Crystal of Odryskia

[Sgt. Sarge]

Is this relic bugged? Got it early game and it just feels far too powerful, it has virtually zero downsides and getting unity isn't that hard.

[Cerodil]

It's probably a bit over-tuned but some other relics are arguably just as or even stronger.

[Kalemenos]

Yes, it's a crazy powerful relic. It's so powerful it can rather ruin the challenge of a game, to tell the truth. In my last game, it was VERY early in the game when I saw a neighboring AI empire had the "Debris Belt" archaeological dig, and just put a science ship on it. So I mustered every force I could to capture that system ASAP to stop that empire from possessing the Crystal. I succeeded, but when I had it, I could buy everything I wanted, and the game became a little too easy.

It's the only use I can think of for those "Resource Silos" that you can build on a planet. I always wondered, "what a waste of a precious building spot, who would ever build one of those?" But this relic gives way more energy than you normally can store, in which case, you could lose all that amount which exceeds your storage capacity. You can see ahead of time how much it will give, let's say, 380,000 ene. So if I can store only 45, and my storage units can hold 10,000, then I need about 35 of those silos. It's worth losing the building spot, for how much that Crystal give you.

Then I made an Excel sheet formula, where I write in two numbers: balance and number of days. So if I run the Crystal relic, and it gives me something like, say, 382,000 for example, at that moment I will have 3600 days until I will run it again. Then I subtract things like terraforming, curator/artisan deals, ships I buy from salvagers, and megastructures... - all energy which I will probably spend during that 10 year period. The formula then tells me how much in the negative I can run each month, e.g., -1,053, without hitting zero at day 3600, and then I run the crystal again. During those ten years I buy whatever I need, but I try to get as much alloy as I can in order to build larger fleets than my neighbors. As the years go by, I revise the two numbers (current balance and days left), and adjust my spending accordingly. It's a killer method, but you can't forget to pay attention to it.