Rethinking Equipment Manufacturing

And another idea I'd like some thoughts on:

I don't like free upgrades. But solving free upgrades requires that you either manufacture those things individually instead (which is a pain and the reason why free upgrades were implemented in the first place) or requires a manufacturing project to be completed to get the upgrade (see here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/12797-Costly-Explosive-Upgrades-Any-Interest?p=145846#post145846)

The problem with that second solution - for me anyway - is that it continues to be inconsistent with how other kinds of equipment are produced. Weapons and armour are built individually, yet other items (explosives, missiles, and other aircraft/vehicle weapons if the idea was extended that far) are produced en mass and sit in an infinite stockpile. As a game mechanic it's not terrible but it doesn't sit well with me from am 'immersion' perspective.

So here's a possible solution: why not make all equipment production work the same way as the upgrades for explosives/vehicle weapons. Rather than building individual items, why not have a single project which then unlocks an infinite number of items from that tier? On the one hand, this has some 'immersion' benefits:

- All manufacturing is consistent and there aren't different rules for different kinds of items.

- The relatively high manufacturing cost and time for weapons/armour compared with other projects (e.g. aircraft) is explained since you're not building individual weapons but a whole stockpile of them.

But it also has some gameplay effects which can be considered beneficial as well:

- There's no need to remove equipment from benched soldiers as you have unlimited access to available equipment, thus saving time and hassle when equipping a squad

- You can indulge in a wider range of squad loadouts as you don't have to pay extra for weapons which only get used occasionally

- Equipping and maintaining a second/third squad is vastly less expensive (and may therefore be viable) since you don't need to pay for additional equipment

The only problems I can see with the idea are as follows:

- Losing equipment doesn't matter. However, so far as I can tell it's impossible to lose armour (presumably a bug, but even when I have had a complete squad-wipe I seem to keep all armour I have produced) and the only way to lose weapons is by losing a mission or having a soldier killed by overdamage, both of which are fairly infrequent

- It's easier to equip and maintain a second/third squad (which I guess some people might see as a problem)

Personally, I'm not sure for me that those problems outweigh the benefits I've outlined above. But I suspect this opinion may well not be shared. So, thoughts? Anyone like the idea, or think it's terrible, or have suggestions?

(I'm asking not least because I'm currently nearing the end of making a combat/weapon tech tree overhaul mod and am contemplating shifting to this system rather than the vanilla one. This idea probably works a bit better than in vanilla with this mod since each tier of weapon has three discrete steps which would work very well as discrete upgrade projects.)

Kabill, i am doing brainstorms about this nearly every free time (before sleep, toilet...)..

There is no perfect solution, at least for everyone.. you need to trust your game experience and choose one of it to go to the end if there is no game breaking things..

You dont need to stuck at one solution too..

Before the solution we need to find the question/problem.. what is our problem to solve or question to answer.. we want more enjoyment to satisfy our game as modders..

My questions are:

Q: What do i need to have in this game for more enjoy?

A: I need to do every aspect of the game with fun..

Q: What do i need to have fun from everything?

A: I need to get rewards from everything, so there will be motivation to continue! One more turn concept.

Q: How can i get reward from everything?

A: Loot system. Everybody loves loot. Everybody are dying to click mouse or solve problems to get the loot. Loot is the ultimate motivation to continiue at a game. If there is no loot, u wont have a reason to do that..

Q: How can i put the looting system to this game?

A: There should be loots to give players new things. The player should play the ground mission with a hope to get something new. A research, a new weapon, a material to manufacture something. There should be common things (like a pistol, rifle, alien alloy, ufo parts), rare things (specialist aliens to capture, an advanced weapon (sniper, cannon), important devise from ufo (engines, weapons) and unique things (very special alien commando with a whole new weapon). Every player will wait the mission report for this.

Q: So we got loots, how will players use that loots at a game like these?

A: Special manufacture projects for rare weapons.. you will need an alien weapon drop to manufacture that weapon. Ufo parts will open new techs and manufacture chains for your aircraft. Player will feel strong when he got that hardly research-manufactured weapon when his soldier used it in combat..

Q: This is not diablo, there will be 10+ soldiers maybe 20. So if player try to manufacture everything one by one, wont be there chaos?

A: Its good and bad. You got many characters to equip but many things to manufacture. So common things will be limitless after you finished required research and manufacture. Rare things could be with packets.. like 1 rare grenade manufacture products 5 of it.. rare weapons like high tech weapons can use some kind of alien weapons, so the weapons u get from battlefield will be very important. Unique weapons will come only from special aliens at special missions and you wont able to manufacture it, just modify for human use.

Q: So where will u use this unique materials?

A: Like ground combats we normally dont get anything worth at all, terror and base defense missions. Everybody want to pass after first or second terror mission or base defense.. they are hard, mostly deadly and nearly no reward at all. You save a city and you continue to play.. not so exited if you are a world patriot.. so with the unique weapon/alien aspect, you want to have that terror mission to get the next surprise!

Q: This is.. madness!!!

A: No THIS IS........

Yeah this is my story.. As answer to your new idea, i think its not so good.. it will kill the rewarding system. You will just use everything without thinking about the cost.. Like when u get the new grenades or airplane weapons.. you dont check what grenade or missile you have any more.. you know its the best you can have automatically.. so the excitement killed in action.. I am against to use the one manufacture for all options.. as i said its ok for commons maybe. But i want to keep the excitement to put the first weapon i manufactured after all the effort and waiting of the manufacturing of the next..

And there will be problems at high tech.. You got your first fusion reactor and researched it. Then with 1 by 1 manufacture you can manufacture the first thing with your next fusion reactor.. but at 1 manufacture all mechanic, how many fusion reactor do you need? 4? 6? and cant do anything before to get them all..

i hope i could explain myself.. i just want to show my point of view and brainstorming.

I take your point about loot, although I'm not sure it accords with what I play Xenonauts for personally. But I'm not sure that the system I proposed would "kill the reward system" though, at least not compared with the vanilla game as is. You'd still need the same (more or less) resources to produce the items and they would still use the same kinds of resources. So I'm not sure why it would make rewards less valuable (indeed, arguably it would be more important since you'd need a larger up-front cost to get access to particular equipment). And while, yes, you'd stop thinking about cost after you'd produced the items, I'm not sure that this is any different to at least my own experience at the moment (it's sufficiently unlikely that I will lose items that it's a non-issue).

Vanilla games explosive/warhead system is ultra simple.. So adding anything will make it better.. Your idea is one of the good options and i will use it at my mod but limited.

At your idea everything is black or white. Your team got the that all the item branch or not at all.. You can have all kind of laser weapons, or you wont have a pistol at all. You will give so much thing at one step. I am thinking about getting all MAG weapons together.. its somehow adventure killing.. maybe i like it step by step..

After lasers, tier 3-4 there will be huge gear jump with your idea. Yeah ofcourse there will be much to require to get the branch but as i gave the example.. how many fusion reactor or singularity core would be need to open a specific branch? I prefer to get one thing per a GC rather then getting all after 5 GC with low tech gear..

its all "point of view". Please kabill, its just my idea.. go for what you like to play really.. i am brainstorming many things with the players about my mod. Sometimes their style and mine cant become to one point and i say them "modding my mod is totally free, let me finish it with full functions and then just mod what u dont like".. I am very sure you would use many tecnics and ideas at your big mod and i will get exited!!

It depends on how it is implemented. For the mod I'm making, the way it would be implemented would be in three stages:

- Basic weapons (which covers pistol/carbine);

- Advanced weapons (which covers rifle + a heavy weapon); and

- Special weapons (which includes two additional weapons appropriate for that tier).

So there's - in my opinion anyway - a neat kind of progression there. It doesn't necessarily translate quite as well into vanilla, for sure, but you could probably get away with a similar kind of breakdown. Maybe:

- Basic: Pistol and Rifle;

- Specialist: Carbine and Precision Rifle; and

- Rapid Fire: LMG (and maybe a vehicle automatic weapon if it were packaged with something similar to Armoured Assault)

its all "point of view".

Yes, for sure! But that's why I wanted to bring it to the table as a point of discussion first: no point making something if no one else thinks it's a good idea.

- Basic weapons (which covers pistol/carbine);

- Advanced weapons (which covers rifle + a heavy weapon); and

- Special weapons (which includes two additional weapons appropriate for that tier).

These lines solve many things.

As a little advise about the manufacturing. We got not many choices about the manufacture topics because most of them deleted before release.. So you stuck only with SoldierWeapons,Armour,Vehicles,VehicleWeapons,Aircraft,AircraftWeapons.

I worked on manufacture luas and shared the pictures at my mod topic. I made a good wide manufacture-research ui. I changed Aircraft to Aircraft/Vehicle and AircraftWeapons to Aircraft/Vehicle Weapons so i opened the vehicle and vehicle weapons topics for my special production projects. These makes you more organized manufacture web. If u interested i can send you the LUAs. Topics name can be change at strings but their name are a bit lame.. it took my time to find them

Found it: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/12534-v1-09-X-CE-v0-30-X-Division-In-Earth-We-Fight-Ver-0-9?p=144978&viewfull=1#post144978

An idea that has been bouncing around in my head is that unlocking the tech unlocks the ability to construct prototypes. An additional project would allow for mass-produced versions. The prototypes would be sold off at cost of the materials, so the player isn't heavily disincentized from building prototype version.

The effects would be very similar to your idea, but with these differences:

It would make alien alloys and alenium more useful. Currently, alenium and alien alloys are basically useless until late game interceptor production, and even then a shortage of alenium is not something I've really had to sorry about.

It would add more money to the game. That's not really a big deal because it's easy to compensate for.

It would remove the awkward thematic issue that the rest of the world seems to being doing jack shit.

An idea that has been bouncing around in my head is that unlocking the tech unlocks the ability to construct prototypes. An additional project would allow for mass-produced versions. The prototypes would be sold off at cost of the materials, so the player isn't heavily disincentized from building prototype version.

I'm not sure whether I like that idea for a more vanilla-flavoured game, mostly because I'm not convinced you'd ever need more than a couple of 'prototypes' of any given weapon so the mass-produced version would probably be a waste compared with the cost. However, I can see it working with a more significant mod which longer and/or places more emphasis on multiple squads. Although it would come with the cost of significantly increasing the number of manufacturing projects you need to wade through as there's no way to disable manufacturing projects once they're unlocked.

haven't read through all of it, just a note:

I've made few playthroughs with my own mod that almost forces a full squad per base, usually 8-10 men, and I end up with 3 squads. I was using almost all of vanilla+XNT weapons, the manufacturing process was "standard".

I came to conclusion that "excessive" weapon management adds more fun to the game than problems. The annoyance was not that big I initially expected. It feels exactly like you said - most often you won't "ever need more than a couple of 'prototypes' of any given weapon". Ok, 3 bases => mostly 3 weapons of each type, except for the rifles which will be 6-9.

I had no chance to try "mass production" though, so can't say which approach is better...

PS

going with mass-produced items means you won't have squads with mixed older and newer weapons. Your main squad will also be always the same tech level than those from secondary bases. IMO this definitely hurts game variety.

Is it possible to have a production run produce a multiple of something? For example, producing a set of 50 plasma grenades for the cost of a small amount of alenium, cash, and man hours.

In this way, you could have the consistency of manufacturing most items without the major impact on resources that used to come with it.

Is it possible to have a production run produce a multiple of something? For example, producing a set of 50 plasma grenades for the cost of a small amount of alenium, cash, and man hours.

In this way, you could have the consistency of manufacturing most items without the major impact on resources that used to come with it.

Yes. However, this brings in its own set of annoying micromanagement problems.

I would agree if we were talking about producing one at a time, but producing large quantities at once only adds a small amount of micromanagement. I think it also nicely addresses kabill's concern about free upgrades with less drawbacks than having to produce one at a time.

This could also be extended to production of firearms and armor. You have a base cost for production of 1 each of these things, and another option for a longer production run (say, 10x or so) at a slightly reduced cost in resources to reflect the advantages of duplication of effort that make mass production so valuable.

I have thought about that idea before (but never checked whether it was feasible to implement so that's useful to know, NuclearStudent). However, I'm not sure what advantages it has compared with just allowing unlimited upgrades - either the number that you produce from a single project will be enough to last you (in which case it may was well be infinite) or else it won't (in which case you may as well make things individually).

Arguably it works better in the context of explosives, mind, since they're single use items. So it might work well if one were to go in the opposite direction to what I suggested in the OP and made everything limited finite. (Which is, as it happens, an alternative that I've been thinking about too. I haven't quite got to the point in the game when I can check this, but my hypothesis is that aircraft weapons have unlimited ammo, e.g. if you had to produce an alenium missile to equip on a plane it would have unlimited uses but you could only equip as many at the same time as you have produced. If that's the case, you could make all aircraft weapons need manufacturing individually and then use the above solution for tactical explosive weapons to produce, say batches of 10 or 20 in one go).

There should be only one production per item.. u can do more but its very pointless.. You need to choose one and go for it.. you can choose different ones per items.. You can go one production/infinite item, one production/10 item or one production/1 item.. Vanilla game done this already..

U can make one production for 5 grenade or 3 rockets or 1 weapon.. because think about u have 20 soldier.. u will need about 40-50 grenade, 15 rocket and 2-3 weapon (different one)..

But the purpose here is using hard to find materials. If u say 1 alenium for 1 grenade, u lose all your aleniums just for grenades so u can make that 1 alenium for 5 grenade.. This is not about micromanagement, its about using the resources more practical.

At vanilla you didnt need any material to update your non-soldier weapons... so with 1 time production at least you make players do something more for that new weapons.. bahh i realy hardly explain myself with my english now..

I dont know how many things kabill will add to his mods.. all his weapons and armours? then he needs to organize everything very carefully.. When the numbers are high, u can lose the control easily and sometimes u should start all the way back.. like i do now..

So, having spent some time playing and having gotten to the stage where I'm slowly starting to crank out equipment for my squad, I think I'm actually quite enjoying the vanilla system for equipment production. I've got manufacturing projects for otherwise free upgrades up and running (and I'm convinced this is a good change) but, actually, I'm disinclined to do anything further along the lines I outlined in the OP. Never mind, then!

Some ideas for production costs in multiples:

Alenium grenades x50: 30 hours, 1 alenium, $5000

Plasma grenades x50: 40 hours, 1 alenium, $7000

Electroshock grenades x50: 40 hours, 1 alenium, $6000

Any tier pistol, assault or rifle weapon, jackal armor, wolf armor, sentinel armor x10: about 10% less than normal for all resources

Any tier sniper or heavy weapon, buzzard armor, predator armor x5: about 5% less than normal for all resources

Laser clips x100: 30 hours, 1 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $4000

Plasma clips x100: 40 hours, 1 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $5000

Laser cannon for aircraft x10: 80 hours, 2 alenium, 4 alien alloys, $8000

Plasma cannon for aircraft x10: 100 hours, 2 alenium, 4 alien alloys, $10000

Alenium torpedoes x50: 40 hours, 2 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $5000

Alienium missiles x50: 40 hours, 1 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $5000

Plasma missiles x50: 50 hours, 1 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $6000

Plasma torpedoes x50: 50 hours, 2 alenium, 1 alien alloy, $6000

These are of course a rough idea of what I was thinking for those interested in making all of their goods, and maybe could use a bit of balancing.

I don't think ammunition works well being finite due to a bug.

I always felt the vanilla system was reversed from what I was expecting. The basic gear of your troops had to be individually built and micromanaged while the 'specialist' gear like rockets and grenades were basically free.

It makes more sense to me that basic gear like pistols and assault rifles would be churned out en masse while more specialised gear like sniper rifles, machine guns, and explosives could be requisitioned individually as required. Game wise that would mean basic gear auto upgrades when the research is finished while specialist gear needs to be built individually.

Ammunition could really do with being individualised per weapon as well for that system but, as kabil says, that causes problems of its own.

Probably be confusing to players though and doesn't work so well with vanilla as there is very little difference between weapons within a tier.

I don't think ammunition works well being finite due to a bug.

Is that something to do with going out on missions?

I honestly can't remember now. There was definitely some kind of ammo duplication/cloning issue either in the soldier equipment screen or post-battle.

I really like the idea of mass producing items however I would throw my own twist on it. Rather then being straight upgrades maybe change it to be manufacturing in batches.

So when you build one Lazer rifle in vanilla game, you would build 5. But have each weapon type builds set amounts, for example the LMGs you possibly make 3 or so, the carbines 4, pistols 7 etc.

Possibly to compensate getting many weapons for less material, decrease the sale value and up the build times.

Another thought it would mean there is a lagg between multiple teams getting weapons, soo you could different levels of tech your xenonuats squads. I guess you could do something similar with amour but that a could get messy