Costly Explosive Upgrades - Any Interest?

So, I'm currently testing a rather extensive combat overhaul mod and a small but important part of that is a change to the way explosive upgrades work. Rather than completing a research project which then upgrades your equipment for free, the upgrades are tied to a manufacturing project that you have to complete to get the upgrade instead. Hence, rather than upgrade for free there is a cash and alenium cost for improving your explosives/warheads.

I'm wondering whether there'd be any interest in this being an independent mod. There's three reasons why I think it might be good:

1) It stops alenium/plasma/fusion explosives being obvious-choice research projects (the upgrades are so good that it's almost never worth putting something ahead of these techs).

2) It slows up air progression and ties it more strongly to ground combat performance. Given how easy it is to achieve air dominance, I think this is a neat way of making the air game a little more challenging.

3) It encourages going after landed UFOs, at least in the early game when alenium is difficult to come by (which in turn encourages more night missions which are cool but easy to avoid otherwise).

If there's interest in this, does anyone have any thoughts on costs? In the mod I'm testing, I've made explosives and warheads two separate projects at each tier costing the following:

- Alenium Explosives: $120,000 and 8 Alenium

- Plasma Explosives: $240,000 and 16 Alenium

- Fusion Explosives: $360,000 and 24 Alenium

- Alenium Warheads: $180,000 and 12 Alenium

- Plasma Warheads: $360,000 and 24 Alenium

- Fusion Warheads: $540,000 and 36 Alenium

From what I've played so far (only the first tier) I'm thinking that the alenium costs may be too expensive (I've just completed Alenium Warheads but that used all the alenium I'd been able to scrounge up all game, including a landed Corvette) so I think half those values would be better. The cash costs seem ok though (the Warheads are comparable in cost to a single aircraft of the equivalent tier and the explosives equivalent to a few weapons of the equivalent tier).

So, any thoughts on this?

Sounds definitely interesting and worth doing! Air dominance has always been a bit too easy to achieve and this seems like a nice, organic way to tackle the issue. Prices seem a bit steep though and might alter the vanilla game balance too much. Maybe something like:

Explosives:

$80000 and 4 alenium

$160000 and 8 alenium

$240000 and 12 alenium

Warheads:

$100000 and 6 alenium

$200000 and 12 alenium

$300000 and 18 alenium

You need to take the cumulative difficulty effects into account too. All other manufacture projects are going to be delayed and you probably need more workshop personnel too. How long projects are we talking here anyways?

Currently, they're down as 120, 240 and 360 for explosives and 180, 360 and 540 for warheads. I suspect they could happily be less than this though. Maybe half those values? It's worth noting that - as I envisaged it anyway - you get some research time back there's no explosives research projects. Although, for a vanilla add on it might be worth keeping those research projects as pre-requisites for the upgrade manufactures.

i totally love the idea, i have nothing to add because you exposed all the reasons and thoughs i can possibly have...and aside the numbers wich i think are a little too high, this is a pure gold idea .

I thought about it and i will use these kind of solution at my mod too.. but i will let some unique ones left..

Why dont u use alien alloy to? and fusion should be more expensive because its the end game material.

The logic for just using alenium was mostly lore-related: I don't see why you'd need to house the warheads in alien alloys as opposed to any other kind of material. But in terms of gameplay, alien alloys is used for a lot of things early game while alenium only starts to matter post-corvettes (i.e. with tier-2 aircraft). So it was a way of making early game alenium more useful/important without impacting on resource balance too much.

Alenium is an energy source and u maybe can't make it stable rather then alien alloys. If u count the alenium inside that warheads even little things like grenades u need something to contain them. This is the reason why u need alien allow with alenium. But this is a total physical point of view.

I forgot the default game balance numbers for months. But I am waiting your hidden mod project with patience

Remember that (in vanilla) Alenium is a very scarce resource to begin with. You don't generally see scouts until month 2 and their vanilla yeild is 2 units of Alenium. Fighters halfway through month 2, with a yield of 1 unit. Corvettes pop up in month 3 and their yield is 8 units. Under the proposed usage costs, you'd see 1 missile per 4 scouts, 8 fighters or 1 corvette drastically increasing the need to commit to ground assaults. If more ground assaults is what you'd like to encourage, then go ahead, but it'd be an idea to make sure everyone knows it in advance.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's not a bad idea to think in terms of how many scouts it would take to make a missile, as scouts are available throughout the game and form a constant value.

Remember that (in vanilla) Alenium is a very scarce resource to begin with. You don't generally see scouts until month 2 and their vanilla yeild is 2 units of Alenium. Fighters halfway through month 2, with a yield of 1 unit. Corvettes pop up in month 3 and their yield is 8 units. Under the proposed usage costs, you'd see 1 missile per 4 scouts, 8 fighters or 1 corvette drastically increasing the need to commit to ground assaults. If more ground assaults is what you'd like to encourage, then go ahead, but it'd be an idea to make sure everyone knows it in advance.

I'm not sure whether I'm misreading you but it seems like you've understood the suggestion as requiring each individual warhead to be built separately? If so, that's not what I meant: it's a one-time cost to upgrade all your weapons to the next tier.

In any case, you're right to say that it does increase pressure on alenium and part of the purpose of the change is to encourage more missions (or, better, encourage going after landed UFOs since their alenium yield is significantly higher). Nevertheless, using Skitso's numbers I'm not sure it would make much difference, maybe one or two more missions than normal or a landing or two instead of crash missions. Certainly, I got 9 alenium from a landed 'vette yesterday which would almost be enough for both alenium upgrades using the revised numbers suggested.

Alenium is an energy source and u maybe can't make it stable rather then alien alloys. If u count the alenium inside that warheads even little things like grenades u need something to contain them. This is the reason why u need alien allow with alenium. But this is a total physical point of view.

I forgot the default game balance numbers for months. But I am waiting your hidden mod project with patience

Sure, you could come up with lore for it (indeed, strictly speaking this mod would already require lore changes since there's an in-game explanation for not needing alenium to building alenium explosives!). But, personally, I'm not certain there's much gain from requiring alloys as well since they're already used plenty. Although that said, I wonder whether there's should be a parallel change to aircraft cannons requiring alien alloys. Seems silly to have to upgrade warheads but not cannons (and I really don't like the free upgrades).