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Balancing the Numbers

Hello! As podcat noted in the prior Dev Diary, he is away this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so I am filling in for him with a tech lead's perspective about our ongoing activities for the 1.6.2 open beta patch. (If you want to get access to the current open beta build, see the 1.6.2 beta thread for instructions.)The content designers continue to patch up a variety of problems that have been reported. In particular, this will include fixes to the Battlecry and Awake and Angry achievements, and news events to inform players of relevant changes in the game state, such as naval treaties being removed.I am also informed that we have two new popular field marshals, already a part of the available 1.6.2 open beta, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim of Finland, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey:The programmers are also working through a number of issues of various sizes. These include improvements and fixes for naval interfaces, like a new mission warning icon that will help players detect when their task forces are ill equipped for their missions and explain why. Also, some of the rules and behaviors surrounding naval missions and assigned regions have been reworked to avoid weird or exploitable issues with distant and disconnected regions. We have also made some incremental improvements to the naval invasion AI to make it better coordinate the timing of multiple related invasion orders, and we are continuing to iterate on the invasion AI.One area that we have been looking to balance is the ratio of screen ships to capital ships that the AI is choosing to produce. We know that some countries could stand to have more screens, but we don't want to push those numbers up too far, so that they end up with too few capital ships instead.To help efficiently guide our balancing, we have taken advantage of a cool system that our automation testing team has provided, to log out various game stats that can be collected and graphed each night. This has given us a baseline to know what the current ratios tend to be for various countries. Then, after making balance changes, we can watch the numbers the following night to verify that the AI has adapted appropriately, instead of requiring the designers to manually run a game for an hour to find out if the changes hit the desired target.Here are a couple examples of the current screen to capital ratios for the U.K. and Japan, over time (note that the numbers are multiplied by 10, but the ratios are actually from about 4:1 up to around 8:1):We hope to have an update to the 1.6.2 open beta patch with these and other fixes by the weekend. The current status of the open beta branch is documented here , and you can follow that thread for future updates.