The First Leg (Left)

Two other broad components will round out my pre-release preparation:

Practice:
No matter how much affinity I have for a given game, practice always helps me. There's an art to practicing efficiently. Playing matches against random opponents online has its benefits, certainly, but you can do better. To do better requires appropriate practice partners. The ideal practice partner is someone you like spending time with, who wants to improve their game, who admits their mistakes, who is good at spotting yours and who is better than you are. Practice games should have minimal emotion attached. It's hard to practice when you care too much about losing. You're not practicing to win, you're practicing to learn. You want to avoid a situation where your partner thumping you three times straight makes you want to call it quits for the night.
I'm looking for likely candidates to practice online with. I expect there'll be a Vassal mod up and running inside the next month or so, until then I'll have to settle for playing the downloadable demo. I found two likely practice buddies on the official forums, Jeff and Corle. Both have called dibs on being the inaugural WoWminis World Champion, so they should be prepared to put in some hard yards. They both seem like nice, yet opinionated guys and Corle already has quite a gamer resume. He nearly was World Champion of the Mechwarrior game published by Wizkids.

Theory:
There are some things practice can't tell you. Questions like 'what are the chances that a combined Arcane Blast and Fire Blast will kill a full health Gorebelly' aren't really answerable except through the application of statistics and/or programming. While you'll get a feel for these sorts of probabilities through play, I'd rather remove the fallibility of perception from the situation and have some raw figures to mull over. I'll want to have a rough idea of the damage distributions of common attack/defense combinations, find out who the most efficient figures are in terms of simple slug-fests, and get a feel for the importance of hills and forests. To this end I'll need to code up a statistical application that can accept a variety of arguments. It'll also give me a chance to work on my programming skills.

I've got about 10 weeks.

Next: First Impressions.