> This is great information, Sam -- thanks. One other question I forgot to include is, how is attack rate determined from Agility? Is attack rate expressable as "x number of attacks per combat turn" or something along those lines? (And if so, what constitutes a combat turn?)

Agility effectively translates to "number of hits per unit of combat time." It's not usually apparent what a "unit of combat time" is just from reading a battle description, but you get the idea. Anyway, it does mean that a character with an agility of 2 gets to hit twice as many times as a character with an agility of 1, but only half as many times as a character with an agility of 4.

> Right now it seems that if you're battling a well-defended opponent, you'd do better to pump up your Attack score as much as possible, so that you deal damage on one attack out of three instead of one attack in five, for example. But if your Attack is already pretty close to the opponent's Defense and you have the opportunity to improve Agility, a couple of extra attacks might be worthwhile.

It's a multiplication problem. The damage you do during a combat round is basically your agility times (your attack power minus your target's defense power). Assuming you can distribute a finite number of stats as you please, you ideally want your agility to be equal to the attack/defense difference. 6 times 6, for example, is greater than either 5 times 7 or 7 times 5.

The two complications are, one, your opponents change from battle to battle and frequently *within* battles. Two, a point of attack power isn't always interchangeable with a point of agility. Certainly when you have an extra point to distribute, it can go to one as easily as to the other, but when purchasing equipment and upgrades, some are more costly than others, some are temporary and some are permanent, etc, so it's a more complicated problem to maximize your combat capabilities than the basic underlying math suggests.