Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Unique as in requires Constr 8 and you can only have one.

Or did you mean you don't understand why?

Jade Knife: blood sacrifice is already twice as effective as its supposed to be, so in effect you sort of get a free jade knife with every priest anyway. Letting you compound that with an actual jade knife was just crazy town.

SDR: its a gem gen, and like other gem gens, not good for the game.

Hammers: QM argues its because hammers were necessary to play the game, forced many nation's pretenders to look sort of similar (need E3 capability somewhere), and caused E gems to be over-valued and used on hammers to the exclusion of everything else - and on top of that they add a lot of micromanagement for forging. I only really dispute the undesirability of the last part, but that's why he did it.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

SDRs being a gemgen is just bs and even qm admitted in irc that they're just "have similar properties". Gemgens reproduce exponentially without upper bound while SDRs don't produce anything by themselves and have upper bound of approx 3*number of provinces suitable for hunting, so their effect is proportional to your gem income from sites (both are proportional to total number of provs you own), unlike true gemgens.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Well, it's a gem generator with a limit. It's still something you put gems into and get more gems back in the long run.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

The biggest problems with gemgens as I understand are 1) they can grow unbounded (well, limited to producing 50/turn in the end) which encourages turtling 2) their income is hidden. Both of them don't exist for SDRs. Thus SDRs are not gemgens, both by their effect (previous post) and by their issues.
And summoning units/casting spells with gems during conquest is definitely gem generator by your definition. You put gems into it and gain more gems in the long run from captured provinces. Let's ban capturing provinces, then.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

That's ridiculous and you know its ridiculous. :P

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

He's right that they're not really gem gens though, which is the main point. I think the more important reason for making the SDR unique is that blood is a bit too strong, and that's the easiest way to nerf it. I can't blame QM for preferring to unique dousing rods than to change and balance the costs of all blood spells to try and balance blood out.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

I agree, removing SDRs in such widely used and important for the community mod without warning is ridiculous. Gemgens were removed after much debate AFAIK and they were considered broken by vast majority back then which the vote in another thread shows, not so with SDRs.
Seriously, it really irritates when people call something only remotely close "WARNING! GEMGENS" and use it as an excuse to remove it from game. I feel that options should be removed from the game only if they are seriously broken.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Um, if it's not a gem generator, what is it? It has no purpose but generating gems over time. It's just much more limited in potential and use than the others, which is presumably why it lasted so much longer before getting nerfed.

Noone is against things just because they are gemgens. I.E. Eternal Pyre and similar spells are blatantly gem generators but noone is saying to take them out.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

Actually Dimaz, I think the community was a bit outraged about the loss of gem gens at the time, but gradually came to see it as a change for the better.

I think basically, blood and blood sacrificing are both severely overpowered. Removing SDRs (and Jade Knives) is an effective way to mitigate that, while having the added side effect of removing some micro, and allowing Blood nations to start their research with something other than Const 4.

Re: CBM 1.7 released
 

The game that Xanatos (IIRC) tried to start with CBM 1.5 short after the 1.6 release never started because there were only 4 or 5 players who wanted to join (including me). I think that shows the level of acceptance. I know some people that were against the change but it was sort of impossible to start the game with gemgens here at the time.
Blood being op is completely different matter than SDRs being gemgens or not. Actually I'm not sure that it needs external balancing even if it is op as usually it more or less balances itself in the game (especially with diplomacy). Also banning gemgens effectively made blood stronger so it's just the conseqence of previous decisions. And removing SDRs of cause nerfs blood but 1) unequally for different nations 2) it removes just another "investment" part of the game which is bad imo. They are sort of cheap for what they do I agree, 10B seems more adequate.