Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Prime 2.0 · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

Robots. Space for plants is good too though.

qazcdewsx · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan More space for plants

trooperist · Sep 29, 2022

Yay, life support for our space stuff. Even just the basic stuff will probably a lot better than our current processes.

Also when are we giving our infantry STU swords? /s

Simon_Jester · Sep 29, 2022

REACTIONPOOOST!

Ithillid said:
FloatingWood
So, I tried the Terminal Edition. Performance is… choppy and uneven. The parts viewer takes a good while to load, and when you select a new part it can take a few seconds to pop into view. Looks great, but trying to get a new angle is a chore, framerate nearly instantly craters to 5 FPS or less.
Launch sites are well rendered and pop into view nearly instantly, but the moment you push the button for launch, slideshow.
There's only 1 rocket design pre-made, an Ariane 1, and trying to design your own rocket or parts is just a terrible struggle to deal with slideshow framerates.
OOPS:TE needs a lot of development to become more than a demonstration on how things can be ported to isolinear, but if the launch site loading performance is an indicator… it can do a whole lot. Used to be that loading Tanegashima took a couple of minutes. I'll take 'ping lag' levels of rendering speed.

Huh yeah, isolinear would trivialize that aspect, wouldn't it?

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...

SaladMan
#GDIWife
Oof. That's an unfortunate launch. How the hell did you even manage that? That's some weird tier of bad luck.

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

FloatingWood
Morale of the story; don't text and rocket.

GDIWife
So I've finally figured out there's a piloting assist thing and you can set courses you want to travel and stuff like that. I've been able to actually properly orbit with that, it's really neat. Unfortunately I think I messed up slightly on re-entry. I was wondering how much detail different areas had and I've always wanted to see Paris so I thought "Why not take a look at it in the game?" but I guess I was a little bit too low and I might have blown up the eiffel tower.

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

I pray that this turns into a running gag. Forever.

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

...Chicago. The Philadelphia. Paris. Aus-fucking-tralia.

That's impressive.

InTheZONE
I find the camera misses a lot. There's just something awe-inspiring about the way everything shifts around and under you, and how the area acts somehow like a living thing. It seems almost responsive to your presence and it's a constant battle for superiority between you and the world around you just to stay alive. There's just a presence, a feeling that you can't capture on any kind of recording device. It makes you feel so awake and alive.

Or it makes you paranoid as fuck and completely on edge to the point where you can't act even with the best training. Even with the best selection process you never really know how someone will react the first time.

Badass.

All that being said. One day there won't be any Red Zone on the planet. No Yellow Zone either. We'll find out what forests and jungles and savannahs feel like. We'll relax on beaches, go swimming in the water and lie down in meadows. When we're through with the Red and Yellow zones they'll be memories in film and pictures and nothing of value will be lost.

FloatingWood
I'll raise a glass to that day, InTheZone. May the green death rock one day be driven off the Earth.

[grunts in approval]

Q1 2062 Results

Resources: 1050 + 100 in‌ ‌reserve‌ (-30 from Reconstruction commissions) (-15 from Bureau of Arcologies) (-15 from Consumer Industrial Development) (100 in Reserve for Banking)

Well, that's better than I'd dared to hope.

Political‌ ‌Support:‌ 45
SCIENCE Meter: 3/4

Communal housing didn't scratch the mad (social) science itch, I guess?

Current Economic Issues:
Housing: +51 (30 population in low quality housing) (-5 per turn from refugees) (+1 high-quality housing per turn)
Energy: +43 (+4 in reserve)
Logistics: +14 (-2 from military activity)

Well, hopefully we can get our Logistics back up. Food is gonna be shored up a bit soon. Other indicators holding strong.

Military Priorities

Ground Forces

Looking at the next plan, Ground Forces expect to see a general drawdown in direct military investments, with focus shifting to ecological and economic development. With the Brotherhood weakened by war, it is time to focus on developing and iterating new technologies, pushing the material edge, rather than mass deployment of new technologies, especially given the crushing superiority demonstrated a mere year ago.

You're still gonna bust our chops about it if we don't roll out the Guardian Mk II, I bet, though.

Steel Talons

The Steel Talons are looking to the future, with plasma weaponry and distributed fires being priority actions for them. While the Brotherhood of Nod is currently on the back foot, the Talons are envisioning a radically new way of war, focused on expanding Initiative expeditionary capabilities and leverage industrial advantages.

Treasury: "When you say 'distributed fires,' do you mean that you want to distribute the capacity for fire support, or that you plan to distribute fire widely?"

Steel Talons: "Yes."

Initiative First
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.

Well, I'm not gonna miss him, but yeah, that's gonna change things a lot.

Others however have been making diplomatic noises. Yao Qinglian has made indirect overtures to Intelligence Operations and the Diplomatic Service. While nothing has yet come of it, there are many open questions, especially given her prominence in the Brotherhood. While the initial queries have been about establishing regulated humanitarian trade routes between herself, Bintang, and the Bannerjees, the overall thrust has been attempting to defuse tensions in the region and ensure her own security.

Well that's a good sign. I think she's authentically feeling the heat, which suggests that Kane's conclave that we caught a recording of... wasn't a facade.

I mean, he knew he was acting on a stage and we were watching, sure, but it sounds like the messages he had for his warlords then continue to align broadly with what we're seeing out of his warlords now.

The visitors used stasis fields across their offensive, freezing GDI and Brotherhood formations in place, and on the defensive, bubbling their own positions to counter nuclear and ion cannon strikes. The nature of stasis fields is hard to describe, but 'odd' is probably the best way to put it. The existence of stasis fields has excited physicists for quite some time, as the way the fields function and exist does not play nice with how humans consider the way relative reference frames are supposed to function in ways that are difficult to explain to people without degrees in the field. On the other hand, it may be a manipulation of phase shifting, in the same way that the surviving threshold tower has been rendered invulnerable, a process that has driven dozens of Initiative theoretical physicists into early retirements.

On the other hand, maybe if we can crack stasis fields we can crack phase barriers... [rubs hands]

Or not.

Educational Bottlenecks
While GDI has a quite robust educational system, it has begun to run into a key bottleneck as GDI's population has continued to gray. Students, especially students that have the potential to receive security clearances needed for high level work in the Initiative, are becoming more rare twelve years after the end of the Third Tiberium War, and likely to become even more so in the next decade as the generation of children worst impacted by the war come of age. This is exacerbated by the expanding role of the rest of the government and private businesses that now have the funding to pay for sizable numbers of very talented graduates, the same population that GDI's organs need to continue expanding operations. Finally, there is also the issue of upkeep. There is constant churn of retirees, promotions, and transfers, needing routine infusions of fresh blood to keep departments and bureaus at full functionality.

Hopefully we'll get something of a baby boom (or a feeble semblance of same) if we continue rolling tiberium back and with Columbia and the space habitat expansions providing hope... But even if we do, that won't impact workforce demographics until the 2080s and later. This is gonna be a lasting problem. No wonder AEVAs are a coveted solution.

In terms of jobs, many are services oriented. However, much of the new industrial construction is also located in these areas, with for example, Gary, Indiana being slated for a number of the auxiliary systems used in Initiative electric vehicles, including the now standard two way radios, antennas, and a number of the external coatings. Similarly, many of the new kudzu plantations are based out of these new, and newly expanded, facilities.

We have conquered. And now we caffeinate.

The reconstruction of Tokyo has taken nearly two years. While the damage was extensive, both to the port facilities and other militarily critical facilities, much has been rebuilt and replaced. Craters have been filled, tank farms have been rebuilt, dock facilities repaired, and substantial work has been done to the on-base housing and facilities that were damaged by the raid. While mostly just patch jobs and expedient temporary fixes that will be replaced with proper long term repairs as maintenance schedules permit, Tokyo port is effectively back open for business. A pair of Summit-class battleships will be based there for the foreseeable future, as will nine of the new Shark-class frigates as they become available, along with a substantial number of other craft.

Summits... have we heard of that battleship class before, or is it new?

In a second attempt at building communal housing, GDI has found far more success. While not an unqualified success, it is a useful project. With more careful vetting, and a heavy selection bias towards people with strongly pro social attitudes and behaviors, the prototype community is a relatively happy place, if something that is heavily artificially maintained, rather than naturally arising from the design.

The core design is simple, and based on arcology systems. A fully enclosed city block, six stories high, with four primary entrances, one on each side of the building. Over top, an ALON based skylight allows in natural light to reach nearly every room. The top four floors are all habitation, each an independent room, with relatively simple facilities, laundry chutes, and basic hygiene equipment. Nearly everything else is done communally, from cooking and eating, to washing clothes and work. Lean, efficient, and designed with multiple functionalities in mind. The central plaza is key in this, sports in the afternoon, converted to tables in the evening for a meal, and then a movie theater after darkness falls.

Well, glad we have it, and if we get down to Low Quality Housing +8, I'll say we're doing all right; this isn't inherently a bad place to live for people who like it (which I wouldn't).

[ ] Green Architecture Risk Assessment and Testing
Green architecture, integrating a combination of natural materials and plant life into constructed environments, has been intentionally avoided for decades due to the potential risk of rapidly spreading tiberium infections on the sides of buildings. However, tiberium has mutated since then, and potentially the risks can be mitigated or avoided.
(Progress 92/90: 10 resources per die) [46]
Safety 1d100: [96]
Affordability 1d100: [61]
Effectiveness 1d100: [50]

Ahh, man. Tha'ts good. Reasonably affordable and effective, and hella safe.

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.

THE SWORD!

So the team got to work and when they finished, they came out with something deceptive. A modified GPU, set into a housing meant to encapsulate the isolinear chip, and meant to do one thing in massively parallel processes. Transmit data to and from the isolinear computer. Ironically, by simplifying the design, the peripherals turned out far better than expected from their original design brief, and while the new peripheral chips do have some flaws, such as excessive heat and a bulky design, an isolinear computer using the new peripheral outperforms anything of equivalent size using conventional technology by a significant margin. This, fundamentally, makes the entire process radically simpler, as rather than needing to reinvent every piece of computer auxiliary hardware from scratch, conventional auxiliaries can continue in use, with isolinear converters simply added on.

Ahhh, thank goodness!

GDI forces, not content with last quarter's drives, have expanded the offensives, pushing hard in California and Europe, while in Australia, preparations have begun, but were held in base, their operations directors calling a halt before the offensive had even begun in a desperate effort to slow the immense bleeding that the widespread offensives were causing, even as tiberium advanced elsewhere.

Yeah, I think we've temporarily hit our limits. A quarter of vein mining for things to stabilize sounds good.

In the wastes, eruptions of visceroids are not common, but every few days, a roving pod encounters Initiative forces, and in many cases attacks. 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.

Huh. Visceroid packs. That's not fun.

In one instance, the Lupkov pass became a choke point for Initiative operations, with a full battalion of ZOCOM and a substantial force of miners having pushed through, but then collapsing mountains blocked the pass substantially trapping them on the other side. A five day struggle ensued, while the cut off force attempted to mine back through the pass while fighting off tiberium and creatures on every side. Unfortunately, their last transmission was that the final defensive line had fallen and that they were out of ammunition and supplies, even with Pacifiers having maintained a constant barrage in support to their front. A last ditch effort to land supplies via OSRCT drop pods saw the ion storm overhead blow the pods over 20 kilometers off-course, spelling doom for the last survivors.

...Oh. Oh God.

Well, this is a fight we can't really... not have, I'm afraid, but I'm not glad of it.

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.

URRAA!

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.

Wow. We're actually... schlurping the tiberium out of the Red Zones.

We are threatening to drink tiberium's milkshake here. And it's mad about it.

But GDI's resources are not so unlimited as those of Tiberium. The Lupkov Pass incident, where ion-storms and rapid Tiberium upheaval trapped a thousand men and women, is the pinnacle of tragedy, and by the time relief forces broke through, there were no survivors. Even if not for Lupkov, replacements for materials in many areas consumed in deep red zones are dangerously lower than the consumption rate. While GDI can up-scale production and has existing stockpiles that can last for up to a year, ZOCOM has sent a hasty message back up the chain calling for a halt to all further Deep Red Zone expansion until they can sort out all the problems.

Yeah, that's what I was figuring. We do what ZOCOM says, and we halt Phase 4 of the border offensives. Still plenty of potential associated with vein mining, though that gives us all the more reason to push +Capital Goods.

The station bay being constructed has seen significant reformatting occur on the stations yet to be built. Rather than being built in their own orbits, the proposal is simple. Build a component part to the station in the space near Enterprise, using the parts assembled on Enterprise itself for much of the bulk material, from windows to core structural components, while other, high precision parts, such as computers, sensors, or myomer elements for flexible components like docking tubes, can be brought up from Earth's gravity well. This will substantially cut down on the needed lift capacity from Earth, ease the process of construction due to the construction crew being able to operate from Enterprise directly, and when a station part is completed tugs can slowly deliver it to the station under construction, where a crew merely needs to plug the module in.

Construction of the bay has been relatively smooth all things considered, with a substantial number of launches being simply machine parts, and robots, alongside a dedicated complement of construction configured Unions custom built for the station. While larger scale deployment of the Unions will wait for more extensive need for deep space construction, a small number of custom builds will provide a training cadre and begin to work out any kinks in the process.

Yaaay!

These concerns have lead to some odd alliances, with the Initiative First, and United Yellow List parties being among the most worried about the potential of these treatments.

Huh, yeah. IF religious conservatives and people afraid of Nod influence, and UYL people who remember the results of Nod genetic experiments and general ubermensch crap.

The Global Defense Initiative's first successful digital interactions with isolinear computing xenotech in 2059 were possible primarily not because of the skill and insight of the research group involved, but rather because of an incredibly convenient confluence of the fundamental structure of the isolinear computing substrate and alien design methodologies. When one of the general purpose computing crystals of a Scrin artifact receives an input datastream sufficiently outside the bounds of what it was designed to expect, it often shifts into what appears to be analogous to a zero-confidence Safe Mode that both locks out existing stored data, possibly irretrievably, and serves as an integral adaptive diagnostics and reprogramming toolset.

Huuuh. That actually explains why it's so hard for us to get stuff out of Scrin hardware.

For most ground vehicles the switch to ferro aluminum armor is a simple matter, just taking the old armor out, putting the new armor in, and then adding significant sections of added protection. For example, on the Pitbull recon vehicle, the armor has been primarily added around the cockpit, with sections of spaced and laminar armor panels to provide protection without harming visibility. In the air however, things are significantly more complicated. The primary limitation on ferro aluminum armors for refits is volume more than weight. Taking, for example, a Firehawk air superiority fighter, by the time a meaningful amount of weight had been added to the already heavy aircraft, the smooth lines and unstable shaping would have been buried under slabs of armor, with the nose, wingroots, and engines all having been slathered in the stuff. However, currently, the refits are small scale, with prototype versions all that have been procured so far.

I hate to say it, but I think we'll need to leave this project for the Bureau of Refits, when we get around to establishing that.

The infantry recon drones are fundamentally simple things. An attachment onto a Zone Armor's backpack, the drone is carried in a compacted state, launched with a command, and then self managing its flight path along a usually predetermined route, either maintaining an orbit around the squad, or, when multiple are being used, sweeping a particular sector at a given range. There are two standard models. A fixed wing pusher design, with wide wings for maximum lift at low velocity, that are packed folded in and then electrified for stiffness during launch. While endurance is not the best, less than an hour in standard regimes, and just over that in power saving mode, it is enough to give Zone Armor a significant overlook capability, being able to find opposition and scout terrain without exposing themselves to unneeded danger. The second design is a quadrotor drone, meant to operate in more vertical environments, such as built up urban fighting, with greater recoverability for short jaunts, rather than extended searches, and capable of docking with the Zone Armor automatically. However, not all Zone Armor has equal room for drones, as they compete with power cells, missile launchers, and jump jets for space on the back. Zone Defenders have the greatest potential, with Captains sitting in the middle, and Zone Raiders and Marauders have the greatest limitations

Heheh. The nice part is that the Zone Defender is the one we're most likely to see used heavily by Ground Force en masse, so we may see infantry-launched drone swarms as an option in our future.

The delays with functioning Zone Suits coming out of London have been a critical problem, especially with the sheer aggression GDI has been using against the Red Zones. While there are certainly supplies being made available to other units, many have been forced to resort to various forms of maintenance deferral as new production suits are poured as quickly as they can be produced into fighting the green. Zone Raiders especially are in high demand, as they are being used as rapid response squads. The sonic grenades they carry disrupt tiberium quite effectively, and so can punch holes for cut off or trapped Initiative assets to retreat through.

Yeah, I was afraid of that, and it's more reason to push production. Especially since Deep Red conditions consume suits; the suits themselves don't last indefinitely because when they touch tiberium, there's a good chance the tiberium will start eating them.

More broadly however, the program is running into issues, with diverging expectations from Ground Forces, ZOCOM, and other branches requesting training and equipment of their own. ZOCOM's training regime is slow, thorough, and designed for Deep Red operations, meaning that even now, throughput of suits is significantly higher than training capacity. The Ground Forces are especially frustrated by this as they are looking seriously at deploying Zone Armor supported heavy offensives deep into the Brotherhood's positions, and need larger formations quickly, and are willing to push significant amounts of maintenance work much higher up, rather than ZOCOM's doctrine emphasizing the ability of even relatively small formations to maintain their own equipment organically.

That makes sense. On the bright side, we have at least a year before any major military offensives for obvious reasons, so we should be able to sort this out in time.

Pick up to Four of ...

[ ] Tabitha Henessey
One of the Initiative's more promising rocket scientists, Tabitha has been one of the major figures in cracking gravitic drives. Promoting her to her own department will substantially increase GDI's ability to conduct research on advanced propulsion systems.
(+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)

[ ] Michael O'Brian
One of the key figures in the development of the fusion systems currently in use across the Initiative, Michael O'Brian appears to be a strong figure to bring on board for broader development of spaceship classes.
(+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)

[ ] Dr. Dinesh Bora
One of the scientists seized by InOps from the Bannerjees, Dr. Bora is a genetics specialist, with a focus on plant genetics. While most of his work has been on various forms of tib crops and soil stabilization efforts, which have primarily been deployed in India's river valleys, he has turned his coat and has requested work for the Initiative, "in the common interests of mankind." While he does ask that his creations be made freely available to the Brotherhood as well, it is a relatively small demand for a scientist of his capabilities.
(+2 Agriculture Dice, +5 to Genetically Engineered Plants)

[ ] Dr. Taylor Bernard
A Parisian, Taylor is among GDI's newest leading experts on heavy industrial engineering, and fusion development. In terms of demands, her goals are simple: Ensure that the overwhelming surge of power production that created so many of the problems that she has been working on for the last few years does not happen again in her career.
(+1 Heavy Industry Die, +1 energy from DAE) (Must take Department of Alternative Energy before end of plan)

[ ] Adrian Whittard
A son of a railroad magnate from before the Third Tiberium War, Whittard is obsessed with anything that moves material, and has a near monomaniacal focus on infrastructure and logistics. While actually putting him in charge would be a disaster, he does have a flair for making significant progress on infrastructure work.
(+1 Infrastructure Die)

[ ] Dr. Rima Alcard
A robotics scientist with some radical views on automation, Rima has been sidelined repeatedly for her advocacy of a systematic machine state. However, with some funding, and work on her experimental systems, she may be on to some quite encouraging design work.
(+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)

[ ] 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)

[ ] Graduates
While not the most exciting choice, selecting a number of graduates from various programs around the world will expand GDI's capabilities in the particular area. Although certainly not experienced, they are unlikely to seriously degrade the quality of the department at hand. (Pick 1 of) (+1 Die, -2 bonus for two years)

[ ] Infrastructure

[ ] Heavy Industry

[ ] Light and Chemical Industry

[ ] Agriculture

[ ] Tiberium

[ ] Orbital

[ ] Services

[ ] Military

[ ] Bureaucracy

Oooh, tricky. Graduates isn't as good as it used to be.

...

Let's see.

[ ] Tabitha Henessey
(+1 Orbital Die) (Must complete Gravitic bay by end of plan)
[ ] Michael O'Brian
(+1 Orbital Die, +2 to Orbital)
[ ] Adrian Castro
(+1 Orbital Die, +5 to spacecraft design and deployment projects)

We have three options that each yield +1 Orbital die. Any of these are viable, and a combination of them would be a hellaciously good way to ensure we actually hit our space population target with minimal Free dice expenditure.

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

This is definitely the mad science route. I'm broadly supportive of this.

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

This guy makes me actually comfortable with DAE. We get +1 Heavy Industry die out of him for a few years, then it goes "poof" and metamorphoses into +4 Energy per turn. I like it.

[ ] Adrian Whittard
(+1 Infrastructure Die)

Appealing, but Infrastructure is actually a pretty strong category for us already.

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

Hmmm. Interesting. Major tradeoff energy here. We could use the die, and frankly, we're gonna need the automation.

[ ] Graduates
(+1 Die, -2 bonus for two years)

Not bad, but... well, in the areas we most need dice (Heavy Industry, Orbital) we already have options.

I literally have not read the discussion, so this is me putting up a plan blind, but:

[X] Plan Mad Science
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard
-[X] Michael O'Brian

This gives us our +1 Orbital die, sets us up for an actually good DAE option, gives us insane Agriculture energy that we can put to work in a great way, and also gives us more automation options that we can combine with our impending advances in drone tech and isolinear computing to help offset all the problems we're facing with a graying population and so on.

Daniel14541 · Sep 29, 2022

Karugus said:
Rima… why Lady? What world does a systematic machine state seem like a good idea when we've already put down a genocidal AI with a fetish for Reusing, Reducing, and Recycling humanity?

I like AEVAs, I think AI are neat… but we have living evidence that just assuming we can solve everything with machines is dangerous. And I can't imagine our constituents lining up at the prospect of their incredibly powerful bureaucracy transitioning into a more opaque, more powerful machine state.

Excuse you? What are you talking about?

Simon_Jester · Sep 29, 2022

Lightwhispers said:
I'm really not so fond of Rima Alcard: -5 per die on a department is kinda painful, and I am not convinced the robotics/automation projects will be all that worthwhile, when I feel it is likely we'll get similar projects when we actually get low on Labor. And getting another Orbital die will free up free dice for LCI and other things.

It's Light Industry; we can afford the dice malus, because there's very few urgent projects in that area. Advancing our automation is going to make a lot of difference in the long run. Remember what the results post said about problems with a shrinking workforce and graying population. That's not going to go away any time soon.

Image said:
Deep Red sounds like an awesome name. It's a monster in every sense that cares not for life. Very Chernobyl would be frightened again.

Deep Red has already killed and eaten Chernobyl.

I'm serious. The entire Chernobyl nuclear accident site was overrun and devoured by the Red Zones years ago in-game.

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

I mean, we're "close" on a map of the Earth, but we're nowhere near close to the foot of it. And honestly I'm just as happy; getting within direct fire weapons range of Kane's tower doesn't sound like a good move. Though it might get him to get off his ass and help us with the TCN, I dunno.

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.

We've got a temporary lockout, but it's not so much a political thing as it is a case of ZOCOM going "Holy shit, this is worse than we thought!" and needing to seriously rethink its tactics, methods, and logistics in order to not take crippling, unsustainable losses. In this case, they're not so much blaming us for fucking up, as saying "we honestly cannot support further intensification of this project until we sort some stuff out."

Which is fine. We're in very very unprecedented territory here and it's having a big impact, weakening the Red Zones' effort to expand in a very literal way.

VonVonson said:
There is something real fucky going on in the deep red zones. I know it's competing for a million other projects but we should put an extra dice into the zone armor factories if we're able

That's what I was saying already.

F0lkL0re said:
To answer the first the four departments that have gone the lonest without a security check are Agriculture which was 13 turns ago (ow), Military which was 12 turns ago, Tiberium which was 9 turn ago and Infrastructure which was also 9 turns ago and since 94% success chance is a nice solid chance of success I decided to try to catch up on three departments rather then going for 100% on one department 94% on another, as for why Infrastructure I flipped a coin.

Yeah, I'd normally agree, but when one of the top two departments is Military, I want to take no chances, y'know?

There is a reason I want to do both right now yeah.

We don't have to do ether right away but having them both ready to go will make planning around the need for what they produce and their cost actually doable rather then developing them when we start running out of energy/cap goods.

Well, I'm coming around on the merits of doing the improved H-G process right away, especially what with us having the glacier mines producing the way I'd hoped.

But I already want to do improved fusion right away.

I know and it's nice of you not to repeat your arguments here but I decided to go for the Islands due to them taking less progress so they could be conceivably finished with two dice and to a lesser extent due to the longer production time the Islands have compared to the Sharks so while there's a good chance that they won't be ready for the start of Karachi if we do them now they may be ready for the later parts.

The thing is, the later parts of Karachi are going to involve pushing inland and physically building the giant superhighway and all that.

That's the part amphibious warfare ships aren't so helpful for. Whereas we're still going to be running convoys in and those convoys will still need escort.

Jprice · Sep 29, 2022

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

MightbeaMimic · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Summits... have we heard of that battleship class before, or is it new?

The Summits are the standard GDI Battleship class. I don't know if we've heard the name before but I'm pretty sure we've heard the name of individual ships and they're named after mountains

Simon_Jester said:
Yeah, I think we've temporarily hit our limits. A quarter of vein mining for things to stabilize sounds good.

13 dice on vein mining?

Kyr'am · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
[X] Plan Mad Science
-[X] Dr. Rima Alcard
-[X] Dr. Dinesh Bora
-[X] Dr. Taylor Bernard
-[X] Michael O'Brian

I believe that's just Plan Stars and Plants, if I'm not misreading it. It's currently the third place plan.

F0lkL0re · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Yeah, I'd normally agree, but when one of the top two departments is Military, I want to take no chances, y'know?

Yes it's entirely fair I just think that 94% with one die rather then 100% with two is fine.

Simon_Jester said:
The thing is, the later parts of Karachi are going to involve pushing inland and physically building the giant superhighway and all that.

That's the part amphibious warfare ships aren't so helpful for. Whereas we're still going to be running convoys in and those convoys will still need escort.

Yes that's true but as I said the main reason I chose the Islands over the Sharks is because the 180 progress for the former can be done with two dice unlike the 300 progress of the later.

Hazard · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Summits... have we heard of that battleship class before, or is it new?

It's our old battleship class, named for mountains.

Simon_Jester · Sep 29, 2022

MightbeaMimic said:
13 dice on vein mining?

Nah. Five. Two on improving the Hewlett-Gardner process.

Because at 1050 RpT or so, our budget's actually looking pretty good. Even if we scoop up +5 dice or so with this turn's recruitment actions, I'm confident in our ability to fund them all.

Though it'll put us damn close to our dice cap, in all fairness.

Kyr'am said:
I believe that's just Plan Stars and Plants, if I'm not misreading it. It's currently the third place plan.

Yeah. At some point in the next twenty-four hours I'll actually look at the real plans and pick one, but right now I just wanted to write my own ideas down before I'd reviewed the thread discussion. Among other things, because it clarified my own opinions on the matter.

F0lkL0re said:
Yes that's true but as I said the main reason I chose the Islands over the Sharks is because the 180 progress for the former can be done with two dice unlike the 300 progress of the later.

Eh, yeah, but by the same token, "project is cheaper" doesn't always mean "project is better or more worth doing quickly."

Phht · Sep 29, 2022

Ithillid said:
InTheZONE
I've been looking at the vids of the op that my old ZOCOM buddies have been sending and holy shit I'm kinda regretting my decision to transfer to GF. They're running into some amazing stuff out there having the time of their lives while i'm stuck babysitting some shiny new ZONE troopers who aren't even getting taught the basics of ion storm maintenance or shard blizzard survival
FML, right?

I love the fact that most people are terrified of Deep Red, and this guy is "Goddammit, look at the cool shit I'm missing out by training up a bunch of PBI on Zone Armor basics!"

The work is hard, fighting deep in the blasted plains. Great fissures have cracked open in the earth, spewing forth rains of liquid tiberium, geysers erupt in salvo and serial, some sending sprays a hundred meters into the air as pressurized liquid bursts forth in grand profusion. A squad in a bad place can be showered by liquid tiberium, and even the most tiberium resistant materials known to the Initiative, besides the T-Glass widely used in viewports, is consumed in a matter of hours. Entire platoons at a time are rendered ineffective as they try to push the front, meter by painstaking meter, further down the nearly two thousand kilometer stretch of hell marked to be taken in the offensive.

In one instance, the Lupkov pass became a choke point for Initiative operations, with a full battalion of ZOCOM and a substantial force of miners having pushed through, but then collapsing mountains blocked the pass substantially trapping them on the other side. A five day struggle ensued, while the cut off force attempted to mine back through the pass while fighting off tiberium and creatures on every side. Unfortunately, their last transmission was that the final defensive line had fallen and that they were out of ammunition and supplies, even with Pacifiers having maintained a constant barrage in support to their front. A last ditch effort to land supplies via OSRCT drop pods saw the ion storm overhead blow the pods over 20 kilometers off-course, spelling doom for the last survivors.

Jesus Fucking Christ. Even if we weren't told the military's putting a hold on RZ ops, I'd be calling a halt to reassess how we approach things after these descriptions. A fucking battalion of ZOCOM killed due to a landslide isolating them.

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.

I love that we're actually having to use MARV chassis for dealing with the sheer amount of shit going on.

Simon_Jester said:
Well that's a good sign. I think she's authentically feeling the heat, which suggests that Kane's conclave that we caught a recording of... wasn't a facade.

I mean, he knew he was acting on a stage and we were watching, sure, but it sounds like the messages he had for his warlords then continue to align broadly with what we're seeing out of his warlords now.

Kane, I think, likes getting multiple things done at once when possible. Theatrics for both his people and us, but also making sure his warlords understand the actual issues he wants them to handle.

Simon_Jester said:
Summits... have we heard of that battleship class before, or is it new?

I believe those are what I thought we've heard of as Mountain-class earlier. Either it's retconning the name to Summit-class or QM misremembered the class name?

--

So, given the holy fuckballs RZ descriptions, I'll be pulling all dice off RZBO regardless of if it's locked out or not (likely is). Likewise... I think I'm going to only put forth the Chicago variant of my draft plan, rather than both because I think we're going to need more CapGoods sooner rather than later so no putting it off a turn to get in the last BZ Apartments phase (though I guess I could scrap everything but the Apartments and put the rest on Chicago...). We could probably fit it in the turn after while finishing off Chicago. I think I'll only move one of the three Tib dice to vein mining, and put the other two dice on Improved H-G.

Oh, and swapping Ultralight Glide Munitions to Zrbite Sonics. Because fuck the Deep Red.

[X] Plan Power Plants
[X]Plan Free the free dice
[X] Plan More space for plants

RentingViewer · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad

MightbeaMimic · Sep 29, 2022

Phht said:
I love the fact that most people are terrified of Deep Red, and this guy is "Goddammit, look at the cool shit I'm missing out by training up a bunch of PBI on Zone Armor basics!"

I'm just going to bring your attention to the wiki description of ZOCOM personnel

Red Zone service is perhaps the most demanding of any GDI assignment, as most soldiers cannot endure significant Tiberium exposure for more than a few weeks at a time without risking serious physical and psychological damage. There are exceptions however - men and women who find the experience of living and fighting in a near alien environment to be an energizing, engaging experience. These individuals quickly find themselves assigned to ZOCOM - and few, if any, would be happy anywhere else

And Kane's response to them is equally telling

Their fanatical devotion to driving Tiberium from the Earth renders them antithetical to all that Nod stands for, all that we are. ZOCOM are a blasphemy, a threat beyond even that of their taskmasters.

So yeah, he's about average for ZOCOM

Shadows · Sep 29, 2022

RentingViewer said:
[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad

Missing ' Science Squad ' after Mad

Like this:

[] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

MightbeaMimic · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Nah. Five. Two on improving the Hewlett-Gardner process.

Because at 1050 RpT or so, our budget's actually looking pretty good. Even if we scoop up +5 dice or so with this turn's recruitment actions, I'm confident in our ability to fund them all.

Though it'll put us damn close to our dice cap, in all fairness.

Personally I think I'd rather have the money to do what we want early rather than needing to balance funds more, especially if something expensive pops up

Void Stalker · Sep 29, 2022

Derpmind said:
Here's a quick comparison of how dice bonuses for some of our recruitment options may affect us:

Interesting that the extra die from rima puts us ahead of pace here if we assume no free dice in the category despite the -5, just the power of adding in another dice.

Simon_Jester said:
Hopefully we'll get something of a baby boom (or a feeble semblance of same) if we continue rolling tiberium back and with Columbia and the space habitat expansions providing hope... But even if we do, that won't impact workforce demographics until the 2080s and later. This is gonna be a lasting problem. No wonder AEVAs are a coveted solution.

Yeah that is a major worry for me because this is an issue that you can look ahead and see coming but at the same time is not really visible in the ways other problems are and is easy for people to think about dealing with later. Except that there is a lead time to fix things, also once the problems start having major visibility at that point anything we do is triage for the problem. Meanwhile getting Rima now would let us build our new industry with the increased automation in mind instead of having to refit everything we build between now and the crisis point, and likely to be able to better look at implementations instead of rushing to put quick fixes in place.

tenchifew · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
[x] Plan Stars and plants

Really liked the update.
The "kerby space program" equivalent in the beginning was hilarious, and the description of red zones frighteningly majestic.

Vehrec · Sep 29, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Nah. Five. Two on improving the Hewlett-Gardner process.

Because at 1050 RpT or so, our budget's actually looking pretty good. Even if we scoop up +5 dice or so with this turn's recruitment actions, I'm confident in our ability to fund them all.

Yeah. At some point in the next twenty-four hours I'll actually look at the real plans and pick one, but right now I just wanted to write my own ideas down before I'd reviewed the thread discussion. Among other things, because it clarified my own opinions on the matter.

?0 R/Dice HI project
OMG R/Dice HI project

You'll laugh, you'll cry, when you see our projects for next turn that are currently being hashed out on Discord.

Oshha · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan More space for plants

Simon_Jester · Sep 29, 2022

MightbeaMimic said:
Personally I think I'd rather have the money to do what we want early rather than needing to balance funds more, especially if something expensive pops up

I don't see it as either-or. With 1050 RpT, we're doing just fine even if we have, say, 59 dice to fund next turn. We can't fund everything at 20 R/die, but we have plenty of 15 R/die and even 10 R/die projects that still need doing.

Look at the draft budgets people have been throwing around; most of the time we stay under 950 RpT or so without really even trying, which means 20 R left over for each of the 4-5 new dice we're getting, even with no serious effort to keep budgets under control.

So taking 'only' five dice on vein mines (probably enough to clear two whole phases for about another 65 RpT next turn) doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice to me.

Void Stalker said:
Interesting that the extra die from rima puts us ahead of pace here if we assume no free dice in the category despite the -5, just the power of adding in another dice.

Well yeah.

Without Rima, we're getting four dice per turn that average 78.5 Progress each. With her, five dice and 73.5 Progress each. The multiplication problem comes out very much in favor of Rima.

Yeah that is a major worry for me because this is an issue that you can look ahead and see coming but at the same time is not really visible in the ways other problems are and is easy for people to think about dealing with later. Except that there is a lead time to fix things, also once the problems start having major visibility at that point anything we do is triage for the problem. Meanwhile getting Rima now would let us build our new industry with the increased automation in mind instead of having to refit everything we build between now and the crisis point, and likely to be able to better look at implementations instead of rushing to put quick fixes in place.

Agreed, strongly.

Vehrec said:
?0 R/Dice HI project
OMG R/Dice HI project

You'll laugh, you'll cry, when you see our projects for next turn that are currently being hashed out on Discord.

I mean, worst case, we'll just have projects we can't do immediately. That's annoying but not a disaster, because we have tons of projects that we could totally use the dice on right now and that will still be good projects no matter how great the new shiny appears.

We'll go on mining tiberium; our budget isn't going to stop at 1050 RpT. I'm not suggesting that we stop, just that we don't need to keep frantically shoveling all our Free dice into Tiberium due to urgent desperate need anymore.

Mortis · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad

FrozenChosen · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan More space for plants
[X] Plan Space and Agri

doruma1920 · Sep 29, 2022

[X] Plan A Decent Spread/Mad Science Squad
[X] Plan Power Plants

@Oleg-14191 thanks for posting my plan earlier, I passed out immediately after posting.

Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Cinnamon Roll AI

Officially not an Inquisitor

Sacred Priestess of the Benevolent Dice Gods