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 Peregrine wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:
In nearly thirty years Magic the Gathering hasn't discovered the unshakable formula for balance.
Centuries old IGoUGo board games haven't got it either.

No, but they have come far closer than GW can even dream of. Don't fall into the trap of "nobody has perfect balance, so balance doesn't matter".

In what world (edition) has MTG ever been closer to balance than GW stuff? Really an honest question, I don't ever recall a time when even all colors could compete equally There are always huge net decks that win, there might be 5 at one time, but of all the possible decks this is a minimal amount. MTG wins out because it is much easier for people to trade out for the new net deck. This doesn't really work for 40k, where you spend a ton on an army, build, paint etc. People are not frequently jumping ship from one faction to another (some do, but most do not).

The balance between cards, and in general in magic, is and always has been terrible. The difference is that they rotate out broken combos, and people adjust because doing so is easy. If GW did that people would scream to high heaven. IF they said in 7th, well we see eldar with Warp spiders and Wraithknights are winning left and right, so those things are banned.

Now GW could do a better job of balance (8th is a giant step in the right direction compared to 7th), whether that will continue in a favorable direction with tweaks, new codices etc. or not remains to be seen. I'm hopeful that it will, but worried based on the past that codex releases will see balance go down the tubes.

Yeah I often hear the claim on the internet that magic is balanced, and then every time I go to a local thing with some buds they always tell me that 'we're all gonna lose anyways because we couldn't get our new decks built in time.'"

That doesn't scream balance to me, and neither does dividing magic up in to 3-5 (?) types of play in order to restrict or allow certain cards.

That's exactly like dividing 40k up by unit type and even army building and calling it balanced. (e.g. models created past 3rd edition aren't allowed at this tournament, this tournament only plays models released in 4th-5th and anything before or after is disallowed, this other tournament / play format only allows models released in 8th edition, etc).

 Peregrine wrote:
And how exactly do you make that work? It's unlikely that the Stormraven and AA are going to have equal point costs.

Regariding an alternating draft, a list has equal costs, say to 100 PL. Once one player hits 100 PL or as close as possible, they stop. Then the other player completes their list.

Is it less granular than points? It has to be. But the biggest "balance" factor here is how well the players draft against each other's selections. Points don't have to be the be-all, end-all of balance mechanisms. Imagine this format versus that Stormraven list.


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
That's exactly like dividing 40k up by unit type and even army building and calling it balanced. (e.g. models created past 3rd edition aren't allowed at this tournament, this tournament only plays models released in 4th-5th and anything before or after is disallowed, this other tournament / play format only allows models released in 8th edition, etc).

The best examples I can think of are Highlander formats, or the "No Retreat" comps in Europe (where DE could win in 7th).

Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.

Martel732 wrote:
Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.

Starcraft has a few things 40k lacks though, which I would argue makes balancing it easier:

1) Computer-assisted adjudication means games can be tested more quickly, and things can be adjusted more easily.
2) Wider playerbase means that imbalances (which do make it through testing obviously) are more easily spotted.
3) There are clearly counter units and 'best armies' (e.g. there are counters to Marine bio-balls that, if played against Terran mech, lose horribly) so armies can be reconfigured on the fly (tech-transitions) which in 40k they cannot - a Marine bio-ball just loses and goes home if it meets its counter.
4) The maps are controlled by the developers rather than the players involved; e.g. if a unit would be OP on planet bowling ball, the developers simply don't put a map in the rotation that is Planet Bowling Ball - in 40k, a super-shooting unit may be far less OP with more terrain on the board, but there is no way to guarantee players play with the requisite amount of terrain of the exact specifications to downgrade that unit's ability, as Starcraft can.

Those are just 4 mentions off the top of my head.

Martel732 wrote:
Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.

Not really because it still lacks the draw backs of balancing a minis game. If something gets nerfed, people can easily and cheaply adjust. There is much wider testing, much easier and cheaper to implement changes. StarCraft probably has more games played every day than 40k does in a year as far as what can easily be recorded as results for balancing.

Breng77 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.

Not really because it still lacks the draw backs of balancing a minis game. If something gets nerfed, people can easily and cheaply adjust. There is much wider testing, much easier and cheaper to implement changes. StarCraft probably has more games played every day than 40k does in a year as far as what can easily be recorded as results for balancing.

Starcraft also has a much smaller unit selection, but a lot of bizarre edgecase tactics that can come from how they interact. The game is also at times less about raw tactical forethought, so much as your ability to localize bullettime in your fingers and attain superhuman APM as you out-micro as well as out-macro. :(

I imagine Starfleet Battles is probably the best old-school analogy, just because both players have a frankly crazy set of moves available to them. From jury-rigging shuttle payloads in-game, to Tractor Beam shenanigans, to deciding when to overcharge your Warp Drives if you were Orion Pirates.

It's probably easier to balance Starcraft, but they also put in the effort.

40K desperately needs something like a tech-transition, though. Blind build sheet losses suck.

I also don't like the lack of temporal cost as a balancing factor.

GW could publish standardized competitive maps pretty easily, at least eliminating that factor.

Martel732 wrote:
It's probably easier to balance Starcraft, but they also put in the effort.

40K desperately needs something like a tech-transition, though. Blind build sheet losses suck.

I also don't like the lack of temporal cost as a balancing factor.

GW could publish standardized competitive maps pretty easily, at least eliminating that factor.

Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.

Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.

I know. It just seems so.... retro and inferior. And arbitrary. You can't even scout.

Why are we discussing an inferior RTS anyway instead of something good like 40k?

Established competetive maps is an interesting idea. Most tournament tables i see are incredibly sparse.

Martel732 wrote:
I know. It just seems so.... retro and inferior. And arbitrary. You can't even scout.

And yet we all play it.

Or I do. I guess I shouldn't assume someone on a 40k forum plays 40k.

Starcraft was imbalanced for years. Did you play online before the spawning pool got nerfed? It was an absolute joke, on small maps you could not defend. If you drew a Zerg opponent, and you weren't playing Zerg, you lost. End of story.

It wasn't until that game had been out for years did they actually start balancing it. But a computer game has a few advantages, namely they can track statistics much more easily, across the entire playerbase.

And in reality, most of the time you know what builds people are doing in Starcraft. That game comes down to micro control, and scouting for base locations. In a competitive environment your army build is pretty much predetermined. The better "micro & multitask" wins, the battle itself is an ancillary thing.

But that is neither here nor there.

I think the core question here is, should you have a 50/50 win chance in every game you play? Or is it enough that it averages out to 50/50?

This whole thread smacks of "I lost therefore the game is imbalanced."

 Melissia wrote:
Why are we discussing an inferior RTS anyway instead of something good like 40k?

Because it's 5X better as a balanced game.


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 Marmatag wrote:
Starcraft was imbalanced for years. Did you play online before the spawning pool got nerfed? It was an absolute joke, on small maps you could not defend. If you drew a Zerg opponent, and you weren't playing Zerg, you lost. End of story.

It wasn't until that game had been out for years did they actually start balancing it. But a computer game has a few advantages, namely they can track statistics much more easily, across the entire playerbase.

And in reality, most of the time you know what builds people are doing in Starcraft. That game comes down to micro control, and scouting for base locations. In a competitive environment your army build is pretty much predetermined. The better "micro & multitask" wins, the battle itself is an ancillary thing.

But that is neither here nor there.

I think the core question here is, should you have a 50/50 win chance in every game you play? Or is it enough that it averages out to 50/50?

This whole thread smacks of "I lost therefore the game is imbalanced."

I have been able to block a 6 pool since day one in SC II.

Martel732 wrote:
Because it's 5X better as a balanced game.

It's a festival of mediocrity that wasn't even in the top five RTS games of the year it came out, let's talk about 40k instead.

 Melissia wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Because it's 5X better as a balanced game.

It's a festival of mediocrity that wasn't even in the top five RTS games of the year it came out, let's talk about 40k instead.

Sure. The hopeless slog where the codex with the best costed models gets to flop their plastic schlong on the table and win. Oh, I'm sorry, sisters are still on metal.

If you want to talk about trash games like starcraft, we have a video games forum for it.

Frankly, I'd rather play an unbalanced 40k than a "perfectly balanced" starcraft any day. Even with balance where it is, there's a lot more interesting things going on in 40k tactically and strategically than a lot of people give it credit for.

I'd like there to be at least one list build in each available faction that could reasonably beat the list builds of every other faction in the game when no obvious mistakes are made by either player in that game. Factions, in this context, exclude any keywords that are subsets of other factions. That's my definition of balance in regards to 40K.

In order for that to happen, I think a sideboard in list construction is required to prevent catastrophic matchups. In order for a sideboard to work, each faction needs a roughly equal amount of options to counter the list builds of every other faction. I think you need to break up the Imperium faction tag as a first measure. After that, many of the factions that have less options will need a lot of releases. Also, the internal balance in the factions among options will need to get better.

It takes a comprehensive look at the game in light of all apparent list builds to balance; per model balancing will never do enough.

 Melissia wrote:
If you want to talk about trash games like starcraft, we have a video games forum for it.

Frankly, I'd rather play an unbalanced 40k than a "perfectly balanced" starcraft any day. Even with balance where it is, there's a lot more interesting things going on in 40k tactically and strategically than a lot of people give it credit for.

Sort of? It's better in 8th, where its harder to win in the list building phase. But 40K had quite a run of that problem being first and foremost. But 40K is not very deep, especially compared to historical-based games.

40k has a lot more variety than most historical based games. Also better lore-- everyone and their mother can rip off history, and most of them do it poorly at that.

 Melissia wrote:
40k has a lot more variety than most historical based games. Also better lore-- everyone and their mother can rip off history, and most of them do it poorly at that.

Variety does not make for interesting game play by default. How much variety is there going to be with 27 pt scatterbikes in 7th or chimeras from 5th?

40K's lore is also far less interesting than actual equipment used by actual people who died accomplishing actual goals. 40K writers are lazy and use too many Deus Ex Machinas (Rowboat?). To me, the lore for 40K is a negative that create dopey-looking WWI tanks.

I have rarely played a historical-based game that was worse than 40K.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.

Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.

I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.

SilverAlien wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.

Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.

I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.

Truth be told, I always took the view that being able to reinforce or recursively add troops to your army was not in and of itself overpowered. Material advantage only goes so far when the positioning itself is restrictive. Remember Chenkov Conscripts and Tervigons dominating 5e? Neither do I.

The real issue with 7e summoning was you could add it fairly easily to an army, and there was no real positional drawback you had to work around in order to make Summoning work. This became even more notable when the summoners were airborne or on Jetbikes. Pop out of reserves, summon, then swoop an extra 2d6 or turbo or whatnot. Summoning was akin to a methed-up Saiyan flying in, dropping in a unit, then legging it!

I agree with the 8e "cannot move" part of summoning. I disagree with the idea of it being a "fixed reinforcement points" setup, as not only is it inconsistent (Necrons can get "free troops" via continual reanimation, but a Bolt of Change will only turn a target into a Spawn if you spend points to do so), but just a hack-fix in general, where the only real reason to summon is to throw up an impromptu Horror-Wall or few.

The issue in 7th was how many units could summon, and could be summoned.

IT isn't a problem if an expensive unit like the Tervigon, can summon termagants, but also has a pretty high chance of losing that ability at some point. It is a problem when those summoned units can not only summon, but also assist in making it easier to do so.

So if summoning was extremely limited (say a GUCO could summon some nurglings in base with himself) it could be a thing. But summoning with no practical limit is broken. SO in 7th summoning was broken because you could in theory summon thousands of extra points fairly easily.

You mention the Tervigon, in 5th ed, at best in a 5 turn game would have been summoning 78 Termagants which was I think 390 points of cheap troops. On average it was much closer to 30ish total. Which also all had the downside of exploding if the tervigon died, were limited by synapse etc.

When Daemons could summon heralds, it was a problem. If summoning was a fairly expensive ability (the porataglyph, was not horrible), as an upgrade for Heralds/Greater Daemons/sorcerers, and disallowed for Tzeentch (other than splitting horrors) and could only summon the respective marked troop units, (2D6 models, if you roll doubles you can no longer summon, if you roll double 6s you die). It could be made to work/have worked. As it was in 7th it was horrible.

 MagicJuggler wrote:

SilverAlien wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.

Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.

I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.

Truth be told, I always took the view that being able to reinforce or recursively add troops to your army was not in and of itself overpowered. Material advantage only goes so far when the positioning itself is restrictive. Remember Chenkov Conscripts and Tervigons dominating 5e? Neither do I.

The real issue with 7e summoning was you could add it fairly easily to an army, and there was no real positional drawback you had to work around in order to make Summoning work. This became even more notable when the summoners were airborne or on Jetbikes. Pop out of reserves, summon, then swoop an extra 2d6 or turbo or whatnot. Summoning was akin to a methed-up Saiyan flying in, dropping in a unit, then legging it!

I agree with the 8e "cannot move" part of summoning. I disagree with the idea of it being a "fixed reinforcement points" setup, as not only is it inconsistent (Necrons can get "free troops" via continual reanimation, but a Bolt of Change will only turn a target into a Spawn if you spend points to do so), but just a hack-fix in general, where the only real reason to summon is to throw up an impromptu Horror-Wall or few.

We can just give Necrons FNP again if you want.

It REALLY isn't reinforcements at all.

Really, GW would just have to care about balance. Guilliman, for example, is clearly too strong at 2000 points. His buff makes any weapon that hits on a 3+ and wounds on a 3+ 80% more effective. If you apply his buff to the 1600 remaining points in the list, they shoot like 2880 points or more if rolls go into 4+ territory if you completely discount his personal impact on the game. That level of force multiplication just isn't available to any other faction. That clear and obvious imbalance just shows that GW doesn't really care to balance their game, despite what their rhetoric may say.

That isn't to say that the game isn't good. The conversion opportunities and hobbying aspects are superb, and actually putting those models on the table to PewPew is really satisfying. The game just isn't close to balanced.

LiMunPai wrote:
I'd like there to be at least one list build in each available faction that could reasonably beat the list builds of every other faction in the game when no obvious mistakes are made by either player in that game. Factions, in this context, exclude any keywords that are subsets of other factions. That's my definition of balance in regards to 40K.

In order for that to happen, I think a sideboard in list construction is required to prevent catastrophic matchups. In order for a sideboard to work, each faction needs a roughly equal amount of options to counter the list builds of every other faction. I think you need to break up the Imperium faction tag as a first measure. After that, many of the factions that have less options will need a lot of releases. Also, the internal balance in the factions among options will need to get better.

It takes a comprehensive look at the game in light of all apparent list builds to balance; per model balancing will never do enough.

The game you are looking for is called Warmachine. You're welcome.

If my choice is between warmachine or quitting wargaming altogether, I'll just quit.

As problematic as 40k can be balance-wise, its aesthetics and lore are IMO second to none in terms of awesome.

Yeah, is like a hamburguer. You know is bad to your health. You really know that at the end of the day, isn't the best food in the world.

But oh boy, isn't it delicious when you are eating it.
Give me Crazy Fanatical Nuns with a sexual fetichism for fire and Space Men Knight Monk fighting agains't Green English hoolligans with axes and swords!