Hello trickycdr!
The good news is - you are totally right about the behavior. The bad news is - you’re totally wrong about the reason.
Gem matching/swapping games like GoW have some very well-established math about how large the board can be & how many colors you can support for a reasonable chance of matches. Too many colors and you won’t get matches most of the time. To small a board and the same thing happens.
8x8 board with 7 colors is in a wonderful spot. As all of you have experienced when playing GoW! Occasional “rich” boards with lots of matches, very infrequent “stall” boards with 1 or 0 matches possible. All part of the math.
Now here’s the fun part: If you can eliminate one color - via “remove all yellow gems” or “transform all brown gems to red” or somesuch - you’ve effectively changed the board math. Instead of 8x8 7 colors it is now 8x8 6 colors. Which makes the chance of accidental matches via drops & cascade matches MUCH higher. If you run a team with 2 such gem conversion troops, effectively turning the board into 5 colors, you can get some CRAZY chains going. (Random match chance on an 8x8 7 board is about 9%. Random match chance on an 8x8 6 board is about 15%. Random match chance on an 8x8 5 board is about 26%!)
But there’s no secret ai parameter adjusting the drop rate - YOU are adjusting the drop rate by removing colors, and thus making the board “richer.”
Of course, at the same time you make the board “worse” for random matches if the gems are of the color you have eliminated. And this is the key point: eliminating all gems of one color means new drops are 6/7 MORE likely to match/cascade, and 1/7 IMPOSSIBLE to match/cascade.
So if you make a very rich board, and then get the one gem color that fails to cascade, you’ve almost certainly set up the AI to do something ridiculous. No secret parameters or conspiracy necessary.
Here’s how you can mitigate this : be mindful of the colors your opponent uses. If you have a gem transformer, actively REMOVE the colors they use. That won’t reduce the chance that they will get lucky - but you can reduce or eliminate the chance that their lucky matches will be useful.