Tip: Template for reducing late game MM hell

[Micah]

You sum up the advantage of a sneak attack pretty well, but I don't see how that relates to gem items.

If you lose 90% of your territory in a turn and can't reclaim it quickly you're sunk either way...there's still a large gem swing in favor of the attacker and your income will drop below your upkeep. In either situation you've got to rely on what you have on-hand to orchestrate your counterattack, not what your income is providing. Once the attack is sprung the difference between having 20 gem income versus your opponent's 80 without gens and having 70 versus your opponent's 130 with them is of little importance, you're still way behind and unlikely to catch up, even if the proportions are comparatively better. At that point the defender is reduced to protecting the few castles they have left, since an offensive push against a superior opponent that is expecting it is folly. Which leads us back to extreme cases of turtling, which it seems no one likes.

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Psycho

Even without VPs it is always enough to take those 10-20% of provinces, anyway. Once your opponent sees that you can take his lands bit by bit, it becomes evident that you will win eventually and futile to continue the game.

Well, if you can take my provinces bit for bit and I can't do nothing about it, then you already have some advantage that I can't beat, I wasn't talking about that.
However if I can do something and you are just advancing with your real forces (instead of holding them back or making a trick switch whenever you take a province etc.) I can just equip my counters and teleport them on you/let you run into them. Especially as I don't care about particular provinces I can just have 1 less SC as you and 10 cheap raiders to take exactly as many provinces from you as you from me.

[K]

Originally Posted by Micah

You sum up the advantage of a sneak attack pretty well, but I don't see how that relates to gem items.

If you lose 90% of your territory in a turn and can't reclaim it quickly you're sunk either way...there's still a large gem swing in favor of the attacker and your income will drop below your upkeep. In either situation you've got to rely on what you have on-hand to orchestrate your counterattack, not what your income is providing. Once the attack is sprung the difference between having 20 gem income versus your opponent's 80 without gens and having 70 versus your opponent's 130 with them is of little importance, you're still way behind and unlikely to catch up, even if the proportions are comparatively better. At that point the defender is reduced to protecting the few castles they have left, since an offensive push against a superior opponent that is expecting it is folly. Which leads us back to extreme cases of turtling, which it seems no one likes.

I think that the gem gen income is important, which is why people attach so much importance to it.

I mean, you can lose 90% of your provinces and take most or all of them back after a few turns of thug summoning and forging (both of which require some gem income); it's folly to believe that a sneak attacker is a superior opponent and will defeat you just because they attacked you while your attention was directed elsewhere.