That's what concerns me most. Running a city with no houses, I had to burn coin instants. Being a primarily combat city I have a lot of then, a whole lot of 15% ones from weekly Spire climbs. Used so many that it's probably not sustainable in the long term. Since someone official floated the idea these increases were meant for event quests, and the coin rage has been constant, loud and undeniable, I'd bet on them decreasing the coin requirements for future FA badges.
Any discontent with the bracelets badge increase was drowned out by the coin rage. With 6 boosted factories and set and evolving bldgs producing T1, it still took feeding the Storm Phoenix, enchanting the factories, and pushing through productions with time boosters at a much higher rate than previous FA's and I still didn't reach the overall collection amounts that I did previously. This is very much unsustainable! And I've been hoarding strategically overprepared for over 5 years in this game, lol! Where does that leave players who approach the game with the (much more practical!) 'it's not doing me any good sitting in my inventory' logic?
The guards badges worry me the least. It went from requiring 3x Squad Size (ArmyCamp/MapProvince SS) to 4x SS. Even with 0 armories (thus zero training size from Shrewdy) only using a lvl 22 Bulwark for training size so all my training bldgs ran out of troops overnight, plus passive troop productions from AW's, etc, I still had leftover guard badges. While it might be an issue for small city FS's where more cities lean towards catering, usually those have some players who are developing their military, so those players can help more with guard badges. But, are the caterers going to be able to compensate for the bracelets since more of their city is making goods? Probably not, because they need all 3 tiers of goods so they're not focused on just T1's.
I actually had a balanced cater-only city (literally zero military buildings) and I thought that the bracelet income was... modest. With the caveat that that particular city
⁰ is parked in a sleepy Fellowship waiting on an invite
¹ for which I established that city, so I wasn't able to truly test it as much as I'd have liked. The bottlenecks there were of the sort that any halfway decent slumlord would've scoffed at.
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As for my main city, the final results just minutes before the event ended were:
And I dumped a few time boosters into making more barracks troops to keep up with the tourney. The spells that went into boosting the culture items (for the tiaras) meant that I
was still overproducing supplies from my three Spire-won Magic Workshops.
AFAIK, bracelets have always been a low(-ish) problem so the fact that
coins, of all things, became such a problem made it, as you've said/implied, the top issue. Kinda like a newspaper (does anyone still remember those?):
Something has to be on the front page, and
something else has to be on the other pages. The Great Coin Purge has shock value, and now I'm starting to think about it cynically. What if the change was actually on purpose to desensitize us to second-page-but-still-newsworthy bracelet problem? [/tinfoilhat]
EDIT: Added separator to help make it clear that the image does NOT tie into the aforementioned cater-only city, but to the main city. The presence of the guard badges should've been a hint, but... well. inb4
EDITS: Trying my hand at adding
superscripts to posts.
0: This experimental city is in US3 - Felyndral. Apologies for any confusion!
1: Statement valid for two days less than 4 months from when the city was established. Which was... two days ago. Finally got picked! *happy dance* ... *rolls for dex check* ... *nat 1* ...!!! *promptly falls over*