Game ballance, what is that?

Game development

Hello I'm your host zaceron and today I will look at

The strategy game conundrum, a convenient alliteration, which encapsulate this complaint. I both love and loathe strategy games. Be it turn bases or real time. Yes I am a bit rubbish at them, more like mediocre really. However this does not stop me from playing the hell out of them. Especially command and conquer is a favourite series of mine. Regardless I will not deal with multilayer here though. This is purely from a gameplay perspective, mainly campaign modes and pre made scenarios. Such Fan made missions or from the side of the developers.

I really, really enjoy the general challenge in zero hour, but the base game is fairly easy and a lot of interesting content was cut. The mod shock wave restored most of it and then some blowing new life into the game. A couple of triggers did break though making some maps a tad too easy.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is contra 009, which overhaul the entire thing and makes it hard, no not hard, a slog, you know like waddling through a Marsh wearing soggy sneakers caked in mud, during a torrent of rain. A sodding hailstorm of endless waves of units, super weapons and artillery, the kind units are incapable of returning fire, unless baby sitting takes place. But the moment I dare to split push, or put my attention elsewhere for a split second, everything goes belly up, like a dead fish in water after tossing dynamite into the water.

A typical scenario goes like this.

I pick a general to play and plump down a base as quickly as humanly possible. While also get a good economy going and a defensive wall.

Then I hunker down for at least twenty to fourtyfive minutes, getting my special powers online and unlocking super weapons, before I'm bombed back to the Stone age by the enemy super weapons.

Which leaves very few legit and efficient strategies for taking out the enemy without being overwhelmed, like a roach on an anthill. The normal maps offers a fair enough challenge I suppose, once I find the best strategy. However there are three bosses, which I scale from doable, just a bellend and oh god why? What where you thinking? Needless to say, the USA boss is a straight forward affair. GLA boils down to cleaning a toilet with a cotton swab, while being swarmed by gnats the size of tanks. However China is an entirely different beast. Because she comes with more artillery, more units and there is no convenient choke point on the map to make up for the insane income infrastructure needed to survive long enough to exterminate Liang. To top it all off, there are at least three scripted reinforcement events and her artillery barrage general power.

About the only way to have a decent chance is to trash each command center and the dozers, within the three different bases. A course of action that is either ridiculously easy, or insanely hard. It depends entirely on the general. Instead of a fairly fair, fun and challenging map. It becomes becomes a quagmire, where nothing is fun and everything is just tedious to the max. Easy mode is terrible enough, but there are two more difficulties. Ironically enough the normal generals becomes a joke in comparison.

I do not know how to balance this kind of skewed difficulty though, but it happens with an irritating frequency. I do believe it often has to do with fans whom play the game to death, setting the challenge rating based on their skill, instead of the general skill level of people not that heavily invested in the game.

Zaceron signing out