You will probably be surprised with the update.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen, but yes, I consider it surprising that there's going to be an option for "have Treasury try to
make it happen."
By the way, I read your entire quest. He came out just fine. Of course, personally, I would have preferred a greater emphasis on space, but nothing can be influenced here.
This was to a large extent a choice of overall strategic direction at game start. This
could have been "flee Earth into space quest," but we chose the options that were mechanically optimized for continuing to fight it out against tiberium here on Earth.
The only thing that disappoints me personally is that there is no particular bias towards diplomacy. Rather, there is the Brotherhood of NOD, but we do not know what they are doing and cannot contact them.
Plan quests usually don't focus on external diplomacy. It's about running the economy (with some kind of overarching government telling the economy-runners what to do). So I'm not sure what to say...
I also think we ought to devote the maximum number of dice to the army.
I don't know about
maximum because we do have some other priorities- for instance, getting the heavy industrial base properly revved up so we can continue to build and power war factories and consumer goods factories, and refurbish wartime factories with more capital goods so that we can further increase production and recover the military's pre-Tiberium War III strength.
I'm on board with people pushing for the shell factory and orbital spends, but I'd like to promote fusion power spending as another priority.
We're going to have to keep spending huge amounts of dice & resources to produce power, that I feel like its worth investing in fusion in the off chance it can allow us to make power more efficiently. It that happens, everything that uses power becomes cheaper - in the sense we don't have to complete so many projects to get them working.
It should be noted that fusion power investment at this time doesn't seem to actually involve a ton of resources because we can't force the learning curve of the prototype reactor very hard. 2-3 dice at 20 resources per would represent a strong investment, and more than 3 dice is almost certainly not warranted by the situation.
In fact, it is not at all a fact that we will succeed in this area, firstly. Secondly, this will require re-equipment of the entire energy sector.
Why would we have to stop building fission reactors, or stop operating existing fission reactors, to start building fusion reactors?
It can still be done, there will be increases in progress required for each subsequent stage of power generation we do. The new tiberium refining process may reduce this too, since it allows preferential production of elements, though I don't know if it can select for specific isotopes such as fission fuel needs.
Trouble is, the new process is years from being made safe and reliable enough to go into mass use, and we need power now. Not that fusion really helps there.
By the way, what type of nuclear fuel do we use? Mainly uranium? Or also a thorium fuel cycle? What about plutonium fuel? Theoretically, we still have a lot of thorium on Earth.
We use all of the above, I think. The problem is that we're using it for
everything and that many of the regions we'd normally be mining in are either Red Zones where tiberium has overrun the mine sites (and likely eaten the deposits themselves) or Yellow Zones where security is problematic and Nod can disrupt operations at any time.
Also people we need more ways to connect to the internet this coming election while the number of seats going around the next election is around 400 that is just a pittance because we really need more voters. The first election for the first parliament post-3TW is only 12% turnout so many people in the Blue Zones itself did not get to vote we need more voters to the polls so more communication satellites and fiber connections are needed since the electorate need their voices heard.
This is another thing there's a lot of support for, but it didn't win out in the Q4 plan just now. However, people are still fighting for more fiber optics and satellite communications.
So ultimately the current phase of Blue Zone Power Production is barely enough to get some of the most urgently-needed factories up and working ASAP, and we have been told that the costs for the next phases are only going to keep going up. So we need to get the Fusion Power Prototype done right now not for the single point of Energy it provides but the hope that it will unlock more effective Energy options.
A good point. And a good argument for spending dice on it- although given that we
do still need to complete
Blue Zone Power Production with at least two dice, and the high demand for free dice on military affairs, we probably can't throw enough dice at the fusion prototype to ensure completion in 2055Q1.
Indeed since our current laser system point defense is based on technology from 50 years ago. Granted, so is this 'new' NOD laser we 'discovered', but their laser tech is still a lot better than ours.
50 year old NOD laser tech is better than the latest GDI laser tech and they've only improved further in those 50 years.
To be fair, from the sound of it, we're looking at crystal beam laser technology that Nod was using right up to the
Second Tiberium War, circa 2030.
So the Nod lasers that are definitively better than our lasers are only, like... 25-30 years old, not 50-60 year old lasers from the
first Tiberium War back in the 1990s.
Fuck NOD's magical, from nowhere, supertech.
Honestly I think a lot of it comes from specifically reverse-engineering alien archives available to Kane personally since the 20th century, plus willingness to fuck around with tiberium in ways we're not because it's fucking reckless if you care about maintaining Blue Zones on the planet?
That's my impression, anyway. Though I'd be very very curious to see
@Ithillid 's take on this if we were running Nod Quest.
It might be a case of 90% of the NOD weapon was worse then what we already have but the 10% that is better is enough to improve our existing lasers to a point that they become practical.
It's a straightforward thing. GDI hasn't really pursued tactical laser technology in decades. It just hasn't been a priority.
Improbably capable VTOL aircraft, yes.
Railguns, yes.
Big stompy killbots, yes.
Smart munitions, yes, to the point where
fucking hand grenades have little thruster packs and onboard guidance to do shit like target the windows of a structure and fly into them.
Nod ain't got
shit on us in the field of smart munitions, or Hitting A Thing With Another Thing Very Hard.
But lasers? Cloaking? Those are things Nod's been working on and we haven't. Shrug.
