Radio Relays; a good investment?

[Turniphead23]

Hi,

So on my last playthrough (failed due to avatar and no cores) I had 400 income per month which was not a lot and I found myself short of funds for GTS stuff and weapons; on a previous playthrough i had a lot, maybe too much and had 1300 a month. Maybe overkill, but it seems building more of them than just for intel pays off mid game as you are getting increased income for the whole run.

But on a lot of threads i've read that most players build them for intel and I wondered why,as you can receive greater income with more of them.

So whats the the deal with that?

TYVM

[wicked lester]

I may be mistaken due to mods currently in play, but I find that it takes way too long to get your money back on relays. I don't get them unless I need to save on intel or want the perk for finishing that region.

[Perplex]

Radio relays is important for contacting new regions unless you want to be totaly screwed. Radiorelays reduce contact cost to nearby regions.

They are good for income too but you wont get back the investment early enough. When you get the income from them you dont really need it. (you gain from 3-5 of them but after that you usualy get enough resoursces to be fine without more, when it comes to supplies that is but you still need them for intel savings)

EDIT: Also good for continental bonuses.

[Commander Gorda]

Its mostly used to reduce Intel cost to contact regions but increased supplies are nice aswell.

[Turniphead23]

Thanks for these answers. Very helpful

[Predator Goose]

Don't forget they're necessary for continent bonuses too. Really like Europe's instant grenade and ammo research.

[Aranador]

I basically try to have all the continent bonuses, which require a certain amount of radio towers, but arrange them in a way that I can cover as much contact reduction power as possible as I go.

[Fringehunter7719]

TLDR warning - skip to the end for the conclusions

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In order to activate all the continent bonuses offered to you, you have to build a total of 8 radio towers (1 in Europe, 1 in SA, 1 in Australasia, 2 in NA, 2 in Asia, 2 in Africa - 1 that you start with).

Each radio tower costs $25 more than the last ($50 more on legend), so this means that the minimum you spend if you want all the continent bonuses is $50 + $75 + $100 + $125 + $150 + $175 + $200 + $225 = $1100. If you build an extra tower you increase this by $250, two extra costs you $525 (on legend that's $50 + $100 + $150 + $200 + $250 + $300 + $350 + $400 = $1800 with a cost of $450 for one extra tower or $950 for two).

In terms of income, each tower gives a +50% modifier to the region in which it's placed (and reduces the intel cost of contacting adjacent regions to its standard value for the difficulty you are on, 40 intel for non-legend or 80 intel on legend. For every region remote from a tower the region you are contacting is the cost is multiplied: 40/80/120/160 or 80/160/240/320 on legend). Regions typically start the game offering between $50 and $100 every 3 weeks.

An early game spare radio relay on non-legend is probably going to endure for about 25-30 weeks before you end the game (arguably a bit less, since you'll have spare supplies up the wazoo towards the end anyway) or about 8 - 10 supply drops worth of +50% on that $50 to $100, or in other words something like $200 to $500. On legend it's probably more like 40 weeks (and again, this might be slightly generous as you will reach a point where supplies no longer matter before you win) which gives 13 supply drops or about $325 to $650.

So it can be worth building an extra relay if you have the cash, and there's a region that you wouldn't otherwise contact that offers an above average number of supplies per three weeks and you're still in the very early or early part of the campaign, but you also have to weigh up what you're not scanning in that time - construction boost at skirmisher HQ (or regular HQ in non WOTC) is often extremely valuable in getting tactically useful buildings up sooner as well as generating supplies/alloys/elerium at a faster rate, and needless to say you wouldn't want to be postponing scanning engineers/scientists if they pop up. Similarly if you would be devoting that time to contacting regions you would be boosting your income faster as well, so if you've got spare contact capacity and won't enable saving intel on contacting a new region (i.e. you're putting a 3rd radio relay in a continent, or a 2nd in Europe/SA/Australasia) then that's going to be the wrong decision too.

There are a couple of additional factors too - one is that successful retaliation missions award $3 per saved civilian on the income of the region they are saved in and some rumours or covert ops give similar small bonuses. This income will also get a 50% boost from a radio tower, so the regions you have at the start of the game, which often get multiple retaliations can end up being worth a fair bit more than they initially appear. That can change things.

Also, the calculation is clearly different on legend, where the extra scaling of radio relay costs makes the balance point a bit less favourable to building them.

There's also one subtlety in Asia - you can activate the continent bonus by having 3 regions all with a tower in instead of contacting all 4 regions and building 2 towers. If intel is in short supply this can be a better alternative if the map has decent routes into the adjoining continents.

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In conclusion, it's generally not worth building radio towers that aren't for the purpose of reducing intel costs. This is especially true on legend and from mid game onwards.

It is occasionally worth building one or two in early game if you happen to find yourself with spare supplies and nothing particularly useful to scan (including construction boost) for a period.

[krabdr]

Originally posted by Commander Gorda:

Its mostly used to reduce Intel cost to contact regions but increased supplies are nice aswell.

This and Fringehunter's analysis.

[Perplex]

Originally posted by Predator Goose:

Don't forget they're necessary for continent bonuses too. Really like Europe's instant grenade and ammo research.

The bonuses are random each time you start a new game. My current Europe for example have GTS traning, not granade or ammo research. etc etc. But then again none of my current continental bonuses are any good QQ.

[wicked lester]

Originally posted by Perplex:

Originally posted by Predator Goose:

Don't forget they're necessary for continent bonuses too. Really like Europe's instant grenade and ammo research.

The bonuses are random each time you start a new game. My current Europe for example have GTS traning, not granade or ammo research. etc etc. But then again none of my current continental bonuses are any good QQ.

My current game has a bonus of instant res contact which came in really handy when I lost a region. Half cost on GTS discovered on my last continent, not so much.