I know. The problem is, for me, they don't seem efficient enough in terms of dice to justify doing them all the damn time, when we could be doing everything else in the bureaucracy section when they come up.
I do think we've hit the point of diminishing returns for security reviews, as demonstrated by how often they turn up literally nothing. However, the flip side of that is that we want to make sure no department goes too long without a security review. Remember what you said about how we want to access options that warn us about problems we didn't know we had? Well, security reviews
definitely have the potential to do that. Knowing something like "there are Nod saboteurs on our space station" or "corrupt local managers are funneling consumer goods production contracts to their cronies" is important, and security reviews give us that information.
I go back to my memories of the original Attempting to Fulfill the Plan, and all the incredibly vital options that came out of the bureaucracy section, most of which got us labor, which was we were running out of all the damn time. But one of the biggest ones was statistical planning, which revealed how many cut corners were occurring beneath our notice, and how off the mark the estimates were in comparison to reality.
And so I see similar option down there at the bottom, and I can only facepalm that no one made them priority number one, especially considering that they outright state that they will give us information that we need.
It would hilarious if it wasn't so dammed disappointing.
I think you may be overlooking some reasons for hope and some differences between the quests.
1) In Soviet Plan Quest, we consistently picked leaders who knew how to play political games. For Sergo and Mikoyan, this was a survival trait under Stalin and an inevitable consequence of the logic of the game. For Malenkov, well, he was picked as part of the political horse-trading that put Mikoyan in charge of the Soviet Union in the first place; he wouldn't have been in a position to be a critical vote for Mikoyan's rise to power after Stalin died if he
weren't himself capable of playing Soviet politics. By contrast, Dr. Granger was very much NOT the political animal option. He's explicitly marked as not being that. As such, he simply does not get the kind of options a man like Sergo or Mikoyan gets under the Bureaucracy tab so often. Instead, we get a whopping +5 on Tiberium and +10 on Services dice, plus madlad options like "hire Nod expatriates to work in the Tiberium Department" that got us a further
+15 on Tiberium dice. This is one reason we're playing a different game- the Plan agency is run by a different kind of person.
2) Soviet Plan Quest started us out playing the 1920s USSR, a nation full of political terror and extremely limited access to information. The bureaucracy in-game is trying to keep track of a national economy using nothing but pencil, paper, and telegraphy. GDI's Treasury Department, by contrast, has a global spanning telepresence network and computerized systems to coordinate everything. They have a larger educated workforce and no Stalinist terror pressuring their underlings to falsify information. In GDI Quest we
started at a level of detailed information about our own situation that it took USSR Quest at least an in-game
decade to attain. We have since moved beyond that; we now get exact accounting of our indicators in a way that Blackstar still doesn't give us over there. GDI operates at a much higher baseline of managerial tools and accurate information flow than the Soviet Union in Soviet Plan Quest does. Again, this means we have fewer opportunities for groundbreaking Bureaucracy moves to get more detailed information, because
we already have that information. We can go further, but the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
Yeah, please came we move away from MARVs for a little. They're fantastic, but they don't solve the fact that the military is spread incredibly thin at all. They're powerful but very isolated and concentrated rather than something rolled out across every area of engagement.
To be fair, they
do help out on the military front by letting the military redeploy or do more with less in the areas the MARVs are active. Nod can't harass our stuff as effectively if MARVs keep randomly rolling over their forward bases.
What it comes down to is that MARVs do several things (RpT income, abatement, territorial influence spread, military power), but do none of them
as effectively as an option specced to do only that thing.
I thought that going explicitly by the Military's own words:
it meant that while they might not like MARV getting so much investment in general most of the time, due to the special needs at the current times even they themselves could see, they would understand it if MARVs got focused on for a short while to prevent more loss in territory from the growing threat of encroachment from Tiberium.
Basically, aren't they ok with putting more dices on MARVs specifically right now?
Yes, and no.
They're saying something like this:
"We think you spend too many dice on MARVs. Now, we respect MARVs, but GDI has a whole lot of military needs that cannot be fulfilled by MARVs no matter what you do with them or how many you build. We recommend you do one of the following. Either,
ONE, cut back your MARV dice expenditure to leave more room for the conventional military, or
TWO,, let us just hold the line, consolidate our positions and make do with what you've given us already while you just spend a turn or two obsessively spamming MARVs, and then when you've got that out of your system you can spend
all your Military dice on non-MARV stuff for a while."
They're not saying "please stop building MARVs," they're saying "GDI's security needs cannot be met by MARVs alone, and MARVs have made up a disproportionate share of dice/resources allocated to the military as a whole, so we need you to rebalance, either by surging to meet whatever MARV production targets you have and then switching back to focus on conventional stuff, OR by cutting back MARV production per turn and putting a greater percentage of your effort on conventional stuff."
It's kind of nuanced.
[ ] Plan Chimeraguard Draft
Infrastructure (5 dice)
-[ ] Tidal Power Plants (Phase 2), 2 dice (20 Resources)
-[ ] Yellow Zone Arcologies (Phase 1), 3 dice (45 Resources)
We could do worse.
Heavy Industry (5 dice +1 Free)
-[ ] North Boston Chip Fabricator (Phase 4), 6 dice (90 Resources)
This certainly isn't a
bad time to push North Boston. And North Boston isn't actually that Resource-expensive a project, either (our resource/die average needs to be no higher than 13.333 R/die if we want to activate all dice, but 15 R/die is very close to that). On the other hand, I dunno, there might be better places to plant that free die.
Light and Chemical Industry (4 dice)
-[ ] Chemical Precursor Plants, 2 dice (30 Resources)
-[ ] Yellow Zone Light Industrial Sectors, 2 dice (20 Resources)
Hmm, how good are our odds on finishing
Yellow Zone Light Industry with two dice? Because I do
not want to blow it and fail to finish that before the end of the quarter.
Tiberium (5 dice)
-[ ] Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions (Phase 1), 3 dice (15 Resources)
-[ ] Chicago Planned City (Phase 2), 2 dice (40 Resources)
Without knowing the exact benefits of
Chicago Phase 2, this sounds reasonably promising. I don't know what the actual payoff for
Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions looks like. I also missed the bit where we found out what if any resource income we got from the previous massive wave of prospecting...?
With that said, I'd
like for us to push the next round of refineries soon so we don't get silo'd.
Chicago Phase 2 may not actually give us
that much extra refining capacity, so it may not be a substitute for actually building a wave of plants.
Orbital (3 dice)
-[ ] GDSS Philadelphia II (Phase 3), 3 dice (3 Fusion) (60 Resources)
Given the desire to restore the
Philadelphia before the election, I support this.
Military (5 dice +4 Free)
-[ ] Reclamator Hub (RZ-7 North), 2 dice (40 Resources)
-[ ] Reclamator Fleet YZ-5a, 1 die (20 Resources)
If we're gonna put three MARV dice out there the turn after the military asked us to chill on the MARVs, I'd... well,
part of me wants to flip the balance and put two dice on building the fleet in YZ-5a. But I see the argument for doing otherwise, since we need the hub
finished or we won't be able to do fleet work next turn.
-[ ] Remote Weapons System Development Predator, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[ ] Ablative Plating Refits, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[ ] Governor Class Cruiser Development, 1 die (15 Resources)
-[ ] Titan Mark 3 Development, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[ ] Wolverine Mark 3 Deployment, 2 dice (20 Resources)
Hmmm, not a bad balance of projects. Several dice for the Talons and one for the Navy, not bad, not bad...?
Alright, here's my plan right now. Tidal Plants gets 2 dice to get started on the next power train. The remaining 3 Infrastructure Dice I have dedicated to Yellow Zone Arcologies Phase 1, to try and knock out that Socialist 2 Arcologies Demand before elections. Alternatively, I could put it towards rail lines for more Logistics (which was my initial plan.)
Hm, interesting toss-up. I could see it either way. Personally I suspect that Chicago may turn out to be more Logistics-hungry than we anticipated, making a good argument for railroads.
Building
Yellow Zone Arcologies will definitely please the Yellow List while triggering Osawa's Initiative First Party in the runup to the election; it'll be a polarizing move and how it goes may have a lot of ramifications far beyond just the promise to the small number of socialists we made the deal with.
Or maybe Fusion Peaker Plants will come up next turn and I'll need to throw some of the HI Dice onto that. I imagine it'd be another 20 Resources per die thing, so I could flip 2 dice from Boston to Peakers in that case.
I'm pretty sure Fusion Peaker Plants
will come up and that it'll be a good idea to do that.