I assume, as has been alluded to by devs, that the economic system is getting a bit of an overhaul in Beta 4. Even so, I just want to make sure the problem I'm about to describe is getting addressed in some form.

I played a Large-Random game with some (4) AIs recently. I wanted to test how well I could do in a large (4 star) environment with very few opponents. I found myself a few hours later with hundreds of thousands of credits, having taken my home system early (destroyed the AI already in it) and two other full solar systems.

Metal production was at about 7.5 per second. I had over 50 creds a second coming in. All resource upgrades were researched. Hell, the entire RESEARCH TREE was researched.

But crystal stayed at one to two points per second. Even with god-knows-how-many planets. Even with all the crystal mining upgrades. Even with a ton of ice planets. It increased a total of one point from the base game. And while that may add up to a ton, metal increased even more and is just as valuable on the black market. So..what's going on?

Now, I realize crystal is the "rare" resource in SoaSE. It seems to be meant to limit advanced ship production. YOU REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS/ADDITIONAL PYLONS. But the thing is - the only ship you can make without a lot of it is Cobalts. It doesn't limit advanced ship production, because everything from a LRM frigate to a Hoshiko robotics cruiser is counted as "advanced". So why not stick with the basics?

I'm not sure if you guys would remember this, but there was a Star Trek RTS called Armada II. It's relatively new compared to a lot of classic RTS games but everyone would see it as really old now. Anyway, in the start there was a very SoaSE-style dynamic. When playing the Federation, there was a scout ship (forget it's name, doesn't matter anyway) and the Defiant. The Defiant was the early attack fleet ship you'd build at the start to secure planets and stuff.

Well, what happened a lot of the time was that players would build fifty Defiants and go rush with them. It wasn't a good kind of rush - it was the kind of rush that you didn't want to go up against with any advanced sort of ship, you'd just want to counter it with more Defiants if you were playing mirrored. Well, rushes are common in a lot of RTSs, and they're not always bad. But due to how slow and expensively SoaSE moves in research, the Cobalt is not only a rush king but a cheap unit that's superior to the other units throughout a lot of the game. Why? Research helps (better lasers, shields, armor), but the real limiter seems to be our old friend crystal.

Not only does this encourage players to build up huge armies of cheap, crystal-lacking Cobalts (and therefore limiting fleet diversity to 'cap ship, cobalt x40) it serves as an annoyance. Sure, I can buy a bunch of crystal off the black market, but when you have three solar systems to defend, you need a lot of it, and so you end up clicking Diplomacy every thirty seconds to refill your crystal, run out of credits (2000 a pop!), then thirty seconds later refill it again.

So here's my point.

The fact is - crystal, as it stands, as a resource, seems to be a little broken. Unlike MySQL, vector graphics, and Oprah, crystal does not scale well. Regardless of the various oddities in my style of play that game, it could be seen as an exaggeration of a normal game that pointed out some flaws that are less obvious in a smaller game.

I'd like to hear if anyone else has opinions on this subject.