I really don't appreciate this kind of characterization.
I'm sorry. I get hyperbole-prone in cases like this, because I'm looking at a combination of actions wherein we get 30 PS or so (in two stages) if we sign up to have about 500 RpT of income, then we take -200 RpT or so of permanent expenses, then we have to spend a lot more than 30 PS is we want to divest ourselves of those expenses, so we end up with a starting budget of about 300-400 RpT in practice.
Just so we can... preempt the legislature by doing something they haven't asked us to do.
It's not the end of the world if we don't do all of the sub-bureaus. I'm not saying we need, or are obligated, to do every single option. I just want to pick all of them.
And I'd hope it'd pre-empt Parliment somewhat, rather than waiting first for an explicit narrative reason for why others would want bureaus established.
Sometimes, the consequence of doing something without waiting for a reason to do it is that you turn out to be right. I remember the debates over the ICS back when we were just starting it.
Sometimes, the consequence of doing something without waiting for a reason to do it is that you just do something ill-advised and costly, when no one asked you to.
To be fair, if I was the QM and really needed to reduce my workload, I would just do so unilaterally and write the justification afterwards, rather than risking burnout. Sometimes, the boss (and we do have a boss) just comes down and says "do this, or you're fired". So IMO, it's fine to treat the spin-off departments as options - but they're options that I'm happy to take.
Well yes, but at the same time, they're not all options that are necessarily good for us to take
right now.
The Military bureaus cut into our flexibility and early-2062 budget, and before we can decide if they're a good idea we should almost certainly sort out what our military-facing Plan goals even are.
The Light Industry Capital Goods option is cost-ineffective at a time when we are very soon going to need to scrimp and save on Resources, and it uses Light Industry dice, which are often our most flexible and versatile ones.
DAE is a great option starting in 2062Q1, but not a great option
now, because it locks us into doing something with Heavy Industry dice that may not be advantageous.
I think we're running into a bit of a narrative vs mechanic argument. ...and have people switched sides on that topic compared to the last one?
From a mechanic point of view, starting and spinning off bureaus is good, because it allows important numbers to go up in the background without us spending time and dice on doing so.
Caveat:
From a mechanical point of view, spinning off bureaus
may or may not be good. For example, a Bureau that cost -1 Orbital dice, a -3 to all other Orbital dice, and -30 RpT for 60 Progress per turn on a random moon mine wouldn't be worth the trouble; it would accomplish less than just rolling normal Orbital dice. I deliberately made up an extreme example, but the point is that "this bureau mechanically a bad idea, we'd do better to do it under the Treasury's formal house instead of creating an independent bureau for it" is a real possibliity. Indeed, part of my argument is rooted in the fact that I think some of the bureaus are mechanically beneficial, and some are not, and that some of us are talking like this is a
moral principle, something we ought to do without worrying about the numerical consequences because we're doing what we have to do.
And then my narrative arguments largely parallel yours. The world in which the Treasury exists and is nominally responsible for building five phases of arcologies because Parliament said so is not
morally superior to the world in which the Treasury is responsible for building three and the Bureau of Arcologies is responsible for two. Or for that matter the world in which the Treasury is responsible for zero and the (markedly expanded) Bureau of Arcologies is responsible for five. In-universe, there is no moral difference, the people's lives do not become happy joyful frolicking by default in one scenario where they were grey and sad in the other.
And from the point of view of how much budget InOps gets, there is no functional difference between a world where Treasury gets 650 RpT and everyone else splits 1600 between them, and a world where Treasury gets 450 RpT, the Thousand Independent Bureaus of Doing What The Treasury Used To Do get 200, and everyone else still splits 1600 between them.
...
And I'm not at all sure this will enable us to fully shift narrative focus, because many of these bureaus are functional in part because
they don't do enough.
Take DAE as an example. It provides +3 Energy per turn. That's... actually a lot less than we use in a typical turn. Even when we're not on a ferocious mass war factory production kick, our typical Energy consumption in a
low-key turn can easily be something like -6 or -8 Energy. We can take individual turns where we deliberately avoid using much Energy, but we do that by avoiding otherwise desirable projects that we'll need to do later, or intentionally slow-walking projects that would consume Energy-
@Vehrec did a really deft job of this with, I think, a variant plan draft for Q2 that let him neatly bypass some problems that had me stuck for a while, for example, because it didn't occur to me to do that. The problem, of course, is that this is great for solving short-term problems like "we're not sure if the next big +Energy project is coming online this quarter or next quarter," but in the long run it puts our economy on a choke chain. There's just too many things we need Energy to do.
We built
eight phases of fusion reactors in this plan, and may well build a ninth. A lot of that went into war factories, but a lot didn't, and we're not going to be exempt from war factory construction in the new plan, either. Drones and fighters, power armor factories, at least a few more shipyards, railgun ammo- that's still on the menu even if the pace gets less frantic.
DAE working for a full four years provides less than half of that. It's not going to remove our need to build fusion reactors, or even to spend dice building fusion reactors. And unless we do the
opposite of what Ithillid seems to be encouraging and alternate turns of shock-construction fusion reactors with turns of shock-constructing other things, we're going to be rolling fewer dice per turn on fusion plants, which means that we can't have (as many) turns in which no effort is put into them... which means we may get about the same number of blurbs saying "fusion reactor construction continues apace" as we did before.
Arguably this is a good thing. If DAE
did actually lock in so much Energy production that we might reasonably never need to build a fusion plant manually again... Well, if it's doing that at low-key times, we still end up needing to manually build some phases when things are high-key. If it's doing enough at high-key times, it's taking more than we need at low-key times. It's
desirable for these bureaus to do "almost" enough in the background, while still expecting us to contribute if we want something done intensively.
But it complicates the picture of why these are treated as a mechanical good that is straightforwardly automating the boring parts, or a narrative positive good that we just 'need' to do for their own sake.
From a narrative point of view, we're foisting off parts of what have been our job for at least the last decade onto other departments via spinning off these bureaus, and in effect would be eating most of their budget increase from us taking less simply to fund the bureaus we foisted on them. Which won't endear us to other departments, though maybe Parliament won't really care as long as we also decrease our share of the budget at the same time. After all, to other departments, what's the difference between Treasury covering 30% of the budget and Treasury taking 20% and 10% of the remaining budget is consumed by the bureaus they foisted off on everyone else? Still adds up to 30% of the budget spent on Treasury "related" stuff.
Yeah, this. If we're explicitly planning to divest this stuff and push it out into the other 70-80% of the budget that
isn't going to us, then we're not doing the rest of the government any favors.
That's actually why I think there's a -PS cost. After all, if the Treasury was just decreasing its umbrella by spinning stuff off, Parliament would be happy. They could then transition those bureaus into private companies - Arcology construction, Power plant construction, etc - and help restart the private industry more.
I dunno. I think the government wants to maintain pretty centralized control of housing. God knows I would, in their shoes.
Throughout GDI's history as an institution, going all the way back to Tib War One and only getting
much worse afterwards, GDI has had to manage refugee flows. Tiberium refugees, mainly, but also war refugees. I suspect that by now the great majority of GDI's adult population has experienced "being a refugee" at least once in their lives. Many of them may have gotten to go back to their former homes or somewhere nearby, and many have not, but so much of GDI's territory was lost and then regained, or devastated by aliens and then rebuilt, that even the upheavals since 2047 have had a huge effect. Combine that with the massive efforts to evacuate people towards the poles in and around the time of Tib War II, and GDI has a huge amount of experience with needing to move people around quickly in response to
force majeure.
...
This means GDI needs to retain certain critical capabilities:
1) Relatively high influence over where the population lives. You cannot have people sprawling out into indefensible areas where it will be exceptionally difficult and time-intensive to get them to bombardment shelters or evacuate them in advance of an enemy attack.
2) Relatively high control over housing conditions- housing needs to be physically secure and robust, even at the cost of being expensive. Even Blue Zone apartments are heavily built and environmentally well-sealed by the standards of what we in most twentieth century housing would consider normal.
3) Freedom to quickly mass-produce additional housing wherever it is needed, subject to the limits of
logistical possibility, not the limits of profitability. If GDI can't find a place to build secure housing that's profitable, GDI just has to buckle the fuck down and mine more cancerous green cash rock to compensate.
4) Just to double down on that, freedom to add a lot of housing in a hurry. Notice that we've handily kept ahead of the
really big refugee wave that's set to increase GDI's actual population by something like 20%, even over and above any people who don't actually move but are added to GDI's population because "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." A private housing sector would be very hard pressed to do something like that, and even if construction technology and engineering made it possible, there would be a
lot of fleecing of the government or whoever else is paying for the new housing.
...
So I actually think GDI will
want to keep the housing sector state-controlled. First, because it's so critical to the government's ability to defend the population and manage refugee flows. And second, because it's important to GDI's ability to guarantee housing and other forms of welfare to the citizenry.
But these are details.
Now, yes, all that takes a more pessimistic view of bureau spin off costs (as in, more 10-15 PS cost bureaus than 5 PS cost bureaus at Reallocation) than what might be the case, but one should plan for the worst while hoping for the best.
My prediction is that the PS cost of divesting ourselves of the costs of a spinoff bureau will depend on two factors. One is the size of the bureau's budget. For example, the 30 RpT reconstruction fund is actually still something like 1.3% of GDI's entire budget. That's a big hot potato to find money for, in and of itself. Someone's going to lose funding to pay for what used to be a Treasury mission, and they will
scream about it. Despite grumbling about how much of the budget Treasury controls by the end of a Four Year Plan, I think most of the government has actually gotten pretty comfortable with the "Treasury go do everything" model where they can rely on us to do a lot of expensive shit and not stress about it. Among other things because then
they can focus on nice predictable fixed expenses like "paying the guys who work in the buildings."
The other likely element is whether a Bureau's area of responsibility is something another chunk of the government really wants. The GDI equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense is probably pretty comfortable with getting a spinoff bureau that handles "build more munitions factories." But the Bureau of Arcologies is kind of an orphan, because as you point out, historically Treasury's been handling all housing construction for the last 10-15 years. We may see lower PS costs to divest ourselves of the budget for a -15 RpT munitions bureau than a -15 RpT arcologies bureau.
Because then we can point out that with 300 RpT, unless they want us to close down the set line items in the budget, we cannot deliver what they want, so if they want anything done they must either give more money, or order the Treasury to close down, say, the Arcology Bureau, which would make for some fascinating talking points for the political opponents of whatever wit decided that was a good idea.
Discretionary budgets are fucked with. But nobody sane screws with the maintenance and operating budgets of something, unless they want it gone.
The question is, does that cash out as us needing to spend less Political Support to achieve similarly favorable results at reallocation?
I think it would not. Because from Parliament's point of view, this is the Treasury using its accounting skills to generate some fuckery excuse for why they "must" allocate a higher total share of the budget to Treasury operations. This does not predispose politicians to think well of what we are doing. They see what we did- we are in effect trying to hold the arcology program hostage in exchange for getting to keep an extra 15 RpT of budget that goes to our
shell company spinoff bureau.
Remember that the bureaus generally aren't actually more dice-efficient or even resource-efficient than just building stuff manually the way we have been doing. We can't say "it is necessary to have this department and fund it continuously at this level for us to have Capital Goods," because we were supplying major Capital Goods boosts in the last three Plans without needing a sub-bureau. Our choice to "lock in" parts of what was hitherto an entirely discretionary budget will be recognized as an attempt to make the exact political gambit you are now describing, and we will still have to pay the same amount of PS (that is,
reputation with and clout among politicians) to achieve the desired results.
