Or, as Tyler Sigman states in his introduction:
Be warned: this feature is long and contains a lot of things that are suspiciously and unsettlingly math-like. Go check up on BRITNEY SPEARS or PARIS HILTON or AMY WINEHOUSE if you have a shorter attention span. (Take that, Search Engines!)
Okay, so the article is probably not for everyone. But if, like me, you relish busting out excel to figure out optimal talent point placement, have a calculator by your side whenever making a major decision in a game, and spent hours of calculation discovering the most efficient Pokemon team (take that, schoolyard bullies!), this is manna from heaven.
It’s also good to know that, abhorrent as game design can be in the turn-based space, there’s at least one guy who understands the basics (Mr. Sigman worked on Age of Empires DS).
Instead of using a video game as his example, Mr. Sigman turns to a board game he’s designing, which although is perhaps less appropriate to the Gamasutra setting, is useful for the simplicity of calculation that a lack of a computer requires. Check out the article here.
