Simon, the Space Force won't add any new tools to it's quiver until we complete ASAT 5, so a missile that's ion cannon proof won't care about your fourth node. So either you want to sprint to that completion, or you don't actually want to harden the network, or you just are very mistaken.
Please cut back on the anger, if you read past the post you're quoting you'll note that I already surrendered.
We've historically been on good terms so I'm sorry for whatever I've done to embitter you this much. A lot of people have talked about a lot of things involving space projects, and if you take a moment to try and see it from my point of view, I'm sure you'll understand why "bolster space defenses in a way we promised to do by end of plan anyway"
seems like a logical next step immediately as one finishes a gigantic and expensive space megaproject that houses our command and control hub for all of GDI.
I'm not saying I'm wrong, but I hope you can at least stretch far enough to accept that I wasn't being
stupid, okay? I am not the only person to suggest the course of action I am only now abandoning.
As for the MARVs, I'm principally opposed to them on the grounds that the fleets are highly regional. Sure, they're practically impregnable to most conventional attacks, and can even no-sell nukes to a certain extent now. But they're also kinda...stuck in one place, while our problems are global. You want to ring Mecca with Marv hubs, but the 'Karachi Rush' team want to build one in the Himalaya blue zone to cover it until we get our superhighway up the Indus river valley, and one near Karachi itself to cover that. We're talking about serious dice expenditure to get all these MARVs as well, and it's unlikely to fall into neat 'two military dice, everything else is Tiberium' boxes. The expense we have to pay for them is the secondary, but still important concern-these are not cheap fortifications or affordable mitigation. Marvs are, to butcher a phrase, borrowing from Peter to protect Paul, and we can in fact protect both of them.
Again, the complication is that they're providing real economic benefits alongside the security. If it were
only about the military security, the "rob Peter to pay Paul" aspect would be a big problem. If it were
only the economic aspect, then yeah, they're not especially efficient...
Though Yellow Zone hubs' ability to thicken our refugee trickles is arguably
unique outside of full-court
Yellow Zone Harvesting presses which put a lot more strain on the overall global military and are
spectacularly inefficient at using Tiberium dice, economically speaking.
But seriously, for choices of area where we can stack up two Red Zone MARV hubs in a row (say, Beirut -> Istanbul), we have a reasonably efficient project. 335 Progress at 20 R/die for 25 RpT and +3 Red Zone mitigation looks pretty attractive, viewed in isolation, even without the military benefits.
Vein mines have a higher payoff per unit Progress but cost Capital Goods and don't provide Red Zone mitigation.
Red Zone Containment Lines can give us the mitigation at roughly equivalent cost in progress per unit mitigation, but cost more per die and provide much less resources. Three rounds of
Red Zone Harvesting is more lucrative and not too much more expensive in progress, but involves extending ZOCOM a lot (though the tidy payoff in potential for glacier mining is not to be despised...
if we have the Logistics to cover it!)
MARVs aren't optimal and they do burn Military dice which isn't ideal, but they're not
that bad just as an economic proposition, and while the military benefits are localized they're at least
there, helping to counterbalance the suboptimality.
That said, two dice is obviously the wrong thing to get hung up on OSRCTs for-we need them for Refits instead upon reflection. 3 Orca dice, 3-4 Aurora dice, and 3 Refit dice maybe? We won't know until we see the Aurora's stats in the cold light of day-if it takes Capital Goods, we might need to break the spider-silk glass for an emergency.
I'm hesitant to do the war factory refits in Q3 simply because there
is some chance BZHIS won't complete in Q3. I'd rather have the Capital Goods "cash and carry" for this project than risk going net negative on Capital Goods, and even the third phase of the project hits us with a -4 Capital Goods penalty.
As for the Aurora factories' stats, one thought that occurs to me is that they're likely to be closely comparable to those of the Apollo fighter the bomber is based on.
While it is true that the combination of MARV hubs and fleets is moderately expensive, I think the fact that they are effectively the only way that we, as the treasury department, can dictate strategic deployments is essential to consider. In addition, I believe we may want to consider using the hubs by themselves during the upcoming war turns as a form of quickly deployed stopgap measures in specific areas of the globe that GDI is facing issues in; as stated by Ithillid, the hubs now serve as heavily fortified locations even without the fleets.
True, but most of the hub locations are
very isolated from support. We'd need to be very judicious about which hubs we try to throw together if we're not in a position to fill them with MARVs quickly.
There is no clear evidence that we vitally, as in "cannot reasonably expect to win at acceptable cost without this," need the ASAT 4 for the coming warlord dogpile.
Others' relaying words regarding ASAT and Space Force's confidence has already convinced me.
As I said to Vehrec, I hope you can, at least, stretch to being willing to accept that my initial wanting to focus on further expansion of space defenses as we finish an extremely expensive and critical space-based megaproject that houses our command and control hubs for al of GDI is...
Well, even if you think I'm wrong, I hope you can accept me as something other than a babbling fool for wanting it and thinking, in the past, that it had been a good idea. I am not the only person to talk of doing
ASAT Phase 4 alongside completion of the
Philadelphia in the past few quarters of game-time.
As for getting them back up into space, we literally have Leopards we don't need for space lift on tap, the only problem is setting up a long term logistical train exploiting orbital/suborbital shipments of megatons of resources.
It's not the supply of Leopards.
The hard part of getting an orbital strike RCT back into space
begins with the part where after they're deployed, to get them back up again, I'm pretty sure you need to move them back to a spaceport. Which is generally going to be deep in a Blue Zone out of range of Nod action, in exactly the kind of place orbital strike RCTs
don't drop, so a substantial overland march is involved.
Furthermore, even if Leopards are capable of rough-field landings and takeoffs 'wherever' including hastily seized and prepared fields near wherever the orbital strike RCT happened to be fighting... the RCT will still need to re-embark, launch the formation's space transport in an orderly manner, get back aboard the space station, and reload the station with its drop pods.
It's a big operation, and having ten times more transport shuttles doesn't necessarily make it a lot easier because at some point the spacelift capacity isn't the bottleneck, the bottleneck is all the complexity and pain-in-the-ass factor of "moving house" when the stuff you're moving includes high explosives and you're moving several thousand people and all their military equipment.
Realistically, these units are sort of like paratroopers. They are extremely mobile in their transport planes and can go anywhere, including places no other troops can go. And they can go there
fast, potentially on relatively short notice. But fast as they are, the troops
lose much of that mobility as soon as their feet hit the dirt; they cannot hop back up into the sky and parachute down again in a distant location. They're more like paratroops who rely on transport assets not part of their own TO&E, and which they cannot bring with them to their deployment zone. They're not so much like helicopter infantry who have organic transport capability to make lightning-fast moves again and again whenever they wish.
Dropping ten or twenty thousand troops via the OSRCT has a lot of potential to decide any single battle, but if you want to decide three battles in the same one-week period, you're probably going to need a separate OSRCT formation for each drop.
I'm prepared, at this point, to take the Space Force's word for the whole thing being the best use of resources sent to them- but I do want us to keep our expectations realistic.
Except that +3 is considered marginal for cap goods and one good strike takes us to 0 or negative, so same situation as logistics, then again if we are in the 90+% for BZHIS then it is something we can chance. I likely would not put free dice on it since those are dice that can go to income or mil rollouts which reduce the chance of NOD reducing logistics, cap good and other such stats.
The benefits of having +5 Capital Goods cushion instead of +3 during a war is mostly beneficial to our ability to be confident of
continuing to build factories during that war.
The benefits of having +25 Logistics cushion instead of +7 during a war is beneficial to our ability to
continue to supply the front lines during that war.
One is a more immediate and urgent problem than the other. Furthermore, it is
deterministic that our Logistics will take hits in wartime, since there is no realistic way to avoid enemy raiding of our transport assets and absolutely no way to avoid the extra strain of needing to supply large numbers of troops using up lots of supplies in active combat across multiple continental fronts. By contrast, it is merely
possible that the warlords will succeed in penetrating our defenses hard enough to inflict more than minor (-1/-2) losses to our Capital Goods supply.
Furthermore, again, the consequences of temporarily going negative on Capital Goods are those we have seen- new factories cannot be built efficiently or at all until Capital Goods production is brought up to speed, with the possibility of
eventual economic collapse if the problem is not remedied for years at a stretch. That's quite bad, but it's not immediate in the sense of "you start losing a lot more soldiers literally the week after this happens." The consequences of temporarily going negative on Logistics are much more pressing and immediate, because the lack of supplies to the frontline is likely to make itself felt almost instantly.
Also, the jump from +3 to +5 is much smaller than the jump from +7 to +25. We gain a considerably greater measure of immediate security from the latter. I will happily sacrifice the chance to have a +5 (rather than +4 or +3) Capital Goods stockpile during the warlord dogpile, for the chance to have a +25 (rather than +7 or +11) Logistics buffer.
