I am gratified that something I found interesting has generated so much discussion.
But someone has to do the work, so anything that is done has to be reasonable in terms of the effort required. That means that a full scale economically accurate pricing model is not appropriate. What is needed is something that is a reasonable simulation of real world economy that makes the game more fun and retains playability.
My opinion on variable prices :
- The random variation (The one which doesn't reflect player's sales) could be applied once every month : This should be frequent enough to have an effect, without the player having to re-check prices every 3 days in case what he's building has suddenly dropped price without warning.
- The effect of player's sales should probably be applied on each unit (sell 1: 100$, sell 3: 100$+98$+97$), otherwise the player would be encouraged to hoard items and sell large amounts at a time.
That's approximately what I intended. The price of an item would be set when the item is available to be produced. It would decline by 5% per month thereafter, plus 5% more in a month where any of the item had been sold. (In other words, there is no recalculation with every sale, but simply a boolean flag set which says the item was sold in that month.)
Let's consider an example. The Motion Scanner requires 4 spaces to build, plus 1 for every engineer working on them. 220 engineer hours are required to make a Motion Scanner. $34,000 in supplies are required per scanner.
How COULD we set a base cost for the scanner? Let's suppose a Manufacturing base which has 8 Workshops, 8 Living Quarters, and 200 Engineers. (Not that it can't have other things, but this is for establishing a base cost.)
With this setup, 196 Engineers could work on scanners at the same time. That gives you 141,120 Engineer hours per month. (720 hours * 196 Engineers.) At 220 hours per scanner, this group would make 641 scanners every month. That costs $34,000 * 641 or $21,794,000 for supplies plus $5,000,000 for engineer salaries, plus $360,000 maintenance on the Workshops and Living Quarters, or $27,154,000. Dividing that by 641 means it costs you an average of $42,362 to make a Motion Scanner.
Now, based on my earlier suggestion, in the month the Motion Scanner is available for manufacture, it's sale price is set at 3 times the base cost + a random value between 0 and .2 times the base cost. In this case, let's say that value is $130,000. Each month after that, the sale price drops by 5%, or $121,600, $115,500, $109,700, $104,300, $99,000 ... and so on (rounded to nearest 100.) If any Motion Scanners are sold in a month, and additional 5% is knocked off at the end of that month. (Which is unrealistic, but it make it easier to account for increasing supply and helps encourage the player to manufacture other things.) Even without sales, the price of a newly researched item to be produced would drop below production cost in 2 years. If you add in monthly sales, that would drop to a single year.
Hoarding would not be an issue because any sale, from 1 to 100000 is going to trigger an additional drop in price at the beginning of next month. Therefore if you sell whatever you are going to sell as soon as possible.
Why do this? First, it would mean that instead of initially having financial problems, but after a few months you have more than you can possibly spend, the opposite becomes true. A year after you can produce something, it's no longer a viable product for financing. Why? Because surely someone in the government, even with secrecy being a requirement, is going to want a piece of the money you are raking in and is going to set up production in a secret factory and cash in.
- The items which can be bought could also have prices affected by player's demand. If the price of large rockets rises every time you buy one, you are rewarded if you adapt, rather than stick to all-rocket equipment.
I think the purchase price represents the cost of items currently in use by the world's militaries. The effect on supply and demand of sending even hundreds of these items to XCom would be negligible compared to worldwide requirements.
-
The recruitment can be cheap at the very beginning when people volunteer to join XCOM, but when you need more people, it becomes more expensive to print the nice XCOM recruitment posters, locate possible candidates and get them to defect from their current engagement/job to work for you.
I find it funny, these attempts to paint X-Com as something which is affected by free markets in the slightest... Especially since the project has all the cash it needs (as opposed to wants - resources are limited so the commander won't go completely crazy, also because that's how Western government organizations work).
Solarius says that according to canon, the XCom operations and the existence of aliens is a secret. So no recruiting posters, and no free market, but that doesn't mean the XCom commander is an idiot. He needs funds beyond what is allocated to him by the 13 governments which are in the know. If he's not smart enough to build the most profitable item, then he's not smart enough to be the XCom commander.
Let's take an even simpler example. An Alloy Cannon takes 20 spaces to build plus 1 per engineer, and $95,000 in supplies, plus an Alien Alloy which is built at a loss. The sale price is $45,000, which means you lose $50,000 per cannon you build, not counting losses on quarters, workshops, and alien alloy. Just how many would you build?
Implying they didn't want to get Laser Cannons in the first place...
Au contraire, in the piece of fiction I wrote, the FGB said he wanted 1000 for the Presidential Guard, but didn't need 12,000 per year in perpetuity. But it does bring up an interesting point. SOMEONE in the 13 governments which fund XCom knows about the aliens, knows about the invasions, and wants everything hushed up. So no public sales. But what about these Faceless Government Bureaucrats? Do you think they don't want their personal asses protected? With each and every item that XCom can produce, the FGBs are going to want anywhere from a few to several hundred for their personal guard forces. In the immortal words of Rosie O'Donnell, "No one should have a gun, but I am a celebrity and I need protection."
Basically, what I am suggesting is there is no free market, no recruiting posters, no competition for new technology, but there still is a semi-free black market for these same items, and such a market makes more sense for the limited quantity of items which XCom can produce.
