Just one more vote for the balance people. I remember the first hero that I created for Freedom Force... A nice Spider Man alike hero... I wasted close to three hours creating a nice skin and tweaking the numbers till I got him just right. Then I decided to go online and face off with some other FF Geeks. The all had Hulk alike heros and within the first 30 seconds of the game I was out... tell me that balance in any game isn''t an issue and I''ll tell you that your game is doomed to fail. At GDC last year I talked with a guy that set up a the database for a well known RTS - this database was utilized to tweak the units to ensure balance (among other things). Balance, in an RTS, is a big deal and giving the players the ability to create their own units without a system that will maintain balance is probably a mistake.

-Just my 2 pieces of wood from my resources.

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Dak Lozar-
The problem wasn''t game balance, but mission balance. What if the mission you played required you to be agile or stealthy? Then those hulk-wannabes would have lost. The problem with game balance is that the game designers rely too much on micro-balancing....the units themselves. Not enough consideration is given to macro-balancing...the mission context.

Take for example the Vietnam conflict. The Vietnamese were vastly outgunned in terms of firepower. In a raw sense, unit design would seriously favor american units in terms of both training and unit quality/firepower. And yet the context of the war had two vital consequences. Firstly, the jungle vastly negated a lot of the firepower advantage. Secondly, mission objectives for each side were different in that the Vietnamese just had to wear out public support for the war and/or enlist the will of the Republic of Vietnam people while the Americans had no strategy other than "containment" since the US government was afraid that an invasion of North Vietnam would lead to another Korean War situation (i.e. the Chinese would get involved....and this time they had nukes). When looked at this perspective from a macro view then the sides are balanced more or less. To focus solely on unit balance is a huge mistake.

Moreover, designers try to balance out the capabilities of a nation. In most designers minds, everything must be equal, including the overall capabilities of a factions units, as well as the resources and production capabilties of each side. Again, it is a mistake to look at design this way. Each side has advantages and disadvantages, but the sums of these pros and cons may not be the same for all parties involved. So how do you make it "fair"? Again, by looking at the macro view and designing by a context of the war that will be fought. Look at the American Civil War as an example. Here the Union troops had much better equipment (especially towards the end of the war), far superior artillery and artillery crews (Longstreet once said, "give me Southern infantry and Northern Aatillery and we can defeat the world) and outnumbered the southern troops in almost every major engagement by at least 2-1. And yet the south almost won...how? Their generals were by and large better than their Union peers, and the tenacity of rebel troops was greater than their foes. However, the real stroke that almost made the South win had nothing to do with troops or manufacturing capacity. It had to do with popular consent of the war. By 1864, despite some Northern victories, the Northern people had grown very weary of the war. To them, there really wasn''t much point in going on. Many feel that had it not been the victory at Vicksburg that Lincoln may not have been re-elected and the North would have sued for peace. In other words, the South''s greatest advantage was that it did NOT have to militarily defeat the North''s army nor destroy its manufacturing. All it had to do was defend its right to exist...and it was up to the North to destroy the South''s armed forces and destroy its capacity to defend itself.

In my own game design, one side is pretty outnumbered on a scale of roughly 5-1. There are a few unaligned factions, but even if they joined in, the odds will be about 3-1. It too is about a civil war, and much like the ACW, all one side has to do is weather the storm. The trick is in surviving the odds that are stacked against them. Victory for the FreeZone side (the minority side) will be measured more by how many units survive to make it to the next battle, and to defend its people who are on the run. The NEG''s Earth alliance Coalition troops must take the offensive and capture key targets with a minimal loss of casualities, otherwise public support will wane over time.

quote:Dauntless typed:
The problem wasn''t game balance, but mission balance. What if the mission you played required you to be agile or stealthy? Then those hulk-wannabes would have lost. The problem with game balance is that the game designers rely too much on micro-balancing....the units themselves. Not enough consideration is given to macro-balancing...the mission context.

OK, I think that I do agree with you on the ''mission context'' point. This is probably (just guessing) the result of one set of designers creating units and another set creating missions - once each group has completed their work - the title goes gold. Then we get the game in our hands and discover the pros and cons of specific units through our own or someone else’s discovery.

Or even worse, the missions that ship with the game have been designed with the knowledge of the imbalance of units and once players start creating missions with the tool provided with the game - we make the discoveries.

I think with the shift in developers thinking that they need to provide tools to allow players to create missions, or in other words extend the life of the game; they (we) have created an additional burden of creating a tool set that can be shipped to end consumers thus requiring (depending on the size of the game and the tools that are shipped with the game) extra programming talent and sacrificing balancing and play testing of the missions released with the game.

Having said that and taking your point, I think it’s safe to conclude that the real mistake is in the tools that the developer creates for creating missions/scenarios. The tools need to be smarter with regards to unit capabilities and visually display to the user the balance or imbalance of the current scenario. I envision a tool that would utilize terrain analysis along with unit analysis in providing a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each side vs. another. I’m sure that somebody out there is actively working on a tool that surpasses my sparse description.






Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser