Game balance is hard for small studios. In the games I’ve made, some don’t care about ‘balance’ – DOG BEAR is for example, a short game about storytelling, so it’s not like that’s a game with a precarious set of interconnected balances. Other games are balanced more by players’ skill than the game systems, like Lily Blade (though initial printings of Lily Blade contain some glaring balance problems).
Middleware on the other hand is a game where the players are opposing, together, a part of the game system. If that opposition isn’t fun because it’s too hard, that’s a problem. If it’s not fun because it’s too easy, that’s a big problem.
Initial testing of Middleware was with agnostic players, players who were not prone to min-maxing design or gameplay. Lots of people wound up with slightly multicolour decks, with people picking up Overload cards to draw a few extra cards and ignoring them for Raids. Initial servers were designed against players who would focus, and the numbers and effects on them were really brutal. Players hated them. In the final release, the servers were dialled back and their effects were reduced.
Now, Middleware’s servers are simply not up to the task of dealing with a moderately capable play group. I’m hearing tales of 40+ raid Strengths against a server that can have, at most, 20 raid strength.
Now here’s the trick: Middleware is a printed, physical card game. If this was a digital game I could just use a little bit of code and say, increase the power of every individual server card. Easy, right? But it isn’t, and I can’t. What’s on the cards is on the cards. If I change the text on a card, I have to change it in a way that’s easily remembered, or (horrors) ask players to alter their cards.
This is a challenge of game design. I want to change the game, I want to improve the game, but I want to do it in a way that only interfaces with the plastic rules. Things I can change without necessarily requiring changes to cards. I don’t want to institute rules that are too complex either – so things that require multiplication are potential problems.
Complicating this further, some cards have (minor) mistakes on them. The solution there is to clarify, or provide errata text – hey, this means ‘face up’ etc. But doesn’t that fly in the face of my worry about altering cards?
There are fixed parts to the game. There are parts of the game that need fixing.
Right now the current idea is that servers start at a base strength = all server cards, and each faceup card adds +1 to each server, meaning that at the end each server will have a bonus 8/16 points of strength, which should hopefully be a challenge without being overwhelming… but that might not be enough!