[Micah]

Wish is needed to turn pearls into OTHER gem types. Wish does not enter into the situation when you are converting TO pearls. I bring up wish because it means that the game considers pearls to be equal to two other gems, which is the same ratio you get from alchemy. Granted the equivalency doesn't appear completely until late game, but that's when clams have the most impact, so a minor quibble. The way alchemy works and gem valuation is why I brought up E and F as having taken harder nerfs, since you DO need wish to get those gem types without paying through the nose.

Um, your point B IS a side point, since we're talking about astral, not earth and fire.

I'm not convinced that S nations actually took the hit you're describing, although since they're almost all human nations they did lose some ground to nations with recruitable thugs, since thug/SC nations do better in a tighter gem economy. I don't think that has anything to do with magic flavor though, just that S nations tend to be human (and I already explained my objection to using R'lyeh as a metric.) In fact, in the last RAND game I was pretty hell-bent on avoiding fighting astral nations if at all possible, and lost something like 300+ gems and 5000g worth of stuff to a 4,000g communion of astral mages played by an inexperienced player. Maybe astral was even MORE powerful before, but it's certainly not hurting now.

As to the bottom section of your post, I have to toss off a quick "wtf" for some of the accusations and arguments you're making there. You do make a good point though, albeit by accident. You could go ahead and remove all pearl income from the game and it would not effect the true cost of astral magic, which is that each pearl you spend is the equivalent of two other gems. CBM doesn't change that, it just makes it obvious.

Granted, having a pile of pearls allows you to defer the extra cost until you could have wished the pearls away into gems, but sooner or later every pearl you spend is 2 gems you don't have, and I am posting from a game-winning mentality here, meaning you will most likely have access to wish by the end-game. (And I already admitted to there being a bit of a nerf in games that last long enough for clams to pay off but not long enough to get wish...that's a pretty narrow band though, and the clams really don't kick into high gear until around the time you can wish, so I consider the effects fairly minor.)

And the "screaming" comment was based on the consistent posting of the supposed astral "nerf" as fact across several threads, not because of this specific instance, or really the tone in any of them. I'm not sure if you are the author of all of the posts on the subject or not, but taken in aggregate I believe my comment was warranted, though perhaps mistargetted.