Poll: Big Items For 8.0

[TechSY730]

I don't think that crystal is an uninteresting resource. Starcraft has a similar resource mechanic with its minerals and gas, which are essentially identical and yet have a huge impact on strategy. You have some units which are cheap and only cost a small amount of minerals and some higher level units which cost more minerals and some gas and the really big things which cost a lot of minerals and a lot of gas. I don't see why AI War can't do something similar. In fact, earlier, I saw a suggestion to make crystal far rarer but make it only required for the really big stuff like Golems, Spirecraft and some starships. That way, you could survive without crystal but to fully augment your fleet with the big firepower you would need to get some, which would add another element to the tactical decision of what planets to take.

True. That would be a viable way to balance it. However, this sort of balancing has been done in...well...almost every RTS around that has multiple mined/collected resource types. Maybe that's why this sort of idea failed to gain traction, this sort of "hacking resource" felt a bit new and original compared to the now "classic" way of dealing with this issue.

That said, I still think this sort of idea is a better approach than "gutting" a whole central piller to the game that has been around since, well, before launch IIRC, and replacing it with a somewhat esoteric, used to be optional "side-activity", for which a "resource pool" seems like an odd thing to give an explicit value to the player as a central "thing to manage". But I seem to be out-voted in this case. *shrug*

[Coppermantis]

Yeah, hacking is definitely an interesting twist that stands out as a mechanic, but that's no reason that crystal has to be given the boot entirely. To be fair, though, rebalancing things with a reworked crystal would take a lot of work and may not be worth it.

[Tridus]

I don't think that crystal is an uninteresting resource. Starcraft has a similar resource mechanic with its minerals and gas, which are essentially identical and yet have a huge impact on strategy. You have some units which are cheap and only cost a small amount of minerals and some higher level units which cost more minerals and some gas and the really big things which cost a lot of minerals and a lot of gas. I don't see why AI War can't do something similar. In fact, earlier, I saw a suggestion to make crystal far rarer but make it only required for the really big stuff like Golems, Spirecraft and some starships. That way, you could survive without crystal but to fully augment your fleet with the big firepower you would need to get some, which would add another element to the tactical decision of what planets to take.

Starcraft has three major differences:

1. It's not practical to just wait to get more, if it's coming in slowly.

2. There's no convenient auto-conversion between the two resources.

3. There isn't already a valuable resource that's needed to get your higher tier units. (Gas does that.)

Crystal in AI War right now as it stands is really just metal, only with a different colored number. Doing something like making it rare but only required for certain units leads to difficulties in a game with so many options. Lets say we do as suggested here: if I don't turn on Golems or Spirecraft, do I really care about crystal? If there is ever going to be enough on the map to make Superweapons viable without taking 50 planets, than either there's going to be enought o make cheaper Starship construction easy, or you're going to have to seed more or less selectively as you turn superweapons on/off.

It's not doing anything distinct, whereas metal, knowledge, and hacking are.

edit - Starcraft also doesn't have randomly generated maps with random amounts of resources. Resources are given out in a predefined, always balanced way between the players such that you know how much is available at your starting base and first expansion. After that it's up to how many bases you get and how much you spend, but the two games are very different.

[TechSY730]

And finally, in Starcraft (and most other PvP RTSs), since you are fighting using the same "economy rules", that gives a strong incentive to not just "wait for more" as if you do, that greatly increases the chance your opponent used it more efficiently and thus has an army at a time you don't, thus, you will lose.

In this game, the opponent does not use the same economic model. Also, the game has been deliberately designed to let the players have the most say on the "pace" of the game, which if they choose to exercise this properly, basically means they can get a situation where they can usually afford to just "wait for more". (Yes, this breaks down somewhat starting at about difficulty 9, but those aren't really the balance points. )
These factors contribute to the idea of balancing a resource that is infinite but "slower to get" a "suspect" thing to try in this sort of model, as the restrictions aimed for probably won't do their "jobs" in this sort of model.

[The Hunter]

Maybe instead of 'superweapons only' we could go 'MK4-MK5 only' or something like that, would make more sense. And if getting rid of it maybe it still could be left accessible as an additional option for people who like it.

Edit:

Back to hacking talk, what about ability to hack Dire lairs to legimately get random controllable dire guardian(at the cost of massive AI response ofcourse). 
And hacking H/K Lair on AI homeworld to get H/K.  >D

[Tridus]

Back to hacking talk, what about ability to hack Dire lairs to legimately get random controllable dire guardian(at the cost of massive AI response ofcourse). 
And hacking H/K Lair on AI homeworld to get H/K.  >D

Hey, why not hack in and place an order to the other galaxy for an exo on an AI held system while we're at it.

[The Hunter]

Back to hacking talk, what about ability to hack Dire lairs to legimately get random controllable dire guardian(at the cost of massive AI response ofcourse). 
And hacking H/K Lair on AI homeworld to get H/K.  >D

Hey, why not hack in and place an order to the other galaxy for an exo on an AI held system while we're at it.

YES, also alternate winning condition: hack the AI homeworld station, taking control of every unit/building/etc of that AI in the galaxy.

[Tridus]

Maybe instead of 'superweapons only' we could go 'MK4-MK5 only' or something like that, would make more sense. And if getting rid of it maybe it still could be left accessible as an additional option for people who like it.

I don't really see that happening. Keeping it in means crystal prices have to remain on everything in the game (and be added for new things going forward), crystal node spawning has to stay in, harvesters have to stay in... essentially changes to things are going to have to be done twice.

Keeping around a system like this that just isn't relevant anymore winds up creating bloat.

[keith.lamothe]

Also, what does crystal have to do with hacking?  Surely it's not just competition for screen real estate - I see plenty of room in the bar at the top of my screen, even on my little laptop.

It is a real estate thing.  Minimum supported width is 1024, which the current top bar comes about 20px (guesstimate) from filling currently.  I can't put another indicator in 20px

I mean, sure, we don't _have_ to do anything different with Crystal.  But when one of the top-line resources isn't pulling its weight that's definitely where I look when I'm trying to improve the game.  We discussed a few ways of simply modifying crystal and they really were not well received.  Then hacking was proposed as a totally different thing to replace it, and that's gotten a lot of support.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I personally want crystal killed off. In my latest games, crystal only mattered at the beginning of the game. As you go along, it starts to become less important that a planet has crystal and just that it has a lot of resources on it. I see no compelling reason to keep the resource in the game. Not unless we did some major changes to the economy (again) and really, we've tried to make crystal work so many times now that I would much rather Arcen worked on more interesting mechanics such as hacking.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, crystal could be made important/interesting, but basically it would involve gating a lot of stuff you already have access to behind the new crystal.  Fine with me, not fine with a lot of you.  So we do something else.  The hacking changes do impact existing choices to some extent (k-hacking, ship-design-hacking, superterminal hacking) but I've tried to keep the numbers mostly similar on those.  If anything it's just going to make the game easier because you get to "spend" AIP twice in some sense. 

Any outbreaks of easiness will be squashed by appropriate defense mechanisms.

[Aklyon]

Any outbreaks of easiness will be squashed by appropriate defense mechanisms.

Considering theres also a new Atlus game coming this month, I wouldn't be surprised.

[Draco18s]

Yea, crystal could be made important/interesting, but basically it would involve gating a lot of stuff you already have access to behind the new crystal.  Fine with me, not fine with a lot of you.

Reminds me of how I did this little procedurally generated RTS flash game....I haven't touched in 18 months.

I kind of kept the metal/crystal disparity, but mine was Iron/Gold (gold being referred to as "trace minerals," gold being a resource that is used heavily in computer chips).  Iron was the defacto "everything needs iron" resource and was 10 times as plentiful.  Add more armor to a unit, needs more metal.  Gold was a rarer resource that mattered for things like rate of fire or number of shots per salvo (essentially being a resource that represented the unit's on board computers).

There was also a limit on the resources available on the map.  And dead units were resource nodes (you could reharvest a blown up unit for 75% of its build cost).

I also had a third resource, which I called crystal.  Crystal functioned as the unit cap mechanic.  Each ship needed exactly one (and was always reharvested), turrets were built off hubs (hub used 1 crystal and supported eight 0-crystal turrets).  Crystals were the "power source" for space travel and the main resource over which players would be contesting, and which would cause the back-and-forth fighting (assault the other guy's base, you leave a bunch of dead units over there, he harvest them and turns them into units which he leaves dead on your doorstep, repeat).

It'd be pretty cool if I would actually finish that game. X3

Anyway, just another perspective on metal/crystal.

[Aklyon]

Was that the one with the asteroids, draco? I might remember that a bit.

[Draco18s]

Was that the one with the asteroids, draco? I might remember that a bit.

Yep.

(Making the asteroids was both a grueling and fun experience!)