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40k is horribly imbalanced.
The only way to balance the game would be to completely overhaul it to the point where it wouldn't be 40k anymore. Which, I believe is why no one that plays 40k actually wants a balanced game. It would change to much. Specifically, the game mechanics that make it fluffy would be radically altered.

What people sound like they want from the game is this -

From Wikipedia
Eurogame
A class of tabletop games that generally have indirect player interaction and abstract physical components. Such games emphasize strategy, downplay luck and conflict, lean towards economic rather than military themes, and usually keep all the players in the game until it ends.

Games made for everyone
While many titles (especially the strategically heavier ones) are enthusiastically played by gamers as a hobby, Eurogames are, for the most part, well suited to social play.
Playing time varies from a half-hour to a few hours, with one to two hours being typical. In contrast to games such as Risk or Monopoly, in which a close game can extend indefinitely, Eurogames usually have a mechanism to stop the game within its stated playing time. Common mechanisms include a pre-determined winning score, a set number of game turns, or depletion of limited game resources. For example, Ra and Carcassonne have limited tiles to exhaust.

No player elimination
Another prominent characteristic of these games is the lack of player elimination.
Eliminating players before the end of the game is seen as contrary to the social aspect of such games. Most of these games are designed to keep all players in the game as long as possible, so it is rare to be certain of victory or defeat until relatively late in the game.
Some of the mechanics, like hidden scoring or scoring at the end of the game, are also designed around this avoidance of player elimination.
Balancing mechanisms are often integrated into the rules, giving slight advantages to lagging players and slight hindrances to the leaders. This helps to keep the game competitive to the very end.

International audience
These games are designed for international audiences, so they are not word games and usually do not contain much text outside of the rules. Game components often use symbols and icons instead of words, reducing the amount of text to be translated between localized editions. Gameplay also tends to de-emphasize or entirely exclude verbal communication as a game element, with many games being fully playable if all players know the rules, even if they do not speak a common language.

Game mechanics
A wide variety of often innovative mechanisms or mechanics are used, and familiar mechanics like rolling dice and moving, capture, or trick taking are avoided.
If a game has a board, the board is usually irregular rather than uniform or symmetric (like Risk rather than chess or Scrabble); the board is often random (like The Settlers of Catan) or has random elements (like Tikal).
Some boards are merely mnemonic or organizational and contribute only to ease of play, like a cribbage board; examples of this include Puerto Rico and Princes of Florence.
Random elements are often present, but do not usually dominate the game. While rules are light to moderate, they allow depth of play, usually requiring thought, planning, and a shift of tactics through the game and often with a chess- or backgammon-like opening game, middle game, and end game.

So really some key points here on balanced game design are:

Competitive & Strategic heavy but also, for the most part, well suited to social play.
Half-hour to a few hours, with one to two hours being typical.
Have a mechanism to stop the game within its stated playing time.
Simple Rules - do not contain much text outside of the rules. - Game components often use symbols and icons instead of words,
A wide variety of often innovative mechanisms or mechanics are used, and familiar mechanics like rolling dice and moving, capture, or trick taking are avoided.
If a game has a board, the board is usually irregular rather than uniform or symmetric (like Risk rather than chess or Scrabble); the board is often random (like The Settlers of Catan) or has random elements (like Tikal).
Random elements are often present, but do not usually dominate the game.
While rules are light to moderate, they allow depth of play, usually requiring thought, planning, and a shift of tactics through the game

Are these elements that people would want to see in 40k? I would say yes and no.

Yes because they should lend to a fun experience for everyone and to improved competitive play.
No because to implement these every army would need to be roughly equal to one another in terms of Unit types, unit costing, unit firepower, unit melee power, unit survivability, special abilities, psychic powers etc... And of course if everyone is roughly the same but just have different models then the fluff is completely destroyed.

If you want a balanced game where regardless of what army you play and whom you're playing, everyone can compete and have a good time, would you be willing to see every army become similar in terms underlying mechanics?
Would you be willing to accept radical unit point re-costing that takes into account firepower, movement, CC ability, special abilities, weapons, survivability etc?

By underlying mechanics - every troop choice in every army is roughly the same and have slight advantages and disadvantages over one another so that when 2 troop choices of a similar type face off there's an equal chance that either could win. Same for Fast Attack, Elite, etc...
---Of course this would mean that the unit categories may need to be changed to more defined roles, ex.
Tactical HQ (tactical being defensive minded or well rounded)
Assault HQ
Support HQ

Tactical Elite
Assault Elite
Support Elite

Tactical Troop
Assault Troop
Support Troop

etc...

Do you really want balance?

As happens every single time the word 'balance' comes up the short answer is "it depends on what you mean by 'balance'."

If you want to go dig into technical meanings of 'game balance' you're getting into odd abstract questions that don't have any bearing on reality.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In more detail:

You're making a pretty immense logical leap here. Eurogames have certain properties and Eurogames are generally considered well-balanced, but those properties aren't in any way essential to a well-balanced game and don't actually translate outside of a boardgame. On top of all this every property you've described is tangential to 'balance'; you've quoted passages describing stylistic decisions, visual design elements, and things that are irrelevant to a game designed for one-on-one matchups and not played on a board.

Naaris wrote:

Are these elements that people would want to see in 40k? I would say yes and no.

Yes because they should lend to a fun experience for everyone and to improved competitive play.
No because to implement these every army would need to be roughly equal to one another in terms of Unit types, unit costing, unit firepower, unit melee power, unit survivability, special abilities, psychic powers etc... And of course if everyone is roughly the same but just have different models then the fluff is completely destroyed.

If you want a balanced game where regardless of what army you play and whom you're playing, everyone can compete and have a good time, would you be willing to see every army become similar in terms underlying mechanics?

This is the bit that's most wrong. Symmetry (different units working the same way) is not balance (minimizing the impact of the initial conditions of the game on the outcome). Balance can be produced by symmetry, and some of the best and longest-lasting games around are very symmetrical (chess, for instance), but symmetry is not a necessary component of balance. Starcraft and Warmachine are both good examples of games that are fairly well-balanced and almost completely asymmetrical.

Would you be willing to accept radical unit point re-costing that takes into account firepower, movement, CC ability, special abilities, weapons, survivability etc?

This statement is nigh-pointless in a vacuum. Everyone's willing to accept rewriting points values. Nobody can agree on how to do it. Explain what you actually want to do with points values.

By underlying mechanics - every troop choice in every army is roughly the same and have slight advantages and disadvantages over one another so that when 2 troop choices of a similar type face off there's an equal chance that either could win. Same for Fast Attack, Elite, etc...
---Of course this would mean that the unit categories may need to be changed to more defined roles, ex.
Tactical HQ (tactical being defensive minded or well rounded)
Assault HQ
Support HQ

Tactical Elite
Assault Elite
Support Elite

Tactical Troop
Assault Troop
Support Troop

etc...

Do you really want balance?

We all want balance. None of us want balance acheived lazily. Making everything work the same way would make the game more balanced and more boring; Age of Sigmar and D&D 4th both tried this, and both were incredibly divisive revisions that sent large chunks of the player base packing.

40k is not a host of mechanics inherently. You could burn the game to the ground and start fresh with a complete overhaul of the game and build something smoother, more intuitive, faster to play, and much more fun.

What makes it 40k is the iconic setting and the iconic units. With better designed mechanics you can help build the setting into the core of the game.

Balance isn't impossible. It just needs to be actively cultivated.

This guy put an awful lot of work into thinking about game balance.
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/subtractive-design
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/game-balance-and-yomi
What could be a good start is what can we take away (subtractive design) and it still be 40k?
We all see it as having some history bloat.
So rather than add, what would we remove?

Some suggestions:
- Remove random charge distance.
- Remove warlord abilities
- Remove random psychic abilities, just keep the default one.
- Remove formations (I can hear the torches being lit and forks being taken up).
- Remove allies.
- Remove snap-fire.
- Remove reaction fire.
- Remove Jink.
- Hahaha... remove AP!
- Remove terrain purchase with army selection.
- Remove steal initiative.
- Remove movement on shooting phase.
- Remove all movement on assault phase other than for assaults.

What could you do to strip the game down to the bare bones and still be 40k??

Nobody expects perfect balance. No game has perfect balance. At the same time, 40k is so broken that its unplayable without house rules and self restrictions.

Other games manage reasonsble balance and flavor fine. 40k doesnt even try. That doesnt mean it is impossible.

There is nothing special about 40k that it couldn't be balanced, or lose some sort of appeal by being balanced better. There's nothing flavourful about poor balance.

Don't make excuses for poor game design and lack of effort. Simply an overhaul of the points alone would fix many problems, and yet more by removing broken abilities and tweaking the allies rules. Nothing about those changes would alter the core feeling of 40k and yet it would be a dramatic improvement.

 Talizvar wrote:
This guy put an awful lot of work into thinking about game balance.
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/subtractive-design
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/game-balance-and-yomi
What could be a good start is what can we take away (subtractive design) and it still be 40k?
We all see it as having some history bloat.
So rather than add, what would we remove?

Some suggestions:
- Remove random charge distance.
- Remove warlord abilities
- Remove random psychic abilities, just keep the default one.
- Remove formations (I can hear the torches being lit and forks being taken up).
- Remove allies.
- Remove snap-fire.
- Remove reaction fire.
- Remove Jink.
- Hahaha... remove AP!
- Remove terrain purchase with army selection.
- Remove steal initiative.
- Remove movement on shooting phase.
- Remove all movement on assault phase other than for assaults.

What could you do to strip the game down to the bare bones and still be 40k??

I actually like a lot of these ideas

Though if you didn't want to get pitchforked with the removal of formations, you could go the opposite way and remove the FOC, CAD, and all non-formation detachments completely and just make everything formations (which could allow for further development of unit roles, e.g. "same unit but different point cost and rules depending on its role in a formation").

Either way, I'd just like to echo what the others have said in this thread:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Nobody expects perfect balance. No game has perfect balance. At the same time, 40k is so broken that its unplayable without house rules and self restrictions.

Other games manage reasonsble balance and flavor fine. 40k doesnt even try. That doesnt mean it is impossible.

This topic is Dakka's own version of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

 Crimson Devil wrote:
This topic is Dakka's own version of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Darn, I had some quote somewhere that boils down to: "Just because something may be impossible to achieve that is worth doing, should not discourage you from the process of the attempt.".
The Sirlin links explore many systematic methods of getting balance without ruining a game and how to deal with a high degree of complexity.
I think there are a huge number of things that can be removed to improve the game which would not be a bad starting point.
The lore of 40k is vast so they can still continue with expanding units without needing special snowflake rules for each new unit: I think many special rules cover that ok (which can still use a trim).
We tend to be excited enough just seeing the models which is what they claim they are focused on: Genestealer cult, IK:Chaos, Deathwatch, Custodes, Sisters of Silence to name a few.

I think the main issue is the circular logic of how unit points cost may be loosely based on it's capabilities, if you change or remove special rules or change the usefulness of certain stat-lines the points value should reflect that.
I know Battletech is an incredibly complex game with each mech having a ton of stats, they made a formula to condense all that to a simpler game in Alphastrike.
A guy posted an excel sheet to convert here, notice the HUGE list of stuff in the "data" tab. http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=46879.0
GW did make some custom vehicle design rules a long time ago which showed a system could be made: https://spikeybits.com/2016/07/40k-flashback-vehicle-design-rules-retro.html
I know I made an excel sheet for that a long time ago... will have to see where that went.
What is good with developing an algorithm is at least there would be a consistent at least baseline means of points assignment.
I am getting a bit sick of how multiple armies have their own spin on the humble Rhino for instance.

I know a few folk at Dakka have taken a stab at it.
The problem is: do you remove/change specific rules of the game, then changing points assignments based on those changes? OR change the points based on how the rules stand now and look for better balance?

I think the "best" means of approaching it is assign each special rule or game rule a "multiplier or weight value" which can then be updated as rules change and then universally changes the points value for all the affected units. That is the only logical way I can see of approaching it and allowing all that hard work to not be undone.

What I want to know in order for something like this to get started is where someone who has compiled all the units with their stats and potential upgrades?
I know when I was fussing with the points balancing I kept the Actual units costing with it to compare against, you knew you were getting close when "reasonable" units matched in points and the OP units started climbing in points.

Anyway, it IS a topic of interest but really only can be resolved with GW putting in the effort OR someone creates a system that is so insanely reasonable everyone wants to adopt it by default.
A "set" formula is the only way I can see this being achievable without GW backing.
All that would be contained within army-building software at least.

It's not impossible, just it requires A) GW to acknowledge the games are the big thing, not the models, and therefore focus on balance and playtesting beyond just "Hey this sounds cool, let's roll with it and see where it takes us", and B) The playerbase to not demand a game that caters to everything and is willing to give up something.

There are games much more varied than 40k that at least strive for balance.

As other people have mentioned, 40K is nothing special with regards to lack of balance. It "could" be balanced. There are mathematical ways of doing so. While it may have changed, GW have admitted in the past that they do not use math to create the point values for units. In one old White Dwarf they were discussing the (at the time) new Ork Warbuggy. They said they played five games and came to an agreement on what they felt the vehicle was worth.

The overwhelming factor which is simple: Games Workshop is here to sell models, lots of models. Game design is secondary at most. While there may be some goodhearted fellas at GW designing units/games, etc. it's obvious that the budget/time/manpower is not aimed at creating a brilliant set of game rules. As much as I have enjoyed GW products in the past, I'd argue that absolutely none of them were brilliantly made - even my favourites.

GW needs to make sure they have just enough of a rule set to continue selling loads of plastic models to people. Even if those people just invest $200-300 before bailing on the idea/genre, GW wants that small bit o' honey. I don't fault them for that. GW has rolled from bankrupt gamer-friendly to business-driven entity over the past 15-20 years.

TLDR: Could you balance 40K? Yes. Will GW put forth effort to do so? No.

 Elbows wrote:
As other people have mentioned, 40K is nothing special with regards to lack of balance. It "could" be balanced. There are mathematical ways of doing so. While it may have changed, GW have admitted in the past that they do not use math to create the point values for units. In one old White Dwarf they were discussing the (at the time) new Ork Warbuggy. They said they played five games and came to an agreement on what they felt the vehicle was worth.

This is actually fine. Using math doesn't really work well in a complex game like 40k, it would take an immense amount of effort to come up with a system that accounts for everything and gives an accurate point cost. The actual way to figure out point costs is to make a guess based on experience and then refine the guess through iterative playtesting until you get a final answer. The only problem here is that, where companies like WOTC will spend months on extensive playtesting, GW only played five games and never went back to playtest their guess at the point cost after the first five.

There's also just a plethora of things that everyone can see is broken or over/undercosted as soon as they see it, stuff that is just obviously wrong even without playtesting, often through multiple codex iterations. These are the truly inexcusable things.

Stuff like Scatterbikes, Hydra Flak Tanks, sub 300pt Wraithknights, Necron Wraiths, Ogryn, Skyhammer, Vespid, etc.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
As other people have mentioned, 40K is nothing special with regards to lack of balance. It "could" be balanced. There are mathematical ways of doing so. While it may have changed, GW have admitted in the past that they do not use math to create the point values for units. In one old White Dwarf they were discussing the (at the time) new Ork Warbuggy. They said they played five games and came to an agreement on what they felt the vehicle was worth.

This is actually fine. Using math doesn't really work well in a complex game like 40k, it would take an immense amount of effort to come up with a system that accounts for everything and gives an accurate point cost. The actual way to figure out point costs is to make a guess based on experience and then refine the guess through iterative playtesting until you get a final answer. The only problem here is that, where companies like WOTC will spend months on extensive playtesting, GW only played five games and never went back to playtest their guess at the point cost after the first five.

It would take an considerable amount of effort and money, luckily, GW has the resources to do so. GW should be at the vanguard and use stats and math to make a better more balanced game. Would it be perfect ? Of course not, but it would be a lot better than the pos we have now. It would bring up more sales too imo.