I already worked up a Mantis report for this, so I'm not going to repeat what I typed there, just copy and paste:
Ores like Sapphire or Citrine or whatever, currently seem to be nowhere near as important as they should be; they're pretty much THE reason to go into caves most of the time (unless you're looking for survivors, which is the other good reason), but the vast majority of the time.... you simply dont need any more of them. Spells have very low costs in terms of how many of these stones they need, and a quick 5-10 minutes in any cave can give you so many of any one ore (sometimes more than one type!) that you cant possibly spend all of them in creating spells on that continent. Very often when I finish a continent, I'll have like, 50 extra of some of these stones, simply because there's no use for them.
This means that the player really only needs to enter caves during the earliest part of any given continent; they can just gather some ores while searching for survivors, and then there just isnt any real reason to go back into the caves after this; not even for things like granite or whatever, which can be found easier in places like the Lava Flats.
My idea was, that instead of doing something like increasing the ore cost of spells.... which would probably just annoy people.... make these more desirable by providing alternate crafting uses. You could, for example, craft Guardian Scrolls of various types: Spend, say, 30 Citrine, and you could craft a Moderate Wrath of Air. That number (or somewhere around there anyway) really wouldnt take that long to get at all (particularly if the player also does Boss Delve missions!), but would take some work, so it wouldnt reduce the usefulness of getting the same scrolls from missions.
Another very similar use might be to use these to UPGRADE scrolls you already have; this might provide another way to get major/potent scrolls, which currently are often very rare, and very hard to use, and very dependant on which buildings you happen to have.... there's so much luck involved with these that they just end up never being used (and honestly, I rarely even see them). So being able to stick, ah, I dont know, 40 ores onto some scroll or whatever, to advance it from Moderate to Major (or whatever), would not only give another use for the ores, but would offer other ways to get these scrolls. Choice of WHICH ones to upgrade would also make the "luck" bit of these higher scrolls a bit less of a problem, since the player could choose which scrolls to upgrade based on which buildings they have access to.
And a good thing about all this, is this mechanic would remain completely optional: At no point would the player HAVE to spend a bunch of time in caves getting ores. But it would make doing so a useful option.This is something I've been thinking about for awhile; I know that building stashes are an issue that's brought up alot, in terms of them not being very important right now, but I honestly feel that caves & gem rooms are currently even less important. You simply dont need very many ores at all, and they're SO easy to get. I always end up with TONS of them, and there's no use at all for them. And there's little other reason to venture into caves, so..... yeah.
That, and the difficulty of finding/using high level scrolls has always bothered me. I dont think I've used a major/potent even once yet!
Thought this might be a good idea in relation to both issues, figured I'd post it here, see if anyone has any thoughts on this.
Also, the mantis link:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=8648
