[Scott Hebert]

I doubt many of you remember me, but those that do might remember my rather silly passion for 'brute-forcing' certain things.

Well, I am currently trying to work out accurate gold costs for random picks on mages, using Illwinter's baseline as given on their website. I have discovered a rather unusual event.

It needs tweaking, but a general rule of thumb is that a fully random pick is worth 25g regardless of the mage's fixed picks. Elemental or Sorcery random picks are harder to quantify (at least, on mages that have both), but I hope to have those quantified soon.

Now, a few caveats regarding this. It assumes that the random pick is fully random; i.e., it can be any of the 8 paths, and it is not bound to any other random pick (such as in the case of Atlantis's Kings of the Deep). It also assumes that each of the 8 paths of magic are equally desirable. That is, Fire magic is no better than Air magic is no better than Death magic is no better than Astral magic. This is Illwinter's assumption on their site, and I have followed it.

What prompted this is the at-times rather obtuse pricing of mages in the game. Certain mages are drastically undercosted (High Seraphs, Circle Masters, Daughters of Avalon), while others are drastically overcosted (Master of the Five Elements, Pans). I hope the end result of my research will be a balance mod to redress this.

Something else that I hope to glean is the 'formula' for calculating the cost of commanders, beyond the very simple. I feel that I have a basic grasp of it, but the quantification of various 'specials' needs to be tightened.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I will check when I can.