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Yes but there isn't a reason they can't slow it the heck down now if its impacting the quality and lead time to get things right.

random voxcast or what have you is not putting it out, black and white, for all players to easily see and digest. They do say they don't strive hard for balance but then go ahead and say they are trying to balance things. They need to either give up the ghost and admit they won't be balanced because they want to use it to sell, or they are just crap at it and can't do it despite best efforts or if it happens it's just a happy accident. As is they consistently talk out of both sides of their mouth depending on the crowd and intent they want to put out there. Which leads to these talks. Now, I'd say they were quite clear with the first stage of AoS, it was as casual as can be and only the most foolish tried to make it competitive.

They're NOT contradicting themselves when they say they're trying to balance it!

Look, these two things can EASILY both be true:

a) A highly balanced and competitive, tournament-style game is NOT their priority, and never will be. Their priority is a game that reproduces the "feel" of the setting/lore/IP, for the sake of a fun afternoon between friends or likeminded strangers.

b) They still want players with a more competitive tilt to enjoy the game, and they know that relative balance between factions and properly representative points costs are important to most players regardless of play style, so they try their best, relative to their other goals and their practical limitations, to balance the game!

HOW on Holy Terra is that a contradiction!?!

It’s not. There’s just a lot of soapboxing going on.

nataliereed1984 wrote:

random voxcast or what have you is not putting it out, black and white, for all players to easily see and digest. They do say they don't strive hard for balance but then go ahead and say they are trying to balance things. They need to either give up the ghost and admit they won't be balanced because they want to use it to sell, or they are just crap at it and can't do it despite best efforts or if it happens it's just a happy accident. As is they consistently talk out of both sides of their mouth depending on the crowd and intent they want to put out there. Which leads to these talks. Now, I'd say they were quite clear with the first stage of AoS, it was as casual as can be and only the most foolish tried to make it competitive.

They're NOT contradicting themselves when they say they're trying to balance it!

Look, these two things can EASILY both be true:

a) A highly balanced and competitive, tournament-style game is NOT their priority, and never will be. Their priority is a game that reproduces the "feel" of the setting/lore/IP, for the sake of a fun afternoon between friends or likeminded strangers.

b) They still want players with a more competitive tilt to enjoy the game, and they know that relative balance between factions and properly representative points costs are important to most players regardless of play style, so they try their best, relative to their other goals and their practical limitations, to balance the game!

HOW on Holy Terra is that a contradiction!?!

You can only put out a half arsed attempt at something for so long before it seems either you suck at it or you really don't want to accomplish it. The contradiction is in they could easily accomplish both. Nail down that tight tournament rule set, for you know those competitive types they care about. For this they have no limitations, they are the company that puts out the game if they wanted to do it they should have all the assets on hand to do it and time on hand to accomplish this task despite all the " But it's hard !! " people keep tossing out there. This is a rule set for a game not rocket science, it can be done despite how bloated they keep making it. They could always you know, un bloat it as well, just saying.

Both casual and competitive could be a priority, and if time is an issue they should take their time and do the job right.

It's an awful lot of coddling for this professional company that can and should put out better efforts or be frank to the fact they don't give a crap. Being commended for lazy effort shouldn't be a thing when most people hold themselves to a higher standard why should we expect less from this very large company that has been doing this for a long time ?

If we grow to accept less than best effort, the crap product we get is our fault and we saw where that led to last time, it led to 7th edition and the game circling the drain while some hard liners kept saying how amazing it was and they did their best and anything more was just too much to ask for. This whole conversation happened then too, yet somehow, they found an ability to do better when money was on the line. I think we can reasonably believe they could do much better than they currently are. I'm not even asking anymore they do better, I just want them to level with everyone they won't ever really seek better balance, or they are bad at it. As the tongue in cheek jokes are fine but honesty goes a long way then even I could shoot down these posts and be like " Bruh, they just don't care lol, you want balance this is the wrong place for you. " As I said, I wouldn't even be mad, but the token signs of " balance " will just keep leading people to actually want it, you know, the balance they claim to be working on.

AngryAngel80 wrote:
Yes but there isn't a reason they can't slow it the heck down now if its impacting the quality and lead time to get things right.

They are though? Space Marines came out in August, next official codex release is Sisters in January.

Why to people still think that casual/narritive and competitive need different kind of rules?

Competitive gaming does not need any balance nor does it need good rules.

Bad rules will be compensated by a tournament FAQ/Errara, bad balance will be compensated by everyone playing the best armies with the best options
No problem here that need to be fixed.

Casual/Narritive people don't care about balance as they use Power Level or no points at all and just play scenarios without victory conditions
again, no problem to be found


But, the big problem is that casual/narritive people are going to play competitive events and start to struggle as they don't have a chance with their army and don't want to buy in a new one just to be able to play the game with a different group of people.

this was less of a problem in the past with armies being smaller and cheaper.
just needed to paint 60 models and having an army for competitive events and one for narritive events was fine

now buying and painting 100 models for one army and people want to use that army for both
and at this point the whole balance problem kicks in


overall, casual/narritive players will always benefit more from well written rules and good balance than competitive players (as soon as the pay2win netlist is gone and skill is more important some WAAC players will struggle)

and in most other games it is the narritive group who demand better rules/balance as the competitive group is happy with taking whatever is the strongest option

saying otherwise is either an excuse for lacy work (as they don't want to try or don't care) or from people who like the imbalance as it makes WAAC easier


PS: if GW really does not care about competitive games, they should stop doing matched play points and just update power levels
because the majority of people are said as not caring about competitive too, this should make no difference at all and it would be clear for everyone that the game is not made for competitive play

but GW is doing it because the playerbase wanted to have it, which means there must be more people doing competitive gaming and/or those spending more money so that it is worth the afford

or the casual/narritive people demand matched play points, which means they care about balance and that brings back the first point

Slayer,

My original point was about how I find the emerging narrative in my games of 8th edition. You said my account was not from a "tourney list" so I provided the context. You also referred to me as a CAAC, so I corrected you. The player base for 40K is wide and you should respect that not everybody approaches the game in the same way as you.

Cheers,

T2B

AngryAngel80 wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

random voxcast or what have you is not putting it out, black and white, for all players to easily see and digest. They do say they don't strive hard for balance but then go ahead and say they are trying to balance things. They need to either give up the ghost and admit they won't be balanced because they want to use it to sell, or they are just crap at it and can't do it despite best efforts or if it happens it's just a happy accident. As is they consistently talk out of both sides of their mouth depending on the crowd and intent they want to put out there. Which leads to these talks. Now, I'd say they were quite clear with the first stage of AoS, it was as casual as can be and only the most foolish tried to make it competitive.

They're NOT contradicting themselves when they say they're trying to balance it!

Look, these two things can EASILY both be true:

a) A highly balanced and competitive, tournament-style game is NOT their priority, and never will be. Their priority is a game that reproduces the "feel" of the setting/lore/IP, for the sake of a fun afternoon between friends or likeminded strangers.

b) They still want players with a more competitive tilt to enjoy the game, and they know that relative balance between factions and properly representative points costs are important to most players regardless of play style, so they try their best, relative to their other goals and their practical limitations, to balance the game!

HOW on Holy Terra is that a contradiction!?!

You can only put out a half arsed attempt at something for so long before it seems either you suck at it or you really don't want to accomplish it. The contradiction is in they could easily accomplish both. Nail down that tight tournament rule set, for you know those competitive types they care about. For this they have no limitations, they are the company that puts out the game if they wanted to do it they should have all the assets on hand to do it and time on hand to accomplish this task despite all the " But it's hard !! " people keep tossing out there. This is a rule set for a game not rocket science, it can be done despite how bloated they keep making it. They could always you know, un bloat it as well, just saying.

Both casual and competitive could be a priority, and if time is an issue they should take their time and do the job right.

It's an awful lot of coddling for this professional company that can and should put out better efforts or be frank to the fact they don't give a crap. Being commended for lazy effort shouldn't be a thing when most people hold themselves to a higher standard why should we expect less from this very large company that has been doing this for a long time ?

If we grow to accept less than best effort, the crap product we get is our fault and we saw where that led to last time, it led to 7th edition and the game circling the drain while some hard liners kept saying how amazing it was and they did their best and anything more was just too much to ask for. This whole conversation happened then too, yet somehow, they found an ability to do better when money was on the line. I think we can reasonably believe they could do much better than they currently are. I'm not even asking anymore they do better, I just want them to level with everyone they won't ever really seek better balance, or they are bad at it. As the tongue in cheek jokes are fine but honesty goes a long way then even I could shoot down these posts and be like " Bruh, they just don't care lol, you want balance this is the wrong place for you. " As I said, I wouldn't even be mad, but the token signs of " balance " will just keep leading people to actually want it, you know, the balance they claim to be working on.

Okay so:
1. Writing rules does not have "no limitation". The people writing rules and playtesting need to be paid and deadlines must be met. You can't say "well they should take their time" because people get impatient. While IH are stomping all over the meta EVERY other faction is sitting here waiting for THEIR power creepy codex. If GW DID take their time people would equally bitch about them being too slow.

2. It IS hard. I mentioned before even Privateer Press, who for a while was GWs biggest rival and whose game was entirely focussed around tournament level play was never greatly balanced. It was KIND of balanced but still the meta was dominated by certain lists and still is, despite having public beta testing and literally top level tournament players on staff to playtest.

3. You can't "unbloat" it. People hate it when they can't use their models anymore. GW frequently receives flak on these forums for their "no model no rules" policy. Imagine how people would feel if models they DID go into Legends or something. Can you imagine the reaction if tactical marines were just axed in one fell swoop when they shifted to Primaris? I almost wish GW had done that so I could see it. It would be like when they axed Fantasy all over again except with 50% of their customer base.

4. The comparison to 7th is a confusing one to m because it shows that the customer base IS willing to take their money and leave but since 8th launched GW has been doing so well that the BBC publishes news articles about it. Moreover this hasn't been an initial surge and then a drop off like you would expect if the game was as crap as people would have you believe but a steady increase, which means its retaining players who are still buying stuff. So either people are enjoying 8th despite its balance flaws and the naysayers in this thread are a vocal minority or AoS is doing some crazy numbers.

@kodos we care about matched play/points because it makes games easy to set up. As I said before evert game arrangement I've made for 8th has gone like this:

Me: Anyone free this week?
Friend: I'm free monday.
Me: Cool, 2000pts?
Friend: Sounds good, see you then.

We don't spend the following day discussing house rules etc. We just meet, explain what isn't WYSIWYG and play.

 Sim-Life wrote:
.
@kodos we care about matched play/points because it makes games easy to set up. As I said before evert game arrangement I've made for 8th has gone like this:

Me: Anyone free this week?
Friend: I'm free monday.
Me: Cool, 2000pts?
Friend: Sounds good, see you then.

We don't spend the following day discussing house rules etc. We just meet, explain what isn't WYSIWYG and play.

and this will work the same with "20 Power Level" or "Scenario X, army lists as the book".

that your are asking for matched play points which means your asking for a more balanced game as PL will offer or that the outcome is not fixed
it is not easier than the other options, but it gives the impression of a more balanced game with an open outcome

and this is the problem for a lot of people as matched play points are not better balanced than PL (for some units but not everything) and the outcome depends on the chosen factions/lists (and is not open until the end)

 kodos wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
.
@kodos we care about matched play/points because it makes games easy to set up. As I said before evert game arrangement I've made for 8th has gone like this:

Me: Anyone free this week?
Friend: I'm free monday.
Me: Cool, 2000pts?
Friend: Sounds good, see you then.

We don't spend the following day discussing house rules etc. We just meet, explain what isn't WYSIWYG and play.

and this will work the same with "20 Power Level" or "Scenario X, army lists as the book".

that your are asking for matched play points which means your asking for a more balanced game as PL will offer or that the outcome is not fixed
it is not easier than the other options, but it gives the impression of a more balanced game with an open outcome

and this is the problem for a lot of people as matched play points are not better balanced than PL (for some units but not everything) and the outcome depends on the chosen factions/lists (and is not open until the end)

Our group likes points because of the granularity and the fact that its how we've been playing for 20+ years. I probably should have mentioned that. Its really more the former than the latter though.

Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

 kodos wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
.
@kodos we care about matched play/points because it makes games easy to set up. As I said before evert game arrangement I've made for 8th has gone like this:

Me: Anyone free this week?
Friend: I'm free monday.
Me: Cool, 2000pts?
Friend: Sounds good, see you then.

We don't spend the following day discussing house rules etc. We just meet, explain what isn't WYSIWYG and play.

and this will work the same with "20 Power Level" or "Scenario X, army lists as the book".

that your are asking for matched play points which means your asking for a more balanced game as PL will offer or that the outcome is not fixed
it is not easier than the other options, but it gives the impression of a more balanced game with an open outcome

and this is the problem for a lot of people as matched play points are not better balanced than PL (for some units but not everything) and the outcome depends on the chosen factions/lists (and is not open until the end)

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced. Unit x has 6 boltguns, unit Y has 4 chaincannons and 6 boltguns, yep perfectly equal in PL. You might as well count number of wounds in your list as counting PL, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA, there is a point (CA 24 at GW's meandering pace towards balance) where almost all options will be viable with pts, not at all so with PL which could be CA 21 if it became a goal and GW set up the right method for balancing and testing their game. I could do it easily as a part time job if I had a solid team of playtesters and a guy or two that were good at math (if I applied myself for a bit I'd be able to do it myself as well) and crucially GW's official mandate, because with that you unlock a bunch of volunteer resources. A simple thing like question scheme released to the 40k community with a rating of 1-5 would massively enlighten GW. Something as silly as nerfing Ogryn while leaving Bullgryn alone wouldn't happen if you had a scheme that said "Ogryn 1,5 Bullgryn 3,8".

One of the biggest issues currently is that they've opened the box with faction bloat. They CAN'T go back or there would be rioting in the streets if they removed things, even if it was for the overall balance and health of the game you'd have people screaming bloody murder that their stuff isn't valid anymore.

Even if they tightened these restrictions for tournament play (the hypothetical "Organized Play" subset of rules) you'd have people bitching that they bought 5 Knights and can't use them, etc.

Also, I notice people keep thinking that the variety of options in 40k somehow makes it more complicated. It really doesn't. Most of it is just illusions to look complicated (e.g. this unit has 10 different weapon options) when A) There's often one obvious good choice and several obvious bad choices and B) These are all minor options. A game like Gaslands or Warmahordes or Guild Ball or what have you, while they are often smaller than 40k, have more actual options that really impact the game rather than get bogged down in minutiae.

I haven't tried the Apoc rules but I've heard they are fairly good, and probably better at 40k than 40k is. To answer the above question, why would it need to be the default? Because history has shown that in most cases if something isn't the default, it doesn't get used. People LIKE having an "official standard" they can fall back on and dislike having to ask if something is allowed. So if Apoc were to be used for 40k but as an option, you would see it come up very rarely and everyone would just stick to "default" Matched Play because you don't have to do any work and you can be certain someone has played it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vict0988 wrote:
You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced. Unit x has 6 boltguns, unit Y has 4 chaincannons and 6 boltguns, yep perfectly equal in PL. You might as well count number of wounds in your list as counting PL, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA, there is a point (CA 24 at GW's meandering pace towards balance) where almost all options will be viable with pts, not at all so with PL which could be CA 21 if it became a goal and GW set up the right method for balancing and testing their game. I could do it easily as a part time job if I had a solid team of playtesters and a guy or two that were good at math (if I applied myself for a bit I'd be able to do it myself as well) and crucially GW's official mandate, because with that you unlock a bunch of volunteer resources. A simple thing like question scheme released to the 40k community with a rating of 1-5 would massively enlighten GW. Something as silly as nerfing Ogryn while leaving Bullgryn alone wouldn't happen if you had a scheme that said "Ogryn 1,5 Bullgryn 3,8".

PL might not be balanced, but neither is points. So for all the hate PL gets, it's not really any different. While GW has seemingly abandoned PL that appears to be more because everyone immediately jumped on "Why wouldn't I just take all the best options then if it's all free" instead of seeing why it was actually there.

Wayniac wrote:
One of the biggest issues currently is that they've opened the box with faction bloat. They CAN'T go back or there would be rioting in the streets if they removed things, even if it was for the overall balance and health of the game you'd have people screaming bloody murder that their stuff isn't valid anymore.

Even if they tightened these restrictions for tournament play (the hypothetical "Organized Play" subset of rules) you'd have people bitching that they bought 5 Knights and can't use them, etc.

Also, I notice people keep thinking that the variety of options in 40k somehow makes it more complicated. It really doesn't. Most of it is just illusions to look complicated (e.g. this unit has 10 different weapon options) when A) There's often one obvious good choice and several obvious bad choices and B) These are all minor options. A game like Gaslands or Warmahordes or Guild Ball or what have you, while they are often smaller than 40k, have more actual options that really impact the game rather than get bogged down in minutiae.

You don't need to remove units to remove bloat, I think a lot of people appreciate their special weapons in their squads and how that helps them specialize in small ways that you cannot with the new Primaris units or in the Apocalypse specialist game. Removing Chapter Tactics, Combat Doctrines, WL traits and Stratagems with the next CA and release a set of universal Stratagems and WL traits and re-balance Relics (and probably cut down on the number for some factions...). It's six pages for Stratagems and WL traits and five pages for Relics. CA20 won't need datasheets so it could replace that.

 vict0988 wrote:
You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced. Unit x has 6 boltguns, unit Y has 4 chaincannons and 6 boltguns, yep perfectly equal in PL. You might as well count number of wounds in your list as counting PL, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA, there is a point (CA 24 at GW's meandering pace towards balance) where almost all options will be viable with pts, not at all so with PL which could be CA 21 if it became a goal and GW set up the right method for balancing and testing their game. I could do it easily as a part time job if I had a solid team of playtesters and a guy or two that were good at math (if I applied myself for a bit I'd be able to do it myself as well) and crucially GW's official mandate, because with that you unlock a bunch of volunteer resources. A simple thing like question scheme released to the 40k community with a rating of 1-5 would massively enlighten GW. Something as silly as nerfing Ogryn while leaving Bullgryn alone wouldn't happen if you had a scheme that said "Ogryn 1,5 Bullgryn 3,8".

PL might not be balanced, but neither is points. So for all the hate PL gets, it's not really any different. While GW has seemingly abandoned PL that appears to be more because everyone immediately jumped on "Why wouldn't I just take all the best options then if it's all free" instead of seeing why it was actually there.

If one can of tomatoes is 4 dollars and the other one is 2 dollars, but canned tomatoes in russia cost 1 dollar, do you go to Russia, buy the 2 dollar tomatoes or the 4 dollar tomatoes? It's the perfection fallacy. You choose the best option available which is pts.

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

Well, it doesn't have new space marines. So yes.

That is not a high bar, though.

 vict0988 wrote:

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced.

But people here claim that balance is not needed for casual/narrative games, so PL are as good as are matched play, with the advantage that they don't even give the impression of balance while matched play points do.

So if balance is not important, just use PL and everything is fine

taking matched play points for something that they are not meant for or in you example why by tomatoes if you want apples

, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA,

not really

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

KT is up to point better
but for different reasons, as it is smaller and faster you are more likely to finish games and play more of them which is an advantage for competitive game

As a narrative player, if the game does not represent the narrative on the table, I am not interested.

I hear a lot how GW pushes their narrative and that is so important to their games, but neither AOS nor 40k on the table look anything like their narrative. It is in the wild usually a min/max fest where the core of the armies that are in the books are minimal or not present at all.

Thats why I don't play 40k, and haven't for some years now, and a major reason why I dropped AOS as well (among a couple other reasons that deal solely with game mechanics).

If 40k had rules that enforced their narrative and made the core forces of the armies have to be represented, I'd probably reconsider it. That goes hand in hand with internal balance of the books, which for GW games is usually virtually non existent.

I do not like to be forced to collect a certain type of collection in my chosen faction to have good games because of very bad internal balance that only makes a couple of things viable to field.

Just because I am a narrative player does not mean that I enjoy boring one sided games because one force is mathematically superior to the other one in such a way that no game is to be had after turn 1 unless you give in and collect the viable models.

The whole balance is not needed for casual / narrative games is ... the strangest piece of fiction I have heard in some time.

Yeah, when I talked about consolidating rules I never meant making models unplayable. This should never happen, everything that has model should have rules. I was merely speaking about all tacked on extra bonus rules that differentiate otherwise identical units of various subfactions. But the conclusion is same though; people love such bonus rules and would get mad if they were removed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:

I hear a lot how GW pushes their narrative and that is so important to their games, but neither AOS nor 40k on the table look anything like their narrative. It is in the wild usually a min/max fest where the core of the armies that are in the books are minimal or not present at all.

A bit harsh, but I get what you mean. It bugs me when the way the army would be composed in the fluff and how it is composed on tabletop are miles apart. How well or badly these match vary from faction to faction though. In any case, Were i writing rules making sure that the rules support the sort of force structure the fluff would imply would be one of my top priorities.

 kodos wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced.

But people here claim that balance is not needed for casual/narrative games, so PL are as good as are matched play, with the advantage that they don't even give the impression of balance while matched play points do.

So if balance is not important, just use PL and everything is fine

taking matched play points for something that they are not meant for or in you example why by tomatoes if you want apples

, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA,

not really

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

KT is up to point better
but for different reasons, as it is smaller and faster you are more likely to finish games and play more of them which is an advantage for competitive game

I don't know why anti-casual people keep saying this because no one else has. It's getting kind of tiring seeing people claim casual players don't care AT ALL like you could put a carnifex down and claim its stats are 20 across the board and all space marines have 1 for all their stats because its more accurate in our head canon.

Its just that casual lists don't min/max armies so flaws that only happen when you bend optimization to breaking point don't exist in casual games, so our game is a bit more balanced for it.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced.

But people here claim that balance is not needed for casual/narrative games

I don't know why anti-casual people keep saying this because no one else has

that is the point
I say balance is much more important for the casual/narrative than it is for the competitive game

but every time people ask for better balance, the answer is "40k is not meant to be played as competitive game", which was not the question

but it is always the excuse why GW is not taking care about it in the first place and everything is still fine

Also, I notice people keep thinking that the variety of options in 40k somehow makes it more complicated. It really doesn't. Most of it is just illusions to look complicated (e.g. this unit has 10 different weapon options) when A) There's often one obvious good choice and several obvious bad choices and B) These are all minor options. A game like Gaslands or Warmahordes or Guild Ball or what have you, while they are often smaller than 40k, have more actual options that really impact the game rather than get bogged down in minutiae.

It's not a question of balancing individual codex entries and their wargear, you're talking about a lot of possible builds in many possible codices. Build a computer program to see how many possible 2000 point army lists are legal in a marine codex. There has to be billions of combinations before you start adding the effects of warlord traits, strategems, terrain abilities, etc. Some lists will end up being more powerful than others. It's not that a marine tactical squad is hard to balance compared to gluing machine guns to hotwheels or pairing warcasters/warjacks - the point is that you can take 2-6 of them in a regular army in a ton of permutations who you must balance with the HQs, banner abilities, strategems, and that's before you throw in the rest of the codex. Multiply this by a couple dozen codices and GW has almost no incentive trying to achieve anything remotely close to the moving target that is "balance."

The tournament crowd who are upset that this army or that army doesn't see the top tables is dwarfed by the Timmys whose parents buy his models and the beer & pretzels crowd who get games in between their kids' soccer games.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced.

But people here claim that balance is not needed for casual/narrative games, so PL are as good as are matched play, with the advantage that they don't even give the impression of balance while matched play points do.

So if balance is not important, just use PL and everything is fine

taking matched play points for something that they are not meant for or in you example why by tomatoes if you want apples

, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA,

not really

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

KT is up to point better
but for different reasons, as it is smaller and faster you are more likely to finish games and play more of them which is an advantage for competitive game

I don't know why anti-casual people keep saying this because no one else has. It's getting kind of tiring seeing people claim casual players don't care AT ALL like you could put a carnifex down and claim its stats are 20 across the board and all space marines have 1 for all their stats because its more accurate in our head canon.

Its just that casual lists don't min/max armies so flaws that only happen when you bend optimization to breaking point don't exist in casual games, so our game is a bit more balanced for it.

This is so very true.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Its just that casual lists don't min/max armies so flaws that only happen when you bend optimization to breaking point don't exist in casual games, so our game is a bit more balanced for it.

'Press X to doubt'

You personally, perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that all people who play casually don't enjoy stomping face and adhere to some unwritten set of rules.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
The point was that the more factions, units, and special rules there are, the more difficult it is to balance them all while keeping pace with constant new releases. Which is a pretty self-evident truth that almost everyone has agreed on. Not "these kinds of things cannot exist in a balanced game" or "more factions inherently means less balance".

The constant shifting goalposts, strawmen arguments, aggression, hyperbole, not bothering to keep up with what a given point is meant to address, and the amount of people who seem to be deliberately avoiding any possible middle-ground in this thread is incredibly exhausting. I really should have stuck with my instinct like 15 pages ago to leave this conversation alone due to how negative it was getting.

Nobody has disagreed that more factions, units, and special rules make the game harder to balance, that's not what I've been talking about.

My point is that

more factions, units, and special rules

is not the only way to accomplish

the feeling of each chapter / organization / warband / legion having it's own culture and approach to warfare and strengths and weaknesses and such

which is the false dichotomy you were setting up in the post I originally quoted:

Thus, a narrative element that is fun for narrative players and ties the rules to the lore and IP comes at the expense of what would be best for creating a balanced and competitive game.

You were arguing that removal of the myriad bespoke codices that differentiate subfactions means sacrificing characterization/feeling/fluff from the subfactions. I argue that this is simply not true; it's just a matter of using broader, simpler effects that achieve the same 'feel' as more complex ones while being dramatically easier to balance. Design for effect.

And yeah, if AK-47 Republic can make Navy SEALs and Somali militia feel radically different despite drawing from the same core army list, I'm going to go ahead and say Drukhari/CWE/Exodites can be the same way. For that matter, do Chaos Marines with ten thousand years of experience and ancient weapons and armor currently play much differently from loyalist Space Marines with ten years of experience? I'd argue that for all the books and supplements layering on special rules, the core mechanics fail to meaningfully differentiate factions through statlines or army organization. It comes down to an avalanche of special rules and stratagems, and still at the end of it all a group of rag-tag Genestealer Cult insurgents and a crack squad of highly-disciplined Cadians still play and feel virtually identical to one another.

Streamlining the game, in the process providing design space for fluffy faction/subfaction rules, can make the game both fun for narrative players and better for competitive play. That's all I've been saying.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
Serious question:

Those of you saying that Apocalypse should be the "default version"...

Why?

Because it's a better game. I'd like to see GW take their better ruleset and run with it, rather than continue to prop up the bloated mess of the current one.

It would need modification to function well in the 1000-2000pt range, particularly as it fails to model things like special weapons that have historically been important to unit identities, but the core of a better game- an actual C&C mechanic, alternating activation, better implementation of the Stratagem concept, and much faster combat resolution- are all there already.

 Fajita Fan wrote:

Also, I notice people keep thinking that the variety of options in 40k somehow makes it more complicated. It really doesn't. Most of it is just illusions to look complicated (e.g. this unit has 10 different weapon options) when A) There's often one obvious good choice and several obvious bad choices and B) These are all minor options. A game like Gaslands or Warmahordes or Guild Ball or what have you, while they are often smaller than 40k, have more actual options that really impact the game rather than get bogged down in minutiae.

It's not a question of balancing individual codex entries and their wargear, you're talking about a lot of possible builds in many possible codices. Build a computer program to see how many possible 2000 point army lists are legal in a marine codex. There has to be billions of combinations before you start adding the effects of warlord traits, strategems, terrain abilities, etc. Some lists will end up being more powerful than others. It's not that a marine tactical squad is hard to balance compared to gluing machine guns to hotwheels or pairing warcasters/warjacks - the point is that you can take 2-6 of them in a regular army in a ton of permutations who you must balance with the HQs, banner abilities, strategems, and that's before you throw in the rest of the codex. Multiply this by a couple dozen codices and GW has almost no incentive trying to achieve anything remotely close to the moving target that is "balance."

The tournament crowd who are upset that this army or that army doesn't see the top tables is dwarfed by the Timmys whose parents buy his models and the beer & pretzels crowd who get games in between their kids' soccer games.

This is something that people comparing balance in 40k to balance in other wargames either ommit or don’t realise. You can indeed create a wargame that actively steers itself towards a tie, there are mechanisms at game designer disposal that can achieve that. You can create a game, in which every decision that happens happens after the game has started, no problem here either, chess or Go are prime, but not only, examples here. But the problem in 40k is and always was, that most of player decisions in this system happen before players even meet at the table and you cannot balance that - point systems and army construction restrictions are tools not complex enough and too limited in their capacity to achieve that goal. In 40k, after the first roll you can only decide where to move, what to shoot or what to charge, and what of those three actions to boost with psychic powers or in 8th with your finite CP resource. Those are in turn tools not capable enough to close power gaps that occur in an open army construction system so vast. And if you redesign the game to deal with this problem it won’t be 40k anymore. Of course we can discuss if it’s a bad thing or a good thing, but even two major overhauls in the last 30 years, 2nd to 3rd and 7th to 8th show that there will inevitably be shifts in the playerbase and those two overhauls weren’t as drastic as redesign required to achieve the level of balance people expect. And financial results of the last years show that current state of the game is working just fine for both GW and large enough part of their customer base. So why would GW have to change their succesfull business model to anything else? And for those who wished that Apocalypse is a glimpse of what is to come - it most likely won’t happen exactly because those same people don’t want to invest their time and effort to sway others from „default mode” to „better mode” so GW don’t see any major response to Apocalypse from competitive crowd. So why should they bother? Because game design ethics? Come on...

And a word about balance in narratives, as I see there is a lot of misconception here: it is not that we do not need balance in our games to have fun. It is that we take the reality as it is for the last 30 years and don’t expect GW to provide us with balance - we simply balance scenarios and forces ourselves on the fly, as neede for the narrative we want to play out. And because we aro not bound by what GW provides we can utilize all those additional tools that can increase how close resulting games are beyond what point systems can provide. A carefully executed narrative game can be as balanced as top tournament tables and requires the same amount of knowledge about the game and balance issues. We just utilise this knowledge to a different end goal. But because of the flexibility of such approach we actually strive when there are a lot of actual or even nuanced/minutiae options at our disposal, and are not hindered by them.

And for the love of god, narrative=/=casual, stop grouping those two together as if they were synonyms. Those can be as far apart as they are from hardcore competitve approach.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Its just that casual lists don't min/max armies so flaws that only happen when you bend optimization to breaking point don't exist in casual games, so our game is a bit more balanced for it.

'Press X to doubt'

You personally, perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that all people who play casually don't enjoy stomping face and adhere to some unwritten set of rules.

Then they're not casual players

 catbarf wrote:
For that matter, do Chaos Marines with ten thousand years of experience and ancient weapons and armor currently play much differently from loyalist Space Marines with ten years of experience?

Yes! The Loyalist newbie is a Primaris so has better stats and gets much better faction rules for some reason!

Because it's a better game. I'd like to see GW take their better ruleset and run with it, rather than continue to prop up the bloated mess of the current one.

Apoc being 'better' is just an opinion. One that you want to forcefeed to others. If you think it is better, you can play it.

Now personally I think there are some things 40K should steal from Apoc, but to me Apoc as it is now is way too streamlined, sterile and gamey.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

You're out of your mind if you think PL is more balanced or remotely as balanced.

But people here claim that balance is not needed for casual/narrative games, so PL are as good as are matched play, with the advantage that they don't even give the impression of balance while matched play points do.

So if balance is not important, just use PL and everything is fine

taking matched play points for something that they are not meant for or in you example why by tomatoes if you want apples

, it's next to useless for balancing purposes and pts are getting more and more balanced with every CA,

not really

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Is Kill Team more competitive or balanced than 40k? I haven’t tried it and that’s an actual question.

KT is up to point better
but for different reasons, as it is smaller and faster you are more likely to finish games and play more of them which is an advantage for competitive game

I don't know why anti-casual people keep saying this because no one else has. It's getting kind of tiring seeing people claim casual players don't care AT ALL like you could put a carnifex down and claim its stats are 20 across the board and all space marines have 1 for all their stats because its more accurate in our head canon.

Its just that casual lists don't min/max armies so flaws that only happen when you bend optimization to breaking point don't exist in casual games, so our game is a bit more balanced for it.

You don't have to min-max to discover that a basic Imperial Guard or Codex Marines or Eldar or even Dark Eldar are strictly better than Grey Knights, Angel Marines, or Necrons. So what's your point now? What is someone gonna do, give a point handicap?

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
What is someone gonna do, give a point handicap?

That certainly is an option.

 catbarf wrote:


You were arguing that removal of the myriad bespoke codices that differentiate subfactions means sacrificing characterization/feeling/fluff from the subfactions. I argue that this is simply not true; it's just a matter of using broader, simpler effects that achieve the same 'feel' as more complex ones while being dramatically easier to balance. Design for effect.

And yeah, if AK-47 Republic can make Navy SEALs and Somali militia feel radically different despite drawing from the same core army list, I'm going to go ahead and say Drukhari/CWE/Exodites can be the same way. For that matter, do Chaos Marines with ten thousand years of experience and ancient weapons and armor currently play much differently from loyalist Space Marines with ten years of experience? I'd argue that for all the books and supplements layering on special rules, the core mechanics fail to meaningfully differentiate factions through statlines or army organization. It comes down to an avalanche of special rules and stratagems, and still at the end of it all a group of rag-tag Genestealer Cult insurgents and a crack squad of highly-disciplined Cadians still play and feel virtually identical to one another.

Streamlining the game, in the process providing design space for fluffy faction/subfaction rules, can make the game both fun for narrative players and better for competitive play. That's all I've been saying.

I wonder if you were here when very flavourfull 2nd ed was castrated and replaced by uber bland index era, streamlined 3rd. And before bringing out an argument about Index era being temporary - 3rd ed Eldar codex have not brought back any of the former flavour. Had different 3rd ed armies played differently? Well, yes. Were those differences deep enough to allow for interesting narratives and immersive feel of the game? Hell no... The transition between 7th and 8th had similar effect, current layers upon layers of "bespoke rules" are less flavourfull than 7th eds basic level of USRs/unique special rules, but I agree that 7th ed required a lot effort to balance games out, even narratively speaking, so it is no surprise that 8th came almost universally as a relief, for any type of players.