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 Zweischneid wrote:

Than why aren't you playing Chess instead of 40K? If balance is the key to fun, Chess should be infinitely more fun than 40K? Infact, game design itself would be a pointless pursuit. It'd be largely impossible to ever create a game that is more "fun" than Chess or Go, since they come rather close to perfect balance.

But I play Chess too. Actually I play all the games I mentioned you, and many more. And new games are always welcomed. Also all my family and lots of friends plays chess too. Far more people have fun playing chess than playing 40k.

However I do not play tournaments. I know hundreds of people who play chess and I don´t know a single one who goes to tournaments. Everyone play "for fun". And we have lots of fun! That doesn´t mean that Chess is "the perfect game" in any sense. It has good things (like balance) and bad things. I didn´t say that balance is all, I said balance is quite important.

So why would I play 40k? For me, it is the setting, the background, the models, and all the crazy things going on... But it is not a perfect game at all. It has a lot of problems, and unbalance is, by far, the biggest one. The lack of balance is a bad thing: it turns games that should have been for fun into tournament-style matches where the one who bring the new combo wins at the cost of being branded TFG. It gives a sense of unfairness and unsportmanship that shouldn´t be there.

In many cities there are parks with chairs and tables with a chess board on it. You can go and play with a complete stranger. Lots of people have fun, and rages and arguments are really rare. Now imagine what would happen if you go to such a place and the person in front of you shows you a letter signed by the company who did the table saying that he is allowed to do two movements for each one of yours because he paid some money to the company. Nobody would play with this person, and if this is the norm almost nobody would go there. It would be as empty as a GW store, with just a handful of players, most of them having bought unfair advantages (and the occasional noob), having endless discussions about which barely legal combo will win the day.



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 Zweischneid wrote:

Starcraft was build on balance, largely because it was made before Blizzard got (really) big. Starcraft II is build on imbalance like all professionally designed video games.

Starcraft II is build on imbalance? So a single faction is so better than the others that everyone plays it? Are you sure?




Automatically Appended Next Post:
And people complaining that Starcraft II is unbalanced is complaining. It is not a good thing for anyone. People who believe that is not getting fun. From their point of view it is a fail, and thus they quit the game and try to convince people not to buy it. And how could it be otherwise? If a person wants to play Terrans and Terrans are completely useless, this person is not suddenly going to like Zerg.

Well said but remember in balanced games both sides are equal to the point where at best you get to choose which colour you are. Dont get me wrong risk and chess is great but to acheive balance GW would have to give everything a near similar statline and all the guns the same stats etc.

FoW as an example in my opinion has acheived balance between variation and game balance. They do this by making most of the guns the same, units the same attirbutes and so on, but you still get to make faction choices that change how you play. Playing as the red guy in risk mens just as much as playing the yellow guy for example. Playing Orks is completely different to playing Space Marines and so on.

I for one am fine with the inbalance because its a result of getting huge amounts of customization on the feild beyond colour or meaningless symbols such as monopoly etc.

Thats why i dont blame GW as much as i blame the players that make crazy combos etc and table people for no real gain and all.

Back to the point of FoW, there is very little choice in how you customize your platoons a lot of the time, however with a Guard squad i can combine units, add commissars, change up the weapons and so on. FoW i can usually add an extra team per platoon... Huge difference in customization and variation.

So GW at the end of the day has merely given us the freedom to make our armies and customize them as we please but as a result there are lots of possibilities to create OP units and combinations. Unless everyone is fine with closing the gap of difference between the factions then balance is something that wont work so its up to us players to make the game fun more balanced.

Happily prove me wrong though its just something i have noticed.

 Zweischneid wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
If all units are equally viable, there's no meta. How could there? Choosing X or Y would make no difference whatsoever.

You're making the extremely common mistake in assuming that balanced means the same.
It's absolutely incorrect. It means that for every strength there's an equally important weakness. All units are equally viable, but a meta evolves to exploit the weaknesses of the units being used. In fact a system like this shifts the meta far more often - in computer games the meta will shift over the course of a game.

Not really. If all strengths, advantages, etc.. are perfectly off-set by weaknesses, disadvantages, etc.. of the same measure, there's no metagame. In the sum, overall, the spread would still be even as no particular unit, army, etc.. would stand out.

The meta starts rolling when one particular unit - Unit A - is slightly above-average (despite having a weakness). People flock to this unit/army/etc.. because it is better than average. At that point, people discover unit B, which has a particular strength that exploits the particular weakness of Unit A and/or counters the particular unit B. Thus, while Unit A is slightly better than average, it becomes relatively weaker as people start to flock to Unit B. Then there is Unit C that offers particular advantages vs. Unit B. etc.., etc...

You still need that initial imbalance to kick the meta off. If all are equal (after subtracting (or adding?) weaknesses from strengths) you're still sitting at nothing. And if the meta ever slows down, you need to give it a kick with a new imbalance in the system.

No, the meta starts rolling when the better players start using a particular unit/choice effectively. Then other players start to use either the same unit in order to try and emulate success, or the units that are available in order to counter the dominant list/force/deck/whatever.

Once the environment reaches the stage where the counter unit is so common that it renders the original concept no longer viable, the players start to move on to something which counters the counter, again, typically in a cascade pattern from the better players to the "less good."

None of this is inherently predicated on any unit being unbalanced or overpowered, in fact it works best when every option has proportional strengths and weaknesses.

 Swastakowey wrote:
Well said but remember in balanced games both sides are equal to the point where at best you get to choose which colour you are. Dont get me wrong risk and chess is great but to acheive balance GW would have to give everything a near similar statline and all the guns the same stats etc.

FoW as an example in my opinion has acheived balance between variation and game balance. They do this by making most of the guns the same, units the same attirbutes and so on, but you still get to make faction choices that change how you play. Playing as the red guy in risk mens just as much as playing the yellow guy for example. Playing Orks is completely different to playing Space Marines and so on.

I for one am fine with the inbalance because its a result of getting huge amounts of customization on the feild beyond colour or meaningless symbols such as monopoly etc.

Thats why i dont blame GW as much as i blame the players that make crazy combos etc and table people for no real gain and all.

Back to the point of FoW, there is very little choice in how you customize your platoons a lot of the time, however with a Guard squad i can combine units, add commissars, change up the weapons and so on. FoW i can usually add an extra team per platoon... Huge difference in customization and variation.

So GW at the end of the day has merely given us the freedom to make our armies and customize them as we please but as a result there are lots of possibilities to create OP units and combinations. Unless everyone is fine with closing the gap of difference between the factions then balance is something that wont work so its up to us players to make the game fun more balanced.

Happily prove me wrong though its just something i have noticed.

You are not wrong. I do believe a certain unbalance keeps the game crazy and extra-fun. There are times when games like Chess or Risk get repetitive.

However, I think GW pushes it way too far. It is not that difficult to make some changes via FAQ and nerf the worst combos, as well as buffing up some useless units. And the lack (or excess) of interest showed in some factions makes the game quite unfair for some players. Compare the last Sisters of Battle codex with the 5th edition Codex Grey Knights, let alone the last Space Marine Codex. When a 5th edition daemon player loses in turn 1 against a GK player is not fun. When a Sisters of Battle player faces 6 Necron fliers or 3+ Vendettas it is not fun. Playing against a 4 Riptide Tau or a Screamerstar with most armies is just not fun.

And passing the problem to the players is not a solution. It is a "survival of the jerk" situation where the only one having fun and coming back for more is the odd WAAC player.


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 azreal13 wrote:

No, the meta starts rolling when the better players start using a particular unit/choice effectively. Then other players start to use either the same unit in order to try and emulate success, or the units that are available in order to counter the dominant list/force/deck/whatever.

Once the environment reaches the stage where the counter unit is so common that it renders the original concept no longer viable, the players start to move on to something which counters the counter, again, typically in a cascade pattern from the better players to the "less good."

None of this is inherently predicated on any unit being unbalanced or overpowered, in fact it works best when every option has proportional strengths and weaknesses.

^This. If all options are more of less at the same level, the meta works perfectly. Clearly overpowered options erase local variables and give us copy-pasted, boring lists repeated over and over. What´s the point of evolving or trying new stuff if it is clear which one is the better option?

 azreal13 wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
If all units are equally viable, there's no meta. How could there? Choosing X or Y would make no difference whatsoever.

You're making the extremely common mistake in assuming that balanced means the same.
It's absolutely incorrect. It means that for every strength there's an equally important weakness. All units are equally viable, but a meta evolves to exploit the weaknesses of the units being used. In fact a system like this shifts the meta far more often - in computer games the meta will shift over the course of a game.

Not really. If all strengths, advantages, etc.. are perfectly off-set by weaknesses, disadvantages, etc.. of the same measure, there's no metagame. In the sum, overall, the spread would still be even as no particular unit, army, etc.. would stand out.

The meta starts rolling when one particular unit - Unit A - is slightly above-average (despite having a weakness). People flock to this unit/army/etc.. because it is better than average. At that point, people discover unit B, which has a particular strength that exploits the particular weakness of Unit A and/or counters the particular unit B. Thus, while Unit A is slightly better than average, it becomes relatively weaker as people start to flock to Unit B. Then there is Unit C that offers particular advantages vs. Unit B. etc.., etc...

You still need that initial imbalance to kick the meta off. If all are equal (after subtracting (or adding?) weaknesses from strengths) you're still sitting at nothing. And if the meta ever slows down, you need to give it a kick with a new imbalance in the system.

No, the meta starts rolling when the better players start using a particular unit/choice effectively. Then other players start to use either the same unit in order to try and emulate success, or the units that are available in order to counter the dominant list/force/deck/whatever.

Once the environment reaches the stage where the counter unit is so common that it renders the original concept no longer viable, the players start to move on to something which counters the counter, again, typically in a cascade pattern from the better players to the "less good."

None of this is inherently predicated on any unit being unbalanced or overpowered, in fact it works best when every option has proportional strengths and weaknesses.

Was going to elaborate upon it but... azreal you took the words out of my mouth!

 da001 wrote:

And people complaining that Starcraft II is unbalanced is complaining. It is not a good thing for anyone.

So people complaining about Starcraft II being unbalanced are all wrong, and the game is balanced.

But the people complaining about 40K being unbalanced are all right, and the game is indeed unbalanced.

You guys really cherry-pick the way to make it just the way you like it, don't you?

 Zweischneid wrote:

 da001 wrote:

And people complaining that Starcraft II is unbalanced is complaining. It is not a good thing for anyone.

So people complaining about Starcraft II being unbalanced are all wrong, and the game is balanced.

But the people complaining about 40K being unbalanced are all right, and the game is indeed unbalanced.

You guys really cherry-pick the way to make it just the way you like it, don't you?

Perfect imbalance is a video game concept to "force" meta changes within the game. I believe that you are correct that SC II is developed with this concept in mind.

Perfect imbalance works in video games because everyone that buys the game has equal access to all races and all units.

Perfect imbalance even works in TCG or LCG games for the same reasons: theoretically every player has the same level of access to all the cards in a game.

Perfect imbalance, IF (and that is a big IF), it was ever applied to a miniature wargame, would be a broken and idiotic game design concept because a player has to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to adapt to these forced meta-changes.

Either way, for that type of game design philosophy (or any other), to work, you would have to start from a perfectly understandable and clear foundation (from a mathematical perspective), so that the designers could then introduce precise changes to affect the balance of the game. GW's current crop of "randomize everything" rules aren't nowhere near clear enough from a mathematical perspective to make that type of design possible and even if it did, the rules are so poorly and terribly written that one simply cannot assume that the people that come up with them have any real idea of what advanced game design concepts like "perfect imbalance" even are, let alone how they should be implemented...

 Zweischneid wrote:

 da001 wrote:

And people complaining that Starcraft II is unbalanced is complaining. It is not a good thing for anyone.

So people complaining about Starcraft II being unbalanced are all wrong, and the game is balanced.

But the people complaining about 40K being unbalanced are all right, and the game is indeed unbalanced.

You guys really cherry-pick the way to make it just the way you like it, don't you?

Guilty as charged.

There is no single unit in SC II that is as abusive as the WS. If you don't understand that, then you know nothing about SC II.

Starcraft brood war was balanced. However you must understand that each race had a portion of itself or a unit that was overpowered. But these units while overpowered had distinct and exploitable weaknesses. For example.

Terran: The Siege tank. A unit with extremely high damage both single target and splash. Also it was built from a common facility so a large number could be built quickly. A line of tanks was very difficult to break because of the tremendous amount of damage that was put out.

However the downside. To get that damage you had to sacrifice mobility. Not just a little all of it you were completely immobile. You had no defense against air and even a large line of tanks could be exploited by flanking and attacking from multiple angles to spread out the damage.

Now lets look at the wave serpent. It has mobility by being a fast vehicle. It has defenses with the shield. It has above average firepower for a transport. Yeah its a transport as well allowing it to take troops to critical locations (objectives).

However its downside is...
...
wait what is its downside again? I have not seen one. There is no comparable disadvantage or exploitable trait that limits the effectiveness of the wave serpent.

Wave Serpents are direct only!

Its balance through inaccessability!

You can't buy them en masse from a discounter, only at full price from their own website.

Yeah, that'll keep things positioned nicely.

 FirePainter wrote:
Starcraft brood war was balanced. However you must understand that each race had a portion of itself or a unit that was overpowered. But these units while overpowered had distinct and exploitable weaknesses. For example.

Terran: The Siege tank. A unit with extremely high damage both single target and splash. Also it was built from a common facility so a large number could be built quickly. A line of tanks was very difficult to break because of the tremendous amount of damage that was put out.

However the downside. To get that damage you had to sacrifice mobility. Not just a little all of it you were completely immobile. You had no defense against air and even a large line of tanks could be exploited by flanking and attacking from multiple angles to spread out the damage.

Now lets look at the wave serpent. It has mobility by being a fast vehicle. It has defenses with the shield. It has above average firepower for a transport. Yeah its a transport as well allowing it to take troops to critical locations (objectives).

However its downside is...
...
wait what is its downside again? I have not seen one. There is no comparable disadvantage or exploitable trait that limits the effectiveness of the wave serpent.

This is spot on.

Although I'm not quite in the Peregrine camp of believing GW doesn't play test at all, I am in the camp that something is certainly amiss. A few potential issues *might* be that their play testers are ineffective, they rules authors don't properly deal with the information that comes back or the play testers aren't given all of the necessary information to work with.

By ineffective play testers I mean either those people can't read or they simply run the book through a few games and are done. Point of order: grav guns. You'd think the number 1 new gun for Marines would be exceedingly clear on how it works against mixed armor unit types. This is a very common setup. Common enough that it would have been brought up in the middle of the first game.

That said, I get the feeling that there are several rules and/or units which simply never get over to the play test group at all. Mandrakes in the DE codex comes to mind. Had that unit been play tested it would have been apparent that the entire unit would need to be tweaked or it wouldn't sell... Another unit are the Hell drakes. Those rules feel like they were made up simply to ensure the sale of models with zero regard for playability.

Given GW's secrecy policy, my guess is that play testers are simply not given the whole story and certain units/rules are withheld as internal only or made up last minute based on sales policies. I'd love to talk to one of the SM play testers to see if my guess is accurate; but I doubt any of them would discuss it.

I think the secrecy policy does come into it but in a way that play testers aren't sourced from outside the company. You can test your own game a hundred times and you will think it is perfect with no holes in it. Throw it out into the public and all of a sudden you'll be informed of mechanics that don't work, badly worded rules and broken combinations that you never thought of but are wholly within the rules you wrote.

A combination of a much larger number of people testing it and people going into the game with only the rules you've provided and not your vision of how things are meant to work allow players to find things wrong with the game. I think the latter is very important here as in rules thread there is always a discussion of RAI vs RAW. I'm sure the writer would read their rule and know exactly what it means but when we read the rule exactly as it is written without their insight we have to guess at what we think they want to happen.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 da001 wrote:

And people complaining that Starcraft II is unbalanced is complaining. It is not a good thing for anyone.

So people complaining about Starcraft II being unbalanced are all wrong, and the game is balanced.

But the people complaining about 40K being unbalanced are all right, and the game is indeed unbalanced.

You guys really cherry-pick the way to make it just the way you like it, don't you?

I think this reasoning is unfair. Most players consider W40k completely broken regarding balance and most players consider Starcraft (both of them) an example of balance. Of course there are exceptions, the internet is big. But look at the tournaments:
Starcraft is quite balanced:
w40k is unbalanced: Of course this is debatable, but I don´t think I am cherry-picking.

Also this is about external balance (Codex 1 vs Codex 2) balance. The internal balance (mutilators vs heldrakes, pyrovores vs tervigons) is even worst.

More important: my point in the sentence you quoted was that those complaining about unbalance are upset. They stop playing the game. Unbalance is perceived as a really bad thing, because the sense of unfairness and unsportmanship associated with it.

On topic again, I don´t think GW cares about play-testing. They follow the "rule of cool". Two reasons:
1) If they did, the mistakes are so glaring that they are doing it wrong. It is difficult to achieve a good balance, but it would be easy to detect things like heldrakes or pyrovores. Just a few tries and you detect such things.
2) More important: they know the most glaring mistakes a week after the Codex is released, because players quickly detect them and post them on the internet. But they do not fix them. It is obvious that the Vendetta, the Pyrovore, the Mandrake or the Heldrake need help, but they are not fixing it. Also keep in mind that they are losing money because of that, quite obviously in the case of the "useless" units.

About the "rule of cool" goal. If the writer likes the army, it gets overpowered.
If you look at the Adepta Sororitas Codex and the Space Marine Codex, written at the same time, I think it is quite obvious that one of them has lots of effort on it, while the other is something any fan could do in about four hours. One of them have many things changed to make the army cooler at the cost of overpowering it, while the other seems to works in the opposite direction. In 5th edition, Codex Grey Knights and Codex Sisters of Battle proves this further. It is the clearest case, but there are more: Codex: Eldar and Codex: CSM are written by the same person.

I can´t believe Ward aimed for external balance when writing Codex: Grey Knights. Specially against Daemons.

I can´t believe Ward aimed for external balance when writing Codex: Grey Knights. Specially against Daemons.

Actually that was only one ability, if GK's had kept some of their old gear Daemons would be even more hosed now. Such as the famous ability to ignore Daemon Cover saves with psycannons.

Odd as it sounds, GK's actually became LESS effective against daemons when the codex hit, of course then again they were written when Daemons were still attached to CSM, and GK were just two units that allied into other codex's.

Which means that GW never really cared about balance. In any edition.

 Swastakowey wrote:
In my opinion 40k is an absolutely awesome game if you weed out all the power gamers and are left with a bunch of guys who choose units they enjoy and play competatively but to the point where everyone has fun.

Not GW fault entirely but the players who exploit the game who are at fault.

40k is most fun when you play in a regular group that has a consistent view on how to interpret the rules and are dedicated to having fun the same way with the game. It works least well and is the least fun in environments where you are always playing totally new opponents who have different interpretations of the rules and different opinions on how to get the most fun out of the game.

In more balanced games with better written rules I haven't found the same split and can more readily enjoy playing in my regular leagues with folks I know or at larger events against completely new people.

Skriker


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 Swastakowey wrote:
FoW as an example in my opinion has acheived balance between variation and game balance. They do this by making most of the guns the same, units the same attirbutes and so on, but you still get to make faction choices that change how you play. Playing as the red guy in risk mens just as much as playing the yellow guy for example. Playing Orks is completely different to playing Space Marines and so on.

Back to the point of FoW, there is very little choice in how you customize your platoons a lot of the time, however with a Guard squad i can combine units, add commissars, change up the weapons and so on. FoW i can usually add an extra team per platoon... Huge difference in customization and variation.

Ummm...there are limits on unit customization in Flames of War because they are based on historical units and not just made up. A german Volksgrendier platoon can't suddenly have flamethrowers in every squad because that didn't happen historically. Also, playing flames of war and unit characteristics is not even remotely the same as playing Risk. In Risk EVERY unit in one army is exactly the same as identical units in the opposing armies. That is not the same in flames of war. They haven't made "every gun the same" or given "all units the same attributes". Your description of FoW is not even remotely on target. What they did do is cost things consistently in each of the 3 war periods. Also units are broken up and kept strictly to their war periods. Rules are also consistent for each unit type with the addition of faction flavor to make them behave closer to their historical counterparts. You won't find lists with King tigers for Early war at all or with100 point King tigers for later war just because the list writer thought they are so cool and wanted to see more of them. Units that hit harder and are harder to destroy cost more. Units that are easily broken, easily targeted and so on cost less. This is how balance actually works. It isn't through homogenizing the armies across the game to be the same.

Playing Germans does play differently than playing Italians, or Russians or British or Americans. Romanians and Hungarians tend to play similarly to germans, but that is because they adopted a lot of german equipment and a lot of german doctrines for their armies thanks to german control. Even within the British there are different factions that play slightly differently from baseline British forces. Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, South Africans all have slightly different feels when played on the table. So there is just as much variety in FoW as in something like 40k. It is just that the differences are not big and flashy since every force was a human army during WWII. Kind of limits the extent you can take it to.

Skriker


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clively wrote:
By ineffective play testers I mean either those people can't read or they simply run the book through a few games and are done. Point of order: grav guns. You'd think the number 1 new gun for Marines would be exceedingly clear on how it works against mixed armor unit types. This is a very common setup. Common enough that it would have been brought up in the middle of the first game.

There is already a rule that tells you how to deal with units that have mixed armor types in a unit in the BRB. The grav gun doesn't need a separate special rule, it just needs to follow the one that already exists. It is that simple. That can just as easily apply to grav gun wound numbers as saving throws.

Skriker