We're not going to get that government upgrade next turn, let alone invest the action, and without the passives handling it there's going to be quite a bit of pressure on the voters to say "Eh, how bad could going over our forest limits really be?" and vote for a shiny instead of forestry.
That is fair. But I have a counterpoint: Your mistrust of the voters is REALLY expensive.
Consider this. We ARE building a Lvl2 Marketplace next turn. I'm not going to bother presenting an argument for this; if you have been following the thread, it is clear which way voter sentiment falls.
A Lvl2 Marketplace costs 2 secondaries, 6 wealth, and 6 culture.
I would say that 6 wealth costs about a Main action to produce. {S} Plant Cotton + {S} Expand Economy gets us a total of +6 Wealth, +3 Econ, -1 Tech, -2 LTE, and I think that the Tech and LTE losses basically balance out the Econ gains there.
The 6 Culture would also probably require a main action to produce, but since we don't really need the culture urgently I'm going to be generous and call only a single secondary. Note that the most powerful stat-generating secondary we have produces only 5 net stats, and they are all hard-to-overflow Econ.
So in total, the cost of the Marketplace is 5 secondaries worth of actions and resources. These aren't just an abstract stat calculation but actual and near-immediate action expenses: we are,
as we speak, running low on both Econ and Wealth, and will have to take actions to restore them. We also have a constant Tech expenditure, which culture income and therefore overflow would have helped against.
So by not switching policies, we effectively commit 5{S} worth of actions. What about if we DO switch policies?
Well, switching policies next turn costs 1{S} for the switch. Then, if we want to Main Expand Forests for two turns, that would cost another 4{S}. At this point, we would have produced the same amount of forests, but also gotten +2 Econ, +2 LTE, and two major chances at forest innovation. Furthermore, we would have produce 8 infrastructure progress in those turns, enough to get us the Marketplace and have 2 progress left over.
So. After two turns, the difference is roughly measured as:
Don't Change Policies
Costs 5{S}.
Gets us +2 Forests, builds Marketplace.
Chance Policies
Costs 5{S}.
Gets us +2 Forests, builds Marketplace.
Has 2 infrastructure progress left over
Gets +2 Econ, +2 LTE, and 2 forestry innovation chances
Has 2x Policies set to Infrastructure and not Forestry
~~~~~~
You know how you guys have said that policies aren't for short-term quests? Well here is the thing. Infrastructure Policy is so much more valuable than Forestry Policy right now, that
even if we switched the policies back after two turns, therefore eating ANOTHER secondary to switch back, then the net effect of switching would be to have 2 infrastructure progress left over, +2 Econ, +2 LTE, and +2 forestry innovation chances, all for the cost of being down a single secondary.
