<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">\subtitle{Game Balance}
\date{Friday, 18 May 2018}

\begin{document}
	
	\begin{frame}
	\titlepage
	\end{frame}
	
	\section{What is Balance?}
	\begin{frame}{Game Balance}
		\begin{block}{Question}
			What is balance?
		\end{block}
		
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{Game Balance}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item A game is balanced if all players have an equal chance of winning - Bartle
		\item Richard covered a combat example in the first part of the module.
	\end{itemize}
	
	\end{frame}
	
	\section{On Strategies}
	
	\begin{frame}{Game Balance}
		\begin{itemize}
			\item What about higher level strategies?
			\item Zerg rush?
			\item Dominant strategies
			\item Metagaming
		\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{Metagaming - Rock Paper Scissors}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item A beats B, B beats C, C beats A
		\item If there are lots of A players, people will play C
		\item Then there are a lot of C players, so people play B
		\item and so on...
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{Metagaming - Dominant Strategies}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item What if A is significantly stronger?
		\item no one will use the other two strategies
		\item We want to encourage variety in play
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{Can we detect this?}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item Can we detect strategies which are overpowered?
		\item Try to punish strategies we don't want to see
		\item We did this earlier in the week with rotate and shoot!
		\item Can we measure this?
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{Automated Game Tuning}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item Academics seem to think so...
		\item Ryan Leigh et al (2008) - Co-evolution for game balancing
		\item Alexander Jaffe et al (2012) - restricted-play balance framework
		\item Mihail Morosan - GAs for tuning parameters
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\section{Game Curves}
	\section{First Move Advantage}

	\begin{frame}{First Move Advantage}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item Affects turn based games
		\item Going first in tac tac toe means either a win or a draw
		\item Worse effects if you have resources
		\item We need a way of dealing with this
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	\begin{frame}{First Move Advantage - dealing with it}
	\begin{itemize}
		\item Metrics help us - we can track win rates
		\item Need ways of tweaking power levels - small increments are better
		\item AIs might help here - known skill levels, run lots of games help us tune our values
		\item Careful, our AIs might not be good measures of possible skill levels
	\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}

	
	
	\section{Watching}
	\begin{frame}{Extra Credits}
		\begin{itemize}
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxszx60ZwGw - Power Creep
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3b3hDvRjJA - Power Creep in hearthstone
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w - Perfect Imbalance
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w - Balancing for skill
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5eq4IQ6Go - Delta of Randomness
			\item https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRHdIScOMWQ - Balancing Turn based games
		\end{itemize}
	\end{frame}
	
\end{document}
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