[Executor]

I've held my tongue before I had a change to experience CBM 1.7 myself to criticize it. I hope something constructive will come of this.

So far from experience I'd have to say that CBM 1.7 has been a disaster regarding item prices, which ultimately led to several other problems.

Like Corinthian said, and quite contrary to what people expected as I remember some talks how it would actually increase the effectiveness of thugs, it led to a severe decrease in thug numbers.

Even the cheapest thugs become expensive without hammers.
And given that they are supposed to be expendable unlike SCs they shouldn't require much investment.

High level item forging became unbearable. Often you have to rely on a booster to forge other boosters and so on. And those boosters are quite often necessary to get a global spell, cast battle spells, to summon stuff and such.
For example forging a ring of wizardry to get a ring of sorcery to cast GONB for example is bloody awful, 110 gems just for the rings, etc.

Also, the race for the artifacts kinda got well much less important.
Even if you manage to hit construction 8 first it doesn't matter as you certainly won't have enough gems to make proper boosters and than the important stuff you need/want, even with very high site frequency which coshes more problems that it solves.

The thing about rushing to const 8 was that you had to sacrifice a lot to get there first. If you rush construction and get attacked in the meantime there's a good chance you won't ever make it there as you'll be dead since you wasted research on construction rather than summons and battle spells to defend or attack.

And even if you hit construction 8 first, ok, you managed to get a few good artifacts before you blew all your gems away, so now what?

Many of you feel that by simply increasing the site frequency it wouldn't pose much of a problem after all.
Wrong, by doing so you'd probably create much more micro and complicate things as I doubt anyone is crazy enough not to have some kind of a rainbow pretender with such common magic sites, so every nation would have to radically change their approach, strategy.

This is all based from experience on a CB 1.7 game mentioned above.

Now, as for CB 1.8 a lot of items got their prices lowed, paths dropped etc as to compensate for the loss of the hammers. I have no idea how this will actually impact the game until I try it out but I'm sure that this will be the first of several item balancings we'll see as a reprocation of the hammer loss.

The fact remains that even with lowered prices many items will still become unusable I feel. Bows will be the first to go probably, certain cross path items too. There are some items that just weren't worth using without hammers and having their prices dropped from 5 > 3, 10 > 6 etc.

I'm not saying that the loss of hammers will prove to be a bad thing in the end, having to think and plan in advance in how to get E3 with every nation you play is not very accommodating, and personally I love some changes on certain items as even with hammers things like stone idols or those big eartly trample wings were almost unexciting,
I'm just saying that it will need a lot of work and trials and error before it's all well sorted out as so far their removal has caused more problems than good.

Until than, I'll probably stick more to hammer games. Hammer time!