[Literature] Game Balance ch3 - Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves

[Literature] Game Balance ch3 - Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves:

My notes from course 3 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

An intransitive game is like Rock-Paper-Scissors, where everything is better than something else and there is no single “best” move. In contrast, in transitive games, some elements are just flat out better than others, and we balance that by giving them different costs.

The cost is expressed in terms of game resource(s) (eg money, wood, existing units, items, technology, skills, ...) but can also consist of temporal restrictions (eg single-use constraint on a particular item, or a bonus being limited in time). A player wil pay a cost if she can see benefits to her situation (eg better stats, bonus skill). The goal for the game designer is to reach benefits = cost. In other words, if the weapon is overpowered, then either decrease its power (or any benefit) or increase its price (or any cost). Overpowered <=> undercosted.

A cost curve is a game balance technique designed to put everything in terms of the resource cost. In some games, you can choose to make an increasing, linear or decreasing curve, all of them might be balanced, but they have different effects on the gameplay. In Magic: the Gathering you get one Mana per turn. If you were the designer and you made a cost curve that was increasing, so that each additional point of mana gives you more benefit than the last, you’ll have a game where late-game cards are really powerful and early-game cards are pretty weak, so you’ll have a game that is heavily weighted towards late-game play. If the cost curve is decreasing, it puts more of a focus on the early game. The curve depends on the game duration you expect.

How to build or reverse-engineer a cost curve? [...]