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TLDR; Points based balancing systems have a basic design flaw - look to other ways to balance AoS.

[I didn't put this in Proposed Rules because I'm not proposing any - I wish I could! - Snapshot]

Like a lot of people I lurk with great interest to see what emerges from the community efforts to hack some sort of balancing mechanism on to AoS. I get that people are especially interested in numerical systems, because, well, numbers...

Two nights ago, the end-game of a game I played had my High Elf Mage against a remnant group of 3 clanrats, a skaven warlord, a rat ogre, a packmaster, and a poison wind mortar team (yes, it was an IoB starter set game).

I'm toast I thought, but what the hell - let's kite the buggers and snipe them dead with Arcane Bolt. You won't be surprised to know the HE mage won the day for the simple reason that he could cast his spell in the Hero phase, then move+run as fast as he could out of the way of the melee units who were in hot pursuit (we had the Benny Hill theme running in the background!). And yes, over about 7 rounds of kiting, the PWM team hit once - hehe.

According to one of the point-based systems that's been developed the 80pt mage was against (roughly) 245pts of skaven, but it wasn't even close to a contest. I absolutely don't want to poo-poo this or any other work that's happening, but the point-based "balancing" systems that are being worked on are fundamentally flawed because of basic maths.

If you have a subjective measure, like the potency of a unit, you could probably say that unit A is more potent than unit B, but when you do this you are talking about something that is called an ordinal measure (as in ordered). You can do lots of nice things with ordinal measures, like say who is more potent than who, how many units of potency X have I got, and stuff like that. What you can't do, and actually have something that makes any sort of sense, is take those potency measures and add them together. To do that, and have it make sense, you need something called scalar measures (think height, time intervals,etc). If we could devise a scalar measure for unit potency, we could say that unit A is twice as potent as unit B, add things up to our hearts content, and build 2000pt lists until our spreadsheet fingers bled. It also means that if our hypothetical measure is good, any 500pt of units will be as potent as any other 500pts of units, and roughly speaking you'd expect to see pretty even contests (as least as far as wins-losses is concerned).

The problem is, I don't think such a measure exists, for the simple reason that the potency of a unit depends fundamentally on context. The silly example of my end-game above, essentially renders the skaven worthless because they couldn't catch me fast enough. The flip-side would be that pretty much any melee unit would nail me in short order if they could get me in combat.

As much as I admire the attempts to attach numbers to units, I think it'll mainly serve only to salve the hurt GW did in doing away with the points system (a decision which makes sense, even though it isn't popular). FWIW, I suspect a balancing system is going to emerge through the use of warscroll limits, keyword restrictions, and battleplan designs, and obviously some groups are already down this path.

I just wanted to vent a bit about this, because point systems don't produced balanced games in systems as richly varied as AoS, WHFB, and 40k. How many times have you tabled, or been tabled in a "balanced" game, when you know it has little to do with player skill, and a lot to do with unit composition and rock-paper-scissors? The beauty of the AoS deployment model is that you have every opportunity to minimise the chance of sending a paper army against your opponent's scissors, but of course, there is enormous scope for arseholery if your collection can't compete with your opponent's, and he/she is a WAAC grub.

This is completely unconstructive criticism, because I sure as hell don't have the answer to stopping people creating games that are not even worth playing, but I think you have to at least understand that if you choose to use one of the point based systems, you might not get what you're looking for.

Good post snapshot. I tend to agree. Especially in AOS, where a unit's effectiveness can be drastically changed just by having another unit near it on the board. An actual pure points system would have to attempt to adjust accordingly to each synergy between units.. And that's nigh impossible. It may have seemed like a dumb move, but now it seems GW left points out because the game actually suffers from the presence of a points system.

The way it is now, anybody can have any game they can imagine, and use that game to (forgive me) learn to play. If i deploy units with a lack of synergy and get steamrolled by my friend's synergistic, themed army, i can try and put more synergy in my list than last time. If my monsters get plugged early, i can deploy mobile mounted infantry instead to mitigate losses and be more of a scalpel than hammer. It seems like a constant learning experience in which the competitiveness is determined by your opponents and yourself as you move through the game experience.

In a points system, players only real "competitive choice" is to find the things that are undercosted/way too good for their points in certain situations, and use them as much as possible. That doesnt provide balance... It provides an excuse for a player to claim his list is balanced when its tailored to blow the opponent off the table. 1000 pts of nurglings is not equal to 1000 pts of imperial knights. I would venture to say that a game with as many variables as warhammer can't truly be balanced numerically without removing alot of variables and over-simplifying the game.

Point costs are a licence to abuse army creation, in alot of circumstances. Granted, it can also be a helpful tool for two friendly gamers to approximate a balanced game, but in the hands of competitive players, the system gets broken and taken advantage of, and that's part of the appeal for many people. Yet anyone who doesnt find that appealing, views it as detrimental to the game.

In short, i would say that points probably arent the answer for AOS, although the game would benefit from at least some balance mechanism for pickup games, even if it is entirely optional. And the playerbase would more readily accept GW official balancing mechanisms for army creation more than they will any private, playermade one. I havent even shown my group the various point schemes posted on here. I think they would have as many if not more problems with the point systems than the complete lack of balance, and its already tough to get a game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I can't imagine 40k without points, though. It's far too embedded in the game's own culture. AOS has the benefit of being a new game entirely, and looks to have much better internal balance overall than 40k.

Honestly, this is why a lot of good games use there whole rule set as a way to balance the game from the ground up.
Using.
-points
-missions
-terrain rules
-mandatory army selection
-other

You don't need everything but you do need something.
Most games take the combined arms approach with a army to need something to deal with everything they could encounter and minimising the ability for players to create a army that is likely to meet an a oponant that they cannot effect in the game.
Taking the above game, if you had a objective the skaven player could have gone for that.
Forcing the game to end before you could win by running or pushing you into more risky play for the chance at a win.

Right now, from the start AoS seems to lack anything of the sorts and is in need of some car from GW.
Why I am seeing what the community does right now, I honk it is going to need something more from GW at this point.

I'm a big fan of the lack of points. I think they introduced a lot of problems in the game. Back when I played, and it's been a few years now, I always saw strife about points, whether the win was legitimate because of one army being overpowered, etc. Points beyond anything else in the game became the guide to building your force, and I think that limited the hobby.

What I think is missing is not necessarily a balancing mechanism, but some sense of army construction. I haven't seen all of the scenarios, but I would be interested in scenarios that give guidelines for army construction, and not specifically name what units to bring. I think one of the favourite parts anyone has in Warhammer is coming up with your army or war band or whatever, and AoS leaves it slightly too open-ended.

If units were actually balanced within an army, that might work. The problem is they aren't. Some units are simply better than others in every conceivable way. (See: Stormvermin vs. Clan Rats) Where a point system previously balanced the two, now the only reason to bring Clan Rats is in a specific formation.

Granted, as the old armies phase out for their new replacements, I suspect some of that might change. For better or worse though, who can say?

Personally I'm of the opinion that balancing should occur by creating categories of units, setting up equalized model counts across tiers, and then establish loose formations along the lines of what various clubs are already doing.

So for example set categories such as light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, destroyer (siege engines and monsters), and hero. Basically put units into the most applicable category, and equalize the units model count across their own tier.

Then create various flexible formations where instead of specific units it states the number of each category you can pull from. Essentially you create various tiers of formation so that they'll be balanced against each other so maybe you have:
"1 heroes, 1 Destroyer, 2 heavy, 2 light"
or
"1 hero, 2 destroyers, 3 light"
which are both "Warband Tier formations" This lets players field either identical formations or balanced yet different formations. Then write scenarios with special victory conditions where different sized formations can be used against one another such as "Sudden Death - Assassination" where a "Skirmish Tier" force needs to kill the warlord of a "Warband Tier" to win, ect.

Sure it'd be convoluted to balance at first, but then when it comes to playing you literally pick a formation tier and just pick out the requisite boxes of models and you're good to play. It keeps the spirit of AoS while implementing a fast pick up and play system; no calculating points, eyeballing, agreeing on per unit wound restrictions, etc.

I completely agree. My wife and i have been playing AOS a lot. We were initially using wounds but found that isn't a perfect way to balance either.

An example of this wound be a unit of skaven or skeletons vs a unit of high elves. A unit of skaven or skeletons should have more wounds or models to make things fair.

We also found a good 1 vs 1 battle: Kroq-gar vs the mounted celestial dude from the starter. Kroc gar has 12 wounds vs 7, but has a worse save. The celestian also has rending which is wicked in this game.

I think gw was smart by not using points as you have pointed out or using wounds counts. The game should be based on fun and armies should be created accordingly.

Seeing the leaked rules for the Stormcast paladins, we've now got a pretty good idea of how armies written for AoS might look.
Liberators have their strong points and are the most survivable unit overall. The Judicators have very different intended roles depending on weapon selection. The Decimators are horrific against massed infantry, but are out on a limb when it comes to multi-wound/large stuff. Retributors are your multi-wound matchup. Protectors help your units get into contact and have the ability to deal with monsters.
The better a unit is at dealing with situation X, the worse it gets at dealing with situations Y&Z.
There is no 'objectively better' option in isolation, like we have with the legacy warscrolls.
Combined with scenario play over pitched battles, I think this is where AoS is going - toolbox armies that contain the possibilities of one-sided match ups if used correctly, and there won't be a "I'll never use that unit" situation.

You seem to not understand the point of a point-based system. A point-based system is not, as you think, supposed to make every 100 points unit able to beat another 100 point unit. A points-based system is supposed to roughly (as close as possible) portray a unit's global strength - that might be what you meant to express when referring to "potential" but your example clearly contracticted this then.

A points-based system doesn't mean that you can get everything you want at X points and expect to get into an even matchup. Even in a points-based system, you are expected to bring a viable and well-rounded army in order, able to cope with the current (local) meta.

A good points-based system attemps to balance similar units, e.g. Goblins, Night Goblins, Skaven slaves, Clanrats etc. are more comparable, given that each of them have a similar role. Your example strongly suggests that a 100 pts Wizard should be about as strong as a 100 points regular unit - and that isn't the idea behind a points-based system.

The next problem is, as usual, balance. Everyone who has a closer look at AOS quickly sees that the rules are extremely poor and among the worst GW has realized in a long time. Just take Goblins as one example. Rock Lobbaz are the objectively best war machine, Stone Throwers in general now became the perfect sniper weapon. Goblins are worse than Night Goblins in all regards etc. AoS, in concept, tries to put synergies into focus but since it's often poorly written, there most often is one clear chain of units that is to be used in order to maximize effectiveness. Let's not start about the forced synergies (i.e. Goblin Herders + Cave Squigs or Orc Bully + any war machine).

A main reason for why a lot of people like the removal of points is the freedom to blame. In a points-based system, a good one, and both parties having equally strong armies, you can either blame bad luck (which, rule of big numbers etc., isn't a smart thing), a better opponent (hahaha!) or a lack of balance. With no points and thus no way to sort-of objectively measure an army's strength, you can always refer to your opponent just having the better army.

AoS, in its core, is a ridiculous pay-to-win system that only works on a "good friends" level and is a nightmare for PUGs and anyone looking for even a trace of even-eyed competition. AoS is extremely open for abuse and poor sportsmanship, let alone a terrible rules system on its own.

That saddest part about the entire affair, however, is that seemingly, tons of people needed GW to officiall tell them that they can play without looking at points. I am baffled by people not even getting the idea of maybe doing so without GW holding their hands in 8th. You were unable to get to an agreement with the same people you play now? That says more about the state of this part of the tabletop community than about the rules themselves...and it certainly says a lot about most of the "Yay, no balance system!" faction.

 Sigvatr wrote:
you are expected to bring a viable and well-rounded army in order, able to cope with the current (local) meta.

Or something new, intelligent and intuitive that breaks the current meta!

This is why I like points systems. You get to hammer out some theory in your head to see if you can, within the boundries given, come up with a game changer.

In malifaux the points system works damn near flawlessly. But that's not down to the points alone. That's down to rigerous playtesting and beta phases. There are many many more special and fun rules that make every crew different to play in Malifaux, and yet Malifaux doesn't allow for the kinds of shenanigans OP described. You just can't do it. There are too many factors in play to specifically prevent it.

The problem is that AoS is a big "we don't care!" of loose rules and you're told to make do. "DO WHAT YOU WANT! LOOK HOW FREE YOU ARE!"
(We always were. We could always play whatever game we wanted with our miniatures. You've not added freedom, you've taken away choice.)

OP is right about one thing. You can't balance a game with points alone. The rules need to be balanced in themselves. They aren't even a little bit.

disclaimer: I can have fun with AoS anyway. I have good friends and we can wrangle fun out of it and we do. Doesn't make it a fun game. If there is precious little game and we have to provide the bulk to create the fun, it just means we're fun people.
I like the AoS that we play. I hate the AoS that GW gave us.

Snapshot wrote:

FWIW, I suspect a balancing system is going to emerge through the use of warscroll limits, keyword restrictions, and battleplan designs, and obviously some groups are already down this path.

Op says no to limits to points, but yes to limits elsewhere... Seems like the same tool to me...

Snapshot wrote:

I just wanted to vent a bit about this, because point systems don't produced balanced games in systems as richly varied as AoS, WHFB, and 40k. How many times have you tabled, or been tabled in a "balanced" game, when you know it has little to do with player skill, and a lot to do with unit composition and rock-paper-scissors? The beauty of the AoS deployment model is that you have every opportunity to minimise the chance of sending a paper army against your opponent's scissors, but of course, there is enormous scope for arseholery if your collection can't compete with your opponent's, and he/she is a WAAC grub.

Says points point produce balanced games. Gives examples of extremely poorly designed games like whfb, 40k and aos as 'proof'.

If you are going to argue this, at least be honest, and look into points based systems thst are actually extremely well balanced, like infinity, warmachine and malifaux.

Regarding being 'tabled' - how do you know it's got nothing to do with player skill? Massive amount of assumption right there. With nothing to back it up either,

And a question. How do you minimise sending a paper army against a scissors army in aos? In a way that can't be done in other games? It seems you are suggesting 'tailoring the armies to be balanced against each other'. Well, duh. And I can do that in infinity or warmachine too.

Snapshot wrote:

This is completely unconstructive criticism, because I sure as hell don't have the answer to stopping people creating games that are not even worth playing, but I think you have to at least understand that if you choose to use one of the point based systems, you might not get what you're looking for.

Same with non-points based systems. It's just as open to abuse and bad games.

Thing is, I like point-less systems as well as points based systems. Points-less is how me and my friends play flames of war. What gets fielded depends on the scenario, and what's appropriate and makes sense. With lots of home brew and added tinkering. What I like about points-less is it allows a less structured and less rigid approach to building and playing games. Essentially 'let's try something cool.'. We don't need a book to tell us how to play - we can be in the driving seat. But it requires a co-operative effort, and everyone being on the same page, and essentially being fairly likeminded in their approach. In other words, it offers great freedom. But freedom isn't free. With great freedom comes great responsibility.

@Deadknight,

Having points has never guaranteed a fair fight. Saying skill is a factor is just the typical excuse. We all know that some armies were defenseless against Black Sun.

The problem most people have is adjusting to determining what to field when setting up instead of a set army based on points that you spent a week crafting. The power of adjusting your list when you know that it is a bad matchup is now possible.

Of course you, have people say I'll bring my whole collection. Well most tournaments are going to setup a 3-15 war scroll army make up. From this you can make the choices to include in your battle. If summoning or reserves prove to be an issue then a wound limit can be imposed on those units in reserve.

Points is tedious free your mind, have fun.

 thejughead wrote:
@Deadknight,

No one ever gets my name right... :(

 thejughead wrote:
@Deadknight,

Having points has never guaranteed a fair fight. Saying skill is a factor is just the typical excuse. We all know that some armies were defenseless against Black Sun.

You still don't get it. Points are a tool. Nothing more. You're example has a lot less to do with 'points don't work' and a lot more to do with it being a 'poorly designed points system' with 'terrible playtesting'. gw games are a terrible place to reference when you talk about points and balance considering they use a dartboard approach to assign the former and have less than zero interest in the latter. In other words, the foundations you are building your argument on is quicksand.

Like I said, look at balanced points-based games like infinity, warmachine and malifaux to see that yes, points work and points can be used as a very effective tool to achieve balance.

 thejughead wrote:

The problem most people have is adjusting to determining what to field when setting up instead of a set army based on points that you spent a week crafting. The power of adjusting your list when you know that it is a bad matchup is now possible.

So 'pick and choose stuff up on the fly'? Well, why can't I do that with points? I can just as easily have a chat with my opponent and see what kind of game he wants. Funny though that you don't like points as a tool but still see the need to imply other tools to achieve the same thing (wound caps etc).

Simple truth us You could always do this. Some points based games are built around it. Warmachine has a multi list format as well as a sideboard for weaker casters for example for it's games.

 thejughead wrote:

Of course you, have people say I'll bring my whole collection. Well most tournaments are going to setup a 3-15 war scroll army make up. From this you can make the choices to include in your battle. If summoning or reserves prove to be an issue then a wound limit can be imposed on those units in reserve.

Again, multi list formats and sideboards already exist in games.
How is a fifteen 'wound' limit better than a 'point' limit? It's points by a different name. And there is nothing stopping me simply taking the best choices I have and spamming fifteen war scrolls with them.

Your 'solutions' aren't. They don't work.

Snapshot wrote:
TLDR; Points based balancing systems have a basic design flaw - look to other ways to balance AoS.

A lot of other games do very fine with mostly just point systems. Sure, there always are some better and some worse units, but the most competitive mainstream wargame I have ever played (WarmaHordes) is mighty fine with points being the main factor of balancing. Sure, it has it's flaws, but there's no flawless system. This one just works the best in general.

Snapshot wrote:
Two nights ago, the end-game of a game I played had my High Elf Mage against a remnant group of 3 clanrats, a skaven warlord, a rat ogre, a packmaster, and a poison wind mortar team (yes, it was an IoB starter set game).

I'm toast I thought, but what the hell - let's kite the buggers and snipe them dead with Arcane Bolt. You won't be surprised to know the HE mage won the day for the simple reason that he could cast his spell in the Hero phase, then move+run as fast as he could out of the way of the melee units who were in hot pursuit (we had the Benny Hill theme running in the background!). And yes, over about 7 rounds of kiting, the PWM team hit once - hehe.

I haven't seen that game, so I can only tell anything based on what you said here, but it really sounds like your opponent did something really, really stupid. If he outnumbered you 5:1 in unit ratio it'd take you a couple turns to kill him and you only could target one unit per hero phase, add the fact that you wouldn't always score a successful cast due to random dice results and the fact that he could just spread and corner you - all it would take would be to tie you up with one unit long enough for the rest to catch up and murder the elf. That's not imbalance, that's poor tactics mixed with apparently great rolls on your side, so I would never say this is any indicator of whether points make sense or not.

Snapshot wrote:
According to one of the point-based systems that's been developed the 80pt mage was against (roughly) 245pts of skaven, but it wasn't even close to a contest. I absolutely don't want to poo-poo this or any other work that's happening, but the point-based "balancing" systems that are being worked on are fundamentally flawed because of basic maths.

If you have a subjective measure, like the potency of a unit, you could probably say that unit A is more potent than unit B, but when you do this you are talking about something that is called an ordinal measure (as in ordered). You can do lots of nice things with ordinal measures, like say who is more potent than who, how many units of potency X have I got, and stuff like that. What you can't do, and actually have something that makes any sort of sense, is take those potency measures and add them together. To do that, and have it make sense, you need something called scalar measures (think height, time intervals,etc). If we could devise a scalar measure for unit potency, we could say that unit A is twice as potent as unit B, add things up to our hearts content, and build 2000pt lists until our spreadsheet fingers bled. It also means that if our hypothetical measure is good, any 500pt of units will be as potent as any other 500pts of units, and roughly speaking you'd expect to see pretty even contests (as least as far as wins-losses is concerned).

The problem is, I don't think such a measure exists, for the simple reason that the potency of a unit depends fundamentally on context. The silly example of my end-game above, essentially renders the skaven worthless because they couldn't catch me fast enough. The flip-side would be that pretty much any melee unit would nail me in short order if they could get me in combat.

I think you're wrong here - as you know a lot of games use point values and they just work. You know why? Because the developer actually tests their builds and work hard to make the point system as good as possible. Of course a couple players won't be able to come up with a great, balanced point system within a few weeks since the release of the game - they weren't there when the developers designed all the units and they don't know what they had on their minds while doing it. It'll tkae more time for random players to do what GW could've done much faster (granted that they had a proper playtesting group).

Snapshot wrote:
As much as I admire the attempts to attach numbers to units, I think it'll mainly serve only to salve the hurt GW did in doing away with the points system (a decision which makes sense, even though it isn't popular). FWIW, I suspect a balancing system is going to emerge through the use of warscroll limits, keyword restrictions, and battleplan designs, and obviously some groups are already down this path.

Point-based systems are much more popular and are known to work well. It's also much easier to balance with points than with restrictions - as you know a 1 wound clanrat is not equal to 1 wound stormvermin and as far as I remember they share all the keywords. I know this example has been beaten to death more than the dead horse, but it's a great example on how such a system is worse than points. You can give a clanrat 2 point cost and stormvermin 3 or 4 depending on their performance in a hundred recorded and properly analyzed test games. Also this works much better with AoS idea of "bring anything you want" than warscroll limits, because you can't bring it this way. Say, someone wants an Ogre Tyrant and spam thundertusks because he likes the idea of a mammoth hunting party. Now you want to take that away from him because he can't field so many of the same scroll or keyword, right? With point systems you can bump it's cost high enough for them to be balanced even when taken in large numbers. But, again, playtest it for weeks and months to see how high the point cost should be. And playtest it with a big group of people so you get various types of mindsets working on them.

Snapshot wrote:
I just wanted to vent a bit about this, because point systems don't produced balanced games in systems as richly varied as AoS, WHFB, and 40k. How many times have you tabled, or been tabled in a "balanced" game, when you know it has little to do with player skill, and a lot to do with unit composition and rock-paper-scissors? The beauty of the AoS deployment model is that you have every opportunity to minimise the chance of sending a paper army against your opponent's scissors, but of course, there is enormous scope for arseholery if your collection can't compete with your opponent's, and he/she is a WAAC grub.

This is completely unconstructive criticism, because I sure as hell don't have the answer to stopping people creating games that are not even worth playing, but I think you have to at least understand that if you choose to use one of the point based systems, you might not get what you're looking for.

I idsagree with richness of those systems being any problem - it just takes more playtesting. I know, I know, I repeat myself, but I am currently working at a game studio that develops a skirmish tabletop game and it can't be stressed enough how a big, varied group of testers is important with balancing. And so will have to do the people who make point systems for AoS, it won't happen overnight, it'll take time to perfect them.

EDIT: that being said I wouldn't mind seeing a proper, well-balanced system based on warscrolls and wounds - if done well I'll applaud them - it's not like I am stubbornly stuck with points as balancing factor so if I see something that works better I will, obviously, support it.

OP, your story is not a proof of point based systems not working but thanks for posting anyway. It's a great example of how stupid AoS system is. If there was anything resembling a matchup system, your opponent would just go for the rest of the arrmy or objective and you could run all day with your wizard. Takes a travesty like AoS or a really really bad player for something like your story to happen.

Klerych,

I can't speak to Warmachine/Hordes never having played them, and I accept what you and others say about its balance.

I too am more than happy to applaud a good point-based mechanism in AoS if it could be developed. Who knows, based on what we are seeing in the real AoS units there is MUCH less variability in things like weapon load outs than in WHFB and 40k, so perhaps this will make it easier to build a workable system that scales from the skirmish to the massed battle. Bring it on!

I just hope the competitve scene doesn't drain the soul out of the game once they start mathhammering it

A good game won't lose any soul once it gets competive.
For me I don't think Age of Sigmar has much soul now.

With warmachine the same people here where I am want to do tournaments, leagues,campaigns and scenario based games.
We play the RPG and incorporate charecters and battles from that into our games at times.

And still have a healthy pickup community with even our most competive players varying up tactics and games to help new players.
Infinity gets similar treatment as well as our mordheim campaign.
None of which has lost anything from the desire to play the best we can and to discuss and think about what we are playing with and why.
One of the bigist issues I have with age of sigmar right now is that people seem to be saying it offers so much that other games don't.

But it doesn't offer anything much than easy to learn, which adding in all the units and army's I don't think it's that much easier in the end by much than others.
If anything to me it's just a lack of depth making the game simple without as much substance.

Warmachine has points yet there are units you never use, because it's cost doesn't justify it. Points are never perfect it's just the way it's been done.

I for one am enjoying this version of Warhammer the way it is. Don't like it? Don't play it.

 thejughead wrote:
Warmachine has points yet there are units you never use, because it's cost doesn't justify it. Points are never perfect it's just the way it's been done.

Very few units. To be fair. And it may not be due to points costs.

And then people have gone on to win big tournaments with those units. Jamie Perkins and kossites comes to mind. It's a game where every unit can be built into a game winning strategy.

Thing is, expect those point costs to be adjusted if they're off the mark with an errAta, and they will be more relevant. Or expect a future release to buff them (skin walker alpha comes to mind). Points costs work fine. Play testing is required to get them right. But they're fine.

Deadnight wrote:

 thejughead wrote:
Warmachine has points yet there are units you never use, because it's cost doesn't justify it. Points are never perfect it's just the way it's been done.

Very few units. To be fair. And it may not be due to points costs.

And then people have gone on to win big tournaments with those units. Jamie Perkins and kossites comes to mind. It's a game where every unit can be built into a game winning strategy.

Thing is, expect those point costs to be adjusted if they're off the mark with an errAta, and they will be more relevant. Or expect a future release to buff them (skin walker alpha comes to mind). Points costs work fine. Play testing is required to get them right. But they're fine.

So far nothing has buffed those poor Trencher bastards... :'D Too bad, always wanted a trencher-themed list. But yeah, those "outright bad" units make up only a couple % of all the at least decent units in the game.