Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

[MightbeaMimic]

Any plan go with these options?


[ ] Tabitha Henessey
(+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)

[ ] Dr. Dinesh Bora
(+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)

[ ] Dr. Taylor Bernard
(+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)

[ ] Dr. Rima Alcard
(+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

also does the extra energy per turn change up the formula on how effective DAE is?

Click to shrink...

Yes. Mine and Derpmind's
Whichever of us posts our plan first once the vote opens

 

[Derpmind]

GDIWife
Hmmm. First attempt blew up on the launch pad. Second attempt went better, it took off but was aerodynamically unbalanced so ended up careening into the launch control tower. I'm glad I don't work in orbital design, I can tell you that much

GDIWife
Okay, I'm doing slightly better now but I did manage to crash a rocket full of fuel into the middle of Chicago… Oops

GDIWife
Errrm. The good news is that I have finally made it into space. The bad news is that I must have missed some orbital checks or something and I may have accidentally hit the Philadelphia 2. I really hope I'm not going to end up on some kind of watchlist for this

GDIWife
#SaladMan Honestly I'm not actually sure. I got into space, then I looked down at my phone to see if there was a guide for going into a proper orbit. Next thing I knew the station was just kind of there and I didn't have nearly enough time to do anything about it

InTheZONE
…
If anyone important is reading this thread can they please make a note never to allow GDIWife within 100m of anything that flies?

GDIWife
Yeah, the Tiberium does seem to explode really easily. I accidentally tried lithobraking (learned that term from a guide) in a tib field and I think I ended up blowing up most of Australia

Click to shrink...

GDIWife has memetically bad piloting skills.

SCIENCE Meter: 3/4

Click to shrink...

The SCIENCE Meter isn't going up as easily as it used to...

On the other side, there are cities where Initiative industry has not yet expanded into the area, and significant parts of the city are set aside for private concerns. To take Madrid for example, it is one of the newly built tertiary cities. Wracked by urban fighting in the Regency War, nearly every building has seen extensive reconstruction, if not total replacement. Allotments of cotton, mulberry bushes and hemp are already growing in preparation for a new clothing industry. Community Thread, one of the many cooperatives that have gone from proposal to practice in the months since the Initiative began its loan program, has established its first facilities in the old capital city of Spain. The vertically integrated systems that would allow them to grow the allotments are something that needed massed start up funds, and with the tertiary cities being some of the cheapest urban and suburban land in the Initiative, Community Thread is only one of the many success stories being written outside of the core urban environments that have been the traditional core of Initiative industrial capabilities.

Click to shrink...

Even if they're not Planned Cities, between various projects we're basically building entire cities across the world right now. The scale of this quest can be quite big.

In the city itself, a softer, more civilian side has begun to emerge. While the air tastes of industry, there are cafes, libraries, art museums, and other centers of cultural expression cropping up across the city. From a hard bitten outpost clinging like a tick onto ruined buildings, the city has begun to flower into a functioning metropole, a demonstration that GDI can still reclaim the Earth. But even so, tiberium outbreaks are common, and at any given time, there are a few buildings being demolished for tiberium spikes to be installed, and others going up to try and keep ahead of the underground menace.

Click to shrink...

We need Vein Mines ASAP. Constant tiberium outbreaks are going to start hurting us more and more going forward if we don't figure out a way to address them.

A proverb that does not get nearly enough play is that when you give people new material, somebody, somewhere, is going to try to make a blade with it. And the new alloys are no exception. Some are too brittle for good blades. Take U0026, which was used to make a short bowie knife of about 18 centimeters at the New York testing facility, which broke at the grip. The best results have come with U0451, a high carbon and chromium spring steel rich in STUs, especially duranium and adamant, a close relative of 5160 steels. The result is a blade that is dense, but strong and incredibly tough, with the first round of testing using it against a decommissioned drainage pipe, which it survived with no noticeable damage. The blade is a relatively thin, roughly meter long construction, with an hourglass grip, and in-line crossguard, in the style of the old Northeast-African kaskara. Made in the London facility, it has wandered across Europe in the last month. When presented up the chain, the blade itself has been tested against everything from Initiative boron carbide strikeplates, to solid blocks of bar stock. While not all were cut, the blade has survived and required only minimal maintenance, although it did need to be regularly sharpened to keep a cutting edge in the face of the abuse.

Click to shrink...

Add some Zrbite Sonics to this, and we'll have a certified super sword. Possibly the most important piece of equipment for any FPS protagonist.

[ ] Red Zone Border Offensives (Stage 2)
[ ] Deep Red Zone Tiberium Glacier Mining (Stage 1)

Click to shrink...

Just wanna say I super appreciate the vivid descriptions of Tiberium as an alien, hostile landscape from another world that wants to eat you.

The glaciers under attack fight back in their own ways. Tiberium intrusions into the Deep Glacier Mining Zones are almost a daily affair, and the glaciers seem to grow back before the eyes of the workers, regenerating fresh cyrstal mass into each opened cut. ZOCOM has been able to trace that some of this mass is pulled from nearby tiberium fields, which in turn slow the growth of other fields in an attempt to replenish themselves via subterranean veins. This effect cascades across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, slowing tiberium growth in a vast area.

Click to shrink...

While we've known this is how Abatement works for some time, it's really cool to see it happen in real time.

These proposals have certain segments of the population pushing for regulation or bans, primarily around the cosmetic side of genetic editing. Very few people are willing to push back against, for example curing lactose intolerance, but many are concerned about a beauty and talent arms race developing. While future programs are going to be universal or nearly so, that is not a panacea against systematic biases creeping into Initiative society. Prior to recent years, it would have been possible to dismiss such concerns as something that would only be applicable in the far-off future, and not needing more than cursory regulation and legislation. Thanks to a number of ex-Nod scientists, alongside a significant amount of data on the Brotherhood's work on genetic augmentation (human and otherwise) acquired recently, that supposedly far-off future has come faster than predicted.

Click to shrink...

You can take my cat ear gene mods from my cold, dead hands.

The development has been split among three separate design groups.

Click to shrink...

From prior wiki-reading, I believe this is in reference to the three "classes" from TW4? The Offense, Defense, and Support Crawlers, right? Hopefully, we'll get to unlock all three.

 

[Vilegrave]

Did we manage to push up to the threshold tower that was mentioned last turn? From what i remember we were getting close.

Also that Nat 1 on the Glaciers is painful, hopefully it won't lock us out of Super Glaciers entirely the same way we're locked out from normal ones.

 

[MightbeaMimic]

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
-[X] Tabitha Henessey (+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard (+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

Basically Void Stalker's plan but I replaced O'Brien with Dr. Bora.
It gives dice to 4 different categories but doesn't focus on any one and favours alternative benefits over pure bonus numbers
Also SCIENCE!

 

[One Autumn Leaf]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard (+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)


[X] Plan More space for plants
[X] Plan Power Plants

 

[Void Stalker]

[X] Plan To the Stars
-[X] Tabitha Henessey (+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard (+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

Dinesh was very tempting but given how hostile the deep red zones are and the desire to see more orbital work this is what I am proposing.

Tabitha helps Gravitic dev, O'Brian helps all our orbital efforts as we are going to be doing a lot of stations as well, Bernard gets us a die we can put into DAE and makes DAE better, plus if we do that say year 3 we have the rest of year 1 and all of year 2 with an extra die in HI. And finally Rima is vital because I am looking at our labor numbers and seeing issues long term and that is not something we can do quick fixes for so better to start getting increased automation online before the crunch hits because of the time it will take to rollout. Plus increased automation will be handy as we develop more orbital stations and space craft. So all 4 help with space indirectly or directly

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

 

[RCNAnon]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants

 

[Balmung1]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants

 

[BOTcommander]

[X] Plan To the Stars

[X]Plan Free the free dice
-[X] Tabitha Henessey
-[X] Michael O'Brian
-[X] Adrian Castro
-[X] Graduates
--[X] Orbital

[X] Plan More space for plants
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Adrian Castro (+1 Orbital Die, +5 to spacecraft design and deployment projects)

 

[Aerrow Shadow]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants
[X] Plan To the Stars
[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

 

[Oleg-14191]

[X] Plan Power Plants
-[X] Tabitha Henessey (+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)

[X] Plan More space for plants

 

[Lightwhispers]

[X] Plan More space for plants
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Adrian Castro (+1 Orbital Die, +5 to spacecraft design and deployment projects)

For those who want to slow the inexorable spread of Skynet, or just think that automation projects will come in their own time and don't want to take a painful penalty to LCI dice.

And I'm okay with this one, too.
[X] Plan Power Plants
And this
[X]Plan Free the free dice

 

[Gorefink]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants
[X] Plan To the Stars

 

[KnightDisciple]

[X] Plan More space for plants
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Michael O'Brian (+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Adrian Castro (+1 Orbital Die, +5 to spacecraft design and deployment projects)

 

[Derpmind]

[X] Plan More space for plants
[X] Plan Power Plants

 

[Necratoid]

First remember you have 5 open dice and 4 picks from the list. Graduates only matter if you are planning to hard focus on Orbital.

[ ] Dr. Taylor Bernard
(+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)

Click to shrink...

An odd duck of a choice. Grants a heavy industry die and demands its removed by end of plan. In exchange you get a better bonus from the department. The current effect is:
(+3 Energy per turn, -10 Resources per turn, -1 Heavy Industry Dice)
Which makes it end up as making the department of alternate energy more effective and leaving you with technically -2 dice total when he leaves. That make annoy some people with the unfull dice pool.

Probably best to just spawn the DAE next turn and call it a day for him.

[ ] Dr. Dinesh Bora
(+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)

Click to shrink...

Only real drawback is that he limits the research in agriculture to things its okay for NOD to have access to. So keep that in mind if shiny, shiny options come up later that you have to wait him out or give NOD that tech. Worth it, but keep that in mind as a bit of a limiter.

[ ] Michael O'Brian
(+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)

Click to shrink...

Solid option, helps with the orbital heavy sections of the plan.

[ ] Tabitha Henessey
(+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)

Click to shrink...

Mystery option unlock to do with gravitics on a project bay your already planning on doing for the spacecraft anyway. A good, if not mandatory choice. Likely provides new and exciting wys to spend your STUs.

[ ] Adrian Whittard
(+1 Infrastructure Die)

Click to shrink...

Strickly a better option than graduates with the narrative feature of makin some botches for logistics the result of him being in charge of something. Probably unintentionally. Though he also probably has connections for logistics boosting options realistically.

[ ] Dr. Rima Alcard
(+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

Click to shrink...

Exists to have a temporary negative for future bonuses. Probably makes things like factories and the lunar mines more productive. Stings to use until she doesn't basically. Blatantly going to help with the brain crunch. With probably help with advancing the usability of the iso chips.

[ ] Adrian Castro
One of the SCED's test pilots, who has flown nearly every spacecraft in current use across the Initiative, hiring Adrian as a consultant on larger spacecraft design and construction may well provide a much better user eye view of how design decisions are interpreted and is likely to speed construction overall.
(+1 Orbital Die, +5 to spacecraft design and deployment projects)

Click to shrink...

Solid choice, but probably like Henessey in some ways.

---

All told the Graduates are only a thing if your not going to pick 4 out of the 7 of these people. Adrian is okay, but not shiney as an option. Benard is an option to make the DAE a thing more worth it. Most of the reast are just about picking your Spaceborn bonuses. Meaning the two most interesting choices are the other two.

At the moment Bora is +2 dice and a +5 to plant bonus for public domaining Politice Plants and Tarberries. He also probably opens up new options. Unlikely to generate many warcrimes there.

This means the main one to discuss is Alcard. The -5 to Light Industry and Chemical dice is a bit spicy upfront, but that is probably all about slowdown from getting in the way testing things. Realistically his +1 dice means +25 on average to over all progress instead of 50. Meaning you still come out ahead. So now its all about what he actually effects currently.

[ ] Department of Distributed Manufacturers he is irrelivant to and you already did the relevant iso project. That leaves:

[ ] Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner
[ ] Bergen Superconductor Foundry
Expensive projects your going in on anyway so he boosts these anyway with his personal dice.

[ ] Civilian Ultralight Factories
190 point project that you'll probably not notice his effects much anyway.

[ ] Carbon Nanotube Foundry Expansions
300 point project that would be basically an all in for a turn anyway.

All in all he doesn't actually have much over all to cause issues with. When he does cause issues, its going to end up with output going up anyway. You have 4 projects and a department you could spilt off anyway.

---

At least that is my read here.

 

[GerPN76]

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

 

[Daniel14541]

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
-[X] Tabitha Henessey (+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard (+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

At this point we need the science more then we need the bonuses. More alternatives means more options which leads to better plans. Better plans lead to better outcomes.

 

[Shadows]

[X] Plan Seo's Mad Science Squad
[X] Plan A Decent Spread
[X] Plan Stars and Plants
[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
[X] Plan Free the free dice

 

[Lightwhispers]

Exists to have a temporary negative for future bonuses. Probably makes things like factories and the lunar mines more productive. Stings to use until she doesn't basically. Blatantly going to help with the brain crunch. With probably help with advancing the usability of the iso chips.

Click to shrink...

Just pointing out, the -5 to LCI dice for Alcard is permanent, unlike how the -2 for Graduates only lasts 2 years.

 

[aledeth]

[X] Plan More space for plants
[X] Plan Power Plants

 

[Chimeraguard]

[X] Plan Space and Agri
-[X] Tabitha Henessey
-[X] Michael O'Brian
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora
-[X] Adrian Castro

[X] Plan More space for plants

 

[Sib]

[X] Plan Stars and Plants

 

[edofthesquid]

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
-[X] Tabitha Henessey (+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora (+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard (+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard (+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

Get grav improvements ticking harder narratively, get a boast to the interesting plants and possibly narrative boosts to diplo for some subsets of Nod, get an energy specialist up (sad we'll lose the bonus die at some point though), and definitely hit automation and robotics since we're seeing pain with student numbers. Pure speculation, but maybe that'll work with service AEVAs to give us some sort of remote AI supported schooling?

 

[Calvin]

Holy shit, seeing what was left of a harvester after it got caught in a tibnado…

Click to shrink...

Considering it was mentioned that Red Zones had "category 6 hurricanes" canonically...

Hideo Ozawa is dying. A man held up by some as the last emblem of the old Initiative, reviled by others as the vanguard of a reactionary force bound and determined to enforce a new apartheid by others, and to yet others an embarrassment that drove the venerable Hawks into collapse, he has always been divisive, and rarely more so than in the last years. His Initiative First party had always been a coalition, one cobbled together from the fringes of the old Hawks.

Click to shrink...

I do wonder if the splinter group will end up splintering.

Life, but not as we know it, blended seamlessly into tiberium, alloys, and biomimetics. And that life has to be kept functioning. To do that, the Visitors use a series of reactions.

Click to shrink...

And this Visitor life support system was the mystery roll?

U0451

Click to shrink...

I always like seeing that number.

With over a dozen attacks in the last month of operations at the Chicago front alone, the Deep Red is apparently home to wildlife long thought near extinct, although in nowhere near the numbers indicated by the historical records.

Click to shrink...

It was always kind of sad that Tiberian Sun's alien life "went extinct" like that.

The deep glacier mines are alien, alienating places. The bases are set on stilts, jutting out over titanic seas of glowing green. While in many red zones, Tiberium has overtaken the remnants of human settlement, trees and walls still standing, haunting markers of what has been lost, here in the deep red, every trace of civilization, every landmark, every reminder that this had once been a part of earth has been wiped away.

The entire goal of the project has been this: drives to secure and build up mines upon some of the largest and richest Tiberium glaciers in the world. It has paid off magnificently, but the cost has been tremendous. Each such glacier needs a dedicated rail line-and in some cases a highway as well. Each glacier mine is erected in a harsh and alien environment, but new tools claimed from alien claws now claw at the dangers. Spikes earth the energy of Ion Storms, directing it into sonic emitters almost constantly. T-glass gleams upon surfaces, and tendrils pluck the green and blue crystals from the workfaces. MARV chassis are required to support the largest of excavators, removing crumbled overburden and debris, as smaller harvesters drive into the gaps thus opened. Each harvester may have a useful life measured in weeks or even just days, before it must be cut off it's undercarriage and the contaminated bits shipped off to be recycled or scrapped entirely. All of this is underwritten by the tremendous productivity of these mines. Ten point five percent of all of GDI's tiberium income now flows from these three clustered sources in Slovakia, Wyoming, and Iowa.

The glaciers under attack fight back in their own ways. Tiberium intrusions into the Deep Glacier Mining Zones are almost a daily affair, and the glaciers seem to grow back before the eyes of the workers, regenerating fresh cyrstal mass into each opened cut. ZOCOM has been able to trace that some of this mass is pulled from nearby tiberium fields, which in turn slow the growth of other fields in an attempt to replenish themselves via subterranean veins. This effect cascades across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, slowing tiberium growth in a vast area.

Click to shrink...

I'm quoting this whole thing because it's one of my personal favorite pieces of writing you have produced thus far.

Based out of Chicago, the largest of the projects takes a MARV chassis as the baseline, and strips out most of the internals for a pass through factory, taking in materials from one side, and rolling finished vehicles out the other side. However, it has three critical flaws. The first is the MARV hull itself. The MARV simply can't operate at long ranges from massive, and expensive, hubs, which require a substantial amount of upkeep themselves. Trying to migrate them from base to base is also excessively problematic, between needing to replace the entire drive train after such a trip, the other component wear issues, and the sheer size of the vehicles, meaning that there is no existing infrastructure capable of holding it. Second, the MARV base puts severe restrictions on both manufacturing speed and the size of what can be handled.

In Oslo, the program is quite a bit different, smaller, lighter, far more compact, something that is more an iterative evolution of the mobile construction vehicles of the current Initiative. A flatpack factory in other words. The problems this one has are more to do with that fragility. The systems don't do well in transit, and when deploying need vast amounts of flat space, while also needing to run extensive calibrations, that, even with the science team, take days between setup beginning, and production starting.

The third design is more revolutionary. Taking an old Orca Command Vehicle schematic from the Second Tiberium War, the team in Seoul is still on the drawing boards, planning on trimming nearly every noncritical system to make space for more factory tooling, and conveyors. The project is rumbling along at a very slow pace, with each step being an intricate balancing act to both make a functional factory, and make it fly.

Click to shrink...

These sound quite familiar, let's just hope ours are better.