I've done some research about efficiency of mixing colors - what I've found out:
1) red and blue are needed only in minimal quanity, becouse they have cap/scale slowly on higher grades - I use 1/8 of gem for them. 2) white/anything best mix is 2 white and 6 the other one(s) 3) black/anything best mix is 3 black and 5 the other one(s) 4) black overgrows white about g47, so for ultimate (50g) managain and killing gem I use black then, white before. 5) red hits every monster only once, so in front of eg. manatrap you need slowing gem, which will compress monsters going to you
According to this I use following recipes for gems - all g1 crafted by shift+g together: 1) slowing - 2 blue, 2 red, 4 white 2) managain before g47 - 2 white, 1 red, 5 orange 3) managain after g47 - 3 black, 1 red, 4 orange - I usually craft 3 black, 1 red before to get some hits and then craft with same grade orange 4) killing before g47 - 2 white, 1 red, 5 yellow 5) killing after g47 - 3 black, 1 red, 4 yellow - I get some kills on 3 black, 1 red same as with the managain
Ok Ledrias ad thunderrider, I may not have understood what was going on with the 33% loss of power when pressing 'U'. Could you please do a little commented video about it thunderrider, or Ledrias if you have a youtube channel, I'm pretty sure it'd help a lot of people in the Gemcraft community.
What I understood from that and what I apply, is the fact that duping a gem then combining it with it's duplicate is more powerful than simply pressing 'U'. I couldn't measure by how far given I didn't want to waste whatever mana costs a G52 gem, but it's would have been biased since my manafarm gem had a bloodbound component.
When you mix 2 gems, resulting special become the sum of (rude numbers) 0.8 of higher special + 0.7 of lower. So, if you mix pure + dual, you would get 0.8A+0.7*0.5A=1.15A. If you simply uprade - 0.8*0.5+0.7*0.5=0.75A
