Just bear in mind that what you're seeing on the Test Server is a very, very early look! We'll have more information on this feature at a later date.
just looked at the stronghold on test.. 21k brew for a single 4 hour buff buff.? also I had 6 strongholds and its still going to take 4 hours to make 1 buff. I think your figures need revisiting.
Are you kidding? 21k brew is worth like 200 coins and even with the other stuff the buffs are relatively cheap when compared to rec guide or skunk for example. The buildings are mainly for lvl65+ and the build speed limitation is there to not make the building overpowered. By design you are not supposed to run a +500% speed buff 24/7 but they are still leaving the option for the hardcore players
Only as long as demand does not increase. If a larger group of people starts using the buffs, whether the cost is high or low you will only be able to say in comparison to actual production players can pull off. And if I remember correctly that 20k+ is equivalent to something like 2-3 friarys.
The question is : why ?By design you are not supposed to run a +500% speed buff 24/7 but they are still leaving the option for the hardcore players
There is a soft cap on production forced by resource consumption, there is no logical reason why there is an additional production bottleneck, aswell as there is no logical reason why anything BB does to change that bottleneck barely even addresses an issue (considering that +100% buff with a little over 20% uptime barely changes anything with regards to production, and still comes at a cost of probably 1-2 thousands of crystals).
A lot of people have been producing brew way too much already due the new mini quests. Epic farm alone produces +200k per day with all buffs active and it can do even more when including the upcoming 3x 24h buff and the raise to level 6.
Balance. Stronghold is not the only source for barracks buffs in the game. With all active I think you can have over +1000% increase to speed. This has been gone through at test forums few times but resources are not a good limitation on their own as they can be acquired multiple ways. Production time however is something that you cannot bypass easily as the buildings are behind multiple runs which require crystals and so on. MCC is 70 pieces so 200-300 crystals per run and it can take only few runs to get one Stronghold with resources or as a loot.
Ok let me rephrase the question : why it is considered a balance issue ? What kind of actual problem is there in people being able to produce many more units if they happen to be able to afford it ?
Unless of course the main goal of BB here is artificially inflating time one needs to spend playing instead of keeping people online by providing reason for them to actually play.
Look at it from a different perspective : we've already been capable of producing several thousands of recruits every day for few years now, is anyone arguing its actually a problem ? If not, then where is the issue with being able to produce as many mounted swordsmen ?