So I'm at the stage of development where I have a lot of things to play around with, monsters, random item drops, some crafting, random world generation, and I'm starting to want to balance the game. I have, of course, played the game with different strategies, finding holes and adjusting gameplay, but it feels inefficient.

I've also written a script to help me balance combat. It works by evaluating hp and damage and let's me know how many hits it would take the player to kill any monster, and conversely, how many monster hits it would take to kill the player and I can scale different attributes to affect combat outcomes. I can use it to see how wielding weapons and using armor changes combat outcomes too.

My question is, how do you find balance issues? Do you play the game a lot and tweak values? Do you set up spreadsheets, models, and equations? Do you do both, neither, or something else entirely? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and techniques.