How to fix the balance of AtWar

With all due respect to the team responsible for the game's development, I come here to shout my humble opinion into the void. This post is the result of my dissatisfaction with the current role that Strategies play in the game, going far beyond numbers for nerfs / buffs, but directly touching AtWar's own game design.

---

Balance in AtWar
Balance is often interchanged with "fairness" in many contexts, but game design requires a higher standard in order for a game to be considered balanced. Balance is a property of a game that involves the relative value of the game's choices. When a game is balanced, players begin with the perspective of their starting goals, each decision holds value and the outcome of the game is revealed during final scoring.

In this post I will not address the issue of Upgrades, which hinder the development of the game for newcomers.

Game design balance covers expansive topic and to assist in breaking it down we have three categories of balance:

• Internal Balance: related to the Upgrades that the player has, as well as his premium subscription, which grants him access to the General and rare units.
  
• External Balance: encompasses the player's intent at the beginning of the game, being composed of all available Strategies.
  
• Positional Balance: it is related to the map/scenario to be played, as well as the number of cities and reinforcements.

---

Design considerations when creating a new Strategy

• Symmetry: how does the Strategy interact with all the others? Are they very similar or divergent and is this intentional?
  
• Internal balance issues: how does it interact with the player's Upgrades?
  
• Repetition: does the Strategy offer enough variety of mechanics or is it simply a repetitive back-and-forth sequence?
  
• Tactic saturation: are there at least three or four legitimate paths to victory?
  
• Pacing conditions: how does the Strategy act when directly confronting or retreating units every turn, or dealing with scenario-only mechanics?

---

Strategy Complexity
The span of complexity encompasses the entirety of a Strategy from unit stats to the other mechanics and layout to player decision trees. The key areas of complexity in game design is striving for a high depth to complexity ratio and the playing value created through emergent gameplay.

AtWar will benefit if the people responsible for the meta development strives to aim for a high depth to complexity ratio. By decreasing the cognitive burden on players while increasing their opportunity to make interesting decisions, a game will become simpler to balance, more enjoyable to play and generate a better reputation upon every match. This ratio can be improved using two simple methods:

• Reduction of Complexity: eliminate mechanics and unit stats constraints which contribute a proportionally small amount of strategic depth.
  
• Expansion of Depth: extend existing ideas in a way that increases strategic value while adding a minimal amount of complexity.

---

Emergent gameplay
Games with a high ratio of depth to complexity can sometimes be described as easy to learn but difficult to master. These games feature a simple set of rules and an important game design concept known as emergent gameplay.

citoj:

Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.

In AtWar, we might define emergent gameplay as having two key components:

• A simple ruleset (a.k.a unit stats or Ethos).
  
• Strategies cannot be fully deciphered simply from knowing the game controls.

Applying emergent gameplay is one of the most difficult tasks in game design. It requires successful playtesting and convergent but harmonious ideas.

---

Utility
Utility is defined as the usefulness of something, the ability of a product or service to satisfy needs or wants. In a game, the utility might be defined as the "meta".

At the current state, AtWar fails to increase utility through a reduction of complexity, something that, in the long run, becomes extremely counter-productive, even unfeasible.

We can increase utility through the reduction of the length of Strategies, and an expansion of the options available.

---

Pacing and choices
In my opinion, one of the biggest flaws of the Strategies today is the complete ignorance of the value of pacing.

Pacing has the ability to build focus and motivation in a gaming experience so that the next turn feels more important than the last turn. Since pacing has a tendency to play out over the timeline of a game, a shorter playing time can preclude the effectiveness of many interesting approaches to pacing. The longer a game lasts the more options it can potentially employ to implement pacing. Pacing is largely determined by what players are doing, how efficiently they do it and how they approach the end of a game. Take a look at this article on Wikipedia: Freytag's pyramid.

Much of the AtWar Strategies are not conditioned to the "dramatic arc", they act as cake recipes, where players have only mechanics which encourage chaining actions one after another, it feels like the player has no control/liberty over his own game.

---

The importance of the Ethos in Strategies
The Ethos of a Strategy can be defined as a clash between theme and mechanics. It must present clever, elegant, or unusual resolutions to in-game issues, showing information in a concise, centralized, or attractive manner. It provides familiarity, purpose, clarity, assurance, parsimony.

The nature of an Ethos can be described in three ways:

• Supplementary Ethos: weak theme, strong mechanics. Strategies that require changes in order to become used more often.
  
• Heavy Ethos: strong theme, weak mechanics. Might be unfriendly to new players or demand Upgrades to be worth something.
  
• Inseparable Ethos: balanced theme, balanced mechanics. This is what good Strategies look like, Imperialist, Lucky Bastard and Iron Fist are great examples of that.

---

Suggestions for the future
I have a series of suggestions and changes that could be implemented after a few playtests, but I prefer not to post them here for now so as not to scare everyone! But at first this is it:

• Remove self-sabotage: many Strategies have unnecessary nerfs that will just induce players to error.
  
• Keep options open: today, most Strategies offer a SINGLE path to victory, destroying other options. When in fact they should offer an EASY way to victory, while keeping the other roads open.
  
• Transparency: let everyone see, opine, test frequently.
  
• Special units: make better use of special units like Anti-aircraft, Sentry Plane, Buildings.
  
• New Strategies: in my opinion, AtWar needs an absurdly high wave of new Strategies, something that may become easier to implement if the suggestions I made above are followed. Think of games like League of Legends or Counter-Strike, players have dozens and dozens of heroes or weapons available, imagine if LoL had only 20 heroes, or if CS offered only 15 different weapons. All players would be conditioned to do the same thing over and over again, saturating the game quickly.

---

Graph reference

The radar format chart was made to roughly illustrate a comparison between the robustness of all strategies subject to change. All Strategies were categorized through six AtWar intrinsic mechanics: Attack, Defense, Movement, Health, Luck, Economy. I will refer to such mechanics simply as "Attributes". Considering a performance grid that varies from 0 to 5, the default value of the sum of all Attributes is 12. The "None" Strategy has 2 points in each Attribute.

The value of an Attribute does not depend purely on the bonuses and penalties related to the units, as it must also take into account the Strategy orientation and the internal, external and positional balances. Imperialist, Lucky Bastard, Blietzkrieg, and Relentless Attack, were not modified, since they already show good results. The "forgotten" (or abandoned) strategies, such as Scorched Earth and Hold the Line, were not considered, since they require greater care and more time for analysis to have a satisfactory status, something I already started to do more than 7 months ago in the days of Garde. Overview of the impact of the changings I'm purposing:

Strategy	Attack	Defence	Luck	Movement	Health	Economy	Total value
Naval Commander	4	3	2	3	2	1	15
Desert Storm	3	1	2	4	2	1	14
Master of Stealth	3	2	2	3	2	2	14
Perfect Defence	2	4	2	1	2	3	14
Great Combinator	2	2	2	2	4	2	14
Hybrid Warfare	3	3	2	2	2	2	14
Insurrection	3	1	2	2	2	4	14
Imperialist	1	2	2	2	2	5	14
Sky Menace	4	1	2	4	2	1	14
Blitzkrieg	2	1	2	5	2	2	14
Counter-Insurgency	2	3	2	3	2	2	14
Lucky Bastard	2	2	5	2	2	0	13
Relentless Attack	3	1	2	3	2	2	13
Iron Fist	2	2	2	0	5	2	13
Guerrilla Warfare	2	0	2	3	2	4	13
Industrial Powerhouse	2	3	3	2	2	1	13
None	2	2	2	2	2	2	12

Please note that the table above and the graphs below doesn't represent the quality of the Strategy as a whole, many of them are pretty situational, such as Naval Commander and all the ones air/stealth-oriented. Its nothing but a parameter for the exercise we're doing here.

---

Desert Storm
Orientation: Ground/Air units.
Updates: Make DS more about movement and economy management.


Helicopters

• Decrease attack bonus from +2 to +1.
  
• Decrease range bonus from +3 to +2.

Bombers

• Remove the range penalty.

Tanks

• Decrease cost penalty from +30 to +20.
  
• Remove defence penalty.

---

Guerrilla Warfare
Orientation: Ground/Stealth units.
Updates: Slightly increase GW defensive capacity, making Infantry a unit more similar to the Militia, while transports return to their standard expansionary capacity at a higher cost (redundancy removal).


Infantry

• Decrease attack penalty from -2 to -1.
  
• Decrease defence penalty from -2 to -1.
  
• Increase range penalty from -1 to -2.

Transport

• Remove range penalty.
  
• Increase cost penalty from +150 to +200.

Air Transport

• Remove range penalty.
  
• Increase cost penalty from +200 to +250.

---

Iron Fist
Orientation: Universal.
Updates: Considering that the Militia is unable to leave cities (without transport), and that IF is a strategy that makes large-scale movement/detection almost impractical, it's an adjustment for large countries/continents.


Militia

• Receives +1 defence against Marines and Submarines only.

---

Master of Stealth
Orientation: Stealth units.
Updates: Submarine becomes a more effective when fighting naval units. Air Stealth is more cost-effective. A few more minor adjustments and redundancy removal.


Submarine

• Decrease attack bonus from +2 to +1.
  
• Decrease range bonus from +2 to +1.
  
• Remove critical chance bonus
  
• Increase HP by +1.

Stealth

• Remove range bonus.
  
• Increase the critical chance from +2 to +4.

Marines

• Increase defence by +1.
  
• Decrease cost discount from -40 to -30.

Tanks

• Remove range penalty.
  
• Remove defence penalty.

Destroyer

• Remove all penalties

Infantry

• Decrease critical chance by -2.

---

Perfect Defence
Orientation: Ground units.
Updates: Internal balance issue. Adjustment that has a greater impact only on small presets or low-fund scenarios.


Transport

• Increase cost by +30.

---

Naval Commander
Orientation: Naval units.
Updates: Attempt to leave NC a strategy with some efficiency on the ground for slightly higher costs.


Tanks

• Remove attack/defence penalties.
  
• Increase cost by +10.

Marines

• Decrease attack by -1.

---

Sky Menace
Orientation: Air units.
Updates: Changing it from Supplementary Ethos to a Heavy Ethos.


Tanks

• Remove cost penalty.

Helicopters

• Increase attack by +1.
  
• Increase range by +2.

Air Transport

• Increase attack bonus from +1 to +2.

Anti-Aircraft Defences

• Decrease cost by -200.

---

Insurrection
Orientation: Ground units.
Updates: Greater synergy with internal balance. Transports return to their standard expansionary capacity at a higher cost (redundancy removal).


Militia

• Increase critical chance bonus from +2 to +3.

Infantry

• Remove attack penalty.
  
• Increase critical chance by +2.

Marines

• Decrease attack penalty from -2 to -1.

Submarine

• Remove attack penalty
  
• Remove range penalty.
  
• Increase cost penalty from +150 to +200.

Transport

• Remove range penalty.
  
• Increase cost penalty from +150 to +200.

Air Transport

• Remove range penalty.
  
• Increase cost penalty from +200 to +250.

Recruitment Center

• Increase cost by +400.

---

Industrial Powerhouse
Orientation: Ground units.
Updates: Attempt to make IP a strategy more focused on luck and economy, forcing a certain defensive posture of the player.


Militia

• Decrease range by -2.
  
• Increase critical chance by +2.
  
• Remove cost penalty.

Tanks

• Remove defence penalty.
  
• Decrease range by -1.

All naval units

• Decrease defence by -1.
  
• Increase critical chance by +4.

All air units

• Decrease attack by -1.
  
• Increase critical chance by +4.

All buildings

• Increase critcal chance bonus from +2 to +4.
  
• Increase defence by +2.

Recruitment Center

• Reduce cost by -600.

Fortifications

• Reduce cost by -500.

Anti-Aircraft Defences

• Reduce cost by -300.

Bank

• Reduce cost by -300.

Radar Array

• Reduce cost by -150.

Coastal Battery

• Reduce cost by -130.

---

Great Combinator
Orientation: Universal.
Updates: This makes GC a universal-oriented strategy, instead of focusing only on land units. It can be as good as IF.


Bombers

• Decrease attack by -1.
  
• Decrease defence by -1.
  
• Increase HP by +1.

Destroyers

• Increase HP by +1.
  
• Increase cost by +20.

---

Hybrid Warfare
Orientation: Universal.
Updates: Incisive attempt to make HW an even more universal-oriented, leaving Militia off balance and correcting inconsistencies with values.


Militia

• Remove all bonuses and penalties.

Stealth

• Remove all penalties.

Tanks

• Remove cost penalty.
  
• Decrease defence penalty from -3 to -1.
  
• Decrease range by -1.

Bombers

• Reduce cost by -30.

Submarine

• Decrease attack penalty from -2 to -1.
  
• Decrease defence penalty from -2 to -1.
  
• Increase discount from -25 to -40.
  
• Remove range bonus.

---

Counter-Insurgency
Orientation: Air units.
Updates: CI is now less focused on a single unit, having greater gameplay strength. Also flirts with Buildings. It needs another name, "counter" in the gaming world might sound different from the military term, imo.


All units

• Increase view bonus from +1 to +4.

Helicopters

• Increase range by +2.

Marines

• Remove attack penalty.

Submarine

• Remove attack penalty.

Stealth

• Remove attack penalty.

Sentry Plane

• Receives +2 defence against Tanks and Infantry only.

Radar Array

• Reduce cost by -150.

Fortifications

• Reduce cost by -500.

Anti-Aircraft Defences

• Reduce cost by -100.

---

Note: This study was made based on the MDA framework, which is a formal and iterative approach to understanding games developed in 2004.