Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

It's the question of: Would you rather have 5 options that are perfectly balanced or 100 options where only 10% are competitive choices? Obviously we want 100 competitive choices, but any good designer understands fast, cheap, good; pick 2 and minis are really no different.

It's also important to remember that "competitive" is a spectrum and if you start limited your definition to only things that win tournaments, you're on the reactive side of the meta (aka behind) and your definition is itself limited the amount of viable options to those that fit in however many armies fit on the podium.

My definition of competitive is that if I put it on the table that I will have a fighting chance to win the game against my opponent, whom I assume will be min/max optimizing.

Trasvi wrote:

@Above . As to "mid tier" players being the WAAC guys... I think the mid tier is far more made up of people who are aiming for 50% wins than people who are trying hard but just bad. Maybe 10-20% are going there with realistic aspirations to win the event - the other 80 are just there to play games. Out of our entire local gaming community of 200+ regular tournament goers, I'd count 5 at most who fit in to the "iffy" category.

It depends on the size of the tournament. Once you pass 50 or so players, people seem to have more realistic goals and aim more for 3-2 sort of days. It's in the 16ish player events that you tend to see the WAAC take the middle, as a lot of the gak they pull on the newbies won't get them past the experienced players who take up the top slots.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:
My definition of competitive is that if I put it on the table that I will have a fighting chance to win the game against my opponent, whom I assume will be min/max optimizing.

But what is "it"?

It's honestly fairly difficult for a single underpowered model to tank a game. It might underperform and disappoint, but most of the time when I see a game go really badly its when someone loves a pet unit so much they make it their entire army and even then, in a good number of those games I half the rules are forgotten to make things even worse. I find across all the games I play, opportunity cost tends to be a far greater factor in determining what's competitive than a true "if I put this on the table I will lose".

But what is "it"?

"IT" is my entire army. When I deploy my army, I want to know that I have a fighting chance to be able to win the game against my opponent and that if I lose it is either due to bad dice, or bad choices on my part (or both), not because my opponent was rolling list with extreme power coefficients that made the dice odds basically roll anything but a 1 to win.

An example would be that I like to field chaos space marines or rubrics. Neither have any real use in the game short of wasting my points.

If I field a single unit of rubrics in my thousand sons army and my opponent is going full adepticon optimal, I'm playing at a sizeable disadvantage out of the gate typically.

If I field two units of rubrics and my opponent is going full adepticon optimal, barring extreme bad luck on his part and great luck on mine, the game is a no-contest.

 LunarSol wrote:
It's the question of: Would you rather have 5 options that are perfectly balanced or 100 options where only 10% are competitive choices? Obviously we want 100 competitive choices, but any good designer understands fast, cheap, good; pick 2 and minis are really no different.

It's also important to remember that "competitive" is a spectrum and if you start limited your definition to only things that win tournaments, you're on the reactive side of the meta (aka behind) and your definition is itself limited the amount of viable options to those that fit in however many armies fit on the podium.

The answer is I'd rather have say 20 choices where 80% are competitive choices (or some middle ground).

As for the idea that one bad unit won't tank a game, that depends on the unit honestly. If I really want to say run an Ork Stompa, I am investing half my points (give or take) on one model that is not competitive. SO that very well might tank my game. Or if I want 2 units of a unit I like. There are also cases where it is more than one unit type. Like if I wanted to play a mixed Ravenwing Deathwing List, some of those models are ok but sub optimal, and some are bad, so you end up on the losing end against someone running a tooled out list.

I definitely prefer a middle ground, but I'm also accepting that if a game goes on indefinitely, the "20" eventually because "100" but the number of competitive choices rarely grows as the same rate. Players also seem to abandon a game if you stop adding new options and just focus on improving the balance between the existing ones; so I'm not sure if 20 is a real option for long.

I think its important to remember that nothing is binary. Take the Stompa. Suboptimal? Absolutely, but how overcosted is it? Even if its its worth half your points and half your army, you can still put it in an army and be 75% effective.

None of this is to say things couldn't or shouldn't be better; just that a lot of things do better than people give them credit for and if you love a model; put it on the table every once in a while in a list that gives it its best shot and see what it can do. Playing it out, even just to see how close you can get to a win vs the best is often more educational than bringing your best and claiming victory.

 LunarSol wrote:
I definitely prefer a middle ground, but I'm also accepting that if a game goes on indefinitely, the "20" eventually because "100" but the number of competitive choices rarely grows as the same rate. Players also seem to abandon a game if you stop adding new options and just focus on improving the balance between the existing ones; so I'm not sure if 20 is a real option for long.

I think its important to remember that nothing is binary. Take the Stompa. Suboptimal? Absolutely, but how overcosted is it? Even if its its worth half your points and half your army, you can still put it in an army and be 75% effective.

None of this is to say things couldn't or shouldn't be better; just that a lot of things do better than people give them credit for and if you love a model; put it on the table every once in a while in a list that gives it its best shot and see what it can do. Playing it out, even just to see how close you can get to a win vs the best is often more educational than bringing your best and claiming victory.

I feel like for big expensive models, the 75% effective hasn't really held true as they often die very early if you lose half your army turn 1 before it does anything then the game is basically over. i would still play it out but I would have no real expectation of victory, and it really isn't more instructive than bringing your best. Losing is more educational then winning. However, losing because you made bad army choices is only educational insofar as you know those army choices are wrong, not really in your play. For instance if I play well, and get a close loss after throwing away a bunch of points, all I really learn is: "if I didn't waste those points in army construction I could have won."

As to adding units, you can still do that if the other options are limited because then you just need to balance them against existing balanced units. The problem with the GW model is they tend to release models for one faction at a time, rather than release a little bit for each faction. The little bit for each allows an easier playtest, rather than "here are new rules for an entire faction, and 5 new units too."

40k in particular has very alpha strikey mechanics without any real limitations on target selection that really limit the ability for overpriced models to contribute their partial value.

The problem with incremental releases is they limit the ability to make a meaningful change to how a force works. It tends to result in factions that lag behind really struggling to get the attention they deserve. Languishing models have a tendency to get stuck forever and it limits the big ideas you can do. For example, you wouldn't see something like the combat doctrines introduced if Space marines were just getting one new primaris kit each year. Done well, a big push release gives you the opportunity to create big ideas like genestealer blips or Deepkin tides.

Mostly though, balancing units against one another just doesn't reliably result in armies that are balanced against one another. There's a lot of value in looking at an army as a whole and taking a chance to modernize the whole thing, particularly as it gives a chance to ensure the new stuff fills a niche without replacing one.

 auticus wrote:

But what is "it"?

"IT" is my entire army. When I deploy my army, I want to know that I have a fighting chance to be able to win the game against my opponent and that if I lose it is either due to bad dice, or bad choices on my part (or both), not because my opponent was rolling list with extreme power coefficients that made the dice odds basically roll anything but a 1 to win.

An example would be that I like to field chaos space marines or rubrics. Neither have any real use in the game short of wasting my points.

If I field a single unit of rubrics in my thousand sons army and my opponent is going full adepticon optimal, I'm playing at a sizeable disadvantage out of the gate typically.

If I field two units of rubrics and my opponent is going full adepticon optimal, barring extreme bad luck on his part and great luck on mine, the game is a no-contest.

I don't think that anyone is arguing that currently some units such as Rubrics aren't underpowered. I think that most competitive players would be very happy for those units to be rebalanced so they were a viable choice. And I think that casual and competitive players alike would see big benefits from that. And GW for the most part is being quite decent at doing this in 8th edition.

What I am arguing against is the idea that you should be able to swap equal points of unit X for unit Y, while keeping the rest of the army the same, and expect it to perform the same. It cant happen if we want to retain some notion of different roles, units with strengths & weaknesses vs other types of units.


Plus I'm a little skeptical of the idea that the difference between "even match" and "no contest" is the amount of points a rubric unit is overcosted by... which would be an overall 1-2% handicap at current prices.

Well there is no way to really "prove that". If I take a thousand sons army with two units of rubrics against any form of tournament list, it is a foregone conclusion from turn 1 every time.

But that may be how i look at it. If my army with two units of rubrics is 2000 points, a tournament optimal list is running as if it were 3000 points or more. Thats the point of tournament optimal lists though, exponating the undercosted nature of your busted units to make 2000 points operate at a much higher value.

I think tough that you should be able to trade x points of anti-tank unit A for X points of anti-tank unit B with no loss in effectiveness.

Essentially I don’t think 2k points worth of grits should be good. But an Ork army should be able to run tankbustas or Killa Kans without a marked difference in effectiveness.

 LunarSol wrote:
40k in particular has very alpha strikey mechanics without any real limitations on target selection that really limit the ability for overpriced models to contribute their partial value.

The problem with incremental releases is they limit the ability to make a meaningful change to how a force works. It tends to result in factions that lag behind really struggling to get the attention they deserve. Languishing models have a tendency to get stuck forever and it limits the big ideas you can do. For example, you wouldn't see something like the combat doctrines introduced if Space marines were just getting one new primaris kit each year. Done well, a big push release gives you the opportunity to create big ideas like genestealer blips or Deepkin tides.

Mostly though, balancing units against one another just doesn't reliably result in armies that are balanced against one another. There's a lot of value in looking at an army as a whole and taking a chance to modernize the whole thing, particularly as it gives a chance to ensure the new stuff fills a niche without replacing one.

Good points. I was playing some 3rd edition last week and it was fascinating how much the design ethos has changed since then. When playing 3rd you really get the sense that the designers were far more concerned with creating a system that let players represent "stuff happening" on the tabletop, rather than making a balanced or streamlined game of skill. There was much greater emphasis on roleplay and using the 40k ruleset as a system to play out fun battles and scenarios within the outrageous grimdark setting.

Now I'm kinda tempted to learn to play 2nd edition because I've heard it leans even more into roleplay than 3rd, making the games even less focused on simply winning.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
It's the question of: Would you rather have 5 options that are perfectly balanced or 100 options where only 10% are competitive choices?

The second option, which in spite of all the streamlining is STILL probably closer to what 40k is today, is arguably one of biggest factors in making 40k so compelling to narrative-oriented players, especially with older editions: extreme granularity in unit customization and system interactions. Having formal mechanics that specify exactly how a model in a unit can Death or Glory an incoming tank trying to run them over is an AWESOME thing to have for fluff/narrative-centric player. It might seem clunky to a competitive player who uses 40k to demonstrate skill or mastery, but for a narrative player those systems add that extra level of structured randomness that legitimizes the story playing out on the battlefield, increases immersion, and enriches their experience.

But of course it also runs completely counter to the goal of producing a tightly balanced, streamlined game of skill.

These types of mechanics are more concerned with "simulating fantastic battles in the 41st millennium" and are far less concerned with being an "accurate measure of skill between two 41st millennium generals". It's a matter of design priorities.

 auticus wrote:
Well there is no way to really "prove that". If I take a thousand sons army with two units of rubrics against any form of tournament list, it is a foregone conclusion from turn 1 every time.

But that may be how i look at it. If my army with two units of rubrics is 2000 points, a tournament optimal list is running as if it were 3000 points or more. Thats the point of tournament optimal lists though, exponating the undercosted nature of your busted units to make 2000 points operate at a much higher value.

I guess I'm struggling to see how simply taking those 2 units means an auto lose. In your hypothetical where a optimised list manages to squeeze 3000pts worth and yours is 2000, the rubrics by themselves arent *that bad* that they are effectively 1000pts overcosted on their own, right? Say theyre worth 75pts per unit compared to the 95 you currently pay, the rubrics themselves only handicap you by 40pts. Youre not 33% down, youre 2% down, and as important as list building is in this game a 2% deficit can easily be overcome with skill or luck.

Largely because the rubrics are overcost by quite a bit and an optimized list is 100% composed of undercost units.

Forcing you to also match your list with undercost units or fall behind quickly.

I know that when I ran tournament optimized lists, I rarely lost, and always placed high in tournaments to include coming in at #8 out of 80 in the old GW GT days. When I don't run optimized lists, I'm about a 50/50 and against optimized lists will lose more than I win if I also don't have an optimized list.

So what do people actually want? I'd suggest that both 'competitive' (read, people who like organised play not people who just want to rack up wins) and 'casual' players want:

- Games that have an even chance of each player winning
- Games where both players have that chance right up to the last turn (which is turn 5/6/7, not turn 2).
- A selection of models where all are fieldable and playable and nothing is 'uncompetitive'.
- Advantages to building 'optimised' armies, but not so much that an optimised army auto-stomps an unoptimised one.
- The ability (and maybe encouragement) to build themed armies, but where building a themed army neither handicaps you to the point where you can't win OR becomes so powerful that you get an auto-win.

In theory, that's what everyone wants. Competitive players get COMPETITION (the armies are balanced, so if you win it might actually be because of your skill). Casual players get to build armies with models they like and still have an engaging and balanced game. The only thing these requirements DON'T cover is people who just want to win, and who want to do it by finding tricks, loopholes and combos that mean they don't have to do it by being better in-game. (In my experience, competitive players tend to cite the former of these in threads like this, but in practise an awful lot of tournament attendees seem to be the latter.)

It seems to me that there are two big things that would need to happen to the game for the above conditions to be met.

- Better balance across the board internally between units.
- Major reduction of destructive power of attacks so the game innately lasts longer.
- A massive downscaling of buffs that add abilities in-game (Chapter Tactics, Stratagems, etc). The issue with these, as people have said before, is that they make it impossible to point individual units accurately, since how good the unit it changes with what buffs it has. You can still have all those buffs, they just have to be way less powerful.

If GW won't do any of that, then we only have two solutions to playing balanced games:

- Only play tournament games with competitive, optimised lists and units, chase the meta so your army can always compete, ignore any units that are uncompetitive, shrink the playerbase to only people who can afford to keep up both in rules and in cash.

- Don't play competitively as 40k is obviously a rubbish game for that. Moderate your lists and play narrative games, accepting that there is little skill involved and who wins is pretty much meaningless.

Can someone give me an example of one of these "loopholes" or "tricks" that I could be using?

From the sounds of it they should be pretty common but I can only think of one that hasn't been almost immediately FAQed

I often find when casual players complain about rules loopholes as often as not it falls into 2 categories
1.) Broken OP unit combo they didn’t think of or know about. Things like the old CP farm powering Knights, or in 7th edition things like screamer star 2++ re-rollable saves.

2.) A tactic they are not familiar with or did not consider. Things like Tripointing to lock units in combat, charging and staying 1” away so you can pile in slightly closer and gain movement, charging vehicles to prevent shooting etc. Generally rules that feel gamey rather than intuitive.

Basically times when the rules end up not feeling like authentic battle, and feel like a game. It feels cheap and that is when people seem to get upset.

That is a strong schism yes. Gamey gamers vs gamers that expect some semblance of immersion and "realism".

Breng77 wrote:
I often find when casual players complain about rules loopholes as often as not it falls into 2 categories
1.) Broken OP unit combo they didn’t think of or know about. Things like the old CP farm powering Knights, or in 7th edition things like screamer star 2++ re-rollable saves.

2.) A tactic they are not familiar with or did not consider. Things like Tripointing to lock units in combat, charging and staying 1” away so you can pile in slightly closer and gain movement, charging vehicles to prevent shooting etc. Generally rules that feel gamey rather than intuitive.

Basically times when the rules end up not feeling like authentic battle, and feel like a game. It feels cheap and that is when people seem to get upset.

As for 1... yeah, there are some powerful combos, but luckily they're getting less than they used to be and GW is specifically going out and nerfing these where they are found.
And 2... charging in with vehicles to eat overwatch was specifically called out by GW as a positive ability in the new edition. And there are people who really consider tripointing to be a loophole? It wouldn't even occur to me that anyone could be against it, its such a fundamental part of the game that melee armies can't function without it.
I guess these are the people who also claim there is no skill involved in the game and it's all just down to list building, so they use "ah but that's just a loophole" to dismiss any time someone does display skill.

I guess this is why I always advertise, when I'm looking for a game, that I'm looking for something competitive/tournament practice. If there are people who feel that very basic rules interactions are too gamey I don't think there's anything that could let us both have an enjoyable game regardless of how tame a list I made.

I think 40k builds up the "no tricks" mentality in people a little more than most games simply because the rules are generally updated to remove model position from the game and abstract things as much as possible.

 ArbitorIan wrote:
- Games that have an even chance of each player winning
- Games where both players have that chance right up to the last turn (which is turn 5/6/7, not turn 2).
- A selection of models where all are fieldable and playable and nothing is 'uncompetitive'.
- The ability (and maybe encouragement) to build themed armies, but where building a themed army neither handicaps you to the point where you can't win OR becomes so powerful that you get an auto-win.

These, sure, my best games have been themed lists that bounced off each other at the exact right angle to make things tense for four or five turns. And they all happened this edition by simply playing people who built things they found cool, and/or could afford

- Advantages to building 'optimised' armies, but not so much that an optimised army auto-stomps an unoptimised one.

Not really, optimized implies a best option, and I'd really rather have nothing that absolutely stands out as the best unit in an army. I'd rather have a balance that promotes a TAC list to handle a variety of possibilities and capture board position than the lascannon delete brigade lead by a smash captain riding a knight. But that's 90% solved by mission points structure and the end of kill points in general.

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:

Not really, optimized implies a best option, and I'd really rather have nothing that absolutely stands out as the best unit in an army. I'd rather have a balance that promotes a TAC list to handle a variety of possibilities and capture board position than the lascannon delete brigade lead by a smash captain riding a knight. But that's 90% solved by mission points structure and the end of kill points in general.

I think that's what everyone wants. The problem has always been that no one has ever managed to actually make such a game.

When I play Kings of War, its definitely not perfect, but its closer to this than any GW offering.

Gates of Antares is also a lot closer to this than 40k.

Conquest so far has been great and a lot closer than GW games.

Middle Earth is a GW game that also comes closer.

In any of those games, I don't feel that the game is lost before the first die is cast. In 40k and AOS (and WHFB before that) that is definitely not the case. That is an intentional design decision by GW.

There will always be a best list math wise. Those can be countered by having a multitude of scenarios that have different win conditions. Some based on killing. Some based on objectives. If you mix those missions up and you have multiple win conditions, it becomes harder to optimize one list to rule them all.

Additionally, pay a person well versed in statistics to develop your points system so that the glaring obvious garbage units and over optimal units go away and fit on the bell curve properly. Especially in a game that has removed all pretense of being a battle game and has thrown in entirely on making a dice game that is centered around statistical probability and maximizing said statistical probability. These games have linear regression model written all over them.

There’s no balance in 40k and there never has been. Things are arguably better now than they’ve been in the past though.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see the imbalance within and between codexes as an issue for me as a tournament player. If a codex has stuff in it that’s crap then I won’t buy it. The problem sometimes comes when a new codex or edition appears and my old stuff is suddenly useless, but for me personally that’s not the end of the world. I quite enjoy making new armies and painting them, so an excuse to do so is sometimes quite welcome.

I think it’s arguably a bigger issue for casual games. Imagine if a parent buys their two kids random squads for Christmas and one is vastly better than the other – which is a reasonably likely outcome. One kid wins all their games, things are boring and they stop playing. Everyone loses, especially GW. This happened with my younger cousins – one got marines and the other got orks. The orks never won a game and they both gave up. My aunt bit my ear off about it at one point.

Aside from balance, the biggest issue 40k for me is its turn sequence. Games are still decided by the roll for first turn, and that’s just not good enough. I went 5:0 and not 4:1 at the LGT because I went first in the last game against another knight army, and that sucks for a competitive system that wants to take itself even remotely seriously.

It doesn’t only suck for competitive play though. It also sucks to get home from work, grab something to eat and head out for an evening game that is also determined by one dice roll. It sucks to spend hundreds of pounds and hours getting an army ready just to play a game that lasts ~5 seconds to win or lose, then 2-3 hours to resolve.

There are all sorts of things that GW does themselves in terms of mission design and TOs bring in to try and remedy this issue. Things like having the option to pay CPs for a cover save on turn 1. The problem is too big to fix with these kinds of actions though – a fundamental change to fix the core issue is what’s required.

So for 9th I’d like to see the turn sequence thrown out. Bring in a sensible system of alternating activations like is used in (almost) literally every other wargame out there. Even GW’s own games, from kill team and necromunda all the way to apocalypse have switched to alternating activation. It’s high time that 40k did too.

It's pretty obvious they have been testing the bed for 40k using those specialist games.

The thing is, alternating activation is worthless along with any other core rule balance you make so long as you continue to write horrid amounts of codex creep and refuse to make patches in real time.

Best thing to happen for 40k would be to make hard copy codexes that contain fluff, pictures and painting sections only and for all data slates and points to be made available electronically so they can be patched easily and quickly. This current model is silly. I have a Necron codex that nearly every point is incorrect in it lol. Then there are the FAQ and errata. That's one army with a single book. Worse yet the army is dead in the water for who knows how long and even then I am trusting they won't frick it up again.

Burn and churn of my armies is the #1 reason why I won't play a game. If I have to constantly buy new armies and paint and assemble them to have good games, that wore me out a decade ago.

A broader bell curve of power also means seeing more diversity in the game. Even when I was a tournament player (1998 - 2010) seeing the same builds day in day out over and over again burnt me out.

It absolutely does destroy casual games you are correct. When you are a tournament player you accept that it is what it is. If you are not a tournament gamer, you are often forced to deal with the tournament meta in non tournament environments as well, which destroys fun.

The turn sequence is also a big pain I agree fully. IGOUGO needs to die in a greasy garbage fire. Standing there an entire turn (or double turn if you are an AOS fan) taking it in the face is the opposite of fun.

There's really no game out there without a degree of burn and churn if you chase after whatever won the last event. Your best bet is to devote yourself to that game and buy everything. Now, there's a lot of games where the churn doesn't require as much investment because army sizes are much smaller and 40k has a huge problem in its model specific equipment micromanagement mixed with rules that don't really encourage diversity, but the core problem is there for pretty much any game you get too deep into.

Having played these games for an obscene amount of time I'd say I somewhat disagree with you. I have never had to burn and churn in any system other than a GW system.

I may not be at the top of the power curve in say Kings of War, but I'm always competitive with the same models I've been using in that system since 2010.

I can at least have engaging games with that same army. Burn and churn is required (for me) when I have no shot at any semblance of a good game before the first die is cast.

Everyone's threshold may vary. Some people may burn and churn to stay at the tippy top of the power curve; that is not my requirement.

And the model count in that game is identical to whfb which typically had a larger scale in models as 40k did.

You guys seem to be having a really good discussion here. I'd just like to point out that if you are seriously suggesting that "mission objectives" are more important than having balanced units...You are just so far from the realm of reality you should reexamine your ideas. Mission objectives matter less and less the bigger the difference in force power between opponents.

If I can realistically table you in 4 turns (this happens quite a bit in my games - especially when overcosted units are in the picture) No amount of strategy can make up the difference.

The idea the mission objectives can fix the game is trying to treat the symptom...making balanced units is the cure.

Except for when tabling the opponent doesn't give you a win, but scoring objectives turn after turn does.

In a five turn game (GW current scenarios) if I am scoring objectives and beating you in score and you wipe me in four turns, but can't make up that score in one turn, you still lose.

I have played many of those type of scenarios.

That's not arguing against balance being more desired either. I would love if GW used a statistical model to plot their points costs instead of throwing darts at a board and intentionally undercosting units to sell more (and in AOS' case this is absolutely true as the ghb 2016 official points were based on scgt comp points which intentionally undercost monster units to encourage people to take those - and that was from the author's keyboard saying why he chose to do that).