Nerfing Militarism
May 17th, 2007 LukeIn the 2 days since my last post, Militarism’s user base has swelled from a meagre 13 to a surprising 33. That’s without any extra effort on my part, past e-mailing a single link out to a couple friends.
That’s 33 people banging on Militarism and how it’s balanced out. That’s 32 more people banging on Militarism than when I’m working on it alone. It’s quickly helped me realize that there are some…glaring balance issues.
For example, if a player has a “Phalanx” unit, they’re virtually unkillable until a player has built about twice as many phalanxes as the player they’re about to attack has. I needed to tweak that.
Earlier, Militarism players were ranked based on their army sizes; this was a good indicator of who a player might be safe attacking, but felt like a bad way to rank users. What if a user just built a whole pile of the cheapest unit? They would skyrocket to the top of the standings list, even if a user had sat and waited and built tons of the very best unit available. So I implemented a different rankings system, based on a players ’score’; their score is made up of their current gold, available recruits, new recruits that they haven’t heard about yet, and their army. It’s a much better way of ranking users as a whole; and for players who still need to see how many units an enemy has, I’ve left that on the standings page. I’m not sure if it will be there indefinitely.
I needed to nerf all of the units in Militarism because, originally, some were very overpowered, and some were very underpowered. Now, I believe, I’ve achieved some semblance of balance between all of them. I’ll find out soon if I haven’t.