asthasr

Please keep Terry Goodkind as far away from Elemental as possible.

It's never going to go 9:1 because of a cooler effect. :) That said, even in the case of something like that, the skills should be tweaked. If Ba is being used 9:1 that means that Bb, Bb1, and Bb2 were wasted development time. That has to be weighed by the devs, of course. This is not intended to be an automatic, emergent system. Think about it like this: if the statistics I posted are based on 1,000 games, that means that these techs were chosen...</

Well, interpretation is always the problem with statistics, DeCypher. There are a few possibilities in the example I gave: The tech itself may be imbalanced. A descendant tech may be imbalanced. The tech may be necessary to access a flexible branch of the techology tree. The imbalance may exist, but be intentional. Case 1 should be easy to diagnose. It would exhibit itself as a tech with a high selection rate across seve

It's not a question of finding the "slightly sub-optimal" paths and weeding those out. Those are the lifeblood of an interesting gaming experience. Instead, think about a tech which occurs in 90% of won games. This is a tech which is dangerously close to "necessary." It might simply be foundational, like researching "Alphabet" in Civ IV, but it might also be a truly off-the-wall spell that is simply too strong. This can occur even without the players realizing th

For the Betas, I think it would be a good idea if you implemented "postgame dumps." Essentially, these would be XML files containing information on technologies researched, spells used, items bought and the like. They could be parsed to provide statistics: individual technologies could be correlated with final scores, short/long games, and the like. If 95% of winners are taking, say, Earth Magic, this would provide valuable balancing information instead of relying on a