1) Making golems awesome and allowing us to choose if there is a balancing factor is brilliant. I for one don't mind having uber units that help my weak skillz beat the game on 7.3.
I agree, Chris came up with a great solution there. It's taken us about a year to find it, after numerous re-inventions of golem stats, but hey, better now than never
So you can balance it with big AI attacks (that use the same mechanic as the spire city retaliation attacks, actually), or massive costs, or with nothing directly and instead pack in the challenge some other way (or not, if desired).
2) I've only gotten my first spire city up, but really liking the extra dimension it adds to the game, very cool (though I wasn't ready for the core ships that streamed in when I started building it).
Glad you're liking the Fallen Spire progression, that was most of my work on this expansion
It's a pretty different way to play, and becomes a _very_ different way to play if you choose to follow it far enough. The escalating AI attacks (which tend to contain many core ships, yes) tend to keep things pretty challenging
Thanks and keep up the great work. Now if I can only talk my friends into playing.
Thank you for your support
And I'm sure we've got a spare mind-control device around here somewhere...