[WraithLord]

K, you present plausible arguments that makes sense.

However, I must say that my experience with gems gens agrees with Micah's assertions. I found myself in the situation he describes on a number of occasions. It boils down to penalizing the attacker which increases turtling. A partial remedy to that is adding house rules that disallow sending gems but I personally think that such a rule will have negative impact on the "fun" factor in diplomacy. Removing gem gens altogether seems like a cleaner solution. You know you've lost and want to give all your gem income to your attacker's enemies, better (for game balance) that it be 100 instead of 1k gems.

I still have very little MP experience w/o gem gens so I can't tell whether or not the perceived issues with gem gens are indeed solved when removed.