The thing is they'll take longer to build, be more expensive and the Navy doesn't want a carrier with improved striking power- they want a lot of relatively small hulls that can cover a ton of area. Wingman drones on escort carriers are objectively unnecessary feature creep. It doesn't help them patrol better, it makes them more expensive, harder to build- all to do a job the escort carriers exist to allow other hulls to do.
It has been established that we get roughly the same number of hulls either way, so
that's not a problem. The problem is that we spend more on the actual carrier yards themselves... which is arguably a good investment. Because the wingman drones
are going to be useful to the escort carriers. Among other things:
1) It
can assist in anti-submarine warfare because the ability to carry more sonobuoys and torpedoes increases the probability of any given patrol aircraft (and its buddy drone) successfully finding and sinking a sub.
2) It definitely assists when the escort carrier detects a Nod raiding group at range and decides to go chainsaw them with an Orca airstrike, because the drones can carry a large and disproportionate load of munitions to thicken the strike package.
3) On the predictable occasions when escort carriers are pressed into service to hit a high-priority target or fight a battle against unexpectedly heavy Nod naval assets, the drones will, again, thicken strike packages.
I say this as the
first person to advance many of the arguments you are now advancing. I think it's worth it, not least to keep the Navy from retroactively wanting to squeeze drones onto a carrier that isn't designed to service them.
Setting up a strong sucker punch is not spending ineffciently, since it sounds like we are getting the jump on NOD. It means we have a better chance at landing telling blows to NODs industry- which means the war will take less time and they will do less damage to our own infrastructure. In addition cap goods and energy are not end goals, they are useful in so far as what they provide (though having a surplus is useful since that avoids any interruption of all the production we do).
That's exactly what I want- a surplus. That's why I want to be a bit more moderate in potential Energy consumption (so we retain a reasonable buffer of Energy in Q1)
while also throwing enough dice to have a good chance of completing
Nuuk Phase 2 in Q1.
Your plan ends up distorted by how many Apollo factories you're trying to rush into production in a hurry, is what I'm saying. Such that to have Energy surplus you
have to crash-invest in fusion reactors again, and thus
have to short Nuuk's construction and not have much Capital Goods left.
I will say that having the Apollo factories to ensure our aerial dominance during this isn't a bad idea. It helps us suppress NOD even further.
Yes, but just because it "isn't a bad idea" doesn't mean we should do it. There are costs to trying to build three Apollo factories at once, and it's debatable whether we need
that much crash-acceleration of Apollo production
that fast. We need them, and my plan works on two factories! But we don't necessarily need all three right now at the cost of burning -12 Energy on them.
In regards to the Wingman vs Escort, is is a guarantee that every Escort will have a wingman now?
If we develop the escort carriers after or in the same turn as we develop the wingman drones, the escort carriers will be upsized and modified to accommodate wingman drones along with their normal contingent of Super Orcas.
We are going to be building wingman drones, and we are going to be building naval hulls in the near future. Both are incredibly important for our long-term prognosis in this war. One for our airforce, and the other for our navy. We don't need, nor do I think we intend, to wait on escort carrier development just because wingman drones are not completed yet. Developments that finish on the same turn incorporate each other's tech (if compatible), as seen by our missile development programs.
The bigger question is which hill do we want to develop:
[ ] Escort Carrier Development
With the coming battles with the Brotherhood of NOD primarily existing in the littorals and in small actions, GDI needs a new wave of carriers. However, these, unlike the heavy carriers of the era before the Third Tiberium War, are small designs, built exclusively to carry Orca strike packages and control the airspace around them while being far cheaper than their predecessors.
[ ] Victory Class Monitor Development
A dedicated littoral combat ship, designed around a series of mission packs, ranging from 203mm rifles and rocket batteries, to anti-submarine and anti mine warfare. Intended to be a general purpose support ship for offensive operations against the Brotherhood of Nod, it will fill a wide range of purposes that GDI has often not had the resources to fill effectively.
[ ] Shark Class Frigate Development
The Shark Class is to be a shorter, thinner, and overall much lighter version of the Governor, including lacking the systems for longer range bombardment systems. Instead, it is primarily oriented towards relatively short ranged air defense, and the constant antisubmarine warfare patrols, filling out GDI's need for convoy escorts.
Overall, I don't think we are that interested in the Monitors at this time. Between Escort Carriers and Frigates, I think that I slightly prefer frigates due to being able to roll out more hulls, that each hull is put into the field faster, and that they fill a greater gap in our current doctrine than the escort carriers do. If escort carriers were capable of carrying more than just light bombers, I think that I'd prefer them instead.
The Navy has repeatedly told us that the escort carriers fill a
major hole in our current doctrine.
Namely, the hole where "we don't have any ships capable of doing naval aviation besides the big fleet carriers, so the fleet carriers have to be pulled off of important offensive and sea-superiority duties to do things like guard convoys."
That's a big hole, or rather a case where the fleet carriers are being improperly used to fill Hole A, with the result that they are leaving Hole B,
the hole they were designed to fill, uncovered.
The
Sharks would also fill a hole... but the hole in general is "anti-submarine warfare," and building a wave of escort carriers already helps with that at least somewhat. Whereas the
Sharks cannot take the place of fleet carriers in convoy escort duties, because they are pure surface combatants with an ASW focus.
So the escort carriers fill one hole completely, and also partly fill the hole the
Sharks focus on. While the
Sharks fill one hole, but do not at all fill the hole the escort carriers are focused on.
To that end one can see we need energy and cap goods, the issue is however we do not necessarily need increases at the same time. Looking at the cap good expenditures- for ground armor factories we want Reyjavik 4 to finish first, which means Q3 at the earliest so the cap goods and energy for those can be gathered in Q2. In the meantime I do not expect to try to roll out more than one escort carrier shipyard a turn so even doing escort dev Q1. And between doing Nuuk 2 (and with enough to basically force a rollover), finishing Reyjavik 4 and enterprise 4 in Q2 that is enough of a cushion with our current production to carry the escort carrier cost. In addition we likely want to push Nuuk 3 out in Q3 which means we need the energy for that between Q1 and Q2 since that likely takes all of our HI dice for the turn, hence biasing some early fusion production in Q1 and a 2nd stage Q2 to ensure that energy needs are there.
The main factor I feel that you are neglecting is the impending war.
We are likely to take damage from strategic strikes during the war, which means maluses to Energy supplies and Capital Goods supplies. I want those holes filled in as soon as possible, because when we go into negatives in either area, it means we cannot run the economy at full efficiency.
Now, there's a bit of a conflict here, because getting any kind of +Capital Goods
quickly is a hard project right now, and getting +Energy is tough too, especially if we don't try the controversial move of finishing the tiberium power plants.
My own view is that we should try to avoid building all three Apollo factories precisely to limit the Energy costs and let us keep up a respectable buffer
without rushing quite so hard to build more power plants. And, again, be a bit intentional and thoughtful about budgeting our Energy needs for future Plan turns as well, precisely because we need the Nuuk buildup badly and should be pushing it aggressively. Slow-walking it at three dice per turn or so means we don't finish Phase 4 until very close to the end of the Plan, and I'm not a fan of that.
So to you, you have this timeline, but I think your timeline is too aggressive about building up (and spending) Energy, and not aggressive enough about Capital Goods. I say this because I am more worried about damage to our Capital Goods supply than to our Energy supply, because the former seems to be less distributed than the latter.
Escort Carriers are both anti sub but also support ground strikes and provide air coverage at sea. Shark frigates are more anti-sub. We want both but given the longer time for escort carriers to rollout I think we want the escort carrier 1st so we can get to work on deploying 1 or 2 shipyards sooner. The question is what techs do we want to have done with dev to incorporate into both. For escort carrier- wingman drones and any weapons that go on the drones are big ones to me. Less sure on what dev projects will help the Sharks.
Honestly, the drones should be fine with just missiles. Also, if the military is worried about the drones being unreliable, the idea that each individual drone carries a fixed amount of ammo and can't just shoot 300 times will probably be reassuring, so we're more likely to see the tactical lasers mounted on the piloted aircraft.
Only problem is that carriers will take at least 9 months to build and another 9 to fit out and workup, that's the original rate for the Governors. The first ones likely won't be ready until after the dogpile is over and perhaps even wont be ready for Karachi. These are basically being built ahead for next plan even if that rate is sped up somewhat you're still looking at maybe around 6 months to build then another 6 to fit and workup, again going off of the Governors.
If your concern is hulls you want frigates which will be faster to build and workup. If your concern is carriers then the number of total hulls at sea isn't your breakpoint.
No matter how many frigates we build, it won't take the fleet carriers off escort duty so they can operate in the Indian Ocean as an offensive force.
If we work
quickly to develop escort carriers, by next year there
might be a few that are complete enough to perform duties and free up fleet carriers in the Indian Ocean in 2061Q1 or at least 'Q2.
Thanks for the analysis. I think that we are going to go with a mix of light and heavy metals though. Each level of enterprise gives us the ability to process X more of each, right? I'm not sure that there is a good reason to focus exclusively on one or the other.
The advantage of monofocusing on one type is that you get the benefit of rollover dice, and with the dice budget so tight, we need all the help we can get.
At the same time, you're not wrong.
) on them.
