Balancing teams

It is really difficult to comment on these types of things with out knowing more about your game mechanics. The thing about special abilities in good games, is to make the abilities varied so it feels different when you play with different teams. However it also needs to be balanced. You need to start with the question ' How does some one win my game?' Then figure out how each different aspect of your game (Tech, resources, armies, ships, whatever is in your game) gets a player to the point where they can win the game. Then make the 'powers' proportional to how much that aspect of your game influences who wins. Did that help? I am new here and want to be helpful, if they have 'private messages' on this site you can give me more details and I will give you my thoughts on your game.

Hey Mr. Krapula (lol)

Exactly as our good friend says, this is something that is hard to really comment on as in order to help "balance teams" we need to know about the teams themselves and in great depth (eg: Alien race Y tends to always win space battles - we could say "try making the laser beam have a 50% chance to fire succesfully, or maybe put the laser beam into a tier 2 area, so they would only have access to it towards the game by which time the others would have developped laser defences "

But at the moment it sounds very big, broad, and awash with the starts of some great ideas. What I would say in your specific example in all honesty is it sounds already like there will be hundereds and hundereds of different choices and items and ships etc. And if you want 10 alien races as well, then you would need to test and balance each piece of equipment, ship, dice rolls, card options for 100's or possibilities if - as you say - each alien race needs to work totally differently. Perhaps we can keep the number of different races but maybe its better to start with, say 2 or 3 and then gradually release more and more as expansions and ad-ons?

Either way I think your best choice of action in regards to your orignal question ("How do I balance the races effectively within the game ideas") is to first of all, completely sort 1 race (say humans) and then play a coupld of games of humans vs humans. Like a mirror match. This will test out if all "systems are go" first of all, and if the game at the heart of it works or does not work or is boring or is super fun! What I would do then, is think "oustide the box" a little and think to yourself: if the "building spaceships " part of the humans game is really fun, then maybe I could have another race that doesn't have any buildings at all, but has big mother ships that build smaller ships themselves! And then tihs could be the basis for your first alien race. And another could be say: The humans are much better at building than conquering and get VP very quickly from building, perhaps I could make a war-like alien race that gets a lot of there VP from the game by destroying things! But then each thing would need a "destroy: VP" value. Perhaps then I could have one alien race that can actually increase the value of VP's gained through its high-tech technology, but themselves are very bad at fighting, so they should ally with the warrior race, as perhaps they would get points from allying! But then the VP increasing race and the warrio race (once allied) would perhaps be too powerful, so Ill make another race that excels at destroying things "in alliances" perhaps some kind of bio-race that infects one unit, and it spreads to a corresponding allied troop, killing them both. But then that would be powerful so I would invent a cybertronic race that excels in combat against bio-organic organisms but not so good against robot organisms - etc .etc .etc. etc. etc.

And you can see that once you have a fully fledged and ready -basic- race you can easily go on to define other characteristics of other races. But you need this first initial concept before we can REALLY help you out with some great ideas :o)

Cog