I've been reading feedback pretty intensely in the last few days. Most of it's positive but some players are writing concerns about things like animal taming maintenance or turret maintenance. I figured it might be worth offering some of my thinking on the balancing process. It could enrich the feedback process if you guys knew *why* I was making some of these changes. I can't guarantee I've got everything right (yet), but I can guarantee there is a thought process behind every change.The first thing to note is that nothing is final yet. The whole reason we do unstable builds is to get feedback so that we can fix the problems. So if there's something you don't like in the unstable build, don't worry too much - if it does turn out on broad testing to be a bad idea I certainly intend to change it. And in fact I've already adjusted quite a bit in the few days since unstable came out. It's best to not get sad about something that may not even happen.The second thing is that theorycrafting is really dangerous. Theorycrafting is when someone just reads or thinks about a game, imagines how it might play, and gives feedback based on that without actually playing it in significant depth. The problem is that games are frightfully difficult to imagine and hard to predict from a description. Even professional game designers with 15 years' experience can't theorize accurately at how a game design will play. I can't! So we use tons of coping mechanisms (constant playtests, short iteration cycles, unstable builds for feedback) to escape from our own mental incapacity. So it's best not to get sad about something you've just imagined - it may not turn out that way at all in real play.The theorycrafting point I think is especially important on something like the animal training maintenance. Consider this: We all know they need maintenance now, but how much maintenance do they require? There's a huge difference between needing to re-train each animal every 4 days and needing to do it once every 60 days. But from the changelist, nobody can tell this since no numbers are written. Which means that theorycrafting about this change requires simply inventing a certain balance point - which could be off by more than 10-fold! From this alone, any imagined outcome from this must be suspicious since there's a really good chance it's off by 10x or more in terms of impact. Even those who think training maintenance is a negative change might be okay with it if it was 10x milder than they're imagining.The actual intent with this change is specifically to make it so that super-swarms of attack animals are still viable and still powerful, but require commitment. In B18 you can have 100 attack boars for almost free. They feed themselves automatically by eating grass. They haul stuff for you, rescue your people, fight your battles with zero risk to colony or colonists, provide meat and leather (even when killed in battle), reproduce themselves for free. All this can be done for the price of training each (free) boar once. It's an insanely OP strategy in B18 to the point of being quasi game-breaking.Animal training maintenance is quite mild; it should be barely noticeable at "normal" animal herd sizes and even if you have a mega-swarm it just means you need a few dedicated beastmasters to keep them all together. A few dedicated beastmasters is still a a small cost for the benefit of a mega attack animal swarm, it's still a bit OP compared to the core strategy of straight-up gunfighting. (Though I still plan to watch for more play stories about this and see how it really plays when someone tries it, the balance can still shift either way.)---Regarding how I'v approached balancing the game, here's one of the ways I see it. The way Beta 18 was, we can imagine there are 7 player strategies. Label them Strategy A, B, etc. What we had was this:B18Challenge level: 6Strategy A strength: 9Strategy B strength: 8Strategy C strength: 6Strategy D strength: 5Strategy E strength: 4Strategy F strength: 3Strategy G strength: 2A few observations about this:1. People love strategies A and B. They're super strong! They always work! They give you what you want, which is victory.2. People don't even think about strategy F or G. These are newbie traps. You try them once, get your ass handed to you, and never touch them again. Bad for newbies, irrelevant for everyone else.3. Much of the game mechanics are wasted. Since only 3 or 4 strategies are even viable, we've got whole game systems supporting strategies EFG which aren't really being engaged by players.4. There's not much choice. If you want to do really well you pretty much have to use A and B. If you want to survive at all you can do a few more things, but you have to force it.5. Strategies A and B are really easy, so you don't really have to engage the game much to play them. Not much risk, not much drama, not much thought.Overall it's not a great situation. But how to remedy this?Well, we could power up the challenge level to 9. Then strategy A would be nice and challenging, solving problem 5. But we've now totally obsoleted all the other strategies even more. There's even less choice; problem 4 gets way worse.It's impossible to power all the strategies up to 9; there are inherent constraints in the game that make this impossible in some cases. E.g. if one strategy is "open field melee combat", it's almost inherently symmetrical between player and enemies; there's no elegant way to make this favor the player more. There are other constraints like, "does it make sense thematically" or "is it intuitive", etc. All these constraints are the fundamental challenge in balancing.What I've tried to do is rejigger things so it's a bit more like this:1.0Challenge level: 5 combat relationship.Finally there's a high-level issue with late-game colonies getting super ridiculously rich. Turret maintenance forms a long-term late game resource sink. Also note that the ship is a lot cheaper to build now, which opens space for this.-Like I mentioned, animal training maintenance is a targeted change specifically to bring the "mega animal swarm" strategy somewhere in the neighborhood of a reasonable level of effectiveness.It also addresses the late-game resource overflow issue. You can eschew turrets and instead us an animal mega-swarm, but now you need some good handlers and a good amount of food to keep all those animals trained and healthy. Again, perfectly viable, but no longer trivial.And now, since the overall challenge level is lower, some more basic strategies should become more viable. I'm talking about things like "build sandbags and just fight them in a gunfight" or "draw them indoors and melee their asses".Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.There's a million more relationships like this too.----There's lots more to write. In fact I could probably do a book on this (har har) but I figured this is enough for one day. I don't think everyone will agree with my thinking, but I figured everyone would at least understand the portion of it I'm capable of writing down here. Please do keep on with the feedback!