Game balance again

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 07:40:27PM +0000, Samuel Penn wrote:

>What's your definition of balanced? In Monopoloy everyone starts the
>game exactly the same, and have exactly the same chance of landing on
>any particular square. The only difference is who starts first, which
>gives a small advantage at the start.

A fairly substantial advantage, actually. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_strategy for some of the details.

But I think that what Oerjan's addressing is not so much the initial
imbalance as the problem that, once one starts to win, one tends to
continue to win - whoever gets the early advantage tends to retain it.
This is very common in resource-management games: the more stuff you
have, the more you can build, and the more easily you can bash the
other players.

R