Quote:
Originally Posted by Fakeymcfake
I think you're reading too much into the graphs for such an early point of the game. It's only turn 5 after all and everyone is still busy gobbling up the indy provinces. Priorities shift and in a game like this long term goals are just as important as short term, don't judge the artist until they're finished the piece.
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No, early is the best time to read a lot into the graphs because there's very little noise in the signal. Absolutely zero at the end of turn 1 unless someone felt risky and took a province successfully right away (which also says something about what they did...).
In a 100% gold game everyone starts with 400 income in their capitol. As upkeep isn't deducted from the 'income' score graph that is indeed an absolute number. Anyone with income significantly less than 400 has chosen negative scales in excess of positive, which means they're spending points elsewhere - ie, pretender chassis and/or magic. Truly low early income means they've really sacked their scales and almost certainly have a strong bless or an awake and expensive pretender (ie, rainbow SC).
This is absolutely guaranteed unless your opponent is a moron. They had to spend those points somewhere, and there's only so many places you can spend points. (I mean, we can imagine someone sacked their scales and then *didn't* spend those points on anything, but then we're assuming that person is stupid.)
Basically, deduction and the process of elimination can use the graph reports (especially llamaservers nice numerical rundown) to conclude quite a bit about pretender design for each player. I've only talked about scales thus far - other ratings can easily give away choices made in pretender design. I leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I would bet off the llamaserver rundown after turns 1 and 2 I could tell you the quality of your scales, what type of pretender you're playing, and ballpark your dominion rating without too much difficulty. Add some knowledge of your unit set and I might even be able to make specific guesses at magic paths and scale choices.
If you wait to read anything into the score graph then the noise starts swamping the signal and you lose a lot of information. (What quality provinces do you control? How many turns did you hire mages, and how many of them are doing research? Etc...).