[Micah]

Cons: Creates an inflationary feedback loop with wishing, especially with forge discounts, which in turn makes Forge of the Ancients a game-breaking global instead of just a very good one.

Decouples gem income from provinces, making raiding and even wholesale province capture hold little meaning.

Can be transferred to an allied nation upon the forger being killed off, unbalancing the game considerably, especially in the late game.

Is a mandatory strategy. Any winning strategy in a game with standard settings will be forced to use the gem items to be competitive, and when everyone has to do it why not just take them out so no one has to?

Makes site searching later in the game largely irrelevant. Who cares if you find a new site when you're cranking out 10 new gem items a turn? The only sites that matter are discount sites or indy mages. Playing without gens makes every site discovery an important event.

I'm going to go ahead and flat-out disagree with WingedDog's investment comment. The payback on a blood stone is quite short and it serves as a booster (7 turns for the E gems, and once you have about 10 of them in play your E income isn't going to be very constrained) and clams are also quite short, with the additional complication that W gems pretty much totally suck, so you're essentially investing the spare change you have under your couch and getting back pure gold.


The pros for them remaining in are also largely overstated. It isn't that hard to break into clamming, so claiming they help balance is reaching a bit. (Worst case for normal settings: 80W is less than 8 clams, which will empower an indy shaman to W2, add a water bracelet and you have a clammer that can summon naiads for any additional needs. Most of the "natural" clamming nations need to get to cons6 for water bracelets anyhow, so there isn't a significant time savings for many of them.) Blood stones in particular also tend to help some of the stronger nations, since national blood access is already a huge plus for a nation. Hinnom doesn't exactly need tons of help.

The fixes that should happen IMO are giving boosts to some of the nations and/or the W path in general to compensate for the slight bit of damage done to them by the removal of the gens, which would actually make them fun to play with, as opposed to boosting them with a mechanic that drags the whole game down by its very presence.