Wrong Numbers In "base Information/monthly Costs"

[Bullet-Tooth Tony]

Sometimes, when you're short on money, to make sure you don't start the next month in debt, you go to "Base information\monthly costs" screen, observe the data given there to see if your (income+current funds) is greater than total costs. You see that everything's OK, but the next month starts and suddenly you have -218 000$ on your account. What's going on?

First possible reason is that your engineers have spent some money while building something. But when you make sure manufacturing is not the key, you still may find some money missing.

Yesterday I've done some testing, and what I've discovered:

1) Your biggest expences - salaries and craft rental, thankfully, are calculated, shown on the info screen, and taken from your account absolutely correctly. So, no surprise here.

2) Base maintaince. It's tricky here. Manually calculated sum based on facilities you have and maintaince costs from UFOpedia equals to what is taken from your account, but differs from what's shown in the info screen. But doesn't differ that much, and the sum on the info screen is bigger than your actual maintaince cost, so if you can afford to pay the sum in the info screen, you'll be able to pay the actual sum for sure.

3) The "lost money" comes from the facilities you've dismantled. An empty square, where something has been built and dismantled before costs you $80k each month, and it's shown nowhere. A place, where there had been a Hangar costs you $320k monthly fee (4 x $80k), while any other facility - $80k. Thankfully, if you build something in empty $80k place, this" fee for nothing" is removed and replaced with "propper" cost of the facility you build. With many bases you can lose more than a million because of this.

The practical side of this bug is that many people (including me) are using "safe" base layouts with several empty squares isolating the base from Access lift and Hangars, and also using the cheap and fast-building General Stores (that will later be removed) to build the base faster than normally module by module.

When you're increasing construction speed this way be aware of $80k monthly fee for any square that has been used for that. Count those squares and limit their usage to save money. Build somethind there, if it doesn't break the defensive base layout.

Hoever, in the end-game time with several "LC manufacturing plants", big loot from Supply ships and so on, an uncounted million or so in monthly costs doesn't hurt much.

[[Mad]]

Yea, if I'm not mistaken this bug sounds like the one PiMasta is trying to include a patch for in PyXcom. It normally happens if you're using game editors (Clark Wehyr Editor!), but appears as well in a "normal" game.

 

Edit: You can also read about this bug here.

Edited February 15, 2007 by Mad

[Bullet-Tooth Tony]

I'm using only XComUtil to remove the Difficulty and Base Disjoint bugs - I don't think it counts as an "editor" and can be a reason for this, because it doesn't touch the economic part of the program. With exception of XComUtil patch the game is clear (DOS 1.4 under DOSBox).

[[Mad]]

Well, as I said, it can occur in a non-modified game as well. Just not that frequent.