Furthermore, unless I'm just up too late and should really go to bed now (probably true), it seems that the chances of 20 random picks missing a least one path (in other words, getting 20 consecutive sages and still not having 8 paths between them) is 43.6%, which is relatively high. Math:
1-((1-.0692)^8), where the .0692 is derived from the same calculation as above.
As far as RNGs go, I found a really nice one, called the Mersenne Twister. It is a software RNG, but the software actually finds stray radioactive particles in the dust on your CPU and monitors them for randomness. If you clean your case a lot the randomness goes down, which may explain some of the problems in this thread.
On the other hand... I just disassembled dom2.exe and got this little code fragment... maybe this is the problem?
Code:
public int rand(){
for(int i=0; i<100; i++){
if(seemsRandom(i)){return i;}
}
return secret_very_random_number;
}
public boolean seemsRandom(int x){
// note: add some stuff here before Dominions 3 is released
return true;
}
private int secret_very_random_number=42;