Re: Exploit question
It's funny how everyone manages to leave Niefelheim and Hinnom out of the list of nations that are hurt by gens being removed, since they're great at making them. It's not like the devs had some master plan where the crappy nations were the only ones that could make the gens, plenty of the really good nations have access as well, which means that a lot of the hand-wringing over the supposed nerfing that "clam nations" take is overwrought, since it's a lot closer to 0-sum than the alarmists would have everyone believe. (Though admittedly giving everyone more resources to work with does help weaker nations more than strong ones.) Plus it's really closer to a 0-sum game in general since everyone gets into clamming sooner or later anyhow. On the other side of the coin, some of the weak nations (MA Agartha is the poster-child here, but EA Agartha and LA Man have pretty solid claims as well) have NO access to any of the gens on their national mage paths, and they're the nations that are gonna have the hardest time affording more pretender time to diversify into the gens.
As Baalz said, removing gens is designed to link resources to holding territory, which is designed to force people to move their armies and try to hold territory instead of being able to turtle in one province with 300 gems a turn coming in. Artifacts had gens and did an admirable job getting bogged down, and Preponderance had to be dragged out back and shot because of the crazy gem spiral that developed (I was looking at hitting 40 clams/turn, which was about the most I could manage due to the 50-slot lab limit.) Seems like the new generation of games is doing a lot better in terms of progressing along.
And to paraphrase Zeldor: Gens are a really lousy way to balance weak nations, why don't we just mod them so they don't suck and are interesting to play instead of introducing a really bad mechanic that happens to help them out a little more than other nations?
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