expanding on the unbalanced gameplay issue. another example of that comes from games like resident evil. where for the reason of inducing panic of fear into somebody, the game will put you in the toughest situations with the least amount of ammo or chance for survival. this is balanced in a way to achieve the desired effect.

if you want to generalize all of the techniques on how to balance gameplay then you must understand that there is no concrete technique for it. It is up to the programmers to achieve balance in our software. If something is fluidly balanced then the player doesn''t realize that the cool giant lizard that is their favourite character stands just as much chance in a fight as the little pink star all the girls pick. if you adhear strictly to a balance formula then a player catches on pretty quick, which doesn''t necassarily mean a bad thing. So generalized, you could just bring it down to two type of gameplay balancing techniques. abstractly balancing where 5-3-1 could balance against 3-3-3 perfectly in execution. Or concreatly balancing, where there is a strict method of rules that balance, seen in chess, stratego, rps, warcraft and so on.

I think the best way to ballance a game (rts or rpg especially) would be to first pick some arbitrary values for everything that kind of sound ballanced, and then let people play the game. Make the game update a global database after each game(or session etc) that tells you how many of each unit/ability etc were chosen, and if that person won(or how well they did). You could then keep track of things like the average army composition(or skill selection), average winning army vs average losing army, etc and adjust the numbers until the stats look the way you want them.

[edited by - extrarius on October 31, 2003 12:39:20 PM]