XCOM EU XCOM Economics: Country Funding

[morro123]

Another element of XCOM economics, country funding in vanilla evolves from playing a key role to being a side note in later stages, when you begin making big profits out of the gray market.
Beyond balancing issues, my interest here is to propose different ideas in order to create a more inmersive way to handle the idea of managing the budget of an international organization -and particularly, a secretive one. I'm far from being an expert on the matter, though, so I'll just be stating some ideas that seems reasonable to me. Again, balancing issues aside.

First off, international organizations like the UN seem to have at least a regular budget and voluntary contributions for specific programs.

About the regular budget, apparently there is a payment structure that sets a maximum of 22% (to prevent a nation from overtaking) and a minimum (supposedly based on the ability to pay - GNP/GNI with adjustments). We can imagine many variables impacting those numbers: each country economics; world wide reccessions; country expectations; political alliegances; attitude towards the organization; manipulation purposes; and probably many others we don't even imagine.

Voluntary contributions mean countries donating to programs they bear a special interest in; that would usually mean money for their own national purposes.

From the very basic approach stated above, we could propose the following attitudes a country could show regarding the XCOM budget:

1. Pay the asessed contributions just to be able to demand an XCOM intervention in case of alien activity (see amineri's "all countries contribute" modlet and XCOM OG);

2. Raise individual asessed contributions subject to XCOM more willing to counter alien activity in their nation more than the others ('prefered nation clause during abductions' mod/ reward abudctions interception by raising asessed contributions);

3.a. Pay voluntary contributions applied to R&D programs that benefits them exclusively (vanilla - "country requests");

 

3.b Pay voluntary contributions after council mission fullfillment (vanilla);

 

4. Raise in addition to 3.a./Reduce asessed contributions if country request is fullfilled or not (to be modded);

5. Raise/Lower individual asessed contributions due to country economics or other non alien related events (random event-mod);

 

5.a.Raise/Lower individual asessed contributions due to standard alien related events = +/- infiltration/panic ('results driven');

 

5.b.Raise/Lower individual asessed contributions due to council mission fulfillment (to be modded);

 

5.c. Raise/Lower individual asessed contributions by performance if you counter standard alien activity within their borders successfully by the end of the month (alla 'results driven' but tied to performance, not to panic as in 5.a);

 

6.a. Raise/Lower global asessed contributions due to global recessions or other non alien related events (random event-mod);

6.b. Raise/Lower global asessed contributions due to unusual alien related events (e.g.: first ufo shot down/first terror attack/etc, to be modded);

 

6.c. Raise/Lower global asessed contributions depending on Council Grades.

7. Abandon XCOM funding due to alien pact (vanilla);

8. Do not join XCOM due to lack of faith in the proyect, being able to begin funding XCOM if alien activity is countered succesfully within their borders (similar to vanilla, but not necesarily with satellites, could be after a successfull mission);

 

9. Timed global drop in asessed contributions due to war weariness.

 

Note: As you may have noticed, I'm not in for the idea of linking funding directly to satellite coverage.

Note 2: I really miss the alien score system's role in funding implemented in the OG, could have been improved in EU.

Note 3: In case any of these is implemented funding graphs/statics mod highly recommended!

Edited September 6, 2013 by morro123