Balance is very important to a game as without it, the game collapses as it is one-sided. There are two important types of balance to consider when making a game, the first is game wide balance and the second is internal army balance.
Both of these are very important in making a good game without players having to field one particular list to be competitive or have dead ground within the game for example a unit that's good but there's another available that does just as good a job or better for the same cost of resources or less in game.
Both of these are very important in making a good game without players having to field one particular list to be competitive or have dead ground within the game for example a unit that's good but there's another available that does just as good a job or better for the same cost of resources or less in game.
There are several different types of balance that can be applied to these but I am going to focus on perfect balance and perfect imbalance and what they mean in the context of whole game balance and internal army balance.
Perfect balance refers to a situation where all pieces of the game are of an identical power level where the restrictions placed on the more powerful abilities bring them to be equal to the least powerful. This kind of balance generally leads to a symmetric game like chess as part of the perfect balance system means that the armies are pre-chosen and often randomness is removed from the game. This creates a game in which no player can break the game through choosing certain pieces repeatedly and where skill is the overriding factor to who wins but this can have downsides, taking chess as an example both players have an identical set of pieces that move in controlled ways. This is a game that can't be broken but as players improve they stop just being able to play the game and have to start memorising loads of different plays, move combinations etc and it becomes more of a memory game than the abstract wargame that it is, with players not getting to develop new plays untill they reach the top tiers of the game.
Perfect imbalance is very different to perfect balance, this method balances the game by having pieces of varying power levels and ability sets providing players with choices of what to take to solve problems they may come up against. This method is the most common in tabletop wargames as it allows designers to do more with their game. Perfect imbalance works by giving players multiple choices for problem solving within the game mechanics and piece selection rather than having problem X only being solvable by solution Y. The balancing for this is done by assigning each piece a score based on its power and utility for players to create a force with equal totals of this score, this is the points system common to many wargames.
Game wide balance means that all the army lists you can pick from are if equal power with options to deal with any type of threat in game. This allows players to pick the army they like best for any reason, such as play style or ascetic, and always be able to be competitive with it.
Internal army balance means that all choices in an army list should be equally viable, which normally means that each has its own niche in the army so there's no instance of unit A is good at tank hunting but unit B is even better for the same points.
To get these two into the game is hard as it will come through play testing which will give a small number of data points to balance with whereas when it's release there could be 1000s of players trying to break the balance.
Internal army balance means that all choices in an army list should be equally viable, which normally means that each has its own niche in the army so there's no instance of unit A is good at tank hunting but unit B is even better for the same points.
To get these two into the game is hard as it will come through play testing which will give a small number of data points to balance with whereas when it's release there could be 1000s of players trying to break the balance.
My thoughts would be to get as much information as possible even if it's after release of the game as then when/if it comes to updating to a new version then your players will have found a lot of the imbalances in the system.
