Quantifying Blast Scattering: The Odyssey

Things went to hell this week, as everyone in the family (except me) either has the stomach flu, or bronchitis. Oh, and I have to move my parents from their apartment to assisted living at the same time. Joy.

Less annoyingly, I've also been busy attempting to quantify the average number of models hit by large and small blast templates. After trying some (very time consuming) manual methods, I finally broke down and wrote a script to do the hit testing automatically in a 3D graphics program. Which isn't a whole lot less time consuming to set up and run, but is at least far more accurate.

Costing Out Initiative Differences

Euriochrome and I have been kicking around some ideas for what the objective 'value' of initiative might be in the game. In the process, we've discovered that there isn't going to be one value, but at least 3 major types. I think I've come up with a decent value to start with though.

The Sort Of Work That Balancing A Game Requires

Last week, I dove into the task of balancing WarStrike numerically. Having done this before at earlier stages of the project, I had a good feel for the kinds of approaches that would work best in Excel (my primary tool for this), but I didn't really have an appreciation of how involved the process would be. Or how many variables would be involved. So read on, and you'll get a feel for the kind of complexity that just four little special rules can add to the calculations for what a particular weapon range might be worth. Then you'll have a better appreciation for why so many games just don't bother trying to figure out the math behind their mechanics, and just wing it.

The Technical Side Of Balancing/Testing

Gods And Generals, Mort Kunstler

I don't have anything more to talk about on the game itself this morning. Since I was pulling my hair out all-day yesterday figuring out how to use the advanced features of Microsoft Excel properly. But I might as well talk about what I'm doing, which is the technical setup of a model/unit database and a semi-automated testing system.

Weapons Balancing Vs. Knights

Iron Man Concept Painting, Disney/Marvel

With the new shooting/pen/damage system in mind, I've been working on balancing our weapon stats and troop profiles. Here's the numbers that I've got for Knight survivability.