Question about EA Tir Na N'og

[Festin]

In practice, I think TNN suffers heavily without hammers. When hammers were in, you could take E on pretender (not a bad idea anyway for sacred thug nation, so no wasted points), and you had little use for E gems except for hammers. Without them, things like Vine Shields (which are key items for TNN) are suddenly very costly.

I think game experience with newest CBM so far supports my words: thugs have become rare.

Concerning the anti-SC options for TNN - how about airdropping a couple of Sidhe Lords dual-wielding Axes of Hate?

[Torgon]

What we really need to know too tell if this is a huge hit to thug nations is the average gem outlay per thug, the average gem outlay per sc, and the average ratio of thugs/SC fielded in any given game prior to the removal of hammers.

If gems/thug / gems/SC = thug/SC then removal of hammers should have relatively little effect. E.g. if people were putting 15 gems worth of stuff on thugs, 45 on SC, but the average ratio of thugs to SC was 3/1 then the cost in gems for both was unchanged. You raised the price of both equivalently. 1.33 * 45 and 1.33 * 45.

If gems/thug / gems/sc > thug/SC then removal of hammers did nerf thugs. E.g. people were putting 20 gems into each thug, 40 into each SC but ratio of thug/SC was still 3/1. This effectively increased the price of the thugs. 1.33 * 60 vs 1.33 * 40.

if gems/thug / gems/SC < thug/SC then removal of hammers hurt the SC nations. Opposite of above.

So the question I have for those more experienced, what were these ratios?

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Torgon

So the question I have for those more experienced, what were these ratios?

Very hard to determine .

Don't think you can really put numbers to those values, they depend totally on situation and play style.

[Torgon]

Originally Posted by Soyweiser

Very hard to determine .

Don't think you can really put numbers to those values, they depend totally on situation and play style.

Oh, totally agree that it would be impossible to determine across the entire spectrum of all dominions players. But it gives a handy shorthand to compare to two individual strategies to see which one was more hurt by removing hammers..

All the discussion so far has talked about relative scarcity of gems, whether ultimately you're not hurt as much because you had to forge the hammer initially anyway, etc. However, all of these arguments apply to ANY strategy that employs any forging at all.

What removing hammers essentially did is raise the price in gems of any forging strategy by 33%. This is relative to all other currencies, e.g. gold, production turns, resources.

So for instance if one strategy required 1 forged gems/4 gold invested and another strategy required 1 forged gems/10 gold then the first strategy is much worse off than the the second after the removal of hammers. Similarly, strategy one required 1 forged gems/1 ritual gems and strategy two required 3 forged gems/ 2 ritual gems, in this case strategy two is worse off after removal of hammers.

To give a more specific example. Formoria was mentioned earlier. Formoria has the big kings that make pretty good SC. A strategy could easily be built around them. Each one costs 500 gold. Alternatively, TNN can build a strategy around Sidhe Lord, cost 280 gold. Assume that the strategy usually required the king to be outfitted with 45 gems. Assume the strategy for the Sidhe Lord required 15 gems worth of equipment. What happens without hammers? bump the price in gems of both strategies up by 33%. King was .09 gems/gold, sidhe was .05 gems to gold. Now king becomes .12 gems/gold and sidhe becomes .07 gems to gold. For any given 1000 gold investment the formorians now have to spend 29 additional gems. TNN has to spend 17 additional gems. Assuming the same opportunity cost of gems for other purposes(rituals, spells), in this example the Sidhe are better off after the removal of hammers. Change those initial ratios and you get a different answer.

My point is that to create a good argument about whether a strategy is worse or better off after the removal you have to look at an analysis like this. Just talking about when the hammers pay for themselves, or relative usefulness of a specific type of gem doesn't cut it. These problems are similar between strategies. What really changed is the amount of one resource that you have to invest in that strategy relative to other resources: gold, production turns, gems used in summoning, etc.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Festin

In practice, I think TNN suffers heavily without hammers. When hammers were in, you could take E on pretender (not a bad idea anyway for sacred thug nation, so no wasted points), and you had little use for E gems except for hammers. Without them, things like Vine Shields (which are key items for TNN) are suddenly very costly.

I think game experience with newest CBM so far supports my words: thugs have become rare.

Concerning the anti-SC options for TNN - how about airdropping a couple of Sidhe Lords dual-wielding Axes of Hate?

Well I can't speak to general perception which does seem to lean towards what you describe, but from just looking at the numbers they don't seem to me to support that conclusion. As a rough estimate assume you forge enough hammers to outfit one thug per turn with equipment not more than 10 gems apiece. You're not breaking even on the hammers until you've got 6-7 thugs fielded, and not at a very noticeable detriment until you're close to double that number. I just don't see how modest amounts of thugs mid game are suddenly not cost efficient (in plenty of situations at least).

[Festin]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Well I can't speak to general perception which does seem to lean towards what you describe, but from just looking at the numbers they don't seem to me to support that conclusion. As a rough estimate assume you forge enough hammers to outfit one thug per turn with equipment not more than 10 gems apiece. You're not breaking even on the hammers until you've got 6-7 thugs fielded, and not at a very noticeable detriment until you're close to double that number. I just don't see how modest amounts of thugs mid game are suddenly not cost efficient (in plenty of situations at least).

Sure, we can spend E gems on hammers, or we can spend them directly on equipment. But does this calculation take into account the fact that different types of gems have different utility depending on exact circumstances? Let's consider TNN. It has limited access to E, so even without using pretender for site searching it can have some kind of E income. On the other hand, it has no access to F, except on a hero. If we are talking about thug gear, two best choices for spending E gems are obviously Fire Brands and Shields of Gleaming Gold. But both are F/E items, and thus very difficult to forge for TNN. The alternative is Frost Brand+Vine Shield combo, which is perfectly easy to forge, and they do not use E gems. So, shouldn't we spend E on hammers to forge W and N thug gear? After all, what else can we do with them (if our objective is mass thugs strategy), alchemize?