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In starcraft, marines are 50 min, zerglings are 25 min, zealots are 100 min. They all have very different uses but are balanced within the confines of the game. The whole chess analogy is complete BS. Balance has nothing to do with similarity.

hobojebus wrote:

 Purifier wrote:

hobojebus wrote:

 Galas wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Chess and checkers have perfect balance so yes it's possible just not in 40K with several different races.

But you sure as fekke can get better than 7th.

No, the whites one have an advantage for beginning first.

Or the disadvantage of revealing their stratagy first.

No, it's a well established fact in the Chess world that the advantage is to white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess

Sorry when did we cross over into talking about world class games? here I thought we were on about regular gamers playing at clubs and stores.

You said it has "perfect balance." It does not. You being bad at the game doesn't reflect on whether the game has perfect balance or not, and has absolutely nothing to do with the claim.

Nice ad hominem there, why assume I'm bad rather than average or good rather than great?

Also I already conceded that in high level play white does have an advantage, but at the level I play it doesn't have a big impact as mentioned in the linked wikki article.

I'm not wanting to jump in the argument, just adding to the board game balance discussion. The closest game I can think of with perfect balance would be Go. White plays second but gets an extra half a point in that sides favor.

hobojebus wrote:
Nice ad hominem there, why assume I'm bad rather than average or good rather than great?

Also I already conceded that in high level play white does have an advantage, but at the level I play it doesn't have a big impact as mentioned in the linked wikki article.

Nice ad hominem fallacy. The perceived insult doesn't in any way change the argument. You conceded butt-all. We're talking about the game, and whether or not it has perfect balance. Your relative skill in the game has exactly zero impact on how well balanced the game is. Your skill only affects whether it's balanced enough for you. Your argument was that:

Chess and checkers have perfect balance so yes it's possible

They do not. No matter how much you try to bend it to "well, I'm sort of right," you just aren't. The games do not have perfect balance, end of discussion. With your reasoning, if I'm bad enough at 7th 40k, and my opponent is too, then 7th 40k has perfect balance. I'm sure you can tell how absurd that sounds. Our relative skills in no way makes the game of 40k have perfect balance.

Tic-tac-toe is perfectly balanced. As long as both players know the exact moves, it's impossible to win the game. Yayyyyyy.

There *should* be an unstable equilibrium in a game in order to actually speed up the game once one player starts getting an advantage. Case in point, take Shogi. Shogi is similar to chess ("protect your king, checkmate the enemy king") but with a few differences: Rather than an 8x8 board, it's a 9x9 board, and rather than white and black, both players have the same pieces, which are almost like dominoes with a "direction"/"arrow" and Kanji saying what they are. While the move options are generally more restricted (pawns only move and capture straight and don't have a double-advance, there's only one bishop/rook per player, there's no queen analogue, and each piece has a specific promotion), Shogi also is very unlikely to result in a Stalemate for one simple reason:

When you capture an opponent's piece, you hold onto it. When it's your turn, rather than moving any of your pieces, you can place a piece you captured down anywhere on the board, on your side, with restrictions: can't own two pawns on the same column, can't deploy a piece into a promotion spot, and can't deploy a Pawn that it would checkmate the enemy King (you could plop down any other unit to pull this off though). You could think of it as "zombie chess" but the original rationale was that you recruited captured regiments to fight for you instead, and the "one redeploy per turn" represented logistics, negotiating a new contract, etc. Because losing pieces early on is so dangerous, the game starts off far more defensively but once the piece-trading ensues, the end result is a lot faster than how chess has many possible stalemate scenarios.

A game that is in fact perfectly balanced is simultaneous Battleship. As long as you don't alternate moves, you will both have exactly equal chance to pull off anything, and there is in fact no reason to alternate, other than that doing it simultaneously can end in an unlikely draw.

Could also just say that whoever didn't start gets one more move when the game ends to attempt to draw it. Since losses in Battleship in no way hinders your own offensive ability, it stays balanced throughout.

People want balance, but people also want to blame their losses on imbalance. Look at any video game.

In the end if you wanna win a tournament you have nobody to blame but yourself. Everybody have the freedom to pick the strongest faction and the strongest units which in the end you have to do if you want to win.

The only problem with miniatures games is that if your faction turns to shieet you have to buy a new one which cost a lot of money and take a long time to paint.

And some of the most expensive units can be the best which makes it kind of pay to win.

But in the end one thing I know is that most losers blame everything but themselves and always will.

 Purifier wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Nice ad hominem there, why assume I'm bad rather than average or good rather than great?

Also I already conceded that in high level play white does have an advantage, but at the level I play it doesn't have a big impact as mentioned in the linked wikki article.

Nice ad hominem fallacy. The perceived insult doesn't in any way change the argument. You conceded butt-all. We're talking about the game, and whether or not it has perfect balance. Your relative skill in the game has exactly zero impact on how well balanced the game is. Your skill only affects whether it's balanced enough for you. Your argument was that:

Chess and checkers have perfect balance so yes it's possible

They do not. No matter how much you try to bend it to "well, I'm sort of right," you just aren't. The games do not have perfect balance, end of discussion. With your reasoning, if I'm bad enough at 7th 40k, and my opponent is too, then 7th 40k has perfect balance. I'm sure you can tell how absurd that sounds. Our relative skills in no way makes the game of 40k have perfect balance.

Double down if you want but we'll only end up in a recursive loop, player skill should always count for something or there's no point playing to begin with, the whole motivation behind wanting balanced gameplay is so skill rather than random luck decides the winner.

And I really don't see the need for you to make this so personal there was no reason for it to go that way, calling me a liar is an unnecessary escalation they'll only end badly for one us.

Passion is fine but is it really worth a ban for breaking rule 1? Let's try to keep it civil.

hobojebus wrote:

 Purifier wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Nice ad hominem there, why assume I'm bad rather than average or good rather than great?

Also I already conceded that in high level play white does have an advantage, but at the level I play it doesn't have a big impact as mentioned in the linked wikki article.

Nice ad hominem fallacy. The perceived insult doesn't in any way change the argument. You conceded butt-all. We're talking about the game, and whether or not it has perfect balance. Your relative skill in the game has exactly zero impact on how well balanced the game is. Your skill only affects whether it's balanced enough for you. Your argument was that:

Chess and checkers have perfect balance so yes it's possible

They do not. No matter how much you try to bend it to "well, I'm sort of right," you just aren't. The games do not have perfect balance, end of discussion. With your reasoning, if I'm bad enough at 7th 40k, and my opponent is too, then 7th 40k has perfect balance. I'm sure you can tell how absurd that sounds. Our relative skills in no way makes the game of 40k have perfect balance.

Double down if you want but we'll only end up in a recursive loop, player skill should always count for something or there's no point playing to begin with, the whole motivation behind wanting balanced gameplay is so skill rather than random luck decides the winner.

And I really don't see the need for you to make this so personal there was no reason for it to go that way, calling me a liar is an unnecessary escalation they'll only end badly for one us.

Passion is fine but is it really worth a ban for breaking rule 1? Let's try to keep it civil.

I'm not attacking you, and I'm not calling you a liar, but I guess if playing the victim is all you have left, it's all you have left. You can just admit you're wrong and that's the end of it. Personal skill has nothing to do with whether the game in itself is intrinsically perfectly balanced as you claimed. I'm not "doubling down." I'm trying to explain a very simple concept to you. A game's balance is not affected by who is playing it. If two 4 year olds play 40k, that doesn't magically make the game perfectly balanced. Why are you completely disregarding all of my arguments and instead playing the victim card, or accusing me of doing things I'm not?

From having spent about a year designing azyr comp for AOS I will tell you firsthand that most people really do NOT want balance.

A good chunk of people enjoy listbuilding, which requires bad unbalanced items on both ends of the spectrum.

If you had real tight balance, then 2000 points of my stuff would always be about the same power as 2000 points of your stuff. Which would make listbuilding not really a thing anymore. Which would enrage a lot of people.

No, that's also a fallacy. Composition matters. While starcraft has good balance, 200 marines die to 4 colossi , while 10 marauders and 10 vikings kill the colossi easily.

Uh huh. I don't really think so.

I've been a part of many-a-listbuilding thread where it was apparent that people want undercosted and overcosted items so that you have to have "skill" in picking the undercosted items.

Of course thats not universal but there are a ton of people that based on those conversations would be angry if everything was appropriately point costed.

To me, the game should be 2000 points is roughly equal to 2000 points. To many people the game should be the illusion that 2000 points is roughly equal to 2000 points, but clever list building and netlisting can make the game really 2000 points against 4000 points (what 40k has been since the beginning)

At the height of azyr comp being used in the early aos tournaments, there were a lot of complaints that models were costed too high because the player wasn't steamrolling like he thought he should be and that games were "boring" because they were all so close, and that listbuilding didn't matter in Azyr since you could just grab whatever and it would be as effective as someone spending an hour combing over their list.

This was actually one of the #1 complaints that hit my inbox for several months.

I don't want undercosted and overcosted stuff because that actually takes list building out of the game through false choices.

Then that's a bad game because i just showed how composition is the real list building.

 auticus wrote:


At the height of azyr comp being used in the early aos tournaments, there were a lot of complaints that models were costed too high because the player wasn't steamrolling like he thought he should be and that games were "boring" because they were all so close, and that listbuilding didn't matter in Azyr since you could just grab whatever and it would be as effective as someone spending an hour combing over their list.

So... people were technically complaining that they had to learn o play?

Exactly. Like riptide spammers do now in 8th.

The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

 auticus wrote:
The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

I think it would be more accurate to say that they want Rock-Paper-Scissors. They want there to be a choice that is the right one to bring against X but that may not work against Y. This will create unbalanced games, but both players had the potential to be the one coming to the table loaded to win.

 auticus wrote:
The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

Those people should lose, then. That's not how normal games are balanced, for the most part. Only GW.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Purifier wrote:

 auticus wrote:
The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

I think it would be more accurate to say that they want Rock-Paper-Scissors. They want there to be a choice that is the right one to bring against X but that may not work against Y. This will create unbalanced games, but both players had the potential to be the one coming to the table loaded to win.

Individual games being unbalanced is different than the overall game being unfair. Didn't bring anti-tank? Not the game's fault. Hell, in Starcraft, you change you build in the middle of the game based off your enemy unit composition.

I'd agree they want rock/paper/scissors.

Which to me is horrible in a way.

Maybe because GW rock/paper/scissors is always to make rock useless while super powering scissors which results in the same netlists running around ad naseum.

Martel732 wrote:

 auticus wrote:
The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

Those people should lose, then. That's not how normal games are balanced, for the most part. Only GW.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Purifier wrote:

 auticus wrote:
The current culture has undercost unit maximization so ingrained that yes... they wanted their list to win the game like is traditional.

I think it would be more accurate to say that they want Rock-Paper-Scissors. They want there to be a choice that is the right one to bring against X but that may not work against Y. This will create unbalanced games, but both players had the potential to be the one coming to the table loaded to win.

Individual games being unbalanced is different than the overall game being unfair. Didn't bring anti-tank? Not the game's fault. Hell, in Starcraft, you change you build in the middle of the game based off your enemy unit composition.

This is why I really like the new summoning, and I think it should be more prevalent even as just reinforcements. Being able to put 500 points in reserve and then "summoning" in the right tool for the job is a really cool concept. Could just become a problem with people like me that build lists really slow. But I could bring a handful of different pre-made detachments at 500 points that I can choose from mid game.

Let me redress my issue since I don't think I'm saying what I really mean lol

The concept of someone being able to take, say... all tanks... means that they are loading down on "rock". If your army isn't equipped with a massive amount of anti-tank weaponry... ie your army is not all paper... you will lose.

This extreme form of listbuilding is where my primary issue lies.

 auticus wrote:
I'd agree they want rock/paper/scissors.

Which to me is horrible in a way.

Maybe because GW rock/paper/scissors is always to make rock useless while super powering scissors which results in the same netlists running around ad naseum.

Ehhhh, I don't quite think that's what people want. They don't want the whole game to be a rock/paper/scissors, they want elements or parts of the list to counter and be countered by their opponent's list. When that happens, the game turns into a real challenge of trying to get the right units in the right place at the right time.

My favourite wargaming will always be spaceship/naval combat because of the way movement works, forcing you to plan a few turns in advance. One particular system I played had simultaneous turns with orders you wrote out/planned (much like X-wing setting their orders on the wheels), which meant you had to figure out quickly what they were going to do based on their optimal weapon ranges and how they were going to try and mitigate your damage based on your optimal weapon ranges. The winning player would always be the one who planned the better movements to get into optimal range first while staying outside their opponents' arcs as much as possible. That game was well balanced and offered plenty of customization, so you always had to plan a different way to tackle your opponent's fleet.

There are going to be players who just want to win and want an easy way to do it, and sometimes they'll do it under some pretense of wanting balance. You can spot them when they point out overpowered things outside their army, but vehemently deny that they use anything overpowered in their own list (despite obviously using an overpowered unit). You can safely ignore those people. Balance isn't a committee. You can harness the power of community by reading the raw data (batreps, mathhammer, tournament results), but ultimately, the final balance decisions should be left in the hands of a few professionals.

I think composition in the form of having a TAC list should be encouraged.

But I agree with Auticus that when the "rock/paper/scisors" reach the point of "I'll take all rocks. If your army isn't all paper, you lose" it isn't a fun game.

If I have a TAC army, it should be enough to fight anything that my opponent throw at me. Spammy lists should be just bad lists, and don't expect to win because their opponen just hasn't enough of the tools to fight them.

In Resume: Ideally, you should bring anti-tank weaponry to kill your opponent tanks. But if your opponent has only tanks you should be capable of winning still even if your list isn't 100% anti-tank weaponry. One thing that works towars this is the "everything can hurt everything": You can see all the "mu inmhersion!" that, even being reasonable complaint, is a rule needed to have a more balanced game and interactive game.

Not more "Hmm, I have bringed 4 Imperial Knights... I have killed all your meltas in the first turn... GG eazy peazy"


And I agree with Auticus that people don't want a fair game. They want to stomp their opponents mechanically. You see it in League of Legends. Why is that game so popular? In the moment you take an advantage, the game becomes basically 15-20 minutes of YOU destroying your opponents with 3 hits one time, without nothing they can do, until you win or they surrender. People LOVES that sensation. The "heroic comebacks" can be counted with the fingers of your hand.

 Galas wrote:
I think composition in the form of having a TAC list should be encouraged.

But I agree with Auticus that when the "rock/paper/scisors" reach the point of "I'll take all rocks. If your army isn't all paper, you lose" it isn't a fun game.

If I have a TAC army, it should be enough to fight anything that my opponent throw at me. Spammy lists should be just bad lists, and don't expect to win because their opponen just hasn't enough of the tools to fight them.

In Resume: Ideally, you should bring anti-tank weaponry to kill your opponent tanks. But if your opponent has only tanks you should be capable of winning still even if your list isn't 100% anti-tank weaponry. One thing that works towars this is the "everything can hurt everything": You can see all the "mu inmhersion!" that, even being reasonable, is a rule needed to have a more balanced game.

There should be alternatives to "I move and shoot and hope my statistics defeat you" too, besides hoping you can take integrated AT in every unit you do have. Back in 5th edition, the edition of "mechhammer", vehicles did have weaknesses still. You didn't have to destroy them so much as you had to shake/stun lock just enough to prevent them from contesting your control over the center of the map. Likewise, blocking them was surprisingly easy to do, since vehicles did have restrictive movement rules: Vehicles either move forwards, backwards, or turned around their center. In 5th edition, Rhinos could not do a Tokyo Drift. Since LOS was measured from weapons, and cover was "50% of the model" for monsters/vehicles (rather than 25% or so), the edition also encouraged running your vehicles in "train" formation, to optimize cover. However, intercept or stun the front and back of that train...and you could really screw up an opponent's battle-plan as you ended up with a 9-Razorback pileup!

Wow, I went off tangent there, but point is there should be more to the game than "am I statistically superior?" Can out-maneuvering the opponent provide concrete advantages over your foe, can "techpieces" serve as effective force multipliers besides "I give stat mods", etc.

I agree with all of what you said MagicJuggler, but in any point have I said that the game should be gunline vs gunline and throwing dice until one side wins

I was just speaking against extreme "rock/paper/scisor" gameplay

Issue I have with the poll is the question is really biased where you're not going to get any useful information out of it.

Even people who want to play an unbalanced, no-win scenario want a balanced system where all units feel viable in some niche and armies are equivalent at least on a broad standpoint so they know how far things are unbalanced.

The question reads like "Do you want a game that works or not?"

 auticus wrote:
...

At the height of azyr comp being used in the early aos tournaments, there were a lot of complaints that models were costed too high because the player wasn't steamrolling like he thought he should be and that games were "boring" because they were all so close, and that listbuilding didn't matter in Azyr since you could just grab whatever and it would be as effective as someone spending an hour combing over their list.

This was actually one of the #1 complaints that hit my inbox for several months.

Really? That is hilarious and sad at the same time, and is a perfect example of a subtle WAAC attitude.

 auticus wrote:
I'd agree they want rock/paper/scissors.

Which to me is horrible in a way.

Maybe because GW rock/paper/scissors is always to make rock useless while super powering scissors which results in the same netlists running around ad naseum.

Rock/Paper/Scissors is okay, especially if you add in Spock/Lizard, then it becomes a bit more varied in what the result and army lists would be.

But, If I bring my army's own Scissors against another army's paper, it might still end up like dull kids craft scissors going up against corrugated cardboard depending on the match up - beatable, but only if I am lucky and everything goes well for me.

Hatachi wrote:
The question reads like "Do you want a game that works or not?"

Which can include a one-sided narrative game consisting of a "final-stand" scenario. It will just take more effort to make it work than giving more points to the weaker army, either in the form of scenario bonuses or terrain or the attacking army having a sort of handicap.

But that extra effort scares people away, either because A), they don't want to plan it themselves (for whatever reason), B), they don't trust some other player to plan it (again, for whatever reason), or C), it wasn't released by the publisher and is therefore automatically invalid (though even that is sometimes not enough for some players!).

I don't think you understand the crux of my post. Some people may like unbalanced scenarios; It doesn't mean they was the architecture of the game system itself unbalanced. It's comparing apples and oranges. The group for narrative groups doesn't have to be large, it only has to be the people that want to do it. Not everyone wants to do Cities of Death, but it should work if they want to do it as well as tournament.

Neither of these scenarios, without bringing up if people want to put the work in or not for the type of game that is or isn't what they don't want to do, is more important than the other. The fact the game mode you don't prefer works as well is proof the game, not the scenario, is balanced as well as flexible.

Flexibility should be just as important to you. You don't want balance that will shatter the moment they add a single new unit, faction. or scenario.

*EDIT* I want to point out that I like unbalanced scenarios and tend to play fluffy lists. That's the side I usually fall on. I'm trying to approach the question in the way a game designer would.

Most historical scenarios are unbalanced, and the point is to try to do better than the historical outcome. 40K doesn't have this mode at all.