Basic economy

[FrancoC]

Hi everyone,
thanks to the team, I love this game.

I've been playing for few days and agree with the discussion going on in another tread, a better economy is needed.
But I focused on a quick fix for the current stable version. I noticed that after few months you get so many credits you could build/buy anything and money is not an issue (btw I just played few days on V.Easy and just presume it is the same on other difficulties from what I can read in the scripts).

I wanted to have some basic economy without change the game code and wait for a new version.

The Idea is to have some cash to start with and actually you have to manage your monthly expenditure to avoid bankrupt.

So this is my proposal:

Change the amount of credits the player starts with, and change the credits income you receive every month.
I increased the money at the start, the easyer the difficulty the more money you get in 250k steps so Very Heasy gets 2000k, Standard 1500k Very Hard 1100k. After you create your first base that costs aprox 1.000k (instead of the in game text that say 100k) you will have residual funds based on difficulty level.

Then reduced the monthly income from various nations to 1/4 of the original value.

Those are by no means the final amounts, but it seems it could work, I'm going playtesting to see how it work under different conbinations of play-style (few bases vs many) and diff. levels.

I think it may add some basic economy to the current release without the many "small" adjustments that will probably find their way in next releases.
It can be done just editing two scripts: campaign.ufo and nations.ufo, so it could be a small downloadable patch, say 2.2.0.1

Thanks for reading and sorry for any error.

[BTAxis]

If you find script values you think work well, please submit the script files to the patch tracker on sourceforge, and we'll see about including them with 2.2.1.

[FrancoC]

Thanks BTAxis,
it requires some playtesting as I don't have much data to work with, I just played few days and have my own play-style, it may not be representative of different choises people makes on nuber of bases and personnel.
It could be useful if anyone is willing to try this.
I changed the values and loaded an existing save, it seems the games uses the current values and not the one when the campaing was started. Is this correct?
If true, someone with an advanced campaign could give some feedback?

[wondercat]

Just to add my $0.02 worth to the economy; i'd like to see object 'class' filters, ie pistols, grenades, ammo, rifles, alien stuff etc, along with an ALL filter that displays everything. secondly, i think there should be a penalty for selling stuff (maybe only get 75% of value of item on open market) and another penalty for buying it (maybe costs 150% of value). thirdly, (dammit, i've already used my 2 cents!) i think there should be a shipping delay of 6-24 hours before the item arrives on base. These are little things that would add a bit more realism AND gameplay value to the game.

[SpaceWombat]

I support the idea of delayed item transfer when buying as I do with newly hired soldiers.
I'm not sure about the trade penalty. If there is auto sell after mission this would be a pain in the a**. If an item cost 5000c for the world why would PHALANX sell it for 4000c?
I do not want to get into second hand markets here. 
What would be the gain of that penalty besides the fact that you are "punished" for accidently clicking one button too often?

About the filters: Let's see what a new equipment manager brings. Filters would be nice but in the end an additional "see all" button in the buy/sell and production menus would also do it.

[tobbe]

secondly, i think there should be a penalty for selling stuff (maybe only get 75% of value of item on open market) and another penalty for buying it (maybe costs 150% of value). thirdly, (dammit, i've already used my 2 cents!) i think there should be a shipping delay of 6-24 hours before the item arrives on base. These are little things that would add a bit more realism AND gameplay value to the game.

I disagree. These changes might add a little bit more realism, but i dont see how they add any gameplay value...so if you could explain what gain there might be?

I only see drawbacks in Value penalty and shipping time and no benefits for gameplay:

Right now, the autosell funktion is sometimes automaticly actived, so some items are sold, even if i dont want them to be sold. I dont mind this bug right now, cause i just can buy these items back.
Furthermore, most of the time i only keep one weapons for research. Selling e.g. plasma weapons is quite convinient right now: I put the sell marker to maximum (10 units per click), sell all and buy 1 unit back...fast and easy. with penalty and shipping times all these easy to handle mechanism wouldnt work...

[Winter]

I'm all for shipping delays -- being able to buy and sell things instantly kind-of spoils the feeling of the game, and isn't conducive to proper player planning.

Regards,
Winter

[Psawhn]

I agree that shipping delays are good, but they are incompatible with the current implementation of autosell.
Any item that PHALANX brings should either not be sold, or be replaced (if used up, like a grenade) by another of that item brought along by the aliens (if available). Perhaps on the mission debrief there could be a tab that takes you to another page showing recovered items, used items, and items slated to be sold.
Only items recovered in a mission can be autosold. If you have a stockpile of plasma clips at base, and recover some more and choose to autosell these, the stockpiled clips should not be touched.

A neat little effect might be that each base has a random shipping time modifier. Basically, that one base in Central Asia will have 72+4 hours for new supplies, but the base in Japan has 72-3 hours.

[Winter]

I agree that shipping delays are good, but they are incompatible with the current implementation of autosell.

I despise the current implementation of autosell. The player should be able to set which items are auto-sold, should be able to set his preferred minimum stock levels for autosell, and all items should be set by default to NOT be auto-sold.

Regards,
Winter

[SpaceWombat]

Right.
How about keeping everything by default and a sell menu when running out of storage room.
An additional sell/transfer option menu for the mission report screen could also be implemented.

Furthermore options for autoselling of every amount of certain items in a storage menu (or autobuy, minimum amount to keep, max amount... as Winter mentioned).

The more detailed control for the player the better but everything must work automatically if adjusted once. This prevents you from getting lost/bored in details but provides you with the power to change plans and make the difference with a smart strategy.

[FrancoC]

Back on the original post.
After some testing I came up with values that may work, those are pretty much like the first I posted, it can sustain a 1000k monthly expenditure.
But I don't feel I'm going to dictate the playstyle to everyone.
I don't know how many bases other build, how many scientists/workers people hires. Maybe you (the team) can lunch a poll on this?
Asking:
1. what is your typical monthly expenditure?
2. how many bases you build?
3. how many soldiers?
4. how many scientists?
5. how many workers?

[ufogio]

1. what is your typical monthly expenditure?
2. how many bases you build?
3. how many soldiers?
4. how many scientists?
5. how many workers?

Open a new topic if you need.

I usually play at hard difficulty level.
After the first month, I build a new base. I use it to build many research laboratories and I don't build any other base during the rest of the game.
I usually hire up to 20 soldiers (but this is influenced by a bug in the 2.2 stable release I play, since in this version you can't have more than 19 soldiers in the aircraft-soldiers assignment screen), 40 scientists, 30 workers, and 5-10 medics.
p.s.: hi FrancoC I'm also italian, please tell me if I can help you with something in this or in the translations.

[FrancoC]

Thank you for the info.
The game now (trunk) has new economy, when I will manage to compile from SVN (don't know when or if I will be able I will make other tests, I tested the new scripts in 2.2 and it is much better, not perfect but better. If you want you can give them a try, since the new model is halfway between the original 2.2 and what I posted you should still have a lot of cash.

Concerning Italian translation I have to learn how it is done, I think we can work together on this.
If the developers don't mind we could open a topic in italian language only for translating purpose. So if any moderator reads, please tell me if it is acceptable for you.

[ufogio]

The game now (trunk) has new economy, when I will manage to compile from SVN (don't know when or if I will be able Smiley I will make other tests, I tested the new scripts in 2.2 and it is much better, not perfect but better. If you want you can give them a try, since the new model is halfway between the original 2.2 and what I posted you should still have a lot of cash.

Yes I've seen... I've been playing the svn version lately. Too bad the last version I've tried wasn't really playable because of some bug, like having 17 aliens in a single map
The new economy is ok... the dame really needed a restyle. The only thing, I would increase the starting amount of money, because once, playing Hard difficulty, I've found myself losing the game just after building the first base, because I went too much in debt.

Concerning Italian translation I have to learn how it is done, I think we can work together on this.
If the developers don't mind we could open a topic in italian language only for translating purpose. So if any moderator reads, please tell me if it is acceptable for you.

That's ok for me

[FrancoC]

The only thing, I would increase the starting amount of money, because once, playing Hard difficulty, I've found myself losing the game just after building the first base, because I went too much in debt.

That happened to me too: I just started the campaing in VeryHard, tree times in a row I simply built the first base and went to -53k credits.
I used the default in 2.2 config to start with buildings and personnel.
In hard mode the same results with -3k.

That's ok for me

Let's see if it ok for moderators also, otherwise we'll start in english and swith to italian just when really needed.