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Hello my dear friends including those I disagree with welcome all. ( my new dakka greeting testing it out.)

So after countless years of people wanting balance and fighting over why there is non and why dark angels termies are more costly then norm or vise versa I forget now, I was wondering what is balance.

The ovbious anwser the same, eaqule. Now we want variety and balance, which makes this a bit more interesting.

This is all fixtion do not get mad at the numbers please.


So if a space marine hits a ork on a 4 and a ork hits a ork on a 3 there is a 1/6 better chance for a space marine to hit a ork then a ork to hit a ork.

So to make things even orks should have 1/6 more units, there is balance with unit difference.


Now you can change things a bit by orks moving faster and space marines shooting better. The pay off being the unit of space marines will need to do less damage to balance out the damage they recieved when trying to engage in cloce combat.

In short if the unit of space marines can damage a unit of orks 4/6 times and can shoot 8 inches but the unit of ork can only travel 6 inches there is two rounds the ork get shot. So you need to increase the ammount of orks per unit to make them go hand and hand with the marines in close combat.


Now each race faction and so on has new elites different troops and each army needs to be different. So the question is why should dark angel and space marines terminators cost the same when they are never the same but by name alone. Each unit needs to be priced on that armies units and upgrades not on a general scale.

Why cant skatarii use drop pods? Because they are priced for the space marine to balance out some flaws in exchange for points. It would be like dark eldar taking a knight, something they need but not pointed out for them to use which leads to problems with balance.


Now with all this blanbering on I was wondering what everyone thinks should happen for balance in 40k, 30k and AoS?

Should they pull a AoS let us all balance our own game?
Should they end times them and cutt alot of stuff?
Should they remove some armies?
Should they mass merge armies? All space marines, all eldar, ork , skarti Imperal guard, tyranid, necron?
Should they stop producing new codex and simply update all them to a standard which would mean no new models until all armies became updated.
Other?

What they need to do is a little something that Game Designers like to call 'playtest'.

They need to take the time needed to test the balance of armies against those already in the game.

So, yeah, stop churning out new codecii, and do the needed testing and tweaking.

They need to make models to go with the rules, not rules to go with the models.

The Auld Grump

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
What they need to do is a little something that Game Designers like to call 'playtest'.

They need to take the time needed to test the balance of armies against those already in the game.

So, yeah, stop churning out new codecii, and do the needed testing and tweaking.

They need to make models to go with the rules, not rules to go with the models.

The Auld Grump

But how much money would it cost? You need to balance between keeping old players and luring new players all the while getting more money with out lossing profits.

From a game point of view balance in the game adds to a long life. But if people do not need to keep buying, or you do mot encourage new armies you lose already even if you have a nice game.

KoW will never have a shop, they have nice rules but people will never buy their models. So they are amazing at balance but they never lured enough people to the game.

OgreChubbs wrote:
But if people do not need to keep buying, or you do mot encourage new armies you lose already even if you have a nice game.

People don't stop buying though, well obviously some people stick to a particular army and never buy anything else, but in general if people are interested and engaged with a game they will buy more stuff.

At this stage 40K needs a complete overhaul, ideally splitting the game into two parts. The 28mm Epic that we have just now and the skirmish game that 40K evolved from and still pretends to be. 40K is a horrible mess, both thematically and mechanically.

OgreChubbs wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
What they need to do is a little something that Game Designers like to call 'playtest'.

They need to take the time needed to test the balance of armies against those already in the game.

So, yeah, stop churning out new codecii, and do the needed testing and tweaking.

They need to make models to go with the rules, not rules to go with the models.

The Auld Grump

But how much money would it cost? You need to balance between keeping old players and luring new players all the while getting more money with out lossing profits.

From a game point of view balance in the game adds to a long life. But if people do not need to keep buying, or you do mot encourage new armies you lose already even if you have a nice game.

KoW will never have a shop, they have nice rules but people will never buy their models. So they are amazing at balance but they never lured enough people to the game.

Let me put it this way - I buy Kings of War, but the only GW product that I have bought in six years was a bottle of liquid greenstuff.

I have bought entire armies from Mantic - as has my good lady, as have a goodly number of my friends.

I do not give a donkey's behind how much it costs for GW to do the job that they are supposed to be doing.

This is something that much smaller companies, with much smaller budgets, manage to do all the time.

There is no excuse for the largest company in the business to skip out on one of the most important parts of game design.

The Auld Grump

GW sales have been in decline for several years, thanks to player disenchantment with WHFB and 40K.

The question is not whether GW can afford to reset 40K completely, the question is whether they can afford not to.

I suspect the next annual financial accounts will show a stabilisation of the sales decline, presumably due to AoS.

If this turns out to be true, it might be taken by GW as an indicator that they AoS-ify 40K too.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

I suspect the next annual financial accounts will show a stabilisation of the sales decline, presumably due to AoS.

I suspect that they will have stablised to an extent as well but I would be utterly amazed if AoS has anything to do with it.

I'm of the opinion that GW barely managed to 'salvage' their previous half-year report thanks to the Betrayal at Calth box. Their December numbers were looking so disappointing (this was officially acknowledged) they began to offer the boxed set deals.

I don't know how many bundled boxes and wulfen kits have been sold since then, but without any more significant 40k releases, I doubt the incoming half-year report will be great. I don't expect any 2014-like fall either, just another step in their steady but slow decline trend.

At this stage I think there's at least agreement over the fact that AoS has been a failure (who would have thought?!?! ).

Edit: in regards to the OP, well, the main question here has already been answered: other much smaller companies have proven it's perfectly possible to release balanced rulesets. That GW has been unable or unwilling to do so just speaks volumes about either their incompetence or their lazyness/disdain, and at this point I'm not sure what would be worse.

I think their decline is and was going to happen as time goes on. Much along the same lines that it has for starcraft.

Starcraft was the top dog because it was new mass online play, play with anyone world wide. A fast moving non- turn based non lan game. In a area where there was non again I knew about starcraft before I had a home computer that could play it.

GW where the top dogs I knew about them before the internet. As time passes people jump on band wagons and more and more spawn. Like genric drugs the name brads are still top sellers but they lost alot when so many others jumped on board. So I think the loss of money was a sure thing just due to minature over crowding. Even PP is cracking down on people because they are lossing out.

Top dogs usually stay top but as more dogs get chucked into the pen the size of the yard they own just shrinks.

OgreChubbs wrote:
I think their decline is and was going to happen as time goes on. Much along the same lines that it has for starcraft.

Starcraft was the top dog because it was new mass online play, play with anyone world wide. A fast moving non- turn based non lan game. In a area where there was non again I knew about starcraft before I had a home computer that could play it.

GW where the top dogs I knew about them before the internet. As time passes people jump on band wagons and more and more spawn. Like genric drugs the name brads are still top sellers but they lost alot when so many others jumped on board. So I think the loss of money was a sure thing just due to minature over crowding. Even PP is cracking down on people because they are lossing out.

Top dogs usually stay top but as more dogs get chucked into the pen the size of the yard they own just shrinks.

Tell that to TSR.

And WorldCom.

And Enron.

And Milton Bradley.

And Tyco.

And Kodak.

Size can only go so far to protect a company from incompetence.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* Size can also lead to an echo chamber effect in the upper management - which becomes entrenched.

I think the main thing is not just testing but extreme min / max testing.

But with such a large variety of units and combinations, it may be difficult to resolve min / max issues even if they are identified, unless you make everything more vanilla.

The latter is kind of what 30K is.

The playerbase is not capable of balancing 40k, or coming close due to being players.

More than any other game players of 40k have unrealistic ideals about what their favorite army can do because of how much fluff/nonsense has been written.

The only way to balance 40k is to kill all the fluff off, and start over without the mary sue nonsense that is most of 40k canon, especially anything ever written about space marines,and then completely redo the game from the ground up.

OgreChubbs wrote:
Should they stop producing new codex and simply update all them to a standard which would mean no new models until all armies became updated.

They should stop producing codexes full stop (as rulebooks.)

The current system is so horribly outdated it's not funny, there is no reason whatsoever they can't release models without a codex update. Online rules have been a thing for years and every other company on the market is able to do much better jobs of balancing thanks to it.

A codex is great as an optional extra that you can buy if you want to read the fluff and get some cool art, but the rules should all be updated at once online, and kept up to date online. New models should come with their rules when they are released, instead of needing a codex release.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

OgreChubbs wrote:
But how much money would it cost? You need to balance between keeping old players and luring new players all the while getting more money with out lossing profits.

From a game point of view balance in the game adds to a long life. But if people do not need to keep buying, or you do mot encourage new armies you lose already even if you have a nice game.

You know what encourages people to keep buying? A solid, well built, game. That means a balanced game.
I say that as someone who stopped buying GW a long time ago and spent a lot of money elsewhere because I no longer enjoyed their crappy rules.

OgreChubbs wrote:
KoW will never have a shop, they have nice rules but people will never buy their models. So they are amazing at balance but they never lured enough people to the game.

Mantic has been growing in recent years (they don't publish financial reports but their kickstarters have been doing amazing) while GW has been shrinking and bleeding customers.
No, you'll never see a Mantic store, but GW's stores have been an anchor around their necks recently, and companies like Mantic are simply working with FLGSs instead of against them. Mantic don't need 'Mantic stores' because every FLGS is a potential Mantic store.

The idea that only an unbalanced game with meta shakeups every couple of years will promote sales is so hilariously false. An unbalanced game is just that, an unbalanced game. While it encourages people who have the current powerful armies to buy the new powerful models, it discourages people with the current weaker armies to not buy anything. Very few people ditch entire armies to take up the powerful armies with a meta shakeup.

GW really are dinosaurs in the industry at the moment. Rountree looks like he's trying to improve things, but compared to what's on the market GW are simply getting outdone. Other companies are just doing much better at rules accessibility, rules writing and game balance.

That's not to say people don't like their games. But a lot of people looking for balanced games are simply looking elsewhere. While GW like to beat their retail chain like a dead horse for not earning as much as it costs, it's really the only reason they still dominate a lot of areas. If there's no FLGS and just a GW, people will be more inclined in that area to not look at competition.

 jonolikespie wrote:
No, you'll never see a Mantic store, but GW's stores have been an anchor around their necks recently, and companies like Mantic are simply working with FLGSs instead of against them. Mantic don't need 'Mantic stores' because every FLGS is a potential Mantic store.

Exactly. GW's own stores are a bad business plan. A company "failing" to open their own retail chain is a good thing, not a reason to worry.

blaktoof wrote:
The playerbase is not capable of balancing 40k

The player base are the best people to balance a game due to sheer numbers and the presence of WAAC players who will happily twist the rules and army lists to create hideous combinations that the designers never foresaw. A 'living rulebook' for 40k would solve most of the glaring balance issues within its first couple of iterations.

blaktoof wrote:

The only way to balance 40k is to kill all the fluff off

That's an utterly terrible idea. The only thing going for 40k is its fluff, even in its current tragic and brutalised state.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

blaktoof wrote:
The playerbase is not capable of balancing 40k

The player base are the best people to balance a game due to sheer numbers and the presence of WAAC players who will happily twist the rules and army lists to create hideous combinations that the designers never foresaw. A 'living rulebook' for 40k would solve most of the glaring balance issues within its first couple of iterations.

They're also the worst people to balance a game due to having their own personal bias towards units and armies they like and dislike. While getting information from the general playerbase is valuable, it needs a very reliable, unbiased team taking the information on, filtering out the garbage (even good players can and will give garbage feedback) and making a balanced game out of it. Simply saying 'the community will do it' is pretty disengenuous.

 -Loki- wrote:
Simply saying 'the community will do it' is pretty disengenuous.

The need for oversight is so obvious I didn't even bother to mention it.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:
Simply saying 'the community will do it' is pretty disengenuous.

The need for oversight is so obvious I didn't even bother to mention it.

But that's the point. Community balancing isn't actually the community doing the balancing. It's just a data source. The people providing the oversight choose to do what they will with data. This is done for a reason - as already said, wargamers - even the good sports - aren't the most unbiased bunch.

 -Loki- wrote:
Community balancing isn't actually the community doing the balancing. It's just a data source.

The best data source; some of it will be biased, some of it will be simply wrong but taken on aggregate it is an extremely useful.

GW seems to have gotten where it is today by all but eliminating playtesting and it is extensive play testing, particularly external playtesting, that makes a balanced game.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:
Community balancing isn't actually the community doing the balancing. It's just a data source.

The best data source; some of it will be biased, some of it will be simply wrong but taken on aggregate it is an extremely useful.

GW seems to have gotten where it is today by all but eliminating playtesting and it is extensive play testing, particularly external playtesting, that makes a balanced game.

The issue at hand for GW is that play testing would still see the mess we have now, maybe not as bad in certain areas.

PLC GW inherited a successful company based on the back of some dated concepts. Their subsequent laziness (you could say) has kept a creaking core in print. Arguably play testing would have ironed out a few kinks, but the direction would still takes us to where we are now.

The historic core of GWs rule writing only allows balanced games if you ignore the rules written.

IF you want to arrive at a intuitive well defined straight forward rule set.That allows good enough game balance to support random pick up games.

You have to define the intended game play.
Write rules specifically for the game play, covering as many of the unit types in the core rules as possible.

This will give you a reasonable foundation to build a balanced game with plenty of variety.

Then community play testing can be carried out to fine tune the game balance.

As 40k has never had a rule set written specifically for it.(All 40k rules were made backwards compatible to 3rd ed WHFB/RT.)

It would be nice for 40k to have a rule set developed specifically for it ,(new battle game size) , before 40ks 30th birthday.