-[] Caloric Reclamation Processor Deploy 2 die 20R
We have reason to think that the politically (and literally) palatable version of this project is an
Infrastructure project. The Agriculture version gives us +Food, but at the cost of losing Political Support because the stuff tastes like distilled essence of yuck. Just something to consider. The main things that need doing in Agriculture are to start
storing all the Food surplus we already have, with the
Extra Large Food Stockpiles action and/or the
Strategic Stockpile construction action.
...
(I'm surprised it's Infrastructure and not Light Industry, since the corpse starch reprocessing process sounds more like a
chemical process, the kind of thing GDI would do in big-ass factories. But
@Ithillid makes his own choices)
[X] Plan: MARV Rush
-[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plants (Phase 8) 67/300 1 dice 20R
-[] Isolinear Chip Foundry Anadyr 2 dice 2 dice 100R
-[] Chemical Fertilizer Plants (Phase 2) 276/300 1 dice 15R
-[] Civilian Drone Factories 104/380 4 dice 40R
-[] Freeze Dried Food Plants 151/200 1 die 20R
-[] Universal Rocket Launch System Deployment (Phase 3) 0/200 2 dice 30R 23%
-[] Escort Carrier Shipyards (Dublin) 0/240 3 dice 60R 54%
-[] Escort Carrier Shipyards (Nagoya) 171/240 1 dice 20R
So, just asking, bear in mind that we'll probably have +18 Energy to play with if we
don't complete a fusion phase next turn. Have you counted things out to make sure you have enough Energy to do everything you want to do? Obviously you can't estimate Energy costs for the caloric reclamation plants or the laser deployment, since those don't exist yet in writing, but it's something to consider.
Tiberium 7/7 140R
-[] Reclamator Hub Blue Zone 9 (Progress 0/335) (Canberra) 7 dice 140R
(Military)
-[] Reclamator Hub Blue Zone 9 (Progress 0/335) (Canberra) 2 dice 20R
I'm pretty sure MARV hubs still cost 20 R/die as a Military project, so I think you're 20 R short here. More generally, talk to us a bit about the expected payoff. What do we get for doing this? Do you expect to complete two MARV fleets? Three? Which ones? Elaborate, since it's the memetic cornerstone of your entire plan.
Orbital 8(7+Erewhon)/6 160R
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 102/1535 3+1 Erewhon dice 80R
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 1+2) 45/285 3 dice 60R
-[] Lunar Regolith Harvesting (Phase 2) 276/320 1 dice 20R
I think three dice might be overinvestment here, but I could be wrong.
Military 12/8 190R
-[] ASAT Defense System (Phase 4) 36/220 2 dice 40R 45%
I think we should push OSRCT first and ASAT later. OSRCT is a big enough project commitment that if we have bad luck and need to throw in more dice to compensate, we need to do it
now; it can't wait until 2061Q3 or whatever. ASAT is smaller and more manageable in that respect; we totally
could just slam two dice into it in 2061Q3, probably a third and a fourth if necessary in 2061Q4, and we'd probably be fine.
OSRCT isn't like that; if the first batch of rolls are disappointing we'll still be something like eight dice away from the finish line. So we need to pace ourselves and start sooner.
So thoughts on Chicago q2 or q3? 1hi and 6 infra should push the stage through in one go and there is another stage so we don't lose rollover plus min use of HI dice.
Unless the laser deployment project turns out to be
really big, Heavy Industry dice are no longer so precious that we can't afford to use two of them this way. Or rather, Heavy Industry dice are no longer
more precious than Infrastructure dice. We have 20 to go, we need about two more phases of fusion power to power war factories (8 dice) and also Anadyr (2-4 dice). Unless the industrial laser project is 8-10 dice (I'll be surprised if it is, since that translates as about 640-800 Progress), we can fit in multiple dice on Chicago over the course of the Plan, though timing might be tight in 2061Q4 if we refuse to use Free dice in Heavy Industry during 2061 for some perverse reason.
We definitely want
most of the Chicago dice coming out of Infrastructure, of course, and on any turn that we do Chicago, if we are investing Free dice in Heavy Industry, we should bear in mind that it is more cost-effective to do Free dice in
Infrastructure if the project in question is Chicago.
With that said, I'm strongly in favor of
Chicago Phase 4 at some point in that timeframe, yes!
Q2 if we can plausibly hope to manage it; something weird may come up.
With that said, that's part of why I want to do some work on Tokyo in 2061Q1. It's looking like Q1 will be our "tidy up loose ends" turn in Infrastructure, and Q2 is...
not, but is rather going to be a "Chicago mainly" turn.
And if we don't push it forward at least a little right now, Tokyo harbor is otherwise going to be a loose end until very late 2061 or early 2062. That's a long time to ignore the damage, and it won't be a good look as we go into reallocation.
Plus, I want to
NOT still have a -30 RpT drain on our budget from the reconstruction authority when we get to 2062Q1, but I don't think we can reasonably hope for that outcome if Tokyo still has bomb craters in it over a year after it was attacked. It'll take further time to wind that down.
Definitely in favor of Chicago at some point.
I have no idea when because our plan goals keep shifting and I have no idea when we will be able to spare the dice in the appropriate categories.
Harvesting tendrils showing up kinda grabbed all my attention.
Due to relative dice bonuses, Chicago is mainly an Infrastructure project, because this is where we get the best return on dice invested. We must spend at least one Heavy Industry die on Chicago every turn we work on it, but that's not a crippling obstacle, and we
should be able to do that at any time we like and still clear our Plan goals in that area.
Chicago Phase 4 currently stands at 3/550 Progress. Throwing six Infrastructure dice and one Heavy Industry die at the project for 140 R in a single turn gives us a 74.8% chance of single-turn completion. Adding one Free die to Infrastructure and doing the same thing with that extra die attached boosts the odds to 95.3%, and since this is a project with rollover onto Phase 5, there is no long-term downside to overinvesting in it.
So we can fairly easily knock out this project,
IF we are willing to commit our full array of Infrastructure dice to it for a single turn. Which we definitely have enough wiggle room to do.
...
We have 24 Infrastructure dice left in 2061.
The only truly mandatory project in Infrastructure is to finish two more phases of
Blue Zone Apartments, which will require roughly 250 more Progress to finish- that is to say, roughly 2-4 more Infrastructure dice. Two if we're
very lucky, four if we're quite unlucky, probably three.
There are also two
quasi-mandatory projects (as in, we'll need to do this, because the alternatives are worse or would be very stupid for us to pursue). The first is relatively simple- we need to spend one more die on the current phase of fortress towns. It would be unwise not to finish them.
More importantly...
@Ithillid has, I am told, told us that there will be an Infrastructure project to use the Nod 'corpse starch' technology (now given the significantly less metal name of 'caloric reclamation'). This, as I understand it, will be a project to process agricultural waste into Stored Food without cutting into our reserves of normal, edible(ish) Food.
Since hitting the Stored Food target is likely to be
difficult, especially what with us rolling a natural 1 on the accursed
Freeze Dried Food Plants project that is the cornerstone of our existing efforts to do so... Well, we need all the help we can get from Infrastructure in making this happen.
However, it seems unlikely that this will use up
so many of our Infrastructure dice that we can't afford to spare half a dozen or so for Chicago.
...
Now, it would be a pity if we were stuck rolling, say, four dice on apartments, one on fortresses, six on Chicago, and if that left us with nothing for anything but caloric reclamation. There are a few other projects we'd
LIKE to do, such as:
Suborbital Shuttles Phase 1 (probably about two more dice; this powers us through the most undesirable stage of the project and gets us through to the part where it starts being a good return on investment if we just want +Logistics)
Rail Network Construction Campaigns Phase 5 (this links up the new Green Zone territories we have conquered during Steel Vanguard)
Tokyo Harbor Reconstruction (a personal bugbear of mine, because I don't want to leave the project ongoing all the way up through 2062)
Bureau of Arcologies (the event text explicitly notes that taking this action during the current plan may keep the legislature from imposing punitive "must build many many arcology phases" on us at reapportionment, so we should
probably take this action in 2061Q4 rather than waiting until 2062Q1 or later.
Fitting all of
THAT in around Chicago, the caloric reclamation plants, and finishing the fortresses could prove difficult, but by no means impossible.
