So I was helping my girlfriend with statistics for last couple hours, but I'm back!!
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Fourth, I dont feel a need to dig into information gathering and pressure created through chance per turn given it's pretty self evident and me, you, and most others can follow that to it's logical conclusion on their own.
Welcome back.
You fed me a boatload of white noise that really doesn't further the conversation. You're flat out wrong on a lot of those points and I am not going to write my refutations of all those points unless you want me to (because it bogs down discussion). So, I'll cut to the chase and keep things short so all parties can keep up.
Increase the resources it takes to reach the terminal velocity of any given encounter causes an increase in weight for resource management and allows for more points for information discovery.
By having an ability pool that is seeded per game generation on and a resource pool that is seeded upon an encounter that accepts parameters such as player performance will keep difficulty consistent and diverse without changing combat function.
The short of it: Information hiding/discovery needs to be king.
Thanks for the welcome
If you'd like to point out how I'm "flat out wrong" you can put it in minimized spoiler tag and I'll respond to those points in the same manner. I agree that bogging down discussion isn't good and those points aren't really directly relevant anyway, as you said. But hey, you did ask for said "white noise" when you asked for why I brought in chess, so no apologies ;p
But onto the meat of it: So seed the resource pool and abilities based on player performance? Thus making information discovery/hiding king? Since we won't know the abilities of a given opponent? And greater resources mean bigger challenge and places greater importance on information and allows the player to discover more in a given encounter cause it lasts longer?
This certainly has some merit, maybe. And increasing the weight of information is also a very good suggestion I fully endorse.
The problem is that once we reach terminal velocity though. It basically signifies the end of an encounter once that velocity is reached. The problem I have with this is that resource isn't even health related though. Why have HP on an enemy if it ultimately matters very little in the end?
The only good argument I can think of for that is that a player is then spending time finishing one enemy off while the others get a chance to attack. But this is then mitigated by my above points on player leverage to turn group based fights into smaller encounters.
There's also the fact that the only way to counter player leverage when being creative (ie barrels) is to then massively increase resources to negate said leverage later on. Would then the AI seed such resources even in encounters that don't allow for as much leverage? That'd create problems of it's own and now you're discouraging creativity or enforcing it later on.
More information weight would also be better though. Hiding how much magic/physical armor an enemy has would be a step further towards this.
EDIT: Oh, and there's still the fact that I can divide and conquer by choosing how many enemies to fight at once with patience; effectively limiting opponent access to how much of a resource they can have. That doesn't always work out, obviously. But it works a lot more than I'd think they ever intended.
