CnC3 Developer on game balancing
Kassinger
Shades of grey Join Date: 2002-02-20 Member: 229Members, Constellation
Shades of grey Join Date: 2002-02-20 Member: 229Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Interesting read, mentions stuff to have in mind while balancing NS2</div>Haven't really been active here since 2002, but recently started playing again. So first post in a long time. Anyways;
Command and Conquer 3 is just about to be released, and they've been posting blog posts from time too time to keep the community interested. Anyway, this <a href="http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.aspx#NewsMain" target="_blank">the post titled The art of balancing</a> has Greg Black, who's in charge of balancing, talk about how they do it, without (sadly) going into to much details. (When clicking the link, scroll down to the article link, as I was unable to link directly to it.)
I wonder how UW treats balancing in this early phase of NS2 development, and if they'd learned much from last game, changing their approach too balancing now. I guess how much thought they have to give to balancing early on depends also on how much they're changing from NS.
In a podcast, he also talks about adding "drama" to the units, by making them superstrong in some ways with big weaknesses. Sort of like the Onos, the point being making the other player jump out of the chair and let the game focus on the superunit while it's alive, without making it too unfair. And using "superunits" to end games and crush base-turtling. Yeah, it really made me think about NS, a lot of it, both sharing the RTS part.
So read it yourself, or share your thoughts on balancing, it's an understatment to say balancing is important for strategy games like NS2.
EDIT: The link doesn't bring you directly to the article/post, but if you scroll down in the sidebar to the right, and find the title "The Art of Balancing", you have it.
Command and Conquer 3 is just about to be released, and they've been posting blog posts from time too time to keep the community interested. Anyway, this <a href="http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.aspx#NewsMain" target="_blank">the post titled The art of balancing</a> has Greg Black, who's in charge of balancing, talk about how they do it, without (sadly) going into to much details. (When clicking the link, scroll down to the article link, as I was unable to link directly to it.)
I wonder how UW treats balancing in this early phase of NS2 development, and if they'd learned much from last game, changing their approach too balancing now. I guess how much thought they have to give to balancing early on depends also on how much they're changing from NS.
In a podcast, he also talks about adding "drama" to the units, by making them superstrong in some ways with big weaknesses. Sort of like the Onos, the point being making the other player jump out of the chair and let the game focus on the superunit while it's alive, without making it too unfair. And using "superunits" to end games and crush base-turtling. Yeah, it really made me think about NS, a lot of it, both sharing the RTS part.
So read it yourself, or share your thoughts on balancing, it's an understatment to say balancing is important for strategy games like NS2.
EDIT: The link doesn't bring you directly to the article/post, but if you scroll down in the sidebar to the right, and find the title "The Art of Balancing", you have it.
Comments
--Scythe--
dont have time to read it now though <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />
yeah he doesnt really elaborate too much on the initial balancing, but then again he pretty much covered all he had to. it would be good to hear how they balanced resources etc, not just the units.
i imagine the dev's in NS would tackle the issue in a very similar way, but tweaked for a FPS perspective. it would be interesting to read a similar balancing blog from other FPS games to get more insight on the differences between the 2 different game types.
By Lead Balance Designer, Greg Black
I was recently approached by our stalwart Community Manager, and was asked to write a blog about my job at EA and specifically on the “Art of Game Balance” in Real-time Strategy games. Normally I’d immediately run away screaming from such a request, but he assured me there was nothing to worry about, that you’d all be really interested to hear what I have to say, and the community wouldn’t even consider roasting me to a crisp on the forums. Being the dutiful employee that I am, I accepted. And now here we are.
Let’s start by getting the simple stuff out of the way. My name is Greg Black and I’m the Lead Multiplayer (MP) Designer on Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars. My duties as Lead MP Designer include overseeing the creation of multiplayer maps, user interface design, command and control features (reverse move FTW!), teasing the community via pod-casts, secretly trolling forums, making platinum hits, and most importantly balancing the game. I’ve been with EA (formally Westwood Pacific), since 2001 and have credits on Command & Conquer Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge, Command & Conquer Generals, Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour, The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth and its sequel, and now Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars. Back in 1995 I was blown away by the original Command & Conquer, not only was it the first RTS game I had ever played, but it was the first PC game I ever owned. I’ve been a die hard Command & Conquer fan ever since. Here is a little bit of trivia that you might find useful should you find yourself playing Trivial Pursuit: Obscure RTS Designers Edition: I’ve played every Command & Conquer game ever published on the PC, including Sole Survivor!
The first and most obvious goal for game balance is that all factions, and within them their units, structures, abilities, upgrades, etc are all relatively equal in power. This is core to a good RTS game. It’s well established that success in the competitive online RTS arena is heavily influenced by how well a game is balanced. Few RTS players, especially our most competitive players, want to play a game where one side, unit, or tactic has an obvious or unfair advantage over all others.
The second goal is to provide players with a wealth of viable strategic and tactical options for defeating their opponents. It is not enough to simply give the player a lot of units and structures, those units and structures need to be well designed and balanced in such a way to provide the player with large number of meaningful and effective choices. In my opinion few things are more frustrating in an RTS game than knowing what your opponent is going to do and being unable to effectively counter it do to poor game balance.
The final goal is to attempt to add drama and excitement to the game. It is difficult to quantify, but I attempt to achieve this on the balance side by giving certain specialty units very powerful capabilities and extreme vulnerabilities. A classic example of this is the Command & Conquer Engineer. The Engineer is extremely powerful and able to capture an enemy structure instantly, but it also has massive weaknesses. It’s extremely fragile, it lacks any kind of weapons, it’s slow, and relatively expensive. Using the Engineer at all requires the player to take a large risk. It requires the player to effectively make a substantial investment and spend a lot of time micromanaging and protecting their Engineers. The point of all this is to throw the player an occasional curveball, force them to react to changing battle situations, and to give the player the ability to make the occasional hail-mary pass and come back from seemingly impossible odds.
Balancing any RTS game is very challenging—a game as fast, complex, and as highly anticipated as Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars can actually be intimidating. For starters, the sheer number of possible unit interactions is staggering. When taking into account things like upgrades, veterancy, directional armor, unit abilities, and powers, the number of interactions can climb well into the tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe more. Once you add human ingenuity the system becomes infinitely more complex. Players never cease to amaze me in the creative ways they find to break, cheese, or exploit a game. In the first week Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars is on shelves, there will have been more games played online than we were able to play in the entire course of development. That’s a lot of opportunities for our always innovative players to find flaws in the balance both big and small, but we work to limit this at all costs.
Enough about my philosophies behind, and the challenges of balancing a game, lets talk about the actual process. Now normally when people ask me how I balance a game, I like to quote a scene from Apocalypse Now:
“Willard: They told me you had gone totally insane, and uh, that your methods were unsound.
Colonel Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Williard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.”
The reason I do this, other than to make myself sound like a film snob, is because the process of balancing a game is long, involved, and not easily explained in casual conversation. It’s easier to simply tell people there’s no method, or I read tea leaves, throw dice, or some such nonsense, however if you have read this far you’re probably less interested in pithy film quotes than actual insight in to what I do, so here we go.
The balance process starts in the earliest parts of our preproduction process. Side identity, the combat chain, game mechanics and units and structures designs are constantly being vetted for potential exploits or imbalances. Finding potential exploits and imbalances early on is considerably easier than fixing them later in production. The distribution of units throughout the early, mid, and late game is also of great interest to balance.
Once we’ve gone through our preproduction process, design documents are written and passed on to the various departments responsible for implementation. As units begin to come online and we enter the production phase of the project, this is where I begin the nitty gritty balance work. On Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars I started with a single unit, the GDI Predator Tank. Assigning initial values is easy; it’s a vehicle so it gets a certain armor set based on the combat chain, it’s role is that of an anti-vehicle and anti-structure unit, so I know its going to need to a cannon type weapon, it’ll need to be relatively expensive for an early game unit, and since it’s a GDI Tank I know its going to be relatively slow. After assigning initial balance values to the unit, the fun begins.
I start by testing the effectiveness of a Predator Tank against another Predator Tank. Using my trusty stopwatch, I time how long and how many shots it takes one Predator to kill another. If it takes too long, the unit won’t feel satisfying and if it’s too fast, people won’t have time to micromanage their units out of danger. Finding the initial combat effectiveness of a side’s main battle tank is the cornerstone off of which I balance the entire faction.
Having established an admittedly very rough level of balance on the Predator Tank, I repeat the process with other units as they come online, always balancing their attributes against that of the Predator Tank. After a while, a side starts to come together and the team is able to start playing mirror matches. As the other factions begin to come online, the process of that initial balance pass is repeated across all units and structures. Once all sides have come online and all have a first pass of balance, we begin the process of balance testing in earnest.
At the end of the day, balance is most affected by that pesky human ingenuity I wrote about earlier. Despite all the awesome tools the engineers have provided me for boiling down the numbers (not to mention my trusty stop watch), you simply cannot balance a game this complex with math alone. You need to play, and play, and play some more. Getting as many people to play and get excited about multiplayer is a large part of my job. To help accomplish this there is a weekly team-wide multiplayer test that usually lasts for about two hours, after which I hold a large post-mortem meeting in which the entire team is given the opportunity to give me feedback on the games balance. The rest of my week is usually spent trying to address their specific balance concerns, additional tweaking, and lots of testing.
After a few solid months of this testing, tuning, tweaking, iteration cycle we’ll hit a point where the game feels pretty good. People are having fun, the obvious exploits have been addressed, and generally I’m feeling pretty good about the game and about myself. It’s at about this point, after the Alpha stage, that the community strikes back and my whole deluded world view comes crashing down around me and it’s back to work again.
Much like on The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, our community manager assembled a crack team of the best RTS players in our community to fly out to Los Angeles and test the balance. This is both the highlight of and most difficult part of my job. It’s fantastic, because our community balance testers are amazing. Watching these guys play Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars is like watching an athlete perform at the top of their game. Without fail they offer valuable insights into all aspects of the game. They pound on the game all day until they’ve uncovered every imbalance, every exploit, and faulty design decision.
At the end of the balance tester’s long day of balance testing, I’m presented with a document that primarily serves to list my failings as a balance designer. We go through the list, point by point, debating the merits of this and that, clarifying issues, proposing solutions, insulting each others mothers, and so on. It’s a lot like a live action forum thread, but with far fewer swear words and spelling mistakes.
Once the list has been vetted, our balance testers are off for some fun in Los Angeles while I scurry up to my desk to try and implement as many balance fixes as possible before they get back the next day. As you can imagine this results in a lot of midnight oil being burned, but it also results in an amazing amount of balance improvement every single day. After a couple of weeks of this type of intensive balance tuning the game is worlds better. It’s impossible for me to overstate how much thanks we all owe the guys that helped us balance the game.
What has been accomplished with all this hard work and heart break? Hopefully we have a balanced, polished, and above all fun RTS game that exceeds all your expectations and lives up to the Command & Conquer name. Only time will tell if success has been achieved or not, but I think all you Command & Conquer fans and RTS fans out there are going to have a great time playing Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars, and I look forward to reading your reactions to the game on the forums.
Although I could probably write another hundred pages before I had covered everything involved with balancing a game, I hope what I have written has shed some light on the murky world of RTS balance. Thank you for reading it, thank you for playing RTS games, and thank you for being a part of the Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars community.
-Greg Black<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
For convenience.
--Scythe--
NS1 is an shooter and have a little bit rts in it...
yes, gamebalance of an rts!?
NS1 is an shooter and have a little bit rts in it...
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Some would say its an RTS with a shooter element. And i'd tend to agree with them. In professional matches things like Resource management and choosing the correct upgrade path play a much larger role than FPS skill.
Some would say its an RTS with a shooter element. And i'd tend to agree with them. In professional matches things like Resource management and choosing the correct upgrade path play a much larger role than FPS skill.
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I agree. In typical public play people tend to stack teams, don't teamwork well, and rarely strategize if ever.
Last thing we need the NS team to do is listen to EA about game balance.
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lol
EA's awesome for balance, nothing better then dropping a Humvee on a radar dish.
that was a good read.