Balance discussion/suggestions

[Strela]

So are the changes going to make the title more balanced for fairness for PBEM games? Is the objective of these changes to move away from the actual results of these battles for the sake of fairness of PBEM games?

Is there issues with the scenarios or the game engine? I have read comments that the weapons lack actual stats and the scenarios need less objectives or more time. I only counted 30 PBEM games played so far and there are quite a few scenarios never played. Shouldn't more games be played before adjustments are made?

As for scenario designs, I have a bit of time into SB games in the past. Red Victory has a bunch of well balanced scenarios, but the older SB titles have LOTS of very unbalanced fights. Oz put a lot of time and testing into the RV scenarios and it shows.

The objective is to not move away from the actual result of the battle. I always setup scenarios that try and emulate the history of a battle and reward a player for doing better than his historical counterpart. In some cases that may mean less losses or not 'losing' as badly as the players historical counterpart.

In the bulk of cases the player vs AI scenarios work well. The HTH less so. For example Gertsovka has the problem of insufficient turns and all the Soviets unlocked at the beginning of the game. These two factors have been adjusted to improve the chance the German's have of winning the scenario - yet the German has to do what their counterparts did historically. There is tweaking being done to ensure any player exploits that have been deemed unreasonable are countered. There is a fair bit of work to do in the HTH scenarios and I view it as a WIP as more results come in. Just remember my mantra - grade a scenario and its victory condition on what happened historically.

As far as the engine, yes there are areas that are being looked at. This is a v1.00 release and there is no harm in going back and looking at areas that may look like there are considerations to be taken into account. The major one we are working with is armor vs arnor and there are a number of different solutions being tested.

So in summary we are looking at the obvious errors - as you point out a fair number of scenarios have not been played and they will only be adjusted as sufficient data comes in.


David