400 simulated wars later

Before changing a single combat rule, I wanted numbers. So I taught the game to play itself: AI versus AI, no rendering, four hundred full wars overnight.

The simulator settled two arguments I’d been having with myself. First, the second player was winning noticeably more often than chance allows — moving after your opponent is worth real money on a hex sea. Second, evasion was quietly the strongest stat in the game: fast ships weren’t just hard to hit, they were hard to punish.

Both findings fed straight into the 2.6 redesign. More on that in the next entry.

— logged at the harbor ⚓