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« on: February 15, 2017, 11:58:16 am »
I made a couple of major updates to the mod. First, I added military and civilian aircraft which you can't fly but which you can sell for money. Second, I reworked the secondary conventional aircraft again.
Civilian Aircraft: costs alien alloys, requires a large amount of space and time to build. These have a lower profit per engineer hour, but you don't need special materials to make them (except some alloys which you can build yourself).
Military Aircraft: costs alloys, elerium, navigation, and power source, but costs less space and time to build. Individually these sell for less than a civilian aircraft, but the profit per engineer hour is significantly higher. After considering the lower space requirements, these offer much higher income than civilian aircraft and are a great way to burn through a bunch of extra UFO components you have laying around.
While playing with the secondary conventional craft, I found myself loving the Marauder and Albatross quite a lot. I didn't use the Albatross much because I was getting lazy and also because I got radar bases all over the world, but I had a Marauder at every base. The Sparrow and Stormstrike, however, I wasn't using at all. I realized these craft need to be more expensive, and I had to buff the Sparrow and Stormstrike to make them worth flying. I also noticed after I got Marauders, I missed the choice between Interceptor and Punisher. So now the Sparrow combines its radar bonus with being an upgrade to the interceptor, still with one weapon and slightly increased hit points. It can't patrol as long anymore but it is much faster than before. The Stormstrike now has way more fuel plus the same radar bonus that the Sparrow has. Now you can have your choice of long range patrol craft: either with integrated interception or with integrated transport. I think it makes sense to combine these because all three (light interceptor, light transport, long range patrol) are less popular options than the long duration patrol, heavy transport, or heavy interceptor.
The rental costs of secondary conventional craft are increased, and their initial cost to build has been increased by a lot: they cost over a million dollars to build, plus special materials. I also gave them each a secondary tech requirement because I found I was abandoning the purchase craft too early in the game. These should still find some longevity past Firestorm/Lightning as they do not require elerium for fuel.
Hopefully this will give players more reason to spend money on base expansion and getting more aircraft. I aim to give the player more ways to earn money as well as ways to spend it. Right now I seem to be getting too much money from monthly payments even though I am getting much less from loot, so I'm decreasing the funding (in starting base variation). I originally increased it by 50% per country, but I'm lowering that to 40%. I realize probably part of my excess money comes from not buying many personnel (I only have 50 scientists), but I have a lot of aircraft so that ought to offset it more than it is currently.
So I'll try these new values and see if it works better. I'm still looking to give the player more ways to spend money, so if you have any ideas, please share! Currently there seems to be nothing to do with very large amounts of funds other than show it off to other players.
Last bit of info: I think the game can search into the subfolder to find the startingBase ruleset pieces. If you don't want the alternate starting base, you can simply delete it's subfolder.
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