Measure

Counter strength

You might say: soft counter, hard counter

Counter strength is the advantage a designated counter has over its target under stated conditions, from a contestable efficiency edge to a near-invalidating interaction.

What it does
Separates a soft counter from a hard counter before numbers are retuned, so the designer can state how much advantage the matchup is meant to buy.
Ask
How much cost efficiency, win probability, hits-to-kill or time-to-kill advantage should this counter have, and what can still overturn it?
Typical
Soft counter: the advantage changes the odds but positioning, timing, support or execution can reverse it. Hard counter: the target cannot trade efficiently without changing composition or conditions. Record the assumptions for either label.
Trouble
A nominal soft counter with overwhelming cost efficiency behaves as a hard counter; a hard counter with no readable route to adaptation becomes a binary loss.

Catalogue: Counter severity

Connections

Sources

  1. Ian Schreiber, Level 9: Intransitive Mechanics, Solutions to intransitive mechanics; Solving RPS with Unequal Scoring; Solving RPS with Incomplete Winsthere will not be a single dominant strategy that invalidates all of the others, because it will be weak against at least one other counter-strategy.
  2. Brandon Casteel, In Defense of Hard Counters in Real Time Strategy Games, What is a Hard Counter?; Soft Counters and the HP Problem; Attribute Design vs Bonuses and PenaltiesThe harder the counter, the more cost efficient the trade will always be between 2 participants in combat.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Counter strength" (counter-strength-scale) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

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