Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[Squirrelloid]

Re: Banning Dwarven Hammers
This has a profound effect on strategy because it can severely limit how quickly a nation can diversify its items (by gem type), and thus makes it much harder to start forging useful items in magic paths you don't have easy access to site-searching spells for.

Yes, the hammer earns its gem cost back quickly. But if that isn't in earth gems then its not just an accelerator - its also a diversifier. I mean, forging RoW for full price is fine and dandy if you have astral mages standard, but if you don't getting to cut the cost down makes it much easier to get to the good magic items in that path. Effectively, lack of a hammer makes diversifying your magical paths on your pretender less viable, because you'll have a much harder time generating the gem income for him to do anything with it.

Removing hammers would also unfairly benefit some nations, because they have easy access to the paths which have the critical expensive items. Rlyeh with good Death and Astral strikes me as being high on the list of nations who benefit relative to others.

(Making hammer unique would be far worse - its good, but at least everyone can use it).

On why some nations need compensation if gem generators are removed:
Since someone asked...
The reason why some nations need some tweaking is that they rely on gem generators to be effective in the late game. Bandar Log, for example, needs to clam like mad to afford its national summons. Substantially reducing their cost would certainly help.

Some other nations, like MA Oceania, have nothing else going for them in the late game except they are prime candidates for forging boatloads of gem generators. I'm playing MA Oceania in Water Total War right now, and while i've taken steps to help me have a real endgame, let me tell you the lack of clams is severely hampering me. (In particular, EA Rlyeh totally outclasses me in combat magic, and while there are some things I could certainly have done to have improved that last attempt at storming his fortress, it would have been a difference of number of units killed. I need something to answer his astral battle magic, and water/nature doesn't really have it - summons are the only real way for me to diversify my casting base.)

Re: Diplomacy leads to ganging up on weaker players
Only if the players in your game allow that to happen. Two things need to happen to stop this. (1) Binding agreements are stupid, except for agreements of trade (and even then, not necessary). It leads to situations where a player in a poor position can't bargain his way out because his opponents are locked into NAPs or similar. (2) Weaker players need to sell their survival as an advantage against a more powerful rival, or at least that the threat of the rival is great enough that he needs to be taken down a peg now rather than later. (Being able to break NAPs without warning makes this more possible, because chances are the weak player is trying to turn one assailant on another one, and they likely have an NAP agreement).