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Theyre most likely too close to it. Difficult to see your own flaws, as you know what it *should* say...

Yes, that's part of it.

There isn't an independent review of the rules and the design studio staff are too small to remember everything of all the many different special rules and combinations.

It's a shame they cant "beta-test" codices like you can computer games.

Yeah, that's why the 5th edition Tyranids and Dark Eldar are hideously overpowered and attract hundreds os people who were tired of losing with their Orks and Ultramarines into building new Kabal and Hive lists to stomp on everyine else, forever...

I think there is a fair bit of codex creep, and some favoritism (Imperial dogs!!), but it's not out of control. Yet.

There's only a couple of shining outrages that I have seen, and it tends to be from the perspective of the player.

An Eldar player resents DE being obviously a better codex (well I do at least), but it is understandable as their book is intended for the 5th ed. rules, where the Eldar one showed its age the day the new BRB was opened.

A SM player resents BA for having all their stuff except the crap nobody likes anyway, and then some good and better stuff instead, some of it cheaper too and with a much looser FO with jumping troops, AV13s as fast attack, flying psykic dreads, and AV14s dropping out of the sky.

Everybody I have heard except SW players agree that theirs is a pretty broken book we don't need to list particulars.
Everybody is also rightly fearing good Guard armies, but its not because it's an imbalanced book, it's just a very well balanced book for putting up a fight versus anyone, as are orks IMO. They don't have "better for cheaper" going on or anything like that, they have their weaknesses to be exploited like any other army, they are just good books in the hands of a smart player, not broken ones for dummies to kick butt with regardless of being dummies.

This is from the perspective of a guy who only plays one army, but sees the major gripes in a few others. A lot of matchups are a bit uneven but that's rock-paper-scissors, there's only a couple sticks of dynamite thrown in the game that are overall OP compared to their contemporaries, or just blatantly better than the comparable alternative when it comes to Marines.

Other than that, most of them are pretty in line with the rest. Verdict is still out on GK but I am kind of expecting another broken book of SW-ical proportion. I have no beef with orks, nids, chaos, SM, daemons and they are all (well from an eldar perspective here) "new" books.

Praxiss wrote:It's a shame they cant "beta-test" codices like you can computer games.

They could if they wanted.

A computer game is nothing but a mathematically driven state machine running off a bunch of variables. 40K is essentially a bunch of mathematical variables.

It wouldn't be too hard for GW to write a program that would simulate army matchups. You run it for say 100,000 iterations to generate versus results for a pair of codexes. You then change a variable and run it again. And so on and on. The nice thing is you could also program the variable changes and parsing and analysing the output. You could just let the thing run until it spits out a bunch of charts showing codexes which are stronger or weaker than expected, plus the variables and values which make a significant difference.

I think it's just a simple matter of new dex rules tend to beat out old dex rules. I will admit that xenos forces tend to be screwed over alot. EG Tau...supposed to be the best shooting army, and Im willing to be an imperial force could still outshoot them. Granted the dex again is old, so with new updates it should be interesting to see how the xenos armies go.

Kilkrazy wrote:

Praxiss wrote:It's a shame they cant "beta-test" codices like you can computer games.

They could if they wanted.

A computer game is nothing but a mathematically driven state machine running off a bunch of variables. 40K is essentially a bunch of mathematical variables.

It wouldn't be too hard for GW to write a program that would simulate army matchups. You run it for say 100,000 iterations to generate versus results for a pair of codexes. You then change a variable and run it again. And so on and on. The nice thing is you could also program the variable changes and parsing and analysing the output. You could just let the thing run until it spits out a bunch of charts showing codexes which are stronger or weaker than expected, plus the variables and values which make a significant difference.

I was actually thinking more along the lines of having some sort of selection process where a small amount of members of the gaming commnity were given access to a pre-release version of the codex with the purpose being to troubelshoot it before it was sent out to the masses. Obviously this means that gossip woudl get out but GW have to be aware that thsi happens anyway. They could offer some sort of incentive by way of models or one-off discounts etc etc.

Gorgarak wrote:I think it's just a simple matter of new dex rules tend to beat out old dex rules. I will admit that xenos forces tend to be screwed over alot. EG Tau...supposed to be the best shooting army, and Im willing to be an imperial force could still outshoot them. Granted the dex again is old, so with new updates it should be interesting to see how the xenos armies go.

Three times over.

But it's not malicious or even intentional. There are lots of new tactical options that 5th ed books have because they use 5th ed rules. The designers try and make each army new and different, which means new rules. The more rules you have, the more options you have, the more variety you can bring to the table, the better the army will be. And the most new rules at any one time comes with new editions, so you perceive lots of codex creep when comparing between editions. But if you compare within editions the codex creep arguement just does not hold up.

I think the game is more balanced now than it has been since I starting playing in 3rd. It's the highest percentage of books with strong builds I can remember. It's not perfect, and it never will be, but it's a game. Chill out (in general, not @ gorgarak).

Gorgarak wrote:I think it's just a simple matter of new dex rules tend to beat out old dex rules. I will admit that xenos forces tend to be screwed over alot. EG Tau...supposed to be the best shooting army, and Im willing to be an imperial force could still outshoot them. Granted the dex again is old, so with new updates it should be interesting to see how the xenos armies go.

And in 4th edition, Eldar and Tau were overpowered. Your point about imperial armies is thus null and void.

And in 4th edition, Eldar and Tau were overpowered. Your point about imperial armies is thus null and void.

True, which is why I said their current dex is old, and with new updates it should be interesting to see how GW brings them back. I will agree that Tau and Eldar were both pretty strong in 4th, and its good to see imperial armies getting some more love and attention. Im curious to see if GW will make some nice balanced Dex's for some xenos armies, or if like the OP said, they will take them too far. I think it's safe to say that with 5th edition pretty new, they should be able to get some fairly balanced dexes out in the next year or two, and they have some time to re-balance if things are out of whack a bit. Only time will tell!