I have been tinkering around a game idea and have developed some of the components and even play-tested some parts on Table Top Simulator. However, when it comes to balancing and creating the economy I am having difficulty coming up with a good workflow. I was wondering if there is any good resource for game creators. Maybe some guides, websites or books that teach the basics, theory and help with implementation.
I am looking for ideas on how to balance the rewards of the different resources in the game. All different game strategies should be somewhat winnable, even though they might be very different.
Anyone aware of something? Or has faced something similar but found a way to solve it? I am all ears.
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Sorry to link you to reddit but there is a very active subreddit /r/tabletopgamedesign, they have a ton of interesting content. Unfortunately no lemmy alternative.
Thanks a lot! Lets see if I can make some headway with my game :)
Have you thought about simulation in a simple programming language like python?
I am a capable python programmer but would not know where to start with this. Any ideas?
Implement the game logically, implement different players with possible strategies, let the different combinations play out thousands of games, see if alle strategies win roughly the same time, else tweak values.
If you haven’t done that before: create a function or even better a class for the game, make classes for different playstyles. Each game has to have n players, the game class should have a method that plays the game, most likely executing a round method until the win or end condition is triggered. Each call of round should ask the player objects what they do, e.g. call the players play_round method, whilst giving them the information about the state of the game, these methods return the actions to the game, making dice rolls or whatever during their turn. The game objects shall collect all the informations you want to observe.
Depending on the complexity of your game this is quite an effort, but you will get premium knowledge about balance and once it is done, changes and tweaking balance are easy and almost trivial.
hmmm… never though of it like that. Thanks a lot for the write up. The game is rather complex, this might be very difficult to do but I will tinker around a bit. It makes it also a big more rigid when it comes to changing some aspect of the game but could really help in getting the economy just right. I need someone to do my job during the day so I can work on this :D
