No it doesn't make Craver game play utterly useless, nothing in this proposal discourages Cravers from consuming worlds.



In fact in a really long game I can see a craver player abandoning old worlds, just hoping players will take them over and fix them so they can come back and ravish them anew.



That fits the whole idea of Cravers more than current game play where Cravers just stay on a world and don't move on.

GC13 wrote:
If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

The craver's gameplay is called "consume worlds", I.E. they consume worlds. If you were to make it so anyone could fix a decimated world, it would make this gameplay type utterly pointless.

Nycidian wrote:




[LIST=1]

Any race removing locust points will recieve a +.5 diplomatic bonus per locust point removed per turn, and a 5% trade bonus per locust point removed per turn. The diplomatic bonus will apply to all non-craver races they are currently in contact with.

[/LIST]

That sounds extremely overpowered.

GC13 wrote:
If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

Exactly what i wanted to say just couldn't find the right words, thank you.

TheFrozenOne wrote:
Cravers are meant to be a horrible blight on that galaxy as they devour worlds, leaving them stripped clean. This makes the Cravers much more detrimental, forcing other players to colonize "untainted" systems before them. If it were possible to "enrich" planets again, it would ruin this system. So it's going to be a no for me.

If the game was called Craver Space and the Cravers were an NPC faction all players had to deal with while fighting each other for supremacy then I would agree with you. However, the Cravers are just one (strong) faction out of many, who happen benefit from something penalizing them also penalizing their enemies.

I fully support this idea. Maybe a little tweak can be added: All non-cravers races get a researchable tech that unlocks an improvement. This improvement removes the collected locust points as proposed in the opening post. So you could decide to make use of over exploitation or to stop this in favor for the long run. I imagine this improvement as something that removes a planet anomaly. Maybe soil revivification could unlock this one.

Cravers are meant to be a horrible blight on that galaxy as they devour worlds, leaving them stripped clean. This makes the Cravers much more detrimental, forcing other players to colonize "untainted" systems before them. If it were possible to "enrich" planets again, it would ruin this system. So it's going to be a no for me.

With the exception of the sowers, I don't seee how any of the other factions can be said to 'enrich' the worlds they colonise. They all use the materials, minerals etc. of the planets they inhabit, just in a less intensive and more sustainable way than the cravers. If the cravers have sucked up all the readily accesible/most useful resources, I don't see how anyone but the sowers might go about putting them back again, as they need to to consume them just like the cravers do (just less intensively). Lore aside, I think it removes, or greatly reduces, the unique mechanic of the 'time bomb' that makes the cravers so menacing.

A depleted planet can't have been permanently scourged or you wouldn't get anything from those planets, a depleted planets resources are just much harder to access now that the easily accessed ones were stripped off by the Cravers. It makes sense that a normal race would slowly redress the ecological disaster the Cravers left behind and a race like the Sowers would do so much quicker.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I didn't think so. I still don't understand why terraforming doesn't work to do that, but sorry, I'm taking this off topic now...But, again, I do like your idea. It would be nice to actually start being able to fix up the planets that I (in my opinion) liberated from the Cravers.

Then why can't the craver's just terraform their planets to remove the locust points? As I said, they are supposed to be permanently draining these planets by stripping them of anything useful. You can't terraform a planet if there's nothing to terraform from, right?

Nycidian wrote:
Currently nothing in the game removes locust points as far as I am aware.

I didn't think so. I still don't understand why terraforming doesn't work to do that, but sorry, I'm taking this off topic now...But, again, I do like your idea. It would be nice to actually start being able to fix up the planets that I (in my opinion) liberated from the Cravers.

I think this removes the whole 'time-bomb' aspect of the cravers that makes them so unique and threatening to the galaxy. The whole point is that they are devouring the planets they live on, leaving only husks remaining. This doesn't mean that they are eating everything, so replanting or terraforming will make it fine (such as with a barren planet). Instead they are stripping every useful lifeform, mineral, and element from the planet, and leaving it WORSE than barren. I like that as the cravers expand the other factions are pressed to quickly retake the systems, or contain them collectively, as they really do leave the death of everything in their wake.

Currently nothing in the game removes locust points as far as I am aware.

I like the idea and your plan, but I have one question.



Wouldn't terraforming remove all locust points? Or, at least, shouldn't it? If I take over a Craver system and start the process or turning it into a Terran or Jungle or Ocean world, wouldn't it be implied that in that process resources are restored as the planet becomes something else? Or am I misunderstanding what these points are?