game balance and the maps
Starcraft Brood War is supposed to be a balanced game. The three races, even though they have different units and abilities and strategies, are equally strong. To be sure, one race has the advantage in these situations and another in those, but that’s what makes it a strategy game.
Well, but we know better, or if you don’t then you will as soon as you think about it. Are Blizzard’s original maps from Brood War’s release balanced today? Not remotely. When a groundbreaking new idea or strategy is developed for one race, from the terran wall-in to the Bisu build, does the game’s balance stay the same? No, it shifts because groundbreaking means groundbreaking.
Competitive maps in any era, unless at the very start of professional play, are carefully designed to be balanced for the play of that era (or at least of the previous era!). Every mapmaker checks exactly how far a tank can shoot into each base from outside, weighs the situations in which zerg can get the crucial third gas, considers the positioning of obstacles to keep games fair in each matchup, and on and on in painstaking detail. Maps provide the degree of freedom that keeps Brood War balanced even as the game balance shifts when new ideas arise.
The same for bots. Bots have different skills than humans, so game balance for bots is and should be different. In other words, for fairness, ideally bots should play on different maps than humans do.
Well, it’s not a problem yet. We’re still at an exploratory stage and all balance issues can be blamed on “bots are dumb.” Because they are dumb, right? If something is imba against you, you need to add smarts to fix it—so far nobody’s ranting otherwise. But someday, if we care about balance (which we may or may not), then we’ll want our own maps that are balanced for bots.
Or automatically design bot-balanced maps. It would be a fun research project.
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Campbell Hutcheson on :