Symmetry vs Asymmetry

Balance is an issue for me not symmetry. You can have abilities or forces that are balanced but different.

Symmetry is not a factor in my decision to purchase a game so it’s probably not surprising that I don’t think one is better than the other.

Other than factors like variable setups replayability comes from emergent complexity. How the combination of moves creates a wide variety of possible strategies or ways to pursue them.

I would say it's almost impossible to make a purely symmetrical game: as soon as one player takes initiative it creates new and different choices carrying forward. What we're really talking about when we talk about the replay value that asymmetry provides is a variety of play experience, and there are many different ways to provide that.

On the far end of the scale are games where the two players are essentially playing different games: I'm building skyscrapers while you're trying to knock them down with Godzilla. Of course the play experience will be different if we switch roles! The less extreme version of this that we usually see is in special player powers or in varying setups (especially in wargames). The upside of this method of creating variety of play is that it is relatively easy to introduce: the downside is that it is largely arbitrary, and the variety of play experiences is limited to the number of different options you design.

Chance elements are a very common way of offering variety of play, are relatively easy to introduce, and provide a large number of possible play experiences relative to effort.

The hardest way to introduce variety of play is through depth, but it rewards with a nearly infinite variety of play experiences: games like Chess or Go may be 'symmetrical', but every time a player plays them they come away with a different experience depending on the gameplay itself but also their understanding and skill. Forcing arbitrary asymmetry on deep games could actually reduce their playability, as you shoehorn players into shallower strategies.

Is a variety of play a factor in whether I buy a game? Absolutely. Both the variety of the gameplay within the market (very few people want to shell out money for a clone), and variety of gameplay withing the game (I want to take it off the shelf more than once).

(Postscript) It's also worthwhile to think about using arbitrary asymmetry to seed the game: if it takes 2 hours for enemy forces to engage and start interacting, jumping players forward with an asymmetric setup can do a lot of good for your pacing. Essentially arbitrary asymmetry is making choices for the players: if they were boring choices, you might as well do that work for them. Likewise, choosing a character force that's designed for a certain strategy at the start is a lot more fun than grinding your symmetric force to be capable of the strategy that intrigues you. For me, anyways.

Anybody has some quick idea on how to balance effectively asymmetric forces besides playtesting intensively?

I need to design 3 unique faction with each 9 unique units and I don't know much where to start besides intuition.

I somewhat like the idea of primary and secondary strategy. For example, there are special power up cards that I want to be unique for each of the 6 factions.

I made an inventory possible power up cards, now the problem is how to distribute them among the faction. I thought of making groups card and assigning groups to various faction.

But the fact that seeing a group as a strategy and trying to make relations with other faction's strategy could give me a different point of view than just distributing groups.

Also to allow variety, I could have 3 level of strategy where the firsts levels has more cards than the last levels. So if a faction as a certain strategy as a primary strategy, it will have more cards in their deck about it. Why the faction that has it as a third level strategy will have much less cards.

But this way, it prevents the bug that each faction is focused on one thing and nobody else have access to those abilities.