Why are our counter insurgency forces so useless against the Shadow Warriors?
Your systematic bias in favor of only ever noticing Nod successes while ignoring Nod failures is causing you to post a lot of really bad takes. It's getting kind of dumb. You need to check your bias, get it under control, and recognize that while we often see pictures of Nod winning a battle, GDI won the war.
Notably, we often see Nod winning a battle because it's the battles Nod
won that cause shit we have to sort out in the aftermath. Which means Ithillid has to
alert us to the fact that those battles have taken place. If Bintang hulks out and fucks up Tokyo, we have to
know, so that we are aware of why there is suddenly an "unfuck Tokyo" project on our docket. If Nod as a whole starts firing nuclear warning shots, we have to
know so that we know to dial back the
Yellow Zone Harvesting action before a nuclear war starts. This tends to result in Ithillid posting war posts in which some rough stuff happens to Nod.
Gideon saved himself because we cpuldnt close the lines as his subtle operators helped to neuter Indianopolis' defenses.
And is there a reason why we arent using Tiberium shard bombs ourselves on NOD bases and population centers in retaliation to Gideon's Tib fuckery?
In regards to the first,
yes, Gideon was able to launch effective rear guard actions. Gideon is a very well equipped warlord. He has nukes and shit. If he gets desperate enough, he has many cans of powerful whup-ass he can unleash. His only source of restraint is the fear that we might retaliate in kind, just as we are restrained in using our greatest whup-assery for fear that
Nod might retaliate in kind. Do not whine about the cosmic unfairness of Gideon being able to launch effective rear guard actions; he is perfectly capable of drawing a line in the sand with fusion bombs if pressed hard enough, because "nuclear missile silo" is canonically a weapon Nod possesses for people who've maxed out their tech tree, and Gideon's maxed out his.
In regards to the second, we aren't using tiberium shard bombs on Nod bases and population centers, or other weapons of mass destructions such as nuclear bombs and ion cannon, for several reasons, which have already been explained at some length. I won't go into more
Like do we have any stealth units or special ops at all.
Four words, buddy.
Gotta present for ya.
Like Decim said, it's mostly just a sampling bias in what makes it to our desk. But even among on-screen incidents, the Brotherhood doesn't "always win," they don't even mostly win. Just over the course of the past couple years that I can remember off the top of my head:
1) We captured a Shadow Team and shook them upside down until all their tech fell out before the war.
2) A whole string of failed assassinations before the war.
3) The intelligence coup of the century that let us flip the tables on the Brotherhood with Steel Vanguard. This is a real big one.
4) Mehretu and Reynaldo whiffing the majority of their assassination attempts during the war.
5) The Remembrancers getting detected and chased away from the Bogatyr.
6) The Remembrancers getting detected and chased away from the portal facility.
7) Failing half of their recent assassination attempts, yeah they bagged two politicians but they also missed Stavrakas and Crucible.
And that's just what I can recall offhand from recent events without going back and re-reading old updates
They also recently tried for General Jackson but only got close enough to kneecap her mech, so... B- for effort, I guess?
If we're discussing NODs ability infiltration and sabotage should we not work towards things like Advanced ECCM Development to counter jamming and Stealth Disruptor Development to impact their stealth abilities?
Yeah, we totally should.
The thing is, what we learned from the Stealth Detector or whatever it was is that technologies that materially cut into Nod's capability for deception and stealth grant a huge advantage over Nod when they are first deployed, but are
expensive to deploy. That combination means that we have a strong incentive to wait until an opportune time when deploying the technology has the potential to be decisive. I, for one, am hoping to have one or both deployed shortly before Karachi.
Seriously whats stopping us from carpet bombing all of South america in a grid pattern with ion cannons from space. We bomb a grid, see if some invisible structure had blocked it, if yes, we keep firing until the shield s are overwhelmed or we move on to another grid.
1) Killing every civilian in the South American Yellow Zone, which at a casual and approximate estimate is likely to be something like 30-60 million people, the vast majority of whom are more like Nod's slaves than they are like Nod's supporters.
2) You probably don't care about all that Hitler-level mass murder, though. So care about this: High probability that Nod has some liquid tiberium kicking around somewhere in sufficient quantity that a hit from an ion cannon to trigger massive tiberium explosions of the type that created the giant-ass Red Zones now carpeting large chunks of Australia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. You're gambling with the continued existence of the South American Blue Zone.
3) Actually, it's not so much of a gamble as a "burn it," because Stahl has nuclear weapons. We can't carpet-bomb his territories with ion cannon and nuclear weapons fast enough to stop him from launching his own nuclear missiles, nor can we stop his missiles before they destroy every target in
at least the adjacent Blue Zone in South America. He may turn out to have enough reach to also hit targets in Blue Zones in North America or Africa, too; it wouldn't be out of the question. Remember: Nod knows where our centers of population and industry are. We do
NOT know where
Nod's centers are. Not precisely. Likewise, we do not know where their nuclear weapons are. That is a
crippling disadvantage in a war fought with weapons of mass destruction. All they have to do is see that we are starting to pulverize certain grid squares and
shoot. So you're just flat-out wrong about this destroying Nod's nuclear launch capabilities in this kind of attack, unless of course Stahl is dumbass enough to park all his nukes in one place and you get lucky and hit that place first, which ahahahah, NO.
4) Nod's most important targets are protected by ion-disruptor shields anyway and cannot be ionized from space by any reasonable volume of fire. This is tech Nod has had for at least fifteen years, so it is in no way "broken" that this tech is more available now than it was then.
5) All other Nod warlords will correctly conclude that they're next, and will launch
their own strikes with weapons of mass destruction against all GDI targets in reach. The ensuing apocalyptic war ends with GDI crippled and lobotomized, the vast majority of our citizens dead or dying, and the orbital ion cannons still pecking away from space to exterminate virtually all surviving human life on the surface
More like entirely confirmed. Look at what Bintang bombarded Tokyo with. Remember, she nuked your ships, and conventionally bombarded your cities. There is a reason for that. Namely because it is an open threat that she could have blown every city in the Japanese Blue Zone to cinders if you kept pushing her.
Yeah. I kinda gathered that that was Bintang's way of saying "This could have been Operation Curtis LeMay Was A Pansy and dropped a few hundred kilotons each on most of your major cities in East Asia if I were more pissed about you conquering my tributaries in East Australia."
