Concept

Cost curves

You might say: how much more power costs

A cost curve maps rising benefits or power to the resources, limits and opportunity costs required to obtain them.

What it does

Balances transitive upgrades without assuming that twice the power should always cost twice as much.

Ask

What curve makes the extra capability worth its complete cost?

Catalogue: Cost shape

• Linear: C(P)=P: each extra power point has the same cost.
• Increasing / quadratic: C(P)=P^2: later power costs progressively more.
• Thresholded: C(P)=P below power 4, then C(P)=2P: a capability gate creates a new phase. It counts by the new cost phase after a capability gate, not because the illustrative break is at power 4.

Sources

1. Schreiber, Game Balance ConceptsHow do you know how much each resource is worth? That is what we call a cost curve.
2. Ian Schreiber, Level 3: Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves, linear, curved and diminishing/increasing cost relationshipsHow do you know how much each resource is worth? That is what we call a cost curve.
3. Ian Schreiber, Level 3: Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves, Costs and Benefits; Cost Curves; Creating a Cost CurveHow do you know how much each resource is worth? That is what we call a cost curve.
4. Ian Schreiber, Level 2: Numeric Relationships, Identity and Linear Relationships; Exponential and Triangular Relationships; Other Numeric RelationshipsYou may have a relationship where there are either increasing or diminishing returns
5. Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance, Three Ways to Balance Game Objects: transitive relationships and cost curvesThis is the most direct way to balance objects. The general idea is to find some desired proportion of costs to benefits.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Cost curves" (cost-curves) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ 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