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Hi folks,

There's always a lot of talk on the internets about which army beats which and broken units or net lists. All other factors being equal, then sure, eldar are a bit OP and tyranids are a lower tier codex.

All other factors aren't equal though. The experience, knowledge and talent of the players, both in during the game and list-building process have a much greater influence over a win/lose result than just saying 'this codex beats that codex'. Pure luck is often the deciding factor in a game, and even the models that are available (and therefore time and money) can have an effect.

Rather than 'this army beats that army', shouldn't the real focus be 'this player beats that player'? Why isn't there more focus on becoming a better player?

I often play against a younger guy who has years more experience, devotes more time and money to the hobby and, above all, is simply a better player. He has a talent for analysing an army, a situation, and quickly crunching the relevant numbers. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and codexes. Playing against him is always fun, and I usually learn something in the process, but I can confidently say that the codex he plays from is close to irrelevant in determining the outcome of the game.

Is there a tendency to try to blame any factor except ourselves when we lose? If I get pasted and then discuss the game against a superior player, they will usually point out things I did wrong rather than units I should(n't) have used. If I'm beating someone, I can usually see the mistakes they're making as they make them rather than just knowing their list was 'bad'. Quite often, the list is good, but they don't understand what to do with it in during the specifics of the game.

I'm far, far away from being a perfect player, and I make mistakes that decide the game all the time!

If all players were equal, I could understand this 'top tier' way of thinking, but otherwise I'm not sure how useful it is at all.

Well, that's my blah. Any thoughts?

Unless you particularly enjoy mirror matches, it of course matters.

I see where you are coming from and usually after friendly games we tell eachother what we thought the other could have done differntley. Sometimes during the games too we will stop a friend and say you could do that or you could do this instead which is riskier or this which may have been something they overlooked. My group doesn't really care about winning we just like the game and have fun hangingout. I feel that dakka is often more focused on the competitive scene and what mathhammers out more efficiently which is what some people like more. Some people only want to play tourney or play the most efficient so they have to pay less for more toys. I do agree though that player and tactics are the most important factor, but even that can be foiled by the dice gods.

The game is not mostly luck if you're talking about two typical tac lists walking into a flgs and fuming it out. Better general will win that 8-9/10 times. Decrease that by 1-2 if the opponent has a broken codex (or is at least making use of the specific units that are considered broken,) and increase by the same if the better general has one instead.

When you start incorporating "edge" lists, such as armor spam, or heavy flyers, a lot of other spam lists etc, you start opening up the game result to a lot more luck. Not DURING the game, but rather what list your opponent decided to blindly bring. If you run heavy armor spam and your opponent decides he wants to play dark lance-heavy dark eldar, you're pretty boned.
This luck factor translates over to tournaments as well in the random matchups.

So in answer. Are army lists important? Yes. Do two tac lists go into the game knowing the result? Typically no. It would have to be a hilarious game imbalance situation for that. Do edge lists make the game a lot more paper rock scissor-y? Yes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

niv-mizzet wrote:
The game is not mostly luck if you're talking about two typical tac lists walking into a flgs and duking it out. Better general will win that 8-9/10 times. Decrease that by 1-2 if the opponent has a broken codex (or is at least making use of the specific units that are considered broken,) and increase by the same if the better general has one instead.

When you start incorporating "edge" lists, such as armor spam, or heavy flyers, a lot of other spam lists etc, you start opening up the game result to a lot more luck. Not DURING the game, but rather what list your opponent decided to blindly bring. If you run heavy armor spam and your opponent decides he wants to play dark lance-heavy dark eldar, you're pretty boned.
This luck factor translates over to tournaments as well in the random matchups.

So in answer. Are army lists important? Yes. Do two tac lists go into the game knowing the result? Typically no. It would have to be a hilarious game imbalance situation for that. Do edge lists make the game a lot more paper rock scissor-y? Yes.

Army lists are very important in 7th. Arguably more so than experience and player skill (at least in some cases).

Here's how I look at it. Player experience, skill, knowledge etc. lets you make the right choices. However, it's your army and list that give you your options and determine what your choices actually are.

As a very simply example, your knowledge, number-crunching or whatever may tell you that meltas are your best bet for killing a particular target. However, if your list doesn't include any meltas, then that option simply isn't available to you.

Then you have cases where one army is a perfect or near-perfect counter to another army. For example, if you're playing all-Coven or Coven-heavy DE, then you're pretty screwed if your opponent is using GKs. Your army is supposed to be resilient by having high-toughness, multiple wounds and FNP - but all of those are effortlessly countered by GKs with Force weapons (and, where needed, Hammerhand). In addition, Coven units have negligible shooting - so you'll struggle to even soften him up, let alone win any kind of shooting match. Even with good tactics, that's a colossal handicap you're starting with.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to say that tactics or experience are worthless. If you're fortunate enough to be playing a relatively balanced game, then they'll certainly come into effect. However, 40k today is very much rock-paper-scissors - with many lists being hard-counters to others. And, in many such cases, good tactics simply aren't enough because you're too heavily constrained by the limits of your (or your opponent's) list. If you see what I mean.

There's one other simpler point. This is the Internet and I don't know you. I don't know if you stick your Warlord out in the middle of an open field and rush forward with walking Dreadnaughts or try to Assault a Daemon Prince with a Chaplain. I don't have the first clue how another player plays the game or what their skill level is and short of playing against them I will never know. So we talk about lists and numbers and things that don't have the human error or variable because we don't have the information about the actual person playing the game.

 pocketcanoe wrote:
Hi folks,
The experience, knowledge and talent of the players, both in during the game and list-building process have a much greater influence over a win/lose result than just saying 'this codex beats that codex'.

This is true the vast, VAST majority of the time. When you make a proper TAC list, there are tons of choices to make the impact your future possibly gameplay. Using my Chaos Marines as an example, if I want 2 troops for holding objectives then I have 2 choices. I can take cultists or Chaos Marines (or cult marines, but let's keep this simple). It seems like a simple choice, but it has far ranging implications for my entire game play. If I take cultists, then I'm floot slogging, but I can spend 150 points on something like 35 bodies. That means I'm slow, but for 300 points I can have 70 cultists. If I spend 100 points more for a helbrute I can take a dataslate and have 70 fearless cultists. Or for 300 points I can take 9 marines and a sorcerer in a Rhino complete with upgrades. To me, that choice isn't about the meaningless term of which one is more "powerful", but the more specific and useful to acheive my goal of winning the game. This first choice will impact my future terrain placement (I use the back and forth, random amount of terrain in each 2x2 square), as well as where am I going to be putting my objectives. Also, what else am I going to include in my list to compliment the strengths or make up for the shortfalls of my choice of troop?

 pocketcanoe wrote:

Pure luck is often the deciding factor in a game

If "Pure luck" is the deciding factor in your games, then both you and your opponent are playing wrong. With the amount of choices you get to make every turn, it's not about hoping you get lucky, it's about maneuvering your forces to be in position to take advantage of fortunate situations. Now, are there games where the dice will just crap on you all day? Sure. No matter how good you are, once and a while if you are playing against someone with even a basic understanding of the game, you will get diced. You will not win that game, but it can still be a close one, because you'll make the choices that put you in the best position to take advantage of circumstances.

More likely, if you think that "pure luck" decided your game then you missed quite a few things. My last game, I was failing all my to hits, all my armour saves and all my look out sirs. But I maneuvered with precision and withdrew when I knew I couldn't win. I slowly pulled both our armies into a favourable position for me and in spite of terrible luck up to that point, did all I could to give myself the advantage. So when my luck finally turned and I rolled one good assault attack, I was in a position to take advantage and swing the game around. My opponant, who had everything go right up until this point, had to throw away way too much of his force to keep me from winning the massibve assault battle on his turn and having the run on the table on mine. Then he finaly had one bad roll and failed a charge, leaving a squad of termies in the open and surrounded. Was "pure luck" the deciding factor? My opponent might have thought so, since it seemed my luck turned at exactly the right time, while I know that I was just waiting, moving around until I could capitalize on good fortune.

 pocketcanoe wrote:

Rather than 'this army beats that army', shouldn't the real focus be 'this player beats that player'? Why isn't there more focus on becoming a better player?

That's a personal preference. It's my personal preference, but if two people want to both cheese it up and have fun that way then, since they're both having fun, they're just as correct in how they're playing the game.

 pocketcanoe wrote:

I often play against a younger guy who has years more experience, devotes more time and money to the hobby and, above all, is simply a better player. He has a talent for analysing an army, a situation, and quickly crunching the relevant numbers. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and codexes. Playing against him is always fun, and I usually learn something in the process, but I can confidently say that the codex he plays from is close to irrelevant in determining the outcome of the game.

Is there a tendency to try to blame any factor except ourselves when we lose? If I get pasted and then discuss the game against a superior player, they will usually point out things I did wrong rather than units I should(n't) have used. If I'm beating someone, I can usually see the mistakes they're making as they make them rather than just knowing their list was 'bad'. Quite often, the list is good, but they don't understand what to do with it in during the specifics of the game.

There you go. I will very rarely blame luck. Actually, I can only say there are two games in recallable memory where I actually lost because of luck. In every game there is both good and bad luck. But far more often than not and whether you see it or not, a mistake you made, or a chance you didn't take or a move you didn't see, etc.. was far more to blame for a loss than even a whole game's worth of bad rolls. On the flip side, and this could be me being fortunate to not have people show up to a 1000 point game with a titan, I can only remember losing one game just to the other person's choice of list.

I think luck plays a bigger role than you think, particularly between evenly matched opponents.

There is definitely a cognitive bias in 40k for winners to feel that they played well and losers to blame bad luck.

Blaming luck seems like such a cop-out when you lose, but maybe there's skill in knowing when there really wasn't anything you could do.

I think Pocketcanoe is taking a big step in the right direction towards becoming a better player overall. I have played various competitive games at all levels of play, and the one common thing I found, is to remove variation and create redundancy. The best armies do this, they spam units, and use twin-linked weapons. The luck factor in this game is about as big as a luck factor in other games. Sometimes you don't draw the right card that you need, or sometimes you didn't have a ball bounce your way. I have learned to stop blaming luck for any outcomes and focused instead on the factors that I could control. List building, Meta-analyzing, movement, predictions, and so on.

The "this codex beats that codex" argument is simply the worst cop out excuse ever. What would you prefer? One codex to dominate all the others? Or would you prefer every codex to be exactly the same? Rock-Paper-Scissors is the sign of a healthy game because it creates variety, and gives different players with different play-styles room to have fun and be competitive. The biggest problem with 40k is when one player buys a "rock" army they now have to drop several hundred dollars on a "scissors" army just because "paper" got a new toy that everyone loves, in order to win or at least stay competitive. This is easy to do in other games with lower investment costs and I feel is the root of the problem with most of the destructive mentalities found in sub-par 40k players.

 hyozanman wrote:
The "this codex beats that codex" argument is simply the worst cop out excuse ever. What would you prefer? One codex to dominate all the others? Or would you prefer every codex to be exactly the same? Rock-Paper-Scissors is the sign of a healthy game because it creates variety, and gives different players with different play-styles room to have fun and be competitive. The biggest problem with 40k is when one player buys a "rock" army they now have to drop several hundred dollars on a "scissors" army just because "paper" got a new toy that everyone loves, in order to win or at least stay competitive.

Ok, for a start, you seem to be contradicting yourself. You start by saying that rock-paper-scissors is the sign of a healthy game... and then say that it's one of the biggest problems with 40k.

Second, no, it isn't a sign of a healthy game. How could it be? Rock-paper-scissors is a game with no tactics to speak of. And, you think this is something 40k should be copying? Because, that's exactly what you end up with - games of 40k where tactics are basically irrelevant and you could just call them from the moment armies are deployed.

Furthermore, why would lessening rock-paper-scissors require that all armies be the same? This is one of those really stupid arguments that always comes into balance discussions, with no justification whatsoever. All it requires is some actual effort on the part of the game designers. e.g in order to avoid rock-paper-scissors games, don't let players build lists using nothing but rocks. Whether or not you think IKs are overpowered, having armies comprised entirely of models that are outright immune to small-arms fire is a terrible idea. Same goes for Unbound and other multiple-detachments or formations that let payers spam units. Similarly, don't make units that are either flat-out immune or virtually immune to many weapons. Vehicles were already a problem in terms of being immune to small-arms fire, but now we also have fliers and FMCs - who happily ignore ~84% of incoming ground fire.

This sort of thing does not create a healthy game environment. Maybe online, if you're playing Starfraft or something and can change strategies and units at the drop of a hat. But, for an expensive, collectable game it's a death-knell.

ofcourse luck plays a part, but capitalizing on luck or mitigating bad luck is a much larger aspect (like kungfujew said).

 pocketcanoe wrote:
Blaming luck seems like such a cop-out when you lose, but maybe there's skill in knowing when there really wasn't anything you could do.

Yeah, for the most part, I've never held with blaming luck.There are some things I will blame, like the aforementioned bad-matchups (and for a win as much as for a loss), but I really hate blaming luck.

Often, what I see from people blaming luck, is either bad tactics on their part or an inability to accept that there is a '1' on dice (I'm sure at least some of you have met players who think they can plonk a unit of terminators in the middle of the enemy army and not lose a single model). Or, to put it another way, thinking that the average is what *must* happen every time.

I find that good tactics can diminish the effects of luck. E.g. not relying on a single unit to kill an enemy vehicle and instead making sure that you have other units to shoot it as well if the main unit fluffs its rolls.

The only things I will allow myself to blame on luck is things which are entirely random and which can't realistically be defended against. e.g. losing a psyker to the random Daemon table really can't be described as 'bad tactics' on your part.

I'm not the best at writing lists, partly because of the fact I can't get new units easily. While I am not a tactical genius like the real Creed, I'm not a bad player.
I win about 50% of the games I play, but I feel like I could win a lot more with the best units. Usually I end up bringing everything I have to the store, making a list I know is terrible (I use rough riders 4 de lolz) and have some fun removing tons of models from both sides.