Reply To: Crunched some numbers

[Anonymous 0xp 0]

This is one way I have been thinking about it.   It is the simplest way I can think of showing it.

Let us assume a 2 player wargame that has two factions, Good and Evil, and two different metas exist within each faction, an aggressive meta and a defensive meta. Each player chooses a faction and which meta with which to play the game.

In this example, we have 4 different armies the players can choose, Good Aggressive, Good Defensive, Evil Aggressive and Evil Defensive. The designer has 6 different combinations of armies fighting against each other to balance (we assume playing the same army is balanced).

If we add a third faction, we have six armies. Now the designer has 15 different combinations of battles to balance.

Add a fourth faction – 28 combos to balance.

If we take a real world example, it might illustrate the complexity of having something perfectly balanced.  Dreadball has 24 teams so there are 276 different combinations of matches that can happen (300 if you count the same faction playing each other). Is it actually humanly possible to balance this?”

Now we have to ask the question, what do we mean by balance?  Is it that every game there is a 50% chance of a side winning?  Or is it more like Stone, Paper, Scissors – Stone always beats Scissors, but in the long run, it should win the same number of games as Paper and Scissors.