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"it's almost like "I win" button. Or rather cheat code. And other players still play the game, not knowing they have absolutely zero chances of winning."

I think you got straight into the heart of the matter. When known they won't break the game. When kept secret they are horribly broken.
This can be addressed by house rules requesting that anyone encountering such a site report its location to the game thread. This will actually serve to further spice up the game - imagine the pandemonium when all players learn the location of the "holy grail" :)

EDIT: All that said I'm still against removing the sites - well except maybe alt. as mentioned before - If we go the path of removing random mechanisms that dare to give some advantage then where would we end up?- Probably with an increasingly balanced & boring game.

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Ah, what a lively debate!

Meh, who cares about complete balance? I don't give a crap if someone else has a enc 50% or const 20% site, it a luck factor, like a plague hitting your cap at turn 3 which pretty much means you're done for in most cases (yes it can happen even with luck), or constantly getting rapped by knights, but that's what makes it so fun.

You can have every single bonus site in the game and lose rather badly when everyone dogpilles you, which frankly happens quite often to nations that stand out sadly, which would presumably be nations with bonus sites for example. It could be in possession of a complete newb who doesn't realize it's potential... Anyway, those sites are quite rare and exist to spice up the game a bit.

And yes, I realize having hammers demands the first 35 turns earth income go to hammer forging, but having death gems demands them being saved for Tartarians, and having nature gems saving them for GoR and GoH, and so on... Every path is bound to have some item/spell/summon more demanding and more worthwhile than the rest, and removing one will just make the next in line stick out again, unless you're determent to make all paths as useless as fire.

Now as far as balance goes, my interest there is that items/summons/spells get reasonable prices (for example I think CBM 1.3 or 1.4 had vampire lords cost like 40 slaves, which was absurd), and rather not eliminate parts of the game.
Personally, the removal of hammers and discount sites came rather unexpected to me as I've never heard of a complain regarding those before the change was actually made.

There's was something else I wanted to say, but the thought fled my mind...:(

Removing all this things makes the game just duller me feels.
But luckily CBM is just an optional mode so I'll be sticking with 1.6 for now.

Re: Vote
 

I mostly agree with you Executor, but re. hammers I, at first, thought in similar lines to your own but since then came to think differently and accept the change (as rdonj has presented so well).

A random thought on the matter of hammers - when was the last time you saw a summoned thug keep his original equipment?- like say, a bane lord keep his bane sword?- Never, right?

brands + hammers make other weapons obsolete and in so serve to make the game poorer not richer.

At least w/o hammer players would have other alternatives to the forge action that today is a no-brainer.

Re: Vote
 

Well, I kinda agree too with Rdonj, but I agree with Calahan also.
And making a game with higher gems frequency, btw, doesn't solve the problem Rdonj.
I've said it many times, and I'll say it again, with hammers removed a lot of items need price fixing and a lot of thug based nations need a little re balancing, TNN, Van...

Lowering certain item prices can lead to even more unbalancing than balancing I think. It can give nations that rely on early thugs and SC's like Hinnom, Neif... a considerable advantage in cheaper equipment that they couldn't forge early on with hammers for one.

So keeping the hammers is the lesser of two evils I think.
I'm happy to hear how you think this can be fixed, and what are the actual gains of removing the hammers? Even at this point, with everything being left as it is, thug based nations are screwed, thugs are generally obsolete with high gem required equipment and SC's are even more important which was the one of the points of the CBM, to reduce the importantce of SC's in the end game and introduce some other interesting ways to play.

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Or gear is just as important, so you use less gems on spells and forge just as much gear just at a higher price.

What it really does is raise the cost of gear relative to other uses of gems: battlefield spells, globals, summons. If that makes more interesting stuff useful, it was a good change. If it just means you have to invest even more gems in forging then it wasn't.

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While that does seem correct in theory I doubt that's how it'll play out in games, but I may be wrong, as might you thejeff.

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I don't think this really makes sense. It's not like you need a fixed amount of gear, and then you have enough and spend whatever you have left on spells. Either gear is cheap enough to be better value than anything else, in which case you should make as much as you can (close to the actual situation when hammers are in the game), or not. I would argue that without hammers, the cost/reward ratio of gear is brought closer to that of typical spells and summons, so that basically you have more valid choices.

--

Edit: Or, to clarify (and make it more obvious that I'm mostly agreeing with you):

I agree.

I just don't see why this should be the case (the amount of gear you need is not fixed).

Re: Vote
 

I'm sure hammer existence has nothing to do with the choice between brands and bane blade: thugs with bb die and with brands don't, that's the point. So you just see less thugs in general (aka national units importance), which was one of the original points of CBM. However as Executor said it also hits nations that rely on national thugs and not on troops/bf magic, which should be considered. And I voted "no removal" for all questions except gemgens, which IMO create problems in big games but can be dealt with by using house rules, so my answer doesn't presented in the poll (leave them but limit their usage).

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I know raising the site frequency doesn't completely solve the "less gems" problem, but it would help a bit. Another thing that could be done mod-wise to provide more gems (not happening or even necessarily desirable) would be to increase the frequency of some of the sites that give more gems.

And basically my argument is the same as llama's. It seems to me that without hammers you're likely to see a lot *more* thugs relative to SCs, and fewer fully kitted SCs.

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That's why QM should release changelog for 1.8, there are really tens of nation balance changes :)