Spitball

Dev diary ·

How we balance Spitball

Before a change reaches you, a few thousand bots play it.

Baseball runs on numbers, and so does Spitball. Whenever we change something, a card or a rule, we let bots play a few thousand seasons with it and watch where they land.

Fig. 1A few thousand seasons, sped up. Every dot is one season. It runs game by game and falls into a pile where the season ends. The color is the biggest combo the bots put together.

Some bots play sloppy. Some play like they wrote the game. Each kind has a range we want it to land in: a new player should win the pennant now and then, a great one most of the time, and nobody every time.

The finished view: five rows of piled-up dots, one per kind of player, each scored on the right against the range we want and tagged ON TARGET.
Fig. 2The same view, finished. One row per kind of player. On the right, how each did against the range we want. Green means it landed.

Keeping Rub in line

“Rub” RubinskiTrainer

The card says: “His ‘liniment’ works: every point of heat on you makes your stuff nastier.”Heat is the meter that climbs when you cheat.

When we made strikeouts add a little heat, we knew Rub would ride along: more heat on every pitcher means more liniment working. So the bots played the change that night and put a number on it right away. On his own he was worth about ten points of win rate. Our ceiling for any one card is eight, because one character should help a build, not be the build.

We turned his two numbers down by about a third. Same card, same words, same idea. He came back to seven and a half, under the line and still a great hire.

Rub's lift over the cap, before and after the retune 33 crew members, each a dot at how many points of game win rate he adds on his own. Before the retune Rub sits at +10.3, past the cap of +8. After it he sits at +7.5. The other 32 sit between -0.2 and +4.3. 0 +2 +4 +6 +8 +10 +12 points of game win rate he adds on his own cap +8 Beforeafter the heat change Rub +10.3 Aftera third off his numbers Rub +7.5
Fig. 3Every crew member, before and after. Each dot is how much one card helps on its own. Only Rub is named. The dashed line is the ceiling.

We keep the rest of the numbers to ourselves. Your Record Book tracks the same kinds of things for your own runs, so the best builds are out there for you to find.

See the Record Book →