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Hi everyone, after quite a long break i decided to come back into playing this game and checkout the updates and changes, i will not spend much time to talking about this but i'm quite happy to see the devs are putting a lot of effort into this game, but now, back on topic: Despite a few bugs and a lot of curses, i managed to get through a lot and i'm now sitting at March with a reasonable ammount of veterans (or should i say commanders?), a mix of Condors and Foxtrot, a single Corsair and a Marauder, in my main base i have 30 scientists and 30 engineers ... now heres the thing that doesnt break my game or anything but its crippling my expansion by a lot, my upkeep cost of everything in my main hub reaches 1.000.000 scheckels alone, with the other bases i have half of that ammount is added to the overall upkeep cost, which is 1.500.000 scheckels roughly, the majority of it is taken by scientists, engineers and soldiers. Now, i do not remember how much the costs were in the original XCOM so i really can't do a comparison, fortunately i can still maintain myself by just razing every ship grounded by interceptors (thanks devs, this was one hell of a feature), but money i get from the countries is minimum, i have a few questions : 1) I understand if i improve my relation with a country, this one give me a raise, but no matter how many ship i put down, no matter how many Cities i liberate, no matter how many bases i clear this country still doesnt care and in the end of the month the relationship deteriorates overtime (recently in my playthrough i cleared a huge base in Brazil and in the end of the same month, South america gave me the middle finger, god damn you guys) ... so, what i am doing wrong ? 2) Maybe airstriking is not the best course of action ? should i send the Xenonauts more than just Nuking the crashsite ? 3) Should i use less Engi and Scientists ? but considering the ammount of research i still have to complete, i feel like Scientists are always needed in large quantity, while engi maybe not, but with less engineers, especially in the early game, you will need them ... a lot. Thats it for now, i will attach some screenshots in the next post.

Chris, Been playing around with v10 tonight and very happy with the stability so far. Only one crash to note and it was because I was trying out something unusual. I have some suggested balance changes to make it possible for people to play the game until around September without having to resort to cheats. Most of these revolve around maintenance and wages, as well as construction costs and times for certain ammos. 1. Set wages to: soldier = 15k, tech = 18k, scientist = 22k. (down from 20,25,25k) 2. Set command center upkeep to 50k (down from 100k) 3. Set hangar upkeep = 8k (down from 10k - as your going to need a lot of these initially) This should now put the cost of running two bases in the $1.5m bracket instead of nearer $2m meaning you can run about $1m profit for the first 3-4 months (before negative relations start to take their toll) and allows you to manufacture missiles and replace the occasional aircraft. 4. Set Alenium Missile to 3k (down from 5k as you are going to start chewing through these as fast as sidewinders and you don't want every engagement to cost in excess of 30k!) 5. Set Alenium production between 10-15 (25 is far too high given the much higher tick rate set currently and the almost reliance on these once you are up against groups of 3). Why? There are several scenarios that absolutely require the use of alenium missiles now that fighters can dodge the first missile. 3 F-17s armed with 1xside, 1xalenium vs 3 fighters. Side winders are used to cause enemy to dodge and the alenium missile causes about 70% damage - still require a fair skirmish to kill all. 2 MiGs + 1 F17 armed with 3xsides, 7 aleniums vs 2 fighters and 1 corvette. 2 sidewinders to force the reaction from the fighters, 1 alenium and 1 sidey to kill one and then 1 alenium and some cannon to kill the other. 5 aleniums left - might just be lucky and take out the corvette (but probably not). Still this is gonna happen quite a lot come mid August, but your not going to be managing anything close to this if its taking you more than a day to produce each alenium missile! Sure you can get in close and dirty before firing missiles to make more count but your going to take alot of damage and probably lose one aircraft to that corvette cannon.

I was struggling along today trying to cope with the expenditure of maintaining a necessary 2nd (small base) while my funding continuously reduced month on month when it occurred to me that unnecessary expenditure was to blame. Now it is easy enough to hire and fire staff, but obviously not so easy to construct or destroy parts of your base. After deliberating on what "Maintenance" really means I concluded that the majority of it must reflect staff costs. For example you need doctors and nurses in your medical facility, mechanics and technicians in your hangars, quartermasters and store men in your.. you get the idea! Of course, real-estate isn't going to cost you anything as you have purchased the land for your base out right so that can't be a factor. This then got me thinking, how can I reduce maintenance costs on non-essential facilities? and the answer was; I can't, without destroying them (and what if I need them next week!) However, If staffing costs truly represent "Maintenance" - which I believe they do for facilities that don't consume anything (i.e. stores) then surely maintenace costs should be a function of their current usage. So for example, the costs of running a store at full capacity 50/50 should be different from running it with 10/50. Taking this further, shouldn't this also apply to empty garages and hangars too? This would be very helpful in the fact that I could build some (not all) facilities in a base for future use knowing that it won't cost me very much (or anything) in maintenance until I find need to use it. Lastly, if such a variable maintenance fee was found to represent a positive game change then I would also petition for the ability to adjust the funding to say the Medical Facility. At the moment it costs $25k per month which is reasonable. But would it perhaps be possible to optionally increase/decrease funding to this facility to either increase/decrease recovery times by a small margin respectively. This could represent the difference between 24/7 primary care with a high staff/patient ratio and an on-call doctor and ward nurse! As an added incentive, you could add a small chance that patients in poorly funded facilities might die from their wounds. Any feedback welcome! Keep up the good work. =)