Balancing a Turn

Just as it is necessary to balance asymmetrical characters; it is necessary to balance symmetric strategies and tactics available to players.

In Aethermon’s case, this means ensuring that – on average and in a vacuum – no matter how a player chooses to spend their turn, all players are likely to receive similar value. If balanced well the player most likely to pull a head is the player who identifies the strategy that gives them the most value in their current circumstance; rather than rely on a single strategy that dominates other strategies no matter the circumstance.

Excluding Boss Battles (which disproportionately reward the player if successful); Aethermon allows one of four possible outcomes for a player on each turn:

• Standard Battle
• Quest
• Special Encounter
• Recovery spaces

To compare the value of each of these possible outcomes, it helps to reduce their value to a single metric. While not every resource in the game easily reduces to XG, it gives us a good place to start.

Fortunately the game rules clearly define the XG value of a turn spent in a standard battle: Easy battles (against lower level opponents) yield 1XG; Medium battles (against equal level opponents) yield 2XG; and Hard battles (against higher level opponents) yield 3XG.

This gives us the range of value a player should expect to be able to receive on a turn – 1 to 3XG, however the player can expect to spend resources (damage etc.) to get that XG. 

Next week we’ll dig into the unique way we balanced each of the other types of turns with this range in mind.

Keep on Questing AetherRen