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Inspired by my wife, who is nearing completion of her physics PhD dissertation, I decided that it might be useful if I likewise took my several years of experience in 40k and boiled it down into an essay. There was a lot I could write about, from codex creep and meta shifting to force concentration, movement skills and playing to the mission, or expounding on various bits of fluff. 40k is a big game after all.

In the end, though, I thought it would be the most helpful if I directed my energy into talking about 40k itself. What it is, and why we play it. The philosophical backdrop for all the other decisions that we make. Without further ado, let me present:

Abstract Principles of 40k

(You can also download a more printer-friendly copy here, or view it in your browser here).

The hope is that it will help players understand the game and one another better, to help facilitate communication between players. It's a little dense, and more than a little esoteric, but this is a 40k forum after all.

Enjoy!

Overall a nice article. Little short for a dissertation but I will forgive you for it and give you a pass. Now we need to arrange for your oral defense and we can give a PhG (Philosophical Gamer). Thanks for sharing this.

You made a error in logic early on which you might want to think about. In terms of "skill" your players are humans which means that they have minds, emotions, tells, and quirks. If your players were computers then skill would be the sheer difference in ability to lengthen and shorten odds. However when playing a human you can "fool" the player or in other words play mind games. This is why 40K would be much closer to poker than black jack as the player can and does often fold as they perceive the situation to be hopeless. Some excellent examples of this can be found in Jy2's recent LVO batreps where his opponents are GT winners of about equal skill. However due to very aggressive play on his part he made his opponent uncertain and defensive which in turn left them out of position. This is why skill does not cancel out like you indicate, as both players become more skilled the effects on a small difference are more pronounced. You are correct in that the players only act to shorten the odds however in objective games you actually have binary odds of scoring an objective, ie you are scoring or you are not. Therefore player decisions are just as much a factor as luck as you can (and I have) win objective based missions without killing a single of your opponent's models and not allowing opponent's LoS/range.

This discussion also ignores the new deathstars and FMC circus builds which are not actually playing the game anymore. These builds account so much for luck and have so much mobility that they can avoid playing the game and just ignore the opponent until it is time to take objectives or line breaker.

Your comment on chess is slightly off. Humans can still beat the best computers but they actually have to intentionally make poor choices to trick the compute into the "best" position. To counter this the programers have actually had to completely rewrite the routines and make the computer less perfect in it's move selection so that it will not be as predictable. This is the problem with games and humans as human psychology plays a huge effect on everything they do and so they become less predictable in everything they do.

With 40K game balance. Interestingly enough the real problem isn't imbalance per se but the complete ignoring of the game 40K by certain combinations of units and rules. As you said 40K is a game based on d6 and so has a very course gradient. What happens then when you allow all those rolls of d6 to be rerolled if they fail. Well your gradient changed to a 34 point gradient on which only a very small number of those results fail. When you have AP2 weapons they ignore the d6 gradient of armour and when you have ignore cover the d6 gradient of cover is ignored. This becomes extremely obvious in the case of D weapons as the roll to hit is the only 40K rules the D weapon actually follows from there on the vehicle explodes or worse with no armour pen, cover, invulnerable, or mitigation from any of the 40K rules, it turns the game into 1/3 40K. This is the real problem with game balance is that it should be the same rules for both players and if it isn't then you essentially have rock-paper-scissors-dynaminte where every player picks dynamite all the time and the game breaks.

When you speak of "balance" in a game as complex as 40K what you would hope for is to have enough different possible list concepts of equivalent power as to allow a player to play through a tournament and never face the same twice. ie if I play an 8 game GT I should play 1 deathstar, 1 biker army, 1 mech eldar, 1 IG gunline, 1 rhino rush, 1 flyer army, and 1 nidzilla list. If your game is not balanced what you get is 5 games vs GKs and 3 games of necrons or 6 games deathstar and 2 FMC circus. There is a fine line of course and complete balance can never be achieved (even chess is slightly imbalanced with one color having a thin advantage).

I understand what you are saying about list strength but interestingly you are talking about a list type that has essentially been gutted and left in an alley to die by the deathstar builds in the game now. Deathstars also remove your ability to do anything in the game but in new combined USRs ways. Gunlines are cute little curiosities in comparison and could indeed be engaged effectively with application of mobility. Though there is an argument that it was gunlines that forced the creation of deathstars to deal with their damage and allow the other player to get into melee and short range shooting.

Interestingly enough you often say that assault units are the most deep units in 40K. However if you look at assault units as a a cartesian problem you soon realize that assault units only ever move in one direction and so have essentially negated 3/4 of the movement phase and often negate the shooting phase by just turning it into d6" movement toward enemy unit X. This means that assault units are actually only playing a bit less than ~1/2 of the game. The best units are actually white scars SM biker units which use the deployment twice, the movement phase fully, the shooting phase fully, and then the assault phase fully in any given game. They even use an additional hit and run during your opponent's assault phase and so are using ~120% of the intended game. They are essentially the perfect unit by this metric which I can endorse as they are probably my favorite army play style wise.

I would also argue that the killer player group is just as likely to limit inclusion of new material as to want it. If they figure out a magic list that destroys the opponent the best (early 40K and the 6 heldrake newb crusher) they will not want sources that add capabilities into armies that lack them to handle their list (ie forgeworld gave DA decent skyfire units that could actually kill heldrakes whereas a DA without forgeworld completely lacks the ability to participate in a game against a heldrake spam player). Most people are resistant to change and a killer player who is getting what he wants will definitely deny any change.

I perused through it and while I agree with some I do not agree with all. However I think laying out basic truths of 40k that are easily digestible is good.It could do with a little more humour. This isn't I assume a paper for anything. Also, it doesn't have an overall thesis, instead each section kind of has it's own and ending paragraph.

You could force home the diversity and how that actually drives the game. Anyway I will definitely read it more in depth but having read about 10 pages I enjoy it.

I think you could have went more into statistics, because while it is "luck" involved with in the game there are certain statistical facts that will always occur and i think that is what the main fault with your first portion of the essay is and it's section on luck. While I agree to it some degree , 40k doesn't actually deal in "luck" , but statistics.

I think a more solidified cogent argument would be made that he who knows statistics will win. Basically understanding some core concepts will have you win the game, how models interact with each, probability, movement etc.. I disagree with it not being a "strategy" game because of those facts because there is actual manipulation on a free form "board" of movement and distance. Something that is reflective in strategy games.

I am on a plane tommorow but would love to critique fully the whole article if you are okay with that and present arguments. I think that'd be enjoyable.

Is this the smart people thread?

ansacs wrote: However when playing a human you can "fool" the player or in other words play mind games

Yeah, so the luck and skill part of this was a combination of two different articles I'd written, and this was mentioned in the second one, but it didn't make it's way into this work.

In this case, having skill in player psychology means getting your opponents to play "worse" odds, or, more precisely, playing odds with less accuracy to the way they wanted to play them.

If your opponent is made to play slightly "worse" than you, then yeah, you're going to be slightly more likely to win the game, because your opponent played worse.

But that difference is going to be slight (unless the players are rather unskilled in the first place), and the end results are still going to come down to die rolls. Skill in player psychology, then, is still just about manipulating the odds. The only difference is that your opponent acts as an intermediary.

And 40k really isn't like poker. In poker, you never have to reveal what cards were randomly given to you. If everyone folds, you just win.

There's nothing like that in 40k. You don't roll to see if your meltagun hit a tank in secret and then started a bidding war to see if it hit or missed. Your opponent can't just give up and say "yes, it hit, I give up", or at least that's got to be a pretty rare thing (and not part of the rules).

Poker is a game of psychology because you can win through nothing but force of will and your opponent's fear of losing. There's no transmission system for that kind of thing to happen in 40k.

ansacs wrote: This is why skill does not cancel out like you indicate, as both players become more skilled the effects on a small difference are more pronounced.

As skill becomes more of a control variable, it becomes more of a control variable, not less.

As two players become more equal in skill, their difference in skill becomes less important, not more. It's the nature of control variables.

ansacs wrote:These builds account so much for luck and have so much mobility that they can avoid playing the game and just ignore the opponent until it is time to take objectives or line breaker.

... if your opponent never shoots at them.

ansacs wrote:herefore player decisions are just as much a factor as luck as you can (and I have) win objective based missions without killing a single of your opponent's models and not allowing opponent's LoS/range.

What? You won a game without rolling a single die? Without killing a single unit? I'd like to see the player skill discrepancy on that game.

Plus, you still rolled dice to determine things like missions. If it was a KP game, your "no one kills anyone" would be guaranteed to end in a draw.

ansacs wrote:then you essentially have rock-paper-scissors-dynaminte where every player picks dynamite all the time and the game breaks.

Certainly, but the level of obviousness that WAAC players have with making their decisions doesn't have an impact on the rest of the article. Whether it's difficult or easy to take advantage of imbalance isn't relevant to the conclusion.

ansacs wrote: If your game is not balanced what you get is 5 games vs GKs and 3 games of necrons or 6 games deathstar and 2 FMC circus

To the contrary. In a balanced game like chess, everyone brings the exact same army, not nearly the same army. They even all deploy the same way as well.

What you're seeing is an attempt to balance the game, not a result of problems with imbalance.

ansacs wrote:Interestingly enough you often say that assault units are the most deep units in 40K.

I actually said something slightly different. Assault units are the best way to prevent restricting depth to your opponent.

Assault units themselves aren't the deepest way to play, as you mention. The deepest unit would probably be... bikes? Can be fast or slow, can shoot or "run", and can fire different weapons and still assault, etc. I could be wrong on that, though.

In any case, it's not in the context of using as much depth yourself as you can, so much as using as much depth as you want without denying it to your opponent.

ansacs wrote:Most people are resistant to change and a killer player who is getting what he wants will definitely deny any change.

Perhaps, but they'd also likely get bored and change things up by changing games.

I don't know, I guess. I'm not a "killer" type (obviously).




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hollismason wrote:I think a more solidified cogent argument would be made that he who knows statistics will win.

This would be true if there were known best odds (like blackjack, or to a lesser extent, Chess).

I choose to doubt that there are such perfect odds, or if they exist, are impossible to know. There's just so much more going on in a game of 40k than in a game of blackjack or craps.

Yeah, it's a flimsy evidence of absence argument, but... Hey, look over there, it's Plato!



That's the face of someone who agrees with me, right there.

Hollismason wrote:Is this the smart people thread?

Lol



You must be at least this clever to ride.

Skill can never become a control variable is what I am saying. It is impossible as you have included player psychology into skill. It would be like me saying that as people gamble more they will learn that the house always wins and therefore they will gamble less. However this ignores psychology. In reality people gamble more as the next payout is "owed" and they develop addictions. You are not using control variable correctly and your assumption of this as a control variable is unsupported.

There is a happy medium that needs to be reached. Complete imbalance is no different than rock-paper-scissors dynamite. There is no game there is just a joke. Games inherently need some semblance of balance or else why would we have rules. We could just as easily play with out toy soldiers saying pew pew you die and I dropped a nuke so I win. Rules are here to provide structure and balance to our play.

What I am saying is that some imbalance is necessary and even a good thing in the game but like you said people want variety. Therefore there needs to be more than a single army type or codex that you see. If they made 3 army types equaly powerful for each codex (which they more that accomplished in the SM codex) then they would have a good game with great balance.

You have to have LoS and range to damage a unit. With a 1/36 chance to fail an invulnerable save and the mobility to stay out of range from the majority of weapons some armies ignore 90% of the opponents efforts and actively ignore the other player. This is bad balance on a level that makes gunlines look like a joke.

You said a killer type just wants to dominate other players. Why would they get bored dominating other player successfully? In fact as they progressively do so the other player will be more beaten down and cowed. The only reason such a player would want change is to change the game which is not his category but indicates a more complex reasons and personality or because they lost a player base to abuse (in which case they would start a new game not add new material to a game without player base).

 Ailaros wrote:

ansacs wrote: However when playing a human you can "fool" the player or in other words play mind games

Yeah, so the luck and skill part of this was a combination of two different articles I'd written, and this was mentioned in the second one, but it didn't make it's way into this work.

In this case, having skill in player psychology means getting your opponents to play "worse" odds, or, more precisely, playing odds with less accuracy to the way they wanted to play them.

If your opponent is made to play slightly "worse" than you, then yeah, you're going to be slightly more likely to win the game, because your opponent played worse.

But that difference is going to be slight (unless the players are rather unskilled in the first place), and the end results are still going to come down to die rolls. Skill in player psychology, then, is still just about manipulating the odds. The only difference is that your opponent acts as an intermediary.

And 40k really isn't like poker. In poker, you never have to reveal what cards were randomly given to you. If everyone folds, you just win.

There's nothing like that in 40k. You don't roll to see if your meltagun hit a tank in secret and then started a bidding war to see if it hit or missed. Your opponent can't just give up and say "yes, it hit, I give up", or at least that's got to be a pretty rare thing (and not part of the rules).

Poker is a game of psychology because you can win through nothing but force of will and your opponent's fear of losing. There's no transmission system for that kind of thing to happen in 40k.

ansacs wrote: This is why skill does not cancel out like you indicate, as both players become more skilled the effects on a small difference are more pronounced.

As skill becomes more of a control variable, it becomes more of a control variable, not less.

As two players become more equal in skill, their difference in skill becomes less important, not more. It's the nature of control variables.

ansacs wrote:These builds account so much for luck and have so much mobility that they can avoid playing the game and just ignore the opponent until it is time to take objectives or line breaker.

... if your opponent never shoots at them.

ansacs wrote:herefore player decisions are just as much a factor as luck as you can (and I have) win objective based missions without killing a single of your opponent's models and not allowing opponent's LoS/range.

What? You won a game without rolling a single die? Without killing a single unit? I'd like to see the player skill discrepancy on that game.

Plus, you still rolled dice to determine things like missions. If it was a KP game, your "no one kills anyone" would be guaranteed to end in a draw.

ansacs wrote:then you essentially have rock-paper-scissors-dynaminte where every player picks dynamite all the time and the game breaks.

Certainly, but the level of obviousness that WAAC players have with making their decisions doesn't have an impact on the rest of the article. Whether it's difficult or easy to take advantage of imbalance isn't relevant to the conclusion.

ansacs wrote: If your game is not balanced what you get is 5 games vs GKs and 3 games of necrons or 6 games deathstar and 2 FMC circus

To the contrary. In a balanced game like chess, everyone brings the exact same army, not nearly the same army. They even all deploy the same way as well.

What you're seeing is an attempt to balance the game, not a result of problems with imbalance.

ansacs wrote:Interestingly enough you often say that assault units are the most deep units in 40K.

I actually said something slightly different. Assault units are the best way to prevent restricting depth to your opponent.

Assault units themselves aren't the deepest way to play, as you mention. The deepest unit would probably be... bikes? Can be fast or slow, can shoot or "run", and can fire different weapons and still assault, etc. I could be wrong on that, though.

In any case, it's not in the context of using as much depth yourself as you can, so much as using as much depth as you want without denying it to your opponent.

ansacs wrote:Most people are resistant to change and a killer player who is getting what he wants will definitely deny any change.

Perhaps, but they'd also likely get bored and change things up by changing games.

I don't know, I guess. I'm not a "killer" type (obviously).




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hollismason wrote:I think a more solidified cogent argument would be made that he who knows statistics will win.

This would be true if there were known best odds (like blackjack, or to a lesser extent, Chess).

I choose to doubt that there are such perfect odds, or if they exist, are impossible to know. There's just so much more going on in a game of 40k than in a game of blackjack or craps.

Yeah, it's a flimsy evidence of absence argument, but... Hey, look over there, it's Plato!



That's the face of someone who agrees with me, right there.

Hollismason wrote:Is this the smart people thread?

Lol



You must be at least this clever to ride.

Good Sir,
Please expect my reply to your essay as soon as my current affairs are in order and I have adequate time to avail myself of your arguments. You should prepare thyself for mine reckoning.

Sincerely,
Hollismason

ansacs wrote:Skill can never become a control variable is what I am saying. It is impossible as you have included player psychology into skill. It would be like me saying that as people gamble more they will learn that the house always wins and therefore they will gamble less. However this ignores psychology.

But what does psychology actually do? It causes your opponent to play "worse" odds. This syllogizes straight to psychology manipulates odds, which means that it has the exact same definition as player skill.

If I can convince someone to choose an apple instead of an orange, it doesn't change the fact that either way he's buying fruit. At no point does 40k escape from being a dice game just because my opponent rolled different odds.

ansacs wrote:There is a happy medium that needs to be reached. Complete imbalance is no different than rock-paper-scissors dynamite. There is no game there is just a joke. Games inherently need some semblance of balance or else why would we have rules. We could just as easily play with out toy soldiers saying pew pew you die and I dropped a nuke so I win.

It's only a joke if the only point of the game is to win it. Having armies that are more different in power level rather than less difference means more diversity and more player choice. It's what gives the game depth.

And, to be fair, D-weapons are strong but they don't completely negate an opponent's ability to do anything just by themselves. They're a bad addition, sure, but they're more bad in scale than scope. You can achieve the same effects as D-weapons (stuff getting blown up) without them.

ansacs wrote:Therefore there needs to be more than a single army type or codex that you see. If they made 3 army types equaly powerful for each codex (which they more that accomplished in the SM codex) then they would have a good game with great balance.

But it's the players who are choosing to play the game this way. It's not the game itself. If people want to make the game a mirror match where everyone shows up with the exact same list, there's nothing to stop them (nor necessarily should there be), but the game doesn't require you to show up with the same list as your opponent any more than it requires you to use D-weapons or gunlines or deathstars.

And when two (or more) armies are equal in power level, then they're not actually different armies. They're only different in aesthetic. It's the same army with different minis and a different look and feel, but nothing more.

It's false diversity, and not really better than everyone just showing up with the same list.

ansacs wrote:You said a killer type just wants to dominate other players. Why would they get bored dominating other player successfully? In fact as they progressively do so the other player will be more beaten down and cowed. The only reason such a player would want change is to change the game which is not his category but indicates a more complex reasons and personality or because they lost a player base to abuse (in which case they would start a new game not add new material to a game without player base).

Yeah, I'm a little out of my league with this one.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons behind the mass push by these kinds of players towards mainstreaming forgeworld? It makes sense that this kind of a player would want to have changes so long as it benefited themselves and not others. We're going to play the same game as last time, but this time I'm going to show up with a dozen sabre defense platforms and you'll lose that much quicker. What do you mean forgeworld isn't legal? I will make logical fallacies until I'm blue in the face until you let me use them! Especially if you don't follow suit and use forgeworld yourself, which I'm guessing you're not as you're trying to prevent it from showing up in games.

I don't know.

Hollismason wrote:
Good Sir,
Please expect my reply to your essay as soon as my current affairs are in order and I have adequate time to avail myself of your arguments. You should prepare thyself for mine reckoning.

Sincerely,
Hollismason

To Mr. Hollismason.

Good day.

I write to you in my own effort to express to you the gratitude being felt a necessary consequence of your previous correspondence in which you, having so politely informed me of your current intention towards my previous work, of which you have earlier received a copy, being a task towards which I accept your desire to consume, which was accepted in all graciousness as I am able to muster; in my own hand, true gentlemen and orators such as ourselves being of reasonable understanding of the use of a semicolon, by which we may interlace dependent causes chiasmatically one between another to permit the efficiency of communication, being achieved to such a great and eloquent extent by use of clauses, both dependent and independent.

Once again, good day, sir.

With the fondest of regards and filled with friendship.

-Ailaros

Except the entire game is NOT dice dependent. Once a game type is chosen there is setup and movement which are dice independent. Your argument that the game is entirely dice dependent is exactly is not logical as the exact opposite could be said as in a theoretical game where one player never moves within range or another player the game is decided entirely upon player skill (probably with line breaker, lol).

Let us imagine the extreme case of imbalance. The only HQ choice of a new army is called GOD. GOD cannot be harmed in any way, always starts on the board, forces all reserves in on turn 1, and every turn it is on the board it automatically kills all enemy units on the board. GOD also scores any objective within 500 miles and can score objectives on other player's tables. I think we can agree that this is both imbalanced and makes any such game a joke. It is clear that complete imbalance is even worse than complete balance and any game will need a balance. The problem is that even if players play for other reasons than to win the units in 40K are so out of whack that taking a themed seer council completely overpowers 90% of the players and lists. It is not playing the same game because it ignores most of the rules.

It is not false diversity. You are making another unsupported assumption that equal power levels would mean equal play style and experience. I can make two lists of similar power level; CD FMC circus and SM biker army. They play completely differently, the experience playing each army with and against is very different and if you played a tournament with 3 of one or a mix you would know the difference. You have made an assumption that equal power level means same experience. If this is true then why do foods with the same calories taste different or light with the same intensity look different? Because there are other factors and you have made an over simplification.

You need to step back from your bias about forgeworld. You are totally out of line with it and have made a generalization that does you no credit. Your statements as it is, reads that people who want to play forgeworld all want to abuse other players and ruin their fun. You have not supported this in ANY way with anything even resembling logic and have in fact ignored logic with dismissing statements. If you "don't know" I would definitely not to commit to a statement that is frankly insulting.

ansacs wrote:Except the entire game is NOT dice dependent. Once a game type is chosen there is setup and movement which are dice independent. Your argument that the game is entirely dice dependent is exactly is not logical as the exact opposite could be said as in a theoretical game where one player never moves within range or another player the game is decided entirely upon player skill

Except you can't win a game without killing stuff. The only way you could do this is if your opponent didn't deploy near any objectives, and absolutely refused to do any damage whatsoever.

I guess this can be an exception, but it's pretty specious. It only works when one person purposely throws the game.

ansacs wrote:The only HQ choice of a new army is called GOD.

In this case, yes, but it's specious once again.

The game is not set up in such a way where a person is forced to play with auto-win units. If that were true, then yes, there would be diversity problems, but that would be because of problems in diversity, not because of problems with imbalance. In this case, the latter is caused by the former, not the other way around.

ansacs wrote: They play completely differently, the experience playing each army with and against is very different

But it's just a different in aesthetics.

If they were really balanced, then the differences would make no more difference than if you had painted your minis blue or if you had painted your minis red. Not to say that aesthetics have no value whatsoever, but that doesn't change the fact that the meaningfulnes of the player choice is removed.

Unless 40k were just a sandbox game, which it isn't.

 Ailaros wrote:
Except you can't win a game without killing stuff. The only way you could do this is if your opponent didn't deploy near any objectives, and absolutely refused to do any damage whatsoever.

What is fair for the goose is fair for the gander. You have made your case repeatedly based upon extreme cases. This exact situation in fact happens to a slightly lesser extent in games between short range armies and FMC circus'. It is especially true in time limited play events as you know when the game ends and so the roll to continue doesn't exist. Without the player decisions your ability to score objectives is 0 and your ability to get weapons in range is 0. Without player decision to bring anti tank your ability to hurt a land raider is 0. The change from 0 to even 0.00001% chance is an infinite increase in probability. Even in high level play one player can push the other out of range to score an objective with the threat of a unit getting into melee alone.

The game I referenced earlier was my CWE double foot seer council in the last codex where I threw almost all my units at the opponent but a unit of pathfinders that infiltrated onto the relic which was within some ruins I could huddle them up into. The opponent had 4 punisher Leman Russ', a few infantry squads, and 2 vendetta. My double seer council died to a man from all the firepower and never made it close enough to shoot or assault but my opponent could not bring his punishers or infantry close enough to hurt the pathfinders and the vendetta's first took out my quad gun and then were out of position to get to the unit on the relic. They didn't drop down into hover as the only other unit left out of the assault was a firedragon unit they would have to get close to to shoot the unit on the relic. It was a relatively large difference in skill but you indicated this is not possible in your saying that no matter the level of skill luck was still required to win, skill was used to manage the binary possibilities not just the statistical >0 to <100% probabilities.

 Ailaros wrote:
In this case, yes, but it's specious once again.
The game is not set up in such a way where a person is forced to play with auto-win units. If that were true, then yes, there would be diversity problems, but that would be because of problems in diversity, not because of problems with imbalance. In this case, the latter is caused by the former, not the other way around.

Once again you made a blanket statement that when taken to it's extreme conclusion was silly and wrong. A perfectly balanced game has a mirror effect but a perfectly imbalanced game is specious? You are the one making blanket statement without supporting evidence and logical progressions. Rather than an absolute statement which by logical progression to it's conclusion becomes a fallacy you should acknowledge that either way taken to the extreme is like everything doesn't work and a state somewhere between balanced and imbalanced is necessary. Not that absolute states are even possible.

Remember that it is you who stated that the game does not need balance in it. Therefore every unit can be made just as absurd but in different ways and the game will be fine as the players can choose not to play. However if the players all choose not to play then you don't have a game.

 Ailaros wrote:

But it's just a different in aesthetics.

If they were really balanced, then the differences would make no more difference than if you had painted your minis blue or if you had painted your minis red. Not to say that aesthetics have no value whatsoever, but that doesn't change the fact that the meaningfulnes of the player choice is removed.

Unless 40k were just a sandbox game, which it isn't.

So are you telling me that cherry licorice is the same as black licorice? They have the same calorie content, therefore according to your logic having the same power (ie energy content) means they are the same and any difference is aesthetic. I think you may need to use the common definition of aesthetic as if two things function differently then they are not related to beauty they are related to function.

And, to be fair, D-weapons are strong but they don't completely negate an opponent's ability to do anything just by themselves. They're a bad addition, sure, but they're more bad in scale than scope. You can achieve the same effects as D-weapons (stuff getting blown up) without them.

But that would be true only , if games look liked this. Come , see opponent list with D weapons , all codex have counters to D weapons , take counters to D weapons in your list . Play game. While actualy the game looks like this . Make a list , buy models , GW makes an expansion with D weapons , no counter to D weapon carriers in your codex , face a mix of people with and without D weapons , while single lists from a lot of codex can't counter both at the same time . play game and either lose to those with D weapons or make an anti D list which may or may not be weak against non D weapons , depending on the codex.

If someone plays a death star army , then there isn't much he can do about 4xD templates per turn , no matter what else he takes on top of the deathstar.

Sigh. Still going with your laughably wrong definition of "balance" I see...

And yep, also the same old masochistic "bring only bad units because gunlines are TFG behavior" nonsense.

Ailaros wrote:
As such, we can conclude that once a player reaches a certain level of basic proficiency, success is more determined by being lucky than good, that player skill plays an indirect, and sometimes indeterminate effect on the outcome of a game, and that 40k isn't a game that in any way accurately tests player skill.

I have a problem with the part in bold.

There is no objective definition of basic proficiency. Considering your entire theory hinges on that, we sort of have a problem.

Also someone said:

Ailaros wrote:They work because 40k isn't just a game where you throw down minis, see who rolls the highest dice first, and then pack it up and go home.

Makumba wrote:If someone plays a death star army , then there isn't much he can do about 4xD templates per turn , no matter what else he takes on top of the deathstar.

So?

DarknessEternal wrote:Also someone said:

Ailaros wrote:They work because 40k isn't just a game where you throw down minis, see who rolls the highest dice first, and then pack it up and go home.

Indeed. I never said that player skill doesn't exist (in fact, the whole second section is based on the assumption that it does). The existence of player skill doesn't mean it's nature is anything other than manipulating odds.

DarknessEternal wrote:

Ailaros wrote:
As such, we can conclude that once a player reaches a certain level of basic proficiency, success is more determined by being lucky than good, that player skill plays an indirect, and sometimes indeterminate effect on the outcome of a game, and that 40k isn't a game that in any way accurately tests player skill.

I have a problem with the part in bold.

There is no objective definition of basic proficiency. Considering your entire theory hinges on that, we sort of have a problem.

That statement isn't meant to be structural, it's meant only to clear off the riffraff.

With enough creativity, you can come up with anomalies to any theory, but those anomalies only have relevance in the tortured circumstances required to make them in the first place. Because this is a general theory, needlessly bogging it down with exceptions of "well, what if one person was cheating?" or "well, what if one person had literally no idea what they were doing and only did what you told them to", etc. etc. can be left to spin off into their own tiny worlds of craziness, as specific circumstances do not necessarily invalidate general theory.

I'm just trying to avoid the "I managed to come up with a situation where something doesn't quite fit therefore your entire theory is wrong" kind of conspiracy-theory goofiness. If anomalies point to real structural problems, well, then we can discuss the structural problems, but I'm not terribly interested in getting bogged down by what will invariably become semantic quibbling. The point of this article is to facilitate communication, not shut it down by endless side-tracking.

ansacs wrote: Without the player decisions your ability to score objectives is 0 and your ability to get weapons in range is 0.

And this is the specious part. It assumes that there is no player skill whatseover (rather than a situation where both players are reasonably proficient, both trying to win the game, etc.). The player is refusing to move weapons into range, and/or is refusing to fire them.

Yes, in a world where both players agree on the mission, rather than rolling, and agree on an objectives-based mission without rolling, and determine first player without rolling, and to determine when the game ends without rolling, and both players agree to never roll a die to shoot anything, come in from reserves, move through difficult terrain, etc. etc, then yes, luck would be controlled for because there is no die rolling whatsoever.

But any statement based on that absurd set of circumstances is only true in those absurd set of circumstances. Furthermore, the only way one player could win is if the other player had no player skill whatsoever, where they refused to ever have a unit of any kind within 3" of any objectives.

So yes, there is a way that luck can be meaningless and player skill is the only thing that matters, but it's in one tiny, unrealistic fantasy.

You can roll more dice or fewer dice, depending on who brought what army, etc., but if it's the die rolls that are what is responsible for the end result, then the number of rolls doesn't matter - the dice are still the determiner.

ansacs wrote:A perfectly balanced game has a mirror effect but a perfectly imbalanced game is specious?

Yes. It's a theoretical plausibility that there could be a perfectly imbalanced game (whatever that even means), but it never actually happens. That's the definition of specious.

Once again, anomalies that only exist in a certain set of circumstances only have relevance to that set of circumstances.

ansacs wrote: which by logical progression to it's conclusion becomes a fallacy

Which fallacies did I commit?

Disagree with my conclusions all you want, but only a fallacy is a fallcy.

ansacs wrote:You are the one making blanket statement without supporting evidence

To be fair, it's a theory paper, not an applied sciences paper.

Also, I don't know how much of what I'd written would seriously benefit or desperately needs empiricism. I mean, how many games do we need to play before we come to the conclusion that you need to roll dice to determine if something was killed or not? In this case, it's deconstructing the rules themselves, not an inductive exercise in data mining.

Plus, it's practically impossible to conduct experiments for this material anyways. How do you even go about collecting a huge mass of rigorous data that is also still applicable to the topics at hand?

ansacs wrote:I think you may need to use the common definition of aesthetic as if two things function differently then they are not related to beauty they are related to function.

Well, that's sort of my point. If any army list is exactly the same power level than any other, the two are only different by form, not by function. If both armies have the same killing power, then the way that they choose to apply it doesn't really matter.

I don't want to bog you down with that whole "basic proficiency" thing, so I'll just add one more thing about it, which we can agree to disagree on if you want.

You define "basic proficiency" as the point where luck matters more than skill. I can accept that definition as serviceable in this regard. However, I feel you're being overly generous with the relative population size of players who possess that level of skill.

And here's where I also come across as a an internet tough-guy when I say roughly 80% of the 40k players I've played, seen play, talked to about playing, read reports of, or just heard their opinion of things don't reach that level of proficiency with the game. Internet groupthink piles on to pressure them from ever improving as well.

On some level, I suspect you at least agree with that somewhat. How many times did you have to explain to people why you're foot-slogging guard were perfectly valid back in those days. Not to people who were somewhat curious as to how you made something which seemed so bad work, but to people that declared such ideas completely devoid of merit and no amount of evidence would persuade them? We can look at the post history for the specifics, but let's just summarize by saying "a lot".

For every one person willing to be thoughtful about how CSM Mutilators can actually be effective, there's twenty people screaming down at him for being a drooling idiot.

That latter group: that's the majority. They are the screaming mass that makes up the population of 40k. And they're terrible at actually playing it.

There is definitely a point where skill is trumped by luck, but calling it "basic" implies much greater spread than it actually has.

In essence, I only dislike the term you've used to define that point and the tone in which you've described the luck vs skill relationship, because I feel like you're implying it is common for a random sampling of 40k players to both be at that level of skill. Also, I'm not trying to contend that reaching that level of skill is some herculean effort. After someone has a working knowledge of the rules, an open-mind and a half-dozen games or so non-netlisted armies usually does it. It's just that most people don't actually have the first one, which is usually a requirement for the second.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ansacs wrote:
It was a relatively large difference in skill but you indicated this is not possible in your saying that no matter the level of skill luck was still required to win, skill was used to manage the binary possibilities not just the statistical >0 to <100% probabilities.

You're putting to fine a microscope on "luck". Luck absolutely mattered to that win.

If you're Seer council blobs had failed all their saves and failed Morale checks the first time they were fired upon, it would have turned out entirely differently. You're skill made you play knowing such things were unlikely, but they were still possible with luck (obviously the bad kind).

That's what he's talking about.

Luck always matters. It can never be removed from the equation. Skill can, at least in the theoretical world where you can have exactly skilled opponents.

DarknessEternal wrote:You define "basic proficiency" as the point where luck matters more than skill. I can accept that definition as serviceable in this regard. However, I feel you're being overly generous with the relative population size of players who possess that level of skill.

(etc.)

Umm... sure.

One of the things that I know got glossed over for the sake of simplicity is that player skill isn't some permanent characteristic of a player. Sometimes I run worse odds when I'm sick, or have low blood sugar, or am distracted by things in my personal life, for example. I'll also reluctantly admit that I've played worse against certain players idiosyncratically (I lost to them several times in a row, and so I play too conservatively, for example), and I've even gotten psyched out a few times, despite how stone cold and calculating I usually consider myself.

In any case, player skill only becomes perfectly controlled for at the point where player skill is perfectly equal (whatever playing exactly the same odds even means in 40k, but I'm willing to believe that it exists, at least for demonstrative purposes). It becomes less controlled for the wider people get apart. It does not, however, explode out of the gate, where if you're a tiny bit better than your opponent, you're anything more than just a tiny bit more likely to win. Part of the point of that section was to bat away the idea that all player skill difference is equally important, or worse, that player skill matters more as the two players become more equal.

But you're right, it is a very fuzzy spot in the theory. We can easily see the extremes where you have two perfectly equal players and a single die roll is all you need to separate them, and where you have the opposite (adjusting, as I said, to filter out cheaters and complete and total incompetence, etc.) where a very good player with a very strong list is only going to be beaten by a very bad player with a very weak list by being extremely lucky.

We can quantify luck thanks to statistics (well, at least, the die rolling part of luck), but how do we quantify player skill? I have absolutely no idea.

So I'll admit, there's guesswork. In this case, I'm relying on the big bag of subjective data from my experiences with playing the game. I've had dozens of games where who won was literally determined by the roll to see if the game ended. If, say, up to 10% of my games end this way, then that one die roll means that one player could win rather than another despite a 10% skill gap. Likewise, I've had a ton of games end by who got first blood. That's a single die roll to see who goes first, and usually a half dozen die rolls or so to get that first kill. Against the opponents I've been playing, just going first makes you very, very likely to get first blood. If, say, 20% of games are determined by first blood, and 75% of the time who goes first gets first blood, that means that a player could be 15% worse than another, and still win. Combine these two together, and just two die rolls - who goes first and when the game ends - could account for who wins a quarter of the games, and so a player could win against someone 1/3rd better than them for no other reason than two die rolls.

So I can't say I know where that exact line is (which is why I studiously avoided it before you pointed it out ), but it seems to me that you can still have a pretty wide skill gap and still have the results of a few die roll very heavily influence the outcome of the game. Given that as two players increase in player skill, the closer in skill level they become, I'd be willing to bet that by the time both players became "reasonably proficient", their skill levels are already close enough to come in under that magic line, wherever it is.

---

Or, here's another example. Let's take two crummy players, but one is twice as skilled as the other. An example of what might happen is that the less crummy player will get a single BS4 meltagun against a tank that really, really needs to die, and the more crummy player will only get two snap-firing meltaguns in range. In this case, the better player is twice as likely to achieve his result. He's twice as good.

Now let's move those players way up the skill level and say that one is twice the player of the other. That might mean that the better player is able to play something at a 2% chance instead of a 1% chance, or a 45.5% chance rather than a less correct 46% chance. It would take just as big of a skill gap, but the impact on the game is going to be very small. It's the problem of player skill that it only lets you play odds more precisely.

Which means that player skill vis a vis luck runs into a logrithm plot problem. Going from very, very bad to bad makes a HUGE difference. Going from bad to good makes a small difference. Going from good to extremely good produces very little difference at all.

That's why I said "reasonably proficient" instead of "rather good", because that logrithmic problem sweeps people towards equality very quickly.

Not sure the overall goal of the piece, but it's a bit too long for my tastes and doesn't have substance most of the way through. Of my notes:

Your description on player types doesn't represent any sort of scale and seems to gloss on three types you do not like and lumps any other into one category. This section doesn't provide much and fails to encaspulate actualy wargamers: People who want a strategic challenge, represented by miniatures and using dice as a "fog of war" aspect set in the 41st Millenium, and one that is beneficial to all parties as it's a social event.

You lost this point at "40k is just a dice game, not a strategy one" as you failed to outline aspects of player skill, capetilizing on player mistake and environment. You treat items like terrain as "luck elements" where as this is not true. Your conclucsion is invalidated by the group of individuals that conitnually win GT level events with 200+ player fields across several rules editions. This alone would be enough for a research thesis on how player skill is actual component of 40k. Reductive argument of "it's just a dice game" is shallow and derails a slowly building thought process that seems well placed.

Your section on balance placates to one style of play and completely ignores every other game as if 40k is in a vaccuum and we have no other reference to like games. Balance, as we know as wargamers, is acheived in other games on a much better scale while still allowing armies to have unique identities and play styles. You miss this entire point and leaves a glaring ommission in your thought process.

List tailoring section is incorrect as the term we know it. You yourself state that list composition is a major portion of 40k. Composing a list to the rules of the game that maximizes it's value, what we know as TAC, is an enterprise unique to Warhamm 40k as well. Again, other games have restrictions in place where it is almost impossible to devise a list that had zero answers to the given scenario, such as your example of an army unable to deal with a mechanized list. List tailoring, as used in common vernacular, is the act of using prior knowledge of a specific opponents army and maximizing unit selection to counter act any effectiveness of your opponents selections. This is, again, mitigated in other games like Malifaux with the objective laid out first and then final composition is selected (with potential asymmetrical objectives) or like Warmachine that allows multiple lists that are selected from by the opponent making the concept of creating a one trick pony list a bad idea.

Your statement on mission and goals of the game design is correct and should be the concept expanded upon. I feel like you should be listening to major 40k podcasts that focus on the competitive scene; they realize that until GW actively maintains their game, the best route to success is not to enforce comp, ban lists, etc. but to create assymetrical missions that effectively allow various army composition types to play to their strengths while still playing 40k.

Throw out your entire section about gunlines. This is a personal opinion and does not reflect any form of factual or informed discussion. When you have an entire army dedicated to this concept, by the design of the game creator, I think this is an invalid section.

Your list building portion fails to highlight the problems inheret with list building and the balance of 40k; there is no forumlaic approach to assigning points values to units that results in a "fair" points cost associated to units. You briefly touch on "stronger or weaker" units but fail to discuss this aspect. Games Workshop obviously does not playtest elements of armies as any experienced person can pick up a codex, read a units points cost and rules and determine, without mathematics, that it is or is not an effective unit. This is the core problem of game balance and could go a long way towards making the game better.

It's at this point I get fatigued and lose interest. If this is an opinion article, then you are allowed to address the game as you see fit. However, given this is approached as a thesis, you need actual factual discussion. Digging through the points cost of units to discuss balance would go a long way to rational reasoning on why 40k is so off key. I suggest the 11th Company and finding their math-hammer segments that delves into this topic and produces actual measurable and comparable reasoning to why some units are never seen, even in the "fluffiest" of armies (still haven't seen a Mandrake on the table in 4 years of active playing).

I applaud your effort, I feel like you haven't gone far enough and thrown in a bit too much personal bias.

TheKbob wrote: you failed to outline aspects of player skill, capetilizing on player mistake

Define "capitalizing". What do you actually do?

TheKbob wrote: Your conclucsion is invalidated by the group of individuals that conitnually win GT level events with 200+ player fields across several rules editions

It's the tournaments themselves which are invalid. The article goes over in detail why this is.

No point in drawing conclusions based on bad data points.

TheKbob wrote: Balance, as we know as wargamers, is acheived in other games on a much better scale while still allowing armies to have unique identities and play styles

Such as?

Are you going to make the argument that MTG and starcraft are actually balanced games?

But what I'm sure you're obliquely referencing is "asymmetrical balance", so I'll just nip that in the bud right now.

I went over this in the article. Games that claim to have asymmetrical balance either enforce balance by secretly just making symmetrical balance (rock paper scissors, for one of many examples), or they take away all player choice (or both, like chess).

I believe it's up to the person who claims asymmetrical balance exists to prove that it does. Usual attempts at this wind up being pretty farcical. It's much more that a person likes the imbalance of a particular game, but wants to believe that balance is a good thing, so they falsely claim that a game is balanced when, in fact, they just like it.

Heck, I've even had claims that M:TG is a balanced game. They're not. Not any more than 40k. Any game where only a few units or a few cards or a few strategies are used is proof of an imbalanced game. In order for starcraft to be seriously balanced, I'd need to be able to take any combination of zerg units and do just as well as any combination of protoss units. Anything less is just a more or less coagulated imbalance where some combinations can be made to be a similar power level, but they're going to be a different power level from a vast, vast number of different combinations.

TheKbob wrote: List tailoring, as used in common vernacular, is the act of using prior knowledge of a specific opponents army and maximizing unit selection to counter act any effectiveness of your opponents selections

I do offer a broader definition, true, but I see it as being more useful.

The only difference between looking at a person's list and changing your own to make it stronger than your opponent's and looking at a person's list and changing your own to make it equal or weaker than your opponent's list is list strength.

The only way that list tailoring for a stronger list is bad is if strong lists are, themselves, bad. I don't chose to believe this, hence why list tailoring can be taken broadly.

TheKbob wrote: This is a personal opinion

It's the result of a logical progression. Call logic opinion if you want, but that doesn't change its nature.

TheKbob wrote:there is no forumlaic approach to assigning points values to units that results in a "fair" points cost associated to units.

Why points costs don't balance a game was went over in the appendix.

TheKbob wrote:It's at this point I get fatigued and lose interest.

Which I think is the problem here. You're not reading for comprehension, you're just reading to try and make nit-pickey statements based on a misunderstanding of the article itself.

"Nit picky statements"?

Nit.
Picky.
Statements.

You're calling him out on doing that yet you're dissecting his post sentence by sentence. That there, is the very UR example of nit picking.

I can't believe I wasted my time reading this crap. The entire point of this essay is that the author is basically trying to convince Tau players that they're bad people and they should give the game up because they're not playing it "the right way", which is entirely the author injecting their personal opinion into the piece while trying to pretend that he came to that conclusion "logically" and objectively. Pure bullgak.

For added hilarity, the writer suggests in order for Tau players to create a "good list" they should avoid taking battlesuits entirely, and instead use more "assault-oriented" units. Not only is he extremely biased against this one style of play, and obviously so, but his lack of understanding and/or complete ignorance of how the Tau army was designed to function on the tabletop is painfully clear. When you make suggestions like this, without realizing that the Tau codex has no assault-oriented units to replace those battlesuits with, and indeed was purposely designed to lack this capability to make up for their strong shooting that you hate so much, it just makes you come off as someone who has no idea what they're talking about at best, and a whiner at worst.

I honestly don't see how a logical person could argue that imbalance in 40k is a good thing, while simultaneously decrying gunline armies as much as you have. I'd think a logical person would compare the performance of said gunline armies to previous editions, learn that in previous editions these armies were not top tier despite using a lot of those same "tricks" (like JSJ, markerlights improving BS/ignoring cover, mechanized elements protecting weaker units from assault), and then deduce that the changes brought about in 6th edition must have created an imbalance that favors gunline armies more than others...not place all the blame on the players and argue that there's something inherently wrong with the mindset of someone who plays Tau instead of the game itself being utterly fething broken.

But I suppose I only think that way because I'm a TFG fun-killing douchelord who should be playing Yahtzee instead, but chose 40k just so I could feth with you.