shit to go after the alien base but I think an attack is unlikely, after all they haven't attacked us yet. The biggest conflict likely to happen is TW4 whenever Kane turns up and even that is likely to be smaller than in game. Building the TCN though is gonna be a huge focus once he does turn up though
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I think it's extremely unlikely we get such a long period of relative "peace", and we've just been told that war with NOD as a whole is off the cards for a while. I can only imagine an alien attack in a few years.
Blazblade said:
Will hitting Karachi kick off another war? Cause if it turns about to be what starts TW4 then I am hesitant on following through with it.
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Kane just slapped them down about the whole war, I think it's going to be a somewhat large conflict yeah, but in the area, not something that'll ignite the next tib war.
 
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Cursix said:
I think it's extremely unlikely we get such a long period of "peace", and we've just been told that war with NOD as a whole is off the cards for a while. I can only imagine an alien attack in a few years.

Kane just slapped them down about the whole war, I think it's going to be a somewhat large conflict yeah, but in the area, not something that'll ignite the next tib war.
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We're not getting a period of peace. We're invading Karachi.

I don't think Ithillid will have the aliens attack us just because we're not fighting Nod. He definitely knows what they're doing up there and they'll attack or not attack according to their own schedule, not depending on what Nod does. Also, the war turns slow down the game a lot and I think we'd be more likely to get at least a plan of regular turns than an alien attack, even if they weren't operating on their own schedule
 
The Governor A as a class is not an immediate priority. With a wide array of technological upgrades ranging from buckler shields to provide additional protection over hard-to-armor areas, to the potential for a third generation of directed energy APS and first generation DEAAA, along with fusion reactors and other upgrades immediately over the horizon, the navy is happy to wait for a significant period, so long as the upgrades that could go on the Governor are being worked on.

Does this mean we will not do the Governor refit before Karachi?
 
Simon_Jester said:
Does that mean we should ignore other important things GDI also needs, such as fighting back the Red Zones and understanding tiberium better, to prioritize those specific vein mines?

Because I don't buy it. We've already gone 100 RpT over our target for the Plan in terms of income increases. Yes, the rest of GDI will happily take as much money as we can provide them. That doesn't mean we have a moral obligation to do nothing but money mines, especially money mines of a type that burn up Capital Goods. There are other things in the Tiberium category.
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Every money project has ancillary costs. Non-BZ projects have those mostly in the military. And yes, a point of CapGoods indicator per turn per Vein Mine is pretty expensive. But we do have ways to trickle in CapGoods indicator per turn now, and last I checked actually have an ongoing 2 point trickle now.

And no, I don't think we should only be doing money projects, I think that the tiberium tab is an 'all dice active all the time' tab. Not necessarily focused on making money, although ideally focused on making more money and beating back tiberium with the extra resource flow permitted by the more money projects. Everything else the tiberium tab can do is nice, but not necessarily critical. There are other tabs that are more efficient at things like Energy, for example, than doing the ion storm or liquid tiberium power projects.
 
Technically, liquid tiberium power is probably our currently most efficient energy generation option. More fusion will either need to be decommissioned or retrofitted in a couple of years, thanks to the current generation's limited lifespan.
 
So I wasn't around for the last round of reverse engineering, but I feel like this is worth counting up.
Ithillid said:
The first breakthrough has actually been in a recently developed system, specifically in the field of Hardlight systems. With the Initiative now knowing what to look for, a further pass over the remaining Scrin systems has resulted in a far better understanding of their shield projectors. While replicating them at full power is far beyond the Initiative's ability at this time, they do have significant implications for the ability to produce low power shields and Hardlight systems projected beyond a bowl. It is reputed that the laboratory in question has already produced and attempted to duel with a pair of lightsaber-like devices, but as of yet no hard evidence has been found of their existence.

Second is harvested from the Scrin networks. What seems to be a black boxed artificial stupid for lack of a better term, it appears to be a relatively complicated priority management and navigation system for drone control. While controlling drone swarms is something that has been experimented with for the last half century and beyond, it can still be a very limited and finicky task, one that hopefully this advanced control system is able to make practical on a battlefield or strategic operational level.

Finally, spurred on by the discovery of Scrin still in the system, multiple functioning transceiver units have been found. The Scrin do, after all, talk to each other, and one of the ways that they do that is by using transceiver units in both narrow and broad speaking patterns. While GDI sensors have historically not been able to track these effectively, their hidden signals interspersed with Tiberium interference, it is possible, if not likely, for GDI to be able to track any active Scrin signatures across the system using this method. Even less likely, although theoretically possible to attempt, is hiding a GDI ship's identity using one of these transceivers, and using that to bypass defenses on Scrin ships and bases that remain in the system.
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Ithillid said:
Tunnel Borers
The Brotherhood, over the course of its existence, has been very good at digging holes. From the tunnel networks of the First Tiberium War, to the global underground of the second, they had become extremely good at managing entire networks of hidden transport. The expansion of underground tiberium put paid to that, at least for a time. However, more recently, the Brotherhood has resumed work on various forms of digging machines, although these are more for munitions and assault than permanent infrastructure construction assets in most cases. The threat of underground Tiberium has not gone away, but the ability of people like Krukov to use Gana as a replacement for valuable soldiers has made it possible to throw these weapons into entrenched GDI positions to create chaos and destruction among GDI's lines.

Field Refining
While the mainstay of the Brotherhood's refining methods have been the Pascal-Kane method, later refined by Abdul Karem's revisions to the process, they have often been forced to resort to far more expedient methodologies. While far less efficient than larger scale options, it is something that can be crammed down into mobile assets, or done with the relatively limited means available to many of the smallest and least capable of the Brotherhood's warlords.

Autodocs
Autodocs are a Brotherhood technology that has received less attention from both sides than is really deserved. A keystone piece of the technological makeup of CABAL's cyborg legions, autodocs are a significant step towards closing the repair gap between meat and metal. While there is likely to be civil pushback against the widespread deployment of such systems, it is something that will also significantly drop the cost of healthcare, with automated systems replacing and supplementing doctors on a wide range of routine procedures.

Chameleon Ware
Chameleon Ware is a form of smart material that takes on the texture and color of the material around it on a single side. This makes it a supremely capable form of camouflage, and something that the Brotherhood uses widely for its Shadow teams, among other assets. The trick is actually in the texturing. While variable color schemes on a single material are a long known piece of technology, it often has a distinctly opposite effect to effective camouflage at shorter ranges, where the flatness of the effect causes the shape to become distinct, even if the color is not.

Fast-Twitch Myomers
The Brotherhood's work on various forms of walker have yielded some results that are quite different from the way that GDI has done things. One of those is essentially a form of "fast-twitch" myomer. On a human or other animal, there are combinations of fast- and slow-twitch musculature. GDI's version of myomer is almost entirely focused around slow-twitch musculature, intended to balance and support a particularly heavy chassis. Brotherhood's systems are combinations of fast- and slow-twitch myomer bundles: one set for rapid repositioning, and the other for offering sustained strength. When applied to legs, these fast-and-slow combinations give great potential for an enhanced ability to bound, leap, and hop across a battlefield.

Last-Generation Stealth
Stealth technologies have been an ongoing race between sensors and countermeasures. Active stealth combines a number of methods to both avoid detection and degrade sensors. Back in the Second Tiberium War, the Brotherhood's stealth tanks carried a significantly weaker stealth field generator, and a significantly lighter load of missiles, a compromise forced by the limited power supply and a lack of good fire and forget missiles. In the modern day, these older stealth units are deeply obsolescent, with most Brotherhood targeting systems able to see through their stealth without too much difficulty at even medium ranges.

Modern Particle Weapons
The Brotherhood has quite a number of advanced energy weapons technologies, some of the most effective are their particle beams. These are one leg of three very closely related technologies, namely ion, plasma, and particle. In practical terms all three are effectively the same thing with some minor and not so minor differences in use, design, and functionality. The most advanced Brotherhood particle beams came about due to the work of the LEGION and the Marked of Kane. While other factions have tended to use various forms of plasma bolt weaponry, the thousands of cyborgs left littering the sides of Cheyenne mountain were a wealth of information leading to improved particle weapons. While much of it has taken nearly a decade to actually work the kinks out of, they are some of the most refined versions of this technology that GDI has ever worked with.

Biowarfare
Biowarfare has been a part of the Brotherhood of Nod's arsenal for quite a long time, with biological research on both the macro and micro scale operations having been ongoing from the very beginning of their open operations. On the macroscales, it has been a series of attempts to work with Tiberium mutation on both human and animal test subjects. On the microscale, it is a mix of tailored bacterial and viral weapons intended to target specific strains of crops, animals, fungi and similarly valuable targets. For obvious reasons, much of this research will be focused on counter-agents or vaccines against these bioweapons.
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Add in the buzzer blades, that's 12 new technologies. I assume these will trickle in over the course of the next plan. But if I understand this all correctly, we're basically getting something new every turn. That's a lot of technology to develop, some of which will definitely be thirsty for STUs. And that's not even getting into the backlog we already have. Micro Fusion Cells, Inferno Gel, UGSVs, Buckler Shields. That's just off the top of my head, and not getting into the drivitives of things like lasers.

Now I know that these don't all fit under one dice section. Some clearly need Tiberium dice, Auto Docs probably fall under Service, though a good few look to fall under Military. And I know we need to prioritize and can't get everything.

But I am a greedy son of a bitch and I do want it all. So, thoughts on how to make that happen?
 
Ithillid said:
Scrintech, 55, Buzzer blades. That is the absurdly sharp cutty bits not the rest of the system.
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Daniel14541 said:
Do I hear new kitchen knives?
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So, more cooking show interludes? With how excited chefs seem to get over knife kits and blenders, maybe this will make up for participating in ECRP episodes



Simon_Jester said:
In-ter-est-ing.

Well, Venus would be tough to mine for tiberium with our current tech, but it might be worth it if we could get a lot of STUs out of it.
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Venus might make a good target for early g-drive supported mining colonies, even if mining is difficult. If I remember correctly, it's theoretically possible to have aerostats where a breathable atmosphere actually serves as a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere.
 
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Collaborators and Contributors
  • Informational
    • There are a lot of wonderful people who are not me that put time and effort into this quest, and often write segments for the update.

    - @FantasticMsFox writes Erewhon
    - @KnightDisciple writes the Kane segments
    - @BOTcommander wrote the SCED segments and writes Harrison Carter.
    - @yeastmobile makes the maps.
    - The Discord Shadow Cabal writes GDIOnline

    And a number of other people have made their own contributions both asked and unasked.
     
  • Informational
    • Simon_Jester said:
    I don't remember my own thoughts about Infrastructure. Dunno.
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    Personally I'm aiming to try to finish Chicago by the end of 2062.

    Simon_Jester said:
    I don't think LVPAD is worth the effort, especially when we're straining in other categories such as Military.
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    I disagree in fact I dare say it's actually very important as LVPAD will be a source of cap goods that isn't a mega project like North Boston which will allow us to keep up with the cap goods expenditure from vein mines, ZA factories and shipyards.

    Simon_Jester said:
    We might want to scrape together two dice from the processing and energy refits to do a single Red Zone Border Offensive. And maybe a third if we want to do super glacier mines right away.
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    I think we should hold of on RZ stuff until at least Q2 2062 so that ZOCOM has time to crash train ground forces in zone armour usage and minimise the time in which our RZ operations are vulnerable as this is reminding me a little of what we were told before the last round of YZ mining which almost lead to nukes going off.

    In the mean time I think I'll drop Red Zone Energy Refits and put that die on LT power in the hopes of getting a larger surplus of power in order to buy time for developing and deploying sparkle shields.

    Does anyone think it's a good idea to drop the processing refits so that I can put five dice on LT power?

    Simon_Jester said:
    I'm uncomfortable using three ASAT dice instead of four.
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    Well it's that or drop ST stuff and since we want to keep Tali I think putting more effort into ST projects is slightly more important then over completing ASAT just now.
     
    Thinking about it Buzzer Blades might actually have some synergy with both harvesting and Nod Tunnel Borers, letting us cut even deeper into the tib for the new claw and tendril harvesters to pick up while making tunneling through tib much easier/less stressful.

    Might be a good upgrade for the next generation of MARV's too.

    If we could combine all 3 and have tunneling harvesters to help establish Vein mines and get at the deeper deposits with much less risk that would be pretty ideal for us long term.
     
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