I like the fact that they are trying out a Wishing Well type building again. Yes i have a few cities loaded with wishing wells. No i wouldn't build a Hedge Maze in them because it's just not an efficient building for it's purpose. With that out of the way, lets looks at this new building and what would make it worth while.
Say whatever you want, the randomness of the production just limits the building to a point where it is not competitive with a typical specialized production building leaving the only reason to have a WW in you city is the diamond production. And based off of the average daily rewards that Inno has given this building compared to other recently released event buildings, we shouldn't look at it as anything other than a WW type building. With those two points said we need to look at why players would want this building, and that for it's diamond production.
So lets looks at it's diamond efficiency.
It's a 5x5 building that gives 100 diamonds at 1% chance so (100 diamonds divided by 25 squares times 1= 4 diamond production per square).
While a typical wishing well with a shrink kit can be brought down to 2x3 at 50 diamonds at 1% (50/6*1=8.33 diamonds per square).
Even a full sized WW beats it at 5.55 diamonds per square.
With these numbers, the building is not worth it for even diamond farm cities. And it makes one think that Inno wanted to give out a wishing well type building without it being too big of a diamond producer. And if that's the case, the only logical solution to this issue is to reduce it's size. I read through some posts in this thread saying the building graphics is complete therefor the building can not be made smaller. Just because the graphic is complete why does that mean they can't reduce it's footprint? Why can't they just reduce the image size. Sure maybe it will be a little out of scale but that's nothing they can't fix with a patch at a later time. The most important thing is getting the stats right to where it's useful but not overpowered.
With the above in mind, I think the most logical size would be 4x4 or 16 squares. At this size we then need to find what makes sense for diamond production.
100 diamonds divided by 16 squares times 1 = 6.25 diamonds per square. That's still not too good and considerable worse than shrunken WW's.
I think the best move at this point would be to double the diamond reward chance to 2%. Now that puts us at;
100/16*2=12.5 diamonds per square. At this rate it would be slightly less than 50% better than a handful of shrunken wishing wells and is finally an event worthy upgrade over a typically available building. A bit much? Maybe, but one thing Inno has surely focused on doing over the last year or two has been to put out extremely powerful event buildings. So i feel this reward is in line for this kind of building.
Finally, the weaker rewards can stay along with slightly reducing the primary (fp/goods) productions in line with the smaller building size, but i think small attack/defense boosts would be a nice addition to make this building more useful for the masses as opposed to just the diamond farmers. For added fluff i think the idea of unit production could add a interesting twist
Final building stats (4x4)
Permanent bonus
Small pop boost
Small Attack boost and or Defense boost
Daily random reward
2% 100 Diamonds
30% 10 fps (3 fps per day generating at 1fp per 5.3 squares)
30% 40 goods (12 goods per day generating at .75 goods per square per day)
10% medium medals (useful for some, useless for others)
10% Supplies (typically useless)
10% Coins (typically useless)
8% 3 of a random special unit production
Looking at the stats above, the building is weaker than the winter spire by giving up fp production and goods for diamond production. However it would still be desirable enough for most everyone as it would be in line with the fire pagoda given out in the spring event aside from maybe giving up half of the attack/defense bonus for the diamond production.
Maybe the stats still need to be brought down a little further to justify the diamond production. You are never going to please everyone. At the end of the day, if the developers are aiming at a wishing well type building that gives diamonds, the diamond reward really needs to be worthwhile over the currently available buildings in order to make it desirable.
I was hoping Inno would take another swing at this type of building and make it useful. I was dreaming up some sort of over the top awesome Atlantis civilization reward building, but i guess an event building will do for now
. Thanks Inno!
