There are really only four points to address here. So the first one is that I'm not sold on Offshore Mining being a thing that won't just be rolled into vein mines or prove to be unrepeatable or something, they're just too unknown to plan around at this point. I'd rather not push towards them when we're completely up in the air about what future progress will look like.
I'm not even clear on what you think "pushing towards them" means.
I'm observing that there's a fairly high chance that they'll be available as an option, and that
IF they're available, it's likely to be worth trying them. Either I'm right, or I'm wrong.
If I'm wrong, it will be obvious that I'm wrong, either because the option isn't available, or because it's available at a cost that's untenable (i.e.
still costing -5 PS per die).
If I'm right, there's no harm being
mentally prepared for the possibility that it might be a worthwhile option to take, which is not the same as making an irrevocable commitment to it.
I'm not asking you to swear a blood oath to demand that we spend dice on offshore mining at all costs. I'm just
talking about it, as something that is plausibly a foreseeable possibility to maybe see in the Q3 options that isn't in the Q2 options. It's speculative, but it's grounded speculation, okay? Geez.
Space, I'm pretty sure the Starbound party doesn't have the freaking votes to get us that promise. With or without Colombia, we're going to have to let other people share our ~60-100 space income. This is not a promise I would want to extract in any case, but I think it's asking for way too much for just three phases of Colombia. I'd price that at the whole station. Which, incidentally, would take so many dice that now we're out of dice to expand our space income significantly.
I'd like to at least
look at whether we can get a deal, to the tune of spending one Bureaucracy die on it during a turn when (under a plan of mine) I'd be planning to spend the other two Bureaucracy dice on something else.
If it makes you happy, you can go ahead and spend all three Bureaucracy dice on the satisfaction survey. Some risk that we won't get the top-tier result, but I can understand why you'd want to do so.
As to why I think we can get a deal, it's because Starbound
did get us a deal for the 2058 reallocation to protect the (admittedly less extensive) space mining income we have now. Since Development and Starbound are on pretty good terms and that's almost a majority in the legislature all by itself, I wouldn't be surprised if Starbound has enough political clout to get that same protection deal
extended to cover the 2062 reallocation on the same terms. Or to at least get some of the moon mine income protected if not all of it. Or
something.
Among other things, because it's usually easier to get a law renewed than to get it passed in the first place.
I'm not proposing to promise X
Columbia phases without looking at what we can get for a
quid pro quo, but it's at least worth looking into.
@Ithillid , can we use the
Make Political Promises action to figure out
what we can get for a promise
and then vote on whether to take the deal? Because that makes it a much more attractive option overall to at least look into and investigate.
Military points are two points-The first point is that we've been slacking off with Auroras, our intel is out of date, and the Aurora, despite being very fast, is actually kind of a shitty bomber and carries fewer bombs than the Firehawk? So we need big numbers of them, fast, if we want to hit all of Krukov's targets. Since producing a global strike-force of Auroras will take time, if we want a big enough force to hit Krukov quickly, we'll need to fully saturate all available factories right away just to assemble our bombers and get them into the hands of the military and train the crews. Also, the Apollo factories were born in a different era of the quest-costs are bigger now, due to simply having more dice and resources available. So I want to be prepared for these factories to be significantly bigger, and I want at least an 85% success rate on whatever dice configuration is needed, since failing to get any factory at all would be a tragic disappointment.
It's reasonable to want to be prepared.
For me, since all my plans are
draft plans that I fully expect to change in response to changing situations, I just tentatively budget three dice and figure out where to get a fourth or fifth die or wherever
if and as needed.
But if for you, the idea of having a plan with three dice and potentially worrying about where to rummage up the fourth is troubling, I can understand that.
As for the plant costs, the thing is that the "build new vehicle production line" cost hasn't actually been changing that much. Projects we've left on the back burner like the hydrofoil yard and the last ZOCOM zone armor plant didn't expand into more expensive and comprehensive projects over time just because we resolved our Capital Goods shortage and got more income. "Build new production line for military vehicle that won't be used by the tens of thousands all over the globe all at once" has fairly consistently stayed in the range of 75-100 Progress for about two major factories throughout the 2050s as far as I can tell.
New Meme Plan for Q4:
-[] Heavy Industry 5 dice 100R
--[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plants (Phase 4) 5 dice 100R ??%
-[] Military 7/7 +7 free dice 320R
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (New York) 3 dice 60R 81%
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (New Sevastopol) 3 dice 60R 81%
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (London) 3 dice 60R 81%
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (Tokyo) 3 dice 60R 81%
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (Santiago) 2 Mil 1 Admin Assistance dice 60R 64%
--[] Ground Forces Zone Armor (Pyongyang) 1 Admin Assitance die 20R 0%
-[] Bureaucracy 4/4 dice
--[] Administrative Assistance x2 4 dice
Prerequisites from Q3: GDSS Philadelphia II, Zone Defender Revision, Blue Zone Heavy Industrial Sectors, at least +8 Energy left over.
Who needs the incredibly important and useful Wartime Factory Refits when you can instead rush out almost an entire Set of Zone Armor in 3 months, and can get the full deployment done in 6 months? (Pay no attention to the time it takes for these factories to spool up to full operation.)
Q&A:...
Question:
Doesn't this potentially burn all five points of Capital Goods we have (including the ones from
Reykjavik Phase 3), without immediately providing for replacement?
Without betraying the essential passion that motivates the meme plan (namely, the desire to crush Nod face with power armor), wouldn't it be better to switch the Heavy Industry dice allocation to, say, two dice on
Continuous Cycle Fusion and three on
Blue Zone Heavy Industrial Sectors?
Or would we then not have enough Energy to power the zone armor plants and BZHIS at the same time?
EDIT:
Ohhh, this is for 2059Q4 and you're assuming BZHIS will be done or one die away from completion then! Got it, got it.
Notably, one main reason we do further phases of
Red Zone Tiberium Harvesting is to enable further phases of glacier mining, so when that's factored in, the resource return on investment starts looking
great... except for the Logistics cost, which we already knew was horrific, and the problems of securing the glacier mine sites, which we likewise know are a problem.
Vein mining looks great if you have the Capital Goods, which as always is a big 'if.'
For currently available projects, the lowest BEP is for S-MARV (YZ 6a), the highest RpDI is also S-MARV (YZ 6a), it doesn't even have any secondary costs. There is absolutely no reason S-MARV (YZ 6a) should not at minimum get the 1 die it needs to finish.
Well, aside from it being problematic to put a Military die on
anything (say, if we're heavily attacked in the 2059Q2 results post).
Personally I favor using Bureaucratic Assistance to tap the Savannah MARV fleet we're talking about over the line. That, or swapping around dice and using it for some other project to free up a 'proper' Military die that assures near-100% chance of completion on Savannah.
Also...
Prospecting pays for itself quickly because it's stupidly cheap in the first place. It's explicitly designed as the thing you do with your Tiberium dice when you cannot fund or cannot find anything else to do with your Tiberium dice... which isn't really the situation we're in right now.
These are income generators that are locked behind another project. I have included the next phase of MARV Hub and S-MARV without any progress as they could be selected from any of the remaining Hubs. I have also included the following paired phases for both Intensification of Yellow Zone Harvesting and Tiberium Glacier Mining to provide a baseline similar to the Future Available projects listed above.
From this it is clear to see that Tiberium Glacier Mining combined project is the most effective income generation on a per die basis. However it costs a significant amount of Logistics. Comparatively to more conventional projects MARVs are similar to T-Glass Foundries without the extra economic factor costs.
MARVs definitely come out ahead compared to other projects that don't have major associated economic or military costs (Capital Goods, Logistics, adding significantly to the strain on ZOCOM, or two or more out of three).
On the other hand,
Yellow Zone Harvesting comes out as a low-reward strategy...
except that we don't so much do that as a way of securing resources, as we do a way of
rolling forward the Green Zone boundary, having the military push forward to "bite and hold" more land and push Nod backwards.
Yellow Zone S-MARVs give 15 RpT, not 25. Aside from that... I feel like your analysis doesn't factor in the military costs and benefits. Stuff like: RZ Tiberium Harvesting is a noticeable commitment by ZOCOM, Railgun Harvesters makes dangerous harvesting locations somewhat safer, YZ Harvesting is more about taking territory from NOD and costs our Military a lot, projects like T-Glass and Lunar Harvesting don't require any military investment, etc.
Also, I don't know how much we care about breaking even? It's nice to know but we're constantly spending all of our income, so we're only really interested in more RpT each turn. Even if it took 20 turns for a project to pay itself back that's still 20 turns where we had more Resources to spend each turn than we did before.
Opportunity costs. Because we
are constantly spending all of our income, so if we spend a ton of it on a project right now, it means we're not spending on another project we could do instead.
Like, it would be an objectively bad idea to spend five dice at 20 R/die on a project whose
sole effect was to pay back 5 RpT of income. Because we could have done something else big with those dice and those Resources, something more impactful, instead.
That's fair and all, but: If we spend 100R to gain +10 RpT, than while it would take ten turns for it to break even on investment, we'll also have ten (and more) turns where on each turn we can activate another die, or upgrade a die to working on more expensive projects. +10 RpT gives us more capability to do stuff than we had before.
Compare that to a 25R project that gives +5 RpT. (And let's say they both cost the same amount of dice.) It only takes 5 turns to pay itself back, but it's not as often going to allow another die to be activated, or a more expensive project to be done.
You're right, but only if you throw the opportunity cost of the 100 R project down the oubliette. Because we could have done something else with those dice and Resources
besides gaining +10 RpT, and it will take some time before the benefits we get elsewhere from occasionally being able to afford to activate another die with the +10 RpT offset the expenditure on the 100 R project.
Arguably... it will take roughly the same length of time it'd take for the project to pay back its own Resource cost, since Resource cost tends to be a rough proxy for how valuable and impactful a project is.
@Ithillid is there any reason for orbital military projects that we couldn't use orbital die for it? or maybe have a system similar to marv where if we put one or 2 mil die on it then we can use orbital die?
Our Orbital dice are so heavily overstrained right now that we're basically committed to spending Free dice on orbital anyway for practically every turn until the end of the Plan.
The way we use Orbital dice to contribute to Military projects is by spending the Orbital dice on
Orbital projects, freeing up Free dice that we
don't have to spend as quasi-mandatory 'extras' to finish our space project commitments at the end of the Plan.
