[Corinthian]

I will no longer deny that removing gemgens was a good idea. And yes. As long as blood sacing remains buggy, removing the jade knife is also a good idea. But hammers and SDR's are not gemgens. They are force multipliers and the game is balanced around using them. They don't create gems. They merely multiply your initial income.

The Hammer make it so that the value of gems used to forge items increase by approximately 40% If you assume that you spend 50% of your gems on gear and have a gem income of 50 gems/turn. Then having an infinit number of hammers will at most increase your gem income by 50*0.40/2 = 10 gems/turn minus the one time cost of the hammers. Because unlike normal gemgens that have a linear or slightly exponential pay curves, hammers have a reverse exponential curve that panes out towards 20% of gem income.

Think of it! The first hammer will pay for itself almost imedietly! The second also. But how often do you forge ten items in a turn? Sometimes sure, but even a rich nation will only do so on occasion, so it might take 15-20 turns for the tenth hammer to pay for itself. And thats not considering that you could build something else for the earth gems that helps you better.


And now to my personal observations. I am in the same game as NooBliss and from my observations, the absens of hammer have made thugs really rare. I have scouts in most parts of the world, but by turn 45 i have only seen 3 nations use thugs at all. Me, NooBliss and Bandar Log. I can afford it because I have the best gem income and can afford to be wasteful. NooBliss can afford it because much of his gear is made from bloodslaves and those are both plentiful and often did not benefit from hammer-discounts anyhow. The lesson here is that the game was balanced around hammer costs and without hammers people will spend the gems on other things.

And even I mostly use naked thugs like Shishis that does not loose out by not wearing things.


As for SDR's, they are, as already stated, more important for weak blood mages than the strong ones. I think a B1 mage gets a 100% boost from a rod, while a B3 gets a 20%. This is because B1-B2 mages are not guaranteed to find slaves and the rods increases both the chance to find slave and their numbers. These are guesstimates, but I believe them to be true. Guess whom its removal will hurt the most? It might be a bit annoying to make/assign them. But they will usually stay with the mage till he dies so its a one time thing. I don't see micromanagement as a reason to remove them. The unbalance created by their removal is a worse thing than the micro IMHO.