The next patch

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Stormbinder:

quote:

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Originally posted by Zen:


Just because you think something is 'out of balance' doesn't mean it is. And if you are still even learning the game what is your perspective of balance going to be? Someone uses something against you and you can't for some reason defeat it, suddenly it's imbalanced? If that is the criteria of balance then I'd much rather have the developers deciding balance.

No, it is not my criteria. In fact I am hoarding clams myslef in my current games. I am doing it because I have to do it to stay competitive in the long run in economic/gem race, but I don't like it. My main criteria as I said before is that I feel that the situation when 99% gem income by the end of the game comes from clams is not exactly what develepers had in mind when they designed this game. I may be wrong here of course, since I can't read developers mind, but based upon the fact that they put so much efforts into designing all these nice gem-prodicing sites and mechanism for searching for them, I don't believe that it was intended mostly for the begining and middle of the game, to jump-start mass clam-production.

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How long are your games? Are you playing 4-player games on the World map, or what?

I mean, your initial gem production is 5/turn. Even if it's 5 Water, this means you get to make one Clam every 2 turns, initially. For even, say, 80% of your gem income to be item-produced, assuming your sites produce, say, 10 per turn (rather small), requires 50 gem-producing items. That's 50 turns of using your natural production (assuming it's all of the right types) to turn into items (500 gems), meaning those items will have produced roughly 1200 gems by that time. That's investing your whole production into them, plus 50 turns of a mage, plus (currently) 25 commanders holding the items, which you're not likely to send on the field as random kill-me commanders - which means "lost" upkeep.

Anything faster, means your current return is smaller - because the already-produced items will have produced fewer gems.

If, during those 50 turns, none of your opponents has taken advantage of your sinking gems into slow-return investments, your map is too big. Or maybe your playgroup is too focused on this being the only viable strategy, and isn't otherwise expanding/attacking fast enough.