The Power of Metal/Crystal

Good post, more people need to know about this. If you're vasari you need to grab those neutral extractors and take advantage of your metal/crystal 2in1 research ASAP, playing against a TEC player going trade you won't be waiting long before the credits start to roll in from selling on the black market.

Some secrets are best left to be discovered by players on their own... personally I would prefer if the enemy didn't know that when he hit the buy crystal button he was giving me a 4.1 exchange rate on all my crystal. The more people spamming trade centers and buying resources, the more money I make. If they start getting matter processors instead my income is going to go down...

Its one of those things that will work good for the few, but if the whole does it dies out. Like going to to best buy early to beat the rush when a new game comes out. If only a few people do it it'll work out for them, if everyone does it its just going to be the same as if they went at any other time. If only a few people are waiting for someone to buy metal/crystal, it'll work out. If everyone in the game is sitting around waiting to see who has to buy resources first, then everyones just going to go on sitting.

The thing is, in most games the resource vasari have "extra" of is metal...Vasari is usually buying crystal. I don't know about you, but as TEC I buy more crystal than metal (by far) as well.

So good luck with that .

I always use the blackmarket with in like 2 or 3 mins of playing the game.

That's COMPLETELY situational. It's pure random luck if more Volcanic Planets or neutral Metal Extractors happen to spawn than Ice Planets and Crystal neutral rocks. Otherwise, Vasari have the same technology for both kinds of Extractor, can capture just about all the neutral rocks thanks to the Jikara, and get refineries earlier. This is no way more favoring metal than crystal.

TEC technically would be buying more crystal since their crystal techs are seperate and more expensive, they're not experts with neutral extractors, and their refineries come a tier later. So Vasari just sells crystal instead. Problem solved.

90%+ of games I play as vasari, the resource I am strained for is crystal. I don't know about you but I seem to find many more metal neutral extractors than crystal, although that could be untrue and I just "perceive" it that way since I am strapped for crystal.

Also keep in mind, your starting planet has 2 metal Extractors, 1 crystal.

Lets assume you have your home world, an astroid, and an ice planet. You now have 3 metal extractors and 5 crystal extractors. I think every planet has the same per second income per extractor which is .54 or so. So your metal income is around 1.62 and your crystal income is at 2.7. Now add 20% to those numbers because the first 2 resource rate techs for Vasari are reasonably easy to get, so your at:

Metal: 1.944(probably rounds down, so lets say 1.9)
Crystal: 3.24

So your crystal income in this situation is considerably higher than metal, and then matter processors come in. I can't remembe if these numbers would be effected by fleetcap, but it doesn't really matter. I'm just trying to show that it is far from rare that your crystal income will be more than that of your metal income. I mean, how rare are ice planets?

The problem I always have with vasari, at least on random maps, is that neutral extractors are almost always metal. They give a lot of metal too, so I don't know if I have the illusion of having not enough crystal or I just get a ton of metal it makes my crystal income look like crap. On top of that I always get metal planets and all my allies get crystal lol.

Maybe it's just me, but as TEC I'm always buying tons of metal and crystal, so even if the vasari player is short on crystal you can still make money from the metal.

So does this mean a good counter-LRM spam strategy would be to start the game, buy 300 crystal, turn around and offer that crystal for 12 per and effectively delay tec for minutes because he cant get enough crystal?

Yes this is better than the 3:1 sell price, but you're still wrong. Even when you do this you get less than you did in 1.02.

In 1.02 crystal cost would often be 800-1200, sometimes even higher, in a typically 4-6 player game.

In 1.03, it rarely goes above 550. 800 at most.

You can't set the price above what it would normally cost to buy it, because really... when you go to buy a Hamburger and Jacky's Burger's has it for 2 dollars and Billy's Burger's has it for 1 dollar, why would you buy the more expensive one? So no, you couldn't set the price of crystal to 12, because then what you'd have is someone always putting 100 crystal up for 100 credits each just to prevent anyone from ever using the blackmarket.

You can however lower your price, this is so you can compete with other players trying to sell their crystal(or metal) on the blackmarket by offering a lower price. As for your stratedgy there though, I don't think it would work very well. You'd be buying crystal for lets say... 3.4 each, and when you put it up for sale it'd still be 3.4. If you bought some crystal and then waited for the price to go up then maybe, but you'd only be getting around .2 credits worth of profit each, so you'd get 20 credits profit for every 100 bought, if anyone buys it.

Its more of, if someone is having to rely on the blackmarket for their metal/crystal income, you can sell yours for 2-3 times what it would sell for normally, and benefit from every purchase they make.

innociv -- I don't see how anyone is wrong. In 1.03 crystal/metal sells, if you just sell it immediantly, for .9 or 1.1 or something each. If you put it up and wait for other people to buy it, you can get 3.5, maybe even 4.5 or so each. So your getting 3-4 times what you would get if you went for immediate gradification. The original point being made was that if TEC only needed credits and then could buy their other resources, Vasari could do just as well for credits by benefiting from every batch of metal/crystal the TEC purchases. So bascially, they are giving you 400 credits or so for every 100 metal/crystal that you give them. So every thing equals out in the end.

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In 1.02 you could sell your crystal for 1k very often to other players, around 600-750 to the black market.

In 1.03 you can only sell it for around 400-500 to other players, sell it for 100-125 on the black market.

People aren't going to pay more for your crystal than they can buy it from on the black market.

Zukkus I'm afraid not. One thing you can try to do, at least in theory, is buy when the market crashes and sell when it booms. This strategy is also sadly flawed as in most games if the crystal market booms it probably won't ever crash. Same goes for metal. Additionally, I don't know about you, but I'd just end up spending all my metal and crystal myself without a concern for what the market's doing.

to crash a market you just need to sell loads of crystal when the price is high

Using the offer amount still gets you more credits than just hitting F5 or whatever you have it hotkeyed to(mine are f1 and f2) for selling. Maybe its not as big an increase as preivously, but its still more. Re-reading the original post, it makes no mention to a version number. The original post is just pointing out that if TEC requires only credits to fuel its economy, then the "weaker" Vasari player can benefit from the TEC players relience on the black market. I don't see what that has to do with versions or how big of an increase it is.

If you put up 200 crystal on the black market, and someone goes to buy crystal, they are buying your crystal. They don't get to choose not to, thats why it doesn't let you put the price really high. So no, they arn't going to pay more for my crystal than they would already, they are instead going to pay exactly the same as they already would, but I would get the credits instead of... wherever it is they go, the pirates.