Talk:UFO Interception

I am currently on 23rd January, so should be able to check whether XCOM Activity relates more or less directly to your pay rise at the end of the month fairly soon, but if it does then clearly you will always want to shoot down UFOs over a sponsor country instead of neutral territory (especially the big scoring recovery missions).

--Sfnhltb 06:31, 28 February 2007 (PST)

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IIRC the amount of money you get is randomly assigned, though increase, decrease, or no change is based upon 'score', and the country's 'happiness' with XCOM. I think this can be seen by saving near the end of the month and noting the funding changes on each save (w/o doing anything special), I believe each time they will be random amounts (but again the sign of the change is dependent on the score, directly or indirectly).

I'm not sure if a higher score as an effect on the average increase (or conversely lower score with average decrease). It is possible. However I imagine that you are still correct that downing a UFO over a sponsors country is better than over a neutral country. Pi Masta 11:51, 28 February 2007 (PST)

Hmm, we should add a graphic to the wiki showing where the sponsor land masses are.--Ethereal Cereal 12:22, 28 February 2007 (PST)

Yeah I had noticed it was random, I think your starting cash is as well, where the random range comes is was something I will be testing at the end of the current month of the game I am on, which might take a while as I am only playing intermittently (lots of work on atm)

--13:11, 28 February 2007 (PST)

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Don't bother with the funding deals. I did this looong ago, both at the StrategyCore forums as well as a complete country-by-country funding breakdown at the xcomufo.com forums. Granted, this was for the starting funds, not for subsequent months. But I did run about 2000 trials on that scenario and found that funding was random within a certain range. --Zombie 14:44, 28 February 2007 (PST)

Hmm, well compared to the starting funds that you tested that were almost static overall (unless I am misreading it, +/- 15k or so?), the monthly amount varies a whole lot more, certainly +/- 250k from the average on a given good month I tested briefly to get an idea of it (and could grow more for an even better month I suspect). I would be interested in finding out what exactly affects it, and how responsive it is to key elements you might be able to control (like how beneficial is shooting down more aliens in sponsor country, compared to the same region (if that affects anything at all), and overall.

Btw, in case you still are thinking about the question regarding the discrepancy between your income and expenditure at startup, i can tell you where the 1860000 comes from at least - its in LIGLOB (A0611C00 in backwards hex) - its basically the source of the Finance graph (except score, which comes from XCOM.DAT combined with UIGLOB), which of course assigns it all to Maintenance - which in theory could include 1.7 million for the planes, 300k for the scientists, 250k for the engineers, 160k for the soldiers, and 224k for the maintaince of facilities of the base, so it doesnt solve it, but at least you can eliminate paying for things in trying to work out what it is.

The most obvious answer here is that you pay for craft rental (1.7 mill) and your soldiers (160k) = 1.86 million, and you dont pay for the scientists, engineers or base maintainance. --Sfnhltb 16:41, 28 February 2007 (PST)

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The monthly funding (according to the OSG) is determined by these two equations:

Alien activity in country + (Overall alien activity/5) X-COM activity in country + (Overall X-COM activity/10)

These numbers are compared and if the alien score is greater than X-COM, the country decreases funding by a random amount, but no less than 20%. If X-COM is greater than the alien score, the country increases funding by a random amount, but no greater than 20%. I'm not sure what the upper or lower boundary is. It could be 0%. Who knows, the frequency of the non-20% limits may increase as score does. Suppose the easiest way would be to edit alien score to 0 and X-COM score to something high and check the results. That would correspond to "EXCELLENT" on the End Of Month report. Another test is to edit both X-COM and alien score to zero and check the funding there. This would correspond to "OK" on the EOM report. One thing is for certain, it would take a great many reloads to form any type of conclusion. One of these days I'll have to write up an AHK script and dedicate some computer time to this project. It won't be right away though. --Zombie 21:47, 28 February 2007 (PST)

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Of course the thing that has lead me onto, is trying to work out how it calculates base maintenance. A lift only new base costs 30k (4k for the lift, 26k extra somewhere), and a vanilla starter base costs 224k, but the parts only add up to 169k, so the extra unassigned part raises to 55k. Whats going on?

So I dismantle the starter base (after dumping all loose objects like people, planes and guns), the first Hangar drops the cost by 10k (not 25k), the next one by 4k (huh?), then 10k again for the last hangar, workshop drops it by 35k (correct!), the radar drops it another 35k (way high!), the living quarters are 30k, the lab 35k (a bit high), the stores 35k (massive - 7 times what it should be), and the lift 30k (4k in UFOpedia).

I thought maybe this was messed up somehow because of being the starter base, but it seems to behave the same way in new bases - as I say empty base with lift 30k, lift + stores + small radar = 95k, adding alien containment, stores, living quarters to starter base is 55k up on the starting cost (second stores 10k off when removed, second living quarters 10k, alien containment 35k)

So the same facilities take different maintainance depending on how many you have of them (it seems), and most of them cost different to what it says they do. No idea what the relationship or reasoning is behind all of this.

--Sfnhltb 17:05, 28 February 2007 (PST)

No what's happening is that there are completed 'empty' modules. When you dismantle a facility it doesn't set the days to build to 255 like it should, and instead just puts the dirt tile there. Apparently these completed dirt modules take monthly maintenance (but isn't shown in the monthly costs IIRC). If you want me to find the post I can, but this is something I'm familiar with and in fact the 'editor' I'm making (PyXCom) should be able to fix it. (another thing is even if you build something and dismantle it before it's built, it will still count down and suck your money away)

Atleast I think this is the issue you are having. Pi Masta 19:57, 28 February 2007 (PST)

No I worked it out, I added the basic details to Known_Bugs#Facility_Maintenance_Costs, there might be something additional as you say, as destruction a facility doesnt clear the construction counter as you say - in fact you can see that it keeps construction counters from previous saves as well at times, the clearest indication its doing stuff like this is if you start a game and name your first base something long, say 'ABCDEFG', and then start again and make a new base with a one character 'X', in the BASE.DAT you will see something like 'X CDEFG' (the space indicating actually a null (00) to show end of string). So when you save it doesnt 100% overwrite all bytes, just the minimum it needs to save the information for your current save (which may have errors like you suggest).

--Sfnhltb 20:03, 28 February 2007 (PST)