Engineering (Long War)

Effect	Manufacture/repair items, build facilities, augment soldiers
Adjacency Bonus	None
Prerequisites	None
Other	None
Build costs	| | | |
Normal	§0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Quick	§0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Maintenance	§0
Power	0

The Engineering Bay houses the engineering team, headed by Dr. Shen.

New in Long War

There are several key differences between engineering in Long War versus vanilla:

There are only 3 ways to get more engineers:

• mission rewards
• from the end-of-the-month reward for satellite covered nations
• from nation requests in exchange for alien materials, equipment, corpses or captured aliens

Workshops do NOT increase the number of engineers!

Nothing is built instantaneously. While in vanilla you could manufacture an extra SCOPE right before a mission, in Long War it takes several days. Most things can be built faster by selecting the Build Quickly mode in the manufacturing dialog. This costs significantly more (150%), and uses some Meld, but produces the item in around half the time. The more engineers you have the less time it will take to manufacture items. The more Workshops you have the less materials it will take to manufacture items. Workshop adjacency also reduces the materials cost of items. Base facilities still have a minimum number of engineers to build, but most items and Foundry projects do not; they will simply take a very long time if you try to build them with many fewer engineers on staff than recommended.

Build time calculations

Based on Amineri's post here, items and Foundry project completion times vary exponentially with the number of available engineers (unlike research time vs. scientists which is a linear relationship). Here is an approximate formula:

build time = base time * 0.5 * (1 + (OptimalEngineers / ActualEngineers) ^ (0.06 * OptimalEngineers))

where OptimalEngineers is the default or recommended number of engineers needed to achieve the listed base time specified in the item / project tables. ActualEngineers is the number of available engineers.

When ActualEngineers = OptimalEngineers, the build time is equal to the base time. In most other cases, there is no 'quick' rule of thumb for calculating completion time, that works for all items / projects. For example, developing a Foundry project that has OptimalEngineers=60 (e.g. Ammo Conservation), with only half the engineers present, will take roughly 7 times longer than the base time to complete . On the other hand, developing a project that has OptimalEngineers=30 (e.g. Improved Arc Thrower), with half the engineers on hand, will take about twice as many days as the base time.

Here are a few more observations about the formula. As long as the the number of available engineers is much lower than the recommended value, recruiting another engineer will significantly reduce the completion time. As the number of engineers approaches, or exceeds, the recommended value for that project / item, then adding more engineers has diminishing returns, i.e. each new engineer reduces build time by a smaller and smaller amount. Also, based on the formula, all build times are limited to 0.5*base time, when building at a normal speed, and 0.25*base time when building quickly.

See also

• Equipment
• Armor
• Weapons
• Building facilities
• MEC Troopers

Long War: XCOM Facilities
	Overview Mission Control Research Engineering Barracks Hangar Situation Room
	Access Lift Alien Containment Elerium Generator Foundry Fission Generator Genetics Lab Gollop Chamber Hyperwave Relay Laboratory Officer Training School Psionic Lab Repair Bay Satellite Nexus Satellite Uplink Thermo Generator Workshop