Exactly this, and why I'd support getting things like Zone armor or more Shell plants over more refits.
The war factory refits do have a few specific advantages:
1) They
DO provide us with vast supplies of military equipment, which can be good to have. In case of a war emergency where we suddenly needed to supply a force that's maintaining a much higher operational tempo, that's good. And high operational tempo can be very advantageous.
2) The way they streamline
our operations will concretely give us one or two extra Military dice, which means we can objectively do more that benefits the military.
Especially stuff like consumables production, which is Dice-limited more than it's Resource-limited. We can do more
every turn.
3) They don't actually consume that many Military dice that could go elsewhere. We could finish off the entire remaining set of refits with no more
Military dice expenditure than is required to do a single Zone Armor factory. And while don't get me wrong, the Ground Forces
really want their Zone Armor, the advantages to them of having
one such factory more or less wouldn't necessarily outweigh the entire remaining production boost from Phases 3 and 4 of the war factory refits.
The war factory refits aren't really
wasteful for the military. The thing they really burn, the problematic aspect, is the Capital Goods consumption. We could do a loooot of vein mining with the +8 Capital Goods it'd take to clear the remaining phases of the project.
At this point, I wonder if there is any point to arguing about prioritizing Zone armor at all.
That's because you usually don't read the room very well.
Look, each Zone Armor factory is an average of about 3-4 Military dice, at 20 R/die, with a cost of -2 Labor, -4 Energy, and -1 Capital Goods.
Just
activating 20 R/die projects was burdensome for us until, more or less,
now, because of the very same low income issues you normally pay so much attention to. The Capital Goods cost is substantial and the Energy cost is
painful.
We completed Phase 2 of the war factory refits (which, notably,
accelerated Zone Armor production) for one die, 20 R, and -3 Capital Goods. Diverting that one die to a Zone Armor factory would have accomplished
nothing, and to complete three such factories (to use up the same amount of Capital Goods) would likely cost around ten dice, 200 R, and -12 Energy which would in turn mean building a whole new tranche of dedicated fusion reactors.
The Zone Armor factories are a project on the same scale as the
Governor shipyards; if anything they are
worse because of the higher Energy requirements. Finishing the
Governor yards was a gigantic two-year commitment that consumed constant attention from us through half of an entire Plan. It is not something you start before you are ready.
Now don't get me wrong, I'd like to do a single factory soon just to
start the process of deploying power armor to the frontline forces! But squeezing that in when we have so many programs with
global military impact (like the Super Orca project) that cost the same or
less as even a single factory... It's a tough thing to finance in a hurry.
Stop assuming you're the smartest man in the room and the only one who can see the importance of whatever you happen to think is top priority.
