The aim is to bring Mobile, PC, and console platforms all together in one code base (the Unity version). We’re currently porting the PC version over to the Console code base, with mobile to come at a later point. Because PC & Mobile players will still be interacting with each other while technically on different versions, we’re temporarily removing the AI decision making improvements (no gem sliders for now, sorry!) we’ve made on the console side with the intent that players won’t gravitate towards one platform or another because the AI behaves differently in its decision making.
Our older system was much similar to what players currently experience on the Mobile/PC side of things.
The changes I mentioned were specifically for gem creation spells like Justice & the Guild Guardians, not cascades. I believe the big difference is that PC/Mobile will overwrite gems with the same colour (or the secondary colour). So if you’re targetting a yellow gem with Justice to create Blue & Yellow, on PC it may overwrite a Yellow gem with a Blue, or a Blue gem with Yellow. This results in the net gain of the gems you get may not be the full 15.
However on Unity, and I believe the original design intention, is that the colours you create will not overwrite any gem that is a colour that you’re trying to create already. So in the above example, you won’t overwrite Blue or Yellow gems, only other types of gems. The net result is always the full amount of gems, however this results in a lot more matches, even when we try to avoid matches when trying to decide what gems get converted, as we still create the full number.
We’re looking into more ways we can combat this, though I believe the end result that we are looking at is to return to the way it behaves to the way the current build behaves and overwrite existing colours, as the PC/Mobile version has proven much less looping than console.