Modeling an RTS or how Blizzard was able to put together Starcraft 1 & 2?

Question

Not sure if this question is related to software development, but I hope someone can at least point me in the right direction(no, not that direction..) I am very curious as to how Blizzard achieve such a balance of strategic/tactic forces in their games? If you look at Starcraft 1 or now 2, each race have unique features that sort of counterpart other unique features of other races and all together create a pretty beautiful(to my mind at least) balance.

Is there some sort of area of mathematics that could help model these things? How do they do it basically?

Answer 1

I don't have full answer but here is what I know. Initially, when game is technically ready the balance is not ideal. When they started first public beta there were holes in balance that they patched very fast. They let players (testers) play as is and captured statistics of % of wins per race and tuned the parameters according to it. When the beta was at the end ratio was almost ideal: 33%/33%/33%.