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That is not exactly true . Balance is important for tournaments too. If one type of list is too dominant , there will be a drop in number of people showing up to a tournament and the smaller a tournament gets , the bigger the chance that next time even fewer people will come play in it . I agree with you that some armies are better , then others . Perfect balance is impossible to achive . But when there are 3-4 top tier armies , not builds those are always shaped by how the local meta game looks like , the play field is going to be more balanced then when it has 1 army to rule them all and 1-2 runners up .

In 7th ed WFB died out as a tournament game here , because armies could be divided in to demons , armies that can try to counter demons when they are lucky and armies that can't deal with demons at all.


But balance being more important to what ever is casual gaming , I fully agree on . If the only counter to build or army X is runing specific ally , fortification or units , a normal player may do it , but someone who wants to play an army of 6 units of tactical marines may not have such an option . And losing all the time is not fun at all , as you said it yourself.

There is no test of skill in alpha strike hammer, it's just dice. The game is too alpha strikey to support a competitive enviroment.

EDIT; If the table size was tripled...

Then again alpha strike could still happen possibly thanks to super mobile units, extremely long ranged weapons, and drop pods on drop pods. Along with that, it would take longer to reach the enemy (heck I'm not even sure when you would be able to get close enough to CC!) and objectives would be worthless unless put in the middle of the battlefield.

To OP I say this. Imbalance does still affect tournament play. Yes, tournament gamers will always tend to bring optimized lists. That being said, optimization can stagnate environments and convince people to stop playing. As above people mentioned, daemons did this for warhammer fantasy. I do agree that the terrible balance more heavily damages "casual" gaming simply because neither side is bringing the best weapons possible. Heck, you might even find somebody playing a all CSM tzteentch army or a IG force that uses almost all the rough riders possible.

I think the best example of lack of balance hurting , so called, casual game play are BA. They are a very hard army to play with and require a pre build army . Their stuff is either a must have and use in this one way only or never take at all . I can imagine that someone with a bit of luck could win a local tournament with BA ,but someone with an BA army out of stuff he likes will not like 6th ed at all. And BAs are not the only army in w40k , that is balanced like that . GK , SoB , IG play more or less the same .

I think GW would say that the rules are only guidelines and if you feel that they are unbalanced you are free to make your own.
But I really hope GW will get off its lazy ass and make the 7th edition absolutely awesome and more balanced.
Even if the rules are just guidelines, it would be nice if they would be actually good guidelines...

Agree with Makumba. When I was still actively playing MtG tournaments, there was a deck so dominant, that it was played by almost everyone. In a tournament with 128 competitors 108 had brought the exact same 75 cards, three thirds of the remaining decks were tailored to counter the dominant deck. This was very unhealthy for the tournament scene because games got dull and people stopped showing up. Every since WotC has been carefully watching their new releases to make sure that at least three or four different decks would be at the same level of power (with more or less success).

GW has to do the same. Their different armies do not have to be exactly equal in power, but the choice of codex should be less relevant to winning than list building, skill and luck. There are already many reports of people getting bored/annoyed when they come to a tournament and see riptides, serpents and screamers everywhere. This is a big sign of an unhealthy tournament environment which will sooner or latter die out. Sadly, this is a declared goal of GW, so nothing we can do about it.
Despite what you implicitly declared, competitive players are also playing for fun. The fun of playing against other powerful armies to see if you can come out on top. If you're playing against the same army all the time, tactics become automatisms, and you're pretty much push models around while being bored.
By definition, two equally good players should win half the games against each other, no matter what armies they play.

Also, don't fall for the "balance is probably near impossible" lie. Balance is possible, if you out work into it and keep fine-tuning your game. Balance doesn'T happen, you have to put work into it.

The reason the "I want to bring the sisters" guy/gal wants to do that is because they are the army he/she has, and dosn't want to be forced into getting s new army for tournament play.

Broken balance affects everything. Who wants to play a game, even a friendly game, where you get stomped through no fault of your own but because you chose an army/units that are rubbish?

There should be no "weak" units or armies. There can be some units that are better at some things (e.g. a CC squad should be better than a shooty squad at combat) but not to the level currently wherein most armies have units that fall into three categories:

1) Must take at least 1+ (e.g. Heldrake, Riptide)
2) Average unit
3) Bad unit, never take these

#1 and #3 should never exist.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But I really hope GW will get off its lazy ass and make the 7th edition absolutely awesome and more balanced....

I remember saying that about 6th.

Players also need to accept some responsibility for their actions & choices, especially in non-competitive/tournament play.

For example, last edition:
Daemons were not a horrible book by any means. Yes they were not quite on the same power level as the likes of BA's/IG or anyone running a lot of mechanised units, but they still functioned perfectly well in friendly pick-up games.
Grey Knights were written to simply shat all over a Daemon army, if you chose to abuse the really nasty anti-daemon stuff.

Games were tough on a Daemon player, but still doable even without resorting to a tailored list, provided the GK player showed a little respect and self control and agreed to not pull stupid gak like Warp Quake the entire table, or min/max a mechanised Purifyer army full of psycannons, or take Dark Ex out the wazoo, or put Truesilver Armour on every vehicle (especially those Psyflemen!), or throw a Banisher into every single Henchman unit in a Coteaz army, etc...
Similar to now with Daemons getting the new codex treatment, in a purely friendly game, there is no need what-so-ever to be giant @$$monkey and pull out the 2++/re-roll 1's shenanigans.
Take the 'Good Book' for sure, but in a friendly, non-competitive game, show some god-damn restraint and don't abuse the mechanic to build the nearly unkillable unit from hell.

The same goes for any army really... Yes the balance could be better, but just because you can do something/take a certain combination, doesn't mean you always should do so!
It's fine in a friendly game for a Tau player to take a Riptide, especially if they really like the model. Now unless they first forewarn their opponent and/or give them a chance to re-tool their list, that Tau player should not be plunking 3-4 of the b******* on the table!
Same goes for a Chaos player seeing his opponent brought Space Marines - don't pull out 2-4 Helldrakes because there's no challenge at that point, especially if the Space Marine player doesn't have much AA ability...
Or a Necron player plunking a Flying French Bakery list on the table vs. a DE or BA player...
Or a Space Marine player min/maxing their Grav Guns vs. a Tyranid Monster Mash list, or Ravenwing/Deathwing player, etc...

It's called sportsmanship. In friendly/non-competitive/narrative games with nothing on the line but some lols, people apparently need to start showing some.

 Fenrir Kitsune wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But I really hope GW will get off its lazy ass and make the 7th edition absolutely awesome and more balanced....

I remember saying that about 6th.

and 5th and 4th ............

Experiment 626 wrote:
Players also need to accept some responsibility for their actions & choices, especially in non-competitive/tournament play.

Yes, that's what you should do, given the circumstances. I don't disagree with you on that.

However, a better game balance wouldn't force you to jump through hoops in order to make the game enjoyable for your opponent though.

In a well balanced game, the tau player could plonk down however many riptides he wishes without ruining the game for anyone and/or getting insulted as TFG.
In a well balanced game, no single unit should be able to make half the armies in the game obsolete, even if taken in quintets.
In a well balanced game, a combination of as little as three army choices should not generate nigh-invincible units.
In a well balanced game, using a mono-build list like croissants of doom should easily be counter-able by every army in the game.

It's not the player's job to make the rules they paid up to $100 for work for their opponent. It's GW goddamn job, we pay them for that.

While I don't agree with this totally (I think balance affects both styles of play), it's a good way of thinking about it, and brings a useful perspective.

Unbalanced units and armies discourage creative and comprehensive armies (why buy these units if they are so bad, and you never use them?). They discourage the player who loves an army's look and feel, but loses with it constantly, and they discourage the player whose army (whether through neglect or poor rules design) is ill-suited to compete in the current game environment.

What's more infuriating to me is that GW uses points costs, which should make it ridiculously easy to balance things better.

If Riptides (or whatever) are really, really, good, and show up all the time--make them cost more points! Don't change the rules and screw up the fluff. Just make better units more expensive in points.

There are very few units in the game right now whose rules are too good. That's a bold statement, but I'm going to explain it. There are very few units in the game which work BETTER on the tabletop than they seem to work in the background and fluff. In my own opinion, that's all the rules should concern themselves with. There are a few. For instance, I don't think it's part of the fluff that Stormtrooper Hellguns blow through Space Marine armor like nothing's there. That doesn't mean that Stormtroopers are overpowered. That means that their rules are poorly written to reflect their background. When Chaos Marines invade, you don't call in the stormtroopers!

On the other hand, there are a LOT of units whose rules are bad. These are units which are supposed to be capable of a particular role, or distinguished for a particular excellence, and don't actually work that way. For example, Space Marine Dreadnoughts are supposed to be incarnate heroes to their Chapter, virtually indestructible demigods of war that stride the battlefield and smite the mightiest foes. Nope. They get plonked apart really quickly. That doesn't mean they need to be cheaper to field. They need better rules to reflect the fact that they are supposed to be awesome warriors, not inexpensive list fillers or a cheap way to get an extra lascannon.

Now, on the other hand, there are a LOT of units whose rules are fine, but who cost too much or too little (mostly too little, I think). If more of these really popular, very powerful units cost more points, then they wouldn't show up as much, and you'd have the option of taking a lot more 'normally powered' units to oppose them.


This would be better for casual gamers as well as tournament players.

For the casual gamer, you could take the units you liked to model, paint, or play with. Your lists might be unusual points totals, but within that points limit, you would have a reasonable chance of doing well vs. most opposition. You might find an opponent whose army was well-situated to take you apart, but, in general, you wouldn't run into cases where a third of their army killed 9/10ths of yours. Picking the units you liked wouldn't sometimes make you into the local loser (if you liked, say, kans, dread, and slugga boys) or TFG (if you happened to think that Riptides were awesome looking mega-robots!). Your unit choices wouldn't be invalidated by army creep, or codex creep, or the new hotness, as the new hotness would also be the new 'really expensive option' if it really was hot.

For the tournament player, you would know that the most popular, most powerful units, would be appropriately expensive. You could make reasonable, educated choices about taking a smaller army composed of the most effective units, or a larger, more varied army of less powerful units, which might give you more flexibility or the ability to absorb some bad dice rolls (or good dice rolls from the opposition). Taking the 'best units' would consistently, regardless of army, mean that you were also taking a much smaller force, and that there was a real trade off between picking the best units and picking more units. Because the effectiveness of units would be better balanced against their points cost, there shouldn't be a preponderance of 'top builds' that showed up at each tournament, which would make games more challenging, since you might need to know how to fight against many different armies with many different, effective army lists, rather than planning for facing a few armies with a few similar builds.

 Bottle wrote:

The goal of tournament games is: to win, to be a test of skill.

The goal of friendly games is: to have fun.

Therefore when list building, there is a difference between the two styles of play:

1. Tournament players will choose the best units available for their army.
2. Friendly players will choose the units they like the most.

I think we can all agree so far? (If not, please say so )

So, using that first assumption, that within an army some combinations of units are better than others, we can then make a second assumption.

2. Some combinations of units from one army are better than combinations of units from other armies.

And then we can deduce the following:

3. Some armies are better than others.

Perfect balance between all the armies would be nice, (although it is probably near impossible.) But it is not actually needed for tournament play. Why? Because we are free to choose to bring any army to a tournament. If you think Taudar is the best, then... Bring Taudar to the tournament!

But here is when people chime in saying "but I want to bring my Sisters of Battle to the tournament!" (Or any other army you deem is underpowered.) the question is why? Why do you want to bring them? I think it will always boil down to them being the models you like, the faction you have the most FUN playing with. But if you have agreed with my assumptions at the start, you'd know that fun is not an intrinsic part. There goal is to test the skill of the player (and while that can be enjoyable, I'm going to arbitrarily say it is distinct from "fun", (e.g I don't think tennis players at Wimbledon have "fun" during their games, but no doubt enjoy taking part.)

A tournament player is out to win. To win you should choose the best combinations of units. Some armies have better combinations of units than others. Therefore you bring the best army to the tournament.

I've chosen this section to quote as it contains the bits that I feel are most problematic.

- Not everyone owns a Taudar army. Not everyone can afford to buy and paint a new army every year. By saying 'bring the best army to a tournament' you disqualify anyone who does not have the current 'best' army from being able to compete. In previous editions there were still strong and weak armies, but because the balance was better over all, more people had a chance to compete with the models they have in their collection. If less people have any chance of winning, less people will turn up.

- As you say, tournaments are, by definition, competitions of skill. Buying the most powerful army is not a skill. So, if we were to have a more balanced game, we could say that 40k tournaments would be MORE dependent on skill.

- Even given that the primary point of a tournament is to win, the real reason most people attend them is to have some fun games with new opponents. I'd suggest that 80% of the people you find at tournaments are what we'd call casual or semi-competitive players. They don't expect to win the whole tournament, but they'd like to think they're in with a chance of doing ok, and they don't want to just auto-lose based on list. It's completely valid to say 'tournaments are just for the people with the most competitive armies' but this will drive the majority of tournament attendees away.

I think you have made a major mistake in your core premise. The first principle for your logic should be that this is a game and every individual who plays it is trying to have fun as they define fun. This is why all the rest of your arguement falls apart with even the least analysis as the tournament player, casual players, and narrative players are all trying to have fun but have different ideas of fun.

The tournament player doesn't just want to win they want a challenge in doing so and to feel rewarded for a difficult fight. They want to do this with an army they love in a game they love or they would be doing this in MtG where they could get big prizes or video game tournaments where the prizes are also big. Poor balance affects them just as badly as anyone with the caveat that the TO can curve some of the worse abuses.

The narrative player wants to create a story and use the armies and fluff they love to do so. Poor balance can make this impossible as some fluff armies are not even possible to create within the rules (TDA Deathwing in kill squads, good luck with Belial required to unlock them as troops) and none of the fluff says that some armies are absolutely crushed in a single turn by most other armies. In many ways they are the most insulated from unbalanced rules as they are already writing their own rules and already had to communicate heavily with their opponent and agree upon a number of limitations an special rules. If you already have to agree on special mission X from badab war but with units X, Y, and Z traded out then agreeing to invulnerable saves are 2+/4+ if a reroll is allowed is not that hard.

The casual pickup gamer is the person who really suffers under bad rules. They often play new people and must either play rules as written against anything and everything you can imagine or spend 30-60 min trying to convince a near stranger that the seer council they love so much and is not fun to play against. Funny enough this is either a one of the other groups "slumming" or a only moderately interested (or too busy) person. Usually most pick up games only people (in my experience) either have very limited casual time or don't have the interest to have 40K friends/groups.

The final category is TFG whom doesn't agree with premise 1 which is both payers should have fun with a game. They don't want a challenge, a story, and they either don't care or don't want you to have fun. This is the person who drives away new players and is the sour apple in the bundle. This is the only category that benefits from poor and unbalanced rules as anything that allows him to just win with little effort is a boon to him.

Bottle wrote:Naysayers are wrong when they say bad army balance is the reason 40k is a bad tournament game.

Agreed. 40k is a terrible tournament game, but not because of imbalance.

Bottle wrote:...
...
...
A tournament player is out to win. To win you should choose the best combinations of units. Some armies have better combinations of units than others. Therefore you bring the best army to the tournament.

I therefore think army balance has no sway over 40k being a good tournament game or not.

A correctly-executed syllogism. How refreshing.

Bottle wrote:The goal of tournament games is: to win, to be a test of skill.

Here is your critical problem, though. Tournaments should be a test of skill. 40k isn't a skill game - it's a dice game where skill plays the ancillary role of learning how to play the odds better. It's like blackjack - better blackjack players will win more games over a long period of time than worse blackjack players because they play the odds better, but there's no way that you can have blackjack tournaments without defiling what a tournament is.

Until you entirely remove the random element from 40k, it's not a game that you can take seriously. Not as a game of skill, nor as something you can have real tournaments around.

Bottle wrote:And this is where army imbalance really comes to shine and is problematic. Because losing every game isn't fun and winning every game isn't fun either when it is with your mates.

Jidmah wrote:In a well balanced game, the tau player could plonk down however many riptides he wishes without ruining the game for anyone and/or getting insulted as TFG.
In a well balanced game, no single unit should be able to make half the armies in the game obsolete, even if taken in quintets.
In a well balanced game, a combination of as little as three army choices should not generate nigh-invincible units.
In a well balanced game, using a mono-build list like croissants of doom should easily be counter-able by every army in the game.

Okay, but think about it for a moment. How are we really defining balance?

Because what it looks like here is that a well-balanced game is one wherein a player can take any combination of units and do more or less just as well as another player taking any other combination of units.

Do you really want a game like this? Because if there are no strong units and weak units, strong armies and weak armies, or strong combinations and weak combinations, then what does it matter what you take? In a way, your choices become irrelevant. You're just taking different-shaped models.

In this world of balance, you take away the meaningfulness of a player's decision. List building becomes pointless.

It would just make the game worse.

I'd argue the other side, that in order for a player's decisions about what to bring to be meaningful, he has to be able to "fail" at list building. He has to be able to make bad choices. Furthermore, he has to be able to make choices that he KNOWS will be weaker than other choices, but still wants to take them anyways.

Because when you sit down to play chess, whether you play black or white is scarcely relevant (to anything but the opener). In order for a player to have serious choice, they need to be able to bring a different kind of army, and for that to have a real impact. They need to choose not to play taudar, for example, which means they need to have a choice that's actually different than taudar, and if taudar is the best, then that requires you to have things which are worse.

Now, yes, this can obviously lead to extremes, and you don't need to tell me that tau lists can be pretty boring to play against, but still, 40k needs imbalance to be 40k. The only question is striking the correct level of imbalance.

And what is that correct level? As best I can tell, it's to provide a relatively smooth power curve in such a way where a person can play with exactly as powerful of an army as they want, and be able to have some expectation of what the result of the game will be by comparing it to the power level that their opponent brought. And 40k already does this pretty well.

But the thing is, though, that it has to be a player choice. Yes, people can complain that we shouldn't be forced to balance the game ourselves, but we MUST be required to balance the game ourselves in order for our choices to have meaning. It's just part of the cost to get the advantages.

If you don't want to have to sit down with your opponent and hash things out, then play a game where both armies start out equal to each other, like chess or stratego or go. That way you'll get what you want, but you also won't get 40k.

It takes "some assembly required" to have the freedom to assemble the game the way you want.

ansacs wrote:The tournament player doesn't just want to win they want a challenge in doing so and to feel rewarded for a difficult fight.

I don't know if I agree with this definition.

A person who wants a challenge will play weaker and weaker lists the better they get at the game. They will constantly be handicapping themselves to make sure they always have that serious chance of losing. They will be looking to ratchet up the difficulty level, so to speak. Playing the game on hard mode means taking out those powerful units and putting in weak ones, and showing up with weaker armies rather than stronger ones.

Now look at the tournament scene. It's filled with players struggling to find the strongest lists that they can so that they can put the least amount of effort in and achieve the best win record possible.

That sounds like the exact opposite of what you're talking about. I can't think of someone who wants a challenge any less than someone who is playing for the purpose of winning (which is the point of tournaments in the first place).

 Ailaros wrote:

Bottle wrote:Naysayers are wrong when they say bad army balance is the reason 40k is a bad tournament game.

Agreed. 40k is a terrible tournament game, but not because of imbalance.

Bottle wrote:...
...
...
A tournament player is out to win. To win you should choose the best combinations of units. Some armies have better combinations of units than others. Therefore you bring the best army to the tournament.

I therefore think army balance has no sway over 40k being a good tournament game or not.

A correctly-executed syllogism. How refreshing.

Bottle wrote:The goal of tournament games is: to win, to be a test of skill.

Here is your critical problem, though. Tournaments should be a test of skill. 40k isn't a skill game - it's a dice game where skill plays the ancillary role of learning how to play the odds better. It's like blackjack - better blackjack players will win more games over a long period of time than worse blackjack players because they play the odds better, but there's no way that you can have blackjack tournaments without defiling what a tournament is.

Until you entirely remove the random element from 40k, it's not a game that you can take seriously. Not as a game of skill, nor as something you can have real tournaments around.

Bottle wrote:And this is where army imbalance really comes to shine and is problematic. Because losing every game isn't fun and winning every game isn't fun either when it is with your mates.

Jidmah wrote:In a well balanced game, the tau player could plonk down however many riptides he wishes without ruining the game for anyone and/or getting insulted as TFG.
In a well balanced game, no single unit should be able to make half the armies in the game obsolete, even if taken in quintets.
In a well balanced game, a combination of as little as three army choices should not generate nigh-invincible units.
In a well balanced game, using a mono-build list like croissants of doom should easily be counter-able by every army in the game.

Okay, but think about it for a moment. How are we really defining balance?

Because what it looks like here is that a well-balanced game is one wherein a player can take any combination of units and do more or less just as well as another player taking any other combination of units.

Do you really want a game like this? Because if there are no strong units and weak units, strong armies and weak armies, or strong combinations and weak combinations, then what does it matter what you take? In a way, your choices become irrelevant. You're just taking different-shaped models.

In this world of balance, you take away the meaningfulness of a player's decision. List building becomes pointless.

It would just make the game worse.

I'd argue the other side, that in order for a player's decisions about what to bring to be meaningful, he has to be able to "fail" at list building. He has to be able to make bad choices. Furthermore, he has to be able to make choices that he KNOWS will be weaker than other choices, but still wants to take them anyways.

Because when you sit down to play chess, whether you play black or white is scarcely relevant (to anything but the opener). In order for a player to have serious choice, they need to be able to bring a different kind of army, and for that to have a real impact. They need to choose not to play taudar, for example, which means they need to have a choice that's actually different than taudar, and if taudar is the best, then that requires you to have things which are worse.

Now, yes, this can obviously lead to extremes, and you don't need to tell me that tau lists can be pretty boring to play against, but still, 40k needs imbalance to be 40k. The only question is striking the correct level of imbalance.

And what is that correct level? As best I can tell, it's to provide a relatively smooth power curve in such a way where a person can play with exactly as powerful of an army as they want, and be able to have some expectation of what the result of the game will be by comparing it to the power level that their opponent brought. And 40k already does this pretty well.

But the thing is, though, that it has to be a player choice. Yes, people can complain that we shouldn't be forced to balance the game ourselves, but we MUST be required to balance the game ourselves in order for our choices to have meaning. It's just part of the cost to get the advantages.

If you don't want to have to sit down with your opponent and hash things out, then play a game where both armies start out equal to each other, like chess or stratego or go. That way you'll get what you want, but you also won't get 40k.

It takes "some assembly required" to have the freedom to assemble the game the way you want.

ansacs wrote:The tournament player doesn't just want to win they want a challenge in doing so and to feel rewarded for a difficult fight.

I don't know if I agree with this definition.

A person who wants a challenge will play weaker and weaker lists the better they get at the game. They will constantly be handicapping themselves to make sure they always have that serious chance of losing. They will be looking to ratchet up the difficulty level, so to speak. Playing the game on hard mode means taking out those powerful units and putting in weak ones, and showing up with weaker armies rather than stronger ones.

Now look at the tournament scene. It's filled with players struggling to find the strongest lists that they can so that they can put the least amount of effort in and achieve the best win record possible.

That sounds like the exact opposite of what you're talking about. I can't think of someone who wants a challenge any less than someone who is playing for the purpose of winning (which is the point of tournaments in the first place).

I am opposed to the idea that every possibke combination of units should be "equal", but I also disagree with your assertion that thre should be "stronger" or "weaker" units. The relative strength of a model should be reflected in its point costs (with adjustments made for the specialities of specific armies- IG should have some what cheaper tanks and more expensive assault options for instance). The challange of listbilding should not be to find the most point effective units in the codex and spam them, it should be to decide on the style of gameplay you wish the list to pursue and find the right combination of units to make it work (or to realize that it cannot work with the tools available).

A failure of listbuilding should be a failure to realize that the units you chose for your army list wpuld not work well together, or would not work well against the opponent's chosen combination of units/tactics, or that they do not really fit the tactics you had in mind for them, or that they do not fit your playstyle.

Yes, there should be "bad choices" and "good choices" in listbuilding, but not to the extremes that exist today and not for he reasons that dictated WAAC listbuilding in the current meta.

 Ailaros wrote:
Until you entirely remove the random element from 40k, it's not a game that you can take seriously. Not as a game of skill, nor as something you can have real tournaments around.

You can repeat this as often as you like, but it doesn't make it any less wrong. There are plenty of tournaments with games with random factors: MTG, poker, etc. The difference here is that those games have good randomness (and good balance), while 40k just has random tables for the sake of having random tables.

Because what it looks like here is that a well-balanced game is one wherein a player can take any combination of units and do more or less just as well as another player taking any other combination of units.

Wrong again. A balanced game still has room for list building, and failure in list building. Unit A and unit B might be equally powerful in some abstract sense, but aren't necessarily interchangeable in a list. For example, a dedicated melee army might have to make difficult choices about whether to go all-in on melee units or to hold back some shooting units to camp on their "home" objectives. So unit A might be a good combination with the first option, while unit B might be best in the second. And then you have factors like player preferences: melee and shooting might be theoretically equal in their chances of winning, but I as a player might strongly prefer a shooting army because I'm better at that strategy. And so even among a pool of equally powerful units I'm still going to have preferences, and my decisions will still make a difference.

Though your argument does amusingly prove the OP's point that balance matters most for casual/fluff games, since the average casual/fluff player wants exactly what you described: a game where they can take whatever units they want (because they look cool, because it fits their fluff, etc) and still have an equal chance of winning.

Well, but if every unit were exactly correctly priced, pointswise, then this would mean that every army, regardless of what units were in it, would be exactly as strong as each other. This means that there aren't real differences between armies, but it would merely be a difference between the number of minis that a player wanted to put down, and what those minis looked like. After all, if one person shows up with 10 uber-models, and another shows up with 1,000 suck models, and the end result is the same chance of either person winning the game with 1 model left on the table, then the only difference, really is aesthetic - one player likes big minis, and the other player is a masochist.

The idea that 40k would be a proper rock-paper-scissors game is an interesting one, but I don't know if you can pull it off in an environment like this. Also, I don't know how much I'd want the game to be that way. Do you want a game where you show up with your list, and your opponent shows up with theirs, and they're equally powerful in general, but your stuff just won't win against his stuff because your combination is bad against his combination?

That sounds like it's taking a problem with 40k and making it worse, rather than better.

 Ailaros wrote:
Well, but if every unit were exactly correctly priced, pointswise, then this would mean that every army, regardless of what units were in it, would be exactly as strong as each other. This means that there aren't real differences between armies, but it would merely be a difference between the number of minis that a player wanted to put down, and what those minis looked like. After all, if one person shows up with 10 uber-models, and another shows up with 1,000 suck models, and the end result is the same chance of either person winning the game with 1 model left on the table, then the only difference, really is aesthetic - one player likes big minis, and the other player is a masochist.

The idea that 40k would be a proper rock-paper-scissors game is an interesting one, but I don't know if you can pull it off in an environment like this. Also, I don't know how much I'd want the game to be that way. Do you want a game where you show up with your list, and your opponent shows up with theirs, and they're equally powerful in general, but your stuff just won't win against his stuff because your combination is bad against his combination?

That sounds like it's taking a problem with 40k and making it worse, rather than better.

So an ork army and a tau army would play exactly the same but with different model counts in a well balanced system?
Yeah.. riiiiiight.

 Ailaros wrote:
This means that there aren't real differences between armies, but it would merely be a difference between the number of minis that a player wanted to put down, and what those minis looked like.

Sorry, but that's just nonsense. A single A model might be worth 100 B models in some abstract sense, but that doesn't mean that a 10 A list and a 1000 B list are equal. Or maybe both of them are bad, and the real ideal ratio is 3 A 700 B, at least for certain missions. Or maybe I, as an individual player, am really good at positioning my units effectively for late-game objective grabs but I'm not very good at guessing where my opponent's melee units are going to charge. Do I want a list with 4 A 600 B, or should I go with 5 A 500 B? Or, to give a 40k example instead of these abstract numbers: should I take meatshield Kroot in my Tau army, or should I trust my JSJ skills (and the dice) to keep me out of trouble? Even if kroot are perfectly balanced with crisis suits that decision is still a complex and interesting one.

Really, the only problem here is that you don't have any imagination.

That sounds like it's taking a problem with 40k and making it worse, rather than better.

Lol? How exactly is a rock/paper/scissors game where list building dominates better than the current game, where you play rock/paper/scissors, except rock automatically wins unless both players play rock (in which case it's a draw).

Bottle wrote:A tournament player is out to win. To win you should choose the best combinations of units. Some armies have better combinations of units than others. Therefore you bring the best army to the tournament.

The chasm-wide gap in your logic there is that very few people have both the time and money to just buy and paint a whole new army every couple of months to stay on top of the "meta".

Ailaros wrote:
Okay, but think about it for a moment. How are we really defining balance?

Because what it looks like here is that a well-balanced game is one wherein a player can take any combination of units and do more or less just as well as another player taking any other combination of units.

Do you really want a game like this? Because if there are no strong units and weak units, strong armies and weak armies, or strong combinations and weak combinations, then what does it matter what you take? In a way, your choices become irrelevant. You're just taking different-shaped models.

In this world of balance, you take away the meaningfulness of a player's decision. List building becomes pointless.

It would just make the game worse.

I'd argue the other side, that in order for a player's decisions about what to bring to be meaningful, he has to be able to "fail" at list building. He has to be able to make bad choices. Furthermore, he has to be able to make choices that he KNOWS will be weaker than other choices, but still wants to take them anyways.

Because when you sit down to play chess, whether you play black or white is scarcely relevant (to anything but the opener). In order for a player to have serious choice, they need to be able to bring a different kind of army, and for that to have a real impact. They need to choose not to play taudar, for example, which means they need to have a choice that's actually different than taudar, and if taudar is the best, then that requires you to have things which are worse.

Now, yes, this can obviously lead to extremes, and you don't need to tell me that tau lists can be pretty boring to play against, but still, 40k needs imbalance to be 40k. The only question is striking the correct level of imbalance.

And what is that correct level? As best I can tell, it's to provide a relatively smooth power curve in such a way where a person can play with exactly as powerful of an army as they want, and be able to have some expectation of what the result of the game will be by comparing it to the power level that their opponent brought. And 40k already does this pretty well.

But the thing is, though, that it has to be a player choice. Yes, people can complain that we shouldn't be forced to balance the game ourselves, but we MUST be required to balance the game ourselves in order for our choices to have meaning. It's just part of the cost to get the advantages.

If you don't want to have to sit down with your opponent and hash things out, then play a game where both armies start out equal to each other, like chess or stratego or go. That way you'll get what you want, but you also won't get 40k.

It takes "some assembly required" to have the freedom to assemble the game the way you want.

I don't think I could disagree with you more. List-building shouldn't be some sort of mini-game; we have become accustomed to it but the fact that we need to put so much time and effort into designing a list is a serious design flaw, not some sort of gift from GW.

Yes, it does reward those that have the time and skill to put together good lists - and I do understand the appeal of that - but looking at it objectively, it makes no sense at all that the fact that the winner of a match can be sometimes determined before you even deploy your armies, just by looking at the lists.

Now, granted it would be impossible to actually ever have a situation where one could just throw together any models and have as good a chance as anybody else, but I absolutely believe that given enough work, it would be possible to have 1) armies that are all more or less of equal strength and 2) have every unit in every book be useful if properly integrated in coherently-designed list. Needless to say, we are FAR from such a state of affairs in 40k. Indeed, we seem to move further and further away from it as each new release hits.

 jonolikespie wrote:
So an ork army and a tau army would play exactly the same but with different model counts in a well balanced system?

You just have to understand Ailaros' bizarre views of 40k. For example, Tau players who use JSJ instead of moving up to get slaughtered in melee are WAAC sociopaths, and people like Ailaros who voluntarily cripple their own armies to claim some weird moral high ground about playing on "hard mode" are the ultimate competitive players (unlike those Tau sociopaths). So for this "hard mode" to exist the game has to be unbalanced. A balanced game wouldn't give Ailaros his self-congratulatory "hard mode" rants, so balance must be evil.

That is objectively NOT balance. Go play Starcraft II. Then come back to 40K. It's vomit-inducing.

 Bottle wrote:
The goal of tournament games is: to win, to be a test of skill.

While this might be true in theory, it's a long way from absolute truth where 40K is concerned.

I know quite a few tournament players who enter tournament not because they play hardcore and just want to win, but simply because it's an easy way to get in a solid weekend of gaming against varied opponents.

Particularly in areas where Comp scoring is still in use, what a lack of balance does then is discourage variety, and by extension discourage those more casual players from entering tournaments.

1. Tournament players will choose the best units available for their army.

Only true in a non-Comp environment, and assuming the tournament player is buying his army specifically for the tournament, rather than just using what he has.

2. Friendly players will choose the units they like the most.

Not always, no. My casual lists are made up of a mix of stuff I want to particularly like, stuff that I have because it was collected cheap somewhere along the way, and stuff that I just want to try out for something different. And how powerful a list I make up out of it will depend on who I am playing against. '

Playing friendly games doesn't mean not playing to win. It's a game where someone is supposed to win.

Perfect balance between all the armies would be nice, (although it is probably near impossible.) But it is not actually needed for tournament play. Why? Because we are free to choose to bring any army to a tournament. If you think Taudar is the best, then... Bring Taudar to the tournament!

With the end result being that the top players all bring Taudar, everyone gets extremely bored with always playing against Taudar armies, and tournament attendance plummets.


We saw this in practice at the end of last edition when Grey Knights were released.

But if you have agreed with my assumptions at the start, you'd know that fun is not an intrinsic part. There goal is to test the skill of the player (and while that can be enjoyable, I'm going to arbitrarily say it is distinct from "fun", (e.g I don't think tennis players at Wimbledon have "fun" during their games, but no doubt enjoy taking part.)

Tennis players at Wimbledon are making (or aiming to, anyway) serious money from their occupation. 'Competitive' 40K players are doing it for fun. There's not really any other reason to do it, since 40K tournies rarely pay any sort of significant cash prize, and sponsorship isn't really much of the thing. The divide between professional sport and 40K tournies is so wide that they can't even see each other on the opposite sides of it.


Army balance has everything to do with tournament 40K.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ailaros wrote:
Well, but if every unit were exactly correctly priced, pointswise, then this would mean that every army, regardless of what units were in it, would be exactly as strong as each other.

That would be ideal, yes. In much the same way that a battleship in monopoly is exactly as 'strong' as the shoe.

A game should be an even contest, unless the players specifically agree to impose a handicap on one side or the other.

This means that there aren't real differences between armies, but it would merely be a difference between the number of minis that a player wanted to put down, and what those minis looked like.

It would mean nothing of the sort. An assault army would still play differently to a shooty army. They would achieve their objectives using different strategies... they would just have a reasonably even chance of actually achieving those objectives.

Do you want a game where you show up with your list, and your opponent shows up with theirs, and they're equally powerful in general, but your stuff just won't win against his stuff because your combination is bad against his combination?

That would pretty much be the exact opposite of the above situation. But is, in fact, exactly the situation 40K is in now. Moreso with the addition of Superheavies to the standard game.

 Bottle wrote:


The goal of tournament games is: to win, to be a test of skill.

The goal of friendly games is: to have fun.

Therefore when list building, there is a difference between the two styles of play:

1. Tournament players will choose the best units available for their army.
2. Friendly players will choose the units they like the most.

That doesn't make sense.

If tournament games were about being "a test of skill", tournament players would always choose the worst units available for their army.

That way, the impact of skill to the final result is maximized.

If a tournament player chooses the best units in a Codex, he can never know if a given victory was due to his skills, or due to his selection of units, turning the idea of tournaments into a "test of skill" ad absurdum.

 Zweischneid wrote:
If a tournament player chooses the best units in a Codex, he can never know if a given victory was due to his skills, or due to his selection of units, turning the idea of tournaments into a "test of skill" ad absurdum.

List building is a skill.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
If a tournament player chooses the best units in a Codex, he can never know if a given victory was due to his skills, or due to his selection of units, turning the idea of tournaments into a "test of skill" ad absurdum.

List building is a skill.

If you say so.

List building is also fun. So imbalances between units and Codexes might simply be a contribution to the casual enjoyment of the game.

 Zweischneid wrote:
So imbalances between units and Codexes might simply be a contribution to the casual enjoyment of the game.

In theory maybe, if the imbalances are subtle. But in a game like 40k, where the imbalances are obvious to anyone who spends a few minutes looking at a codex, it doesn't really add much enjoyment. But it's much better if the game is balanced, since decisions in a balanced game are much more interesting and more difficult to make.