Given that I primarily play 4-player co-op, that does skew things a bit for my perception. But, I play a healthy amount of solo, too. In 4-player, you almost
never have enough resources to do everything that you want, even though there are more resource spots on every planet, because you just can't take as many planets per player as in solo. So that then makes it so that all of the territory concerns are hugely different there -- you have to figure out how to maximize the territory that you have, which is where MkIII reactors come in, and where the higher-Mk command stations as well. In solo, those things are less of a concern, but by the same token the total number of ships you have in solo is lower, so it is more difficult to muster really large attack forces.
In many cases, I find that I simply
cannot take another planet while also defending myself with the resources I have in 4-player (depending on the map), which leads to interesting quandaries past a certain point in those games. Last week I took one new planet, which had an ARS on it, and lost all six of my other planets (and my teammates also lost two of their planets) in the process. We recaptured those planets (I had already previously lost my home anyway), but that was the cost of diverting forces to a raid two hops away, where they needed to be committed despite the wave of 1,600 mkII ships that then decided to be incoming just as soon as I got there.
Anyway, my point with that is that there are a variety of playstyles, which affects how people look at the various resources, and additionally with different numbers of players that can also have some effect. Even the ships you are using can make a big difference -- if you're playing with Zenith Bombards and aren't being super careful to keep those alive, your energy and metal and crystal are going to be really hurting most of the campaign.
My takeaway so far is that most people seem pretty happy with the resource balance as it currently is, although there are a variety of different playstyles that can cause wildly different opinions on specifics. It seems like the majority are not finding metal and crystal to be in too great of abundance, though, so I'm reluctant to do any reductions or anything. IKP, if you want more of a challenge, you can always give yourself a negative handicap to keep the resources lower to match your playstyle and provide a challenge more tuned for your specific needs. The best part? Negative resource handicaps give you a score multiplier in the adjusted score that shows on the high scores list (not the "raw" score shown ingame).
Also also (a complete aside): some of your other concerns about score are probably mitigated with the adjusted score on the high scoreboards list, as that's very differently calculated than the raw score in the game itself. Frugality with units really goes a long way there, as KTL ratio is a heavy component of that weight.
Back to the subject at hand: I guess this comes down to some beliefs about game design. I'll give two examples (excuse the length of this, but I'm making a point).
First, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. In that game, there are really two games (at least). First, there is the game for "normal mortals" who are nonetheless pretty good at Mario. Blocks are a certain way so that you can play off your historic Mario knowledge, secrets are designed to be searched out and found in a certain way, everything is tuned to a certain progressive difficulty for those folks (which includes me). Then there is the
other game, which I have never played, but which you can see in their "Super skills" videos. The levels are all laid out in a way that the people with insane skills can complete the levels at breakneck speed -- for one example, there is one castle in world 7 where there is a row of coins that is totally pointless for normal players, but which if you hit a P block way back further in the level, and then run at that insane speed all the way to those coins, you can slide along them as brick blocks and leap off on the far side right before they come back to coins and dump you in the lava.
Second, there is Left 4 Dead 2. There are a whole lot of things I could discuss about that are relevant here, but I'll stick to two points. First, on normal difficulty (which is where I play with my wife), there is a lot of room for error and just "having a good time." You can lose, and we sometimes do, but you also don't have to be pitch-perfect with every aspect of the game. Even the Witches, one of the most feared enemies in that game, aren't all that bad (still terrifying, but not instant death, which is very different). There are at least two different games there, with the same levels. But, even on just normal difficulty level, there are a variety of different sub-games based on what weapons you play with. I tend to favor certain automatics, a few melee weapons, and stuff like the grenade launcher. Given that I never play with shotguns, that means that a whole avenue of tactics is pretty much not at my disposal. The grenade launcher is a discipline in itself, though -- my wife hates it, but is great with the SMG, which I can't stand.
What's my point? Well, my point is that any game has more components than any one player will ever use. Some of the coins in Mario games are pointless except to the very best players. Depending on the weapons player prefer in L4D2, some parts of the game are very difficult or trivially easy. Depending on the difficulty you play on with L4D2, you can treat it as just a fun diversion, or as a highly tactical simulation of a zombie invasion. What is "right" is whatever the given player wants to do -- these are games, after all.
Circling back around to AI War, if someone plays a strategy where metal and crystal are never a concern, to me that says there are other huge concerns that they have. In other words, you are probably doing much more tactical management than I do -- I don't have time to manage most battles, because I tend to do multiple things at once, and so I take more losses. Some players feel like scouting is completely useless, others feel like its the backbone of the game (I'm in the second camp). And of course opinions vary wildly on the various ships themselves. So my point is that it's not a major concern to me if metal and crystal are not always a forefront concern in some playstyles. I'm very careful to always curtail anything that is exploitative, but that's not the vibe I'm getting here -- what you've said is that it makes metal and crystal not a focus, but shifts the focus elsewhere. Grenade launcher versus SMG is what I hear, and that's A-OK with me. The only time I have a problem is when the grenade launcher is so powerful that people are a fool to use anything else (even if using the launcher is really difficult or something, that's still not good).
This has been a very interesting discussion, but my conclusion thus far is that I-KP has found a new way to play that is interesting, which is very different from what most people do, and which has different meta-rules for how to succeed. I always love it when people bend the games in ways like that, particularly when it's not an exploit I have to nerf.
Variety is good!
