Preliminary question: economics

[jffdougan]

Can somebody point me to the files where data relating to item pricing, man-hours to construct items, engineer salaries and workshop maintenance costs? I'm working up a proposal connected to what feels like a tighter economy in v. 2.5-dev compared to v. 2.4, but would like to make it a little more concrete.

[DarkRain]

You'll have to check several *.ufo scripts, like (1) armour, weapon and aircraft definitions; (2) research definitions; (3) campaign definitions and (4) base and buildings definitions

[jffdougan]

Thanks. This might be a bit to work up then, although the gist of half of the proposal is reducing the cost to manufacture items by a factor related to the number of man-hours required to produce them and the hourly engineer wages & facility upkeep costs. (Right now, manufacturing is a money-losing proposition; what I'm suggesting essentially makes it "break even").

The other half was going to be to allow the sale of alien corpses for research purposes.

Loosely related to which -- I just accidentally killed all 3 captured aliens I had while trying to figure out where my statistics on number of alien corpses were. Is there a way I can retrieve one of the post-mission autosaves to undo that? (or are they pre-mission?)

[Noordung]

You are not really factory to make profit out of your produced items... but maybe something like if one thing is worh 100 than you would pay 100 for buying, get 70 for selling and need 60 for producing it.
I also think alien ammo is a little to expensive while alien materials and antimatter could be worth more.

[jffdougan]

I put some of this into a PM thread with HHour, but let's lay out my thinking before I get too far on this:

- It has been determined by UFO:AI's powers that be that they are not interested in having manufacture for profit be a significant source of income for the game. Therefore, what I propose won't, in net, result in manufacture for profit contributing to the game's economy. However,...

- At present, after engineer salaries and monthly workshop maintenance costs are accounted for, manufacture of Terran technology is a net /loss/ compared to simply purchasing items in the open market. This strikes me as counter-intuitive.

- I'll dig through some of the scripts to see if I can work out what this might look like. I have, however, been cautioned that the game's code may not have a way to implement what I'm suggesting.

[geever]

You can set production_price for items which defaults to the buy price if not set, but cannot sell corpses...

-geever

[Unisol]

You can set production_price for items which defaults to the buy price if not set, but cannot sell corpses...

-geever

Wait, one can do that by modifying .ufo files? All glory to the first one to create mod where production is actually profitable.

[jffdougan]

You can set production_price for items which defaults to the buy price if not set, but cannot sell corpses...

-geever

Is there an underlying reason (either code-based or story-based) for that? I could imagine that all kinds of research labs would be interested in acquiring them.

[cevaralien]

How much is the maintenance cost for the aircrafts? I rise the cost of each of them.

[se5a]

I tried adding production_price for the medkit and nothing happened.
tried it in both research.ufo and weapons.ufo

[DarkRain]

A quick search of the source code reveals it should be "productioncost" in the item definition (weapons.ufo) instead.

[geever]

A quick search of the source code reveals it should be "productioncost" in the item definition (weapons.ufo) instead.

Yeah, sorry for the confusion. I should update the wiki documentation...

-geever

[se5a]

Ah yes, that does it, thanks.