First pass at… Balancing

I say first pass, but I’ve been tweaking a lot as I’ve been going through the weeks! Mostly I’ve been building spreadsheets with lists of things. 

For example, I went through every human role and attempted to boil down what they do into a series of “actions” that they take. Against those, I flagged if they had terror/PR/money/income/tech/artifacts/etc impacts. Then for each factor with a yes, I estimated what numerical effect it would have on turn 1 vs turn 4, or what the minimum effect vs the likely effect vs the maximum effect might be. 

As a specific example, out of the list of all actions, how much money would each nation want to spend to do all the actions they want to take on turn 1? That gives me a base-line on the “want” outcome. 

The next step is to be a little devious - think about how much from the “want” amount I can take away to force interesting/difficult decisions by the players. This means that on turn 1, when the Head of State is divvying up all the income, they will not be able to give every team member everything they are asking for. 

The reason I’m thinking about turn 4 is because it’s a nice mid-point of the game and it helps me think about the actions they might want to take at that point. If I have some min/max/likely numbers for that mid-point, it helps me craft the income and PR tracks.