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I keep reading over and over how things have been unbalanced for many editions of the game, and how some armies are more powerful at different point levels.

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

It was something along the lines of they started with a base statline that had a specific point cost. increasing or decreasing a stat increased or decreased the point cost by a specific amount. This was across the board for all armies so if you had a space marine with the same stats as an elder, then the point costs would be the same.

Of course, armor also played a part in adding to the point cost, depending on what the save for the armor was, but all 4+ armor added the same amount to the total for all armies.

Using this method, there's no way things couldn't be balanced, if all your troops were super tough, you would have far fewer of them. If they were super weak, you'd have a boat load and it all evened out.

But now I've seen threads where they've adjusted stats, but the point costs remain the same, or point costs have been adjusted but not the stats. So obviously they've thrown this method out the window and it's no wonder they are having a horrid time trying to balance anything and I can't understand why they would do this.

I mean, if it was so the armies could be bigger so they could sell more models, then why not simply start with a lower base point cost?

Because their system didn't work.

How much should a power fist be worth? GW decided decades ago that it should be 25pts. Thing is, it's 25pts regardless of whether it's on a Chapter Master or a guardsman. 1 WS3 S6 attack is not worth even remotely close to 25pts. 4 WS6 S8 attacks are. Yet they're priced the same.

The same principle applies to virtually everything in the game. It's impossible to price anything linearly, because different things are worth different amounts to different units. Centurions would get a ton of value out of BS5, but Khorne Berzerkers couldn't care less about BS5.

You can't just say "well, just figure out how many points X is worth, and apply that to everything". It simply doesn't work like that.

 DarkLink wrote:
Because their system didn't work.

How much should a power fist be worth? GW decided decades ago that it should be 25pts. Thing is, it's 25pts regardless of whether it's on a Chapter Master or a guardsman. 1 WS3 S6 attack is not worth even remotely close to 25pts. 4 WS6 S8 attacks are. Yet they're priced the same.

The same principle applies to virtually everything in the game. It's impossible to price anything linearly, because different things are worth different amounts to different units. Centurions would get a ton of value out of BS5, but Khorne Berzerkers couldn't care less about BS5.

You can't just say "well, just figure out how many points X is worth, and apply that to everything". It simply doesn't work like that.

Why is why master Wargear lists that you buy all your stuff from is a stupid idea.

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

War has changed.

We have more things to complain about!

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Exalted for truth, Mr. Tuttle. Though this makes me wonder whether this post is an old copypaste as well...

 TheNewBlood wrote:

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Exalted for truth, Mr. Tuttle. Though this makes me wonder whether this post is an old copypaste as well...

I'll never tell!

Yeah I heard that 10 years ago when I actually played that it was unbalanced. The game ain't perfect get used to it.

To expand on what others have already said ...

kaotkbliss wrote:
Using this method, there's no way things couldn't be balanced, if all your troops were super tough, you would have far fewer of them. If they were super weak, you'd have a boat load and it all evened out.

"True" balance in a complex system can never be achieved. The more complex a system is, the harder it is to even get close to something resembling (!) balance. If you think that there's any purely mathematical way to achieve balance, you're fooling yourself. This *might* work in a small system, with only a handful of different models. 40K has not only a handful model, it's the most complex system (judging be the sheer number of different units) in existence.

Now that's not saying that balance should be thrown out of the window entirely. Far from it. As of now, I'm not quite sure where GW is going (seems like they decided to reach for a generally higher power level). I just know that there's no formula for balance.

Anything under 1500 isn't worth unpacking the models.

Funny that, WotC seem to have a good grasp of balance, in a system involving several thousand components.

I laugh when I see 40K players write that 'magic is less complex'... take a look at the comprehensive rulebook for tournament play, it's over 200 pages long of just text and is pretty complex in places.

The rules are so well written and the grasp of the game balance so good that you have a world ranking system and a professional circuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of prizes.

GW just aren't interested in making 40K that sort of game. All they are interested in is selling miniatures. When the 3D printing home revolution comes, they'll go out of business very fast.

Edit: just to point out, I'm actually enjoying 40K more than Magic at the moment... Yes, the balance is shot (I played my Tyranids vs. my housemate's GK + a Knight Paladin on sunday... got roflstomped). Yes, GW can't write rules for snot. It's still possible to have fun though!

 JTFirefly wrote:

"True" balance in a complex system can never be achieved. The more complex a system is, the harder it is to even get close to something resembling (!) balance. If you think that there's any purely mathematical way to achieve balance, you're fooling yourself. This *might* work in a small system, with only a handful of different models. 40K has not only a handful model, it's the most complex system (judging be the sheer number of different units) in existence.

This. No system is balanced. You can argue over weather one system is more balanced than another, but no game is perfect. Even chess, with limited amount of movement, extreme abstraction, equal forces and only 6 different "units", about as simple as a "wargame" can get, is unbalanced. There is a big first turn advantage.

zerosignal wrote:
Funny that, WotC seem to have a good grasp of balance, in a system involving several thousand components.

I laugh when I see 40K players write that 'magic is less complex'... take a look at the comprehensive rulebook for tournament play, it's over 200 pages long of just text and is pretty complex in places.

The rules are so well written and the grasp of the game balance so good that you have a world ranking system and a professional circuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of prizes.

GW just aren't interested in making 40K that sort of game. All they are interested in is selling miniatures. When the 3D printing home revolution comes, they'll go out of business very fast.

Magic isn't inherently more balanced though. WotC regularly review and ban cards if they prove to be game braking. It balances because of the very nature of the game means that WotC can come out and say "X card is now banned from tournaments". Comparing what WotC and GW can do is comparing apples to oranges.

3D printing will have the same effect as the inkjet printer on publishing companies...

Nobody wants or expects a perfect game.

That has never been argued anywhere on these forums by someone with two brain cells to rub together.

 Blacksails wrote:
Nobody wants or expects a perfect game.

That has never been argued anywhere on these forums by someone with two brain cells to rub together.

Yeah. That strawman gets thrown around a lot. No one expects a perfectly balanced game. Just some effort to balance it, as opposed to the mess it is now.

 DarkLink wrote:
Because their system didn't work.

How much should a power fist be worth? GW decided decades ago that it should be 25pts. Thing is, it's 25pts regardless of whether it's on a Chapter Master or a guardsman. 1 WS3 S6 attack is not worth even remotely close to 25pts. 4 WS6 S8 attacks are. Yet they're priced the same.

The same principle applies to virtually everything in the game. It's impossible to price anything linearly, because different things are worth different amounts to different units. Centurions would get a ton of value out of BS5, but Khorne Berzerkers couldn't care less about BS5.

You can't just say "well, just figure out how many points X is worth, and apply that to everything". It simply doesn't work like that.

Butt the guardsman w/PF was a lot cheaper than a CM w/PF because the lower stats. so for every 1 CM, you would have 2 guardsmen. So yes, it did work but people who complained it didn't felt their army should be OP and crush everyone. In the group I regularly played with, we had practically every army available between us all and never had a problem with balance.

*edit*
While there was never really an issue with balance, my brother (a CSM player) complained about it, but then he was TFG who would cheat and fudge rolls to win so his opinion doesn't count.

No, it only worked because nobody in your group had the inclination or skill to break it.

Linear point buy cannot be balanced, not even in theory, let alone in practice.

 Steve steveson wrote:

Magic isn't inherently more balanced though. WotC regularly review and ban cards if they prove to be game braking. It balances because of the very nature of the game means that WotC can come out and say "X card is now banned from tournaments". Comparing what WotC and GW can do is comparing apples to oranges.

3D printing will have the same effect as the inkjet printer on publishing companies...

They may not be quite the same, but still. GW create a much more friendly environment to play in by releasing errata for their codices and rulebooks reguralry. Just look at all the faqs and errata WotC put into their card search engine.That's more than GW will ever have the need to. They have more manpower but still. GW doesn't seem to even be willing to put in the least amount of effort. And now that they have digital dexes the issue is even slightly worse to me.

And I dunno about 3d printing. What effect exactly did inkjet printers have? Wotc is still going strong and printing cards hasn't even crossed my mind. I doubt they will be the end of tabletob companies even if they didn't change to selling blueprints rather than models.

 lord_blackfang wrote:


Linear point buy cannot be balanced, not even in theory, let alone in practice.

That just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, in fact, that's the complete opposite of reality.
*edit*
I mean, if the point value is the same for something for everyone, how can it not be balanced? Everyone is paying the same amount for the same item. The effectiveness of that item between weaker and stronger troops is offset by the total points spent per model due to the model with lower stats being cheaper and therefore you can get more of them.
/*edit*

Sure other parts of the game may have been broken such as special rules or spells, but the building of an army list was not.
Especially from what I read now with complete armies being pretty useless at normal game points levels.

I don't remember every rule or every conversation or every game we played back in the '90's but I do remember no one had issues with army lists and the only person who complained anything was OP or too weak was my brother who I've stated before is TFG/WAAC and he only complained because his juggernaut of Khorne or bloodthirster was killed.

 ImAGeek wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Nobody wants or expects a perfect game.

That has never been argued anywhere on these forums by someone with two brain cells to rub together.

Yeah. That strawman gets thrown around a lot. No one expects a perfectly balanced game. Just some effort to balance it, as opposed to the mess it is now.

Careful now, a certain someone will be summoned if you keep mentioning "perfect balance".

That just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, in fact, that's the complete opposite of reality.
*edit*
I mean, if the point value is the same for something for everyone, how can it not be balanced? Everyone is paying the same amount for the same item. The effectiveness of that item between weaker and stronger troops is offset by the total points spent per model due to the model with lower stats being cheaper and therefore you can get more of them.
/*edit*

This mathematically does not work at the level of points we are talking about. So lets just say we talk about a Melta Gun to make this fairly simple.

Lets say that it costs 10 points, say a marine costs 15 points and a guardsman costs 5 points.(For easy math not acuaracy) So marine with Melta is 25 points, Guardsman w/ melta is 15 (in this example). So the guardsman is 3/5ths the cost of the marine. So for every 5 guardsman with melta guns I get 3 marines with melta guns.

Shooting at a T4 target the marine hits 5/9ths of the time. the guardsman hits 5/12ths of the time. So on average with the same points worth of models the marines kill 1.7 models on average, the guardsman kill 2.1. So the guardsman are 20% better than the marines at killing the target. They also have more upside with the potential to kill 2 more targets than the marines.

Now you could say well then drop the points cost of the marine 20%, but this does not take into account all the other stats, durability etc. It gets horribly complex, and just not doable at point levels in the double and single digits like we are working with.

kaotkbliss wrote:
Butt the guardsman w/PF was a lot cheaper than a CM w/PF because the lower stats. so for every 1 CM, you would have 2 guardsmen. So yes, it did work but people who complained it didn't felt their army should be OP and crush everyone.

True, but the two guardsmen also die a lot easier than a marine hero

I do remember some older books where things like power weapons were cheaper on 1W models than heroes. Makes sense as they die easier and have weaker stats to put the weapon to use. And heavy weapons were more expensive in squads that could take several, since they were more effective when concentrating on one task compared to a TacSquad where that one Lascannon shot at a Landraider meant the other nine guys were useless,

Breng77 wrote:

That just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, in fact, that's the complete opposite of reality.
*edit*
I mean, if the point value is the same for something for everyone, how can it not be balanced? Everyone is paying the same amount for the same item. The effectiveness of that item between weaker and stronger troops is offset by the total points spent per model due to the model with lower stats being cheaper and therefore you can get more of them.
/*edit*

This mathematically does not work at the level of points we are talking about. So lets just say we talk about a Melta Gun to make this fairly simple.

Lets say that it costs 10 points, say a marine costs 15 points and a guardsman costs 5 points.(For easy math not acuaracy) So marine with Melta is 25 points, Guardsman w/ melta is 15 (in this example). So the guardsman is 3/5ths the cost of the marine. So for every 5 guardsman with melta guns I get 3 marines with melta guns.

Shooting at a T4 target the marine hits 5/9ths of the time. the guardsman hits 5/12ths of the time. So on average with the same points worth of models the marines kill 1.7 models on average, the guardsman kill 2.1. So the guardsman are 20% better than the marines at killing the target. They also have more upside with the potential to kill 2 more targets than the marines.

Now you could say well then drop the points cost of the marine 20%, but this does not take into account all the other stats, durability etc. It gets horribly complex, and just not doable at point levels in the double and single digits like we are working with.

Except that its also a lot easier to kill a guardsman than a marine.

kaotkbliss wrote:

In the group I regularly played with, we had practically every army available between us all and never had a problem with balance.

*edit*
While there was never really an issue with balance, my brother (a CSM player) complained about it, but then he was TFG who would cheat and fudge rolls to win so his opinion doesn't count.

You never having a problem with balance either means eithe Rose tinted glasses or your group didn't really push the game to where it got broken.

Older editions of gw games were just as broken, if not more so, whether you want to discuss rogue trader, 2nd ed or even third ed.

Gw might have had a system, but it never really worked...

Spetulhu wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:
Butt the guardsman w/PF was a lot cheaper than a CM w/PF because the lower stats. so for every 1 CM, you would have 2 guardsmen. So yes, it did work but people who complained it didn't felt their army should be OP and crush everyone.

True, but the two guardsmen also die a lot easier than a marine hero

I do remember some older books where things like power weapons were cheaper on 1W models than heroes. Makes sense as they die easier and have weaker stats to put the weapon to use. And heavy weapons were more expensive in squads that could take several, since they were more effective when concentrating on one task compared to a TacSquad where that one Lascannon shot at a Landraider meant the other nine guys were useless,

That was just a rough example, I'm sure the more likely scenario was probably 4 or 5 guardsman to a space marine hero. But the point wasn't to get into exact numbers. It was a system that worked and you didn't have things like base gretchin troops costing the same as base space marine troops even though the stats were completely different. (I know this is entirely true but it's a close example of what is going on with the current system)

What edition were those older books because the ones I played weren't like that. (at least not that I remember)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Deadnight wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

In the group I regularly played with, we had practically every army available between us all and never had a problem with balance.

*edit*
While there was never really an issue with balance, my brother (a CSM player) complained about it, but then he was TFG who would cheat and fudge rolls to win so his opinion doesn't count.

You never having a problem with balance either means eithe Rose tinted glasses or your group didn't really push the game to where it got broken.

Older editions of gw games were just as broken, if not more so, whether you want to discuss rogue trader, 2nd ed or even third ed.

Gw might have had a system, but it never really worked...

What is the purpose of purposely breaking a system other than to complain about the system? We played the game as the rules stated, built our lists on what models we liked and what we had. We would often pick up new models and try them out in a game to see how they worked. Often times because there were a large number of us, we would have 1 vs 2, 2 vs 2, 3 vs 1, 3 vs 3 ect battles and a lot of 1 vs 1.

The problem is now, if we were to play the same way as we did them (friendly games, by the rules) it just wouldn't work. I mean I've been wanting to start a WHFB TK army, yet everywhere I turn I hear that unless you play huge games with them, they don't work. Or how completely useless other 40k armies are like tyranids. So making any kind of list, whether you're trying to push the rules to breaking point or not, it's a fething mess.

I'm not saying oldhammer was perfect, but the idea of the point system they worked out for building armies was.

kaotkbliss wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

That just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, in fact, that's the complete opposite of reality.
*edit*
I mean, if the point value is the same for something for everyone, how can it not be balanced? Everyone is paying the same amount for the same item. The effectiveness of that item between weaker and stronger troops is offset by the total points spent per model due to the model with lower stats being cheaper and therefore you can get more of them.
/*edit*

This mathematically does not work at the level of points we are talking about. So lets just say we talk about a Melta Gun to make this fairly simple.

Lets say that it costs 10 points, say a marine costs 15 points and a guardsman costs 5 points.(For easy math not acuaracy) So marine with Melta is 25 points, Guardsman w/ melta is 15 (in this example). So the guardsman is 3/5ths the cost of the marine. So for every 5 guardsman with melta guns I get 3 marines with melta guns.

Shooting at a T4 target the marine hits 5/9ths of the time. the guardsman hits 5/12ths of the time. So on average with the same points worth of models the marines kill 1.7 models on average, the guardsman kill 2.1. So the guardsman are 20% better than the marines at killing the target. They also have more upside with the potential to kill 2 more targets than the marines.

Now you could say well then drop the points cost of the marine 20%, but this does not take into account all the other stats, durability etc. It gets horribly complex, and just not doable at point levels in the double and single digits like we are working with.

Except that its also a lot easier to kill a guardsman than a marine.

Which if you'll note I said at the end but that makes the balance more difficult rather than less difficult. Especially with all the weapon types. 5 guardsman with Melta trading shots with 3 Marines with melta are actually more durable. AP matters cover matters S of weapon matters etc. A point system where most infantry costs less than 30 points is difficult to balance due to the range of abilities. Also each stat is of different value (1 point of WS =/= 1 point of BS etc.) They system was never balanced. Was it more balanced? Maybe, but GW has never put a ton of thought into points costs of models and how they balance out.

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Yeah, and shame on us for expecting some level of improvement after 15 years and 5 editions of only incremental changes

Personally, I've never felt GW was great at balance.... but it was forgiveable back in 2nd and 3rd editions, not so much after 7th edition.

My nostalgia is mostly for 2nd edition, not because I thought it was more balanced but simply because I thought the core system needed less tweaks to be awesome.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Yeah, and shame on us for expecting some level of improvement after 15 years and 5 editions of only incremental changes

Personally, I've never felt GW was great at balance.... but it was forgiveable back in 2nd and 3rd editions, not so much after 7th edition.

My nostalgia is mostly for 2nd edition, not because I thought it was more balanced but simply because I thought the core system needed less tweaks to be awesome.

Even GW's design team thought this, as the first version of 3rd was reportedly very much a tweaking of the style of 2nd. Only after the demands of management came down, did 3rd begin the movement forward towards bigger and bigger games. I would postulate that after 5th, management decided that the rules should become a vehicle for sales of models rather than something to be improved, and here we have the current 7th edition of 40k.

And it doesn't sound like that "rules for sales" model is slowing down at all, if the rumors of 9th edition WHFB where you can take nearly any model for an army are true. Expect the future to be Super Unbound- a game akin to 40k All-Stars, where you can take anything! All you need to bring is your forging pen and you're off on an adventure!!

 Accolade wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Yeah, and shame on us for expecting some level of improvement after 15 years and 5 editions of only incremental changes

Personally, I've never felt GW was great at balance.... but it was forgiveable back in 2nd and 3rd editions, not so much after 7th edition.

My nostalgia is mostly for 2nd edition, not because I thought it was more balanced but simply because I thought the core system needed less tweaks to be awesome.

Even GW's design team thought this, as the first version of 3rd was reportedly very much a tweaking of the style of 2nd. Only after the demands of management came down, did 3rd begin the movement forward towards bigger and bigger games. I would postulate that after 5th, management decided that the rules should become a vehicle for sales of models rather than something to be improved, and here we have the current 7th edition of 40k.

And it doesn't sound like that "rules for sales" model is slowing down at all, if the rumors of 9th edition WHFB where you can take nearly any model for an army are true. Expect the future to be Super Unbound- a game akin to 40k All-Stars, where you can take anything! All you need to bring is your forging pen and you're off on an adventure!!

Wasn't it the creators of 2nd edition that moved on from GW and made Bolt Action?

I remember when 3rd first came out one of my mate's very early comments after playing a game was "they just changed it to sell more models". Though at the time a lot of models were transitioning from metal to plastic and that's when we started getting the first decent multipart-multipose models, so the cost of building an army actually wasn't terrible (a lot of armies in 2nd needed a heap of metals to be workable).

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 cvtuttle wrote:

kaotkbliss wrote:

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

Honestly what you are reading is the same stuff that was being said 15 years ago. Go use the wayback machine and take a look at the official GW forums. It's the exact same arguments, statements of unbalance, and decrees about how it used to be.

I once made a post on these forums where I copied and pasted comments from 15 years ago into this forum and showed how nothing changes. Even war. War never changes...

Yeah, and shame on us for expecting some level of improvement after 15 years and 5 editions of only incremental changes

Personally, I've never felt GW was great at balance.... but it was forgiveable back in 2nd and 3rd editions, not so much after 7th edition.

My nostalgia is mostly for 2nd edition, not because I thought it was more balanced but simply because I thought the core system needed less tweaks to be awesome.

A couple adjustments in their point system could have fixed that stuff, instead they threw the whole system out and now it's borked beyond comprehension. When I hear of updates that make cannon fodder units cost as much as another armies elite troop or someone's bolter upgrade cost as much as another armies lascannon, then they've completely gone the wrong route.

kaotkbliss wrote:
I keep reading over and over how things have been unbalanced for many editions of the game, and how some armies are more powerful at different point levels.

I remember GW used to have a system for creating lists so everything was balanced and I can't figure why they would move away from that.

The reason is because you're remembering wrong. This a) does not work, at all, especially for a game with as many unique special rules as 40k, and b) was never the way they did things. What they did do was put together a set of Vehicle Design Rules, which everyone remembers fondly, but which put out intentionally overpriced units to avoid being unbalanced, and was not related to how they priced units in codexes. I think people misremember that and assume there was some internal algorithm the designers followed when pricing things.

From what I recall, based on an old interview, they generally take a stab at a point value based on similar units and past experience, then play test to tweak things. There are some designers with a better understanding of point values than others, and their personal approaches have always affected the codexes. Just look at the difference in pricing things like power fists for different characters, depending on who's writing the codex - they've honestly taken a step backward in this regard in the past few editions and I think they're experiencing brain drain in the rules department as their best designers leave to work for other companies.

If there is, or ever was, any sort of algorithm, it would have been used as a first guess and then play tested to find the actual value (and I think you'll find that any experienced player can make a good first guess at a unit's point cost just based on perceived value vs. other units; you really don't need an algorithm for that).

Basically, you cannot set a fixed point value for a type of weapon or a special rule or a point on the statline. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't work. Further, you probably would be very hard pressed to come up with a generalized equation to tell you how much that weapon or stat or rule should be worth in any situation. There are just too many variables at play, too many interconnected stats and rules, too many interactions with other units (both friendly and enemy) that you have to consider. And when it comes to unique special rules for a unit, forget it - there can clearly be no system for this, and nearly every unit has unique rules of some kind. Others have tried to point all this out to you, so I'm not really going to go into it past that.

The one thing I will say in your credit, you're right that whatever GW used to do for balancing units, they seem to care less and less. It seems the new standard is to take an underperforming unit, change nothing about it, then stick three of them in a formation that grants free bonuses. Is the original point cost of the unit reasonable if it needs to be given free buffs? Or is the buffed version now overpowered? GW doesn't seem to care that much, they just want you to buy more of them.