I really enjoy this game, but the dust mechanic causes friction to me as a player. I've avoided using the dust exploit, so the changes they've made haven't affected how I play the game. All the other systems and resources make sense, but the dust mechanic perplexes me. My problem is; I'm never sure when I'll get more. Sometimes, I get some for entering a room, other times not. Sometimes enemies will drop some, other times not. I'll be 2 dust short of powering another (vital) room and I have no idea when that might happen. This usually means that I avoid using merchants, as I have no way of knowing if, when or how that lost dust might be recovered.



My suggestions;



1) I think that the crystal should have health, like all the other modules, taking damage rather than draining dust reserves. That way a 'close call' is actually recoverable.



2) Buying and selling from merchants should allow the use of food and industry as currency, in addition to dust. With appropriate conversion rates, obviously. I feel more choice here, would open more strategies.



3) The penalty applied for having multiple modules, should only apply to that type of module. (If I have 1 industry module (base cost 10), the 2nd costs 3 more industry. But the 1st food module built should still cost 10 and not have the penalty applied. The the 2nd food module would then cost 3 more.

Great suggestions

For what it is worth, I quite like the tradeoff between health and currency for dust. One feature I find remarkable about the alpha is its replayability, even with only three levels. I think a key contributor to this is the absolute nature of decisions you make. For instance, the merchants in dungeons I run tend to have a fairly high mortality rate and so I can only really expect to buy and sell within one or two turns of meeting them. The fact that dust will affect the number of rooms that can have enemies spawn, as well as act as my health, makes me very hesitant to 'stock up'. As a result, I'd be hesitant to adjust the idea of dust as health.



That said, the idea of exchange is an interesting one. However, I would be inclined to make the exchange rates as punitive as they are for selling items (it seems to be roughly a third, if that, for items found in the Dungeon). I think it suits the context as dust is a tremendously scarce resource and so, as a consequence, should require a significant windfall to part with it. One challenge is that I tend to notice I have a fairly high stockpile of food and industry by the 3rd level, and so I think the exchange would need to be weighted based on previous trades (by analogy: imagine we could only barter. If we had engaged in some kind of trade where I had already given you 10 apples in exchange for, say, a radio, you would probably be hesitant to accept any more apples for our next trade).



Of course, the elements I find appealing are the very ones that you find frustrating, and so this may simply remain a difference of opinion. But based on the first part of your post, could you really say that dust is behaving all that differently from the other resource? Granted, there's no autonomous resource generation (which is fair. More dust -> more powered rooms -> fewer waves -> less fun), but otherwise bonus food or industry is an unexpected event.

I disagree with your first suggestion, If you do that, the crystal will loose a lot of its importance. When my crystal is attacked, I feel that like a disaster, with a life bar, you loose this feeling.



For the second one, I'm not sure. actually I agree that I don't want to spend my precious dust at the merchant but in level three, in this state of the game, food become almost useless (all heroes being at level 5) so there will be no challenge to stuff heroes if you can sell your food. By the way, this uselessness of the food will be a problem when the game get more levels I think.

So I'm not trully satisfied with the dust mechanic too but I just find great that we have difficult choices to make and the dust management permit that.



However, I totally agree with your third suggestion. The global penalty for the modules make no sense. That is so obvious to me that I didn't notice that before I read you... ^^.



Edit : Oops, in fact I almost agree with all the systemchalk post. He was just faster than me ^^.

I really like the way the dust is keyed into your ability to power rooms AND buy equipment. Theres a constant pull from all of your needs to have to make really important decisions upon how you use your precious dust. I was under the impression that dust comes from battle with the enemy. When walking through rooms, you sometimes pick up small quantities of it, because enemy were slain there and the dust is their charred remains. I didn't think this trickle source was simply random for running through rooms.



It's very powerful to have to power down rooms to be able to light up alternate paths as you explore and open up defendable but lucrative routes - all the time searching for the exit. It's makes for a very decision intensive, exploratory probe through the various paths to your goal. This isn't lighting up the whole dungeon and reaping the rewards, this is surgically picking your way through and altering the routes you create by opening that door and seeing what torment or pleasure lies beyond.

I find myself in the predicament of agreeing with everything systemchalk has said. But as always, I must remind people who are playing the game that science is not in - and other features - so it contributes to why we have such a stockpile of food and industry when we reach the end of level 3.

Ok but science don't impact the dust and its importance with the crystal. ^^

Zorzomezz wrote:
I really enjoy this game, but the dust mechanic causes friction to me as a player. I've avoided using the dust exploit, so the changes they've made haven't affected how I play the game. All the other systems and resources make sense, but the dust mechanic perplexes me. My problem is; I'm never sure when I'll get more. Sometimes, I get some for entering a room, other times not. Sometimes enemies will drop some, other times not. I'll be 2 dust short of powering another (vital) room and I have no idea when that might happen. This usually means that I avoid using merchants, as I have no way of knowing if, when or how that lost dust might be recovered. (emphasis mine)

I think the current way that Dust works now does well for how the resource might look like at the end of the development cycle: it creates a lot of tension. So feeling like you're never sure when you'll get more and never knowing if you're risking more than you know is good; that's the point of the mechanic as far as I see it. It makes the resource a little more unique from Industry and Food; you can't obtain Dust in the same fashion as you do those two and the emphasis on their function is quite different: Dust is the foundation beneath both the others, so naturally it becomes more important than the other two. Later, Dust is also going to be used for (likely powerful) hero skills which will add another dimension to the resource on top of powering rooms and buying items for your heroes (though it seems likely that merchants will come to exchange for the other resources; think this is good, provided it costs a bit more perhaps).



Obviously then, an important aspect of the game will be in how you manage Dust and difficulty will rise or fall accordingly (at least in the current iteration of the game; I think that later it might have less of an effect when other events hit the game, ie. fires needing to be extinguished, etc.) The exploit allows the player to negate a large portion of the difficulty (and perhaps some bad decision-making) by providing an easy way to get Dust, which is otherwise a somewhat rare resource, for little risk involved (set up a nice chokepoint, put all your heroes/defences there, spawn a bunch of waves, profit). The fix addresses this issue somewhat in making the run for the exit more risky if you do this (which you haven't, props to you), but I would prefer to see the option gone completely for a couple of reasons.



For one, it breaks immersion; why do monsters just stop coming once you've removed the crystal from its socket and then put it back? Did they suddenly just lose interest? I'm aware that games don't always need to make sense, but I don't see why they shouldn't try their best to do so. To this end, it makes more sense that the monsters would continue to make a mad dash for the crystal once unsocketed for whatever their reason (if there is one) to destroy it regardless of who or what gets in their way, with more and more fervor the longer it remains that way unless the survivors (your party) get off that floor. On account of this, from a gameplay perspective, it makes the run for the exit that much more intense and thrilling; though currently, due to the fix, it takes a little bit for the waves to get running -- by the time they do I'm already at the exit in most scenarios. Think the previous mechanic was better in this regard.



Secondly, it removes this method as an easy way to get Dust while making things less complicated from dev's point of view; they only have think about a working mechanic for the crystal run instead of one for the crystal run and stopping people from sitting and farming all day using the waves it spawns. There is already a risk/reward mechanic in place if you want to try and get more Dust in the form of intentionally leaving rooms unpowered. The player could choose to power every room that she is able to, but she could decide not to: this would create the chance that a monster wave might spawn in that room, but it could provide the player a chance to gain some more Dust from waves that might not have spawned otherwise (ie. when opening a door, there is no room unlit or unoccupied by a controlled hero, therefore no chance of wave spawn). Essentially this is what people are doing with the crystal exploit, though the waves are unlimited (therefore the gain unlimited), whereas the intentional-unpowered-room strategy does have a limited number of tries in the form of the number of rooms you have left to explore. Since Dust isn't meant to be a resource necessarily easy to gain and the game is trying to be fairly simple, I suggest this mechanic (leaving rooms unpowered) satisfies both of these things well while the current fix only does so at a mediocre level.

I agree with #3. It seems the whole point of module cost increase should be to keep you from going all-out on that particular type of resource.



That said, if the intent is to limit players from growing significant reserves of any resource, then I guess it works as intended.

I sign myself under the ideas #2 and #3, I've proposed them too in different thread (by the way, maybe it'd be good to limit the number of those feedback threads?).



Nevertheless, can't support the first proposal. It would broke the "lore" behind it, with Dust being a source of "electricity" here. In your scenario the monster can dwindle your provisions of food and industry (by wrecking the modules, gens, injuring heroes), but they would be unable to affect the Dust - thats imba. Secondly, the current solution brings more to the atmosphere of danger and peril, as any mishap can waste your game. Besides, its really rare for the monsters to gather at your crystal. Either its a thing of really bad luck (nothin to do about it anyway), a general break of your defenses (this way the game is probably lost anyway, sooner or later) or because of some wrong planning by the player, i.e. his fault. Yeah, they can be attacked by the crystal monsters, but again, if we'd allowed them to sneak past your defenses, its again... our fault.



This kind of deserved punishment I can accept ^^

Anosognos wrote:
I agree with #3. It seems the whole point of module cost increase should be to keep you from going all-out on that particular type of resource.



That said, if the intent is to limit players from growing significant reserves of any resource, then I guess it works as intended.

I like #3 too. As for #1 and #2, I like the current crystal health system especially for the tension element and against #2, its kind of the same thought.