Balancing a fleet without making one ship the obvious choice
Make a bomber tough enough to threaten capital ships, and you risk making it too tough for the light ships that are supposed to counter it.
That’s one of the balancing challenges we’ve been working through in Exodus-Protocol. Our ships and combat structures follow a rock-paper-scissors-style design: different strengths, different weaknesses, and reasons to build more than one type of unit.
Our latest development work includes additional gameplay testing and a rework of combat logic, with separate approaches for attacking and defending fleets.
To test balance without spending all our development time setting up battles, we’ve connected AI agents to our battle simulator. We still use its visual playback to inspect individual fights, but agents handle much of the repetitive setup and simulation work. Around 5,000 simulations have helped us tune the base statistics of ships and structures.We compare performance against resource cost, construction time and the actions a unit can take. We also repeat matchups with different random seeds, rather than treating one lucky victory as proof that a ship is balanced.
Alongside those simulations, gameplay agents build empires and report potential bugs. This reduces the manual workload and makes repeated testing more manageable for a small team.
The aim isn’t to make every matchup equal. It’s to preserve useful strengths and meaningful weaknesses, including when upgrades enter the picture. The agents help us explore the numbers; deciding whether the resulting choices are interesting remains our responsibility.
More about the process and what we’ve learned:
Using AI to test our game, not just build it
https://www.exodus-protocol.com/journal/using-ai-to-test-our-game-not-just-build...