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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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I don't think we can pave a network for every one of our small towns like the US south in the different climate of our interior. We are facing a notable shortage but I don't think we should be using the interior of the US as a benchmark.
 
End of the day, unless you live in an extractive rural area there is no reason to put a lot of money into it. It's hugely inefficient. The money is best spent in taken care of a lot more people in an efficient area. There is a reason why people move to cities its because there is nothing to do in most rural towns but drugs.
 
Stormingart said:
Vice News

New York Times

Anyhow, I am getting tired of talking about China
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When you post stories about China a lot, people will respond.

In this case, I will just point out that China is a very, very large country. The stupidest and most criminal actions taken by the stupidest criminals in a nation of over 1,000,000,000 people are going to look very, very foolish. That doesn't mean that just repeating them with the implication that such actions are typical and saying "this proves that China is an imploding tofu dreg nation" will point us towards the truth.

SuperHeavy said:
I don't think we can pave a network for every one of our small towns like the US south in the different climate of our interior. We are facing a notable shortage but I don't think we should be using the interior of the US as a benchmark.
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Siberia is less like the American South and more like the most remote parts of Alaska or some of the states of the American West.

However, the core parts of Russia are quite another matter, and we do badly need a lot a lot a lot of roads there.

Falsehaven said:
End of the day, unless you live in an extractive rural area there is no reason to put a lot of money into it. It's hugely inefficient. The money is best spent in taken care of a lot more people in an efficient area. There is a reason why people move to cities its because there is nothing to do in most rural towns but drugs.
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Well, I myself was talking about the point of diminishing returns on rural road infrastructure just a little while ago... but it's important to recognize that we are far short of actually reaching that point.

We're still at the point where towns are dying because they have only gravel or mud roads connecting them to the outside world, when those same towns could do profitable things if they just had a decent road connection, things that would more than pay for that road if only we'd build it.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well, I myself was talking about the point of diminishing returns on rural road infrastructure just a little while ago... but it's important to recognize that we are far short of actually reaching that point.

We're still at the point where towns are dying because they have only gravel or mud roads connecting them to the outside world, when those same towns could do profitable things if they just had a decent road connection, things that would more than pay for that road if only we'd build it.
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I do think we should do more road projects but for example 35% of US roads are unpaved and that is probably to high, hell a gravel road is better to drive on than a potholed road. The question is how much can we build before the maintenance of it more expensive than its worth. This is definitely one point where we should not try and match the US. Rural towns are going to die no matter what, unless we wont to stop mechanization every town is slowly dying and building roads for the conditions now and not 10 years from now. will just cause us problems.
 
It appears that Big Road has once again extended its greedy grasp over the great proletariat.

Clearly, what's needed is a thorough re-education on the writings of our Great Comrade Malenkov, so that you will understand: true Communism is when the railroads stretch to every garage, even in the most backward rural settlements harboring reactionary peasantry.

This ensures loyal workers can use their private locomotives not only to commute to their state-designated workplace but also to make recreational stops at McStalin's for ice cream takeout, assuming, of course, the machine isn't broken, which would undoubtedly be the result of bourgeois sabotage.
 
Pox said:
It appears that Big Road has once again extended its greedy grasp over the great proletariat.

Clearly, what's needed is a thorough re-education on the writings of our Great Comrade Malenkov, so that you will understand: true Communism is when the railroads stretch to every garage, even in the most backward rural settlements harboring reactionary peasantry.

This ensures loyal workers can use their private locomotives not only to commute to their state-designated workplace but also to make recreational stops at McStalin's for ice cream takeout, assuming, of course, the machine isn't broken, which would undoubtedly be the result of bourgeois sabotage.
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Indeed comrade! A train for every man! We need to pass a law dictating that every building has a parking spot for every train!
 
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Why have roads been treated like Trotskyists this quest? Is it American plan makers yanking too hard in the opposite direction and going train brained? TBH if the situation is as serious as it appears to be I would expect way more extreme language in the option. Really hard to tell sometimes with the socialist doublespeak text.
 
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Ferdiad said:
Why have roads been treated like Trotskyists this quest? Is it American plan makers yanking too hard in the opposite direction and going train brained? TBH if the situation is as serious as it appears to be I would expect way more extreme language in the option. Really hard to tell sometimes with the socialist doublespeak text.
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I think so. Its people conjuring up imaginary subruban sprawl that is borderline impossible to happen under the Soviet Union's still largely-planned economy, instead of "being able to travel from mid-sized city A to mid-sized city B 60km away without spending an hour stuck in mud".
 
Yeah, we also consistently over estimate the state of roads, hence why moscow had major arterial roads that weren't paved until the 50s under malenkov, then when we made progress on that we switched to working on 60s hsr, which while cool was possibly not the optimal use of our infra dice!
 
I see I was wrong about roads. Again. IDK if it's better or worse it happened due to a misremembered quote rather than botching the vibes.

Ferdiad said:
Why have roads been treated like Trotskyists this quest? Is it American plan makers yanking too hard in the opposite direction and going train brained? TBH if the situation is as serious as it appears to be I would expect way more extreme language in the option. Really hard to tell sometimes with the socialist doublespeak text.
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Also overestimating the potential of our rail network, we forgot that in the vast expanses of Russia connecting every village with a branch line is just not gonna happen.

And yeah the socialism lang doesn't help. It's always "a few more roads would be useful" with little sign of emergency -> Maybe one turn where the blurb has an easy to miss "this is very important now" appended -> Holy shit the entire supreme soviet is breathing down our next demanding roads or else they yeet us.

VonVonson said:
Yeah, we also consistently over estimate the state of roads, hence why moscow had major arterial roads that weren't paved until the 50s under malenkov, then when we made progress on that we switched to working on 60s hsr, which while cool was possibly not the optimal use of our infra dice!
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The lack of sense of scale also doesn't help. We built I think 6? Stages of "paved road network" which sounded like a big-ish number to us, but unless you caught a throwaway line you didn't realize that at that point Moscow and Leningrad were the only two cities connected by a paved road. Later on after Klimenko got the big road target there was no subsequent political requirement to do Local Roads by any deadline, with only the West Russian network available, so we figured we could take our sweet time, and this jumps us.

Dang it, why does our road policy need to be built on vibes? We've had statistical planning for almost four decades now, you'd think we could get the planners to straight up tell us "We need Y miles of road to avoid seriously choking economic development, we have X so far"

...Yeah I realize I am just venting salt. Sorry.
 
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Ferdiad said:
Why have roads been treated like Trotskyists this quest? Is it American plan makers yanking too hard in the opposite direction and going train brained?
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To an extent, though honestly I'm not clear on how often it is for road-heavy plans to be vetoed in favor of road-light plans.

TBH if the situation is as serious as it appears to be I would expect way more extreme language in the option. Really hard to tell sometimes with the socialist doublespeak text.
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I do think that this is one of the cases where Blackstar's tendency to write virtually all possible plan options in the same rather abstract voice, only moving the "earnest/sardonic" slider up and down depending on who the internal narrator is, may get in our way. We seem to only get confirmation of how bad the road situation is in the discussion.

And to be clear, the roads HAVE been competing with things like sewage and water purification the entire time, and we've had to deal with problems like "oh hey, it's the mid-1960s and the USSR literally has not built a non-military airport since before World War Two, so you have your aircraft industry designing jetliners and then being unable to fly them because in a lot of places the airstrips are just big dirt rectangles."

There have been some actions I'd think were of questionable efficiency, such as when we went on a 50s-era kick funding subway systems for just about every really major city in the USSR including cities whose subway networks were not completed until the post-Soviet era or in some cases never in that they still do not have them in real life, as I documented in this post dated from the in-quest 1960 turns. The high-speed passenger rail network is kind of a shaky one in my book too, though that ended up taking the form that it did in part because of how we reacted to a high profile railroad disaster, as I recall.
 
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The road situation is so bad that basically every other potential non-road project got cancelled and sewers nearly got cancelled just as we were starting it. I think we were supposed to have finished all stages of the Western Local Roads well before now. We knew that it locked out Transportation Enterprises(Stage 5) since Turn 84 (6 turns/years ago), which might indicate that we were supposed to finish the Western Local Roads by the end of last 5YP.

All these other Local Roads and the supporting Infra were likely gated behind Western Local Roads, but we took too long and now we're in emergency mode. We'll probably have to do every road project on the list before we can even get a look at the other Infra projects that have been pushed to the side. Current previews from Discord show that every stage of Roads has a larger stage after it, so there is an awful lot of work to do.

We have been given hints that the road situation is extremely dire, that its well in the territory of significantly holding back our economy growth. Any hopes we might have for pushing further out, getting to important but out of the way resources or getting a basic standard of living to remote areas are all gated behind these roads.

We have had two back to back 5YP without an Infra focus and I think the character POV giving us a rather high level city focused view of the situation while losing sight of day-to-day life for much of the nation. I don't think we can afford to do another plan without an Infra focus as we've let the Infra hell stew for too long. We also won't get access to auto-road dice if we don't do constant non-stop road investment, likely for two whole 5YP.

We still need to do the water processing plants, heating insulation program, metros, keep on top of the grid, upgrade the airports and ports, and probably do more telco/internet infra too. Also need to keep up with the boomers and their growth.
 
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Funnily enough, if you go back to the vibes-based pre-statplan days:
Current Economic Issues:
Rail: Shortages Severe
Coal: Large local surplus, general shortage
Steel: Moderate shortage
Energy: Local surpluses and shortages
Food: Steady, Spread unevenly
Labor: Shortage, difficulty pulling without changes to the food supply
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Most of these are predecessors to modern resource/price indicators, but an indicator of the quality of our transport network was lost in the shuffle. currently, the MNKh minister/playerbase has less easy access to a summary of how well goods can be moved around than Sergo did. If as part of the 'economic summary we look at closely every turn' we had something like "road access" or "transportation" that gradually progressed from "moderate bottlenecks" to "severe bottlenecks" to "critical bottlenecks", perhaps we'd be less surprised.
 
Blackstar said:
Like, the situation is desperately bad and you have been progressing at maybe a quarter of the rate that the actual ministers want to have you caught up by the end of the next decade.
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Can we agree, we lock four infra dice on roads? And we hold it there until it's painful and some other situation gets absolutely desperate?

No more talk of dams or sewers or water or heating. There's always some critical thing that isn't roads that we just need to do and the end result is we can't commit to roads. No more pet projects.

No more distractions. No more half-measures.
 
edqu said:
Can we agree, we lock four infra dice on roads? And we hold it there until it's painful and some other situation gets absolutely desperate?

No more talk of dams or sewers or water or heating. There's always some critical thing that isn't roads that we just need to do and the end result is we can't commit to roads. No more pet projects.

No more distractions. No more half-measures.
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What I'd like to do going into the Eleventh Five Year Plan is a two-step plan:

1) Minimize our autodice expenditure on things that aren't roads (we'd be fortunate to get road autodice options). Last Plan we got a big autodice Housing option, several interlocking 1-2 autodie rail options, and dam autodice. I think we need to cut the rail options on grounds of "fuckit, good enough," keep the housing autodice to a low level but still ticking away, and stop building dams on the grounds that we've already built just about every viable dam close to where people live and are now basically proposing to build aluminum smelters in outer Siberia just because that's the only place left to put dams and we have no other way to use the power those dams would hypothetically generate if we built them. We've got just about every dam the OTL USSR ever built and then some, and we don't have every road the OTL USSR ever built, so it's time to switch gears.

2) With autodice minimized, we should have plenty of Infrastructure dice. Then we can afford to trickle dice into one or two side projects a turn, while still spending a great flow of dice (4, 5, 6, 7, I don't know exactly) on roads every turn.

I think that by following this two-step plan we are more likely to actually get more done on the roads. The key here is to minimize autodice expenditure on anything that isn't a road. Yes it means we'll have to spend more Chemical/Heavy Industry dice on power plants, yes that may come at a cost in terms of steel prices or lots of other things. But that's what we have to do.
 
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The problem in America is not the presence of roads or their quantity but rather the lack of other mass transit options. Such as busses trains or trams.

One can also argue that American road designs are also problematic, but the quantity is fine. You can get where you need to go with cheap sedan vehicles.
 
Come to think of it, if you want fuel economy, forcing everyone who uses a road (and many places literally do not have rail service) to drive around in a bulky but robust vehicle that's halfway to being an ATV just to get through the mud and snow on the roads is probably not good for fuel efficiency. Optimizing a car for high fuel economy involves things like keeping the frame relatively light, the ground clearance relatively low, and the body streamlining suitable for long periods of fast movement. None of that plays well with crappy roads.
 
The official project description for Western Local Roads for the last few turns sounded as dire as one can get without putting a bunch of caps lock and exclamation marks in your official government report. Phrases such as "inadequate", "significant shortfalls" and "critical condition" do not indicate a project that could be safely ignored.
Even the previous description that has since been dismissed as severely underestimating the problems very explicitly said "the official reports say the situation is very bad and needs strong intervention, but if you literally just try to go outside of Moscow its clear that its much worse than that".
 
During my passion (listing every single project in the quest), it became clear to me the plot was being lost when the players opted-in to Passenger Rail Network (Western SU) (1962). The European rail conversions ate up a few years before this, but hey, CMEA had to be built.

This project though? It's still the largest project the quest has had to date, well into the thousands, and Blackstar kept jacking up its scope nearly every other turn as technological improvements continued to decrease its needed progress. I don't know how many infra dice were spent on this. It was a lot. It was like a decade of infra dice.
 
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