- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think that depends very heavily on Nod's decisionmaking. It's likely to run on until Kane calls a halt, or until all the warlords collapse from exhaustion and decide they need to go eat a sandwich or something.
The problem is that it commits us to a really big income increase. Realistically, everything we do with our Tiberium dice is important, and it's likely to increase income, but it's not a good thing if we end up in trouble because we 'only' increased income by 175 RpT between now and the end of the Plan, instead of 250 RpT, because we 'got distracted' trying to optimize for Red Zone mitigation instead.
I prefer that we keep our freedom of action.
Also, this overlooks the long-term value of actually finishing the refineries that the current version of the target would require. Building more refining capacity is good because it positions us for further income increases, and insulates us against economic disruption if Nod blows up any one refinery. Sooner or later we'd have to build those refineries anyway, to keep GDI's economic growth from coming to a halt.
It's very much not obvious that Chicago Phase 5 is going to be significantly better defended against Nod attacks than Chicago Phase 4. And doing this would make your proposal to change the refining target entirely redundant anyway, because even Chicago Phase 4 would get us most or all of the way to hitting our "raise the refinery cap" target.
I dunno. You're not really wrong here, but the problem is that finishing three projects makes it considerably more likely that some will go over the line and cost extra dice, because there's no rollover between the projects.
For instance, the optimistic case is that we put five dice on the Station Bay, then six each on Columbia and Shala, and everything finishes. This optimistic case has a 0.49*0.42*0.42 equals roughly an 8.6% chance of happening. By contrast, the chance of a more pessimistic case where the Station Bay takes six or more dice to finish (likely spread out over two turns) and both of Shala and Columbia take at least seven dice to finish through Phase 3 has a 0.51*0.58*0.58 = 17% chance of happening.
So we're roughly twice as likely to need 20+ dice to finish this set of commitments than we are to need 17 or less. By contrast, Enterprise Phase 5 is a straight shot. There's less risk of a high-variance bad result screwing us over either due to time constraints (forcing us to inefficiently dump a ton of dice at the last minute to make sure it finishes by 2061Q4) or due to good results in one project not carrying over to another (us rolling amazingly well on the station bay and realizing that this gives us nothing direct to aid in our completion of the stations themselves)
Y'know, if we're taking the Heavy Industry shift, it's not really that limiting? We will almost certainly have some wiggle room in our Heavy Industry dice in 2061 if we swap things out so that we're not committed to churning out Nuuk. Maybe not much, but some.
Good news is, we can be reasonably assured of getting at least +12 Consumer Goods one way or another.
+4 from Drone Factories offsets the +4 if we don't do the arcologies. We're overwhelmingly likely to do Fertilizer Plants. And Chicago Phase 4 is likely to get done by the end of the Plan as well, which would apparently be a +Consumer Goods project. We can hit this target.
If we were worried, then it would be better for us to commit to Vertical Farms than Ranching Domes anyway, because that would enable us to more easily hit the current target (along with Light Industry investment), and provide us with +Food instead of -Food.
Agreed.
I'm hesitant about the ASAT-SADN swap. The Military dice requirements are rough, though we CAN make it...
If we stick to the regular goals, it would require massive Free dice investment to be assured of having both the station bay and the Leopard II yard before the next Plan starts.
To be fair, SADN is legit important enough that we may want to do it EVEN IF it hamstrings us in other ways. Do not forget that nuclear cruise missiles could hit us at any time, as could massed barrages from something like Gideon's shard missile gambit.
Honestly, the more I think about that, the more I worry, and it's not like I've ever hesitated to put Free dice into Military before.
[X] Plan Attempting To Adapt
-[X] Complete Anadyr and Industrial Lasers Before end of Plan (Capital Goods)
-[X] Complete SADN Phase 2 (ASAT)
-[X] Complete at least three more phases of Blue Zone Apartments (Arcologies)
-[X] Commit to completing five phases by end of next plan (Karachi)
I'll happily commit to 4-5 phases of Shala or Columbia or more next Plan and see if we can't get them complete by end of 2065.
