Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Prime 2.0 · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
We'd need to leave some dice fallow at first,

I'm not sure why, to be honest. Free dice can go into security reviews, and security reviews also take up department dice - and then we have multiple 5rpd projects we've been saving for lean times, and some 10rpd ones besides.

And then there are the aeva projects, which deactivate even more dice.

Seems like we ought to be able to put them all to use just fine, honestly.

Ithillid · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Getting a sense of whether the Navy means "start work on this and don't completely drop it and if it takes four years to get the full set of associated projects done, we won't consider it a broken promise as long as you don't outright quit trying for too long" or "and we're gonna get really mad at you on short notice" is the kind of thing I'm a bit neurotic about, I guess.

It is mostly the former more than anything else.

bigking321 · Jul 20, 2022

Would the governor refit fall under that refit department that's been discussed?

Not sure if we've had any concrete details yet but the governors, lasers, and railgun munitions would all be covered if I understand it correctly.

Definitely something we should consider doing. It would save a lot of dice and resources if those projects just happened in the background.

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

Ithillid said:
It is mostly the former more than anything else.

That's... good to know. In that case, I might feel more comfortable making the deal. I'm very happy to promise them the Governor-A deployment along with wrapping up the naval projects I already listed, and in fact to me that's kind of the minimum compatible with saying "we want the navy to be in good shape."

bigking321 said:
Would the governor refit fall under that refit department that's been discussed?

Maybe some parts would and other parts wouldn't, if it's a combination of refitting existing ships and facilities and also breaking ground on new shipyards.

Not sure if we've had any concrete details yet but the governors, lasers, and railgun munitions would all be covered if I understand it correctly.

Definitely something we should consider doing. It would save a lot of dice and resources if those projects just happened in the background.

Possibly, but the departments aren't magic; it can take them a while to chew through a big project (e.g. the Tokyo reconstruction). We might not be saving dice on net. Then again, we might.

I'd rather not spin off the Bureau of Refits or the Bureau of Munitions or whatever until after reapportionment, frankly, when we have a better sense of which military projects are and are not Plan commitments. Spinning off one of our Military dice for the whole Fourth Year Plan when realistically it's gonna do seven dice worth of work on Plan targets and nine dice on stuff that isn't might not be a good deal for us, if we want to avoid a situation like the one we face now where we've done a whole mess of work for the military but a lot of it doesn't count towards keeping the legislature happy.

Prime 2.0 said:
I'm not sure why, to be honest. Free dice can go into security reviews, and security reviews also take up department dice - and then we have multiple 5rpd projects we've been saving for lean times, and some 10rpd ones besides.

There are very few 5 R/die projects on the docket at the moment, so I'm not sure what you mean unless you've heard in Discord that those projects will reappear in 2062Q1 or something.

And then there are the aeva projects, which deactivate even more dice.

Yeah, if you don't mind spending an average of three Service dice at 20 R/die and -6 Capital Goods, neither of which we'll really be able to afford to spare in the early phase of 2062. We need to avoid unnecessary Capital Goods expenditures to make sure we have a surplus despite all the vein mining we're going to have to do.

Right now we're sitting at +16 Capital Goods with the Q2 turn results factored in. We've got +6 in the pipeline in the near future from Crystal Beam Laser, +2 from Bergen Phase 3, +2 from Enterprise Phase 5, offsetting -2 from tiberium claws, -1 from hospital expansions, -2 from the Newark yards, and -1 from the Mastodon plants.

So by Q4 we can reasonably hope to be sitting at about +20, allowing for any trickles we get from departmental dice.

In the longer term (counting projects we're gonna want to start as early in 2062 as practical if not sooner), we have -2 from electric cars, probably -1 from the station bay on Enterprise, another -1 from more hospital expansions, up to -6 or so from Zone Armor factories, and -2 from the Seattle yards, Balancing that off, we have maybe +6 from Chicago Phase 4, +4 from Carbon Nanotube Foundries, and conceivably +8 from Advanced Materials Bay if we decide we want it. All of those are expensive projects to be doing in early 2062 and some of them would be hard or impossible to frontload, though we could invest in some of them plausibly in 2061Q4 if we wanted to.

Just from the above projects I've listed, we're looking at +18 Capital Goods, +26 with the materials bay, and that's taking for granted that we do Chicago Phase 4 in the reasonably near future and find or make time for the nanotube foundries.

And we're already getting kicks in the pants from the legislature for the civilian economy languishing, and one major cause of civilian economy languishing is Capital Goods scarcity, and we really wish we could do about 10-15 phases of vein mining in 2062 to get our budget up to snuff if ZOCOM doesn't feel like it's ready to play ball.

So yeah.

Capital Goods are going to be tight at least until we can get another megaproject up and running, and there is not room for AEVA deployment.

Hell, just running through this has partially converted me to the merits of Advanced Materials Bay.

Derpmind · Jul 20, 2022

Ithillid said:
-[ ] Multiple Civilian Departments: Take no more than 20 percent of budget at reallocation: +15 Political Support

I really like this option. I've been thinking we want to spin off all of the available sub-bureaus by Q4 so we have the most room possible to gain back dice in the next year. The problem is the temporary crunch in the first year as we bring our budget back, but options like this makes it fairly easy to reach 100 PS going in to the reallocation. At which point we'll near certainly be able to afford to pass off the sub-bureau's costs to the Congress so that we need longer have to pay for them. Combine that with giving the rest of GDI and the civilian economy a bigger shot of the arm? All increases in tax revenue go through the Treasury first; we'd have four years straight to reap that increasing harvest.

That said, we're likely going to have other options that can get us to 100 PS, and I know the 20% reallocation is hard to sell, even if it would be a big help to everyone outside the Treasury. (Also, I don't remember if we have a hard cap on how much PS we can gain?)

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

Derpmind said:
I really like this option. I've been thinking we want to spin off all of the available sub-bureaus by Q4 so we have the most room possible to gain back dice in the next year. The problem is the temporary crunch in the first year as we bring our budget back, but options like this makes it fairly easy to reach 100 PS going in to the reallocation. At which point we'll near certainly be able to afford to pass off the sub-bureau's costs to the Congress so that we need longer have to pay for them.

I just want to be clear, do we have any assurance of this? Because I'd really hate to make choices going into reapportionment that are predicated on the assumption that we'll have opportunities that don't materialize.

From the point of view of the government departments we're making this promise to, it would feel like kind of a cheat if Treasury swore to forego about 100 RpT of income (roughly a 5% slice of the budget), only to then spin off 100 RpT worth of sub-departments that technically aren't part of Treasury anymore but are now new competitors in the race for the other 75-80% of the budget.

So I suspect that spinning off all those new bureaus is going to cost at least 15 PS, because the bureaucratic resistance to our doing that is going to be at least comparable to the resistance we'd face from just trying to sequester that slice of the budget ourselves instead of insisting that it be handed out to our new Mini-Mes.

Combine that with giving the rest of GDI and the civilian economy a bigger shot of the arm? All increases in tax revenue go through the Treasury first; we'd have four years straight to reap that increasing harvest.

Yeah, but I think we're going to be pretty lucky if that adds up to more than +100 RpT until a long way into the plan.

That said, we're likely going to have other options that can get us to 100 PS, and I know the 20% reallocation is hard to sell, even if it would be a big help to everyone outside the Treasury.

Just remember, a lot of the stuff we do is ALSO a big help to everyone outside the Treasury. Being able to afford to fund, say, Nuuk Phase 4 is also a boost to the civilian economy (because Capital Goods shortages are a genuine problem the economy faces).

I've been concerned lately that there seems to be a rise in the sentiment that the Treasury is somehow selfish or unethical for striving to hold onto and conserve resources for its own operations. The problem is that these operations include a lot of stuff Parliament and the populace truly want done, and expect us to figure out how to accomplish. But we are not magicians, and we have to work within the constraints of what Parliament decides to do to (or with) our budget. If we sign too much of it away, everything else we do gets pushed back, perhaps subtly, perhaps dramatically.

HousePet · Jul 20, 2022

I am slightly puzzled that we are still shouldering the full cost of whatever we spin off. (Shouldn't someone else be handling the Forgotten aid funding by now?)
But perhaps that is simply because Parliament hasn't got around to working out a new budget system (something about a war), or they are waiting for the Reallocation so that other Ministries have the funding to manage them.

Derpmind · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Just remember, a lot of the stuff we do is ALSO a big help to everyone outside the Treasury. Being able to afford to fund, say, Nuuk Phase 4 is also a boost to the civilian economy (because Capital Goods shortages are a genuine problem the economy faces).

I've been concerned lately that there seems to be a rise in the sentiment that the Treasury is somehow selfish or unethical for striving to hold onto and conserve resources for its own operations. The problem is that these operations include a lot of stuff Parliament and the populace truly want done, and expect us to figure out how to accomplish. But we are not magicians, and we have to work within the constraints of what Parliament decides to do to (or with) our budget. If we sign too much of it away, everything else we do gets pushed back, perhaps subtly, perhaps dramatically.

We naturally value the parts of the game that what we can directly see over the parts we can't. How do we evaluate Nuuk over, say, ??? in InOps, or ??? in the Welfare Department? We usually only know of these things indirectly. It's possible that a better-funded InOps would have warned us to not do the most recent phase of YZ mining, or a better funded Welfare would have reduced the impact of our wartime Health penalty. But we don't have that info, and given that Ithillid can only write so much, the other departments basically have to be vague, abstracted entities with a fixed line budget and not much else.

It's far easier to justify maximal investment back into the Treasury, especially since we can increase our budget to do even more Treasury things. To mangle a quote: "The Treasury is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding Treasury." But only the Treasury can do that. Everyone else gets stuck with a fixed budget for 4 years. And given our (unforseen) massively expanded population, if we keep too much budget in reallocation then the other departments are going to be less capable of doing their own Nuuk-equivalents for 4 years straight.

TL;DR: It's both a mystery box and an obligation.

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

HousePet said:
I am slightly puzzled that we are still shouldering the full cost of whatever we spin off. (Shouldn't someone else be handling the Forgotten aid funding by now?)

To be fair, Treasury's budget has never dropped below about 30% of GDI's GDP for the entire game, and we are explicitly "the organization that handles the money." Making us responsible for the Forgotten aid subsidy program isn't actually unreasonable, and importantly, that is a program, not a whole government department in its own right.

Meanwhile, most of our spinoff bureaus consist pretty much entirely of Treasury personnel, probably use a lot of Treasury administrative systems and procedures, and are relying on skillsets developed within the Treasury-controlled planned economy. It is entirely reasonable that we are still paying for, say, the Bureau of Arcologies. It would not be unreasonable for Parliament to keep the Bureau of Arcologies as a component of the Treasury that has a mandatory minimum funding level within Treasury's budget... It's just that Treasury would prefer for it to be someone else's problem.

Derpmind said:
We naturally value the parts of the game that what we can directly see over the parts we can't. How do we evaluate Nuuk over, say, ??? in InOps, or ??? in the Welfare Department? We usually only know of these things indirectly. It's possible that a better-funded InOps would have warned us to not do the most recent phase of YZ mining, or a better funded Welfare would have reduced the impact of our wartime Health penalty. But we don't have that info, and given that Ithillid can only write so much, the other departments basically have to be vague, abstracted entities with a fixed line budget and not much else.

See, I'm aware of that, but at the same time, when we're explicitly told "the private sector is bottlenecked by a Capital Goods shortage," we should probably seriously consider whether it's actually important for us to produce Capital Goods. And producing Capital Goods costs money that comes out of our budget.

It's far easier to justify maximal investment back into the Treasury, especially since we can increase our budget to do even more Treasury things. To mangle a quote: "The Treasury is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding Treasury." But only the Treasury can do that. Everyone else gets stuck with a fixed budget for 4 years. And given our (unforseen) massively expanded population, if we keep too much budget in reallocation then the other departments are going to be less capable of doing their own Nuuk-equivalents for 4 years straight.

You're not wrong, but here's the thing.

The difference between 20% and 25% GDP starting budget for us is about a 25% increase in that initial seed corn amount. Which is very impactful, especially if we're under pressure to actually do things other than obsessively mine a ton of tiberium in early 2062, as well we may be.

The difference between 80% and 75% GDP starting budget for everyone else is about a 6% increase in everyone else's budget. That's not nothing, but it's unlikely to yield transformational results.

I'm not even suggesting maximal investment back into the Treasury.

What I'm suggesting is that we need to be mindful about what kind of minimum budget we actually need in order to be able to do our job, our job as defined by Parliament, reasonably effectively. And try not to fall too far below that.

...

Let's treat this as a thought experiment. How much money do we 'need' in 2062? Well, we're going to be starting a big tiberium mining kick, so as a starting point I would suggest we consider the cost of putting all our Tiberium and Free dice on vein mining. That's 280 R. If we don't spend that money it just makes recovering the budget and expanding the tiberium economy even harder down the road. Burning the seed corn is not a good move.

Now, Starbound is going to have expectations of us in Orbital, because that's the quid pro quo of them letting us keep the moon mining income: they expect us to use that income to fund space operations. They may accept a bit of jugglery at the beginning of a plan, though, so let's post a 60 R budget for Orbital. Hopefully we'll be able to find a 10 R/die project there, or Starbound will forgive us for leaving a few dice fallow to concentrate on a 20 R/die project.

...

All other budget areas don't place us under special obligations, in that it's unlikely that anyone is specifically going to have strong expectations on us, or that we will need to do a singular particular project, right then and there on the spot. Everyone will want us to do things but them not getting done right away usually won't be a problem, I think.

In most remaining areas there is something useful we can do at 10 R/die. Apartments, electric vehicles, artificial wood but maybe not much else, caffeinated kudzu or aquaponics, railgun munitions. Not sure about Services but projects do tend to turn up there, and heaven knows there's going to be a need for expanded social service infrastructure (e.g. stadiums and such) with our population growing by 100-150 million people within a few years.

So for all dice in categories not already designated, allocate 10 R/die. There will probably be a few items that are important enough to be worth doing right away even at more than 10 R/die, such as "unfinished business" from nearly-completed 2061Q4 projects, but that averages out; we can make up for it by finding any 5 R/die projects available (there's at least one in Military), or by leaving at least a few dice fallow in other areas where our Plan goals do not seem too burdensome.

(This actually means the Orbital stuff blurs into the background, but I want to make the point that leaving Orbital dice fallow after reapportionment is gonna be a bad look with Starbound if we do more than a very little of it.)

...

Now, even assuming we spin off every option we've seen and some we haven't, we go into 2062Q1 with 5 Infrastructure, 3 Heavy Industry, 3 Light Industry, 4 Agriculture, 5 Service, and 6-7 Military dice. Let's posit six. That's 27 dice that require funding. Posit that we do two security reviews, bringing us down to 25. I don't recommend going whole-hog and taking four security reviews, as the increased risk of failures spread across several departments seems nontrivial. Roll four times with a 90% chance of success and you have about a one in three chance of fucking up at least once. So, 250 R on top of the earlier budget categories.

So. 280 R for mining, 60 R for Orbital, 250 R for The Ministry Of Everything Else.

That is 590 R.

If we have less than 590 R to spend in 2062Q1, that is almost certainly going to come at the cost of opportunity costs on future projects that we could have worked on in 2062Q1, but chose not to. A little more than that might be nice, but 590 or so is close to our practical floor.

Which means that even if we have, say, 150 R in the piggy bank saved up (if we're doing the banking option, and we should, it may be hard to have much more)... Well, we need something like 440 RpT income, and anything less than that increasingly "cut into the muscle," not "cut into the fat."

Now, 100 RpT of that comes from moon mining, more or less, so that leaves about 340... which means that yes, we can get by on 20% of non-moon-mine GDP (about 420 RpT), as long as we divest most or all of our line items.

The problem, though, is that doing things this way means that we need that meme plan surge of tiberium mining income just to stay afloat since we're burning up our piggy bank money in the first quarter of the first year of the plan. We then need a second full meme plan surge of income to start getting the plane up and off the runway and into the air, and it goes on from there.

So going down to 20% GDP means a rough start, even if we do manage to shake off all the line items. But with that caveat, it's at least tenable...

...

...Except that if we shake off all the line items (total cost, more than 5% of the overall GDI budget)... We're not really doing the rest of the government any favors. They're no better off with us having 500 RpT of disposable income and 150 RpT of income that goes line items than they are with us having 500 RpT of disposable income while a cluster of loose independent ex-Treasury bureaus eat up 150 RpT of the rest of the budget.

InOps and Welfare and so on don't get the money either way.

That's what bugs me. We're not making the rest of the government better off by shaking off our spinoff departments to get away with formally claiming that "Treasury takes only 20% of the budget, and pay no attention to all our subsidiaries we just spun off so they won't count anymore."

mmgaballah · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
[ ] Department of Distributed Manufactures (New)
(+1 Capital Goods per turn, -20 resources per turn, -1 Light and Chemical Industry die)

Is this what we want one of our Light Industry dice to be doing, at this cost, every turn forever? I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. There are some real advantages to this option, but also major disadvantages, especially if we lock it in during 2061 and then have to take the extra -20 R out of our budget in early 2062.

I am pretty sure there are options later on once we pick this or stuff like it to expand and grow those departments letting them provide better returns

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

mmgaballah said:
I am pretty sure there are options later on once we pick this or stuff like it to expand and grow those departments letting them provide better returns

1) Why are you pretty sure of this? In most cases, the capacity of an organization like this, at least at the limits of resolution of our game engine, would only change significantly if we funnel them more money. We might have that option some day, but we might not.

2) Besides, one of the major reasons for the spinoff bureaus to even exist is to give the legislature a way to make certain things happen (such as "get more Capital Goods into the economy") other than just heaping us down with more and more Plan mandates. If they want the Bureau of Arcologies to be able to build more than the equivalent of two phases of arcologies per Plan, let them find the money to expand it, or let them wait until we've dug up enough extra tiberium mining income that we can afford to part with some of ours (that is, when we're back to more like 1000 RpT and less like 500 RpT).

3) Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right, that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea to do all the spinoffs right this minute when we're not going to have the money to do that any time soon even if the option becomes available. The spinoff departments existing doesn't mean it's necessarily optimal to take all of them right away, and I think we need to take some care to think over each one on a case-by-case basis.

I feel like to some extent we took a message from the QM ("If you want to be able to keep adding more dice to your very large organization, you need to start spinning off some chunks of the organization") and over-interpreted it into "and therefore, spinning off chunks is inherently always a good idea."

The thing is... As of 2060Q4, we were running at 57 dice. We have five spinoff dice options, having taken three of the available ones, and we have good reason to think at least one more option is coming.

How many dice do we expect to gain in 2062 from recruitment options? I think it would be optimistic to expect to be able to gain more than about five. Compare and contrast to the start of the Second Plan and Third Plan, if you like, but at some point, we've just... done enough, at least for now when we're at a very delicate phase of our budgetary cycle and need to be careful not to write checks we aren't going to be able to cash.

doruma1920 · Jul 20, 2022

Budget wise assuming we go for Multiple Civilian Departments:
Current GDP: 2115 (Tiberium) + 25 (Taxes) + 95 (Space Mining) = 2235 Total
Relevant GDP with Lunar Mines Reserved = 2140 Total
Lunar Mines = 95 Current, 100 Projected (with Rare Metals Phase 2)

The following will run with both the minimum 2140 RpT pie, and a hypothetical 2200 RpT pie assuming we get some income aside from the Rare Metals mines in the coming two turns. 60 additional RpT is likely near the max of what we could get, and that is assuming we go for multiple vein mines or Red Zone projects in addition to the ~20 we are likely to get with two phases of GZ intensification (the second should unlock with the completion of the current phase of Fortresses) and Harvesting Claws.

Assuming we activate the following:
-Division of Alternative Energy
-Distributed Heavy Industrial Authority
-Department of Distributed Manufactures
-Munitions Department?
-Refit Department?

We will have a total of 46 dice (51 current (not counting Bureaucracy) - 5 = 46)

If the cost of the line items are not dropped we would be shouldering -115 RpT to support the current line items. If we take all the ones currently available and adding -35* for the munitions and refit departments if they unlock, that would be ~-210 RpT (-115 - 10 (DAE) - 30 (DHIA) - 20 (DDM) - 35 (M&RDs) = -210)

Income	20%	20% With Lunar Reserved	20% with Lunar and Line Items	25%	25% With Lunar Reserved	25% with Lunar and Line Items	30%	30% With Lunar Reserved	30% with Lunar and Line Items
2140	448	528	318	560	635	425	672	742	532
2200	460	540	330	575	650	440	690	760	550

Note: The percentage alone assumed we lose the Line Items and we don't get the Lunar Income. With Lunar Reserved includes the 100 RpT we assume will be reserved for the Treasury thanks to Starbound and we lose the Line Items. The absolute worst case where we don't get the Lunar Income and we are saddled with the Line Items was not considered

That means our average affordable RpD will be:

RpD	20%	20% With Lunar Reserved	20% with Lunar and Line Items	25%	25% With Lunar Reserved	25% with Lunar and Line Items	30%	30% With Lunar Reserved	30% with Lunar and Line Items
2140	9.7391	11.4783	6.913	12.1739	13.8043	9.2391	14.6087	16.1304	11.5652
2200	10	11.7391	7.1739	12.5	14.1304	9.5652	15	16.5217	11.9565

Respectively. Compare this to our current affordable RpD of 1200/51 = 23.5294

What this means is that if @Derpmind is correct and taking the Multiple Civilian Departments will spin off the costs of our line items we will have a low, if respectable income between 525 and 540 RpT, and would be quite fine income wise. If they are wrong and we keep the line items and we take all of the departments then we will have less income then we did at the start of the third FYP. Honestly I see the position they propose to be a really good one. We'd have all these various Economic factors ticking in automatically. 3 Energy, 3 Con Goods, 3 Cap Goods, and 1 Hi quality Housing every turn would give us 48 of Energy, Con Goods, and Cap Goods by the end of the plan, thats a couple mega projects worth of Economic benefit, not counting the two arcologies worth of the best housing we can build.

If we went for this the position it starts us in is a decent one, the concern is just how much PS will it cost to spin off all of our departments, cause that is what we'd have to do. It does put us in the situation where we are effectively taking 30% of the budget, as you'll see if you compare the 20% with Lunar Reserved and the 30% with Lunar and Line Items columns. We might face some PS losses that will mitigate the gain we get by promising we won't take a plurality of the budget.

Taking a 20% budget would have given us 20 PS during the last Reallocation. It is reasonable to assume that has gone down to 15 PS thanks to how much the budget has grown in the intervening 4 years. However, I'm not sure how much it could potentially cost to drop the Departments. If its nothing, great! If its 15 PS ok, nothing really has changed. If its more then 15 PS we'll be in the hole for however far over it is.

*This is assuming -15 for the Munitions Department and -20 for the Refits Department as that is what a typical munition/refit RpD cost was, could be less.

mmgaballah · Jul 20, 2022

doruma1920 said:
We will have a total of 46 dice (51 current (not counting Bureaucracy) - 5 = 46)

the loss of dice is arguably the greatest issue long term due to us always ending up with more resources than dice within the first year of any plan but since the new mechanics the great elder brain has announced included raising the dice cap to 70 despite us not having even reached the former cap of 60 dice we can safely assume that we will at the start of the next plan have plenty of options to regain and even increase our dice up to the cap , so we can just spend these dice without issue at the last turn of this plan since we will get replacements plus interest at the start of the next plan anyway

Asmodemus · Jul 20, 2022

I've caught up! And wow, the timing of my hoversters joke, right after a big old argument.

It's an interesting overall believable take on my favorite franchise that our GDI loving GM has made and has been quite the enjoyable ride. As a Noddie fanboy, I salute you.

I would've done a great many things differently probably if I were in control, mostly shafting the steel talons for funding harder, but the thread has lead GDI interesting places.

I look forwards to seeing where they take it with less pressure from active ongoing warfare.

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

doruma1920 said:
What this means is that if @Derpmind is correct and taking the Multiple Civilian Departments will spin off the costs of our line items we will have a low, if respectable income between 525 and 540 RpT, and would be quite fine income wise. If they are wrong and we keep the line items and we take all of the departments then we will have less income then we did at the start of the third FYP. Honestly I see the position they propose to be a really good one. We'd have all these various Economic factors ticking in automatically. 3 Energy, 3 Con Goods, 3 Cap Goods, and 1 Hi quality Housing every turn would give us 48 of Energy, Con Goods, and Cap Goods by the end of the plan, thats a couple mega projects worth of Economic benefit, not counting the two arcologies worth of the best housing we can build.

I really, really think we should hedge our bets a bit by just... not taking literally every spinoff bureau option we are offered.

It is very likely that the PS costs of getting Parliament to fund those bureaus is going to scale with the amount of RpT we're asking them to commit to doing so. All the arguments for why we should take 20% of the budget instead of 30% because it means there's 200 more RpT to spread around the rest of the government and economy are ALSO arguments for why thrusting 200 RpT worth of subsidiary bureaus into Parliament's lap and expecting them to find funding is going to hurt the rest of the government and economy.

From an outside point of view, there is no practical difference between the Treasury taking 650 RpT of budget, and the Treasury taking 450 RpT of budget while an additional 200 RpT is hoovered up by the Bureaus of Arcologies, Heavy Manufactured Goods, Light Manufactured Goods, Consumer Goods, Alternative Energy, Military Refits, and Military Munitions."

Either way, that's a total of 650 RpT of money that is being spent on what are, historically speaking, Treasury functions and have been since Tib War III, and which are not available for InOps, Welfare, the military itself, or other parts of the government.

Which means we are likely to pay a very hefty political price if we try to shove that many spinoff bureaus out of Treasury's budgetary umbrella. Because all the same people who very much want to push our share of the budget to 20% instead of 30% very much do not want to have to deal with the sudden appearance of several new government agencies that need 10% of the budget total and are directly competing with them for funds.

...

So if a spinoff bureau doesn't look like an efficient use of resources in the context of early 2062- if it looks like we can find a better use for the dice- then we should act accordingly. Maybe we should just postpone taking the option until later, unless we have specific reason to think we're in danger of exceeding our dice cap. There is no reason we should treat those options as quasi-mandatory instead of taking them when and as it makes sense to do so.

I specifically think we should hold off on the MIlitary bureaus. In 2058, the Plan targets we got, while useful things to have, turned out to be only tangentially related to what the military as a whole most wound up needing. Ground Forces needed consumables and we got heavy consumables targets, sure. But the commitment to do well over a thousand points of OSRCT stations may well have reflected the political imperatives of the time (Space Force was agitating to finally get some funding for the project and we let it languish a long time, so the legislature overcompensated). And we wound up need to do a LOT of work for the Air Force and Navy to keep them competitive, even though the Plan basically didn't mandate anything for those branches of the military.

We need to wait to find out what Military Plan goals we actually have, so we can figure out how or even if the spinoff bureaus fit into planning for those goals.

mmgaballah said:
the loss of dice is arguably the greatest issue long term due to us always ending up with more resources than dice within the first year of any plan but since the new mechanics the great elder brain has announced included raising the dice cap to 70 despite us not having even reached the former cap of 60 dice we can safely assume that we will at the start of the next plan have plenty of options to regain and even increase our dice up to the cap , so we can just spend these dice without issue at the last turn of this plan since we will get replacements plus interest at the start of the next plan anyway

I think you're being grossly optimistic.

Look back and see how many dice we gained at the start of the Second Plan, and at the start of the Third Plan.

Asmodemus said:
I've caught up! And wow, the timing of my hoversters joke, right after a big old argument.

It's an interesting overall believable take on my favorite franchise that our GDI loving GM has made and has been quite the enjoyable ride. As a Noddie fanboy, I salute you.

I would've done a great many things differently probably if I were in control, mostly shafting the steel talons for funding harder, but the thread has lead GDI interesting places.

I look forwards to seeing where they take it with less pressure from active ongoing warfare.

I am really hoping we can find at least a little wiggle room to fund Talons passion projects starting in late 2062. I'm especially hoping for sparkle shields and MRASP, though I may be misremembering the acronym there.

Rakuhn · Jul 20, 2022

I'm hoping to step down to 25% of GDP in 2062, and 20% of GDP in 2066.

If we had started planning for going to 20% GDP earlier in the four year plan, and thus stockpiling a lot of resources to restart our economic engine in 2062, I'd have been in favor of doing it.

With only two quarters left at effectively zero resources reserved, and it being very difficult to convince people to not spend every dime that we get our hands on, I think it would do a disservice not just to ourselves, but to the entire initiative to take that deal.

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

Rakuhn said:
I'm hoping to step down to 25% of GDP in 2062, and 20% of GDP in 2066.

If we had started planning for going to 20% GDP earlier in the four year plan, and thus stockpiling a lot of resources to restart our economic engine in 2062, I'd have been in favor of doing it.

With only two quarters left at effectively zero resources reserved, and it being very difficult to convince people to not spend every dime that we get our hands on, I think it would do a disservice not just to ourselves, but to the entire initiative to take that deal.

I think that deliberately trying to economize this year would have been a mistake. The big-ticket expensive items that we've invested a lot of R into are things that are going to pay off in the long run, not random boondoggles.

We're now in a position of budgetary comfort, but that's because we've finished some quite important but also quite expensive projects. The Initiative would not have been better off for us deciding to put those options off for another 3-4 years until we could afford them again.

mmgaballah · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
Look back and see how many dice we gained at the start of the Second Plan, and at the start of the Third Plan.

that was before the mechanics were updated , I asked the mind eating squid about it a while back there will be options to get more dice at the start of the next plan , after all what would be the point of changing the dice mechanics to account for and require more dice if he then proceeds to not gives the needed amount dice to use the new system it would be the same as having not changed the mechanics at all

Asmodemus · Jul 20, 2022

It was a bright sunny day outside as two figures discussed matters in a GDI meeting room. Not one of the fancier ones designed for after action reports or discussion of urgent situations, it was more a throwback to the 90s with only a few items here and there showing the current year in design.

"Alright, where do you think the next revolution's coming from?" The male of the pair asked as he sipped at his drink.

"Simple. Portals." The declaration was instant and smugly said with an air of believing it obvious.

"That ongoing project? Really?" Skepticism was upfront at that declaration.

"You asked where the next revolution in warfare is coming from. I know, Treasury and other departments are focusing on the logistics side, and I know, logistics and warfare go hand in hand. But it's more than that." She paced around, mind working.

"This is the automobile, the airplane, the steam engine, it will upend everything we know. The first prototypes will be moving dead cargo most likely, some things may go wrong, some issues needing to be worked out, disasters even. But they'll keep at it, refining it. First it will be cleared for ores, then processed metals, devices, food, boxes of ammo, before finally getting to the big one."

"People."

"Right. Getting people from site to site. And.. into the field."

A finger raised at that. "Even they needed specialized structures in the area for that."

A feminine head shook. "I didn't mean the free standing wormholes. I meant like their rings that brought in their infantry and vehicles. That's when everything, and I mean everything changes."

She got up to the display, bringing up images to accentuate her points of normal army groups moving.

"You know how troops move now, units brought in from the sky or moving along the ground, digging in, bringing in materials from the factories back home, but imagine a portal central plan. No need to have masses of troops moving, instead you just need a centralized structure.

One giant connection back home to work with."

"An MCV." The guess was on point and direct.

"Precisely. Doubling as the big connection and workyard for setting up other connections."

"It would have problems, the storms-"

"-didn't bother them, now did they?" The interjection came with emphasis by her.

"..True. Very true. Bastards thrived in them, wreathed their bases in em."

"And we have their communications methods to work with. Back to the point. Big connection home, haul in the materials, local guard once it's set up. Maybe have the whole thing come down from orbit if Treasury invests more in space. Regardless, it's there, it sets up other portals, for the infantry, for the vehicles, for the ammo, sets up generators to power it all, haul in tib for that maybe.

Regardless, once it's set up, you just need to get people ready and have them march through. What was one MCV is now-"

"An army."

"I see you're getting it. Would need to space things out a little, can't have people clamber through in a mass, give them a few seconds before sending in the next. We'd need places back home with troops readied up, but with space being no object, we could have entire companies on standby to march through in careful groups to avoid congestion, spread over multiple bases. Same with vehicles and aircraft."

"Issue of them knowing what they're getting into." He objected, knowing that familiarity with the terrain was important.

"With EVAs we can cut things down, people can read on their own time on the march, adapt to the situation. Not sending them directly into battle after all. Less they're expected to know the less they'd need to know, commandos would need to get a clear picture of what they're going out to hit for instance.

But with this we could have our forces everywhere, just needing one MCV at a battlefield to get an appropriate force rolling, more and more powerful as time goes on if needed." Her voice picked up in excitement and imagination.

"We'd need a organizational system to ensure forces are delivered appropriately."

"Naturally, some shorthand priority for ensuring commanders can get the force they need. Point based maybe?"

"What? Like one load of tiberium, one infantry squad?"

A feminine laugh came at that. "Maybe if GDI was some corporation with only an eye for profit rather than victory. No, more like a response to threat level.. details can be worked out once it's a reality, this is just prediction."

"True enough. I'll admit it is a heady proposition, just getting a force in anywhere."

"There's also the 'ammo' side of things. While the middle stages where they perfect bringing in people and supplies in a decade, maybe two or more if we're unlucky is where we're thinking of, imagine a bit beyond."

"Beyond?"

"When they can have smaller portals from the supply centers chained through local structures to the individual soldiers, with a backup on them in case of disruption somehow of course."

"I.. I'm not sure-"

"Imagine a grenadier squad, they come upon a Nod comms center. They have the tools for breaking it, yes. So what do they do?"

"They hit at it's equipment weakpoints to disable it, then structural weakpoints to attempt a collapse."

"But at the end the structure is left standing."

"Naturally, have to conserve their grenades for later targets."

"But what if they didn't have to?" The question surprised and intrigued the man as the woman leaned in. "What if they had a direct line, to some armory back home filled to the brim with grenades? What if their ammo was effectively unlimited?"

"That's.. They could just level the thing with enough ammo. Bring it down firmly on any Brotherhood still inside instead of needing to clear it."

"Exactly. Take that and apply it to a predator tank, to a hammerhead. Imagine an army that can just STAY in the field, firing without fear of running out of ammo, that can just hit tank after tank, infantry after infantry so long as they stay in one piece."

He leaned back, astounded at the idea, mind full of non-stop firing zone forces save for potential of overheating, grenadiers just bringing Nod bases down on their own if they caught them off guard, MCVs being shipped in with minimal guards into combat areas covertly establishing bases just off to the side of the target instead of a battlezone away. "I can't imagine it. The sheer potential. GDI as a force, fighting like.. that."

She leaned back with a smug grin, confident in her vision. "I don't think anyone could."

Derpmind · Jul 20, 2022

Simon_Jester said:
I really, really think we should hedge our bets a bit by just... not taking literally every spinoff bureau option we are offered.

And I think we really should take every sub-bureau option available in Q4. What better way to show Parliment that the Treasury is willing to play ball? They may not give +PS, but I'd expect we'd get substantially different offers and/or PS costs from Parliment if we've already spun off a bunch of the sub-bureaus than if we've only done a couple. Plus it gives Ithillid room to offer us more options for gaining dice at the start of the year.

Rakuhn · Jul 20, 2022

Derpmind said:
And I think we really should take every sub-bureau option available in Q4. What better way to show Parliment that the Treasury is willing to play ball? They may not give +PS, but I'd expect we'd get substantially different offers and/or PS costs from Parliment if we've already spun off a bunch of the sub-bureaus than if we've only done a couple. Plus it gives Ithillid room to offer us more options for gaining dice at the start of the year.

I don't think that really follows?

Take the HI Cap Goods action. It's explicitly worse at producing cap goods than our other available options at a per resource and per die basis. What it offers is additional redundancy, so we don't need as high of a cap goods stockpile, and more 'local production'. I don't think parliament particularly cares whether we spin it off or not. Fortunately, with the new 'see offers available system', we can outright see rather than speculate.

Whereas the bureaus we span off this turn made sense:
-arcologies are popular, but we find it difficult to muster the shock effort to build them. The sub-department guarantees a steady trickle over time at a resource discount.
-cons goods are popular, offer local employment, and it's a lot better for everyone involved if their production is targeted and predictable

Cap goods, they'd probably rather us just build Nuuk or North Boston. I'd still be in favor of the Alternative Energy department, but that is more due to wanting to save resources for the upcoming energy crunch. Locking in an LCI die at 20 rpt, or an HI die at 30 rpt, is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing for preparing for the next plan.

Now, there is an argument to say 'we'll just make parliament pay for them', but that kind of goes against the whole 'spinning off departments will make parliament give us more flexibility' line of thought.

Anyways,
@Ithillid
Will departments split off in Q3 or Q4 be available to remove from our balance sheets in realloc 2062, or will they need to wait until 2066?
Can we get a ballpark idea of how much it would cost to remove our existing commitments (whether grants, forgotten, etc.) in PS? Subject to change based on parliamentary support going into realloc, or other unknown factors, ofc.

Ithillid · Jul 20, 2022

Rakuhn said:
Will departments split off in Q3 or Q4 be available to remove from our balance sheets in realloc 2062, or will they need to wait until 2066?

Yes they will be available for removal.

Rakuhn said:
Can we get a ballpark idea of how much it would cost to remove our existing commitments (whether grants, forgotten, etc.) in PS? Subject to change based on parliamentary support going into realloc, likely.

Subject to parliamentary support, and subject to how much funding you are asking for. Generally 5-15 PS per item.

Simon_Jester · Jul 20, 2022

Derpmind said:
And I think we really should take every sub-bureau option available in Q4. What better way to show Parliment that the Treasury is willing to play ball? They may not give +PS, but I'd expect we'd get substantially different offers and/or PS costs from Parliment if we've already spun off a bunch of the sub-bureaus than if we've only done a couple.

Why?

The pressure to start bureaus doesn't seem to be coming from Parliament so much. They care about the results more than the administrative angle. In-character, the pressure to start bureaus is coming from within the Treasury, to keep the managerial complexity (read: dice cap) under control.

Why would the legislature be impressed by our "willingness to play ball" just because we have sub-bureaus. Those are still state-run enterprises functionally little different from what Treasury normally does, just with more monofocus on specific tasks. I don't think Parliament cares whether we handle, say, military munitions projects with a spinoff bureau or with an in-house Treasury focus. Maybe you're running off a bunch of stuff Ithillid said in Discord, but I haven't seen it and I'd appreciate some explanation of why you're expecting these results.

Plus it gives Ithillid room to offer us more options for gaining dice at the start of the year.

Yeah, but real talk, I don't think he's gonna offer us +7 dice just because we wrote off +7 dice in the first place. I think we'll get the same general range of recruitment options we saw in 2054 or 2058, and that only netted us so many dice at a time.

I see no reason why we should treat "make more spinoff bureaus" as a goal in and of itself, as opposed to something we do because it follows logically from the actual needs of the field in question.

We're signalling to Parliament that we are "willing to play ball" in a game they don't care about, and we're signalling to other departments that we're trying to end-run the "20-25% of budget, no more" goals they want to push us down to by creating a bunch of... Basically the bureaucratic equivalent of shell corporations. I'm not even saying we shouldn't have those, but we shouldn't treat them as an end in and of themselves.

Rakuhn said:
I don't think that really follows?

Take the HI Cap Goods action. It's explicitly worse at producing cap goods than our other available options at a per resource and per die basis. What it offers is additional redundancy, so we don't need as high of a cap goods stockpile, and more 'local production'. I don't think parliament particularly cares whether we spin it off or not. Fortunately, with the new 'see offers available system', we can outright see rather than speculate.

To be fair, that department will build lots of little Capital Goods plants all over the place, which is a good thing given that we're trying to induce development of whole new city centers in the places we're building those giant clusters of apartment blocks to house the new citizens. Actions that promote distributed industry have some real virtues.

Honestly, I'm more having second thoughts about DAE, because that builds power plants and I think power plants aren't likely to be as big a driver of employment as factories. I could be wrong about that though.

On the other hand, DAE is cheap Energy, very Resource-cheap, and that's not a bad thing.

With that said... Well, for example, Nuuk Phase 4 is 1200 Progress for 32 Capital Goods. That's not that far off from the +2 per die invested value of the corresponding bureau, though the 30 R/die cost is unfavorable I admit.

It's the Military bureaus I'm most reluctant to get "just because," along with the Light Industry Capital Goods one. Because the latter is inefficient and the former may be a great way to "lock in" Military dice on things that aren't Plan targets while forcing us to scramble to accomplish things that are.

Ithillid said:
Yes they will be available for removal.

Subject to parliamentary support, and subject to how much funding you are asking for. Generally 5-15 PS per item.

...

Okay, everyone. If each item in question is somewhere between 10 and 30 RpT, then this is a very inefficient way to secure income unless the PS costs for asking for more than 20% of GDP turn out to be incredibly high.

If we can get, say, +15 PS for promising to go to 20% GDP, and +15 more for actually doing it, but that only cashes out as eliminating 60 RpT or so of line items from our budget, we're running at a net loss and would have been better off just using our political leverage to get 25% GDP and pay the 60 RpT of line items out of pocket.

As I suspected, this is sounding like a bad deal.

Hazard · Jul 20, 2022

Asmodemus said:
"There's also the 'ammo' side of things. While the middle stages where they perfect bringing in people and supplies in a decade, maybe two or more if we're unlucky is where we're thinking of, imagine a bit beyond."

Optimistic. Unless we have breakthroughs I wouldn't expect portals to hit 'can bring anything other than bulk through' before the 2080s, if then.

But being able make supply lines go from 'munitions storage buried deep in a mountain' through a portal to the front lines is already pretty big. Especially as it goes from a corps asset, to a division asset, to brigade, to regiment, to battalion. It basically means that at most soldiers have a day's delay between filing a request and getting the goods moved from the central depots. It removes so many logistical overhead steps.

Derpmind said:
And I think we really should take every sub-bureau option available in Q4. What better way to show Parliment that the Treasury is willing to play ball? They may not give +PS, but I'd expect we'd get substantially different offers and/or PS costs from Parliment if we've already spun off a bunch of the sub-bureaus than if we've only done a couple. Plus it gives Ithillid room to offer us more options for gaining dice at the start of the year.

I'm with Derp.

We actually have a stronger hand to negotiate for a greater share of the income flow if the floor on our expenses is higher.

Asmodemus · Jul 20, 2022

Hazard said:
Optimistic. Unless we have breakthroughs I wouldn't expect portals to hit 'can bring anything other than bulk through' before the 2080s, if then.

Our tech's moved pretty fast overall and we've got AIs boosting the research or will. Plus the main problem with any technology is knowing it's possible. But it is understandable the GM would hesitate to let GDI get to the front portals for people as it would greatly change around how things were.

I also wonder if I didn't make things explicit enough in there that they were describing GDI as they were in the RTS game by the end?

Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Subversive Element

Subversive Element

Subversive Element