The specific timing of messing with Free dice allocations to get a tiny number of hyperprivledged overachievers into space by election day...
I feel like this is a very very slanted and biased characterization of the project.
Columbia is the prototype for all future permanent space habitats. Building it is
NOT just about "getting a tiny number of hyperprivileged overachievers into space," and you know it full well.
There's a reason why agreeing to finish
Columbia counted as a major (even double-weighted!) promise during Plan negotiations. There are a lot of voters who genuinely want to see this thing done, and/or a lot of politicians who would be able to point to it as a major success of the current government
and make that assertion stick.
The argument for building
Columbia is basically the same as the argument for building arcologies instead of (or along with) apartments and/or communal housing. It is what the people want to see done, because its existence gives them hope that in the future- the future of ten or twenty or thirty years from now- humanity will still be able to thrive.
We've been directly told in so many words that population growth is minimal because people don't have a lot of hope for there being any future for their children and grandchildren to live in.
Columbia, even in its early stages, is a symbol of that hope, and a construction pause of a year or two while people figure out the bugs won't erase that.
...doesn't significantly change the timeline on how many people are in space 5 years from now, 95% of the work is going to happen after the Ent/mines either way so why is it so critical that we shake up our plans to get a tiny handful up there by the election?
I mean, why is it so critical that we
not shake up our plans? Plans are not magic. We can make sensible choices to do things for a variety of reasons.
And, again, we're operating within a democracy. Giving people what they want is beneficial to the relationship between Treasury, the government as a whole, and GDI's citizenry. There's more to this game,
as the QM has explicitly told us, than just the numbers we can see and make go up.
"How many people are in space X years from now" is not the only metric. "How many people
see space as something beneficial, something they are willing to (for instance) set aside funds for during budget reapportionment" is also a metric, and one we don't see until we see the consequences (such as the moon mining funds being set aside for us during reapportionment in 2058).
Paying attention to the narrative beats of the quest matters, and the narrative has been telling us more and more directly that there is real desire to see
Columbia done, or at least begun.
Lets take a look then on the actions we are likely to take soon that affect Energy.
-2 Integrated Cargo System (-2)
-4 Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 2)
-8 Blue Zone Heavy Industrial Sectors
+1 Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 3)
+2 Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 4)
-1 Freeze Dried Food Plants
+2 Wartime Factory Refits
-2 Universal Rocket Launch System Deployment (Phase 2)
-2 Universal Rocket Launch System Deployment (Phase 3)
-2 Shell Plants (Phase 4)
-1 Shell Plants (Phase 5)
-4 Ground Forces Zone Armor (Set 1)
-4 Havoc Scout Mech Deployment (for both)
-25 total
Which would leave us with +0 Power left if we do them all and avoid Railgun Harvesters.
I do not expect us to finish all of these before finishing BZIS (Nuuk comes after, for one) after which we would be building another fusion plant anyway, but I suppose that if we needed more processing capacity asap for some reason, had low value Tib dice, and wanted a substantial Power surplus the refits would make sense over a refinery.
The latter two of those conditions apply.
We have 25 Energy worth of projects we'd like to do within the next 3-4-5 turns or so, we only have
roughly that amount of Energy in the pipeline, and we don't want to have to rush to finish the
next phase of power plants just to keep ourselves from running out again after finishing the
Phase 3 power plants that are currently at 199/300 and likely to complete this turn or next. So we "want a substantial Power surplus," plus we can expect some power plant sabotage during the coming war and want to be prepared.
Meanwhile, there is a similar issue regarding Logistics which I have already discussed, but just to address the other point...
Yes, we have "low value Tib dice" right now. We have a lot of Tiberium dice, and many of the most attractive projects that involve them are not available or would be inadvisable to pursue at this time. We can't do glacier or vein mines on a large scale right now. We have a lot of stuff we need to do that consumes Resources that make expensive mitigation options unattractive. Combine these and there's not a lot to do with our Tiberium dice that's inherently
better than taking steps to increase our refining capacity.
We want surplus of everything, including Rs which we are currently effectively at -x for because we don't have enough for everything we want and will shortly need a lot more too. So trading some Log surplus into a lower R deficit via spending fewer Tib dice only seems reasonable to me.
That seems very reasonable... If, that is, you ignore the part where we've got a war incoming. War is going to place a very large,
immediate strain on Logistics. Having intense military operations running on many fronts all over the world means that certain sectors of the economy rev into high gear and that vehicles are kept busy moving troops and supplies to the front. Nod kicking its commerce raiding, interdiction of air traffic, and sabotage of port facilities and other infrastructure into high gear is going to be eating into our Logistics capacity, likewise.
This is not just a game of abstract numbers; there are
specific reasons why 2059 in particular is a bad time to commit to Logistics-eating projects, because it's a year we're starting with a 'slim' Logistics buffer and also a year where we anticipate a massive spike in Logistics demand, and failure to meet that spike without going into negatives means military setbacks against Nod.
After we've beaten the warlord coalition, the strategic calculus is likely to change significantly, and that second phase of refineries becomes a much more attractive option in 2060-61, especially since we've already promised to do it anyway.
No, there are still MARVs, and Offshore Mining could have used more dice.
There are MARVs, but we can only use Tiberium dice on MARVs if and when we're willing to invest a bunch of Military dice, which for obvious reasons we have hesitated to do lately. And there is a practical limit on how many Tiberium dice we can spend on MARVs even then because it's senseless to spend dice on building up MARV fleets if we're not sure we have hubs to support those specific MARVs.
Offshore mining could use dice... if we're willing to burn Political Support on it faster than necessary. A project that costs -5 PS per die is very much a project you want to slow-walk under normal circumstances, because of all our resources, Political Support is one of the hardest to collect more of in a hurry.
I'm
hopeful that offshore tiberium mining will mature into an option we can pursue aggressively in the near future and put lots of dice on, but that hope cannot materialize until we get through the current tricky phase of the project. It may well be that
next turn, 2059Q3, I oppose doing any further refinery refits because it's better to work on offshore mines, but we aren't there yet. Still in the prototyping phase and overcoming the political opposition.
I don't think your two stances are mutually exclusive, really. Yes, becoming an interplanetary species is something I'm really interested in and I think ought to be a goal of the quest regardless, but failing to save our home world is a symbolic loss that would haunt our species for the rest of time.
In a realistic sense, it may well be unavoidable, but I don't necessarily believe that to be the case in-quest. I don't think that either fleeing to space or saving the earth as options are impossible. Difficult, for sure, but achievable.
Not to mention, fleeing Earth doesn't mean we're safe, it puts us in an even more vulnerable position than we started in. Little infrastructure capable of sustaining our growth at first, the arduous task of setting down new roots on a neighboring planet (likely Mars for that Goldilocks zone goodness), the knowledge that aliens exist and know where we are, and the ever present threat that Venus or Earth is going to explode and eventually seed every planet in the solar system with Tiberium.
The only way we could really escape Tiberium, as a whole, would be advanced FTL technology which we seem nowhere close to achieving.
To be fair, if tiberium established itself on Mars or the Moon, we could respond easily.
The reason it's a problem on Earth is that it was seeded all over the planet and grew into a gigantic metastasized planet-cancer before GDI could muster an effective response.
The reason it's a problem on Venus is that it was seeded
in one place but had a long uninterrupted period to grow before we could respond, and because containing tiberium on Venus is gonna be
really hard because it's Venus.
If we
saw tiberium hit Mars and we already had Mars colonies, it would be relatively straightforward to scour the surface for tiberium deposits while they were still spreading slowly and hadn't gotten deeply embedded in the crust and weren't spread out across thousands of square kilometers. We could deal with that.
A place like Mars or Luna is much easier to keep tiberium off than a place like Venus, or a place like Earth
as it is now, in the wake of the first Tiberium War and all the shit GDI had to go through just to
start responding effectively to tiberium.
The last time we talked about this Ithillid straight up said it's impossible to get all the remaining humans off the planet before we lose to Tiberium. We can get hundreds of millions but IIRC the crazy "drop everything and plow all Free dice into space every turn for the rest of the game" theoretical max number was like.... 500-600M people? Not even enough to empty out the Blue Zones, much less NOD territory.
I'm pretty sure that any accurate, non-spitballing estimates
@Ithillid has about how much space evacuation we can hope to accomplish is going to depend very heavily on factors not even the QM can predict.
Gravitic drives may markedly affect our eventual ability to evacuate Earth by making it much more practical to ship people to Mars, for instance, or to do easy spacelift on the lunar surface, or to do asteroid mining.
If we got Scrin portal tech (which we very well might, though we very well might not), that would make getting large numbers of people off Earth much simpler, arguably even trivial, which would help a lot.
I suspect there are a number of other Nod and Scrin techs we could gacha-roll that would have major impact.
And it's a confirmed fact that getting the stabilizers has substantially increased the amount of time we have before Earth becomes uninhabitable and kills off the Blue Zone residents. Other Scrin gacha techs might similarly extend the time we have left. All our efforts to fight tiberium on Earth
do, as a matter of objective fact, buy us more time for a space evacuation, and thus the power to evacuate more people, even if Kane decides to be a dick and doesn't give us viable TCN blueprints.
So I wouldn't take anything the QM says,
at a specific moment, as absolute gospel, because not even he can predict every turn that the quest will or will not take. The QM's estimates may change, or the QM himself may miss certain synergies that we might otherwise benefit from.
Infrastructure 5/5 Dice 75 R
-[] Rail Network Construction Campaigns (Phase 2) 15/275 (5 Dice, 75 R) (99% chance)
Heavy Industry 4/4 Dice 80 R
-[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plant (Phase 3) 199/300 (1 Die, 20 R) (37% chance)
-[] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 1) 0/160 (3 dice, 60 R) (91% chance)
Railroads are a very questionable choice; they provide immediate Logistics payout but push up against diminishing returns. If you're willing to spend 75 R on railroads, it's arguably worth it to spend 90 R on three
Suborbital Shuttles dice, which provides almost as good a short-term payoff and opens up considerably better long-term payoff.
Also, your Heavy Industry choices are equivalent to abandoning a major Capital Goods project in mid-operation, because we're already a third of the way to
Blue Zone Heavy Industrial Zones. Not a good choice.
Agriculture 3/3 Dice 20 R
-[] Perennial Aquaponics Bays (Stage 3) 163/350 (2 Dice, 30 R)
-[] Extra Large Food Stockpiles (1 Dice, 0 R)
Orbital 5/5 Dice + 7 Free Dice 240 R
-[] GDSS Philadelphia II (Phase 5) 474/1425 (12 dice, 240 R)
Military 6/6 Dice 90 R
-[] Shell Plants (Phase 4) 128/300 (1 Dice, 10 R)
-[] Havoc Scout Deployment Seoul 92/110 (1 Die, 10 R)
-[] Havoc Scout Deployment Brest 77/110 (1 Die, 10 R)
-[] RZ-7S MARV Fleet 0/210 (2 Dice, 40 R) (3 Tib dice. Completes; 35% chance for next fleet.)
-[] Reclamator Hub ??-??, 84/105 (1 Die, 20 R) (100% chance)
Your Agriculture costings are inconsistent. If it were me, I'd recommend either doing a start on
Freeze Dried Food Plants, or putting more dice into
Perennials to clear it out of the way so we can concentrate on the next big thing.
As for the rest... Well, even I consider twelve dice on the
Philadelphia to be a bit over-ambitious, but I can respect the urge to surge. I will say that if we're willing to focus dice that ruthlessly, and want to prioritize that sharply, we should probably sacrifice deployment of one of the two Havoc factories in order to put a second die on
Shell Plants. The military as a whole needs the next phase of shell plants more than it needs rapid rollout of the Havoc.
Why the processing refits when you can put the die in MARV construction?
Three Tiberium dice on MARVs, along with the two Military dice, gives us a median Progress outcome of 252+3*30+2*19 = 380. A fourth Tib die would give us 460 Progress as the median result and very likely be overkill, since we have no reasonable hope of finishing yet a third Reclamator Hub in this same coming 2059Q2 turn.
That... is a lot of Philly? Why? It will finish next Q without such a massive investment I believe?
The reason for aggressive pushes on the
Philadelphia like this is so that while the station almost certainly won't finish in 2059Q2 (nice as that would be)... it will be
easy to finish it in 2059Q3, which means we have more options for what to do with our Orbital dice, and/or are free to spend our Free dice on something other than frantic efforts to ensure completion of a space station phase that offers us no overflow and may thus be completely wasted.
It would be nearly ideal if we could get
Philadelphia Phase 5 up to within 50-100 Progress points of completion in 2059Q2 and just need to "tap" it over the line with the last couple of dice, in other words.
Wait you are putting dice into MARV construction? The hub(s) are not ready yet. Even if simultaneous construction was allowed, you are putting 5 dice into constructing a single fleet because it has nowhere to overflow to like this.
The plan we are discussing puts enough dice to finish a second hub along with the hub in Alabama (?) that is already finished and ready to receive MARVs, as I recall.
