Are we confident that there will be a Stage 12 for Glacier Mining and that it won't have a high Logistics cost? That last RZ Harvesting expansion sounded rough.
It was rough because Nod put up a fight, not so much because the area itself was hard to get to.
Wondering if we slow up a bit on Glacier chasing, and start on expanding our Processing Facilities. The Processing Facilities are also going to cost Logistics, and with the Integrated Cargo System likely 3 quarters away at best, we should ensure we can afford the Logistics cost of the Processing Facilities with existing Logistics projects.
Also, bear in mind that we have automated shipyards coming in for sure in Q3 under my plan ("Surefire Shipping"), which when combined with the probably-single-die effort to complete the commsats that can be easily tacked on in Q4... Well, as I understand it, we started with +4 Logistics, gained +2 Logistics from commsats, and lost -3 to apartments and a glacier phase. So now we're at +3.
With the automated shipyards we're at
+12, which is more than enough to cover an unexpectedly expensive glacier phase, and we've got another easy +2 from commsats as low-hanging fruit for a total of +14 by Q4 if we really want it. There's enough left over there for the refining plants.
(Also, I suspect that having a broader spread of refineries might reduce the Logistics strain of some of our existing glacier mines, I dunno, could be wrong)
...
Beyond that, there's always railroads if we need to hammer the "Logistics NOW dammit" button; it's less efficient than ICS, but we can get it sooner. With arcologies and tidal power largely out of the way in Q3, we can slam out one more phase of railroads with reasonable confidence as an emergency measure. Not that I expect to need it.
(And if we aren't trying to rush two stages of Glacier Mining, we can be chill about whether the Civilian Shipyards complete or not.)
The problem is that we've got a bunch of extra dice compared to last plan, and a bunch of 20 R/die projects we
really want to push, and we just plain can't fund them without getting our budget up to snuff. If we can't get something like 700 R/turn, we're constantly going to be leaving areas fallow just to support our operations elsewhere.
My other concern is the Shimmer Shield Development. We have a lot of stuff to roll out already.
While Shimmer Shields will potentially reduce the consumption of Hockey Pucks Ablats, I don't think we can afford to line up further Deployment projects right now.
See, the problem with this line of thinking is that it makes it nearly impossible to do any research. Shimmer Shields is a tech with a
LOT of applications (among other things it's one of the few ways we have of protecting our space stations from gigantic Nod anti-satellite laser systems).
There is
literally NO requirement that we do an immediate 'deployment' of the tech, but we need to know what can and cannot be done with it if we're going to plan around it. We can fuck ourselves over very easily by refusing to experiment with the fruits of our Nod/Scrin research on the grounds that "it's just more stuff to deploy" while ignoring the potential payoffs of the tech.
What the actual? Is this the first time NOD has rolled out non-human macroscale bioweapons?
Nah, we've seen cyborg zombie crocodiles and shit in the past few years. Now, them being able to bio-engineer squidoids that can credibly threaten to board and storm a naval cruiser underway is a bit of a surprise, but not really an outside context problem compared to other stuff.
What's the range of that plasma weapon? Comparable or superior to our railguns? Is it Scrin-derived? Do we cover our ships in Ablat?
Nod's had plasma guns since at least Tib War Two; the original ground attack version of the Banshee used 'em. Pretty sure they got ahold of some of that tech from the first time they got their hands on the Tacitus; subsequent access to the Tacitus and Scrin tech can only have made things easier.
Scaling them up to naval guns isn't much of a surprise.
I suspect that plasma weapons are significantly more effective against our anti-laser ablatives than lasers would be, if only because we
optimized the ablatives against Nod's lasers and not against the much rarer plasma weapon tech.
Arcologies should finish next turn, which will help with Housing further, possibly enough to do ICS if we can afford its costs.
I think we can. ICS isn't actually more expensive per die than most of our other Infrastructure projects, besides tidal power and apartments. We should be able to largely finish the project in two turns of focused efforts, by which point even if we do no new housing in 2058Q4 or 2059Q1, we'll still be +4 up on Housing from where we started. And squeezing in one more phase of apartments at a slow-walk wouldn't be that difficult, and would help us not
lose our gains in getting a lot of refugee families out of the fortress towns and shit like that.
ACS progression is nice, but we'll be wanting to toss any non-shipyard dice towards another round of Fusion for Energy. HI dice should not be going idle.
The problem is just that Heavy Industry dice are so goddamn
expensive. If we weren't effectively committed to blowing 60 R on finishing our Nod/Scrin research, or if getting the
Philadelphia up and running weren't a priority, or if we weren't still trying to expand the glacier mines, it'd be a lot easier to find the resources to activate the fourth die.
More resources, but we will need to push on Ground Forces Zone Armor soon, to garrison them. Or do more Factory Refits, to get the earlier ZA factories up to speed, rather than having to hand-make some parts.
Yes, but those are 20 R/die projects with significant Capital Goods cost... which in turn means
more expensive Heavy Industry options. We can't start aggressively pushing those projects until we have our income up to a higher level than it is now- something like 700 RpT sounds more manageable, and I'd rather try for 750-800. But that's gonna take a while, especially since we only have about 1-2 more glacier phases before we need to pivot back to the slower and more CapGoods-intensive vein mining for a while, or the similarly expensive and less lucrative (but CapGoods-cheap) moon mining.
On that note:
[]Plan Under Review Q3 2058
-[]Infrastructure 5/6 50R
--[] Tidal Power Plants (Phase 3) 154/300 2 dice 20R 62%
--[] Blue Zone Arcologies (Stage 2) 548/650 2 dice 30R 91%
--[] Security Review 1 die
Ugh. Leaving Infrastructure dice fallow is just
painful. We are badly hurting for everything Infrastructure provides us, and Infrastructure dice aren't even the really expensive ones.
-[]Heavy Industry 4/4 + 1 85R
--[]Tokyo Chip Fabricator (Phase 1) 0/125 3 dice 45R 96%
--[]Automated Civilian Shipyards 139/250 2 dice 40R 80%
-[]Tiberium 6/6 + 1 210R
--[] Red Zone Tiberium Harvesting (Stage 11) 2 dice 50R 98%
--[] Tiberium Glacier Mining (Stage 11+12) 30/360 5 dice 150R 81%
-[]Orbital Industry 4/4 70R
--[] GDSS Philadelphia II (Phase 4) 100/715 3 dice 60R (3/10)
--[] Expand Orbital Communications Network (Phase 5) 79/135 1 die 10R 69%
20% chance of the shipyards not completing. I don't know whether to expect the cost of Glacier Mines #11 and #12 to be more like -5 Logistics or more like -7 Logistics, but in either case, even if the commsats finish (and they might not), this plan means we're kind of fucked if the shipyards don't complete, because the commsats alone only bring us to +5 and that means our Logistics in Q4 are
tight.
Also, investing only three dice in the
Philadelphia this turn makes it nigh-impossible to be confident of completing Phase 4 in Q4, which we really really want to do. Much like the stabilizer, getting it done a turn early can have significant (if not transformational) long term knock-on consequences.
-[]Services 3/4 65R
--[] NOD Research Initiatives 124/160 1 die 30R 95%
--[] Scrin Research Institutions 160/350 1 die 30R 100%
--[] Litvinov Tax 1 die 5R
If you're gonna budget for a Litvinov tax in Q3 as opposed to accepting delay in that area, you should budget more than 5R. Most new projects these days are at least 10 R/die.
-[]Military 6/6 + 2 110R
--[]Wartime Factory Refits (Phase 2) 52/90 1 die 20R 91%
--[]Orca Refit Deployment 0/200 1 dice 15R (median 1/3)
--[]Naval Defense Laser Refit 0/??? 3 dice 45R? ??% (median 3/??)
--[]Hydrofoil Shipyards
---[]Busan-Ulsan 69/85 1 die 10R 100%
--[]Orbital Nuclear Caches 0/175 1 die 20 R (median 1/3)
--[]Security Review 1 die
Given all the other sacrifices you make in this plan, I'm going to argue (painfully)
against the orbital nuclear caches. I suggest turning the nuke cache die into a second Super Orca die. Then use the 5 R thus freed up to either increase the "Litvinov Tax" budget to something that might actually get the job done, or to convert a Tokyo die into a Shipyards die so we have assured +9 Logistics (which we need pressingly next turn), instead of assured -1 Labor (which we don't).
Slightly riskier than
@Simon_Jester's Surefire Plan on Logistics: a 6% chance of passing neither Orbital Comms nor Automated Civilian Shipyards. And no ICS.
Yeah. I'm specifically trying to look forwards to making sure we have solid Logistics as soon as possible in the coming year of 2059, because we're going to have real problems on our hands when Nod goes 'hot' and starts hitting us all over the place. During this quest we've always been in a
low-level state of warfare; everything going up to mid-level at once is going to mean that our existing Logistics, adequate to low-level warfare, becomes inadequate. We'd see many sectors forced on the defensive or undermined because we just can't get supplies to them.
Every time an update brings up transuranics and how important the processing facilities at Jeddah and Chicago are because they're the only ones that can make a reliable amount makes me nervous. No matter how many new defenses and naval vessels we put on guard duty.
Really think we should give ourselves some redudancy and get the new Tiberium processing centers up and running soon rather than waiting until we hit the processing limit.
I like the sentiment, but we
really need the income because we're constantly leaving dice fallow. 1-2 more rounds of glaciers is about all we can get cheaply from Mecca-Jeddah-Medina's bonuses, and after that the immediate next logical target is the refineries (plus building railgun harvester factories that will probably provide some 'cheap' +RpT increase while making our overall military posture in the Red Zones
better)
That or task more weapon satellites for each target in an attempt to overwhelm the defenses, no shield is perfect especially what Nod can rush together in the field.
I mean, the ion shielding on a battleship is likely to be about as good as Nod can construct on a mobile platform. It won't match the Temple Prime shields, but it's entirely possible that trying to just beat it down with brute force will be less efficient than using the same amount of ion cannon fire to sink the battleship's escorts and render it vulnerable to attack by conventional forces.
