Like I said, they can cloak all the buildings they want. I want to track the supply lines for them. Ships need a lot of materials and work. We track them. And once we start getting a general idea, well, I'm sure our Commandos would be happy to get a easy job of blow up the disrupters and clear out to minimal safe.
And why do you think I suggested Rods from God? Can't disrupt a tungsten rod once you set up on a path.
[X] Plan Finish Chicago Dammit
-[X] Complete Anadyr and Industrial Lasers Before end of Plan (Capital Goods)
-[X] Complete at least three more phases of Blue Zone Apartments (Arcologies)
-[X] Commit to completing Chicago Planned City by end of Plan, and four phases of Karachi by end of next plan
General: This plan is assuming the current leading Renegotiation plan 'Budget Balancing' wins. IE:
-[]Complete Anadyr and Industrial Lasers Before end of Plan (Capital Goods)
-[] Complete at least three more phases of Blue Zone Apartments (Arcologies)
-[] Commit to completing five phases by end of next plan (Karachi)
It is also very similar in some respects to Simon's Anadyr Also Alliterates Plan, though there are some key differences. Namely in the allocation of Free Dice between HI and Military.
Infrastructure: Attempts to knock out the Apartment goal and help get ahead of the Refugee issue, while simultaneously drawing down on Steel Vanguard.
Heavy Industry: Knock out the next phase of Fusion and start Anadyr. Also looking to pick up the Industrial Lasers and remove that part of the new Plan and see if they reduce progress requirements or have other effects. It doesn't over invest in Fusion nor does it have a chance of Anadyr finishing this turn. I don't think it's a good idea to sprint for Anadyr right now with how low our income currently is. The R saved from Anadyr is better off elsewhere.
LCI: Focus on Bergen with the remaining dice going into Fertilizer plants and a dice to start Civilian Drones. Goal being to not over complete Fertilizer and slow walk it. This is another difference from Simon's plan in that it doesn't need to save extra R for Anadyr and uses the spare R to move 2 dice to Fertilizer to help get ahead of the Food problems.
Agriculture: One die on Freeze Drier Plants to give it a coin flip. It is a good source of Food, and we need it for the Food Reserve goal. BZ aquaponics takes the rest of the dice with the goal being to shore up our Food surplus. It was this or mechanization, and I'd prefer a larger initial boost to Food just cause our situation could change rapidly. I'll note we need 4 more Food to supply all the Food Stockpiles, assuming none is consumed by refugees.
Tiberium: Next phase of YZ Harvesting along with catching up on the GZ Harvesting to add some income along with securing our backline now that the war is sort of winding down. Similar logic for the dice on Porto and Bissau, now that Reynaldo's forces are moving to guerrilla ops, it would be very beneficial if the Harvesters in their area are better armed and able to ward off potential attacks by irregular forces. This also applies to Bissau, where its located in west Africa to secure against Mehretu's and the Ten Rings raids. I agree with Simon with reguards to the Processing Refits, now is the time to execute the refits while we still have 570 processing slack. The Refit will remove 250 and leave us with 320 Processing slack, which is more than the 300 that would get taken offline from one of the Tib Processing plants being sabotaged. (That 300 comes from how much each Tib Refit gives us once complete 250+50).
Orbital: Spreads dice to be die efficient on the Lunar mines. Also, Erewhon makes his first small step.
Services: I don't know if there is going to be a deployment project for Mind Shields. If there is it seems prudent to rush for it, and this part of the plan will change. Enough dice to finish AMA, but does leave a chance that it won't finish this turn. I admit this is concerning, but the exact Health value might change between the results and the new turn, as it has before.
Military: Continuing the rollout of the shipyards and Firehawks. The shipyards are focused on finishing the Frigates over continuing the Carriers. Along with improving our consumables situation via the Ablat, as of last, we knew that things would need to slow down if our stockpiles were not reinforced, but we only had a timeline for the shells, which will have improved with the completion of the last phase of shell plants. Getting the Railgun Munitions to remove that from the list and to save R. Additionally, getting the Mastodon to plan out the last year of the plan more accurately, and to improve the Steel Talon's situation (which the Light Combat Laser will also do). They are the ones primarily going up against the Order thanks to their task of defending key sites, and I'd really like to reduce their ability to run wild.
Q1: Health: +2 (-7 from Wartime Demand) (-3 from Refugees)
Q2: Health: -1 (-8 from Wartime Demand) (-5 from Refugees)
Q3: Health: +3 (-9 from Wartime Demand) (-10 from Refugees)
(-10)->(-13)->(-19)
Last turn people were dying to preventable conditions due to us not providing enough healthcare. This turn we added an additional +10 Health, but the ongoing war ate 6. I think it is very, very likely that we are going to be down another -3 by the end of the next turn. I think that we need at least one medical project to be deployed if we don't want a repeat of Q2.
We currently have the following health projects available for deployment:
-[LCI] Civilian Drone Factories. +1 Health. 10 RPD. 4 dice 13%, 5 dice 55%, 6 dice 87%, 7 dice 98%
-[SERVICES] Automatic Medical Assistants. +5 Health. 20 RPD. 2 dice 26%, 3 dice 83%, 4 dice 99%
And that's it.
Our available health developments are:
-[AGRI] Poulticeplant Development. 20 RPD. 1 die 95%
-[SERVICES] Hallucinogen Development. 15 RPD. 1 die 88%, 2 dice 100%
-[SERVICES] Human Genetic Engineering Programs. 25 RPD. 1 die 28%, 2 dice 92%
Speculation:
-Cloned organs are presumably locked behind ranching domes.
-Additional caps good heavy projects for +Health are locked behind AMA
AMA needs at least 3 dice, preferably 4. And we'll want to make good progress on CDF if we want to have it within range of completion the following turn, to give us just that slightest bit more margin of error until the demands on our medical system start receding. We probably want at least one of the above developments next turn as well.
Of the three, we can only be certain that Poulticeplants will give +Health. The others might not directly give +Health, or they might take a long time to implement. (Genetic Engineering in particular is almost certain to take time to work.) Because of that, we might want to to throw a die to researching the Poulticeplants this turn. If it's comparable to Spider Cotton, even if it won't be an efficient project, we'll still have the option to surge dice there to pump out an extra point or three of +Health in an emergency.
At the very least, NOD has to be aware that Health has been our most vulnerable category the past two turns. If they're going to land a successful sabotage hit on us, our healthcare system is the likeliest place they'll target.
[X] Plan Finish Chicago Dammit
-[X] Complete Anadyr and Industrial Lasers Before end of Plan (Capital Goods)
-[X] Complete at least three more phases of Blue Zone Apartments (Arcologies)
-[X] Commit to completing Chicago Planned City by end of Plan, and four phases of Karachi by end of next plan
Now that Chicago can no longer be done with Tiberium dice, this is a really tough row to hoe. Our Tiberium dice are mostly free for us to work with as we see fit, but we have significant commitments in Heavy Industry (even if we use the Anadyr/Lasers option), because we need many more fusion reactors to power all our war factories and everything else we're doing. It would take just about every Infrastructure and Heavy Industry die we have, or close to it, to finish Chicago Phase 4+5 in the time available. Phase 4, and Phase 5 some time next Plan, is a much more reasonable target that is less likely to force us to make other sacrifices, and Phase 4 is more than enough to meet all our current needs for the project in the immediate short run.
So the question is, are you about finishing Chicago for the sake of accomplishing goals that will benefit our global efforts? Or are you about finishing Chicago for the sake of Chicago being finished?
I question the wisdom of this balance. First, I think we should hold off to start the fertilizer plants for at least one more turn, because we're already rolling out huge amounts of Food from the aquaponics project. The big advantage of the fertilizer plants is that we can continue to accrue at least a little +Food while using all our Agriculture dice on building the granaries. We don't need that right now, so I'd rather hold off for a bit. Moving those dice to the drone factories makes it realistic to hope that we can have the drone factories in 2061Q1, when they contribute that little +1 Health boost. It also frees up 10 R for other purposes.
The light combat laser project... Well, I'm not a fan of spending Military dice on passion projects that aren't Plan requirements right now, but since your plan explicitly doesn't include the SADN swap, we can probably afford to do it, so it's not a bad move as such. My big beefs here are with your prioritization on frigate yards versus escort carriers (the naval situation will never be good until we have escort carriers in sizeable numbers, and the longer we wait to start yards, the worse that gets), and the fact that generally this plan has so many dice for Military that it's light on Heavy Industry. The problem there is that we want to keep fusion plant production up to a high pace so that we don't risk getting stalled out, and that ideally we want our mandatory projects done by, say, 2061Q2 so that we have time to work on Chicago or passion projects like the Suzuka plant. This level of investment is so heavily balanced in favor of military concerns over industry that it gets in the way of doing that.
Not that easy.
The likely associated convoys and logi will also be both protected and cloaked. It's not a lack of trying from GDI that NOD still has some degree of ship production overall.
Not that easy.
The likely associated convoys and logi will also be both protected and cloaked. It's not a lack of trying from GDI that NOD still has some degree of ship production overall.
On the other hand, there is also the likely decoy operations that one can use. Use false offsets to somewhere else, make decoy actions/movements/areas, etc.
So the question is, are you about finishing Chicago for the sake of accomplishing goals that will benefit our global efforts? Or are you about finishing Chicago for the sake of Chicago being finished?
I can understand giving someone the benefit of the doubt, but I feel like we've talked to each other enough and that my posting history has been consistent enough that it speaks for itself on this issue.
That said, I do believe the reasoning presented through the thread is strong regardless. We always need capital and consumer goods, we need housing, and as we have more planned cities to build and Adelaide being available while we're still committed to Karachi one way or another, knocking out Chicago has to be done. You can argue that we'd lose flexibility in planning with it as a semi-hard requirement, but it doesn't prevent us from doing some other things. Just means we must prioritize.
So I wanna finish Chicago because I'm a special interest individual that cares deeply about Chicago, but there are very solid reasons to do it.
I can understand giving someone the benefit of the doubt, but I feel like we've talked to each other enough and that my posting history has been consistent enough that it speaks for itself on this issue.
Apologies, but to be quite candid, I've forgotten your position on this issue, because if I tried to keep track of what everyone in this quest thinks about everything, I'd need about three spare brains to do it with.
How do you differentiate the idiot not doing his job from the deliberate decoy convoys and all the various idiots not doing their jobs on things that don't involve a key Nod military production base?
Remember, for starters, that Nod's population logically must have some civilian economy. There's a lot of traffic that's moving steel made at a tiberium refinery to a construction site, not just to tank factories and shipyards.
Which do you think gets the high-quality, highly reliable cloaking devices and the drivers who are reliable about using them? The civilian convoys, or the critical military supply runs?
I will be very surprised if building an 1800-Progress planned city turns out to be an efficient way to supply Housing compared to 160-Progress phases of Blue Zone Apartments in existing cities. If we're trying to resolve the actual housing crisis, Chicago's probably not our answer.
Chicago will be a good source of Capital and Consumer Goods, but by nature we don't need a great deal of either right now; we're running a large Capital Goods surplus, we are likely to switch to Anadyr/lasers and close out our requirement anyway, and we are close to meeting our Consumer Goods target for the plan.
Even with all of this in mind, I personally favor finishing Chicago Phase 4 during this Plan and trying to make progress towards Phase 5... but we're going to hurt ourselves badly if we treat it like an overriding priority. To finish the full megaproject by 2061Q4, we will have to burn up a lot of Infrastructure and Heavy Industry dice that we badly need for other projects.
I remember running an analysis like this for Chicago back when it was an Infrastructure/Tiberium project. It turned out that we could, in fact, get all the benefits of Chicago more efficiently by doing other Infrastructure and Tiberium projects. That didn't make doing Chicago up through Phase 3 a bad idea, and it won't make finishing it a bad idea- but we need to be aware that planned cities are not usually the most efficient solutions to global indicator problems like "we need more Housing." They tend to be more efficient as solutions to regional problems like "we need to ruin Gideon's whole decade" or highly specific problems like "we need to pioneer the technology of rolling Red Zones back and mass-producing goods."
Which are both important... but not areas where us delaying completion of our project until some time in 2062 or mid-2063 is exactly ruinous.
How do you differentiate the idiot not doing his job from the deliberate decoy convoys and all the various idiots not doing their jobs on things that don't involve a key Nod military production base?
Remember, for starters, that Nod's population logically must have some civilian economy. There's a lot of traffic that's moving steel made at a tiberium refinery to a construction site, not just to tank factories and shipyards.
Which do you think gets the high-quality, highly reliable cloaking devices and the drivers who are reliable about using them? The civilian convoys, or the critical military supply runs?
Here's the thing- The way I view it? Shipyards take a LOT of resources to maintain. Meaning multiple convoys, which yes, like you said, get high quality gear and such. Here's the thing though, people aren't 100% reliable. Yes, one or two are ognna slip up, and we can use that to slowly build a profile. This is a long term operation. Bonus points if we also start looking at other ways to pin down their locations.
Planned cities might not be the most efficient but the capstones seem to have dramatic effects on a area.
Mecca being the only one we've completed and it causing a warlord to go neutral on us and hostile on another warlord. I have no Idea what diplomatic outreach is available from that but it's probably significant.
And I'm certain that everyone is in agreement to do the cities. But it's easy to see why some might want to make Chicago a priority. Especially with it helping other plan goals and new city sites becoming available.
We can't do Planned City Adelaine or other Planned cities without it. Especially considering that we waited so long on Chicago that it's original capstone changed on us. Mecca completed and gave us a a revolt faction. It has good effects. Chicago was originally going to give us mini-Blue Zones for Planned cities. Sure it's not efficient planning wise but it's effects are generally good.
Edit: Adelaine for example allows us to print a fleet almost yearly
Here's the thing- The way I view it? Shipyards take a LOT of resources to maintain. Meaning multiple convoys, which yes, like you said, get high quality gear and such. Here's the thing though, people aren't 100% reliable. Yes, one or two are ognna slip up, and we can use that to slowly build a profile. This is a long term operation. Bonus points if we also start looking at other ways to pin down their locations.
I mean, I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing GDI already tries, it just doesn't make the news, because it's super boring work 99.99% of the time, and when GDI does actually try to fire an ion cannon and pop a suspected Nod shipyard like a zit, it's not really something Treasury nerds have much reason to hear about.
Planned cities might not be the most efficient but the capstones seem to have dramatic effects on a area.
Mecca being the only one we've completed and it causing a warlord to go neutral on us and hostile on another warlord. I have no Idea what diplomatic outreach is available from that but it's probably significant.
And I'm certain that everyone is in agreement to do the cities. But it's easy to see why some might want to make Chicago a priority. Especially with it helping other plan goals and new city sites becoming available.
I'm strongly in favor of doing Chicago, and doing it soon, but making it a Plan goal to finish it by 2061Q4 puts us under a hammer in a bad way.
If we weren't trying to finish two sets of shipyards plus assorted other war factories in a hurry, with some Heavy Industry commitments still unmet and about a full phase of apartments' worth of refugees pouring in every turn... I think we could pull it off.
Can we at least try to get it done some time early next plan then? Because I like the effects Planned Cities have(even if Chicago didn't complete) narratively but it's hard to compute that math wise
