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Here's a question that I'm wondering about:

People love to complain about Warhammer 40k and how imbalanced it is. Because it is. It's a horribly imbalanced game with a truly disgusting capacity to build armies that other armies, even if reasonably built, simply cannot deal with. It lends itself to some very unfair games.

I don't think that many people will disagree with me on this point.

That said:

How many of your games are actually imbalanced or unfair? For example: how often do you find yourself in games that involve Ork Trukk spam vs. Eldar scatbike spam?

How often do you find yourself in games that involve unbound assault marine armies facing off against flyrant spam?

Do you find that most of the games that you actually play are basically even? Or basically uneven?

Provide examples.

No. My armies are always 100% perpendicular.

Typo noted and corrected.



Edit:

Power + level = parallel.

Apparently.

There's an important distinction between fair factions and fair lists. Like Eldar are my favorite to bring, but I intentionally down-power significantly them if I know I'm playing a weaker army.

HuskyWarhammer wrote:
There's an important distinction between fair factions and fair lists. Like Eldar are my favorite to bring, but I intentionally down-power significantly them if I know I'm playing a weaker army.

I meant "fair lists."

Imho, there's no such thing as a game of warhammer 40k that are "whole faction against whole faction."

Factions don't exist on the gaming table.

Particular armies do.

Example:

My most frequent opponent is a tyranids player who brings a single flyrant.

I bring a missile launcher/sternguard heavy crimson fists gunline.

To answer the corrected question: most of my games involve very unequal armies, which is a major reason why I play so rarely now. While playing the exact same list for every game most of them are either one-sided massacres in my favor or crushing defeats where I lose the game as soon as the ink is dry on my opponent's army list.

I try to match what my opponent brings, power-wise. I'll have a chat beforehand and try to gauge what that will be so we can have an interesting game.

I'm not interested in massacring people unless they're going full-on competitive, in which case the gloves are off! It's not usually what I'm looking for though.

I don't play in tournaments and the games are pre-arranged - we know roughly what each of us is going to bring, so most of the games are evenly matched and fun. I'm a fan of tailoring lists beforehand. For example, if i know that the enemy is going to bring a psy deathstar, i take my msu trukklist with bully boyz. If i know he's going to bring a mediocre ig platoon, i put away my lobbas and trukks and go with footslogging boyz and grots.

On the other hand, there are occasions where i have no info on what the enemy's going to bring. And this games are hit or miss.

 Traditio wrote:

HuskyWarhammer wrote:
There's an important distinction between fair factions and fair lists. Like Eldar are my favorite to bring, but I intentionally down-power significantly them if I know I'm playing a weaker army.

I meant "fair lists."

Imho, there's no such thing as a game of warhammer 40k that are "whole faction against whole faction."

Factions don't exist on the gaming table.

Particular armies do.

Example:

My most frequent opponent is a tyranids player who brings a single flyrant.

I bring a missile launcher/sternguard heavy crimson fists gunline.

No wonder you complain about tyranids so much

It always seems I am bringing a knife to a gun fight, but I purposely try to avoid the arms race 40K and many other games tend to induce among players.

That said, I seem to best with my Tau army, the faction simply plays to my strength - gunlines - I guess.

I play a wide range of power levels depending on who I'm playing against

Very rare to see a significant power disparity.

 Stormonu wrote:
It always seems I am bringing a knife to a gun fight, but I purposely try to avoid the arms race 40K and many other games tend to induce among players.

That said, I seem to best with my Tau army, the faction simply plays to my strength - gunlines - I guess.

You seem to best what with your Tau army?

Do you find that your most even games happen when you use Tau?

Do you find that you win the most often when you use the Tau?

I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I try to match what my opponent brings, power-wise. I'll have a chat beforehand and try to gauge what that will be so we can have an interesting game.

I'm not interested in massacring people unless they're going full-on competitive, in which case the gloves are off! It's not usually what I'm looking for though.

What kinds of army or armies do you normally field? What about your opponents?

We play weekly and do not tell the other players what exactly we will play. Most of us have several armies so it is not even clear if we play against Marines, Deamons, Dark Eldar or Sisters. I think there is no army we do not play except Deathwatch.

We do not use flyers or gargantuan/superheavy that often. So most of the time it is a very fair matchup. My friends do not play 40k as long as I do, so I am a bit of the better player. That way I'll manage to win with lower tier armies like sisters, Blood Angels or CSM (Codex-only). When using Tau I am not fielding/spam the real beasts. It works pretty well. That said, we will never tell someone to not use their models/army.

Of course sometimes you get tabled because of tactical fails or bad dices. But usually it is really a fun game and who will win is not clear till 5th or even 7th turn.

I generally try to find out what army my opponent will be using and go from there, if my buddy is using his Guard, well then I'm not going to run my hardest list against it. But if he's bringing his Decurion Necrons, like he did this week, then I will bring a cheesy list too.

If you talk to your opponent before hand it's easy enough to try and match up and bring things to a level playing field.

This isn't always possible though is it. Sometimes you go to a club or a FLGS for a pick up game and you come up against an unexpected list. How do you plan for that?

If there's no balance I have no interest, which is why i don't play GW games if I can help it.

In normal games? Pretty level but in current campaign that we're playing the differences between certain armies is really significant, like when our Nid player faces off against a Fist of Medusa/Clan Raukaan combo, he gets wrecked every, single time.

Most games at my local shop are fairly even, usually by semi-deliberate design. While we frown on list-versus-list tailoring, nobody's averse to making compromises based on factions. "Oh hey, I'm bringing a Dark Angels Lion's Blade, but you're bringing Tyranids with no flyers... Shall we retune things a little?" Which would probably wind up with the DA player switching to a CAD (or switching from mono-DA to DA with BA allies, say) and the Tyranid player breaking out a Flyrant or a Crone.

Also, most of our guys are just not terribly WAACish, and three of us have notoriously terrible dice luck. That's its own bag of bees.

One guy had a squad of 10 Dire Avengers with Prescience on them fire into a squad of Hormagaunts with no protection other than Stealth from Night Fighting, and managed to score no kills. In that same game, he also had a squad of Fire Dragons get swept by a pair of Termagants.

Another had a Storm Wolf fire all its guns (multimeltas, lascannons and a helfrost cannon) into a Predator for three turns, managing a grand total of two hits, for a single "Crew Stunned". (Losing two hull points to the Predator's autocannon while doing it...)

I managed to self-inflict four wounds on a Riptide while firing Overwatch against a few Skitarii. Yes, all from Gets Hot.

These kind of things make for frustrating, if memorable, games.

The shop I play at, things tend to be pretty even. Occasionally, a TFG will come in from outside the shops usual crowd, but we've pretty much identified them. We tend to play lower points games (1000 or less) to get in more games in a day, and that in itself tends to cut down on most OP things.

We've had armies trounced by things they should have walked over, and walked over armies that should have trounced them. Even had a couple where the armies were so well balanced, they couldn't hurt each other or win by objectives, and only one or two lucky dice rolls determined the winner.

I haven't been the favored side in well over a year at this point.

 Traditio wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:
It always seems I am bringing a knife to a gun fight, but I purposely try to avoid the arms race 40K and many other games tend to induce among players.

That said, I seem to best with my Tau army, the faction simply plays to my strength - gunlines - I guess.

You seem to best what with your Tau army?

Do you find that your most even games happen when you use Tau?

Do you find that you win the most often when you use the Tau?

I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here.

Sorry, I seemed to have dropped a word there. I *do* best when I play Tau, meaning I win more often than I lose with them - even though my (lone) riptide usually seems to die to Novacharging himself.

The only rule my FLGS has is games are at 1850. Everything in the rules is what goes.

So if I bring a gak list with Tyberos, I know I deserve the loss. If I won, good for me I guess?

Play with the models I like and play vs what ever opponent wants to use.

That does not mean I spam knights if using imperial or flyrants if nids, in fact the only auto include when using nids is Swarmlord with tyrant guard as I love CC and use the units that can do that also love dreads and use them all the time as well.
Lists are made before hand as club meets once a month and the games are arranged before hand with only knowing what army fighting and even then not even that.

Most of the time games are fairly even and if not normally down to really bad dice or bad tactical decisions.

I've not had a single game that felt at all unfair, though I've had games that I've lost by very large margins. I have a large collection of Orks and the guy I play nearly all my games against has an extensive CSM collection - we both bring a wide variety of lists, styles and units to the table and always have entertaining games. I've had a few games against Tyranids, Grey Knights and Eldar and those games have felt equally balanced and enjoyable.

 Traditio wrote:

What kinds of army or armies do you normally field? What about your opponents?

On the casual end it's usually a Combined Arms Detachment with four 10-man Tactical Squads as the core, 10-man Jump Assault Squad, 10-man Devastator Squad, Captain and whatever decoration I feel like, Land Speeders, Dreadnought, real traditional stuff. No Drop Pods, and I keep the Grav Cannons out.

Mid range I start into the Gladius Demi-Company Formation, but keep all the ten-man squads. Maybe add some Grav Cannons, Maybe a Drop Pod or three. Or sometimes I'll experiment with the Pinion Demi-Co with all the Scouts.

For the really competitive games it's a full Gladius Battle Company with all the trimmings. Lots of Grav Cannons and Drop Melta, 11 free transports. Very aggressive, lots of redundancy.

The people I play against range from less experienced players with flavorful Horus Heresy armies, to guys that have traveled out of state to go to tournaments. It's been a lot of variety over the last few years. Fun, thematic Chaos Builds, White Scars Battle Company, Tau Riptide thingy. Sadly, we lost our local Eldar guy, so I haven't seen them on the table in a while. A year or two ago it was common for me to see a Titan on the table, or to expect a number of Imperial Knights. We had an Ork horde player that was running over armies for a while, which was a lot of fun to see. Our scene seems to have de-escalated a bit with the exception of the occasional Tau or Daemon army. Nowadays the games tend to be more casual, which has been a nice break. Depending on how things progress over the next few months I may start driving a bit further to find some more cutthroat players though.

I play orks in a SM/Eldar/Tau heavy environment.....So no

Though there are a few CSM players who I love playing against.

 koooaei wrote:
I don't play in tournaments and the games are pre-arranged - we know roughly what each of us is going to bring, so most of the games are evenly matched and fun. I'm a fan of tailoring lists beforehand. For example, if i know that the enemy is going to bring a psy deathstar, i take my msu trukklist with bully boyz. If i know he's going to bring a mediocre ig platoon, i put away my lobbas and trukks and go with footslogging boyz and grots.

This. Additionally my gaming group likes to play either maelstrom or narrative scenarios which also balances things. The only one really worried is our Tau player who does some heavy list tailoring - because as Tau he can easily do it .

I play necrons, and I've faced a lot of armies I could beat on auto-pilot, for the best example I once beat an imperial guard tank army loosing only one warrior, which is admittedly an outlier but gak was bad for him that match. In my last tournament I took a Genestealer cult by marching forward, without cover, shooting his army to death, having my hq take an objective, and sitting on it while i disintegrated his army. I have lots more examples just like these.

I might be a tad weird though, I hate the idea of someone tossing me a softball and letting me win, so I expect my opponents to go HAM and I return the favor. If someone asks me to tone it down, I'm happy to, but my default setting is full throttle. Everyone plays the game in a way that makes them happy, and my best times are where both opponents left it all on the field, held nothing back, and win or lose those are good fights. In fact Some of my favorite fights have been losses, like my first fight against a skyhammer assault force, or that time I got rallied by space wolfs.

My Play style means that I have participated in a lot more blowouts than other players on this thread seem to have been in. Honestly though, I think that experience reflects the current meta more than someone who tailors there list for each fight.

If these poll percentages:

1. Remain steady
2. Are actually representative:

Roughly half of all games involve a significant power imbalance.

Well, there you have it, GW:

Roughly every other game that is played is just flat out unfair. It takes 3+ hours to resolve a "normal" game. And roughly half of these games obviously favor one army over another. Before the participants even start rolling dice, one player basically already knows in advance that he's going to lose. And you charge an absurd premium even to put these armies on the table.

And you wonder why you are losing customers and profits en masse.

 Traditio wrote:
If these poll percentages:

1. Remain steady
2. Are actually representative:

Roughly half of all games involve a significant power imbalance.

Well, there you have it, GW:

Roughly every other game that is played is just flat out unfair. It takes 3+ hours to resolve a "normal" game. And roughly half of these games obviously favor one army over another. Before the participants even start rolling dice, one player basically already knows in advance that he's going to lose. And you charge an absurd premium even to put these armies on the table.

And you wonder why you are losing customers and profits en masse.

While I'm not here to discuss GW's known tendency for imbalance, you're really neglecting human nature. Some people like to win, try to edge in lists with slight edges against opponents, are that guy, etc. Really, if all you're here to do is just rant and rave, you're way late for the party.

 Traditio wrote:
If these poll percentages:

1. Remain steady
2. Are actually representative:

Roughly half of all games involve a significant power imbalance.

Well, there you have it, GW:

Roughly every other game that is played is just flat out unfair. It takes 3+ hours to resolve a "normal" game. And roughly half of these games obviously favor one army over another. Before the participants even start rolling dice, one player basically already knows in advance that he's going to lose. And you charge an absurd premium even to put these armies on the table.

And you wonder why you are losing customers and profits en masse.

Why do you insist on mis-representing your own poll results?

Firstly, you can't infer anything about how likely a specific game is to be imbalanced because you haven't captured any data on the number of games played by respondents. (maybe people that have no problem getting a balanced game play way more)
Secondly, even if you assume that they all play the same number of games then it's 40%, not "roughly half".

The more interesting takeaway is that 47% of respondents have no problem getting regular balanced games while 27% struggle to get a balanced game. (numbers updated)

The problem is not that every game isn't perfectly even. In any game with force selection some people will select sub optimum combinations. (like you and your insistence on taking a weapon loadout that struggles against flyers, high AV and powerful MCs despite your codex offering better alternatives)

The problem is that the range of power levels available is not even across the codexes.