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For something to be broken it needs to be...broken. If MR was completely removed from the game I don't think it would change an appreciable amount. Just like if Devestating Charge was removed it would affect all of a few units (actually, I don't know if Bretonnians have it, but still).

But I don't know if you need to fix something that has almost no impact on the game. Because then you need to look for something to fix it towards. And that's when the Law of Unintended Consequences appears.

DukeRustfield wrote:
Magic does a really good job vs. deathstars. Its is the direct counter.

As I already pointed out, direct counters are a lazy, and cheap piece of game design. It's a glorifed rock/paper/scissors game.

I already laid this out quite clearly;
"Tactical depth comes when each element is needed, and no element can win a game by itself. So a player might get a lot of value out of powerful magic or deathstars, but these options by themselves won't be enough to win a game.

It's why the game got a lot more interesting in 8th ed, because with steadfast we suddenly had units with a unique tactical role other than killing the enemy in front of them - delay a more expensive unit while your more powerful units defeat the rest of the enemy's force.

All that leads to a conclusion that the best way to deal with deathstars isn't to have some kind of special attack that kills deathstars. That kind of set up just leads to rock/paper/scissors like you suggested. The best way to deal with deathstars is to build a tactical environment where a deathstar by itself might be a tactical asset, but not enough to win a game alone.

We're actually pretty close to that set up right now, as players can delay, avoid or flee from deathstars while targeting the rest of the enemy force. It's just that given the rest of the rules there is a general trend towards having just a couple of big blocks of infantry, and that leaves players with few options to delay or divert deathstars currently. Probably the best solution would be slight changes to the rules to encourage the return of smaller flanking units into the game."

And magic isn't just KILL THEM ALL. A unit is a unit. Hexes that affect an entire unit can really cripple a deathstar as it's the most efficient possible use of a spell. I just opened my BRB to the first lore I found and it was Shadow and I saw Enfeebling Foe, reduce str of every model in a unit by D3. You just made them a LOLstar.

All those things still work, whether MR works against the big 6 spells or not. So you're not really making much of a point there at all. And what's more, those things work in a way that's interesting, because they require a combination of forces - a hex spell in combination with another factor (most likely a unit of your own) to be effective. That's how it is supposed to work - your unique assets combine in a way to overcome his unique assets.

It is not supposed to work as deathstars<big magic spells><moderate units><deathstars. That's just paper/rock/scissors. Games determined by the luck of army match ups.>


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DukeRustfield wrote:
For something to be broken it needs to be...broken. If MR was completely removed from the game I don't think it would change an appreciable amount. Just like if Devestating Charge was removed it would affect all of a few units (actually, I don't know if Bretonnians have it, but still).

But I don't know if you need to fix something that has almost no impact on the game. Because then you need to look for something to fix it towards. And that's when the Law of Unintended Consequences appears.

That reasoning works to argue that anything that's presently totally ineffective should remain totally ineffective, because otherwise people might take it and break the precious paper/rock/scissors balance we have right now.

 sebster wrote:

As I already pointed out, direct counters are a lazy, and cheap piece of game design. It's a glorifed rock/paper/scissors game.

I already laid this out quite clearly;
"Tactical depth comes when each element is needed, and no element can win a game by itself. So a player might get a lot of value out of powerful magic or deathstars, but these options by themselves won't be enough to win a game.

If you HAVE to take something, that is rock/paper. Your analogy only works if you believe there is one hard counter for every tactic. There isn't. There's multiple. If someone doesn't want to take magic, they shouldn't have to. Or if they don't want to take terror-monsters, they shouldn't have to. And currently they don't. But if you remove hard counters to things, then you leave fewer and fewer to combat a given strategy. If nothing could beat a monster except magic, you'd have to take magic, because you can be sure players will take monsters. That's roshambo.

All that leads to a conclusion that the best way to deal with deathstars isn't to have some kind of special attack that kills deathstars. That kind of set up just leads to rock/paper/scissors like you suggested. The best way to deal with deathstars is to build a tactical environment where a deathstar by itself might be a tactical asset, but not enough to win a game alone.

That's exactly what we have now... You don't HAVE to use magic on a chosenstar. You could just redirect it. Or flank it. Or tarpit it. Or use low level augment/hex magic on it, as opposed to lvl 6's. Or war machines. There's a bunch of counters. But you'll find nearly every game on earth designed by humans has some variation of X > Y > Z > X. Soccer strikers vs. defenders. Basketball centers vs. guards. Artillery vs. infantry. Anti-aircraft guns vs. aircraft. Nuclear bomb vs. anything (cheaters!). I mean, that's nature. That's the Tree of Life in a nutshell. Only the apex predators have no counters. Cows vs. grass. Mosquitos vs. cows. Birds vs. Mosquitos. Cats vs. birds. It goes on an on. Those are hard counters.

That reasoning works to argue that anything that's presently totally ineffective should remain totally ineffective, because otherwise people might take it and break the precious paper/rock/scissors balance we have right now.

We have balance. That's this game. If you don't like type of balance, you're free to make your own, but to change a fundamental concept like how magic casts isn't going to change one portion, I guarantee it. It's another simple mathematical formula. If X + Y + Z = balanced, where the variables are major components of the game, X(10) + Y + Z isn't going to = balanced. Because Y and Z haven't changed and X has. I.e., deathstars will have remained exactly the same in power but now one means of dealing with them will be greatly curtailed. If you want to nerf magic, fine, but you have to evaluate other stuff that will be affected. MR sucking, and it does, isn't game-breaking. It's not even game-bending or bruising. Like you can't say steadfast also gives +3Str to any unit that has it simply because you want to see bigger units. It would totally mess up balance.

DukeRustfield wrote:
If you HAVE to take something, that is rock/paper. Your analogy only works if you believe there is one hard counter for every tactic. There isn't. There's multiple. If someone doesn't want to take magic, they shouldn't have to. Or if they don't want to take terror-monsters, they shouldn't have to. And currently they don't. But if you remove hard counters to things, then you leave fewer and fewer to combat a given strategy. If nothing could beat a monster except magic, you'd have to take magic, because you can be sure players will take monsters. That's roshambo.

No, you're not getting it. It isn't about how many hard counters there are. There could be one, there could be twenty, it doesn't matter. As long game balance is nothing but counters it is simplistic game design.

As a simple example, look at the world right now. ICBMs are a hard counter to everything. But basing a military around just ICBMs would be stupid, because you can't just blow up the enemy and win. You need to take and hold ground, and that means a combination of military assets from infantry, to armour, to close air support, to air superiority.

And it's the same thing here. Let deathstars be all powerful. So what if there's no hard counter that'll kill them? Give players the range of assets that means a deathstar might stomp anything it fights directly, but that it is prone to being delayed, redirected, tarpitted, and ganged up on by a player deploying a range of assets.

That's exactly what we have now... You don't HAVE to use magic on a chosenstar. You could just redirect it. Or flank it. Or tarpit it. Or use low level augment/hex magic on it, as opposed to lvl 6's. Or war machines. There's a bunch of counters.

This is exactly what I've been saying. I said there's other counters to deathstars, and that is where game design should look, not to having more hard counters for big enemy units.

Having game design focus on redirecting and tarpitting as the counters to big enemy units is the superior way to address problems of big enemy units... and the rules right now are almost there. The problem right now is that when no such powerful enemy unit exists there's little value to redirectors in an alternate role, meaning these units are quite rare in the metagame (meaning deathstars are too effective when seen).

Change that by letting flanking units deny steadfast and you'd see a lot more 10-15 man speedy flanking units, who could be used as redirectors when a deathstar is put on the field. Simple, and all without needing the hard level 6 magic spells as a hard counter, bringing all their additional problems with them.

But you'll find nearly every game on earth designed by humans has some variation of X > Y > Z > X. Soccer strikers vs. defenders. Basketball centers vs. guards. Artillery vs. infantry. Anti-aircraft guns vs. aircraft. Nuclear bomb vs. anything (cheaters!).

You're missing the point. It isn't that you can't have counters... it's that a tactical environment that consists only of counters is crude, and not that fun.

I mean, it didn't take Napoleon to know that infantry in square are a hard counter to cavalry. But it wasn't just that simple. Deploy cavalry into a threatening position on the flank, but combine that with infantry to the front, and the enemy is split between forming into square to counter the cavalry, and line to maximise their strength against the infantry to their front.

We have balance. That's this game. If you don't like type of balance, you're free to make your own, but to change a fundamental concept like how magic casts isn't going to change one portion, I guarantee it. It's another simple mathematical formula. If X + Y + Z = balanced, where the variables are major components of the game, X(10) + Y + Z isn't going to = balanced. Because Y and Z haven't changed and X has. I.e., deathstars will have remained exactly the same in power but now one means of dealing with them will be greatly curtailed. If you want to nerf magic, fine, but you have to evaluate other stuff that will be affected. MR sucking, and it does, isn't game-breaking. It's not even game-bending or bruising. Like you can't say steadfast also gives +3Str to any unit that has it simply because you want to see bigger units. It would totally mess up balance.

You have this really odd idea that WHFB is balanced on a knife edge. It isn't. It's more or less balanced, for the most part, as long as people basically agree not to break it by taking the most powerful combos. That's how balance has existed, more or less, in the game since it first began.

There's nothing like the precision of balance you're maths arguments pretends.

 sebster wrote:
No, you're not getting it. It isn't about how many hard counters there are. There could be one, there could be twenty, it doesn't matter. As long game balance is nothing but counters it is simplistic game design.

I don't think you don't understand planet earth. And the interaction of every species and item on it that has ever existed. I mean, a condom is a pretty hard counter to pregnancy. Counters are omnipresent in everything.

You just seem (extremely) unhappy with the rules of WHFB, and every other game known to man, so I will just say you need to go off and wow us with your game of strategic non-counter counters. I would suggest as a starting point you look at the games of checkers and Connect Four. Which do not have counters, just taking turns plunking pieces of exactly the same value. But as soon as you cross the line to chess or Axis and Allies or Stratego, you're going to find counters. As soon as you have any game pieces of different attributes, they will be counters to each other or they will be unbalanced. That's about the most basic game theory you can possibly get. If Connect 4 had one piece that was 4 wide, the game would end as soon as the first player goes...unless there's some kind of counter. Any counter. Like that piece being random. Or not available until turn 5. Or diagonal only. But those are all counters to a game-winning piece in about the simplest game there is and without it, the game is meaningless.

Didn't you see the movie war games? Tic Tac Toe has no counters. An X is exactly the same as an O and who goes first doesn't matter. That's nice and balanced. But unless you don't comprehend the game, it will never end in anything except a tie.

DukeRustfield wrote:
I don't think you don't understand planet earth. And the interaction of every species and item on it that has ever existed. I mean, a condom is a pretty hard counter to pregnancy. Counters are omnipresent in everything.

You're just making things up. I've already pointed out that counters are good, but by themselves they aren't enough to produce a good game. You just get rock, paper and scissors.

Add in movement, add in negating and diverting abilities, and you start to get tactical complexity. Ignore that stuff and just keep prattling about what counters what and you get, at best, Pokemon.

You just seem (extremely) unhappy with the rules of WHFB, and every other game known to man, so I will just say you need to go off and wow us with your game of strategic non-counter counters.

Again, you're just making stuff up. I am not unhappy with WHFB, I think for the first time since I first played (3rd ed) the game has a number of diverse assets so that play is actually interesting from game to game, and list design features more consideration than 'how much lethal stuff can I shove into this list?'

But that doesn't mean the game can't be improved. Giving a useful role for Magic Resistance, and encouraging greater numbers of smaller mobile units would improve the game.

And one thing that kills any kind of conversation about stuff like that is jumping up and down and shouting 'game balance' over and over again, as if the WHFB was ever a finely balanced game.

I would suggest as a starting point you look at the games of checkers and Connect Four. Which do not have counters, just taking turns plunking pieces of exactly the same value. But as soon as you cross the line to chess or Axis and Allies or Stratego, you're going to find counters. As soon as you have any game pieces of different attributes, they will be counters to each other or they will be unbalanced. That's about the most basic game theory you can possibly get.

fething read what I'm fething saying or don't bother replying. It's that simple.

I am not questioning the value of counters in game design, I am questioning your simplistic notion that counters are the only concept in game design. Because 'this is good at killing that but highly vulnerable to some other thing' is an important design concept, but it isn't the only important design goal.

If it were then Pokemon would be the height of game design.

In truth every thing in war is about countering the enemy forces strengths somehow. The spear was created to counter the guy with the shorter weapon the bow to counter the spear and horsemen to counter the bow but war is also more then that. Using your pieces in unpredictable or unusual ways can win you battles that the statistics would have said you would lose before they saw it. Most of the greatest generals in history won their battles using tactics to allow weaker units to defeat larger stronger ones. The Greek Phalanx was the most powerful infantry fighting formation on the planet until the Romans found a tactic to beat it and they never won another battle. Creating new hard counters that just up and say "No your not allowed to kill my unit that way anymore because I added this" doesn't expand the game but limit it. Tactics are the counters to Deathstar and magic doom not adding a cheat code to cancel the effectiveness of one or the other. Also tic tac tow should always end in a tie between any two players other then children unless someone made a mistake.

 White Ninja wrote:
...Also tic tac tow should always end in a tie between any two players other then children unless someone made a mistake.

...no one said otherwise.
But seriously, you raise good points. Most of which were already covered earlier. Let's not start this up again.

Miss read what he had said about tic tac tow I though he had said something else.