[Wk12 Balancing]
In A Book Of Lenses (Schell 2019), discusses balance. He talks about the lens of fairness, which asks designers to consider wether a game should be asymmetrical or symmetrical and how that relates to the skill level of players. Auto chess is a highly skill based game. Although there's a lot of randomness the point is that the player's ability to formulate strategy and to respond to randomness is judged. Symmetry is very important in auto chess so that player's who win or lose, win or lse because of their skill as opposed to an imbalance within the system. At the same time there are various ways Teamfight Tactics for example accounts for new players. There's some traits that are easier to play because some strategise are more obvious or more liekly to appear. Experienced players accept this level of imbalance because part of the fun of the game is also about creative problem solving. Players want to discover strategies / comps that haven't been played often and how best to power up that comp.
SCHELL, Jesse. 2019. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Third Edition. Milton, UNITED KINGDOM: CRC Press LLC. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/falmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5842983 [accessed 14 Dec 2024].
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Initial atempt at a balance model
Initially I tried balancing the traits by breaking them into the bonus' they provide. I found this to be not very effective though because it wasn't very easy to standardise the test. This meant that for some abilities it was hard to know wether the model was accuratley representing the benefit they were providing since some were implimented slightly differently than others.
In the next balance sheet you'll see I standardised the test better by creating "fair fights".
Balancing Traits 1
I created this balance sheet to discern how often each trait was winning in a fair battle. A "fair" battle ment 1 trait vs 1 other trait and any unit differences were equalized meaning they would have the same health / attack damage and attack range. Then I'd record who won. As you can see Terrier was a clear dominant strategy and Toy was incredibly weak. The reason Toy was so weak though was because it would only heal others on it's team so in effect it didn't have a bonus at all in this scenario. I could have kept that however to be able to balance the traits in this way I decided to allow the toy to heal itself. I reduced Terrier's bonus as well as Gun since it was winning most of it's battles.
Balancing Traits 2
In this next iteration the range wasn't as extreme (9 - 1 = 8) in comparison to the first range (10 - 0 = 10). However some traits were still much stronger than others. Since making toy able to affect itself it would appear the bonus it applied wass very strong and needed to be reduced. Gun was also clearly weaker so perhaps I'd gone too far with nerfing it. Hound came out as being very weak again it's trait only works when it has other units of the same trait around so I wasn't super concerned that it was quite low. From playtests I knew Pastoral was overpowered. This wasn't appearing in the balance sheet though because the pastoral trait scales with the number of defenders so it gets more powerful in the late game where there's more enemies on the board.
Balancing Traits 3
Again the range decreased (7-1 = 6) however there was still a lot of variation happening within the traits. On this atempt I realised the AI should be winning more instead of it being an even split between AI an dplayer wins because the AI has an advantage. The AI hits first so if the traits are perfectly balanced then the AI should win no matter the trait. I've highlighted all the battles that fit this criteria in the box and I've added another section on the right to acknowledge perfectly balanced traits.
Balancing Traits 4
You can see again the number of times each trait wins is getting closer together. For this next balance I was mostly focused on trying to give Hound more of an advantage so I gave it another ability that meant that whichever champion it was attacking it would block it's heals. I also added this because it counters the two main "healers". This helped a little bit but not by much.
Balancing Traits 5
For this final balance pass I also gave the hound some bonus attack damage and I kept tweaking this damage. It had to go up a lot for it to make much of a difference. Eventhough it meant that the hound trait vs the terrier and toy was technically unbalanced I was okay with it staying like this because the numbers were lining up pretty well and hound is beaten by all the other traits. I could see a good strategy being that player's would combine hound units with another one so you could make your team really good at picking off the weakest enemy.
Balancing Units
The individual units needed to have variation within their stats to give the player another reason to want to combine champs. It also meant that player could strategise around what stats benefitted which traits.
The way I did this was that I took the scores from the previous balance sheet and added them to the trait giving a 1 if the trait won 4 games, 2 if it won 5 games and 3 if it won 7 games. Then I filled in the rest of the stats until they equalled a total of 8 each increasing stats that would benefit that trait i.e. health and attack damage for terrier.