[Scott Hebert]

Well, here's the thing about castling. As you said, it's a legitimate strategy. Hence, your labeling of it as 'abusive' is purely of your own belief. It's not abusing anything except perhaps the balance of the game. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the game. For me, it's rather the same as being mad at the fact that a Queen can move better than a Rook or a Bishop in Chess.

Luckily, unlike Chess, we can try to see it changed. However, a few things need to happen before any change is implemented.

1) Verification that this is indeed not how the game was meant to be. IOW, if the Designers felt that the desired end-result of a game was to have castles everywhere, they're not going to change it, and you're really just wasting your time.

2) Verification that the strategy is, indeed, 'abusive', as you put it. Is the strategy unfair? Is it inherently superior to any strategy that can be feasibly used against it? Does one person using the strategy force others to use the same strategy, or fail?

If 1) and 2) are verified, then you have identified something as a problem. And, BTW, you need to have more than one person able to reproduce the results of a strategy before it can be termed abusive. The best way is NOT to have that person win without the strategy. If he plays, and wins, you've lost your argument. If he plays, and loses, you can't chalk up the loss to the absence of the strategy. A better way is to have that person explain his strategy in minutest detail to others, so that they understand at the best level how to duplicate it. Then, see if THOSE people can win with the strategy. If they can, and they come to dominate the environment, THEN (and only then) do you have an abusive strategy. If a person with a 'potentially abusive strategy' has explained their strategy to others, and those people have tried to use that strategy against others, and failed, there are a few reasons why that might be.

1) Lack of familiarity with the strategy. They may need more experience.
2) The original player did not explain themselves well enough. This can be accidental or intentional.
3) The original player is winning on skill, rather than an abusive strategy, and therefore his strategy is not abusive.

Now, assuming that you can duplicate this abusive strategy, then you have the task of determining the root cause of the problem. Is the strategy too easy? Is it too hard to disrupt? What element of the strategy is making it abusive? For castling, some possible questions are: Is it the cost of the castles? Is it the way that the turn order is processed? Is it the ease of building SCs?

Once you have identified the core of the problem, you need to propose solutions to the problem that target the core problem, and address its problems. Solutions to the above questions could be: Double the cost of the castles, make sieging happen before Magic (which means you can't Teleport/move a SC in to protect the Castle), or drastically change the way SCs operate.

Finally, you need to test the solution, to make sure that that it does, in fact, deal with the problem. Once you have tested the theory, and found it suitable, then you can present a complete package to IW, from start to finish, and see if they'll implement it. Presuming that 1) was passed, they should.

This is the amount of work that should go into any perceived problem in the game, and the less work you do, the less incentive you give IW to give your arguments credence.

Hope everyone's liked Problem-Solving 101.

Scott