Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either.
> Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost certainly it'll be worse than Excel.
You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe.
I'm not sure you understood what the parent was saying? This seems like a non sequitur.
In a spreadsheet, derived values can be updated instantly. Say you want to upgrade a bandit from leather armor to chainmail (6 or so equipment items changed), and then verify that his total defense and modified movement speed are still within reasonable ranges for the part of the game where he appears. With a text file, you've got some arithmetic to do. With a spreadsheet, it's there at a glance.
Or say your enemies are missing too much, and you want to give them +10% accuracy across the board, for all of 50+ enemies. In a text file, that's a lot of cursoring around. In a database, you could knock together a query to do it, but that still might take a couple of minutes, depending. In a spreadsheet, I could do it in 15 seconds. (And if I screw it up, a couple of Ctrl-Zs puts everything back where it started. That's not so easy in a database.)
And, y'know, a lot of programmers really underestimate the value of good formatting. A database can spit out nice columnar tables easily, but a spreadsheet can do things like put borders between stat clusters related to different categories; automatically color-code data so you can see at a glance what the highest and lowest values in a given column are, or spot out-of-range derived values; add alternate-row shading to make it easier to scan across a long row; and on and on. That is useful. It lets you find and correlate the data you want faster with fewer errors. Not everything has to be viewed in flat text.
[1] https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-economy-w...