A baseline of power is important to establish in a game, and maybe even more important to stick to. When you have obvious aberrancies outside the typical power curve, they stand out and end up distorting games. It's one think to have a tier list where most items in a game gradually get sorted into: this is mostly inevitable, and not even a bad thing as long as all the options have their own niche that makes them worth considering to most players. If the list is relatively compressed (the best options aren't way ahead of the bottom), then this is inevitable unless the range of choices is tiny. And this can be further mitigated by having the bottom options function as conditional counters to the top, which hugely increases their value and power against first-order strategies. But when outliers are identified and they start having a negative impact on a game by monopolizing player choices, how do you correct the issue? There's a few ways to approach it, but a big one is deciding whether to retain the option or discard it. Discarding is extreme and outside the scope of this rambling. Instead, I'll be looking at two contrasting philosophies: balancing up or balancing down. After learning the lessons of Plamo vs Plamo's hyper-granular customization, I knew I wanted Afterglow to have Ships that were customizable, but in much tighter boundaries than PvP's units allowed. This was necessary for a few reasons:
I always design this stuff by the seat of my pants instead of trying to develop an algorithm to cost things out. But because of this, my intuitions often produce some odd (shitty) results. |
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