[Baalz]

Well, as I posted elsewhere I don't think the hammer nerf is quite as crippling as everyone makes out. Take, for instance my suggestion to crank out piercers because that particularly makes the comparison easy with everything is in E gems. With a hammer you're saving 2 gems apiece - but you sank 11 or 15 gems into the hammer so you're not even breaking even until you've made 6 (or 8) of them. This is compounded by the fact that if you've got hammers available you're not just forging a single one so it's not unlikely that it's late game before hammers really pay off. True, they do pay off in a big way by end game when you're forging big things and can easily save 50 gems per turn, but that's not really where the sweet spot is for this sort of nation.