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A case for making manufacturing marginally profitable


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Casualties mostly. I like to have spares.

You make a good point. Setting up the second base as an intercept first then using the funds gained from missions to expand it into a strike base. Rotatable rooms would be a big help in setting it up. It'd be over about a month and a half (month end for funding injection, 14 days for all the rooms to be finished).

Sounds fair. If the Chinook keeps global range you might be able to get some extra missions in from the second base intercepts, or at the very least the funding increase from the cover.

$1,025,000 to do that and just fill the workshop + lab you start with. Adding an extra one of those would add $250,000 (for lab) or 175,000 (for workshop). Much more acceptable.

On another front, seems that increasing the sale price of alien weapons by $10k might be too much. Rolling in cash come January (2 million, 4 Corsairs, a Shrike and a full team armed with laser and plasma + Wolf). Its partly due to selling Alenium (over 100 per crashsite), Reactors not exploding in severe crashes (600k per landing ship/cruiser before weapons sales) and getting at least 500k from weapon sales. Manufacturing capacity (and alloys when cruisers get fixed) is the bottleneck now.

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Yeah assuming the governments of the world aren't also making their own versions of lasers and so on you would expect to get your money back at least.

I always assumed that part of the funding contract would state that any technology produced by the organisation I was funding would be available to me without me having to pay through the nose for it.

I am already paying the staff wages as well as providing the facilities they use so the only thing I would expect to be charged for would be materials.

I wouldn't sign the contract otherwise!

This isn't a pharmaceutical company where I pay for all of their research, testing and production costs just so I can start paying 1000% profit prices to them as well.

In other words selling for no loss to start, then adjust pricing in small increments if the balance is wrong.

Remembering of course that not everyone will have the same idea of balance.

I might feel that a new, fully equipped, base in the first month is optimal balance while Sathra may feel the second month is better, someone else may feel that you should barely be able to have a radar/interceptor base by the end of the third month.

Maybe finding the spot where the game should be balanced is the real starting point and I don't think that has been done yet.

The governments have no way of reverse-engineering Xenonauts weapons, as they all require at least Alien Alloys, if not Alenium, and Xenonauts keeps all of those spoils from every UFO.

And you'd think that you wouldn't have to pay through the nose, but look at real-life weapons contractors: the government pays the company to design, for instance, the missile, then pays for each missile. Not to mention the fact that what the world governments are paying he Xenonauts is really a pittance.

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The premise here is that you would be able to get by on money made from manufacturing if you have a dry spell of UFO ground missions. As I understand it, to actually manufacture something worthwhile, you need alien materials. Materials which you get from UFO ground missions.

How exactly do you expect to profit from manufacturing if you don't have said materials?

Perhaps this problem could be mitigated otherwise? Make first-month UFOs appear only in the region where your base is, slowly (or quickly, depending on difficulty) expanding across the world? Maybe force the random spawn algorithm to take into account the locations in which UFOs spawned recently to make these locations better spread out?

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The governments have no way of reverse-engineering Xenonauts weapons, as they all require at least Alien Alloys, if not Alenium, and Xenonauts keeps all of those spoils from every UFO.

Technicly, the governmetns are also fighting and occasionaly they do shoot down a UFO. So they should have some materials.

That's not to say that it's impossible to make a laser rifle wihout alien materials. It just wouldn't be as good.

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Technicly, the governmetns are also fighting and occasionaly they do shoot down a UFO. So they should have some materials.

That's not to say that it's impossible to make a laser rifle wihout alien materials. It just wouldn't be as good.

If the governments had any way of downing UFOs on their own, they wouldn't need the Xenonauts. And, if you pay attention to the research tree or read the research descriptions, you'll see that, yes, you do need alien materials to build lasers. The research states that the only way to reliably cool them is by using Alien Alloys for the body and the only way to generate sufficient power is with Alenium.

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Its part of the various background stuff that the various governments DO gain access to alien materials (hasn't made it into the game yet). Its the reason the small ships stop showing up on your sensors as the earth governments slowly gain the ability to fight off the smaller ones on their own. The Xenonauts fight on the forefront of the invasion as they have the most resources and capability to take on the new unknown contacts.

Its after the Xenonauts gain experience fighting those ships and crews trickles down to the rest of the world that everyone else can join the fight effectively.

And anyways, later in the game the various local force units start carrying lasers (usually about the point you get plasma). They don't use it for armour so they can build more guns. They have the people to spare, and their lasers are probably technically more inferior to the Xeno gear as they have to make the resources stretch more while the Xenonauts can be more profligate with them (and they make the mistakes that waste resources).

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Remembering of course that not everyone will have the same idea of balance.

I might feel that a new, fully equipped, base in the first month is optimal balance while Sathra may feel the second month is better, someone else may feel that you should barely be able to have a radar/interceptor base by the end of the third month.

Maybe finding the spot where the game should be balanced is the real starting point and I don't think that has been done yet.

Personally one of my favorite choices of the OG was that you had a choice on day one to either plop down an access lift and a radar (virtually breaking the bank and counting on the perfect start) or leaving it a month or so. Your game tended to play out so differently in terms of difficulty - either struggling along for a month or two with a limp (cash wise) but reaping the benefits later OR going for a really strong starter base and climbing up the tech tree quickly.

Certainly I don't think you should be up an running with a full second base (with living quarters, stores, hangars, 2 fighters and a chinook) until the end of month 3 unless you make that risky decision early on and it pays off. Risk reward is good

That second bases needs to feel/be earned or at the very least a decision that stretches your early finances to the limit. Not just something that comes about because you have lots of spare cash lying around (which there might be a danger of if you can manufacture willy nilly).

What I think I am driving at is that manufacturing for profit should at maximum match funding from nations for 1 workshops.

In the extreme play: With space limits that probably means maximum 3 workshops in original base (assuming no other upgrades) an means you could in theory earn in the region of $1m per month from manufacture on top of your $500k or so funding in month one - that's assuming one is dedicated to producing actual consumables and the other 2 are profit generating.

On the balanced play: For a two workshop play, you would probably not be able to do much more than just cover your base expenses with a second workshop, but freeing about $500k per month extra to play with.

Either way your not going to reap the benefits until month 2 whereas another player might have a basic intercept base set up by then.

Edited by Belmakor
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Hmm, tried out having alien weapons only worth 5k more than present. Did pretty badly (lost at least 1 person nearly every mission), and after about 8-10 crash-sites (2 auto-gen, and all but one of the shootdowns was a Light Scout) by the end of the month I had an partially upgraded main base (new living quarters and Workshop, filled lab and workshop and 6 suits of Jackal and a MiG) and just enough cash to build a new base with the funding income and had a bit over 100k left over (saving for a radar).

Part of this may have been because I increased the sale price of alien plasma clips to 3k. I gained nearly 150k from them I think.

Will have to see how much cash I have when I get to Landing ships.

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  • 2 years later...

Personally, I think the major problem isn't the necessity of manufacturing, it is the randomness of UFO distribution and the fragility of first month finances. If a player could be guaranteed a minimum number of UFO encounters during the first month, then there is little argument for manufacturing profit, because the organization's failure at that point would be due to the player's failure, which is acceptable.

One kind of odd alternative is a vessel like X-Division's AWAC; a mobile radar vessel available from day 1 would allow a player to locate and intercept UFOs even if they get unlucky on first month UFO distribution.

Basically, I am against manufacturing profit because it devalues the core failure mechanics of the game. The major arguments for manufacturing profits revolve around providing the player alternatives when the randomization screws them. I'm personally for giving them other tools, rather than simply negating the funding mechanic all together.

Also, for those who just want a mechanic for surviving a finance drought, why make manufacturing profitable? Why not just not give the player the one time option of a "Fire Sale" where a large amount of resources are removed, and the player receives a significant finance boost as compensation? That way the core funding mechanics remain valued, but the player still has an option to counter a really unlucky streak.

Edited by JDCollie
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Personally, I think the major problem isn't the necessity of manufacturing, it is the randomness of UFO distribution and the fragility of first month finances. If a player could be guaranteed a minimum number of UFO encounters during the first month, then there is little argument for manufacturing profit, because the organization's failure at that point would be due to the player's failure, which is acceptable.

One kind of odd alternative is a vessel like X-Division's AWAC; a mobile radar vessel available from day 1 would allow a player to locate and intercept UFOs even if they get unlucky on first month UFO distribution.

Some ppl like that awac's idea, some ppl can't find a reason to use it.

I want to use that idea, but i fear to make it boring and became a mood killer. So the bases radar's will be less usefull and even you have many bases you still need that planes and micromanage them. If radars are enough powerful, nobody will use them..

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Some ppl like that awac's idea, some ppl can't find a reason to use it.

I want to use that idea, but i fear to make it boring and became a mood killer. So the bases radar's will be less usefull and even you have many bases you still need that planes and micromanage them. If radars are enough powerful, nobody will use them..

I mostly mean to illustrate that there are gameplay options for fixing the problems that people have mentioned, rather than simply making manufacturing profitable.

Profitable manufacturing simply undermines a core mechanic. Regardless of how you balance it, it will always serve to reduce the importance of defending member nations, and that is something which should never happen.

In short, we should give players more tools to do their jobs, rather than making their jobs irrelevant.

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If you say that the sells are to the funding governments--than it would supplement the funding not offset it.

Another way is to make the sale price the same as the manufacturing price at least than the sell of excess items would not be a money loser. Which is now is. And sometimes you run short of money big time--so much so that it seems STUPID especially after it is obvious that the Earth is being invaded. And there is an organization fighting that invasion. I would suspect that funding would increase considerably due to public pressure for protection from the TERROR missions of the Aliens.

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