I think Assess Demand doesn’t quite work as planned: the text says that it is applied to ‘that Client’ but it doesn’t specify how the client is selected, and whether it’s a communal action as applied to each Client separately or all Clients at once (eg if I do it for Elite can Kevan then do it for Vatican). It also specifies that you add a Want, then remove a Want at random, but as the result of that will always be Clients having exactly 1 Want there’s no need to randomise the removal; the Want that gets removed will always be the older of the two.

I also think that Triplet is (sigh) tilted towards sugar; I hate that we have to play with this mindset already but being able to make a box with a discrete value under 7 makes it trivially achievable for the sugar gang. I won’t object to that if Swamp looks like passing as I think that prop will go some way to eroding the literal bifurcation of the plays, and I do accept that it’s a marginal edge.

Oh, sorry, I misread Assess Demand; I see now that it does apply to all clients in one go.

Right, you basically just do the same thing for each client.

I put Triplet into the range where both Press and Sugar could hit it easily (whereas Scale is horrible for both, and good for Spin). If you think it’s still unbalanced, we can try to rebalance, but it’s hard to favour Press strategies at the moment because their range is just strictly worse than the Sugar range.

Maybe Sugar should be fixed to the 4-7 range, rather than 1-7? That would create more differences between the three main box-gaining strategies.

“Exactly 3” feels a bit too easy to get, and “8 or more” feels very much a “rich get richer” type scenario.

Well, fulfilling the Want gives you 2 Cogs. So if you have a Sugar or Press setup to guarantee yourself a 3-Box (to get the 2 Cogs bonus), you also have the capability to guarantee yourself a 5-Box instead, which is worth two more Cogs if Clanked.

“8 or more” is intended to give a buff to the Spin strategy, the point being that these are the Boxes that can’t be produced via Sugarcube (whereas a Spin will generate them 30% of the time).

(Asceticism is, of course, a nerf to Sugar.)

2 cogs without having to use a machine activation is probably better than 5 cogs having to use a machine activation

presses can also make boxes with exactly three, but that’s not a bad thing; with how this randomizes Wants & gradually increases their number, specific wants that are easy to accomplish alone can become much harder to accomplish in tandem with multiple other wants!

Per Ais’s demonstration that Sugar farmers can easily construct a lot of Boxes with any number from 1 to 7, so would have no difficulty in hitting both Triplet and Scale while using them all up.

per Kevan

CoV for the sake of the Q