Balancing a Game (part 3)

While the Solar Echoes damage system worked extremely well in encouraging team-play, it also meant a number of other challenges. The damage range of weapons was limited, though this was somewhat mediated by armor (damage reduction) and using cover (which makes it harder to actually hit a character.) Yet despite this, there were a lot of encounters when a character would directly face another in battle, and both might deliver enough damage in a single round that both would fall. Battles were always intended to be faster in Solar Echoes than in other games, but not so fast that they would only last one round. A single round of combat eliminated options and sometimes even the need for any strategy at all. We saw a pattern that the most engaging battles—the battles that lasted the longest and required the most strategy—were battles with robots. Robots, in Solar Echoes, have more “hit points” than characters, we call it “hardness.” Hardness is a measure of how much damage a material like metal on a vehicle or robot can sustain before being destroyed. Essentially, having more hit points produced the kind of battles we wanted, but only robots had this—battles with other enemy characters were almost always short, and this was discouraging, especially considering that enemy characters often had many more talents and strategic options to utilize than robots...