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My own feelings are that it can’t be, the main and obvious reason is that it is fictional. You create a race like the Eldar and Necrons who are eons old, but then have to make them playable. Logic says that these races should be able to turn up on the battlefield and push everybody aside due to their technology. However in trying to make them playable you then allow in-balance to creep in. On the one hand you have the star cannon & bright-lance, but you then have troops running around with a catapult weapon, which stats aren’t that impressive.

Logic says for the younger races to beat them they would have to swamp them with numbers. Their weapons should be that powerful, that you should need a ratio of at least 3 to 1 to beat them. However to stop making them an uberforce that nobody wants to play against, GW mutilates them.

All this means is that in making the new alien race attractive you have to give it some nice shiney weapons, but have to neuter them or add restrictions to control them. It’s the same with some of the stats used for representing the models themselves. Again using the Eldar as an example, the fight skills should be right off the scale. You have a long lived race who should have hundreds of years experience per trooper. I can understand that they could be physically weaker than a SM, but they should be blistering fast and skilled.

Anybody who wants to create a rule-set for a WWII knows that he doesn’t have to worry about genetically or alien enhanced troops. The weapons are all about the same when it comes to performance (or in the case of Tiger & Panther tanks, production restrictions control how many you can field), troop quality can be easily represented, there are no armour saves.

This isn’t a moan about the system just a reflection on why we could always be chasing the perfect Codex and why gamers will always be able to manipulate army lists.

Eh, I don't think all that really has anything to do with why 40k isn't balanced/balanceable. Giving Eldar technology so good that an opponent would "need a ratio of at least 3 to 1 to beat them" would not make them an uberforce if they were, guess what, 3 times as expensive. You're barking up the wrong tree, IMO.

The quick answer is yes.

- G

Absolutely it can be balanced. Step 1 is to separate the fiction from the rules. That doesn't mean "give everyone the same stats, only these guys are in powered armor, and these guys have pointy ears."

The biggest problem 40k has is that their point system is based solely on what "feels right" to the designers. They didn't consciously sit down and go "each marine is worth exactly 2.5x an Imperial Guardsman." But they should have.

A good place to start is to begin with a basic statline (say, a Guardsman).
Now assign points to modifications to that statline - +1 BS increases shooting accuracy by 1/3, so maybe that's worth 1/3 of the base value; +1 Ld increases leadership test success by so much, so modify, etc.

Now playtest for a while, and see how your balance is, both in small and large scale, at range and in hth. Modify points a bit, to remain close to parity.

Next, start handing out weapons. Start with a lasgun. Add points based on the improvement the weapon gives.

Now playtest for a while, and see how your balance is, both in small and large scale, at range and in hth. Modify points a bit, to remain close to parity.

Start introducing specific kinds of special rules. Start with your "feels right" values for things like ATSKNF, the Guard Leadership bubble, and Fearless.

Now playtest for a while, and see how your balance is, both in small and large scale, at range and in hth. Modify points a bit, to remain close to parity.

More special rules.

Now playtest for a while, and see how your balance is, both in small and large scale, at range and in hth. Modify points a bit, to remain close to parity.

Introduce vehicles.

Now playtest for a while, and see how your balance is, both in small and large scale, at range and in hth. Modify points a bit, to remain close to parity.

See the trend? Each development step should involve a complete check of what your new rule has done to game balance, and tweaks until it "fits." Note that "parity" doesn't require equivalence - you can choose, for example, to give Guardsmen an edge at ranged combat, but a disadvantage at close combat, while Marines are decent across the board. Individual units can be introduced for specialized roles, but they need to be checked both by themselves, and as part of a larger force. Force multipliers (Guard Leadership is a good example) need lots of testing, as they scale up with the size of the army.

A lot of the small-scale checking can be done with a spreadsheet. Even things like cover save modifiers can be broadly addressed, by assigning probabilities for certain types of cover available (case 1: 25% of the board is cover, of which 50% is 5+ area, and assuming a predisposition of the player to put a unit with cover-enhancing rules in cover at least 75% of the time; case 1: 25% of the board is cover, of which 20% is 4+ area, and assuming a predisposition of the player to put a unit with cover-enhancing rules in cover at least 75% of the time; etc.).

It's a long process. But it doesn't have to be a hard one. Once you've got a base model worked out, it's actually fairly straightforward to create something new, by starting with the appropriate base template and modifying from there.

A lot of balancing can be done by mathematical models. There is also the concept of a balanced force and this is more difficult. For example, a few people have been complaining in other threads that their H2H units find it hard to hit skimmers. The answer to this is to put more anti-tank weapons in your list.

100 points of sword-swingers is not necessarily balanced against 100 points of rifle shooters. Players should be allowed to weight their list one way or the other, but they should also have the chance to put in stuff to cover their areas of weakness. In other words, using force selection for balance.

This balancing needs to be considered against the desire to give each army a different flavour. Let's take Tau. They are rubbish in H2H and their slightly longer range weapon does not compensate. But a clever Tau player can mechanise his force to keep his puny infantry out of the enemy's claws, then use manoeuvre and firepower to compensate for his lack of assault strength. Orks OTOH are good in assault but not as good at shooting, but they have strength of numbers which allows them to use weight of fire to compensate for low accuracy.

Good subject.....however, I'd like to see the opposite of what is proposed here (balance)...as I'd like to see some huge inbalanceies!

Space Marines should be Uber bad ass, exactly like the fluff says....you already have unit limitations, so why not...surely thats the whole point of only having a hundred battle brothers per chapter...cause they are so bad ass!

I'd like to see IG being much cheaper (points wise and £$£ wise) so you can field hundreds of them.....theres your balance I guess...and its keeping with the fluff!

Its poo that you read the fluff and novels where Space Marines are like the baddest thing since Master Chief (HALO) and yet you go play and look at the stats and they're a couple of points ahead of your average IG trooper...wow, super human my arse!

Delephont, none of those examples would be imbalanced if they were priced accordingly. Uber SMs? Sure! 30 points each, let's say?

(However, that creates the problem of ludicrous real-world price differences between armies. I'm fine with that, but from anecdotal evidence, I think it would piss off a lot of non-SM players.)

I really think that this question, like almost everything else, is subjective.

Do *I* think it'll ever be balanced? No.

Know why?

Because "balanced" is always going to be used by (most) gamers as an opinion.
As a result, you will NEVER have a game that everyone agrees is balanced.

I take that back... you COULD have one, but you won't.

The only way you'll ever see it balanced (fluff aside) is if you come out with 1 rule book and 1 codex and the codex has 1 entry for each unit type and a notation on what the unit is called, depending on what kind of army you play.

Of course, you could only have 1 unit for each force org chart, otherwise, people will complain about certain units being more or less balanced thatn other unit types in the same force org slot.

It would SUCK, but it would be balanced...

Eric

Can the game be balanced? Yes it can. Will the game be balanced? Probably not. Balancing a game is a tremendous amount of work. I've been doing some work on it with H.B.M.C. and the guys on the revisited project and let me tell you, its not easy. However GW could certainly do a better job. Math plays a large role in determining what's good and what isn't. Unfortunately GW doesn't employ mathematical models in their assessment of unit values. They might catch on though, so I'm holding out hope.

As for imbalances, you can balance things out to the fluff in a number of ways. Wide disparities in the quality of troops and equipment are all possible in the game while maintaining balance. I wouldn't mind seeing marines be super tough uber soldiers sort of like they are in Inquisitor (they kill everyone). It would be fluffy and could be a lot of fun. The balance side of it though would require them to be crazy expensive. Rather than costing a mere 15 points, they might cost 50 points each or something like that, depending on just how powerful they are. The same thing goes for things like the eldar. Their base troops might be kind of joe with stats similar to basic humans (IG) and thus be priced the same, but then when you start piling in advanced weaponry and the like, the price just goes up to accommodate for it. Most imbalances in the game can be fixed with a price adjustment, its just tricky finding out what exactly that price needs to be.

The other major headache is things that are force multipliers. IG leadership bubble gear, the eldar avatar's fearless aura, the necron res orb, and the space marine commander leadership 10 projection are all examples of things that do not scale in price but their effectiveness scales with the size of the game. You pay a fixed point cost to get them but the usefulness of each increases with the size of your army. Things like this either need to be scaled in price with the point value of the game or limited to only being taken in games of a certain size (and priced according to their usefulness in games of that size).

Something else that would be so incredibly useful, although only when releasing a new edition instead of codecii, would be scrapping this backwards compatability nonsense. 6th Ed. WHFB and the Ravening Hordes book were a perfect example of releasing a rules set with basic, balanced army lists, and then working from there, with the expectation that the set will last 5+ years or whatever. The book, because it was made at the same time as the rules, re-balanced everything by taking the new rules into account, instead of the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants mentality that GW has adopted.

That being said, GW seems pretty dedicated to the backwards compatability idea. I know that the jump from 3rd to 4th in 40k and 6th to 7th in WHFB weren't huge jumps, but I still feel like Ravening Hordes style books released simultaneously with the new edition (less the two lists for the two armies in the starter set, which would have their own books) would have resulted in a greater sense of balance than what we have now.

3rd edition was a "hard reset" of the system.

Perhaps they can make something similar by 6th edition 40k. All the rumors
about 5th edition say nay, though.

(Good thing they're just rumors for now...)

40K can be balanced, just let Phil Kelly write all the codexi.


That way each army can have 2-3 Game breaking units/abilities/wargear that keeps the rest along the line.

Janthkin wrote:The biggest problem 40k has is that their point system is based solely on what "feels right" to the designers. They didn't consciously sit down and go "each marine is worth exactly 2.5x an Imperial Guardsman." But they should have.

A good place to start is to begin with a basic statline (say, a Guardsman).
Now assign points to modifications to that statline - +1 BS increases shooting accuracy by 1/3, so maybe that's worth 1/3 of the base value; +1 Ld increases leadership test success by so much, so modify, etc.

Bingo ! the "just feels right" rules writing is killing this game.

oh and they could just outsource the rules to a company that knows how to write a proper rule set.allowing them to focus on just making models.

bigchris1313 wrote:Something else that would be so incredibly useful, although only when releasing a new edition instead of codecii, would be scrapping this backwards compatability nonsense. 6th Ed. WHFB and the Ravening Hordes book were a perfect example of releasing a rules set with basic, balanced army lists, and then working from there, with the expectation that the set will last 5+ years or whatever. The book, because it was made at the same time as the rules, re-balanced everything by taking the new rules into account, instead of the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants mentality that GW has adopted.

I hear ya. I, for one, would really like to see army lists updated with the rules. When that happens you get less stupid crap happening due to rule changes nerfing or buffing things without appropreate point adjustments happening at the same time.

is life in the 41st lillenium balanced?? Well theirs your answer

The “point” of point-based army games in not to find balance, but to find huge configuration wins over other armies spending comparable points….the same methodology embraced by configurable-deck-card games. The appeal of games like 40K…to many players…isn’t the search for balance, but rather the hunt for the biggest advantage.

If you want balance have each side play the exact same force. (Ironically, the advantage would go to the player moving first, but those are the breaks.)

tesseract wrote:The “point” of point-based army games in not to find balance, but to find huge configuration wins over other armies spending comparable points….the same methodology embraced by configurable-deck-card games. The appeal of games like 40K…to many players…isn’t the search for balance, but rather the hunt for the biggest advantage.

If you want balance have each side play the exact same force. (Ironically, the advantage would go to the player moving first, but those are the breaks.)

What you say is true though it is not the whole of the story.

Obviously a pure H2H army with no AT weapons is at a big disadvantage versus a mechanised skimmer army -- this is what you call a configuration win for the skimmers, though in this case it is the H2H player's fault for not putting more AT weapons into his list.

Apart from this, there are clearly points imbalances built into 40K such that similarly configured armies from different factions can have a significant imbalance of power despite being theoretically balanced in composition. For instance, many Dakkites consider basic SMs to be undercosted by about 2 or 3 points each. This is a basic structural imbalance if true.

It is possibly to create a balanced, point-based system game system with diverse armies with interesting styles of play. FOW, AT-43, Warmachine/Hordes, and SST all point toward that, to one degree or another.

I don't think 40k will ever be balanced, because that's not what most of the fans want (aside the tournament/league players) nor what the design team want. They like the imbalance, the cheese factor, the spam of certain units/upgrades, or alternatively playing 'what looks cool' without any regard for effectiveness in the game. GW is not interested in true balance at this moment for the same reason that it's not interested in bringing prices down: to change both, or either, would require a complete paradigm shift for both the company and the majority of fans.

And, frankly, I've made my peace with that. GW 2nd Ed. was an imbalanced game, and you knew it walking in. It's only been since 3e that there has been some mythical, Platonic ideal of 40k espoused by some. What this means is that there's no 'voice' for balance in the game, except to play other things (Mongoose's statement that they specifically target 'post-GW players' is interesting in that regard). So I play other games that have worked out their identity issues (i.e. 'fun' game vs. balanced game), play 40k with a few friends for the nostalgia value and the familiarity, and just know what I'm getting into.

Ultimately 40K's core target market is 13 year old boys.

Wolfstan wrote:Can 40k ever be truly balanced?

No.

Jan posted somthing almost exactly like I would have. Designer need to base points values off of a base line. I would say use marines as the baseline since the game clearly revolves around them. Then they should use stats and math to figure this out. The fluff should be irrelevant.

You could use a Space Marine, or a Guardsman or a theoretical average.

You need to work out carefully how much each stat is worth. For instance, extra movmement is only worth something when a model moves. One way to do this is just total the value of all the stats, and make that the point value. Then you run into problems like with Leadership because it does not run on a linear scale.

The way to make the game work is decide what kind of armies are wanted, for example, Eldar, fast and high firepower but low defence, Tau, fast and high firepower, OK defence and bad H2H, then work out the stats for balance, then write the fluff to support it all.