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#1
04-21-2007, 12:30 PM
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How to Balance WW games.
I am in the process of writing up a theme idea for an Average Speed game I'd like to mod sometime later.
It's generally accepted that a 13er 3 wolves - 1 seer (n0 peek) - 9 vanillas is balanced (?) I think. Once games get larger and more complicated is there a formula for working out how to balance things fairly? Are there any resources I can get pointed towards that detail how to setup games so the balance is goot. Obv you can just rand the game and trial and error through a bunch of scenarios to work out how long any given setup could last but. What makes a game balanced? What effect do various Mish Mash style extra power roles have on a game? And how long should a game run for at most? 2weeks a month? (assuming 12 hour days & 12 hour nights) 
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#3
04-21-2007, 01:27 PM
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Re: How to Balance WW games.
[ QUOTE ]
13 - 3 / 1 / 9 peek 15 - 3 / 1 / 11 no peek 17 - 4 / 1 / 12 peek 19 - 4 / 1 / 14 no peek 21 - 5 / 1 / 15 peek (this is debatable) 23 - 5 / 2 / 16 no peek 25 - 6 / 2 / 17 peek 27 - 6 / 2 / 19 no peek that seems right to me... 3 * 2 / 1 * 2 / 9 * 2 + 1 (compared to a 13 man turbo) there's an extra villager but no peek ------ around 21 it gets weird whether you should add the 2nd seer or not yet [/ QUOTE ] Maybe I should put this in the sticky...
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#5
04-21-2007, 07:38 PM
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Re: How to Balance WW games.
matrix,
For ordinary games, durron's chart is good. For special games with powerful characters, just to use a cliche, it's more art than science. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward - vote buyers, an extra kill, and so forth. Other times it isn't (pumpkin, evil seer, neutral characters). I would recommend looking at games in the past for characters that are similar to yours. Read them and ask players who played in them how much that role impacted the game. Especially useful is the perspective of the person who played the role. One important thing to note is that they often won't do what you expect. A good example of this is the Tokyo!! character in the anniversary game that just finished. He had to power to one time make himself unlynchable. We expected him to wait until some point in the game when he had a little heat or really wanted to make a point and then use it but he used it immediately on day 1 to clear himself as a villager. So try to think of other ways that players would use the character. Naturally, you're probably not going to come up with whatever convoluted strategy that luckay or nich would come up with but thinking it through a little more will be hugely beneficial. Roles like Tokyo above are particularly difficult. They are powers that come in extremely handy if a certain situation arises, but are quite weak if it doesn't. If you can, it will help overall game balance if the special power helps to balance the game. So maybe some village power that is quite useful when there are a lot of wolves relative to villagers but could otherwise not be good (something that randomly kills people would be roughly what I'm talking about here). Otherwise you have to do some sort of EV like calculation and determine how likely you think such a situation will come up. I think many game mods have reached the same conclusion. If you are going to err in any direction, favor the wolves. I think I'll make a modding post later with more thoughts.
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#6
04-21-2007, 07:45 PM
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Re: How to Balance WW games.
Power roles should never be greater than 1/5th of the village.
If they are, you better have either extra night kills or extra vote-buying evils. The most important power I had as metsandfinsfan was the power to say "I am metsandfinsfan." Make sure village actually has a hard time winning by clearing x villagers.
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#7
04-21-2007, 08:41 PM
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Re: How to Balance WW games.
25% of the players as wolves is pretty standard. This means that for the game to be close at the end, the village will need about a 50% rate of lynching wolves. (50% of the players in the game are eaten at night, the remaining players that get lynched are evenly mixed as wolves and villagers.)
Obviously, the village is in bad shape if it just lynches at random. That's why there are seers to give some help, and villagers can make reads to help them out - which is especially powerful later in the game. From past experience we know how much to account for villagers using their brains and we know about how many peeks to expect from a seer. Confirmed villagers are really the key to the game. If you are designing a themed game, you need to remember that each village power role is essentially the same as a bonus seer peek in addition to whatever other powers they have. The more village power roles you have, the more you need to weaken the seers to avoid the village getting any easy lock on the game. To achieve balance, you want to try to estimate each character's power in common terms. For example, a one-shot vigilante is basically the same as giving the seer a bonus peek and giving the village a bonus lynch. If you're starting from a standard 17 player game and add the one-shot vigilante, then you should remove the seer's n0 peek and reduce the game to 16 players. Giving bonus powers to the wolves may seem nice, but keep in mind that what seems balanced at the start of the game may not be balanced by d3. There have been some games where if the wolves lose a few players early, then their remaining powers are too weak to overcome all of the village powers... but if the wolves all stay alive a few days, they can use their powers to just steamroll their way through the rest of the game. Another side effect of this is that the wolves have to take more care to keep their strongest members alive, which can give the village much more information to work with later in the game if things have stayed even. And on a final note, if the wolf power is something like a double vote, then there is a good chance that they will end up being outed at some point or at least have their identity narrowed way down. Don't give the wolves powers which are going to end up hurting them.
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#10
04-22-2007, 12:12 AM
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Re: How to Balance WW games.
[ QUOTE ]
Here's a question... What is the impact toward balancing a game if you have a godfather on the wolf team? [/ QUOTE ] It helps a lot. Definitely setup-specific, though.
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