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My brother and I used to change points values significantly. He played daemons and I play orks. In 7th at equal points values I was realistically conceding on turn 2 or 3. We ended up changing points values around and most of the games were still very close when playing 3k orks vs 1850 of daemons. He even managed to win with this change.

What do you do when your army is low tier and not competitive? Don't play competitively. I don't think there's any army that is unplayable however. There are certainly some that are just weak, but unplayable means you can't form a force in the first place

 Marmatag wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

 gwarsh41 wrote:
Space wolves were my first army. I love the lore, the looks, the style, everything. I just love my Space Wolves.

They are rumored to be the last imperial index, and currently the "competitive" way to run them is spamming storm bolters on EVERYTHING. Which doesn't really appeal to me. I've ran them a few times in 8th, and all the cool stuff I really love to use fell flat, all my plans failed, and nothing went the way I expected it to.

Thinking back to how much my daemon army improved with a codex, as well as how fun the stratagems are for death guard, I've just been leaving my wolves on the shelf. Patiently awaiting their codex. I paint a few every now and then, but I'm OK with waiting for them to get a codex.

Off topic, but Can you give me a rough competitive SW list ATM?

Sure, at a high level:

Thunderwolf Cavalry /w storm shields
Wolf lords on thunder wolf
Hellblasters (using outflank)

Supported by Custodes bike captains & imperial guard. <--- every single space marine list needs this. These two things on their own are super competitive so you can add whatever you want and at least be decent.

Essentially you have a ton of 3++ characters and 3++ cavalry which move quickly and are devastating in melee.. as well as mobile dice to clear chaff, since your cavalry can take chainswords, + the wolf attacks, as well as the custode bike captains. You also pack a punch to clear bigger things.

And you have standard guard cheese so you'll never be table even if you roll awful, and can artillery slap anything dangerous.

Yeah, this pretty much sums up what I have seen. Only thing not listed is how often I see WG bikes with storm bolters brought up. It is substantial dakka, but I don't play SW for dakka. I play them for fast CC... which my nurgle army is doing way better with.

Just to respond to an earlier post that said tzaangor blobs are no good anymore - I don't think that's quite true.

- They get the 1st-turn charge attempt with darkmatter crystal.
- They get +1 to their charge result
- They have access to Tzeentch reroll (fates psychic power, wc6+) as well as the CP reroll, so they get to reroll none, one or both of their dice.

I don't know what the odds are on this, but they're well over 50%. I know you're looking for 100% reliability on top table events, but they are one of the few units left that can offer this kind of charge potential on T1. They still do top-tier work for me.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Breng77 wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
The discussed online is the important part, most people are looking at pickup or tournament play online and asking advice on winning. You don’t see a lot of people asking for list advice for their narrative campaign.

To be fair, when they do they get ridiculed and yelled at for not being competitive enough.

I used to ask for list advice all the time on this website, but instead of getting helpful advice I just got yelled at for not being competitive enough.

To be fair in a lot of cases people post lists without context, and then get hammered. That may not always be true, but people don’t usually post “I’m playing a battle trying to recreate/create X cool scenario, do you think this list will work for that?” That said I never spent much time in the list section here there was never much to be gained, the signal to noise ratio was far too low. Your general player is terrible at list critique for any kind of play.

That's because people can use narrative lists in every context. I'm bringing a 3-superheavy list to NOVA because my army is a superheavy tank regiment. I won't ask for help building the NOVA list, though, because apparently "making the best within these constraints" is essentially just heresy; if you're not trying your absolute hardest to win then you shouldn't even try at all.

On at least 2 separate occasions I've posited a "generic" list while asking for ideas of how to use certain units or make up the last 500 points or anything, and on the two that I can think of I've gotten yelled at for not being competitive enough. It's true, even my generic "take-anywhere-even-to-tournament" lists are generally rooted in my narrative, but surely people could talk about how to play and improve with subpar choices rather than just dismissing the whole list as awful and ridiculing the idea of even trying.

That is because most people on here are terrible at the game, so take strongest units and profit is what passes for list advice. Just look at the space wolf advice above. “Every “Marine” list needs to be guard + custodes.” People confuse “be competitive” for win a GT. For instance if you wanted to win NOVA I would tell you to drop your list entirely. But if you just want to compete there are plenty of things you can do.

@ op

Mattel endlessly gushes about multi damage every post.

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
So what do you do when you army is low tier and just not playavle/cometative at all?
I have run into a problem where the armies I have and actually care about are such hot garbage that they have gotten to the point where it's just not even worth Fielding or playing the game. Do you all just wait it out? Do you give in and just buy one of those competative armies/gimick that actually winds games even if you don't care about the armies?

I'm struggling to have any interest in the game anymore since it seems the only way I'll win is if I invest in armies don't care at all about.

I don´t buy this top/low tier nonsense. It´s just whining on a grand scale. You have a very obvious low/high tier system in Blood Bowl with stunty and non-stunty teams. In 40K there are no such extremes like in this sports game.

Lol. 40k has never been, isn't and will never be balanced game. Tiers exist. Pretend they don't exist if you wish. By any chance you play Imperium or Eldar?-) Easy then to claim there's no tiers if you are playing the top dogs.

 techsoldaten wrote:

nou wrote:
One of the saddest things that happened to 40k between 2nd and 8th editions was this huge shift towards "only competetive meta is 'true 40k'" with everything else possible with this game being frown upon or marginalised, as was with 2/3rds of 8th BRB or CA contents...

Let's not overstate the problem. "Only competitive meta is 'true 40k' when it's discussed online with everything else..." would be a more accurate statement.

The Internet had a big impact in the growth of competitive 40k, and sometimes we mistake online discussion for the reality most players inhabit. Very different things.

For me, 40k is only fun to play when others are enjoying it, otherwise I retreat back to painting and modelling. There needs to be some payoff besides rolling dice. 7th edition went terribly for Chaos Space Marines so I mostly skipped it.

Once you've played 40k for a few editions, you know what it's like to have the rules working against you. A few people mentioned they would never want to ask for a handicap, I offer them when I know someone is playing a weak Codex. My army lists are tiered so that I'm not just steamrolling other players and can experiment with units I don't usually take.

There is nothing wrong with tailoring the rules to make the game competitive for both sides.

Unfortunately "...when discussed online..." is a half truth only, as "competetive matched play is the only true way" arms race attitude spills over to the real world. During my time here on dakka I've seen quite a lot of people complaining about having very competetively focused FLGSs as the only option available with pretty much no room to wiggle. I myself have had a long break from this hobby when my old group 'died out' exactly because of this change of focus. I'm happy to have a likeminded group once again (mostly fresh 'convertites' from board games/rpg background) so this problem doesn't personally affect me that much and you also seem to have no such problems and there are most certainly thousands of players that do just fine in carving their own niche, but there is no denying that overall focus of gaming (this does apply to other genres outside of 40k or even TT games) shifted in the last 20 years toward 'seriousness' and for many people the struggle is real.

Unit1126PLL wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
The discussed online is the important part, most people are looking at pickup or tournament play online and asking advice on winning. You don’t see a lot of people asking for list advice for their narrative campaign.

To be fair, when they do they get ridiculed and yelled at for not being competitive enough.

I used to ask for list advice all the time on this website, but instead of getting helpful advice I just got yelled at for not being competitive enough.

Lol so you ask for competitive advice on a list, and then get mad when people give it to you? What other sort of response are you looking for? If you want to build a cool list just build what you think is cool, nobody can give you advice on what your personal taste is. If you ask for advice on a list, people will give it.

No-ones chasing you down to berate you for not being competitive enough. You might envision they do, but in reality people just don't care. This post just reads like you posted some gimmicky lists and then got salty when people were honest in the feedback that you asked for, and judging by the only one of your list threads that got any real responses, I'd say that's exactly what happened.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Unit1126PLL wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
The discussed online is the important part, most people are looking at pickup or tournament play online and asking advice on winning. You don’t see a lot of people asking for list advice for their narrative campaign.

To be fair, when they do they get ridiculed and yelled at for not being competitive enough.

I used to ask for list advice all the time on this website, but instead of getting helpful advice I just got yelled at for not being competitive enough.

Lol so you ask for competitive advice on a list, and then get mad when people give it to you? What other sort of response are you looking for? If you want to build a cool list just build what you think is cool, nobody can give you advice on what your personal taste is. If you ask for advice on a list, people will give it.

No-ones chasing you down to berate you for not being competitive enough. You might envision they do, but in reality people just don't care. This post just reads like you posted some gimmicky lists and then got salty when people were honest in the feedback that you asked for, and judging by the only one of your list threads that got any real responses, I'd say that's exactly what happened.

That was a list for giggles.

The type of "I want to be more competitive but please let me run the list I want to" argument I am talking about is this:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/488127.page

Where at least 50% of the responses were "y you gotta run dat list, is bad" and me trying to explain that, instead of helping me actually answer the question I asked. Fortunately, other posters came and gave some good insights, but DakkaDakka has only gotten worse since in terms of "your list is bad and you should feel bad" every time I post something.

Take a look at the Slaanesh thread I posted in General to illustrate that the FAQ was not the end of the world; apparently my list wasn't competitive enough or something (or my opponent's wasn't competitive enough). It was a Friday Night PUG at a local store, which is exactly the kind of game we should hope GW is balancing around.

Sumilidon wrote:
What do you do when your army is low tier and not competitive? Don't play competitively. I don't think there's any army that is unplayable however. There are certainly some that are just weak, but unplayable means you can't form a force in the first place

I consider an army unplayable if it doesn't have close to a 50% chance of winning, other wise I'm carrying around a force just to deploy it and then pack it away again.

I don't see the point in playing a match that's decided before the first model is placed, may as well just roll dice at that point.

In this context competitive means it has a chance to win a game not a tournament.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

Unit1126PLL wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
The discussed online is the important part, most people are looking at pickup or tournament play online and asking advice on winning. You don’t see a lot of people asking for list advice for their narrative campaign.

To be fair, when they do they get ridiculed and yelled at for not being competitive enough.

I used to ask for list advice all the time on this website, but instead of getting helpful advice I just got yelled at for not being competitive enough.

Lol so you ask for competitive advice on a list, and then get mad when people give it to you? What other sort of response are you looking for? If you want to build a cool list just build what you think is cool, nobody can give you advice on what your personal taste is. If you ask for advice on a list, people will give it.

No-ones chasing you down to berate you for not being competitive enough. You might envision they do, but in reality people just don't care. This post just reads like you posted some gimmicky lists and then got salty when people were honest in the feedback that you asked for, and judging by the only one of your list threads that got any real responses, I'd say that's exactly what happened.

That was a list for giggles.

The type of "I want to be more competitive but please let me run the list I want to" argument I am talking about is this:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/488127.page

Where at least 50% of the responses were "y you gotta run dat list, is bad" and me trying to explain that, instead of helping me actually answer the question I asked. Fortunately, other posters came and gave some good insights, but DakkaDakka has only gotten worse since in terms of "your list is bad and you should feel bad" every time I post something.
.

Literally one person said that your list wouldn't work, and that was Peregrine, probably the most widely disliked poster on this site. A whole bunch of other people to respond defended you against his pushing. And at the end of the day.... He actually had a point when he said there's a difference between not being competitive, and putting an army on the table that is literally guaranteed to lose outside of cleaning the entire table. He wasn't getting at you for being less competitive than him, he made no comments on your models being too weak, he outright said that it was because you were wasting your opponents time by playing without the ability to score and should probably reconsider, you are no longer even playing and strategy game at that point. But that's whatever.

Above all, it's disingenuous to act like this is a problem with Dakka not liking anything less competitive than itself, when it's really a problem Peregrine alone, had specifically with your free-table list, and not because your models weren't competitive enough.

Take a look at the Slaanesh thread I posted in General to illustrate that the FAQ was not the end of the world; apparently my list wasn't competitive enough or something (or my opponent's wasn't competitive enough). It was a Friday Night PUG at a local store, which is exactly the kind of game we should hope GW is balancing around

What? No, that's the exact opposite of what we hope, because that's not what balance is, that's an excuse to brush off imbalances. If it's balanced at a competitive level it's balanced all the way down to a casual level. The same does not work in reverse. This is ENTIRELY different to what you were complaining about, you made a thread telling everyone how the game was going to play, while citing two casual lists as your evidence. No gak people are going to point out that your lists aren't that great and this doesn't reflect at all what people are complaining about. You were the one telling them they were wrong, not the other way around, don't act like everyone just bullied you for trying to share a list lol.

What do I do when my army is low tier? Build another army. With 2 armies, you double the chances that at least one of them will be in the meta.

Play anyway.

Imperial Guard and Sisters of Battle weren't exactly top tier last edition, I did well anyway.

For the most part, I list tailored heavily to fight specific builds I expected to see based on my meta, and accepted the loss if the enemy list happened to fall into my weak areas.

drbored wrote:
What do I do when my army is low tier? Build another army. With 2 armies, you double the chances that at least one of them will be in the meta.

And GW's plan is working.

Sumilidon wrote:
What do you do when your army is low tier and not competitive? Don't play competitively. I don't think there's any army that is unplayable however. There are certainly some that are just weak, but unplayable means you can't form a force in the first place

Try building a traditional list of an Inquisitor and retinue (lets say a couple of acolytes, crusaders, and death cultists in a landraider), a core force of mechanised stormtroopers (chimeras/rhinos), and a lone temple assassin.

Use the current battle brothers, rule of three, and an inquisition warlord trait and relic.

drbored wrote:
What do I do when my army is low tier? Build another army. With 2 armies, you double the chances that at least one of them will be in the meta.

Nah you don't reward companies for screwing you over, you give their competition your money instead.

How about playing 2 VS 2 and partnering with the most OP army to try and achieve balance?

Or some kind of crazy free-for-all (Are there some rules for this in the back of the main book? I kind of think I skimmed over them once but GW rules are a bit hit and miss - you may need to make your own) where being perceived as a low threat level could work in your favour?

If you think Inquisition has it bad, try solo Corsairs. 3 units max, regardless of points, in matched play. And none of them heavier than a Falcon.

And at max, you get 0 CP.

One thing that helps is figuring a couple of tricks in your armybook between your units and strategems, and focus your command points on doing what works.

I play a dedicated Emperor's Children warband. Its not hyper competitive, as
1) I am not not taking units at optimal sizes, instead opting for the sacred number
2) I'm not doubling down on my most powerful units, instead focusing on modeling and having a visually striking army. (only taking one block of Obliterators)

I will get rolled by a really competitive list, but I can handle an above average list okay by really focusing on my armies strengths, like Endless Cacophony on a unit in the right place (typically either my Plasma Raptors, Melta Bikers, and of course the Obliterators)

Its not impossible to win with this army, and boy do they look good when they pull something off. But it really requires a lot more from me to play well than my Eldar.

Using Rhinos to charge fire support units to tie them up, or absorb dangerous over watch so you can safely get something squishier in combat. Rhino charges have turned life around for my CSM. Its not something readily apparent but a huge tactical edge when applied. I've managed to launch a Rhino charge against a double butcher cannon array leviathan- bet he wished he had kept a close combat weapon then! The Rhino made it in because the Dread was busy ripping holes in other parts of my army...

You can still win with your favorites, you just have to focus harder and really milk everything you can out of your units and stratagems.

 SHUPPET wrote:


...If it's balanced at a competitive level it's balanced all the way down to a casual level...

I just want to point out this is not true, AT ALL. A good example is starcraft, where the factions are roughly balanced around the highest level of play, however in the lower leagues the players aren't good enough to adequately utilize certain races mechanics that the balancing assumes you are doing perfectly. Two good examples are zerg larval injections and terran marine micro. If you are missing larval injections as zerg you are taking massive economy hits, and terran is balanced around properly microing your marines, both of which low level zerg and terrans struggle with because they simply don't have the speed to do everything. As a result a lot of the lower leagues are skewed toward protoss.

w1zard wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:


...If it's balanced at a competitive level it's balanced all the way down to a casual level...

I just want to point out this is not true, AT ALL. A good example is starcraft, where the factions are roughly balanced around the highest level of play, however in the lower leagues the players aren't good enough to adequately utilize certain races mechanics that the balancing assumes you are doing perfectly. Two good examples are zerg larval injections and terran marine micro. If you are missing larval injections as zerg you are taking massive economy hits, and terran is balanced around properly microing your marines, both of which low level zerg and terrans struggle with because they simply don't have the speed to do everything. As a result a lot of the lower leagues are skewed toward protoss.

Thanks for the elementary level breakdown of the game I've played for 8 years, but this isn't Starcraft. Absolutely none of what you said applies to tabletop. There is no high skillcap mechanical barrier locking different players out of different strats - everyone can do exactly the same thing with the exact same amount of ease, the second they choose to do it. I appreciate your point because you're not wrong in the context of SC2, you are just wrong in the context of this game, which is the game I made the statement about.

Additionally, in the case of SC2, the solution to this low level imbalance is simple: get better. The tools within the faction are practically available. It's not demanding a disproportionate level of skill to your opponent to succeed, just a basic floor level for the echelon of play.

Starcraft example is indeed flawed, but nevertheless SHUPPET statement is indeed wrong, unless you add "...of matched play tournament prep style games on similiar terrain setup within your local meta closely resembling universal meta". It is enough to say, that popular large tournament formats each having their own mission sets and terrain rules yield different optimal builds exactly because rigid point costs aren't universal metric.

Things get even messier if you play on more complex terrain setups, against non-meta lists, deviate from standard EW missions, play Maelstrom only, or custom scenarios, or play on square table, play different game sizes, never play against IG or Marines as your local group is xenos only so you have different arms race entirely, etc... then you soon realise, that "competetive ballance is best for everyone" is a myth perpetuated by people, who don't really know how 40k can be played outside of "EW matched play on fair terrain". A simple example (one of many I could write here): if you have a narrative scenario, in which Guilliman starts in one corner of the table with a small squad of Sternguard as they are sole survivors of previous part of campaign, and the rest of your point allowance starts the game on the opposite corner coming in as reinforcements from another parts of the larger battle, and your enemy deploys all along the other diagonal line, then Guilliman is overcosted liability not undercosted powerhorse of your army and you should play uneven points lists to ballance this out. Another example are Dark Reapers - they are entirely different beast if you play standard game on planet bowling ball and when you have three of them in your collection and play on terrain heavy, maze like tables - with recent point increase they rarely earn their cost outside of a single tempest launcher. If you don't account such factors when playing "outside of meta" and instead rely on mythical "appropriate point costs are enough to achieve ballance in every concievable game and matchup on all levels of play" you'll have a hard time. And this was always true, no matter the edition, no matter how large the power creep was or how bad relative codex ballance was - outside of narrowly defined "fair mathed play" every one-dimensional point system is bound to fail miserably and is a rough guide only.

The issue is that it is literally impossible to balance around what you are suggesting. As such balanced around high level matched play is what is best, because it works the best for most people concerned with balance. The only way to balance weird scenarios like RG alone with one squad 6’ away from the rest of your army, is and always will be up to the players creating that scenario. You cannot balance something around it’s worst possibl use. That is an issue with aura buffs in general.

I will postulate that I think GW needs to decide what they are balancing around. I think they need to release an organized play ruleset, that stipulates the missions used, terrain layouts/density and points costs they are balancing the game around. Without that the game will never truely be balanced, it will just be better than it is now.

As to the star craft example I think it holds to an extent there are things better players think to do in this game, and abilities they value more than lower level players do that can make it feel like some units are worse (or better) than they might perform in super casual play.

nou wrote:
Starcraft example is indeed flawed, but nevertheless SHUPPET statement is indeed wrong, unless you add "...of matched play tournament prep style games on similiar terrain setup within your local meta closely resembling universal meta". It is enough to say, that popular large tournament formats each having their own mission sets and terrain rules yield different optimal builds exactly because rigid point costs aren't universal metric.

Things get even messier if you play on more complex terrain setups, against non-meta lists, deviate from standard EW missions, play Maelstrom only, or custom scenarios, or play on square table, play different game sizes, never play against IG or Marines as your local group is xenos only so you have different arms race entirely, etc... then you soon realise, that "competetive ballance is best for everyone" is a myth perpetuated by people, who don't really know how 40k can be played outside of "EW matched play on fair terrain". A simple example (one of many I could write here): if you have a narrative scenario, in which Guilliman starts in one corner of the table with a small squad of Sternguard as they are sole survivors of previous part of campaign, and the rest of your point allowance starts the game on the opposite corner coming in as reinforcements from another parts of the larger battle, and your enemy deploys all along the other diagonal line, then Guilliman is overcosted liability not undercosted powerhorse of your army and you should play uneven points lists to ballance this out. Another example are Dark Reapers - they are entirely different beast if you play standard game on planet bowling ball and when you have three of them in your collection and play on terrain heavy, maze like tables - with recent point increase they rarely earn their cost outside of a single tempest launcher. If you don't account such factors when playing "outside of meta" and instead rely on mythical "appropriate point costs are enough to achieve ballance in every concievable game and matchup on all levels of play" you'll have a hard time. And this was always true, no matter the edition, no matter how large the power creep was or how bad relative codex ballance was - outside of narrowly defined "fair mathed play" every one-dimensional point system is bound to fail miserably and is a rough guide only.

the point is if all these rules were part of the base ruleset and the rules were balanced for the highest level, that would still be the case for people playing the exact same game casually. Pointing at the fact that players have had to make rules themselves for this game to be balanced is just more support to the fact that GW haven't finished balancing their game properly.

And casual play should always have terrain. Use household items. If you are playing the game like that, don't complain that it's unbalanced lol.

Exactly my point: there is no such thing as perfect ballance or even "close enough ballance" if you don't account for terrain (including deployment zones layout), win conditions, game size etc... And even then, with such multitude of factions in the game and rock-paper-scisors of nature of some matchups, such ballance will still be dynamic and top performing army will strongly depend on statistical odds of encountering it's hard counter. And such achieved ballance do not spill over outside of context it was ballanced for - sticking to BRB and CA only, without any houserules whatsoever, there is absolutely no way to "officially" ballance Narrative Play section with any point system and 27 factions. Such scenarios will always have to be roughly wieghted by players themselves and "better ballance" of matched play doesn't really improve anything in this context.

And I'm not complaining about imbalances in this game, I'm only trying to show on some edge case examples that "better tournament ballance improves game for everyone" is simply untrue. What is also untrue is that narrative players somehow do not care about ballance - we do need baseline to work on when ballancing odd scenarios, we just account for many more variables and do not believe that anyone can do this work for us, not GW and most certainly not tournament focused players, which more often than not screw things up instead improving them outside of most obvious offenders. Take a Razorwing Flock example - in casual context this was no-issue unit as no sane narrative player would build an army around them and one or three bases of them gave a nice Hitchcock feel to the local skirmish, hardly breaking the game. This is no longer true as tournament players ridiculed this unit so much that it was nerfed and no longer adds flavour to the game. Of course I can deviate from official rules and spin a one-off scenario involving a murder of wild Razorwings, but this only proves my point even further - tournament based ballance is not an universally good metric. It has its merits but it also has it's very deep limitations and stating otherwise is simply being dishonest.

 SHUPPET wrote:
Peregrine, probably the most widely disliked poster on this site.

I love you too.

I am firmly in the camp that competitive balance is the best form of balance generally. To say otherwise is incorrect. Especially in a game like 40K, where many communities get into a competitive arms race because nobody wants to lose all the time, and it is incredibly easy to go online, look at high scoring tournament lists for the faction you play, and BUILD THAT LIST.
This isn't like the 80s and 90s where list building is a rare skill that sets the good players from the rabble, anyone with an Internet Connection can get a highly functional, capable tournament class list and as long as they have half a brain cell they will go on a tear through their local community with it, until other players start getting top tier competitive lists from the internet to match. There are still the great players who set the trends and create new meta breaking lists. But for most players and local tournaments a top tier competitive list is a google search and some credit card debt away.

This is why people get so worked up about balance. It doesn't matter where I play my games, whenever I got to large group setting open play nights- from Minneapolis to Detroit, a large portion of the players are bringing tournament clone lists. This isn't applicable to games I play with my friends where we can candidly discuss what type of game we want to play and tune the level of our lists to play what we want to play without creating a lopsided curb stomp.

Most people asking for advice and complain about balance aren't doing so because they are WAAC tournament players. Most of them are newer players who are getting curbstomped on the regular at their FLGS or local GW by cloned tournament lists, and they want help, and they want the units they love, the ones they started 40K for, to be able to be useable.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Thanks for the elementary level breakdown of the game I've played for 8 years...

Stop being rude. I didn't want to assume you knew I was talking about.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Absolutely none of what you said applies to tabletop...

Yes it does.

As others have stated, and as you have so eloquently pointed out, the analogy isn't perfect. However your assertion that "if it's balanced for high level play it's balanced for all levels of play" is incorrect for pretty much any gaming system, WH40k included. Now you can argue that its a GOOD thing that lower level balance is ignored in favor of higher level balance, but that is a whole other can of worms.