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 HANZERtank wrote:
So my imperial guard regiment made entirely of tanks, with no infantry of any kind in it shouldn't exist in game. Despite it being made explicitly clear in the fluff this is how guard regiments operate. Entirely focused on one aspect and not having support from within the regiment itself. They have to take from other regiments to fill their weakness. But I guess that would be deemed as ally shenanigans and be too op? And I can't use forge world list because it too is op. And formations are op so I can't do it that way. Guess we'll have to rewrite the fluff then, but that couldn't end well (see necron rewrite) so what do we do?

The same thing should be done that was done for marines as a whole:

Ignore the fluff and make sacrifices for the sake of game balance.


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ZebioLizard2 wrote:Because your option doesn't add strategy, it just means you can literally throw things down and have a 50/50 chance to win?

I write a list
You write a list
We trade lists
Then we flip a coin, congratulations play again?

Because what sort of game can guarantee a 50/50 chance regardless of 20+ options within a book?

Again, you're making a strawman of my position. It's not 50/50 regardless of in-game decisions. It's 50/50 prior to in-game decisions.

Once you start deploying, moving your units around, selecting targets to shoot and assault, rolling dice, etc., your chances should start changing.

Martel732 wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Correct.

The Wraithknight has deviated too far from the "Jedi curve" there's is no effective counter that does not require a disproportionate investment of resources.

It needs "patching," but it's existence doesn't somehow invalidate the theory of perfect imbalance, it is just an example where designers got it wrong.

There is simply no advantage to miscosting a unit. Any given unit might be undesirable because of meta shifts, but miscosting for the sake of miscosting is foolish.

I'd say Eldar players have derived a massive advantage from a miscosted unit. Anyway, that's beside the point. As the video says, that deliberate (mild) miscosting can help drive the game state and also the sales (which, done well and as part of a generally healthy approach to a game, nobody should really begrudge a producer making a living from their product) helping keep the game interesting and dynamic.

Picking on the Wraithknight as an example of why the system doesn't work is not a strong argument, the WK isn't an example of perfect imbalance, it's an example of a monumental clusterfeth of poor design.

It's not just the Wraithknight. It's any miscosting. You don't need miscosting to drive the meta. That's bs. The meta is driven by perceived advantage, it doesn't have to be a mathematically absolute advantage.

It's just that the WK is a EASILY perceived advantage.

Miscostedness does NOT make something interesting and dynamic. The players do that. As well as sidegrade units. Not superior, not inferior. Different.

The thing with a meta curve is that it can be relatively inelastic depending on the game.

For instance, in League of Legends, it's fairly easy to acquire the best champion of the month, and a few minor runes you might need to buy, but only for your first couple months of playing are runes an issue.

However in Warhammer40k, it's a much longer path to creating a counter or adapting to the meta. I can't just suddenly not be a space marine player if that's all I have, and suddenly have a functioning eldar army with Wraithknights.

Hence, the meta here is fairly inelastic.

It's far more likely that rules will come out to address the Wraithknight before the meta would shift.

But in any case, we were talking in a general sense, not in regards to 1 specific unit. Having some overpowered units is a small price to pay for a game that presents a wide variety of fundamentally different options.

One poster mentioned strategy bearing into play. In a perfectly balanced game, the strategy is set out for you, from the beginning. So, it really does come down to dice rolls, and over enough trials, that is a 50/50 outcome. So his point wasn't a strawman and is completely valid.

"In a perfectly balanced game, the strategy is set out for you, from the beginning. So, it really does come down to dice rolls, and over enough trials, that is a 50/50 outcome. So his point wasn't a strawman and is completely valid."

That's completely not true. Your decisions of when and where and how to engage matter a lot. A good terran player can beat another inferior terran player in SC in a match of 20 marines vs 20 marines.

Gunzhard wrote:
The great variety is what makes this game so much more appealing to me than Flames of War for example. But look back at previous wars or modern warfare, yes the bulk of nearly every army on earth is made up of troops/infantry, but that is not necessarily reflective of how combat is "most often" approached, I'd say logically, it'd be even less so in futuristic, imaginary warfare, but the beauty of 40k is - you can treat it however you like.

I'm not saying "Don't play those units". What I am saying is I want lists to be representative of the fighting forces the factions are most likely to field. In the current state of the rules, the only mechanic that does so are detachment bonuses, which are much derided. As for the state of warfare 40,000 years in the future, the whole idea of ground forces fighting each other seems a little silly when city-sized starships can just obliterate them from orbit. So, arguing it's more "realistic" for army lists to be comprised of less Troops and more exotic units is farcical.

So any battle that's not a Troop-battle is a "fringe example"? ...says you, have you read any of the campaign books? And for the record we actually do have Aerial combat rules however unpopular, and GW did make rules allowing an All-LandRaider (Spearhead) at one point - but beyond that IG can field all tanks now, Blood Angels can and often send elements of their 1st company (not troops) into battle alone etc etc... Your "troop battle" can be a special one-off if you want. Heck Aeronautica Imperialis is in the very newest Codex.

Yes, we have aerial combat rules, but we don't really have rules for a force entirely comprised of strategic bombers striking a ground force, which is what I envisioned when you mentioned bombing runs. Nor do we have strategic bombers - well, I suppose there's the Forge World Marauder. I didn't say engagements where one side or the other doesn't field anything that their dexes categorize as Troops don't happen. However, I'm going to stand on them being fringe cases because commanders won't have unlimited access to unlimited numbers of every exotic elite unit all the time. Most of the time, they would have to make do with what they have, and what they're reliably going to have is Troops. Hence Troops-based lists are the most thematically appropriate.

Having a significant chunk of troops is in NO way a leveler of balance. It may be how you think the game should be played, or how you envision imaginary space battles, but having X amount of troops isn't going to fix anything. For some armies that is an enormous tax for others a massive boon, and we've been there before and 40k has yet to have a "balanced" set of codex or rules. Further some people don't want to field Troops; you do, so you can go ahead and do that.

The only army a high mandatory Troops requirement would be a massive boon to is Eldar. Take Windriders out of the equation (they should be a Fast Attack choice), and the environment is much more balanced. I've been playing since 3rd edition, and in all that time there has never been an edition that required more than 2 Troops choices, and most armies could and can satisfy that requirement for little more than 100pts. So, you can't actually comment on how balanced a mandatory Troops-heavy environment would be. I can because I've been playing in one for years now. The armies members of my group play include Eldar, Dark Angels, Tau, Chaos Marines, Imperial Guard, and Sisters of Battle - some top tier, others bottom tier. We generally have close games, some so tight they literally turn on a single die roll. I'm not saying it's the panacea that fixes all of 40K's ills, but it does help considerably.

Traditio wrote:I have a consideration for those saying that making the game balanced would remove all strategy, etc. from the game (which is complete bull gak):

Consider the current alternative. How much strategy is involved when many games are determined simply by the lists that are being opposed to each other?

Many games can be resolved by the following procedure:

I write a list.
You write a list.
We trade lists.
We then decide a victor without even bothering to play, since one list obviously cannot beat the other list in the vast majority of circumstances.

Because that's totally a desirable state for the game.

I'm making the (strange, I know) suggestion that in-game decisions actually should matter. They should be the most important factor in deciding who wins, in fact.

The state of balance in 40K is certainly deplorable. However, that doesn't mean the rules have to protect incompetent list builders from the consequences of their incompetence. For instance, if you take a list where your only anti-armor weapons are missile launchers, and I take a list with 3 Dreadnoughts, you're probably going to have a bad game - especially if your battle plan is to pod non-upgraded Sternguard on my deployment zone. If I'm at all competent at deployment, your chances of popping 3 Dreads with MLs are tiny, which means my Dreads are almost certainly going to be able to charge your Sternies when they drop in. The Sternies won't be able to do a damn thing to them in the shooting phase, and their chances of damaging a Dread in the assault phase are vanishingly small. One could cry "OP DREADNOUGHT CHEEZE!", or one could learn to take some combi-meltas in his Sternguard squads.

Now, is it annoying to have the rules change, to have things that were good become less good, and have new things added that require you to add new things to adapt? Yes. I've got scads of Marines with missile launchers that used to be worth fielding back in 3rd ed, and had their place all the way through 5th. I don't use them now, because MLs suck for the price in this edition.

That said, you're playing an army that takes advantage of things that have not always been in the game. Sternguard weren't a thing until 5th edition, and drop pods weren't a thing till 4th edition. If someone had been playing since 3rd edition and refused to adapt to drop pods, you'd refuse to give much credence to their complaints, and you'd be right to do so. Games Workshop is going to add new things, because people like new things. Heck, I love everything about my armies, and I love to have a little bit of everything in them - or in some cases, a lot of everything.

You may think it's unfair to have to buy new stuff in order to keep your army competitive, and that's an attitude that is not entirely without validity. However, consider the return on the investment. If, say, $100 gets you 2-3 Devastator Squads, netting you grav cannons and some combi-weapons you could use to upgrade your Sternies, that's an investment that's going to serve you well for the entire edition. People will routinely buy a console game for $60 and trade it in after a week. If $100 is an investment that will help your army for even 6 months, that's a much better return on your investment, and given that the usual edition cycle is 3-4 years, one would usually be apt to get much more return off that $100.

Martel732 wrote:
"In a perfectly balanced game, the strategy is set out for you, from the beginning. So, it really does come down to dice rolls, and over enough trials, that is a 50/50 outcome. So his point wasn't a strawman and is completely valid."

That's completely not true. Your decisions of when and where and how to engage matter a lot. A good terran player can beat another inferior terran player in SC in a match of 20 marines vs 20 marines.

You need to clearly define inferior.

Because once you know the strategy, and the maps, it boils down to micro, not strategy.

Like, if your inferior player built no units, of course he'd lose, but we're not dealing with cases rooted in hyperbole, right?

Yeah 40k can't be compared to Starcraft for a variety of reasons, mostly turn-based. You really can't micro your army out of range until after the enemy shoots it. The person who moves into range can shoot before the enemy has an opportunity to moget away.

"it boils down to micro, not strategy. "

No, there's still build order and building the right counter units and expo timing. If we are talking Starcraft.

Inferior:

250 pt Land Raider vs 295 pt Wraithknight.

Inferior.

Martel732 wrote:
"it boils down to micro, not strategy. "

No, there's still build order and building the right counter units and expo timing. If we are talking Starcraft.

Inferior:

250 pt Land Raider vs 295 pt Wraithknight.

Inferior.

And build order, counter units, and expansion timers mean nothing if your armies are banelinged to death, swarm hosted, tank shocked *INSERT MORE STUFF HERE* to nothing each time you attempt combat.

Of course it requires a proper mix however.

 Traditio wrote:
I have a consideration for those saying that making the game balanced would remove all strategy, etc. from the game (which is complete bull gak):

Consider the current alternative. How much strategy is involved when many games are determined simply by the lists that are being opposed to each other?

Many games can be resolved by the following procedure:

I write a list.
You write a list.
We trade lists.
We then decide a victor without even bothering to play, since one list obviously cannot beat the other list in the vast majority of circumstances.

Because that's totally a desirable state for the game.

I'm making the (strange, I know) suggestion that in-game decisions actually should matter. They should be the most important factor in deciding who wins, in fact.

Its not that making the game perfectly balanced would remove all strategy. Making the game such that any list has a completely equal chance of taking on any other list requires an extreme dumbing down of the game. Units that are directly meant to counter one other kind of unit, or that cannot deal with another kind of unit effectively cannot exist. There would still be strategy involved in this dumbed down game it just would not be as dynamic and interesting. There is an alternative to this ridiculous dichotomy of play deciding everything vs lists deciding everything. Both can matter, and currently in 40k both do matter. Personally I think both should matter.

Designing a list is fun, and strategic. You have to think about all the threats you will have to manage, and then how you will manage them. Your list will have some strengths and weaknesses, and you should have a plan for how you will manage them. As long as the game has enough room for players to make interesting strategic moves in game then unfavorable match ups can be won. We see the same lists of names making it to the tops of tournaments each year, even when there are plenty of other players playing very similar lists. These players make it there because they play well. 40k is a far cry from being balanced, but tournaments do show us that that skilled play does matter. Sure a tournament winning list will probably beat a casual list with relative ease, but this is true in pretty much every game. You don't see low level magic card players saying that the pre-boxed deck they bought should have an even chance against the recent vintage champions deck. I don't expect my garbage infinity army to match up against the ITC champs list. When I bring my ridiculous death star of every eldar unique character I do not expect to win ever. You should not expect your list to always have a fair chance. As long as players come to the game with an understanding of what level of competition they are playing at then skill will matter, and the players will have fun.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"it boils down to micro, not strategy. "

No, there's still build order and building the right counter units and expo timing. If we are talking Starcraft.

Inferior:

250 pt Land Raider vs 295 pt Wraithknight.

Inferior.

And build order, counter units, and expansion timers mean nothing if your armies are banelinged to death, swarm hosted, tank shocked *INSERT MORE STUFF HERE* to nothing each time you attempt combat.

Of course it requires a proper mix however.

What are you talking about?

Martel732 wrote:
It's not just the Wraithknight. It's any miscosting. You don't need miscosting to drive the meta. That's bs. The meta is driven by perceived advantage, it doesn't have to be a mathematically absolute advantage.

It's just that the WK is a EASILY perceived advantage.

Miscostedness does NOT make something interesting and dynamic. The players do that. As well as sidegrade units. Not superior, not inferior. Different.

Then adopt a different method of imperfectly balancing aside from cost. The issue I was addressing with the video, and something you haven't really addressed simply by ragging on the WK as an example of poor balance, is that it isn't necessary for everything to be the same to be balanced.

It is perfectly ok for one thing to be better at something than another, the problems occur when the designers stuff up and cross the line between "strong but manageable" and "broken." Then it gets compounded if the totality of the faction, as with Eldar, don't really offer any real weaknesses to be exploited outside of the egregious outlier. Then it gets further compounded in 40K because there's so little player agency once lists are drawn up and the models hit the table. It isn't coincidence that most games that are held up as better examples of balance over 40K require a lot more in-game decision making, making room for skilled play can help mitigate balance issues, and when a serious effort is made to balance factions and units in the first place, any issues pretty much disappear altogether, at least to the standard that many players find acceptable.

"It is perfectly ok for one thing to be better at something than another"

This is critical for meaningful choices. The problem comes in when you have so many units that are STRICTLY better in 95% of circumstances.

 Traditio wrote:
Many games can be resolved by the following procedure:

I write a list.
You write a list.
We trade lists.
We then decide a victor without even bothering to play, since one list obviously cannot beat the other list in the vast majority of circumstances.

Because that's totally a desirable state for the game.

Look at any thread in the Tactics or Army List forums and you'll see dozens of people doing this exact thing. Very little of the comparisons will meet with agreement, unless the army list is extraordinarily bad. You can't resolve a game in this way. Need to play it out.

 Grand.Master.Raziel wrote:

I'm not saying "Don't play those units". What I am saying is I want lists to be representative of the fighting forces the factions are most likely to field. In the current state of the rules, the only mechanic that does so are detachment bonuses, which are much derided. As for the state of warfare 40,000 years in the future, the whole idea of ground forces fighting each other seems a little silly when city-sized starships can just obliterate them from orbit. So, arguing it's more "realistic" for army lists to be comprised of less Troops and more exotic units is farcical.

So any battle that's not a Troop-battle is a "fringe example"? ...says you, have you read any of the campaign books? And for the record we actually do have Aerial combat rules however unpopular, and GW did make rules allowing an All-LandRaider (Spearhead) at one point - but beyond that IG can field all tanks now, Blood Angels can and often send elements of their 1st company (not troops) into battle alone etc etc... Your "troop battle" can be a special one-off if you want. Heck Aeronautica Imperialis is in the very newest Codex.

Yes, we have aerial combat rules, but we don't really have rules for a force entirely comprised of strategic bombers striking a ground force, which is what I envisioned when you mentioned bombing runs. Nor do we have strategic bombers - well, I suppose there's the Forge World Marauder. I didn't say engagements where one side or the other doesn't field anything that their dexes categorize as Troops don't happen. However, I'm going to stand on them being fringe cases because commanders won't have unlimited access to unlimited numbers of every exotic elite unit all the time. Most of the time, they would have to make do with what they have, and what they're reliably going to have is Troops. Hence Troops-based lists are the most thematically appropriate.

I'd like to stop you here and just point out, your idea of "most likely to field" is entirely opinion, not based in modern warfare, or fictional imaginary warfare that is 40k either; not to say it couldn't be and there are indeed examples of it in the fluff... but there are just as many if not more examples of the exception to that - despite the overall organization of the armies on paper. I completely disagree that "troops-based lists" are the most "thematically appropriate"... in a high-tech sci-fi battlefield it is more likely the least thematically appropriate. You are trying to push "theme" and fluff when it suites your point but ignore it everywhere else... like I said before - just IG and Orks baby; or Knights/Titans and tanks/flyers.

 Grand.Master.Raziel wrote:

Having a significant chunk of troops is in NO way a leveler of balance. It may be how you think the game should be played, or how you envision imaginary space battles, but having X amount of troops isn't going to fix anything. For some armies that is an enormous tax for others a massive boon, and we've been there before and 40k has yet to have a "balanced" set of codex or rules. Further some people don't want to field Troops; you do, so you can go ahead and do that.

The only army a high mandatory Troops requirement would be a massive boon to is Eldar. Take Windriders out of the equation (they should be a Fast Attack choice), and the environment is much more balanced. I've been playing since 3rd edition, and in all that time there has never been an edition that required more than 2 Troops choices, and most armies could and can satisfy that requirement for little more than 100pts. So, you can't actually comment on how balanced a mandatory Troops-heavy environment would be. I can because I've been playing in one for years now. The armies members of my group play include Eldar, Dark Angels, Tau, Chaos Marines, Imperial Guard, and Sisters of Battle - some top tier, others bottom tier. We generally have close games, some so tight they literally turn on a single die roll. I'm not saying it's the panacea that fixes all of 40K's ills, but it does help considerably.

Except for Tau my group has all the same armies, we don't force any homebrew comp with troop heavy lists and our games are usually close too. There have been several editions where 'troops' gained some advantage, scoring, ob-sec etc... and I remember GW-GT's from at least as far back as 3rd have troop comps; I still keep my Army-Builder set to show the %-age.

Anyway my point is -- narratively it doesn't make sense to force people to field more troops, and balance wise is doesn't actually improve anything either.

You're just creating a new imbalance... shifting it to the right but not actually solving it.

I think people are conflating the argument "not all in game units need be balanced," with "the Wraithknight is balanced and fine."

I agree that in game decision should have more impact, but that shouldn't mean that list building decisions should have none. If all is equal it comes down to who's played the most, and they then start to have an advantage. If someone just started and played someone whos been going since 2nd edition, that new guy will get ruined. How is that fair, this game is supposed to be balanced yet I constantly get beaten. I would go and add new elements into my army but whats the point, everything performs jsut as well as any other combination. And if I try learn new tactics a more experienced player will probably know the counter tactic before I fullly understand it myself. Guess I either give up, or play people of similar experience where it becomes that 50/50 may as well toss a coin chance again.

I'm not. I'm saying that there is NO advantage to having miscosted units in the game at all. Cheap stuff should be weak and have little battlefield efficacy and expensive stuff should be powerful and have a lot of efficacy. Instead, what we have in 40K are 27 pt models that can school 400 pts models because of arbitrary strengths and AVs assigned to said models. We have 225 pt models that can absorb more firepower than 800 pt models.

Martel732 wrote:
We have 225 pt models that can absorb more firepower than 800 pt models.

It's not like the Riptide is without weaknesses to exploit.

You just happen to want to shoot it with Lascannons.

Yoyoyo wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
We have 225 pt models that can absorb more firepower than 800 pt models.

It's not like the Riptide is without weaknesses to exploit.

You just happen to want to shoot it with Lascannons.

I'm pretty sure he uses Lascannons because they're a pretty common weapon. What weaknesses are they then?

Yoyoyo wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
We have 225 pt models that can absorb more firepower than 800 pt models.

It's not like the Riptide is without weaknesses to exploit.

You just happen to want to shoot it with Lascannons.

Oh please enlighten me. It takes an unrealistic number of grav cannon shots as well. Since they are expensive and hard to get SAFELY within range. There's a guy who fields 10 grav cannons in a marine list who usually gets 4 or 5 safely to range against Tau on a consistent basis. That will kill ONE Riptide. And you sacrificed half your list to do it.


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pm713 wrote:

Yoyoyo wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
We have 225 pt models that can absorb more firepower than 800 pt models.

It's not like the Riptide is without weaknesses to exploit.

You just happen to want to shoot it with Lascannons.

I'm pretty sure he uses Lascannons because they're a pretty common weapon. What weaknesses are they then?

I use them because they are common and to get people to think about how much other stuff you could kill with that many lascannon shots. Multiple IKs. A Warhound. Multiple, multiple Tyranid MCs.

pm713 wrote:

I'm pretty sure he uses Lascannons because they're a pretty common weapon. What weaknesses are they then?

Their weakness is Melee. If you can get to them, you can stop them from shooting.

Getting there is hard, but the reward is great.

 Insectum7 wrote:

pm713 wrote:

I'm pretty sure he uses Lascannons because they're a pretty common weapon. What weaknesses are they then?

Their weakness is Melee. If you can get to them, you can stop them from shooting.

Getting there is hard, but the reward is great.

They are not weak in melee. Because MC OP. Free AP2, and 2+/5+++ means they retain their immortality and slowly squish your dudes. There's maybe two units in the whole BA codex that can beat a Riptide in CC.

 Insectum7 wrote:

pm713 wrote:

I'm pretty sure he uses Lascannons because they're a pretty common weapon. What weaknesses are they then?

Their weakness is Melee. If you can get to them, you can stop them from shooting.

Getting there is hard, but the reward is great.

Except I still need to get there which is pretty hard considering the Riptide can keep moving at least 6+2D6" every turn, it and the rest of the army have strong shooting and even if I do I need enough models to survive the combat long enough to kill the T6 2+ 5++ and maybe FnP monster with a lot of wounds.

Martel732 wrote:

They are not weak in melee. Because MC OP. Free AP2, and 2+/5+++ means they retain their immortality and slowly squish your dudes. There's maybe two units in the whole BA codex that can beat a Riptide in CC.

Even if you're in CC with guys incapable of killing it, having it slowly kill a squad in melee is a hundred times better than having it quickly kill guys with shooting.

On the flipside, if you're engaging it with something that can kill it, and it loses the combat and it flees, you don't have to spend all that extra effort to get through it's shield and FNP, it just dies in the sweep.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

They are not weak in melee. Because MC OP. Free AP2, and 2+/5+++ means they retain their immortality and slowly squish your dudes. There's maybe two units in the whole BA codex that can beat a Riptide in CC.

Even if you're in CC with guys incapable of killing it, having it slowly kill a squad in melee is a hundred times better than having it quickly kill guys with shooting.

On the flipside, if you're engaging it with something that can kill it, and it loses the combat and it flees, you don't have to spend all that extra effort to get through it's shield and FNP, it just dies in the sweep.

In general, by the time you can engage the Riptide, you are just adding to its kill count by tarpitting your own unit. The Riptide has already easily paid for itself by the time you can assault it. Another reason it is hopelessly broken.

Martel732 wrote:
"It is perfectly ok for one thing to be better at something than another"

This is critical for meaningful choices. The problem comes in when you have so many units that are STRICTLY better in 95% of circumstances.

No, the problems come when you have units that are strictly better with no meaningfully greater investment of resources. If one unit is twice as durable and has twice the damage output, but doesn't cost double the points, then there's a problem, unless there's some sort of trade off, eg the better unit has very short range and poor mobility. If the efficacy is exponential, rather than linear, then, again, the resource cost needs to reflect that.

 Marmatag wrote:
I think people are conflating the argument "not all in game units need be balanced," with "the Wraithknight is balanced and fine."

Another way to look at it is that the WK itself might be imbalanced, but it's extreme stats don't make it so just by themselves. If it was 100% the same, but cost 200 points more and was harder to get into an army by way of Formations, we'd have a completely different situation.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"It is perfectly ok for one thing to be better at something than another"

This is critical for meaningful choices. The problem comes in when you have so many units that are STRICTLY better in 95% of circumstances.

No, the problems come when you have units that are strictly better with no meaningfully greater investment of resources. If one unit is twice as durable and has twice the damage output, but doesn't cost double the points, then there's a problem, unless there's some sort of trade off, eg the better unit has very short range and poor mobility. If the efficacy is exponential, rather than linear, then, again, the resource cost needs to reflect that.

I mean for the cost implicitly in my statement. 40K units don't have enough trade offs for sure.