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That said MTG and GW have very different approaches to balance.

MTG rules have basically not changed in ages. Yes new abilities come and go; but the broad core is basically the same. If you took someone from 20years ago and gave them a modern magic deck chances are they'd pick the game up really fast because most of the game remains the same.

Meanwhile with GW because they change so much you can even just find difficulty moving from one edition to the next one. Yes fundamentals like rolling a dice are the same; but loads of stuff moves around. Heck the rules shift around on movement from universal distances to unique per model etc....


I think this is a big difference - MTG aims for 1 system that they polish, refine and adjust and heavily focus on balance.
Warhammer just doesn't aim for that.

 Overread wrote:
That said MTG and GW have very different approaches to balance.

MTG rules have basically not changed in ages. Yes new abilities come and go; but the broad core is basically the same. If you took someone from 20years ago and gave them a modern magic deck chances are they'd pick the game up really fast because most of the game remains the same.

Meanwhile with GW because they change so much you can even just find difficulty moving from one edition to the next one. Yes fundamentals like rolling a dice are the same; but loads of stuff moves around. Heck the rules shift around on movement from universal distances to unique per model etc....


I think this is a big difference - MTG aims for 1 system that they polish, refine and adjust and heavily focus on balance.
Warhammer just doesn't aim for that.

sure, and I think there are three major reasons for that.

the first is the cynical worldly reason: edition changes make money. Long time players forget that GW makes more money off of a new player buying into the hobby than a long time player buying the new models for his army. They also make more money off of a player seeing an armies new rules, or even the new ways their current rules interact with new cores, and then buying a new army than the player who tries to adjust his army to keep up. What many people want most from a game: being able to play with a handful of friends with the same rules and armies for years is something that effectively makes GW $0 and so is not going to be a priority.

Teh second, again, is the ease of playing multiple games, playing games with brand new cards, and the larger player pool. I'd bet more games of magic were played between launch and revised than have been played of warhammer since rogue trader. They simply have the ability to hone the game better.

The final reason is Magic uses the same core rules, but essentially makes players throw most of their armies away every few years, at least in some formats. Commander lets you use your old cards, but has it's own problem of not enough of the old cards being available. There is zero reason not to include Gaea's cradle in every green commander deck, which is now a $900 card that goes in a 100 card deck. Imagine if GW not only hadn't made fire dragons since 2002, but also promised to never make them again.

Essentially, magic (semi literally) prints money by selling people new cards all the time, even if they have a huge collection. You can build and play a very solid, even competitive, eldar army using only models from literally 30 years ago. Even with power 9, a magic deck from 1995 would not last long in the modern era.

Yes, you can play historicals or minis agnostic rules that don't change. And if that's what you or your group love, go for it. But that doesn't generate the income to make plastic kits at the rate and quality GW makes. It's a trade off.

And I'm not immune to the allure of being able to play with old stuff. I have a huge first born ultras army that will likely never see the table again. One of my dreams is to see GW make a sister to HH and create a new Badab war game, using 3rd/4th edition style rules, to let players build and play their firstborn stuff in a little sandbox off to the side.

MTG does have its problems.

Around the time I stopped playing? Green had seen its signature tricks (Trample, Reach) shared with others, the Mana Cost of creatures increase (utterly bollocksing Mana Acceleration as an advantage), and the spreading of Lifelink and Deathtouch.

To add to that? Green Creatures tended to be themed per block. So my Elves of Mirrodin literally didn’t play well with the Snakes of Kamigawa.

Blue? Oh hi, have more Wizards.

Red? Oh hi, have more Goblins

And so on with Soliders and Zombies for White and Black.

So, I ended up with my best tricks appearing in other decks, legacy synergy enjoyed by everyone else denied, and the cost of Creatures going up (whilst Blue still got BS like a 2/2, Flying for 2 Mana).

Black of course then got the option to Knack My Library. And they took their sweet time giving anyone a way to defend their Library. That was like entering a Boxing tournament, where Kevin, and Kevin alone, is allowed to blooter you in the pills without penalty.

It’s not easy, being Green!

Edit: wrong thread

Another thing too that I don't think gets talked about as much, or at the very least, gets overshadowed by more prominent things you can point to like busted units or RNG, is how much player skill really does factor into the game. Especially when you try to take the very long step from casual to competitive play. Some of the other posters have spoken about it a bit but I wanted to add more to that.

Especially as I was reminded of that very much this weekend.

As I've mentioned a few times on here, I've been doing very well with Kroot and I they are a very powerful army at the moment. There are a lot of 40k players in my city, but skill levels wildly vary, so while I'm a reasonably skilled player and winning nearly all my matches, it's not indicative of how balanced the army is, or even how skilled I am really as for, at least in the part of my city that I play in, I feel like a big fish in a small pond.

Near the end of last year I'd played against one of the best players in the city, this was back before Kroot were making as many waves online as they are now. He was the favoured to win the event and I managed to take our match by a handful of points (I think it was 88-79 IIRC), but he'd never seen the army the way I played it before, never had a chance to practice against it, so I did have the advantage there. We were both discussing after the fact how evenly matched it was and put a lot of it down to first turn advantage, had he gone first that game, the score likely would have been reversed.

I had the pleasure of facing him again at an event this past weekend. Same armies, Kroot vs Guard Tanks, both of us had improved upon our list since last time and he also got the first turn this time round. However, in this match, while I still managed a respectable score (80-64), he very clearly outplayed me. From deployment to choices in the early game, I could see the writing on the wall by the end of turn two, I knew I was being completely out classed. He plays all the time, gets his reps in and knows the game backwards and forwards, while I'm lucky if I get one game in per month. Even then, all it took was one match against me for him to take the measure of both me and my list and create a solid counter for it next time. I, perhaps a little too overconfident from my winning steak and my victory against him the first time, did not possess the same skill.

The thing is, while his army was very finely tuned, if it had been someone else fielding it, I'm certain I could have won the matchup. I had actually played the round before that against someone else on his team who I took down very handily, and while he was still a skilled player, the differences in how it felt to go up against them both were night and day, even though they were both on the same competitive team.

My point after all that is this. Even with the statistics that we have, while Warhammer is big, the players that attend all of these events, even the competitive ones, have wildly differing skill levels. Yes, the top of the top players are still going to cluster together to a point, but there are only so many of them, especially when you spread them across the number of factions that the game has. Just relying on tournament data, it's easy to look at it and see certain armies performing better or worse than others, but how much of that is the skill of the players that happen to own and be playing those armies at the time vs how good the armies actually are? It's harder to say than it seems.

I've won plenty of matches against many variations of Guard lists with my Kroot, but If I had to rematch my opponent from this weekend again, I'm not sure I could beat him (even though I am very much looking forward to our eventual tie breaker). My winrate against Guard is around 90% this edition, but that number isn't indicative of how balanced the two armies actually are against each other...

TLDR, with so much variation between player skill and possible army composition as well as a incredibly quickly changing meta game, the closest I think we can really come to saying what's balanced vs what's not is a general direction of which way the wind is blowing at best. There's just not enough time or data with the same skill level players using the same ruleset against each other to generate realy imperical data on the matter, the best we have are vague trends.

Addendum: I just noticed today that Guard has the lowest win rate out of any faction in the game right now at 45%, just to enhance my point about that being unreliable. I would certainly not have guessed that based on my experience last weekend.

That’s the downside of overly focussing on the meta.

At the low end, you’ve people who’ll Netlist with no real understanding of why that particular army list is so potent. So they struggle to get it to fully perform. They only consider what their army can do, and never seem to see what I can’t really do.

At the high end? You can lack the experience of playing general or particularly unusual lists. And so you may simply lack familiarity to be able to spot the weaknesses you need to exploit.

Where would even get those netlists?

40k has been operating of archetypes for some type now, a clear indicator of vastly improved internal balance compared to old times.
Faster balancing cycles also makes building that one OP list much less desirable because it might be gone by the time you have bought, build and painted everything. The main reason why DG demon engine spam was so rampant recently was because everyone actually had tripples of those models from previous editions and/or army boxes.

Personal collection and local meta matter much more for list building these days.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
That’s the downside of overly focussing on the meta.

At the low end, you’ve people who’ll Netlist with no real understanding of why that particular army list is so potent. So they struggle to get it to fully perform. They only consider what their army can do, and never seem to see what I can’t really do.

At the high end? You can lack the experience of playing general or particularly unusual lists. And so you may simply lack familiarity to be able to spot the weaknesses you need to exploit.

Agree with this wholeheartedly. A great player with a good list can compete and often win against a good player with a great list.

Balance is an artificial concept. Equal points usually do not equate to equal performance on the tabletop. If it did, the average win rate for all players would work out to 50%.

The rules should not be mistaken for a system of competitive calibration and the meta analysis should not be mistaken for a telemetry gauge. GW bakes overpowered rules into new releases to drive sales, amongst other marketing tricks. Balance Dataslates are a measure of tournament results, it does not account for people who do not participate in tournaments (which is most players.) Then, after several years of all this noodling with the current ruleset in pursuit of balance, GW tosses everything out to start all over again.

If someone wanted to achieve perfect points parity across all factions, it could be done through simulation-driven regression, tree search simulations, probabilistic models, and reinforcement learning. Sitting down with a DGX Spark, it would probably take me a couple months to hit on a model capable of spitting out a recognizable set of rules that achieves optimal points values for all factions.

But Games Workshop exists to sell models, paints, books, and IP licenses to game developers. It's not in their interests to have a perfectly balanced set of rules. For one thing, imbalance is their edge, it's what keeps people coming back to improve their armies. For another, I question whether anyone wants to play a game that comes down to the same odds as a coin flip but costs time + significant expenses to participate in. Most people would not see the point.

Just enjoy the ever mutating mess that the rules are and always will be. Enjoy it enough to get very good at it, then balance doesn't seem like a thing anymore.

Perfect points really isn’t a thing for the same reason market prices constantly change. The value of things is constantly changing in response to what other things people take. A lot of what’s bad might just not be the right tool for what other people are taking.

MEQ might be the most common stat line across the game, but that means it’s actually relatively uncommon as a subset of models taken. Players react to MEQ by focusing on things like S5 and AP.

Indirect fire is a lot more valuable of a tool against Eldar than Knights. Your faction might have a wide variety of tools but their value is constantly changing. One of the big reason 10th has worked so well competitively is simply that it’s put less emphasis on points to differentiate options and made tools more diverse, leaving it up to players to adapt to changes in the meta.

The issue surely is that balance doesn't depend on "perfect points". It only has to be "close enough".

If one army is genuinely worth 2000 points, and another is worth "about 2050" points, then yes they'd have an advantage, but how decisive would that really be to win rates? For example if you literally mirrored each others armies - but the other guy gets a relatively cheap character or min-sized chaff unit on top.

I think it would be lost in the noise. If you played hundreds of games maybe they have a slight advantage - but treating each game as a discrete event I don't think that would matter. Decisions and dice/RNG would have a bigger impact.

But as you move the dial that shifts. At 2000 to 2400, I think there would be a dramatic effect on win rates. At 2000 vs 3000, I think it would verge on 100% win rate for the 3000 point army, unless the skill gap between players is outrageous (more plausibly, the 3000 point player can't be playing to win).

This is why points adjustments work. Equally however its why they usually have to be spiky to have an impact. If you are shaving off 50 points that's probably not impacting the army's performance that much. If you have to cut 150-200, you are taking a substantial unit (or 2) off the table that will have an impact.

hypothetical balance would require a dynamic engine to compare both army compositions and determine their relative value to each other before EVERY GAME.

There is no static value of a weapon or unit, it's entirely based on its utility against the target.

Lascannons are more efficient against knight armies than heavy bolters, but less efficient against Orks.

So you'll never get perfect balance and close enough is the only practical method.

EDIT: in the future they could put an ai in the app trained on the unit data that generates real time army points scores when you and your opponent input your armies. But whether that's technically possible I'm not sure it's going to be very satisfying to players

 techsoldaten wrote:
Balance is an artificial concept. Equal points usually do not equate to equal performance on the tabletop. If it did, the average win rate for all players would work out to 50%.

That's not how balance works.

Every player would have a 50% win rate if every player was equally skilled. They're not.

I'm a better player than someone who's getting their first game in, and I'm a vastly worse player than a Grand Tournament champion. If the game was perfectly balanced, I'd get slaughtered by the champ and win handily against the newbie (assuming I treated the latter game just to win, not to help teach them, of course).

 JNAProductions wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:
Balance is an artificial concept. Equal points usually do not equate to equal performance on the tabletop. If it did, the average win rate for all players would work out to 50%.

That's not how balance works.

Every player would have a 50% win rate if every player was equally skilled. They're not.

I'm a better player than someone who's getting their first game in, and I'm a vastly worse player than a Grand Tournament champion. If the game was perfectly balanced, I'd get slaughtered by the champ and win handily against the newbie (assuming I treated the latter game just to win, not to help teach them, of course).

sigh

The first thing I said in that message was that a great player with a good list can compete with and often beat a good player with a great list.

Don't explain that back to me or how balance "works."

My understanding of "balance" as it is commonly used is: for armies with the same number of points and all other things being equal, each side should have roughly the same probability of winning. A balanced ruleset would mean the choice of faction should have almost no impact on outcomes.

That does not mean each side has the same probability of winning in every game. External and independent factors, like player skill or list selection, would also still affect outcomes. But that has nothing to do with what people mean when they use the word balance.

If that's not what balance means, then explain yourself.

Grand Tournament Champions represent the tiniest fraction of the player base. They are not the people you use to judge the quality of the rules. The vast majority of people who play 40k - greater than 95% - are average. When I said a balanced ruleset would reduce the probability of winning in any game to the odds of a coinflip, I'm referring to that reality.

And it would get very boring after the first few games.

If I bring an army which is all vehicles, I don't think its imbalance that I do better against a list which has no anti-tank, than a list which has lots of anti-tank.

I can see the idea for "dynamic pricing" if you want every game to have a 50/50 outcome - but I feel that's a bit artificial. I don't think your choice of list should have "no" impact, it just shouldn't have overwhelming impact.
Equally, you shouldn't go "Eldar are just better". But its not unreasonable to go "lots of Aspect Squads playing keep-away will do better into this list than that list."
I like the fact 40k has various "archetypes" for list building - even if that can create certain asymmetry.

A common historical source of imbalance in 40k was if for example if a faction had "terrible" anti-tank (Tyranids come to mind for instance), so even if the meta is all vehicles, they are stuck taking bad units which will often underperform. Or more likely just taking their good units, and hoping not to run into vehicles.

In my view the answer, which GW seem to have tried (in a way they didn't 3rd-7th) - is that units should explicitly be good at what they do. But most units should be "okay" into most units because that dilutes the impact of skew.

But if I choose to run a "Dark Eldar foot carpet", its not really imbalance that massed Kabalites/Wyches/Wracks aren't doing a lot to Knights.

That would be true if the game army selection was itself a balanced system, but their current system does allow all tanks, which provides implicit approval that your army can work with them.

 Hellebore wrote:
That would be true if the game army selection was itself a balanced system, but their current system does allow all tanks, which provides implicit approval that your army can work with them.

Well yes. This is why I think its good that 40k allows every unit to hurt every unit - in a way that wasn't the case before. For some that harms verisimilitude and makes the game more computer-game like. But in terms of "making the game work" I think its better.

But I think the wider point is that you aren't necessarily trying to balance the game so every possible list selection has a 50/50 chance against any other list selection.

techsoldaten wrote:My understanding of "balance" as it is commonly used is: for armies with the same number of points and all other things being equal, each side should have roughly the same probability of winning.

When a tank company goes up against Oops, All Meltaguns on a board of dense terrain, should they both have an equal probability of winning?

Should an army of CQB specialists expect to go 50/50 against an army of snipers and artillery on planet bowling ball (ie no terrain)?

An army chosen with careful consideration for synergies and putting upgrades on relevant units should be equally effective as an army chosen by dartboard with powerfists on Devastators?

The premise that balance means any two armies, units, or anything with the same points cost must be evenly matched is the naive interpretation, and it's plain wrong. You cannot assign an objective measure of value for an option in a system where the actual, practical utility of that option is entirely dependent on a multitude of different factors.

In practice points represent an opportunity cost to the player, not an objective measure of value. As the designer, you adjust that opportunity cost to encourage army-building in the manner you intend, and then balance the resulting armies against one another. But the actual effectiveness of any given unit within that army is going to vary on the table, and it is a cast-iron bitch to make Unit A appropriately costed when used in Army Archetype 1 without being brokenly overpowered in Army Archetype 2 or when it goes up against Enemy Faction Delta or in an environment that has a lot of Unit Type Blue. Tweaking points isn't an effort to achieve some concept of mathematically perfect balance, it's to give options the right level of comparative utility that there are no must-takes or never-takes.

A game with good balance is one where players have a lot of freedom to design armies that are viable on the table. It's a game that doesn't punish you for taking 'trap' options, doesn't have choices that are never worthwhile, has all the available factions and archetypes on roughly the same level of power, and isn't contingent on prescriptive out-of-game considerations (specific terrain layouts, or gentleman's agreements on army composition) to have a good time.

It is not a game where every army can expect to go 50/50 against every other army. That's just not how this works.