When you leave a floor, you keep some assets but lose others. In a sense, the permanent assets are strategic (acquiring them counts toward the game as a whole), while the lost assets are tactical (they apply only to surviving the floor you're currently on). Here's the rundown:



Strategic Assets:

• Industry, Research, Food (resources)
• Equipped Items
• Heroes and their levels
• Module blueprints and upgrade levels
  
  

Tactical Assets

• Dust (gets reset to ~20 at beginning of each floor)
• Unequipped items
• Constructed Modules
  
  

The challenge is to survive each floor while maximizing your strategic assets.



Given this, it seems reasonable that anything in the game could have both a tactical price (dust) and a resource price (industry, etc.). For whatever reason, though, things seem to cost only one or the other, and the distinction seems arbitrary.



Items

For example, equipment costs only dust. If you can keep the merchant alive until you're ready to leave a floor, it doesn't matter how high the price is; you're done with the floor, so you're trying to turn dust into anything you can take with you. Even if an item's effect is worthless, if it costs 40 dust, then you can turn it into two lit rooms as soon as you find the merchant on the next floor. Adding a small industry/science/food price to items would reduce or eliminate this pawn shop mentality.



Modules

As another example, modules cost only Industry. Assuming you enter each floor with 50+ industry, you can buy the optimal setup for any room immediately, as long as it will protect enough generators long enough that you'll make a good profit. The tactical decision is easy, since it's usually obvious what setup would be optimal. The strategic decision is also easy; an experienced player will know enough to multiply increased income by remaining doors to find how much the investment will pay.



Imagine, though, that generators and towers could have their damage and income upgraded for a combination of industry and dust. Say you find dust and a major module slot behind door number ten on a floor with thirty doors. This would create a legitimate strategic choice: Do you light the room and try to defend a non-upgraded generator, or do you upgrade the generator in a room where you already built? Suppose you decide to invest the dust in defense rather than generators. This creates a tactical choice: Do you light a room to eliminate it as a wave spawn point, or do you upgrade towers?



There are balance issues, but I think those can be resolved. In the modules example, the dust price and % increase in strength would have to be tweaked until the choices I mentioned were legitimate choices-- at door ten, sometimes you light the room, other times you upgrade modules.



I'm curious to know other people's thoughts on this. Does it make sense that mixed costs could add depth to the game? Are there other examples of things that could (should?) have mixed costs?

I think this is a great idea, I did find that "exploit" if it can be called such, as to where you can shut down rooms to get that 30 dust item, equip it, and bail the level, I wasn't too sure if I felt comfortable doing it like that.

As you said, the dust income and costs would definitely need to be altered, but I do believe this would add another layer of strategy that would not be going too far from DoTE's current tower defense system but enhancing it, and at the same time not truly adding anything new to the table.



+1

About spending dust in the merchant at the end of the level, I don't think this is an exploit. It's a valid game mechanic, and the game is very hard. Keeping the merchant alive adds to the difficulty. Then there's the random goods. The merchant may simply not have anything worth taking. So it's already something which happens what, 10% of the time? 20% at most.



Dust is already the most important resource in the game, since without it, you have too many unlit rooms, then insurmountable waves of monsters come, then it's game over. Research, on the other hand, is underused. Using research to upgrade major/minor modules is a better call IMO, since it puts it into a more prominent role.



Giving dust more uses just makes it more important. It is already the primary goal for survival. Having alternatives would be good to give the game more strategic choices, and there still isn't a solution to the 'get dust or be trumped' issue.