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 TU-based tactical games 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 Elerium 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.

Actually the return to capital can probably be calculated quite easily (based on production costs vs profits on the most profitable items). If X-COM were actually to be allowed to borrow, it should be charged at least near to this much interest or otherwise a free money machine is created. Because of X-COM's short-term, high stakes objectives and potentially massive future cash flow, it would probably borrow very heavily if it could to build up a strong position. But then, who would lend to an entity that not only doesn't exist, but is fighting a life or death struggle against powerful forces beyond our comprehension?

A tricky question though with capital costs is how to amortise them over the production of multiple items. Obviously the worst case is to charge the entire capital cost to the first unit produced (a possibility worth considering under 'External Markets - Buying', below). We could make some educated guesses about the order of magnitude, based on the likely market size. Again, see below under 'Inelastic Demand' for some guesstimates - thousands for small arms, hundreds for aircraft weapons, dozens for aircraft. Unfortunately this is a better 'efficiency of scale' than X-COM gets in the standard game, so it would make the game easier. For purposes of game balance over realism, we need to amortise over numbers that make sense in the time frame of a single X-COM campaign. For balance, that might be more like ten for small arms, 2-4 for craft weapons and 1 for aircraft. This comes in to play more with the 'External Markets' angle.

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 game 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 the benefit of this data, we can set fair prices for all manufactured components and allow them to be sold (by 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 in the standard game: 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 SAS 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. And maybe the market for e.g. Mind Probes would be more limited.

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 and stable prices. Possibly the sales are allocated to funding nations by rota in the early stages - that would make sense. The funding nations get allocated artefacts "by 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%.

Now obviously you don't want to make advanced items available from the start, that would defeat a lot of the challenge of the game. From a game play point of view what you want to do is give the player a reasonable alternative of buying vs manufacturing the item, once they have done the necessary research.

Options for doing this... say that an item can be bought on the open market:

1. Once the item has been captured.

2. Once one (or more?) examples of the item have been sold onto the market.

3. Once the item has been researched by XCom.

4. Once one example has been manufactured by XCom (this could be hard to check for though).

5. Any of the above, plus a time delay. For 1-2 this would be related to the Research time.

In cases 1-2 the Research is being done outside of XCom which really changes the game. In this case there should be a big premium payable to the external arms company that owns the patents etc. This can be done in PURCHASE.DAT as the buy and sell prices can be set independently of each other, so set the Buy price at 200% of Sell price (vs the more normal 133% of sell price). Or at the very least we could put the price of the item up by say 50-100%. Keep in mind that as part of 'Efficient Pricing' we have (in theory!) already factored in the cost of the research effort (scientists, labs, capital etc).

In general though I don't favour bypassing the Research tree so that favours options 3-5. 3 is easy to check for in the game files. 4 is tricky, at least for alien items, because while you can see items under construction, you might miss the moment they are constructed. For non-alien items, the mere existence of the item in the game proves it has been manufactured.

As an extra variant you might say that only hybrid items, not pure alien items, can be manufactured by the external firms. So while laser rifles, a power suit or an Avenger can be built, and indeed mass produced, by a high tech arms company, only X-COMs "Deep Black" science labs can painstakingly assemble small numbers of genuine alien items like Mind Probes, Blaster Launchers, etc.

I'd be quite comfortable with this variant (hybrid only) and it makes it easier to police option 4 which is the most challenging and probably the best for gameplay. Or you could mix 3 and 4, charging a 50%-100% premium on purchases until such time as X-COM has produced their own example of an item.

There is also the question of delivery times. Delivery times for the Avenger are very long and compressing that to 72 hrs would seriously affect the game balance. I think that PURCHASE.DAT can be hacked to lengthen the delivery times for specific items. Probably the delivery time should be based on a reasonable setup such as a 100-space workshop with as many engineers will fit. We don't really want to provide advantages to buying the Avenger, we just want it to be a not unreasonable option.

One final question is availability of resources, especially Elerium which is the only thing that can't be manufactured. The price of Alloys can be computed with a floor equal to the labour & capital costs of production, and a ceiling based on the most profitable item you can produce with Alloys (Mind Probes I think from memory). The price of Elerium should be at least the value derived from the most profitable item you can build with Elerium. Potentially it is much higher, since Elerium is scarce and has other very valuable irreplaceable functions (hybrid aircraft fuel, winning tactical missions, saving the world...).

A strict interpretation would be track the amount of Elerium sold (and anything else that can't yet be manufactured by the external market at that time, eg Alloys / UFO Power Sources / UFO Navigations). You would then not be allowed to buy more manufactured items than could be built using the total resources sold up to date to the 'external market'. But apart from patching the game I can't think of any way to do this kind of double accounting. Actually I can, in XComUtil you could record all UFO recoverables after each mission, and then subtract from that all XCom stores and the inputs to all existing manufactured items (ignoring anything destroyed - presume comprehensive recycling of such valuable scrap). But that would be a hassle to code up.

There is an argument for a highly elastic price for Elerium, based on the total supply. Of course, as players we 'know' that (apart from variant self-imposed rules like 1-Mission or No Detection etc) there is ample Elerium just around the corner. That's the reality of the standard game, so in a standard game a fixed price for Elerium is probably justified.

The Elerium Standard

This brings me back to the beginning in a logical circle. Prices are all relative, so what is the reference point? You can do this one of two ways. Either take the most profitable item in the game, and work back from that to deduce the correct price for Elerium (pricing all other components along the way, eg Alloys, Power, Navigation). Or, you can take the price of Elerium as it is, and work your way 'up' the chain, correcting the prices for everything built from Elerium. I like the first method because it has the least impact on existing revenue-generating options from manufacturing. The revenue a player can create should stay exactly the same (proportionate to the inputs of labour, capital, raw materials); they just have many more ways of generating that revenue.

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

Also see the Tools section below for the Base Fixer.

Tools

Spreadsheets

I have uploaded some spreadsheets concerning XcomUtil manufacturing profitability; efficiency of aircraft detection platforms; multiple radar fix.

Base Fixer

I've just finished beta testing a Python script that

fixes the Paying for Dirt bug
fixes the Phantom Radar bug
implements my algorithm for improved effectiveness of multiple radars

It's not quite ready for prime time as the file locations and options are hard coded. But it works!

Phantom Radar Bug

Is listed at ExploitsA#Phantom_Radar_Trick. Thanks for adding, though. Also, I'm under the impression that building a new structure, even starting one, eliminated Phantom Radar; so upgrading-in-place cannot be done. Arrow Quivershaft 21:52, 17 March 2008 (PDT)

OK thanks for that. i will test but you are probably right! removed this text:

This bug allows you to "upgrade in place", for example building a new Hyper-Wave Decoder over the top of an existing Large Radar, and retaining the detection capability of the Large Radar until the Hyper-Wave Decoder completes building. (Unless something else completes building first).

Spike 02:10, 18 March 2008 (PDT)

For XCOM CE (since I stare at this in a hex editor a lot):

* Completing any new structure causes the radar stats to be recalculated at the base the structure completes at.

* Starting new structures is perfectly safe.

-- Zaimoni 7:49 18 March 2008 (CDT)

OK I've done some tests and confirmed what Zaimoni said is right. Upgrade in place is possible. If you dismantle a small radar and build a large radar over it, the SR detection value applies until the large radar (or any other facility) completes building in that base. I see the detection values in base.dat and I also get detections/intercepts from the base that has "no radar". The Base Information screen detection strength shows zero but base.dat shows 10%.

Reinstating the "upgrade in place" comments in the Known Bugs entry!

Spike 17:47, 19 March 2008 (PDT)

User:Spike

Contents