I think we'll be able to advance lithography a bit even without a focus. We wouldn't catch up but there will be options to continue lagging behind in rear view mirror.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Could we meet the 60% service increase from the service target? Not sure how much stuff even with a focus would be profitable...
"Required for" Population Distribution Programs(Stage 3-5): This sounds like a continuation of current Development of Population Services. As the last results turn noted, given every small town a post office and grocer is nearly running at a loss. This is important, but not a source of big bucks.
Computerization of Finance: This is probably very profitable.
Retraining Programs: Likely runs at a loss, and debatably necessary if we're ramping up unskilled labor price
Distribution of Professional Services: Making lawyers and stuff very available? I don't know enough to say how profitable that will be, but probably not superbly.
"Required for" Population Distribution Programs(Stage 3-5): This sounds like a continuation of current Development of Population Services. As the last results turn noted, given every small town a post office and grocer is nearly running at a loss. This is important, but not a source of big bucks.
Computerization of Finance: This is probably very profitable.
Retraining Programs: Likely runs at a loss, and debatably necessary if we're ramping up unskilled labor price
Distribution of Professional Services: Making lawyers and stuff very available? I don't know enough to say how profitable that will be, but probably not superbly.
Given how shallow the lake is? Unlikely. Could also be that a bunch of gas wells aren't going to be properly capped before the area is flooded tho.
There's alot of areas where building a gigawatt of nuclear generation capacity just isn't practical. If it is politically viable to put in a bit of "GEP" now, before an oil crisis, it will likely continue to be viable (and efficient) to keep adding every plan.
Especially as next time we can implement GEP, it won't be prototypes and pilot projects.
Not everything needs (or is best served by) baseload power from a ginormous plant.
From the sounds of it, we still haven't brought mass availability of transistor electronics to the ordinary worker yet. Forget computers for a moment, we need to provide transistor radios, hi-fis, transistorized colour televisions, calculators, digital watches and VCRs. These don't need chips necessarily, and if we do use chips in them, we don't need the best stuff. But these are all huge product categories in the 70s and 80s. If we don't develop domestic industries, we're going to be hemorrhaging money on imports.
If we don't develop these industries now, we probably never will. Not only is this the period in which these technologies were in enormous demand, but we are not so far behind to make trying to catch up not worth our time.
And alot of this stuff (especially televisions and tape players) will be very important to be able to produce any kind of reasonable home computer.
Not to making processors, no. But there's more to making a computer than just the processor.
VHS players for example take mind boggling precision. There's a reason why the countries that became the dominant players in VHS player manufacture were also the countries where computers tended to be assembled.
Assembling electronics was a labour intensive process that was difficult to automate, so cheap labour made a big difference. But once that cheap labour had gained skill, not only the people doing the assembly, but also the people planning the factories, managing the factories and doing the QA. And those skills were largely transferable.
The computers of the 80s all could have had way more memory. The issue was that RAM was expensive and these computers were being made on very tight budgets. Had RAM been cheaper, banking could have been used to go above what the CPU could address.
With how labour intensive consumer electronics are in the period, that makes these industries a good candidate for soaking up manpower producing something worthwhile.
I am not sure that advanced computers will really add a whole bunch of productivity.
I lean towards investing in more fundamental things first.
Though I am tempted by an infra/services plan.
3 dice on rail electrification and 7 dice on housing could really help, come the oil crisis. Good quality housing, and importantly, dense housing that has good public transport to the places people need to go will have a big effect on how much suffering the rise of oil prices causes for our people.
Am torn on where to invest in high speed rail next. The Urals expansion puts us closer to connecting Central Asia, and will reduce pressure on the airports. The Caucasus expansion could lead to high speed rail to Turkey and Iran. Intensifying trade with Turkey and Iran could help offset the oil crunch. Am leaning towards the Urals tho. Unless the cheapness of the Caucasus becomes a big point in its favour.
Regards,
fasquardon
I think that the Ural HSR is the logical next project, both because it's the prereq to tying Central Asia in to the network (which dovetails nicely with our newfound base thanks to RR) and because it will serve many more population/industrial centers than the Caucasus region. HSR in the western USSR has ended up largely functioning as a commuter system rather than a replacement for vacation flights or whatever, there's vast numbers of people living in smaller satellite cities outside Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kiev, etc. that commute on the HSR network to the big city every day. This helps spread out the infrastructure and population services stresses to secondary urban centers rather than turning Moscow into a city of 20 million with a sewer system designed for 5 million, and more importantly it replaces cars for commuting. This is good just for general anti-car purposes of course, but it will be triply important when the oil crisis hits. Getting commuters in the Ural industrial belt to take the train instead of a car will save a measurable fraction of pain when gas prices spike, I think, and while this is probably also true in the Caucasus it won't have the same impact with smaller cities and populations there.
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Isn't this a good argument for max HSR and Electrification dice? More high speed railway AND electrified railway will presumably mitigate some of the impact of oil crisis, and it's also a relatively cheap way of using dice now that our budget is going down.
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- The great frozen north
Agreed on Ural rail.
Aside from the LI/HI debate, another key question for this vote is, how many non-locked infra dice do we need? The housing option blurbs sound like letting the Mikoyankas rot away and letting new builds replace them is viable at 5 dice if politically non-ideal, which is very useful because doing the three Mikoyanka stages manually would eat a lot of dice. A relatively rail-heavy brace-for-oil-shock plan has 2 Ural dice and 2 rail electrification dice. Add 5 housing dice and 1 on river reversal, that's 10 infra dice. Can we get by only two dice in infra, backed by free dice?
Two big things we'd like to do in infra is sewage (that's been delayed AGES) and western Local Roads- unlocking the last stage of Transportation Enterprises would be very useful for meeting our services target.
Without an infra focus, any non-RR hydro is WAY out. Maybe we can squeeze in a 1-dice irrigation project, IF we go down to just Caucasus HSR instead of Ural. But I'd rather not. We just did start RR after all, the other farmers can be patient and wait their turn.
Aside from the LI/HI debate, another key question for this vote is, how many non-locked infra dice do we need? The housing option blurbs sound like letting the Mikoyankas rot away and letting new builds replace them is viable at 5 dice if politically non-ideal, which is very useful because doing the three Mikoyanka stages manually would eat a lot of dice. A relatively rail-heavy brace-for-oil-shock plan has 2 Ural dice and 2 rail electrification dice. Add 5 housing dice and 1 on river reversal, that's 10 infra dice. Can we get by only two dice in infra, backed by free dice?
Two big things we'd like to do in infra is sewage (that's been delayed AGES) and western Local Roads- unlocking the last stage of Transportation Enterprises would be very useful for meeting our services target.
Without an infra focus, any non-RR hydro is WAY out. Maybe we can squeeze in a 1-dice irrigation project, IF we go down to just Caucasus HSR instead of Ural. But I'd rather not. We just did start RR after all, the other farmers can be patient and wait their turn.
Electrification maybe, but our hsr network is very impressive as is. We've hit diminishing returns point two plans ago.
- Location
- Italy
Normally I'd agree, but doesn't incoming oil crisis change the math about its convenience and usefulness some?
Pempelune
Fanfiction Deep State
Electrification has only a small impact on the oil crisis, because diesel trains consume a miniscule amount of fuel compared to cars. You can see it in the option, running 3 dice on Electrification only reduces Fuel prices by 2.
HSR as a replacement to cars for commuting is more impactful.
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I would take Ural HSR over Caucasus one myself, but I am iffy on the way it works out both budget and dice wise. I suppose spending 170 resources and an infra die is not that much more compared to just using that die normally, but these things add up and reduce our flexibility, which is already somewhat borderline.
Napkin math, HSR would replace half of demand for combustion based transportation for the region, which in itself about 50% demand on oil. Ural should be about 5% population but pretty rich, so maybe 7% of demand; removing half of that is 1,75% dent in oil demand.
Caucasus is probably closer to 10% population but pretty poor, so 5% of cars demand, 1,25% dent. Both are not going to make or break the crisis.
I'd think about that in a different way. Places without HSR will be fucked up by oil crisis somewhat more than places with them. Ural is pretty important region to not fuck up in terms of industry, and Caucasus is going to be worse off without it bc it's poor. Also it's a prime place for a tourist industry boom, which is going to be propped up by HSR immensely. And it would get us Caucasus support politically.
I'd try to fit both but if not, I'd try for Caucasus and expand on it for the internal tourist boom.
Caucasus is probably closer to 10% population but pretty poor, so 5% of cars demand, 1,25% dent. Both are not going to make or break the crisis.
I'd think about that in a different way. Places without HSR will be fucked up by oil crisis somewhat more than places with them. Ural is pretty important region to not fuck up in terms of industry, and Caucasus is going to be worse off without it bc it's poor. Also it's a prime place for a tourist industry boom, which is going to be propped up by HSR immensely. And it would get us Caucasus support politically.
I'd try to fit both but if not, I'd try for Caucasus and expand on it for the internal tourist boom.
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We get very good value out of money from doing one dice of electrification, which entails refitting the most used and profitable lines. Like, there is diminishing returns here, you can see that by the project returns. We could do two, but one is fine, three is overdoing it imo.
Ural unlocks Central Asia HSR next plan, and the population there is huge though, which is another big consideration. Do we want to delay Central Asian HSR by 10 years, or the Caucasus by 5?
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Pempelune
Fanfiction Deep State
I suppose Ural HSR + 1 dice Electrification could be a good compromise, but I'm worried about the lack of dice in Infra unless we take Infra focus.
In a vacuum yes, but of course it's all about tradeoffs/opportunity costs. If we do an Infra focus and max out rail investment, then we're going to drop the ball somewhat on domestic consumer supply. If we take the LI focus for consumer goods, then we're not going to be able to afford as many trains, you get the deal.
I think I actually favor the LI/Services focus after thinking about it for a day, Sandman managed to squeeze in Ural HSR and a die on rail electrification which is going to take the worst of the edge off already. Clawing some profits out of the domestic consumer sector while it's still ripe for the picking is important for both the state budget and for general population morale now that we have the beginnings of a high end consumer base.
But in the interest of seeing what the alternative is, I threw together a plan with Infra focus instead of LI and hella train spending. This would work fine too, although it runs the economy hotter with 15% incentive funds due to the lack of central investment in the consumer sector and not wanting to collapse that after spending all day talking about how important it is. This plan is aimed at preparing our physical infrastructure for the oil crisis as well as possible, at the cost of letting our social infrastructure and economic trends become more vulnerable to it. All tradeoffs like I said, but here's the option.
[]Plan Concrete Dreams
-[]Plan Focus (+6 dice): Infrastructure/Services
-[]Spending: 20+15% GNP (+10900R)
-[]Target: Basic Infrastructure
-[]Infrastructure Autodice (-13 Infra/-2 Ag dice, -2450R base but modified by steel prices)
--[]Housing: 7 Infra dice (-1200R)
--[]Passenger Rail Network(Ural Region): 2 Infra die (-350R)
--[]Rail Electrification: 2 Infra dice (-300 R)
--[]Modified River Reversal, 1 Infra + 2 Ag die (-500R)
--[]Dnieper Reservoir System, 1 Infra die (-100R)
-[]Power Autodice (-5 HI/-2 CI dice, +604 power, -2200R)
--[]Krasnoyarsk-Irkutsk Hydroelectric Zone: 0 Infra Dice, +60 power from last FYP's program (-0R)
--[]Nuclear Power: 3 HI dice, +64 power from last FYP's program (-920R)
--[]Coal Power: 2 HI dice, +240 power (-620R)
--[]Gas Power: 2 CI dice, +240 power (-660R)
-[]Services Autodice (-5 Services dice, -660R)
--[]Healthcare: 2 Services dice (-360R)
--[]Education: 3 Services dice (-300R)
-[]Total Discretionary pool: 6 FR/5 IN/5 HI/6 LI/4 CI/4 AG/11 SR, 5590 R
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- Location
- Italy
I like this plan, but could we maybe manage to lower coal to 1 by making up for it with another gas dice, the dams and GEP?
Dams don't start working immediately, but they also have agricultural benefits AND the two smaller ones only take. A year to start giving electricity
That's a good point too. Next plan we're probably doing HI to catch up on lithography and my guess would be LI to capitalize on that. Won't be able to fit a lot of infra again.
- Location
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How critical are the West Russia (Dnipro or Volga) reservoir systems? They're useful sure, but with an infra dice crunch this plan even worse than last one, might more flexibility for other projects be better than locking in a dice?
Yet another thought: Not having a Light Industry focus only locks us out of stages 2+ of microcomputers and consumer electronics. 1970s electronics are primitive anyway, eighties is when it really gets cool and big. Could we do only the first focus-less stages to get a basic demand base going, and then grow the fire next plan when microchips are more advanced? Doing that effectively would need an HI/CI focus again in 1980, so if we ever want infra soon we need it THIS plan... Hot damn, @Crazycryodude 's infra/service plan suddenly looks VERY tempting!
Question though, why only 2 healthcare dice instead of 3? Just too expensive? Thinking that postponing advanced equipment to the eighties will yield better stuff?
Yet another thought: Not having a Light Industry focus only locks us out of stages 2+ of microcomputers and consumer electronics. 1970s electronics are primitive anyway, eighties is when it really gets cool and big. Could we do only the first focus-less stages to get a basic demand base going, and then grow the fire next plan when microchips are more advanced? Doing that effectively would need an HI/CI focus again in 1980, so if we ever want infra soon we need it THIS plan... Hot damn, @Crazycryodude 's infra/service plan suddenly looks VERY tempting!
Question though, why only 2 healthcare dice instead of 3? Just too expensive? Thinking that postponing advanced equipment to the eighties will yield better stuff?
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I think the thought is that 3 dice focuses in best equipment for only a few hospitals, compared to improving things everywhere, so it's seen as suboptimal for best effect nation-wide.
And yeah, infra-service now in preparation for oil crisis, followed by HI-LI to go heavy on both chips AND more efficient industry once energy efficiency actually becomes something worthy of consideration sounds like a good idea, assuming we can afford it.
Nuclear will also be ramped up, which should still leave us for enough energy available whe also allowing us to reduce coal usage.
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I think basically everyone would like to draw down coal reliance as soon as possible, the main difference between putting 1 and 2 dice into it is how rapid the phase out would be. 1 would mean a quick loss of demand for a rather large sector of industry, which would cause some economic hiccups. Managable ones probably, but its the thing to keep in mind.
Edited Concrete Dreams a little, I think it makes sense to do the Basic Infrastructure target with such a heavy Infrastructure spread already. The lower MFPG target will let us cheap out on HI during a tight budget and shuffling around a couple dice to put 2 fewer on trains and 2 more on housing is pretty easy. The 3rd electrification die is extremely deep into diminishing returns, the Caucasus HSR less so but it's not the end of the world to cut it in favor of much easier MFPG targets. Think of it as leaving an easy HSR project that we can still reasonably fit into a non-Infra plan on the table so we can feed the industry constant business instead of blowing our load all at once and then crashing HSR demand later.
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I think people are overstating the effects of infrastructure on the oil crisis tbh, the gains on electrification while real, are mild outside refitting the most used lines, and HSR while good and something I think we should put at least one dice on so prices don't double next plan, is not going to reduce fuel use that much.
The most important thing imo, is taking decisive action when the time comes in investing in CI, and making sure our industry is up to par and competitive. Right now it isn't, so we need to cut the chaff and pivot into consumer products and such that will still be employing people in 10-15 years. Also, really heavy investments in Services to absorb what labor is shaken off by the corrections brought by the oil crisis and decrease in enterprise funding.
Spending a ton of money in infrastructure is kind of counterproductive to that imo, honestly, I think even my plan overdoes it. But I want to do CA HSR next plan and I don't think people will vote for a plan with no electrification or 3 dice on housing.
The most important thing imo, is taking decisive action when the time comes in investing in CI, and making sure our industry is up to par and competitive. Right now it isn't, so we need to cut the chaff and pivot into consumer products and such that will still be employing people in 10-15 years. Also, really heavy investments in Services to absorb what labor is shaken off by the corrections brought by the oil crisis and decrease in enterprise funding.
Spending a ton of money in infrastructure is kind of counterproductive to that imo, honestly, I think even my plan overdoes it. But I want to do CA HSR next plan and I don't think people will vote for a plan with no electrification or 3 dice on housing.
One wouldn't mean a drop in demand though it says that demand will grow by 1 coal every turn it will likely mean a hard drop in growth of the sector but it will not mean that there will suddenly stop being a demand. Personally i think this is good because we are mining so much coal that is not economical because it eats electricity that is on par with gas complexes.
One coal die is a shocking drop in demand for coal power plants, not coal itself. The big expensive turbines etc. that the plants are all currently spooled for flat out 3 dice production rates of, and will suddenly go out of business if their demand vanishes. Last thing we need is YET ANOTHER self inflicted crisis in our HI tooling enterprises fucking up the economy and political landscape.
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Thats valid and I definitely see the argument for making a consumer-electronics+services focused plan instead. My main concern is that people might end up trying to the consumer goods focus while also spending 5 dice on housing and 4 or 5 dice on railways which I think would just be too much of trying to eat the cake and have it too.
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Are gas turbines too different to adapt the coal turbine factories to produce those instead?