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If the game was perfectly balanced, I wouldn't have quit playing at the drop of 6th edition. So definitely more games.

 Fafnir wrote:
If the game was perfectly balanced, I wouldn't have quit playing at the drop of 6th edition. So definitely more games.

What army did you play before you stopped playing? What motivated you in particular to stop playing?

I'd probably win about the same number of games, maybe a few more. But both the wins and losses would be more competitive and interactive, not just inevitable consequences of whose balance exploits are better.

 Grimgold wrote:
I'm saying your list is a huge factor in the number of games you win, depending on the skill of your opponents it could be the deciding factor.

Your list is OP, the question is would you win less if it were balanced, so it's basically asking if your list was nerfed to ork levels would you win less, and literally the only intellectually honest answer is yes. I just don't get you skill is the only factor people, not only do you have to ignore huge piles of data to the contrary, you have to assume you are several st devs out of the normal range to support your win loss ratio.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given what a well known phenomenon Illusory superiority is.

And somehow, only 1 person (you) voted that he or she would win fewer games.

Amazing, isn't it?

 Traditio wrote:
And somehow, only 1 person (you) voted that he or she would win fewer games.

Amazing, isn't it?

You're neglecting the "who are you playing" factor. You can play only the best lists in a completely unbalanced game and still have only a 50/50 win rate if you're only playing against equally powerful lists (for example, at tournaments and practicing for tournaments). If the game is suddenly balanced you'd still win at the same 50/50 rate because your opponents all have the same power level changes to their own lists. The only people who would experience a significant drop in win rate are the ones who spend a lot of games clubbing baby seals by playing optimized competitive lists against weak opponents.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Traditio wrote:
And somehow, only 1 person (you) voted that he or she would win fewer games.

Amazing, isn't it?

You're neglecting the "who are you playing" factor. You can play only the best lists in a completely unbalanced game and still have only a 50/50 win rate if you're only playing against equally powerful lists (for example, at tournaments and practicing for tournaments). If the game is suddenly balanced you'd still win at the same 50/50 rate because your opponents all have the same power level changes to their own lists. The only people who would experience a significant drop in win rate are the ones who spend a lot of games clubbing baby seals by playing optimized competitive lists against weak opponents.

I'm not sure that I agree with this in all cases. In a balanced game, a necron decurion or a space marine battle company, even without all of the special rules or OP wargear, should regularly stomp a flyrant spam list. Why? Because necron decurions and SM battle companies are internally balanced, but flyrant lists aren't. Ditto for warp spider spam.

 Traditio wrote:
I'm not sure that I agree with this in all cases. In a balanced game, a necron decurion or a space marine battle company, even without all of the special rules or OP wargear, should regularly stomp a flyrant spam list. Why? Because necron decurions and SM battle companies are internally balanced, but flyrant lists aren't. Ditto for warp spider spam.

Why are you assuming that "balance" and "spam" are mutually exclusive concepts?


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And, in any case, you missed the point. It's not about specific lists, it's about why even competitive players might report "no change". If I play nothing but decurion necrons against battle companies, with both armies exploiting every overpowered balance mistake, I might only have a 50/50 win rate. Then in a balanced game I still have a 50/50 win rate. And in your hypothetical "punish spam" version of the game I might actually win more games, because the FMC spam guy I play against now loses all of his games until he builds a new army. So the fact that few people have reported that they would win fewer games doesn't mean they're lying about the strength of their lists, it could simply mean that they're playing against people with similarly powerful lists.

 Traditio wrote:

CrownAxe wrote:Since my regular opponents are some of the top players in 40k, yes i'm pretty sure i'll do fine against random people

Either you exclusively play at grand tournaments, or else, someone has a very high opinion of himself and his gaming group.

You know the top tournament players can play games of 40k outside of GTs right?

 Grimgold wrote:
I'm saying your list is a huge factor in the number of games you win, depending on the skill of your opponents it could be the deciding factor.

Your list is OP, the question is would you win less if it were balanced, so it's basically asking if your list was nerfed to ork levels would you win less, and literally the only intellectually honest answer is yes. I just don't get you skill is the only factor people, not only do you have to ignore huge piles of data to the contrary, you have to assume you are several st devs out of the normal range to support your win loss ratio.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given what a well known phenomenon Illusory superiority is.

Are you dense? The hypothetical situation is "If 40k were balanced". In this situation we assume all armies have a fair chance of beating each other.

Your "huge piles of data to the contrary" doesn't matter because WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING ACTUAL 40K. Since we are assuming that 40k is balanced then that would mean that the armies we play are balanced and would have an equal chance of beating each other as a result. Thus we remove army building as a factor of winning a game

That only leaves luck and skill as factors in winning a game. But since this is hypothetical we have to assume that luck averages out to be equal for both players so is also removed as a factor.

Which leaves only SKILL. In the HYPOTHETICAL QUESITON OF IF 40K IS BALANCED the only factor that can contribute to victory outcome is skill.

Peregrine wrote:Why are you assuming that "balance" and "spam" are mutually exclusive concepts?

I'm not. I'm saying that flyrant spam or warpspider spam in particular are internally imbalanced. If the game were balanced, then flyrant spam would have a determinate set of strengths and exploitable weaknesses, and, since that kind of spam list doesn't have complementary units to compensate for those exploitable weaknesses, then any internally balanced army (read, any army that actually uses several different FOC slots) should be able to stomp it into the ground.

And, in any case, you missed the point. It's not about specific lists, it's about why even competitive players might report "no change". If I play nothing but decurion necrons against battle companies, with both armies exploiting every overpowered balance mistake, I might only have a 50/50 win rate. Then in a balanced game I still have a 50/50 win rate. And in your hypothetical "punish spam" version of the game I might actually win more games, because the FMC spam guy I play against now loses all of his games until he builds a new army. So the fact that few people have reported that they would win fewer games doesn't mean they're lying about the strength of their lists, it could simply mean that they're playing against people with similarly powerful lists.

That is a possibility.


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Peregrine, addendum:

Basically, and I know that this is oversimplified, but it makes the point:

If you only have cavalry, and I have cavalry, archers and pikemen...

...let's just say that I know how I'm deploying. Every. Single. Time.

 Traditio wrote:

"Good" is a relative term. My OP presupposes in advance that the current "good" lists would no longer be the exclusive good lists (or even good lists at all) if the game were actually balanced.

How can it no longer be good if the game is balanced and everything's good. You ain't fielding good nothing, right?

 Traditio wrote:
I'm not. I'm saying that flyrant spam or warpspider spam in particular are internally imbalanced. If the game were balanced, then flyrant spam would have a determinate set of strengths and exploitable weaknesses, and, since that kind of spam list doesn't have complementary units to compensate for those exploitable weaknesses, then any internally balanced army (read, any army that actually uses several different FOC slots) should be able to stomp it into the ground.

That's not how balance works. Balance means that all options are equally viable, not that TAC lists are the best or that armies should have a certain amount of diversity in unit choices. For example, in a balanced game a flyrant spam army might lose badly to certain lists that exploit its weaknesses, but win enough against other lists to get a 50/50 win rate. In fact, there would be a lack of balance if it didn't win enough to get a 50/50 win rate, since the flyrant spam army would be severely underpowered.

What you're actually describing here is the use of deliberate imbalance to favor a particular kind of army (TAC lists with diverse unit choices) that you personally prefer. There's an argument that this is a good game design choice to make, but that question is entirely separate from improving balance.

If you only have cavalry, and I have cavalry, archers and pikemen...

...let's just say that I know how I'm deploying. Every. Single. Time.

Great. If you play footslogging tactical squads with no grav guns and I have MC-spam Tau I know how I'm deploying. Every. Single. Time. The fact that you know how to win when you have a decisive advantage in list strength does not have anything to do with this topic.

 Traditio wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:
If the game was perfectly balanced, I wouldn't have quit playing at the drop of 6th edition. So definitely more games.

What army did you play before you stopped playing? What motivated you in particular to stop playing?

Daemonhunters (later Grey Knights), and then later a bit of Orkz and IG, with a small truescale marine project on the side.

6th edition's shoddy ruleset (random =/= fun), combined with growing army power creep and fluff expansions on the level of bad fan fiction helped to push me away. The push towards bigger and bigger centrepiece models also made it harder to competitively field and build armies around the models I did like, and ruined the sense of intimacy with each individual model on the tabletop (I dislike seeing most of my models as glorified wound counters). Grey Knights requiring Purifier spam and Dreadknights to play at top levels really turned me off from my first and favourite army, as PAGK shouldn't be a thing and the Dreadknight is a hideous abomination that goes against everything that made the Grey Knights interesting on a conceptual level. Paladin and Terminator strike forces were right up my alley, but left crippled and weak by poor mobility and extremely limited target saturation, making them very poor choices against an experienced opponent.

I loved allies from the old Inquisitional codex (really, everything about the old 3e Inquisition codecies except for how they performed on the tabletop come 5th was great), and while I like the concept of allies in 40k in general, it's poorly executed and encourages simply more models and exploitative combinations (see: balance) on the table over creating diverse forces with unique playstyles. This goes doubly with the consideration of the overwhelming amount of Imperial armies in comparison to everything else, and allied support to go with it.

The biggest thing that really killed the game for me was the increasing reliance on random elements, which removed more and more agency from my hands as the player. Ultimately, I felt like I was less and less involved with my wins and my losses with each successive game come 6th edition, and I have no interest in playing a game where I'm barely a participant. Also, the rules are ridiculously convoluted in spite of this lack of real player involvement, which makes absolutely no sense.

Now, my recent return hasn't come in the wake of any of these issues being fixed. It all continues to persist, in some cases having gotten worse. More to do with an itch to paint and an interest in a now more widely popular Killteam (which goes right back to that sense of intimacy I mentioned earlier).

For now, I can only hope that the new edition coming will learn (unlikely as it may be) from AoS, its failures and its successes, and shake things up in a big and constructive way. I wouldn't be averse to a 3e/AoS style reboot, but they'd have to get it right. The current system has grown far too rotten and bloated to continue to exist as a foundation. They need to have a clear vision for what they want to develop towards, and the polish to convey that vision in an easily digestible manner. If they want allied forces and formations, the game needs to be balanced with that in mind. Armies absolutely must be developed with their peers in mind. And not in the sense of one-upsmanship, but rather coexistence and actual competition. They need to reduce the ineffectual decisions and excessive dice rolling, and replace them with a smaller concentration of choices that matter.

Moreover, the constant push to release more and more factions and subfactions and faction expansions is pushing the method of delivery itself far too thin. If they insist on having so many forces to keep track of, this delivery system has to change. Lugging around three to six (!) $50 hardcover books for each army isn't just ridiculously prohibitively expensive, it's cumbersome and slows things down to a ridiculous degree, and makes knowing the enemy nigh on impossible (not to mention the potential for cheating!). Go digital, go free. The rules exist to sell models by GW's own admission, so stop using them as a paywall, and turn them into the marketing you say you want them to be. If I can see what my opponent's army can do, and I can see them actually having fun using it, as opposed to being mercilessly crushed by my own thanks to its horrible inadequacies, I'm more inclined to develop my own interest in their faction. There's no need for codex creep to push models, it's cannibalistic towards the long-term fanbase, and unnecessary to the new players who'll just buy Space Marines anyway.

I'd probably just get the most insane mishmash of models that are not supposed to clash well together and still win 50% of my games cause everything's balanced. Something like an unbound army of grots, ratlings and nurglings and go to town on all those superheavies and superfriends.

 Traditio wrote:
Suppose for a moment that every codex entry and every upgrade were actually playable/usable, and spamming the most OP stuff from your codex were no longer a good way to win the game, because OP stuff simply ceased to exist.

Suppose that every codex entry had a time and a place, and your best bet at winning was using a strategic blend of different things.

Spoken differently: suppose the game were balanced in such a way that an army composed of tactical marines (without grav), devastator marines (without grav), assault marines, rhinos, predators, vindicators, landraiders, terminators, etc...were actually capable of winning competitive games, even without a ton of free stuff and snowflake special rules.

If you kept using your current army, how do you think that your current army lists would fare competitively?

Edit:

Alternative phrasing of the OP question:

"My question is very simple:

Suppose that the game were actually balanced. What do I mean by "balanced"? That you couldn't point to a unit or option in your codex, or a set of units or options in your codex, and say: "Clearly, THIS is the one to use." What if every unit and every option in every single codex were actually playable and actually had a viable in-game use?

What would happen if, suddenly, simply spamming the "best" things in your codex no longer gauranteed you an advantage, and actually HURT you in game because it means that your army is running with a severe internal imbalance?

Would you, you personally, with the army lists that YOU currently use....would you win more games? Lose more games? Or win about the same number of games?"

In the situation you are describing lists become irrelevant, in this situation what you bring is meaningless, I personally would start using bottlecaps instead of minis. Players who are better than you would still win players who are worse than you would still lose and close matches would be determined entirely by dice. The tournament meta becomes spamming the cheapest unit in $ and bragging about how cost effective your army is.

"Balance" (however you define it) is only one part of the equation. Skill counts. Luck counts. Terrain counts. Mood and fatigue count. Mistakes count. Army selection and suitability counts: an antitank gun is not going to be as effective against massed infantry: doesn't mean it's unbalanced. You get my drift....

Two examples. My grots wiped out his terminators. But that's not the whole picture. The whole picture is that it took all the shooting of 2 grot squads to take down the last terminator, after they'd been bombed, zapped, and dakka'd by 4 mobz. But the grots still got the last kill. In my mind, that's balanced. Terminators are SUPPOSED to be hard to kill, but, shoot them enough, and they'll go down. Of course, the risk is that the rest of the army gets off scot free that round... you calculate the risk, and apply your tactics.

Second example: My ork list will table my Eldar opponent. Every. Single. Time. I have 5 flyers. He has no anti air. We played that game once (with 3 flyers) at his request to see what air was like. It was no fun. We won't play that combination again. The only was he could have won would have been to roll 6s for every snap shot, and he simply didn't have enough dakka for that.

Happy gaming!

The main idea of 'balance' is that each army should have the basic tools necessary to beat whatever any other army might throw at them. Now, that doesn't mean that some armies will respond in the same way to each kind of threat, nor does it mean that each army will have the same amount of ease/difficulty responding to those threats. Only that any competently built list should, when played appropriately, have the tools to at least take any situation on. Moreover, that there should be more than a single given approach to list building for each codex, so that every unit gets a chance to shine at something (at the very least, each available troop choice should be something you can develop an army around thematically). One army might excel at something that another has comparatively poor responses to, but so long as a viable response actually exists, some disparity in matchups is acceptable and inevitable.

The problem with 40k's lack of balance comes from two primary places:

1. Some armies have options that are just straight up universally better than others. Really simple concept here. The power creep has gotten out of control, and a lot of armies just lack the power and efficiency to keep up with what the top dogs can throw their way. This problem needs to be addressed by confronting the constant brinksmanship that is pushed with nearly every new codex release.

2. The breadth of unit types and options has grown ever wider, and it simply has become too much. There are far too many niches that need to be adapted to and countered for all but the most degenerate of armies to handle. We have light infantry, heavy infantry, light vehicles, heavy vehicles, flyers, titans, monstrous creatures, beatstick characters, psykers, and a whole list of augments and unit types in between that all can require very different methods of disposal. With all that in mind, building a take-all-corners list can be a daunting task, especially for weaker armies that don't come with excessive brute force and clearly weren't designed with that consideration in the first place. 40k has to become smaller. Send flyers and titans back to Apocalypse, where they belong. Make psykers less oppressive, and more of an accent and nuance to an army, rather than a game dominating force of nature. The less roles we have to balance the game around, the easier it becomes to balance.

This poll is as vague as the last one you posted.

If all the armies were balanced then in theory everyone would win the same amount of games. That won't happen because playing a game is more than just balance, it's rolling for mission, deployment, rolling for reserves, failing charges, guessing what your opponents going to do, a million over decisions that will effect the game.

 Melissia wrote:
They won't slaughter a legion of Orks before the Orks get stuck in combat, nor will they slaughter a hefty platoon of guardsmen before they can erase the marine squad in question, to give just two examples. I never said grav wasn't really damn good, but it's not OH MY FUGGING GAWD RUN FOR DA FUGGIN' HEELS RUHN FER YOHR LAAAIIIIIVES! material, either, which you're pretending it is. It's not an "I win" button. Hell, the strongest army in the game doesn't even have grav weapons, if I'm not mistaken (pretty sure Eldar doesn't anyway).

Ehm... Marines and Eldar are actually pretty tied for the title of strongest contender, and Eldar have D-weapons in abundance (which something that should be balanced, I just don't feel clean anymore after fielding wraithguard).


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 Grimgold wrote:
I love honesty test, and I see I'm the only one who selected I might win less. Really? No one plays eldar, marines, tau or summoning demon hordes? I'm on a 20 game win streak, that would be much harder to accomplish with a codex that was simply middling (like say straight dark angels or orks). I'd like to think I'm a decent player, but having a codex north of the balance point is also very helpful. If all codices were equal I should have lost some on bad rolls alone, or had an opponent better able to capitalize on a mistake I made and pull a win out. This entire threads theme is "My codex is fine, you guys are the problem".

I play eldar, but that doesn't mean I min max. While not downright bad, the other choices are not gamebreakingly strong. Eldar have always been a mono-build army for winning purposes. If you don't do scat/warp/knight spam you really aren't OP. Strong and good, but nowhere close to OP.

 Rolsheen wrote:
This poll is as vague as the last one you posted.

If all the armies were balanced then in theory everyone would win the same amount of games. That won't happen because playing a game is more than just balance, it's rolling for mission, deployment, rolling for reserves, failing charges, guessing what your opponents going to do, a million over decisions that will effect the game.

Skill?

It's pretty significant. Can take the most broken internet wisdom list and still lose to a bunch of grots that outscored you.

I might offer an alternate route of thought in order to answer Traditio's original question that boils down to two points:

(1) If your army relies on the 'abuse' of game mechanics such as powerful (that are often also considered OP) Command Benefits of Formations, then a balanced 40K game system will at least noticeably reduce the effectiveness of your army as a general rule. Similarly, a severely underpowered army list will generally become better. I say this using the broadest strokes possible since being much more specific will mean little since we currently don't know what a balance 40k game system looks like.

(2) As for my current lists specifically (or any other people's current lists for that matter), it is nearly impossible to say since, as aforementioned, we have no idea what a balanced 40k game system looks like.

I'm not claiming that there's a causal relationship...but it is nonetheless worth noting:

Has anyone noticed that the percentages, so far, between "I should be winning more games if this stupid game were balanced" and "I'd win about the same number of games (sure you would, buddy, keep on believing that)" is basically the same as the percentage between people who are and are not basically satisfied with the game?


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ERJAK wrote:In the situation you are describing lists become irrelevant, in this situation what you bring is meaningless, I personally would start using bottlecaps instead of minis. Players who are better than you would still win players who are worse than you would still lose and close matches would be determined entirely by dice. The tournament meta becomes spamming the cheapest unit in $ and bragging about how cost effective your army is.

IoW:

"I like pay-to-win. I have an expensive army and feel like I should have an advantage because I purchased the DLC."

 Traditio wrote:
IoW:

"I like pay-to-win. I have an expensive army and feel like I should have an advantage because I purchased the DLC."

No, that's not what they said at all. If all lists are equally likely to win (because perfect balance) and the only difference is how much the models cost then the only strategy in list-building is to put the cheapest possible combination of models on the table. This has nothing to do with the current state of the game, where it isn't at all "pay to win" and it's very easy to build an army that costs a lot of money but loses every game against more competitive lists.

This is a bizarre poll indeed. It's vague to the point of uselessness. Have another useless data point in your data set.

Assuming "perfect balance" (whatever that actually means) and a large enough sample of games that luck is not a factor there is only one correct answer:

My win rate would be determined by my skill (both at playing and list building since we're still allowing enough freedom to take bad armies in this perfectly balanced utopia) relative to my opponents' skill. Since the OP has no way of knowing the skill level of the respondents relative to their opponents you can't really draw any conclusions from the poll.

That's a massively subjective question, OP.

If the game is perfectly balanced, it all comes down to player skill, yes?

Let's look at X-Wing, a game often lauded for good balance (despite issues you have to pay to fix. Like the A-Wing and TIE Advanced...). An experienced player will usually beat an inexperienced player. But, the flaw here is that when I took it up as a Johnny Come-Lately in Wave 4, my opponents we so good at the game, I learned nothing from my losses. I honestly couldn't say what I did wrong, or what my opponent did right. They were just all over me. So it's a balanced game (for the most part....and if your opponent is a bit difficult, victory can also go to he with the deepest pockets), but that doesn't mean I walk into any game with so much as the glimmer of a chance of winning.

Another poll brought to us by the prophet of the last and only edition (5th).

His Bland Spam is morally superior to every other kind.

He is the Amish of 40k players.

The poll is meaningless unless you are Traditio in which case you twist the results to indicate that the majority of players do not want Grav, deamons SHV SHW giant stompy robots, Gladius, Bikes, Super Suits, Psykers in normal games of 40K.

Anyone not voting his way is either WAAC or trolling.




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 IllumiNini wrote:
I might offer an alternate route of thought in order to answer Traditio's original question that boils down to two points:

(1) If your army relies on the 'abuse' of game mechanics such as powerful (that are often also considered OP) Command Benefits of Formations, then a balanced 40K game system will at least noticeably reduce the effectiveness of your army as a general rule. Similarly, a severely underpowered army list will generally become better. I say this using the broadest strokes possible since being much more specific will mean little since we currently don't know what a balance 40k game system looks like.

(2) As for my current lists specifically (or any other people's current lists for that matter), it is nearly impossible to say since, as aforementioned, we have no idea what a balanced 40k game system looks like.

I would broadly agree. We have no idea what a balanced rule set looks like.

I'd for sure win more since both army I use are not very good in the current meta and I have a lot of variety of models I like to use eich generally put me at a disadvantage eince I'm not spamming that 1 unit that id good in my codex.

Defs would win more games. And also using cheesy units make people braindead with tactics. Why bother being tactical when you clearly know your deathstar is going to stomp a lower tier codex anyways.

IllumiNini sums it up pretty well, indeed. Armies that are -at the moment- considered 'mediocre' or 'bad' would become more viable, whilst the 'top' lists would become less effective.

Not sure what the point of the poll is, though.

 Traditio wrote:
I'm not claiming that there's a causal relationship...but it is nonetheless worth noting:

Has anyone noticed that the percentages, so far, between "I should be winning more games if this stupid game were balanced" and "I'd win about the same number of games (sure you would, buddy, keep on believing that)" is basically the same as the percentage between people who are and are not basically satisfied with the game?

What does this even mean? Are you trying to say that people who are satisfied with the game are the same as those who claim they'd win more/the same amount of games? Because there's absolutely no reason to think that that is the case.

It also depends entirely on the mission and it's objectives.

AoS has much better balance so far. Yes, it's imperfect, but the battle plans and how you win mean it's less about what you've taken than how you use it.

I voted that I'd win more games. Only because I think I've not won more that 3 or 4 in the last two years. Half of them have been close to tie games the other half lost by a third or more in points, the worse losses coming from the TAU. The closest games against Space Wolves, Raven Guard legion and White Scars.
One thing I focus on for building my lists is points allocation.
I try to get the most out of every unit for the least amount of points. Which isn't that hard to do with codex Orks.