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Balance is a fairly qualitative metric that measures the relative correlation of an army's chance of victory with pre-game inputs such as army selection, and whether a player goes first.
The stronger the correlation between odds of victory and said external inputs, the weaker the balance. The weaker the correlation, the stronger the balance; a balanced game is one where generalship should matter more, relative to what units your army has.
MagicJuggler wrote: Balance is a fairly qualitative metric that measures the relative correlation of an army's chance of victory with pre-game inputs such as army selection, and whether a player goes first.
No.
You're still thinking in regards to balance with a scalpel when you should be looking at it in an aggregate. It's impossible to ensure that every army has an equal chance of victory against every other army. That will never happen.
Armies should be represented in tournaments at the relative scale they're represented in the playerbase.
If Dark Eldar players are 10% of the population you should expect 10% of the tournaments have Dark Eldar as the top or close to the top list.
Galas wrote: I remember when Marmatag was a nooby, all shiney and full of joy. How playing the unbalanced mess of Warhammer40k in a ultra-competitive meta has changed you
Bharring wrote: He'll actually *change his mind* in the presence of sufficient/sufficiently defended information. Heretic.
No, not really. Explaining a commonly used fallacious argument about the difference in casual and competitive balance is hardly pedantry.
I'm saying the game should be balanced around tournament level play.
It obviously will filter down.
Which is exactly what I was saying when I said the game should just be balanced, period, not with any distinction to who plays and how.
The point is you should not balance with the struggles of the casual Joe in mind. Just because casual Pete struggles with Necrons in his local meta doesn't mean the complaint is well founded, or that nerfing Necrons would be good for the game.
With ITC and other tournament circuits collecting and formalizing data, you can look at aggregate competitive data, which is useful for balancing purposes.
Of course. On this we agree.
Casual play can be balanced by saying "i can't deal with that unit, so please don't play it." In casual games, units that are NOT overpowered or even considered good in the meta can wreak havoc if people aren't prepared to deal with them. I saw a guy complaining about a Tyranid list that had a Swarmlord in it. That model is not a meta choice, and there is no reason to consider that complaint thread for the purposes of a balance discussion.
Simple stuff.
Here's where you can accuse me of pedantry if you will.
I don't think that asking someone to not play X is balance. Its a compromise between two people who hopefully have a solid knowledge of the power disparity with their lists, but definitely not an ideal situation. Asking someone to not play something can be a non-event for some people, and a big deal for others depending on their attachment to the model or how it fits with the theme of their army. At that point, you're asking for players to self-regulate precisely because the game is poorly balanced that players must resort to asking people to not play with X or Y.
That to me isn't balance, casual or not.
Regardless, we seem to agree that balance should focus on making everything as evenly matched as possible, which benefits everyone. Being competitive or casual has no bearing on it, just make everything on as equal a footing as can be reasonably managed.
Mordian Iron Guard - Major Overhaul in Progress
+Spaceship Gaming Enthusiast+
Live near Halifax, NS? Ask me about our group, the Ordo Haligonias!
Marmatag wrote: Casual games are hurt by imbalance. This is true.
But there is no data collected en mass for casual games.
What do you propose, other than balancing the tournament meta, and letting casual sort itself out?
Collect the data. Or use the tournaments info in playtesting (i.e. take tournament winning armies and play/adjust them against the worst conceivable army you can think of until both win roughly 50/50 in, dunno, 30 games.
Balancing only for tournaments is useless and at worst harmful, a) because most tournaments play heavily houseruled variants of 40K, often tinkering with the most fundamental things like victory conditions that directly change how you win the game and b) represent a highly skewed, self-selective sample of 40K armiies out there, that is not representative of 40K more broadly.
Just having the data doesnt mean its useful data. E.g. medicine used to be frequently tested on (medical) students (readily available) in voluntary (self-selectice) groups, often leading to disastrous results once stuff hits the market and is used by older/younger/different population groups.
I do think the definition of balance does shift slightly from competitive to casual though.
If i had to boil down the two underlying motivations in each game mode to one word, they would be: "WIN" for competitive, and "FUN" for casual. But that is also wholly subjective on my part.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/11/30 16:48:28
Galas wrote: I remember when Marmatag was a nooby, all shiney and full of joy. How playing the unbalanced mess of Warhammer40k in a ultra-competitive meta has changed you
Bharring wrote: He'll actually *change his mind* in the presence of sufficient/sufficiently defended information. Heretic.
MagicJuggler wrote: Balance is a fairly qualitative metric that measures the relative correlation of an army's chance of victory with pre-game inputs such as army selection, and whether a player goes first.
No.
You're still thinking in regards to balance with a scalpel when you should be looking at it in an aggregate. It's impossible to ensure that every army has an equal chance of victory against every other army. That will never happen.
Armies should be represented in tournaments at the relative scale they're represented in the playerbase.
If Dark Eldar players are 10% of the population you should expect 10% of the tournaments have Dark Eldar as the top or close to the top list.
I believe you are splitting hairs here. I want to win or lose games primarily due to generalship, rather than my list being the primary driver. I want tactics discussions to be about board openings and multi-turn attack sequences, rather than comparative merits of unit A's damage-per-point vs unit B's durability-per-point. Mathhammer is important to a point, but if I wanted the remainder of the game to be a comparative exercise in statistics, I would have played fantasy football (and I don't mean Blood Bowl).
Being a self-admitted competitive person, I nevertheless do everything primarily for fun, but my objective within the game is to win. Casual or not, I'm still going to try and win, the difference mostly being in how drunk I am during the match. Even during campaigns, to be fluffy I'd have to try and win, otherwise it wouldn't make sense for the Mordian Iron Guard to not bleed for every inch of ground given.
Balance ultimately focuses on competitive aspects more, but that's mostly from the people who play competitively tend to have a sharper eye for balance issues and find them and use them more often and to a greater extent. Self-proclaimed casual players don't care for that and tend to be more concerned with playing what they want, and get burned when the balance is out of whack. I lay in the middle, wanting to optimize a fair bit within a fairly strict theme and model selection (feth Tauroxes).
To that end, balance is important to me because I don't like feeling that I'm intentionally bringing a sub par list because I prefer Chimeras to Tauroxes, but my competitive side knows I can just find a suitable counts as for the Taurox that looks better (like Secret Weapons 6x6).
Point is, balance should be aimed for everyone because it ultimately impacts everyone the same, and casual players, if anything, are hurt more by balance issues as they tend to play only what they like, rather than competitive players who are more than happy to bounce around and use what is good.
*Edit* And for the record, I also dislike the implied exclusivity of casual and competitive. One can comfortably be both, or sit on a spectrum that changes on a whim. Though for this, I acknowledge its generally seen as dedicated tournament players vs garage/club groups of friends.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/11/30 16:57:08
Mordian Iron Guard - Major Overhaul in Progress
+Spaceship Gaming Enthusiast+
Live near Halifax, NS? Ask me about our group, the Ordo Haligonias!
I would have done without the crybaby comment because the irony is you make yourself seem like a crybaby on dakka too.
I love Dakka as a place where people can come and have reasoned discussion as well as unreasonable rants. Its what makes this site great man! Back to the main discussion though. I think 40k is balanced for the many not for the few. I say this because of a conversation I had with three of the rules writers / design team at GW's warhammer world event last sunday. I wondered into the pod room after having an awesome burger in Bugman's and saw Jervis Johnson sitting there. I went straight to his table preparing my smite psychic power but forgot i'd just used it on the douchebag downstairs so I thought I'd try polite conversation instead. The following is a paraphrasing of the conversation that took place between me and my 3 buddies and Jervis Johnson, Simon Grant and Phil Kelly on a rainy sunday afternoon at warhammer world.
Spoiler:
Me: So i've heard that you do a lot more internal playtesting now for 8th. What do you think is the right points level to play the game at to achieve the best balance?
Jervis: You will get the most enjoyment out of this game by balancing it yourselves. Points are intended as a method for two gamers without pre-planning a narrative to meet up and get a game of relatively even sides. The way I play 40k is in my 'Perry twins' games(referencing the style of play that the twins use) where we agree in advance what models to bring and have fun using the rules without counting points. We have the most fun without counting points. You should do the same.
Me: Fair enough but I play Orks and have done for over a decade and we ork players suffer in matchups with EVERYONE. While I'm really impressed with 8th edition so far and I can't cast judgement about orks yet with no codex, why have we suffered so far in the past man, when are you gonna show orks some love?
Jervis: When we design a rules system like this with so many factions in it each with their own styles certain factions sit on the edge of those rules systems because they bend (not break) the limitiations of the rules system like Orks with hordelike numbers of models or Grey knights as a very small efficient elite army. These armies are always the hardest to balance because they sit as outliers in the catch all rules system. In the past Orks have suffered from this. The beauty of 8th edition and the upcoming chapter approved is that we can balance them not by changing the rules but by changing the points.
This is a brief snapshot of our conversation which actulayy lasted abuout 40 minutes and varied from balance to design to Phil Kelly's awesome next door neighbour. My takeaways from this conversation are that the game is definitely imbalanced and they STRAIGHT UP know it but its more impacting for the fringe armies. They're trying to fix it and for the first time in the game's history they've built a system that is designed from the ground up to be fixable. BUT they also definitely knew previously that things weren't balanced and they kind of treated it like collateral damage of a complex system which is a massive game design FAIL.
Personally I think what Jervis said to me is partially nonsense and it was my mates that stopped me from ranting. But anecdotally I have 6k of Orks about 3k in grey knights and about 3k in White scars and my scars (even in their bad state in 8th) give me the best play experience so I am aclearly getting screwed by their game system flaws.
So to people who say 40k isn't balanced I would ask you whether you have played a balanced spread of the game before making that statement.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/11/30 17:01:09
Martel732 wrote: The effectiveness of your generalship is heavily modified by mathammer, however.
This.
Let me illustrate with an example.
When i lose in tournaments, i spend time reflecting on why i lost. Not blaming dice, but what did i personally do to harm my chances to win. Bad dice happen to everyone. Blaming your dice means you won't get better. So, I reflect on my screw ups. What did i miss, what did i do wrong. Why did i cause myself to lose.
There are a few times where no matter what I could have done different, I won't win the game. That's losing in list building. And it's super frustrating.
Pre-nerf guard was the epitome of this. Can't run from them, they outrange you. Can't hide from them, they can always see you. Can't attack close range, they've got screens. Can't attack long range, they're better at this than you. For some armies it is flatly impossible to deal with that.
Galas wrote: I remember when Marmatag was a nooby, all shiney and full of joy. How playing the unbalanced mess of Warhammer40k in a ultra-competitive meta has changed you
Bharring wrote: He'll actually *change his mind* in the presence of sufficient/sufficiently defended information. Heretic.
Not necessarily. In a game like 40k shooting should dominate, because this is not WHFB in space and guns tend to beat swords. The whole concept of a "melee army" shouldn't exist at all. But you can still have balance between the various shooting-focused armies, even if melee is only present as something you do to finish off the last survivors of your shooting and melee specialists are a tiny part of the game.
Yes it should, because psycho berserker cultists of the god of war in skull-encrusted armour are awesome and metal. 40K as a setting and rules system is set up to facilitate that coolness, so melee is viable. No other argument can be made, because no other argument really needs to be made.
In a more "realistic" sci-fi game, shooting should indeed be king. Infinity does that quite well, you should give it a try if you haven't already done so.
"The 75mm gun is firing. The 37mm gun is firing, but is traversed round the wrong way. The Browning is jammed. I am saying "Driver, advance." and the driver, who can't hear me, is reversing. And as I look over the top of the turret and see twelve enemy tanks fifty yards away, someone hands me a cheese sandwich."
Not necessarily. In a game like 40k shooting should dominate, because this is not WHFB in space and guns tend to beat swords. The whole concept of a "melee army" shouldn't exist at all. But you can still have balance between the various shooting-focused armies, even if melee is only present as something you do to finish off the last survivors of your shooting and melee specialists are a tiny part of the game.
Yes it should, because psycho berserker cultists of the god of war in skull-encrusted armour are awesome and metal. 40K as a setting and rules system is set up to facilitate that coolness, so melee is viable. No other argument can be made, because no other argument really needs to be made.
In a more "realistic" sci-fi game, shooting should indeed be king. Infinity does that quite well, you should give it a try if you haven't already done so.
Yeah, 40k is not Sci-Fi. It's Fantasy with a Sci-Fi skin.
Clocks for the clockmaker! Cogs for the cog throne!
All the "Melee shouldn't be relevant in warhammer, all should be done by shooting" guys I have seen, play Imperial Guard. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions
Dakka does have White Knights and is also rather infamous for it's Black Knights. A new edition brings out the passionate and not all of them are good at expressing themselves in written form. There have been plenty of hysterical responses from both sides so far. So we descend into pointless bickering with neither side listening to each other. So posting here becomes more masturbation than conversation.
ERJAK wrote: Forcing a 40k player to keep playing 7th is basically a hate crime.
A balanced game would give each faction with an equal point army played by an expert a 50/50 chance of winning assuming the terrain setup and win conditions were equally favourable to each
although by the same token if the terrain setup isn't favourable the win chance could be a lot lower
or if the win conditions favoured one rather than the other
Now i'm not saying GW games are well balanced, but a significant part of the issues with the are people regularly playing with terrain that favours one faction over another (eg gunelines on empty tables or cc armies on very dense ones)
or favouring one mission type over another (while it;'s satisfying to kill all of the other players units and table them your army might just not be well suited to that no matter how much you want it to be)
Galas wrote: All the "Melee shouldn't be relevant in warhammer, all should be done by shooting" guys I have seen, play Imperial Guard. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions
Martel732 wrote: The effectiveness of your generalship is heavily modified by mathammer, however.
Hence "to a point." Certain things like "average points killed" matter, but when the majority of "synergy" and stratagems boil down to flat rerolls and bonuses/maluses over positional or techplay...
We will never see balance until the whole ally mechanic is thrown out and a battle-forged army is one that is drawn entirely from one codex. The only way you will see anything resembling balance with the current system is if they make all of the units so bland and similar that it makes little difference what you take. You simply cannot create balance when one army has the ability to shore up a book's weaknesses and another does not.
11,100 pts, 7,000 pts
++ Heed my words for I am the Herald and we are the footsteps of doom. Interlopers, do we name you. Defilers of our
sacred earth. We have awoken to your primative species and will not tolerate your presence. Ours is the way of logic,
of cold hard reason: your irrationality, your human disease has no place in the necrontyr. Flesh is weak.
Surrender to the machine incarnate. Surrender and die. ++
Tuagh wrote: If you won't use a wrench, it isn't the bolt's fault that your hammer is useless.
Me: So i've heard that you do a lot more internal playtesting now for 8th. What do you think is the right points level to play the game at to achieve the best balance?
Jervis: You will get the most enjoyment out of this game by balancing it yourselves. Points are intended as a method for two gamers without pre-planning a narrative to meet up and get a game of relatively even sides. The way I play 40k is in my 'Perry twins' games(referencing the style of play that the twins use) where we agree in advance what models to bring and have fun using the rules without counting points. We have the most fun without counting points. You should do the same.
Me: Fair enough but I play Orks and have done for over a decade and we ork players suffer in matchups with EVERYONE. While I'm really impressed with 8th edition so far and I can't cast judgement about orks yet with no codex, why have we suffered so far in the past man, when are you gonna show orks some love? Jervis: When we design a rules system like this with so many factions in it each with their own styles certain factions sit on the edge of those rules systems because they bend (not break) the limitiations of the rules system like Orks with hordelike numbers of models or Grey knights as a very small efficient elite army. These armies are always the hardest to balance because they sit as outliers in the catch all rules system. In the past Orks have suffered from this. The beauty of 8th edition and the upcoming chapter approved is that we can balance them not by changing the rules but by changing the points.
Boy this sounds.. really unprofessional. And insincere to boot, because they are fast to patch armies they consider highly and in need. See Eldar vulnerability to alpha strikes. Also the last part "CA will fix it; now things are wonderful" sounds like marketing speech. Yuck.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Maelstrom808 wrote: We will never see balance until the whole ally mechanic is thrown out and a battle-forged army is one that is drawn entirely from one codex. The only way you will see anything resembling balance with the current system is if they make all of the units so bland and similar that it makes little difference what you take. You simply cannot create balance when one army has the ability to shore up a book's weaknesses and another does not.
I preferred the way things were in 3rd. Only the inquisition could "invade" another codex IIRC.
If they had ideas for new combinations, they just made new lists made of different units from different armies, but limited within themselves.
They could still sell more books in this way.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2017/11/30 18:12:17
Generic characters disappearing? Elite units of your army losing options and customizations? No longer finding that motivation to convert?
Your army could suffer Post-Chapterhouse Stress Disorder (PCSD)! If you think that your army is suffering one or more of the aforementioned symptoms, call us at 789-666-1982 for a quick diagnosis!
About as far as I like to compare balance is when I can do so with established points values.
For example - a deff dread with 2x big shootas is 131 points. It has 4x str 10 attacks in melee, and 6x str 5 ap 0 shots at 24" that hits on 5s.
A marine dreadnought with an assault cannon is 133 points. It has 4x str 12 attacks in melee, and 6x str 6 ap1 shots at 36" that will usually hit on 4s, 3s if it didn't move.
A marine dreadnought is objectively better than a deff dread - same attacks, same WS, better strength, better BS, better str and AP on its ranged attacks. And it costs just 2 points more.
When unit A is objectively better than unit B that has a similar battlefield role for a similar cost, that's when I consider something unbalanced.
Before the CA points adjustment, I could have made the same comparison between meganobz and custodoes.
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment." Words to live by.
Kap'n Krump wrote: About as far as I like to compare balance is when I can do so with established points values.
For example - a deff dread with 2x big shootas is 131 points. It has 4x str 10 attacks in melee, and 6x str 5 ap 0 shots at 24" that hits on 5s.
A marine dreadnought with an assault cannon is 133 points. It has 4x str 12 attacks in melee, and 6x str 6 ap1 shots at 36" that will usually hit on 4s, 3s if it didn't move.
A marine dreadnought is objectively better than a deff dread - same attacks, same WS, better strength, better BS, better str and AP on its ranged attacks. And it costs just 2 points more.
When unit A is objectively better than unit B that has a similar battlefield role for a similar cost, that's when I consider something unbalanced.
Before the CA points adjustment, I could have made the same comparison between meganobz and custodoes.
But then do you start adding in standard interactions like mekboys, stratagems, chapter tactics, non standard interactions like bubble wraping. too many variables to make 40k balanced as its not really that simple of a game. its one of those types of games that require a literal endless amount of play testing with different builds units and models and thousands of those for dice variables then they need to tweak and do thousands more on top of that. basicly never going to realistically happen inhouse and in the amounts needed to get "balanced"
So, is the OP going to descend from his pedestal he's put himself upon to tell us all why we're wrong with the same tone of utter condescension or is he just happy with the equivalent of lobbing a grenade in a room and shutting the door?
Peregrine wrote:
Not necessarily. In a game like 40k shooting should dominate, because this is not WHFB in space and guns tend to beat swords. The whole concept of a "melee army" shouldn't exist at all. But you can still have balance between the various shooting-focused armies, even if melee is only present as something you do to finish off the last survivors of your shooting and melee specialists are a tiny part of the game.
Kinda. As said, 40k is more sci-fantasy. That said, I would expect gunnery to be more important in most situations than melee. All things considered, I do want melee to actually feel like something whenever it does happen. One of my other gaming projects is a military-action roleplay game that takes place around the very end of the 20th century, and I put as much effort and attention to detail into my hand-to-hand systems as I do the tanks, assault rifles, and hand-grenades.
Galas wrote:All the "Melee shouldn't be relevant in warhammer, all should be done by shooting" guys I have seen, play Imperial Guard. I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions
I might be an outlier - one, I want Assaulty Guard to be A Thing that can be done, but also if my opponent brings a melee army and makes it to my forces in good order, he should absolutely do well while he's there.
Mordian Iron Guard - Major Overhaul in Progress 
11,100 pts, 
7,000 pts
