Portfolio: My work for Forgotten Empires on Age of Mythology: Tale of the Dragon as Lead Balance Designer

About Age of Mythology: Tale of The Dragon

Official Info Page

Tale of the Dragon is the first expansion that Age of Mythology has received in over a decade after its support ended.

• Platform: Steam
• Developers:  Forgotten Empires (my employer at the time) and Skybox Labs.
• Publisher:  Microsoft Studios

Main Features

• New Civilization: Chinese
• New fully voiced Chinese Campaign
• 7 new Random Maps
• One new Unit for each Original Civilization

My Role as Lead Balance Designer

My involvement with the project has started before the product itself was approved. I took part in various brainstorming sessions and proposal reviews that would later define the nature of the project regarding content (China theme), scope (amount of missions, units, maps), staff requirements, and more.

During the production phase, I subcontracted a team of top competitive players. This Balance Team contributed tremendously to the Chinese faction designs, and helped iterate on the original factions’ balance.

I was esentially in charge of everything related to multiplayer, as well as organizing the Balance Team’s activities and tasks. This included:

• Creating/Iterating Designs with the Balance Team and reporting to Directors
• Implementing unit behaviors, stats
• Iterating balance changes based on team feedback
• Guiding the random map scripters to achieve desired map spawn types
• Guiding the animators to get desired unit behaviours
• Organizing Playtests
• Reporting gameplay code bugs and prioritizing them
• Providing campaign feedback

Examples of Implemented Designs:

Key Units

Physician Display

Scout Cavalry Display

Bogsveigir

War Chariot

Vermillion Bird

Chinese General

Physician Display - The Physician is a new unit for the Greek civilization, with its only task being healing other units. Previously, the Greek had to rely on specific minor god path choices to gain access to healing (Poseidon had no option for healing at all!), but the Physician offers a way to restore the health of your units. This comes at a cost though, as they are only trainable from the Town Center. This means that while training a Physician, you will not only spend resources, but also be not training a worker, which allows the opponent to get a slight economic lead. Several new strategies are possible with the Physician, such as keeping multi-headed Hydras alive (they gain heads for kills).

Counter System

The Chinese Hard Counter Units work quite differently from the norm of the game. Generally, the counter system is: Infantry>Cavalry>Archers>Infantry. Each faction usually has a hard counter unit that shares the class with what they counter – for example, the Egyptian Axeman is an Infantry unit that hard counters other Infantry.

The Chinese however utilize the following:

Cataphract

Mounted Archer

Fire Lance

Cataphract - The Cataphract is a slow Cavalry unit that hard counters Infantry. They can't dodge arrows due to their low speed, and their pierce armor is also lower than normal Cavalry's. They are quite expensive, but only cost 2 population as opposed to the standard of 3. They are very weak against Cavalry and Archers.

Chinese Economy

One-for-all Drop Off

Garden Economy

One-for-all Drop Off - Age of Mythology players love to find creative ways of augmenting their build orders to best suit the randomly generated maps as they scout their resources out. Allowing all resources to be dropped at the same structure allows the player to save some wood, and construction time when they can place it between multiple resources.