#3 - Feb. 21, 2007, 8:23 p.m.
You could apply this notion to the whole of any game. Rephrasing it as, "Is it better to have more internal mechanics and mathematics transparent, opaque or translucent to the player?"
In the case of this game, it is rather translucent, in that players have access to enough basic numbers that reverse engineering the game mechanics isn't a huge stretch. However, not all mechanics are laid out transparently, so theorycraft does become involved. In the end, players have the natural tendency to break down, test and analyze components of a game so that pure opaqueness doesn't really occur in any situation.