> My most successful team sacrificed Agility entirely in order to beef up Attack and Defense scores, and absolutely wiped the floor with the opposition. The moral: forget about how many times you can attack; instead, focus on making every attack really *count*.

Last night, Darien and I were talking, and we crunched some numbers and came to the conclusion that investing in agility would be almost universally a mistake. I'm currently conducting a more thorough analysis to see if I need to change the combat rules after the current tournament and before the next one, just to keep the gameplay balanced.

After doing some more number crunching, I've discovered that this is not actually the case -- a minimum of agility is definitely not optimal, and this was coincidentally borne out almost simultaneously by the victory of "xwings," who swiped the #1 spot from you with a set of characters with moderate to high agility.

Still, the #2 spot out of 200 is nothing to sneer at.


> 1) I'd like to know how attacks are resolved when the Attack score is less than the Defense score.

When attack and defense are equal, you do 1 point of damage with every other hit, and 0 points with the remainder of the hits. When attack is one less than defense, you do 1 point of damage every three hits. And so on.

> 2) As the tournament progresses, will there be opportunities to improve Hit Points? A monster that can take more punishment could afford to skimp a bit on Defense and improve other areas.

Not at present. That was the plan all along, but I never got to that during the initial phase of development. I do, however, have loose plans to add the ability to gain hit points later on. This would be something I'd code between tournaments, perhaps whenever I get the general feeling that people have figured out how to play the current set of rules optimally.

> 3) Will monetary awards ever exceed (or diminish from) five hundred dollars minus expenses for the match? I'd like to plan ahead how much saving-up I should be doing for bigger and badder equipment.

Nope, this is how the monetary rewards go for every single round of the tournament. The amount of points you get does increase in the final rounds, though it is still a figure based on the outcome of the match and the medical expenses of the victor, whoever it is.