So, hot take, I actually
really like this. GE 5 should be extremely difficult and costly for us now. Why? Several reasons:
- Most don't have tons of defense boosts in their cities. This promotes more city diversity and opens up new avenues for defense boosts to actually be desirable.
- Making GE 5 so hard means that it won't be a feature that gets added and is immediately forgotten. To complete it, you will have to work really hard, or build your city around completing it!
- This helps balance the rewards and makes it so that, once again, you have to work hard to get them instead of just immediately getting tons of fragments and buildings as soon as GE 5 starts.
Don't you see? GE 5 finally gives this game potential to start moving away from buildings that give only attack boosts. It gives traders more of a reason to produce goods. It makes the game so much less linear and introduces more potential ways to build your city. In fact, I would go so far as to say we need more features like GE 5 introduced over time that take advantage of defense boosts and goods more than they do now.
It's healthy for the game to have a feature that doesn't cater to the current meta.
Now, should the final boost for the army in SAJM be 2569%? Probably not.
The values themselves will have to be tweaked, but not too far. I think ~1500% in same would be fair, and a lot less for lower ages. But for the first time in a while, I actually feel positive about this feature. Inno could release the next event with a building that gives defense boosts and no attack boosts, and guess what? It would actually be a viable option.
tl; dr, the first feature I've been wholeheartedly excited for in a while.
Good job Inno. You did it.