Engineering (Long War)
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| Effect | Manufacture/repair items, build facilities, augment soldiers | |||||||||
| Adjacency Bonus | None | |||||||||
| Prerequisites | None | |||||||||
| Other | None | |||||||||
| Build costs |
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| Normal |
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| Quick |
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| Maintenance | §0 | |||||||||
| Power | 0 | |||||||||
The Engineering Bay houses the engineering team, headed by Dr. Shen.
Options:
- Build/Buy Items. Allows you to manufacture weapons and equipment for soldiers (first tab), armor for soldiers (second tab), and specialized equipment for SHIVs, MECs, as well as interceptor weapons and modules (third tab).
- Build Facilities. Opens access to the construction of your base.
- The Foundry. Develop specialized "foundry" projects. See Foundry (Long War).
- Repair Bay. Repair damaged items. It costs about 20% of the item cost in credits, alloys, elerium and meld to repair an item. See Repair Bay (Long War).
- Augment Soldiers. Augment soldiers into MEC Troopers in the Repair Bay. This becomes available after the research of Alien Biocybernetics. A maximum of 3 soldiers can be augmented simultaneously. It takes 10 days to augment a soldier, and costs 40 credits and 60 meld.
New in Long War
There are several key differences between engineering in Long War versus vanilla:
There are only 3 ways to get more engineers:
- mission rewards
- from the end-of-the-month reward for satellite covered nations
- from nation requests in exchange for alien materials, equipment, corpses or captured aliens
Workshops do NOT increase the number of engineers!
Nothing is built instantaneously. While in vanilla you could manufacture an extra SCOPE right before a mission, in Long War it takes several days. Most things can be built faster by selecting the Build Quickly mode in the manufacturing dialog. This costs significantly more (150%), and uses some Meld, but produces the item in around half the time. The more engineers you have the less time it will take to manufacture items. The more Workshops you have the less materials it will take to manufacture items. Workshop adjacency also reduces the materials cost of items. Base facilities still have a minimum number of engineers to build, but most items and Foundry projects do not; they will simply take a very long time if you try to build them with many fewer engineers on staff than recommended.
Build time calculations
Based on Amineri's post here, items and Foundry project completion times vary exponentially with the number of available engineers (unlike research time which varies linearly with the number of scientists). Here is an approximate formula:
build time = base time * 0.5 * (1 + (OptimalEngineers / ActualEngineers) ^ (0.06 * OptimalEngineers))
where OptimalEngineers is the default or recommended number of engineers needed to achieve the listed base time specified in the item / project tables. ActualEngineers is the number of available engineers.
When ActualEngineers = OptimalEngineers, the build time is equal to the base time. Unlike research time, where the rule of thumb is that for double the number of scientists the research time is halved, there is no such rule of thumb that works for build times, due to the exponential relationship. For example, developing a Foundry project that has OptimalEngineers=60 (e.g. Ammo Conservation), with only half the engineers on hand, will take roughly 7 times longer than the base time to complete . On the other hand, developing a project that has OptimalEngineers=30 (e.g. Improved Arc Thrower), with half the engineers on hand, will take roughly twice as long as the base time.
Here are a few more observations about the formula. As long as the the number of available engineers is much lower than the recommended value, recruiting an additional engineer will significantly reduce the completion time. As the number of engineers approaches or exceeds the recommended number, then adding additional engineers has diminishing returns, i.e. each new engineer reduces build time by a smaller and smaller amount. Also, based on the formula, all build times are limited to 0.5*base time, when building at a normal speed, and 0.25*base time when building quickly.
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