What's with the negativity?

[Adran]

Caches are not, nor can they be just a stat. Caches take what was supposed to be a 50 ss game, for instance, and skew it to not only two different ss values, but also another possible model and its associated AP. With AP being seen as such a limited resource in M2E, gifting a crew with more ss, thus more potential AP, offsets that balance. Even in 2.0 a lot of players don't take more stones into the fight than the master's cache.

Surely they are Just a stat in the same way that Model cost is just a stat.

I would assume we are agreed that not all minions should cost the same to purchase, so logically not all masters need to have the same "cost".

The Cache is the final balencing between 2 masters. The weaker master gaining a better cache than the stronger master, so in effect being a cheaper model.

The value of that soulstone should be roughly consistant throughout the game.

To take it down to its basics. If there were 2 identical models except 1 had a built in suit on one of its actions, and the other had the action but needed the suit, then the first is clearly better. the second can match it in power by spending stone to add the suit. Over the case of 5 turns, even if you can only do the action once per turn it would probably take you 4 ss to get the action off on the second model every turn. Now, the power of the action matters here, but if the action is well worth the effort you might want the second model to have a cache 3 or 4 stones higher.