grimely
Twink Death Sufferer
Okay yeah my bad, we just unlocked the option to last turn
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
Okay yeah my bad, we just unlocked the option to last turn
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I considered throwing it into some of my Q3 drafts- I think I did in one of the older ones. But for this draft in particular, I'm deliberately building alloy-heavy plans. And we don't really have the money for a ton of alloy dice if we throw the 60 RpT at InOps right now.
It's great, but the costs are really painful.
We have 20 capital goods right now, and we have been told that not having enough surplus of capital goods earlier was a big contributing factor to economy being as anemic as it was for a long time.
We also need capital goods for a bunch of stuff, from AEVA's to tiberium mines.
Spending 10 capital goods on Predictive Modelling this turn is not something we can afford in my opinion.
This said, I absolutely want us to invest in it as soon as we do have capital goods for it.
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- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
Potentially, but I'd still like to study the technology even if we don't use it. Something better might be locked behind it.
Also, the text says "risk of spreading Tiberium more quickly" along with "substantially increase the throughput". So it might not increase Tib spread. But it certainly does increase how fast our spikes generate income.
I think it is quite likely that we'll find many places where the risk of faster spread is outweighed by much better harvesting yields. We don't have to deploy these things everywhere.
Alternatively, we might just end up spikes that work faster without adding the accelerator effects. In which case we can roll them out everywhere.
- Location
- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
Testing how the spikes work normally will hopefully help GDI understand how and why they work, which might lead into a future project to improve Inhibitor effectiveness.
That, and with the Stations giving us piles of PS, a project that costs lots of PS is useful simply to keep us from going over the 100 PS cap.
That, and with the Stations giving us piles of PS, a project that costs lots of PS is useful simply to keep us from going over the 100 PS cap.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
I'd go with the Tiberium Enhancement spikes, though I agree with El Presidente that we're likely to unlock more appealing Mad Science options.
It's only five. We'd have gotten the same or more push back from Corpse Starch. Seo is supposed to spend lots of political support anyway, he can earn it back really fast by shmoozing with the Parliament, Military or Public. Not spending is wasteful in its own way.
Edit: yeah basically I agree with @Derpmind
Five per die, on a 2-4 die project, vs. no cost for the nukes. PS is plentiful but not infinite, if there's literally no options for burning it off besides throwing dice at accelerator spikes then sure we do it, but it's the absolute bottom of the list for me. We don't need to intentionally accelerate the growth of more Tiberium, I do not care how many times people post something along the lines of "but what if we can contain it" at me, I will only ever support it if there's literally no other option. Far more Tiberium than we could ever use on the planet already, intentionally speeding up the growth under Blue Zones for a quick buck is a horrible idea that's not even worth dignifying with research funding as far as I'm concerned.
I read the last update of the problem being a lack of trainers for zone armor and not a lack of zone armor, so we can skip building more factories for a turn.
With the department of refits, we might see new versions of existing gear sooner as the military knows there will be progress made once the design is completed.
Ships take a while to build so we better start work on the governors soon even if some of the ships under construction now can be completed as the A model as they are the same hulls with a different superstructure.
100 is a very small reserve, the reserve has to be somewhere in the 500-1000 range just for basic apocalypse-proofing, and a solid fraction of Parliament will likely want more than that. We're going to be stockpiling for the foreseeable future.
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- Outside the Box
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- She/Her
You assume you know how the project will work, but none of us will know that until we've done the research. We can always do the research, find out it's not worth implementing, and then not build any follow-up projects - while also having gained whatever new scientific understanding the research gives us. And why would we build them under Blue Zones? We have plenty of badlands to do dangerous experiments in, far far away from anyone at all.
I really don't see the point in catastrophizing the project.
They're Tiberium spikes, those definitionally go in Blue Zones if only because we basically have no Green Zone left. And I stated directly that if there's really nothing else we could possibly do I would begrudgingly support tossing them R&D money. But it's a lot of PS for something I expect to never leave the lab because the elevator pitch is "what if we build Tiberium accelerators in Blue Zones" and I only need to get to the first half of that sentence before I nope out, without even touching the second half.
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There's the chance that, based on what we saw at the Super Glaciers, that they might not be accelerators but concentrators; pulling Tiberium up from deeper in the Earth instead of accelerating its growth.
Which would be worth getting, absolutely, if we knew that's what it did. Which we need the research for.
We're not talking about a "what is the fundamental principle behind a Tiberium accelerator" research project, we already know approximately what accelerators are and what they do and how to replicate them. We understand them well enough to derive Tiberium inhibitors from them, and test those in contained lab environments as well, and be pretty sure that those genuinely increase/reduce growth rates, not just pull/push it away like a magnet.
Enhanced spikes is a platform development for combining already understood and replicable technologies (i.e. Tiberium spikes and Tiberium growth accelerators) into a product that might hopefully make us more money. If there was a "Tiberium Control Experiments (Tech)" project that was about trying to figure out some underlying principles behind the black boxes I would be all over that in a second. "Enhanced Harvest Tiberium Spikes (Platform)" is an engineering challenge though, not blue sky research.
Enhanced spikes is a platform development for combining already understood and replicable technologies (i.e. Tiberium spikes and Tiberium growth accelerators) into a product that might hopefully make us more money. If there was a "Tiberium Control Experiments (Tech)" project that was about trying to figure out some underlying principles behind the black boxes I would be all over that in a second. "Enhanced Harvest Tiberium Spikes (Platform)" is an engineering challenge though, not blue sky research.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, basically, I'm tentatively planning to swap out one of my Zone Armor dice for Orbital Nuclear Caches, though I'm really not sure what to do for the second one. That, or hope there's an attractive mad science option that isn't as controversial as enhanced yield spikes.
Basically, we have to top off the stockpile to some arbitrary level before we can get full release to the civilian economy. Unfortunate, but there it is.
1) ZOCOM itself is going to be burning through a lot more zone armor because of the strains of the deep Red Zone operations, and needs a robust stockpile.
2) At some point, the first wave of Ground Force troops who are themselves trained on power armor will start training more Ground Force troops. At that point, the number of people Ground Force can put in power armor will really start to take off. Again, I want a stockpile for that purpose.
So I'm not entirely comfortable taking 'time off,' especially when our efforts to get Zone Armor factories done have been chronically underperforming compared to our hopes for every turn since 2061Q4.
There was either an in-character post or Ithillid summarizing the Navy's view on the subject; I forget which. But I am pretty sure that the Navy itself is of the position "it's okay, give it a year or so and pile all the goodies in first" rather than "we need to rush out a refit sooner rather than later."
We know inhibitors aren't just shoving tiberium down into the ground, because we've tested them extensively, including on isolated tiberium where we're in a position to fully assess what it's doing including any underground spread.
It therefore follows that growth accelerators aren't just yanking tiberium up out of the ground.
Yeah, but the reason in question is "because Parliament wants us to." All that stockpiling is intended to create a strategic reserve in case of some kind of all-consuming civilizational disaster, sort of like the huge Stored Food pile. To be fair, I can see the logic, because something like "some second-tier Nod warlord manages to smuggle a nuclear truck bomb into blast radius distance of the North Boston fabricator" is a realistic concern.
Basically, we have to top off the stockpile to some arbitrary level before we can get full release to the civilian economy. Unfortunate, but there it is.
I'd disagree, because there are multiple levels of problems at work here.
1) ZOCOM itself is going to be burning through a lot more zone armor because of the strains of the deep Red Zone operations, and needs a robust stockpile.
2) At some point, the first wave of Ground Force troops who are themselves trained on power armor will start training more Ground Force troops. At that point, the number of people Ground Force can put in power armor will really start to take off. Again, I want a stockpile for that purpose.
So I'm not entirely comfortable taking 'time off,' especially when our efforts to get Zone Armor factories done have been chronically underperforming compared to our hopes for every turn since 2061Q4.
The trick is, we got explicit feedback on this. The Governor-A isn't a fixed static design; it's "the Governor, updated with better kit than we had in 2055 or so." Which means it would probably be a good idea to develop all the stuff we want to go in the platform. This isn't a case where we're delaying construction of a ship class, either, it's a case of wanting to get the mid-life refit of the ship class right before we finalize it.
There was either an in-character post or Ithillid summarizing the Navy's view on the subject; I forget which. But I am pretty sure that the Navy itself is of the position "it's okay, give it a year or so and pile all the goodies in first" rather than "we need to rush out a refit sooner rather than later."
There are Yellow Zone sites around some of the coastal MARV hubs- South America has like three zones like that, and there's Anzio, plus other Red Zone hubs we might build. And, as others note, some of our Blue Zone territories are "pretty far forward and pretty deserted," such as giant stretches of Nevada desert that we have more or less cleared of surface tib. That area isn't any more inhabited or hospitable than it was when people were using it for nuclear testing, and I wouldn't consider it an invalid site for testing tiberium growth enhancers, at least tentatively and on small scales.
I know I'm not 100% aligned with Cryo here, but I'm really not thinking this is likely. Remember, accelerators are inhibitors plugged in backwards, so they should do the opposite of what inhibitors do.
We know inhibitors aren't just shoving tiberium down into the ground, because we've tested them extensively, including on isolated tiberium where we're in a position to fully assess what it's doing including any underground spread.
It therefore follows that growth accelerators aren't just yanking tiberium up out of the ground.
The spikes don't work like a tiberium magnet; they just keep chewing up a subsurface tiberium deposit as it grows and transferring the chewed up material to the surface.
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I don't think that's what was going on with the glaciers at all-my reading is that every tiberium outcrop affected by the regeneration of a Glacier is actually the same mass of tiberium, connected up by underground veins. It literally pulls mass from it's fringes to reinforce the center, it doesn't shift it's growth around. By the same logic, accelerating one tib spike in a blue zone could cause large shifts as the entire vein suddenly shifts into overdrive with it's growth.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah.
And that is why I'm in favor of only testing this system in one of those little bubbles of Yellow Zone conditions our MARV hubs have created on the coasts of the South American Red Zone.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The viability of Tiberian spikes as a deployment will be determined when the development finishes by its quality rolls. There is no particular risk from the development itself, any more than there was from the green architecture development. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out – but we get our mad science either way.
A Sufficiently high quality role would likely imply that we learned something about how the accelerators work in and of itself. In terms of research as a goal though, I will note that our deployment of inhibitors are each an asset to studying the technology, and we have not deployed many. If the enhanced spikes are safe enough to use, their deployment could also perhaps be a research benefit in the same way.
That said, We have not received anything in the way of tangible benefits from the studying of inhibitors that has gone on that's far, so I honestly have no Way to predict what any eventual result would be from our studies of them, nor how long it would take for that benefit to manifest, nor how much investment in inhibitor and spike deployment would accelerate that manifestation.
Halloween may be over, but the spooky black Tiberium boxes remain spooky, it seems.
A Sufficiently high quality role would likely imply that we learned something about how the accelerators work in and of itself. In terms of research as a goal though, I will note that our deployment of inhibitors are each an asset to studying the technology, and we have not deployed many. If the enhanced spikes are safe enough to use, their deployment could also perhaps be a research benefit in the same way.
That said, We have not received anything in the way of tangible benefits from the studying of inhibitors that has gone on that's far, so I honestly have no Way to predict what any eventual result would be from our studies of them, nor how long it would take for that benefit to manifest, nor how much investment in inhibitor and spike deployment would accelerate that manifestation.
Halloween may be over, but the spooky black Tiberium boxes remain spooky, it seems.
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I wouldn't say that Tiberium Accelerators and Green Architecture have similar risk levels, solely determined by quality roll. Crits so far have taken into account the narrative around the projects.
Taking ocular implants as an example, the effect of a Natural 100 was required to make it so that the project didn't generate significiant societal discontent. Whereas no crit was required for 'generic implants' to achieve that result. I believe that we can infer that a nat one on the ocular implants would have significant narrative penalties, even if other projects often get away with only minor delays or a small progress loss.
Applying the same concept to quality rolls would imply that different projects have different dice ranges and scales of effect, and with mad science in particular, different risk levels.
Taking ocular implants as an example, the effect of a Natural 100 was required to make it so that the project didn't generate significiant societal discontent. Whereas no crit was required for 'generic implants' to achieve that result. I believe that we can infer that a nat one on the ocular implants would have significant narrative penalties, even if other projects often get away with only minor delays or a small progress loss.
Applying the same concept to quality rolls would imply that different projects have different dice ranges and scales of effect, and with mad science in particular, different risk levels.
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Note that the ocular crit was a deployment, and this is a development. The risks per narrative are those that are experienced as part of testing and prototyping and thus are sharply limited. If even a sophisticated application of one or two spikes could cause significant problems far afield, the visitors would have done it.
Likewise, I spend a lot of time talking about how deployed inhibitors are studied for a reason - the narrative is that we know so little about them that every example in operation, even those we build, are worth constant monitoring and analysis just for science's sake. Spikes should see the same benefit, being an application of the original technology - it just depends on if they're safe enough to deploy to begin with.
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- Location
- USA
I mean... we could just ask about it. If development of the platform means it gets deployed or if there would be a follow-up deployment project.
I would guess that since it gives income it is automatically deployed but I could be wrong.
I would guess that since it gives income it is automatically deployed but I could be wrong.
I think if we want Inhibitor improvements what we need is more Inhibitors.
I figure they'll help far more than Accelerators
I figure they'll help far more than Accelerators
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
No, the development doesn't indicate that it gives income by itself, so there is likely a deployment project or three.
Might be a Harvesting Spike Refits project, in which case there could be a lot there. We've done 10 phases of YZ Harvesting and 7 of GZ Intensification. Even a modest +5 per project phase would be +85 income.