Recently we put our our first balance patch for Project Exonaut. Here is an overview of the process, data and how I reached the decisions of what to change.

Assumptions

I wanted to write down some assumptions before I dove into the data to see if my instincts would be correct about where improvements were needed. I have played more Atlas Brigade exosuits, so if my assumptions were close to the data, I figured that would be a good indication for Banzai Squadron too. Here were my assumptions going in:

• Rath was underpowered (too low damage)
• Jake was underpowered  (too low ammo)
• Phantom would far and away be the best base exosuit
• Ultimate Cannonbolt was WAY overpowered (all Bulldog-focused exosuits would be)

The Data – Character Exosuits

The data held true to my expectations but there were certainly some surprises in there too. Here are the Exosuits sorted by hacks/per play session.

You can see the top Exosuits are high-level Atlas exosuits. I mostly attribute this to dedicated high-level Atlas players.

I knew the Bulldog pistol exosuits would be high. In designing the exosuits initially, I thought Bulldog mod exosuits would underpowered due to having a period of time before they could access their most powerful weapon. As a result I made their stats a bit higher than standard exosuits. This was a mistake and I knew it almost immediately after the game launched. Bobo was nerfed long before this path but he still remains a high performing exosuit.

I was right about Jake and Rath. They were 2 of the lowest performing exosuits. I really didn’t like that the exosuits for our best shows (Adventure Time & regular Show) were some of the lowest performing exosuits. I knew I needed to buff them up. Basically any exosuit that had less than 12 hack per play got buffed.

The average hack per play across all Banzai exosuits was 13.21. The average across all Atlas exosuits was 15.01.

 

The Data – Base Exosuits

The Base exosuits performed lower, as expected due to guest players, but they were nice and even. Surprisingly, the medium Banzai exosuit was the best performing, albiet by a small margin. My prediction of the Phantom was incorrect, though it came in second.

 

The Data – Weapons

This number was a bit difficult to calculate. I took the hacks for exosuits by their weapon mod and used that to calculate the total number of hacks per capita of a weapon. Certainly not 100% accurate but it’s the best I could get with the data.

The weapons seems nicely balanced. The Marksman rifle being the lowest was expected as it is more of a high-skill weapon. It’s effectiveness in the right hands is displayed by the win percentage of Marksman mod exosuits like Princess Bubblebum and Ultimate Swampfire though.

The Changes

You can read about all the changes made in my previous posts.