I'm only saying that you _can_ balance games with mathematics, and ideally that's exactly how it should be done. I'm well aware of the computational complexity of trying to balance out something like starcraft especially using nothing but brute force (as a designer you probably know where the differences between races you created should lie, so you'll be simulating a smaller subset of the situations).
Although I'm not too sure about starcraft being harder than chess.
Some questions about balancing games
Although I'm not too sure about starcraft being harder than chess.
Well, the state space of StarCraft is clearly much larger than for Chess: Chess has exactly 64 squares, exactly 32 pieces, and an upper bound of 5898 plies in a game.
And I'm fairly certain the branching factor is also much higher: Chess has an upper bound of 28 possible moves per piece, for a upper bound of 896 possible moves per ply.
But the number of moves that obviously make no sense is also much higher in starcraft. The hardness of a game cannot be simply determined by combinatorial complexity, so comparing the two just by how many possible plays there are is not enough. Because what matters is not how many possible moves your opponent can make given a certain state of the game, but rather how many winning moves she can make. With starcraft, you're not as limited in movement and attacks as you are in chess, but most of the moves you can make would be obviously counterproductive.
Because what matters is not how many possible moves your opponent can make given a certain state of the game, but rather how many winning moves she can make. With starcraft, you're not as limited in movement and attacks as you are in chess, but most of the moves you can make would be obviously counterproductive.
Unfortunately, as the program simulating all possible strategies for balance, you can't tell in advance *which* moves are counterproductive.
Take the Planetary Fortress rush as an example. It requires stopping mining minerals after a couple of minutes (entirely counter-intuitive by normal StarCraft standards), and then flying a defenceless command centre into you opponent's base (also counter-intuitive).
This is less of a problem in chess, because a significant piece advantage usually indicates the outcome of the game - thus allowing you to prune the search tree whenever such a advantage is encountered. StarCraft doesn't really adhere to this principle, in part because it requires very little force to execute an unexpected coup de grace (i.e. snipe the command centre, the mineral line, or a vital part of the tech tree), drastically altering the outcome of the game.
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