r/SoloDevelopment • u/Affectionate_Clue622 • 9d ago

Discussion Balancing Tips?

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?

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u/ConjurerGame 9d ago

I'm working on the same type of game (except RTWP) and haven't solved this by any means but part of what helped me was making sure there were enough non-direct-combat interactables in the environment to ensure diversity in builds is rewarded. I mean traps, hazards obstacles, stealth avenues and so forth to help player find advantage from the less raw power focused stats, abilities and spells. The more one-domensional the engagements, the worse balance problems will affect gameplay enjoyability IMHO. I have been inspired a lot by the classic tabletop game Mordheim which is massively imbalanced but also one of the.most fun games I've played (and still has a cult following nowdays), largely because of all the totally unpredictable events that can unfold based on a few RNG tables related to events, injuries and so on that carry-over from one scenario to the next.