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As usual my comments are being half stated and the context is being changed to fit a narrative.

Its never been “tournament results cant be used to evaluate the state of the games balance (full stop)”

Its “tournament results cannot be used to evaluate anything more than the balance of the game at the powergamer level. Incidentally right now thets also bad.

It does nothing for the casual level and ignores the giant gulf that exists between someone powergaming and someone bringing a casual list.

Because people rolling in saying the game is balanced because at the powergamer level there is a diversity (and right now there isnt) and that a book like flesh eater courts is fine because powerlists can deal with them is ignoring that you have to have powerlists to deal with them, which is most definitely the opposite of balance. Its both bad external and internal balance.

Having to socially engineer your groups to not play powerlists because you made the mistake of buying slaves to darkness or beastmen or kharadron overlords is also not an answer that any other game requires. And thats the common answer to bad balance. The hand waive. “Just talk to your opponent”

Except when your opponents buy a powerlist to roll into adepticon and thats the only models they have.

Which is not uncommon. In my area its default.

Carnith wrote:
If it was that Feeding frenzy could only come from the general, or from arch-regents then it would be less of a problem i feel, but it coming from ANY hero makes every unit dangerous.

Another suggestion would be they would be allowed a second pile in later on. This would work like the DoK and Slaanesh second activation mechanics.

Agreed, there have been mechanics like that around since the start but they have always been a second pick instead of immediately getting to go again.

So, I’ve had some more thoughts, about balance and about Feeding Frenzy.

First, and I think I may have mentioned this before, but what if restrictions came on a point basis rather than a unit basis? As in, in a 1000pt game, you must have 200pts worth of Battleline units and 200pts worth of Leaders, and you can’t have more than 200pts each of artillery, behemoths, other units, endless spells or allies. Price the bigger stuff out of the smaller games basically.

...that’s a crap idea isn’t it?

As for feeding frenzy...what if it was changed to “if an enemy unit is destroyed, then any FEC units wholly within 12” of it that haven’t already fought can immediately pile in and attack.” Is that too much?

Having to socially engineer your groups to not play powerlists because you made the mistake of buying slaves to darkness or beastmen or kharadron overlords is also not an answer that any other game requires.

Kharadron Overlords is in an especially bad state, I don't think anyone is denying that. Beasts of Chaos, however, are a decent tome. The problem I see with Beasts of Chaos is that their line is very much Direct Order only which means they are a not as accessible to new players.

Beasts of chaos is a fun book. And against an fec or dok or skaven powerlist, mostly at a huge disadvantage. And a huge negative play experience.

So I have been thinking about Nighthaunts. Specifically their ethereal rule (ignore all save modifiers). When applied army-wide I find it to not be a fun mechanic to play with (verses just on a few units) and the way it works is narrative-breaking. The idea is that it takes willpower and/or magical weaponry to damage them, but the way it works now the most effective offense against Nighthaunt is loads of rend - attacks, so swarms of crappy units are a great choice. The best alternative I have thought of is to tie the rend-ignore to the bravery of the attacker.

Instead of just ignoring all modifiers, they ignore all positive modifiers and all rend (allowing save-reducing magic to affect them) unless that rend came from a unit with bravery 7 or more. But I feel like there's a better option out there. What do you guys think?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Future War Cultist wrote:
So, I’ve had some more thoughts, about balance and about Feeding Frenzy.

First, and I think I may have mentioned this before, but what if restrictions came on a point basis rather than a unit basis? As in, in a 1000pt game, you must have 200pts worth of Battleline units and 200pts worth of Leaders, and you can’t have more than 200pts each of artillery, behemoths, other units, endless spells or allies. Price the bigger stuff out of the smaller games basically.

...that’s a crap idea isn’t it?

As for feeding frenzy...what if it was changed to “if an enemy unit is destroyed, then any FEC units wholly within 12” of it that haven’t already fought can immediately pile in and attack.” Is that too much?

Better to make it so feeding frenzy can only be triggered when a FEC unit wipes an enemy unit out (remove the 'must be within 3"' restriction). So instead of being able to use it whenever it is much more niche and requires some tactical planning in getting the right unit to wipe out the enemy at the right time.

Overlords are indeed in a terrible shape. It’s actually shocking how hard GW nerfed them. And they had some inherent weaknesses in their profiles to begin with.

We’ve spoken a lot about how to tone down the FEC. How do we power up the KO? I mean I’ve got plenty of ideas but I don’t want to derail the thread.

Better to make it so feeding frenzy can only be triggered when a FEC unit wipes an enemy unit out (remove the 'must be within 3"' restriction). So instead of being able to use it whenever it is much more niche and requires some tactical planning in getting the right unit to wipe out the enemy at the right time.

So something like “if a FEC unit destroys an enemy unit in the combat phase, pick one other FEC wholly within 12” of the destroyed unit that has not yet fought. That unit can immediately pile in and attack.”

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Overlords are indeed in a terrible shape. It’s actually shocking how hard GW nerfed them. And they had some inherent weaknesses in their profiles to begin with.

Overlords literally just need one major tweak to be far more viable:
Frigates and Ironclads receive the rules for being able to be garrisoned.

Their "nerfs" have been thanks to people abusing things, not unlike the tweaks that Stormcast saw when they dropped. The new Thunderers are a far more interesting unit to play and play against than the initial "Spam X weapon, Khemist buffs X weapon".

 Kanluwen wrote:
Overlords literally just need one major tweak to be far more viable:
Frigates and Ironclads receive the rules for being able to be garrisoned.

Their "nerfs" have been thanks to people abusing things, not unlike the tweaks that Stormcast saw when they dropped. The new Thunderers are a far more interesting unit to play and play against than the initial "Spam X weapon, Khemist buffs X weapon".

I once played a game against Ironjawz using those rules. The results where amazing; the navigator could speed up all the ships and dispel magic from the safety of the ironclad, the admiral’s opportunistic privateers command trait affected every unit in the army at once, and when the ironjawz hit the ships, instead of rolling over them unharmed they suffered very heavy casualties. I still lost the game, but because of objectives...in terms of casualties, we were neck and neck. Very close...much better.

If you had those rules, improved the saves and innate healing ability of the ships, allowed the ships to launch bombing runs, let navigators outflank ships, let khemist boost ships and put embarking and disembarking in the movement phase, Overlords would work.

I’d also tweak the code a little too. Update them to match current trends. Make custom ports a more attractive option. And get an artifact and command trait for all 6 ports too.

Ditto to the make them work like garrisons option. That alone single-handedly fixes the battletome. There are still rough spots but it makes KO function properly (and like they do in the fluff). Simple, easy change everyone can get behind. Even naysaysers get something as it means units can be targeted when embarked (albeit with cover and -1 to hit).

 auticus wrote:

Having to socially engineer your groups to not play powerlists because you made the mistake of buying slaves to darkness or beastmen or kharadron overlords is also not an answer that any other game requires. And thats the common answer to bad balance. The hand waive. “Just talk to your opponent”

It is actually false that no other game requires this. In fact, the entire tradition of wargaming going back to the early 1800s functions that way. The 1824 version of Kriegsspiel (as well as those published in later decades) required that the participants set up the game including the terrain/map and the forces involved. This was especially true of the version published in the 1870s and later.

In the early 20th century HG Wells published a couple books (Little Wars and Floor Wars) which also assumed that the participants would figure out the terrain (he called it "the country") as well as the forces.

In the late 1950s when the current type of miniature wargaming began to spread more widely the rules all assumed the same thing. And it's been like that ever since. I can post the names of thousands of titles of miniature wargames that all have this same assumption.

This idea that two people can each set up half a board game, without knowing the layout of the board and come together and have it work is actually the aberration. The abnormality. And the only way it really works are when the people have a similar vision or the game drastically reduces the variables. Infinity, for example, is better at balance than 40k or AoS because even the different things in the game sort of do the same sort of things across the different types of soldiers. A sniper from one faction isn't that different from a sniper from another. Same goes for hackers. I'm sure fans would argue how distinct they are, but they really are within a bounded range of abilities.

Furthermore people who play competitive games want the wide disparity in power levels. They want a degree of outright errors and traps in the army list point values. They want list building to be a feature of the matched play scene as just like deckbuilding in Magic the Gathering, building a bad army list is the first skill test people need to pass in order to compete. I don't like it. I don't play that way, but lots of people do. You even posted in this thread about how when you did a better job at balance people contacted you to complain.

I think things just need to be good enough. Clustered around 5-8% of either side of the average win-loss ratio.

GW isn't going to do that, so why not go with the technique that has worked for running successful games since 1824? Get on the same page with your opponent.

 frozenwastes wrote:
why not go with the technique that has worked for running successful games since 1824? Get on the same page with your opponent.

How many players did those games have? Was the style of play (meet up, set up, play over a couple hours with someone you may or may not know) similar? Honest questions because I don't know.

Ok. Well in the half dozen other games I play regularly, this bad of an issue never seems to come up. Ever.

So there must be something else missing there thats present in the gw fanbase that creates this gross disparity.

Youre right people complained a lot when azyr was a point system used in tournaments and it was blocking list disparities.

Maybe then the thing missing in the other half dozen games i play are the competitive attitudes that strive to break the game?

Thats certainly possible.

I argue that GWs games are popular despite poor balance, and that is why smaller games go to much further lengths to ensure it; they cannot match the appeal of GWs fluff, miniatures, and ease of finding players, so they go for the one thing they can beat them on. If balance was not a selling point they wouldn't do that.

This idea that two people can each set up half a board game, without knowing the layout of the board and come together and have it work is actually the aberration

I would add that even online digital games require social contracts to work. Take for example Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends. If you want to have an enjoyable game where you are not rofl-stomped you must engage with your team mates on potential combos and take into account the map(in Heroes of the Storm especially).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Maybe then the thing missing in the other half dozen games i play are the competitive attitudes that strive to break the game?

My experience is that competitive players tend to congregate in bigger and popular games. I see this especially in digital games and would not be very surprised if the same applied to tabletop gaming.

There is also the possibility that with smaller niche games the playerbase could be a little older and more casual. The 30k group where I live is much more relaxed and easy-going compared to the 40k group for example, even if there are some overlaps of players. For me, at least, the only games that have engendered a very competitive attitude in the player bases is 40k and Warmahordes(when they were doing well). All the other games I've played have been much more relaxed.

NinthMusketeer wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
why not go with the technique that has worked for running successful games since 1824? Get on the same page with your opponent.

How many players did those games have? Was the style of play (meet up, set up, play over a couple hours with someone you may or may not know) similar? Honest questions because I don't know.

I really have no idea how large the communities were for various games back in the 19th century or the early 20th century. We barely know about the gaming done in the late 50s from some typed up newsletters and accounts from those involved. The 60s and 70s we know more about and the wargaming books at the time ended up in most libraries in many countries.

If I had to guess the most common format would have been for one person to supply all the miniatures and terrain and host the game. Only later in the 70s and later decades did people get the idea of making "their" army. I think I read some newsletters from the 60s where people talk about how they are painting roman infantry and whatnot to match up with a friend's celts. Or british to match up against some germans.

The 80s, 90s and 2000s saw a true explosion of the number of games. There are too many historical miniature games for me to list here. Some of which were specifically designed so that you could indeed make "your army" and play it against any other. DBA for example, had many lists where you'd make 12 elements for a particular nation and year and could play against any other up until maybe the early 17th century. So you could have hundred years wars knights vs macedonians. It also really restricted terrain and game set up. So every army had 12 units and you played the same scenario on a very few handful of terrain maps.

And it was still pretty tier based at the competitive level. There were tournaments and some armies were clearly better than others. Even with a short list of units (what, skirmishers, blades, spears, auxiliaries, bows, artillery, cavalry, knights, elephants and pikes) and with a spear unit in one army being identical to the spear unit in another army and a fixed army size of 12 units, the game just couldn't withstand the competitive mindset. It was either play a proven competitive army, one you thought would be a counter to the most popular armies or enjoy your time at the bottom tables.

auticus wrote:So there must be something else missing there thats present in the gw fanbase that creates this gross disparity.

I think you're right about that.

Youre right people complained a lot when azyr was a point system used in tournaments and it was blocking list disparities.

I try to be positive about tournament people's preferences even if I don't share them, but the GW crowd tends to be closer to the Magic the Gathering tournament mindset. List building and deck building and doing what you need to in order to win is pretty analogous between the two.

From what I understand the magic development team intentionally undercosts and overcosts cards so decks become more predictable so they can craft the play experience more directly. They have a "future future league" and a "play design" team that tests the combinations of the cards that they intentionally make the most efficient against one another and don't bother testing the majority of the cards that they know are simply not good enough to make it into a tournament deck.

GW (inadvertently?) does the same thing by using tournament people as their playtest teams. Only tournament type lists against existing tournament type lists will get tested.

Maybe then the thing missing in the other half dozen games i play are the competitive attitudes that strive to break the game?

Thats certainly possible.

I'm finding that when my friends and I specifically don't tune our armies in any way and make what tournament players would call bad list building decisions, our games work great. We barely have to solve problems. Only sort of when someone accidentally happens upon part of a tournament level combo or something. Thankfully the types of builds that truly shoot the power level up really can only be made intentionally. I still have not played a game with stormcast using staunch defender. I'd actually have to take it at least once to have a chance of ending up anywhere near a lord-castellant, staunch defender and a max unit of guys with shields. I still haven't taken a unit of stormcast over 10 models so I know I'm not getting the most out of any buffs I could apply to a given unit.

There's also a design failure in that GW goes for cool over balance. Balance is barely an afterthought. So on top of this massive disparity between the goals of the participants you also have an unnecessary laziness. And contradictory design goals like where the points need to reflect the capabilities of just the warscrolls but also the warscrolls + allegiance abilities.

It's just a mess. A perfect storm of crazily incompatible list design approaches and lazy game design and going for cool over balance. And the amount of playtesting is just so small. A few groups here and there and then internal playing. It's simply impossible for them to get games in with even a smattering of all the possible armies so they're likely only getting testing of tournament type lists made from the new material against existing tournament lists. GW decided for some reason they recruit tournament regulars and organizers to do their balance playtesting.

And then there's the constant rotation in of new army books and the long lead time between the army book and when it's tested. Stuff will simply be out that was not when the book was tested.

I don't mean to come across as championing a social approach to balance because it is the *best.* Clearly if you have even reasonable data and a head for math and modelling and can track some game results you can make a system to balance AoS that is way better than the current one. I champion the social solutions because it's really all we have left at this point. GW is simply not going to make their games give results within an acceptable distribution around 50-50 wins and losses.

And tournament results might also mask the problem. If GW doesn't adjust the current top armies then more people shooting for the top tables will switch to them and future events will show a reduction in their win rates. Just because they'll be playing each other more and more. And less skilled players will jump into them thinking it will give them the edge needed to win. As it takes time to paint armies this isn't as quick of a process as it is for a card game where people can just buy the cards and put them in sleeves, but I suspect it still has an impact. I think we'll see the next big tournament concentrate more entrants onto the proven factions.

I think you articulated your position quite well there, and have a lot of good points.

For playtesting you absolutely need tournament players.

But you also absolutely need guys that are coming at it from the casual as well.

You can read it all the time here, on facebook, on twitter, on tga... "the game is in a great place because the tournament diversity is so mixed!"

The standards that are being used right now are as such that if the tournament experienced is diverse, thats good enough for everyone else.

Thats where the failure comes in.

That goes hand in hand with "all you have to do is talk with your opponent if you don't want a tournament powered game".

So the game is fine so long as tournament results have a lot of mixed and varied top 10 place finishers (right now no one can argue thats not the case at all) and if you are a casual then you just have to discuss things with your opponent and they will gladly tone down their list for you.

Thats the attitude that I see as pretty prevalent in the overall GW fan-verse.

That however fails because a lot of people ONLY buy whatever they need to be competitive, and even if they wanted to they could not tone down because they only have what they have. Thats the default where I live.

Then the next obstacle are the guys that feel that everything should be tournament level and if you aren't list building to break the game you either are stupid, don't know how to play right, or are just asking for whats coming to you.

We have listed in this thread a solid dozen ways to treat the game right now that would bring it back into some semblance of sanity so we all know that it can easily be done.

But you can't do that with guys that are only concerned with tournament health. You have to have a mix of players from the various view points of the game.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think you articulated your position quite well there, and have a lot of good points.

Thanks. Any time in the past that I said that "balance is impossible", I should have added "given how GW and their player base operate."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:

That however fails because a lot of people ONLY buy whatever they need to be competitive, and even if they wanted to they could not tone down because they only have what they have. Thats the default where I live.

The key to more happiness in the 40k side of things is to play the missions in the Open Play section. I think 3 out of the 4 assume unequal points. One is even made for one side to double the other. It's sad that people jump to equal points matched play so readily when they could really use some training in playing games where one side has more points than the other. It has applications to matched play as well.

Then they could say "My stuff is all strong tournament stuff, so I'll take 1250 to your 2000 and we'll see how it goes."

And if that works, what a testament to how badly GW has done with the points system.

As someone who has made a functioning points system you must find the current state of things both frustrating and vindicating.

I think the core issue is in many ways that when a game reaches a critical mass it becomes much more competitive minded and tourney centered. Moving away from that or trying to center the experience after that milestone is often a very difficult task if I am to compare it to MtG and digital games. Almost every company wants a competitive tourney game and GW finally has that, warts and all.

As someone who has made a functioning points system you must find the current state of things both frustrating and vindicating.

Very frustrating, but not vindicating in the least because I learned that the mainstream GW fan-verse ideology is about list building, and list building cannot exist if everything were balanced. If everything were balanced, list building would not be as important. The tighter the balance in a game, the less of an impact list building will have. Creating a functioning game point system means nothing when the goal was not a functioning game point system, but rather a game point system that supported and enhanced list building as a "skill". Mine was intentionally designed to make list building less of a "skill" and to make gameplay on the table more of deciding who wins. That was its biggest complaint, it killed listbuilding and was boring because of it.

I think the core issue is in many ways that when a game reaches a critical mass it becomes much more competitive minded and tourney centered. Moving away from that or trying to center the experience after that milestone is often a very difficult task if I am to compare it to MtG and digital games. Almost every company wants a competitive tourney game and GW finally has that, warts and all.

I don't think there is anything wrong with a competitive game. I play the hell out of SAGA and I'm in Kings of War, and both of those games have wide competitive presences, and both are seen at the large conventions with competitive events.

The disparity in those games is only a fraction of 40k or AOS though. Kings of War does have a couple deep issues with their balance, and I think a lot of that is also driven by a lot of those guys wanting the list building and the game devs giving it to them.

Unfortunately with Kings of War, you DO have to rotate your army out every year, and thats a complaint I have in both AOS/40k and Kings of War. The burn and churn. With SAGA and Warlords and Middle Earth I don't have to constantly get and paint new models to have good games. Conquest releases in a couple weeks and I'm interested to see how that balance will be as well. They (their devs) claim they want balance to be #1 there.

I've been to enough game developer conferences (game dev is something I've been involved in since the late 90s) and have sat through magic the gathering development conferences to recognize that they are appealing to the spike personality in GW as well intentionally.

Spike would go away if you took away list building presence. The biggest reason AOS flopped in 2015 release was not that the old world was exploded. It was that there were no points, and therefore no listbuilding at ALL.

I think a competitive game is just fine. However, it is not acceptable that all of your factions are not viable in the first place and that additionally you have really bad books like the top three right now running amuk. Those are either a sign of incompetence or intentional injection to appease Spike.

I am betting its the latter and not the former because I know the game devs are not stupid people.

I think a competitive game is just fine. However, it is not acceptable that all of your factions are not viable in the first place and that additionally you have really bad books like the top three right now running amuk. Those are either a sign of incompetence or intentional injection to appease Spike.

I am betting its the latter and not the former because I know the game devs are not stupid people.

Not stupid, but they are human and will do mistakes. I have worked in a game development long enough to realize that a strange amount of issues get through even when everybody tries to be on guard. Considering the churn they are going through I bet they are just aiming for those unittests to meet deadlines before moving onto the next faction, because they are aiming to do what you want which is to get every proper faction up to date at the end of 2020(I think it was 2020).

Maybe. But with the fec and skaven book the community picked the op bits out in minutes of the community previews.

I don't think it's stupidity, I think it is apathy. They don't care because they don't particularly need to; people will still play and find ways to live with it because at the end of the day the games are fun and the miniatures great. Now personally I feel there is strong evidence for better balance improving sales, and that it is only a small (vocal) minority that actually desires imbalance. Also worth noting players with a strong desire for balance are more likely to play other games, while players with a desire for imbalance are going to gravitate to warhammer as the best place where they can still find players to crush.

 auticus wrote:
Maybe. But with the fec and skaven book the community picked the op bits out in minutes of the community previews.

It's possible that they want a new higher base line for power levels and from here on out books will come out that can make lists in a distribution around DoK in terms of power level. Maybe their trying to hook tournament players to a plow by forcing them to buy a new army twice a year now more. If the old LoN top tier army can't compete in the new field, there's also a ton of armies even less competitive than that.

If intentional and obvious power creep is the new normal then things are about to get way worse for the pick up game oriented matched play crowd.

Churn and burn (buy army then sell army for better army repeat) is definitely a thing i think intentional. And my local meta is flush with it. (Right now there are a few dok armies that just hit our buy sell groups in anticipation of their ghb fall)

But that still sucks for everyone else not wanting to do that.

Now as far as using those armies as baselines, they have pretty much failed hard in that regard since books like the goblin book, or slaanesh, or khorne, or the leaked sylvaneth don't come close to the top 3 shennanigans. They have powerful options but are blown out of the water by the things those three books can do.

From Auticus' first post after the OP:

auticus wrote:At that point you have a bell curve and a standardized baseline to work with and you tweak here and there as needed.

Since I upkept Azyr I have kept up with the current models and the bell curve was shattered a few times. Lately by the FEC book.

The goblin book largely fell within the bell curve so was mathematically pretty balanced overall.

The FEC book has builds that shifted the entire bell to be more narrow which made a lot more builds useless.

A side effect of the FEC book was that things like evocators suddenly fell into the bell curve instead of being broken over the bell curve.

So how would you handle assessing the point cost the basic FEC units given the drastic impact list building has? Load all the increased cost onto the heroes until it falls into the old bell curve? Something else?

Making arch regents a one choice only since they are the emperor. Correcting the over powered scrolls in general. Like the monsters doing 6 mortal wounds.

Barring that ...making the throne one use per turn and hiking up points for the monsters that do off the chart damage for starters.

Removing the free lunch they get by making their feeding frenzy have a cost.

So you see problems in the actual design and very little in the points costs. Wow.

One thing I've noticed about current GW design is that they have really moved away from negative traits. So I don't expect them to add a down side to feeding frenzy.

If you could change no rules and no warscrolls, do you think it's possible to correctly point cost them as is?

 frozenwastes wrote:
If you could change no rules and no warscrolls, do you think it's possible to correctly point cost them as is?

IMO, no. Points changes cannot address imbalances of grand courts, courtier preferences, or the terry maw trait. Additionally there are a number of other areas that can theoretically be balanced with point costs but should really be done with rule changes. For example, as it stands all the units would need a premium added to their points just to compensate for Feeding Frenzy being so powerful, nothing even to do with the warscrolls themselves. Or flayer shooting varying wildly between totally ineffective and completely overpowered based on the enemy army. But there are other areas where simply adjusting points is more appropriate; it should really be both.