[Mzyxptlk]

You guys overestimate how much trading costs.

If you do that operation 10 times in a row (impressive against an active planet), converting 12 roids per time, that's 120 Metal roids that are now Crystal. Assuming your target is a 999 roid (now severely imbalanced: 213/453/333) Terran that only buys, say, Harpies (97/86/86), that means that for every 999k of income (213k, 453k, 333k), they can buy (after faffing about with trading with a 5% tax for a bit: 135980 Crystal and 16080 Eonium to Metal) 3685 harpies with 132 resources left, which is a total of 991397 resources.

If you hadn't done those covert ops, they would've had 333k/333k/333k, which (after trading 14080 Crystal and 14080 Eonium to Metal) would've gotten them a total of 3708 Harpies with 144 resources left over, which is 997596 resources total.

Subtract, and the net result of all your efforts is... 6199 resources lost. 0.6%.

Maybe 10 a time is too few? What if you instead turned all their Metal roids into Crystal ones? Their income in the same period is now 0/666k/333k. The same process (352540 Crystal and 19540 Eonium to Metal) would result in a net loss of 18604 resources, or 1.7%.

I hate to be all Mr. Negative, but... why not just bankhack them? 1 operation, 10 agents (if you're the same value), 10000 resources stolen, a swing of 20000.