Yesterday we received our 15th empowered converter, Child of Summer. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding empowered troops. Some say it makes the AI too hard. I personally disagree, and I say personally because I can understand the logic behind the arguments, I just don’t feel that way when I play the game.
Keep in mind that this is only a list of empowered converters, that means they start with 100% mana, and it’s only converters, not empowered troops that do other things (like Leprechaun which explodes gems).
I think the controversy around empowered converters is that they can instantly fill mana to other troops, emphasis on other troops, because if you look at this list, there is not a single troop here that converts to its own color. There are plenty of other troops that do that (Qilin, Shimmerscale, Sir Quentin Hadley, etc.), but none of them are empowered. I don’t think it would matter anyway, but it’s definitely something they’ve clearly avoided.
There are a couple things to notice with empowered converter troops:
- Every troop has two colors
- With the exception of only one troop, Lamashtu, troops never convert their own color
- As mentioned, they never convert to their own color either
With these rules, we know that every empowered convertor represents four unique colors. That also means we can make highly accurate guesses at future empowered converters. For instance, we have only one troop that converts red to something else. If we wanted to introduce a new one, we know that it would most likely be red to yellow, brown, purple, or green. If it converts red to yellow, then we know its own colors will be a combination of brown, purple, green, or blue.
Interestingly, while green has four different conversion troops, all to unique colors, the troops are all red/yellow. I don’t believe this is random. It’s very hard to have two converters that bounce back off each other. That is, convert one color to another, then use a second empowered troop to convert another color to either refill the first empowered troop, or convert another color to the same color.
Example: Moonsinger converts purple to green. Moonsinger uses blue. Scurvy Seadog converts green to blue, refilling Moonsinger. But Scurvy Seadog uses Red/Yellow, so it can’t be refilled by Moonsinger.
What you can do is run something like Grave Seer which converts green to purple, and First Mate Axelubber which converts blue to red. First Mate uses purple, and Grave Seer uses red. This isn’t terribly useful though because ideally you want your second converter troop to convert to the same color as the first one, otherwise you aren’t really changing the board much.
I don’t see empowered converters slowing down in being released anytime soon though, so eventually the combinations and looping potential will open up. And keep in mind that a lot of empowered converters are used to fill troops (or the hero) that start at 50% mana, and sometimes THOSE troops can convert gems themselves. Thankfully one thing we haven’t seen yet is an empowered double converter (although I’m fairly certain that double converters only change one color to another color and a second color to skulls).
