just tell me one thing please

(not sure why they call it a carbine, it is literally not a carbine at all)

They used to be carbines a long time ago, before the pellet mechanic was introduced. The name just stuck.

The actual carbine they replaced was not as well liked by the community but nobody could bring themselves to call the second tier a 'laser shotgun' for some reason.

How would a laser shotgun even work after all?

There was a suggestion of adding the carbines back in alongside the current shotgun type weapons but it never happened.

I guess the cost was too high to bring back a weapon people didn't really like much to start with.

Yeah, I was thinking $5,000 for Laser pistols, $15,000 for Laser Shotgun (not sure why they call it a carbine, it is literally not a carbine at all), $20,000 for Laser Rifle, $40,000 for Laser Cannon and finally $60,000 for precision Laser. As for Plas and Mag weapons, add about ten or twenty thousand per increment. It got really ridiculous with plasma weapons -- A precision plasma is $120,000. As much as a Scimitar tank. The pricing is so illogical and ridiculous, and it makes it almost impossible to keep your people well equipped.

back in the original XCOMs you could sell stuff you manufacture with a nice profit- not sure if they covered the engineer upkeep but at least you could keep your engineers busy all the time to earn their wages if you werent building something for yourself. but yea, the economy has certainly taken some (bad) ideas from the firaxis games.

You could more than cover your engineers wages, you could pay for the upkeep of all your bases and equipment and also completely ignore the income from the funding nations.

Xenonauts deliberately did not allow that to happen so that focus was kept on the funding nations as a primary source of income rather than becoming irrelevant after the first month or so.

Incidentally this was also planned and implemented before the Firaxis XCom was announced so the idea was not influenced by that game in any way.

You could more than cover your engineers wages, you could pay for the upkeep of all your bases and equipment and also completely ignore the income from the funding nations.

Xenonauts deliberately did not allow that to happen so that focus was kept on the funding nations as a primary source of income rather than becoming irrelevant after the first month or so.

Exactly. In my last UFO Enemy Unknown (X-COM) playthrough I did exactly that: produced the Laser Cannon item on all my 8 bases, and the external funding quickly became utterly irrelevant. that was my 'testbed' playthrough and i just checked, the Nations funding just reached a total of 12 Milions per month. One example is the USA region, they alone are paying more than 2.2 milions.

I played that particular career for long time (my goal was to have a full team of 90+ PSI-powerful soldiers). For each soldier it involved recruiting, puttig him in the PSI-lab , wait one month, see if he is 90+ PSI-capable, and if not, hire nother batch, wait one month.. etc. SO, played it for 'years'. Obviously, with 8 bases I got everything covered, and all the nation's payments were STILL increasing each month, so no idea if there was a limit and if yes, how high was the cap (Chris must certainly know, as he was rumaging through the original files big deal during developing Xeno).

I am actually happy with the current setup. Not saying it is a perfect one, but I generally like games that are able to keep me on my toes, at least for some time. BTW what is the cap on nations funding in Xeno?

I think the max is like $200,000 or so, per nation. I git Europe maxed out on my last attempt to play the game.

The cap is double that region's starting funding.

The cap is double that region's starting funding.

Cap depends on dificulty setting?

Also: which conditions must be met for a region to quit on me? When their funding drops to zero or some obscure negative-points formula?

P.S. offtopic: many thanks for the aerial combat videos on YT. They were helpful.

No, it's always double the starting values.

No, it's always double the starting values.

Then, I can start a new mock game on difficulty X and mousover each region, multiply that by 2 and I got the max/total amount I can ever earn in the game? Sounds logical.

edit:

on Normal, total amount of funding x 2 is 5,728,500.

Then, I can start a new mock game on difficulty X and mousover each region, multiply that by 2 and I got the max/total amount I can ever earn in the game? Sounds logical.

edit:

on Normal, total amount of funding x 2 is 5,728,500.

Difficulty doesn't have anything to do with it - on higher difficulties your funding will drop faster due to alien actions, but the starting and max values should be the same.