The Relevance and Balance of Resources
I find that the game is very gem focused.
Gold becomes irrelevant very quick, and useless once you have a maxed T1 and T2 army. Upgrades don't seem to have much value. I feel like the early game is very short and the mid game is almost non existent. If there was a way to stretch these out and simultaneously decrease the late game (maybe increasing T2 and T3 cost as suggested elsewhere), potentially creating ways for the game to be ended in early game such as cheese or an all in and in the mid game such as a well timed and coordinated attack then this would make gold more relevant. It would also do the service of balancing out the state of the game and making it more interesting as opposed to sitting on your ass in the late game collecting gems and waiting for an opportunity.
If gold becomes relevant suddenly people will be inclined to leave the middle and swoop around the sides hitting the towers and expos.
Comments
Personally I find the earth coin more useful than the gems
Lemme know how things feel after playing some PvP games! People's thoughts on the economy tend to change over time.
The initial reaction of "meh... gold is meh...." is useful for us though. We've been considering amping up the impact of upgrades (perhaps even adding more) so that you are always climbing up to "the next big power spike" as the game progresses.
Do you think it would be worthwhile to have 'infinite upgrades'? Use some decaying function where each progressive upgrade add's less and less (to achieve a soft-cap at some level), but also allow people to continually have a sink for their gold once their army has been fully built?
I never really felt the desire to get the 2x gold mines, as they can be quite difficult to get. Perhaps if they mined gems instead they would be more enticing? (At a slower rate, naturally)