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 Stux wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

 Stux wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
You can't measure tiers in casual games, because there is no control. "Mono" is a casual gameplay restriction. If you're going to claim a casual meta exists, you need to prove it. Local metas exist, which are generally casual, but those are influenced more by "who has what" rather than "what is good." And you can't compare local metas A and B.

Disagree. You can compare Codex A to Codex B, without involving soup, easily.

You not wanting to for whatever reason has no bearing on that.

Because the game is fundamentally designed to to include soup. There is no reason to make a comparison when it carries 0 weight.

I can compare a codex to Pickle Pea. Will he give me the Pump-A-Rum? Who knows. But it's not a good comparison.

That's the point.

Some comparisons are better than others.

Balance should be viewed as what it is in practice, not a dakkadakka pipe dream that goes against the core structure of the game itself.

A mono restriction is entirely casual. Can you point me to a major tournament circuit that uses mono restrictions? ETC, ITC, NOVA, etc?

I don't care about tournaments, not really. I care about whether my Dark Angels stand a chance against Dave's Harlequins.

This is REAL. These games happen way more than optimised Imperial Soup Vs optimised Eldar soup.

Let me pause for a moment: I don't disagree with you.

I fully agree that codexes should be viable on their own.

HOWEVER, balance should consider the full scope of the rules. Codex to codex balance is NOT ENOUGH.

Are we on the same page?

And FWIW, if i was going to rank mono-only codexes, it'd go like this:

Imperial Guard
Orks
Eldar
Drukhari
Tau
Tyranids
Knights
Deathwatch
Death Guard
Thousand Sons
Ultramarines
Custodes
Necrons
Admech
Harlequins
Generic CSM
Dark Angels
Blood Angels
Grey Knights
Space Wolves
Generic Space Marines

I'm probably missing a codex or two but this was off of the top of my head. Because it's weird to me to rate codexes with monofaction as a requirement.

If we're talking about fundamental design as it relates to 40k, while the rules for army construction allow for allies, the armies and codex books are not designed with this in mind. They are designed and portrayed to players as self contained forces ostensibly able to function on their own in most cases. Actual mechanics for interaction between forces are basically nonexistent beyond a couple of wargear items and characters. Many armies have no other factions/books they can ally with at all. The core game army construction rules allow for forces composed from multiple books quite easily, but the actual armies are still overwhelmingly self contained things. The allies stuff we see generally works by either picking and choosing units from disparate books that happen to work well together, and unintended synergy with stuff like CP batteries, but not through intentional mechanics within these armies to work with each other.

Ultimately, the vast majority of the playerbase still runs mono armies and individual codex books matter to the bulk of the players.

There is a point to be made that allies/soup allows many different books to be treated as one single faction, and that in practice at the top competitive level this is ubiquitous and mono armies the exception. That is valid to a point. But then, at that point, what are we doing talking about tiers? At that point the Imperium faction is so big and vague and dominant that it comes down to "Imperials...and everyone else", by simple dint of the fact that the Imperium has so much stuff to choose from.

Of course none of this changes that the Imperial Guard crew here use "mono" as a distraction carnifex when attempting to create smoke & mirrors to suggest that IG isn't blatantly OP. Something like 25% of the lists in LVO will feature Imperial Guard. If they continue to get better, and Ynnari get nerfed, we'll see ourselves in a scenario where tournaments will be an IG vs IG fest.

and until they remove the ability of the IG to act as an unintended source of regenerating CP, that will probably remain the case. Cut the CP battery and half the lists including Guard drop them overnight....

If we want to use simple frequency of appearance at events as an indicator of balance, Space Marines must have been the rulers of every previous meta

 Melissia wrote:
+1 to this. I play mono armies for flavor purposes. It's hard to make allied armies look like a coherent force instead of a hodgepodge of whatever units I could grab on the way out.

Aye, most allies armies look painfully incoherent and gamey, and I can count on one hand the number of well thought out and coherent allies armies I have seen in the last six or seven years since Allies were reintroduced.

 Melissia wrote:
It's hard to make allied armies look like a coherent force instead of a hodgepodge of whatever units I could grab on the way out.

Eh, depends on the army and the paintscheme. Here's my 2000 pt Guard / Knights army... https://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/996425-2000%20Pt%20AM%252FIK%20Army.html

House Terryn Knights + some Cadians in a similar color scheme. I think it looks like a coherent army, and from a fluff perspective it works too since it makes a lot of sense for House Terryn to have a PDF to accompany the Nobles into battle, instead of just sending out their Nobles alone.

Some soups don't make thematic sense, I'll grant you. Like a Supreme Command of Space Marine Smashcaptains doesn't make sense at all. But it's not hard to make allies look like a coherent army either if you model them as such.

I disagree marm. Codex to codex balance would be a lot better than what we have now. ESP if special rules were tailored to benefit codex units more than external allied choices.

If essentially half of the codexes available are space marines in some form or another, shouldn't they be represented?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
I disagree marm. Codex to codex balance would be a lot better than what we have now. ESP if special rules were tailored to benefit codex units more than external allied choices.

I don't disagree that mono as a requirement would produce more balanced games.

I also think that banning superheavies and forgeworld from matched play would improve balance, too.

And even in a "mono only" environment, all SM except DW and Ultramarines would be absolute trash tier, Necrons would be a bit better but still struggling, Admech same boat.

The Catachan IG list with a Shadowsword instead of a Castellan would actually be better because lethality drops in everyone else's army if mono is a requirement. Orks would be dominant obviously. If you dont' have to worry about losing your shadowsword to a castellan it becomes badass bonkers good. IG would be soooo much better than they are now.

And yet another thread devolves into whining about IG. I mean, it's a little perplexing considering that eldar and DE are arguably even stronger than IG this edition. Add onto the fact that the majority of IG detachments taken to tournaments are listed as "secondary detachments" (IE CP batteries and meatshields for units that do the real work) really makes you wonder why certain users are so focused on IG as the culprit of bad balance in 8th.

If I had to guess I would say it was down to the sheer cognitive dissonance and rage of space marine players having their faction of supersoldiers be worse than bog standard army dudes. How dare they! That isn't how it is supposed to be in the lore.

Sorry, a knight castellan with a loyal 32 CP battery is not an "IG army" in any way shape or form.

w1zard wrote:
And yet another thread devolves into whining about IG. I mean, it's a little perplexing considering that eldar and DE are arguably even stronger than IG this edition. Add onto the fact that the majority of IG detachments taken to tournaments are listed as "secondary detachments" (IE CP batteries and meatshields for units that do the real work) really makes you wonder why certain users are so focused on IG as the culprit of bad balance in 8th.

Eldar and DE, without allies, pale in comparison to IG.

And in practice, IG + Castellan beats Eldar. Top table at So-Cal saw Guard crush Ynnari. For example.

Of all the Vigilus factions, IG got the best stuff. You'll see it at LVO, if you go.

 Marmatag wrote:
Eldar and DE, without allies, pale in comparison to IG.

No. Mono-craftworld and mono-DE can fight perfectly on par with mono-IG.

Why not just keep the whole soup thing, so people can have all their crazy armies, but put the rules for it and maybe the titan class stuff in to open? soup players they claim they soup, because of fluff. So narrative games should be right up their alley. At the same time people that play normal matched play games would have their pre dominantly mono armies, and this way GW would be forced to make valid books instead of making books wiht 2-3 units and expecting to make the rest of the army out of 2-3 other books.

w1zard wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Eldar and DE, without allies, pale in comparison to IG.

No. Mono-craftworld and mono-DE can fight perfectly on par with mono-IG.

I mean, this is a lie, but keep doing you man.

Focusing on balance in regards to the soup factions makes a lot more sense than a tier list that ignores it. The thing is, within each flavor of soup exists its own tier list of which codexes are your best choices to fill one of your 3 detachment slots. Going further, each codex has a tier list of which units are worth taking in a detachment of that codex.

Generally speaking, its healthy to prioritize this stuff from the top down, because for the most part, you can usually get away with some suboptimal choices as long as you don't go crazy. It's more important that the Imperium be competitive than Space Marines, its more important that Space Marines are competitive than it is that a Land Speeder is top tier. You might not be able to run a Land Speeder army, but a Land Speeder in a Space Marine detachment in an Imperium army isn't going to cripple an otherwise competitive list.

BuT CorSAIrS!!1

BUt SIstErSSs!!!!!!111

bUT cUSToDEs!!!1111111111111111

Some armies will just not have the full range of tools available to counter every threat. That said, if an army is deserving of a codex, it should be able to stand mostly on its own, without depending on allies to function at a basic level. Because then it becomes a game of "what does this faction do better than Imperial Guard?" Because Guard is the baseline for anything imperium. If you can't outperform guard you have no place in IG +Castellan.

This is how you end up with Imperium codexes that were dead on arrival, like Space Wolves.

 Marmatag wrote:

w1zard wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Eldar and DE, without allies, pale in comparison to IG.

No. Mono-craftworld and mono-DE can fight perfectly on par with mono-IG.

I mean, this is a lie, but keep doing you man.

>Goes to 40kstats.com
>Win % as primary
>Guard 53.89%
>DE 57.10%
>Yanari 62.49%
>Asuryani 51.87%
>Thousand suns 57.84%
>Harlaquins 54.04%

yeah I mean guard is clearly leaps and bounds in front of everything else it's insane

Why would i need 40k stats when BCP has the real data?

Also, the fact that Renegade Guard shows up in the list at all is pretty laughable.

Well the GK data seems a bit right.

It's not.

Blood Of Kittens does the same thing really as 40k stats, they've just been doing it longer and restrict their focus to GTs, majors.

If you want this kind of data, BoK is more complete.


Edit - and we've discussed this before. It doesn't make sense to look at the bottom of tournaments because balance is a measure of how well a list can perform, not how poorly it can be piloted by scrubs.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not.

Blood Of Kittens does the same thing really as 40k stats, they've just been doing it longer and restrict their focus to GTs, majors.

If you want this kind of data, BoK is more complete.


Edit - and we've discussed this before. It doesn't make sense to look at the bottom of tournaments because balance is a measure of how well a list can perform, not how poorly it can be piloted by scrubs.

Yeah, we discussed this before and what you are doing by looking at only "winning" lists is called survivorship bias and is how you fail out of stats 101.

If we are going to ignore stats and just look at winning stats/players why not bring up that the only top 10 ITC player playing a mono list is playing DE

both ways you are wrong so I guess just pick your poison?

Again, I never really got the irrational hatred towards guard. Yes, it is undoubtedly the best mono imperial codex by far. But that is more because Space Marines of all flavor SUCK this edition rather than guard being "overpowered". When you compare guard to xenos codices like Aeldari, DE, and even tyranids or Tau, guard looks way more tame by comparison.

If you look on 40K stats guard are taken almost 3 times more often as a "secondary" detachment rather than a "primary" detachment. It bears repeating that being the best CP battery or meatshield to standout units from other codices does not an overpowered faction make.

Asmodios wrote:
Yeah, we discussed this before and what you are doing by looking at only "winning" lists is called survivorship bias and is how you fail out of stats 101.

Careful, he probably already knows this, he has a math degree after all. /s

w1zard wrote:
Again, I never really got the irrational hatred towards guard. Yes, it is undoubtedly the best mono imperial codex by far. But that is more because Space Marines of all flavor SUCK this edition rather than guard being "overpowered". When you compare guard to xenos codices like Aeldari, DE, and even tyranids or Tau, guard looks way more tame by comparison.

If you look on 40K stats guard are taken almost 3 times more often as a "secondary" detachment rather than a "primary" detachment. It bears repeating that being the best CP battery or meatshield to standout units from other codices does not an overpowered faction make.

Asmodios wrote:
Yeah, we discussed this before and what you are doing by looking at only "winning" lists is called survivorship bias and is how you fail out of stats 101.

Careful, he probably already knows this, he has a math degree after all. /s

We have had this whole discussion before and im seriously perplexed how he doesn't realize that only looking at winning list wouldn't skew data. I mean this isn't something that like obscure high level statistics they literally cover it in stats 101 if not highschool level math

It's not survivorship bias, because the question is fundamentally different than "how well is a faction performing," it's "how good is a faction."

Win loss across all players doesn't really answer the question. You call it survivorship bias because you can't separate yourself from your bias and honestly answer the question.

Astra Militarum as a primary faction have far and away the best representation in the top 3 of major events since the start of 8th edition. That is data. It is a fact. Yet it doesn't match what you're showing here. Because you're selecting a view of the data that is different to fit your narrative.


https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/ref=asc_df_0393310728/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312014159412&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11300095105146963684&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1014243&hvtargid=pla-432731750539&psc=1

Anyway i'm done with this. Enjoy your echo chamber and circle jerk. I'll leave you with this: http://bloodofkittens.com/8th-edition-top-army-list-compendium/

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not survivorship bias, because the question is fundamentally different than "how well is a faction performing," it's "how good is a faction."

Win loss across all players doesn't really answer the question. You call it survivorship bias because you can't separate yourself from your bias and honestly answer the question.

no this is textbook survivorship bias (looking at only the survivors will ignoring the rest of your data set). You want to skew that data purposely to fit a narrative because the statistics don't align with your preconceived notion. The most ironic part about this is using your own method of "lulz ignore all the data" we still end up with an ITC top 10 with a single player that's been playing a single mono codex which is DE. showing that even by your own very poor calculation DE would be the best mono codex not guard.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not survivorship bias, because the question is fundamentally different than "how well is a faction performing," it's "how good is a faction."

Win loss across all players doesn't really answer the question. You call it survivorship bias because you can't separate yourself from your bias and honestly answer the question.

Nah, Asmodios is right. Looking at only winning lists not only lowers your sample size and inherently makes your data less accurate, it also eliminates data points based on criteria that may not have anything to do with balance.

If 40kstats.com only showed numbers relating to primary and secondary detachments with no further data I might agree with you Marmatag because the most popular faction is not necessarily the best. However, they show win percentages of all games of a primary faction and their sample sizes are huge, which tends to indicate that conclusions drawn from the resulting data are pretty accurate. I get that you only want to look at the data from "competitive" lists because purposely including non-competative lists in your sample may skew the results. But, it is more useful to look at performance across all levels of tournament play as a whole rather than ONLY the winners because that is a better reflection of ACTUAL tournament performance.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not survivorship bias, because the question is fundamentally different than "how well is a faction performing," it's "how good is a faction."

Win loss across all players doesn't really answer the question. You call it survivorship bias because you can't separate yourself from your bias and honestly answer the question.

Astra Militarum as a primary faction have far and away the best representation in the top 3 of major events since the start of 8th edition. That is data. It is a fact. Yet it doesn't match what you're showing here. Because you're selecting a view of the data that is different to fit your narrative.


https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/ref=asc_df_0393310728/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312014159412&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11300095105146963684&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1014243&hvtargid=pla-432731750539&psc=1

Anyway i'm done with this. Enjoy your echo chamber and circle jerk. I'll leave you with this: http://bloodofkittens.com/8th-edition-top-army-list-compendium/

It looks like that's also from the start of 8th edition, and 40kstats.com seems to only have data from July of 2018 onwards, so it's more recent data. The blood of kittens site doesn't take into account representation at the tournament either. It looks like Imperial Knights and Astra Militarum are some of the most common armies. I'd expect to see them winning a large number of games, because they have more chances to win because they have more players.

Asmodios wrote:
If we are going to ignore stats and just look at winning stats/players why not bring up that the only top 10 ITC player playing a mono list is playing DE

Because that wouldn't support his point of view.

 Horst wrote:


It looks like that's also from the start of 8th edition, and 40kstats.com seems to only have data from July of 2018 onwards, so it's more recent data. The blood of kittens site doesn't take into account representation at the tournament either. It looks like Imperial Knights and Astra Militarum are some of the most common armies. I'd expect to see them winning a large number of games, because they have more chances to win because they have more players.

Don't army stats in w40k get more flat the more an army is played? Factions that have few players and generate a lot less data can have huge spikes in win %. If 20 people play a faction and one goes to the top, or very bottom, table the avarge will get skewed a lot more then a faction which is played by 200 dudes. Even a proper median is hard to achive with so little data. What we can say is stuff like marines are underperforming, IG are are in most imperial armies in some sort, eldar are doing ok etc I think people still need to wait for ork data, but it seems to be shaping up good.

Karol wrote:


Maybe a stupid question, but much of a discrepancy is there between good and bad armies, what ever they are played as soup or not? It seems to me, that armies that are good do ok as mono, and of course as soups too. It doesn't really matter if someone compares GK as mono codex or as part of a soup, to other mono books or soups. They are always worse. At the same time something like IG or Inari does well as mono army and as soup. It seems like the only promblematic armies, at least as tier lists goes, are armies that do not soup, because they can't. But if one looks as orcs for example they kind of a soup too, they just soup with their own codex. Different units go in to different kulture detachments.

Blood Angels is one of the lowest tier armys in the game outside of soup. But because this isn't a soup game, they can contribute one of the core units to one of the strongest lists in the game. They are a top tier codex soup wise, trash tier solo.

 Xenomancers wrote:
I disagree marm. Codex to codex balance would be a lot better than what we have now. ESP if special rules were tailored to benefit codex units more than external allied choices.

The last part is the key though. Coded to coded balance is a terrible idea if soup is still a thing with really no downside. So mono-Orks is balanced against mono-IG. Cool until IG go out and sure up their weaknesses with stuff from other imperial armies at really no cost. Or Mono-Tau vs mono-Knights is balanced until Knights get a ton of extra CP through allies, and screens etc. you cannot balance both mono-books and allies without some bonus to mono armies or negative to allies. Unless all possible allies share the same basic strengths and weaknesses.

Weirdly aggressive thread.

Agree with Marm on tournament meta. Don't see why you should consider how badly a list can do at a tournament. On that basis Eldar were consistently amongst the worst performing factions in the 7th edition tournament setting - because when 1/3rd of all players bring Eldar, they lose a lot of games. It didn't mean they were worse than whoever else occasionally won a tournament.

The issue is that the mono-codex meta matters to the overwhelming majority of players. If I want to play with my friends, or start a slow grow/tale of X gamers league, but not play someone whose awful, I might want to know that GK are struggling. I don't need to know that if I don't play Imperial/Eldar Soup I am being irrational.

Tyel wrote:
Weirdly aggressive thread.

Agree with Marm on tournament meta. Don't see why you should consider how badly a list can do at a tournament. On that basis Eldar were consistently amongst the worst performing factions in the 7th edition tournament setting - because when 1/3rd of all players bring Eldar, they lose a lot of games. It didn't mean they were worse than whoever else occasionally won a tournament.

The issue is that the mono-codex meta matters to the overwhelming majority of players. If I want to play with my friends, or start a slow grow/tale of X gamers league, but not play someone whose awful, I might want to know that GK are struggling. I don't need to know that if I don't play Imperial/Eldar Soup I am being irrational.

You don't do it because its something called survivorship bias in statistics and is a truly terrible way to analyze data.

Say for example you are creating a new drug to cure a cold. There are 100 trials and in 57% of the time the cold is cured in the other 43% the patient dies. Saying "well looking at the top 57% of the trials this new drug is amazing.... I mean why even pay attention to the ones that didn't make it". Purposely skewing your data to remove failures is going to obviously give a skewed result to what you are looking at.

The funniest thing as I stated before is that there is one player in the top 10 of the ITC using a mono army (they talk about him every week on signals from the front line) and he is using a pure DE army. So even ignoring the very good statistical data we have and looking at an incredibly small elite data set like suggested (literally the top 10 players in the world) DE can not only obviously hang with mono IG but with all soup armies as well

Lol why do people keep placing Orks so high when none of the stats reflect these assumptions? Orks have a 45% win rate. We have yet to win one of the big big tournaments. Our codex is the most recent and our faction does not perform well under time constraints that are becoming the norm.

E - mono DE performs well in large part thanks to AoV. GSC and their allies are about to get a slice of that hot pie. It’s ridiculous to me that only a few factions have such a ridiculous, mechanics breaking ability. I hope GW roll it out to all factions or remove it from all. Stopping a key stratagem is game winning. You can’t put a price on such a powerful ability and in my opinion it’s too much for so few factions to have access to.