I know Aggressive Restructuring sounds attractive, but I think it would be too disruptive to both our budget and the broader economy when we're already flirting with recessionary conditions and things like energy price breakpoints keep threatening to get crossed. Just shuttering Gorky for a year or two while we carve it up and sell it off would obviously leave us with an entire city at 100% unemployment, which is going to be spicy, but even beyond that it means shutting down a measurable fraction of CMEAs entire machinebuilding throughput.
The extra -200 RpY in restructuring costs would sorta break the bank too. I'll touch on this with my comments for Labor Transfers as well, but the budget infusion from the Supreme Soviet is only really enough to cover our loan repayments. We're still in a much better financial situation than expected, we essentially get to keep all the loan cash for "free" and still keep our base income where it was, but we don't have infinite money. Even just the -450 RpY from Bailouts and Restructuring will probably cause a net decrease in our discretionary income.
Especially after accounting for the unquantified but apparently significant non-Gorky failures across HI and LCI, I'm expecting our discretionary income to be about the same (e.g. ~3400) next turn as it was this turn, the budget increase is all eaten up and then some by loan payments + Bailouts and Restructuring, our profitable projects this turn should be enough to offset an additional ~200ish RpY of failures but we're definitely just treading water instead of rocketing ahead on budget.
It costs us like ~4500 RpY to activate all our dice on economic spending (which the economy definitely needs next turn), it will go up to probably more like ~4800 RpY with an extra 2 HI dice, and over 5000 RpY if we add 2 Infra dice on top of that. With a discretionary budget of ~3400ish and
~1400R from the loan left in the bank, it's not hard to do the math. We're already going to burn down most/all of the loan just in 1967 with just +2 HI dice.
I'm worried about even sustaining the extra HI dice into 1968-69, hopefully as the failures restructure and we do more profitable projects some income will bounce back and get us through the later years, but for 1967 even "just" two extra HI dice will eat essentially our entire loan. 2 Infra dice and a -3 roll penalty is a bad choice with this in mind, it's destroying our budget even faster while ALSO tanking our modifier into the negatives for the first time since the 1930s for... what? Getting slightly closer to the intentionally impossible road target we're planning to fail regardless? It's not worth the negative modifier and even worse budget stress.
Western USSR Regional Roads
I think politically we're sorta forced to just accept the target for now, but I want to be
very clear up front: we WILL NOT meet it. It's just outright mathematically impossible unless we get multiple nat 100s every turn, this is a complication from a double crit fail after all. The options to argue seem too dangerous politically, especially if we're going to be asking for favors re: anti-corruption, so we're going to have to deal with intentionally failing a target. But again, this is just political maneuvering to make it our problem in 1969 rather than 1966, I have absolutely zero intention of doing all those roads and neither should any other planner. It would require truly obscene sacrifices, probably on the order of stripping Ag of free dice (and thus failing the
other target we built our entire political strategy around), just really counterproductive economically.
So IMO we take the target, but in everybody's head you should all be aware that we're writing off Central Asian Regional Roads right from the starting line. Even just getting all the high cap + Ural/Caucasus regional roads will be a stretch, Central Asian regional roads on top of that is just not going to happen. We'll deal with the consequences of not funding them when we get to 1969, but I don't want to hear anybody yelling at me in 1967 or 68 that we're on track to miss that target. I know we are, you should also know we are, and know that there's nothing we can do about it without crippling some other sector of the economy.
Which is why I don't want to do Hiring Drives, the +2 Infra dice are just chasing a white whale that we're almost assuredly going to miss either way. So just keep our modifier positive and our budget a little more under control. Give up on actually completing that road target, we're gonna have to deal with that reality even if we take +2 Infra dice in all likelihood, our best bet is to make a visible effort of 9-10 dice a turn and then when we inevitably fail just hope that "well we really tried hard as you can see from all these records, and who cares about Central Asia anyways?" is enough to keep our job.
Call a Second General Meeting
Doing nothing is just a waste of the action, backstabbing sounds really counterproductive for ever having a trusting relationship with our underlings again, and asking for an outright hard stop to anti-corruption is a little too blatant. The economy is kinda falling apart though, we have to do
something to salvage the Ministry here. I think I lean towards the "Apolitical" purges? Obviously there's no such thing, but we don't want to be seen as too politically motivated when accusations of Stalinism are already flying at Abramov and we're on thin political ice with asking for a favor already/planning to fail the road target. I definitely see the value in securing Klimenko's control over the Ministry though, so as long as it's one of the maneuvering options I'm willing to go either way.
All that said, it looks like my votes are for:
[X] Plan Stabilize the Ministry
[X] Plan Stabilize and Fuck The Voz
They don't break the bank on Gorky, don't load us down with extra Infra dice we couldn't fund anyways, and have the political slate I prefer.
