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Now that I have this in the right forum...

Below is a formula to help identify a fair and balanced point breakdown.

Based on a 2250 pts game-

Characters- 500 pts or 22%
Magic Items/Banners- 125 pts or 6%
Core- 1000 pts or 44%
Special- 400 pts or 18%
Rare- 225 pts or 10%

This seems to be in line with other armies that I have seen that were balanced. Please let me know your thoughts.

Really depends on the army that you're using.

HE, for instance, would get hosed with those guidelines (especially Core reqs).

Well, what exactly is "balanced" anyway? Is it an army list that will let you beat me? Is it an army list that is representative of the race?

Blanket statements of Balance arent really applicable. Every race has "fluff" and quirks that will screw up that listing, and personally, I dont know why someone would gimp their own army for the sake of your opponent, unless you have an overriding idea or statement to make..i.e. I will beat you with 4000 skaven slaves. etc

I have to agree with other posters- these systems always end up gimping some poor army over others.

Balanced has no place in Tournament play, as thats competitive play. For fun we just always bring what we want, and more often then not it balances out well enough, except for Daemons.

All very good points. I agree that "fair, balanced, etc" are all subjective things. There is also a fine line between fluff and cheese, and I feel overall GW does a good job balancing this. It seems the character portion needs to be toned down. As a HE player the rules allow me to put 60%(1,200+ pts) of my total points in characters and magic items. This would be a prince on a star dragon, dragon mage and a lvl 2 mage. This does not seem right to me for a "battle" scenario.

My current army list is this-
Characters- 370 pts (16.4%) (2x lvl 2 mages, 1x lvl 1 mage)
Magic Items- 125 pts (5.6%) (Folariath's robe- 45 pts, Annulian Crystal- 40 pts, Jewel of the Dusk- 15pts, Guardian Phoenix- 25 pts)
Core- 1045 pts (46.4%) (2x 26 sea guard full command, 2x 14/15 archers no command)
Special- 410 pts (18.2%) (Lion Chariot, 1x 10 Silver Helms full command)
Rare- 300 pts (13.3%) (2x Eagles, 2x Repeater)
8 power dice
5 dispel dice
This is heavy in the Rare choices but the overall difference is negative 2% off from the original post, which seems "fair" and "balanced" imo.

Tool5252 wrote:All very good points. I agree that "fair, balanced, etc" are all subjective things. There is also a fine line between fluff and cheese, and I feel overall GW does a good job balancing this. It seems the character portion needs to be toned down. As a HE player the rules allow me to put 60%(1,200+ pts) of my total points in characters and magic items. This would be a prince on a star dragon, dragon mage and a lvl 2 mage. This does not seem right to me for a "battle" scenario.

My current army list is this-
Characters- 370 pts (16.4%) (2x lvl 2 mages, 1x lvl 1 mage)
Magic Items- 125 pts (5.6%) (Folariath's robe- 45 pts, Annulian Crystal- 40 pts, Jewel of the Dusk- 15pts, Guardian Phoenix- 25 pts)
Core- 1045 pts (46.4%) (2x 26 sea guard full command, 2x 14/15 archers no command)
Special- 410 pts (18.2%) (Lion Chariot, 1x 10 Silver Helms full command)
Rare- 300 pts (13.3%) (2x Eagles, 2x Repeater)
8 power dice
5 dispel dice
This is heavy in the Rare choices but the overall difference is negative 2% off from the original post, which seems "fair" and "balanced" imo.

It may fit your criteria, but I've never seen anyone take anything close to that. LSG are rare, let alone 52 of them, on top of 30 archers. Also, you aren't taking a single Lord at 2250. If that's what you want to take go ahead, but you can't honestly expect other HE players to use that kind of composition.

I tend to run my lists through a similar percentage check just to see where I sit - time was 'comp' really was evaluated along these lines (but then weren't army choices computed similarly, like 5th edition and such?). Unfortunately even my Warriors of Tzeentch, an incredibly toned down chaos list IMO, doesn't meet your standards:

HQ - 519 = 23%
C - 885 = 39%
S - 393 = 17%
R - 450 = 20%
Items - 175 = 7%

So it breaks almost every category, but you can't really compare categories across armies. My tizz giant + hellcannon is 450 points that comes nowhere near what 2 hydras' 350 points is

- Salvage

yes the most comprehensive come systems simply don't work. GW has made a complete mess of play balance and that's that.

Comp systems work but the one you proposed has gone way overboard. In an ideal gaming world we wouldn’t need comp but there will always be those people that feel they need to take OTT army’s to win. There is no skill in playing OTT army’s or fun for that matter people should comp themselves.

Tool5252 wrote:
My current army list is this-
Characters- 370 pts (16.4%) (2x lvl 2 mages, 1x lvl 1 mage)
Magic Items- 125 pts (5.6%) (Folariath's robe- 45 pts, Annulian Crystal- 40 pts, Jewel of the Dusk- 15pts, Guardian Phoenix- 25 pts)
Core- 1045 pts (46.4%) (2x 26 sea guard full command, 2x 14/15 archers no command)
Special- 410 pts (18.2%) (Lion Chariot, 1x 10 Silver Helms full command)
Rare- 300 pts (13.3%) (2x Eagles, 2x Repeater)

You have a fair point about the prince on star dragon, but this list looks absolutely Terrible to me! Have you played with it much, and have you won games? Because it really doesn't look like it can win to me :(. You have two huge blocks of spearmen/archers (the sea guard), two blocks of archers, and two bolt throwers for your shooting base. For characters you have 3 mini-mages. For march-blockers you have 2 eagles. And for mobile units you have 1 chariot and 10 cavalry (not even heavy cavalry).

That's IT. No hard hitting characters, no hard hitting units. This looks like what a town might call up for battle if the high elf lands were being invaded again, but not a dedicated army. By the current rules, the high elves are designed to be allowed to take LESS core and MORE special. You've done the opposite, which is fine, but wouldn't be at all effective unless the rules were changed to make every army work this way! And even then, your core is so much worse than other cores, you're not going to have a chance.

I just don't see it, but I'm open to seeing where I might be mistaken about this?

For simple comp, here's etc light for 2250:

No more than two of the same special choice
No more than one of the same rare choice
No special characters
(high elfs get max 2 of the same rare and stegs for lizzie chars count for equivalent special/rare slot)

With current books Daemons,VC and Dark elves will play 2k lists
BoC,DoW and O&G will play 2500 lists and the rest will play 2250.

The "offical" ETC comp for 2k9 at least was a bit different but you do get a good framework from the above. This stuff has also been used throughout the europe (barring uk gt's ) for awhile now, so it's actually been used and proven to work allright.

(and no it's not perfect)

Chaoslord wrote:
With current books Daemons,VC and Dark elves will play 2k lists
BoC,DoW and O&G will play 2500 lists and the rest will play 2250.

What's this for?

cptjoeyg wrote:

Chaoslord wrote:
With current books Daemons,VC and Dark elves will play 2k lists
BoC,DoW and O&G will play 2500 lists and the rest will play 2250.

What's this for?

That's because Daemons, VC and Dark Elves have have lots of underpriced and awfully powerful stuff in their armylists. If comp-makers try to refrain from actually changing the actual stat/point values of units, giving the top 3 a 10% point penalty in addition to the restrictions applied to all armies makes a decent compromise in leveling the playing field. In an opposite situation O&G,BoC and DoW have several issues powerlevelwise which warrants them getting a 10% point handicap.

that would be interesting to play against. I would actually enjoy a few games that way. 250 points seems steep but if it works it works. I might try to introduce that back in the states with my friends. Gets rid of a lot of the broken lists.
As for the OPs guidelines, yeah as an HE player 1000 core is rough, and your list, how do you find room for all that shooting... without those units, i would consider a "strong core" army 20 archers and a 24 Spear unit, but that is less than 500 pts. So I would need to take 3 big spear blocks and 20 archers, all of them useless against anything t4, 4+ save (which others can get as core). On the other hand i would be great against Goblins and other elves lol.

interesting.

Yeah.... Then thing is Core choices are designed to be really inexpensive. So having so much devoted to Core ONLY can create some problems.

Then again the armies might end up looking pretty cool on the table top.

Tool5252 wrote:Now that I have this in the right forum...

Below is a formula to help identify a fair and balanced point breakdown.

Based on a 2250 pts game-

Characters- 500 pts or 22%
Magic Items/Banners- 125 pts or 6%
Core- 1000 pts or 44%
Special- 400 pts or 18%
Rare- 225 pts or 10%

This seems to be in line with other armies that I have seen that were balanced. Please let me know your thoughts.

With this as a limitation, Wood Elves can't take a Treeman but Dark Elves can take a Hydra.

Also, some armies would fill up their characters with one Lord, leaving little room for even a caddy (granted the spellcasting will also become more limited).

44% Core is huge. Some armies might struggle to fit in their deployment zone.

Daba wrote:
With this as a limitation, Wood Elves can't take a Treeman but Dark Elves can take a Hydra.

Well we all know Dark Elves are vile creatures that twist the rules to their advantage as much as possible.

how many skaven slaves is 1000 points...