There are going to be other low cost housing projects, but there are going to be complications.
Complications were expected. I don't mean to hassle you, and if you don't want to answer that's fine, but...
Would you consider the current high Logistics cost of apartment phases to be an example of a "complication," or when you say "complication," do you mean something significantly worse and trickier to deal with?
And the fortress towns are winding down as well.
Not entirely unexpected. Winding down with the current sixth phase, or will there be a seventh to finish nailing down the post-Steel Vanguard frontiers? Again, "wait and see" is an acceptable answer, but I hope you can understand my curiosity.
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[blather follows]
So, if I may butt in on your discussion
@Hazard and
@Simon_Jester , but before I go into work I think I can take a moment to throw in my two cents about the role and impacts of new military design and technology.
Technology for technology's sake doesn't really... do a whole lot, but militaries seldom do tech for tech's sake. A lot is merely iterative, making something better at what it already does. Others provide entirely new capabilities that merit changes, large or small, to doctrine. Some tech and designs provide a gross advantage over its predecessors such that a response is crucial. And some remake the face of war entirely because existing doctrine or weapons are wholly incapable of contending with it at humanly plausible scale.
Gunpowder. Radar and radar-guided munitions.
The Dreadnought.
(I just really like lazerpig okay) ...Zone Armor.
You're right.
Zone armor is the priority of every branch because it is utterly transformative, deployed fully it merits rethinking most of our doctrine. Yes, most, because part of zone armor is its ability to command and control drones, and we're on the cusp of that too. It'd have its impacts on everything else even before then just from sensor fusion and the like, but in our case it's a keystone to doctrinal shifts that will make the next tiberium war nearly unrecognizeable from the regency war we just fought.
Command and Conquer, as an RTS concerned with game balance, largely does not simulate this, and can't be pointed to to rule things out by "what happened". But Ithillid is a historian. He knows how this stuff goes, and can be trusted not to let the conceits of the source material get in the way when a spot of realism would enhance the game.
I broadly agree. I do want to develop the Lancer some time in the near future, by the way. By "near" I mean, oh, 3-4 turns, tops.
But I don't want to prioritize it over just
bulk production capacity of Zone Armor in general. Not least because I don't think Ground Force will be able to start figuring the doctrinal revolution out until they actually have physically
enough Zone Armor to do division-scale operations and exercises with it.
Historically, the closest analogy I can think of is the invention of the tank. The tank revolutionized warfare, but the countries that were best equipped to figure out
how it would revolutionize warfare were the ones that actually funded significant-scale units equipped with it. Because once you had an armored division on your order of battle somewhere, you could stop theorycrafting and actually take the tanks out on the road to figure out how things worked in practice. Even peacetime exercises with a force like that are important, and if your nation was involved in any "small wars," it
really helped if you could take a proper mechanized force and fight with it under the intended and anticipated conditions of future wars.
We're going to be figuring out how to use power armor for Ground Force on a large scale, and that means we need large scale production as a key step on the road to figuring out the doctrinal revolution. ZOCOM cannot, in and of itself, help us here. First, because ZOCOM is scattered so widely that I doubt they ever fight with more than a regiment or two in any one place, except maybe during the Tib War III assaults on the threshold towers. Second, because ZOCOM fights under conditions very different from those of Ground Forces' normal warfare, to the point where their doctrine is almost certainly
not the doctrine Ground Force needs to develop.
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The thing is, if you're looking at the development of the tank, it hardly matters whether your first generation tank production models were ideal. What matters is to get into mass production and start accruing combat experience so you can figure out what you need and iterate on the design. Otherwise you just get increasingly impractical prototypes being tinkered with by people who aren't engaging fully with the problem of "so what if we need ten thousand of these" or "will this actually hold up in the intended use case?" The prototypes may
work, or they may work in the highly specialized use cases that reflect their prior and ongoing use, but at some point you need to just say "ah fuckit" and have actual production capacity.
Hence my desire,
for now, in the present moment, to focus on just building some more factories so we have the basic bulk capacity to even
approach a workable doctrine for mass, division-scale Ground Force Zone Armor deployments. We can refine the details once we have a few more of the factories built.
Edit:
As regards conventional military doctrine and Zone Lancers, Zone Armor being rolled out en masse is a transformative event for infantry doctrine, and having the Lancer variant ready for the reworking of doctrine seems like a good idea. Too busy to try to say more now.
You're absolutely right. However, the reworking of the doctrine is likely to be a years-long process, much as the process of figuring out how the tank fits into modern mechanized warfare was a years-long process.
And because no one's perfect, there are likely to be some false starts (e.g. the British insistence on splitting up tanks as "infantry" and "cruiser" models, or the US Army's tendency to cling to horse cavalry well past the point when they should have been beelining for armored cars and mechanized cavalry).
All in all, I think
right now just increasing bulk production is important, and more important than adding more bells and whistles and variants. I expect that feeling of mine to change soon, after we have 2-3-4 more factories under our belts. I think that will be
very much in time for the addition of the Lancer to contribute and play a role in the ongoing evolution of Ground Force doctrine to accommodate powered armor.
Communal housing is our potential apartment replacement for the niche of low cost but acceptable quality housing. Especially with apartments capping out at 10 phases, we need to put 2 dice into communal housing experiments next turn so that the infusion of new housing stock isn't interrupted any more than it has to be.
The good news is, I was already planning to do that, though I'd wavered a bit on whether or how to fit
Green Architecture into the scheme of things.
We can get away with creating Yellow Zoner ghettos for a few months if we really must, but keeping YZ refugee populations stashed away in their own little enclaves in the "bad" parts of town for multiple turns is edging way too close to a temporary solution becoming permanent.
Well, we're not going to just
stop trying to build more Housing. The main thing is that we need to make very, very sure during reallocation that we don't accidentally commit ourselves to spending all our Free dice in (say) Heavy Industry and Orbital. Because we may find ourselves needing a boatload of Free dice in Infrastructure if we're stuck trying to slam out arcology phases.
Putting the marginalized newcomers in their own enclaves in the shitty part of town will reinforce negative social stereotypes and make integration that much harder for everybody. The YZ and BZ populations need to be forced to interact and get used to living with each other, which we make an effort to do when filling up new housing. But we're not going to go around evicting Blue Zoners from their already-assigned apartments to make room for new YZ refugees at an optimal anti-racist population mix, that would be a step too far for even Seo and would definitely get the Blue Zoners rioting in the streets. So the only way we can get properly balanced communities is new construction that we can control the flow of fresh tenants to. Yellow Zoners passing through de facto ghettos in commieblocks or fortress towns for a turn or two while we frantically build enough new communities to get a good mixture is ok, but letting them sit for years is definitely not.
Well, I certainly intend to keep building new Housing to keep this from becoming a lasting problem.
With that said, GDI's "negative rent" system is actually a very clever way to help handle this, in my opinion. Blue Zoners who don't mind living in cramped housing can effectively collect a subsidy for living in these same neighborhoods and developments alongside Yellow Zoners, rather than being
forced against their will to live there because they are poor. Since the problem isn't actually that the housing areas in question are crime-riddled hellholes, it favors mixing.
There is also the fact that, helpfully,
people don't move immediately. Even if a slightly larger apartment is available or something, population flows take time. Thus, not
all the Blue Zoners who live in low quality housing would have moved out immediately and turned those buildings into ghost towns. Some of the commieblock residents would have stayed there as Yellow Zoners (usually usually from the adjacent zone) moved in, for instance.
[gotta go, errands, more replies later]
