Tendrils aren't about the resource increase. They are about the increased efficiency of future mining. If we just wanted money to go up, Vein Mining is cheaper.Because there is a strong argument for doing a major income-boosting surge now, pushing us well beyond our original income target to the tune of 50-100 RpT.
This is something we would do in order to be well funded for 2061 as we face the need to do a long list of expensive projects: portals, Anadyr, Bergen, shuttles, research gachas, and naval laser refits.
If we delay another turn or two, it will be almost pointless to do such a surge, because the R cost of building the surge will not be repaid before we lose the bulk of the funding anyway. It is pointless to spend 60 R to get +30 RpT for two turns, for example, as a strategem to make it easier to pay for expensive dice. One would have been better off just not funding the program in the first place, and diverting the resources to whatever one wanted to spend the extra money on.
I expect that it is going to be a pretty massive project considering the explosion of new material types available for refining, with multiple phases (with each phase increasing the progress discount for everything else). But I also expect that it is going to be very, very worthwhile. Significantly easier to complete planned cities, faster orbital production, more arcologies, cheaper MARVs, the list goes on and on. Especially if it also applies to making factories and shipyards.I am seeing this:
[ ] Advanced Alloys Development (New) (Tech)
While STUs are rare, using extremely small amounts as additives to existing steel, aluminum, and other structural elements has noticeable impacts on the process, producing alloys that are lighter, stronger, and more efficient than existing ones. While widespread deployment will be noticeably expensive, it will cut costs across the board in other ways.
(Progress 0/120: 15 resources per die)
in far fewer plans then i expected as it reads as a reduction of progress needed for all projects costing STU's
alloys that are lighter, stronger, and more efficient than existing ones also seem like a good upgrade for our military and space construction where weight to preformace matters a lot.
I don't think I ever called it a waste, I very much want to do them both, I am just opposed to doing it now due to the Resource cost and a bunch of critical projects or low hanging fruit we could be doing instead.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.
I didn't have time to answer this post before going to sleep yesterday. I recall reading that they are very self sufficient and should not have any problems for I think years? Sure those shuttles would be useful, but no action we have wont be.They're an attempt to give us an advantage in the siege of BZ-18, it's not looking like we'll be able to force a connection through Siberia or the Manchurian Red Zone, and Karachi is still years away (although Bintang being out of action for a year or two might give us a window to go earlier, dunno, we'll see what the navy says). Regardless of when we do Karachi it's certainly not going to hurt to give BZ-18 more secure supply lines.
We have time to do it though, we should be doing what gives us the greatest expected return per die/Rs until like two turns before the end of the plan I say, as we can reliably and without overspending know it out in one go then. Unless of course we have spare Rs, in which case we can send them that way, but my plan at least didn't.Anadyr's a Plan target, Suzuka isn't. I still want to continue climbing the hover tech tree as a stretch goal this FYP, but priority goes to the thing we're actually required to do.
We have a considerable food and consumer goods surplus. More is good of course, but I do not agree with the priority order.We still need food and consumer goods, we're not desperately short on either but they won't go amiss and we know we'll definitely need them in the future. Plus narratively our agricultural establishment has been running at suboptimal efficiency all game, getting the fertilizer supply chain finally rebuilt is a good step even if we need to rebuild the mechanization as well eventually.
When I was making a plan I had just about enough Rs to not have to drop desirable actions for cheaper, less desirable ones, and that's without Erewhon die unsused. It was a very near thing, and without any Isolinear or Portals (100R!). So it seems clear to me that we should be increasing our R income and then do these high cost actions, its not like we don't have cheaper and often easier valuable projects to do, like industrial lasers, particle accelerators, or hovercraft.We have enough money to do what needs doing, the giant stacks of cash would be nice but are hardly necessary to function given that there's multiple plans proposed this turn that do world-conquering military spending along with expensive tech along with comfortably progressing all our targets with no idle dice.
The military's still taking more Green Zone over the next few turns and it needs to be secured, and we can't even fully lock down the Green Zone we currently have. GZ intensification builds up our Green Zone infrastructure and makes it clear that we're here to stay, that's the action for turning Yellow Zone into a real part of GDI society rather than a resource extraction colony. Staying up to date on our GZ intensification is a strategic and political priority, we're trying to care about Yellow Zoners not just treat them as a piggy bank.
The railgun harvesters got a direct callout in the last update for being seriously useful in combating light raids and insurgencies (i.e. the thing we're now dealing with far more often than armored divisions), with the only complaint being insufficient numbers. We can quickly and easily fix that for cheap and then not have to worry about Reynaldo or the Australian Brotherhood inflicting unnecessary damage. We won't be perfectly protected but we'll be more protected than if 40% of the harvester program was left incomplete.
I am not against security sweeps, I am all for doing one per turn, but they haven't turned up anything in ages that I recall and we have been repeatedly postponing those two important looking bureaucracy actions. I should not have called them nothing though.Security reviews are something, unless you like the Brotherhood stealing tech, resources, and intel from us, or even doing active sabotage if we let it get bad enough. If anything the distraction of the war has made us slip a little bit, we're overdue for a sweep compared to past trends, this is hardly wasteful or out of character for how we've played the last decade.
I disagree that we have enough rpt, especially since I don't expect the Portal tech or to a lesser degree the Isolinear actions to become any cheaper in the future, not to mention other expensive new projects I expect we are likely to get.Long term stuff doesn't pay off unless you start it, and waiting until mid-2061 to toss the first die is cutting it too close with no wiggle room left for bad luck IMO. And I don't think there's much ground to stand on complaining about budget, seeing as I made a plan with every die active and multiple expensive stretch goals on our current budget, with our budget projected to grow by a modest amount anyways. We don't have infinite money but we have enough, chasing more this late in the FYP isn't a requirement it's a distraction.
The commission is amazing for the general damage, and the amount we put into it means it can punch above its weight a little and fix bigger stuff faster. Small to medium reconstruction issues. Tokyo is not that, and it's a major population centre to boot.[X] Plan Secure the Gains
Also, why is any plan putting dice on Tokyo?
Never mind enough dice to one turn it?
What happened in Tokyo is literally the reason we massively funded the Reconstruction Commissions, so we didn't need to put dice on it. If we wanted to micromanage reconstruction efforts we should defund the RCs and just waste dice we could use far more efficiently on trying to get things fixed up.
It would've been one thing if we had heard from the military and InOps that a follow up strike was likely. We haven't. What we do have is an incoming housing crisis, an ever ongoing demand for more Energy, fortresses to build in the YZs and a Planned City to finish up.
Also also, why is any plan building railgun harvesters? We actually have enough railgun harvesters for most purposes, if we want to grow our current and future resourcing gains we should go for tentacle harvesters and refits, which will be vastly superior and, knowing we are working with competent staff, probably means that we don't need to do an immediate refit of all the harvesters rolling off the lines in the shiny new factories to fit the new tentacle systems.
We can build new harvester factories after that, with nice guns to chase off Nod attacks and highly efficient harvesting equipment integrated right at the start.
The reconstruction commission is handling a bunch of things we don't see because they're too small to make it to the top. It's best at dealing with a bunch of widespread relatively small damage, not an instance of localized heavy damage, which could take an entire quarter's worth of funding for the commission and still not be all that close to done. I don't favor putting 3 dice on it, but putting 2 on it would likely cut the reconstruction time in half, which will help popular morale, the economy, and also the military. It's not a top priority, but it is probably worth doing.Also, why is any plan putting dice on Tokyo?
Never mind enough dice to one turn it?
What happened in Tokyo is literally the reason we massively funded the Reconstruction Commissions, so we didn't need to put dice on it. If we wanted to micromanage reconstruction efforts we should defund the RCs and just waste dice we could use far more efficiently on trying to get things fixed up.
It would've been one thing if we had heard from the military and InOps that a follow up strike was likely. We haven't. What we do have is an incoming housing crisis, an ever ongoing demand for more Energy, fortresses to build in the YZs and a Planned City to finish up.
Also also, why is any plan building railgun harvesters? We actually have enough railgun harvesters for most purposes, if we want to grow our current and future resourcing gains we should go for tentacle harvesters and refits, which will be vastly superior and, knowing we are working with competent staff, probably means that we don't need to do an immediate refit of all the harvesters rolling off the lines in the shiny new factories to fit the new tentacle systems.
We can build new harvester factories after that, with nice guns to chase off Nod attacks and highly efficient harvesting equipment integrated right at the start.
"Winding down" isn't the same thing as "over". This will be the fourth turn in a row we roll battle dice for the war, after over an entire IRL year preparing for our next major war with NOD. As soon as exactly next turn, I'm looking forward to pivoting away from war turns, just like you. But I won't pretend like the war has suddenly disappeared in a poof of fairy dust and we're no longer at risk of another Tokyo, or worse, happening.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.
NOD is not a monolith. Unlike GDI, they have fragmented forces everywhere. Many of them will be completely worn down by the ongoing conflict, sure. But many of them could have been holding forces back in reserve, if not having entirely kept out of the current fighting just for a moment like this. India, for example, has been mostly focusing on sieging the Himalayan Blue Zone, but they haven't pulled any Masterstrokes on us yet, and we don't have any kind of clear picture of how many forces they have.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.
"Make a profit" does not matter anymore. We are not resource limited. We're dice limited. More Resources no longer means more actions being done. We've gotten to the point during this Four-Year-Plan where we've flipped the game. We have Plans right now that can afford to do said "Expensive Stuff". Just because we can't activate literally every single most expensive project simultaneously doesn't mean we don't have enough to do those projects anyways! At some point, more resources ceases to make a sizeable impact, and we're well past then already.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.
The commission is amazing for the general damage, and the amount we put into it means it can punch above its weight a little and fix bigger stuff faster. Small to medium reconstruction issues. Tokyo is not that, and it's a major population centre to boot.
The reconstruction commission is handling a bunch of things we don't see because they're too small to make it to the top. It's best at dealing with a bunch of widespread relatively small damage, not an instance of localized heavy damage, which could take an entire quarter's worth of funding for the commission and still not be all that close to done. I don't favor putting 3 dice on it, but putting 2 on it would likely cut the reconstruction time in half, which will help popular morale, the economy, and also the military. It's not a top priority, but it is probably worth doing.
For Railgun Harvesters, that's something that we don't have enough of, apparently, to deter insurgent attacks and help lock down our new Green Zones. Granted, I think that focusing on harvesting tendrils is probably a better usage of our dice/resources, but that doesn't make doing the railgun refits a bad idea.