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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Honestly, Kane being happy isn't that big of a deal, depending on the circumstances of course.

He might just be delighted that we are willing to negotiate and actually compromise instead of being belligerent or some such.

Us being willing to work out deals with nod probably really improved his odds of getting what he wants for helping build the tiberium control thing.

Edit: But if I understand it correctly all the negotiations but 1 went poorly?
 
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I'm just sad Litvi-mum is disappointed. I really like her and was hoping peace and prosperity would make her happy after the war hit her so hard.
 
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Alo357 said:
Granger, at least according to one omake
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Well, I suspect Seo is at least starting to earn some respect from Kane the way Granger did. But how much... remains to be seen. At the equivalent point in Granger's career, it was late 2054 and we were a long way away from Granger's greatest achievements like the stabilizer constellation.

bryanfran36 said:
Are... Are we screwed?
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Well, why don't you outline some ways in which you think we might be screwed.

Because we're still stuck on a planet slowly being eaten by green rocks, y'know?
 
So, possible tech transfers and tiberium abatement, and Kane's very happy. Perhaps TCN inbound before 2070?

Now, as a note, remember that while Nod is not monolithic (aside from Kane telling everyone to do something), this is not a negative. Just because one Warlord goes on the attack doesn't mean all of Nod is. So if some other warlord starts shit, that doesn't torpedo the deal with Bannerjees/Bintgang/Yao. What is does mean, is that Caravanserai are neutral (Kane interrupt possibility aside), and now potentially Bannerjees/Bintang/Yao could be more neutral-ish in the same manner (Gana export aside, more than likely). That's a good chunk of Asia and all of Australia that might not be an "active" warzone. And Motherfucking Stahl is apparently open to GDI at least regarding Tiberium abatement, so if Kane says to work with GDI to build TCN....

Southern Asia, Australia, and the Americas would likely see few problems with Nod on TCN construction. Western Europe potentially likewise because Reynaldo is almost a non-entity territory-wise. How Krukov or Mehratu would react, I dunno. Likewise with some of the "top tier" minor warlords. But if Krukov or Mehratu were largely the only major hold outs against working with GDI for TCN... well, GDI can certainly concentrate weight of forces to just steamroll the fuck out of them by not having to really defend four-ish continents.

I bet Kane wouldn't even need to do the whole Ascension conflict thing from C&C4, because we know he's an alien and wants off planet. If he goes "yeah, when it activates, Threshold 19 gets enough power to open a portal to an offworld location of my choice for x amount of time. I'll use that to leave along with my Nod faithful. All tiberium will be controlled/gone afterward, as per the stated purpose of the TCN," we'd probably all go "sure, sounds good. Don't let the iris over the portal hit you on the way out when the network powers up."

And then we leave while Kane's saying it doesn't have an iris because it's not a stargate, dammit.
 
Phht said:
And then we leave while Kane's saying it doesn't have an iris because it's not a stargate, dammit.
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GDI Negotiating Team: "Oh, there's gonna be an iris."

Kane: "Excuse me?"

GDI Team: "Look, be honest with yourself. Take a good look at all the shit you've pulled on this planet in the past three quarters of a century. If there's no iris, it's only because us apes are gonna weld a giant slab of impervious kabongium alloy over the aperture so nothing can come back through."
 
Okay, so this vote turned into a fustercluck, and that is almost certainly my fault.

In the post vote discussion that always shows up on the discord after a vote closes the author of the winning plan said that his intentions with the vote were
Having the diplomats offer what they needed to, not "nothing"."
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The issue is that the winning plan was not expressing that. The winning plan in the vote was saying "treasury does not care one way or the other about the conditions on the trade route"
This is a great big huge red flag. Soviet march flag big. Because it shows a fundamental disconnect between what I was trying to do, and what I had actually done.

So, let me start by talking about the system that I used back in the first two Forgotten Conferences. (Link for the First) (Link for the Second)
The problems were, basically, threefold.
1. It was a deterministic system. You had an amount of leverage. you then were able to balance that as you saw fit.
2. It was a system that effectively gave the Treasury itself too much power. Because of the way that I had formatted it, you ended up being the grand dealmaker in a way that was really not ringing true for me, especially as the Initiative government became more functional.
3. It was too much of an open system. Diplomacy is more like poker than it is chess. Bluffing, gambling and the like are part of the game, and it is something that I wanted to include here.


What I was trying to represent with this vote was a system where you are one voice among many, with other people expressing their own opinions with similar weight to your own. Political parties, the military, Litvinov, among others, who all have their own goals, and you spend PS to make your voice more heard. It was supposed to be more abstracted, more open, and a few other things. But clearly, this did not work right.

In terms of fixes, I have two in mind right now, and will be continuing to discuss this.
1. Everything was too damn expensive. I am probably, going to give you a significant refund of the spent PS, because I did overprice everything significantly.
2. I should have made it a multiple round system, where you get multiple chances to go back and forth, and revise the deal in your interests rather than the one and done system that I used here. I am very unsure if or how I should fix that for this one.
 
Ithillid said:
Okay, so this vote turned into a fustercluck, and that is almost certainly my fault.

In the post vote discussion that always shows up on the discord after a vote closes the author of the winning plan said that his intentions with the vote were

The issue is that the winning plan was not expressing that. The winning plan in the vote was saying "treasury does not care one way or the other about the conditions on the trade route"

This is a great big huge red flag. Soviet march flag big. Because it shows a fundamental disconnect between what I was trying to do, and what I had actually done.
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I think the core mechanical dysfunction here was that the four "maritime" options were fundamentally very different from the rest of the options. Everything else was binary: "do we want this in the treaty, and how badly?" The maritime options are four mutually exclusive positions on the same continuum. This, I think discouraged people from investing in any of them.

Because the maritime positions were the core of the treaty, we effectively didn't have a "support the diplomats in doing what was necessary to get the deal we wanted" option. We had a "pick a specific level of sea rights and say this is the hill Treasury intends to die on."

A more flexible system there would have made a lot of difference, I think.

So, let me start by talking about the system that I used back in the first two Forgotten Conferences. (Link for the First) (Link for the Second)
The problems were, basically, threefold.
1. It was a deterministic system. You had an amount of leverage. you then were able to balance that as you saw fit.
2. It was a system that effectively gave the Treasury itself too much power. Because of the way that I had formatted it, you ended up being the grand dealmaker in a way that was really not ringing true for me, especially as the Initiative government became more functional.
3. It was too much of an open system. Diplomacy is more like poker than it is chess. Bluffing, gambling and the like are part of the game, and it is something that I wanted to include here.
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I'll repeat what I said in the Discord: these 'problems' were not problems, and were probably fairly realistic, for the Treasury making deals with the Forgotten in the early to mid-2050s.

Notably, you didn't... I think that you didn't use a similar system for GDI negotiations with the Caravanserai as far as I can recall; our only real impact there was that we had the option to finish the Mecca-Medina-Jeddah complex faster or slower. Am I misremembering?

The rules that worked for the Forgotten Conferences, though, were inappropriate for this case, you are absolutely correct. Because now GDI has a functioning diplomatic corps, and the post-TWIII domestic political scene in GDI has largely stabilized, and there isn't an enormous imbalance of power like there was with the Forgotten and to a lesser extent the Caravanserai.

So yeah, we needed new rules, you were right to want new rules for this.

In terms of fixes, I have two in mind right now, and will be continuing to discuss this.
1. Everything was too damn expensive. I am probably, going to give you a significant refund of the spent PS, because I did overprice everything significantly.
2. I should have made it a multiple round system, where you get multiple chances to go back and forth, and revise the deal in your interests rather than the one and done system that I used here. I am very unsure if or how I should fix that for this one.
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I mean, it was reasonable to give us the option to burn like 75 PS if we had it to spend.

It's just that in this case, in effect getting anything significant that we wanted would have required us to invest heavily in multiple categories to have any real impact on policy. So unless "Treasury has impact on policy" is just meant to be unrealistic and out of reach, that means the overall combined price has to be scaled to the reality of our fixed 0-100 PS budget scale.
 
Ithillid said:
2. I should have made it a multiple round system, where you get multiple chances to go back and forth, and revise the deal in your interests rather than the one and done system that I used here. I am very unsure if or how I should fix that for this one.
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I'm not sure how well that would actually work in this forum format, but it sounds cool to me.
(In practice, it would expect it to have been mechanically clunky, and a pain for you to write.)
 
Ithillid said:
1. Everything was too damn expensive. I am probably, going to give you a significant refund of the spent PS, because I did overprice everything significantly.
2. I should have made it a multiple round system, where you get multiple chances to go back and forth, and revise the deal in your interests rather than the one and done system that I used here. I am very unsure if or how I should fix that for this one.
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This could be one of those situations where you have to make a trade-off between playability/enjoyability and realism. While multiple rounds probably are the most realistic with lots of diplomatic back and forth, it would only be fun if we could engage with it fully, as the diplomatic team.
 
I honestly, Just wanted to leave the negotiations to the diplomats. With basically Saying, The Treasury wants Karachi. Either through the deal your doing now or the invasion we've been planning.
So If it wasnt a way to tell the negotiators [The Treasury wants this], and you can do whatever with the rest of the negotiations. then yeah I misunderstood the vote.
 
dbRevned said:
So If it wasnt a way to tell the negotiators [The Treasury wants this], and you can do whatever with the rest of the negotiations. then yeah I misunderstood the vote.
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There was not, and there intentionally was not. The system is about you staking out positions on items that you care about and giving the diplomats limits on what they can give. Like lets say you went "freedom of the seas lobby" as a reference. That does not mean that the final deal will include Freedom of the Seas, it means that the diplomats can give Freedom of the Seas as part of their concessions in exchange for other stuff.
 
Ithillid said:
There was not, and there intentionally was not. The system is about you staking out positions on items that you care about and giving the diplomats limits on what they can give. Like lets say you went "freedom of the seas lobby" as a reference. That does not mean that the final deal will include Freedom of the Seas, it means that the diplomats can give Freedom of the Seas as part of their concessions in exchange for other stuff.
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Well yes, but there are a lot of realistic positions that Treasury could stake out that simply were not modeled. And ambiguity.

For instance, "Treasury will back the diplomatic team to the hilt in negotiating as generous a maritime option as necessary to get Karachi through."

That's not Treasury dictating diplomacy or singlehandedly engineering the outcome of the conference. That's Treasury saying "we want literally one thing, diplomats, we will pay through the nose to make it happen if, by some black magic, you can make it happen."

But saying "I put 40 PS on freedom of the seas" doesn't precisely replicate that result, and it opens up a lot of concerns precisely beacuse there's no back-and-forth between us and the rest of GDI's government.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well yes, but there are a lot of realistic positions that Treasury could stake out that simply were not modeled. And ambiguity.
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Because I am personally incredibly wary of write in options, and literally can't write out every possible combination. So I tried to lay out a set of things that are concessions, and a set of things that were demands, and asked you to balance between them.
 
There were enough comments slash hints that we shouldn't act as if our voice was the main one, so I read it as less us making decisions and more giving some light thoughts.

Honestly, I would have preferred making decisions from a player perspective as we are the players. Even if this wasn't as realistic as being one voice among many.

So yeah, I read this vote as "here are Treasury thoughts but other thoughts mean equal or more so don't over step."
 
Ithillid said:
Because I am personally incredibly wary of write in options, and literally can't write out every possible combination. So I tried to lay out a set of things that are concessions, and a set of things that were demands, and asked you to balance between them.
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And that makes sense as a general policy. It just interacted poorly with this specific situation because:

1) Many of the biggest concessions on the list were mutually exclusive positions on a sliding scale, rather than being discrete line items where the final deal could theoretically contain "all" or "none" of the entries in the set.

2) Due to the one-and-done nature of the vote, it was not clear how things would interact mechanically. Suppose we invest 25 PS "freedom of the seas," but the military dumps everything they have into killing the idea of GDI offering freedom of the seas. Does that mean the military and Treasury wind up compromising on making one of the intermediate two positions GDI's actual position at the conference? Or does it just mean the whole conference falls through because GDI can't internally agree on a negotiating position? Or what?

The problem wasn't "we need write-ins," the problem was that there wasn't sufficient back-and-forth about how this was supposed to work or what the interplay between Treasury and the rest of the government would look like. The mechanics effectively force us to choose between putting together a full coherent plan for the treaty and lobbying for it so weakly that it the coherent treaty would inevitably be turned into something incoherent by all the other factions sticking their oars in... Or an incoherent plan for the treaty where we invested heavily in one or two things, but then had no PS left over to lobby for anything else we need. And there was no modeling of the internal negotiation process other than, effectively, a single round of poker: "How much do you bid?"

HeruKane said:
There were enough comments slash hints that we shouldn't act as if our voice was the main one, so I read it as less us making decisions and more giving some light thoughts.
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Yes, but that makes it very unclear whether there's even any point in investing heavy PS in anything- because are the outcomes all predetermined, or does it actually even matter what we say?

Likewise, in a fully realistic system, Treasury would be one of several voices, and it would be an asymmetrically significant voice. Logically, Treasury would have almost no input on whether or not GDI needs to seize Taiwan to make the idea of Nod free shipping lanes workable. That's a purely military consideration. But Treasury would need to be consulted on questions like "can we offer to bribe Nod with food aid or consumer goods or medical supplies," because it would be Treasury supplying those goods. Likewise, Treasury's tiberium experts are the only ones who can do a feasibility study on cooperative abatement projects. So the diplomats would have to be consulting Treasury... logically, at an early step in the process, so that they don't accidentally promise something the civilian economy can't deliver, and so they even know what major needs Treasury is trying to add to the list.

Instead, all that gets resolved in one round, along with the issues I already mentioned.

Honestly, I would have preferred making decisions from a player perspective as we are the players. Even if this wasn't as realistic as being one voice among many.

So yeah, I read this vote as "here are Treasury thoughts but other thoughts mean equal or more so don't over step."
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The main issue for my winning plan was that just using the "Propose" option, to lay out the Trade Policies I thought would be appropriate for what I was trying to convey, would be -45 PS... which, combined with the other options I was taking, would have dropped us into the teens for PS afterwards.
I probably could have designed that plan better, so... sorry.
 
Ithillid said:
There was not, and there intentionally was not. The system is about you staking out positions on items that you care about and giving the diplomats limits on what they can give. Like lets say you went "freedom of the seas lobby" as a reference. That does not mean that the final deal will include Freedom of the Seas, it means that the diplomats can give Freedom of the Seas as part of their concessions in exchange for other stuff.
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Yeah, I don't think anyone interpreted it that way. There should at very least have been a 0 PS "we don't care" option on every choice because.... why wouldn't there be? If this is a multipolar model with many actors putting in their voices to try to craft a diplomatic package, shouldn't "do not include this" have cost PS?
 
Ithillid said:
Because I am personally incredibly wary of write in options, and literally can't write out every possible combination. So I tried to lay out a set of things that are concessions, and a set of things that were demands, and asked you to balance between them.
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Even the fact that some things are concessions and some are demands is not blatant and obvious, only mentioned as narrative items, which is great for reading but makes planning harder.

I think if you had said what you just said now about balancing at the start of the vote it would have helped, because I don't think anything like that was mentioned.

To me it felt very much like: "This is mostly going to happen without you but you do have PS to burn so if you want to try to influence things, here is your shot" And the only reason ignoring the vote was impossible was Seo's Mad Science.
 
Ithillid said:
2. It was a system that effectively gave the Treasury itself too much power. Because of the way that I had formatted it, you ended up being the grand dealmaker in a way that was really not ringing true for me, especially as the Initiative government became more functional.
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Pfft. That has always been the way since the quest started. No matter how it was dressed up with words, the players control the Treasury, and the Treasury controls what gets done for the GDI. This vote was no different than the usual.
 
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