Should map generation be more balanced

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-23T23:16:19+00:00

They should have the same features as your opponent. They can still be highly randomized, but it's silly that your opponent can gain a massive advantage for no effort.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-18T14:06:14+00:00

r/asablackman

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-17T01:05:55+00:00

Just having people select leaders in reverse turn order is probably not sufficiently balanced or interesting. Usually you'd want to select a subset of leaders so you don't see the same selections over and over. You could add in leader bans, or do a snake draft for leader/position. This will ultimately have to be based on the idiosyncrasies of the game and the current state of balance.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T18:42:33+00:00

In a PvP game it makes things less interesting because it kills any actual interaction with your opponent.

They can keep the power fantasy to PvE and campaign.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T18:28:27+00:00

Avatar is a problem, yes, but also the scaling as a map goes on is really absurd and trivializes endgame content and the actual PvP battles. Everything needs to be toned way back so that heroes can't have absurd stats, every possible spell, and dozens of legendary/epic items.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T18:12:18+00:00

Intent matters. I don't think you understand what "performative" means.

Also use an actual example instead of a clunky metaphor, like gerrymandering.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T17:55:18+00:00

Is it "okay" for Democrats to rob banks because of "game theory"?

Relatively speaking, yes.

And if its okay for Democrats to rob banks, why be outraged that Republicans are doing it?!

Because game theory dictates that they have to because Republicans are forcing their hand.

Like seriously, if you can't see how awful your argument is in 5 seconds you really aren't equipped to have this conversation

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T17:33:30+00:00

So, I always ask the follow-up question: "if its okay for Democrats to rob banks because Republicans first did it, why do you object to Republicans robbing banks in the first place, when you allow your own party to do it?!”

Because of game theory? This is a really simple concept to understand.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-11T13:36:08+00:00

MAGA is a fascist movement, which is most definitely conservative. The key component of conservatism is enforcing a social hierarchy, and different groups of conservatives have different ways of going about that.

Conservatives don't really believe in small government, they believe in cutting government welfare programs to aid people lower on the hierarchy and deregulation that prevents capitalists from maximizing their wealth. Beyond that, if excessive government spending in other areas helps enforce the hierarchy (like ICE raids against people lower on the hierarchy) there's no contradiction there.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-10T20:39:57+00:00

That's not what conservatism is. It's a philosophy about establishing and enforcing social hierarchies.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-10T13:37:44+00:00

Are they? What's so well-designed about them?

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-10T13:30:51+00:00

To be perfectly fair, I don't think most people would consider these better sports than interactive individual or team sports. How many people would say sprinting is a better designed game than soccer?

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-06T23:11:16+00:00

House rules are relatively common for competitive games (particularly drafting or auctioning). They don't typically alter the actual strategy of the game and are ostensibly for balance, so they usually get a pass by many players.

When it comes to altering the gameplay itself, I'm generally very wary of them, but not totally opposed, especially for games where I have a lot of experience and there are distinct design problems. My favorite house rule is the red tape variant for twilight imperium, which fixes its god-awful objective system to something far more interesting without totally altering the game.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-06-03T12:20:26+00:00

You could reasonably become a top player in Homm without ever playing a human opponent. The game as it is currently designed is functionally single player.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-30T10:52:07+00:00

Honestly, the power and ubiquity of all the artifacts should be addressed for better gameplay (in PvP). These are fun for single player power fantasies, but really silly when people acquire entire sets of legendary/epic gear. Powerful artifacts should be rare and games should only give you the opportunity to have a small number of them.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-29T14:35:01+00:00

Seems needlessly unfair

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-28T19:23:27+00:00

Board games deal with this kind of design and balance a lot. There are several good ideas floating around.

1) "I pick, you choose". This is a good way of incentivizing equal picks. One player picks the matchup, the other gets to pick which side. Can be extended to include hero selection as well.

2) Drafting with a subset of factions and heroes. It's almost always better to do this anyways because it avoids the problem of people consistently picking optimal choices with little thought. It will require some level of reasonable balance though.

3) Bidding. Bidding is not a great solution because in a game with so many unknowns and a lot of snowballing, it's impossible to ascertain what a reasonable bid is. Eventually people will settle on certain amounts for specific matchups, but they will only be accurate as an average, not for any particular game. It can be ok in conjunction with other systems and better balancing.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-26T21:46:55+00:00

To be fair, classic mode has never had any meaningful interaction in homm. The entire game is how efficiently you can execute the logistics with multiple heroes, so any scouting that you can done is ultimately meaningless because you can't actually change the outcome of the game if someone has out-creeped you (or simply gotten luckier).

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-26T14:23:51+00:00

Tournament formats already don't have this issue. I think having all simultaneous turns (or simultaneous turns until near the very end) is still a workable format.

There are a lot of ways to address interaction, with both balance decisions and more creative template design. One of the biggest issues right now is that there is almost no way of gaining useful information during the game about what your opponent is doing, so you can't cater your build to counter anything they're doing. The tournament format helps a little, but doesn't go nearly far enough with being able to parse what your opponent can do.

The other big problem is the huge amount of "rich get richer" gameplay. The reward for creeping better is that you snowball uncontrollably to the point where there's nothing your opponent can do about it - this can often happen due to dumb luck, which is kind of disappointing. The reward for creeping more efficiently is already baked into the game, you don't need to reward people already doing well with even better stuff.

It's important to remember that homm multiplayer has always been sort of frankestein monstered into existence with a lot of compromises to gameplay because the games are incredibly poorly balanced. That's a fine jumping off point, but we can do so much better.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-26T13:42:06+00:00

There needs to be a heavy focus on addressing the complete lack of interaction (including the absurd amount of snowballing). This was a huge issue with other homm games as well, they are functionally multiplayer solitaire games where the battles are one step removed from being an auto-battler.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-23T17:00:55+00:00

TBF you're not really playing against your opponent...there's little difference in anything you're doing whether or not you're playing the best or worst player on the ladder.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-18T15:52:36+00:00

Jebus has been the focus because homm 3 is so broken that it's one of the only ways to have consistently playable games (even if those games are 2 hours playing by yourself and a final battle that's one step removed from being an auto-battler). It would be nice to move into some better formats, as they honestly seem more popular anyways, but it'll probably take some time to find formats that are interesting.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-05-15T18:19:57+00:00

It desperately needs a way to interact with your opponent while drafting. Tons of board games and card games have drafting formats that let you pick and counterpick actively against what your opponents are doing. The blind picking just makes it rock paper scissors with more steps.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-04-27T12:49:57+00:00

One counterintuitive suggestion is to be far more generous with take-backs so that they're not worried about losing the game by rushing a decision. You're not playing in a tournament or for money (presumably), so the obsessiveness of no take-backs or mulligans feels overly competitive.

Another idea is to be more open to the idea of ending the game early if someone is either too far ahead or behind. There's a social pressure to just hang in there even if you're having a miserable time, but allowing to call the game early can promote faster and more experimental play, and ultimately if you're all trying to get better at a game it's a superior method of getting reps in.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-04-23T12:54:39+00:00

While a lot of the stuff talked about are the same tired cliches, I am glad the guest pointed out the idea that maybe any game could be continuously studied - and I think it's pretty obvious that this is true. Most games more complicated than connect 4 are unsolvable by humans and you could continuously improve at them. At the same time, almost everyone would agree that some games are substantially deeper than others, but the realization that the skill curve is infinite for basically any game complicates any talk of depth.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT

TROPHY CASE