Variable Maintenance Costs

[Belmakor]

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. =)

[Chris]

I think that's a somewhat overcomplex way to deal with the issue - and in a lot of instances, the fixed costs of an installation would remain the same whether or not it's being used. A storeroom has the same maintenance costs whether or not it's full of stuff, for instance (assuming the staff are still there, which they'd have to be if you want to be able to fill it up again in a hurry). For hangars and vehicles, they wouldn't cost any different if they were empty because vehicles and aircraft have their own maintenance costs

But leaving aside the twisted logic of game mechanics, I don't want to make the game too confusing for a player to run a base - micromanaging every building would be a bit of a pain, particularly across several bases...

You may well have a valid point that bases cost too much to maintain, though - I've made no attempt to balance building maintenance costs yet. Is it pretty crippling?

[Sathra]

It can be. Its pretty hard to keep out of the red with 2 bases without selling off alien materials. But its hard to be sure without the alien Geoscape AI being complete, since Waves might help give a better buffer (more stuff at once).

[anotherdevil]

But that assumes that you'll do well. If you're doing poorly then you cannot afford new equipment and bases, and therefore you cannot shoot down/recover many ufos, which leads to less resources to sell...

needs some leeway somewhere...