[2020] Mechanoids: High Risk, No reward

So there's some missing information and zombie memes polluting this discussion, figured I'd try to shed some light.

It had nothing to do with mech assemblers. This was just one of those notions that someone invented that spreads like a meme, but it has no actual source. Mech assemblers were solved just by limiting them, we would never do something ridiculous like completely rebalance an entire enemy type for a problem that could be solved so much more narrowly.

It was related to the general problem of large late-game mechanoid threats almost entirely obviating the need for players to have any economy at all, with the added problem that harder difficulty settings were in many ways easier because you got more resource deliveries from bigger raids. Economy was completely broken, and difficulties were inverted.

We added resource rewards from the raids. They're assigned to one of the mechs (more if necessary). They'll drop piles of plasteel or components. Is this not being noticed? Is it bugged and not working? I'd love to know.

This applies to human raids as well. Critically, these drops are difficulty-independent, which solves the difficulty inversion problem.

What you're really seeing is just normal-difficulty drops being given for giant high-difficulty raids (often provoked by mods or mod-inflated wealth levels). So it feels weird to fight so hard for so little. But this is what high difficulty means.

Play it as you want of course. But the game makes more sense when you actually need to have an economy to gain wealth, instead of just sitting there running a raid meat grinding operation. Generally we want to design the game so that the different aspects of play actually matter consistently instead of just becoming meaningless.

Clusters generally have a big building in the middle with some loot in it (EMI dynamo or whatever), so they're supposed to handle that role. In principle. I've no doubt there is room for improvement in terms of the tuning.

There will always be excessive wealth in late-game at a certain point, that's just the nature of how capital works. We can't involuntarily trash peoples' wealth. The game will always break down past a certain point. I have solutions to this but they're kind of involved (and in consideration).

This was more about alleviating the problem to some degree, not solving it entirely. E.g. You might have tons of flake, but converting that to other usable materials may be tricky. Versus getting massive straight deliveries of plasteel and steel and components - hyper-practical resources.