[X] Plan Driven by G
Project List:
Suborbital Shuttles Phase 2-3 Complete
Urban Metros Phase 4 Complete
BZ Apartment Complexes Phase 9-13 Complete
Hm. Just thinking- how many Infrastructure dice is this? Putting together this as an Infrastructure docket...
2062Q1 (50 R)
Apartments Phase 9-10 (3 dice) (median result has little rollover to Phase 11)
Green Architecture (1 die)
Communal Housing (1 die)
(
@Lightwhispers , I think it was you who recommended frontloading
Green Architecture; I think you're right)
2062Q2 (50 R)
Apartments Phase 11-12 (4 dice) (median result has little rollover to Phase 13)
Communal Housing (1 die)
2062Q3 (75 R)
Apartments Phase 13 (2 dice)
Urban Metros Phase 4 (2 dice)
Suborbital Shuttles Phase 2 (1 die) (median result ~160/250)
2062Q4 (105 R)
Suborbital Shuttles Phase 2+3 (3 dice) (Phase 3 probably doesn't finish but this is worth slow-walking)
Rail Construction Phase 5 (2 dice)
2063...
(slow-walk
Suborbital Shuttles to completion)
(finish
Rail Construction Phase 5)
Now, the problem with this lineup is that it has big "gonna get worse before it gets better" energy as far as the Logistics indicator goes. The problem is that we need the Housing
now, the Housing is cheap per die, and the best major Logistics project is expensive per die, such that it has to either wait until we have actual money (2062Q3-Q4) or be done so slowly that it doesn't finish until that timeframe anyway.
Well, there's a few reasons mentioned.
Securing another red zone and helping military supplies.
Which hopefully will help mitigate that -3.
That's a good point. Getting rid of that -3 Logistics penalty is probably gated behind a combination of border fortresses and railroad connections, so the next phase of rails may
in effect provide a +5 Logistics or something. On the other hand, damn dat dice cost.
There's a bit of a fallacy in saying that we 'need' Rails to take best advantage of Red Zone operations. Yes, it does help somewhat, but we can kind of presume based on the operations being available to work on that we have some kind of logistical route out to at least some of the proposed harvesting areas. Additionally our Tiberium-mining operations may or may not affect our Logistics indicators directly (depending on the operation) but they do tend to include some flavour text that involves laying their own logistical tails; that's why Yellow Zone expansions supported Operation Steel Vanguard - because as opposed to Rail expansions the mine expansions were laying out a large degree of smaller transport routes and infrastructure.
This this this very this. Only the glacier mining operations seem to carry an explicit -Logistics cost, which is probably because they are
extraordinarily hungry in that respect.
Though it should be noted that there is precedent for a different project lowering the Logistics cost of specific glacier mines that would otherwise cost more. That's what happened with the glacier mines around the Red Sea after we built the Mecca-Medina-Jeddah planned city complex.
Also, Red Zone mining has been described in the past as being more akin to a large caravan than any kind of established outpost or anything - their logistics have to be handled by airlift and such, and there's a decidedly limited degree to which a static rail line can help.
Yeah, but that's in part because to get from our Blue/Green Zone border to a Red Zone, you have to pass through a Yellow Zone or travel over water.
In places where we have a direct land connection to the Red Zone, I suspect it helps quite a bit to push the railheads forward and as close to the Red Zone boundary as possible.
Gone. It's too naratively borring to have unlimited phases of apartments, especially as their logistics required climb higher and higher. So they'll be removed from the queue-we've built seven phases of apartments in the past two years, we are over apartmentalizing. The QM just can't think of anything more interesting to say for new phases of apartments.
Okay. Just to be clear, is this something you know that Ithillid has spoken on, or are you reading between the lines?
Also, unless the refugee wave dries up Real Soon and no new wave happens afterwards, then if apartments go and no low-cost housing option replaces it, we're borderline railroaded into running out of Housing no matter what. Trying to slam out an entire phase of arcologies every turn to keep up that way borders on impossibility. Not
completely out of the question, but close.
I'm not saying that's inconceivable, but my gut says there's going to be another "acceptable low-cost housing" solution of some kind, either a continuation of apartments or something else.
The thing is, if we do Zone Lancers now, they come built into the ZA factories we build. If we do Lancers later, we have to go back and refit them to build Lancers. You might think that such a specialized suit would never be required in very large numbers but the first factories skew HEAVILY towards the advanced and specialized suits and away from the generic and boring.
The
ZOCOM factories from the '50s might skew that way. The new factories we're building are designed for maximum volume of production, not bespoke advanced production, because they're designed for Ground Force and Ground Force is not a bespoke-scale organization.
Furthermore, we're going to be building new power armor factories throughout this Plan; pressure is high and we're likely to wind up agreeing to build like twelve of the things total (counting the two that are already done). Worst case, we end up with a situation where the first X factories are dedicated to producing boring old power armor, and the next 12-X have expanded "new hotness" power armor production facilities to compensate. Because we
know Ground Force is going to be using the boring old suits alongside the new hotness; both will still be in demand.
I think it'll be fine.
Again, I'm not asking you to go get word from the QM here, but... have you heard something I haven't? Again, the way you confidently rattle off "the first factories slew heavily..." suggests you know something I don't. Which is fine, but I wish people would tell me.
I also suspect that Phase 10 is the last one for Apartments. Narratively, it isn't viable to keep building housing like this.
Narratively, the big question is whether we "level off" ("this is the strain on logistical infrastructure caused by building X new urban cores per apartment phase, out of nothing") or whether
GDI has recovered a LOT of land over the past several years. Like, a lot. We're at something like 22% of the Earth's land surface now; it was down around 15% at our worst. And GDI's population is still less than 10% of what the Earth's real life population is. We don't actually have a problem with running out of space to put things in; the problem is that we're having to reconstruct entire urban areas rather than just continue finding housing for the existing immediate post-TWIII population... and that
costs.
It's at least superficially plausible to me that we do get some equilibrium point at which we can just keep building more apartment complexes almost indefinitely, at the price of "lots of -Logistics because you're not building these things close to your existing infrastructure anymore."
Steel Talons:
That's fair.
Don't get me wrong,
working on bleeding edge weapons has its place. Arguably, when fighting someone with such a marked high/low mix as Nod, even having those bleeding edge weapons equip a handful of elite formations, if you can afford it.
But sometimes what you need isn't a new gizmo; it's to buckle the fuck down and just start slamming out hundreds of thousands of something that works better than anything the enemy can make in comparable quantity, and rely on numbers and preparation to take down their handful of bespoke
Wunderwaffen.
That's the GDI way.