Metagame Autobalancing for Competitive Multiplayer Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tool for automated balancing of multiplayer games during design, allowing designers to specify complex balance targets and optimize game parameters to meet these goals using simulation-based methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for multi-player game balancing that incorporates designer-defined balance targets and uses simulation-based optimization to achieve them.

Findings

Successfully balanced examples based on Rock-Paper-Scissors

Balanced a complex asymmetric fighting game

Demonstrated flexibility in defining sophisticated balance targets

Abstract

Automated game balancing has often focused on single-agent scenarios. In this paper we present a tool for balancing multi-player games during game design. Our approach requires a designer to construct an intuitive graphical representation of their meta-game target, representing the relative scores that high-level strategies (or decks, or character types) should experience. This permits more sophisticated balance targets to be defined beyond a simple requirement of equal win chances. We then find a parameterization of the game that meets this target using simulation-based optimization to minimize the distance to the target graph. We show the capabilities of this tool on examples inheriting from Rock-Paper-Scissors, and on a more complex asymmetric fighting game.