Sharky Extreme: What stage in development are you currently actually at?

Zileas: At some stage within the alpha development stage. That could last anywhere from a couple months to a half a year depending on various things. Our plan is still to release this year, but we aren't going to nail down a date until we are absolutely sure.

Sharky Extreme: So, release date is “when it's done”?

Zileas: Yes more or less, but we have a pretty small list of things that need to get done, and after that it's just time to polish polish polish until its been polished to our satisfaction. Did I use the word "polish" enough? Let me emphasize that again. To make a good game into a great game, you have to polish.

Sharky Extreme: Are you working on the game with balance between the races in mind from the outset or is that something that will be more closely addressed when you start work on polishing it?

Zileas: I think balance and balanceability are two different things. Balanceability is when the game CAN be balanced. Balance is the final state of the game. Right now, the game is "balanceable." A lot of the design was made specifically to allow things to be balanced in the future. Basically, each unit has a purpose or a purpose group (which are purposes that are similar in some way). For instance, the Dark Elven Dame is a general support unit, and its support group are the spells Agony, Blindness and Rage. All of them increase the effectiveness of your units in some way, either by hampering the enemy, or aiding your troops. Because we have specified the dame as having that purpose group, and it alone has it in its race, it's easy to balance it out -- if the dark elves are too powerful in certain maneuvers that depend exclusively on those spells, we can tweak them.

Similarly, each combat unit basically has several purposes, namely their ability to attack various other types of units. By altering its ability to attack each one of those types of units separately, we can easily tweak a race's ability to do a particular thing. Finally, for same-type units between races (none of the units are too alike save a few basic units, but you can still compare somewhat similar units), we have some mathematical equations that calculate their relative effectiveness.

Really what it comes down to is keeping the purposes of things very clear, and making sure you do everything for a reason. By keeping track of that, it becomes much easier to troubleshoot balance issues.When we did our initial unit designs we went through entire races and were very careful to try to figure out what units can work with what units, and how other races could go about countering it. So "in theory" the game is balanceable. If any of those notions end up failing, we know where the problem lies and where our model fell apart and it'll be easy to fix. I think a lot of developers do brute-force balance, which is time consuming and/or ineffective.