Quote:
Originally Posted by OmikronWarrior
As an alternative to removing hammers, increasing the requirement to Earth-5, and thus the cost to 40 Earth gems, would have a similar effect. Only a handful of nations would be able to forge them, and those that do would have other objects competing for Earth gems. Forging a few to get a discount on really expensive items, such as Rings of Wizardry, would make them worth it, but not for mass producing the little stuff.
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You sure about that? Saving 2 gems/forging, it takes a mere 20 turns to pay off one of those, and that's assuming you never forge anything better than a 5 gem item with it. And you pay it off in 4 turns forging more hammers, who then pay themselves off in no more than 15 turns. (And did I mention the gems they're paying themselves off with don't have to be earth? You might have earth to burn, and those earth are otherwise worth at best half a gem to you - like me right now in Water Total War.)
Doing this is just going to make the disparity between the haves and have-nots even bigger. As it is now, virtually everyone has access to hammers, so everyone benefits from the ability to rapidly diversify on limited gem totals. At 40e hammers become much more limited to those nations who can amass a lot of earth, and thus other nations get correspondingly straightjacketed into national path forgings.
The only way changing hammers is at all realistic is if you make all the magic paths equally good. As I highly doubt that's going to happen...