We may want to dedicate most of our military dice, and even some free dice, to rushing the Aurora.
Ehhhh.
Remember, the eventual
need for production is likely to be no greater than the scale on which we build the existing (and in many ways similar) Apollo fighter. The production lines for those were a project that required two 70-Progress, 15 R/die factories that each used -2 Labor and -4 Energy.
Now, that was before the Capital Goods crisis was resolved, and the factories might be more expensive and demanding now, but I don't expect them to be
vastly more expensive and demanding. It's likely that the actual needs of the project won't demand more than four Military dice. Since we were probably going to spend 10+ Military and Free-on-Military dice next turn anyway, that's not really a majority.
Our window is definitely closing with the Krukov informatvion I suspect if we don't complete one Aurora factory next turn then our chance to hurt him will have passed entirely.
We have already been told that this is true, and existing plan drafts take it into account.
We should note that Ground Forces are now rated High and that they're basically telling us to fund other things please and thank you. So we can focus on things like Auroras, Orcas and ORSCT.
True, though I bet their confidence would take a kick in the balls if a major war started up and their consumables supplies started to crumble. Running out of anti-laser ablatives can't be fun, for example.
Yeah, this looks just safe enough that I'm tempted to roll it out a couple of times, looking primarily for increased institutional experience with liquid tiberium rather than even the energy production. More understanding of the death goop means we can (hopefully) better protect against when NOD inevitably starts making liquid tiberium flamethrowers. Because there is no such thing as too much warcrime in their book.
I want some sense of the actual scale of how dangerous they are. Fifty liters of liquid tiberium isn't a
lot in one sense (think "smaller than a beach ball,") but it might be a lot in the sense of "if this went kaboom, it would explode like a two-megaton bomb," in which case we really don't want to build them. I asked
@Ithillid about this, so hopefully, we'll get some feedback on how big of a kaboom we're talking about.
Another reason to complete the Perennials is their use in diplomacy. While Kudzu will get us much needed caffene, we should still complete the Perennials since they give us many other food luxury items.
Also, it's a low R-cost project we explicitly promised to do, in a category where we have very little else going on and where we often don't even bother to use all our dice.
So we're gonna look
really stupid if we don't do it.
While the Offshore Harvesting might not be an unlimited supply of resources, having perhaps four more phases of it available is equivalent to four phases of Vein Mines that don't cost Capital Goods to use. If the further stations don't cost PS to use, expect to hammer that button soon.
I think the big problem is providing naval security. Nod submarine warfare is gonna be a threat. But doing even a little in the near term would be nice, every bit of +RpT helps.
It sounds like the next two phases of Shell Plants will be less needed as time goes on. (Provided the war doesn't start soon.) However, we're still obligated to build them before the Plan ends. So we might still want to do them soon, while doing so will be most effective.
True. Plus, combined with the ICS to make supply delivery easier on a continental scale, it lets us use a
volume of artillery fire that the Ground Forces haven't previously envisioned, basically drowning Nod in kaboom from ranges at which most of their systems cannot reply.
I think you're being quite overconfident. Our immigration is limited by the territory GDI holds; civilians have a hard time fleeing across the blasted waste of the Tiberium-invested wastelands. If we don't continue to take territory, our immigration will slow down to a trickle.
Personally, I favor saddling up for another couple of territory-claiming
Yellow Zone Harvesting Expansion phases after we're reasonably confident we've seen off the worst of the Great Warlord Dogpile.
We've had better turns but we've certainly also had worse. Offshore harvesting sounds like a promising way to get some quick and easy income, even if it's going to run into diminishing returns and cap out pretty soon it's a novel income stream timed perfectly with the extra Philly dice.
Shame it sounds like we did the Auroras too late, that's what I was worried about. We can definitely rush out a factory next turn and try to get the air force a handful to play with before Krukov manages to move everything but assuming Karachi is still scheduled for Q1 2060 then there just isn't going to be the dice to get them ALL the factories next turn. At least we'll get something, better than nothing, even if Krukov manages to get away with more than we'd like.
Again, Auroras are a specialty aircraft and there will never be
that many good known targets for them at any one time, nor will they ever be deployed in
extreme numbers in any one place barring something really weird like "Oh shit, LEGION just went CABAL and we need to blow up the place it keeps most of its server farms, NOW."
I don't expect the deployment project to be the kind of thing that requires more than about four Military dice barring very bad luck, which still leaves plenty of room for us to lay groundwork for the Karachi Sprint.
We should at least give the Ground Forces a Zone Armor factory or 2
I think that when the next tranche of Capital Goods production pops up after BZHIS, we'll start doing Zone Armor factories for Ground Forces. Right now, they're doing well enough as-is that it's not something we should drop everything to do, because a lot of the other branches of the military really
are struggling.
We have 810 RpT currently, and we'd need around 75 RpT more to be confident of using all our Philadelphia dice.
So we need...median three phases, maximum four. Yeah, that sounds about right.
EDIT: There's also T-Glass, which we can probably count on working on this quarter and next, for a total of 40 RpT. So we can actually get away with as little as two phases of Offshore Harvesting.
There's also also the Savannah MARV fleet, plus incidental income from doing stuff like
Red Zone Containment Lines. We've got plenty of options for mixing and matching to earn some more income, even if we can't afford to do any more vein/glacier mining right now.
I would prefer waiting on Q1 2061, to get all our phases of consumables out, and at least a couple Zone Armor factories in operation.
High Ground Forces confidence should be a sign that we can afford to make a serious localized offensive. The Ground Forces want Zone Armor, but they fought and won the Third Tiberium War without it, and Nod isn't
that much more badass in overall land warfare now than they were then.
Ground Forces has had at least
four major engagements and countless minor ones in which to put their equipment to the test against everything we know Nod's got,
in the past year alone. If they think they're ready to go punch Kane in the face, they're ready to go punch Kane in the face. Or at least close enough to ready that continued heavy dice investment will
keep them ready.
Meanwhile, waiting an extra year to do Karachi will put the project into a problematic state if something weird causes a major setback or limits the available dice expenditure.
That sounds like something that is not under the Treasury's mandate. It would be nice if GDI could do that, but it also would require some reason to actually get NOD to listen. Which generally is not a high probability.
Well, in this case, the best motives are things like "come to the GDI side, we have coffee" and "actually your standard of living will be a lot better" and "do you really want us to have to invade this place and have a big and totally avoidable war, you're kind of in the backyard of one of our biggest hairiest Blue Zones here."
I think it's worth a shot.
Or air-to-air munitions.
Could you imagine a squadron of Barghest-bis scrambling to intercept an Aurora flight over Russia, only to get terminally surprised by a nuclear QAAM? Because I would pay fuck-you money to see that.
Oh yeah. I am definitely in favor of developing an air-to-air variant of the Aurora bomber.
We could call it... the Apollo!
More generally, Auroras are apparently much faster than the Nod hypermaneuverable alien-tech fighters in a straight-line chase, which makes those fighters functionally incapable of intercepting Auroras. It's theoretically possible to intercept a Mach 4 bomber with a Mach 2 fighter, but not realistically possible to do so without the Mach 4 bomber's consent.
Also, nitpick, I doubt it's very useful to nuclear-tip a QAAM. They can score
hits on enemy hypermaneuverable fighters with reasonable reliability, so increasing the blast radius to several hundred meters (the feasible limit for something that fits in a reasonable size missile casing for air to air work) only helps so much... and gives Nod warlords considerable excuse to go nuclear on us in retaliation. Since they're the experts at concealment and dispersal of the fighting forces, limited tactical nuclear warfare hurts us more than it hurts them.
Or no use at all, with hypersonic glide bombs.
The thing is, the hypersonic glide bombs won't necessarily hit the defense laser installation
specifically.
Even if you don't manage to prevent the actual air raid from destroying what it came to destroy... hooting down the GDI bomber after it's already blown up its target is a significant accomplishment for Joe Noddie. Because it means the aforesaid bomber won't be back to blow up another, entirely different target tomorrow or the day after.
Basically what it comes down to is that Nod is likely to be able to put together strategic air defense systems capable of inflicting losses on our Aurora force. But by the nature of what it takes to track a hypersonic aircraft, those systems will
not be cheap, any more than our own SADN systems are, so Nod will probably only be able to provide limited coverage that inflicts moderate attrition on the Aurora force.
And even that will likely take a while, so we may have a "Happy Time" of a year or so where our Auroras can just zoom-and-boom all over the world blowing the fuck out of Nod things with effectively no consequences.
If we're lucky.
