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The Market and You


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Hello everyone, today I would like to discuss economics. 

Actually, recently I was watching a very nice look into what X1 did right and wrong, and it got me thinking about my current runs through UFO Defense, EU, WOTC, and X-Division.

This was the video in question: https://youtu.be/kxJ0rZZIpnE

The quick version is this: The market approach in Xeno 1 was novel for the UFO Defense players, an interesting subversion that played well into establishing that this was an entirely different world, and that you were fully beholden to the funding nations. It worked well from that perspective, but he's right in that it also feels a bit missing in subsequent playthroughs. That feeling of managing your organization is a bit lacking.

The reason I mentioned the others above is that each had an interesting take on how to have your cake and eat it too. EU's take was to allow you to use your contacts to pull in random favors for manufacturing things, but these were often instantly completed, and tended to be either done immediately or forgotten about. X-Divison's take was to make the manufacturing of components necessary for building most equipment, vehicles, etc (How many lizards can you skin to make a tank?), but often it started to get a little confusing as the game went on, as your menu gets flooded with new DSB projects for every new wave. WOTC's approach was to make things have different currencies, with better deals coming monthly for selling random stuff from your stores, but only being able to buy from a mission-only currency.

All of the above were interesting solutions, with WOTC's arguably being the most elegant for a middle ground between a simulatory and general audience. 

That being said, I wondered if for Xeno 2, it might potentially be interesting to copy something not mentioned above. Namely Dwarf Fortress. 

What the hell am I talking about? Simply put, their trading system involved around making a dedicated trade building, where different factions would have random different needs, but would only visit every now and then. This meant that you could trade for supplies, food, drinks, gear, etc for your people, but offering the wrong things might worsen your deals in the future, and if your influence dropped enough, they might just attack instead. 

I could see this working by scaling deals to your region influence, as well as giving them a random time when they might reach out every month in order to exchange favors. Maybe they need some stuff produced (Which could then automatically just be deducted as an option), maybe they want an extra mission, maybe they want to have some of their soldiers train in your training program for a few weeks. Money is one thing, but by trading around favors and materials, it could make for a more interesting use of the systems on hand. Manufacturing is already more time consuming, and this could lead to some interesting strategic choices when it came to meaningfully building up or losing country reputation by a means other than random UFO landings or random raids. 

What do you think?

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Actually, I reckon short term "production run" mini missions where a country orders some of your fancy new tech for a premium price to swell your coffers would be a great way to use your engineers when there is some down time. Each order would be time restricted so you it was only available for a short period of time. 

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I like the idea of funding the entire project on a few *Sebilian meat roasts*.

Although I think that the Oregon Trail model might be more effective: Periodically generate an offer of a trade, at least one side of which is for something that can't be purchased for currency. For example, a country might offer to buy UFO parts for money, or UFO parts for different UFO parts, or alien bodies for a plasma cannon, or a wagon axle for some antimatter.

There could be a fancy simulation behind what is desired and what is available, or it could just pick randomly from a weighted list of everything that is at or below the current tech level, or maybe even some other shadowy agency has an extra bit of alien tech that you've never seen before.

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