How did StarDock do with balancing their other games

They are able but based on my experience with GalCiv 2, it will take at least half a year. Considering how bad the game currently is, make that one or even two years.

What? Are we playing the same game?

Now in the game there are big issues of balance; some can be easily fixed but some are complicated.

E.g. Summons, Archery-Melee, Stacked unit, High-Level spells - almost any combat aspects that are more complex than just fighting of two heroes with bare hands.

I expected this game to be a lot more balanced considering I played GalCiv 2 and it seemed fine....

Here's what I remember in Galciv2

When if first came out, the units would take turns in their attacks.

This lead players to build cargo ships with lots of weapons and attack first always allowing them to win (cargo ships only have 1 hp, but it didn't matter cause it would demolish the ship it was fighting so it never had a chance to shoot back)

 Now ships attack at the same time

Then they needed to count every weapon individually, before the weapon values were all added up into one mega weapon

Example:  A laser does 1 damage

in the old game you could stick 5 lasers on a ship and it would roll between 1-5 for damage.  This made defence pretty pointless.

Now the game tracks each weapon individually so instead of rolling 1-5 for damage, it would instead roll 0-1, 5 times which was much better

If memory serves me correctly, all those things were added before or around the Dark Avatar expansion.  So basically Stardock doesn't just do some simple number tweaks, they change the whole combat system mechanics sometimes.   They are also never really done with balancing since they were tweaking things in Twilight of the Arnor so it's always an ongoing process however the game imo was balanced around Dark Avatar. 

My educated guess would be the game will be balanced enough to the casuals in 3-6 months with only the hardcore really finding any major exploits or OP strats which will slowly get hammered out afterwards but stardock says they are going into this for the long haul so this game is going to constantly be tweaked in the next 2-3 years.

One advantage they have is this game has MP which usually leads to more feedback on balancing but Stardock also has the added challenge of balancing the strat map and the battle map.  I wish them luck on that cause it seems easy but in reality it's a huge undertaking.

To be fair Galciv2 is a sequel, so it's not as if they are doing things blind. so obviously the product would be better. Anyway all games have bugs on release I just don't remember so many people saying Galciv2 was unfinished.

EWOM is their first try at Fantasy including TC.

But then again they were supposed to have learnt from MOM (was inititally conceived as a sequel), AOW etc..

If you ask me, SD purposely didn't spend anytime on game balancing.. because they felt it's one of the things they could fix later.

They focused on graphics, making the game moddable etc..

luketan, I don't think they would bring out a game which they know to be seriously imbalanced.

And... it isn't. There are quite a few issues, but on the whole it's okay. And will be fixed.

Besides - it is very difficult to balance a strategy game, especially when you're still fiddling with it, improving/enlarging/changing it. It is very normal for games to be somewhat unbalanced at the very start, especially when a lot of players mess about and try things the programmers would never have thought of .

Ciao,

Klaus

man plz

cut the crap

in general you can (as many others) think elemental all around is nice and enjoable

its your opinion and i respect it

but BALANCE WISE no

there is not opinion, its just a mess

and it was clear even b4 trying it

to balance there is only ONE THING TO DO, beta test it

and we NEVER had any minute to seriously test the game in a nearly finished state

so *balance wise* the test is now

Okay maybe i overstated it. But if you read the dev journals, they definitely give a vibe that they think fixing game balance issues is easy to do and that gamers over-estimate it. I think technically speaking they are right (assuming the framework is flexible enough to easily accommodate changes), but it does take quite a bit of game play to figure out what to fix.

The problem here isn't like players are saying.. "Strategy X just kills it all"...  It's more like.. the game is just not fun.. 

I thought someone was gonna yell at me for saying "i know we're in paid beta" so non-chalantly =]

BAH!! YOU SON OF A BITCH!!

I think sometimes they let you customize base values too much which have an exponential affect on future outcomes. 

For me, I could always beat GalCiv II with a colony rush by setting my production to 100% and adjusting the empire settings to go into deficit for the first 50 turns.  This of course gives me a MASSIVE turn advantage on all opponents and I could mop up the AI on any difficulty level.

The unit equipment in this game is the same, with proper use of unit equipment, you can really wipe the map with AI.  Also now that build times have been reduced you can spam pioneers and grab LOTS of resources before the AI goes agressive on you.

That being said, the balance on sins of a solar empire was fantastic, but (I think) BECAUSE that game was not as customizable.  I'm sure if you allowed people to customize ship weapons in that game it would be the same as ELEMENTAL, where there are just so many possibilities for exploits, you need to forgo the best strategy in order to have fun playing.  I am going to try a game of elemental where I only use the built in units and see if that is a little better.

Check back in six months to a year

... and possibly after the first paid expansion

To be honest, I'm feeling pretty burned. The state of the game *now* would be a good, solid, REAL beta test. It has all the pieces in place. It has lots of little bugs (and some major ones). But it has huge, huge gameplay issues, on every balance front, from AI to city development to spellcasting to tactical combat to army buildup to research to exploration, etcetcetc.

Worse, it has issues with simple blandness and Not Fun, in the tactical combat, the questing, the monster combat, and perhaps worst of all, in the magic system, something that should be one of the most interesting and enjoyable areas of the game to explore.

As a $50 (preorder!) purchase, it's a bit difficult to swallow (particularly since I'm one of the people inflicted with the awful, awful <10fps bug)

I've beaten on the AI repeatedly on every high difficulty level, even trying to avoid the most egregious of the balance issues in the game right now, but it simply doesn't present a challenge to an experienced thinking player, and in some cases, it won't even present a challenge even if you don't threaten it.

As for GC2/Sins - Sins wasn't their game.

I found GC2 to be extremely lackluster and boring on release, and the first expansion didn't do much for me. The second expansion however, was a major revamp of the game, and while I still find GC2 to be a very flavorless, almost empty experience, mechanically it was quite sound, and the AI was decently challenging (and had pretty cool behaviorlets that made it feel somewhat organic, a high compliment for AI in any game).

So, long story short - I don't see any reason Stardock would drop their support of this game. They have the team, they have the money and the time. The fact that it isn't in great shape now sucks (a lot), but they will likely continue to support it. In six months, patches should have cleaned up all major technical issues, nearly all of the minor bugs, and addressed many of the larger balance issues. Whether or not they will have addressed the simple Fun aspect of the game is a question (and answer) much more open to individual interpretation.

In a year, we'll probably see a good paid expansion pack that will (hopefully) enhance and extend the gameplay in various areas. Assuming the community sticks with the game, that's also around the time we can expect to see some larger mod projects that might be interesting.

I find the current launch situation pretty unpleasant all around. It has definitely damaged my opinion of Stardock as a whole, and while I still have reasonable confidence that they will improve the game, I'm shocked they shipped the game in this condition.

tldr: Yes, they'll improve it in time.

I have to add that DarkAvatar was almost balanced. The Superpowers every Race received were as unbalanced as hell and same goes for the starting boni for each race.

With Twillight of Arnor things become more messy because of the individual tech trees for each race. Especially the AI had problems dealing with all the new stuff and acted considerably worse since the second expansion (which then killed the game for me).

Then there also approach with All-Factory, All-Lab on planest which I regard as an exploit of the planet focus function they introduced before the expansion packs.

There are also some other inconsistencies. But overall a enjoyable game.

Very well spoken and I agree on all points.  The game for me is neither fun nor challenging.  I've beaten the hardest AI repeatedly and, sometimes, the harder difficulty even gives me an advantage.  I've even house ruled myself to avoid taking advantage of superior strategies and exploits.  The Elemental Team needs to make some fundamental changes.

I find SD games to be a bit blend as well, but usually the AI is pretty good, stability is okay, overall execution is sound etc and you could do far worse. But EWOM has not only the ordinary weakness of a SD game but this time it's not even technically well executed!  

You forgot the old "pile on as much defence as possible and leave off weapons" trick too, which wasn't fixed until circa Twilight when they stopped with the auto-resolve if both ships are still alive after fifty turns.

 Thing to remember when complaining about balance - it's impossible to properly balance a game until people are playing it. You kinda need to see what players are exploiting before you can fix it.

Stardock is really good about continually refining their games.  For example, on Gal Civ 2 & expansions prior to the 2.0 version, I was up to Painful and whoopin' tail.  Then 2.0 came out and I was back down to Challenging.  I expect that in time, they'll have all of the many many kinks worked out.