Hoes does Revenge of the Titans money flow work?

Question

Recently i picked up Revenge of the Titans again. I noticed a lot has changed, upgrades no longer cost money, and half the game mechanics seem to have changed with it.

What i never quite could grasp in RotT was the money flow. I've been experimenting a bit with income, and it doesn't make sense at all. Building more refineries sometimes yield less income, taking the refineries tech path doesn't help a lot either. Sometimes i spawn tons of turrets, it feels like a bad attempt, and i end with tons of money. Next i build more efficient for my feel, and i end up with less money :(

Some things i noticed so far are:

• There is a max of 4 refineries per crystal.
• Losing/damage to buildings is fatal for money.
• Replaying missions gives a huge randomness in remaining money.

I'm at loss for the money remaining at end of mission formula, as well as half the strategy guides i find are for old versions of the game. What would really help me too would be a lite of suggested amount of money win/loss per mission. I noticed that some missions let you gain 1k mineral easily, while others can only be solved with a negative total.

Answer

The money that you carry forward to the next mission is simply any unspent money at the end of the previous mission, plus the sell value of all buildings that you still have alive. I can't remember exactly, but I think the resell value of a building is either 10% or 25% of it's original value.

I believe the game also increases the difficulty if you have lots of cash, and reduces it if you're running very short. So don't worry too much about losing some cash over a specific level - the game should help correct for it.

With than it mind, I'd put forward the following advice:

• Losing buildings is very bad - not only to you lose their resell value, you often have to pay to replace them.

• Building too many buildings is bad - because you get less money back than if you'd just left it unspent.

• Selling buildings so you can spend more cash is bad - you're basically spending the resell value of the first building and devaluing it further by exchanging it for the (reduced) resell value of the replacements.

• Don't always saturate crystals with refineries - 4 × $250 refineries for a single $1000 crystal is a waste, in the end you only really get the resell value of the buildings back .
  I try to spend half roughly half the crystal value on refineries, so 2 for a $1000 crystal, 4 for a $2000 crystal and whatever makes sense for groups of near-by crystals (remember that a refinery can only work on one crystal at a time, but if the one it's working on is finished and another is in range it will start work on the second).
  Only use the booster buildings (Reprocessor / Collector) where you have big groups of refineries, they rarely make you more cash in the long run.

• Barricades are a permanent cost - they can't be sold, so no resell value at the end of a level. By this same token, don't be afraid to lose them, it's much cheaper than losing a turret!

And finally, remember that you don't need to sell buildings manually, you automatically get the resell value of everything still alive at the end of a level.

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