How to Balance a unit.

[Kyir]

There never has been a formula to check how overpowered (or underpowered) your unit is. The complexity of your unit is a definite variable in how easy it is to check, If your unit is situational, or has many small all around abilities you may want to simplify it, while keeping a simple unit original after a few years of CAU it makes it much easier to check.

Checking:
At first look at your unit overall, does it take less then 5 damage a hit from armor, block more then 90% (unless it's a ward) or one shot most units? If you answered yes to one or more of those your unit is probably overpowered (there are exceptions, like a high armor compensating for a non-existent blocking percentage, or a unit having to meet a loss from their own side to do high damage (not advised, unoriginal x10)). If you've answered those questions as a no (or yes with a balanced exception) then you can move on to more complex things, like the range of your movement and teleport (example: if you can move across more then 5 squares un-opposed something’s wrong (Unless it involves attack, which is also unoriginal), use your person judgment on Armor, Life and Blocking, Figure out how long your unit will live when exposed to multiple attackers or different sorts, if it's impossibly hard to kill change it, the hardest thing to kill in the game at the moment is the LW (or arguably a BW'd unit or dragon), don't make it harder then that (Also check if a stone golem can set off things too much).

Abilities:
Since your ability should be fairly original it’s much harder to balance.

Buff Abilities: If your unit gives other units Power, blocking, armor, ext. Stop, right now, just don’t. The game’s existing units have a good balance, don’t make GA’s hit for 40, thanks.

Stunning Abilities: While done it’s easier to manage, figure out how long the unit is stunned, if more then one or two turns think of a way you’re hurt by it, (like focus with Frost Golem and enchantress)

Knock back: Stop. Stopstopstop, stop. Overpowered in almost every case, and the few that aren’t have been done.

Enemy Control: Overpowered also, if you’re bent on using this think long and hard about how this affects your enemy, having an extra opponent and one less defender (or just one less defender if you choose to make it focus). A few ideas to balance is to put a countdown on turns of use, damage the controller while focusing, or reducing stats while in mind control state. Also consider the controller just killing it while it can’t fight back.

Those are the few generic ones I can think of, just consider how much you’re changing the game while doing this.

Now let’s apply this to something… yay /clap
We’re going to be looking at my newest unit today, Severance:

Life: 55
Armor: 8%
Blocking: 0%
Power: 28 (Overpower)
Movement: 3
Recovery: 2
Abilities:
Overpower: add 20% Chance to block to attacked unit while determining block chance, if blocked overpower prevents them from blocking next turn (does not affect wards).


Now we’ll look at each stat:
Life: 55
Nothing Over powered here, the low Blocking and armor make up for a bit more then a knight, if anything I should up it K
Armor:8%
Low armor, oh wowz!
Blocking: 0%
Still low, I might decide to up it at some point based on reactions on the thread
Power:28 (Overpower)
Now here’s where I need to stop and think, it can one shot stuff, but Movement 3
Low to balance the damage he could do in the front lines.
Recovery: 2
A good recovery in general, don’t want him WTFPWNing every turn do we?
Abilities:
Overpower: add 20% Chance to block to attacked unit while determining block chance, if blocked overpower prevents them from blocking next turn (does not affect wards).
One of the easier things to balance I’ve made, but still hard, it basically gives them extra blocking, so as far as I look everything seems balanced considering how long it takes to reach a unit and the lack of protection.

The last, and one of the most important things of balance is to listen to other people, they have better ideas sometimes, and see things you can’t.

Gg.

[Toledo 13]

How to make a unit balanced: Don't make it overpowered, Don't make it underpowered... that simple. But this is a good explanation.

[Kyir]

it's more telling you how to not make it overpowered, hard to tell somtimes ;)

[Duffman]

I don't think you can tell people to balance their units by excluding abilities or amping stats. In fact i strongly disagree to people limiting themselves just to make normal but balanced units. What i would much prefer is someone taking an ability that you might consider overpowered by balancing the overall unit through ingenuity and original creativeness. Wasn't that the whole idea of the 99 power thread?

So sure. Don't include these things and your units won't be overpowered. But they'll hardly be interesting either.

Oh except for a unit that raises your unit's power. That is JUST WRONG PEOPLE!

[Kyir]

I don't think you can tell people to balance their units by excluding abilities or amping stats. In fact i strongly disagree to people limiting themselves just to make normal but balanced units. What i would much prefer is someone taking an ability that you might consider overpowered by balancing the overall unit through ingenuity and original creativeness. Wasn't that the whole idea of the 99 power thread?

So sure. Don't include these things and your units won't be overpowered. But they'll hardly be interesting either.

Oh except for a unit that raises your unit's power. That is JUST WRONG PEOPLE!

It dosn't need to be normal to be balanced, it can be harder to figure out if it's overpowered if you make a 2 page unit abilty though, the point I was trying to make in this thread is how you might be able to tell if a unit's overpowered after you make it.

as to the few generic ones I listed I generals don't like knockback or Control units, but they have been done right, I ment that you should think about it before randomly throwing it in.

[Forest_Archer]

Haha, I like this, and it even has some humor in it.

Maybe we should compile all the CAU stickies into one 'omfg u nu00bs st1nk. reed dis' thread.

[bloodreign]

I was afraid someone was gonna say the "S" word :angry:

And by the way we all know the only thing that is sticky around here is the hand KYIR'S got down his pants.:confused:

[Duffman]

I'm not gonna say this would be a bad thing for someone having problems with overpowered units to read. (btw where is the help for underpowered unit makers). But if you're trying to make a 'formula' for checking your unit. This falls far short in saving what needs to be checked. It would be much better to simply say "Write a list of advanatges/disadvantages and compare to make sure it warrants being 1 unit. And then compare your unit with a current unit as to see what your unit would be like ingame."

But if you're saying "This ability is bad, except insome cases"... Wtf kind of guiding is that? What a useless thing to say. Say something like, "If you're going to use this ability make sure your unit has enough disadvantages or tactics involved in being able to use it to warrant having that powerful ability".

So basically people shouldn't be able to make a unit that has knockback because you don't like it? gtfo. If anyone, anyone at all has an idea for a unit that utilises Knockback in such a way that they are trying to make it balanced and tactical, post it. I would love to read it.

In fact i'd encourage anyone reading this thread to take any or all of Kyir's suggestion to not use in a unit and use them while trying to make the unit balanced. Even if you try and fail, i would love to read each and every attempt. Because that is what is creative about CAU.

[Kyir]

I'm saying that people shouldn't use a knockback unless the think about it, what I wrote probely dosn't reflect what I ment to say though :|. I could make a unit with Knockback or Control if I had a random chunk of time to think and balance it