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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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MSH said:
Translating some of the hints in the military section:

- Our tanks are ancient, but are still superior to Nod tanks. That's GDI for you. We need a replacement tank but it isn't yet a major priority.
- GDI's Admiralty thinks we're crazy or possibly fucking with them, the long-term damage that was done to the Navy in turns past has been replaced by an erratic mix of funding. We should seek to even out their ship environment, which will take a while.
- Air Force want more but are largely being greedy, however they are technologically outclassed by Nod. Anti-Air and Superiority should be our focus while we fix that.
- Space Force are mostly a political problem, unless the Visitors attack next turn, I'm sure the odds of that are minimal so it's all good.
- Seo:"Wow, cool science!" Litvinov: "Seo, ZOCOM is drowning." Seo: "This ain't about them." (We should minimize expansion.)
- Ground Forces benefits from the Zone Armor and it will eventually allow them to take over duties from ZOCOM, but it's also not a direct military benefit in most regards.
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Agreed, my suggestions are, in order:

  • Start a proper tank replacement program, this'll take time, so we start the ball rolling early. LIke a wise man said "Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is now." Especially since we've made a lot of modifications we need to figure out hhow they'll be best implemented.
  • Nothing to really do, save even out ships, maybe mae a few extra shipyards?
  • Yeah no, Wingmen, I can live with, but Chair Force is gonna need to pare down their demands.
  • More or less my logic as well.
  • Yeah, we should finish off any expansion projects/abatement ones, and just start properly digesting. ZOCOM needs time to heal, and we've eaten a ton. While GF does have ZA, slowly, it's not just the armor, it's the training and culture that also needs work.
 
-[ ] Core Crops Bay
Tempted to grab one if we go for experimental crops, to get militarists on hopefully neutral opinion. The ability to hopefully feed our space pop fully from space is really tempting longer term, and being able to orbitally drop supplies could be huge.

-[ ] Fruticulture Bay
A bit more tempted to grab this vs animal husbandry since they have largely similar effects (except for possible future biotech stuff from animals).

-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay
Could be super useful long term for supporting future colonies (maybe even supporting eventual terraforming efforts in the far far future?). New development MS projects that are probably less -PS in the future too. Not sure it's worth the hit to militarist opinions, though I think the bit about low g / zero g requirements means it won't be useful to Nod until someone gets a stealth Varyag into the asteroids (which admittedly I think is going to happen, especially once someone steals the info on the MRA factories we're going to add to MARVs.

-[ ] Habitation Bay
Eh, boost to plan goal I guess? And narrative benefits as far as farm outputs could be useful, especially for supporting the sciency bays.

-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay
Eh, lab meat probably is enough to cover this as far as spacer diets is concerned. Not sure the morale efforts and small indicator boost are otherwise worth it, given we have ranching domes no where near filled.

-[ ] Species Restoration Bay
At least one of these, and fill any remaining slots with them for their boost effects. Aiming for a longer term morale boost (showing we think tiberium can be beat), and to save what life we can if we fail.

-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
At least one of these, the boost to colony self-sufficiency and colony cost is going to be huge.

Leaning towards this:
[ ] Plan space crops science no animals
- [ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
- [ ] Habitation Bay
- [ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
- [ ] Experimental Crops
- [ ] Core Crops Bay
 
Prospalz said:
8ish. Could be argued higher if long-term view is prioritized, thanks to various techs from gachas. In short term... We won Regency war, and, so far, are not losing the peace.

This could have been so much worse if the thread didn't manage the economic leap of Granger-era.
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Imo the only thing we could have done better with was investing in the navy earlierand spreading it out more so they have a more sane deployment schedule rather than us slamming out 3 new ship classes in a year. Turns out we need to do a bit more planning for ships, who do months per ships rather than ships per month
 
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MSH said:
[ ] Plan Having Tasted The Fruit, Nothing Shall Be Impossible For Them
-[ ] Fruticulture Bay x1
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x1
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x1
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay x1
-[ ] Habitation Bay x1

Let a new seed sprout in the cold of the void.
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We already have one fruticulture bay, for the record. It might be a good idea to double up on something else, or multiple something elses.

Night_stalker said:
Agreed, my suggestions are, in order:

  • Start a proper tank replacement program, this'll take time, so we start the ball rolling early. LIke a wise man said "Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is now." Especially since we've made a lot of modifications we need to figure out hhow they'll be best implemented.
  • Nothing to really do, save even out ships, maybe mae a few extra shipyards?
  • Yeah no, Wingmen, I can live with, but Chair Force is gonna need to pare down their demands.
  • More or less my logic as well.
  • Yeah, we should finish off any expansion projects/abatement ones, and just start properly digesting. ZOCOM needs time to heal, and we've eaten a ton. While GF does have ZA, slowly, it's not just the armor, it's the training and culture that also needs work.
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In regards to the Air Force, I think it really would be desirable to at least develop the Novahawk fighter reasonably soon, though as a deployment priority it's kind of behind the Sabre space fighter.

The Firehawk fighter is if anything MORE obsolete than the Predator tank. Like the Predator, it's kept competitive in large part by upgrade tech (lasers, QAAMs). Unlike the Predator, it's actively starting to become helpless against its increasingly common Nod opposite numbers. Upgraded Predators seem to still be viable against Nod's tank-equivalents. That is, as long as we're not talking Avatars here, but more conventional vehicles built to the same general scale as a main battle tank, such as the Scorpion, Centurion, and Stahl's 'Hetzer' design. Whereas the Firehawk is still very much at a disadvantage compared to the Barghest.

So any argument for a Predator replacement applies at least as vigorously to the Firehawk.

...

Also, I'm not sure what "properly digesting" means in context. Which projects do you plan to stop, and which projects do you plan to start? Can you be a little more specific?

edofthesquid said:
-[ ] Core Crops Bay
Tempted to grab one if we go for experimental crops, to get militarists on hopefully neutral opinion. The ability to hopefully feed our space pop fully from space is really tempting longer term, and being able to orbitally drop supplies could be huge...
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Shala itself is big enough to feed a huge number of space colonists just from its core space. With no +Food bays it still produces +15 Food. I don't think the increase in capacity is worth it; by the time we actually have enough people in space that Shala can't feed them all, we should be building new agricultural stations, not just relying on Shala being 40% more productive.

This is just us redundantly expanding a capability we already have.

Leaning towards this:
[ ] Plan space crops science no animals
- [ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
- [ ] Habitation Bay
- [ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
- [ ] Experimental Crops
- [ ] Core Crops Bay
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Personally I'd swap out Core Crops Bay for a third Species Restoration Bay. I just don't think we need the former, and the latter... well, I'm not sure it's worth going for all six from a diminishing returns standpoint, but three is definitely better than two.

VonVonson said:
Imo the only thing we could have done better with was investing in the navy earlierand spreading it out more so they have a more sane deployment schedule rather than us slamming out 3 new ship classes in a year. Turns out we need to do a bit more planning for ships, who do months per ships rather than ships per month
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I'm not sure this would make the deployment schedule much saner. At this point the Navy feels whipsawed because we didn't fund new programs for a while and now we are suddenly doing so, not so much because the ships themselves are going to come off the slipways in a way that is somehow bad.


[ ] Plan Attempting to Save What We Can
- [ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
- [ ] Habitation Bay
- [ ] Experimental Crops
- [ ] Species Restoration Bay x3
 
Simon_Jester said:
Also, I'm not sure what "properly digesting" means in context. Which projects do you plan to stop, and which projects do you plan to start? Can you be a little more specific?
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I meant in terms of mitigation and such. Basically, ZOCOM's been wanring us time after time they are being drawn thin. So we need to hheed their advice, not start new mitigation or mines if at all possible.
 
I think a similar arrangement to that of Steel Talons would be good for the navy. One dice per turn forever. That way it keeps us consistent and, because navy is a build strategy, it's constantly churning new projects out
 
[] Plan Science
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x2
-[ ] Habitation Bay

similar to the plan proposed by @Simon_Jester, this trades the third species restoration bay for a third experimental crops bay.

while i think the second species restoration bay is worth it, diminishing returns will kick in sufficiently hard after that that i think getting more science done is more worthwhile.
 
Animal Husbandry has some scientific contribution, and Core Crops might have some (ambiguous language).

The kind of project we're embarking on necessitates taking animals with us, so I think there's more potential there than at first glance.
 
DarknessSmiles said:
[] Plan Science
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x2
-[ ] Habitation Bay

similar to the plan proposed by @Simon_Jester, this trades the third species restoration bay for a third experimental crops bay.

while i think the second species restoration bay is worth it, diminishing returns will kick in sufficiently hard after that that i think getting more science done is more worthwhile.
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It'd like to trade the experimentation bay for an animal husbandry bay just for the biotech points:
[] Plan Living and Feeling
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay
-[ ] Habitation Bay
 
Simon_Jester said:
Shala itself is big enough to feed a huge number of space colonists just from its core space. With no +Food bays it still produces +15 Food. I don't think the increase in capacity is worth it; by the time we actually have enough people in space that Shala can't feed them all, we should be building new agricultural stations, not just relying on Shala being 40% more productive.

This is just us redundantly expanding a capability we already have.

Personally I'd swap out Core Crops Bay for a third Species Restoration Bay. I just don't think we need the former, and the latter... well, I'm not sure it's worth going for all six from a diminishing returns standpoint, but three is definitely better than two.
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Yeah that was the one I most debated. It's primarily trying to balance militarist disapproval and providing expanded capability to drop supplies from orbit if needed, with expanded space food capacity a distant second (as in, supplying extensive lunar/asteroid operations/colonies multiple plans out).

I'm 50-50 on alternately swapping it out for more fruticulture to keep support benefits vs more species restoration for science/morale purposes if I did swap it.
 
Tithed_Verse said:
It'd like to trade the experimentation bay for an animal husbandry bay just for the biotech points:
[] Plan Living and Feeling
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay
-[ ] Habitation Bay
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i considered it, but considering that lab meat is a thing soon and growing animals in space is horribly inefficient i just couldnt justify it from a practicality perspective.
 
I opened my third eye and read this sentence:

Multiple bays would both increase and speed the array of new crops, including programs for radiotrophic crops that could be grown for example on the lunar surface.
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We can work the plan goal without this station, and we'd be pressed to build habitation bays during the plan anyway. And so -

[ ] Plan Having Tasted The Fruit, Nothing Shall Be Impossible For Them v2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x2
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay x1

DarknessSmiles said:
i considered it, but considering that lab meat is a thing soon and growing animals in space is horribly inefficient i just couldnt justify it from a practicality perspective.
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Humanity's relationship with animal life is an essential part of our existence. The research potential of the husbandry bay is a lot more interesting to me than its political or even morale benefits.
 
Ithillid said:
Median Tiberium Refining
The Visitors' mastery of Tiberium makes the Brotherhood of Nod's look like they built their refineries in a cave, with a box of scraps, which, to be entirely fair, they often are. While GDI cannot mimic their technology, let alone improve on it, there are many lessons to be learned from their means of processing, although it is very likely that they are near-completely separate in terms of process from existing HG and IHG systems.
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Big OOF on that. Building the whole Median refining infrastructure from scratch will not be cheap or easy.

And we might have to, especially if it's waaaaay better than anything GDI or NOD have ATM.
 
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I think we can get a lot of the same benefits of the Core Crops bay from Columbia's SCOP bay.

As a bonus, Columbia's bay achieves two additional things:
1. We're diversifying our supply lines
2. We're learning how to build such systems in new colonies, making them more food independent from the start

I don't think the Core Crops bay is a worthwhile investment.
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From a per die basis, the Shala habitation bay is wasteful. I can see it as hedging bets on the scale of the next gen space colonies, though.

On one hand, I think we'd design those colonies such that they evenly hit our project goals, so using the habitation bay should be just straight up worse at achieving them.

Otoh, there might be IC reasons not to do that?
 
MSH said:
I opened my third eye and read this sentence:
We can work the plan goal without this station, and we'd be pressed to build habitation bays during the plan anyway. And so -

[ ] Plan Having Tasted The Fruit, Nothing Shall Be Impossible For Them v2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x2
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay x1



Humanity's relationship with animal life is an essential part of our existence. The research potential of the husbandry bay is a lot more interesting to me than its political or even morale benefits.
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I really like this plan.
I pretty much see doubling up on experimental crops and species restoration as well as at least one high efficiency void crop bay as mandatory for any future developments, leaving us with one slot. Now, I don't think habitation bay is a good idea. Yes, it gives us some more population in space, but we will need a lot more habitats in orbit or on the moon anyway, so I doubt it will actually make a big difference. Core crops bay is more of what Shala is already doing, and we already have enough food in orbit for now. While one more fruit tree bay could be worthwhile, Animal Husbandry offers largely the same benefits, but actually gives us new capabilities no other option offers.
 
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Ithillid said:
Biodiversity is one of the sadder cases here. Basically, from initial results, it looks like Reclamation ate their lunch, and what few candidates were viable effectively got taken under their wing. The big things seem to have been fearmongering on the part of Yellow Zone derived populations, the revelations of just how badly the war on underground Tiberium has been going, especially with the detonation at Mount Belaya, and the rise of a much larger faction of Starbound voters. Aside from that, the idea of biological diversity just kind of pales in comparison
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The impacts however, are going to be felt over the course of decades rather than weeks or years however, and there are serious concerns that the program, without political interest from Parliament, especially given the collapse of the Biodiversity party, and it folding into Reclamation, that the program will effectively be abandoned. At least, until GDI stabilizes the Tiberium situation in a more permanent manner, especially given the twin hits of the doom clock, and the Mount Belaya explosion.
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The Initiative's mining programs have undertaken further expansion. However there is significant public fear surrounding them, with the opening of a mine near instantly spiking requests for new housing - in some cases doubling or even tripling the volume of such overnight. The public fear caused by the Mount Belaya explosion has fundamentally changed how the Vein Mine program is viewed both outside and inside the Treasury.
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While the Wingman project has not been a particularly high priority for the last few years, work has once again restarted, with the Initiative pouring substantial work into a number of factories, and while it has run into issues – primarily with some of the electronic systems on the Wingmen needing recalibration in large parts of the world due to spikes in atmospheric particulate after the Mount Belaya explosion – these are not particularly huge issues, and GDI has significant experience in the field in any case, due to continuing operations during the aftermath of the Temple Prime explosion.
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I want to point out that the Mount Belaya explosion was mentioned four times in this update, a full turn after it happened. It's nothing that hasn't been said before, but Nat 1s can have very large, global effects depending on where they land, and we don't get to choose where or when they happen. The sooner we do Predictive Modeling Management, the better, period.
 
Night_stalker said:
I meant in terms of mitigation and such. Basically, ZOCOM's been wanring us time after time they are being drawn thin. So we need to hheed their advice, not start new mitigation or mines if at all possible.
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One of our Plan targets is to increase GDI's income by 430 RpT within the next eight turns.

What do you propose? Because, again, you're being extremely broad by saying "no more mitigation or mines." Not all mitigation projects and not all mining projects are created equal, when it comes to the subject of ZOCOM strain. And it's unclear what you'd even be suggesting that we do with our tiberium dice in terms of "digesting."

MSH said:
I opened my third eye and read this sentence:

We can work the plan goal without this station, and we'd be pressed to build habitation bays during the plan anyway. And so -

[ ] Plan Having Tasted The Fruit, Nothing Shall Be Impossible For Them v2
-[ ] Experimental Crops Bay x2
-[ ] High Efficiency Void Crops Bay x1
-[ ] Species Restoration Bay x2
-[ ] Animal Husbandry Bay x1
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Personally, I think that by the time we have big enough lunar colonies that some kind of edible radiotroph that can grow in vacuum is particularly useful, we'll have had ample time for the experimental bay to make itself felt even if we only have one. Personally, I'd rather triple down on species restoration. Animal husbandry is a subject I'm wobbling on, because we do need some experience handling large animals in space. We don't really need steak in space, but we do need to know how to handle large animals.

Oleg-14191 said:
Big OOF on that. Building the whole Median refining infrastructure from scratch will not be cheap or easy.

And we might have to, especially if it's waaaaay better than anything GDI or NOD have ATM.
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Well, the good news is that Visitor refining tech will almost certainly be a net positive in STU terms even if it uses STUs itself, because it's what the Visitors themselves use to extract the STUs they need. With that said, it does incentivize us to pause the extremely expensive IHG refits, since even that technology is likely to be made obsolete in the near future.

I still think we should construct some new refineries, because we're well short of our refining capacity target, have no idea when we'll be able to actually implement the Visitor tech at industrial scale, and need the redundancy anyway given the risk of al-Isfahani going nuclear over Karachi.

Rakuhn said:
From a per die basis, the Shala habitation bay is wasteful. I can see it as hedging bets on the scale of the next gen space colonies, though.
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One argument for the habitat bay on Shala is just to increase the workforce. We note how the Columbia hospital bay is limited in some respects simply because the station just doesn't contain enough people to support every function it might have. Not just lack of demand, lack of workforce.

If we're growing the equivalent of +15 Food on Shala plus all the functions of the bays, I can easily imagine that having permanent housing aboard for 2000 people rather than 1000 would only begin to meet requirements for a workforce, and might significantly ease operations.
 
According to the descriptions, Shala is using a high level of automation. Given what real aeroponics systems can do with that, all the normal crops are probably being tended exclusively by robots.
 
we need to work on mining tiberium, the speed spike has some value when we have removed all tiberium from earth and want to farm it. the growth spike have no value as of right now.
the median tiberium refinment is to useful and important to not utilize.
 
Simon_Jester said:
One of our Plan targets is to increase GDI's income by 430 RpT within the next eight turns.

What do you propose? Because, again, you're being extremely broad by saying "no more mitigation or mines." Not all mitigation projects and not all mining projects are created equal, when it comes to the subject of ZOCOM strain. And it's unclear what you'd even be suggesting that we do with our tiberium dice in terms of "digesting."
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That's kinda the problem for our more smarter posters. It just seems to be QM and ZOCOM keep reminding us they're getting overstretchhed. And we keep fixating on income expansion, so....
 
Well, that Nat 1 could have been worse.

I'm happy with this turn overall, re: the military stuff that's been talked about, I feel like if we have the space next turn it might be a good idea to burn through all the Development Programs for new Aircraft/MBTs/APCs in one go just so we can get an idea of what the deployment programs will look like for all of those machines and plan accordingly.

If we can't do them all at once, I think we should probably go Novahawks->Paladins+Mammoth 3->APCs in terms of order, with the Novahawk Development ideally being done next turn.

Regarding the Shala Bays, I'm vibing with the general consensus of the thread, but I would also like to go with 3 Species Reclamation bays, with 1 each of the two science-focused bays and the Animal Husbandry bay for maximum research capabilities.
 
We're already a little too stretched thin on military to be getting generous with development projects. I do think we need to hit military with 9 dice a turn for a while. Better to get deployments started than developments.
 
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