What a fucking turd of a thread this has turned into.
Every game mode should be balanced. 1v1 is "sexy" and has a lot of tournament stuff but most people in the trenches aren't playing 1v1 predominantly. You can't just ignore the majority of your player base in favour of the 1v1 master race.
Balancing team games is complicated, especially larger game modes. Nobody is going to be upset if you can't get perfect balance in a 4v4, but you can't just say "fuck it, everything is fine lol" based exclusively on 1v1s when one side is so blatantly OP in Big Team modes it's ridiculous.
Here are some pro tips for balancing the modes:
- Factions based on resource handicaps will be less handicapped where resources are more plentiful, cutoffs are harder to achieve and team resource sharing is possible.
- Factions with late game advantage are strong in direct proportion to average game length and inversely proportional to probability of game ending before late game is reached.
- The advantage conferred by forward retreat points increases proportionally with the size of the map.
- The degree of micromanagement required for perfect unit preservation increases with higher player counts and larger maps, as more engagements occur, more firepower is concentrated in tighter spaces, and you need to scroll across more ground to get where you want to look.
So, micro intensive factions have a tougher time the higher you scale the modes (i.e. USF late game full of mediums, barring Pershing), armies with good late game (i.e. OKW / UKF prior to major nerfs) scale better with higher modes, factions without forward retreat points are disadvantaged in greater degree, and resource limitations are harder to balance around.
The trick to harmonising balance across game modes is to try and minimise faction strength differentials at different game phases (i.e. factions stronger earlier are advantaged in 1v1, factions stronger later are increasingly advantaged in larger modes) to give everyone an even shot; reducing balanced based around resource handicaps, delay or eliminate the appearance of forward retreat points to prevent them from snowballing advantages early, and try and equalise the degree of micro that factions required. Some of these things are easy, some are very hard (like the micro burden especially).
OKW recently had its resource penalty overturned. It is currently poorly balanced overall as a result of its radical overhaul. It needs time to settle down and be tweaked, but the elimination of it being balanced around a resource handicap is actually a great thing, long term. It means no more stupid napkin calculations, no more silliness with resource scaling in team modes making them way stronger than in solo games automatically etc. There are still OTHER problems with OKW, don't get me wrong, but once we tweak it in a few patches it's actually going to be better balanced across team modes than ever before, IMO. It won't be perfect, but it's a HUGE step in the right direction.
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