Hey Nat, right back at you
The interest rate at 2% is as high as I'm willing to go, any higher and the game becomes too easy at the end. As it is now, the player needs to take part in some defending of sectors to get money, and that's the way I like it.
When I did the new global economy I played with the idea of having the tax money deposited directly into the bank account but decided against it. Since you pointed it out I have now added a dialog option, similar to the auto-payout which does just that. Now the player has 3 options of how to deal with the tax income.
The base mechanic idea is a good one, but my limited time forces me to put it in the "might do" pile. I think it would require adding some new unique weapons, like mp5, SVD and shottie, but if I find the time I'll try to implement it for a release later down the road.
The release that was promised this weekend has been postponed 'til next weekend. I just migrated to Win7 x64 and need this weekend for some more testing. So far I only found a minor issue with the patch, the msvcr71.dll needs to be in the installation folder when the PatchMe.bat is run. I've added a link for it in the Unofficial Patch thread's OP.
From reading all the issues with Vista/Win7 in this and other forums I expected a lot of issues and instability with a 64 bit system. I'm glad to report that I haven't encountered any major problems so far. The game is very stable on my system, no weird CTD's or anything. I'll test it more thoroughly this weekend to see if any other problems occur, but so far I've played many hours and haven't had any CTD's so far. Keeping my fingers crossed
The only compatibility issue I've had was with the compiler for the source code, it had problems with the 64 bit system. It required a compatibility test to run smoothly again and it was no biggie. I must say that so far Win 7 has far exceeded my expectations and the backward compatibility functions are just awesome.