I've been thinking recently about changing the progression requirements from being depth related to requiring the collection of enough artifacts. I think this helps bring them more into the gameplay and gives them a direct value (right now it's pretty unclear that they award random amounts of money). And the story will be more cohesive since we will know that alien tech => bot upgrades which will fit in well with the storyline of corporate's govt contract and weapons deal etc.
This change of course will have ripple effects on balancing, both determining appropriate artifact costs per upgrade as well as artifact placement.
I think that this would increase their value greatly and I think it would be nice to adjust their placement so that some of them are perhaps surrounded by whatever the highest level rock is on that asteroid. This would force the player to make a conscious choice about digging like normal, or having to throw more bots at the tough rock to get to the artifact.
I've been thinking recently about changing the progression requirements from being depth related to requiring the collection of enough artifacts. I think this helps bring them more into the gameplay and gives them a direct value (right now it's pretty unclear that they award random amounts of money). And the story will be more cohesive since we will know that alien tech => bot upgrades which will fit in well with the storyline of corporate's govt contract and weapons deal etc.
This change of course will have ripple effects on balancing, both determining appropriate artifact costs per upgrade as well as artifact placement.
I think that this would increase their value greatly and I think it would be nice to adjust their placement so that some of them are perhaps surrounded by whatever the highest level rock is on that asteroid. This would force the player to make a conscious choice about digging like normal, or having to throw more bots at the tough rock to get to the artifact.