Final balancing.

[Draginol]

Development journal for Apolyton.net

At the end of development, game balancing becomes a priority.

So much of a strategy game, particularly a single player one comes down to little things like pacing. If things cost too much, it's too slow and boring. If things cost too little, then things move too fast and nothing has value.

That also holds true to the difficulty levels. How hard should it be? How aggressive should the computer players be? For me, what I've tried to do is make it so that I can beat the game at "Intelligent" (for the AI players) but just barely. At higher levels it becomes very difficult to win unless I have good starting conditions. Since I've been playing this game in one form or other for millions of years now then I hopefully represent a fairly expert player at the game.

At lower levels, the AI shouldn't be very challenging to experts but to new users present a challenge still.

In game design one of the goals is to provide X minutes of raw fun. Stuff that players find extremely fun. Many fun things may only last 2 seconds, others 2 minutes. There is some metric that says that a good game should provide X total minutes of fun. Designing ships we hope is one of those areas of fun in the game. I have to admit, I really enjoy designing ships, far more than I ever thought I would.

When I'm feeling funny I'll name the ship classes after my wife and kids. In a test game today, I played with my two sons Alex and Ryan (and in fact, my son Alex Wardell was the actual "leader" of my civilization). Being able to name everything in the game -- your civ, your leader your ship classes your individual ships your planets your starbases, etc. I think helps add a little extra fun. I know my kids kick a kick out of some alien saying "I don't think so, Alex Wardell! We're not afraid of you!".

I have my main research planet. I have my spending 33/33/34 and I do 101 research per turn on that planet.

At the same time, with my tax rate at 33%, I about break even. But my approval rating is 85%. The whole approval rate thing kind of bugs me because I feel like population and approval should do more. For example, I'd like to see that if my approval rating is >67% (for instance) that I get some sort of "bonus". I don't know what, maybe my influence on that planet is increased by 15% or something. Or if my population is greater than 10B that I start to get production bonuses. These things won't go into the final game, but it leaves us room to think about it for an update after release.

For me, one of the "fun" things is that I can pause the battle and rotate around. It's like doing the Matrix type thing when I spin the thing around to do the screenshot. It's totally cool freezing a ship at its moment of death.

Another area of tweaking comes in the form of the ethical alignment and government. How much should Federation give you? What goodies should each ethical alignment give you?

In the current build, you get free maint on the initial colony for your top 5 worlds. But we've been wimping out the cost in recent builds because new users tend to run out of money. So we may have to bump up the power of this.

Another area of challenge has to do with the starbases, especially since we ended up letting their powers "stack". This opens the door to abuse but we wanted to let players go nuts with them if they can. I built up my influence abilities as far as I could and have influencer starbases that improve cultural influence by 322%.

My view is that if the AI lets you get away with it, then that's the AI's fault, not the player's.

But in many ways, nothing is taking up as much time as getting the diplomacy just right. When should the AI ask for tribute? When and how often should the AI give in to tribute to you? Moreover, we want different civilizations to have very different reactions and text.

The number of different scenarios is pretty big. And you want to make sure it's realistic and reasonable. What would a decent player on-line do?

There's also sensitivity to what the player is doing. Should the AI react to when the player does an obvious build up? If so, at what difficulty levels? Right now, I have it so that only higher difficulty levels do detailed analysis of human strategies and react accordingly (it's fairly CPU intensive). But on the other hand, will we end up with some review in some magazine where the reviewer played it at easy level and walks over the AI and complains that the AI had bad strategy? This actually happened in a couple of reviews of The Political Machine. Some reviewers think that difficulty levels just mean how much free money we give to the AI. In GalCiv, the difficulty levels determine what algorithms get used.

A decent AI would recognize threats for what they are and react.

At lower difficulty levels if the player is being really blatant the AI will say "We know what you're doing". But at higher levels, it will rarely provide clues or be vauge.

So that's what this weekend was spent doing. Balancing balancing balancing. Next week we have to finish up the Dread Lords campaign...

Here are screenshots referred to here:
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle24.jpg
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle26.jpg
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle30.jpg
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle32.jpg
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle34.jpg
http://www.galciv2.com/beta/beta8/battle54.jpg

[DanQ]

Comments/questions anyone?

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Dan; Apolyton CS

[Oncle Boris]

I've avidly read the OP, but have no question. It's really nice to have a designer commited to keep us informed

[Daz]

Preordered and anxious....

Thanks for the info. I hope you get a patch out fairly fast (and we know the game will need a patch).

[yin26]

Brad's approach to AI is great. The only problem...as he already struggles with...is making sure the public understands well what happens at each AI level. Firaxis got bit on this one rather hard as "the AI that doesn't cheat" was discovered by players to do all kinds of cheating. Soren seemed baffled at that and said, essentially, "Well, *all* AI do _that_ sort of cheating, so I didn't think people would be bothered by it."

Actually, not all AI do the same thing at similar difficulty levels, and I think the easiest thing to do is to have tool tip that explains the AI well enough so the players/reviewers know how to evaluate the game properly.

[DaviddesJ]

Firaxis got bit on this one rather hard as "the AI that doesn't cheat" was discovered by players to do all kinds of cheating. Soren seemed baffled at that and said, essentially, "Well, *all* AI do _that_ sort of cheating, so I didn't think people would be bothered by it."

I can't really guess what you're talking about here. The Civ4 AI doesn't appear to "cheat", and almost everyone seems satisfied with that (the vast majority of complaints are just that it's not smart enough).

If by "that sort" of cheating you mean that the AI players get economic boosts at high difficulty levels, then that's also true in GC2, and every other strategy game.

[oldstatesman]

As a casual gamer, (dare I say more representatative of the majority of gamers than those who like to prod under the hood and learn every little nuance) I am more concerned that the game gives me a fun challenge at multiple levels - I really don't care so much how that happens, as long as it does. Fun is the bottom line for me...

The only AI cheats that bother me are those that can be exploited easily by players - an example is the Civ 3 AI's knowledge of where your ships are - you can use this to your advantage by sending out a pirate to some god forsaken spot halfway around the world and draw the AI's fleet units away from where you will be invading.

My bottom line is fun...and if a few well designed AI 'cheats' can increase the time I spend with a game by several dozen hours as I progress up the difficulty ladder - that is cool by me.

Now bugs that inadvertantly cause AI 'cheats' on the other hand, especially ones that go unfixed, are another issue..

[yin26]

Originally posted by DaviddesJ I can't really guess what you're talking about here. The Civ4 AI doesn't appear to "cheat", and almost everyone seems satisfied with that (the vast majority of complaints are just that it's not smart enough).

If by "that sort" of cheating you mean that the AI players get economic boosts at high difficulty levels, then that's also true in GC2, and every other strategy game.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The issue was more about what the public understood was happening. A good thread on this is here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...heats+cheating My point about what the manual says comes here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...33#post4131833

The manual says on Noble the human player and AI play "under the same conditions," which isn't true. The AI gets all kinds of bonuses. I, personally, didn't care that the AI gets that stuff, but I took the manual to task for stating otherwise.