Revisiting Books - Did books weaken in value?

[zitro1987]

Yes, you make good points. 8 books brings the early uncommons, but it does seem like 9-10 books of a kind serve little purpose for early or mid game. That's a critical loss of early game snowball opportunities to get to your very rare spells. Especially in higher difficulties where the best players don't seem to pick more than 8 books.

no, starting commons is not necessarily the way to do it. But I'm just not convinced 9-10 books of a kind is really that worthwhile due to early game sacrifices, especially the 10th book. Maybe specialist (or omniscient, or either) should throw a little extra reward if you hit 10 books of a kind, or so many other ideas we could come up with to incentivize it a bit more for earlier parts of game.

[Suriname]

The spellbooks system is on the "completed, will not change list". One of the very few things that finally made it there.

I'd like to remind you that one of the primary goals of the previous changes was REDUCING the starting commons. We agreed on that goal so let's not do a 180 turn now and go back to the original system - this year has been enough to prove fewer commons work better in practice - it makes research actually relevant in the early game.

High books are almost mandatory as is for late strategies - I tried playing 6 Chaos many retorts, then 10 chaos less retorts and the second worked light years better. Lack of rares and very rares is a huge problem.
Unsurprisingly the opposite is true for early strategies - fewer books and more retorts work better because retorts are an immediate boost.
If anything, I'd agree with Hadriex on this one, who said mono-color is now stronger than mutlicolor because every realm is self-sufficient. However that is only true if you max the book - almost every realm has keys spells you cannot afford to miss if that's your only realm. So if others think multicolor is the stronger one now, that is a sign of perfect balance.

Furthermore, a guaranteed starting research pick at 8 books is a HUGE early benefit - you're guaranteed to have the uncommon spell of your choice while everyone (even some higher difficulty AI) is still stuck at their common spells. This can be used even for early strategies - werewolves, gargoyles, etc are designed for that, but there are plenty of other strong choices (Planar Travel and Shadow Demons, Stream of Life, Aura of Majesty, AEther Binding, etc) that have long term powerful influence if researched in the early game.
The percentage cost bonus and research bonus is almost as powerful as a retort on its own and gives you extra mana, skill and ofc, high rarity spells.

  Drumsroll 

I agree.

Different reasons: raising cost of research makes each initial spell that much more important. Mono-color is quite strong, see the sorcery example. Chaos might need a little help at the start perhaps? But that's specific to the realm.