Quote:
Originally Posted by Sombre
The topic of taking away hammers in this thread is really about reducing micro, not rebalancing.
I also think your logic is a bit weird. Taking away hammers has the greatest impact on a nation that does a lot of forging and that would previously have used a lot of hammers. Since you say astral, death, nature and earth get the best gear, nations with access to these strong paths would arguably lose out more than others with no hammers, because they're the ones doing the most forging. This seems particularly true of earth powers, who can forge a bunch of hammers rather than having to trade for them or take the points hit on their pretender build.
I also don't really see how hammers help nations that need to diversify more than those who are already have access to the stronger paths. You say it allows lesser amounts of gems in those off paths to be used more effectively, but since it equally allows S/D/N/E to be used more efficiently when they're your main gem income, which in terms of raw gems is going to be far more of an impact,... I don't get it. Clearly it does help forge that N booster to try and bootstrap into nature, but it helps an equal amount (proportionately) with an N powerhouse forging the best N gear.
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I'm assuming that, in general, the first instance of item X is more powerful/game changing/whatever than further instances of item X for your nation. Or to look at it another way, the improvement in performance of your nation improves at a decreasing rate with an increasing quantity of item X.
This is tautologically true sometimes - there can be only one of each artifact.
This is easily proveable other times. The first RoWizardry is amazing. The second one is still awesome, but not nearly as awesome because you can already pass the first around to cast the globals you need. I guarantee it is not the only item of that type.
I would argue it is true for every item though. Basically, the law of diminishing returns applies at some point, and that point isn't ridiculously far along. Ie, the first fully-equipped thug is better than the nth one for some n. He's better than the second because he gives you increased capability. The second lets you apply that capability multiple times or gives you new joint capability. But the third is more of the same, and so forth. Now, there are certainly benefits to having thugs work in parallel, but each additional one is less advantageous to you strategically than the one before it (especially since your opponent will probably develop a counter to whatever you're doing with it).
So taking hammers away from power nations has more impact in raw gems, but less strategic impact. (They can still do it, they just do it less... vs. they probably can't do it at all, or at all reasonably).