I have read about the partition problem a.k.a. the easiest hard problem. I am currently working on a game where there are, say, 180 players that need to be organized into 30 teams with 6 players in each team. Every player is assigned a rank (1-6) based on the skills and the previous performance results.
The problem is to create teams in such a way that all teams have equal chances to win the tournament. As naive as it might sound, but at this stage, I translate that into "the sum of ranks in each team is the same" or, obviously, "all teams have equal average team ranks".
The partition problem is NP-hard and the solution might not even exist. It's not obvious whether the problem I described above is a simplified or even harder version of this famous problem.
What are some "good enough" approaches that can work here? There are greedy and approximate solutions for the standard version, but do they apply to my problem?