Is the forsaken altar kind of garbage or is it just me?

[Kyresti]

At a glance: They're expensive enough to be nonviable until midgame. Even a basic buff costs about half the metagame spoils you'd get from a typical Viceroy victory, regardless of whether you send people to die. They muddle blueprint progression (which, I get it, probably deliberate for prestige runs). They only work during storms. And for what? The boons you get only seem slightly stronger than whatever merchants have on hand.

I feel like for the price point there should be some utterly game-breaking witchcraft involved.

Am I missing something? Is this intended to be a food-crate sink at higher levels where you need that machinery some players are complaining about not finding? Because, like, right now it seems kind of pointless to even build.

[lethminite]

I've not gotten up to it, but i'm pretty sure they are meant to be a sink for citadel resources once you've bought everything, and so the resources would just stockpile endlessly with no use.

[OriginalFireup]

the stormforged perks vary in usefulness by a huge margin, I just had a game where I got a "stormforged free sample" that tossed me 2 parts every 15 amber. This, surprisingly, made it so I could sell the parts back and recover most of whatever I sold, letting me do a pretty reliable cycle of buying and selling everything in a merchants inventory. That on top of having the perk that gives you 1 rep every 60 amber, I had an incredible year 4 victory on prestiege 3 just by back-and-forthing with traders lol.

[Aestrea]

At higher difficulty games, its not rare to see like 17+ machinery, artifact, food in multiple big cache and by that time the only real resource you lack is probably food if you still needed to level up a few things at the end. If anything, the altar is basically just a unfamiliar cornerstone selection with no real cost.