All three of them count, if you actually unlock the rest of the nonvotable array, those would count, and there is not one particular build strategy for them that is significantly better than others. Bigger projects tend to do more to make other projects cheaper than smaller ones.
[nods]
That last bit is quite informative. Because it had looked like
Rare Metals Harvesting might be the 'killer app' here, with much shorter phases and a very rapid reduction in Progress cost from Phases 1 to 2. But while it's probably important to do in the long run, especially if we want an economy independent of tiberium to exist in space... It's not something where we want to slam out three phases of it just to lower the cost on everything else. Especially since the RpT return on investment is considerably less attractive.
Which makes economic sense, I guess. Getting bulk aluminum and iron out of lunar rock and regolith to save on spacelift, while relying on the Hewlett-Granger process to supply any rare earth elements or uranium or whatever, is going to be more efficient than doing it the other way around.
@Faraway-R I would note that Shala also help towards more than just the station construction goal as once it starts producing food we can store it and pit it towards the food stores goal.
Actually, a bay idea for Shala would be a processing bay that tins/dry-freezes/etc some of the output and turns it into food stores.
Shala is not a very efficient way to produce Food, and no major party is pressuring us on the Food goal, so this seems like it wouldn't be very impactful or relevant to the analysis. If we want a lot of Food we know how to get it, and it's not actually that hard to do so once we have enough of a budget to consistently activate our Agriculture and Light Industry dice.
Because locking in to 5 arcologies gives us very little if any flex in our infra dice which are needed elsewhere. As is I think we will hit 4 arcolgoies but I like the ability to flex to YZ arcology or other projects if need be.
Because once again this is the minimum we need to do- we are more likely to exceed most if not all areas we vote but keeping the flexibility to respond to changes in situation is key which the 5 arcology plans fail to do.
Even with five phases (2600 Progress, something in the vicinity of 40 dice over the course of the Plan)...
We retain a fair amount of wiggle room in our Infrastructure if we don't monofocus on glacier mines as our way of getting more +RpT. A pure glacier route, combined with a +700 RpT target, means we need something like 40 Tiberium dice and 35-40 Infrastructure dice worth of Logistics to support it all. But a hybrid glacier/vein route brings that number down to something considerably more manageable.
[] Plan Happy Arcologies, Happy Life
My only concern with this plan is the commitment to [ ] Complete at least six phases of Lunar Mines and [ ] Gain at least 100 RpT from offworld mining
Yeah, I'm actually thinking that over myself.
Assuming we build the stations in Progress optimized build order: Enterprise -> Philadelphia II, this will cost 4356 Progress.
I'm not sure this is actually optimal.
@Void Stalker did some math suggesting that finishing the
Philadelphia first is more efficient, because the Philly costs are already largely locked in and finishing
Enterprise Phases 4 and 5 won't move the needle very much, while Philly's dice bonuses will apply full blast to accelerating work on
Enterprise.
Enterprise phases make building
Shala and
Columbia much more efficient, but that's precisely because we
haven't started work on them yet.
This does bring to mind the less Progress optimized build order for the stations of Philadelphia II -> Enterprise, this will cost 4416 Progress, but would net us a Free Die and +3 to all Dice after the next Philadelphia stage: 715-29=686 Progress (686/70 = 10 Dice). This means the average Progress per die is now 73. For the last stage of Philadelphia II: 1430 Progress (1430/73 = ~19.5 Dice), and would give an additional +4 to all Dice and +1 Die to all categories, so now our average Progress per Die is 77. The Enterprise costs 2300 Progress (2300/77 = ~30 Dice). For a net cost of 4416 Progress, ~59.5 Dice. This would be more Die efficient than the Progress optimized build order, though not by much. Average Dice per turn of ~3.7, ~5.0 if starting Q1 2059.
Ahh, you've replicated
@Void Stalker 's math here.
Each phase of Lunar Regolith Harvesting and Heavy Metal Mines give two of their respective metals, +100 RpT from off world mining would require:
100/(7.5*2) = 6.67 Phases of Lunar Regolith Harvesting
100/(10*2) = 5 Phases of Heavy Metals Mines
Currently we do not know how the cost of Lunar Regolith Harvesting will decrease as we invest, the two examples we have are -15 Progress required per phase for Rare Metals Mining and -10 Progress required per phase for Heavy Metal Mines.
For Heavy Metals Mines to reach the +100 RpT goal we would need 395+385+375+365+355 = 1875 Progress (exactly 100 RpT)
For Lunar Regolith Harvesting to reach the +100 RpT goal we would need:
-If no Progress required reduction every Phase: 340*7 = 2380 Progress (105 RpT)
-If Progress required reduction of -10 every Phase: 340+330+320+310+300+290+280 = 2170 Progress
-If Progress required reduction of -15 every Phase: 340+325+310+295+280+265+250 = 2065 Progress
For Rare Metals Harvesting we cannot complete the +100 RpT goal.
That analysis shows it is more advantageous to invest in the Heavy metals Mines to reach the +100 RpT goal, then to invest in 1 Phase of Rare Metals mining to reach the 6 phases of Lunar mines goals. Total Progress required is 1875+170 = 2045, which is still progress cheaper than the most ideal scenario for Lunar Regolith Harvesting and produces the same amount of resources.
2045/70 = ~29 Dice if we invest prior to completing Philadelphia
2045/77 = ~26.5 Dice if we invest after completing Philadelphia
And those would all be Free Dice no matter if we started investing in the stations Q1 2058 or Q1 2059. We can technically afford that, but it limits our use of Free Dice elsewhere. I completely agree that if we could we should invest in Lunar mines, but it removes a significant amount of our flexibility to make this commitment. I still support Happy Arcologies, Happy Life as everything else is ideal, but the Lunar Mines commitments might be a mine too far.
Yeah, I'm having some misgivings myself. See, I think we really
should pursue moon mining significantly for a variety of reasons (not least as a cushion against getting hit as hard by income reallocation, and so we have an incentive to actually start building space colonies properly)
As written,
Happy Arcologies, Happy Life IS in its way an aggressive space commitment, it's just that it's pushing for more like 4000 points of space stations and 2000 points of moon mines, not the other way around.
However, I'm seriously considering scaling back the commitments. For instance, sacrificing the probe commitment (which is itself a fairly pricey 500+ Progress total project, and where at least one big chunk,
Outer Planets, is unlikely to have immediate payoff) means we have four promises, so we might as well give up
either the +100 RpT
or the six-phase commitment, even though we're still incentivized to hit one target if we've committed to the other target.
The six-phase commitment gives us more flexibility on 'technical fulfillment' because we can use
Rare Metals and it's becoming apparent that those will be pretty cheap. On the other hand, they're also suboptimal as far as actual +RpT income is concerned, so that's an issue.
Thanks. Sorry that I also didn't quite parse your own post as well as I could, I was a little bit distracted.
And actually I can give you an even more efficient plan.
One stage of Rare Metals, one stage of Regolith, and four stages of Heavy Metals would give us an even 100 RpT, for some 1520+340(300?)+170(120?) cost. 2030 max, 1940 min.
And we should probably begin with Rare Metals, I suspect they will cut down all costs by 15 for every other mine. Giving us 170, 380, 370, 360, 350, and 290-ish progress spread.
@Ithillid implied that this would not be the case (that is, that bigger projects are more impactful on overall cost reduction). On the other hand, it
might be worth it to do Phase 1 of
Rare Metals just to see what happens.
This is also an argument (see above) for dropping the +100 RpT commitment, because it gives us a lot more flexibility in how we hit the six-phase target.
