Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by DonCorazon

i understand your point, but don't agree that the benefits of hammers are worth the tradeoff in MM pain. true magic diversification will depend primarily on luck anyways, in terms of finding indies in paths you need and once they site search adequately, your gem income should be fine. while i agree hammers make it easier to forge items in non-national paths, i don't think they are so crucial strategically. further, removing hammers might actually help improve one aspect of game balance. for example, nations with recruitable thugs which are generally OP relative to human nations won't be able to kit out their thugs as prolifically, which might make these nations more vulnerable to human troops and thus help even the scales a bit.

Why don't we consider who the winners and losers are here?

First of all, its been my impression that Astral, Death, Nature, and Earth are where most of the good gear is.

Rlyeh: winner (MA and LA especially)
Good Astral, Death, Earth access, good site searching for all 3, capitol S income. National mages can forge all astral boosters without empowering. Here's a nation which doesn't really need the boost... And aquatic, so it gets to bundle most elemental site searching into water gem useage anyway.

Ashdod: winner
Astral, Death, Earth, good site searching for all 3, has capitol income for S,D at least. Here's another nation that really doesn't need a boost. I imagine Hinnom/Gath are in similar boats?

MA Oceania: Loser (probably EA too, but not familiar)
Nature, but otherwise only really water (with small amounts of earth and air - they generally have to beg or trade for a hammer, or put earth on their pretender). Pretender is only real way to get access to anything else - low gem input will severely hamper Oceania's ability to diversify. (And since removing gem gens is definitely on the table... there goes clamming for Oceania to actually do anything in the endgame as well).

Basically, most of the winners are already really strong nations, and the losers are generally weak nations.

If you want to rebalance the game to make human nations stronger, you almost need to rebalance magical paths to make them more equal, or rebalance races so human nations tend to get more and stronger access to the good paths than non-human nations. Taking hammers away won't help nearly as much as you think.