Modding finances.

[ShakaTheZulu]

So one of the first things that bugged me about xcom was the money scale. For example, the United States gives you $180 per month to fight an almost losing battle against aliens. I pay more in rent a month than that. So I went into the .exe with resource hacker, and basically added three zeroes to the end of everything involving cash. It does alter the way the economy works slightly when you throw in engineers reducing the cost of things, but it really isn't that big of a deal. Mostly you will be paying slightly extra because you will be paying for a remainder that would normally get dropped.

 

However, I've been looking all over to find out where the council rewards are found. I just got a bomb diffusal mission and the reward was $180, which is nothing in my currently modded game, but I can't seem to find any sort of reference for that reward anywhere. Is it buried in some other .ini file? Come to think of it, I didn't see any references to the somewhat levelled up random soldiers you can get either. Anybody have any ideas?

[Xionanx]

You might have been better off leaving all the "Reward" values at the default, and then simply changing the "Multiplier" associate with each difficulty level. So, for instance if you changed to "normal" reward multiplier to be 1000 instead of 1, you would get 1000 times monetary rewards for all actions.

 

You would still need to edit the costs to be in line, but doing that "should" fix the rewards given by council missions to be more in line with your vision.

[Prophanity]

It's there in the exe file. I can't rememere the exact placing of it (at work currently so can't check for you) but it is there under RC-something, then I velieve it's under 1020 and then the follow on 1033.

 

It will list a whole bunch of countries, including ones that don't fund you in-game and you can amend them from there.

 

I've been abel to do it myself, however I can't get it to work with a saved game, only a new campaign.

 

As for your comment about rent I like to imagine the US is giving me $180 million per month ;)

[Gazzzz]

For example, the United States gives you $180 per month to fight an almost losing battle against aliens.

These are not dollars. There is no $ sign anywhere and the UI screens read "credits".

 

If you estimate interceptors around a believable 200 M$, as modern fighter jet would cost, you get a factor of x5000000 for everything and a single soldier or medpack costs you 50.000.000 $.

There's a reason why they discarded real currency. =)

 

I'm still curious how you would balance this.

Soldiers and most "small" items would be practically free while the only cost factors in the game would be interceptors and maybe research / foundry / installations.

[ShakaTheZulu]

I ended up modifying the price on everything I could find. So satellites normally would be $100, and they are now $100,000. All facilities, maintenance, and items that I could find have been increased by x1000. The only thing I couldn't find was specific council mission rewards, however I might try the multiplier idea. Reduce all sources of income (minus the grey market) to normal, and put the multiplier to 1000. That should fix all mission rewards, and essentially make everything look cosmetically better for me.

 

While playtesting what I had done, the only issue that came up was with engineers reducing the cost of building items. A medikit for example, costs $25 normally with 5 engineers. With 9 engineers it would cost I think $21. With everything x1000, it was $25,000 with 5 engineers and around $21,254 with 9 engineers. So you do end up paying a little bit more (the extra $254), but it isn't something that bothers me that much. It would be the equivalent of a few credits/dollars normally over the course of an entire game. Probably around $10.

 

Still, I looked through rcdata 1020/1033 for awhile last night and couldn't find where council missions grab their rewards from. Maybe it is under some strange variable name? Here is the section that has the most promise for what I am trying to do.

 

; Strategy Game Constants

ABDUCTION_REWARD_CASH=200000 (I changed this, normally 200)

ABDUCTION_REWARD_SCI=4

ABDUCTION_REWARD_ENG=4

COUNCIL_DAY=20 (Not sure what this does. Maybe how long it takes to complete a council mission? That would be a long time for General Van-whatever to be on a bridge with aliens.)

COUNCIL_RAND_DAYS=7 (Not sure what this does either.)

COUNCIL_FUNDING_MULTIPLIER_EASY = 1.5f

COUNCIL_FUNDING_MULTIPLIER_NORMAL = 1

COUNCIL_FUNDING_MULTIPLIER_HARD = 1 (I could just modify these values. I'll play around with it after work)

COUNCIL_FUNDING_MULTIPLIER_CLASSIC= 1

[ShakaTheZulu]

After messing around with different variables, I have found that it's not possible to increase council mission rewards via the variables in the rcdata. I reverted back to normal settings for money, and I do not suggest anyone alter the way it is currently. I had some buggy issues after reverting, but I finally got it back to normal. For awhile I was getting -43,000 income on a new game. I guess I'll just have to settle with pretending 1 credit in xcom is worth a lot of money, which is the way it was intended.

 

The only work around for this I can think of is unpacking the upk files and altering the council mission rewards, but I'm not really willing to start doing that yet, especially for a purely cosmetic change. However, it is exciting that people are having success with modding the game already since it's only been out for what, two weeks?

[sakhalin20000]

ShakaTheZulu I revamped money system just adding ~ 000$ to alll the prices in RCData, now the XCom looks like more serious business organisation

 

http://s2.ipicture.ru/uploads/20130211/thumbs/CZ1LLxxr.jpg

 

& i've found the codes of council mission rewards:

.http://s1.ipicture.ru/uploads/20130211/thumbs/VL64e3y1.jpg

But i can't add extra HEX values of rewards.Would anybody explain me how to add them, i'll be appreciate.

Here are the the values which i wanna change:

iMax = 150 to iMax = 150000

iMax = 125 to iMax = 125000

iMax = 100 to iMax = 100000

Edited February 11, 2013 by sakhalin20000

[johnnylump]

If those rewards are two bytes, then they can't exceed $255 (ff). B/c the function returns an "int" you may not be able to change that at all. (we can't change function headers)

 

Edit: I looked at the function, and yes, the rewards would max at 255. I'm not sure what would happen if you rewrote the script (although there's room to do it by eliminating the tiered difficulty rewards), because I'm not sure if a function that returns an int can send back a number greater than 255. But it might!

 

You'll need to learn how to rescript, though -- it's more than changing a number in the code; it's eliminating extraneous code to fill in what you want.

Edited February 18, 2013 by johnnylump

[PaxEmpyrean]

This looks like a solution to an imaginary problem. The game uses credits, not dollars.

[johnnylump]

Well, it's an aesthetic change, rather than a structural one. We've turned on alien bodies in the tactical game for aesthetic purposes, so I don't see anything wrong with wanting to alter appearances to satisfy players' preferences. I'm just not sure it's possible in this case.