Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
TAble 8.3
effects of Tweaking
Production costs in
simWar
TuRTlE
WINS
RuSH
WINS
DRAW OR
T IMEOuT
AvERAGE
T IME
T WEAk
no tweaks
929
68
3
70.97
defense 1.5
890
105
5
74.27
defense 2.0
660
337
3
77.88
defense 2.5
515
480
5
74.04
Factory 6
844
154
2
78.81
Factory 7
792
204
4
88.07
Factory 8
710
278
12
98.53
Factory 9
568
401
31
107.87
Factory 10
455
509
36
107.61
Offense 1.8
914
83
3
67.77
Offense 1.6
888
112
0
63.86
Offense 1.4
802
198
0
58.31
Offense 1.2
653
347
0
52.33
Offense 1.0
506
494
0
48.33
chanGe one thinG at a time and
exaGGerate the chanGes
When balancing a game, it is usually best to try one change at a time. if you change
two things, you can never be sure what change contributed what effect. in addition, it is
usually best to start with a pretty big change first. That way, you are sure that the change
is actually having any effect and moves the balance in the direction that you want it to
move. You can always change the value back to somewhere halfway between the original
and the new situation.
We can also change the balance between the costs of factories and the costs of
units by increasing or reducing their effects. In this case, we tried different variables
for the factories' production rates (the number of resources each factory produces)
and the chance that attacking units will destroy defensive ones. We also tried differ-
ent settings for the initial and total available resources.
Table 8.4
lists the effects of
these tweaks.
