Ok so weve all heard this idea before, iv personally shot it down like 4 times myself, but I think that with a little organization this could work.

1: Put every artifact into a category. i.e. Probes:Cargo, Attack, Defense. Traps:Halc, Omi, Krionus, Hack. Somethings like Formers/buffers (AKA The main reason people stack AP) would not be available.

2: Assign every Category an AP range i.e Traps 1.5-2.5K AP 1.5 Omi, 2.5 Krionus

3: After choosing a certain Category, one can pay double the price for ANY ARTIFACT GAINED, with a 2-5Xs chance of getting an artifact from that category.

it would take some balancing, and formers/buffers would be out. But it could allow people to get the artifacts needed when needed in some cases.

With the current system, its almost impossible to prevent raiding. I am always drying up my APs with a small amount remaining. What can we do to even that out?

~Drake

For that I think just making the bottom 5% of your AP cap unraidable would work. Like for me it would be 28,000*.05= 1,400 AP. So in this case in terms of raiding 1,450 AP would be considered the same amount as 50 AP right now.

Id be good with any AP amount under a shipment-able amount. (which would be 250? The cost of a probe?)

its put a % on it so higher ranks dont suffer more from raiding, but I think this is a tad bit off topic.

Sorry Coth, ill go back and edit them all, saying bump coth bump! LoL
I just want planet fluxes and star chart purgers. Nothing else. Get me that.

how about this...

organize markets by category then assign a percentage to them...(it could even be done on a per artifact basis, although i would imagine knocking everything down to just two specific artifacts should increase the chance of obtaining well over 100%)

for example:

planetary expansion artifacts: terraforming device, quasi spacial expanders, etc ---- 160%
ship expansion artifacts: ship-bot, rescued prisoners, duternium brackets, xcharge cells ---- 120%
probes: flux,defense, cargo, etc... ---- 25%
planetary beneficials: relay tower, warp gate, processing core, blah blah blah...so on -----45%

then....allow the selection for groups, or individual artifacts if you want to go that rate, and take the average percent
after that is allowed, have the average taken and reduce the total net artifact income by that percentage, call it a market broker tax or whatever

ex:
player has 1000 artifact/hr production, then selects planetary expansion at 160% and ship expansion at 120%...average would then be 140% which would give the player an artifact point production of 0/hr.....therefore, balance is maintained and forcing players to choose at least one crap group, or group that has a million an one possibilities in it

ex2:
player has 1000 artifact/hr production, then selects planetary expansion and probes (160 and 25% respectively), this reduces the players production by 92.5% leaving 75 per hour....making something like a quasi expander taking 80 hours to wait for something like a 1 in 12 shot of getting, pretty balanced if you ask me...

also, we all know how runaway the credits are in the game with people having trillions and trillions of credits or more....so you could either add a scaled cost of using this function, say at rank 100 it would cost you 2million credits per use of artifact collection, or at rank 1000 it could be 2billion per use (not really sure on the amounts, but you get the idea..)

further, to prevent abuse by people just maxing out all their points and then using the "artifact broker", and further enforcing the "money sink" the game currently doesnt have, you could set a function that would zero out the current artifact points upon opting into the program and charge a credit per hour charge for building up, or even just a high flat rate....

finally, to scale it to level...you could possibly use the amount of planets scanned and occupied as a baseline, since it generally remains constant over development and only really increases when people get desperate for additional planets and start taking crappy ones, you could do something like [handicap+(((100%-handicap)/((planets occupied)/(planets scanned)))*playerlevel)]

ex.
a rank 125 player has 25 planets occupied and 100 planets scanned, selects planet expansion and probes giving a 92.5% handicap...we then subtract from 100% giving a baseline for scaling of 7.5%...then, on a side note, we divide the 25 planets occupied by the 100 planets scanned and come up with .25....moving back, we see that 7.5*.25 gives 1.875% and we multiply it by the players level divided by 100 leaving it the same....with the scaling done, we add that to the original percentage of 92.5 yielding a net artifact reduction of 94.375%

higher level ex.
a rank 400 player has 200 planets occupied and 400 planets scanned, selects the same set giving the same baseline handicap of 92.5%
we then repeat the scalling process....we start with the 7.5% for scaling again...this time we take it and multiply it by .50 to give 3.75% and when we divide the players level by 100 giving a multiplcation of 4 or...15.0% when added back into the original it reduces the total artifact production to 0 with a 107.5% reduction in artifact point production

this basically makes it so that when much much higher level players use the function they are forced to either select more groups or get nothing and also allows lower level and newer players use the function without much additional hindrance, maintaining their growth as it is right now

further, when dealing with players of higher levels who produce massive amounts of points per hour it scales it so that it takes more and more every 100 levels off of their production and when dealing with all players who by bad luck get crap planet selection to occupy from it calls for less of a reduction, giving those unfortunate players a little bit better of a chance getting something that they need to help them expand...

yes....i was this bored to think of something like this...

the only flat rate thing i used was percentages for groups (which i didnt put all that much thought into, i just made a seemingly appropriate number for the few that i put in the post) and the flate rate cost of opting into the function (this one i put zero thought into...i really didnt feel like developing a scaling function for it, although any exponential function would probably work, like f(x) = x^(4) or something with f(x) being cost and x being the player level...would make it at something like 1 credit and level 1, and something like 62.5 billion at level 400....and that would be just to get click on the function)

there was a slight flat rate used in the scalar function of the formula itself, but its part of a function that doesnt use a flat rate....it could be overcome, but the intent behind my idea was to completely eliminate the usage of it once you get that high.... at like lvl 600 if you select any of the higher level artifacts it basically always reduces your production to 0 making you unable to use the program

ya know...when i typed that response...there was another post after my first one....erm....i may be losing my mind

Yeah I typed it without really reading your first post. I think paying credits for artifacts should be impossible, since having credits depends more on your research and upkeep at the higher levels than it does on actual minerals. It would sort of shunt people into one of two paths; artifacts or research. Or just make everyone mine like crazy.

Paying AP for a specific artifact would be much less frustrating for higher levels, where most of what you get is worth scrapping and it is pretty easy to be desperate for an ancient crystal foci of all things. At lower levels, it would give people something to look forward to. It would have to be scaled by either a multiplication, logarithmic or exponential factor. Like 3x more expensive every 10 levels or something. That would eventually put things outside of capacity though. Permanent benefit artifacts should be almost as hard to get as they normally are and lose you a kajillion other artifacts in the process. I think that can't really happen with how high the limit goes. My limit is 47k and it fills up in 12 hours. 47k AP for a flux would be a bargain for me.

I have this idea of an "Archeology Sweep":
Can activate for 24 hours
Costs a boatload of credits to start
Costs a hourly artifact point upkeep
Gives an increase to the chance of rare artifacts when receiving artifact shipments during that time

Because your artifact points would come slower (or even in reverse if you aren't careful) your ability to gather artifacts during that time would be greatly reduced. The upfront credit cost prevents players from just turning it on without thinking it through. As it only activates for a day, a player would have to restart it every day (with the credit cost again) and keep track of when they plan to gather artifacts before the time runs out.

An addition to this idea is multiple stages of the effect, costing more credits and artifact points exponentially as the chances would get higher. And don't forget, you still might not get what you want!