what is the goal of the crystal changes?

[LordSloth]

I think shifting the majority of the resource cost of starships and most importantly Zenith Trader constructions to crystal would be a huge benefit. Here's how I envision it:

First, early starships often tank economies, but are extremely helpful in dealing with Thief/Spireling type AIs. The ability to get just enough Heavy Bomber Starships (tract plats) or Plasma Siege Starships (grav drains) would be fantastic. Starships should be priced (reduced overall metal) so you can afford the initial outlay from your starting home command income, but if you wanted a full set you'd have to wait just as long as you already do. You should also be able to easily afford mk3 fleetships from your home command stations, but it would cause a mild crystal drain, making it compete for resources with starships, as it currently does so with the metal/crystal overlap anyways. It currently isn't unaffordable to unlock mk3s from the start of a game and build them (and I do so occasionally), but throwing starships in the mix is (although people do patiently build -everything- on the higher difficulties I hear), at least if you're looking to start claiming systems and increasing AIP after the first wave hits.

While the Zenith Trader is a popular and mostly fun feature in co-op games (hello one-shot raid engine, superfortress, black hole generator, super fortified human whipping boy), the simple fact is that the prohibitive resource costs often detract from teamplay, in my opinion, as players will run their economy to the bone. Offload a large portion of the cost to crystal, and you could merely hobble the player's eco, rather than cripple them outright. They'd have to be extremely conservative with their existing starships, but they could now afford to replace their low mark fleetships, rebuild the occasional turret at a slow pace (say, 75% of their metal eco taken up by zenith construction, rather than 300%), and repair their starships if they carefully shepherd them along. As it is, certain special projects effectively take a team member out of the equation for their duration. Instead, they'd be mostly locked out of replacing/rebuilding other more advanced tools. Your average non-"sixteen homeworld, fallen spire, 60 hour" game superforts lock the player out of any action as it is. For your sixteen homeworld player, I'd suggest raising the cap on things like superfortresses, while maintaining the overall firepower, since they'd possibly be more common, with the expectation that the typical one-worlder might get just one powerful but weaker superfort, but your Cinths would still get their incredibly deadly and expensive chokes (but then, with that many homeworlds and city hubs, I'm sure they can afford it).

This also might end up as an indirect nerf to Raid Starships, even if you end up buffing them to better handle guard posts. There are players in co-op who love to do everything with Raid Starships, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might force them to more aggresively distract fleetships with fighters and whatnot. Getting them back alive would be more important.  They might benefit from a bit of a buff depending on player feedback once they become harder to replace - I haven't had the co-op chance to see how my usual raid-heavy teammates react to the new guard posts yet, so I can't draw any conclusions.

I imagine asteroids wouldn't require crystal to construct, but there might be something interesting you can do by giving them prohibitive crystal -repair- costs on medium difficulty. Medium difficulty is the least popular co-op spirecraft asteroid difficulty among my group and dramatically reduces the variety of spirecraft people actually use to stuff that never sees close combat unless it is a suicide-type.

I do expect golem reconstruction to consume all my resources, and I don't object to that remaining true. They'd still be worth getting in most circumstances and careful engineer allocation can be used to effectively tweak resource consumption. They don't interfere too much with co-op as is, the rebuilding player simply sets production to a level where they can do some low level actions like contribute to threat cleanup, turret reconstruction, etc. If the team as a whole decides they need the golem, they can pitch in to get it done quicker, and the golem rewards them with a visible effect on progress towards objectives. The zenith toys, on the other hand, don't give as much feedback as in... "I've got a horde of zombies." "These eyes and superforts are no more". Zenith Toys are relatively passive things, in regards to actually achieving the official game objectives.

I'm imagining crystal actually speeding up the co-op game, rather than slowing it down. It should bottleneck production of prohibitively expensive things like obscene costs do now, but it wouldn't take a teammate completely out of the fight during a megaproject, effectively losing a co-op player to the constraints of their playstyle. In a singleplayer game, this isn't a big deal, the game continues at the player's pace. In a co-op game, these idling players actively cost the other players in the homeworld multipliers. I am envisioning a smoother melding of the different player-styles.

So, a question: if crystal cost did affect starship cost, how aggressively should it scale upward? If producing mk1s is reasonable on a single homeworld, would the quadruple cost of a mkIV be crippling? Any SP problems would be dramatically multiplied in Co-op, as equitable territory expansion is already quite expensive in AIP, limited sources of crystal would make acquiring sufficent sources a nightmare.

On the other hand, if the crystal cost didn't scale up 1:1 with mark level in order to facilitate production, but rather say maxing out at double the crystal cost for a mk IV, you'd have to balance around not spamming them. Of course, their current role has been aimed more at a "support" rather than "fleetship replacement" and I haven't gotten enough time with them to give worthwhile feedback - simply saying it would be a concern to look at my imagining of the system.

[Diazo]

Hmm.

I'm starting to see a large overlap with Spirecraft here. You need to capture a system with the resource to use the ship.

Now, crystal as being talked about is an ongoing thing and spirecraft consume the asteroid used to build them, but they are starting to seem quite similar to me.

Does that invalidate the idea? No. But maybe tweaking spirecraft might be the way to get what is being talked about here.

D.

[Cinth]

Lordsloth.. just a point about the z trader stuff.. even though I usually have an economy that will support the building of those toys, often I find that a specific world wont hold a choke long enough that I want to build supers.  Early I build the mass drivers since they are comparitively cheaper and faster to build.  Even when I do find a planet I want to place a long term choke on it doesn't get a super just because.  There is still a heavy time investment for them. If I still have things to do with the fleet, ill build one while I am out and about, it still gets on/off as resources are needed for other stuff.

[_K_]

...

Zenith trader megaprojects are noobtraps. Unless you have the massive economy to support their construction.
Dont walk into the noobtrap. Here is a quick and simple solution. No need to fix it by modifying the game around it.

Your suggestion is basically to make crystals into some some sort of luxury resource, so that people can cripple their economy by some megaproject without actually crippling it. Why not just... not cripple it in first place?

And it's not like it would work anyway. The problem lies in resource conversion and the way resources are consumed.
If your megaproject drains your crystals badly, then it will also be draining your metal due to conversion. If you turn conversion off, your "regular" fleet-ship production will stall the moment a unit with nonzero crystal value gets in the queue.

So yeah, use megaprojects as a dump for resources when you are about to reach 999 999's. Not as something you seriously intend to waste yur time on.

[Hearteater]

ZPG, Radar Jammer II, Inhibitor, Booster, BHM, OMD, Counter Spy and Super Fort are all legitimate projects.  I built a ZPG and Counter Spy off one home world and my economy wasn't particularly slowed.  Only the Ion Cannons (specifically IV+) are traps.  The Ion III is not unreasonable to build.

[LordSloth]

We're talking six to eight player games, with people (who when I'm lucky) haven't played the game in months if not major releases. When I'm not lucky, they haven't played the tutorial. I'm not complaining at all about their SP implementation, though I certainly wouldn't mind seeing ion cannons MKV brought into the real of almost plausible. How do the resource points scale again?

[chemical_art]

Hmm.

I'm starting to see a large overlap with Spirecraft here. You need to capture a system with the resource to use the ship.

Now, crystal as being talked about is an ongoing thing and spirecraft consume the asteroid used to build them, but they are starting to seem quite similar to me.

Does that invalidate the idea? No. But maybe tweaking spirecraft might be the way to get what is being talked about here.

D.

The idea, I think is that while spirecraft are on-shot craft, the crystal units will have a smaller impact (whether it be via smaller caps, etc) and be continuous. 

So, for example, you could have crystal have a weaker lightning warhead that costs a lot of crystal but no AIP...but you only get a very few. You could then every half hour or so slug a warhead to help break a siege...but due to caps, you can't play facebook till you have enough to pop an AI HW.

[contingencyplan]

First, I would suggest that we (i.e., Keith ) post a poll addressing the question of combining Metal and Crystal, regardless of what is done to replace Crystal, as the two questions are largely independent (they could always add another resource and keep M+C for instance). If we're generally in favor / nobody thinks of some way that it completely breaks the game, I'd say pull the trigger and do it, before we figure out what to do with Crystal --- that way, we can playtest that change without confusing balancing discussion with a new / modified mechanic. [1]

Personally, I'm very much in favor of combining; pending further analysis, I'd say that the cost differences don't really impact gameplay that much. It's not just a weak mechanic; IMHO, it's a very artificial split (that has led to bugs with the most recent patch, though fixing those should be the end of that). The only thing I would note is that the resource cap should be raised if they are combined to minimize the "feast or famine" problem documented elsewhere.



Second, I think that the economy is reasonably good and straightforward to balance as it is (ZTrader and all), especially if the resources are combined. I really don't think that crystal should remain a component of the main economy --- if M+C are combined, none / as few as possible of the current ships should cost Crystal, as there's already enough checks and limits placed on them (Knowledge, Power, and ship cap) for a fairly rich set of strategic choices.

We shouldn't figure out what to do with Crystal or how to force it into the economy --- that's approaching the problem backwards. Instead, I'd propose that we figure out what additional mechanics we'd like to have, and figure out a way to bring Crystal to them. By making Crystal a completely separate economy system from Metal, we have more room to try some guano-loco ideas without impacting those who want to keep playing a regular game. [2]

This could even cut some Gordian Knots between play styles. For example, let's take my long-winded beef with destructible capturables [3]: try having a unit similar to the Harvester Exo-Shield (does anybody even use these?) that shields a capturable unit, making it invulnerable. A number of balancing ideas have been posited (e.g., Keith's "blood in the water" and "loss of structure for a time") that could be incorporated. Additionally a Knowledge cost could be imposed; I'll come back to this in a second.

Another suggestion that has been mentioned a while back (that I'm fond of as well) is a modular command station. This could be a way to do something similar, without interfering with the established CS mechanics --- just build a separate modular building that's separate from modular fortresses, less powerful, much more common, and potentially maintains scouting and supply.

The biggest hurdle that I see is in the implementation --- artwork and mechanics and the like. These sorts of changes may not be reasonably doable. [4]

The next hurdle is balancing. I'd say, at the least, that every "experimental" unit should require a fairly significant Knowledge cost (they're experimental after all), to offset the benefits involved and preserve the strategic tradeoffs involved --- probably about 6k apiece, if not more.

The other point of balancing is how the resource is collected. If the crystal units can be destroyed, I'd argue that the resource should be a collectable, similar to Metal (though that gets back to the "destructible vs. indestructible debate). On the other hand, if the units are "once built, they're yours forever," then I'd suggest a mechanic similar to Knowledge (instead of destructible capturable): each planet has a certain amount that can be mined (or possibly a Spire city-style "control point"-based like Hearteater proposed, though the former would allow for better flexibility).

Some other COMPLETELY spitballed ideas:

• A building that disables all wormholes for 60 seconds on death / death of the CS.
• A hacking ship that rolls back the AI hacking response (or even AIP?) --- essentially behaves the same as the knowledge hacker, except upon completion drops the response back a level from what it was at the start.
• A building that can reallocate champion points.
• If we really want to try something crazy, an AI unlocked ship hacker --- similar to the ARS hacker, except it unlocks a ship that the AI already has unlocked.

Obviously, these are extreme ideas (and ice-cube's chance of any of these actually working), but why not? Instead of trying to simultaneously drop Crystal and still find a place for it in the current economy, why not treat it as a blank slate?



[1]: I understand that having the blank space is annoying, but the devs could always put Toranth's avatar in its place as a "there but for the grace of God" reminder.

[2]: This is essentially making the Crystal units "uber-experimental." I know I saw somebody proposed a similar general idea, but heck if I can find it. Apologies --- I'd be happy to edit to give credit.

[3]: Here for those who want to read it. I'm still re-re-reading the responses; I'm not convinced yet, but I'm still thinking about it.

[4]: While I'm thinking about it / since I haven't seen anywhere else to request it: if / when this game reaches end-of-life, please seriously consider open-sourcing it.