We're collecting some balancing feedback!
We are currently preparing the next balancing patch for Thronefall. While we think we have a pretty good idea of where we stand and what could use some balance attention, we'd love to get your input as well.
- What parts of Thronefall's balancing would you like to see changed?
- Are there any upgrades, weapons, perks, etc. that you feel are currently too weak or too strong?
You can stop reading here and reply directly to this post with your suggestions. Or you can keep going to learn a bit more about our design philosophy when balancing Thronefall.
Thanks a lot for the continued love and support!
Paul & Jonas
The Tool Box
Hi, Jonas here. I'd love to give you some insights about how I approach balancing Thronefall and the challenges that come with it. It's a deep dive, but worth a read if this kind of stuff interests you. Enjoy!
One analogy I really like is that balancing a single-player game is like offering the player a toolbox filled with a variety of tools. The desirable outcome would be that players get to use ALL of the tools in that toolbox. Not all in equal frequency—some tools have rare use cases—but what matters is that every tool gets used at least some of the time. Otherwise, putting them in the box would have been pointless in the first place.
Balancing pure power levels against each other is in my experience a poor approach, as it results in a few tools winning out over all the others. Make that archer a bit too strong, suddenly it's at the top and the only unit people use. Make that archer a bit too weak and nobody picks it anymore, because a different one is on top now. Trying to balance a game this way is a battle you can fight forever, but you're doomed to lose.
That means the only way to make sure all tools are used is to make all tools solve specific situational problems. Not every perk should be equally good on every map. Not every unit should be equally strong against each enemy. The circumstances should heavily influence which tools work and which don't. That way, the chance of every tool finding a use case goes up.
A lot of strategy games do this with rock-paper-scissors systems where certain pieces counter certain other pieces and so on. This is a reasonable approach; however, it is also possible to overdo that. If it is too obvious which tool you should use in which situation, it becomes boring again. The challenge should not be to put the square-shaped tools in the square-shaped holes and the triangular tools in the triangle-shaped holes.
Much of the fun in strategy games comes from deciding on the correct tool to use for a specific situation. If this choice is too easy, it kills the challenge, and a choice can be too easy in two different ways: Either the choice can be too easy because one tool is always the best, or it can be too easy because the correct tool is much too obvious (even though it might be a different one every time).
One example where I feel this toolbox-balancing approach works well in Thronefall at the moment is the mill upgrades. Every upgrade has very clear advantages and disadvantages that differ greatly depending on the situation. Explosive mills help little against ranged enemies, whereas wind spirits don't exactly shine against melee warriors. As you face a variety of different enemies throughout a match, deciding on the best mill upgrade to pick is a fun challenge and depends on the enemies and on the map. Sure, not every mill upgrade is useful equally often, but there are clear use-cases for all of them in the game.
One example of where this does not work as well would be the archer units because hunters and particularly fire archers are currently almost always the best options to go for. Fire archers counter both groups of enemies as well as siege engines, which makes them universally useful. If we buff them too much, they dominate the meta. If we nerf them too much, they become insignificant. Balancing universally useful units to compete with other options is extremely difficult.
Fire archers in particular are one of my biggest regrets for balancing Thronefall in hindsight. It is too late to make any significant changes to them at this point, and I don't want to nerf them too hard, either, as they are still fun to use. Our best shot at this point is probably to make the other archers more situationally useful so that they can overtake the fire archers in specific situations under specific circumstances.
This toolbox mentality is how I try to balance almost everything in the game. I want everything to be situational so that everything has some use cases.
There is, however, one exception I make to this rule, and that is for beginner tools. I often want to provide a decent default option to new players that they can pick if they are unsure. These are the only tools that are intentionally not very situational but very universally applicable; however, in order to keep them balanced, I have to intentionally under-power them a bit. Otherwise, I run the risk of them suppressing situational tools too often. A good example of where this works well at the moment would be Royal Mint, a solid perk for new players, but not as much for experienced folks who likely prefer more specialized perks such as Pumpkin Fields or Big Harbour to fill the same role.
Main Takeaways:
- Upgrades, Perks, Units, Buildings are like tools in a toolbox.
- Tools don't need to be used equally often, but every tool should have use-cases where it is best.
- The fun comes from challenging the player to choose the correct tool at the correct time.
- Making that decision fun can be achieved by making tools situational, but not overly so, resulting in an interesting optimization challenge.
- The only exception to that rule would be beginner tools that are universally useful but slightly underpowered by design.
Questions for You:
- Which "tools" do you never use?
- How could we make them more situationally useful?
Emotional Damage
Have you ever wondered why balancing is such a surprisingly emotional topic in a lot of games? I certainly have, and I would love to share my guess for why that might be.
First of all, it is caused by the fact that balancing is important and most players know that. It's not "just" a bunch of numbers. These numbers very heavily shape an experience. Looking at the toolbox analogy, whether you get to use all of the tools in that box or just one makes a huge difference for player enjoyment. Players care because it matters. That should be the obvious one.
The less obvious one is that balancing is actually similar to politics. Everybody has a different experience with the game. Especially with strategy games that offer a large variety of different upgrades and play styles, one playthrough will look completely different from another. This can result in highly opposing "world-views" about the balance of a game. One player who had difficulties countering Quickslings might think they are completely broken, while another player who picked a different counter might think they are completely fine.
I've noticed that players (and probably developers as well) tend to get stuck in their balancing world-views. For example, I've seen players getting stuck in the view that eco upgrades are ALWAYS the best option to pick in Thronefall, not realizing that the defensive upgrades often allow you to expand your economy much more efficiently elsewhere.
Similarly I sometimes see new players getting stuck in the belief that building mills is much too risky and does not yield good returns, which could not be further from the truth. These players then struggle a lot more because of that, yet they can't easily break loose from their perspectives on their own.
This can even result in completely opposing balancing world-views, such as that either Builder's Guild is the only valid upgrade path for the Castle Center or that it is not worth it at all.
In short, everybody sees different things happen in their game, and therefore everybody has a different truth to tell when it comes to balancing questions. It is easy to point fingers and say that somebody else is wrong, but you have not seen what they've seen, and they have not seen what you did.
That's why taking feedback and getting more representative data is so important for balancing. That's why we decided to ask you, but that is also why the topic is so emotionally loaded, why we will likely argue in the comments, and why we will never fully agree on how to best balance the game. I think this is important to understand about the balancing process.
Trial and Error
Because I have my own limited balancing world-views and I am very much stuck in my own perspective the same way most players are, most balancing changes aren't much more than an educated guess. It is very difficult for me to predict the full consequences of a balancing change beforehand. For example, I never would have guessed that the Interest perk would be so wildly efficient for highscore hunting. It's just not something that crossed my mind as the raw income on paper is really not all that great even compared to houses, yet here we are.
Any balancing change we make is essentially a guess. A guess that the change will make things better rather than worse. Most of the time these guesses are luckily correct, but some percentage of guesses will also be wrong.
That is why in every single balance patch, some changes will make the game better and some will make the game worse. The way to judge a balance patch is by the success rate of those guesses. If it is above 50% then it should count as a good patch, though negatives tend to stand out more, so ideally you should better be aiming for 80% or above as a developer.
Risk Aversion
Now that we're getting closer to the full release of Thronefall later this year, I would prefer not to make any HUGE redesigns to the balancing anymore. Players are for the most part very used to how the game works now, and I don't think we should shake things up too much at this point. E.g., Entirely changing how a unit works or replacing a unit with a different one is off the table at this point.
As this might be one of the last balance patches before the release of the game, I also want to increase the success rate of my guesses as much as I possibly can. The way I try to achieve this is by asking for a lot of feedback and by not making any changes that I see as too risky.
Especially risky are raw buffs to tools that are already very universally useful, even if they're underpowered at the moment. (Usually economic upgrades fall into that category. I often struggle to make them situational.) Buffs to situational tools, on the other hand, are much much less risky, because even if you overdo it a bit, at least they won't dominate in every situation.
Making tools more situational and buffing them that way is certainly on the table, and my ears are wide open if you have any ideas.
Another risk aversion strategy is that I think we want to go mostly with buffs and very few nerfs. Making tools more powerful may result in power creep, but to be honest, Thronefall would benefit from being a bit easier anyway, so we don't really mind some healthy power creep at the moment at all.
Some Current Ideas
Here are some balancing ideas I'm playing with at the moment:
- Increasing the number of available perk points from 3 to 5, both to make the game easier but also to allow for more strategic options in your loadout. (There are arguably other ways to achieve the same effect, but this implementation is most inviting from a development perspective as it doesn't cost any development time.)
- For fire archers, I've been thinking to nerf them a bit, but not in raw damage output, but more in utility—for example, -25% movement speed and -25% health. They should still be almost equally powerful after that but with some more pronounced potential drawbacks. This would by design only be a small nerf, though.
- At the same time, longbows could receive +35% bonus damage against humanoid enemies and prioritize humanoid enemies, a situational buff to carve out a more interesting niche for them. Crossbows likely need some extra range (let's say +30%) and maybe some bonus damage (maybe +25%) against ranged units, as they already somewhat fill the anti-ranged role with their ranged armor. Hunters seem to be in a decent place (they deal like +122% damage versus monsters, so very situational indeed); there are just a lot of monster enemies at the moment.
- Spearmen already have plenty of drawbacks like being extremely squishy and vulnerable to ranged attacks, so they could probably just use a straight-up buff in damage and movement speed to better fulfill their role.
- Builder's Guild, the Castle Center upgrade, is another trouble child with very split opinions. At the top level, it seems too weak, but as a universally useful eco upgrade, we need to be super careful with buffing it too much unless we find a smart way of making it more situational.
- Castle-Up has a similar problem where it is essentially an eco upgrade that is pretty universally useful. I wonder how we could make it more situational. Otherwise, maybe just a small buff is the way to go.
- Magic Armor on the Castle Center could maybe only deflect damage from ranged enemies but deal a lot more damage in return. This would make it more situational, better in some cases and worse in others, which sounds nice to me.
- Godly Curse has always been in a weird spot, with most players not even knowing about the lock target hotkey (tutorial update is on its way). It's also been veeeery very niche with almost no legit use-cases. I would still love for it to fill the anti-boss anti-high-health-unit role in some way, so I thought about changing its effect to: When your character attacks an enemy for the first time, it instantly loses 25% of its remaining health (this is per enemy of course). This would be independent of your current damage stats, making it a potentially interesting option for many different builds while still being quite situational.
There are obviously more things that need attention, but these are the most interesting ones that I wanted to share with you for discussion.
Wrapping Up
You now understand what it takes to balance a game with 2,412 balancing parameters (that's the current number counted by my balancing tool). The more we can activate our collective intelligence on these issues, the better, as individual opinions on game balance tend to be limited in one way or another. I will do my best to sort through all of your suggestions and, based on them (and my personal experiences), make the best guesses I possibly can (also considering factors like risk aversion and required development times).
Thank you so much for taking the time to read all the way to the end if you did. I hope you got something out of it. Thanks a ton for all the love, support and continuous feedback! We really appreciate it.
Cheers,
Jonas
