Hello everyone !
I have known this game for quite a long time now, but have only recently started to play it again.
Let me tell you what went through my mind :
I was playing on standard settings, a quite enjoyable game, but noticed that, really, the UN was clearly not giving me much to fend with. Each country giving me enough to buy, what, 60 grenade launchers per months ? The funding was clearly too low as far as I was concerned.
But then, hey, the UN's always been this way, just like any government, there's never enough funding, so you have to do with it ! Besides, about 400.000 credits per months is quite an important sum, let's be honest. We're just heavy consumers.
So, when I noticed I had a workshop, and that there was an option to sell items, my mind just screamed : Paul, why don't you craft some high-tech items and sell them ? That could be a great addition to your income, since your workshop doesn't always have things to do !
And so I started doing just this. And then I noticed one thing : The crafting price is always equal to the selling price.
It can arguably be true for such items as an assault rifle, for which there already is a mass-production chain. But for some technology we have just researched ? That no one else possesses ? Sold at the price it was built ? It really bugged me.
Besides, even for such things as a handgun, the price ought to be lower than the price of the market (Or equal, in a state of perfect "concurrence" - mixing studies in french with describing them in english is quite hard -, assuming the marginal cost doesn't depend on Q) since production costs only represent the costs of the materials used to manufacture said items - and these materials are usually always the same : our manufacturers' salaries are paid separately.
So, something that would in my opinion be great to implement would be a trading system in which you could sell new, high-tech wares and make a profit out of it - but perhaps not for too long, as companies would re-do the reverse engineering that we already did on aliens !