Hello there! My name is Johan, also known as Taencred and I’m the Balance and Sandbox Design Lead at Element Studios for Axon TD: Uprising. Today, we’re going to be giving a high-level explanation for our overall balance goals, as well as acknowledging our mistakes and looking to the future.
It’s a bit of a long one, so go grab some popcorn and something to drink, and if you like to get into the nitty gritty details of things as much as I, enjoy the read!
Topics of discussion:
- Tactical Choice
- Improving Choices, Step by Step
- Maintaining the Challenge
- Mistakes and Learnings
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Tactical Choice[/h2]
Whenever you see a reward, you can see a potential development you can make to the field with that reward. This is a Tactical Choice.
The place where you primarily see this in every mode, is whenever you beat a wave. The End of Wave rewards choice will pop up. These are mostly split into three categories:
- Credits, which allow you to place down new Defenses.
- Path manipulation items (ADDs, Blockers & Recycles), which allow you to alter the map.
- Power, or Power + Techs, which allow you to upgrade your Defenses and/or invest into future gains.
You often end up wanting to Expand to a nearby Island, place something down to cover your exit, or upgrade one of your Traps in the front at the same time, making for interesting decisions that affect how the session will progress beyond that point as well.
That’s the most basic form of tactical choice that exists at the core of our game, and if there’s one thing we want you to take away from this post it’s that our goal with any balance change or addition in this game is always the same:
Offer more choices.
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Improving Choices, Step by Step[/h2]
If the player knows that something isn’t worth picking up, it’s no longer a choice. If something is way too good for what you have to spend on it, it also removes the other potential choices from your considerations as a player.
Ideally, we’d always want to balance these choices around relative value so that all of them are somewhat equal. If every upgrade or Tech in the game were straight up damage, attack speed, range or cost adjustments, it’d make sense to only think of the game like that.
Most upgrades however, are by design much more interesting. In addition to that, any given Defense or its Upgrades have interactions with other Defenses, which raises or decreases their general value. So sometimes it’s not even a case of the Defense itself being too powerful, but rather a combination of multiple Defenses. We also often encounter interactions we didn’t anticipate or plan for.
Lastly, different Defenses are designed to solve different problems, and with every single map in the game having unique wave orders, map layouts and to some degree rewards, it often takes a little longer to analyze where the balance problems lie.
Our goal is to keep tuning existing Defenses, Techs, Overloads and Axons to make each choice as interesting as possible.
With that said, we don’t intend to always have every choice be equally viable. That would be a near impossible task, and it would leave us with little room for designing new additions as well, since some are more situational than others. However, you should at the very least be interested in considering each choice and what it could possibly do for you.
This is expected to be an ongoing process throughout all of Early Access and beyond.
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Maintaining the Challenge[/h2]
One thing is true for any game. The fun of it essentially comes from overcoming challenges. When things are too easy, you get bored. When things are too difficult, it’s frustrating.
This end of the spectrum is where aside from bringing things down that have a relatively higher value than other Defenses, we also look at our Axons and the overall economy of the game.
Axons are generally pretty easy to balance. We look at what they’re supposed to counter, or add to a composition, and make sure they meaningfully do so across the entire game as you play. In Survival, we also have a ramping HP multiplier applied to all Axons the further in you go to make sure they stay relevant. Additionally, all healing abilities have percentage-based values to make sure they scale into the later parts of the game.
Our goal is that all Axons should stand out from one another and counter something different.
You can expect occasional adjustments to various Axons to try and make each one a bit more unique over time.
Before we get into the next point, let’s just quickly define the word “economy” in this context.
Economy refers to all resource gains and costs. Resources include Credits, Power, ADDs, Blockers and Recycles.
Overall the economy mainly comes down to 5 factors:
- Credits from killing Axons.
- Credits and Power from Generators on the map.
- End of Wave Credits/Power/Path Manipulation Rewards
- Techs that generate Credits/Power/Path Manipulation Rewards
- Defenses and their Upgrades that generate Credits and Power
When it comes to Campaign, Quickplay and Co-op, this is fairly straightforward to balance on a map by map basis. The resources you have access to are limited, and you therefore naturally have to make decisions about expanding through the maps to make use of generators and gain other advantages, and your loadout choices naturally have an impact on your progression. In addition, because you actually have to make these tradeoff choices, you can’t always pick the Techs.
In Survival, this can easily get out of hand, especially with a bit of luck on the Tech side. In 0.2, you wouldn’t even need much luck, since players managed to push all the way to the end, and thus were able to grab most of the Techs in the game (some disappear from the reward pool once you hit a certain wave count). You get significantly more resources for free just by surviving, and you also have the meta progression rewards from the Upgrades.
Our goal here is a bit more complicated because Survival is endless and the other modes are not. We want to make sure that resource generation is something that feels useful and good to build around in all modes, while simultaneously not allowing it to get out of hand in Survival. Therefore we’re closely monitoring caps and restrictions we implement to make sure they land correctly, and will iterate as is necessary to hit that goal.
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Mistakes and Learnings[/h2]
Let’s address the elephant in the room. What happened with Survival Endless in 0.2?
Well, quite frankly, roughly what I expected!
I knew Normal wave 120 would be beaten (to be clear, wave 120 was only ever supposed to be a technical limitation, no player should ever reach there realistically), but I wasn’t sure there were still things in the game strong enough to also clear Hard at that point.
Mind you, the HP multiplier at wave 120 is x48! The only reason it’s possible to break the game to that extent is because a few select Defenses so greatly exceeded the desired value-to-cost ratio that instead of the game getting harder, it felt like it was getting easier and easier at that point.
The Sandbox (All the Axons, Towers, Overloads and Techs) of Axon TD is rather big (and we plan on further expanding on it quite a bit!), and Endless Survival wasn’t the only thing we were working on in 0.2, so I already knew we wouldn’t have the time necessary to find and fix all existing ways of breaking the game in time for its release. Not only was this game never built to last that long, but if there’s one thing you can always count on from your players, it’s that they will find new ways to break your game that you never expected.
Aside from relative value outliers like Proximity Mine, Network and Missile Launcher, there were also two other enormous things we had overlooked.
Specifically, these were Network U3 and Command Link U3. For those unfamiliar, Network U3 generates Credits per kill under a Network Beam, and Command Link U3 generates Power at the end of each wave per connected Tower. Neither of these were capped!
The madness that ensued from the individuals who realized this was endless Credits and Power in an "endless" mode!
So what have we learned? Well, future additions will be reviewed differently, more carefully, both in terms of how they could scale, and how they might need to be capped in order to not completely break the economy of the game. It’s not that this wasn’t done before. We often had conversations about this and made changes to account for it, but we obviously need to be even more strict in how we look over each and every one of the Upgrades and Techs whenever we make a major change.
Lastly, to be completely transparent about where we’re going, our high-level goal is for the best players to get no further than wave 80-90 in Survival on Normal. This is for a couple of reasons.
- Keep the players engaged in pushing builds the furthest possible.
- If several builds can get to wave 120, the leaderboards will end up being about who gets there the fastest and the most flawless, and that’s very demanding on players on a wave by wave basis in such a long mode.
- We want to respect the player’s time better. No run should ever take 10+ hours to complete. In fact we’re aiming closer to 4-5 hours at most.
- We can use a specific wave number as a benchmark for how strong a build should be allowed to be to help encourage build diversity among the top players, and also as an indicator how far we can buff up underperforming builds.
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With all of that said, I think it’s about time to wrap up this lengthy article and thank you for reading and understanding if you got this far.
Our intention here was to be a bit more transparent so that all of you, our acting commanders, can understand where we’re coming from and our overarching philosophy when we’re making adjustments.
Thanks for all the support and the feedback so far! Our hope is that when you see Axon TD: Uprising in your Steam library, it’s something you’re always excited to try new things in. We’ve still got some ways to go I would imagine, but we’ll keep trying!
Next week, we’ll be previewing the upcoming Version 0.3 patch, so look forward to that!
Cheers
/ Johan
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