I have a question for dice crunchers. Once we catch up on mil tech? Would alternating military and MARV construction be worth IE 5 military dice and 3 MARV. Then 5 MARV and 3 military?
I don't see why this would be qualitatively better than just steadily going for 4 MARV and 4 military dice and only occasionally deviating from that. Also, 3 MARV dice is a good baseline if we can afford to sustain enough free dice for 5+ dice on regular military stuff, because reclamator hubs cost 105 Progress and actual Super MARV fleets cost 210, so that makes it relatively long-term sustainable to be working on one hub and one fleet at a time. It might sometimes be desirable to 'spike' a second hub or something, but three MARV dice is probably the most we can seriously consider going for.
Especially given that the conventional military is already cranky about how much of our dice is going to MARVs. We're
only getting a pass on that because of how stupidly many Free dice we're putting into the military, and it's going to become a sore spot in the long run.
Besides, once we catch up on military technology, we'll have better options for tiberium abatement that cost less in the long run than MARVs, so we might as well separate our actions and let Tiberium dice do tiberium and our military do
specifically what the military needs to secure our tiberium operations best.
MARVs are a compromise solution and they're good to have, but they're not ideal. We end up spending 315 Progress and ~100 Resources for +15-25 RpT and 3-4 points of mitigation, and we can probably do better elsewhere.
We are NOT behind the ball in military anymore, I have crunched the numbers. In the first 4 year plan, we used 53 Military Dice, and in the second 4 year plan to date we've used 52. In the first 4-year plan, we spent 585 resources on the military. In the second plan to date, we've spent 750 resources, and are rapidly closing in on 21% of all spending for the plan being military. We are closing in on Full War Status military spending, and while we're not in big danger of overheating the economy, it might be wise to moderate our spending and work on other sectors with our free dice-like say, our agriculture backlog, or our megaprojects, or getting our Tiberium Processing upgrades when they come.
Given that Nod still hates us and never actually stopped fighting us, going full war mobilization for several years to push them
way the fuck back is not necessarily a bad idea now that we've got the civilian economy up to more or less acceptable levels.
I definitely don't want to throw every single Free die at the military forever, but I also don't want to
stop throwing Free dice at the military just yet. Especially if we're still using three-ish Military dice per turn on MARVs, something the rest of the military still grumbles about.
I know a lot of people have already talked to you about exact numbers of military dice, so I will say no more on that in this moment.
That there is demand for new consumer goods does not mean we need to build new factories.
What we are building is not 'factories with specific products'. Specific product types? Sure, but not specific products.
What we are building is 'consumer good production capacity'. So a new videogame comes out, or a different clothing style becomes popular. The top level of the Treasury does not need to care because a dozen or more layers of bureaucracy lower is where the decisions are made as to what clothing factory produces which clothes, or which servers will be dedicated to which games.
If a rating drops, it's because there's an actual increased demand for something, not because there's a changed demand for it.
I think what
@armentho meant is that the more consumer goods we produce, the more people will want. Firstly because they will always believe (and not necessarily be wrong) that the option to have nicer living conditions will continue to exist if only they could have this, or that, or the other thing- a car, or a Vroomba-plus personal cleaning robot, or a bigger selection of wardrobe, or clothes made out of comfy smart fabrics, or fancier VR video games, or bigger and more spectacular entertainment of other kinds, or any of a thousand things.
And secondly because right now there are many things our population has spent a decade learning to do without, and as they realize they
CAN have those things, at least in principle, they'll miss them and want them to come back.
QM still had us behind the ball on mil and are you including MARV dice in those numbers? As it is the 1st 4 year plan we underfunded the mil department so saying that the dice we used there is the total we should aim for is off.
To be fair to
@Vehrec , what he was saying wasn't "we should aim to match the First Four Year Plan." It's "We are already matching our First Four Year Plan's military spending total
and we're only halfway into the Second Plan!" It should be noted that if we keep up military dice spending at the rate of the past several quarters, we'll have sunk something like 130 (!!!) dice into the military by the end of the Plan, which is a truly prodigious number even if ~48-ish of those dice are MARV dice. After all, MARVs don't do nothing for military performance, as I understand it; they're still a net plus to overall Nod-crushing efforts once they actually get stood up and operational.
Now, I'm not saying that's actually bad- it would probably force Nod onto the back foot which is nice for other reasons. And, hell, it's
Command and Conquer and to me the series has always been, in some sense, about blowing up Noddies.
But
damn it's a lot. There's a reason that many of the Hawkiest Hawks who've ever Hawked are looking at us and going 'damn, that's actually not bad, didn't think you had it in you' and grunting with manly approval.
As it is NOD is starting to deploy new prototype weapons and we are still working on initial factory rollouts to modernize our forces and have not pushed forward with new weapon systems nearly as much as NOD has.
But I essentially agree with you here, to be very clear. On the other hand, we do have megaprojects (like North Boston, or a lot of the pricier Agriculture options) that would go considerably faster if we were willing to spend some Free dice.
I know Agriculture is kind of the poor relation in our plans, but consider. If we had truly large Food surpluses there would be big advantages. Right now our stored Food capacity is simply NOT enough for us to weather a prolonged global famine. We could roll a surplus into that. Moreover our stored Food capacity is limited in how many Yellow Zoners we can provide food aid to, and food aid is actually important because most Yellow Zoners cannot reliably grow uncontaminated food themselves and the need for food is probably one of the constant strings keeping Yellow Zoners attached to Nod.
Giant surpluses in both Food and Housing would enable us to simply evacuate Yellow Zoners to the Blue Zones, or let them survive in the 'Green Zones' under conditions far superior to typical Yellow Zone ways of life, which would greatly accelerate our efforts to deprive Nod of future recruits.
