Rant on mineral costs of boosts.
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I love the concept of using boosts for economic purposes. But they're just too expensive. Prohibitively so. You can use them for things that pop occasionally, like mineral deposits themselves, with their 50K cooldown. But in common use, even a small operation will outstrip your ability to mine the base minerals, or convert other resources to them..
Combat is so rare, that you can stockpile boosts for that. But most people don't even bother with that. They never even get to the point of developing effective manufacturing and boost code since it's just easier to respawn or just quit. And there is no incentive to use boosts for the economy. (outside of mineral mining, and the niche of Power Banks with only one access point.)
My rant comes with a suggestion:
Reduce the cost of boosts for T1 and T2 by 66% and 33% respectively. Keep everything else the same, but require only 10 T1 boosts per body part, and 20 T2 boosts per body part. Why should a +100% carry boost cost the exact same amount of Keanium as a +300% carry boost? How does that provide an incentive to learn about boosts and write boost code?
There are 4 essential "costs" in game, and they overlap with each other in many ways (You can sell minerals/energy for credits and use the credits to buy minerals/energy.) The 4 are: Energy, Minerals, Lab reaction time, and Spawn time. The challenge is to balance these. By artificially inflating the cost of low level elements (T1,T2 boosts in this case, but it applies to PC powers as well.) you severely curtail their ability to be used in situations where they're less than economical in their full form, or that full form is simply not an option.
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Are you complaining about how there is a "market failure" within the T1/T2 boosts, where there are few listed orders, consequently the prices aren't very competitive?
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@wtfrank No, I wasn't even going there. But I could if you want, but for completely different reasons.
No, I was railing against the basic "All the cost up front, all the benefit at the back end" design philosophy. It's like an omlete recipe that allows you to make a 1, 2, or 3 egg omelet, but the difference is you use small, medium or large eggs... all the omelets use 30 eggs. (To be fair, it's hard to come up with a good metaphor for this.)
You could argue (And I'm sure you want to.) that the incremental list of minerals to make the tiers of boosts are the extra cost, but I would counter that that's a mechanic to exponentially increase the return / cost relationship for the higher tiers, not to establish the base cost of the boosts. The 'steps' between the benefit levels (typically a linear scale, like 100%, 200%, 300% 400% for non boosted, T1, T2, T3) is too steep at the beginning.
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The "low tier boosts are under used" argument has been brought up a few times. The answer so far has been "but we still see them being used". That is pretty hard to counter since we don't have the numbers, But screeps plus is big enough ags might be able to chip in whether this is true or not. I think Tigga is often cited that the lower tiers are useful as is, (imagine tiggers armed with three times as much tier 1 boosts).
However, I've never heard the lower the compound cost for lower tiers argument. I think this deserves more investigation. Possibly go so far as introduce per compound cost. Then the devs could selectively make some under used boosts cheaper to use without disrupting the whole.
Either way I think it would be wise to let factories land and settle before we advocate tweaking anything that might affect the mineral market.
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@smokeman said in Rant on mineral costs of boosts.:
No, I wasn't even going there. But I could if you want, but for completely different reasons.
OK well the reason I was asked was because of this:
Why should a +100% carry boost cost the exact same amount of Keanium as a +300% carry boost? How does that provide an incentive to learn about boosts and write boost code?
So I don't understand what the issue is with the cost in Keanium. To get the +300% carry boost you have to add 3 more minerals and perform 3 more compounding steps, with much longer cooldowns (since the change a year ago). So I don't understand the issue you're raising as it's much easier, faster and less complicated to make the T1 boost than it is to make the T2 or T3 boosts. I don't think it's a useful way to measure the boost in "number of Keaniums per tier".
Is the issue you're saying that you feel like the return on the boost at tier 1 is nothing?