Game balance discussion

[JeodC]

Concerning game balance tweaks, the original code has a large difficulty spike from Rookie to Hotshot. For example, in AIGame.cpp, the robot Tubbs has the following difficulty changes:

• DIFFICULTY_TRAINEE: Increases maximum speed by 20% (* 1.2f), maximum acceleration by 10% (* 1.1f), and sets the full anger time to 22.0f.
• DIFFICULTY_ROOKIE: Increases maximum speed by 30% (* 1.3f), maximum acceleration by 50% (* 1.5f), and sets the full anger time to 20.0f.
• DIFFICULTY_HOTSHOT: Increases maximum speed by 70% (* 1.7f), maximum acceleration by 150% (* 2.5f), and sets the full anger time to 18.0f.
• DIFFICULTY_ACE: Increases maximum speed by 75% (* 1.75f), maximum acceleration by 180% (* 2.8f), and sets the full anger time to 15.0f.
• DIFFICULTY_INSANE: Increases maximum speed by 80% (* 1.8f), maximum acceleration by 200% (* 3.0f), and sets the full anger time to 12.0f.

Should the base source modify the difficulty spreads to be more even, or keep them as-is? Is Tubbs the only robot affected? It looks like Homonculus and Old Scratch have more even distributions.

[SiriusTR]

I wouldn't have any concerns with doing a game balance pass, the rationale being that I doubt anyone would want to play the "status quo" version that much. Insane could possibly be left intact if we do have purists out there.
I do think that a rebalance should not focus purely on smoothing out the difficulty bumps, though, but taking a more holistic look at how fun the game is to play on each difficulty level. That will likely take longer, but I still believe it's necessary. Sometimes robots are too difficult to hit on most of the difficulty levels, and to fix that we'd have to wind down the speed/acceleration across the board (since making them larger is often too dangerous).