Balance discussion/suggestions

[ComradeP]

Being from an Engineering background I don't see you having enough data yet to make adjustments to the game engine yet. There are 58 or so scenarios and 40 of them are not even played yet. Isn't that roughly 68% of the scenarios haven't been played.

This is a point that many game developers stick to, but I strongly disagree with it.

The idea might actually be one of the issues I keep running into with various wargames: not all of the mechanics were checked to see if they could work within the confines of the rest of the system, even though you could do so with a calculator in many cases.

I'm not inclined to (beta)test wargames anymore for developers that are known for not responding to what the test team finds, as that decreases the quality of the final product and means testing is to a significant extent a waste of time for the test team. I've been in that situation a few times, unfortunately.

Let's say you have some machinery with a part that isn't entirely functional. You know the part isn't entirely functional because you can verify that purely by testing the machine. By a process of elimination, you're also likely to find the part that isn't working, although maybe not the cause.

What you're saying is that you need to test the machine in various conditions before determining that, but that's not true. The problem is in the machine, not in the conditions it's used in.

The beauty of game mechanics, based on a mathematical system, is that many results can be predicted without playing a single turn. That's not enough to balance things, but if you play it and determine that the predictions were correct, you can balance things.

Something like armour vs. armour performance won't change from scenario to scenario. The results might be slightly different due to the terrain the tanks fight in, but the actual mechanics won't change. Likewise, AA performance of non-AA units won't change either from scenario to scenario, as their AA rating is always 2.

Being a mathematical system, you can safely detach the workings of the unit values from the way an actual scenario works when it comes to determining how the various values interact with eachother. The impact they have on an actual scenario does need to be tested.

A number of the results we're seeing now were probably a surprise to the developers, so I'm not saying they failed in their testing process. It's a new game partially relying on mechanics ported from other titles, and unexpected results pop-up. In this case, it would have been more difficult to estimate how things would work in practice as the mechanics might work fine in the titles they came from, but not in the specific Panzer Battles Kursk setting.

Note that aside from Gertsovka, I'm not saying a scenario is broken as such, only that for some scenarios the point totals seem odd and that there's a difference in pace depending on how elaborate Soviet defences are and how good the Soviet and German units are.

Commenting on starting positions or VP positions wouldn't make sense until scenarios have been thoroughly tested.