Always against you, when it comes to your rush-by-fleet-buyout tactics I could see in your videos!!!

:P

Well how else you want to fight jadonyx cravers next door?! :-D It's not like I have a choice... -.- and for that particular strategy the 5K planet buyout AND pretty much the faction choice is fairly irrelevant tbh, but yeah I can see how market prices might affect it... oh well. It certainly reveals the issues that only have been in the game since release till this DLC.

So do we settle for half prices on lumeris planets then? :-D We need a Lumeris specific buff. I always liked how I could just quickly pick out a good resource planet regardless of distance and turn it into an income in the outpost state, bonus points if it was in another constellation so I never sent food.
That seemed like a fun gameplay. Now it's just fancy way of generating 1 dust per resource a turn which would with a +10 node pay for itself in about 25 turns. =D

I also didn't quite like this change and expressed concerns about it during the beta. 

The main reasoning for it, quoting The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales "this decision was made because the "just sell luxuries to make insane amounts of Dust" strategy devalued all Dust improvements and allowed Warmongers to finance massive fleets without having to produce Dust in a more traditional manner, circumventing inflation (or even benefitting from the inflation caused by the Dust-focused empires as it would increase the sell price of the luxuries.)".

My problems with that change are following:

1.Buyout strategy (or rather maintain ecomomy through trade playstyle) is completely gone now;

2.Luxuries which already had very limited uses in the game became even more irrelevant (esp for factions like UC);

3.Previously i believe that having/not having access to some luxuries could change your gameplan drastically and impelled diplomacy/trade/war interactions and now they are all just out there on the market and just for 1 dust.

But i'm afraid koxsos we're in the minority, cuz it looks like a lot of people were glad that change was finally made and i can see it their way.

And one more thing about my 3rd point is that same also can be said about strategic resources what makes them a lil bit less "strategic". U got some dust? Just get on the market what you need for that Wonder Victory *laughs in shadows*.

BadBecauseMad wrote:

The main reasoning for it, quoting The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales "this decision was made because the "just sell luxuries to make insane amounts of Dust" strategy devalued all Dust improvements

I also expressed misgivings, for most of what you said, but this part is wrong. Dust is pretty weak as a resource - that's what makes dust improvements weak. Inflation slowly makes dust even weaker. You used to be able to  amass dust by selling luxuries to the market in huge volumes (which made resource generating buildings better dust buildings than dedicated dust buildings, as they actually kept pace with inflation!). Now you can't do that. That makes raw dust slightly more valuable (because you can buy more useful resources from the market at their minimum price), but overall just crushes any interest in making dust at all, in any way, beyond covering basic costs.

koxsos wrote:

which in turn cripples the ONLY truly dust reliant faction, dem fishy Lumeris bois, who need to pay 40k to expand on this planet in the endgame. (but yes, in turn if they were to invade it, gain ownership in X turns and then refund it for dust, gain would be nice, but still not very helpful)

It badly hurts them. I think their planet expansion costs grow less with inflation, though. I'll give them a play through and see how I find them after the changes. 

Lumeris were very, very strong - possibly the strongest faction, due to how quickly though could assimilate minor factions.  A nerf isn't entirely unwarranted. I'm mostly just sad that dust economies are so wretched, especially compared to EL (where it was actually quite strong). The market changes damage 'luxury economies', but don't really affect 'dust economies'. 

IceGremlin wrote:

The thing about the Market minimums is:

A- They let you ignore Inflation, which is bad.

&

B- They let you ignore Inflation, which is good.

The whole problem at hand is in order for inflation to matter and work as intended, the Market minimums had to go- but Inflation is a bad mechanic that punishes Dust production, so making it work as intended is also terrible. The only reason the Market was so strong was because Inflation otherwise cripples everyone for trying to turn a profit.

This was something that came up before, that the Market minimums are an exploit, but also the only way to bypass a bad mechanic.

What we need is for inflation to either go away entirely, or be reworked to not be a direct function of all Dust production everywhere ever. 

Unfortunately, they took the opposite route, and bolted on actual mechanics with Lumeris and inflation. I guess some devs must really like the inflation mechanic and just decided to double down on it.

End results so far: I still don't make dust directly, but now I ignore excess (most) resources, too!

While we're talking about markets:

Inflation Manipulation and Flipping Ships: 21 Billion dust by turn 72 normal speed with Umbral Choir

Summary:

1. Sell a bunch of expensive carriers for dust as your starting seed. Make the carriers as bad as possible by equipping them with expensive and useless gear so they will sell for a lot and the AI won't buy them from the market.
2. Drop the inflation to x0.25 by getting a massive negative income from Behemoth C3 Center spam to increase your upkeep. [Each Behemoth C3 Center doubles the upkeep of a Behemoth up to a 100k/behemoth cap]
3. Buy your carriers back from the market and spam dust upgrades on your Trade Headquarters for pennies due to the x0.25 inflation
4. Scrap some Behemoth C3 Centers. This along with your heavily boosted Trade Headquarters will give yourself a massive income and spike up the inflation rate. [I reached x1384 inflation]
5. Sell your ships for $$$

I don't believe this sort of gameplay is intended, but manipulating inflation is both possible and highly lucrative.

Actually after playing couple of games i have to admit it's not that bad at all and selling luxuries feels a lot more sensible now rather than being completely broken. My initial impressions were based on memories of how much gold you could get early game from luxuries and playing abundant resources galaxies. So i'm convinced minimal market value change is for good.