Some numbers and facts, now that I'm closer to being happy with them, but they're still far from settled, especially since nobody but me has played with them yet.
Removals:
* Silver Matrix, Gold Matrix, Sage Tome, Student Tome, Mind Matrix, and Spirit Chime have all been removed from the game.
* Demons no longer earn training points.
* All demons immediately have 8 ability slots.
* Players no longer automatically learn abilities from demons.
Additions:
* Each floor of the dungeon has roughly 1000 + FL*100 currency to find, if fully explored. (FL = Floor Level, generally, this will increase by 1 per floor) Side dungeon/branch floors have a bit more.
* Copy Ability lets you copy an ability from one demon to another demon or to the player. This costs roughly 500 + 50 * XL (XL = level of the target learning the skill) The cost is increased by 150% for the player. Copy Ability gets slightly more expensive as the target fills up its ability slots. Copy Ability's cost is now paid when training demons as part of a negotiation demand as well.
* Fuse Demons lets you sacrifice one demon to modify another, in exactly the manner of Silver/Gold Matrix items of the past. This costs roughly 2000 + 200 * XL (XL = level of the target being modified), and is increased by 100% if the demon being modified is a unique.
* Restore Demon lets you revive a demon, exactly as a Spirit Chime used to do. The cost is 1500 + 150 * XL (XL = level of the target), and is increased 25% for a modified demon, and by 50% for a unique demon.
For now, I've left out the various add-ons we talked about (such as loyalty discounts, restrictions on who can train what) that were intended to counter various possible issues. This is for no greater reason than I want to see if the problems these are meant to address actually happen before I add complications designed to fix them. I definitely think they are *risks*, but what remains unclear is 1) how likely the risks are to happen, and 2) how bad it will be even if they do. I pin a fair bit of my hopes for avoiding the risks on the relatively high cost assigned to Skill Copy. Each floor gives you roughly enough currency for either 2 at level Ability Copies or 1 at level Ability Copy for the player. Even this rate, the maximum, makes ability copying much rarer than it was before, when you had tons of TP and when ability copying to the player was free if you just waited long enough.
But, on the other hand, Copy Ability is highly targeted now. You pick the ability you want, each and every time. So while you do get a much lower number of them, you use all of them exactly how you want.
Still, I can type all day, and all that matters in the end is the results, and we won't know that until this thing is out in the wild.
I just wanted to let you know where things were headed.