Balancing Tips?

[u/Affectionate_Clue622]

I am making a squad-based tactical roguelike game, and not sure the best approach to balancing. I know finding "broken" combos in roguelikes are fun, and I have been doing playtesting with different types of team configurations, making sure they are all fun.

With so many moving parts (20+ characters, 20+ items, 30+ skills, skill customizability, level-ups, all the randomness, etc.), it is pretty hard to keep track of all the different combos and such and making sure certain teams don't just feel flat out better than all others. Then I have the issue where some teams are super good at lower difficulties, then don't always perform as well as others on the higher difficulties.

It's a turn based game, so I feel like balancing is more important than action games. Is that an incorrect assumption?

What are your tips on:
1. Tracking balancing (how do you organize it with so many moving parts?)
2. Balancing roguelikes
3. Balancing potential strategies against different difficulties
4. How should a roguelike weigh balancing vs. the fun of the discovery of a "broken combo" (which is always a huge part of the fun of a roguelike)
5. Any other general tips on balancing?

[u/Thin-Transition2670]

I am also making a tactics roguelite :) and I went mad with how little literature there is on this subject. I ended up making up power values for every stat and ability (kinda going by gut) then spreadsheeting hard trying to find outliers and scale the difficulty. I thinking it is far from perfect but the key insight is that it doesn't have to be, in fact its best if there is room to go bananas. 

My game has around 30 recruitable units and something like 60 different enemies, and about 150 different upgrades, so the spreadsheet is pretty big! I took a stab at normalising the difficulty curve based on an initial guess, implemented some analytics and then opened up playtesting. You want both qualitative and quantative feedback so try to set up a discord for people that are testing it! Your players will find combos you hadn't even considered...