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 Argive wrote:
Every army has an equal chance of winning - The dice decide the game and not if your models are wearing power armour or not.

That might be a well balanced game, but you might as well be tossing coins.

To my mind a well balanced game is one where player skill is the deciding factor the majority of the time. If Bob's Marines are consistently trouncing Joe's Guard, they should be able to trade factions and Bob's Guard should trounce Joe's Marines just as consistently.

The Newman wrote:

 Argive wrote:
Every army has an equal chance of winning - The dice decide the game and not if your models are wearing power armour or not.

That might be a well balanced game, but you might as well be tossing coins.

To my mind a well balanced game is one where player skill is the deciding factor the majority of the time. If Bob's Marines are consistently trouncing Joe's Guard, they should be able to trade factions and Bob's Guard should trounce Joe's Marines just as consistently.

If you remove dice manipulation then what you are left with in my opinion is critically assessing risk v reward and acting on this. Deployment planning and in turn manoeuvring from a generals point of view. So the skills that matter mean the most rather than "Have I put my re-roll combo wombo in my army and ensure I can combo wombo any unit in the game on the first turn and have I deployed all my dudes within 6" of dude a so I can combo wombo".

So yeah. If the dice have equal playing field then whats left ??
To me whats left is the strategic thinking and planning which are quintessential parts of a good balanced war-game.

Im not stating this as fact, its my opinion so YMMV of course.

When I complain about "balance" in 40k I'm grumbling about whether or not there's a good reason to use the available options. You can argue about winrates or player skill all you want but the fundamental problem is the disconnect between whether something is a cool model you might want to use and whether it's actually useful in the game. I don't want every single option to be perfectly equal to every other option, I want the game to stop lying about very basic assumptions. I don't want to have to negotiate a handicap before every game to use the models I like, I want to be able to show up with 2,000pts of stuff, my opponent to show up with 2,000pts of stuff, and us to play a game that doesn't end with one of us blasted off the table in two turns because the people on the design team didn't sit down and have a discussion about what 2,000pts actually means.

I'm going to go way looser and say units don't have to be balanced for standard missions with four pieces of ruins and six pieces of low cover or whatever a tournament standard is. The value of units can change tremendously with terrain, and the game is more varied in it's manifestation in 'standard tournament format', so I'm pretty loose with my requirements points-wise.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I split balance into three components:

1) External balance - I define this as balanced when all books are played proportionally (e.g. if there are 20 factions, then each faction should be played in roughly 5% of games), and the winrate for every faction is between 45% and 50%. The optimal winrate for a balanced game is much closer to 48%, leaving 2% for draws. This is across the entire playerbase, in an attempt to compensate for skill.

2) Internal balance - this is much harder to quantify, given that units should be split into roles. However, if pressed, I would say this is two things:
a) subfaction balance - of the 5% of all games that this faction is involved in, each subfaction should be represented equally (e.g. if there are 5 subfactions of Chaos Space Marines, then roughly 20% of the total Chaos Space Marine games, or 1% of all games, should be played using a given subfaction's rules).

I disagree with all this. Factions and units should not be represented based on how big a percentage of the total number of options available there are, but according to their models and their lore. So if 90% of people like the the Imperial Fists colour scheme and lore but only 10% of people like the Raven Guard colour scheme and lore then it shouldn't be a 50/50 split between the two factions. People should be able to collect and play with what they love, not be forced into a faction or playstyle based on imbalanced rules. Like in League of Legends a champion isn't a failure just because it's not popular, it's a failure if everyone that tries the champion plays it for a few games and then leaves it, but if a few people play it but they then really love that champion then it's okay that not that many people play it.

I agree with your assessment of unit balance, it really sucks to warn people not to buy and paint or try out a unit because the unit might underperform to a degree where it ruins your game. The alternative where you have to warn someone to dial it down for casual settings isn't any better either. Another big problem is balance between options on units, one thing I absolutely never want is to recommend people to tear their minis apart to give them different options, so meltas and plasma guns should both be viable in some kind of list and one shouldn't be a bazillion times better than the other for any given chapter.

 Halfton wrote:
Been playing off and on for a decent number of years and have basically been hearing the same thing since I started that the game.
That is, “The balance is terrible”.
Don’t really have a dog in the race since I’m casual, but I was wondering does the community have a definition of what a balanced 40K would play like?

This is more a side consideration but would that balanced state favor Casual play or Competitive play?

As has been mentioned:

Faction-Faction Balance is most often brought up. This means that the collective win/loss rate of a faction is near 50%. In any given gameplay situation whether competitive or causal, if I look at a list of faction pairings, I shouldn't be able to predict who won based on faction alone.
This is usually a greater problem for competitive players. Competitive players will naturally eschew the trap units and use the strong units, so internal balance isn't as severe a problem is everybody's best lists are well matched against each other.

Internal Balance is the second problem. This is if there's a few units that are drastically better than others, and a few that are drastically worse. If every single IG list has 9 Earthshaker Platforms, or there hasn't been a Stalker on the table in the entire edition, then there's not good internal balance.
This is usually a greater problem for casual players. If you want to use a Stalker or don't want to have an Earthshaker Platform in your army, you don't want to be crippling yourself by bringing "fluffy" or "fun" armies.



Right now, Faction-Faction balance is pretty tight relative to the recent past. Internal balance is at like an all time low. GW had generally be focusing on nerfing overperfoming units and buffing units that they consider "core" and expect to see in the optimal lists from a lore perspective with most of a line left in the "well, if you want" pile unless it starts overperforming. An example is Leman Russes and Grinding Advance, while everything with a Battle Cannon had issues because the Battle Cannon and other heavy AT guns really sucked, the Leman Russ was considered a priority because its iconic and the Vengeance Redoubt or Marcharius were left to be sad. And there are a bunch of weapon options for the Leman Russ, but really only the Battle Cannon is checked for balance and the rest are just "worse Battle Cannons".

Already defined for you, internal vs external balance, in many posts.

There is also easy ways to check whether both are satisfied. Websites like https://www.40kstats.com/ give you counts on both (faction winning sliced up in many ways, units used).

I am glad they are starting to look more into competitive outcomes as a measure of balance, e.g. the whole IH debacle.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Agreed. The reason I included point 2a is because you could have the following hypothetical situation:

Codex Hypothetes has a 48% winrate overall, and all the units inside of it are viable...

...but only in one sub faction. The 48% overall winrate is achieved by 3/4 of the subfactions having like a 30% winrate and the remaining 1/4th have a ludicrous winrate.

this is bad for the game, as it makes the 48% winrate of the entire codex misleading (since it's an average of a few badly variant subfactions; I pity all the players that have to play against the subfaction with a super high win rate!) and it makes the less powerful subfactions a trap choice for new players or player who like their narrative.

A million times this. I've been hearing for a while now that Tau are well-balanced. What this really means is that the one standout build (Triptides and drone spam) has a decent winrate, but the rest of the faction is pretty mediocre. It's misleading to say that a codex is balanced when it really has poor internal balance, but the highest-performing build in it can stand up to other codices.

I like the way you've codified three different types of balance. The difference between category 1 and category 2 is something I've been harping on for a while.

 Halfton wrote:
This is more a side consideration but would that balanced state favor Casual play or Competitive play?

To cover this point (since I don't think anyone has yet), it helps both. Competitively, it puts more onus on in-game player skill than just list-building and Casually it reduces the chances of bad, one-sided games just because one army happens to be OP at the moment.

A well balanced game benefits casual play the most - if all choices have an equal chance at victory then the game is more fun. It makes competition harder because their is no I win button. The same players winning competitive events over and over is a tell tale sign of bad balance.

 Xenomancers wrote:
A well balanced game benefits casual play the most - if all choices have an equal chance at victory then the game is more fun. It makes competition harder because their is no I win button. The same players winning competitive events over and over is a tell tale sign of bad balance.

Not sure about that, really. The same UNITS winning would indicate that.

Martel732 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
A well balanced game benefits casual play the most - if all choices have an equal chance at victory then the game is more fun. It makes competition harder because their is no I win button. The same players winning competitive events over and over is a tell tale sign of bad balance.

Not sure about that, really. The same UNITS winning would indicate that.

Don't wake up the "40k requires no skill" crowd.

 Xenomancers wrote:
The same players winning competitive events over and over is a tell tale sign of bad balance.

Wait, what? Would you apply this to...any other competitive event?

Is Basketball an imbalanced sport because Lebron keeps winning? Is League of Legends an imbalanced game because a korean eight year old could beat me on any champion with their feet? does Ken Jennings finally put the lie to the horrific imbalance of Jeopardy?

To me, a balanced game means two players of roughly equal skill can play against each other with the factions of their choice and each has a reasonable expectation of winning.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
The same players winning competitive events over and over is a tell tale sign of bad balance.

Wait, what? Would you apply this to...any other competitive event?

Is Basketball an imbalanced sport because Lebron keeps winning? Is League of Legends an imbalanced game because a korean eight year old could beat me on any champion with their feet? does Ken Jennings finally put the lie to the horrific imbalance of Jeopardy?

Umm Lebron is OP. Basketball is not balanced.

The difference here in 40k is everyone can play with Lebron or some combination of Lebron, Curry, Harden, ect. All at once. So ultimately anyone who doesn't take the super allstar combo is thrown out. This excludes a lot of competitors. So the reality is even if the event has 500 players - only 40-50 actually matter. It would be practically impossible for the same players to place at the top consistently if all armies had an equal chance of victory.

League of legends is kinda weird in this sense. It is very poorly internally balanced. 20-30 champions are just better than the rest. They balance specifically for the competitive meta so the poor internal balance is intentional. Sometimes I wonder if GW rules writters look to games like this for inspiration. If they do it is a mistake. LOL is a very poorly balanced game except for the very narrow microscope they put on competitive play. However - player skill is a serious factor in the game. 40k by comparison has about 1-100th the skill requirement for top tier play.

"The same people keep wining, so therefore its not skill but army imbalances even tho they switch armies"

Wow.... thats... thats our there man. Are you high?

Switching from one top tier army to another is not really switching armies though.

Just because the sheik of dubai buys the second line up of bulgarian weight lifting team, and suddenly dubai starts winning bronze and silver in competition does mean that dubai produces great weight lifters, has goot coachs or med teams .

Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

I'm pretty sure competitive professional sports are far more regulated than competitive 40k. Lance armystrong was a cheater...however - nearly everyone he was competing against was also cheating as well.

 EnTyme wrote:
To me, a balanced game means two players of roughly equal skill can play against each other with the factions of their choice and each has a reasonable expectation of winning.

This, except it would be nice to remove trap units and autotakes.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

I'm pretty sure competitive professional sports are far more regulated than competitive 40k. Lance armystrong was a cheater...however - nearly everyone he was competing against was also cheating as well.

So are you implying that these players are all cheaters? I really don't understand how you can say that the same players win so therefore the game has bad balance. I'm not saying it is balanced, i'm asking how does the same players winning equate to poor balance?

Xeno, I feel like you're conflating 'top players' and 'top units/armies'.

We can pretty much all agree that the same few units/armies shouldn't be constantly winning events. When you're saying 'everyone can take Lebron', this seems to be what you're referring to.

But the idea that highly skilled players shouldn't be able to consistently win a skill-based game is... pretty far out there. I can't even think of a sport where this isn't the case. Like even poker, with its high degree of randomness, has good players and bad players.

I would consider it an optimal state where there's enough depth to the game that a handful of really skilled people can place well year after year, and do so while rotating through a large variety of equally-viable armies.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

I'm pretty sure competitive professional sports are far more regulated than competitive 40k. Lance armystrong was a cheater...however - nearly everyone he was competing against was also cheating as well.

So are you implying that these players are all cheaters? I really don't understand how you can say that the same players win so therefore the game has bad balance. I'm not saying it is balanced, i'm asking how does the same players winning equate to poor balance?

I was just implying that in professional sports they do things like...drug test. What safety measures does ITC take? They don't even check your dice.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 catbarf wrote:
Xeno, I feel like you're conflating 'top players' and 'top units/armies'.

We can pretty much all agree that the same few units/armies shouldn't be constantly winning events. When you're saying 'everyone can take Lebron', this seems to be what you're referring to.

But the idea that highly skilled players shouldn't be able to consistently win a skill-based game is... pretty far out there. I can't even think of a sport where this isn't the case. Like even poker, with its high degree of randomness, has good players and bad players.

I would consider it an optimal state where there's enough depth to the game that a handful of really skilled people can place well year after year, and do so while rotating through a large variety of equally-viable armies.

Well typically its the same player playing the same broken army over and over again or a new broken army comes out and they just switch to that. Nothing against the players for doing that but they aren't winning with bad armies or even average armies because they can't. They win with the best armies. Because overpowered armies and strats exist - it is possible for a player top win nearly every game. Just saying it's a tell tale sign the game is poorly balanced. Especially in a game with such a low skill ceiling as 40k. I love this game but it's hardly dynamic - that is part of the reason I like it - it's not stressing my brain too much to play it. That is what League of Legends is for.

I wouldn't call BA the best army, but Box wins because he builds to beat elite shooting castles.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

I'm pretty sure competitive professional sports are far more regulated than competitive 40k. Lance armystrong was a cheater...however - nearly everyone he was competing against was also cheating as well.

So are you implying that these players are all cheaters? I really don't understand how you can say that the same players win so therefore the game has bad balance. I'm not saying it is balanced, i'm asking how does the same players winning equate to poor balance?

I was just implying that in professional sports they do things like...drug test. What safety measures does ITC take? They don't even check your dice.

LOL this is one of the stupidest convo's i've seen you do now.

Yes they test, again go look at Insulin Gut, b.c 99% the time they test for gak no one is using or don't care about. And the fact that you are "implying" all these players are cheating is just sad "they don't check your dice".

So you are saying the top players are cheaters and that is Proof the game has terrible balance.
News flash! we all know the game is imbalanced, the messed up part is, theres 1000's of pieces of proof and you go to "Cheaters and top players are why".

I was going to ignore you, but this is to golden to pass up.


EDIT: B.c you added more after. You do know that Sean Nayden won with Yncarne and hordes of wyches when everyone said it was bad right? So yes it is with "off armies" sometimes.

Martel732 wrote:
I wouldn't call BA the best army, but Box wins because he builds to beat elite shooting castles.

Not really familiar with his specific tactics but blood angels have been all over the competitive meta for most of the edition. If you can reliably charge from deep strike and ignore over-watch with fly keyword...that is a formula for victory.

The best players I know are using gravity dice.

The easiest way to see if skill is involved in 40k or not is to watch professional games.

If you find yourself going "wow, that was a good move, never would have thought of that myself!" then it was skill.

If you find that their moves are similar to ones that you, yourself, would do (or ones you could have seen coming) and the determining factor of victory is lists and dice, then that game was not determined by skill.

I watched Eldar flyers vs Imperial Guard on twitch at the top tables of a game once, and the Guard player basically just did his best to hide from the flyers, and the eldar player did his best to dismantle the opponent's army with the fliers. Neither one of them made any moves that I didn't expect or pulled any tricks that were "WOW AWESOME of him to spot that weakness!" or whatever.

It basically came down to the last few remaining guardsmen vs. what few ground forces the Eldar player had on objectives, and IIRC the eldar player won because his rolled better / compensated for RNG better once the flyers had dismantled the Guard's heavy friendos.

 Xenomancers wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I wouldn't call BA the best army, but Box wins because he builds to beat elite shooting castles.

Not really familiar with his specific tactics but blood angels have been all over the competitive meta for most of the edition. If you can reliably charge from deep strike and ignore over-watch with fly keyword...that is a formula for victory.

No, they haven't. And those things alone don't give victory. Not even close.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
The easiest way to see if skill is involved in 40k or not is to watch professional games.

If you find yourself going "wow, that was a good move, never would have thought of that myself!" then it was skill.

If you find that their moves are similar to ones that you, yourself, would do (or ones you could have seen coming) and the determining factor of victory is lists and dice, then that game was not determined by skill.

I watched Eldar flyers vs Imperial Guard on twitch at the top tables of a game once, and the Guard player basically just did his best to hide from the flyers, and the eldar player did his best to dismantle the opponent's army with the fliers. Neither one of them made any moves that I didn't expect or pulled any tricks that were "WOW AWESOME of him to spot that weakness!" or whatever.

It basically came down to the last few remaining guardsmen vs. what few ground forces the Eldar player had on objectives, and IIRC the eldar player won because his rolled better / compensated for RNG better once the flyers had dismantled the Guard's heavy friendos.

Yeah, I've watched Box's games looking for this stuff, but it's really just tripoint: the game. Making SG engineers vs tough foes is cute, but not epicly awesome.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Its the point they need to be able to pilot different armies, showing it is more skillful than "rolling lucky"

We also are talking about 40k not something that literally has cheaters in it b.c "this drug isn't said to be illegal" Just look at "Insulin Gut" and your 'll see....

I'm pretty sure competitive professional sports are far more regulated than competitive 40k. Lance armystrong was a cheater...however - nearly everyone he was competing against was also cheating as well.

So are you implying that these players are all cheaters? I really don't understand how you can say that the same players win so therefore the game has bad balance. I'm not saying it is balanced, i'm asking how does the same players winning equate to poor balance?

I was just implying that in professional sports they do things like...drug test. What safety measures does ITC take? They don't even check your dice.

LOL this is one of the stupidest convo's i've seen you do now.

Yes they test, again go look at Insulin Gut, b.c 99% the time they test for gak no one is using or don't care about. And the fact that you are "implying" all these players are cheating is just sad "they don't check your dice".

So you are saying the top players are cheaters and that is Proof the game has terrible balance.
News flash! we all know the game is imbalanced, the messed up part is, theres 1000's of pieces of proof and you go to "Cheaters and top players are why".

I was going to ignore you, but this is to golden to pass up.


EDIT: B.c you added more after. You do know that Sean Nayden won with Yncarne and hordes of wyches when everyone said it was bad right? So yes it is with "off armies" sometimes.

It obvious you are a fan boy and totally unwilling to accept reality. You are the one that brought up cheating.

Look at your above post. In essence you dismissed my argument because cheating exists in other sports. Yeah...you can't even go there. Cheating exists in all things competitive. It is human nature. Which is why competitive sports regulate their games...have preassigned penalties for cheating that occurs in games and they test for steroids and performance enhancing drugs. Also you are misrepresenting my argument. I didn't even state that cheating is the reason that the top players place consisently. I stated that the same players consistently placing at the top of events is a sign that the game is poorly balanced. This game has very low skill expression.