Financing the operation

[thothkins]

Is there a chance that the Aliens will give up the invasion because of the smog layer created by all those Xenonaut factories?

[Max_Caine]

I’m sure this has been brought up already, but I can only see one way of making manufactured goods work as an alternate revenue stream and not as the only revenue stream. And that is to introduce market economics. That was the biggest problem with xcom:eu. The prices were static, so it was easy to work out the most efficient way to make manufacturing work. If prices react to flooding a market with goods, then manufacturing might work as a short-term prospect, but couldn’t be figured into long-term goals. But would that be fun? Would it be fun to watch price trends and try and work out when the best time to buy and sell would be? Or would market trading take over as the new revenue stream? >_<

[Gorlom]

I think you are focussing too much on "profit" and not enough on "return of investment".

Let's say you have a manufacturing base that produces a net profit of 1000$ a day. Let's also assume a normal playthrough will take around 2 ingame years. So if you have to invest 700 000$ for your manufacturing base, you won't break even until the game is finished - if you invest that money from day 1, and don't use it for any of the other juicy stuff you would like to have.

That means being able to sell at a profit doesn't ruin the dependency on funding by itself, which I think is the greatest concern here. I think the existance of some stuff that allows you to at least finance the maintenance of the production facilities and technicians has one advantage:

Players who invested in a decent production infrastructure won't get punished when there momentarily isn't any stuff they need for the fight. You don't have any fair chance to know how much production is "too much" when playing the game for the first time, because it depends on result of research you have no knowledge of.

Why would a normal play through only take 2 in-game years? Is it just me that thinks that sounds short?

And if you go by your assumptions that the game is balanced so that you don't break even until you finish, then you invalidate the point of being able to build for profits imo. Basically you are saying it would be impossible to get any return on the investment, that it costs more to set up then you can ever get out. So why do you need to get anything out of it in ways of profit anyway? Why not just balance the national funding properly instead?

Without a market economy (or some kind of economy at least) all you do is 1) punish the inattentive player that doesn't notice you can manufacture for profits, and 2) open up the game to be exploited by min-maxers.

[thothkins]

Probably scattered throughout

- Have a finite amount of each item type that can be sold. everything else just sits there until destroyed.

- Have a decreasing price for each item (possibly linked to the above)

- Have fluctuating price, making manufacturing trickier as you may have to hold onto the goods for some time.

- Have selling items reduce support from funding nations as they become less reliant on Xenonauts. Short term selling cash v long term funding decreases. Local forces might increase.

- increase chance of having your base spotted with each workshop you have belching out certain Alenium type by products.

[Gauddlike]

I’m sure this has been brought up already, but I can only see one way of making manufactured goods work as an alternate revenue stream and not as the only revenue stream. And that is to introduce market economics. That was the biggest problem with xcom:eu. The prices were static, so it was easy to work out the most efficient way to make manufacturing work. If prices react to flooding a market with goods, then manufacturing might work as a short-term prospect, but couldn’t be figured into long-term goals. But would that be fun? Would it be fun to watch price trends and try and work out when the best time to buy and sell would be? Or would market trading take over as the new revenue stream? >_<

Yeah it has been mentioned a few times I think.

It does make sense as a way to counteract overuse of profits.

Harder to balance than simply leaving profit out of it completely though.

[Gorlom]

Probably scattered throughout

- Have a finite amount of each item type that can be sold. everything else just sits there until destroyed.

- Have a decreasing price for each item (possibly linked to the above)

- Have fluctuating price, making manufacturing trickier as you may have to hold onto the goods for some time.

- Have selling items reduce support from funding nations as they become less reliant on Xenonauts. Short term selling cash v long term funding decreases. Local forces might increase.

- increase chance of having your base spotted with each workshop you have belching out certain Alenium type by products.

Those are some nice ideas. I think 1), 4) and 5) are new. I don't care for the first one, but the fourth one is pretty nice actually.

A lot of hassle to implement and balance, but intriguing as a concept nonetheless.

[thothkins]

four might have been better had I finished the sentence.

it was supposed to read:-

Have selling items reduce support from funding nations as they become less reliant on Xenonauts. Short term selling cash v long term funding decreases. Local forces might increase in effectiveness, as a result of having received advanced weaponry. This doesn't have to be shown in the sprites, just in the background.

Another option would be to have the prices of things linked with the ticker. This simulates that there comes a point when the funding nations realise that whatever weapons they have, they are still not going to be any match for the invasion. So, they may increase finding, but stop buying manufactured items.

[TMP]

You are making quite a few assumptions there but not looking at them in a wider context.

How many engineers is the profit margin you mention based on?

Does it take into account living quarter upkeep for the engineers?

What specific product or are all to have the same profit margin?

How would that be affected if someone was to have 4 workshops in a base, or 4 bases full of workshops?

If you make a million a month from manufacturing laser cannon and spend it on building more factories would you make 1.1 million next month?

Return of investment is fine at a small scale but eventually you end up outrunning the problems by building more factories.

First question: 1 living quarters with one workshop completely in use. From there on, everything scales linearly (investment and maintenance). Someone made calculations about this in the beginning.

Second question: Yes.

Third question: Doesn't really matter. You could have the profit margin increase continously the higher you get into the tech tree. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Fourth question: More like 1.03 to 1.05 million, to increase the time until you get back your investment.

Last statement: Eventually is the important point. Time is not an irrelevant factor. Neither in real world economics, nor in the game.

Financing the production facilities (along with all of the other facilities) is the whole point in the funding from nations.

You aren't penalised when you have nothing you need to build.

If you don't build anything then you are spending no money except for the upkeep, which you would be spending anyway.

If you use the stuff yourself, the sell price is irrelevant. You are financing the stuff you use by using the funding. That principle is not violated. On the other hand, assume I have either 200 engineers or 50 engineers. But 50 engineers are sufficient to build everything I want to until I get the next upgrade. So having 200 engineers means I pay 4 times the maintenance but I get absolutely nothing back. That's "penalizing" in my book. But when I start the game I don't know if I will need 50 or 200. That's a problem I see.

Sure, you have a similar problem with research. There are other solutions for this, though.

If you start to lose funding you then have to decide if maybe you should cut back on engineers, focus only on things you definitely need to build, continue as you are and make cuts in other areas if you get more desperate, or get out and hunt down more aliens for things to sell.

Incidentally that also slows alien progress so gives a double benefit if you are struggling to compete.

Unfortunately, building and dismantling infrastructure isn't a no-cost thing. Engineers don't get paid for each day afaik, but for each month. Not that easy to cut back to save money in the short or mid term.

That is much more interesting to me than building more factories to get more cash in.

This gives me the feeling you missed my point. Producing for profit DOES NOT mean it's helpfull to build more factories to get more money.

Example: 3% return on investment per month. I have 1 000 000. But I do nothing, while you build production for 1 million.

Ten months laters. You have now 300 000. While I still got my 1 million, so I'm better of. 30 months later, I finish the game. I still have my 1 million. You have 900 000. So I finish the game with more money than you with your "making money" scheme. So how again is building production facilities helping my cashflow in this case?

Why would a normal play through only take 2 in-game years? Is it just me that thinks that sounds short?

And if you go by your assumptions that the game is balanced so that you don't break even until you finish, then you invalidate the point of being able to build for profits imo. Basically you are saying it would be impossible to get any return on the investment, that it costs more to set up then you can ever get out. So why do you need to get anything out of it in ways of profit anyway? Why not just balance the national funding properly instead?

Without a market economy (or some kind of economy at least) all you do is 1) punish the inattentive player that doesn't notice you can manufacture for profits, and 2) open up the game to be exploited by min-maxers.

I used 2 years, because that's roughly the maximum that I stayed in the game in TFTD. You can finish that game within 1 ingame year without problem. It isn't really relevant for the principle, though.

There are two reasons why I would like to be able to get some profit. The first one is realism. I don't see it very plausible that the raw materials cost more than the final product (you already pay for the wages of the engineers and facility maintenance). The second one is to make certain "wrong" decisions less punishing. Knowing the exact amount of engineers you will need at which point in the game becomes less important. It would still helpfull, but not as much.

While this would punish the inattentive player, not being able to build for a little profit will punish EVERY player (and the really inattentive one will build for profit and lose additional money - don't laugh, I know someone who wasn't aware that building stuff costs money)

I don't see how this opens the game for exploits by min-maxers. If the (maximum) net profit per month is 100% / (average game time in months), how can it be exploited? It can't.

Edited June 6, 2012 by TMP

[Infinitum]

Selling weapons to what market though? The black/private market is ruled out due to the Xenonauts being an international agency (and I can't see any backing countries wishing to spread this technology to the general populace). As for selling to countries, why would they be interested in aquiring such small quantities of firearms using a technology I can only assume is already distributed to them?

There's also the entire factor of Laser/Plasma weapons being effectively useless without access to large quantities of alien fuel, which comes in very limited supply for obvious reasons.

As for balance reasons, I for one also find strategy more interesting when it involves a choice between several bad options rather than a few generic good long term economic investements.

[Max_Caine]

Concerning realism, it can "make sense" that a final product sells for less than the raw materials and labour costs used to make it if the market for that good either nonexistant or weak. In that case, the manufacturer has made a bad bet on what would sell, and ends up making a loss. For instance, making MiG-23s. The Soviet Union could sell the airframes at an inflated price to Xenonauts. The cost of making, then installing the specialised avionics and detection equipment suitible for detecting and fighting Ufos then preparing the hull for ufo attack could inflate the cost of the MiG beyond what Xenonauts could get back for it if they tried to resell the aircraft, as said aircraft is useless for non-ufo combat without a considerable overhall.

Secondly, in the current alpha engineer requirements for any manufactured product are very precise. An exact time/date for the manufacture of a product line is given. Therefore, the player will always know how long a product line will take to produce. If the player knows manufacturing time per engineer, the player can adjust engineer requirements as necessary. Additionally, also in the current alpha, the hiring and firing of staff is very streamlined and instantaneous. This may change in subsequent builds, but as things stand, there is no penalty to sacking staff. If I find I have too many engineers, I can sack them until I need them.

[TMP]

The labour cost is an additional cost to the manufactoring cost, so I don't see it as justified to use it in the realism argument. On the other hand I would admit that it's not impossible for a final product to have less worth than its original components. It's just not really common.

Firing engineers doesn't cost anything, but it doesn't help you either. They get paid for being hired and at the end of the month, not for the time they are hired. Sacking staff for less than a month doesn't save you any money. (And you can't reasonably reduce other maintenance cost)

Edited June 6, 2012 by TMP

[Gauddlike]

This gives me the feeling you missed my point. Producing for profit DOES NOT mean it's helpfull to build more factories to get more money.

Example: 3% return on investment per month. I have 1 000 000. But I do nothing, while you build production for 1 million.

Ten months laters. You have now 300 000. While I still got my 1 million, so I'm better of. 30 months later, I finish the game. I still have my 1 million. You have 900 000. So I finish the game with more money than you with your "making money" scheme. So how again is building production facilities helping my cashflow in this case?

My problem is that your point makes no sense to me.

You are against not making profit from sales because adding profits allows you to not make any money?

Surely if your whole point is related to wages you would be better off just reducing how much an engineer or scientist is paid if they are inactive?

Your above example seems to be showing a single system with profits enabled from two different views, one person building factories and one person not building any factories at all.

It is over simplistic and doesn't really demonstrate anything.

For example if the same money was spent under profit making and non-profit systems the profit making system would be self funding, or at least take the sting out of its upkeep.

You would be saving money every month from your funding while still having a large manufacturing machine ready to jump into production whenever you need anything.

Building 20 laser rifles would always be a better choice than building the 10 you absolutely need because the rest are sold for profit and pay wages.

If you can only sell for the amount you have paid to make them then you have to decide if you can afford to hire and maintain a large amount of engineers.

You can't just splash out near the start of the game and then allow your factories to run themselves through the whole rest of the game.

You may not know how many engineers you may need but you will work out how many you actually want which is far more important, especially if you have to pay them yourself.

Do I want to spend my funding on keeping engineers available for when I need to build my next batch of weapons or replace a lost interceptor?

Should I save that money to spend on scientists or on a larger pool of troops?

Those decisions are lost, or at least their import is reduced, if you can just have as many as you want and get them to pay their own upkeep and wages.

Getting back your initial costs isn't as important as the upkeep.

Once you have spent the money, for example after a particularly good run of ground missions or a large funding spike, then you can forget about it if it is self funding or the upkeep is significantly reduced.

If it isn't self funding then you have to think about how to work within your income.

On the other hand I would admit that it's not impossible for a final product to have less worth than its original components. It's just not really common.

I am talking about selling for cost here btw, not at a loss.

Edited June 6, 2012 by Gauddlike

[Max_Caine]

If you want to use realism as an argument, then you cannot separate the cost of labour from any other cost involved in manufacturing. Without labour, there is no manufacture. If you look at the earlier link I gave which strategized manufacturing in X-com:Ufo Defence, here it is again the analysis deliberately includes the cost of labour in calculating the overall net profit from the sale of manufactured goods. Furthermore, on page 6 when you counter Gauddlike's points, you include as part of the $700,000 base investment you discussed on page 5 labour costs!

How many engineers is the profit margin you mention based on?

Does it take into account living quarter upkeep for the engineers?

First question: 1 living quarters with one workshop completely in use. From there on, everything scales linearly (investment and maintenance). Someone made calculations about this in the beginning.

Second question: Yes.

Furthermore, I would argue that ultimately every product is finally worth less than the goods they are made from. Consider the iPad. From the offical apple store linked to the UK site, first-generation iPads are £100-£300 cheaper than their later cousins new iPads for comparison. With every new generation of iPad to come out, the price of first-generation iPads will continue to tumble. Their worth drops until they aren't worth what's inside them.

Edited June 6, 2012 by Max_Caine
got my numbers wrong - taken off until I work through them again.

[Max_Caine]

Let's crunch some numbers. Using current-alpha stats (subject to change) what does TMP's $700,000 investment in manufacturing get you?

Cost of a workshop is $200,000, with a $10,000 upkeep cost. Cost of living quarters is 150,000, with a $5,000 upkeep cost. Now, amazingly, that works out to 2 living quarters and 2 workshops - if one was to invest everything in plant and machinery. For the purposes of this example, let's say that there's extra money from somewhere to finance the first goods off the production line and hire labour. So, with 2 living quarters I can have 100 engineers, fully staffing 2 workshops. Engineers cost me $15,000 each per month and an inital hiring cost of the same (so I also have to find that money as well) so that's $1,500,000 labour costs, with a further $30,000 in upkeep every month, for a total of $1,530,000. If the council of nations were not giving me a paycheque every month to cover these exact same costs, to break even I have to make $1,530,000 per month.

Okay, what to make? How about MiGs? Per 50 engineers I can crank out 1 a day, so if I set up parallell production lines, I can have 30 per line every 30 days. However, at 250,000 per, that's horribly expensive to start up. How about laser guns? They are one of the first thing you can manufacture after MiGs. What would be suitible? Well, I would want to maxmise my economies of scale whenever possible. Laser pistols are priced at $20,000, and 1 is made every 9 hours per 50 engineers, laser carbines and laser rifles at $50,000 every 16 hours, so laser pistols it is! If I set up 2 production lines, I can crank out 80 laser pistols per line every 30 days, for a total of 160 pistols. (The reason that I want 2 production lines are there is a cap on the number of engineers I can put on a single project - 99. So I am better off setting up two lines instead of 1 to maximise my workshops.)

Let's say that the gross profit per item is very small. I make for $20,000, I sell for $21,000. My gross at the end of the month if I produce laser pistols is $160,000. That's less than a quarter of my upkeep - so there's no point in me investing in this project to begin with. Okay, how about a gross of $2,000 ($52,000) per item ? Then I double my gross for $320,000. Eh. Still no good. If I want to break even from the sale of goods and I have no other source of income than manufacturing, I am going to need to be able to sell a little higher.

Break-even is at a gross profit of $9600, but the magic turnaround is at a gross profit of $10,000. With two workshops working flat out, I produce 160 pistols. at $30,000 per pistol, I make $1,600,000, for a net income of $70,000. Providing I only have two workshops doing just pistols, at a guaranteed sale of $30,000 per pistol (a 50% markup!) my ROI is 10%.. I can recoup my inital investment 10 months from start.

Now, the barriers to making a profit for even two workshops are formidable. Most formidable are labour costs. Every fully-staffed workshop adds another $750,000 to the wage bill (and quite frankly, the engineers are on a crap wage). But, once you cross the magic profit line, because the engineers are total robots who only exist to serve their master and will work around the clock 24/7, even small net profits will add up quite quickly.

[Gorlom]

@ TMP

After rereading your whole post: You don't actually want manufacture for profit do you? Not pure profit at the very least. You want something to make idle engineers useful when you don't actually need anything produced?

Are you after profit that excludes the costs for living quarters/workshop and engineers wages, but is a loss if you include them?

Is it enough for the manufactured goods to sell for more then simply selling the raw materials?

First question: 1 living quarters with one workshop completely in use. From there on, everything scales linearly (investment and maintenance). Someone made calculations about this in the beginning.

For X-com or for Xenonauts? could you please provide a source for this?

If you use the stuff yourself, the sell price is irrelevant. You are financing the stuff you use by using the funding. That principle is not violated. On the other hand, assume I have either 200 engineers or 50 engineers. But 50 engineers are sufficient to build everything I want to until I get the next upgrade. So having 200 engineers means I pay 4 times the maintenance but I get absolutely nothing back. That's "penalizing" in my book. But when I start the game I don't know if I will need 50 or 200. That's a problem I see.

Sure, you have a similar problem with research. There are other solutions for this, though.

You say yourself in the paragraph prior to this one that "Last statement: Eventually is the important point. Time is not an irrelevant factor. Neither in real world economics, nor in the game." Why is making your stuff faster a penalty if "time is not an irrelevant factor"? You have to weigh the time it takes to complete against the costs to complete it. What you basically want to di is remove that weigh off. This will effectively speed up any game that employs this. Meaning Chris will have to balance Xenonauts for regular gameplay and for accelerated gameplay by minmaxers.

This gives me the feeling you missed my point. Producing for profit DOES NOT mean it's helpfull to build more factories to get more money.

Example: 3% return on investment per month. I have 1 000 000. But I do nothing, while you build production for 1 million.

Ten months laters. You have now 300 000. While I still got my 1 million, so I'm better of. 30 months later, I finish the game. I still have my 1 million. You have 900 000. So I finish the game with more money than you with your "making money" scheme. So how again is building production facilities helping my cashflow in this case?

.

Took me some time to follow the logic in this argument. It's oversimplified and takes nothing else into account. I don't even understand how it's supposed to sell your point; that there should be manufacture for profit in the game?

You are basically saying that it's a stupid idea since it's never worth it. It's not even going to be any point in the small scale if you only get 3% return on your investment. You just want some additional benefit over the increased speed of manufacture and ignore any other balance.

While this would punish the inattentive player, not being able to build for a little profit will punish EVERY player

This is a fallacy, you are just assuming the game will be improperly balanced from your experience with microproses games.

I don't see how this opens the game for exploits by min-maxers. If the (maximum) net profit per month is 100% / (average game time in months), how can it be exploited? It can't.

The difference between minmaxers/theorycrafteers and casual players are generally so big that that it will either be useless for the casual player or exploitable by the minmaxers.

If it is possible to somehow balance the game so that there is a small benefit for both casual and minmaxers (without the game literally telling you the best way to use the "manufacture for profits" trick I'm going to assume that it takes far too much time to balance and make sure there is no loophole.

Your idea looks good on paper, but I'm personally not convinced it's actually doable. Maybe you can prove me wrong in beta if you personally do some trial and error mods?

Edit: placed the whole post in spoiler and added the first paragraph

Edited June 6, 2012 by Gorlom

[TMP]

You want something to make idle engineers useful when you don't actually need anything produced?

(I hope the other questions are answered as well in the following text)

In essence, yes. I absolutely do not think that building production facilities for the generation of income should work. It's not a strategy I like, or one that I ever used.

I basically tried to argue: "You can have that much gross/net profit and it will still be impossible to use production as a money-making scheme." (That you could even have a net profit is the whole "return on investment" stuff). I think I communicated that badly.

I have to say after looking at Mac_Caine's calculation that I severely misjudged the relevance of the initial investment and the maintenance cost. As a consequence there's a very thin line between "making no net profit" and "making too much net profit". Setting the sell prize for a laser pistol to 29 000$ gives you a net loss, setting it to 30 000$ will give you too much profit. Setting it to 29 700$ (40 months ROI) or 29 650$ (80 months ROI) would probably be fine, but who wants such weird sell values?

Seem like the possibility for a net profit is actually not really relevant.

So, how much net loss do we want? I think want as little as possible, but it looks like you guys see it differently.

[Gauddlike]

I would prefer no real loss either.

I feel selling to cover the production costs would be good but I would need to look into it and see how that works across the board.

For example if you can only sell for a set price how is that affected by manufacturing at a small base with 10 engineers instead of one with 100.

[yawa]

If manufacturing makes a very very small positive profit, that may make people feel they constantly have to be cranking out items and selling them, and the tedium may reduce enjoyment in the game. I'd rather see it make no profit or make a decent amount.

Making a fair return I agree has some serious balance issues... but in Xenonauts, doesn't everything you manufacture use a limited resource? It might be possible to balance around that fact, if everything used some of your limited alenium or alloys (eg the worth to you in terms of powered armour may be greater than the money gained from selling the components). If I recall, in Xcom you could create alloys, and laser items didn't need any elerium, so it was a pure time -> money conversion.

Personally I disliked being able to sell things for a profit in Xcom, purely because of the annoyance of setting up the engineers, bases, and selling off your crap every few weeks. Oh, and on base defense missions all your lockers would be full of laser pistols But if you used this tactic you could beat Superhuman without ever losing a funding nation.

Incidentally, the current game balance (kickstarter build) isn't awful. On Veteran I can get 4 bases by August with good coverage, but it's quite tight. I think I'm making more money from selling mission loot than the funding nations give me. There doesn't seem to be much use for the alloys and alenium you currently get though, so I am free to sell them.

Oh, as it stands currently you can of course sack all your idle scientists and engineers on the last day of each month. Just hire them back if you need them in the next month. Costs you nothing *and* lets you pay their wages with the nation money. Maybe the hire vs maintain costs need to be tweaked slightly. Certainly I'd like to be able to pay my guys from the money I'm about to be paid, rather than having to maintain a reserve equal to the wages.

[Gauddlike]

My option there would be that you have to pay a months wages in advance when you hire them then when you sack them you pay however much they would have earned in that month.

For example sacking them on the 2nd day of the month would pay them 2/30ths of a months wage, if you sacked them on the 29th you would have to pay 29/30ths.

[RotGtIE]

Frankly I never really gave a damn about manufacturing for profit in the old X-Com, and I don't really care to see it in any remakes. The important thing was always that there was a way for the player to supplement or outstrip his regular monthly funding with commission-style tasks he could manage between pay-periods. This was absolutely necessary for a successful campaign - you absolutely could not expand and improve your operation on monthly council funding alone. Whether you used manufacturing or simply raided and looted en masse, the important thing was you had some way to generate additional income on your own terms.

Manufacture required a significant amount of planning, initial investment, and took up a lot of realtime, but the benefit to it was that the money was generated at a constant, predictable rate, and was done so safely, with no major risks involved. It's also arguable that, since X-Com was released well before the days of easy internet game guides, it actually required some cleverness on part of the player to recognize the potential that manufacture-for-profit had, and then take advantage of it. Raiding and looting was much easier and quicker, since you were already supposed to be doing missions anyway, and once you realized what equipment you didn't need to hold on to, you could offload most or all of the excess to turn every mission into a significant financial endeavor - remember that a single heavy plasma gun, the most common alien weapon, sold for some $144,000, and the corpse you took it off of raked in $20,000 on its own. You essentially gained a reward of over $150,000 for each felled enemy combatant this way, and you did it just by succeeding in a mission and shaving the fat off of your operation - it just entailed the risk of a combat mission every time you went after this source of money, and it was also less reliable, as you could not always predict when and where missions were going to become available to you, and what size of mission (and thus size of haul, and also what degree of risk) you were going to have access to when it came.

But the important thing was, you had something - anything - that rewarded you in addition to your very maintenance-oriented monthly funding. You got your maintenance funding just by holding on with what you had. You got your spending money by taking on risks and reaping the rewards from succeeding after taking those risks, and then later by pooling together enough resources to set up a manufacturing operation which itself would then be able to fuel your economy independently.

I am not even suggesting that manufacture-for-profit OR looting-for-profit should be implemented in Xenonauts the same way they were in X-Com. The important thing is WHY they were implemented in X-Com - they were two different ways for a player to achieve the same goal: reaping financial rewards through risk-taking or ingenuity, giving the player a way to overcome the problem of financial stress imposed on him from the outset of the game. I only feel that Xenonauts in its current stage lacks this crucial element - sure, you can sell alenium and other haul now, but that's only because the tech tree isn't complete enough that you will need these raw materials to manufacture equipment in the current build. None of the things playtesters are selling off now are going to be so expendable when they have to actually consume them in the manufacture of essential equipment. In fact, I think that's a good thing; I'm really impressed to see how streamlined the inventory is in Xenonauts. Even in this early build I can see that Xenonauts is not bogged down with large amounts of "junk equipment" that served more or less as vendor trash in X-Com, and I really like that. I think streamlining is definitely the right way to go, but the problem occurs when an attempt to streamline removes an essential component of the gameplay - the reward for risk-taking or for displaying managerial ingenuity. Even if the source of extra income were to still come from the council in the form of performance bonuses granted immediately after missions, that would fill in the gap that I feel is lacking in the current demo build of Xenonauts - some way for the player to do something to earn more money than the regular allowance based on his gameplay performance in a very immediate sense.

It also makes missions more exciting for the player. Rather than thinking "oh great, another UFO - when am I going to get to the end of the month" they will be thinking "great, here comes one - if I earn enough here, I'll be able to set up a new base/buy that new interceptor/hire those extra scientists I need/manufacture that superior equipment I can't afford yet"

[Gorlom]

Looting for profits is already in game. Alien weaponry is sold off automatically since you can't use them (but corpses are destroyed rather than sold). And you can sell off other stuff like alloys manually. (but you already touched on that)

[Leonatus]

Frankly I never really gave a damn about manufacturing for profit in the old X-Com, and I don't really care to see it in any remakes. The important thing was always that there was a way for the player to supplement or outstrip his regular monthly funding with commission-style tasks he could manage between pay-periods. This was absolutely necessary for a successful campaign - you absolutely could not expand and improve your operation on monthly council funding alone. Whether you used manufacturing or simply raided and looted en masse, the important thing was you had some way to generate additional income on your own terms.

Yes, pretty much. In the old XCom, the funding nations gave nowhere near enough money to support more than the absolute minimum of bases. For several bases and the manpower and equipment to cover the entire planet additional income was mandatory.

I for one didn't produce for profit in my first two playthroughs. Didn't need to, thanks to the ridiculous amounts you got for the heavy plasma rifle. Later, when I had the idea of producing stuff just to sell it tried a third playthrough just for this after doing some number crunching.

The trouble with the funding nations is that they very much set the entire pace of the game. There is no way to really influence it in any significant positive way. It will rise a little bit if you do your job and will take a nosedive when nations drop off the council if the player botches some significant missions which makes those do or die in every case.

This puts a hardcap on Xenonauts operations and dictates largely the amount of your bases and equipment before the game even starts because there is no real way to up your finances.

That could be intentional of course as it makes the campaign easier to predict but for me the amount of freedom the original XCom offered in how you approach the game, even if some were not intentional, made the game so very addictive.

So most people here claim that they don't care for production for profit but that is absolutely no argument to leave it out as long as it is really only an option.

Leo

[tonberrytoby]

I tend to set up a manufacturing base ( or raid Sirius in Apoc ) whenever I wanted tactical challenges without having to worry about those nations being taken whenever I looked away for a second.

So for many playstyles you need the extra money. So how about an extra money slider in the difficulty settings. You can just put it on 10x funding if you want to play the game for the tactical stuff alone.

Or put it on 0.1x funding if you want to fight the alien menace with extra small resources.

This slide should of course be orthogonal to the normal difficulty slider. Or maybe even 3 sliders while we are at it: Politics ( Funding and nation satisfaction ), Strategy ( Amount and Strength of UFOs on the GS), Tactics ( Amount and Strength of Aliens on the BS).

[Gorlom]

So most people here claim that they don't care for production for profit but that is absolutely no argument to leave it out as long as it is really only an option.

Same can be said for including it. If it's really necessary for you it can be modded in easily enough so that Goldhawk doesn't need to balance the game around it or as X-com did: balance the game poorly.

Personally I think we should postpone this discussion until the game comes to the beta stage and it's time to actually balance the gameplay.

[Leonatus]

Same can be said for including it. If it's really necessary for you it can be modded in easily enough so that Goldhawk doesn't need to balance the game around it or as X-com did: balance the game poorly.

Personally I think we should postpone this discussion until the game comes to the beta stage and it's time to actually balance the gameplay.

No, it's really not the same. Including it means opening up a variety of possible strategies for people, not including it just means you forcing your opinion on others.

By adjusting the selling price and the construction time of a product it's quite easy to control just how many months it would take for a built workshop + living quarters filled with technicians to pay off and by how much. Once it's ascertained just how much money is neccessary for this game, balancing this should be not much harder than balancing everything else in the campaign.

Leo