Small point: microgeneration is good for when something cuts the connection between the power plant and the buildings (like a tank knocks over a power pole or something). More power plants can't address that problem.
Otherwise I agree with everything you just said here.
1) It depends on the microgeneration. A lot of what looks like microgeneration on our scale (we mostly build giant gigawatt nuclear reactors and stuff) probably still relies significantly on substations and power poles and so on. You're not fundamentally wrong here but it's complicated.
2) That kind of problem has only small-scale consequences. It's not
nothing, and it's better to have protection there than to not have it, but... Well, the problem is that no matter how much microgeneration you have, you're still fucked if Nod manages to sabotage several major fusion reactors and knocks you down by -8 Energy in a turn when you only had a +4 Energy surplus to begin with. The microgeneration can only do so much to stave off problems in the long run. Having surplus/reserve
generating capacity on a large scale matters too.
I've explained why I want the projects multiple times at this point. Let's go over this one more time:
The Tidal Power Plants at this point are a cost saving measure. I'm not going to build them as a tripwire right now when we need to maximize our Dice utility.
Your stated justification for the project has changed, then, since when you were advocating it in 2057.
Further complicating this is that in terms of energy per unit Resources invested... Well, to have an 82% chance of finishing the next phase of tidal power would take three dice, or 30 R, for +4 Energy. The equivalent investment in fusion power is about five dice or 100 R for +16 Energy.
As long as we can't afford to activate all our Heavy Industry dice, the tidal plants aren't actually cost-effective compared to just
not using those Infrastructure dice and spending the money on the next wave of fusion reactors.
It only
really makes sense to build tidal power if:
1)
We don't urgently need Infrastructure dice on other projects, which is not true right now, or...
2)
We do urgently need +4 Energy, but can't afford to spend enough to get a whole +16 Energy quickly. Also not true right now, though perhaps true in Q2-Q3.
It's just not worth it until the demand on Infrastructure relaxes a bit. Fusion power has a better return on investment even given that we have a tidal phase half-finished that (hopefully) hasn't lost much progress yet.
I'm building up this round of them to make sure I have enough Energy to work with until Fusion Power Plants are again available to be done alongside other actions. This will take a few turns so having 20 Energy gained in the meanwhile will be a good buffer for that.
The Energy from the fusion plants has far more to do with the buffer than the Energy from the tidal power. It might very well be more productive to simply spend 20-40 R on partially completing a fusion phase than to even bother with the tidal phase.
Hey
@Ithillid I'm under the impression that the Improved Tiberium Containment Facilities are to the Tiberium Processing Plants Action what the Blue Zone Microgeneration Actions are to any sort of an Energy generation Action. A hardening of infrastructure. Is this actually true?
I'm pretty sure the containment facilities just let us build tiberium silos capable of storing tiberium from quarter to quarter, so that if we ever have a turn where we mine more tiberium than we can refine (say, because a refinery was destroyed) we can store the surplus tiberium until later.
In a way, this hardens our infrastructure... but it's not as
good a form of hardening as just
building a lot more refineries, so that we have plenty of surplus capacity and any reasonable Nod attack will not require us to stockpile tiberium until the refineries can be put back online. Furthermore, surplus capacity means we can contemplate upgrading existing facilities, and that we'll have more diversified options for producing things like transuranics and rare metals efficiently, and that the burden on our Logistics network won't include time and resources wasted moving tiberium over intercontinental distances because the glacier mine is in, say, the Congo River valley but the nearest available refinery is thousands of miles away by ship and rail in Mecca or Chicago.
In other words: We're in real trouble if one of our processing hubs is attacked and the equipment damaged.
Getting improved containment and/or extra refineries is something we should probably work on soon given we've had narrative hints that Nod is getting ready to try something big again.
Since extra refineries is actually a fairly simple project (roughly 3 Tiberium dice, 90 R, -4 Energy, -2 Logistics), I think we had better go for it quite soon. It's one of the reasons I'm yelling so much about income increases- because no way in hell can we afford a 30 R/die refinery project in 2058 without it.
We are likely to do the new processing plants sometime in 2059-2060, depending on how our harvesting goes, since after Medina finishes we'll have ~400 processing capacity spare.
I'd hate to wait that long, because Nod may be ready to start launching hard-hitting attacks including "masterstrokes' as early as mid-2059. I don't want our refining capacity to still be "all eggs in two baskets" then.
Refining capacity is
NOT an area where we want to be close to capacity. The sheer amount of our refining capacity that's tied up in two relatively exposed sites makes that dangerous. It means that with one well-placed hit by a nuclear munition, Nod could easily knock our refining capacity down by a
lot in a single successful mission.
GDI could
very abruptly lose 50-100 RpT of total national income from a single raid that merely
damaged the refining complexes. And a successful Nod offensive that destroyed either Planned City complex, or even just besieged it and made it unsafe to transport huge amounts of tiberium in and raw materials out, would cut GDI off from
several hundred RpT of income.
Even if Treasury doesn't lose all of that out of its own budget (hard to say how that played out), it'd be a disastrous blow to GDI's overall war economy. And make no mistake, if Kane really wants to cut us off from Chicago,
he could, given time to prepare. If Kane really wants to cut us off from the refineries at Jeddah and Medina,
he could. We cannot afford to leave that window of vulnerability open any longer.
Honestly I'd like to attempt the project starting in 2058Q3 or 2058Q4 at the latest, preferably with two dice up-front and one die per turn of "slow-walk" as necessary afterwards.
I strongly suspect Kane is
specifically planning that as an element of any potential Tib War Four, as a way of immediately neutering GDI's economic advantages in a protracted war. Capturing those refinery complexes would be even better for his purposes (especially since those facilities use a refinery technique that is less limited compared to the ones Kane prefers), but destroying them or just cutting them off from our logistics pipelines would be crippling to our overall war economy.
Indeed, I imagine we might make him a very unhappy man by
abruptly removing this weakness in our posture, shortly before the time at which he is prepared to push the "GO" button on his masterstroke. 😈
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