Wow. Nifty stuff. I was wondering about this a little bit myself. While we're talking about game mechanics though, there's something I've been wondering about: in the rules of battle, there's a chart that for d that maps out attack/defense ratios between 0.5 and 2.0. There's a definite pattern for those chart numbers, and it says when d is outside that range, a proportional value is done, but it doesn't seem to follow the same pattern. In the first round of the prelims, I had Gilgamesh with 15 Attack vs. Ballclod's 7 Defense, I would've expected 17, 17, and 18 damage for the first three attacks (essentially, three 18s vs. four 17s out of every seven attacks), but instead it turned out to be 17, 16, and 17.

So, it seems I still have a little figuring out to do. It's really only that useful in the early prelims, but it's potentially helpful there in trying to plan out fast kills without wasteful hits to get a few extra points (useful in the long run since the top rankings in the qualifiers are sometimes pretty close). The plan was to have one attacker with 15 and one with 14; 17+16, 17+16, and 18+16 damage = 100 to knock Ballclod out in exactly 3 rounds of attacks... but it ended up not working out that way, heh. So I guess I haven't quite figured out really-high d-ratios yet... or really low ones, for that matter, but ideally I won't ever be that far behind on attack power, heh.