Additionally to this he creates an artificial testing environment that isn’t representative for the gameplay.
It reduces the evalueation of the units to very simple and specific battke scenarios that also basically never occur in real games.
In total what he demands is not only basically infeasible, but also completely useless for a proper analysis.
It even starts with the basic question of “how much does a certain unit actually cost”? And even at this we will have various different approaches. I for Instance one time made a evalueation tool that calcs the “worth” of a unit in a wood equivalent (which is basically an equavalent in villager working time). And for the initial investment costs I used a exponential time correction factor that basically corrects that investment by trying to answer the question “how much better would your eco be atm if you would have used that eco for booming instead”. IDK IF this is even the correct approach. Most likely it isn’t. The reality is much, much more complicated. But even with this approach there come a lot of “problems”, factors you either can’t really account for (like ressource distribution in your buildorders or the outplay of a drush or whatever rushes that are usually done) or you have to estimate. Like when are people getting the upgrades and how much the military buildings are “working” effectively.
And even with all this, the calc can basically only be apllied in a quasi “stable” state of the game where there are no tactical restrictions to your economy. Even if it’s designe was initially meant to calc when it’s best to get certain upgrades, depending on your investment in certain military, it still can’t be used to account for the different timing advantages due to faster age-ups. Especially as these decisions on when going for the age-ups are usually based on (dis-)advantages in the game.
As the whole calc is necessarily settled on the estimation that the state of the game is basically “even” and no one has a clear advantage, all the strategical ways to close or have a comeback in the game are necessarily unmappable by basically any mathematical or statistical evalueation which is targeted to be applyable for an “even” state.
This is only a very few words on “how complicated” this stuff is.
I made the calc for the “effective” cost of the units nevertheless to get a feeling for that, so I can try to account for that as much as I can in my unit designs or other ideas. But the goal isn’t even to get a “perfect solution”, rather than to see which options actually won’t work.
And I also won’t use that tool anymore, as it’s way too hard to use - I haven’t designed it well, so there is a lot of things that need to be inserted in crude ways. And then it’s basically impossible to explain what actually happens in the tool, at least here. So nobody can even follow if the steps are all correct and if I have accounted for everything.
And that’s only the second biggest crux of this “balance” stuff. The communication is necesarily flawed as everybody has a different take on the stuff and even the most “basic” mathematical approaches lead to extremely complicated tools that are hard to explain, as there is so much stuff to account for.
The bigger crux is… A game like this is necesarily disbalanced. At least when it comes to different timings, but also from strategical perspectives. Knights are the biggest military powerspike in the game. The Game is completely designed around that. It’s necessary for the game.
And this thread isn’t about changing that. It’s about how to reduce that powerspike in a fashionable way so it’s not that dominating anymore.
The question isn’t even IF that powerspike exists. And so far I have seen from basically every viewpoint, all possible calculations and test runnings, it is there.
If we now would run these tests that are promoted by @DMgCrowley we would necessarily come to the conclusion that Knights are totally overpowered (which is correct). But then we would need to actually nerf them to the ground and remove that powerspike entirely. And this is definitevely the last thing that should happen.
So this approach of “balance” isn’t even sufficient here. It’s not about making Knights “balanced” . Knights have always been imbalanced and intentionally imbalanced.
It’s actually only about trying to find ideas how this powerspike can be turned less decisive for the outcome of the game. Notably for the outcome, not necesarily to directly target the powerspike itself, but probably instead the ways to get to this powerspike or what happens after.
This was a lot of stuff. But I think it’s necessary, to make clear, this isn’t a “balance Knights” thread. It’s about accounting for the impact that powerspike currently has in the game dynamic and trying to get solutions for reducing that impact so other aspects of the game become more relevant.