@pcsurgeon To be fair, you're partly right. Deal is pretty much obsolete now even on its own merits, but Basil is small enough to still be viable if it's levelled enough.
Funny enough, seeing all these new comparisons between GBs and the new towers in terms of space efficiency got me wondering why all the military GBs provide the same bonus despite all being different sizes. Should Zeus really provide the same effect as a CdM even though CdM is 4 ages higher and over 4 times larger? Is the reason Deal is almost twice the size of Basil for the same military bonus because medals are that much more valuable than coins? Basically, I've started wondering if the reason why these towers are causing 'balance' issues might be because the GBs that they're competing with are already imbalanced themselves.
GBs don't need to be balanced for size as long as they provide unique benefits as you can only have one of them. Sure their size can be a consideration in terms of when/if you build them. A 70 space alcatraz there's good reason why you might want to procrastinate it until you feel you need it. A 6 square zeus you might throw up as soon as you have prints even if you don't plan to level it too hard immediately. But all the popular ones are basically tier-zero buildings where they're way better than event buildings if you want what they offer. Ones that just offer stuff you can already get easily enough other places tend to be the bad great buildings.
Basically you can look at space-efficiency as the following:
Tier-0: Buildings that are so incredibly efficient that if you care about their effects of course you want them - but you can only have 1 so you can't make a city full of them. The best GBs, Yggdrasil, Shinto Temple.
Tier-1: The most space-efficient event buildings offered so far in one aspect or another. Things you *could* pave your city in with enough diamonds.
Tier-2: Filler buildings that are better than ordinary buildings but significantly behind the best event buildings coming out; but often can be obtained in large quantities much cheaper that tier-1 buildings which often only come at a rate of 1 per event for free (daily specials in events, terrace farms, etc)
Tier-3: Ordinary buildings that can fill certain roles well in whatever quantity you want them.
Tier-Junk: Things there's no efficiency reason to build. You can still build them because they're pretty.
When it came to basil/deal, losing their uniqueness to tactician tower which combined with watchfire can completely replace them is significant; basically they got bumped out of tier-0 (due to uniqueness, not popularity) down to maybe tier-1.5 for basil, tier-junk for deal.
When it comes to say Aachen though, attack for attacking army has been relatively cautiously offered in terms of space-efficiency on non-GBs anyways so it'll remain a tier-0 building. For now at least. Defense for attacking army though they can get competition on that front now though.
It's possible they went too high too fast on the efficiency of tactician tower and sentinel tower providing new effects that previously made GBs unique.
