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So im noticing that power levels and points are a lil off. Not by much but definitley noticable. Anyone else seeing this?

You are not the only one to notice.

Once again, power only converts to points if you understand how the power system is more or less created.

You can't convert points to power - simply doesn't work.

Yes, they are designed to be different, deliberately.

Wouldn't be much of a 'different system' if it was really not so different...

Ok

GW said that Power LVL is meant to be an "Average" of the strongest a unit could be and the weakest with points
So a Tactical squad that is kitted out to the max and one that is bare bones, power lvl is somewhere in the middle

Indeed, Power Level is designed as a sort of 'reasonable' middle ground. Take, for example, my Sororitas army.

As a rather extremely orthodox conservative order, the Order of the Luminous Beacon tends to lavish its superiors and characters with upgrades, including inferno pistols and power swords, just as an example.

In a points-based game, I have to think long and hard about that - having an Inferno Pistol on a Retributor sergeant, or say, a footslogging BSS sergeant, is a huge waste of 12 points.

In a PL game, that fluffy choice becomes a non-issue, and allows my sergeants to carry Inferno Pistols without actively weighing me down just for fluffy reasons.

ive been playing points and losing to Knights and lord of skulls and i throw everything at them 4x las predators, vindocators, abaddon for re rolls, DPs, and terminators. I feel like i have to play knights too just to stick around till turn 3. I was wondering why i was losing so bad if we were playing the same point level and i compared power levels and his was def higher. Dont really know what to do besides insisting on playing power level for matched play/campaign.

usually it's the other way around that problems like that happen. But pure knight lists are on the powerfull side so that may be army balnce rather then points .

 Ineedvc2500 wrote:
ive been playing points and losing to Knights and lord of skulls and i throw everything at them 4x las predators, vindocators, abaddon for re rolls, DPs, and terminators. I feel like i have to play knights too just to stick around till turn 3. I was wondering why i was losing so bad if we were playing the same point level and i compared power levels and his was def higher. Dont really know what to do besides insisting on playing power level for matched play/campaign.

Pure knights are one of the weakest armies out there in 8th edition because of the way objective scoring works. I suggest either: Play Power Levels if you feel they're more balanced, or stop trying to play into his hands. Bringing big stuff (terminators, DPs, big tanks) plays into the knight player's hands.

Play the objectives with hordes of tiny stuff. Even if he's in combat with you, if you have two models within 3" of the objective when it comes time to score it, you win, even if in the next turn he was going to cream those two models. Hordes of little stuff wins games vs knights, though it may not kill them well.

Will do. We havent been playing physical "objectives" yet so i see where you are coming from. We've just been doin the campaign "fate of Konor" which as far as i know doesnt have A-B-C objectives.. yet. Ill be prepared though when we do.

Objectives make the game much more strategic and more than just a shooting gallery. The card based objective system was a huge breath of fresh air when it came out for 6th, and it's just as good here. Unfortunately you're probably stuck with the Konor missions for now.

The Konor missions are definitely campaign or scenario missions, which you must design around when building your army. For example, knowing this week's mission (Mission 3) ahead of time let me build an army of superheavy tanks, with which I was triumphant, because they damn near never get cover anyways (which is absent), are Vehicles, and are very difficult to kill while possessing firepower that usually hits above their weight slightly.

Equipment doesn't change power level, some units have high power level because if you kit them out they would cost much more points than their base coat, and some units have somewhat low pl because they have no upgrades.

ANd other units have a lower poewr level because they have cheap, crap equipment that lowers their average PL cost even though if you're using PL and gaming the system you're going to be using the expensive but good stuff.

That's not how they've calculated power level though.

Because Power Level is intended for children. I am not trying to be insulting to anyone who use power levels, but that is why they were made. GW thinks that children (aka 12 to 15 year olds) are incapable of basic mathematics so they made all the numbers smaller and made it so you don't need to account for upgrades. It's a lot less scary to play a "50" Point game than it is to play a "1000" point game. GW's current income stream is reliant on said 12-15 year old demographic buying models with mummy's credit card, then quitting.

The only solution if you want a fun game that has even the barest semblance of balance is to ignore power levels and use points.

I have a 2k Points list that is only 89 power. By all rights it should be closer to 100. If I were to play a 100 PL game I would have at least 25% more points than my opponent. And that's without me trying to maximise the point/PL discrepancy.

I would say PLs are made for the casual crowd. People who don't have the time to tally up the points for their models and just want a quick game in.

Whenever I organize a friendly 40k game we often spend something like an hour or two making our lists. If one of us forget to do so before we arrive, everyone has to sit and wait until that one person is done (we like to chat as a group for casual games, so we get lumped into teams). This way we can just look at the power levels and what we have, plop it down on the table and ready to go. Since these are also models from our "serious" lists, with points efficiency worked out for the models in question (as in, the idea amount of points to spend on them if we were using points), it negates the possibility someone is going to min-max and take advantage of the "free" points.

If you just wanna field whatever's on hand, Free Play is for when you just don't care about any semblance of "even"-ness.

It... doesn't really take much time to tally up points. Certainly takes far less time than actually assembling and painting the miniatures in question, and can easily be done while waiting for the minis to dry.

I mean I get that you can favor one or the other as merely a matter of opinion, but it really doesn't take long to tally up points, even without the help of a program like battlescribe or ab40k.

Gw employ crap devs, this is not new info.

Never said just tally points, I mean make up entire lists. We like to shake it up every once in a while. This does speed everything up.

 Melissia wrote:
It... doesn't really take much time to tally up points.

You'd be surprised. Couple years back, I remember a game of warmachine. The other guy didn't have much time or much of a collection so we went with 15 points. He had to pull out his phone to work it out (with 4 models). Still took several minutes.

you should really have it worked out ahead of time, which is why I recommended doing it while you're assembling and painting.

Even ahead of time, it's still a good chunk of time. For Organized play, I can understand. But for some beer and pretzel game where we just want to relax? This is so much easier.

I honestly couldn't tell a difference in the amount time it took to build a list in either system. Even if there was one it was a few minutes which is hardly a burden. Not enough to warrent a completely different system that functionally ignores the value of upgrades.

Are people really that bad at basic addition and subtract? We learned this in elementary school.

 CrownAxe wrote:
Are people really that bad at basic addition and subtract?

Yes. Feels above reals.

Dunno about you guys, but we usually have duplicates of units that have weird point values due to the wargear and we dislike taking just one of something, so multiplication, division, and so forth goes into it. Like if we have 3 squads of one thing but that shaves off just enough of some points that we can't field two squads of another, we're gonna have to sit down and consider what to have and what not to have. Plus it's incredibly unsatisfying when you have something like 23 points left over and the cheapest choice you can make is 8 (or some other number that is not divisible by 5).

Between flipping back and forth pages trying to squeeze out that last point or two and points that end in weird numbers (Chaos Terminators were my bane), being able to just go to a datasheet and add up the power levels is a lot less time consuming. Not to mention I no longer have to scramble through my collection to find the right models. A squad of PMs? Just add the PL to the list and grab about 7 random guys and we're ready to game.

EDIT: I'm just saying, PL is good for the crowd that just wants to turn off their brain and play a game of 40k without going completely balls out no rules. Plus, it hurts no one by existing and, unlike primaris marines, aren't exactly poised to replace things, so I don't get why all this vitriol.

I actually find power annoying. It's easy to shave off an upgrade here or there to meet <1500 points. It's a bit harder to shave off 2 PL when your cheapest thing is 8 PL, putting you at about a 10% disadvantage.

Basically, I too don't loose much time totalling my Power, nor my Points, when building lists. I tend to simply open up Excel, type a squad, character or upgrade name in column A, type its cost (a few in Power level games, and lot in Point level games) under column B, and there is a cell somewhere that adds all the numbers together for me. I spend more time sifting through books or adjusted Point Value lists to find the correct amount of Points for an upgrade or model, than I spend on math this way.

Also, I tend not to agree with the statement that Power Level is introduced purely for the lower-aged demographic. While I realise why this might seem so, especially as I once aplied for a job at the local GW and was introduced to their agressive "Your child likes this so now you pay through the nose" in-store advertising of their own products towardsparents and their offspring that walk in the door, I see there is a big target audience that benefits from the ease of the Power Level system as well.
When in my early teens, I had plenty of time to do some math, and my parents actually encouraged this. I did math, I calculated 'big' numbers and considered statistical odds in list building. Now, as an adult, I have a fulltime job. I have a wife and a couple of pets. I have a household, where I tend to vacuum the rooms and do the dishes before my friends come over and have a game. I don't live with my parents anymore, so guess who would cook a meal? Not my mom in my current circumstances. I don't always have the time needed to pour over books, and lists, and errata, and FAQs, and online adjusted point cost lists to adjust my army with every last single-point squad and character upgrade. For those rare, spur-of-the-moment invitations to my friends to come over and have a game, the Power Level system provides a quick, but dirty way to field reasonably equal forces in a minimum of time.

As for why Points and Power are so different, that's a choice by design. A choice, to calculate Power depending on lowest Point Value and highest Point Value. favours the units (squads, characters, etc.) with the least upgrade options. Two examples; a Necron Warrior squad really has no options other than to add a couple more Necron Warriors. Their low Point cost and high Point cost for a squad of 10 Necron Warriors is basically the same. So their Power Level is quite reasonably the same as an equivalent Point Level. Opposite that is a Space Marines tactical squad. It has a certain Power Level that is derived as an average between the lowest Points value and the highest. As such, its Power Level if relatively greater than its Point Cost Level if you don't take any upgrades. However, the Power Level is quite too low as compared to Point Cost Levels, when the squad is upgraded with a heavy weapon, a special weapon, and a fully kitted veteran sergeant. If all such options (like a lascannon, a plasmagun and a powerfist) are added to a squad that then still costs X Power to use in the game, it will also be udercosted, while a squad without ay upgrades will be overcosted, due to the way this system seems to work.

 Melissia wrote:
It... doesn't really take much time to tally up points. Certainly takes far less time than actually assembling and painting the miniatures in question, and can easily be done while waiting for the minis to dry.

I would think you're assuming that people play wysiwyg. (I do so working out a units points is done once and then it's just a matter of choosing units and totaling)

Lots of people don't and they chop and change all of the equipment, move models between squads, etc. They are starting from nothing every time they write an army list.