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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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We are going to be part of the negotiations.

Watsonian reasoning: "The Treasury is a big power block, has the most knowledge on the scale of what Kane is asking for, and what the Initiative is capable of offering. It also has a lot of ability to offer carrots and sticks to the rest of the Initiative to get them to line up behind the offer."

Doylist reasoning: "This is a transformative event, and it is more fun for the players to be able to be able to influence it, rather than having to take it as is. That ship already sailed with the Forgotten Negotiations."

I don't think we can build up more than 100 PS, and there is a limit to how far we can twist people's arms with PS alone (hence the difference between political support, parliamentary support, and public support (invisible)). I still think it is worthwhile to do certain PS costing actions prior to re-alloc, especially if paired with doing favors to pay for them, but it does put a very sharp limit on how willing we should be to spin-off expenses during reallocation itself.
 
If Kane shows up for negotiations, I'd expect that to happen before we meet with Parliament. If for no other reason than building a TCN is the kind of mega-project that would supersede most 4-year Plan Goals.
 
That's why he'd be smart to do it afterwards. We'll be in a weaker negotiating position after hashing everything else out, and everyone has expended their political capital and strained their relationships with each other.

Kane isn't obligated to do what is best for us.
 
Rakuhn said:
That's why he'd be smart to do it afterwards. We'll be in a weaker negotiating position after hashing everything else out, and everyone has expended their political capital and strained their relationships with each other.

Kane isn't obligated to do what is best for us.
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I mean, logically that ends with us immediately going back to Parliament for another round of Reallocation to re-do all our Plan Goals. I don't think anyone wants to do that.
 
If Kane shows up with the plans of stopping the consumtion of the planet. I think we can fairly safely assume that most if not all plan goals would be gone/postpone

Would be kinda crazy if we went
"We can stop tiberium forever!"
"Treasury can't because we're too busy making bacon factories as per the plan goal"
 
Derpmind said:
I mean, logically that ends with us immediately going back to Parliament for another round of Reallocation to re-do all our Plan Goals. I don't think anyone wants to do that.
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It would probably be fairly politically expensive to drop commitments that we already made, true. That's probably part of the reason why having a high PS buffer is valuable going into the negotiations. I'd imagine that dropping commitments would be part of the negotiations themselves, rather than be a separate update.

We could also try to keep our commitments relatively open.
 
Sa'kage said:
If Kane shows up with the plans of stopping the consumtion of the planet. I think we can fairly safely assume that most if not all plan goals would be gone/postpone

Would be kinda crazy if we went
"We can stop tiberium forever!"
"Treasury can't because we're too busy making bacon factories as per the plan goal"
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To be fair, historically speaking, that's exactly how planned economies go.
 
Rakuhn said:
It would probably be fairly politically expensive to drop commitments that we already made, true. That's probably part of the reason why having a high PS buffer is valuable going into the negotiations. I'd imagine that dropping commitments would be part of the negotiations themselves, rather than be a separate update.

We could also try to keep our commitments relatively open.
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So the problem with this line of logic is that if Kane approaches us with the ability to save the planet then it doesn't matter what the previous plan goals were because everything will be superseded with "save the planet ". Parliament is not some monster who only cares about the numbers.
 
The TCN is a megaproject that is going to take multiple plans to complete. Our plan goals will have minimal influence on its completion, unless we choose an absurd amount of income as a promise.

What plans goals do interfere with is shiny acquisition. Using 'bacon' as an example, that could interfere with a promise to 'feed the civilians residing within Nod's territories', which we may have otherwise made to help get a shiny tech, a better version of the TCN, or getting Kane to agree to turn Gideon over (trades not to scale).

Keeping in mind that we can still make the 'bacon' of our own recognizance even if we don't make it a plan commitment, of course.
 
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One Autumn Leaf said:
So the problem with this line of logic is that if Kane approaches us with the ability to save the planet then it doesn't matter what the previous plan goals were because everything will be superseded with "save the planet ". Parliament is not some monster who only cares about the numbers.
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No they are very emotional humans with even more emotional constituents. Assuming they will act objectively logical is flawed. And thats assuming the believe cooperating with Kane is objectively logical and that seems a giant leap to make in character.
 
StarJaunter said:
No they are very emotional humans with even more emotional constituents. Assuming they will act objectively logical is flawed. And thats assuming the believe cooperating with Kane is objectively logical and that seems a giant leap to make in character.
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On the other hand the thread is sorta kinda the representation of parliament.
Remember the blowback regarding liquid tiberium power - positions of some of parliament parties basically mirrored some posters. And the question of cooperating with Kane seems to raise far less opposition than LTP or yay/nay on cooperatives.
 
I feel like I have to point out that PS is not used in negotiations. Look at the two Forgotten Conferences. We're going to have "Leverage" points, and we'll need to have a positive points total for the other side to agree to the terms.

Also, pretty sure we're about to have our Third Forgotten Conference this coming turn or so.
 
Ithillid said:
While GDI was too successful in destroying the alien menace, it was only a temporary setback. Kane and his most loyal followers have taken the time they needed to refine a new plan, a new system. But it is one that the Brotherhood, a weak shadow of its former self, has not the strength to build.
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Nod isn't strong enough to do the new plan/system. Either Kane can negotiate with GDI for the industrial might to do it, or he can try... something else. And I don't think he'd go for yet another war. (4th time's the charm?)
 
So, one thing that I got asked in the Discord is what happens if PS would go over 100. And the answer is that you can go over 100, but 100 is the stable cap. If you end up at say 105 in Q3 results this year, you would have those 105 to spend in Q4, but not have it in full for Reallocation.
 
Rakuhn said:
It would probably be fairly politically expensive to drop commitments that we already made, true. That's probably part of the reason why having a high PS buffer is valuable going into the negotiations. I'd imagine that dropping commitments would be part of the negotiations themselves, rather than be a separate update.

We could also try to keep our commitments relatively open.
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I am fairly sure that under the circumstances, Parliament would be considerably more sympathetic about renegotiating Plan goals than they were when we did it during Steel Vanguard. Steel Vanguard was a war we were winning and launched in a premeditated manner, so it's not a great excuse to duck out on promises. The only one they seemed sympathetic about was the one where we had to kick Karachi down the road, and that was because that was the one goal we realistically just couldn't accomplish. We got off pretty easy there, in a "promise something you'd probably do anyway" sense.

The TCN would be transformational. We'd be fine swapping out some Plan goals.

And hell. We have a @doruma1920 . He might just chug away for like an hour and dump a mathpost on us verifying that yes, we actually can fulfill our plan targets, at which point we get to roleplay Seo being insanely chill about the whole thing.

Sa'kage said:
Would be kinda crazy if we went
"We can stop tiberium forever!"
"Treasury can't because we're too busy making bacon factories as per the plan goal"
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Kane: "No, no, I understand. Bacon is really good, everyone."

Strunkriidiisk said:
"lol, lmao"
- Seo

I get where you're coming from, but man we have entirely the wrong focal character/administrator for "not spending PS like water."
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It's more that I'm trying to work from within Seo's mindset, where spending Political Support on mad science is smart, but precisely because of the need to do so, you don't want to expend the stuff pointlessly.

Argent Citadel said:
Sorry, why are we expecting Kane to approach us soon? Because we got his secret lore? Because the regency war ended?
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We're preparing for him to do it, but also preparing for him not to do it. If he doesn't, the odds are that gameplay just proceeds as normal, so there's not much to discuss.

Ithillid said:
So, one thing that I got asked in the Discord is what happens if PS would go over 100. And the answer is that you can go over 100, but 100 is the stable cap. If you end up at say 105 in Q3 results this year, you would have those 105 to spend in Q4, but not have it in full for Reallocation.
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Huh. Cool. In that case, we should keep an eye on our PS total and make sure that if we'd end up with over 100 points, we have something lined up immediately to spend it on.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I am fairly sure that under the circumstances, Parliament would be considerably more sympathetic about renegotiating Plan goals than they were when we did it during Steel Vanguard. Steel Vanguard was a war we were winning and launched in a premeditated manner, so it's not a great excuse to duck out on promises. The only one they seemed sympathetic about was the one where we had to kick Karachi down the road, and that was because that was the one goal we realistically just couldn't accomplish. We got off pretty easy there, in a "promise something you'd probably do anyway" sense.

The TCN would be transformational. We'd be fine swapping out some Plan goals.

And hell. We have a @doruma1920 . He might just chug away for like an hour and dump a mathpost on us verifying that yes, we actually can fulfill our plan targets, at which point we get to roleplay Seo being insanely chill about the whole thing.
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INB4 we take a fairly minimal set of Plan promises, to get a good amount of flexibility, then we get assigned TCN tasks with not option for renegotiation.
:p
(I do not think this is actually close to possible.)

Also, if we don't *really try* to spend lots of resources, we can pretty easily save 200+ Reserves Q3, and probably as much again Q4... which will give us a lot of flexibility after Reallocation.
 
Lightwhispers said:
INB4 we take a fairly minimal set of Plan promises, to get a good amount of flexibility, then we get assigned TCN tasks with not option for renegotiation.
:p
(I do not think this is actually close to possible.)

Also, if we don't *really try* to spend lots of resources, we can pretty easily save 200+ Reserves Q3, and probably as much again Q4... which will give us a lot of flexibility after Reallocation.
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Ehh. Getting below about 1000 R means giving up on pretty much any expensive per-die projects like suborbital shuttles and Bergen. The draft I worked with goes up near 1100 R and that wasn't really trying to maximize expenses or anything, just "do what we want to do with all dice."

So I'm betting on more like 200-300 R worth of surplus in the next two quarters, and we'll lose 100 R of that if we do the banking option- which we should, because otherwise it's going to be a long time before we can do it again without immediately hurting ourselves.

Still, 100-200 R is actually not bad and will be enough to cushion the worst hit, as long as we don't sacrifice our own budget on the altar of misplaced altruism during reapportionment, and try to stick to reasonably achievable targets.
 
I'm not convinced that the Banking Reforms are the way to go yet. The text indicates that the current situation means that it will just shift problems around more than actually fix things.
I really don't like the way it says it will likely exacerbate the lack of public Capitol Goods and skilled labour. And going into the start of the next Plan is when we are unlikely to have the flex required to address those problems.
So to me, it looks more sensible to use that 100R to try fixing things up a bit more first, then open up the cash for investments. Rather than making the cash available soon, and then having to wait around a year before we can provide what people need to use it properly.

The Economic Census results made it quite clear that we need to approach the problem from multiple angles at once. While Banking Reforms addresses the lack of money in the private system, and we will soon have some Capitol Goods available for the private use, we will not be able to inject a lot of Capitol Goods, nor do we have a solution for the messed up labour market.
So Banking Reforms are part of the solution, but it is not a part that can work without the other parts, which aren't ready.
 
HousePet said:
I'm not convinced that the Banking Reforms are the way to go yet. The text indicates that the current situation means that it will just shift problems around more than actually fix things.
I really don't like the way it says it will likely exacerbate the lack of public Capitol Goods and skilled labour.
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Could you quote the exact language there, as an aid to bringing it forward into the discussion?

And going into the start of the next Plan is when we are unlikely to have the flex required to address those problems.
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Actually, addressing skilled labor shortages tends to involve education projects, which are usually cheap-per-die Service projects, so we could totally do a bunch of those in 2062-63, much as we did in 2058 for the current head of state. The problem is that education programs take a long time to take effect.

The other problem, of course, is that we can't wait for the skilled labor shortage to be resolved, before at least trying to address the other problems. I think you may be falling into "perfect is the enemy of the good" territory here. We can't solve all the problems weakening the private sector all at once, but we can at least solve some of them and narrow down the scope of what needs doing.

So to me, it looks more sensible to use that 100R to try fixing things up a bit more first, then open up the cash for investments. Rather than making the cash available soon, and then having to wait around a year before we can provide what people need to use it properly.

The Economic Census results made it quite clear that we need to approach the problem from multiple angles at once.
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Except we have the cash now, and we won't have it later.

I don't think we should delay setting aside the cash until we're in a position to supply a large quantity of extra +Capital Goods, not least because we may well not even have the cash to set aside then, or not be able to spare it without a good deal of immediate pain.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The TCN would be transformational. We'd be fine swapping out some Plan goals.

And hell. We have a @doruma1920 . He might just chug away for like an hour and dump a mathpost on us verifying that yes, we actually can fulfill our plan targets, at which point we get to roleplay Seo being insanely chill about the whole thing.
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Thank you for the vote of confidence.

HousePet said:
So Banking Reforms are part of the solution, but it is not a part that can work without the other parts, which aren't ready.
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I'm not sure I agree. Labor wise we are fine. It will slow down our gain, but we have such a surplus, which is still increasing, that we can afford to encourage the growth of the civilian economy. As for Capital Goods, we should have a minimum of 18 Cap Goods going into the next plan. As such if we get DHIA we would have a steady trickle of Cap Goods to support the civilian side.
 
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