On Balance

Balance.

It's hard. 

I remember someone from the World Of Warcraft team talking about the giant spreadsheets that they used to balance the game. Suddenly that approach doesn't sound so bad.

Progress has been slow, partly because I've had very little free time, partly because this automated balance approach is hard. I'm pondering taking a breather on Balance and implementing some features.

Here's where we are:

Combat classes 1v1 victory at lvl 1-30 vs the Reference Foe

I've been trying to define a Reference Foe at each level. This graph shows the wins of a single combat character versus the Reference Foe of that level. I've spent a lot of time tuning the Reference Foe, and this is the best I've got. For a "Balanced" progression, I would hope for 0.5 across the board.

Yeah. Hard.

One positive here: the Monk graph climbs nicely, as might be expected from the current Monk progression of bonuses. Monks are clearly overpowered at high levels, but it's nice to see the input data validated in the results.

I do still think that automated balancing is the way forward, but maybe it's time to get some features in too.

Unrelated update #1:
The wife is at 25 weeks. All is well except for the outlook of my free time...

Unrelated update #2:
Crazy Cleve has finally got Grimoire up on a funding site. I encourage anyone reading this to go and invest in his work, I have.
http://www.indiegogo.com/grimoireforever
Go get it.