[V5 General] Selling manufactures goods

[Ruggerman]

Why would you invest in all your money in plant and equipment and make goods that you could not sell for a profit. I realise that this is not one of those tycoon games, but it would help the economy of the project and provide funds for in-house construction and up grades for base facilities, with such funds you could hire more scientist and engineers, as well other soldiers, and mercenaries.

I am just putting it out there for you guys to consider!!   

[Max_Caine]

Depends how Goldhawk want people to interact with the strategic game mechanisms, really. Money is one of the primary mechanisms for governing what a player can do at any given moment, acting as a pool of potential energy that can be directed. If the pool can be only increased by interacting and influencing strategic game mechanisms that the player can't directly take control of (e.g. keeping good relations with funding blocs), then the player is incentivised to take actions which increase that influence, enmeshing the player into those strategic game mechanisms more deeply. If the player can directly take control of the means of increasing the pool (e.g. by manufacturing goods and selling them), then the player is incentivised to focus more on those things that the player has control of, ignoring other strategic game mechanisms except where a failure to interact with those game mechanisms results in a game over (upsetting funding blocs isn't important when your outfit makes more money that the sum total of funding blocs in a month). 

[Dagar]

Short answer on the thematic side: Because if you don't make these goods, you lose and mankind gets enslaved. Making a prospering business out of the situation really should not be your focus.

That said, as an X-Division player, I'd love to have that additional source of income if you have the production capabilities (i.e. ressources and engineers). Theoretically, you could make that into a really well integrated part of the game, where you can build and sell stuff for cheap to bolster nation's resistance, getting better relationships with them, or sell it for a good profit to build up the Xenonauts even more, along with allowing nations to copy your products or not, sending weapons as emergency supplies into crisis areas instead of sending your own troops, ...

[Ninothree]

It is not really a game about economics. I'm not sure it should be either. Although, I would be interested in such a game. Maybe something with competing defence suppliers, so the xenonanuts have other groups running in parallel. Those groups are also trying to salvage alien technology and build/sell weapons to each nation so that the conventional armies can fight off the alien invasion. But it wouldn't be xenonauts.

Although maybe if selling manufactured gear were a thing in X2, it would incentivise you to build and defend multiple bases so that you could expand your military-industrial complex. That has a dark fascination for me.

[Bobit]

You would do it because you get paid for saving the world.

This exists in the original UFO defense game. Modders in OpenX disagree on whether it is a good mechanic. It allows for "interest" and "investments" which is interesting, but does tend to reduce diversity because rushing a significant profit-maker is just so much better than other tech. Imo if we have selling for profit at all, why bother forcing people to check the price of everything when you can just manufacture a $ item?

[Ruggerman]

OK, I do understand that the game is about betting the alien invasion, but all wars through out history have always required 3 Main things, 1: MONEY, 2: MONEY, and 3: MONEY,  having said that, the designers of this game do want us to play within the game boundaries, to meet set objectives. 

I have played pre builds V4 & V5, and you could sell the alien weapons and artefacts, and make a good profit, which allow you to build more bases, aircraft, radar, and all other war winning materials.

So why do we not have the same opportunities on in-house manufacture goods, Plus it helps manage base storage!!

I do appreciate the feed back on this article

Thank You All 

[Bobit]

Alien goods are worth a hell of a lot more than some experimental engineer making guns... in xPiratez the "sell for profit" makes quite a bit of sense, but not in any other game.

[Decius]

Remember the part of Eldest where the protagonist funds an entire rebellion by using magic to make lace?

I'm not saying that's the reason why the rest of the series didn't get optioned for film, but there is a reason.

[TrashMan]

Why not simple send some equipment to a country for a boost at the end of the month (which would not only be a money boost, but also boost the AI soldiers from that country/block?)

 

Makes more sense than selling.

[Max_Caine]

10 hours ago, Ruggerman said:

OK, I do understand that the game is about betting the alien invasion, but all wars through out history have always required 3 Main things, 1: MONEY, 2: MONEY, and 3: MONEY,  having said that, the designers of this game do want us to play within the game boundaries, to meet set objectives. 

I have played pre builds V4 & V5, and you could sell the alien weapons and artefacts, and make a good profit, which allow you to build more bases, aircraft, radar, and all other war winning materials.

So why do we not have the same opportunities on in-house manufacture goods, Plus it helps manage base storage!!

I do appreciate the feed back on this article

Thank You All 

There's nothing wrong with wanting to run a business during the midst of an alien invasion, but consider what that means to the core of the game. As an example: Selling alien goods is a one-off, so if you want to make bank selling alien goods, you need to attack as many aliens as possible, which means adopting an aggressive, piratical approach. Every UFO is a payday so every UFO needs to be shot down and you need to then secure it in ground combat. This endless round of shooting down ufos and securing them will get boring, because you're likely to do the same thing over and over again but if it's too lucrative to turn up a UFO, then it's more likely that someone would rather be bored than not get phat loot. If somoene wanted to run Xenonauts as a corporate entity and get into the whole manfuctured goods/selling aspect then the game would have to be adjusted to address market forces. As Bobit points out, in Xcom, you rush to get the most profitable good first, because that fuels your economy. Once you get that good then you don't have to worry about money. If you don't have to worry about money, then one of the primary controls on the game is broken. If you don't have to worry about money, then you don't have to be concerned about where you build your next base, or if you're going be able to recruit enough troops to last the month, or if you can afford that sweet plasma rifle you've got an eye on. To balance Xenonauts Inc. you'd want to address market forces in some way - possibly through regulation (given the Cold War setting, flooding the market with high-tech weapons is that last thing that ANY govt. wants), or through a simplified supply/demand setup. I think that if manufacturing were to be a part of the game, then it would need some kind of stop or break on it, so it forms part of the mix of ways in which a savvy player can manage funds, rather than becoming the dominant method.

[Chris]

This is a very simple thing to update if we wanted to, but the effect on the overall game is enormous - and like others I'm fundamentally unusure about whether selling for profit is a good idea. I certainly don't think it's a good idea to use the X-Com setup where manufacturing laser cannons can become your main source of income for the entire war, but possibly I went a bit overboard shutting down manufacturing profits in the first Xenonauts.

Really, it depends on the setup of the strategy layer as a whole. If Engineers are staff you can recruit in unlimited numbers whenever you want, it's very difficult to support manufacturing for profit without it getting out of control. Currently, however, Engineers are staff that you have to spend time and effort recruiting from the Geoscape - which means they're a resource in themselves, and if they're capable of earning you money when not manufacturing items you need then that's not necessarily a problem (there needs to be a reason why a player would sometimes choose to recruit an Engineer instead of a Scientist).

To be honest this is just something we'll need to experiment with as the game approaches completion so we can see what the most fun way to set it up is.

[Ruggerman]

Thank You all for your input into this topic.

Yes!! I understand that we don't wont to turn is game into same tycoon resource management game, but after you have researched alien technologies and now have obsolete weapons and equipment, you could sell them on to allies as part of your aid package, and priced accordingly. 

This would also help with your own storage materials, as they now take up space.

 

[FriarBob]

8 hours ago, Chris said:

This is a very simple thing to update if we wanted to, but the effect on the overall game is enormous - and like others I'm fundamentally unusure about whether selling for profit is a good idea. I certainly don't think it's a good idea to use the X-Com setup where manufacturing laser cannons can become your main source of income for the entire war, but possibly I went a bit overboard shutting down manufacturing profits in the first Xenonauts.

Really, it depends on the setup of the strategy layer as a whole. If Engineers are staff you can recruit in unlimited numbers whenever you want, it's very difficult to support manufacturing for profit without it getting out of control. Currently, however, Engineers are staff that you have to spend time and effort recruiting from the Geoscape - which means they're a resource in themselves, and if they're capable of earning you money when not manufacturing items you need then that's not necessarily a problem (there needs to be a reason why a player would sometimes choose to recruit an Engineer instead of a Scientist).

To be honest this is just something we'll need to experiment with as the game approaches completion so we can see what the most fun way to set it up is.

Oh you definitely went (way) too far in my book.  (Others of course will disagree.)  But thankfully you made the game easy to mod too, so those of us who wanted to tweak it could do so.  I'm sure 5 minutes after release (if even that long) someone will do so again no matter what you decide here.  Indeed almost certainly some folks adding and other folks taking it away.

That said, I also agree that making the economic side the primary as in XCom is 'meh' at best and dumb at worst.  It shouldn't be the primary.  And I agree that the 'unlimited' engineers did provide justification for your prior decision.  But I also think there should be options such that when you don't have something better to do there is a reason to not fire all your engineers until you need them again.  And now with firing them (or rehiring them) no longer an option with these recruiting missions this makes for a very good reason to revisit it.

 

[Decius]

Anything that CAN be manufactured without access to alien materials can be manufactured more profitably outside of the secret factories. It makes sense that equipment based on those designs is simply available in unlimited quantities as soon as it is completed; any of the Cold War Superpowers would be happy to buy exclusive knowledge of a new design and pay for it with 'lost' shipments. It would be impossible to make a significant profit off of that type of equipment, since it would simply be copied by other factories and the Xenonauts would be very off-mission employing the Danneskjöld school of patent litigation. 

 

For things that DO require alien materials to manufacture, there's no way to sell the stuff that you engineered after reverse engineering it without the customer being able to reverse engineer it and learn how to make it, given the materials. Since the only reason you can build it cheaper than they can is because you have the materials and they don't, it should be about as profitable to sell the raw materials as to sell the manufactured weapons.

 

Selling alien technology that you can't figure out how to build has no such restriction, but turning a profit on a UFO chop shop is an intended behavior, and I think that running an anational small arms manufacturing company is a degenerate behavior in Xenonauts.

[TrashMan]

It makes no sense to sell for one simple reason - the countries of the world are already financing you, they are your boss. Any piece of alien tech you recover is already theirs. Why would they buy it from you?

 

Sending excess items to a country for bonuses makes sense. Selling does not.

[Ninothree]

On 6/27/2019 at 9:09 AM, TrashMan said:

the countries of the world are already financing you, they are your boss

I like to think that the xenonauts are a bit rude in this sense. That the government is like "hey, we gave you lots of money, can you share the alien secrets?" and the xenonauts are like "shut up and give us more money; we have lasers now so hurry up with that paypal".

[Keflin]

Conceptually I like what X-Division did. Your engineers spend most of their time reclaiming ufo wreckage and corpses and turn them into raw materials to build with. The engineers are never idle.

[TrashMan]

15 hours ago, Keflin said:

Conceptually I like what X-Division did. Your engineers spend most of their time reclaiming ufo wreckage and corpses and turn them into raw materials to build with. The engineers are never idle.

You bring up a good point.

Ideally, you wouldn't get the materials upon securing the crash site - you'd get the UFO that needs to be stored and then dissasembled by your engineers.

I like how UFO AI is handling it. You have a UFO storage as an installation type (can be bombed by aliens if they find it) that can store a specific number/volume. Then you assign your engineers to dissasemble them for usable parts.