Re: Unit Cost Equation
			 
             
			
		
		
		
		Prediction is not what you might think. Of course, I can't predict what a  
modder is going to do. A modder could change Militia to be 10,000 gold. The  
regression equations describe how stats are related to price for existing  
units. To the extent that you generally like what Illwinter has done with  
pricing units, the equations might give you a good starting point. If you want  
to make drastic changes, you may be less interested. 
 
My guess is that the Illwinter guys don't use equations. One of them probably  
makes a unit and assigns a price based on an intuitive understanding of its  
usefulness. After playtesting, the price is modified. 
 
I can put things like magic paths and special abilities (e.g., ethereal) into the  
mix. I already did so with flying, which turned out not to be uniquely  
important enough to keep in. Keep in mind, however, that the equations  
above are already explaining about 80% of the variance. That is the equivalent  
of a correlation of .90. Whatever gains come in the future will be very modest  
at best. 
 
As for using nonlinear equations, I have looked at polynomial regressions for  
some of the predictor variables. Morale, for example, is pretty much linear.  
The squared term adds a little, and the cubed term is negligible. In other  
contexts, I have played around with log, square root, and reciprocal  
transformations. My experience has been that they are most useful when the  
vanilla linear regression isn't working well. Here, vanilla works like  
gangbusters, so the room for improvement is small. 
		
	
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
	
		
			
			
			
			
				 
			
			
			
			
            
			
			
				
			
			
			
		 
		
	
	
	 |