Game Design: Balance in Multiplayer Games

What Is Game Balance?

Two-player games: it means that one player does not have an unfair advantage over the other.

Single-player games: we use balance to describe whether the challenge level is appropriate to the audience.
Multi-player games: where there is asymmetry (that is, where players do not start with exactly equal positions and resources), we use balance to describe whether one starting position is easier to win with than another.
Within a system that has several similar game objects (such as weapons in a role-playing game, and so on), we use balance to describe the objects themselves, specifically whether different objects have the same cost/benefit ratio.

No one wants to play a multiplayer games that causes them to lose unfairly.
Players need to feel that multiplayer games give them as much a chance as winning as other players.
However, this is often not an easy task.
We are going to learn a practical technique for ensuring that your characters are balanced using the Tank War Example.

You can make sure that no player has an unfair advantage by providing all players with directly equivalent features.
Carefully balanced differences between characters can often make a more interesting multiplayer game and increase the longevity of the gameplay.

You can provide players with meaningful choices right from the start of the game by including gameplayer differences between characters.
This will become meaningless if a player discovers that one character always has an advantage over the others.
The game degenerates into a competition to choose the best character first.
Making sure this doesn't happen requires careful planning and thorough play testing.

We are going to create heavy and light tanks as balanced alternative to the basic tank from our Tank War game.
Start by making a list of characteristics that could be varied to make the game more interesting:

Rate of Fire	How fast the vehicle can shoot its main weapon
Shot damage	The amount of damage caused by each shot of its main weapon
Shot speed	The speed at which shells fly through the air
Vehicle armor	The proportion of damage that is absorbed by the vehicle's armor
Vehicle speed	The speed at which the vehicle moves forward
Rate of turn	The speed at which a vehicle can turn on the sport.
Vehicle size	The size of the vehicle (the larger the size of the target, the easier it is to hit).

Let's create a table for each vehicle type and list the strengths and weaknesses we want them to have for each characteristics.
The ideas is to produce a different profile for each vehicle that balances out their abilities.
Launch Microsoft Excel and create the following chart

Characteristics	Heavy Tank	Basic Tank	Light Tank
Rate of fire		-
Shot damage		-
Vehicle armor		-
Max speed		-
Rate of turn		-

Download the tank game: new_tank1.gmk along with the tankdata.txt file (they both must reside in the same directory)
The game will read and write your tank settings to this text file.
Load up and play test the game.
Click on either tank will cycle between the three different tank types available: light, basic, and heavy.
Pressing the Shift key will toggle a test panel at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to tweak the characteristics for each tank (by left clicking to increase and right clicking to decrease the values).
Settings are saved and loaded to the data file so they are not lost the next time you play the game.

The settings for each tank start off exactly the same as the original.
First, change the settings so that they have the strengths and weaknesses that we gave in our Excel table.
Play the game by driving and firing each tank on your own until your 're fairly happy with the changes.
Next, find a partner and play the game.

Play every combination of tanks and battle it out in order to establish whether any of the tanks has an unfair advantage over the others.
When you find that ones does, make some tweaks to balance things out and try again.
Make sure you stick broadly to the original strengths and weaknesses in the table though!
You should eventually reach a stage where all tanks are fairly equally matched without being the same.

All the Combinations of Tanks
Your Tank	Your Opponent's Tank
Light	Light
Light	Basic
Light	Heavy
Basic	Light
Basic	Basic
Basic	Heavy
Heavy	Light
Heavy	Basic
Heavy	Heavy

Which characteristics are the most/ least important?
How does this depend on theplayer's individual abilities and strategies (try always driving backwards, if you haven't done so already).
How much do the characteristics required for balanced tanks change as players get better at the game (try watching some beginners play the game now that it's balanced.)
Do you still have a preference for one type of tank? Does this matter?
Would these same settings be useful for creating progression in single-player mode against the computer?
Are your settings realistic, and does it matter if they're not?