Is it possible to change the rate of income for resouces? At the moment I'm not getting a balance with my resources. I'm either losing it like water in a sieve or I'm gaining more money than Bill Gate's intrest on his bank balance.

I believe the problem is with how often resources are calculated. You gain and lose resources every hour. After taking into consideration of track you can normally get an income of +24 on most resources. In a day you can make 576 units of that resource, how many things can you manufacture and research which take up 576+ units a day?

Is it possible to change income calculations to daily rather than hourly? Manufacturing and reserch time take the same but their costs are done at the end of the day. This would meant a small lose isn't that crippling but a huge income isn't that unbalancing. As it stands, as long as you've got a psoitive balance money no longe matters by the time wargots arrive.

Not quite sure what you mean by "you can normally get +24 on resources".

Because of the where I built my colleges I have more than +500 for low tech, +300 high tech and +200 alien tech.

Resources don't need to be changed to daily - you need to change your strategy to make it work. Learn to take advantage of knowledge buildings. By increasing the knowledge level in a base you will also increase the production from the mines - how much is covered in more detail in my guide (link below).

There is a way to change the rate of income, as each of the different difficulty levels gives different quantities of resources, with Easy giving the most, and super human giving the least. I don't know the exact bits you need to modify but it can be done - I'm sure someone can point you in the right direction if you want.

I don't have a problem myself. the +24 was for example only and is more common at start game, I'm currently getting between +100 - +200 income on each resource.

But as you have pointed out its easy to get up to about +500 resouce. How much does a suit of heavy armour cost and how long does it take to manufacture. By the point you can manufacture the expensive items does money remain a concern for you?

I think heavy armour was taking me about 8-12 hours to produce, but that was with 12 adv weapons factories With only a couple of factories you are looking at 1-2 days per suit.

The actual cost to produce is quite low, but it does keep your factories busy from producing other useful items, or from using the space in bases for other buildings.

The cost to buy heavy armour through recruiting was 3000 low tech (before the countdown ends). I think this goes up to 4000 after that, and 5000 a little later (avoiding giving plot events away). All you need to find is a human with L3 gunman training, and the heavy armour should be visible from the picture.

As long as you have a good positive income you might as well buy the stuff you need. When you have +500 per hour it will take less time to earn 3000 than it will take to make the armour yourself

Okay maybe heavy armour was a bad example but as you pointed out you can easily have enough money to waste on soldiers just for their armour because you're impatient. As soon as money becomes that disposable it has little game use.

The way I see it. It's not a matter of the amount of incoming and outgoing resource. It's a matter of the rate.

Even a ######x[+1] means you'll have receive 1 point of ######x resource an hour. That means 24 of ######x resource per day. Even with a rate like that you can build just about anything you want.

I also would like to find a way to have resource rate modified to a daily rate i.e. once every 24 hours instead of once every hour. Changing the diffifulty level does not affect the rate at all. It affects the resource amounts. You still get get (or lose) resources at an hourly rate. Just the figures are higher or lower. Multipling the resource amount by 0.0416' (1/24) is not an option as the cost of your tracks will still be deducted hourly ... essentially meaning resources become totally unmanageable (as tracks would now cost 24x as much in upkeep - track upkeep cost is the same regardless of difficulty level).

After much thought about this I'm fairly certain a daily resource rate would make the game overall more challenging as it'll affect not only your manufacture and research, but your ability to stockpile ammo and purchase troops (easily your biggest capital outlay - even the cheapest human costs 50 human resource points, enough for about 10 assault rifles). This might stimulate more need to request for resources and might, as a result, possibly even make diplomacy an issue - *gasp*. However there's no way to test this theory as it appears the resource rate (NOT resource amount) is hardcoded.

Still I'd really like to change the rate to daily...

Slowing the healing rate down might help too ... though I think that can be modded. (will look into that later)



Hmmm ... just had an idea ... maybe as a work around ... make everything (equipment, people, etc.) cost 24x more?

I believe the amount of resources a provinces generates can be modded (though I don't know how). My reason is that the resource income is affected by game difficulty, meaning there must be a way to change it. There is a mod available for Super-Easy mode, which I think increases income further than easy mode, but having not used it I don't know if it just increases the productivity of knolwedge buildings.

As for wanting resources only once daily I think that would require a lot of work for little reward, as if it were possible would require modify a lot of different factors, since everything is designed to run on the hourly system AS uses.


As for the cost of things - they are deducted in a couple of different ways.

Tracks are deducted as upkeep, you never actually pay this amount, but it is deducted from your income before you get it. The same happens with maintenance on base structures, and research topics - the cost is deducted from your income before you get it. The amount that is left is displayed as the ######+50 figure at the top of the screen.

The other type of cost is direct expenditure. Manufacturing items have a cost per item, and constructing buildings at your bases have direct costs - as soon as you click to build them the cost of the item is deducted from the pool of resources you have collected. Unlike track upkeep this cost cannot make your resources go negative - if you don't have enough you can't build the item.

For slowing healing you can deliberately avoid getting a L3 medic, or increase the damage of weapons/lower resistance of armour, so when your soldiers get injured they stay in hospital longer.

I think the balance of resources is pretty good early in the game, and can be a good challenge to keep everything working. But once you get colleges, and learn how to use them effectively, it takes the pressure off. Having a few bases packed with colleges can quickly cure the problem of being low in one resource. Balance is probably the hardest aspect to any mod - it is easy to create a super-effect that makes one part of the game much easier or harder, but it usually unbalances the game as well.

Why would I want to do that (ref: L3 Medic)? Besides even a near dead character takes 3 days to recover completely without the L3 medic. It takes me 3 days do get over the flu. Guess near death and the flu are pretty much the same thing

I'm talking about keeping soldiers out for a week or more... [like how it went in X-com]



Yes. It's really easy to do that. But I've already mentioned it's not an issue of amounts but of rate.



And if your upkeep is more than your income it's a negative value, which means you pay off from your stockpiles. So you do pay the amount. It's values you see are the nett figures, not gross. You have some lackey accountant hidden away in the Laputa that does all that math for ya

A few more things (I'm tired of quoting) resource management in the game is extremely simple. So simple that it's not even a factor (unless you're plotting world domination - then it's impossible. There's just not enough "alien" tech to keep the tracks running).

I think you're missing the point, Avenger.

My point about decreasing the rate is - what you pay for maintanence remains the same, but how much total resource you rather in a day is reduced to 1/24 or 0.0416x the current. This makes resource management a factor as you'll find it rather costly to buy more soldiers; you'll have to carefully manage your ammunition supplies as they cost resources too; you might end up asking your allies for supplies which would affect your diplomacy with them (won't it be interesting if they attacked you once in awhile?); tracks and research is unaffected. With one simple change (the rate), the whole game is turned around. It's not an uber change that affects one thing. It's a minor change that affects EVERYTHING.



BTW Colleges do not affect resource income in any way what so ever. So what are you talking about?

BTW, you are wrong and Avenger is correct. Please search the forums for "colleges" and/or "resources" and you will receive a learning experience.

Hmmm ... my replies didn't get posted.

Well to recap, thanks for the insight guys. Haven't noticed the increase before. Hope it's not been confused with the potential jump in resourse income that happens when you stop research. Will be sure to look out for it when I run the game in future. (or maybe I'll just demolish a college and see if the resource income is affected.)

Doesn't change the daily vs hourly situation though. Hope a way to mod that will shine through one day (or maybe in the next hour or so).

Just to update. Checked the glossary for the knowledge buildings and - mining increase is one of the perks they give. Guess I overlooked that.

My bad.

Yes all knowledge buildings increase the productivity of mines in that country (you saw in the other thread ). By using that it is possible to have a positive flow of all resources even when going world domination. My stats were around +300, +500, +200 before I fast-forwarded time to the final mission.

I must admit I forgot about negative income, as apart from very early in the game I've always avoided being there. I realised that in order to expand I need to build more tracks, and if I can only just support what I have now, I won't be able to afford the expansion. If my income is very close to 0 I continue to win provinces, but won't connect them until either more colleges have been built, or the base I plan to connect will be self-sufficient, producing more resources than it will cost to connect - for instance the scandinavian base costs more to connect (needing 3 tracks) than it produces from its provinces (unless you build knowledge buildings).

I would highly recommend having a L3 medic - the only reason I suggested not having one was to slow down the healing rate of soldiers. Though I take your point that 3 days is very quick to recover from life threatening wounds

Perhaps in the future they use high tech healing equipment, kinda like those bacta tanks from Star Wars; that is why recovering from near death in the future takes about as much time as recovering from flu today. Possible?

Perhaps increasing the time of advanced research would be the easier way to solve this.

More Labs -> higher costs & lesser Knowledgebulidings -> lower income

Olaf: "Perhaps increasing the time of advanced research would be the easier way to solve this. More Labs -> higher costs & lesser Knowledgebulidings -> lower income"

Knowledge buildings are an essential part of Advanced Research as without them you can't even build the required labs. Besides, I feel the increase in resource from knowledge structures is a non-issue as the percentage increase isn't that much.

Yunn: "Perhaps in the future they use high tech healing equipment, kinda like those bacta tanks from Star Wars; that is why recovering from near death in the future takes about as much time as recovering from flu today. Possible?"

In the imagination anything is possible. My point is about game balance. Unfortunately UFO:AS seems very difficult at the beginning, but once you manage to build assault rifles (which takes about a week, game time) it's much easier. And when you get your first sniper ... forget about it.

This is mainly because once you've gotten a few territories resource becomes a non-issue. It's still received 24 times a day. Resource affects your ability to build, research (not really an issue as it's time factored cost as well), and most importantly hire soldiers. A lvl 1 soldier costs 50 of the related resource to buy. At +2 hourly income that'll equal about 1 day. At +2 income daily, that'll take you almost a month. And that's for some clueless noob of a soldier.

Another issue affecting game balance (at later levels) is the lack of enemy improvement (sure enemy equipment improves, but their numbers are still easily manageable). But that's outside this thread and besides there's a few mods that kind of fix that by bumping the numbers.

Avenger: "I would highly recommend having a L3 medic - the only reason I suggested not having one was to slow down the healing rate of soldiers. Though I take your point that 3 days is very quick to recover from life threatening wounds"

Yeah, of course, L3 medic is one of the first skills I level up to ASAP. Mostly because of the "Re-animation" ability. Oh, I started a new game and my statement was off. Longest healing time is about a week. Why I stated 3 days was because with a L3 medic the longest healing time I had was - 1 day 7 hours - and this was for a re-animated trooper (i.e. dead but revived). The game states the presence of a L3 medic halves the time (regardless of how many L3 medics you have). Guess that's another game aspect that doesn't quite work like it's supposed to.

In total having longer healing time = more troops out. More troops out = More backup needed = More troops needed = More money needed (to buy troops) = more resource needed = more terroritory needed = more troops needed, wait oops that was the problem. Make resource gathering and healing take longer and the game gets far more challenging. If you don't have enough troops to do missions you'll have to forgo them. Forgo missions and diplomacy drops. Not enough diplomacy and you can't get troops at all. Resource Management could be the slippery slope that leads to a hopeless cause. Too bad it's a (non-moddable) non-issue in the game as it's waaaay too easy in it's present incursion.

I want to make a mod to boost production and troop costs by 24x (for my personal play testing), unfortunately it seems I'll have to do this for each individual item, building and troop type. Anyone know how I can boost the costs with minimal hassle?

"Minimal hassle?" No such thing. You are looking at over a thousand edits, just in the equipment file alone, to do what you wish to do.

the worst you could do with minimal hastle is slow down R&D significantly by editing the difficulty modifiers
other then that ... start working on that equipment file

Before you mess to much with resourse rates be mindfull of the different needs at the starting, middle and end positions. In my last game there was not a single Alien resourse in Europe or Russia. It wasn't until I hit Africa, the West Coast of the U.S. and China that I found any at all. I had to wait to build most my tracks until I found an Alien resourse base then track there and pack it with colleges. It was a big limiting factor on building and research, which did make it more of a challenge. Sure when I concoured the world I had plenty of resourses because of some exclusively all college towns in alien resourse areas. However if the alien resourse requirements in the early or middle game had been signifigantly higher I would of never made it out of Europe.

So if you are looking for balance I would say the game is well balanced (at veteran dificulty) in the beginning, pretty well balanced in the early middle and way too much profit potential at the late middle and end. If you get a bad random resourse drop at the begining the game is much more chalenging. If you mess with that you may make it unplayable for those that get a bad random drop. A better solution, for game balance, would be to only mess with the cost of the advanced products/buildings only available at the late middle and end of the game and leave the income side alone.

Of course the best improvement would be to cut the last research subject time by half if not more, so you don't have to do the same mission 100 times. Which would also cut 5 days of +100 - +500 of income.

What about increasing Track-cost for larger numbers of tracks?

Remember my aim here is to see how rate will affect the game. Not costs. Since the resource rate seems to be hard-coded there's no way to do this and my 24x costs for buildings, production and troop costs is just a workaround to test out my theory. (it's far from an ideal solution as I think the beginning resource amounts are just right for establishing a funtional base. In which case I'd pump those up too from my personal test run). Remember: I'm not looking to reduce the amount of resources. I'm looking to reduce the frequency at which it is gathered. Conversely with a daily rate your negative income figures also go down less so you stand to lose less material per day (which is a good thing).

I believe track costs are as challenging they should be (they cost exponentially more. i.e. more per track, the more tracks you have), besides that's hardcoded as well I think. Please be mindful that changing the rate would only affect your stockpile and not your research or tracks (these are calculated by rate as well).

Shadowarrior: ""Minimal hassle?" No such thing. You are looking at over a thousand edits, just in the equipment file alone, to do what you wish to do."

That's what I thought. Even then that's not what I wish to do - it's just a workarond to test a theory. I wish to change the rate ... not the costs ... .

Kind of tired of repeating myself about rate NOT costs. I'm in the middle of some work projects now that should clear up by the end of the month. Will try the workaround then and report my findings. Cheers, all.

I understand what you are saying completely. You want to mod it so that if you had a few days or a week where you had the world under control you don't amass 5 billion of each resource such that it would be impossible to ever run out if even if you lost a major resource area. You want to make it so the items which have fixed costs take a signifigant chunk out of your resources. You want to make it so the rate at which factories use resources is signifigant to the rate at which you gain net income.

One factor is the number of factories of each type you have though. If something costs 200 alien resource, but takes 1 day to make if you have one factory, then the rate at which you are using alien resource from making this item is 200 per day which translates into an hourly rate of 8.333. If you have 24 of these factories, then you get the item in one hour but still pay the same fixed cost. So in this case you are using alien resources at an hourly rate of 200.

The problem with this is you really don't need enough of any item such that you would be using your resources at that rate for production for long. Maybe if you were playing superhuman iron man mode you could make use of all those resources... im not sure...

Your style of play is a major factor. If you are not playing iron man mode, on any difficulty level, then you can't blame income rate. Of course you are going to amass huge piles of resources, you aren't using them for anything except to build exactly 7 of each new item that you can't get through missions. Oh and buildings as you capture new bases.

But play in superhuman iron man, and all the sudden you can't get enough resources to make what you need. You might have enough factories to build the most expensive items such that they drain your resources at an immense rate and still have to do it almost non stop.

Regarding the 24x cost thing, what you want is some kind of program that finds numbers and multiplies them. You can use an advanced find an replace function that differentiates between 1 and the 1 in 12, but then you have to go through every value a cost might be. It shouldnt be too hard to program one though.