Here’s an idea to make the game a little easier when training, new hires, and other unpredictable effects threaten your design/tech balance: Genre specialists. Genre specialists haven’t optimized their skill at any particular field of game design. Instead, they’ve devoted themselves to studying the games industry as a whole, and identifying the most critical components of each genre.
Genre specialists should have their tech/design ratio heavily biased towards whatever would push a game towards the optimum at a given moment. Their own skills would still matter for the size of bubbles produced and the rate at which they were produced. Training someone as a genre specialist should require the same 450/450 skill-balance that is required for training someone as a graphics specialist.
However, to balance these things, genre specialists shouldn’t be able to also specialize in a development stage, and they should cause a (small, consistent) penalty to the score of the game. They’re a guard against risky designs, but they’re also a voice against innovation, which Game Dev Tycoon treats as a critical component of game development. Having multiple genre specialists should make the score penalty increase drastically. They may produce a perfectly balanced game, but it could only be a clone of someone else’s!
EDIT: To clarify, I’m not talking about ‘Action’ specialists or ‘RPG’ specialists, but specialists in ‘Genre’ itself. As in, specialists in the idea of genres, who know how game development, genres, and consumer reactions interact with each other, and who thus know how to keep the team focused on what a game needs for a given genre.
I see where you are going with this idea, but I think this might make the game too easy. Part of the challenge is crafting your team to keep your bubble ratio where you want it. It also makes you specialize in two or three genre types rather than being a company that does everything. Having a wildcard who does nothing but pushes you to an ideal genre balance would disrupt this. Depending on the size of the score penalty, people would either always use them, or NEVER use them.
I think a more natural way to help players with their bubble balance is to have a clear indicator of what the ideal balance is during development. If the player sees their game start out with a good balance in phase one, then suddenly get way too technical in phase two and staying that way in phase three, not only will they know that game’s score is going to be getting a penalty…but also why. This could prompt a player to possibly hire someone new with skills filling in the missing bubbles…or to give their whole team a training that boosts their abilities in design or teach, whichever one is lacking.
The problem is that the tech/design balance is never revealed in the game. Never. You occasionally get told ‘reached a good balance’, and presumably if you were playing the game without a wiki open (I don’t even try), you’d occasionally get told you didn’t. The ‘reached a good balance’ message is something I usually get on 7’s. Not hit games, just break-even ones. Clearly the game isn’t giving good feedback here.
It’s not wrong to have people always use one wildcard. It’s what I would expect. Only crazed optimizers trying to beat their past high scores should skip the chance to have a penalty wildcard. It would only be generally wrong to use two or more.
Your feedback ideas would help too. Quite a bit, in fact. Your suggestion addresses the same thing mine addresses: lack of player feedback. Yours requires a new UI element. Mine builds the feedback into the UI that already exists. I think it would be amusing to watch the wildcard struggle against an unbalanced team. If their output is all on one side, there’s your canary in the coal mine telling the attentive player that training the other skill would bolster scores.