Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-84.110.72.169-20130907124036/@comment-11490363-20130916200855

I also now realize that a much easier calculation is possible.

By increasing your HP, you allow yourself more attacks. I won't bore you with the proof, but here is the result.

Let A1 and HP1 be the attack and HP of your current configuration.

You then have a bunch of weapons that you can swap in and out, and some of them increase attack but decrease HP, and some increase HP but decrease attack. In some of these cases, one increase more than compensates for the decrease in the other stat. You can determine which fairly easily in fact!

You can *safely* increase HP at the cost of attack, or vice versa, according to this procedure:

Let A2 be the (higher) attack value you are considering, you changed a weapon say and the new attack is A2 and you want to know if you should keep it or if the HP drop (if HP goes up then of course you should change it since both starts are increasing!) is not sufficient to compensate for the new attack. You can calculate the minimum HP that is required to balance the increased attack.

HP2min = HP1 * (A2 / A1)

Similarly, let HP2 be the (higher) HP value you are considering, you can calculate the minimum corresponding attack value to compensate for the increased HP as:

A2min = A1 * (HP2 / HP1)

More simply, by whatever ratio (X) you increase one value, you can decrease the other by the reciprocal ratio (1/X). As an example, if you double (ratio = 2) the attack value, it is balanced by reducing the HP by a factor of 2 (ratio = 1/2), or halving it.