Shack: Balancing is always a big challenge with RTS games. I assume that was this case on this project, especially in determining how often players can use these secondary abilities.

Dave Pottinger: Right. The first time we put Warthog ram in, there was no timer. [laughs] And that's evolved.

Some of the abilities have timers, some of them don't. The Spartan jacking doesn't for example. The balance guys--we've got a team of highly paid professional playtesters, that all they do is play the game, that are just massively better than the rest of us.

So they had a hard time balancing the ability to juggle the Covenant leader, who's generally infantry, with the Warthog ram. Because they would build like ten Warthogs, they'd individually select each of them, ram the leader, and by the time he'd hit the ground they'd have another Warthog there ready to ram him again. And I saw a game where they juggled the leader for like 26 seconds.

Shack: [laughs] Right.

Dave Pottinger: Like, there's no way I could ever do that. [laughs] But they could, so we ended up having to balance that out so that they can't juggle him anymore. They just kind of knock him back. So things like that have been kind of fun to be honest.

This is a much more tactical strategy game, and it's a different set of challenges than I think we faced with Age 3 and Age of Mythology. It's much more about the fast-switch type of things. If you played Skirmish, the Arbiters powers are something that's just not been in a strategy game before. You press Y, and the camera sort of zooms in, and it's this rage power. You flip the right stick and he jumps to this target and does a fatality, and you flip this one and he jumps back to this target and does a fatality.

We're struggling with that one from a balance standpoint. Not from a "how much damage does he do," but how easy is it for an enemy to target him in that mode. So we're trying to write some code so we can kind of target a couple places at once and fix that. We're down to those sort of edge cases. The game has been pretty balanced now for a while. We've done enough of these games now where we're pretty decent at that.

Graeme Devine: I think we still wanted to have that "monster over the hill" feeling though. We just didn't want it to be tank-tank, infantry-infantry. We wanted a group of 20 infantry to go over a hill and see a Scarab.

That Scarab mowing them down, it's like that moment in War of the Worlds where all the troops go over the hill, and they go over the hill, and they all come back flaming. That's cool, and that's what you want from aliens, right? I think one of the genius things of Ensemble is the ability to balance that and still get that feeling into the game.

Dave Pottinger: It's been a struggle, because we... we got maybe a little boring with the way Age 3 got balanced. It was always cutting things back. And we had a very clear mission this time that nerfing isn't allowed. If you're a unit, and Graeme's a unit, and I'm a unit, and you're overpowered, Graeme and I have to be brought up to equal you--not bring you back down, which is the easier way to do it.

And so having the Scarab, it's that big unit, 20 pop, 3000 supplies, takes a long time to build--you get one of those things up, and it's a freakin' force to be reckoned with. But, it does walk kind of slow, and it has to strafe the beam, so you can micro against it. Or you can just completely ignore it, sacrifice this base, and go try to kill the base over here that produced it.

Dave Pottinger: It's a big, bad-ass thing, but it does have a few Achilles heels, and ways to deal with it. But it is one of the things that Halo forces us to play on. Scarabs are Scarabs. Spartans have to be just right on the precipice of being overpowered, because they have to be the coolest thing.

Shack: How will co-op play in the campaign function? Will you have two separate bases, or share?

Dave Pottinger: You share things. You can build a base, and then I can build a barracks with that base. I can use the barracks, you can use the barracks. We thought about for a long time splitting everything, where you have my bank, I have my bank, and ne'er the two shall meet. And in the end--because the big concern on paper was, what if you spend money that I'm saving?

And it turned out that the right thing for co-op was to actually pool it, and let you spend the money that I'm saving, so I can get mad at you. That interaction is actually really good. It takes about half a scenario to a scenario for people to figure out this natural play.

If you play scenario four, which is kind of some base building and some fighting, you start out with Warthogs and Hornets. So we give all the Warthogs to one player, all the Hornets to another player. You can gift units to another player, so you can switch it up. That kind of co-op tends to lend itself to splitting up roles. You're going to build the base and defend it, and build me the units, and I'm going to go out and use them here and manage the special abilities.

And I think the secret thing was kind of doing the opposite of what everybody asked for initially, and making people actually work together and figure out the hard problem, as opposed to un-asking the question, which seems like the safer... "Don't fuck up my bank. Here's yours, and here's mine." Turns out that putting them together was actually the secret sauce that made co-op really fun, and at least for me, and I think for Graeme too, it's the best way to play the game.

Shack: I assume competitive multiplayer has all the standard features? Matchmaking..?

Dave Pottinger: Yeah, so we have 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, different modes, things like that. You can go in and do a private match and invite people, matchmaking, leaderboards.

Shack: Seen a good reaction to that component?

Dave Pottinger: Oh absolutely.

Shack: Sort of that Halo-esque competitive thing?

Graeme Devine: [laughs]

Dave Pottinger: We definitely expect 99% of the people to play the campaign first, certainly even moreso because it's now on console. But the legs of the Age games, and the legs of the Halo games are rooted very deeply in the multiplayer aspect.

So we spent a lot of time, even though it was done in parallel with the campaign, in fleshing out both civilizations. They play really differently when you get down into it. When you play as the UNSC, it feels different than the Covenant.

Shack: In what way?

Dave Pottinger: The thing is that--Graeme has also written a big chunk of the battle chatter. The battle chatter with the units the UNSC guys do is different than the battle chatter the Covenant guys do. We have this thing called AI Coach that helps give you some context for a skirmish game. If you play against the AI, the UNSC is nice. The Covenant is a little bit berating.

The Covenant guys, all three of those leaders-- the Prophet, the Arbiter, and the third we can't exactly mention-- they're all angry. They're the big charismatic religious leaders, sort of zealous followers. The UNSC are more the good guy regimented armies, but the Covenant leaders are the single most powerful units in the game. Everything the Covenant do revolves through the leader.

There's three different ways to deploy leaders: they can be a great combat unit, you can use their cool powers, which are very interactive and visceral. By that token, you pay for them every second. If you cast Cleansing, the beam comes down--if you're familiar with the lore that's what they use to blast the planets--so that's the Prophet's ability. The beam comes down, and you drive it around with the left stick, and you can spell bad words out online, but you're paying resources every second. And that's the only power the Prophet has.

It's the kind of evil leader thing that's really the big difference. And they build bases differently, and have different ways to protect the bases, but that's more secondary.

Shack: So you guys announced that the Flood will make it into the game as enemies, but they're not playable, correct?

Graeme Devine: The Flood are not playable. They're on some Skirmish maps, and it adds a lot of flavor to those maps, and you certainly do fight them in the campaign. We actually did want to get the Flood playable into the game, and that was something that we struggled with for a long time.

But in the end we wanted the Flood to be the thing you feared the most. We wanted that fearful feeling. We didn't just want them to be monsters that were versions of infantry that you could not really be scared of. We want them to be scary, we want them to be the overarching bad guy, that if you let them go for long they will dominate the entire galaxy because you left them for 20 seconds too long. So getting that feeling of fear into the Flood was really important. But they're in there.

Dave Pottinger: The Flood are just in the campaign, and the Flood that are in the skirmish come from Age, and come from that background. Just kind of change it up there, and make the maps have a much more individual identity. And we can't really talk about all the Flood-specific maps yet, but it's a complete head-turn when you play on those maps, it's very different.

Shack: And you have long-term plans for downloadable content?

Dave Pottinger: Yes, the studio that's starting will be doing support for title updates, DLC. We've got DLC planned forever--that's obviously an important part of the overall Microsoft strategy. And we've had some workings on that already. And we did have some plans for Flood in Halo Wars 2, and that's perhaps more up in the air now.

But to Graeme's point, we wanted to do Flood, and do it right. We needed to get the good guy UNSC and the Covenant right, and the Flood were never quite getting the proper attention to fit in. And we don't want to do them and make them half-assed and have them be not as threatening as they should be.

The Covenant and UNSC--once you play the UNSC you'll be able to play the Covenant fairly easily, though the Covenant are a lot more advanced, and have some harder to use things. But the Flood needs to be very separate and different.

We wanted to do it right. If there's a Halo Wars 2, maybe. But that's not for us to say anymore.

Shack: Thanks guys.

Halo Wars is expected to land on the Xbox 360 sometime in February.