Balancing For Skill

[Epson]

Balancing For Skill

The equation: Player skill in to power out
This cannot be linear. The ratio of power to skill should be higher the lower the skill that is required. Very different from saying that low skill should equal high power.

Let’s say it with an example:
Supreme commander. What’s the most powerful strategy most of us learned when we started playing single player campaign? Probably turtling. This gives us a huge amount of power compared to relatively small amount of skill. You could dominate the AI and do pretty well against your friends until coming to FAF. Yet it is nowhere near the most powerful strategy in the game. Rarely do you ever see the ‘pro’ players use this strategy. It is not a game winning strategy at the higher end of play.

So why are these strategies important? They give some way for the new player to compete. They allow a new player to get comfortable and begin to enjoy the game before they have to commit time to playing their skill.
Let’s take another example. Sniping with T3 bombers. (Or maybe even sniping in general). FAF’s matchmaking isn’t perfect. You will often get low experience players thrown in with pretty high experience players but it looks balanced on paper.
The only way to make the game interesting for both sides is something that grants a high power to skill ratio for the low skill required to use it. You are not going to be seeing ‘pros’ use this often because there are far better strategies and the risk of wasting significant resources if it is countered. But you will occasionally see a ‘pro’ taken out by a newbie using this strategy.
Non supreme commander example? The Noob tube.

Without these strategies the game would have a fraction of the player base it has today.

When you don’t balance for skill.
First order optimal strategy. (FOO). These tactics/strategies aren’t actually that powerful but they are far more powerful than anything else you might learn at the moment. Leads to using the strategy over and over and over again. Players will hold onto this strategy until it doesn’t work. Which can be fine. However this point has to come early.

Too often other strategies are put in that are clearly more powerful but require a lot more skill to perform. If B is 20% stronger than ability A but 3 times as hard to execute then ability B is only ‘better’ if you a Korean Cyborg. The player then hits a vertical learning curve because there is so much skill they haven’t learned. The Forged Alliance expansion eased this slightly. It gave player a lot more experience with mid and late game play. However they still hadn’t learnt much outside of the turtle strategy and it takes a lot of extra skill to get into the depth of FAF.

First of a series of video game design philosophy that I've shamelessly borrowed from other sources and adapted for FAF. Original source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w

These are intended to be used as concepts when talking about balance rather than people failing to communicate their point. For example the arguments about the RNG of FAF. I would refer them to this principle.