Pricing mages

[elmokki]

EDIT: I was going to post this on unitgen thread, but made a mistake and by the looks of it this crap forum doesn't allow removing threads.

Being an economics student with courses in econometrics and having statistics as a minor and being a nerd I wanted to run a regression on mage prices to get a decent model to base UnitGen prices on. I've tried this once earlier and back then it was an utter failure.

Now I gathered new data of 63 mages. These are human or humanlike (monkey, abysian, lizard, caelian) chassises. Some mages with very notable extra abilities got left out, like anything with a forge bonus and tuatha/van mages which would be easily thugged.

I ran a linear regression with variables:
- Picks: Direct picks of magic the mage has, ie non-randoms
- Randoms: 100% chance randoms the mage has (linkeds obviously are 2 or 3 depending on link size)
- Holy: Holy levels the mage has
- Max: Maximum reachable magic level with 100% randoms

Intercept - 9.432022355 - significant at 80% confidence level
Picks - 28.98576911 - significant at 99% confidence level
Randoms - 24.0029813 - significant at 99% confidence level
Holy - 20.16660489 - significant at 99% confidence level
Max - 20.5083636 - significant at 99% confidence level

All variables except randoms and obviously intercept are significant at 99.9% confidence level too, which is fairly huge, but I'd be happy far lower anyway.

Intercept was less significant than the others by far, but seeing how it's about 10 I'm fairly happy with the result since every single chassis in the list should be worth about 10 gold as a troop with decent equipment.

R^2 was about 0.925 so it's a fairly good model as a whole too, but obviously the prices will rarely hit vanilla prices spot on. It's no wonder of course since the stock nation mage prices are valued for the nation, not with a general model in mind.

That said, if you use this model for determining a mage price you'll probably get a mage price that is -+20% or so from what the price of the mage should be. Replace the intercept with a suitable price for the chassis though (like a jotun giant should probably get 30 or something as intercept)