@Simon_Jester
According to the status page, we've completed the following hubs:
RZ-1 North
RZ-6 North
RZ-6 South
YZ-5a
According to
@Crazycryodude's post after the rolls, we are at 49/105 for RZ-7 N (Chicago). Am I missing that we completed RZ-7 S somewhere else?
I must be mistaken; I was relying on a misremembered comment from some time ago in the thread.
Look, I'm not saying that we need to get every bit of overflow we can. But when it is to something that is a very high priority (red zone) or high priority (the first yellow zone to secure red zone military resupply and tiberium exports), it is very nice to have.
Fair enough- but at the same time, there are overarching practical questions.
1) We are
definitely completing the YZ-5a fleet, period, end of sentence. We're already too far into committing to it, it serves a strategic purpose, and failure to do so in a timely manner risks handing a victory to the recently named Nod warlord in South America. We'd be leaving money on the table.
2) We are also definitely completing the RZ-7N hub, in preparation to completing the fleet there; it's our next goal.
3) All questions of this aside, we really cannot afford to budget an arbitrary number of dice to MARV construction indefinitely. Three dice is close to a maximum and frankly I'm not sure we should even be sustaining three indefinitely. It's making the difference between a rapid military upgrade cycle and a
rapid upgrade cycle as it is, and I'd really like to get through the backlog of immediately post-TWIII upgrades as fast as possible now that we're committed to funding that seriously.
Because of (1) we don't want to wait more than about 1-2 more turns to finish the YZ-5a fleet. Because of (2) we want the RZ-7N hub finished soon... But because of (3), we're realistically not going to do much on the RZ-7N
fleet until the YZ-5a fleet is finished.
This gives rise to the basic logic of "one die on the hub, two dice on the fleet."
I would note that we also now have a decently sized pure Socialist Party, so there clearly is a slide towards support for the planned economy— and if we continue to do well, I expect that to only grow.
We'll see how the Socialists' support for us breaks down at the start of the Third Plan. They may be planned economy fanboys, they may not, it may depend.
I will say, though...
No.
It's a slide towards 'do not let corporations be a bunch of dicks, and protect the right of the workers to not be abused for the sake of another's profit'. Subtle difference.
The Market Socialists especially don't care about whether or not the economy is a planned one or not, so long as it functions, but the Socialist Party is not going to go all 'planned economy hurray, now everything shall be good and better'. They too want things to actually get better, focusing on the lot of the general population and the most deprived among them. The centralized command/planned economy? That is one of a number of ways they will consider as ways to make it happen.
If the planned/command economy can be proven to be at best detrimental and possibly outright harmful to the goals of the Socialist Party, said party is going to drop it as a way to get things done.
That I think this projects a bit much.
The Market Socialists and Socialists are separate parties. They almost certainly have a
fundamental incompatibility or they'd have joined to form a united party list, one that would be very powerful and influential. Instead they form two smaller weaker parties that can be played off each other, and there's probably a reason for that.
I'm pretty sure it's "Market." Socialists who favor a planned economy are overwhelmingly likely to be in the one-word Socialist Party; socialists who think the planned economy is inefficient and would like to open it up considerably- just with collectivized ownership of the means of production, rather than privatization of the planned economy into privately owned major corporations like the leadership of the old Free Market Party.
