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I like the idea of using resources to directly upgrade your current equipment. Sounds like it would be faster and cheaper than fully researching new tech, and then manufacturing new gear. I also like the idea of dismantling equipment scavenged from missions to produce other resources. Say you dismantle those 5 plasma rifles to get Alenium and Alloys. Then you can use those to upgrade your current armour or weapons. I'm less enthusiastic about rare items and drops tho; especially if it involves overly complicating the research and manufacturing process. It sounds like it could be a time consuming and expensive task to implement, and resulting in unrewarding and grindy gameplay. I'm also concerned about item bloat, like Comrade mentioned above. X1 has a nice feature where all those weapons, bodies, etc. are sold immediately when the mission ends. Adding components for crafting could add a layer of micromanaging that I don't really care for. Can we sell these components? Do I have to divert resources from Engineering to break them down? Do I have to break them down myself? Do I have to memorize a another crafting recipe tree? Maybe if rare drops were fully functional gear, and ready to use (research required) then I think it could work. For example: Alien leaders in large ufo's and bases could carry rare guns or ammo. The drop would be guaranteed but difficult to get. The leader has an extra powerful plasma rifle, but you still need to research plasma weapons to use it. Maybe there could be special missions that randomly appear where the player is given a chance to raid a hidden supply depot or something. Success gives the player some rare equipment like a new gun for the aircraft. "Local forces in New Mexico report increased alien activity at this location. We request Xenonaut ground forces to investigate." I'd also like to see rare drops (especially drops carried by ground troops) to have bonuses other than stat buffs. Maybe that plasma rifle carried by the alien leader can also behave like a grenade launcher, or it carries a pistol that can fire a couple of light rockets, etc.

I'm having a weird problem, and was hoping to get some help. In short, when I play for a while, it seems like my saves start going jank. (Last 4 saves attached, in case anyone knows how to make sense of that stuff) The previous time this happened, my save files were blank, this time they crash the game on load. There was nothing unusual aside from my computer running a bit more intensely than normal, but that could have been the streaming software. When I loaded them in-game to test it at the time, they loaded fine...now they don't. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on with this? I'm over a year into this campaign, stuff ain't super stable, even with a fresh install twice now. Additionally, I have a question if anyone might be interested. How difficult would it be to make a randomizer? Like just allowing every enemy type to spawn, and giving a chance for every research for every item or some such? I suppose technically just unleashing the chaotic spawns might have the intended effect. Still, XDiv might be super fun randomized. Ironman Round 2.sav Autosave3.sav Autosave2.sav Quicksave.sav

Yeah, I certainly see how that could work for rare UFO spawn items - but I was more thinking of the basic items when I said it might not work very well. It's plausible you'd know if a UFO has a special shield generator on it or something but it's rather less plausible for you to know in advance than 3 of the 10 plasma weapons aboard would have functional Beam Emitters when recovered. I guess I could take a leaf from the XCOM playbook and have it so that stunned aliens have a 100% chance of dropping recoverable items, whereas aliens you kill only drop it 30% of the time or something? Might make stunning aliens a bit more rewarding given it's much more dangerous than simply killing them. I quite like that idea, actually - gives the player a way to mitigate randomness through good play, but as you'd probably only ever need a max of say 20 Beam Emitters (or whatever) there'd be minimal advantages to farming the same type of UFO over and over with stun weapons.

Quirks and flaws of equipment families notwithstanding, Xenonauts 2 follows a linear research progression path. That is to say, the further down the tech tree you advance the objectively better equipment families become. Furthermore, the game follows a linear difficulty progression path. UFOs become larger and more difficult to fight, aliens become harder to kill, and better equipped to kill squaddies equipped with current-gen technology (e.g. aliens have three generations of weapon technology in X2). The X-Division mod for X1 formally recognised this and subdivided the game into specific Phases. As equipment families progress and alien equipment also progresses the pressure is on the player to be ahead of the technology curve. As aliens improve of the course of the game it is generally better to research and manufacture current-gen to match the threat presented by aliens at that point in the game rather than stick last-gen, which matched the threat presented by aliens at the point where last-gen was current gen. This is most prominent with the armour equipment families – it is noticeably better to have wolf armour than it is to stay with basic armour and have the heavy armour upgrade. However, in X1 it is a valid strategy to not invest in current-gen and rely on last-gen technology (the “rush plasma strategy”). The aim of this strategy is to wait for a future generation of equipment family which is significantly better than current-gen, is achievable in a timescale that does not create undue pressure for the player and can be manufactured in large numbers reasonably quickly. While waiting, resources are either horded or spent on current-gen technology in another part of the game, e.g. forgoing Ground Combat lasers to purchase more armour, a key plank of the rush plasma strategy. So, into this, we introduce components. Components as presented in the OP create economic scarcity for current-gen equipment families. If you don’t have the component, you have to pay a stiff penalty to replace the component required, so balancing resources between various current-gen equipment families becomes more pronounced and the desire to obtain components becomes sharp. Penalties for last-gen technology are apparently less than the penalties for current-gen technology. As a consequence there is a strong economic incentive to focus more on last-gen technology than current-gen as resources can be used more effciently. If a player comfortably feels that s/he can survive on upgraded last-gen as opposed to current-gen then we are already in the scenario identified by Chris without any further incentivisation required. Items drops don’t need to be made more common, because economically you can make up for the penalties more efficiently than current-gen. In this proposed scenario, making last-gen drops more common encourages investment in current-gen by the expedient of flooding the market. If components for last-gen become more common this frees up resources to invest in current-gen that would otherwise have been invested in the technologically inferior but economically superior last-gen. It would, however, from a gameplay perspective be better to make the player feel pressured that they need to invest in current-gen technology over last-gen. A considerable percentage of the playerbase for X-Division enjoy the mod because of that pressure to keep up with current alien opponents.

Wouldn't a fatigue system, coupled with UFOs appearing in a wave, naturally puts an upper cap on how many UFOs can be recovered per team? Resource conversion between tier? Now that really sounds like a mobile game that force you to grind and grind. Yeah, you get more resources with bigger UFO, but the difference is typically not as big as the difference between tiers. What I mean is maybe old tier can become a safety net for players who made a major stumble, like losing the main base along with the A-team, they can still quickly field newbies with second-tier items and recover quicker. To do that they don't need to be free, but they need to become half as cheap or more. Civ kind of do it the other way - it boosts your resources with tech, but the result is the same: lower-tier units are cheap enough to become the new basic. If a random can be mitigated by player skills, it is a challenge. That gives players satisfaction. If a random can be mitigated by grinding, well, it's grinding. Generally speaking, randomness works against players, and xcom already has lots of randoms. Also, many players won't remember when their luck evened out, and most players do not judge "evenness" as statistics. Player have a skewed perception of random's evenness. Lastly, numerically equal chances are not equal in game terms; bad rolls can destroy more than the gain from lucky rolls. (In this case, bad luck on loot hurts the campaign more than the boost from good loots, which means each campaign's difficulty curve is partly random. Can actually be good if there is a safety net to prevent it from ruining the game.) Lots of rolls can even out the chances, yes, but if something should even out then leaving it by chance may not be the best chocie. There are other ways of course. New XCOM and Battletech both implements a "miss chain breaker" to guarantee some hits. Not a complex system, but still adds to the complexity. A dynamic difficulty system that buff / nerf the opponents as you do well is a pretty common solution to the problem. The original xcom tried to do that, Apoc did that, phoenix point is doing that. In particular, in Phoenix Point the system works too well that save-scumming players soon find themselves facing bullet-sponge enemies that can one-shot half the team with one grenade. I think the top lesson from it is that, when a player scum saves, just let him/her be. It's obvious (s)he is not playing for a "fair" challenge. ("fair" as in most xcom game assumes you'll take at least light losses.) Second lesson, a modder will cap or disable the system for those who want the "raw time-based xcom experience". (Which is ironic since the very first xcom tried to implement dynamic difficulty but bugged, ended up forcing every campaign to have same difficulty.) Another system I've seen are events to help the underdogs, like when a player lost most soldiers, the veterans of a private military company come join xenonauts after their head is killed or controlled by the alien, and bring some alien loots with them. It's more common in games with fixed roasters, such as Sequence Palladium and UFO:Afterlight.

I'm halfway through my thesis on why increasing drop rates on old tech would be beneficial (I wish I was kidding), but what I will say about grinding is if you want to stop grinding from being the primary strategy for play, then I would suggest imposing economic penalities. You could actually use Strategic Operations or Agents for this. Fighter UFOs have in v12 a Strategic Operation where you can recover an item. Fine. Make that the norm for item drops. You don't get any item drops on a mission complete. Instead, the UFO remains on the map for X amount of time, like fighter UFOs do. You can click on the UFO and spend X amount of money for a chance to get a drop. The more money you spend, the higher the chance of a drop. Perhaps you could spend an agent for 100% chance of a drop, but then you've no longer got that agent. Edit: The basic premise - spend X resource to get Y% chance of a item drop is infinitely mutable. E.G. you could perhaps assign scientists and/or engineers as a "salvage team" to a UFO which takes game-time to salvage a UFO. The more scientists and/or engineers you assign as a salvage team, the better the chance of a drop. Heck, you be even more radical. Instead of getting any instant rewards like you do right now, all rewards cost a reource to get. Going back to the salvage team idea, you can only get rewards from a ufo once a salvage team has finished salvaging a UFO - that would impose economic penalities on grinding that could be felt through the lifespan of the game (scientists for the drop, engineers for basic resources?).

If last-gen components will be more readily available, like Max Caine suggested, like if their cost decrease with tech, or drop rate increase with tech, I'd support it for the spice. Otherwise, I am biased towards Against, as it complicate things and has the potential to hangs the econ or even the campaing on some more random rolls. For reference, There is a 35% chance that recovering 10 plasma weapons yields no beam accelerator (90%^10), 12% chance after 20 (90%^20). Not a very nice chance. One in ten players won't even see plasma drop beam after, let's say three combats. Worse, if a plasma may drop three components, the chance of not recovering one of them increase to 72% @ 10 drops and 32% @ 20 drops. Too few components, and the system is not fun enough. Too many, some players are bound to need to spend extra resource to make up, and some players are bound to get too many! The hard part is, the line depends on player luck! Are there not enough variety with the addon system to keep inventory and production interesting? I think the trend (non-rogue-likes, non-micro-transactions), is to make common resources stable and reliable, while "consumables" are rare and powerful, like xcom 2's core or civ's hero. And not too heavily luck based - players feel better when skills play a factor. Whether 10% or 40%, drop chance is a term that better fit lootbox now.

One thing I would like to see is earlier generation components become more available in relation to the current generation of technology. For example, if nanothread was only useful for basic armour then when wolf armour becomes available I'd like to see nanothread more accessible. The reason for upping the drop rate would be to create greater tension between filling out last generation technology and focussing on current generation technology.