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It ruins the point of the item forge by making it too difficult to craft high tier items for heroes, who need these items to deal with giants and dragons effectively. There are other and better ways to delay item forge use, prevent abuses of item crafting, or limit its tier crafting abilities with connections to armory building improvements or SPI's.

If fragments still have a purpose after this review, they should be connected to lava harvesting structures or SPIs, and be the very pinnacle resource required for t4+ items. They should have a clearer connection to Lithorine or "Crystal" at the very least.
 
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Exactly, item forge is delayed enough even now, you need to unlock it, build it and have some essences and magic gathered to even craft anything. There is no item abuse either, because you can craft only one item at a time anyway and cost of items is high enough to discourage you from making more than one item every 20 turns. Plus player is actually at a big disadvantage regarding items, because ai is getting them for free every few turns (talking about T3-4) just sitting at throne city.

And no i dont have any new dlc from new season and i dont plan buying it like ever, unless they go on sale for at last 90% discount.
 
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Wholeheartedly agree.
Less is more! The item economy is non-existent as is.
 
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I think it's a good way to incentivize crafting lower-level items. Previously crafting lower-tier items often felt like a waste of Essence since slots are the ultimate limit. Now there's some leeway.
If crafting high-tier items (or items in general) is too hard, you can tweak item forge cost, Binding Fragments abundance and other levers. But I think Fragments were introduced for a good reason, as explained by the devs back then.
 
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I think it's a good way to incentivize crafting lower-level items. Previously crafting lower-tier items often felt like a waste of Essence since slots are the ultimate limit. Now there's some leeway.
If crafting high-tier items (or items in general) is too hard, you can tweak item forge cost, Binding Fragments abundance and other levers. But I think Fragments were introduced for a good reason, as explained by the devs back then.
Its another resource that takes away attention from other resources. We're supposed to progress our custom factions to max capabilities. Making it harder for champs and wks to build items, weapons, and armors to take on Giants, ES, and Dragons tilts the balance of the game to their favor. None of the other rulers get a unique forge mechanic to compete with Giants, so nongiants already lose access to t4+ items.

And now it makes sense for the other rulers to barely get access to t4 items in the late game? We can't even loot dead or captured heroes efficiently except to get one random piece, drastically reducing the usual source of binding essence we used to have. Nobody should have to be forced to craft low value items if its mid to late game and they have the resources to pay for better ones, its illogical for a strategy game that can provide quality vs quantity dilemmas. The value of low tier items was their cheapness and speed of access.
 
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I think it's a good way to incentivize crafting lower-level items. Previously crafting lower-tier items often felt like a waste of Essence since slots are the ultimate limit. Now there's some leeway.
If crafting high-tier items (or items in general) is too hard, you can tweak item forge cost, Binding Fragments abundance and other levers. But I think Fragments were introduced for a good reason, as explained by the devs back then.
It is not. Its good only for quickly fullfil defender, nothing else. I dont want to craft t1 items with nothing, when i have unlocked abilities that i want to use but i cant, because it bumps instantly item to t3 and t3 item cost 25 annoying resource that you dont have 90% of time. I want to craft items early game, crafting lategame is pointless when game is already ending and you cant transfer items to another map.
 
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Disagree. They subtracted one turn from all of the forge recipes to the point that now you can build multiple tier 1 items in a single turn which is a huge benefit.

I like that trade with itr now a little more difficult to draft Tier 4 and Tier 5 items. It's still not difficult to forge them and I like the bit of deferre gratification and the tradeoffs that make you consider scarpping T3 and T4 items that you find.

Some of you have no patience and sdhouldf look to mods or cheat codes if you are in such a hurry.

As for me, I get bored with a match when I start running out of things to research, build or forge. I wish there was even a rarer tier of items and culture traits to further accelerate getting them.
 
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I do agree the system could use a change, altho i'm not entirely sure what solution would be the best, there's a lot of solid ideas to choose from.

For those who don't mind mods however, there is a mod with a building that gives essence income (and fragments from it's T2 and T3 upgrades)


It feels balanced enough considering you have to invest some time and gold into actually building it up.
 
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I do agree the system could use a change, altho i'm not entirely sure what solution would be the best, there's a lot of solid ideas to choose from.

For those who don't mind mods however, there is a mod with a building that gives essence income (and fragments from it's T2 and T3 upgrades)


It feels balanced enough considering you have to invest some time and gold into actually building it up.
It's a fantastic short-term solution, but mods get outdated very easily with additional patches and dlcs. This should be rectified by the original team in the base game ASAP, ideally with SPIs or throne city building chain.

Fragments could be discarded and replaced with imperium gold or mana requirements colinked with Binding Essence, forcing a strategic choice for players to build higher tier items or investing in higher tier units/buildings/upgrades.

Or, if they must be kept, call them "Crystals" "lithorine fragments" and make them available to lava/ashland resource specific SPIs for easier high tier item crafting. Players should fight over building cities and capturing wonders over important terrain tiles. And every culture should have a different and unique SPI for processing essence and fragments.
 
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My initial suggestion stands by.

Let us convert essence into fragments

Then put some modifier if you will, like a per-turn limit, or diminishing returns until X turns, or even a gold price (for the alchemist pro doing the conversion).
 
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On one hand, I kind of see the reason behind this. Why ever craft lower tier items when you can save Essence for better stuff? The devs clearly want to add some kind of progression to item forging.

...But consider, we like making overpowered weapons early and the need for magic materials already added progression enough.
 
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