Problem here: The refugee situation is a crisis. We've been trying and failing to deal with it effectually ever since the Erie War, which is now about two in-game years ago.
I think Retraining Campaigns is more important because again, we are cripplingly underskilled as a population. We've had 35-40 years or so with effectively no useful public education on a large scale and very limited (and declining) access to industrial technology. The youngest people who are likely to have even a good high school education are in their fifties, with everyone younger than that having to get by on some combination of catch-as-catch-can one-room schools the Vicks didn't smash, plus homeschooling, plus autodidactism and on-the-job training. We need retraining more than we need snazzy weapons for a single brigade, however powerful that brigade might be in battle. Because against any enemies we're likely to face in the short term, our advantages are size and logistics, not overwhelming technology.
Notably, we have an almost unlimited amount of railroad track that we need for strategic reasons. This is a very safe action to overcomplete, because the obvious ways to overcomplete it are either "whoopsie, we laid some extra branch lines to places we needed them," "whoopsie, we got a head start on the next major railway corridor we need," or "whoopsie, the Fairy Godmother Department let us lay high quality double-tracked rail with modern signalling systems imported from Europe." All of which benefit us greatly in the long run.
I could see swapping them out.
The question is if we get it this turn, or the next turn. You are using one AP for a 12% reduction in failure rate and this is not worth it. Let's put it in different terms and say we payed one AP to get a 98% chance increase on Expatriate Outreach, instead of a 85%. I don't think it's worth the trade. We can recover from being delayed in Expatriate Outreach by one turn, but I don't think the delays on setting up the Mississippi route will be as manageable.
The Refugee situation was under control, what is happening right now is a new wave. This is not a continuous failure to get the situation under control, this is a new wave. We did two extremely successful action to address the refugee situation during turn 4 and 5. We have a setback of one turn, which happens when you have a lot of spinning plates.
That is probably a fair point. Depending on how important this to other voters, I might alter my plan.
I don't think getting half a success a turn earlier is going to have a benefit here. And the action pretty cleary hints at the lack of experts making the timing problematic, hinting at a far better chance one we get expats. You are starting with a non-critical action too early, making it likely we waste the AP spent there.
"on a failure, you may choose to succeed anyway at the cost of..."
Yes, that is what you may choose means.
I don't really understand your reasoning for spending so heavily in Military (which notes Reforging the Sword as the last important action) and Development (which is quite well served with 3 AP). If there is a department that doesn't need free AP, it's the one that gets 3 per turn.
This seems mostly pretty good (modulo some of Simon's points, like about the rail construction), but I am confused about Officer Academies, which is marked in one place as 1 AP (which I am pretty sure is your intent) but on the line as having 2 AP.
Sorry, I forgot to edit it. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
I would guess an area where a lot of Victorian refugees settled. Little (Nation) has been a pretty standard term for the USA, like Little Russia in California.
If I have to guess, the refugees are now more geographically concentrated, leading to increased tensions inside Detroit. With Detroit's native population becoming more hostile to them, the refugees thinking they are being left behind, it is a problem.
Yes. The choice to burn lives and political capital to ram through the objective shall be yours, should it become necessary.
1 I mean presumably their are anti drone weapons available these days such as laser point defense net guns and EW, presumably Japan doesn't have a monopoly on concept .
I think this overspends on defense. Also, our military advisor specifically advised us against trying Forging the Sword when we don't know what our military will be armed with because we haven't got a supplier yet.
A 25% chance of yet another failure on this issue doesn't make me happy, because we've had multiple failures already and we're being explicitly told that the issue is building up into a crisis. Further delays may result in irreversible setbacks.
Hm. Something to that, maybe. At the same time, those expatriates are obviously in great demand, to the point where expediting or overcompleting may have rewards that make things more worthwhile.
I'm not so sure. Those actions regularized the legal status of refugees, but they didn't create any institutions or infrastructure to handle them.
I think worrying too much about the timing is a "perfect is the enemy of the good" thing. Poptart Quest narrators aren't perfectly reliable. Yes, in principle, it would be best if everything worked like a finely oiled machine and the workforce got their GEDs "just in time" for factories to open up where you need your GED to be able to work effectively. In practice, retraining the workforce will itself create opportunities for economic growth, including actions by non-state enterprises. I'd rather have an educated workforce and still be working on the factories than have factories standing empty because illiterates can't use the machines.
Ehh, I could work with this. Except that I really believe setting up adult education programs at all is not the sort of thing we should delay for 6-12 months waiting for outside experts to tell us how to do it better. There's a lot of basic "This 37-year-old man never learned how to read" shit going down in our territory, stuff you don't need to be a rocket scientist to try and do something about.
We also put in a lot of effort into making sure they get sufficient housing, and ensuring food abundance. If you read the action description closer, the refugees feeling left behind and potential unrest is emphasized, not a lack of basic necessities.
I believe the distribution of refugees and lack of economic opportunities is the main issue here, not lack of housing or food. In either case, I've decided to put two actions on Refugee Management, making this point of disagreement somewhat moot.
That is nice and all, but we are already struggling to keep up with the demands for our Department of State. Spending one of our precious AP to get a shot at overflow isn't an apportierte use. And if your argument of a follow-up action being unlocked holds true, the chance to get a bonus price won't be the only chance for a reward.
I'm not worrying about timing, I'm opposed to starting an education program before we properly integrated refugees into our social systems and before we have sufficient educators. I'm opposed to starting projects before we have the resources to pull them off properly. I see no reason to push this one turn ahead when we aren't even building factories right now. The effort will be less effective, the increase in skilled workers will depress wages for them and there is no urgent need for it.
Retraining campaigns is not an adult literacy program. This is about training people for factory work and trades. If we are going to start teaching people how to read, it will probably be under the Department of Education for obvious reasons.
Two things:
The first action taken on the project won't complete it; it's far more likely to involve laying basic bureaucratic underpinnings to even create the needed adult education schools. That's progress that will generalize and be effective even it happens before the refugees are being vectored into the system by an appropriate government agency, and even if it happens before we build factories.
1) It says "it would be best if," and does caution us that there can be drawbacks if the action is taken too late, or if we take it too early without taking other steps to boost economic growth. That doesn't mean there aren't also advantages to at least beginning this quite sizeable project sooner rather than later.
We don't know this is the case. And even if it was, it makes more sense to plan out a training project after we have the experts at hand. A sudden influx of experts can change the scope of the project vastly, and will change where we set up those facilities.
I don't think it's a good idea to base this decision on the assumption we will get DC reductions across the board at the cost of making progress at something that is guaranteed to give us AP, namely taxation. Two projects explicitly mention a lack of experts (Retraining Campaigns and the Berau of Taxation). I think it's far more likely getting the expats will unlock additional actions, rather than reducing the dc for other actions.
Possibly. However, getting additional free AP a turn earlier still is the better option compared to less chance of failing a number of projects IMO. The way I see it, we have a large amount of work we are behind on (Foreign Weapons, The Mississippi, The Refugee Crisis, Modernizing the Army, Getting a functional intelligence service). The best option for addressing the current situation is to increase the amount AP we can spent, since it doesn't just allow us to do more actions per turn, but also mitigate the risk of failure in specific areas. Whereas DC reductions will be spread in ways we can't anticipate and that might be useless to us, we can control the AP and counteract the risk of failure in any given department.
