User:Spike

Hi, my name is Spike. I live in London. My mates all played XCom when it came out, when they were feckless students, but I had a job so I didn't get to play. I'm making up for lost time now. I love retro tactical SF games. I like to play Laser Squad, MegaTraveller, any old rubbish.

I think one of the reasons is these are all variants of the old miniatures rules by GDW - Snapshot, Mayday, Azanti High Lighting etc. In the day, how we wished for a computer program to help us with the tedium of playing those games by hand. Even Laser Squad would have blown us away.

Having said that I don't play any head-to-head stuff, like X-Com 2000. I imagine I would get my arse kicked.

This site is fantastic to use, so it's nice to be able to make some small contributions to the site, and the game.

Musings

To avoid spamming the site Discussion pages, and spamming people with 'watch' enabled on those pages, I'm going to start doing the decent thing and composing my musings here on my own page. If I get my thoughts edited and reasonably coherent I will then transfer them to Discussion pages and then onto actual articles.

Here are some of the topics I am interested in at the moment...

Economics

The Geoscape game is a classic resource game and delivers lots of great game play in its own right, even when not intercepting or doing tactical missions. Economics is key. Looking at the the economic articles on the site at the moment, they focus on making money. What I am interesting in is 'fixing' the economics so it all makes more sense.

Efficient market

At the moment it is possible to sell lots of things for either profit or loss that does not make sense. I would like to fix the buy and sell prices so that they balance out and there are no egregious opportunities for arbitrage, or the reverse. For example I've calculated that based on the maximum profit you can make out of Elerium and Alloys (the raw materials in the economy of XCom), the price of Alloys and Elirium should both be quite a lot higher. Or alternatively some of the prices of manufactured products should be lower.

I would like to just true up all the prices of everything to reflect the economic costs of production, and to allow them to be sold at a modest profit. (And bought at a modest premium, see below). It's not good that there are so many 'black hole' items that are hideously unprofitable to produce, and a few 'optimum' items that everyone manufactures all the time.

Capital costs and interest

Correct pricing needs to take account not only of raw materials, labour and maintenance inputs, but also capital costs (initial hiring, facility building). For this an interest rate (cost of capital) needs to be posited for XCom. Given XCom's status as a covert internationally funded organisation, reasonable access to money markets could be assumed. For game purposes a capital cost of 5% - 10% is probably fine. Even 1% per month would probably work fine given the game's short time horizons.

External market

At the moment you can buy and sell conventional equipment but only sell some advanced equipment (and not all of that), and not buy any of it.

Selling

As long as egregious profits are not being made (see preceding section), I think you should be able to sell all manufactured products eg aircraft. After all, the funding nations (and others) would no doubt like to get their hands on aircraft with such advanced characteristics. The problem of course is setting a fair sale price. Probably the designers didn't have the time to do the exhaustive manufacturing analysis that has since been done on this site and other fan sites. With this date we can set fair prices for all manufactured components and allow them to be sold (editing PURCHASE.DAT. Standard (or higher?) fixed profit ratios would apply for buy vs. sell pricing of manufactured goods.

Inelastic demand

Demand for advanced, alien and conventional items is totally inelastic, the price does not drop no matter how many units you sell. On reflection, I don't think this is that unrealistic. For conventional items, XCom purchases and sales are a microscopic part of the whole traded economy in such items - outfitting a maximum of 250-odd soldiers will not make a dent. For advanced and alien items, demand is never really going to drop. Once the US special forces have been outfitted with Heavy Plasmas, the Israeli, Russian, and French special forces will want to catch up. (And the British might get around to buying some Laser Rifles, ha ha).

Much less would the nations of the world say no to purchasing high performance hybrid aircraft. They would pay millions (and perhaps this is why the game designers did not permit the sale of aircraft).

I can see buyer fatigue setting in if hundreds or thousands of laser cannon are produced for sale, as these are limited to combat aircraft and there are only a few thousand front line combat aircraft in service at any given time. Another reason to diversify the options away from a handful of 'optimum' manufacturing items.

If you wanted a cap you could probably specify about $1 billion of inelastic demand for advanced items of each type. 7000 Heavy plasmas - about enough to equip 12 special forces battalions. A hundred or so of each aircraft type. After that the market might start to get a bit soft.

I think there's a case that the very first few examples of each item would have a much higher price. But perhaps we can posit that as part of its funding agreement, XCom has agreed to sell recovered weapons etc back to the Funding Council nation at reasonable prices. Possibly the sales are allocated to funding nations by rota in the early stages - that would make sense. The funding nations get lots and are then free to resell them to each other or, eventually, on the open market.

Buying

Slightly more interesting is allowing the 'External Market', in the form of military-industrial firms with links to the funding nations, to produce advanced items. This would then allow XCom to simply buy, rather than manufacture, items such as Avengers.

The pricing would simply be the total economic cost, as determined by the 'Efficient Market' process above, plus some profit margin - probably the standard buy/sell profit margin which is about 33%.

Detection

Detection by Aircraft

See my sections in Talk:UFO_Detection#Detection

Fixing Multiple Radar

See my section in Talk:UFO_Detection#Multiple_Radar_Effectiveness_Algorithm_and_Hack