Eh? 125R in Tib is 'low'?
Yes, it is. Most Tiberium options cost at least 20-30 R/die, and we have seven Tiberium dice. A
seriously funded Tiberium budget tends to be 150 R or somewhere north of that; we're only able to activate all our dice on 105-125 R by leaning heavily into the handful of 10-15 R/die projects we have.
Well, I was doing one phase of Vein Mining along with 2 dice on Anadyr so that we could finish Anadyr and roll out the first phase of Tendrils on the turn after.
It was an up-front resource increase so that we could do more up-front resource increases and high tech at the same time.
One phase of vein mining is relative pocket change; it's not
nothing, but it's not all that impactful compared to the sums we're contemplating throwing around.
This is more or less the last chance we have to invest Resources in such a way that we get back more R than we spend before reapportionment hits. it gets harder and harder to make even Tiberium investments pay for themselves starting in 2061Q1, and nearly impossible in 2061Q2-Q3. If we have any consensus to take late-Plan income increasing actions, we should be taking those actions now.
There is room in there but i think there are better places to spend it then rebuilding ports faster, one of the candidates is completing Chicago in three turns of 1 HI die + 6 infra dice.
I like to do tow if possible three of it this plan, 3 dice on shuttles, 5 on completing housing, a stage of rail and complete the in progress fortress towns.
Put this way. I am reasonably confident that Tokyo being in bad shape won't cause any immediate military disasters for
this quarter. I am not so confident about
next quarter, about 2061Q1 or 'Q2.
The reason I want to frontload Tokyo repairs is so that it's
out of the way, freeing us up to do work on Chicago or other projects in 2061, instead of us constantly having to debate whether to put effort into it because otherwise the project will drag out long enough for Bintang to recover and take advantage. Even if she can't do that right away, letting the action autocomplete will take long enough that she'll have another shot.
@Simon_Jester I completely disagree with your notion that only YZ Fortress Towns secure our territory. In addition to the Rail Lines having been critical for shipping supplies forward, (and refugees back,) both YZ Harvesting and GZ Harvesting have explicitly helped us not just move forward but also secure what we've gained:
I'm not saying those actions
have no effect, but "this helps" and "this helps enough that it should continue being literally all we do even as the offensives wind down" are not the same thing.
My plan continues
Green Zone Intensification, and it spends 3-4 dice on assorted frontline-boosting projects depending on the variant. What it
doesn't do is shovel 8-10 dice into projects that are calculated almost entirely to boost the frontline, because we are no longer trying to actively advance the front lines because Ground Force needs an operational pause anyway.
I don't think suddenly ceasing these projects for a three month period, right when we'd most expect some kind of pushback from NOD, is in any way a good idea.
I think your analysis of when we should most expect Nod pushback is incorrect. Nod's forces have been fighting pitched battles for months, the same as ours, and they don't have as much operational endurance as ours do because they rely so heavily on sneak attacks and being able to decide the terms of the battle. This is exactly the moment at which I expect most of the warlords to
NOT have strong, prepared, formed units of heavy hitters capable of actually punching GDI hard enough to knock us back significantly. There may be one or two exceptions, such as Stahl who's good at force preservation, but most of the others have lost significant forces and will still be rebuilding their strength.
The enemy is always three meters tall and bulletproof; it is easy to neglect
their fatigue and the strains on
their establishment.
Even if you disagree on the narrative side, on the mechanical side these projects likely give some kind of bonus to our battle dice rolls. Last turn we rolled 13 battle dice. Even a small bonus could make a significant difference in any of those outcomes. And losing battle rolls can have consequences much bigger than a little territory lost, as seen with the recent damage to Tokyo. Unless we inexplicably have zero battle dice this turn, these projects are still going to have an impact.
A few +2s or +3s on battle dice rolls are nice, but the roll bonuses can't be
that impactful or we'd have won the damn war entirely just from having thrown something like 10+ dice of Infrastructure and Tiberium into supporting the offensives.
There comes a point at which scrambling to do every last little possible thing in our power to support the offensives becomes counterproductive, if it comes at the cost of the civilian economy and technological growth.
This is also why I want to finish off the Railgun Harvesters. We've had Raider attacks rolled for three turns in a row so far, and the Railgun Harvesters are stated to help counter that. Plus we know projects have greater effects when completed than they do when nearly complete. Remember how we left the last ZOCOM Zone Armor factory unfinished for too long?
Look, I'll be happy to make room for the railgun harvesters next turn; I'm specifically trying to slam out a 600-point project right now because it's desirable to have and slow-walking it means we effectively can't make a profit on the Resource outlay required to do it in the first place. So either we do it quickly now and profit, in the short run while we're trying to do Expensive Stuff, or we don't profit and it distracts from our other Expensive Stuff, or we wait something like 6-8 turns before we can
afford to do it.
I do not think it reasonable or realistic to continue spending as heavily on "military-supporting" actions
after Steel Vanguard as
during Steel Vanguard. There is simply too much to do, involving too much of the civilian economy.
I actually think that we are going to want
some progress towards the Tokyo harbor reconstruction, but it doesn't necessarily need to be right now.
@Simon_Jester
The Caloric Reclamation Processor will have two general modes of deployment. One in infrastructure, which will give us stored food without having to go through the "make food, make storage" process and at no ps cost. The other in agriculture, which will give us food directly at a ps cost. So the infra dice are going to be more highly contested in the coming turns than you assume.
So you might want to either divert those dice to security (such as rails), or downsize them to apartments (for plan goals).
I don't think that's an issue.
A surge on Tokyo now gets the city patched up. Importantly, and this is something I don't think we've considered...
When the reconstruction phase ends, we get the money back. The longer we have significant war damage that needs repairs, the longer it will be before we get the money back. I don't want to spend an extra 5-6 turns spending 30 R/turn on auto-reconstruction just to save us three Infrastructure dice that cost 45 R total.
Furthermore, we have a
lot of surplus Infrastructure dice. We have 24 dice and almost no obligations except apartments. I'm pretty sure we can get a good deal of mileage out of
Caloric Reclamation Processor if we're willing to spend, say, 6-8 dice on it... and we
have those dice.
Ships take time to build and repair y'all. Bintang took a bloody beating this fight. She isn't coming back for at least a year
We don't know what she has under construction or how good her repair tech is. Furthermore, her submarine force is basically undamaged.
I'm with cryo here, what's the point in us spending 30rpt on the biggest, shiniest and best equipped repair department possible if we then just repair everything ourselves and have them filling potholes.
Because then we get the money back. That repair department isn't gonna last forever; it's gonna last until it's done fixing everything. Letting the repairs spin out for longer while the repair authority attacks the question means that takes longer to happen.
Sure, infrastructure has some leeway but it's hardly at the point where we can justify wasting dice. The fact that people are arguing housing vs railroads vs fortress towns is proof that we still have very good things we can spend this on.
The largest naval foe in the region is catching her breath after we kicked the shit out of each other, and nobody else is really close enough with sufficient forces to go after Tokyo. Sure, maybe 1 dice on repairs might be nice but I don't think there's too much of a risk in letting our repair department do their jobs and save us the dice and resources we'd otherwise be spending on something they're perfectly capable of managing themselves in a reasonable timeframe
The thing is, with our large surface ships out of the picture, Bintang's forces in general (like the submarines that launched those Kelpies, or those missiles) have even more freedom of action- because a lot of our ASW and other things hinges on cruisers and carrier air wings, sadly.
The rest of the initiative desperately needs more resources to account for the results of this war. It is very, very unlikely that we'll be able to get a larger than 30% share of the funds. I suspect that even keeping the 30% share is going to cost PS this time around.
The bigger the pie, the less desperate the rest of the Initiative will feel at the prospect of only getting 65-70% of that pie...
We invested the maximum Rs we could into repair budget for a reason I assume, so why are we wasting it now by spending die on it?
I'm hoping to recover our investment a lot sooner if we get the job done quickly and economically. I'd rather have the reconstruction wrap up in 2061Q1 or 'Q2 and have the extra 30 RpT to play with in the tail end of this year and the start of next, than have the reconstruction chug away in the background at great expense per turn to
avoid spending any dice.
If Infrastructure dice were more precious (say, if we were doing Karachi), I'd make my decision the other way around.
Three die on civilian factories, someone is saving up Rs. Portals again isn't it.
Nah. Tendril harvesters. Plus, the only other places to put dice in Light Industry are
Reykjavik Phase 5 (which I don't wanna start right now),
Fertilizer Plants (which we don't actually
need right now), and more Bergen dice, and more Bergen dice get
really pricey really fast.
Plus, I suspect the drone factories may chain into further not-too-expensive useful projects in other fields, and that would be nice.
Skywatch again? I'm missing something aren't I. Identical to the other plan in fact, dunno whats so great about Mastodon its explicitly something of a terror weapon and I would much prefer more escort carries instead or something.
As noted, Mastodon is a Plan commitment these days, we have to do it in the next couple of turns anyway. Might as well be now; my plan still has five dice for shipyards and three for wingman drones, after all.
As to Skywatch, what you're missing is that we just launched like five probes at Jupiter and they all went offline simultaneously in a huge burst of interference or something,
ALL AT ONCE. That is a sus situation. It merits investigation. Because while whatever the problem is clearly isn't a whole Scrin battlegroup, it may well be something we at least want to
know about. The project is cheap and Space Force has
very suddenly started asking for it as a high priority, so... I think we'd better look into it.
And nothing gets done in Bureaucracy again.
Security reviews aren't "nothing." The fields that get reviewed here in my plan are both overdue, having not been swept for infiltrators and corruption in over
three years.
Huh, no portals or isolinear. Good. You know what I will vote for this plan, I like a lot better than the other one, my only significant quibble with this one is waste of dice on repairs after we invested so much into repair budget and have our hands full with a refugee crisis and low quality housing.
Isolinear is not a waste. It's a Plan commitment these days,
@Enerael . We're gonna have to do it.
Portals isn't a waste either, because if we don't do it this year it's going to delay
all further portal applications, including ones we really want, for at least a few more years down the timeline. You can't force a research learning curve; you have to get the ball rolling as early as practical if you want to reap rewards later.
