Can you elaborate on your experience with balancing, snowram?
I participated quite a bit in the development of a relatively popular Cube World clone. Balancing was already a hard process of trial and error, but accounting for party size was downright hellish. Numbers aren't growing linearly, they follow weird exponential functions where you have to consider dozens of variables. How much damage should both parties do and take, how many enemies should there be, how AoE, buffs, debuffs and crowd control interact with more enemies, how fight readability changes with more characters, how the environment fit for the number of characters... And considering we are talking about a CRPG there, I wouldn't risk my sanity.
Yikes. With matrices, you can have equations with as many variables as you want, but there's no guarantee that it's going to be meaningful, especially if the variables aren't behaving uniformly. You can't just set the difficulty level of a party of 4 at a certain value and see if the other party size can be set equal to it and check the variable values because the game experience might be completely different. There's a way to have average damage output be the same across party sizes, and average health, and average success rate, but who knows how literally EVERYTHING else might respond to that. There goes the die-rigging and nerfing idea. Trial-and-error the only way?
Remember the human (This is a forum for a video game):
