Quote from: mongolian on June 02, 2009, 07:05:12 PM
Just remember, it's vital that not all units be the perfect worth for the dollar ammount. If all units were perfectly even (impossable), then more stalemate scenarios and games going on forever would occur.
This doesn't make sense, unless you mean that if they were all balanced they'd all be the same. Even then, having the exactly the same army as the opponent doesn't guarantee a stalemate. Does chess often end in stalemates? Aren't those armies perfectly balanced, aside from white going first? Ever played Starcraft? Three completely different races to pick from and yet they are all balanced and players rarely stalemate.
Stalemate scenarios and unit balance both arise from unit stats. But stalemates are a completely *different* problem.
Say I have an invulnerable unit that has 99 power, range 6 and can attack 10 times a turn, but can't move. Anyone without this unit would be mad, it's horribly overpowered. By your logic, since it is imbalanced it should prevent stalemates. But all this unit does is generate stalemates because it makes it impossible to attack the castle, but it is incapable of attacking the castle itself.
What you need to avoid stalemates is not imbalanced units. What you need is to simply giving players the ability to show their skill and beat other players. Even with all the units perfectly balanced, not all army compositions would be useful, and so players could differentiate themselves both in army composition abilities and army execution abilities. If two players are almost equally skilled, then you just need to make the game difficult enough that the small difference between them matters.
That said, it can't be perfectly balanced, or even nearly so. Zatikon is like a fighting game. Fighting games tend to not be balanced because they usually have a ton of characters and there are just too many possible matchups. Zatikon's units obviously can't be fully balanced because it has as more units than there are characters in many fighting games. That said, when balance problems are obvious, why not fix them?
Bottom line:
If Zatikon has a problem with stalemating, that is a flaw in the game, and you can't get rid of it simply by making unit X imbalanced.