Concept
Dominant strategy
You might say: degenerate strategy, exploit, city spam
A strategy that beats the alternatives so often that it removes the choice.
- What it does
- Is a sign of a balance fault: players stop making real decisions.
- Ask
- What would a player who only wants to win do in every game?
- Trouble
- Players repeat the same opening every game, and guides call it the only way to play.
Sources
- Soren Johnson, GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack, Tank-Mages and Infinite City Sleaze
The reason to kill tank-mages and ICS is that a single, dominant strategy actually takes away choice from a game because all other options are provably sub-optimal.
- Richard A. Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds, p. 269
If one playing style leads to greater success than others, most people will adopt it. By deliberately partitioning the player base such that there are several styles, each of which is dependent on the others for success, a virtual world is much more interesting.
- Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero, Game Balance, ch. 1, p. 8
In PvP games that are designed to support multiple strategies and paths to victory, the game is balanced if each strategy can be viable and competitive with other strategies, given equal player skill.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Dominant strategy" (dominant-strategy) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/4x-strategy/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal