Can I get some cheese with that...

[Vynd]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
Although people may have made good points pro and con the various changes advocated, I don't think we have seen much hard evidence on any of them.

What kind of evidence, you might ask? The kind of stuff Zen talked about:

quote:

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Long ago I did a breakdown of Clam's and later Peter (may he rest in peace with many women and large tracts of land) gave another breakdown. With the #'s presented it was shown that you can abuse it, but only in specific circumstances with a specific gameset and only really viable for a very slim selection of circumstance.

If you advocate a change without taking the time to gather evidence like that, you are basing your arguments on preferences and opinions, whose relationship to reality is questionable.

Advocating change without the type of evidence above is what's been called whining.

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I think you're being unreasonable. I saw Peter's clam evidence, and while I'm sure it took some time to put together it was still relatively straightforward to develop. As I recall, it was essentially a mathematical formula that calculated how many astral gems you would get if you started making clams from water gems, and then more clams from alchemized astral gems, etc., etc. Forgive me if I've oversimplified it a little. But the point is, it required absolutely no in-game testing. It was just a matter of determining what the proper formulas were and then crunching some numbers.

There's no way I can see to do this sort of abstract number crunching for the issues of castling, or VQ, or raiding, or other things that people have "whined" about lately. There are no numbers to crunch here. No forumla to extrapolate from. The only way to gauge the impact of these various strategies and issues is to see them in action, in a game setting. Which takes a heck of a lot longer than running a few formulas.

Even if you could somehow run a big set of games in which to test your argument about, say, castling, there's no way to control for the variable you are interested in. The endless possible choices that each player can take means that you'll never know if a particular person won because they built lots of castles. Maybe they won because their opponents were just generally incompetent. Maybe they won because they found some nice indie provinces early. Maybe they won because they hoarded clams. Most likely they won, or lost, based on an interaction of a lot of factors, many of them not readily apparent.

So it is impossible to provide the sort of rigorous evidence you are looking for. And I don't think it is at all fair to tell people that their arguments carry no weight because they can't meet an impossible standard. Besides, it won't work. People will keep making their arguments, based on whatever logic and annecdoatal evidence they can muster. (And I say more power to them!) I suggest that you learn to live with this fact, rather than, um... whining about it.