Was working on some of the top items in
the mantis voting this last week and one of them stuck out at me as something we could do to use a new crystal mechanic. So I'm just tossing this out here to see what you think. If this one goes over like a ton of bricks (like my last something-different-we-could-do-with-crystal idea), that's totally fine with me, we'll just move on
Anyway:
Basically take the
"Military Builder" idea but go a bit more whole-hog:
1) Add a "Military Builder" unit that's similar to the Mobile Builder (edit: to be clear, this would not cost knowledge to unlock) but:
-- Is pretty durable, possibly even with cloaking.
-- Can function outside supply.
-- Has an additional build-menu tab for a new category of stuff.
2) That new category of stuff the Military Builder could build would include:
-- New versions of most (possibly all) the normal turret types that would be similar to the normal turrets except:
--- Have fairly low caps (say 10% of a normal turret cap), but those caps are per-planet like the miniforts'.
--- Can be built and can function outside supply.
--- Build pretty quickly.
--- Are unlocked along with their normal turret equivalent (so mkI laser turrets would have both the normal and the per-planet variety unlocked from the start, and researching the mkII version would give you the mkII of both, etc)
-- Similiarly done (per-planet-cap, outside-supply) new versions of the normal forcefield generators and possibly a few other things. Maybe even all-up forts, though I'm not so sure about that.
3) As discussed before, since m+c is functionally a single resource at this point (crystal as a distinct thing is not an
irrelevant mechanic, but it is definitely a
weak mechanic), just combine all previously existing forms of metal and crystal income and expenditure into just metal. But leave the concept of crystal in existence (at this point there'd be nothing in the game at all that would either give you crystal or cost crystal, however).
4) Similar to what I've discussed before, add new "crystal caches" (basically crystal-only distribution nodes that don't cost AIP) and "crystal mines" (take-and-hold ongoing-crystal-producers, either lost forever or lost for X hours if destroyed, kinda depends on what folks are willing to deal with) into the initial map seeding. Unlike my previous proposal I think it'd be better to not have any crystal income via the home command station (or any other command station) since we wouldn't be making crystal a requirement for any unit you can build in the current version.
5) Make all those new per-planet-cap + works-outside-supply toys cost crystal instead of metal. Probably also make them relatively energy-expensive to keep you from filling their caps on every single planet.
In short: this wouldn't take away anything you can do now, but it would give you some new toys to play with if you're willing to play this proposed "new crystal game" to pay for them. It even gives you a bit more cap you can throw onto your chokepoints, but it gives a much higher buff to other forms of defense. Which is good, because you'd need it to defend those mines if you weren't going to just get by on what the caches give.
The new crystal resource could also be used for some special expansion stuff or whatever later if it made sense.
So, thoughts? Feel free to just feed this idea into the chipper shredder if you like, but I figured it could be pretty cool
