Honestly I feel people might be too focused on naval- get point defense done for sure but after that we have other branches we need to catch up. Really a balanced build is going to do us better, dev and deploy projects in each section instead of this all in on one area and let other areas lay idle.
I mean. The two biggest things the Navy wants right now are point defense and the Super Orca. The former is the project you favor; the latter is a project that benefits multiple branches and strengthens our whole overall global force pretty much everywhere we fight and in every kind of circumstances.
Then right after that would probably be the escort carriers, which we may slow-walk a bit if we can squeeze it in.
"
But trading Barghests for Firehawks isn't like trading our Apollos for their Venoms. It's more like trading our Apollos for their Vertigo bombers if the Vertigos had an air to air load out capability. Venoms may be cheap, but those Vertigos aren't exactly."
Firehawks actually
are relatively cheap for us, we literally just got done massively revamping and upgrading the production lines. The pilot training is difficult, don't get me wrong... but ultimately, you can train new pilots in a couple of years, and GDI has a solid training establishment- it
must given the sheer scale of a global air force and the constant combat losses. Plus we're probably actually losing
less trained combat pilots per year if we go for Super Orcas, because our CAS and tactical airstrike capability becomes much tougher for Nod to chew up. And even cyborg pilots for Nod take time to surgerize and time to train; you can't just literally shove a cyborg into a cockpit and have them be effective with fighters, I suspect.
I'm not saying Firehawks are
dirt cheap, but GDI's advantage has always been industrial capacity, and Nod's advantage always hasn't. Given that Banshees and their derivatives use exotic xenotech just to function, from Nod's smaller industrial base, there is
no way that trading them on something like a 1:1 ratio for GDI Firehawks works out well for Nod in the long run.
...
"Infantry power armour just means raising the floor needed to hurt the infantry. Trying to make power armour infantry into 1 man tanks is a fool's game, and just means that the enemy fields tank busting equipment as the standard weapon that your power armour infantry are going to get slaughtered by because they can't or don't hide from it. So the smart play is to make sure your infantry can take the occasional hit, and maintain proper mobile warfare tactics."
Up to a point, but antitank weapons are necessarily going to be slower-firing and less capable of achieving area effect. What really slaughters infantry in the open is that you can just
sweep a large area of the battlefield with machine guns and fragmentation bombs/shells/whatever, and any infantry not cowering in a dugout just die within a matter of seconds. To do the equivalent when each individual soldier has power armor starts requiring impractically heavy weapons (you cannot issue every man a .50 caliber machine gun) or weapons that have counters (laser rifles can be 'hotshotted,' but our power armor boys can wear ablatives).
So no, you don't have troopers just randomly standing out in the open getting shot at, but if you
don't take advantage of the ability to ignore things like fragmentation weapons, you lose a significant fraction of the advantage the power armor confers in the first place.
...
"Rebuilding would be below the attention of the Secretary of the Treasury I expect, being under the header of 'expected combat damage repair funds'. More expansive fortifications are likely as a request."
You may be right, or it may turn out to be a small Infrastructure project. I'm not sure either way, so I want to be mentally prepared for what to do if it comes up.
...
"Depends on what the Indian warlord(s) want. There's a difference between 'I am a valued contributor to the Inner Circle because GDI hates the inventions I loan out' and 'I am Kane's right hand because I have the economical strength to loan out my forces and the military genius to command them well'."
Looking back, the Indian warlord may be specifically trying to avoid that "number two" position and just continue ruling India as their private fiefdom in peace. Historically, Nod "number twos" don't have a great survival rate during Tiberium Wars. Some of that is because of them randomly doing stupid shit and betraying Kane, but some of it's just because Kane ultimately considers members of his inner circle expendable if they happen to outlive their usefulness- and they can outlive their usefulness
unpredictably, for reasons they did not foresee.
So being Kane's "econ guy" who can just control a stable territory and mass-produce good stuff for him, but who
isn't actively building a reputation as a field commander and ideological leader in their own right, may be a good way to have a lot of influence within Nod without being exposed to the same levels of risk.
Which, come to think of it, would kind of make the Indian warlord our opposite number and counterpart in some ways.
...
"Processing capacity is nice, but is idle if we don't fill it with tiberium, Vein Mines and other tiberium harvesting operations give us Resources to spend on projects."
Plus, the plan under criticism (mine) spends three dice on the next round of processing plants anyway. We don't need Karachi for processing capacity, and we have already become
dangerously overreliant on planned cities in deep Yellow Zones near Nod territory for our tiberium refining.
We build Karachi if the military logic supports building Karachi. Not for other reasons.
...
"Orca AA missiles are QAAM variant Thunderbolt missiles we roll out with the Universal Rocket Launch phases. We have AA missiles for Orcas."
I'm pretty sure the Orcas can't actually deploy air to air missiles very effectively without a refit.
This isn't really unusual, by the way. An aircraft like an Orca (which is basically a cool weird form of attack helicopter) probably doesn't
by design have the kind of radars or datalink systems that are well suited to tracking incoming aerial targets. Even if you could hang Thunderbolt QAAMs off the wings and ask them to independently acquire targets, it's not going to be a very effective anti-air warfare suite, because it probably won't have the ability to network with other platforms or track targets out to the full limits of the missile's engagement envelope.
So I'm pretty sure a Super Orca refit
will give us a major boost in the Orca's ability to defend itself in the air or to intercept low-performance enemy aircraft like Carryalls and Venoms.
How fast could we push that out anyway? Not that we need to rush it rn but I'm just asking.
We kind of do need to rush it, it's one of our most-desired military projects and it's been on the back burner enough that generals are probably getting cranky waiting for it. It's definitely on the short list of Stuff To Do Next Turn if at all possible for most of us, or at most Turn After That.
But as noted, three dice gives us a roughly 50/50 chance of clearing the project in one blow, and if that's not enough we could gauge whether to throw one or two more dice on the pile afterwards.
[] Orca Refit Deployment 0/200 2 dice 30R 10%, 3 dice 45R 57%, 4 dice 60R 89%, 5 dice 75R 99%
I am hoping to fit in at least 2 dice in the coming turn, with most of the remaining military dice going to laser PD for the navy.
I don't think we should treat the Super Orca as a lower priority than naval point defense. Naval point defense is only impactful on actual surface naval warfare, which is nice, but we
just had a big throwdown with Pirate Queen Bintang and she lost a lot of surface combatants even if her flagship survived just fine. She's not likely to hit us again
immediately, whereas when it comes to battles that Orcas participate in, we are constantly fighting all over all of the everywhere.
I'd say Super Orcas are just as urgent as the point defense refits.
An important point about Macrospinners-the bonus to mecha and Zone Armor projects from them is from whatever spinner reaches Stage 4 or 5 first. And if you're insistent on getting Reykyavik up to stage 3, then you might as well take it to stage five, since the total progress on Reykjavik is only about 300 points more than on Joburg. Which is less than the cost of going up to stage three, and is about 1 turn of full investment Post-Philly.
Yeah. The big question is gonna be "how much rollover do we have on Reykjavik Phase 2?"
If we only have a little or none, it's arguably more efficient to take Johannesburg to Phases 4+5, because then we don't have to complete a redundant 320-point phase that confers no Zone Armor or mech bonuses to get there.
If we have a lot of rollover (e.g. Reykjavik is at 100/320), then Reykjavik is so close to being bumped up to parity with Johannesburg that it's arguably a good idea to just keep investing in Reykjavik, which is farther from Sabotage Warlord's center of power and considerably more isolated from heavy Nod attack.
"Moving over a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers and all their kit over that distance in a couple days is frankly the most alarming part of this entire scenario because it points at a logistical adeptness and a professionalism we havent seen on this scale since the end of Tiberium War 3. Someone has been studying the blade."
Yeah, Krukov is definitely logistically adept. We shit-talk him because when he actually brought his mechanized forces into contact with us, we beat them up, but the bare fact that he can even
field a mechanized corps or two and wedge them into an uncomfortable position we would very much prefer they not be,
over continental distances, on short notice, makes him a big threat. He doesn't have to attack the same place again, and he could conceivably strike anywhere or nearly anywhere on the periphery of the Yellow Zone within which he operates.
That makes him a threat that requires extensive preparation on an enormous "front" to confront with full confidence, tying down a disproportionate amount of GDI resources just to respond to.
...
"2)You dont move this many people and this much heavy metal without being seen from orbit. Not when smaller columns of pilgrims were complaining about getting pegged by ion cannon strikes. The lack of effective long range precision fires during the travel phase here points at the use of large numbers of decoy generators by Krukov, I think."
I do think this is probably correct.
@Ithillid seemed to imply that.
...
"3)The performance of the Home Guard at Arkhangelsk was entirely over the top.
Wasteful of lives in a manner that GDI frankly cannot afford. Someone obviously hasnt gotten the memo of trading space and infrsstructure for time, and saving the over the top last stands for places it actually matters.
If they were ordered to conserve their lives and decided instead to pull a Horatio at the Bridge?
This is a Bad Thing.
Bad for military discipline, bad for the implications about the Home Guard training program."
Ehhh. These were a couple of fairly small infantry units overrun by a mechanized force that crashed through the front line defenses due to extreme concentration of force. If they tried to saddle up and escape in vehicles, they'd have just gotten shot in the back by Nod tank guns from a kilometer away.
You can't always stop the enemy from overwhelming or encircling small elements of your own force
everywhere, and when a specific individual unit does get overrun like that, having them be willing to dig in and delay the enemy's blitz as long as possible so buy time for the operational commander to plug the hole in the line is probably the best result you can hope for.
I'd say it just represents a case of Cherdenko being good enough at his job to force GDI to take casualties against its will, which is frankly totally expected from a mid-ranking Nod commander.
...
"5)India. Again.
We have seen Indian cyborg exports at Chicago, near the Malacca straits, and now in Russia.
We really should do something about that in the next year and half."
I'm not sure we
can, not in that timeframe. India is a major Nod territorial stronghold.
It's like Nod saying "Europe. Again. We keep seeing weapons GDI manufactures in Europe. We need to take Europe away from them." I mean,
yes, we actually do have a lot of important stuff in Europe. But first of all we
do have some capacity to spread that around and often do when we need to.* And second of all, it's a huge zone of territory that we've had plenty of time to fortify, so taking it is a major operation even for the full-scale global assets of all of Nod working together.
Your suggestion is good, but has an air of "the mice have voted to bell the cat" about it. Don't get me wrong, doing a SUDDENLY KARACHI planned city drop in late 2059 to force the Indian warlord to pay attention to local security concerns sounds appealing, but even that won't "solve" the problem we're facing.
__________________________
*(I bet that Kane
himself, in particular, has backup copies of the documentations on creating the Indian cyborg monsters)
...
"CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
1)Krukov's major resourcing operations are in the Far East. Also out there we have the Siberian BZ and the Korean BZ as staging points for GDI forces. Rolling out Orca Refit A16s would significantly improve our ability to engage in the time-honored practice of harvester hunting, especially as Orcas carry antistealth scanners.
And regular orbital measurements of Tib fields would point us at which areas are being exploited, even though Nod harvesting operations are stealthed.
Hit them in the wallet." We can identify which general areas Nod harvesters are active in, but only in the sense of "we're pretty sure they've been mining from this ten-by-ten kilometer grid square this week." Lighting up areas that large with ion cannon fire is prohibitive for a lot of reasons.
...
"2)Krukov's access to GDI-specification industrial machinery points at a market for GDI military schematics in Nod.
This is something to keep in mind with our internal sweeps."
True, although most of the stuff he's copied is
old GDI equipment, and he's had plenty of time to manufacture "match-grade" hardware for stuff he can't make himself. We know Nod covets our machinery and production equipment, and frankly we should do another sweep of the Military sub-department to address that... but it's just so damn hard to pry loose a Military die.
In the vein of GDI and NOD switching strategies and an idea of great irony. The best counter to burrowing tanks releasing Bioforms into our fortifications may be to equip our Guard units (i.e. our GDI Militia) with Flamethrowers. They're cheap, easyish to make, super effective against living weapons (especially in confined spaces) and I suspect some of our Guard members may have prior experience using them or working alongside those who do.
Complication.
Nod cyborg monsters may be specifically designed with very minimal pain response on their skin surface, and for the larger ones a
significant external layer of exoskeleton or outer hide that can ablatively burn away, plus ablative armor (two can play at that game).
Remember, they are designed to be
expended, and are so extensively modified that they are often barely recognizable as being related to normal terrestrial organisms. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some tame tiberium wildlife or some shit like that.
Now, flamethrowers can still be effective. If you just literally wash one of these beasts in fire, it may be blinded and it's probably on a timer until the napalm or superior equivalent burns through to something critical. But they're going to be nowhere
near as much of a win button as they would be against more realistic and less extensively augmented war beasts.
...
"Also given the mystery surrounding India and Nods presence there. The regularity that these bioweapons are showing up in multiple warlords hands. I am beginning to suspect the Warlord controlling the subcontinent may be Kane himself or someone already answering directly to him.
The previous assumption has been that Kane is hard at work in the Threshhold tower BUT it has been 8 years since the start of the quest and he has had the Tacitus for some time now."
For that matter, there are probably, like, transporters or something built into the Threshold tower. It's quite possible that he spends 95% or more of his time in the Threshold tower, and can still commute to India whenever he actually needs to make decisions there. It's certainly his biggest, most productive, most stable territorial stronghold, so I imagine that a lot of the stuff he really wants to happen would be done there. The inner circle has all the cool shit, but the cool shit has to be
made somewhere, and it's probably not made in a precariously concealed bunker just a few hundred kilometers from the nearest Green Zone where GDI could overrun it completely by accident without even realizing it was relevant.
So, Zone Armor factories then?
They're our Ground Forces highest possible priority, and we've been putting them off for years by now.
The big obstacles to starting them have been:
1) Building up enough of an Energy reserve to build enough of them to matter (requires fusion power).
2) Building up enough of a Capital Goods reserve to build enough of them to matter (requires Heavy Industry megaprojects that compete directly with the fusion reactors, and the Capital Goods themselves are also desired for many other things).
3) Having enough
Resources to build enough of them to matter (which was an obstacle up through all of 2058, really, until now).
We are now in a position where we could knock off a Ground Armor factory or two fairly quickly. But only one or two. So the question we have to ask is:
Which is more impactful, for instance- completing
the entire Super Orca program? Or completing
only one Zone Armor factory for Ground Forces, which would be only one sixth of the scale of production they would need
just to equip their spearhead forces?
It's not a trivial question. The Ground Forces want Zone Armor for everyone, but they don't worry about how much it'd cost to make that happen. Not that I blame them- but the cost is the main obstacle here. Building even the first wave of Zone Armor factories for Ground Forces is going to be a commitment on the same scale as the
Governor yards, and you remember what a pain in the ass it was to get all of
those done back during the previous Plan.
