Realistic Currency Mod - need Help

[dubiousintent]

The biggest problem you are having is that of scale. You are talking about covering the costs of items that range, on the low end in thousands (at military contract pricing) for items like scopes and medkits, to multi-hundreds of thousands (millions) of equivalent for Rangers and Firestorms and the like. You are used to thinking in terms of dollars, euros, yen, or whatever, but those are simply too small in terms of units for game purposes (like using pennies), and not what large organizations like governments and the military deal in. You need to peg the low end of your scale to something like 10,000 monetary units and rationalize the upper end as favored trading partner, foreign aid, or vested interest party discounts on the big ticket items. That gives you a range of costs from 1 (10,000) to 255 (2,550,000). Which is basically what Firaxis did. (The '$' is merely a 'value units' indicator. Which is why I like the '§' used on the UFOpaedia site better: less emotional baggage.) The trade off of using more precision is simply not worth the headaches either in bytes of code or in trying to manage money on that range of scales.

 

A suggestion to make costs somewhat more realistic sense within the same scale, would be to make the really low end items 'free' (like grenades) or accept that 1 is merely a token cost for 'job lots'. Once you have accepted a particular scale of monetary value, then rebalancing with a range of 1-255 becomes more 'palatable'.

 

Just my 2 'lowest units of monetary value' worth.

 

-Dubious-

[Amineri]

You can also imagine that for big-ticket items like Inteceptors, XCOM isn't so much buying them outright as getting them "on loan" from the Funding Council nations, in which case the cost could simply be some relatively minimal form of overhead.

 

If you try and go "too realistic", then game balance can definitely suffer. Fighter jets and satellites would be so much more expensive than everything else that if a player can afford one, then every other item in the game is essentially free.

 

According to (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/07/f-22-fighter-loses-79-billion-advantage-in-dogfights-report/), a highly advanced fighter like the F-22 (stealthy and with super-cruise capabilities) costs ~$420 million. The same article estimates the Eurofighter Typhoon, a similar aerodynamically capably fighter without super cruise or stealth is ~$200 million.

 

At those numbers if a player can afford even a single interceptor (and probably needs more), then even spending $1 million for any other item in the game is a pittance. At that point you might as well make every other item in the game free :wink:

 

That said, we have found on occasion that we end up with some items over §255 (as does the vanilla game).

 

The absolute low end of the cost scaling isn't set by the item build/buy prices but instead by the grey market sell prices -- the §1 sell price for a weapon fragment. We've basically kept that as the low end, then set country incomes and item build/buy prices relative to that.

 

Even ignoring the interceptors / satellites, if you make the first MEC suit cost $40,000, then if a Medikit costs ... say ... $1,000, then effectively the Medikit is a neglible cost. In order to keep Medikit purchases as a relevant factor they would to probably cost at least $5,000 and probably more like $10,000. And pretty much everything is going to have to cost some multiple of $1,000, or could be rounded to the nearest $1000 without significant impact.

 

In which case if things are measured in $1k units, then the MEC costs $40k, and the Medikit costs $5k or $10k. At which point the vanilla cash price of §25 isn't crazy out of line.

 

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Please don't get me wrong -- I don't think that the vanilla pricing system is anywhere near ideal, particularly as you get into mid/late game. However I think that trying to follow a strictly "realistic" guideline will probably lead to worse game balance.

[yerude]

With normal difficulty and no additional second wave options i would totaly agree. Of course, xcom is "just a game" and it doesnt need to have realistic values.

 

But thats i want to make a mod. I want to increase the feeling, fight aliens is just not a "game". What i realy miss in xcom, is the feeling this is a "war" and not a "kick all aliens butt play".

When i played xcom the first time on normal without second wave, i reached a mid game status where i just started rushing through the missions, killing everything very easy without realy caring about tactis nor money spending.

I only used 4 assault soldiers and 2 snipers. Who cares support and heavy weapons if you just run in front of them end just shoot them down easily.

This kind of "rushing" was realy crap and after a few missions i was bored and pissed about the missions. I had a time in this game, i just wanted to skip all missions.

And also fighting ET Ufos was a joke. The firestorm is much to powerful and with a good weapon u will just finish everything off without taking critical damage.

 

I want to make the game much more deep, more stratetic, more war, more money planning, more difficulties in fighting ufos.

I realy exploited the strength of the assault class and snipe class. Thats why i used perk roulette when i played Xcom EW. My big hope was, that the Exalt troops will increase the tactical gameplay. Well thats true but the missions are very easy too and i still miss a challenge.

 

Of course you can switch on higher difficulties but the game will just become more difficult in a way which is to simple minded. Aliens having more hp, more will, more accuary and do more damage is just not a solution for me.

This is kinda boring and unfair. In my opinion, a game should become more difficult by changing the AI to use more skills, and use their skills more wisely. There must be more influencing in gameplay. Well maybe ur a badass in missions, ok why not making ufo fights more difficult too? This is my goal i want to reach. Changing the difficulty in my way and not the way im forced to do by the game itself.

Im not an average stupid "press one button" mobile phone gamer. I want Xcom, not Xrush! (Who says, a game like Xcom shouldnt be influenced by other tactical round based games like jagged alliance?I say, get what u can to make ur game more qualitative)

 

Changing the currency is just the basics of my mod. Of course i will think of balancing it to make it work fine with a good playing gameplay. I dont want my fighters have to cost some hundred millions of dollars.

But i want to change a lot, telling everything i plan on would take a while :laugh:

Im testing the scaling out a bit, but one main part should also be, that soldiers die very often and iron man should be set. So more Soldiers will "realy" die. And of course, the should lose all their equip.

And if a titan dressed soldier will die, you realy should sit there and be sad and feel like to wanna cry :laugh:

 

Using captured aliens and dead aliens as an own ressource for gene mods and be able to get more other benefits, it will give u more choices what you wanna do in missions. If you just try to wipe em out from distance to ensure your soldiers wont die every mission, if you may risk a shorter distance to capture aliens. You may wanna cover your soldiers with the arc thrower by using smoke grenades. It is all up to you.

The "normal" prices for stuff is based on a game where you do not use iron man, that is why i have to change. If your soldiers die a lot, they just cant cost 10 and ur fighter 40 (on normal) thats stupid.

And of course i dont want unlimited stuff like the alien grenades become after researching. Also if possible, i want to change the frag grenades beeing buyable and limited. If your soldiers lose their stuff, maybe your soldier "only" costs 5000 but the equipment will cost more. So you wont give ur rookies the best stuff.

 

If i change the scale that would be possible, but not perfect. However i scale it, there is always a fixed difference of 255. If my flash grenade costs 1000 as lowes price, the fighter can cost 255.000 at max. But thats s*** i dont want a fighter cost 250000 and a grenate 1000 maybe i want the grande cost 500 and the fighter 200000 i dont know but the firestorm should cost over a million and again i have the same problem i had before.

The scaling wont help that much. And i want to avoid your abling to exploit the alloys you get if you sell them via black market. If the scale is to high, u will become to rich in no time.

So balancing it of course will need time, BUT i dont want to be forced to the lowest and max limits of my possible costs.

 

But by the way. I will test out if it is possible to change the scale and let items cost <1 so maybe 0.5. Lets see what happens if it works, i will let you stay up to date

 

 

 

Anyway, i want to change all upk stuff for my curiousity and maybe i want to do different mods i could need it for.

 

Edit:

I changed

ITEM_CREDIT_BALANCE=1000

in the dgc.ini

I balanced all the costs before too so the mosts costs are insanely high now. But there was an interresting bug i found out.

My biggest scares are about the blackmarket will become op so i checked what i would get for my stuff. The valuas in the BM are the ones i made FE (not balanced of course)

But the money i realy get is scaled. Maybe i can use this "bug" for my needs

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/669082956843226466/1004E5FCB4687E0E528C8C976CA8B00A55F0B95F/1024x576.resizedimage

 

(why am i not allowed to use the image button of the forum?)

Edited January 9, 2014 by yerude

[Elodran]

You you should really move up in difficulty levels. Normal is handicapped in many ways, including aliens having less hit point (it's not that classic/impossible have more), you can have small number of aliens attacking you at any giving time, the AI is much less limited and will use things like grenades very infrequently.

 

Classic is the level you should really be baselining at.

[yerude]

Yh i played EW on classic but it wasnt realy more difficult it just took more time :laugh:

 

As i said, i want to enable iron man for all my changes and i dont think any of the standart difficulties is realy made or balanced for iron man.

Of course, it is all a question of what u like and is depending on your individual likes and dislikes.

[monju125]

I've had a similar issue with the difficulty system; simply adding more aliens and giving them increased stats might make the game more difficult, but I don't find it to be in a particularly meaningful way. I've spent quite a bit of time recently mapping out and reading through the AI functions in order to improve it in a way that would be scalable with difficulty. There are currently only a few places in the AI that change with difficulty:

 

Likelihood of using plague/blood call/alien grenade/medikit (XGAIAbilityDM.AI_IntangiblesScore)

Maximum number of engaged aliens (XGAIBehavior.IgnoresActiveList and XGAIPlayer.GetMaxEngagedAI)

Minimum hit chance used for determining attack priority (XGAIBehavior.GetMinHitChance)

Maximum amount of enemy units in overwatch allowed for a unit to move (XGAIBehavior.GetMaxDangerLevelMovement)

Low cover preference (XGAIBehavior_Sectoid/ThinMan.PrefersLowCover, only applies on easy difficulty)

Whether or not a unit will avoid a VIP on council missions (XGAIPlayer.AvoidVIP, only applies on easy difficulty)

 

The way I see it, there are a couple separate ways to alter the AI that would scale with difficulty: increase potential coordination between units at all difficulty levels but implement less certainty of that coordination being successful at lower difficulties; or maintain current coordination/tactics at low difficulties but implement better coordination/tactics as difficulty increases. Unfortunately both require quite a bit of work to implement. I've actually already implemented a change in my game by co-opting a debug function in XGAIBehavior. It acts as a sort of "mistake" system, randomly altering the priority of potential actions with the chance dictated by the game's difficulty. It's not exactly what I ultimately want to implement, but it was a good test and helped increase my understanding of how the AI chooses its actions.

[yerude]

Your idea if changing the AI is good, i thought about too.

The problem i see, the indicators for the AI are "dumb" too :laugh:

Sometimes, it is better to take a risk to shot an enemy first even if your hitting chance is lower. There can be different reasons for.

Fe. how aliens could "think about"

1. The target is near to death and only a little shot would kill him, ergo no more actions of him next round, ergo no more dmg of him

2. Killing the weak enemys first ( with low hp) to try to eliminate most threads faster

3. Killing the "most dangerous" enemy first (because its damage is insane, it is using grenades, it is trying to posses with psi attacks, is able to kill a weak alien nearby which need to be saved, etc)

4. mobile enemys who can fly or move faster may think of hunting sniper soldiers.

5. some enemys should stick closer to heavy weapon class to make sure they cant use explosives.( for 5 there should be changed grenades wont always hit 100% to make you not always place ur grenades to the edge of an alien if your soldier is close, there should be a risk for that)

6. the alien shouldnt try to use psi panic on enemys which it could just kill by one shot

7. the sectoid commanders should always try to posses you... if there are 3 soldiers in front of you, possesing is senseless because you die next round anyway. So the alien must now, when he trys a suicidal attack and just try to run at ur side and try to hit u criticaly. It is like sacrificing himself do deal most damge)

 

What i also miss, if the chance they are using their skills is hightened, they always do by first contact.

The AI is realy bad about. Even if your attacking with a single soldier, they try to use grenades which are more intelligent vs a crowd of soldiers or to destory high defense.

 

But im not sure a aggro system would be best. Normaly, i dont like aggrosystems. But in SP they are maybe an idea.

 

The stupidity of AI is one reason i have to rethink about scaling the values of high and low cover.

I hoped by make the cover more important the gameplay would change a bit because you have to play it more like chess. Hitting an enemy of the front which is covered by high cover should be very diffuclt.

So you have to think of moving to a different location. This may result in making supression attacks much more interresting. (never used the supression skill ever before haha)

Well the Idea could might be realy great changing alot but the problem is, the AI is to stupid to change their tactics.

Is there any one who maybe want me to help changing the ai using supression shots more often depending of the hit chance?

Or making the enemeys more think about flanking you?

Edited January 10, 2014 by yerude

[Amineri]

I've spent quite a bit of time recently mapping out and reading through the AI functions in order to improve it in a way that would be scalable with difficulty. There are currently only a few places in the AI that change with difficulty:

 

 

I wanted to point you to this thread : http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/989749-r-d-ai-improvements/

 

As both a place to share your findings and figure out what was done with the EU AI code.

[monju125]

Ah ha, I knew tactical AI had to have been discussed somewhere before, but I hadn't seen a thread for it. Thanks, Amineri.

[yerude]

For all who cares.

The ITEM_TIME_BALANCE=x value does NOT influence all of the costs and money you get.

You also have to change other values.

 

Unluckily, they do not change gene mod costs. That was the main purpose i changed it.

Changing alle the costs sounds easy, but is realy pernickety work.

And you do never know which costs you have to change manualy and which not :pinch:

 

I still have to change gene mod hex from 2C ## to 1D ## ## ## ## :confused: