"You have not succeeded in dealing with the alien invasion..."

[Sarariman]

So I'm playing TFTD and doing very nicely. Absolutely every alien craft gets shot down or captured. At month end, it says the committee is very pleased with my excellent progress. The next paragraph says I haven't succeeded in dealing with the alien invasion, and that XCOM has been terminated.

 

My monthly rating is 8,781, which it says is EXCELLENT! The funding change is +1,350,000. Why am I getting this message?

[Jman4117]

Is your cash balance running in the negative? I think you lose if you are either 1 or 2 million in the hole for 2 months in a row

[Sarariman]

By George, you've got it!

 

I had $2 million at the end of the month, which I thought a healthy balance, but I think salary costs are deducted once a year at this time, whereas I previously assumed they were monthly.

 

Usually, I never, ever sell Zrbite, but I had to do it to avoid extinction.

[Bomb Bloke]

If you haven't done so already, now might be the time to put any spare Engineers you have into slave labour and get them making some stuff for pure profit. You can see a chart here detailing the cost vs reward of each item, though beware of spoilers - it lists every item you can ever produce.

 

To sum the chart up, the only items really worth making are Gauss Cannons, but there are a few other projects that can be used if you don't have access to those yet.

[Sarariman]

I've heard this one before. I don't do it because I feel it's against the spirit of the game, but I'll try it if selling Zrbite isn't enough. I've never been that desperate in the past.

[NKF]

I find gathering zrbite in TFTD much harder than collecting elerium in UFO, I don't recommend selling it. Best kept to be converted in to Ion Armor, sonic oscillators and sonic pistol ammo.

 

To cut your costs down, don't expand your bases too fast at the start, and try to keep your tech staff numbers down as they are a major money drain at the start. 100 scientists chews up 3 million a month for example, and that's just their pay and not counting the maintenance on the various facilities they need.

 

What about your sonic weapon stocks? Sell all the cannons except the ones you are planning to use. Even the ammo, unless you're having trouble collecting them. Don't sell sonic pistol and blasta rifle ammo as they become harder to come by as the game progresses.

 

- NKF

[Gimli]

I find gathering zrbite in TFTD much harder than collecting elerium in UFO, I don't recommend selling it. Best kept to be converted in to Ion Armor, sonic oscillators and sonic pistol ammo.

 

Very interesting, because in the last two playthroughs I had the exact opposite impression. Heck, I even had to transfer some Zrbite to another base because I had something like 500 of it. And I don't think I made it to July that time.

But hey, the tradeoff was that I was unable to get a mission with dead Deep Ones. I had caught a live one thinking I would always be able to get a dead one later, as they're easier to kill than, y'know, not to kill. Guess what, I was wrong.

[sluissa]

While I've not played as much TFTD as UFO, and I've not built any of the higher end subs in TFTD, I've never had a huge problem with elerium/zrbite in either game. Granted, I'm very frugal with it because of the rumors. I tend to only have a few of the researched craft with with human craft staying as a workhorse. I also rarely if ever manufacture clips or power sources. I just use what I scavenge and usually have more than enough. Power and Flying armor(forgot the TFTD names) are the only real major elerium/zrbite costs I deal with.

[Zombie]

For me, there is an initial drain on Zrbite for better armor, but most of it is stockpiled to fuel the hybrid craft. Yeah, the hybrid craft cost a lot to build, but in the long run they pay for themselves - assuming you have a good team of soldiers to lead missions to get more Zrbite. Don't think I ever ran into shortages of it though.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

Due to the randomness of this game, the phrase "your mileage will vary" is very appropriate.

 

My experience with low Zrbite is usually during the early to mid stages of the game, where you have few bases and coverage is low. You may find that you are attending mainly to terror sites and most of the submarines you do manage to shoot down will have their IBA's blown to bits. And a lot of the interior too for that matter. That's probably because they seem to have more IBA units in the subs than there were power units in UFO's.

 

It picks up eventually and you do start amassing a reasonable stockpile if you are frugal and sensible with its use. It's not so bad when you've adapted to playing comfortably with low-tech solutions like Plastic Aqua Armor for defence and investing what zrbite you do capture into sonic oscillators.

 

- NKF