I think this ignores the sheer massive population disparity between our yellow zones and our blue zones.
I think we're going to be trying to hold the fringes of those Yellow Zones (the parts closest to the Blue Zones) as long as we possibly can, piling on as much Red Zone mitigation as we can to keep them from collapsing. Given how high our Blue Zone mitigation is, it's quite possible that by the time tiberium mutation really sinks its teeth in, we'll have rolled the Blue Zones forward significantly and those arcologies, many of them, will retroactively
be Blue Zone arcologies.
Besides that... Honestly I think you overestimate the degree to which this action is going to be "politically fraught" in the current political landscape. The Blue Zone supremacist faction of the Hawks has isolated
themselves. No other major party still has serious objections to building arcologies in the Yellow Zones. It's not that big of a project, it's not that expensive, and whatever resentment may exist will have been at least
diminished by the time and effort we've put in refurbishing the damaged or destroyed Blue Zone arcologies that already exist.
Along with the fact that theoretically we should be emphasizing a personnel pipeline out of the Yellow Zones rather than massive permanent structures for prolonged habitation.
I want both. But I don't want to waste resources on massively expensive ways to fulfill a party promise in the Blue Zones when there's a cheap way to do it in the Yellow Zones,
and cheaper ways to get enough Housing to meet our needs in the Blue Zones too.
Because the thing is, as the people now living in Yellow Zones under our control vacate to Blue Zones,
more people will flow in towards us. The goal isn't to depopulate the narrow Yellow Zone slices we already hold, it's to suck the population
out of areas deeper in the Yellow Zones, pulling refugees into our fortress towns and arcologies where there's safety and good living conditions and jobs working in factories and on tiberium mitigation projects.
I think you overestimate how much actual leverage this will give Initiative First that they don't already have.
I know we're working on it but we really need the get them better gear. They didn't have to sit down with us. They could've gone to the rest of the government in the lead up to the election and wrecked us.
True. On the other hand... we
have been getting them better gear. Their confidence has improved. We've been spending 5+ dice on Military actions every turn for quite some time now.
We've given them a massive supply of artillery ammo- not as much as they could find reasons to shoot, but then there's always one more Noddie to detonate
somewhere downrange.
We've built new fighters and are starting to supply the Navy with new ships. The pipeline for better equipment isn't flowing as fast as the military could wish, but it
IS flowing, and I think they're beginning to recognize that with some positive acceptance. Though they still feel a need to give us an occasional thump upside our collective heads when we do something that in their eyes is silly, and I don't blame them.
I think this is a spending thing. Like an Arcology option or two in Blue zones or finishing out our goods issues? Should take the edge off this.
Up to a point, but frankly, the share of the population behind it is low enough that I think they're just our neo-racist conservative wing finding a new outgroup to ostracize: Yellow Zoners. Some of them may fuck off and find something else to do if we build some more housing for them or whatever, but others won't, because it's not
about the actual share of our production and efforts that improve lives in Blue Zones. It's about the fact that we spend
anything to improve lives in Yellow Zones, instead of just building a wall and making the Blue Zones great again.
I have no respect for that shit.
And if Tiberium advances through all our countermeasures, we're going to be stretched maintaining lines of supplies to those same arcologies in an increasingly desolate and hostile environment. As opposed to setting up reasonably good quality housing and defenses that are far easier to salvage and relocate in the event our current borders collapse than giant self contained cities.
The entire point of our tiberium mitigation efforts is to
at least keep 20% or so of the planet (the Blue Zones and the inner fringes of the current Yellow Zones) habitable for as long as possible, because if we can't do that, then we won't last long enough to evacuate to space anyway.
Mutation isn't going to flip on like a light switch and nullify all our tiberium abatement at once. And we're gonna keep trying to push it back. It could, and hopefully will, take
decades before we are ultimately overrun... And having good places to live in what are now the Yellow Zones and will in the long run become the forward bases of humanity's defense against tiberium is going to pay off over the course of those decades.
There are costs and consequences to choosing yellow arcologies. Ones we don't need to bear right now- trying to pretend it won't alienate more people and will simply piss off people we already don't give a shit about is optimistic in the extreme.
I think you grossly overestimate the number of people in the Blue Zones who actually have a problem with the idea of us building infrastructure in Yellow Zones, especially when we are obviously
also building infrastructure in Blue Zones
all the time.
MARVs are not weapons to fight Nod. The military isn't telling us to stop building MARVs either.
They are saying 'we understand why you are so focused on building MARVs, but please do not forget there are other military commitments and they do need funding too'.
In a way, yes, but in another way, they're saying this from a Nod-fighting perspective because that's what they
do.
That moment where the average expected election result means you get more members of parliament than the entire previous session had members and it's still never going to be enough to get even half your relative share of the electorate.
That's probably actually another thing the Initiative Firsters are upset about. Expanding telecommunications, including expansion into the Yellow Zones, means that their votes are being diluted.
Because that kind of person never likes the idea of the franchise expanding to include people who aren't them.
