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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Hazard said:
That wasn't the Alps.

That was Renaldo.

It was the Carpathians about a decade later that did that.

And GDI didn't exactly spare any effort trying to get those poor bastards out.
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For reference, because that phrasing is a little ambiguous (and because the description is entirely worth reading again):
(from Q1 2062)
Ithillid said:
In Europe, the conditions are even worse. The mountainous Balkans are hard terrain, a reason for short barreled mountain guns, not because the guns were good, but because they were the only artillery that could be hauled up sheer mountain faces. Avalanches are common, as mining efforts cause collapse after collapse, especially as the Initiative has to painstakingly reshape the surface for every meter advanced, cutting roads into and through mountains, breaking through into a valley or plain, before having to set forth once more up those harsh faces. Once more, attacks are common, mutated creatures boiling out of holes to attack the miners.

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.

"Before Granger, we passed through Red Zones, fought them where we could, but mostly it was about recon, security, finding the safe routes and avoiding the worst of it. Now, Intelligence and recon said it was bad, but there is bad, and then there is the Deep Red. It is deeply alien, and angry. I never thought rocks could be angry before."
  • Lt. Harry Sims, ZOCOM
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It was the effect from a nat 1 on the Deep Red Glacier Mining project.
 
Makes me wonder how many more mutated creatures were thrown at GDI and Nod during the TCN construction... and if tiberium could produce them or even worse from crystal formations.
 
alvus said:
Except they do this, always. Infinitely.
There is no shortage of NOD "best of the best", there is no inteligence failure, there is no "they got their target but got killed in turn", when NOD tried they won 100%.
I think the only time we got told about NOD suffering on their victory was their recovery of the Tacitus.
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As the person who made the assassination rolls and the nuke rolls for Nod, this is 1110000% complete and utter bullshit. Not only did Ithillid rule that for Nod to succeed (especially once we'd dumped mountains of money onto InOps) it needed to, like, double GDI's roll (this is for the dice roll pre-modifiers), but my actual raw dice luck over the course of all the assassination rolls was at best "median average", if not indicatively a bit shit (as is typical for me lol). Nod succeeded at probably 40-50% of its assassination attempts, at best, and of those, several resulted in the kill teams dying.

With the Nukes, I think I got maybe 15-20% of them through, thanks to how much we invested in SADN? Aka GDI's investments paid off.
 
KnightDisciple said:
As the person who made the assassination rolls and the nuke rolls for Nod, this is 1110000% complete and utter bullshit. Not only did Ithillid rule that for Nod to succeed (especially once we'd dumped mountains of money onto InOps) it needed to, like, double GDI's roll (this is for the dice roll pre-modifiers), but my actual raw dice luck over the course of all the assassination rolls was at best "median average", if not indicatively a bit shit (as is typical for me lol). Nod succeeded at probably 40-50% of its assassination attempts, at best, and of those, several resulted in the kill teams dying.

With the Nukes, I think I got maybe 15-20% of them through, thanks to how much we invested in SADN? Aka GDI's investments paid off.
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There were 13 launch sites/platforms. InOps Dagger teams took out or otherwise made four of them unable to launch. Of those remaining, they got off 30 interceptable salvoes, and the rolls for 5 of them were below the DC20 threshold to get through. One of them was a Shadow Team who carried it into the Union shipyard facility, and didn't make it back out, the others were the modified Falak subs which had the railgun-assisted hypersonics that got through SADN by virtue of Goes Fast. (But the payload was in the single-kiloton range, IIRC.)
It's nearly impossible to avoid loss completely, but in terms of a strategic engagement, it was scratch damage. That said, it could have been a lot worse had some previous decisions gone otherwise (such as spending a reroll on the results of the diplomatic conference that would otherwise have got the Bannerjees and possibly Bintang involved in the Karachi invasion, if not necessarily the nuclear strikes.)
 
VinnyMoneyHo said:
So…..we're reached the end. What now? There's a sequel coming up? Something about Mass Effect?
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Probably not for a while. GM has just spent years running this quest, battling burnout along the way to give us an ending and an epilogue. They've got another quest running that they updated recently and are playing with.

But yeah. some time to take a break and handle some of the planning and setup for the sequel quest.

Ithillid did an amazing job and now we just need to be patient before the sequel begins. But there's other things they'll be doing in the meantime.
 
Ithillid said:
To begin with, you persistently sought a golden timeline. Where you could have it all. You wanted to have socialism, space, the destruction of nod, and not make substantial moral compromises while doing everything. And this was something where, in trying to do it all, you never progressed down any of the particular tracks. You could have built a military capable of bulling through nuclear strikes, and if you had any of the leaders besides Litvinov, you would have been going on offensives through the nuclear strikes, and screaming as boston gets an express delivery of sun. At the same time, you were investing heavily enough into things like abatement, to make running down the rabbit hole that was the adaptation pathway (essentially becoming a civilization of tib mutants, with infrastructure that integrates and subverts tiberium) less than politically viable.
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This is why I enjoyed this quest. It felt like the changing of the old guard in GDI to an actual reformist faction. Like GDI wasn't forgetting anyone anymore and it was looking up into the stars. Like we tired to do everything and did okay. But like how could you not try to save earth while leaving? Or save people while fighting your enemy? It just felt like GDI was trying to live up to it's charter and most of the time I assumed we were going to fail at it.

But like it felt right to try. Rather than just leave the masses of the world to suffocate on the great alter of efficiency. Even if it was iust survival numbers of people on the moon at the end? Humanity could say, GDI struggled and failed but at least it struggled.
 
Honestly, immediately post-TW3 was the perfect time to have a chance to change GDI's direction massively. Most of the gov't got Philadelphia'd, Boyle got himself arrested ordering what could've been a planet killer used on the Visitors... Lots of empty holes needing filling, where the right person at the right place at the right time could have an out sized effect on things. And boy, did we have an effect. :D

I imagine that if there ever was a Nod Quest equivalent to this, it'd probably kick off post-Firestorm, given that nearly all of the Inner Circle is gone, CABAL is gone, and Kane is still out of the way recovering from TW2 shenanigans. The real question would be if it started before or after Slavik got killed by Marcion. I'd like to think immediate post-Firestorm, as Nod is still reeling from the events, Slavik is still around, and a good while before Kane+Legion covertly take the field.
 
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