It is easy to want to add more and more complexity to game components.
But with each layer of complexity comes a multiplier of difficulty in balancing. Perfectly balanced game components are not necessarily that interesting, but completely unbalanced components can break your game.
An Example: Weapon Damage
Currently I am working on a ruleset for a table top game.
The theme of the game is tactical spaceship combat. Naturally, the ships have weapons and can attack each other. Each weapon has the following attributes:
- Damage applied on hit
- Range and possibly variable damage over range
- Energy Cost to fire
- Accuracy and possibly variable accuracy over range
- Ammo or no ammo
First Level of Complexity: Damage and Cost Ratio
The simplest things to balance here would be to find a nice semi linear progression of damage and cost to fire.
Lets say we start with a core weapon, a laser that does 2 damage for every 1 energy. Now any weapon that does more than 2 damage per energy spent would be considered strong and any weapon that does less than that would be considered weak.
Ships that produce more energy would have an advantage to be able to fire their weapons more often.
Second Level of Complexity: Account for Accuracy
But these weapons have an accuracy value as well.
So the damage number is not the real damage number. We have an expected damage number that is the damage times the accuracy percentage.
If say, the accuracy of the laser from above was 75% then the expected damage per shot would be 1.5 damage to 1 energy spent.
We could use this to further balance weapons by bringing up the accuracy of low damage weapons and decreasing the accuracy of high damage weapons so their expected damage is closer to the baseline while still making them feel powerful or weak.
Third Level of Complexity: Ammo Count
Now we enter ammo into the equation.
The game is turn based with a max number of turns per match. Limited ammo would cap a weapons max damage it could apply over the course of the game.
Weapons that do not use ammo would theoretically be able to fire every turn. Their max damage would then be expected damage times the number of turns in the match. This could be adjusted based on if you reasonably expect an engagement in the first couple of turns.
If we have a 10 turn match, our baseline laser weapon that has an expected damage of 1.5 per energy spent would have an expected max damage of around 15 for a game.
To make a balanced high damage, low ammo weapon we would want to get the expected max damage to be roughly 15. An example weapon from the game would be a torpedo weapon that has 2 shots, an accuracy of 50% and does 15 damage per shot. Only being able to fire twice, on average 1 of the 2 shots will hit giving the weapon an expected max damage in line with the baseline weapon.
Greater Complexity: The Rest of the Game
We have an idea of just how the weapons relate to each other in relative power, but we have to balance them in relation to the rest of the game.
The ships have movement and energy generation, the weapons have various fields of fire and we did not even consider the range variable in the analysis above.
We did however simplify the damage, accuracy, and ammo into a single value that could be used to make balancing weapon power easier.
I hope you found this useful in bringing some balance to your own game.
Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.