I’ve played a good deal of competitive games, both casually and competitive. However, I’m always the one that goes to forums, reading up about everything possible, and learning the very foundations of the game.

Sadly, that doesn’t mean I’m immediately good at the game. Very often I’ll know a whole lot about the competitive state, every detail, all possible moves, but I never get a lot of personal experience. I’m hesitant to play with others, simply because I’m scared that I’ll suck. Add to that the fact that I’m easily bored, and I end up knowing a lot of things about a lot of games, but still sucking at them.

One thing that competitive games always have trouble with is Game balance. I thought I’d write some blogs (or articles) on this for multiple reasons. First of all, it’s to help me put my thoughts on paper. I have a lot of opinions on the topic but I never write them down. Furthermore, it’s to help people get insight into the matter. Often people talk about game balancing while not knowing the fine details of it. And last of all, I hope that maybe some new developers (or people that mod existing games) read this, so that it can improve their games

I’ll mainly write about Real time strategy games, because it’s so easy to find examples, and because game balance is most important in them (though one could also argue that fighters profit more from a good game balance). However, most of the things I’ll write about apply to a wide variety of genres: Fighters, FPS, TBS, RPG, Puzzle games (think Tetris), racing, etc. I’ll assume that the reader knows the basics of the RTS genre, though I’ll explain some lingo.

Throughout these articles I’ll refer to a number of words, that not everybody knows. I’ll outline them here.

Metagame:

Metagame’s official definition is a bit different from the definition used in online games. When people talk about the metagame, it’s usually what people use. For example, a metagame could be melee-heavy, meaning that there are a lot of players that use melee units. Usually, the metagame changes constantly because people react to each other. If the metagame is melee-heavy, players will start using counters to melee units, and the metagame could shift to anti-melee instead. But with so much anti-melee, players will start using a lot of ranged units, and so the cycle goes on.

Macro:

Macro is usually referred to as a mixture of economy and territory control. It means the game on a large scale: For example, you might be losing small skirmishes, but you can still win in the macro game because you control much more territory than the opponent. Usually, if you are ahead in macro you will win the game because you have large advantages over the enemy: Better economy, better positions, more territory, etc. It is hard to find a corresponding definition in a genre like fighters, but positioning in those is still pretty important: If you’re in the corner, you’re bound to get hammered hard.

Micro:

Micro is literally ’small’. It’s the game on a small scale, with individual units. An example of micro is to not send your units into battle and let them fight, but to manually assign targets to all of your units. In FPS, you could call aiming a form of micro.

This is the end of the introduction, I hope people will look forward to the rest of the parts.