I probably won't be triggering any apocalyptic MiB retaliation waves in 1998, at least not on purpose.
Aaand I took out a surprise MiB ufo on a pest control mission with 2 PSGs, incendiaries and a couple dogs in early 1998. I was very lucky with enemy placement or I would've noped out of there. Got... 1 Alloy. Research time! Let's see if this has any consequences
This has indeed been discussed before, e.g. here (among other things). A non-XCF specific but interesting take is here.
Thanks for the links! One thing I realized: treating X-Com as hard sci-fi is an exercise in futility (although futile exercises can be entertaining!). The original Image Comics-style intro should probably make that point all on its own. I feel a little silly for bringing up even the "bullets small" argument now.
IMO, the issues is not so much with alloy availability per se, but with timing: there is only a limited time window when alloy ammo is a good upgrade, at which time the alloy supply is justifiably scarce and usually better spent on other things.
Based on a few campaigns, you'd usually want tritanium early (like, in 1998) and in 1999 it is necessary only for big projects (like building multiple improved labs, crafts, etc.). At that point you don't need to bother with tritanium ammo anymore
Hm, I realize the 14 day building time of the mill further cuts into the window where Trit ammo is useful. Probably not a big deal but also not optimal.
I'm not sure singling out heavy weapons like that is a good idea, perhaps increase costs/man hours instead?
The mill is designed to be kinda optional and obsolete-able: So I didn't touch explosives, shrapnel et al because you want to build those even after you replace the mill (or even never build it). Most of them aren't bullets, too. And they are reasonably popular on this forum so they probably don't need a buff.
The miniguns still burn Alloy because that's a bit of a design and flavor choice in XCF (1 vanilla minigun belt eats like 3 personal armors).
I also increased gains from UFOs by a factor of 10/3 in general, more for small UFOs and less for bigger ones. And a factor of 15 for bases, which includes Hybrid Embassies. Over 1k from an Embassy gave me ample supplies to squander away.
Get that bling! Personally I'm not ready for post-scarcity X-Com
I'm not a hoarder, but I did build an "archive" base with 1 from each artifact and prisoner and the Arrow last time which slowed down a few story bottlenecks considerably.
Since I need to make more human factions anyway, there might be some (other than MiB) that use titanium. We'll see.
Rather ominous!
A research to just contract out the tritanium ammo instead of having to manufacture them would likely be more choice.
Honestly what I would do is take the existing option to farm out Tritanium ammo to MAGMA and expand it. In particular, push it forward a bit so that it comes sooner and let it also give you access to BlackOps tritanium ammo. That would make it a much more worthwhile investment and yet not one without tradeoffs.
Allocating engineer hours is the strategic heart of that part of the game tho. Buying transfer times are an interesting logistics mechanism (e.g. the HMMV) but when it comes to ammo I would simply buy a slightly bigger pile to work around it.
money making schemes (gas grenades or prods)
I don't have gas grenade production yet; does that actually make money? In my old game all "profitable" projects were actually money sinks because they didn't pay the running costs completely, and it would have strictly been better to hire less engineers.