[Dimaz]

I feel CBM goes to the wrong direction starting with gemgen removal in 1.6. I never fully agreed to that change as it only removes from the game and adds nothing. I agree however that gemgens had to be nerfed for large games where there were hundreds of them on each side; still there are solutions to that problem that I think are more acceptable. House rules for example. Usually each starting game has some rules like not abusing LaD or not preventing movement with scouts etc. One of them could be not to build more gemgens of each type than the current turn number. Or not more than 50. Whatever. And the winner has to upload the turn archive for everyone to see that he wasn't cheating.
But when CBM removed them completely, it was too much. They represented the concept of economic investment in the game along with generating globals, SDRs and hammers. You either spend your gems now to get immediate result or invest them to get more later. And it was an important strategic choice as overinvesting can leave you without gems to deal with immediate threat.
As I said, this investment in gemgens wasn't really balanced as after initial wars it was an optimal choice in 99% cases to build more of them instead of spending. But CBM removed the choice at all instead of dealing with the problem in subtler ways.
Now the same thing happened to SDRs and hammers. I think this items add important part to gameplay as economic investment; without them we have less strategic choices. Again, I agree that after gemgen removal blood became a bit too powerful; however dealing with it in such manner is too much I think. When I played blood nations I had a choice to move into blood or research const 4 first; now it's gone. Perhaps SDRs are too cheap for what they do so maybe they should be moved to b2 - this way they will be fogeable only by more powerful mages and the mageturns for them will enter the equation; more choices as the result. As for DH, I think they are perfectly fine as they are, being the only investment in 1.6 that gives back gems of all kinds and not only of it's own.
And the MM argument is the strangest thing I've ever heard. I spend hours on late game turns and about 30-90 mins on midgame when I'm in a war - directly to click things, and who knows how much time during work day to make plans. And even with blood-heavy hations it's only about 10 minutes on huge maps to transport slaves and give items to guys that need them - I tend to forge items when I already have the unit for them. Most of the time goes into watching battles, planning, scripting and moving armies around, counting gems to give for bf spells and to scouts... Honestly, I don't think moving hammers around takes more than 5% of all the time on the turn.