From the OOC thread, first post.
Expense: Regular equipment can be given to everyone in your army. If a piece of equipment is difficult to produce, it has expense levels: 1 is Expensive, 2 is Very Expensive, and 3 is A National Effort. It doesn't matter how many different types you have, as you'll still only be making a total number of guns enough to equip everyone. Inexpensive equipment could be given to every soldier, if you want. Cheap vehicles means everyone can ride around in one instead of marching. Expensive equipment can be given to officers, or one per squad (5-10 soldiers). Expensive Vehicles means a pretty good number can be used for support. Very Expensive equipment can be used by special squads only, about 1 in 100 soldiers. Very Expensive vehicles are few and far between on the battlefield, or there are only a couple squads in total. Your nation can only deploy one National Effort at a time. It had better be an aircraft carrier, or a nuke, or a giant walking robot if you want this to be worth it. If you have multiple weapons at a price tier, then soldiers/squads choose one for the situation. Some weapons, EG crewed machine guns and artillery, don't benefit much from being Inexpensive because there aren't many situations where you'd want everyone using one.
So yes, national effort things do get built, so therefor even if there's only one rifle a year we're still building it, so the tech should get easier and eventually it should just be very expensive, even assuming we don't revise it again sometime.
Anyway, I'll also vote for putting our production focus on the original rifle this turn, which will knock it down to very expensive. While we still won't have very much of them, bringing it down to very expensive will mean that we'll actually be able to leverage having a better rifle then anyone else and should hopefully decrease the time until it goes down in complexity because we'll be building more of them. Combined with the fact that we should have better artillery then anyone else (unless they designed a better/longer ranged one this turn), and I think we'll be able to make the landing.
Whereas if we just get more transports I'm pretty sure we'll just be sending more men to the slaughter because we won't be able to counter the enemy's better infantry power and there's no way we'll be able to land enough to swarm them under by sheer numbers.
So +1 to focusing on the original Rifle.