Declinator
Arbiter
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2013
- Messages
- 542
Any imbalance between players in strategy games should come from player skill or lack thereof, not lack of fundamental capabilities to be even with the enemy. You can just as easily have an "underdog story" with a balanced game as you can with an imbalanced game - ever played StarCraft and come back from an early Zergling rush for example?Against an AI the balance isn't that important. Obviously there needs to be some sort of balance but it doesn't need to be totally even. In Red Alert for example the Soviets are easily more powerful what with both the best tanks and the best defence. However in campaign play you are facing an enemy that has a considerable base already built so you never start from the same point as they do in the first place and it doesn't truly matter that your tanks are more powerful as the enemy simply has more of them. In Skirmishes you can have multiple AIs so as to avoid the easiness trap and 1-on-1 against an AI that starts from even footing is hardly challenging even if it is also Soviet...
And there is also the other side of the coin which is that you can play against the over-powered side. The scramble when you see multiple Mammoths coming? Breaking down the Tesla coil defence with your inferior units? Fun times.
Even in online play it could be interesting to play against a side that has the advantage similar to how enjoyable it is to knife an enemy with an AWP in Counter-Strike. Of course anything approaching professional play would be ruined by not having a balance but this kind of slight non-balance is more akin to being white in Chess than it is to having two queens.
Note that I'm not suggesting that balance is inferior. Just that it isn't always superior either. Playing with or against an advantage can be fun.
I'm also not saying C&C is superior because it isn't as balanced as SC but that its non-balance is not a big enough factor to make it worse than SC.
Yes, it's true that generally speaking balanced is better than not balanced. I did not want or mean to argue otherwise. Just that it isn't quite that important in comparison to other factors.
Take for example the aforementioned C&C1 and C&C3. Overall C&C3 is the better game pretty unequivocally and it is much better balanced. However they seem to have pursued balance with a bit too much zeal as Nod and GDI feel almost the same in that game. Obelisk isn't the be all end all defence structure anymore as GDI has its own structure that works differently but is in the end the Obelisk of GDI. Both have fast and effective bomber planes, both have artillery tanks, and both have super weapons that deal pretty much exactly the same damage. Nod even has the equivalent of the Mammoth tank in form of the Avatar.
There are some specialties on both sides of course, such as flame units with Nod but at the end of the day the difference feels smaller than it used to (in C&C1) and I think this is something that they sacrificed on the altar of balance.