Mechabellum Evolved Autobattlers, but One Problem Remains Unsolved – Wen You Ge | grokludo 14

Wen You Ge, also known as Bearlike, leads the team working on Mechabellum, which I've routinely called the best autobattler since it hit Early Access years ago.

Autobattlers give you no control over the battle. It's all about setting up your troops beforehand with smart positioning and synergies, and watching it play out. This style of game was catapulted to fame with Autochess and its variants, such as Valve's DOTA Underlords and Riot's Teamfight Tactics.

Mechabellum is known for evolving autobattlers from a Poker-esque genre that requires multiple rounds against multiple opponents to determine a winner, towards a more deterministic, competitive 1v1 experience. Along the way, it had many design problems to solve.

It's been a long, iterative journey from Mechabellum's original version, heavily inspired by Mahjong, to what it is today. Bearlike talks about a Poker version of Mechabellum, as well as solving problems like how far units should be able to move, and how unit techs solved the "deathball" problem.

"We tried all kinds of different solutions. Making each piece unmovable is actually a very extreme solution. So that's the last solution we tried," says Bearlike.

With each change, Mechabellum moved further from the established autobattlers and became its own entity.

But there's one problem it hasn't solved yet.

"We still haven't figured out how to add content to the game," says Bearlike. "You can't keep adding new pieces to your chessboard. And Mechabellum is hitting the point where adding even more new units doesn't really make much sense."

This is at odds with the nature of a live service game, in which players expect endless new content. After a certain amount of time without an update, Bearlike says, player numbers start to drop.

There are a few tricks up Bearlike's sleeve, including the addition of rotating layouts of buildings being the game's version of "maps." But there's a tension between adding content to keep things fresh, and keeping things simple for new players, which would be the Holy Grail for Bearlike to solve.

Once you've got a successful live service game, how do you transition into something timeless? Does the content treadmill have an offramp?

Bearlike talks about these problems and more in this week's ep, including the ill-fated RTS Battle Aces, hidden vs open information, and the simplest solution for positional play you've ever heard: "Add a ball."

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