Balance Principles

Issues dealing with gameplay balance.
Antandron
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Balance Principles

Postby Antandron » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 2:33 pm

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Tex
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Tex » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 4:15 pm

2 things...

First, I don't think your method is good/great in any sense for balancing a RTS game because it appears to lean heavily into a false sense of "apples to apples". Maybe I'm reading it wrong? Regardless though, you simply cannot do this when there are a multitude of variables you have to ignore to achieve this.

Second, balance in RTS is a fluid state and can never be perfected or even achieved in a solid state. RTS demands thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness creates strategy. Strategies used multiple times yield observations. Those observations yield knowledge of nuances for exploitation. Exploitation leads to advantage. Opinion (and thoughtful comparisons made with CONTEXT) on that advantage can lead to it being declared an imbalance.

Do you see how this works?

Even if you believe you have perfectly balanced any RTS, what will happen is someone will observe a nuance that they can exploit to find an advantage. An exploitable advantage is in essence, imbalance. This is an acceptable state of things for a few reasons, but the main one being that in order to achieve perfect balance, there would only be 1 race with only 1 kind of skin available, and all maps would have to be perfectly symmetrical.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Nurland » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 4:35 pm

Why should every vanilla opening even be equal? They cost different ammount of resources and some of them have access to 15-20 power upgrades that are often bought for the first engagement anyway. They also have different scaling into later game.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Ace of Swords » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 5:15 pm

Come back when you have a basic understanding of asymmetrical game balance.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Oddnerd » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 6:04 pm

If that is how you view balance then you should avoid asymmetrically balanced games.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby egewithin » Fri 02 Mar, 2018 10:26 pm

Even if you replace every race with GK, they would still be broken.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Adeptus Noobus » Mon 05 Mar, 2018 7:09 am

I will try to be a constructive as Tex: https://www.google.de/amp/s/davidgagnon ... esign/amp/

This is the difference between what you suppose and what this games balance challenge is. Your assumption that every unit and race can be made the same is false and goes against this games design.
IF however you came up with a metric that describes a units strength, which factors in ALL of its traits in a cross-race comparable manner, then we could balance the game the way you propose. Last time we spoke (I also wrote this in another thread) I already pointed out that simply going by a units economic value to ascertain its strength is a flawed approach as it does not factor in all its traits.
The table in the article I posted makes it very clear.

Thank you for your effort though. Good to know people are still invested.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Death_Kitty » Mon 05 Mar, 2018 5:31 pm

I know I'm very new to this community, but I have a fair experience with RTS balance, so here are my 2 cents from an impartial view point:
IDEALLY balance should be 2 players of equal skill and different races winning 50% of the time in every match-up.

However, that does not mean the skill has to be distributed equally through the entire game, nor does that mean that said skill have to be the same. Let me explain with a game I know far better than this one: Wikinger mod for company of heroes 2:

Broadly speaking, American early game is far easier to play: infantry are cheaper, have the M1 garand and carbine, and can quickly be given BARs. Americans also have access to early .50 cal, a great machine gun. Germans have to make sure they don't get overrun early game by Americans so they can still get to their late game, when the tables flip: Americans need to show a lot of tactical planning and skill to kill german heavy tanks (who often cant be penetrated from the front by most US vehicles/bazookas) and elite infantry armed with FG-42, StG-4, panzershrek and the like. Germans have the easier late game due to their great units... that's not to say it is easy/a free win. And as long as it is not a free win, factions that are "imbalanced" are alright, as they get "nerfed" when the match progresses to lategame...
I think the best way to describe this phenomenon in elite terms is Eldar? Their early game is strong, but lategame weaker/requires more micro than other factions? Do feel free to correct me... I am new. So the whole example OP gave with the primary/early game builds having to be equal... they really don't.

The problem with balance is 2 fold: making an acceptable feedback environment and finding players of equal and acceptable skill levels. Often this is difficult for many RTS communities, due to thinks like lack of context: as an IG player, I would not comment on the, say, Chaos vs SM matchup. That would be foolish. I also can't reliably comment on any matchup involving IG, b/c bias. (sc2 has this problem I'm abundance). Ideally, the best way to balance a game is to do this: get someone who has never played this game, but is familiar with RTS in its general mechanics. Have them watch a sickening amount of streams to get a feel for the game without having them establish a bias, give them plenty of statistics, then leave balance to them/their team. Game balance must for the most part, be view impartially. This is an issue that requires data analytics from a third party, which is not always possible even for bigger games, let alone mods.

Alternatively, you can have members of the community specialize in 2 races, use bias to your advantage: say if I played and equally enjoyed IG and Eldar, My feedback for Eldar vs IG matchups could be seen as more reliable, and adding more factions to my list allows me to offer feedback in exponentially more match-ups (1, 3 if i mained 3 factions, 6 with 4, 10 with 5, so on). but then we run into the second issue: as i learn more factions, my skill with each deteriorates because their is only so much time I can invest in learning them. (look at a game like starcraft, a game with only 3 races, but with so much nuance, the people who play multiple races with equal or near equal skill get drowned out by bias. and that player base is huge)

Sorry for the wall of text, but those are my 2 equally impractical solutions to game balance for rts.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Antandron » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 8:38 am

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Re: Balance Principles

Postby boss » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 11:24 am

This fred just makes me want to cry nuke it :)
Forums great more stuff to talk about.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Yabbaman » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 3:25 pm

I don't really see the point of this thread. Does the op imply the game is not balanced or there's some other nefarious point to it?
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Antandron » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 5:11 pm

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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Yabbaman » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 7:10 pm

Just a boring faction to use. No setup teams, no jumping infantry, no supervehicles. Boring commander too :-(

PS

Don't think that article is too pertinent to the methodology used by relic when creating the game either.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Impregnable » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 10:04 pm

Yabbaman wrote:Just a boring faction to use. No setup teams, no jumping infantry, no supervehicles. Boring commander too :-(

PS

Don't think that article is too pertinent to the methodology used by relic when creating the game either.


- There is a famous phrase among relic fans in my country about relic's balance principles and design principles. Relic has always been relicing and will relic again. This just basically transfer to beneath meaning.

- Relic always make a gamble in every single title they release. They try a whole bunch of new things that was not tried before in RTS or their other titles and try to be 'innovative'. Then, they fire and forget about the game balance and quality of life features like observer mode, a working ladder, bug fixes etc. The problem is innovation does not mean that something has changed only but it means that something changed for the better.

- So far, with all the titles leading up to COH2, relic managed to convince enough people that their 'innovation' was good. This is why Relic fans largely forgave missing or lately adding quality of life features and terrible balancing. However, in DOW3 these streak of gambling jackpots failed. Its change was judged by all fans to be not innovative. They judged it was changed for worse not better.

- As a result, the time proven weakness of relic which was missing or lately adding quality of life features and terrible balancing ran rampant without so called innovation to cover it. The moment fans judged that change was not for the better, DOW3's fate was sealed to be doomed.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Yabbaman » Tue 06 Mar, 2018 10:34 pm

Gamble or not, their games up to coh2 oozed quality imho and really moved the genre forward. As to their current situation I think it's more related to their inability to execute their plans right, rather than some sort of a game design gamble. I mean what sort of gamble is it to remove sync kills from dow3? It's a lot of work to implement, this I get, but not as a prudent design choice. TBH already dow2 felt somewhat less polished than COH, so I am not too surprised it's all been downhill from then on.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Impregnable » Wed 07 Mar, 2018 4:07 am

Yabbaman wrote:Gamble or not, their games up to coh2 oozed quality imho and really moved the genre forward. As to their current situation I think it's more related to their inability to execute their plans right, rather than some sort of a game design gamble. I mean what sort of gamble is it to remove sync kills from dow3? It's a lot of work to implement, this I get, but not as a prudent design choice. TBH already dow2 felt somewhat less polished than COH, so I am not too surprised it's all been downhill from then on.


Yeah, that inability to execute their plans right is such a huge thing. Whatever their original thinking was, it is impossible for fans to see. What they actually see is how they executed and materialized those ideas in a published game and they get judged based on that as a result.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Atlas » Wed 07 Mar, 2018 4:30 am

OP post is super interesting and a revolution of thought on Elite balance. I be taking notes like:
Image
But more seriously, we can always take a second look at some stuff. There's always that one thing every patch that goes by unnoticed until suddenly someone picks up on it. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with OP or its methodology but, like my own scholarly readings, I'll take out the parts that I find particularly salient and/or illuminating.

I do feel that T1 and early T2 are the most influential parts of the game, for example. This is why ultimately minor changes like Heretic changes tend to draw such huge reactions and consequences.

DoWII Elite as an RTS in particular is a very difficult challenge because of the number of matchups to consider. Starcraft 2 has three factions, Command and Conquer anywhere from like 4-7 depending. But counting the different commanders, you can get a LOT of different matchups in DoWII Elite. How do you balance them all? Ultimately, I don't think you can without whitewashing everything together.

People who read the changelogs know that I am a big proponent of standardization, but I do this to form a basic baseline upon which to make salient distinctions between units. Ultimately, I do think that asymmetrical balance has to be the method we use and while I fully concede that in doing so we ultimately create a scenario where "true balance" can't be achieved, I find the end product much more worthwhile to play.

So yeah, if there is a "Balance Principle" we should use, it should be based on how we can make the best compromise between expected winrate, engaging gameplay, unique dynamics between different factions and nerfing Eldar out of the game.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Schepp himself » Wed 07 Mar, 2018 10:46 am

Atlas wrote:[...]
So yeah, if there is a "Balance Principle" we should use, it should be based on how we can make the best compromise between expected winrate, engaging gameplay, unique dynamics between different factions and nerfing Eldar out of the game.


Didn't see that coming. Nice one.

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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Adeptus Noobus » Wed 07 Mar, 2018 7:02 pm

GK HAVE NO JUMP SQUAD??????????????????????????????????


Thank you Ace 8-)


@OP:
I keep repeating myself: find a metric that takes into consideration ALL of a units traits (dps, speed, armor) and then we can talk about direct comparisons. I will give you an example: while Space Marines do start very slow and their units are usually more expensive, they are a lategame powerhouse that you surely don't want to face at their full strength. To compensate for their slow start, they have excellent map control capabilities in the form of Scouts which also never stop scaling. They are a fantastic unit overall. Orks start a lot stronger (wether its too strong is debatable) but their units have mostly infantry armor only so you can bleed them a lot easier and inflict economic damage to compensate for their teching speed. In turn you get red and levels etc which will all come to play in future fights. If my Banshees e.g. are lvl 4 and have the aspect of strength, you should think twice of blindly charging me with your Nobs. If you help me leveling my Sterns to lvl 3, they will shred your Shootas and Sluggas on approach. Their heavy infantry armor and abilities giving them a greater and greater edge the more you keep them around.
I could go on and on and on about the real differences between the races and why they play out differently. You see, its the little things that make this game tough to balance.

I will give you one more example: You think Tactical Marines are comparable to Strike Squads? In the first few fights maybe but Strike Squads scale so much worse so how CAN they be compared as equal?
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Impregnable » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 12:14 am

Also CSM melee is no joking matter. When it is range vs range, they have very good advantage of being able to just go in and melee them since range vs range in melee is decided by who has flat out more health and melee damage. This especially true once they have eternal war which is a T1 upgrade that increases both melee and ranged damage by 20%. After that upgrade, no other basic ranged squads can win against it in melee in T1 except SS.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Schepp himself » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 2:51 pm

Adeptus Noobus wrote:[alot of stuff that is well thought-out and one nasty you-tube-video]


I just want to point out that due to the principle you just described a balance of 1v1 and 3v3 becomes rather hard if not impossible. Because which 3v3 game doesn't last until Tier 3?

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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Yabbaman » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 3:57 pm

Adeptus Noobus wrote:GK HAVE NO JUMP SQUAD??????????????????????????????????


I play this game for the spectacle. Something being op doesn't concern me too much.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Adeptus Noobus » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 4:13 pm

Schepp himself wrote:
Adeptus Noobus wrote:[alot of stuff that is well thought-out and one nasty you-tube-video]


I just want to point out that due to the principle you just described a balance of 1v1 and 3v3 becomes rather hard if not impossible. Because which 3v3 game doesn't last until Tier 3?

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Sadly, enough...
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Tex » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 6:14 pm

I think I cried a little bit when I read the part that said, "ASM, Raptors, and STORMBOYZ are all comparable"

Just no. ASM and Raptors yes. Stormboyz absolutely not. Should I be throwing Raveners into that mix as well? Man statements like that remove a lot of credibility because it shows you don't yet understand some very important nuances.
In case you don't yet know what I am referencing, stormboyz are a hopelessly bad jump unit in Tier 1 compared to ASM and Raptors because they do not provide any disruption upon landing. It completely changes the way you use them.
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Re: Balance Principles

Postby Antandron » Thu 08 Mar, 2018 6:24 pm

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