Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Simon_Jester · Oct 18, 2021

sunrise said:
Karachi Planned City requires at least a Tiberium dice each turn but infra dice are optional so can be build with just Tiberium dice that have a higher bonus then our infra dice. So i would always take a Tiberium dice over a infra dice if committing to Karachi Planned City and that option has a lead that it is almost sure it will win.

Derpmind said:
+1 die to two sectors is huge. Another die is more than enough to make up for the temporary -2 progress penalty. More importantly, this is near-certain to be a permanent upgrade - Masses of graduate students can't be assassinated or all retire at once.

On the subject of which sectors to choose, Orbital is often limited by its 3 dice and is somewhere we can expect ever-increasing investment into as GDI's orbital presence expands. Both Tiberium and Military are sectors that we're happy to fully activate, and often gobble down free dice. But of the leading choices, I don't think Infrastructure is a good one. It already has a high 5 dice and rarely uses free dice. And if you want an extra die to help with Karachi, we'd be better off putting that extra die into Tiberium since Tiberium has the larger die bonus...

If we have Arya Gulati on the team, our Infrastructure bonus rises until it's within shouting distance of our Tiberium bonus. Because Gulati's +10 to Infrastructure is close to the Qatar loyalists' +15 to Tibeirum, and those are the only applicable bonuses).

So having an extra Infrastructure die to spend on planned cities becomes almost as good as having an extra Tiberium die to spend on planned cities, and means we spend fewer turns in the long run actually building the cities and being forced to scrounge up Tiberium dice to spend on them.

For the current Four Year Plan we are seriously behind on Infrastructure, especially if we commit ourselves to trying to resolve the Housing crisis in anything other than the most minimalistic way possible (about 1400 more Progress on arcologies plus however many phases of Apartments it takes). We are also going to face heavy burdens keeping Logistics up. I am reasonably confident that we can find constructive uses for a sixth Infrastructure die throughout the Plan, and frankly I think we're more likely to run into trouble there than in Tiberium.

Dmol8 said:
- Puts 4 Dice on Arcologies to get a Stage of them done and 1 Die on Rail Construction since we don't need 5 Dice on Arcologies anymore. On 4 Dice Arcologies are now 82.93% chance and an Average DC of 37 to complete a Stage of Arcologies.

Well, I've already kind of done this argument to death, but I seriously think we should take modest progress on arcologies and slam out a phase of Apartments to resolve the immediate Housing crisis cheaply and with certainty.

- 1 Die on Tokyo Chip Fabricator with a 6% chance and a DC of 95. Not counting on it completing, but the progress will be useful the turn afterwards.

If you're prepared to spend Resources building redundant industrial facilities, I would previously have honestly recommended prioritizing Reykjavik over Tokyo. Reykjavik is only 160 Progress away from beginning to return +1 Capital Goods, while Tokyo is 375 Progress away from returning +2 Capital Goods.

But.

I note that Tokyo has been rebalanced and now produces equal amounts of Capital and Consumer Goods. This is a huge upgrade from our perspective, making Tokyo actively competitive with North Boston- almost as efficient in Capital Goods for sheer cost-effectiveness, and the early phases come a hell of a lot cheaper than North Boston Phase 5.

Tokyo now has my approval as a project, and since it's only 15 R/die it's a relatively attractive Heavy Industry option at the moment.

Though we really want to get Reykjavik up to Phase 2 before a major war starts, for exactly the same reasons we want Tokyo up and running.

- Red Zone Tiberium Harvesting gets 3 Dice on it because there is one more Stage we can complete with the Logistically cheap Glaciers after this one.

Maybe two. It's heavily implied that there are four potential glacier mining sites associated with Medina, and while the Logistics cost of the later ones will probably rise, I think we've only tapped one of the four sites so far (along with finally doing the glacier mines in northern Italy).

- Orbital Cleanup gets 4 Dice on it because we will need extra Resources next turn with all the various Dice we need to roll and some of them are expensive. 94.01% chance and an Average DC of 28 to get a minimum of 35 Resources from two Stages and a 6.21% chance and an Average DC of 76 to get a minimum of 60 Resources from four Stages.

Orbital cleanup has reached the point where even with fusion dice it is highly likely to be resource-neutral on net. Since with average rolls, each phase takes about 1.5 dice to complete, even with fusion dice you have to spend an average of about 15 R to do a cleanup stage.

So the immediate next orbital cleanup phase has a hope of paying us back a profit for our investment (if we roll high on one die) and a good chance of breaking even (if we roll low on the first die, have to roll a second, but then get lucky on the coin toss and get 20 R of payoff)...

The next two phases of orbital cleanup will...

At best make a 5-10 R profit (if we roll high on one die),
Sometimes break even (if we roll low or medium and need two dice, but get 20 R to cover expenses), or
Quite often fail to break even and wind up making a loss (if we spend two dice and wind up only getting back 15 R).

Realistically, Orbital Cleanup has stopped being a thing we can do for profit. Aside from spending maybe one die on this immediate next phase, we're unlikely to actually make any money doing it, and it would probably be better to just leave the dice fallow, or concentrate the Resource expenditure on something with a more tangible reward like commsats or the Philadelphia.

Void Stalker said:
With us looking to pick up 4 more dice I feel trying for double glaciers again is going to be vital for the income we need to use them. More so if we are looking to pushy Philly stage 4 and 5 as that will eat up a lot of resources and we have the NOD and SCRIN research to do, not to mention being able to rollout the more expensive mil projects.

Though if we're gonna do that we need to think really hard about what we can do to keep the load off ZOCOM's back for too long, because even if your back is wearing power armor there are limits.

Like, get the ZEMEVs online, yes, but also start work on ZOCOM's buddy drones or something, even if it means sacrificing a die we might otherwise use on point defense.

I'm gonna think about this and consider doing my own plan draft, an alteration of "Infra Infra Revolution" along the lines of what @Dmol8 is doing.

Ithillid · Oct 18, 2021

Rakuhn said:
I really, really doubt that the GM is going to make someone named after Maxim Litvinov into an arch-traitor, who uses the promises of a better and more just society to lull the nation into a false sense of security, and uses those promises to render the nation vulnerable to enemies without.

She is not an arch traitor. An idealist, sure. A bit naive, sometimes. But very competent and very much wants the best for the Initiative.

Void Stalker · Oct 18, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
Though if we're gonna do that we need to think really hard about what we can do to keep the load off ZOCOM's back for too long, because even if your back is wearing power armor there are limits.

QM already gave us how much current ZOCOM can handle and even doing 3 (Q2 and Q3) more glaciers is within their capability- as it is Q3 and Q4 we can do some ZOCOM aid (say sonic artillery and maybe 1 or 2 ground armor since that is something that frees up ZOCOM forces for elsewhere, that and Orca refits to have a better support aircraft on call). The extra mil dice is going to be nice to start chewing up our backlog.

Alo357 · Oct 18, 2021

For my 2 cents on out naval priorities I think we should get the last hydrofoil yard and at least develop the Wingman before working on the carriers since then they'll be designed to accommodate them once the drones are in production. After that we should get the frigates in play to at least fill out the Navys defensive forces.

Dmol8 · Oct 18, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
Maybe two. It's heavily implied that there are four potential glacier mining sites associated with Medina, and while the Logistics cost of the later ones will probably rise, I think we've only tapped one of the four sites so far (along with finally doing the glacier mines in northern Italy).

We already did two Red Zone Harvesting Stages out of those four Logistically cheap ones. We only did one Glacier Mining Stage of those Logistically cheap ones. So throwing 3 Dice on Red Zone Harvesting may see that expansion done and over with for this plan and leave us with only completing 2 more Stages of Glacier Mining which we can focus down in Q3 for extra Resource gain.

Simon_Jester said:
Orbital cleanup has reached the point where even with fusion dice it is highly likely to be resource-neutral on net. Since with average rolls, each phase takes about 1.5 dice to complete, even with fusion dice you have to spend an average of about 15 R to do a cleanup stage.

So the immediate next orbital cleanup phase has a hope of paying us back a profit for our investment (if we roll high on one die) and a good chance of breaking even (if we roll low on the first die, have to roll a second, but then get lucky on the coin toss and get 20 R of payoff)...

The next two phases of orbital cleanup will...

At best make a 5-10 R profit (if we roll high on one die),
Sometimes break even (if we roll low or medium and need two dice, but get 20 R to cover expenses), or
Quite often fail to break even and wind up making a loss (if we spend two dice and wind up only getting back 15 R).

Realistically, Orbital Cleanup has stopped being a thing we can do for profit. Aside from spending maybe one die on this immediate next phase, we're unlikely to actually make any money doing it, and it would probably be better to just leave the dice fallow, or concentrate the Resource expenditure on something with a more tangible reward like commsats or the Philadelphia.

Right. I'm done with this argument of yours. We are making profit the moment we gain some more Resources because we still have our Resource income boosted by those gains next turn and on top of that Orbital Cleanup is a type of Infrastructure hardening that helps us put stuff into Orbit more efficiently and with less Logistical strain:

Ithillid said:
[ ] Expand Orbital Communications Network (Phase 3)
With another major wave of clearance done, further communications bandwidth can be launched, reducing the number of dead zones and increasing connection reliability, including the expansion of voting access.
(Progress 140/135: 15 resources per die) (+2 Logistics) (5 Political Support) (Fusion)

With the increased demand for communications bandwidth and connectivity within and between Blue Zones and GDI mobile assets, the Initiative has chosen to further expand its satellite communications network. Anchored by the set of space stations still under construction and expansion in high orbit, multiple new constellations of broadcast and communication satellites have been seeded in the skies above and below the orbits claimed by the Tiberium stabilizer arrays, reinforcing the invisible web of communications that link every GDI asset on and around planet Earth. Further satellites have been laid to support GDI scientific and industrial operations in cislunar space, with further plans to expand the networks towards Mars and the asteroid belts in support of planned GDI industrial operations. Many of the orbits have been simplified and rationalized at the same time, as the removal of much of the mass of debris orbiting the planet is nearing completion.

So finishing Orbital Cleanup will actually matter for all the various Space Stations we want to build up.

Taffer86 · Oct 18, 2021

Starting next year, I'm hoping we can set up Ground forces Zone Armor at a rate of 1 base per year.

lolo1610 · Oct 18, 2021

[X] Graduates
-[X] Orbital
-[X] Tiberium
[X] Sarang Mikoyan
[X] Arya Gulati
[X] Brigadier General Tali Jackson

Lightwhispers · Oct 18, 2021

Dmol8 said:
So how often does that assassination roll happen and how often on average can we expect to lose people. I'd like to know and you are this thread's main probability calculator.

We have no way of finding out. It's one of the things that Ithillid rolls in the background as NOD operations, and rightfully doesn't tell us anything about them until they actually try an operation that we notice. (I imagine that there are a bunch that don't reach the Treasury's notice.)

Simon_Jester · Oct 18, 2021

Void Stalker said:
QM already gave us how much current ZOCOM can handle and even doing 3 (Q2 and Q3) more glaciers is within their capability- as it is Q3 and Q4 we can do some ZOCOM aid (say sonic artillery and maybe 1 or 2 ground armor since that is something that frees up ZOCOM forces for elsewhere, that and Orca refits to have a better support aircraft on call). The extra mil dice is going to be nice to start chewing up our backlog.

I'm not saying "ZOCOM can't handle it," I'm saying "if we're gonna go whole hog, we need to make sure we actually do the stuff that needs doing in order to ensure ZOCOM can handle it even if things don't go perfectly."

Alo357 said:
For my 2 cents on out naval priorities I think we should get the last hydrofoil yard and at least develop the Wingman before working on the carriers since then they'll be designed to accommodate them once the drones are in production. After that we should get the frigates in play to at least fill out the Navys defensive forces.

@Ithillid just addressed this.

The escort carriers aren't a very good platform for wingman drones no matter what because a carrier can only accommodate a limited number of physical aircraft in its hangar. A wingman drone designed to escort an Orca may add 'heft' to the Orca's attack power, but if two Orcas and two drones take up the same amount of hangar space as three Orcas, then you haven't gained very much by adding the drones. Especially when a lot of what those Orcas actually do is fly search patterns and drop sonobuoys and so on. Because given the mission of those escort carriers, they're hunting for submarines more often than they're launching huge barrages of ordnance or firing off air-to-air missile salvoes.

So frankly, it doesn't even matter whether we have wingman drones; the escort carriers probably aren't going to use them. The wingman drones are more likely to see use on the big fleet carriers, but those are built to a design that dates back to the early 2040s at the latest, and probably older; the navalized version of the drones will be designed to fit the carriers, not the other way around. Which is the normal way to do things for carrier aviation.

We've already designed the advanced aircraft hat's going to fly off the escort carriers and that needed to be designed before the carriers could be built to accommodate them. It's called the Super Orca.

We're done. The escort carrier design is ready to go.

Dmol8 said:
We already did two Red Zone Harvesting Stages out of those four Logistically cheap ones. We only did one Glacier Mining Stage of those Logistically cheap ones. So throwing 3 Dice on Red Zone Harvesting may see that expansion done and over with for this plan and leave us with only completing 2 more Stages of Glacier Mining which we can focus down in Q3 for extra Resource gain.

Ahh. I see. I had somehow gotten the idea that you were talking about the glaciers (of which three cheap options remain) rather than the corresponding harvesting operations (of which, yes, only two phases remain).

Right. I'm done with this argument of yours. We are making profit the moment we gain some more Resources because we still have our Resource income boosted by those gains next turn

If we spend 40 R to gain 40 R, we haven't gained anything Resource-wise. Spending 40 R now to boost our future income next turn by 40 R is a losing proposition.

There may be some minor benefit to another Orbital project, or there may not; we don't know because all we've seen is a narrative comment.

@Ithillid , may I ask what kind of concrete effects we're looking at for space projects, particularly commsats and station construction, for completing another phase or two of Orbital Cleanup? Because that should be something our people can predict, and it looks as if the benefits are minor enough that they're not getting listed except narratively.

...and on top of that Orbital Cleanup is a type of Infrastructure hardening that helps us put stuff into Orbit more efficiently and with less Logistical strain:

@Dmol8 , I think you're using "infrastructure hardening" too broadly and vaguely. Furthermore, "ability to put stuff into orbit" isn't actually one of the soft spots in our infrastructure; it does not urgently need hardening.

If Nod blows up a few water treatment plants in the Green Zones or smuggles a nuke into North Boston or Johannesburg, then we take a huge hit. Those are places where we have what might be termed a 'soft spot,' and therefore places where we have what might be called a need for hardening.

If we have to reroute a few satellite orbits to avoid bits of debris, then we don't take a huge hit, we take small hits whose consequences are what you might call 'incremental.' That is, there is no simple easy way for Nod to just trivially inflict a ton of weakening damage on us with a single well-placed attack. Nor can they trivially inflict a ton of weakening damage on us with a broad category of attacks that will be easy to do (like firing a handful of missiles at each of a large number of installations in easy range of their missile units).

"Infrastructure hardening" isn't just a phrase for "projects that make something I want to do a little bit easier." When you use that term, you're making very specific implications that we have a vulnerability and that you are taking the project to protect that vulnerability.

But cleaning up the orbitals doesn't protect us from major threats. The debris cloud is no longer a major threat.

Derpmind · Oct 18, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
If we have Arya Gulati on the team, our Infrastructure bonus rises until it's within shouting distance of our Tiberium bonus. Because Gulati's +10 to Infrastructure is close to the Qatar loyalists' +15 to Tibeirum, and those are the only applicable bonuses).

Never underestimate a +5 bonus. There is no diminishing effect on our die bonuses. More is always better.

Simon_Jester said:
For the current Four Year Plan we are seriously behind on Infrastructure, especially if we commit ourselves to trying to resolve the Housing crisis in anything other than the most minimalistic way possible (about 1400 more Progress on arcologies plus however many phases of Apartments it takes). We are also going to face heavy burdens keeping Logistics up. I am reasonably confident that we can find constructive uses for a sixth Infrastructure die throughout the Plan, and frankly I think we're more likely to run into trouble there than in Tiberium.

I am positively baffled you would say that. We should always be activating all our Tiberium dice, whenever possible. They quite literally pay for themselves, and they stave off the apocalyptic death rocks. A 6th die would not go to waste there. Or a 7th die, or an 8th... Even if, zay, we needed all our Resources elsewhere or were stalled militarily, we'd still have the repeatable Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions at 5R per die. We will never run out of useful ways to use a 6th Tiberium die.

Chimeraguard · Oct 18, 2021

Derpmind said:
We always activate all our Tiberuim dice. (I can't honestly recall a single turn where we haven't.)

Actually, I'm pretty certain we had several turns during the Military Crisis immediately after the 2nd 4YP's Nat 1 that resulted in the military putting its foot down on Red Zone ops where we also didn't risk things like YZ ops either. Which resulted in a bunch of Tiberium Dice remaining idle until the low-cost prospecting became an option.

Derpmind · Oct 18, 2021

Chimeraguard said:
Actually, I'm pretty certain we had several turns during the Military Crisis immediately after the 2nd 4YP's Nat 1 that resulted in the military putting its foot down on Red Zone ops where we also didn't risk things like YZ ops either, resulting in a bunch of Tiberium Dice remaining idol until the low-cost prospecting became an option.

My memory is flawless. You saw nothing.

Dmol8 · Oct 18, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
I'm not saying "ZOCOM can't handle it," I'm saying "if we're gonna go whole hog, we need to make sure we actually do the stuff that needs doing in order to ensure ZOCOM can handle it even if things don't go perfectly."

@Ithillid just addressed this.

The escort carriers aren't a very good platform for wingman drones no matter what because a carrier can only accommodate a limited number of physical aircraft in its hangar. A wingman drone designed to escort an Orca may add 'heft' to the Orca's attack power, but if two Orcas and two drones take up the same amount of hangar space as three Orcas, then you haven't gained very much by adding the drones. Especially when a lot of what those Orcas actually do is fly search patterns and drop sonobuoys and so on. Because given the mission of those escort carriers, they're hunting for submarines more often than they're launching huge barrages of ordnance or firing off air-to-air missile salvoes.

So frankly, it doesn't even matter whether we have wingman drones; the escort carriers probably aren't going to use them. The wingman drones are more likely to see use on the big fleet carriers, but those are built to a design that dates back to the early 2040s at the latest, and probably older; the navalized version of the drones will be designed to fit the carriers, not the other way around. Which is the normal way to do things for carrier aviation.

We've already designed the advanced aircraft hat's going to fly off the escort carriers and that needed to be designed before the carriers could be built to accommodate them. It's called the Super Orca.

We're done. The escort carrier design is ready to go.

Ahh. I see. I had somehow gotten the idea that you were talking about the glaciers (of which three cheap options remain) rather than the corresponding harvesting operations (of which, yes, only two phases remain).

If we spend 40 R to gain 40 R, we haven't gained anything Resource-wise. Spending 40 R now to boost our future income next turn by 40 R is a losing proposition.

There may be some minor benefit to another Orbital project, or there may not; we don't know because all we've seen is a narrative comment.

@Ithillid , may I ask what kind of concrete effects we're looking at for space projects, particularly commsats and station construction, for completing another phase or two of Orbital Cleanup? Because that should be something our people can predict, and it looks as if the benefits are minor enough that they're not getting listed except narratively.

@Dmol8 , I think you're using "infrastructure hardening" too broadly and vaguely. Furthermore, "ability to put stuff into orbit" isn't actually one of the soft spots in our infrastructure; it does not urgently need hardening.

If Nod blows up a few water treatment plants in the Green Zones or smuggles a nuke into North Boston or Johannesburg, then we take a huge hit. Those are places where we have what might be termed a 'soft spot,' and therefore places where we have what might be called a need for hardening.

If we have to reroute a few satellite orbits to avoid bits of debris, then we don't take a huge hit, we take small hits whose consequences are what you might call 'incremental.' That is, there is no simple easy way for Nod to just trivially inflict a ton of weakening damage on us with a single well-placed attack. Nor can they trivially inflict a ton of weakening damage on us with a broad category of attacks that will be easy to do (like firing a handful of missiles at each of a large number of installations in easy range of their missile units).

"Infrastructure hardening" isn't just a phrase for "projects that make something I want to do a little bit easier." When you use that term, you're making very specific implications that we have a vulnerability and that you are taking the project to protect that vulnerability.

But cleaning up the orbitals doesn't protect us from major threats. The debris cloud is no longer a major threat.

Tiberium dust launched into space on vectors to infest other bodies in the Solar System from various NOD combat actions that we can't track because there is too much dust in orbit seems like the kind of masterstroke of long term planning Kane would add just as an aside to his actual masterstroke. Or maybe Tiberium debris. Either way I want the orbitals cleaned up so we can track everything that goes up and so we avoid any other Tiberium infestation in the Solar System.

Rakuhn · Oct 18, 2021

I think we stopped doing the prospecting since new taps were starting to be placed in the yellow zone. Now that we have a formalized green zone (as well as that green zone being slowly converted to blue zone) it should be viable again if we have nothing better to do with tiberium dice.

staplesdex2 · Oct 18, 2021

We could always use that Tiberium Dice to develop those Liquid Tiberium Power Cells to offset any power shortages that might come up. We'll take a hit to our PS but we did took the option for it to exist in the first place so might as well continue on that tech tree. That and use Seo's bonus to it.

Ithillid · Oct 18, 2021

Lightwhispers said:
(I imagine that there are a bunch that don't reach the Treasury's notice.)

There are a lot, from a fairly substantial civil war, to a lot of the tech developments. The brotherhood is a secretive bunch, and there are often things years in the making that you don't see until you hear about a 2050s version of the Project 945s.

Simon_Jester · Oct 18, 2021

Derpmind said:
Never underestimate a +5 bonus. There is no diminishing effect on our die bonuses. More is always better.

I mean yes. The point is just that the gap closes up a lot, which has impact.

Suppose we want to spend 16 dice on a planned city. Under Granger near the end of the Second Plan, we could spend 16 Tib dice, spend several turns mixing dice at 8 Tib + 8 Infra, or spend three turns rushing it at 1 Tib + four or five Infra, like we did with Mecca-Jeddah-Medina towards the end there.

...

Assuming a typical dice roll of 51 on d100, these options would, on average, net us 816 Progress from the dice alone on average. And Granger had +35 on Tiberium dice and +15 on Infrastructure. Depending on whether Granger spent all-Tib, half-Tib, or only three Tib dice on the project, we could expect the following spread of outcomes:

All-Tib: 816+560 = 1376 Progress
Half-Tib: 816+400 = 1216 Progress
Min. Tib: 816+300 = 1116 Progress

There is a significant efficiency gap there, precisely because each die we flip from Tib to Infra reduces overall Progress by -20.

...

Now, consider 'mature Seo,' after the temporary maluses are gone and after his bonuses grow in. As I recall, Seo doesn't have Granger's +5 Tiberium bonus, but he still has (for now) the +15 from the Qatar loyalists. And unlike Granger, his "baseline" bonus in categories not touched by specialty bonuses is +21. If we give him an extra +10 to Infrastructure, Seo is rolling at +36 for Tiberium and +31 for Infrastructure. (I'm deliberately ignoring the boost from additional Philly phases).

For the same dice distributions, we get a different Progress spread:

All-Tib: 816+576 = 1392 Progress
Half-Tib: 816+536 = 1352 Progress
Min. Tib: 816+511 = 1327 Progress

There's still a clear spread, but it's much less dramatic. The difference between using a Tib die or an Infra die is far less likely to make the difference between successfully or unsuccessfully completing a phase of the project. We are far more free to just use the Tib dice for other things, if we need to.

...

This is supportive/synergistic with strategies like relying on vein mining for +RpT infusions and using the reduced strain on Infrastructure dice to build planned cities.

As I've mentioned, vein mining consumes more Tib dice for an equal RpT income, but it doesn't consume nearly as many dice on net when dealing with glacier phases that cost 4-5 Logistics per phase. At 5 Logistics/phase, it's the difference between needing to spend roughly 4.5 Tib dice and 4.5 Infra dice on glaciers, or 8 Tib dice and 2 Heavy Industry dice worth of capital goods on veins.

If we have the Tib dice to spare, the combination of vein mining and planned cities lets us secure and fortify territory with relatively minimal extra strain on our military deployment patterns.* But we don't have the Tib dice to spare if we're stuck doing planned cities with a ton of Tib dice because it's the only reasonably efficient way to complete the project... But then again, with Gulati, we aren't stuck in that position.
____________________

*(And our current expansions around Mecca are going to leave that strain plenty high enough!)

I am positively baffled you would say that. We should always be activating all our Tiberium dice, whenever possible. They quite literally pay for themselves, and they stave off the apocalyptic death rocks. A 6th die would not go to waste there. Or a 7th die, or an 8th... Even if, zay, we needed all our Resources elsewhere or were stalled militarily, we'd still have the repeatable Tiberium Prospecting Expeditions at 5R per die. We will never run out of useful ways to use a 6th Tiberium die.

I'm not saying a sixth Tiberium die would go to waste, I'm saying a sixth Infrastructure die wouldn't.

When I say "run into trouble," I mean that we are more likely to slam into the "we do not have enough dice to achieve our plan goals" problem in Infrastructure than in Tiberium, in my opinion.

I am not saying that we can't find something useful to do with any Tiberium dice; nearly an arbitrary number of such dice could be productively used somehow.

Dmol8 said:
Tiberium dust launched into space on vectors to infest other bodies in the Solar System from various NOD combat actions that we can't track because there is too much dust in orbit seems like the kind of masterstroke of long term planning Kane would add just as an aside to his actual masterstroke. Or maybe Tiberium debris. Either way I want the orbitals cleaned up so we can track everything that goes up and so we avoid any other Tiberium infestation in the Solar System.

That's not "hardening our infrastructure," though, because "our infrastructure" does not include random uninhabited celestial bodies. I'm not saying it isn't a good idea in theory as such, but it's not accurate to describe it as "hardening our infrastructure."

...

Although there is reason to doubt that Nod could make such a gambit work as neatly as you imply.

First, it would require him to launch payloads from the surface while escaping all our ability to detect and shoot down the launch vehicle, which is easier said than done, though probably not impossible for some kind of weird-ass cloaked missile.

Second, tiberium dust has surely already been ejected into space in considerable quantities by the Temple Prime explosion, and it's pretty likely that some of it achieved escape velocity given just how big that plume of ejecta we saw in the cutscene was. If other celestial bodies in our solar system haven't been contaminated by tiberium, it's likely that this is for a reason. For instance, tiberium may not actually be fully capable of spreading starting from tiny dust fragments that get bombarded by solar radiation for months or years and then have to grow in the comparatively hostile environment of a vacuum. Tiberium dust can grow on Earth,* but that doesn't mean it's fully effective as a self-replicator in space environments.
________________________

*(Though tiny microparticles seem to take long enough to grow that a person can live with "rock lung" for years, even though a simliarly sized statue exposed to a large tiberium nugget would be a solid tiberium statue within a much shorter time)

But all of that aside, it's just NOT infrastructure hardening. It's you speculating that sweeping all the little bits of dust out of stable planetary orbits would make it easier to detect escape velocity dust or projectiles moving away from the planet. Your speculation may be true or false, and if true may be relevant or irrelevant to the situation at hand... but the notion is to do something very specific, and it isn't "hardening infrastructure."

Absoloot · Oct 18, 2021

I'm surprised to see how popular Micheal O'Brian is. 1 die is pretty minor compared to some of the other bonuses IMO. Most of the other people we can pick give two dice or a bigger bonus.

I think the crit from Sarang is worth quite a bit more than a single die, one we can just as easily get from hiring graduates.

Alo357 · Oct 18, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
@Ithillid just addressed this.

The escort carriers aren't a very good platform for wingman drones no matter what because a carrier can only accommodate a limited number of physical aircraft in its hangar. A wingman drone designed to escort an Orca may add 'heft' to the Orca's attack power, but if two Orcas and two drones take up the same amount of hangar space as three Orcas, then you haven't gained very much by adding the drones. Especially when a lot of what those Orcas actually do is fly search patterns and drop sonobuoys and so on. Because given the mission of those escort carriers, they're hunting for submarines more often than they're launching huge barrages of ordnance or firing off air-to-air missile salvoes.

So frankly, it doesn't even matter whether we have wingman drones; the escort carriers probably aren't going to use them. The wingman drones are more likely to see use on the big fleet carriers, but those are built to a design that dates back to the early 2040s at the latest, and probably older; the navalized version of the drones will be designed to fit the carriers, not the other way around. Which is the normal way to do things for carrier aviation.

We've already designed the advanced aircraft hat's going to fly off the escort carriers and that needed to be designed before the carriers could be built to accommodate them. It's called the Super Orca.

We're done. The escort carrier design is ready to go.

Except it wasn't said that they won't operate the Wingman drone just that a finalised design adding drones to its loadout would have to sacrifice too much of its airwing to accommodate the drones. Nothing was said about the drones being built to fit the carriers, in fact, they probably are by default regardless of anything else.

As we were told before we designed the Super-Orca, the escort carriers are going to be designed to fit our current capabilities. If we had designed the carrier first then we may of lost out on space for our new Orcas or lost out on some loadout options for them. Though we are going to be using them for ASW and limited anti-shipping duties which the Wingman does have a variant to support.

The QM even mentioned in here that they come in a variant designed for ASW duties, right where he mentioned that our existing carriers will lose space to the Wingman drones. Because as we have been told for a long time. New units will be designed around the technologies available at the time which includes naval units.

@Ithillid could you please weigh in on this so that @Simon_Jester and I aren't blindly interpreting this. If we design the Wingman Drone before the Escort Carrier will the carrier be designed to have a compliment of ASW drones?

Edit: please forgive any formatting issues, I am on my phone.

Simon_Jester · Oct 18, 2021

Absoloot said:
I'm surprised to see how popular Micheal O'Brian is. 1 die is pretty minor compared to some of the other bonuses IMO. Most of the other people we can pick give two dice or a bigger bonus.

I think the crit from Sarang is worth quite a bit more than a single die, one we can just as easily get from hiring graduates.

O'Brian comes with no baggage.

Sarang, admittedly, comes with baggage- she doesn't share the kind of political idealism we seem to expect out of our senior officials, and she's asking for a big ask in exchange for her appointment.

I'm not saying Sarang's not worth it, but she does come with baggage, and sometimes quest voters are commitment-phobic in areas like that.

Alo357 said:
Except it wasn't said that they won't operate the Wingman drone just that a finalised design adding drones to its loadout would have to sacrifice too much of its airwing to accommodate the drones. Nothing wad said about the drones being built to fit the carriers, in fact, they probably are by default regardless of anything else.

The point is that it's irrelevant to worry about whether the drones and the escort carriers are compatible if it wouldn't make sense to fly the drones off the escort carriers in the first place. Furthermore, as you say, the drones are likely to be designed to fit the escort carriers, even if the drones are developed later, so in the event that it ever starts making sense to fly the drones off the escort carriers, we'll probably still have that option.

...

The escort carriers are a project the Navy has wanted for a long time. I don't think we should keep holding it up any longer; it'll be fine as-is with the Super Orca as its main aircraft, with or without the drones. This is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, and it's not even very much "perfection" that we'd be gaining.

As we were told before we designed the Super-Orca, the escort carriers are going to be designed to fit our current capabilities. If we had designed the carrier first then we may of lost out on space for our new Orcas or lost out on some loadout options for them. Though we are going to be using them for ASW and limited anti-shipping duties which the Wingman does have a variant to support.

The QM even mentioned in here that they come in a variant designed for ASW duties, right where he mentioned that our existing carriers will lose space to the Wingman drones. Because as we have been told for a long time. New units will be designed around the technologies available at the time which includes naval units.

Any carrier has a fixed amount of hangar space to operate aircraft from. Until and unless you design a carrier that's actually a mobile portal generator for teleporting fighters from a land-based airstrip, putting more of one kind of plane on the carrier will always mean having less of another kind of plane.

It is this tradeoff that presents obstacles for flying wingman drones off of carriers, and we can't design around it even if we might conceivably mitigate it a little by purpose-building carriers to accommodate the drones.

Remember, wingman drones are wingmen; they mimic the actions of the piloted aircraft they're escorting, and tend to automatically engage in the same kind of action as the piloted aircraft. Having +1 wingman drone in your carrier's air group is better than having +0 extra aircraft of any kind. But it's not actually as good as having +1 piloted aircraft for a lot of mission profiles, including many of the ones escort carriers are likely to need.

DecaffeinatedOwl · Oct 18, 2021

Rewrote my dice cost analysis from scratch to be more expandable. The old spreadsheet was too unwieldy to update regularly.

GDI Dice Cost Analysis (Expandable)

Upshot is that we need a total budget of 749 RpT to be sure of activating all our new dice.

Derpmind · Oct 18, 2021

Absoloot said:
I'm surprised to see how popular Micheal O'Brian is. 1 die is pretty minor compared to some of the other bonuses IMO. Most of the other people we can pick give two dice or a bigger bonus.

I think the crit from Sarang is worth quite a bit more than a single die, one we can just as easily get from hiring graduates.

Either way, Enhanced Security Services still holds the 4th place slot, and going by the banner we've only got a bit over 2 hours before this vote closes. Seems like neither of them are getting in.

Ithillid · Oct 18, 2021

Alo357 said:
@Ithillid could you please weigh in on this so that @Simon_Jester and I aren't blindly interpreting this. If we design the Wingman Drone before the Escort Carrier will the carrier be designed to have a compliment of ASW drones?

That will have consequences so far as size goes, but yes.
Broadly, right now, you are looking at something that is more or less going to be an overgrown Izumo. Something in the 35-40 kton range designed to carry some 36 aircraft. 12 hammerheads, and 24 Orcas, all VTOLs so you don't need a ramp or catapults. Once you add in the Wingmen, that jumps to a floor of 50ktons because you suddenly need 36 aircraft, plus another 36 (or more) wingman units.

Simon_Jester · Oct 18, 2021

TripleTango said:
Rewrote my dice cost analysis from scratch to be more expandable. The old spreadsheet was too unwieldy to update regularly.

GDI Dice Cost Analysis (Expandable)

Upshot is that we need a total budget of 749 RpT to be sure of activating all our new dice.

Well, we're at 505 now, and I think we can close the gap in about three more turns if we really try. Two turns would be pushing it.

Can you summarize what you mean by "to be sure," though? Because I'm not sure what average cost/die you're using as a benchmark and would have to do some mental arithmetic to work it out from reverse-engineering.

Absoloot · Oct 18, 2021

Derpmind said:
Either way, Enhanced Security Services still holds the 4th place slot, and going by the banner we've only got a bit over 2 hours before this vote closes. Seems like neither of them are getting in.

So disappointing! More Crits! Crits are some of the best moments in dice games.

Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web

We do deserve to exist.

The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web

CLASSFIED