while I know the balancing isn't done (or even started) yet, i found this 'problem' to be more of a design question than pure balancing.

I've had 2 games:

- game one: the first 3 Items or so i found where dex potions/books, increasing my moves. this way I just conquered the map before my enemies even build their 2nd or 3rd cities. I gobbled up all the potions and books from the goodie huts, making me faster, with high defense and lots of damage. whilst I still couldn't kill a troll all by myself, everything else I had for breakfast

- game two: the first few items were healing pots, defense and attack potions, and lots of weapons/armor.. while I was quite good equipped, I just couldn't get anywhere. In fact, when I encountered my enemies the first time, they both already had 3 cities and a small army.. I still defeated them, but it was painfully slow

the incredibly vast difference in gameplay seems just wrong. luck with picking up the right items at the right times should not have such a big influence..

conclusion:

- making starting stats sane (ie 1 move just doesn't cover it. 1 potion gives +2 moves (i think), meaning threefold. one item or not should not make such a difference). so: 3 moves default

- decreasing number of moves by potions: only 1 or even 0.5

- un-randomize goodies. while a randomness is certainly good in theory, in fact, lesser randomization is perceived way better if correctly applied. for this I need to explain:

a friend one coded an mp3 player. background is not important.. anyway. at first he had complete randomness in playing tracks and it just seemed wrong.. while it was random, the human mind either recognized patterns where there were none (didn't it play like 3 songs in a row of that genre?) or the stile-breaks were so clear it just ached. so he went and made it less random. zero, one or two features (genre, artist, album etc) of a track have to match the currently playing one to be considered next track.

so I think goodie huts would need a similar mechanism. depending on whether the content of a hut is predetermined when creating the world or just randomly generated when accessing the hut, different calculations would have to be done, but the result should be the same:

- the number of each type of item should be limited. ie 5-10% chance for dex potions meaning there can't be another dex potion, if this would raise the chance to 11%.

- the location of equal stuff should be randomized to spread it over the world and not just one corner (OR to make it even more fair, for each region where a player is, the goodie huts are generated, so there are always x-y dex potions in ones vicinity and other players have exactly the same amount around them)

- or a completely different strategy: when opening a hut, the content is randomly generated. the possible contents are 'something completely random' or 'some random useful thing'. the latter (which should occur more often) could check whether the visitor really needs a 5th sword or if he wouldn't be better served with a first shield or so. while still random (equipment, potions whatever), it would would be perceived better than getting 4 health potions in a row (which happened to me and didn't seem random even though it was)

well.. that were just a few (or half a book) thoughts of mine..

ora