[ECONOMICS] Manufacturing for Profit Rebalance

[ibanix]

One of the things that always bugged me about the vanilla XCOM experience was the arbitrary profit/loss from manufacturing. Laser Cannons will return you good money, but building and selling Mind Probes, Personal Armor, or Alien Grenades would cause you to lose money.

You'd figure that the black market would be all over Mind Probes (beloved by marketing executives!), and high strength personal armor and explosives is in demand from military everywhere.

So I've attempt to rebalance the entire system. *Everything* that can be made will now make you a profit. However, how much of a profit they make depends on several factors:

* How long does it take to produce an item?
* How much space does it take while producing items?
* Does it take any alien alloys to make the item?
* Does it take any E-115 to make the item?

In general, more complex and larger projects give more profit. Alien alloys raise the final price; E-115 being very hard to obtain, hugely raises the price. HOWEVER, to keep game balance from items obtained from raiding UFOs, prices on recovered items have changed as little as possible. In particular the selling price of plasma weapons (Heavy/Rifle/Pistol) have not changed, and UFO Navigation/Power Source have not greatly changed.

Have a ton of excess alien alloys, a free hangar, and a lot of time to spare? Build an Avenger. It will take you almost a month (at ~50 engineers), but the pay out will be almost $4 million. The Firestorm and Lightning will also make you money - and the resale value will make it worthwhile to produce.

If you have excess E-115 and a need for cash, Hovertank/Plasma will make you almost $600k per unit profit. If you only want to use 5 spare E-115, you can build 5 Plasma Pistol Clips in less time than it takes to build a Medi-Kit, and will net you $90k.

Or you can still build items that don't take AA or E-115... they just won't pay nearly as well, but you'll never worry about running out, either.

INSTALL: Drop into Ruleset folder and enable. You know the drill.


Changes were based on the hugely useful Profitability Analysis spreadsheet developed by Mike Fay. The spreadsheet was originally available from ufopedia.org (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Manufacturing_Profitability). I've included a copy of the spreadsheet, which includes both the old (vanilla XCOM) profit analysis, and my changes. The changes made are highlighted in yellow for easy reference.


Suggestions and comments are greatly appreciated.

-ibanix

[Warbear]

Have a ton of excess alien alloys, a free hangar, and a lot of time to spare? Build an Avenger. It will take you almost a month (at ~50 engineers), but the pay out will be almost $4 million.

This probably breaks the balance since one can build a manufacturing base and sell from 2 to 8 avengers per month.
Would be nice to see government orders sometimes. The player can accept or reject the order. In case of expiration the government leaves the project or decreases its funding.

[ibanix]

This probably breaks the balance since one can build a manufacturing base and sell from 2 to 8 avengers per month.
Would be nice to see government orders sometimes. The player can accept or reject the order. In case of expiration the government leaves the project or decreases its funding.

I thought about that, but consider:

1) You need a free hangar to make a craft; (+$200k)
2) You need at least two workshops (at $800k a piece  -> $1.6m statup);
3) You need at least 50 engineers (at $25k/month -> $1.25m/month)
4) You'd have to have researched the Avenger, which is a really long research tree.

By the time you get to this point, you're nearing being ready to go to Cydonia. By the end game, if you're willing to spend the entire month+ and space to make spare Avengers for cash, you're just helping yourself to the end.

[El Yahpo]

I like this. I will try it, but I don't have a whole lot of experience with manufacturing goods for sale in vanilla.

[Align]

Hm. I went the opposite route back when I toyed with making my own mod, and made everything be a net loss...