[Ming]

Thanks Hiro. It is unusual to have the designer of the game answer personally to one’s questions, and with playing tips too! It is obvious that you care for the game and are proud of your creation. You should be proud as LOL is a great game. I checked out the other games in the top 5 strategy game award for 2005 (from the post elsewhere in this forum) and would personally rank LOL ahead of the other 4.

I was mistaken in thinking Gnomes get 500G when playing second. I stand corrected. Thanks also to ichbinsehselber for pointing this out. The fact remains that Gnomes can recruit Gardeners on T2 and 3 when playing second as opposed to T2 and 4 when playing first. As far as I can remember none of the other races has similar compensation in terms of recruitable units when playing second. Maybe you could illuminate me (and probably others as well) why you think 500G is sufficient compensation for playing second?

On my problem of Arcatta vs. Gnomes, I did use Arcatta healers to back up the Sorcerers and Archmages and almost always attack at full strength, but as Gnome player I almost always ensure that the Sorcerers/Archmages are killed even if it leaves others at full strength, so the high healing power is not very relevant. I also find that the flight ability can be extremely useful in some maps (e.g. Arcatta vs. Afflicted in the campaign) but not that relevant in others. Maybe I am missing a few tricks?

Two other comments:

1. In the spirit of your minimalist approach, shouldn’t you reduce all gold amounts by a factor of 50? That is, Cutpurse gets 1G per damage and cost 16G to recruit, Gnome cities generate 16G per turn and other cities get 20G per turn, etc.
2. Is there a keyboard command that cancels an action? Right now I need to click on the unit itself to cancel an action and clicking on the wrong square could end up having the unit cast a spell/ability on its adjacent ally. This could be disastrous as every mistake could become a game loser in LOL.

I hope I am not nit-picking. Like most gamers, I just hope that a great game can become even greater.