Right now, you can boost the price paid for minerals up, but you can not drop the price of minerals. Since raising the payouts raises the amount of crowns in the ocean, boosting has to be *very expensive* or the game would become unbalanced.
What if, you could raise the payout of one mineral while lowering another by the same amount? That would be just a payout shift, so it wouldn't cause any more crowns to be paid out to players. this means that the cost of doing a price shift could be *much* lower, maybe only 1%-10% the cost of raising just one mineral payout.
This would probably cause many more people to sink crowns trying to get strata the way they like. Of course, people could undo what others have done, resulting in more crowns being sunk. With only one mineral going up and one going down, a single payment wouldn't force a certain strata type, you would have to pay at least twice for that. Actually, even paying twice (and no one else doing anyting) wouldn't guarantee a certain outcome since the gate may never fill with minerals, so there are still advantages to a real boost or many price shifts.
Oh, and having auto-sell work across gates would be a big help. In the case of a tie in price, the gate next gate to finish should get the minerals, and in cases of a tie on that gate, the lower strata should get the minerals.
This was suggested already by myself (and possibly others), but the problem with shifting is not as simple. You instantly think that "well 10 red at 4 and 10 blue at 6 is the same as 10 red at 5 and 10 blue at 5"....but you have more than 1 stratum. This forces it to push the blue to the 6, but the red will just go to the strat/gate/whatever with 5. This isn't so apparent right away, but imagine if someone shifts strat 1, and then does a reverse shift in 2....so the payouts look like:
64555
35444
33333
22222
11111
Autoselling to this gate is now becoming obvious of the inflation of crowns into the system if you don't charge the right price for the boost (in this case, the break-even point is 50% cost). My suggestion had this same problem as well (but on a much smaller scale).
However, I have 2 suggestions for boosting now that I think about it.
1. Boosting vertically -- Instead of boosting 1 color up in price, you instead swap the price of the color down in the lower strats. This would not change the payouts AT ALL, while allowing a better way to shape the gates, for example, you start off with:
55555
44444
33333
22222
11111
00000
Let's say that I want a slime gate in the 2nd strat, then I would pay for a green and yellow down swap from strat 1, and a red down swap from strat 2....3 payments to turn the gate into this:
54545
35454
43333
22222
11111
00000
The payments could be in a straight-pay amount (like 10k crowns) because the amount given for the minerals is the exact same....just changed to a different stratum. When a stratum becomes finished, all lower ones get a +1 as normal, but just max them out at 5 and voila, no inflation (in fact, it becomes a crown sink because people would actually put money into the system).
2. This idea is actually someone else that I read, but be able to move minerals between stratum would be nice. Once a strat gets to 100%, it becomes locked, but other than that, we should have the ability to move (for example) 1,000 red from one strat to another (paying crowns based on the amount moved, like 10%).