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"Balance" can be a hard thing to define, checkers and chess have a true balance but some argument can be made on who goes first or second determines differing strategies.
Non-random game wins are determined by experience of the player completely.

Introducing randomization starts increasing the odds of a newer player having a string of good luck and may win.

The experienced player figures out how to account for or mitigate the randomization in the hopes of their better strategy to prevail.

There shall always be a problem when you have specialized units (artillery/cavalry/infantry) where large amounts of a given type can be exceedingly advantageous only in certain circumstances (rock/paper/scissors).

Saying all that, I find X-wing has been good for "balance" for a game with a fair bit of variety but they keep finding the odd combinations are exceedingly powerful which then get some point adjustment or FAQ.

Any game where the manufacturer sells the rules and the miniatures, there will be massive conflict in balance. Less so if it's a historical game where there are competing miniature manufacturers. When sales are directly tied to game performance/"new hotness", you end up with crap.

PS: This excludes a number of small game manufacturers, but big companies (GW, FFG, etc.)...it's a recipe for disaster.

I think any real discussion on the subject of balance deserves a mention of David Sirlin's work. I greatly wish it wasn't written in a way that mostly serves to encourage people who would abuse it and drive away the people who could learn the most from it, but the information itself is very useful. Check it out if you haven't, just try to focus on the message over the messenger.

As for balance, I think its important to recognize that a lot of the appeal of games (of any kind) is in realizing fantasy and expressing imagination. We take great joy in choosing our avatars, which is why we increasingly see games that focus on heroes or champions or warcasters or masters or whatever they decide to call it. To a degree though that expands to the whole army and its ability to bring some aspect of imagination to life.

The break, then, comes from the fact that for all the fantasy in the avatars, the games themselves come down to hard coded rules and often raw math. Imbalance imposes reality on our imagination and forces us to choose between our desire to win and the characters we envisioned.

I think one of the big things that makes this worse is that a lot of people don't truly appreciate what having a live opponent means. Life is rarely made up of the kind of zero sum games that head to head competition brings to bear, so a lot of people don't really appreciate their opponent's own desires to win. Getting to the point where you really accept that if you want to really win, you have to put in as much as your opponent sounds obvious, but is rather hard to really appreciate.

Probably could double this writing about the idea of what balance actually looks like and why people struggle to accept it, but I'm already well past the TLR so I'll save it for later.

 Da Boss wrote:
Perfect balance in a wargame is likely unattainable, but that does not mean we should not try for good balance. When people say they want 40K to be balanced, they mean that they want the balance to be better than it currently is.

Arguing from the position that perfect balance is impossible is essentially a straw man based on at best misunderstanding the point people are making and at worst misrepresenting it.

If we could move past that in these discussions it would be helpful in finding meaning, understanding and common ground.

But that poses the question - How good should 'good balance' be? How good is 'good enough', in other words? What percentage of balance/imbalance would you accept? And could it ever be 'good enough' to get a pass from those who seem to see it as their duty to tear down, tear apart and criticise? If 'perfect balance' is impossible, as you say (and I don't disagree)How much 'imbalance' are you willing to accept? How much is actually 'ok'? How many loopholes, and errors and mistakes are you willing to accept, and how bad? What 'price' of balancing factors (e.g. Homogenisation, small scale, formats that risk splintering the community, limited rosters/options, all-but-eliminated player choice in list-building etc are you willing to accept, also factoring in, and acknowledging this is a business, and business needs should also be considered (meaning, you need new releases, and bigger rosters etc). Or are we looking at a situation, where despite people claiming to want 'good enough' balance, or 'better balance', the difference between what they'd accept as 'good enough' or 'better balance' and the impossibility of 'perfect balance' is so small/narrow, that it is essentially the same thing.

And this poses a further question. There are mechanics in place elsewhere that have arguably contributed to what the community often ascribes as 'better' balance in other games. Unfortunately, every such thing comes with a price. And every mechanics has its own dectractors. For example:
Warmachines 'kill the caster' and scenario - alternative victory conditions. 'But why should the game end just because you've killed one specific dude'. (Also: think of how the metagamers will twist the game if all they have to do is kill your hq and they win)
Warmachines 'multiple list' tournament system, and sideboards. Try telling 40k players for a 1500pt tourney, they have to have not just one. But two 2000 point armies...
infinity: in 40k scale, its guardsmen, and veteran guardsmen with lasguns, autoguns and the ocasional heavy stubber, and armed with carapace armour or flak armour. Plus they have old school rending. Great game. But the scale is tiny, compared to 40k. Try tell people that 90% of the game is now illegal for games and anything bigger than a crisis suit might as well be burned. Christ they're still talking about squats, twenty years on.

Let's also be clear - both of these games are regarded as 'good enough' when it comes to balance. But even then, both have their howlers and loopholes to exploit.

Deadnight wrote:

But that poses the question - How good should 'good balance' be? How good is 'good enough', in other words? What percentage of balance/imbalance would you accept? And could it ever be 'good enough' to get a pass from those who seem to see it as their duty to tear down, tear apart and criticise? If 'perfect balance' is impossible, as you say (and I don't disagree)How much 'imbalance' are you willing to accept? How much is actually 'ok'? How many loopholes, and errors and mistakes are you willing to accept, and how bad? What 'price' of balancing factors (e.g. Homogenisation, small scale, formats that risk splintering the community, limited rosters/options, all-but-eliminated player choice in list-building etc are you willing to accept, also factoring in, and acknowledging this is a business, and business needs should also be considered (meaning, you need new releases, and bigger rosters etc).

Part of the reason good is never good enough is simply that everything has its fans; and if you're a fan of something, its really no fun to be punished for liking it. I think a lot of players often make this harder on themselves than they need to by not being happy unless they can spam that one bad thing or getting so fixed on it they forget about all the other cool things that them to the game/faction/etc, but regardless, the existence of a cool, but bad model will draw an angsty crowd that will dominate the conversation. There's also just a good crowd of people who believe in points to the level that they believe in blind equality that really aren't ever going to be happy.

Of the Sirlin articles I mentioned above, I think one of the best ones is the idea of competitive diversity. That balance at the cost of choice isn't always and improvement. A game with 5 perfectly balanced options isn't necessarily better than a game with 100 options with only a tenth being competitive. Trying to improve the 90% is an admirable goal, but it never really happens. To me, what's important is prioritizing what needs to be competitive. You want to make sure most of your players have a route to compete without abandoning at least the top level organization of your options. If your game has factions, EVERY faction needs to have at least one competitive build. From there, making as many of the sub factions or avatar characters competitive is the next most important bit. Sometimes you need to prioritize that. If you're making a Star Wars game, make sure Vader is proper terrifying. From there, I guess individual unit choices matter, but this is likely whack-a-mole so it becomes more about making sure the stuff that's really cool that you want to represent your game is good enough to be on tables drawing people in.

Deadnight wrote:
For example:
Warmachines 'kill the caster' and scenario - alternative victory conditions. 'But why should the game end just because you've killed one specific dude'. (Also: think of how the metagamers will twist the game if all they have to do is kill your hq and they win)
Warmachines 'multiple list' tournament system, and sideboards. Try telling 40k players for a 1500pt tourney, they have to have not just one. But two 2000 point armies...
infinity: in 40k scale, its guardsmen, and veteran guardsmen with lasguns, autoguns and the ocasional heavy stubber, and armed with carapace armour or flak armour. Plus they have old school rending. Great game. But the scale is tiny, compared to 40k. Try tell people that 90% of the game is now illegal for games and anything bigger than a crisis suit might as well be burned. Christ they're still talking about squats, twenty years on.

Bad examples
Infinity is a Skirmish Games, and I never heard anyone complaining that he is not allowed to take Land Raiders in Kill Team, or that Imperial Knights as a faction don't exist in Kill Team

Warmachines Scenarios are comparable, you can win the Game by Scenario points or with Kill Points, except that not everything gives you a KP. And of course this could work if Papa Smurf had the rule that the enemy wins as soon as he got killed, he would not have been in so many lists in the first place

And people have asked for Sideboards in 40k for a while now, specially since auto-lose/win against specific lists is a real thing.

Scale of the game has nothing to do with Balance at all. Just because there is Kill Team is smaller does not mean it is better balanced than 40k, the same for Apocalypse being larger.

Kings of War is balanced the same way as is Vanguard, although one is a mass battle game and the other one a Skirmish.

Deadnight wrote:

But that poses the question - How good should 'good balance' be? How good is 'good enough', in other words? What percentage of balance/imbalance would you accept? And could it ever be 'good enough' to get a pass from those who seem to see it as their duty to tear down, tear apart and criticise? If 'perfect balance' is impossible, as you say (and I don't disagree)How much 'imbalance' are you willing to accept? How much is actually 'ok'? How many loopholes, and errors and mistakes are you willing to accept, and how bad?

I would never accept mistakes, loopholes and errors. Those have nothing to do with balance but are there because of lazy/bad writing or design. Something that can happen with free rules or small companies, but not with a Premium priced product like 40k

And balance need to be good enough that victory is decided on the table, not during list building or by choosing a faction, and internal balance need to be good enough that all units in a Codex are a real option, otherwise there is no reason to have them at all.

 kodos wrote:

Bad examples
Infinity is a Skirmish Games, and I never heard anyone complaining that he is not allowed to take Land Raiders in Kill Team, or that Imperial Knights as a faction don't exist in Kill Team

Not my point. Part of the reason for infinitys good balance is that its scale is so small. It's a D20 game, but essentially a dozen (or less!) humies per side, with (a) relatively limited variation in stats, and (b) a big swing towards lethality over durability (heck. Power armour is statistically about as good as 40k flak armour). It's easier to account for things. The point was not that people complain that they can't take land raiders, but a one of the tools you good use to help balance the game, is to lower the scale. Ergo, get rid of everything bigger than a humie. Or failing that, make a new unit type - anything smaller than a Titan gets a 'chaff' stat. Now obviously, were you to choose this as a mechanisms to help balance your game, expect a lot of resistance...

 kodos wrote:

And people have asked for Sideboards in 40k for a while now, specially since auto-lose/win against specific lists is a real thing.

Some people have asked. I've seen the threads. And then they got torn apart by the usual internet anger. I think it's a generally good idea for the most part, personally. It worked reasonably well in WMH. But are you willing to (quite literally!) pay the price, or force others to do the same? Again, you will face an awful lot of resistance.

 kodos wrote:

Scale of the game has nothing to do with Balance at all. Just because there is Kill Team is smaller does not mean it is better balanced than 40k, the same for Apocalypse being larger.

I think I might have used the wrong word. Scale does have a role to play, but I think we also need to consider 'scope'.

Scale has a big role to play. Firstly, It's easier to balance a game of ten options than it is to balance a game of a thousand. Building a game around a defined variation, or 'scale' or 'scope' of game, (e.g. Skirmish, platoon level, army level etc) and defined unit types helps you focus appropriately in terms of mechanics etc thst suit the game. You can build mechanics that work for the game. upping the scale of the game to account for everything from thugs with chains to city stomping robots causes problems- it's a lot harder to build appropriate rules and to have a system that works across the board for everything, whereas it's easier to have more focused and more effective rules for games with a narrower scope

I'm probably explaining this poorly Kodis. I'll think about how to word it better - it's been a long day.

 kodos wrote:

Kings of War is balanced the same way as is Vanguard, although one is a mass battle game and the other one a Skirmish.

Indeed, kings of war gets a decent reprutation, but from some of the things I've heard, aren't most of the units fairly.. 'homogenous' and isn't the game itself relatively simplistic? I've not played it myself, I only ask... but homogenised units isn't another option to use. Not many people like it however...

 kodos wrote:

I would never accept mistakes, loopholes and errors. Those have nothing to do with balance but are there because of lazy/bad writing or design. Something that can happen with free rules or small companies, but not with a Premium priced product like 40k

Or just unforeseen consequences.

 kodos wrote:

And balance need to be good enough that victory is decided on the table, not during list building or by choosing a faction, and internal balance need to be good enough that all units in a Codex are a real option, otherwise there is no reason to have them at all.

So how good is 'good enough'?

How do you account for victory on the table as opposed to list building when, for example, I take a tank company and you take a company of anti tank guns that is in essence, a 'silver bullet'? Do you limit choices? Do you try to remove 'hard counters'? How does this work with the rock/paper/scissors nature of tanks, anti-tank guns and further aspects of the game, like infantry, aircraft etc that simultaneously need to fit, not only I need the context of tank/anti-tank, but against each other?

And what price will you pay in terms of design 'sacrifices' to ensure all units are a real option? Do you reduce the scale/scope of the game? Homogenise the choices?

Bear in mind, I am not trying to catch you out kodos. I don't necessarily disagree with you and This is not a trick question. And thank you for responding.

and isn't the game itself relatively simplistic?

Kings of war's rules are a few factors of complexity above GW games.

For myself, and I’ve expressed this before, a well balanced war game should have two *well planned* armies have a 60/40 win ratio.

As a goal, I would say 2-3 archetypes should be viable in a faction. With about 20 factions in 40k, that would be around 50 archetypes to balance. So trying to get 50 archetypes to get a 60/40 split would be damned tough. 2500 combinations, including mirror matches. I don’t expect anyone to be able actually do that.

I’d say 40k has grown beyond the ability to balance within its own constraints. It is also why I feel that being within 10% of “true value” should be the objective for pricing units... and why I find the granularity of single point upgrades to be laughably inaccurate, and more likely to lead to inaccurate points vs “true value”.

I know I'm going to catch flak for this, so I'm cinching up my IBA, snapping on my K Pot, and bracing for the barrage.


The closest I've seen approaching balanced games in miniatures wargaming would be WFB 6th Ed. with the Ravening Hordes army lists, and 40K 3rd Ed. with the middle of the book "black" codices. Those lists were internally and externally balanced because of the changes to both systems necessitating it, and both of those games are about as balanced as you're going to get as far as GW stuff goes.

It's the main reason I went back to those games once I realized how badly the rules of both systems had gotten.




I don't play any other games, really, as I have too much invested to shift as of right now. I'd have liked to have tried Star Trek: Attack Wing, but it appears that ship has sailed.

I think the discussion of "scope" is really important.
The original scope of Warhammer 40k was skirmish level. Then it became squad level, then combined arms, and gradually the scope increased.

Now we have a game where gigantic miniatures and fliers, better suited to an entirely different game scope interact with squads of mooks where the precise positioning of each mook is important.

This is crazy. "Normal" 40K including stuff like Riptides, Wraithknights, Knight Titans and Stompas is crazy. The scope of the game cannot accommodate them without severe warping of the entire game system. It was a huge mistake to put them in the "regular" game, rather than keeping them for special scenarios designed to make them fun to play against without distorting the fun "combined arms" level play that the game was designed for.

Apocalypse seems to manage this better, having been designed from the ground up to focus on the appropriate scope. I still think games like that are better played with smaller scale miniatures for aesthetic reasons (the 6'x4' average miniature battlefield looks comical to me with these huge units stomping around them, and it highlights the artificiality of the game too much) but the feedback from people playing it is that it allows the fantasy of using these gigantic (and undoubtably, cool) miniatures together with their normal armies in a satisfying way.

40K is trying to be all things to all people. It can't really be balanced while doing that, not to even mention the bloat in the number of factions these days.

40k using Troop sized rules to play Company sized games and wants to be playable from 300 to 3000 points.

Usually a game has a sweet spot were the rules work best, the further away you are the worse is the balance

Bolt Action works with 1000 points and would be unbalanced at 2000.

KoW starts working at 1500 points

Deadzone, FireFight, Warpath tries to scale the rules with Deadzone being the Troop based game, FireFight being platoon based (500-1500/2000 points) and Warpath the company based game (2000+)

Now one can still blame the players for using the wrong size of 40k and that one should use Apo rules for 2k points

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

Bad examples
Infinity is a Skirmish Games, and I never heard anyone complaining that he is not allowed to take Land Raiders in Kill Team, or that Imperial Knights as a faction don't exist in Kill Team

Not my point. Part of the reason for infinitys good balance is that its scale is so small. It's a D20 game, but essentially a dozen (or less!) humies per side, with (a) relatively limited variation in stats, and (b) a big swing towards lethality over durability (heck. Power armour is statistically about as good as 40k flak armour). It's easier to account for things. The point was not that people complain that they can't take land raiders, but a one of the tools you good use to help balance the game, is to lower the scale. Ergo, get rid of everything bigger than a humie. Or failing that, make a new unit type - anything smaller than a Titan gets a 'chaff' stat. Now obviously, were you to choose this as a mechanisms to help balance your game, expect a lot of resistance...

There is even a more limited variation of stats in 40k and the durability is not really a thing
and it is not that simple
Of course you can remove everything but Space Marines from 40k and just play 500 point, the game is scaled down every factions has the same base and 40k should be balanced.

But it is not, Ultramarines, Iron Hands, Thousand Sons, Space Wolves, Black Legion are all using the same base with no real difference, just like all the Infinity factions, and still there is no balance between them

Infinity is not better balanced because there are just a dozen humans per side with no variation in stats and all carrying the same weapons. It is better written and tested and has seen improvements/development with each new edition instead of being a complete new game that starts from scratch

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

And people have asked for Sideboards in 40k for a while now, specially since auto-lose/win against specific lists is a real thing.

Some people have asked. I've seen the threads. And then they got torn apart by the usual internet anger. I think it's a generally good idea for the most part, personally. It worked reasonably well in WMH. But are you willing to (quite literally!) pay the price, or force others to do the same? Again, you will face an awful lot of resistance.

Some people have asked here, I had this discussion each time I helped organising a tournament or event

And I don't think you get what really happens out there, when I started, tournaments were at 1250/1500 points, and people have asked to increase it from the beginning.
It was more the opposite, that we faced heavy resistance for not forcing people to buy more. As soon as it was 1750 the first people asked for 2000 points or even more. Investing money to get a better chance for winning a 20 people event is a thing.

If we would change it to 1250 points, but 2 lists that each must be played at least once, the resistance will be much less than using a non-official Errata or WD-rules

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

Scale of the game has nothing to do with Balance at all. Just because there is Kill Team is smaller does not mean it is better balanced than 40k, the same for Apocalypse being larger.

I think I might have used the wrong word. Scale does have a role to play, but I think we also need to consider 'scope'.

Scale has a big role to play. Firstly, It's easier to balance a game of ten options than it is to balance a game of a thousand. Building a game around a defined variation, or 'scale' or 'scope' of game, (e.g. Skirmish, platoon level, army level etc) and defined unit types helps you focus appropriately in terms of mechanics etc thst suit the game. You can build mechanics that work for the game. upping the scale of the game to account for everything from thugs with chains to city stomping robots causes problems- it's a lot harder to build appropriate rules and to have a system that works across the board for everything, whereas it's easier to have more focused and more effective rules for games with a narrower scope

I'm probably explaining this poorly Kodis. I'll think about how to word it better - it's been a long day.

This is the complexity of the game, and yes the more complex a game is and the more options there are, the harder to balance it is.

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

Kings of War is balanced the same way as is Vanguard, although one is a mass battle game and the other one a Skirmish.

Indeed, kings of war gets a decent reprutation, but from some of the things I've heard, aren't most of the units fairly.. 'homogenous' and isn't the game itself relatively simplistic? I've not played it myself, I only ask... but homogenised units isn't another option to use. Not many people like it however...

Problem with KoW is that people look at the stats, say there is no big difference so the game must be more simple than others with more different stats

I mean having toughness 5 or 6 (maximum) has a bigger impact in KoW than the difference of toughness 8 or 10 (maximum). The "more" homogenised armies in KoW play much more different than any 40k army in 8th edition.

and the game by itself is more complex than AoS or 8th 40k.

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

I would never accept mistakes, loopholes and errors. Those have nothing to do with balance but are there because of lazy/bad writing or design. Something that can happen with free rules or small companies, but not with a Premium priced product like 40k

Or just unforeseen consequences.

Not with that price tag

Deadnight wrote:

 kodos wrote:

And balance need to be good enough that victory is decided on the table, not during list building or by choosing a faction, and internal balance need to be good enough that all units in a Codex are a real option, otherwise there is no reason to have them at all.

So how good is 'good enough'?

How do you account for victory on the table as opposed to list building when, for example, I take a tank company and you take a company of anti tank guns that is in essence, a 'silver bullet'? Do you limit choices? Do you try to remove 'hard counters'? How does this work with the rock/paper/scissors nature of tanks, anti-tank guns and further aspects of the game, like infantry, aircraft etc that simultaneously need to fit, not only I need the context of tank/anti-tank, but against each other?

And what price will you pay in terms of design 'sacrifices' to ensure all units are a real option? Do you reduce the scale/scope of the game? Homogenise the choices?

Bear in mind, I am not trying to catch you out kodos. I don't necessarily disagree with you and This is not a trick question. And thank you for responding.

It seems that most of us can agree that 40k is broken AF. It can reach the level that a person is essentially tabled on the top of turn 1. In this instance noone is really playing a game as in playing as a child does, and having fun. This of course raises the obvious point of why we are playing the game that way, or playing it at all.

This being said, balance is still a tricky issue. As many have said, balance is essentially unobtainable. I have also suggested that even if it was, the resulting game may be very boring.

So where should we try to fall of the balance spectrum? Should we consider it at all and just focus on fun? Maybe people have different forms of fun. Some people like to find broken stuff, and others like to push miniatures around.

 Elbows wrote:
Any game where the manufacturer sells the rules and the miniatures, there will be massive conflict in balance. Less so if it's a historical game where there are competing miniature manufacturers. When sales are directly tied to game performance/"new hotness", you end up with crap.

PS: This excludes a number of small game manufacturers, but big companies (GW, FFG, etc.)...it's a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes both. Battlefront (Flames of War), for example, has been taking pages from the GW playbook since they provide both models and rules for their game. No current model = no rules as an example, despite this being World War 2 where other models are readily available. And, just like with GW, you have the usual defenders with "They're a business and need to do this to get you to buy their product" as an excuse for doing that (despite, you know, other businesses not having to do that) or saying it's fine to take pages from GW by citing GW's success (which is in spite of their practices, not because of them).

The problem with Warhammer is that it's too bloated to balance, even if GW was capable of doing it (which they repeatedly show they aren't). or if they wanted to (which they show they don't) There are too many convoluted permutations to even begin to balance it. There are, of course, more complex games like Warmahordes, but Warmahordes didn't have dozens of factions, they had a smaller amount and the complexity was in abilities and interactions, which are things you can actually test together. GW goes the other side and makes a lot of variety, but most of it isn't well thought out at all and made irrelevant by other choices, or just are no good at the role they are intended to be.

I think at this point they are too far gone. They would likely have to gut the range and revamp the rules and avoid having dozens of factions and rules spread all over. Which, even if they would be willing to eat the potential lost sales, would cause a riot in the community which has frequently shown that they don't really care how bloated the game gets as long as "kewl models" and the min/maxing combo approach can work.

In the GW sphere, Adeptus Titanicus is absolutely one of their best in many regards, especially balance-wise. There are nastier lists, sure, but disregarding the one single blot (recent Acastuses, nerf pending) there are no ultimate combos, no unanswerable threats and the game is truly won and lost on the field. Even pretty much all the weapons and options are useable in their own niches (yes, even Avenger gatlings. I've felled Reavers with them ).

This is greatly helped by several factors:

1) The scope of the game is limited. It's a skirmish game where both sides often have maybe half a dozen miniatures each.
2) Stuff is durable. If the games aren't unreasonably large, it is very hard to immediately off any proper titans. This also produces interesting decisions later, when the stuff starts to enter the death spiral on turns 2-3.
3) Actions alternate. To get anything resembling a huge alpha strike on your opponent, they must have reacted wrong to begin with.
4) Decisions matter. Autopiloting is a death penalty and the game rewards good positioning that forces your opponent to split their actions suboptimally. Bonuses have opportunity costs, resources are managed and not everything can always be had.
5) It's great at representing the fluff behind it. AT has managed to show titans feeling like titans, has weapons that serve functional purposes (strip shields, punch through armour, aimable finishers...) and gives a nice amount of crunch to managing injured locations and reactor heat without going overboard into intrusively taxing administration.
6) Everything has a role. There are no "like unit X but better" choices, as all engines serve somewhat different roles in the grand scheme of things and offer a large variety of actual strategies to think about when constructing your force.
7) Amount of dice and skill. It's a dice game with operational friction in commands, you can flub your repairs and burn and so on, but in general every roll of dice is a meaningful event that matters and does further or hinder your plans. There's also a lot less of them around. Disoriented playing with a hard list WILL lose to a focused effort of a less on-paper powerful list.
8) It's very reminiscent of BFG in its rules, which is always only a good thing

Best of all, it's still in its infancy and all sorts of cool interactions are found. Some of the best fun I've had with GW games in a long time.

I mean you could ban LOW's back to appocalypse.
Remove entry barrier rules.
And use KT rules for smaller skirmishes.

In a way a flowing design.
Would it be flawless? No, but it would be an attempt atleast to fix some issues.

 Just Tony wrote:
I know I'm going to catch flak for this, so I'm cinching up my IBA, snapping on my K Pot, and bracing for the barrage.


The closest I've seen approaching balanced games in miniatures wargaming would be WFB 6th Ed. with the Ravening Hordes army lists, and 40K 3rd Ed. with the middle of the book "black" codices. Those lists were internally and externally balanced because of the changes to both systems necessitating it, and both of those games are about as balanced as you're going to get as far as GW stuff goes.

It's the main reason I went back to those games once I realized how badly the rules of both systems had gotten.
.

I have played a lot of games, and this is accurate.

The more chrome and hooks they need to add, the more unwieldy the whole thing gets.

To answer why even though aos and 40k are broken AF, legions of players defend it and play it anyway is largely because there are legions of players.

You know your investment is safe. You know you can get games. Everything else is secondary.

Great games with great rules mean nothing if no one wants to play it because they already dropped a grand on a 40k army.

There has also been an explosion of people trying to cash in with their pay to subscribe twitch streams or blogs or patreons which requires a large fan base, of which gw is perfect for maximizing internet glory and patreon accounts.

If Joe’s Game Dev created aos or 40k, no one would give it a second thought.

That, I think, is the key part. GW gets a pass because it's GW, and for some reason that excuses it. If some indy company had come out with AOS or 40k, the game would be ridiculed for how piss poor the balance is, and rightly so. Yet because GW is so massive, it's ignored and people don't care nearly as much as they should. You even find people defending the lack of professional proofreading from GW books when for any other publisher would be the expected norm.

It boggles my mind sometimes the level of "Oh it's not a big deal" you see online in response to all of these things that should by all rights be more important.

IDK. For all we like to say otherwise, minis games really get their start on the artistry of the minis themselves. If the models are great, the gameplay becomes the next focus and people push it into competition. From there, a game gets tested and often companies will take this moment to really refine and polish their rules, which tends to lead to a lot of the Mk2E explosion in popularity. In many ways, 8th has followed this style to great success and is rather quickly growing into a bit of a bloated 3rd edition of itself. That said, if it was a game from nothing, I think the artistry of the models might be enough to get it off the ground. I'm just not sure it wouldn't have faltered the way a lot of kickstarter games have long term without the established playerbase.

Wayniac wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
Any game where the manufacturer sells the rules and the miniatures, there will be massive conflict in balance. Less so if it's a historical game where there are competing miniature manufacturers. When sales are directly tied to game performance/"new hotness", you end up with crap.

PS: This excludes a number of small game manufacturers, but big companies (GW, FFG, etc.)...it's a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes both. Battlefront (Flames of War), for example, has been taking pages from the GW playbook since they provide both models and rules for their game. No current model = no rules as an example, despite this being World War 2 where other models are readily available. And, just like with GW, you have the usual defenders with "They're a business and need to do this to get you to buy their product" as an excuse for doing that (despite, you know, other businesses not having to do that) or saying it's fine to take pages from GW by citing GW's success (which is in spite of their practices, not because of them).

The problem with Warhammer is that it's too bloated to balance, even if GW was capable of doing it (which they repeatedly show they aren't). or if they wanted to (which they show they don't) There are too many convoluted permutations to even begin to balance it. There are, of course, more complex games like Warmahordes, but Warmahordes didn't have dozens of factions, they had a smaller amount and the complexity was in abilities and interactions, which are things you can actually test together. GW goes the other side and makes a lot of variety, but most of it isn't well thought out at all and made irrelevant by other choices, or just are no good at the role they are intended to be.

I think at this point they are too far gone. They would likely have to gut the range and revamp the rules and avoid having dozens of factions and rules spread all over. Which, even if they would be willing to eat the potential lost sales, would cause a riot in the community which has frequently shown that they don't really care how bloated the game gets as long as "kewl models" and the min/maxing combo approach can work.

40k has "dozens" of factions in name only.

Marines are much more similar than different.
Guard
Sisters
Chaos marines and demons
Nids
GSC (basically Nids crossed with guard anyway)
Eldar and Dark Eldar could be the same codex with different army lists
Harlies were better implemented as special units in other Eldar codices, imo
Tau
Orks
Necrons
Mechanicus

The smaller factions are unnecessary and outright detrimental to the game. Inquisition and DW are much more suited to skirmish-level games, Custodes could become imperium's special units alaf Harlies, etc.


Bury and forget IGOUGO and move on to AA. Consolidate armies and units. Properly utilize USRs, and reduce the bloat and non-USRs to the bare minimum to make unique marine units distinct, give those chapters their own army lists and so forth, and the game will already be much better balanced. What the game really needs is a more complex core that is actually capable of facilitating inter- and intra- faction diversity alongside agency and balance. This means moving away from "bespoke" rules that tweak the math, to SRs, unit types and so forth that allow armies/units to take special actions, among other things.

We already had this

And it was not better as faction rules were written independent from the core, making more of their own thing then care about the basic rules

So the current style of the game fits GW's attitude of writing rules much better


And how many factions are there is a difficult question, as comparing WM/H with 40k, if each Marine book is considered its own faction, you need to count each Warcaster and/or Theme list im Warmachine too.

either way, both end up with a similar amount of factions that needed to be balanced against each other

and Mercenary in WM/H are equal to the soup problem in 40k

 auticus wrote:
To answer why even though aos and 40k are broken AF, legions of players defend it and play it anyway is largely because there are legions of players.

You know your investment is safe. You know you can get games. Everything else is secondary.

Great games with great rules mean nothing if no one wants to play it because they already dropped a grand on a 40k army.

There has also been an explosion of people trying to cash in with their pay to subscribe twitch streams or blogs or patreons which requires a large fan base, of which gw is perfect for maximizing internet glory and patreon accounts.

If Joe’s Game Dev created aos or 40k, no one would give it a second thought.

You essentially describe Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Blastaar wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
Any game where the manufacturer sells the rules and the miniatures, there will be massive conflict in balance. Less so if it's a historical game where there are competing miniature manufacturers. When sales are directly tied to game performance/"new hotness", you end up with crap.

PS: This excludes a number of small game manufacturers, but big companies (GW, FFG, etc.)...it's a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes both. Battlefront (Flames of War), for example, has been taking pages from the GW playbook since they provide both models and rules for their game. No current model = no rules as an example, despite this being World War 2 where other models are readily available. And, just like with GW, you have the usual defenders with "They're a business and need to do this to get you to buy their product" as an excuse for doing that (despite, you know, other businesses not having to do that) or saying it's fine to take pages from GW by citing GW's success (which is in spite of their practices, not because of them).

The problem with Warhammer is that it's too bloated to balance, even if GW was capable of doing it (which they repeatedly show they aren't). or if they wanted to (which they show they don't) There are too many convoluted permutations to even begin to balance it. There are, of course, more complex games like Warmahordes, but Warmahordes didn't have dozens of factions, they had a smaller amount and the complexity was in abilities and interactions, which are things you can actually test together. GW goes the other side and makes a lot of variety, but most of it isn't well thought out at all and made irrelevant by other choices, or just are no good at the role they are intended to be.

I think at this point they are too far gone. They would likely have to gut the range and revamp the rules and avoid having dozens of factions and rules spread all over. Which, even if they would be willing to eat the potential lost sales, would cause a riot in the community which has frequently shown that they don't really care how bloated the game gets as long as "kewl models" and the min/maxing combo approach can work.

40k has "dozens" of factions in name only.

Marines are much more similar than different.
Guard
Sisters
Chaos marines and demons
Nids
GSC (basically Nids crossed with guard anyway)
Eldar and Dark Eldar could be the same codex with different army lists
Harlies were better implemented as special units in other Eldar codices, imo
Tau
Orks
Necrons
Mechanicus

The smaller factions are unnecessary and outright detrimental to the game. Inquisition and DW are much more suited to skirmish-level games, Custodes could become imperium's special units alaf Harlies, etc.


Bury and forget IGOUGO and move on to AA. Consolidate armies and units. Properly utilize USRs, and reduce the bloat and non-USRs to the bare minimum to make unique marine units distinct, give those chapters their own army lists and so forth, and the game will already be much better balanced. What the game really needs is a more complex core that is actually capable of facilitating inter- and intra- faction diversity alongside agency and balance. This means moving away from "bespoke" rules that tweak the math, to SRs, unit types and so forth that allow armies/units to take special actions, among other things.

Oh I absolutely agree, but GW treating so many things as different and independent is just adding to the bloat. I would love USRs again, in some fashion. I find it odd that most games move AWAY from having a dozen variations of the same rule (despite the reason why you do that making perfect sense) while GW doubled down on it with 8th. AA I think would be neat, I actually really like the Bolt Action system (not sure if it's used in Gates of Antares) with order dice, but simple alternating would work well too.

There's a lot they could do, but won't. Either because they feel they don't need to, since the playerbase obviously doesn't care and gives them record profits in spite of the rules, or because they aren't capable of doing it and would just mess it up over the years like they did before.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ghorgul wrote:

 auticus wrote:
To answer why even though aos and 40k are broken AF, legions of players defend it and play it anyway is largely because there are legions of players.

You know your investment is safe. You know you can get games. Everything else is secondary.

Great games with great rules mean nothing if no one wants to play it because they already dropped a grand on a 40k army.

There has also been an explosion of people trying to cash in with their pay to subscribe twitch streams or blogs or patreons which requires a large fan base, of which gw is perfect for maximizing internet glory and patreon accounts.

If Joe’s Game Dev created aos or 40k, no one would give it a second thought.

You essentially describe Sunk Cost Fallacy.

He does, and it's pretty accurate too. People play 40k because everyone around them play 40k, so you know you can get a game of it. Not so much if you play something esoteric; you may not get anyone who cares, or one or two people which often isn't enough to justify the investment, and that's if you can get the local store to let you play it there if they don't sell the game, and if you aren't met with hostility from the community for even daring to suggest another game to "push an agenda".

Many game designers start their journey of discovering by trying to build a better 40K.

See you in the Wargame Design forum soon!

It is a sunken cost for sure. Having tried to build up a community of something other than 40k or aos, it is the single biggest pain point that you have to overcome.

Right now we have our Conquest group at 9 people, we just lost a handful of interested players to the new AOS box set coming out.

Because those people weigh the cost of getting a new conquest army vs getting a new AOS box set, and the number of people playing AOS is greater so its the safer investment.

Even though all were highly interested in Conquest the game because the rules are very good.

 greatbigtree wrote:
For myself, and I’ve expressed this before, a well balanced war game should have two *well planned* armies have a 60/40 win ratio.
As a goal, I would say 2-3 archetypes should be viable in a faction. With about 20 factions in 40k, that would be around 50 archetypes to balance. So trying to get 50 archetypes to get a 60/40 split would be damned tough. 2500 combinations, including mirror matches. I don’t expect anyone to be able actually do that.
I’d say 40k has grown beyond the ability to balance within its own constraints. It is also why I feel that being within 10% of “true value” should be the objective for pricing units... and why I find the granularity of single point upgrades to be laughably inaccurate, and more likely to lead to inaccurate points vs “true value”.

You have reminded me something to do with scale, not just on points value but the currency we use to play the game: D6.

The granularity of the D6 seems to be awfully small since each one point bonus or decrement is in 16.7% intervals that has to represent every form of buff or handicap in the game.
It is due to this "scale" and the need to differentiate all these models that the developers seem to get "cramped" trying to fit all the various attributes from 1-6.

How Gulliman, Imperial Knight, Baneblade and a Gargant can share the same 6 point scale as a Getchin, Conscript, Cultist and Nurglings I have no idea.

It would definitely reduce the need for so many custom rules being used to differentiate units now.

Moving up to D20s would let the stats do most of the work.

 Talizvar wrote:


The granularity of the D6 seems to be awfully small since each one point bonus or decrement is in 16.7% intervals that has to represent every form of buff or handicap in the game.
It is due to this "scale" and the need to differentiate all these models that the developers seem to get "cramped" trying to fit all the various attributes from 1-6.

It's actually worse than that if you take a look at which stats on the curve are really useable. Doubly true if you want to consider modifiers, which need some space to modify:

7+ invalidates the roll and isn't really usable without reliable modifiers. 1+ is essentially the same problem.
6+ is hugely problematic, as the difference between it and 5+ is half/double depending on which way you look at it and total going to 7+. This makes it incredibly hard to both use the stat and allow modifiers, as they massively impact the results there. 2+ is in a similar boat.
So really, the only truly safe values to modify are only 3+ and 4+. Everything else results in really messy interactions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eldarain wrote:
It would definitely reduce the need for so many custom rules being used to differentiate units now.

Moving up to D20s would let the stats do most of the work.

D20's have their own issues, but I have to say I'm impressed with what Apocalypse has done with its hybrid D6/D12 system.

I define "balance" as follows: there should be a good reason to use every option in the game. I shouldn't have to tell people "Don't play (army X), they suck", or "Don't play (army Y), they suck" the way I do these days with Grey Knights, Tactical Marines, and other things GW has chosen to leave by the wayside.

I don't care about tournament results. "Perfect balance" is a cartoonish strawman about how if you can't achieve perfection it isn't worth bothering. I do care about players, whether they're me or other people, not getting hamstrung in random pick-up games because they liked the wrong models, to the point where most games are a foregone conclusion and I might as well not bother deploying models because the game was won in the list-building phase.

If I look at other miniatures games I've played, Warmachine, Infinity, Bolt Action/K47, X-wing, it would be ludicrous to suggest that any of them were "perfectly balanced", the tournament rankings have shown dominance for one list over another, but at the same time none of them have factions or models that you should never use because you're just going to lose. That is the ideal of "balance" tabletop games should strive for. People shouldn't be punished for liking the models or lore of something that the designers don't like writing rules for.