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So I've been reading a lot on dakka about the idea that certain armies are the NPC armies of the games system. When you look at the spread of armies available to choose from there is a clear imbalance in codex strength that is not debatable. It can be debated which are stronger or weaker than others but generally speaking there are certain armies like Orks or CSM that are clearly lower in power levels than those at the top of the table like Tau Eldar SM etc.

Initially I thought this was accidental based on natural bias during the design phase. Then I went on to consider the cynical option that as a publicly listed company the design team are leaned on by the suits to improve armies that already sell well. I also considered that its fluff related, with the idea that small races like tau and eldar survive in an aggressive galaxy simply by the fact that their technology and battle prowess exceeds other armies but they lack the numbers or attitude to expand and dominate the galaxy.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if there is a conscious plan in the design team towards a less than subtle attempt to create deliberate imbalance based on an internal difficulty system much like a video game might employ. The logic being that certain armies that grab the attention of new players are deliberately easier to win with and the more experienced players gravitate towards other armies for a far more strategic or challenging approach to the game not the hobby.

After ranting at GW for years I came to accept the imbalance for what it is regardless of its cause and I now play CSM and Orks primarily because it is just harder to win with them and every win is that much more of an achievement as a result.

What are your opinions?

If it was why top of the dogs keeps changing...

"Oh crap. We want these to be bad but accidentally made them too strong!"

 nurgle86 wrote:

What are your opinions?

If you were right, that would be the dumbest way to balance a game I've ever heard of.

I'm pretty sure it's a mix of a few different factors:
1) Sales.
Need to sell a unit? Make it stronger in some way. Need a bump in revenue before the next fiscal year? Guess the next codex needs to be strong! etc. It's not all the same reason, but it all boils down to sales, so while they might show themselves differently, they are still all rooted in sales.
2) Personal bias by writers towards a certain army. Some writers seem to think that certain armies are awesome and should be strong as gak (Gav on GK) and think others are just cannon fodder and should be for anyone spending massive amounts of money on the army too (Gav on SoB.)
3) A complete disinterest by writers to actually write rules that are balanced. They just don't care. They've even come out and said in the past that it's not supposed to be balanced. It's that kind of attitude that created the mess of pointless (hehe, get it?) AoS.

Well its a theory more than anything but we know that the design team that has been working on the recent few editions is very different from those that worked on the early editions of 40k.

The top 5 armies are more or less interchangeable in strength. Eg on any given game I would be confident with SM that I could beat Tau or Eldar or Necrons at the start of the game with appropriate tactics. There are games I've played as orks where its pretty close to impossible to win games without my opoonent making mistakes or the dice going heavily against him/her.

Someone once made this staement, don't remember who: for competitive players, you alternate OP armies, so that each time the edition changes, they have to buy new stuff or even change their army if they want a chance to stand up to other copetitive players. GW got this and now makes the best of it. So, to my mind, that IS intentional.

 nurgle86 wrote:
Then I went on to consider the cynical option that as a publicly listed company the design team are leaned on by the suits to improve armies that already sell well.

This doesn't make any sense. If one of your product lines is selling better than a second line you buff the one with lower sales. The one with higher sales is doing well as it is and you may have already convinced all of your potential customers to buy it, so buffing it is likely to result in the players who already bought everything they need winning even more. But if you buff the under-performing faction you have a lot more room to generate new sales.

The logic being that certain armies that grab the attention of new players are deliberately easier to win with and the more experienced players gravitate towards other armies for a far more strategic or challenging approach to the game not the hobby.

This also doesn't make any sense. The fluff of 40k is the primary appeal, and people aren't going to give up the fluff and models they enjoy just so they can have a weaker army that is more challenging to win with. You'll find newbies with Eldar and 20-year veterans with Eldar.

I a part of me believes so, and it makes lots of sense.

We know that GW groups their customers in types, every GW store employee asks you the what do you get out of the hobby question when you enter. I don't know how GW groups their customers exactly but that doens't really matter. What does matter is that not all players like the same thing and GW might just give the players what they want ( at the cost of things they don't really care that much about)

players ho like to collect, model and play casual games are having a bast playing with orks. They can model all they want even have rules for looted wagons and have a brand new range of beautiful models. At the cost of being non competitive.

Players who like the fun of competitive play and don't really like to plaint hordes have armies like Eldar, Tau and Necrons to play. At the cost of making the models harder to convert / model it yourself

It sure is a bit more complicated then this, but it makes a lot of sense to make specialised armies for certain groups of players. Just think of it orks will sell regardless of their rules, while ugly outdated eldar models will sell as long as their rules are good enough.

To be honest I think that there are far more dumb reasons for that.

1. Before the FAQs I think that most of the Game Designers never even knew that their rules might be gak or hard to understand. I think that most writers maybe gather a small team and then doing their thing, in some kind of isolation.

2. GW often changes plans right in the middle. While Orks, Grey Knights, DE and so on where on a good powerlevel someone just had the bright idea to introduce formations for necrons, buffing them to hell, and all other factions that got released after them.

3. I also think that many writers don`t want to write the Codex they got assigned. Wasn`t it the guy who wrote tyranids that he hated them because he lost many games with his imperial guard against them? What a bright Idea to let someone like him write the new tyranid codex. I also remember someone saying that no one from the designers actually want to touch the CSM Codex, ofc I`m not sure if that is actually true.

4. Incompetence at last. When I read the article about the new Wraithknight in the white dwarf and their "testing" they did I thought: "so you tested it and came to the conclusion that the wraithknight is op, so what did you do? you pusehd him out anyways" nuff said.

well its quite probable that I'm just looking for intention where there clearly is none but when I see a repeated trend I look for reasons as why that might be the case.

I had never heard that idea about the tyanid codex designer.

I find it doubtful that the factions are balanced for newbie appeal. for one thing, Elder are one of the current power houses. and I suspect Eldar aren't particularly a super duper popular faction with newbies. I imagine statisticly the factions most popular with newbies are space marines (or their various flavors) and well.. chaos space marines. Eldar IMHO aren't exactly an iconic 40K faction (not saying they're bad just not iconic)

meanwhile some of the more iconic factions that even casual fans have heard of, are kinda weak. Orks, CSMs and 'nids are all VERY well known factions

No, some Armies are not intended to be "NPC's" i hate this whiny "my codex is deliberately being screwed over" envy rage nonsense that constantly gets posted here.

Yes it's annoying that the game isn't perfectly balanced and that some of the armies get more updates than the others. But that's pretty much always been the case, and hey that's life.

The fact is, there is probably a very small design studio that works based around a release schedule that's probably determined by sales. If Space Marines, Tau, and Eldar are selling well then the higher ups are probably leaning on the design studio to make more of those models, so the rules team need to make more rules for those races and so on.

It's just a cycle that repeats. The races like Chaos Space Marines that need a massive overhaul just keep getting pushed back, because they probably need such an investment of time and resources to do it justice so it's a larger project. Same with the Guard.

Then you have things like the Dark Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids, or Orks that have a pretty good model line, but varying degrees of good or bad rules, but don't sell in particularly good numbers so probably won't get the attention they need because the rules team won't be pushed in that direction.

There's probably not some grand master plan to screw anyone over here, or to make Tyranids into a "NPC" army. They are just a little out of date compared to the Tau.

Like most things in 40k at the moment, the game would benefit from a little bit of an overhaul, maybe a new edition where all the codices get an update at the start for the edition rather than a drip feed through the course of its lifespan.

I don't know. How can the same studio release a top codex, Codex:space marines, and then release two codices using the same core stats that are both terrible, CSM and BA?

Read the new GW FAQs. They don't have a tight, well balanced tournament game in mind.

 Voidwraith wrote:
Read the new GW FAQs. They don't have a tight, well balanced tournament game in mind.

We're not even close to talking about that. I don't want to lose to Eldar in three turns via tabling.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Just to set my position clearly on this. I have seen a lot of whining about my army not being the best and I've been there myself until I started a new army.

This thread isn't whining so much as trying to suggest the possibility that there isn't some devious plan in the company to screw orks or CSM like its been suggested but there might be a plan of sorts.

Once I just accepted that there is inherent imbalance in the game system I came to realise that unlike other game systems like MtG for example, the imbalance is not being dealt with despite a multitude of opportunities to do so.

In Magic the imbalances can sometimes be brutal and deliberate but they are fleeting because of the natural cycling of the game. In 40k there have been plenty of opportunites to fix imbalances but these are never taken.

If you take Orks as an example, they had a middling to weak codex that got weaker when re-released. They got a lot of love in terms of new models but they got hit with the nerfstick quite badly. They then had what looked like a hasty supplement release in WG! that maintained the status quo. Since then they've had supplemental formations and a re-release that have taken the army no where. The conclusion I draw is that this may well be by design.

Ive come to accept this imbalance and tried to embrace it in the gameplay philosophy of playing the game on hard mode.

If you're an eldar player, whether you realised it or not or even if it didn't matter to you when you chose the army, when you step up to the table with your army you will be having an easier game in all aspects than most other armies.

Martel732 wrote:

 Voidwraith wrote:
Read the new GW FAQs. They don't have a tight, well balanced tournament game in mind.

We're not even close to talking about that. I don't want to lose to Eldar in three turns via tabling.

I'm not justifying what they've done, I'm just pointing out that GW seems to take their game less seriously than we do. If, however, the new FAQs and Errata are drafts only (like they say they are) and they tweak some of the ridiculous rulings (example: Drop Pods) after listening to the player base's reaction, then I feel this new regime has a chance to take 40k to a much better place.

To your exact point...Yeah, as I've said a few times before, GWs overall INABILITY to attribute points costs to units is where they fail the most, and it's THE biggest problem with the game today. Eldar wouldn't be tabling you in three turns if they started with less models on the table. They're just FAR too efficient as it currently stands.

 General Kroll wrote:
No, some Armies are not intended to be "NPC's" i hate this whiny "my codex is deliberately being screwed over" envy rage nonsense that constantly gets posted here.

Yes it's annoying that the game isn't perfectly balanced and that some of the armies get more updates than the others. But that's pretty much always been the case, and hey that's life.

The fact is, there is probably a very small design studio that works based around a release schedule that's probably determined by sales. If Space Marines, Tau, and Eldar are selling well then the higher ups are probably leaning on the design studio to make more of those models, so the rules team need to make more rules for those races and so on.

It's just a cycle that repeats. The races like Chaos Space Marines that need a massive overhaul just keep getting pushed back, because they probably need such an investment of time and resources to do it justice so it's a larger project. Same with the Guard.

Then you have things like the Dark Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids, or Orks that have a pretty good model line, but varying degrees of good or bad rules, but don't sell in particularly good numbers so probably won't get the attention they need because the rules team won't be pushed in that direction.

There's probably not some grand master plan to screw anyone over here, or to make Tyranids into a "NPC" army. They are just a little out of date compared to the Tau.

Like most things in 40k at the moment, the game would benefit from a little bit of an overhaul, maybe a new edition where all the codices get an update at the start for the edition rather than a drip feed through the course of its lifespan.

Yes this ^.

Also it is clear GW basically sees the game as a fun way for hobbyists to show off their paint jobs, rather than some hard-nosed and po-faced competitive game. If it was supposed to be a game and not a model catwalk it wouldn't even be on an absurdly huge 28mm scale, it would be on a practical 6mm scale. It was only and always the players that made it into a competitive game. The AoS reboot of WHFB (as much as I dislike it) was clearly an attempt by GW to kick into touch what a 28mm hobbycraft "game" is supposed to be about: an excuse to get your models out of the display case and have a bit of silly fun with other hobbyists.

Combinatorics is what makes the game so hard to balance not malice, the more factions, the more different unit types, upgrades and combinations of the aforementioned the harder any game will be to balance. Balancing chess is easy, balancing 40k will always be close to impossible.

Tourney's ham-fisted attempts at making the game balanced for competitive play usually make things worse, because again combinatorics. An example: the game proper allows unlimited number of detachments and unbound, but many / most tourneys "balance" this by only allowing one detachment. This doesn't hurt armies whose playstyle revolves around few elites that are relatively effective without force multipliers such as HQs like Eldar, SM, Tau because you can fit a well rounded force in one CAD easily. Other armies like Orks really need to use multiple CADs to get a well rounded force for a given points. That in itself isn't a problem in the actual game, but is only down to the daft "balancing" of tourney organisers.

 General Kroll wrote:
"my codex is deliberately being screwed over" envy rage nonsense that constantly gets posted here

I am not claiming that the codex is screwed over. I am just claiming that different armies might have a different role in GW's eye. GW didn't screw orks they just made it an army that is attractive to modellers and awfully unattractive to those who are having a good time playing with 3 wraith knights, some bikes and warp spiders.

The whole reason why I guess this isn't because of the codex that could be just a result of power creep etc. it is the post 7.5 releases like Waaaagh ghaz that are the reason why I don't believe GW is trying to balance things out in power and attractiveness for types of players.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SolarCross wrote:
Other armies like Orks really need to use multiple CADs to get a well rounded force for a given points. That in itself isn't a problem in the actual game, but is only down to the daft "balancing" of tourney organisers.

It isn't even about CAD's sure orks do better with multiple, but the real issue is where units, formations and armies fit in the point efficiency curve. Some armies are clearly designed to be above the curve and others are designed to be under it.

They are either deliberately or accidentally creating imbalance.

I honestly believe its deliberate

That gives them a lot of credit.

It has been known for a while that the rules team was actually two seperate teams that had the different armies and rulebooks split between them, and they would be working on the next set of rules for the books they covered solely within their respective teams. This has lead to one team being more inclined to fluffier armies and rules while other was more 'Ard Boyz!!!! in rules and units. We have seen this with progressive Eldar, Tau, Marines, and regressive Ork, Bangles, Dangles, and Guard.

The new management appears to be shaking things up, but a decades long career in management informs me that GW's departments are still run the exact same way as they always have because people seldom change. Hopefully the new management is buikding a better 8th while they learn from their attempts to patch 7th. Hopefully.

SJ

I chalk it up to a combination of incompetence and apathy on their end.

At least it is in the popular armies like orks. Armies with less sales and only a few or none supplements such as sisters or dark eldar might be accidental unbalanced since they don't have had the opportunity to fix it. But amries with as much supplements as Orks or SM are something else.

 Blacksails wrote:
I chalk it up to a combination of incompetence and apathy on their end.

No, I think they actually do care. It's just that they design things in a vacuum thinking everyone plays the way they do, or the way they "obviously" intended. Unfortunately, we don't. We play by the way we read the rules and then argue out the inconstancies over and over again like a ritual, praying for the Design Gods to answer.

Well, they've finally answered, and we disagree with their interpretation of their own rules.

SJ

GW have been notoriously tight lipped on their design team to the point where they no longer elaborate which individuals work on a new release.

I don't think its incompetence on the part of the design team.

It may be apathy. It may be lack of time to work on each release. It may be a lack of overview.

But as old Zoggy said with orks re-releases it does seem intentional.

 oldzoggy wrote:

It isn't even about CAD's sure orks do better with multiple, but the real issue is where units, formations and armies fit in the point efficiency curve. Some armies are clearly designed to be above the curve and others are designed to be under it.

Point efficiency probably does vary a quite bit from codex to codex but I doubt very much this was done on purpose, by design. Combinatorics by itself explains this quite well enough. It varies also internally to a codex also due to combinatorics.

It also depends quite a bit on context: which is worth more points as an upgrade: an AP3 weapon or a weapon with the monster hunter special rule? Against an SM army the AP3 weapon is golden but the monster hunter is garbage, the reverse would be true against a tyranid army. So what points cost to give each upgrade? You could say well more people play SMs and few people play tyranids, so the AP3 will be more useful more often so it should be worth more. But then... you have nerfed that option against SMs while simultaneously making having 3+ armour stock more valuable so now should models with 3+ cost more? Round and round it goes.. balance is impossible in a game like 40k, there simply isn't enough super-computers simulations, genius level play testers you can throw together to continually keep an ever changing game with so many interacting factors balanced. I think GW does try, if only to reduce the hate mail they get from the crazys, but they will never get it good enough for competition without cutting out at least 2 out of 3 factions, removing most upgrade choices, and reducing the number of units down to about four or five and making all the factions more or less identical. More like chess in fact. It might be a serious game then fit for serious competition but it wouldn't be 40k anymore.

If they do care, then it means they've put in effort to the rules to achieve some goal. If the goal is balance, they've failed, and therefore are incompetent to some degree. If the goal was deliberate imbalance, I suppose they've succeeded, but I'd argue its still incompetent design.

The other option is they just don't care, play the way they want, and have no higher design goal, so, apathy.

I like how this almost becomes an equivalent of the Existence an omnipotent and benevolent God discussion.

Lets just say that GW does not exists ; )

The thing is there are some things that can`t be explained. I see that many people argue that new and shiny models need good rules too so that they sell well. Well, lets have a talk about the Ork Gorkanat and Morkanaut. New Models, gakky rules. Or the new dark eldar flyer. Again new model, super gakky rules.

And then you have just stupid designer, perfectly shown in the faqs right now. When you have a BRB FAQ that just says something that was ruled in another way in an earlier faq. So that you can see that the one who answerd that question has done no research at all. And then we have answers in the Blood Angels FAq that says A while the same Questions with the same content is asked for another Faction the FAQ Guys answer B. So this leads me to the conclusion that you have different persons answering different questions and no one talks to each other to get a coherent FAQ.