Okay, I'm going to put together a preliminary plan because why the hell not.
Hm. Comparing and contrasting with my own draft plan,
Better Living Through Chemistry.
[]Plan Power-Up
-[] Infrastructure ( 5/5 dice) [ 80 Resources]
--[] Tidal Power Plants (157/200 ) (10 Resources)
---[] 1 dice
--[] Fiber-Optic Expansion (105/240 ) (40 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
--[] Blue Zone Arcologies (Phase 1) (304/450) (30 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
Arcologies are up to 396/450; it is questionable whether it's worth putting a second die on them. Meanwhile, there is a modest but significant chance of
Tidal Power failing with only one die. But we're depending on having
at least Tidal Power if not
Blue Zone Power next turn in order to feel free to do anything energy-hungry
THIS turn (that is to say, 2055Q3...) So that means we should probably shift a die from
Arcologies to
Tidal Power. Incidentally this frees up 5 Resources for elsewhere if you felt resource-limited.
-[] Heavy Industry ( 5/ 5 dice ) [ 70 Resources]
--[] Fusion Power Prototype (124/200 ) (20 Resources)
---[] 1 dice
--[] Blue Zone Power Production (Phases 2) (346/550 ) ( 30 Resources)
---[] 3 dice
--[] Union Class Construction Yard (137/180 ) ( 20 Resources)
---[] 1 dice
The big point of concern here is the relative lack of dice for
Fusion Power Prototype.
Blue Zone Power has only a middling chance of completing with three dice, but that's hard to ensure (I think it'd take about
five dice to be really confident, maybe even six).
Since we have no reason to expect our Energy situation to be good any time in the foreseeable future, but rather to always (appropriately for a
Command and Conquer game) to be capped by the available Energy supply, we have very strong reasons to want fusion energy as soon as possible. If at all possible it would be desirable to get two dice on the prototype, either by spending a free die (as I do) or transferring a die from something else. On the other hand, both
Blue Zone Power and the
Union Yard are critical projects in their own right for our short and long-term futures, respectively.
-[] Light and Chemical Industry ( 3/ 3 dice +2 free dice) [100 Resources]
--[] Bulk Plastics Facilities (126/200 ) ( 10 Resources)
---[] 1 dice
--[] Superconductor Foundries (0/200 ) ( 90 Resources)
---[] 3 dice
--[] Security Reviews - Light and Chemical Industry
---[] 1 dice
We just did a security review on light industry literally this turn and rolled a 183. There is no need to repeat. Now here I see why you have no free dice for heavy industry- you're doing something
broadly similar to what I do with 'Better Living Through Chemistry,' only standing up
Superconductor Foundries instead of
Chemical Precursor Plants. This is more energy-lucrative, but also very resource-expensive, and even with three dice you have no assurance of completing the project in a single jump- indeed, I haven't checked
@Derpmind 's excellent probability matrices, but doing some quick estimates I suspect the odds of finishing with three dice are lower than 50%. This ties into an overarching risk associated with your plan- namely, that none of your Energy-granting options are a sure thing that covers our
immediate power needs, though admittedly the odds of
all three Energy options failing are low.
Also, you make no effort to complete or even work on
Yellow Zone Light Industry, which is problematic because it's a campaign promise we're really hoping to get done before the election. While I (unlike some others, including Derpmind) am comfortable with waiting to finish it until Q4, I would prefer not to have to
sprint to finish it during Q4 because no further gains were made during Q3.
-[] Tiberium ( 3/5 dice) [70 Resources]
--[] Red Zone Containment Lines (Phase 3) (8/180) (50 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
--[] Chicago Planned City (41/80) (20 Resources)
---[] 1 dice
Given that Tiberium dice have our highest bonus and that it is extremely important for us to get as much tiberium mitigation done as we can to expand the Blue Zones
before tiberium begins to mutate to resist sonic fencing in two years' time... It is probably not a good thing for us to fail to activate all our Tiberium dice. Granger is basically the new Dr. Mobius, and leveraging (and enhancing!) his Tiberium bonuses has been a cornerstone of our strategy throughout the quest. I strongly recommend finding the resources to activate the remaining two Tiberium dice on
something.
-[] Orbital (3/3 dice) (2 Fusion) [45 Resources]
--[] GDSS Shala (Phase 1) (0/90) ( 20 Resources)
---[] 1 Fusion dice
--[] Orbital Cleanup (1/90) (25 Resources)
--[] 1 dice + 1 Fusion dice
You've mis-estimated some costs here. Orbital Cleanup still costs 15 R/die, so fusion dice spent on it will always be less rewarding than fusion dice spent on a space station that costs 30 R/die. Both fusion dice should go on the space station...
...But I think we should work on another phase of
Philadelphia II before we begin work on
Shala. We're likely to get more useful bonuses from Phase 2 of station construction than from another Phase 1. It's likely to only take one more quarter to get the basic core of the
Philadelphia working, because we're at 92 progress on Phase 2 already thanks to the overflow from Phase 1. That will be a major political milestone for us, and is likely to unlock mechanical benefits, as discussed above. Whereas Phase 1 of any station generally gives us nothing.
While
Shala and
Columbia are indisputably very important, nothing we've learned in the recent past should compel us to jump away from one project to another project
hastily when we're close to reaching a major milestone on the other project.
-[] Services (3/4 dice) [15 Resources]
--[] Game Development Studios (0/300) (20 Resources)
---[] 3 dice
Service dice are another area where we get strong bonuses, so leaving Service dice inactive is always a pity. If nothing else, I suggest you flip a die from
Arcologies to
Tidal Power to reflect the increased progress you didn't take into account, and then use the 5 Resources thus freed up to activate another die of
Game Development. More generally, I think the aggressive spending on
Superconductor Foundries in your plan is sucking the oxygen out of the room for other projects, which I'm not entirely happy with.
-[] Military (5/ 5 dice + 2 free dice) [110 Resources]
--[] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 1 North (0/105 ) (40 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
--[] Super MARV Reclamator Fleet (RZ-6 South) (136/210) ( 40 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
--[]Remote Weapon Systems Development Predator (0/40) (10 Resources)
---[]1 dice
--[]Point Defence Refits (15/250) (20 Resources)
---[] 2 dice
1) You're actually using three free dice on the military.
2) If we are going to build the planned city for mitigation in Chicago, we should probably put the next reclamator hub in Red Zone 7- North (nearer to Chicago) or Red Zone 7-South (where we currently have glacier mines to cover in the American South). Not Red Zone 1 (I believe that's in Europe).
3) While I support your priorities on military research and development, a lot of people will want to build the Advanced Myomer Works next turn, I think.
That said, I do think we're not going to go back to just one or two dice into Military any time soon. I figure that we're basically guaranteed to be doing the two-three cycle needed to get a MARV fleet operational over two turns until we max that out, whilst also spending at least one or two dice on other projects going forward for a long time. At least until we've managed a full replacement cycle for our current designs, which likely means a bunch of refits first as well.
I think at some point we may not be able to keep up the MARV cycle while still adequately maintaining the conventional military. The MARVs are very much what
we want done, but they don't do the majority of the fighting.
I will not be voting for any plan without at least an investment towards the proper deployment of Steel Talons mechs because they are both our R&D division and no new weapons systems can be up for mass production without a mech platform. The Woverines and the Titans are the big ticket items we would need to help advance our military and would help in no longer having Granger's picture in every dartboard in every Steel Talons base.
So, what about projects that invest heavily in other branches of the military, such as the Air Force (whose VTOLs need a makeover badly), the Navy (which has multiple major projects that need doing) and the conventional ground forces (whose tanks can't even get a frickin' machine gun and so keep getting taken out by suicide bombers)?
I'm talking about the industry. We finish that up, and start blowing our dice on the Army.
Yellow Zone Industry is just one project, and it's not really even competing with the military for dice much (
maybe a Free Die or two). Remember that we have entirely separate dice categories; we can't put 100% of our resources on any one thing because we don't have the dice.
Next turn we really need to get the Governor cruiser done so we can build its shipyard the turn after.
Remember folks, everything has a lead time that will tick along in the background. Just because it got done doesn't mean it'll complete its job within that quarter. Most if not all actions and items in this Plan Quest have lengthy lead times.
The Apollo fighter factories for example needs multiple quarters before they can fully furbish GDI with Apollo fighters. It takes time to build shit and train people in their use and integrate it into the GDI arsenal.
The Governor Cruisers will most likely take almost a year or a year and a half before they can show their chops.
Once the shipyard is done GDI will have to build the cruisers, train the crew, do shakedown cruises, fix all the issues shown in the shakedown cruises, train crew again to fix issues, *then* actually start patrols. That takes a lot of time.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the
Governor-class cruisers are more necessary in and of themselves than everything else we're doing. For example, point defense refits to existing warships might be a higher priority, among other things because they
don't require years of lead time to start having effects, only a relatively short period of training the crews on the point defense systems that already more or less work.
We should put more resources into building more MARVs. You can never have enough MARVs.
We're already operating at a point where if we were building any more MARVs we'd be doing effectively nothing for the rest of the military. So I think we may have hit saturation on what we can afford to spend on MARVs, at least until we get more Military dice (e.g. from that comprehensive war factory upgrade program).
Can they?
They haven't had a security review since the Q2 2053 in the last plan and they have had a massive expansion in manpower after the budget revision. As far as we know we might have been leaking military hardware and classified information like a sieve for close to two years and we won't know until we do a security review.
First, the military probably does SOME of its own security reviews.
Second, Q2 2053 was literally two years ago. We have seven departments. We mechanically
can't do a serious security review of each department more than about once every 1.75 years, because there literally are not enough quarters in the year to go around. So don't act like they're "behind schedule" just because it's been two years. If we hadn't done a review in
four years, now that would be different.
Hmm, if we really want to invest more in space, completing the next phase of ASAT is necessary.
The current network is only a bit better than the old one, so it needs development in order to protect the relatively fragile eggs we have in orbit.
Well, sort of. At the moment we have
less to protect in orbit. Back before Tib War III, as I understand it... We had a roughly Phase 4
Philadelphia in place, protected by Phase 1 ASAT. Now we have Phase 1
Philadelphia and Phase 2
Enterprise, protected by Phase 2 ASAT.
The
Philadelphia was very much the primary command and control center for all of GDI, to the point where by blowing it up Kane more or less blew GDI's brains out and put fucking Redmond Boyle in charge for the duration of the war. Also during that time, we had ASAT controlled entirely from a single ground station, which then got attacked by Nod.
Now the command center for ASAT is in space, which is good because it means the defense system's control center is at least
no longer outside the defense system's own coverage. So the system is better protected than it was, and we have less up there to protect.
When we have more significant industrial or command-and-control concerns up in space,
then it's going to be time to upgrade to Phase 3 ASAT.
Considering GDI has been using Tiberium economics for the last 50-60 years, in that Tiberium is a wonder material with just a little refining you can turn into just about anything, would GDI industry/economy suffer from suddenly not having complete access to their alchemy material?
I know it's not completely going back to reinventing the wheel, Enterprise shows that non-Tiberium refining is still alive and well, but things might be difficult if we have to go and search for a specific element like a normal civilization.
One thing Scrin technology is no doubt very good for is mining tiberium on uninhabitable hell-worlds (made so by tiberium) for the benefit of a spacefaring civilization, since that's what the Scrin themselves use it for. So we can, in that scenario, probably just keep mining tiberium on Earth (mostly with tele-operated infrastructure from orbiting stations, i suspect) and doing everything
but tiberium harvesting and refining in space.
Heck not to be pessimistic here but we don't need to evacuate the whole planet for us to technically win just enough people so the human race doesn't die out.
And yes that is grim as all hell I won't lie but when it comes to a space colony our first concern is getting enough people off world to see the continuation of the human race(that should only be a few hundred thousand at a minimum). After that then we can concern ourselves with getting everyone off earth but as long as enough people get off world to avoid any potential genetic problems and to ensure there's a large enough population to allow growth as well as sufficient independence for them(by that I mean won't need earth for any major supply based issue that may come up) then we're golden.
It's by no means the most optimistic thing to say but it's also the baseline we should be going for if we do plan to start going really heavy space colony wise. Anything after that is a nice bonus.
Edit: Heck got morbidly curious on this and looked up how many people would be needed to successfully repopulate mankind in a apocalypse(which let's be honest we're in) and technically we need only 500 people to do so.
Fuck that.
Spaceships go brrrr until everyone who wants a way off the Earth can get off.
Everyone.
Everyone.
Except Kane. He can get out and walk.
