Diamonds has the FDO rank all available sites by expected profit and exploit them from most profitable down, even if that means eating a loss for the first few years due to startup costs. For instance, the new HQ mining systems in the former LBZ, if settled via a diamonds policy, will not return their initial investment until their third year of operations. This is best if you're in the right place to plan for the long-term, economically.
Hm. That... I am not sure that sounds like the situation we find ourselves in, now that I think about it.
The Rachni hold dozens of planets within Virmirean-controlled space, tying down the First Raiding Fleet to the point of exclusion in a constant patrol pattern to keep them suppressed. In addition to garrisoning the new colony, Mira would use this army to kill rachni. Unless you want to glass them all (you don't, they're quite valuable and it would look terrible once you reestablish contact with the wider galaxy), you need to invade those worlds at some point. This would hardly be an immediate thing, mind; preparations would need to be made. This is the same woman who lit into her subordinates over casualties borne of poor preparation. But Mira is not in a position where she'll be rolling back a recruitment wave.
Well, suffice to say that war on that kind of scale is... I'm honestly expecting seven-figure casualty numbers, at least. I'm not sure anyone on Virmire is really ready for what's likely to happen except maybe the batarians. And maybe the salarians, but while they're cold-blooded enough to shrug off "a million casualties is a statistic," they lack the willingness to engage in that kind of brutal slogging combat, as far as I can tell.
It does remove a huge swath of unemployed from the job market now without spending action. Those people will draw unemployment insurance once we get that going, so not that big a spending.
Interestingly, unemployment insurance for
all the unemployed people costs considerably less than drafting
roughly half the unemployed people. Despite how much surplus equipment we're throwing at the problem of the army expansion based on what
@PoptartProdigy said.
This suggests that while drafting six hundred million soldiers may be
effective at fighting the effects of unemployment, it probably isn't very efficient. I'm not at all sure I support it.
By the end of WW2, ~31% of the population of Germany was in military service.
The USSR had around 34 million people drafted of a population of ~190 million, around 18%. The fact that we're at ~16% is nothing to freak out about.
World War Two Germany was, by that point, in the midst of an apocalyptic invasion from all sides by nations that were loudly (with reason) fantasizing about crushing them back into the Iron Age. It was conscripting just about every male from thirteen to sixty.
Soviet Russia was, at around the same time, picking over its military manpower pool so thoroughly there were hardly any males left alive of the cohorts born in 1922-23 (those of prime military age for conscription in the early 1940s). They, too, were drafting every male from 18-51 except a handful of critical war specialists.
Those were
desperate levels of military conscription justified
only by the urgent military need to put as many rifles in the hands of as many warm bodies as possible in order to be able to prosecute the war.
By contrast, our war depends far more on naval assets than land war assets, and more on our number of engineers than our number of infantrymen. We need to kickstart our education and industrial infrastructure, not our infantry. This is an emergency measure and we'd be better off winding down the size of the army again once the civilian economy stabilizes.
Guys, by approving you get 600kk people paid. For what - you can decide.
You can teach them there. You can train them there. You can give each and every one a shovel and get your "Public Works" program without spending Stewardship action on it.
We can also give them the Unemployment Benefits option and train them in the already ongoing Crash Courses program.
The main argument for doing this isn't "it gets people paid and trained," it's "we already have the guns and boots sitting around to make soldiers of all these beings, making this
VASTLY cheaper than it would normally be.
And espite that I'm still worrying.
We are at total war.
Offensive operations cost money. Refitting our navy costs money. Expanding our navy costs money.
Even RESEARCH costs money; we haven't been able to pursue Personal Barriers because it costs ~16% of our current income.
Seriously people, I don't get your priorities.
How do you vote for a Raiding Fleet and not get that you are supposed to be straining to be on the offensive?
I
get it, but our economy just had a heart attack and stumbled out from under us. If we don't concentrate on long-term sustainability and building up economic endurance, our doctrine won't matter because we won't be able to defend ourselves, let alone attack.
1) And a high tech army needs a shitton of supplies, from boots to electronic comms. ALL of which has to be built and supplied by companies in the economy. Who have workers. Who get paid.
The problem is, all of this pours back into the issue of brain drain and material drain of resources into the military. Making equipment for the army is almost certainly the main reason the
low end consumer goods economy is shriveling up. If the size of our army supply contracts grows by 150% over the next year or two, supplies of civilian consumer products are going to
stay shriveled up.
So, your plan that wouldn't require an actions requires an action?
To be fair, it requires a
martial action. Right now, stewardship actions are more precious than martial actions. We've finished the major round of military reforms we had planned, and are unlikely to be able to undertake major offensives for another few years, so our martial actions are sort of... pottering around, potentially, and we may be able to benefit from redirecting them along lines more likely to help with the recession. Sort of like with Intrigue.
Okay.
So it's quite obvious.
Do we spend a massive amount of money for a temporary patch, or do we save it for the actual solution we can access next turn?
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. It'll be healthier for us to release industry back to the civilian sector in chunks anyway, if only to avoid Russian Oligarch Syndrome. We'll just release one less chunk, or hold off on releasing the last chunk until our first wave of emergency draftees pass through their term of enlistment and return to civilian life.
No.
HQ and Top Tier Mines cost more to invest in, but yield more. Immediately.
The map explicitly shows there are four five HQ Mines we have yet to tap, representing about 88k/year 110,000/year in income.
Yeah, you're right, I just wish we had more investment capital right now...
