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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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SheepGang said:
There are two different win conditions in play concerning this quest. Our conditions as people enjoying a nice quest about a universe we love/enjoy and in-universe GDI (humans) conditions.
Questors win by -
1. Researching and developing ways to make humans survive with tiberium.
2. The TCN that we know Kane will give to us if he wants to be able to use the threshold tower to complete his objective.
3. Getting off of Earth and making sure enough people survive to continue the species.
GDI in quest wins by -
1. Surviving.
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Adaptation needs the TCN too, otherwise Earth goes boom. Unless some kind of Tib control psychic magic, wouldn't put that beyond the Delta variant forgotten or something.

About your idea that the Columbia doesn't lead to space housing is weird. It is literally the prototype beginning technology to long-term space habitation. I would not be surprise if after getting it to phase 3 opens up options that move towards ringworld type structures.
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That's not my idea? Not sure where you got it from. Of course Columbia is the prototype for space housing, the only thing I am saying is that more than it is needed for that noted return of hope for the survival of human species in that quote. Columbia would contribute to it of course, and Enterprise would most likely too if less so.

Derpmind said:
The biggest reason I want to do the GDSS Columbia is because I think it'll be fun. It'll be fun to start up real space habitation; to see the public's reactions to throwing up the Columbia in one quarter; to find out what Bays it'll have. And most importantly is that it'll be an exciting space project. Space is cool, ok? 🚀

I know it's not the most optimal Numbers Go Up decision. But the GDSS Columbia has been a project option since the very first turn. We may have "chosen a different path" but it's still an explicit part of the Quest, and one I don't want to leave on the table till yet another 4-year Plan.
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Entirely fair! This is a quest, pick whats most fun.

Myself, pragmatism aside, I am looking forward to seeing our options for Enterprise modules first at least though. We are closer to those anyway.
 
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Enerael said:
Myself, pragmatism aside, I am looking forward to seeing our options for Enterprise modules first at least though. We are closer to those anyway.
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Actually, Columbia is closer! Enterprise Phase 4 is 0/765 progress, while Columbia Phases 1+2+3 is in total 0/580 progress.

Sidenote: If the station discount Bay is available to the Columbia, that actually makes building Columbia's three phases first the most optimal choice. But we can't count on that; we don't yet know what Bays are avaliable to which stations.
 
Derpmind said:
Actually, Columbia is closer! Enterprise Phase 4 is 0/765 progress, while Columbia Phases 1+2+3 is in total 0/580 progress.

Sidenote: If the station discount Bay is available to the Columbia, that actually makes building Columbia's three phases first the most optimal choice. But we can't count on that; we don't yet know what Bays are avaliable to which stations.
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Oh right Columbia gets them at Phase 3. Thanks for the correction.

I doubt that the station discount module would be available for the habitation station, or the food growth one that would make little sense, so I am pretty sure that each gets their unique modules to pick from. Well, maybe some would be universal, but the station discount one shouldn't be I think.

Anyway this is something that GDI should know the answer to right now I would think so if you are interested in a concrete answer ask Ithillid.
 
Enerael said:
Please elaborate on what the quote has to do with: "Columbia is the first step, and the longer we kick that can down the road, the more time we're giving the public to internalize the lesson "we're trapped here on Earth and the setbacks GDI took during Tib War III have doomed us all.""
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While I am, as noted, utterly tired of dealing with refusal to believe what they have been told by the QM and refusal to follow the direct implications of things we have seen with our own eyes as a way to swing heavy influence with 45% of the legislature...

I will at least elaborate.

The public is aware that tiberium has made more than half the Earth's land surface uninhabitable. It's in the ocean floor, it's deep underground, it's under the Blue Zones, it's in places we may never be able to even find, let alone get at.

The 'Greying Population' quote is evidence that GDI's populace is making life choices based on the idea that they live in the last days a dying Earth. If you ask them, "is there hope," they may say "yeah, maybe," but the uncertainty is chewing at them all the time.

Until and unless we have a method for controlling tiberium, something that we know really works...

We have one card to play that has any impact on this problem, which is one of the greatest problems we have behind the scenes.

And the one card we have to play is space habitat construction.

I want to play that card. The longer we wait to play that card, the more people are going to go through their formative years, or their prime childbearing years, observing a world that leads them to believe that GDI only puts people in space if they're government leaders or moon miners or astronauts, and that there is no real future in space for the common GDI citizen- or, importantly, the common GDI citizen's grandchildren, who may have no other place to go if tiberium is allowed to dig down into the mantle.

While constructing Columbia up through Phase 3 will not, in and of itself, totally annihilate that belief... It will at least dent that belief. Put the belief on hold, give them an intellectually honest reason to think GDI actually is seriously planning large scale space habitat construction beyond the limits of what is strictly necessary for space industry and Number Go Up.

True but it is connected due to GDI being a democracy, and is one of the few concrete datapoints available to us on this topic.
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I have already pointed out other important concrete datapoints. During reallocation.

You weren't interested in that datapoint, so far as I can determine.

Why are you interested in this one instead?
 
Simon_Jester said:
While I am, as noted, utterly tired of dealing with refusal to believe what they have been told by the QM and refusal to follow the direct implications of things we have seen with our own eyes as a way to swing heavy influence with 45% of the legislature...

I will at least elaborate.

The public is aware that tiberium has made more than half the Earth's land surface uninhabitable. It's in the ocean floor, it's deep underground, it's under the Blue Zones, it's in places we may never be able to even find, let alone get at.

The 'Greying Population' quote is evidence that GDI's populace is making life choices based on the idea that they live in the last days a dying Earth. If you ask them, "is there hope," they may say "yeah, maybe," but the uncertainty is chewing at them all the time.

Until and unless we have a method for controlling tiberium, something that we know really works...

We have one card to play that has any impact on this problem, which is one of the greatest problems we have behind the scenes.

And the one card we have to play is space habitat construction.

I want to play that card. The longer we wait to play that card, the more people are going to go through their formative years, or their prime childbearing years, observing a world that leads them to believe that GDI only puts people in space if they're government leaders or moon miners or astronauts, and that there is no real future in space for the common GDI citizen- or, importantly, the common GDI citizen's grandchildren, who may have no other place to go if tiberium is allowed to dig down into the mantle.

While constructing Columbia up through Phase 3 will not, in and of itself, totally annihilate that belief... It will at least dent that belief. Put the belief on hold, give them an intellectually honest reason to think GDI actually is seriously planning large scale space habitat construction beyond the limits of what is strictly necessary for space industry and Number Go Up.
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I fail to see why you wrote this, because its lacks any new arguments or anything I don't agree with.

To repeat once more, Columbia would give some hope regarding future of human species, but so would other things such as Enterprise if less so and it would slow down orbital construction long term and therefore giving our people hope fully, not to mention lower the number of people evacuated if we end up doing it. And I don't consider getting that shard of hope 2-3y sooner worth that.

I have already pointed out other important concrete datapoints. During reallocation.

You weren't interested in that datapoint, so far as I can determine.

Why are you interested in this one instead?
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If you mean that Grey Population I quoted I have never disagreed with that one, it just doesn't say what you said it says. Columbia is to my knowledge neither a habitat ring nor an off world city and I can think of nothing else you might be talking about from it unless you misunderstand me even more than I think.


SheepGang said:
Wasn't one of your points for not doing it was because it wouldn't affect the grey population due to it not being a lunar city or ringworld? We can't make ringworlds without some type of idea what long-term living in space would entail.
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It would affect it, but not fully give them hope and the accompanying benefits. It is first step towards that end yes, but doing Enterprise first will likely get us habitat rings or offworld cities (not a ringworld, that's not happening) sooner.
 
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Enerael said:
If you mean that Grey Population I quoted I have never disagreed with that one, it just doesn't say what you said it says...
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No, I'm referring to something else I already mentioned, and am pretty sure I mentioned more than once.

In the reapportionment vote update.

But I'm tired of repeatedly doing other people's homework for them, so if you want to be reminded about what that point was... You can read it out of my previous posts.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Either people will read the text the QM puts right in front of them, or they won't. I give up. I'll find something else to talk about.
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I apologize for picking at it again, but I feel I did not explained fundamental disconnect between our positions properly.

Everything we see written in text is subject to "unreliable narrator". EVERYTHING. This is fundamental part of planquest design and have been explicitly confirmed by GM that it applies to GDIplan as well.

Now, we are better off than poor suckers in Supreme Threadviet over at Blackstar's as we can be fairly sure that almost all numbers we see is reasonably accurate, but we know that bias/distortion exist and we need to account for it.

And thus is source of my personal disagreement - (1) You took two (maybe three) datapoints. (2) Then you accepted them as fully accurate. (3) Followed by taking most reasonably optimistic interpretation, but that part was, well, reasonable.

Besides working from limited dataset to derive changes in priority, it is number (2) that I really have problem with, because both "Starbound request" and (if we take it as separate datapoint) "PS for station-building" are clearly (for me, and yes I am aware that it is a bias in action) were a subject of political-driven modification. "Graying population" in some way is worse, since (again, to me) it shows noticeable disconnect between writer and greater GDI and as such I can not accept it as something to plan a long-term strategy on.

All told, it is truly a minor thing to argue so much over. Except. Someone decided that Orbital section is not spicy enough and started to give QM ideas (thanks a lot, Bot). We do have a little slack here, but I fear how much of it will evaporate due to NOD actions and feel that we really can't take risk here.
 
Simon_Jester said:
No, I'm referring to something else I already mentioned, and am pretty sure I mentioned more than once.

In the reapportionment vote update.

But I'm tired of repeatedly doing other people's homework for them, so if you want to be reminded about what that point was... You can read it out of my previous posts.
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Right, I thought that the quote was from then, my mistake.

That said there is nothing I can find there regarding Columbia other than it counts counts twice as a promise for multiple parties, but that's something I have mentioned before myself though and and given that I agreed that Columbia would give people more hope than Enterprise I don't think this is what you are talking about.

Btw of the parties interested in Columbia (and Shala) only Socialists weren't interested in Enterprise and Philly also interestingly. Seems shortsighted. Or at least narrow sighted.

RCNAnon said:
...it literally says orbital habitat in the description. If your argument is based off of that tiny little quibble in vocabulary... o_O
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There are multiple kinds of habitats and Columbia is small. Its the prototype, not a full on city in space. It has, at completion, 2000 residents. That's not even a town.

Its the vital first step, not a proof of mankind's future in the stars.
 
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Jexx said:
And thus is source of my personal disagreement - (1) You took two (maybe three) datapoints. (2) Then you accepted them as fully accurate.
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We have had multiple occasions in the thread where we've been bitten in the ass because we dismissed as inaccurate or unimportant the two or three datapoints that argued in favor of something.

And we have had multiple occasions in the thread where we've been rewarded (either with good outcomes, or by averting disaster) because we paid attention to the two or three datapoints that argued in favor of something.

...

It's one thing to dismiss a few biased datapoints because there's a lot of other data pointing in the other direction. For instance, we regularly dismiss anything that has even a whiff of affiliation with Initiative First because we know they're biased and we have plenty of other information pointing us in the other direction.

It's another thing to dismiss the datapoints out of hand because "I don't believe things could work this way, I'm pretty sure I have a better understanding of GDI citizens' psychology from here in my armchair in a literally different world than GDI's own NPC politicians and the Treasury's own NPC sociologists do."

The former is entirely understandable and reasonable.

The latter has gotten infuriating. The NPCs from whom these datapoints arise are, in-character, people who ought to know. We have no specific reason to think their assessments are wrong, other than "nah, I don't think it's that important." We probably shouldn't be so cavalier about letting that override our in-quest NPCs telling us "yeah, this totally is that important."
 
With regards to what bays are available where, it seems likely to me that there are some bays that are unique to each station and some that are more general. Whether the station discount bey is one of the latter I couldn't say, though it seems more thematically that it would be a special one for Enterprise. (Side note: does anyone have a reference for the scale of the discount?)

Edit: My cat decided to step on the keyboard and hit post way too early, one moment.
 
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RCNAnon said:
No, those are additive. That's 4k people. Which is an, admittedly small, city in space.
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Ah, didn't know that, thanks. That said Wiki says that 1k-10k inhabitants make a town, so my point stands I believe. A medium town to be exact, a large one is 10k-100k.

A medium city appears to house 100k-300k humans, so to lowball it I estimate that a 50k habitat or settlement could convince people en masse that there is hope for the survival of mankind.
 
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I don't think anybody is hard opposed to building the Columbia on principle. The argument has always been should we try to squeeze it in by election day specifically or not and I think that got away from some people. I personally have no opposition to plowing all our space dice into it the microsecond our Plan targets for Enterprise/mining are hit, it's 1000% going to end up a requirement to do next FYP so we should get a head start on it towards the end of this FYP. And I'm sure people will like it, it gives us a bunch of PS just in hard mechanical terms so it's obviously popular without even needing to get into the narrative.

I don't care enough about getting the morale boost ~1.5 years earlier in time for a specific election to change up my plans though, and I don't think anything is going to convince me otherwise. I don't deny that it will be a morale booster, but I disagree that it's absolutely necessary to get this specific morale booster finished before this specific election. People aren't so broken and demoralized that they're about to mass defect to Initiative First or anything, we've made significant strides towards improving civilian morale in planetside sectors, and my personal suspicion at least is that the Brotherhood are sharpening their knives to jump us just before election day while all the decadent Blue Zoners are glued to their TV's and too busy arguing with each other over internal politics to keep an eye on NOD.

I'd much prefer to feed the Military sector as many Free dice as we can these next 3 quarters to try and bulk up our consumables stockpiles in time for game day, there's a lot of dice-intensive but resource-cheap stuff that would really help to do in the short amount of time remaining before I expect a major attack. And feeding the military all our free dice to shock out some shell plants and ablat and URLS etc. in 3 quarters makes it a lot harder to do a significant amount of Columbia by election day even if I wanted it.
 
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Enerael said:
Ah, didn't know that, thanks. That said Wiki says that 1k-10k inhabitants make a town, so my point stands I believe. A medium town to be exact, a large one is 10k-100k.

A medium city appears to house 100k-300k humans, so to lowball it I estimate that a 50k habitat or settlement could convince people en masse that there is hope for the survival of mankind.
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The US defines a city as anything with more than 2.5k residents, so your ideas of what is appropriate for "hope" are going to differ greatly from some.
 
Jexx said:
Everything we see written in text is subject to "unreliable narrator". EVERYTHING. This is fundamental part of planquest design and have been explicitly confirmed by GM that it applies to GDIplan as well.
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If everything might be be untrue, then how can we know anything? At some point we have to accept in-quest information as true-enough, even if some of it might be flawed. Otherwise the only truths become those given by whoever argues their zero-data guesses the loudest.

@Crazycryodude I think you're overestimating how much Columbia will cost us. In Q4, it's only going to cost us 3 Free Dice; (9 dice total including our now-6 Orbital dice.) Given people estimate we're going to need at least 2 free dice permanently on Orbital to keep a good pace on our goals, that's a single extra Free Dice for one single quarter. Not exactly a back-breaking price.

Meanwhile, it's not like Enterprise is going to give us any benefits ground-side (besides a minor +2 CG) until we start up the space mines again near the end of the Plan. Certainly nothing that's going to affect the military in the next few quarters.
 
Derpmind said:
@Crazycryodude I think you're overestimating how much Columbia will cost us. In Q4, it's only going to cost us 3 Free Dice; (9 dice total including our now-6 Orbital dice.) Given people estimate we're going to need at least 2 free dice permanently on Orbital to keep a good pace on our goals, that's a single extra Free Dice for one single quarter. Not exactly a back-breaking price.
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I'm seriously considering stripping Orbital of its Free dice starting whenever Philly is in completion range with the base Orbital pool for a few turns. Not forever but I'm increasingly convinced that we're going to get jumped at some point in Q4 and surging military investment before that is important to me.

My hard floor shopping list for the military that we can do with just the base dice pool is 2 phases of shell plants, 1 phase each of ablat and URLS, the railgun munitions, the Orcas, the wartime factory refits, 3 Mil dice on MARVs next turn to finish the YZ hub left hanging and pay the minimum on fleets to bring Tib dice in to finish the rest, and at least 1 Mil die to finish the Brest factory for Havocs (Bureau dice can get Seoul probably). That all comes out to around 22 dice, give or take a few for luck but it should be right around what's possible with our base dice pool after Philly is online.

But I'd also very much like to go for the "stretch goals" of completing our consumables targets (an additional phase each of shell plants, ablat, and URLS) as well as finally completing the stealth sensors deployment. That's ~12 dice right there, or 4 Free dice per turn, and doesn't even touch things like more tech development or ASAT or an OSRCT station or Zone Suit factories or the GD3 or whatever else we might like to have by game day. I'd like to feed Heavy Industry and/or Infra (mostly Infra) some Free dice as well to speed up the timeline on logistics and power/cap goods, and when I factor that in the Free dice budget starts to look real tight.

Stealing Orbital's allocation for a few turns starts to get pretty attractive, we can still stay basically on top of our targets with the extra base die and bonuses from Philly, and if we get bad luck we can make it up after the dust settles. But I'm increasingly worried about making sure we have enough basic consumables and spare logistics in time for the big show and they're really dice intensive to get going, scrounging up every die possible for the next few turns is important IMO.
 
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I am getting extremely sick of all this arguing space talk so much that any enthusiasm I had before is barely there anymore and wondering if it all exploded means these arguments will finally stop.
 
NHO said:
I won't be voting for any plan without Columbia.
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To be clear, that's after we've got Philadelphia in the bag, right?

Because even I want to finish the Philadelphia first, or at least commit enough dice to be very confident of finishing it and then maybe use a die or two on Columbia in the unlikely but possible event that there are any left over.
 
As it currently stands, we will need some free dice investment into Orbital even without doing Colombia phase 1-3. We will also need free dice investment in Heavy Industry to meet the Capital Goods goal and our Energy needs. We also should consider investing free dice into Military to boost production in the current flare up. If the flare up occurs prior to Q4 or looks like its going to occur immediately after, Colombia doesn't seem doable. If it doesn't we have more slack in our requirements. In any event lets shelve the decision on wether or not to green light Colombia in Q4 as it is a bit far out.

Closest problem first. Finishing Philly as quickly as possible and continuing the build up.
 
If we have any dice left over from necessities and low hanging fruit I would like to put them towards mining/abatement and housing. After, you know, domestic animals and sports and the like, basics on a normal life.

This is because even if we don't need more Rs, having a stockpile would be nice post reallocation and the reallocated income doesn't just disappear, it goes towards military, education, etc and should thus be well worth the effort. This also as a side effect pushes Tib back, giving us more time and better preparing us for the TCN.

Housing wise, until we run out of refugees we can find and Nod civilians interested in a better life we should never stop investing into it.

Space is important but I would prefer to focus on Earth while building up space presence on the side with our 5 Orbital Dice.
 
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