According to the lore, Dust is a near magical substance everyone wants. It can do amazing things and make people superhuman. Yet it is also used as a currency... In the game, as the game advance we end up swimming in it despite it being something rare and valuable, something that is also used for many other purposes like consuming it. The game treat it as printable money, something we can never run out of. But according to the lore, it should be a finite or difficult to replicate resource everyone should be fighting over rather than something you pile up for trading. Doesn't help we have a market always ready to buy whatever we sell, giving us free Dust for stuff we have way too much of and nobody actually buy. In the original ES game Heroes were big users of Dust, but in the sequel it's part of the lore but not the gameplay. Shouldn't Dust something we want to keep rather than trade carelessly like we currently do in the game?

I've been playing on low resources recently and let me tell you, even in the last turns of the game I rarely had more than a few thousand. I don't have that feeling of abundance like I used to during Early Access but I also get your point too.

For me, the low resources/anomalies setting solves it to a certain extent.

Inflation also means you need more and more dust to accomplish the same thing as the game goes on - another reason the numbers get so big so quickly.

You have all this Dust because you are an emperor. Probably the normal people just use another currency, like the Lumeris who use the sakans.

But the marketplace merchants and the Academy Heroes are pretty loaded with it for sure.

Makes me wonder who owns the marketplace, he or she can be as powerful as the Academy owner.

twimpix wrote:

I've been playing on low resources recently and let me tell you, even in the last turns of the game I rarely had more than a few thousand. I don't have that feeling of abundance like I used to during Early Access but I also get your point too.

For me, the low resources/anomalies setting solves it to a certain extent.

Still, as the game is, so long as you have something to sell to the market, it's fairly easy to amass large amount of it. I think the main problem is the way the market is made; it is always willing to buy even if what you sell is not in demand by anyone. Another problem is we lack sink for strategics and luxuries when we are not building anything that needs it.

I think strategics are in a fairly good place right now, especially with the mid-tier building requirements. I usually have enough things to spend them on for a large portion of the game, but eventually they will just become dust waiting to happen when I sell them on the marketplace. But the pacing for me, so far, has been fine. However, with luxuries, unless I am using them for a system development, they are almost always just sent to the marketplace for dustification. Occasionally I will use them for encouraging pop growth, but unless I'm Horatio (and mostly even still),  it never digs too far into my luxury resource coffers.