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Our ProHammer campaign we're launching is map based, and as a consequence players can have multiple armies of various different sizes running around the table.

The way to normalize the fights a little bit is to have "fielding limit" for how many points you can have on the table at once.

It's interesting to ponder - what if 40K had players assemble 3,000 point lists but only 1,500 points could be active on the field at a time. Alpha strikes would be less of an issue as you'd be able to (consistently) bring reserves onto the field as fresh troops, and also modify the units you bring on to deal with the threats of your opponent.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Our ProHammer campaign we're launching is map based, and as a consequence players can have multiple armies of various different sizes running around the table.

The way to normalize the fights a little bit is to have "fielding limit" for how many points you can have on the table at once.

It's interesting to ponder - what if 40K had players assemble 3,000 point lists but only 1,500 points could be active on the field at a time. Alpha strikes would be less of an issue as you'd be able to (consistently) bring reserves onto the field as fresh troops, and also modify the units you bring on to deal with the threats of your opponent.

Anything regarding army construction that happens at game time is a good way of improving balance, because at its core is just the same heuristic approach that is criticised regarding PL usage.

Mezmorki, your idea of streamlined army comp isn't too far off in concept from how AoS has simplified points. In AoS you have a points cost for taking a unit, then a points cost for each multiple of that unit size (eg X points for a unit of 10, then Y points for each additional 10 models you add to the unit). But equipment, command models, etc are all baked into that cost and where you have options, they're designed to be sidegrades. So you can pick whichever choice you want, it doesn't change the overall cost.

It makes for a system where it's very easy to build up a list or swap around choices, but still has granularity for point adjustments as needed.

 Mezmorki wrote:
It's interesting to ponder - what if 40K had players assemble 3,000 point lists but only 1,500 points could be active on the field at a time. Alpha strikes would be less of an issue as you'd be able to (consistently) bring reserves onto the field as fresh troops, and also modify the units you bring on to deal with the threats of your opponent.

AoS has a 'Meeting Engagement' game type where your list is fixed, but it arrives in sequence of Spearhead -> Main Body -> Rearguard. I was hoping that 40K was going somewhere in that direction when they started revealing the concept of strategic reserves in 9th. The game would play faster and the lethality would be less of an issue if instead of starting with everything on the board, you started with a subset and then brought in reinforcements.

I swear I've played a game exactly like what you describe, down to the 'pick what to bring in next to counter what your enemy has', but can't remember what it was. It was a fun way to represent the idea of two opposing forces calling in reinforcements specifically to counter the threat they're facing as a meeting engagement escalates into a battle.

Deadnight wrote:
Privateer press' warcaster game is also extremely interesting to look at if you want to see an alternative approach. In some ways it's a game that's breaking new ground.

The hot take is There is a unit cap that you can bring onto the field, and units are basically 'summoned' from reserves.

Your list is whatever you summon, up to the unit cap. It can be a different list every time. They summon a 'question', you summon an 'answer'.

The game is in its very early stages though and doesn't have a player base worth speaking qbout.

Thats actually quite intriguing to me.

 catbarf wrote:
I can't take seriously the argument that increased granularity only provides the illusion of better balance, when it's being compared to a system where a lasgun and a plasma gun have the same value and a unit of 6 has the same value as a unit of 10. My wife's Scourges are a perfect example of a unit that PL just does not work for, as their equipment massively affects their power on the tabletop. I won't say all their weapon options are perfectly costed in points, but at least they're accounted for.

Accounted for doesn't mean its balanced. Lets say GW updates the points costs, now each weapon is a Scourge squad is a 100 point upgrade. Its accounted for, sure, but now the PL is a much better approximation of the units value than the points cost is, because it is inarguable that a blaster is worth 100 extra points to the Scourges cost. You have granularity, but you don't have balance. Obviously, the cost of the weapons isn't that high, but you accept the idea that a Scourges weapon is "worth" somewhere between 5 and 15 points, depending on the weapon, but can you back that up statistically/mathematically to say anything at all about whether thats an accurate assessment of the weapons value? How do you know that a Dark Lance is actually worth 15 more points than a shardcarbine? How do you know that the significant increase in killing power offered by it doesn't actually make it worth 25 points instead? How do you know that the 1-in-3 probability of missing your hit roll (sans strategems, aurus, etc.) and the inconvenience of the heavy weapon profile on a unit with Mv 14" doesn't warrant it being a free upgrade instead?

As it stands, its also a non-issue. A squad of 5 scourges with a blast pistol + any melee weapon and two blasters clocks in at 90 points (updates from the latest Chapter Approved notwithstanding). In terms of Power Level the unit clocks in at 5PL - PL are set to intervals of 20 points, giving the unit a rough equivalent value of 100 points +/- some fuzz, so guess what - the unit costs roughly the same in PL as it does in points, because the PL of a unit of scourges was set in a manner to account for the fact that the unit would be upgraded with wargear, as the units role is a fast and mobile delivery system for high-impact weapons. The only way to "break" the PL value of the unit is essentially by fielding them naked/not taking upgrades at all - while you can do this with matched play points you would almost never actually want to, so... nothing of value was lost.

This is true of a number of units in the game where wargear upgrades on the unit are basically a given. While there are certainly units where the PL doesn't price in (maximum) upgrades, I'm hard-pressed to find examples of a unit where the PL rating isn't at least roughly ballparked to the matched play points in terms of expected loadout, and what few I can find are the result of the matched play points having been updated and the PL not seeing change. Sure, I can make a min-sized squad of Kabalite Warriors come out to 80 points vs the 60 pt equivalent of their PL3 cost, bdut in most cases you probably wouldn't field a unit with a Power Sword/Agonizer + Phantasm Grenade Launcher + Blast Pistol + Dark Lance + Blaster. Most people fitting minimum squads usuallytake them naked or with minimal upgardes, locally the popular build seems to be tot take a ark lance which brings the squad to 55 points, which ballparks nicely to the units 60 pt equivalence at PL3 and is probably about as fairly balanced. Alternatively maybe you're fielding an an agonizer + blast pistol + phantasm grenade launcher (also 55 points). The typical builds for 10 man and larger squads likewise dovetail nicely to power level. The only time power level doesn't approximate the wargear options is, ironically, when you aren't upgrading them at all, or if you are being greedy and trying to field *all* the upgrades. In general, PL seems to "regress to the mean" of a units matched play cost (i.e. approximate the average), and only falls apart at the tails when units are taking no upgrades or every upgrade possible - this might be an issue if you are playing against a competitive player seeking to maximize their potential, but thats not how PL is intended to be used, and if that competitive player instead takes the builds they would field in a matched play game, there is not a large delta between the costs of the two systems.

Ironically in my experience, less-granular points system tie in better aid the quest for better balance than more granular points systems. Warmaxhine/hordes being the perfect example.

Likewise Team Yankee. What I'm saying isn't really controversial except amongst people who have never actually designed games or researched game design. I didn't jut make this gak up, its something that I learned myself while studying game design and from discussing points systems with a number of well-established and well-respected professional game designers, including quite a few whos names many dakkites would be familiar with.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Just talk to your opponent on facebook before showing up to the LGS ffs,

"hey guys, i'll be looking for a game at John's Wargames this saturday around 1pm. Looking to play Matched Play casual, i'll be playing my Eldar"

"Sweet, i can do that, its cool if i bring Drukhari?"

"sure, but please don't spam too many talos, i'm trying out something new"

"Define too many Talos...."

nou wrote:
A sideboard approach to the extreme I like it.

Indeed. Your collection is your 'army'. But you can only have 4 units on the field.

Bear in mind There are some complications and caveats beyond that and my description is a bit simplistic to convey the complete picture.

auticus wrote:
Thats actually quite intriguing to me.

Indeed. I won't lie. I've been disappointed by, and critical of privateer press for a few years now. Theyve made some really bad calls that have done a great job of alienating me- wmh is nothing like the game I fell in love with any more.

That said, credit where credit is due. I believed ten years ago that PP were a mover and shaker in the industry and in some ways they've always been ahead of the curve. Warcaster, o think, has captured some of that spark again. A lot of the modern 'game' in ttg's has been inspired by or built on pp's approach, even if wmh is now a mature property and frankly, showing its age badly. I do think with some of the features of warcaster (game/unit cap rather than traditional list building, and things like damage bonuses proportional to more accurate attacks) are quite clever and interesting in terms of where they ca take games. Issue is, again, the player base is basically non-existant.

chaos0xomega wrote:


Accounted for doesn't mean its balanced. Lets say GW updates the points costs, now each weapon is a Scourge squad is a 100 point upgrade. Its accounted for, sure, but now the PL is a much better approximation of the units value than the points cost is, because it is inarguable that a blaster is worth 100 extra points to the Scourges cost. You have granularity, but you don't have balance.

What this misses though is that GW determines PL *based on* points cost. So in this hypothetical, unless you got rid of that linkage, the PL of the scourge squad would also go up by ~5 PL.

A Billion Suns operates under the same principles as Warcaster, more or less, as do a number of other games. Its not a new concept, there are a number of games out there that have foregone points and used a similar "question vs answer" system to have players essentially self-balance the game themselves. Its tricky, because theres a definite skill-curve involved in play but to me that just makes it even more suitable towards competitive play. The other major downside is depending on your unit/game design its very easy for it to become an exercise in pay to win, as the player with the larger and more diverse collection has a potential advantage over a player with a more constrained and finite collection who is not able to continue fielding effective answers to questions posed by their opponent.

The thing that is going to spark controversy here though, is that I think Age of Sigmar deserves credit for starting the trend with its very imperfect and highly flawed attempt at essentially doing this in AoS1.0 by going sans points and telling players to agree to a warscroll cap and to alternate deploying them. The problem is that AoS1.0 didn't explicitly indicate this was how the game was balanced, and didn't actually proscribe this as the method you must use, it only suggested it amongst several options. Likewise the warscrolls were (IIRC) left open-ended in terms of size, a dragon was a dragon, but a unit of clanrats could be 5 models or 50. Still though, myself and other amateur (and some professional) designers picked up on it and played around with the idea for a bit as a game design concept. I very much doubt Mike Hutchinson or whoever it is at Privateer Press that is behind Warcaster sat down and said "I'm going to use this system that AoS inspired me to try"), but I think the conceptual seed was planted by AoS and grew/spread organically through discourse until certain designers were far enough removed from its source that they were essentially approaching it as a brand new concept with no baggage to weigh down their interpretation of how it could/should work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:


Accounted for doesn't mean its balanced. Lets say GW updates the points costs, now each weapon is a Scourge squad is a 100 point upgrade. Its accounted for, sure, but now the PL is a much better approximation of the units value than the points cost is, because it is inarguable that a blaster is worth 100 extra points to the Scourges cost. You have granularity, but you don't have balance.

What this misses though is that GW determines PL *based on* points cost. So in this hypothetical, unless you got rid of that linkage, the PL of the scourge squad would also go up by ~5 PL.

AFAIK GW has yet to adjust PL levels for anything in response to matched play points changes (this was a big problem towards the tail end of 8th edition as the points adjustments became fairly dramatic from the initial codex publication), which doesn't mean it can't happen, only that it seems unlikely. On that basis, I discount the possibility of the PL of the scourge squad changing based on a hypothetical Chapter Approved update that increases the cost of a blaster by 100 points.

ccs wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Just talk to your opponent on facebook before showing up to the LGS ffs,

"hey guys, i'll be looking for a game at John's Wargames this saturday around 1pm. Looking to play Matched Play casual, i'll be playing my Eldar"

"Sweet, i can do that, its cool if i bring Drukhari?"

"sure, but please don't spam too many talos, i'm trying out something new"

"Define too many Talos...."

"A squad or two is fine, i'll bring a few more brightlances to deal with them if you want more"

I think any attempt by GW to do something like this breaks down when you consider the size they want to push for the games. Warmachine's two-list structure, or Crisis Protocol's draw from your pool of ten models after seeing the mission, or Infinity's declare factions/declare mission then build lists, or Warcaster's sideboards, only work because they're quite small and it's easy to carry multiple lists in one box; bringing a sideboard for a lot of 40k/Sigmar armies is impractically bulky.

nou wrote:

Spoiler:

@auticus: As much as I value your input, and as I always had, it has to be stressed here, that linear regression model could work in AOS because it had independent linear parameters to begin with. You moved a fixed value, you hit on a fixed value, you wounded on a fixed value and then you saved on a mostly fixed value, since there was little AP proliferation, so SV was also an almost linear parameter. As soon as you manage to establish relative weights of mobility, offense and defense in such linear system, you can sort units by their absolute positions in those dimensions and your point approximations will work smoothly.

But as soon as there is enough AP around, linear regression stops working for AP vs SV pair, as this becomes a dynamic game time parameter. Same thing was with the old S vs T - here even the basic relationship was nonlinear as you had the double 6+ and then a hard cutoff. Even movement in 7th was nonlinear due to all the random rolls and then it was heavily dependant on terrain.

And modern 40K? To hit is nonlinear with all those modifiers; to wound is nonlinear with modifiers and cutoffs; damage is nonlinear with modifiers and cutoffs; save is nonlinear, including invulnerables; even movement becomes nonlinear recently. So linear regression models cannot work reliably to sort units along any dimension, because you don’t have independent dimensions anymore, you have dynamic pairs which are inherently chaotic in nature, and a wholy different math discipline is used to describe those.

But while linear regression is not enough to balance things out, it is enough to find glaring holes in the momentary state of the system and so it can be used to listbuild for advantage, as it obviously is.

Excellent breakdown

chaos0xomega wrote:
...The thing that is going to spark controversy here though, is that I think Age of Sigmar deserves credit for starting the trend with its very imperfect and highly flawed attempt at essentially doing this in AoS1.0 by going sans points and telling players to agree to a warscroll cap and to alternate deploying them. The problem is that AoS1.0 didn't explicitly indicate this was how the game was balanced, and didn't actually proscribe this as the method you must use, it only suggested it amongst several options. Likewise the warscrolls were (IIRC) left open-ended in terms of size, a dragon was a dragon, but a unit of clanrats could be 5 models or 50. Still though, myself and other amateur (and some professional) designers picked up on it and played around with the idea for a bit as a game design concept. I very much doubt Mike Hutchinson or whoever it is at Privateer Press that is behind Warcaster sat down and said "I'm going to use this system that AoS inspired me to try"), but I think the conceptual seed was planted by AoS and grew/spread organically through discourse until certain designers were far enough removed from its source that they were essentially approaching it as a brand new concept with no baggage to weigh down their interpretation of how it could/should work...

In theory, maybe? If you had a way of calibrating "one warscroll" to be roughly equivalent to "one warscroll", and if you could differentiate statlines enough for the choice to be meaningful rather than the relatively uniform damage/durability of Sigmar, and if your faction didn't function purely based on a specific buff stack that required specific models to make work...

In practice I don't think Sigmar had any intention of even trying to start this kind of trend, I think this was an accident emerging from people trying to come up with a more complicated logic behind what GW was doing as opposed to the simpler explanation that their understanding of what a "casual gamer"/"narrative gamer" is being wildly unrealistic.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

ccs wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Just talk to your opponent on facebook before showing up to the LGS ffs,

"hey guys, i'll be looking for a game at John's Wargames this saturday around 1pm. Looking to play Matched Play casual, i'll be playing my Eldar"

"Sweet, i can do that, its cool if i bring Drukhari?"

"sure, but please don't spam too many talos, i'm trying out something new"

"Define too many Talos...."

"A squad or two is fine, i'll bring a few more brightlances to deal with them if you want more"

Got it. 7 Talos is too many.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
...The thing that is going to spark controversy here though, is that I think Age of Sigmar deserves credit for starting the trend with its very imperfect and highly flawed attempt at essentially doing this in AoS1.0 by going sans points and telling players to agree to a warscroll cap and to alternate deploying them. The problem is that AoS1.0 didn't explicitly indicate this was how the game was balanced, and didn't actually proscribe this as the method you must use, it only suggested it amongst several options. Likewise the warscrolls were (IIRC) left open-ended in terms of size, a dragon was a dragon, but a unit of clanrats could be 5 models or 50. Still though, myself and other amateur (and some professional) designers picked up on it and played around with the idea for a bit as a game design concept. I very much doubt Mike Hutchinson or whoever it is at Privateer Press that is behind Warcaster sat down and said "I'm going to use this system that AoS inspired me to try"), but I think the conceptual seed was planted by AoS and grew/spread organically through discourse until certain designers were far enough removed from its source that they were essentially approaching it as a brand new concept with no baggage to weigh down their interpretation of how it could/should work...

In theory, maybe? If you had a way of calibrating "one warscroll" to be roughly equivalent to "one warscroll", and if you could differentiate statlines enough for the choice to be meaningful rather than the relatively uniform damage/durability of Sigmar, and if your faction didn't function purely based on a specific buff stack that required specific models to make work...

In practice I don't think Sigmar had any intention of even trying to start this kind of trend, I think this was an accident emerging from people trying to come up with a more complicated logic behind what GW was doing as opposed to the simpler explanation that their understanding of what a "casual gamer"/"narrative gamer" is being wildly unrealistic.

Thats certainly possible (and something I meant to mention, essentially the "blind idiot god" theory of GW accidentally designing something interesting/innovative).

Deadnight wrote:

nou wrote:
A sideboard approach to the extreme I like it.

Indeed. Your collection is your 'army'. But you can only have 4 units on the field.

Bear in mind There are some complications and caveats beyond that and my description is a bit simplistic to convey the complete picture.

auticus wrote:
Thats actually quite intriguing to me.

Indeed. I won't lie. I've been disappointed by, and critical of privateer press for a few years now. Theyve made some really bad calls that have done a great job of alienating me- wmh is nothing like the game I fell in love with any more.

That said, credit where credit is due. I believed ten years ago that PP were a mover and shaker in the industry and in some ways they've always been ahead of the curve. Warcaster, o think, has captured some of that spark again. A lot of the modern 'game' in ttg's has been inspired by or built on pp's approach, even if wmh is now a mature property and frankly, showing its age badly. I do think with some of the features of warcaster (game/unit cap rather than traditional list building, and things like damage bonuses proportional to more accurate attacks) are quite clever and interesting in terms of where they ca take games. Issue is, again, the player base is basically non-existant.

Privateer was certainly a big deal in the early to late 2000s and I can see a lot of their design choices in 40k and AOS today, which shows just how influential their design choices were.

chaos0xomega wrote:
...Thats certainly possible (and something I meant to mention, essentially the "blind idiot god" theory of GW accidentally designing something interesting/innovative).

I tend to go with the "print the drawing board" theory where GW has interesting ideas that could in theory work, but then prints them without considering the consequences or doing any analysis and ends up completely failing to follow through on stuff that could have been cool, and then assumes that their ideas were flawed instead of their execution so they burn it all down and start over with a new thing that sounds really cool but they're still not prepared to do the work to make it actually function. They're like...first-year game design students with untreated ADHD jumping from cool idea to cool idea without any concept of how to get from cool idea to a cool thing that actually works in the game.

Gotta say I don't see much of WMHDs/PP in 40k/AoS, other than the shift in these games towards what some players refer to as "wombo combo", which is something that has always been present in 40k to some degree, but pushed dramatically to the forefront as of 8th edition to become a central element to gameplay in a manner similar to WMHDs, as opposed to being one of several potential strategies that could be used as was the case previously. There were always (at least as far back as 4th edition when I started playing) models that had aura buffs/nerfs and psychic powers that could buff/nerf units, etc. but "back in the day" these were 1-2 models in your entire army, each of which probably only had 1 source for such a combo buff, and you were maybe only using such abilities a few times per game. In modern 40k, you can have a half-dozen or more such models in your army list depending on the army you are playing, each of which can have several sources for such abilities between relics, warlord traits, general wargear, built-in abilities, etc. which are compounded further by army traits/doctrines/superdocrines, strategems, and other such buffs that you can stack on top of eachother in many different ways over the course of any given turn similar to WMHDs. 40k actually goes far above and beyond WMHDs in this respect, as there are many more sources of such abilities in 40k than there are in a typical WMHDs army list, to say nothing of the fact that 40k adds "army wide"/"global" type sources in the form of superdoctrines and strategems, which are otherwise absent from WMHDs.

 catbarf wrote:


You'll have an easier time balancing out two armies if they're both starting at 2000pts than if they're both 50PL.

Only in the sense that they're somewhat more likely to be closer to balanced to start.

If you actually have to make changes to achieve balance, that's WAY harder to do with points, because every change you make raises or lowers the value of the list. I mean, unless you're okay playing with point deficits- I know someone else earlier in the thread suggested just playing a handicap- not sure if that was you.

But assuming you want to keep equal point values, as soon as you swap something out of a list made with points, you have to find something else to swap in.

That isn't the case with PL. I can pull a heavy weapon out of each of 3 squadsif I think thats more fair to my opponent, and the numbers still match, so I don't have to scramble for a replacement.

Note: I'm not suggesting PL as a balance mechanism; it's an ease of play mechanism.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
...Thats certainly possible (and something I meant to mention, essentially the "blind idiot god" theory of GW accidentally designing something interesting/innovative).

I tend to go with the "print the drawing board" theory where GW has interesting ideas that could in theory work, but then prints them without considering the consequences or doing any analysis and ends up completely failing to follow through on stuff that could have been cool, and then assumes that their ideas were flawed instead of their execution so they burn it all down and start over with a new thing that sounds really cool but they're still not prepared to do the work to make it actually function. They're like...first-year game design students with untreated ADHD jumping from cool idea to cool idea without any concept of how to get from cool idea to a cool thing that actually works in the game.

Yeah. I suspect the issue is that there are several strong personalities with competing philosophies in the studio, so implementation and execution is often compromised as a result of, err... compromise, and thats why so many things seem disjointed and flawed.

PenitentJake wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

You'll have an easier time balancing out two armies if they're both starting at 2000pts than if they're both 50PL.

Only in the sense that they're somewhat more likely to be closer to balanced to start.
If you actually have to make changes to achieve balance, that's WAY harder to do with points, because every change you make raises or lowers the value of the list. I mean, unless you're okay playing with point deficits- I know someone else earlier in the thread suggested just playing a handicap- not sure if that was you.
But assuming you want to keep equal point values, as soon as you swap something out of a list made with points, you have to find something else to swap in.
That isn't the case with PL. I can pull a heavy weapon out of each of 3 squadsif I think thats more fair to my opponent, and the numbers still match, so I don't have to scramble for a replacement.
Note: I'm not suggesting PL as a balance mechanism; it's an ease of play mechanism.

To be honest, theres a number of prominent game designers (both tabletop and video games) who I've read various blog posts, interviews, etc. where they discuss balancing games, etc. and they argue that "points" changes (or resource cost changes, etc.) are generally a poor way to balance games (because, again, they are a shaping mechanism more than a balancing mechanism, and by raising/lowering costs you change the shape which causes nth order consequences requiring further changes elsewhere - a good example of this was Astra Militarum in 8th ed, where multiple rounds of points changes attempting to balance conscripts and guardsmen resulted in conscripts costing more than actual guardsmen while still being a better/more effective and efficient choice) and should only ever be adjusted as a means of last resort, and that the more proper way to try to balance a unit in a game would be to adjust stats/abilities to try to make the unit worth the cost ascribed to it. Another argument I often (but not always) hear is that when trying to balance something, its better to try to balance by bringing everything else up to the level of what you are considering to be overperforming than it is to try to balance the overperforming things down to the level of everything else (with only the most egregious examples as the exception), as there are usually less hurt feelings amongst players that way, AND because if you overshoot while trying to "balance up" you have more room to balance back down again and if you undershoot you still have plenty of room to continue balancing up, whereas if you "balance down" you often don't have much room to overshoot or undershoot or make additional changes, etc. as most games tend to balance very close to the "floor" of the design space which leaves you little room to work with (again, astra militarum are a good example of this, if conscripts are overperforming you don't really have much room to "balance down" as their stats are so low that you would be hard-pressed to make them worse and their abilities/intangibles so limited that there isn't much to adjust. If you hike their points cost that very much pushes them above guardsmen in cost, which just breaks them from their intended role of "cheap horde filler unit". If on the other hand you "balance up" other units in the guard list you make them more attractive options to take and thus give incentive to take something other than conscripts while preserving runway (and actually creating runway) for you to then tune down conscripts further via points hike if the improvement to regular guard units comes with a small points increase.

In both cases, GWs apparent balance philosophy runs counter and contrary to what other establshed game designers advocate for.

IIRC Sandy Petersen had a few posts to that effect in various kickstarter updates for his games.

PenitentJake wrote:

 catbarf wrote:


You'll have an easier time balancing out two armies if they're both starting at 2000pts than if they're both 50PL.

Only in the sense that they're somewhat more likely to be closer to balanced to start.

If you actually have to make changes to achieve balance, that's WAY harder to do with points, because every change you make raises or lowers the value of the list. I mean, unless you're okay playing with point deficits- I know someone else earlier in the thread suggested just playing a handicap- not sure if that was you.

But assuming you want to keep equal point values, as soon as you swap something out of a list made with points, you have to find something else to swap in.

That isn't the case with PL. I can pull a heavy weapon out of each of 3 squadsif I think thats more fair to my opponent, and the numbers still match, so I don't have to scramble for a replacement.

Note: I'm not suggesting PL as a balance mechanism; it's an ease of play mechanism.

Changes you make to your PL list changes the value of the list as well, just not the PL of the list because PL is an abstraction of a mediocre model of value. The ability to change lists is simply not an argument that can be made in favour of PL, it's against the rules for both formats. If you're making yourself the expert and willing to change one or both lists before the game in an effort to balance things then you stop being beholden to GW's points. When I do an intro game I usually bring 450 pts instead of 500, I don't switch out my units for worse or less synergistic units. I don't need to play 500 pts more than someone needs to upgrade all their VanVets with jump packs and TH SS or give as many Guardsmen as possible plasma guns in a PL game.

chaos0xomega wrote:
...theres a number of prominent game designers (both tabletop and video games) who I've read various blog posts, interviews, etc. where they discuss balancing games, etc. and they argue that "points" changes (or resource cost changes, etc.) are generally a poor way to balance games (because, again, they are a shaping mechanism more than a balancing mechanism, and by raising/lowering costs you change the shape which causes nth order consequences requiring further changes elsewhere - a good example of this was Astra Militarum in 8th ed, where multiple rounds of points changes attempting to balance conscripts and guardsmen resulted in conscripts costing more than actual guardsmen while still being a better/more effective and efficient choice) and should only ever be adjusted as a means of last resort, and that the more proper way to try to balance a unit in a game would be to adjust stats/abilities to try to make the unit worth the cost ascribed to it. Another argument I often (but not always) hear is that when trying to balance something, its better to try to balance by bringing everything else up to the level of what you are considering to be overperforming than it is to try to balance the overperforming things down to the level of everything else (with only the most egregious examples as the exception), as there are usually less hurt feelings amongst players that way, AND because if you overshoot while trying to "balance up" you have more room to balance back down again and if you undershoot you still have plenty of room to continue balancing up, whereas if you "balance down" you often don't have much room to overshoot or undershoot or make additional changes, etc. as most games tend to balance very close to the "floor" of the design space which leaves you little room to work with (again, astra militarum are a good example of this, if conscripts are overperforming you don't really have much room to "balance down" as their stats are so low that you would be hard-pressed to make them worse and their abilities/intangibles so limited that there isn't much to adjust. If you hike their points cost that very much pushes them above guardsmen in cost, which just breaks them from their intended role of "cheap horde filler unit". If on the other hand you "balance up" other units in the guard list you make them more attractive options to take and thus give incentive to take something other than conscripts while preserving runway (and actually creating runway) for you to then tune down conscripts further via points hike if the improvement to regular guard units comes with a small points increase.

In both cases, GWs apparent balance philosophy runs counter and contrary to what other establshed game designers advocate for.

IIRC Sandy Petersen had a few posts to that effect in various kickstarter updates for his games.

Those game designers are dumb and haven't thought it through, Errata clogs up the game a lot more than a pts change. If Sandy Peterson said that units in Age of Empires should have their stats rather than cost changed then that's a very different thing from a miniature wargame because the game engine handles the rules, you don't have to put sticky notes on your PC screen to remember that your ballista has a lower range than what it says on the unit card. In 40k a Gretchin should not be more difficult to kill than a Guardsman on account of Guardsmen being twice as tall and wearing body armour. The same is true for Age of Empires, if you accidentally assign a stupidly high cost to ballista then you cannot just increase their speed, armour, range and firepower because at some point they stop being ballista and start being a modern tank.

Conscripts never cost more than Guardsmen and they stopped being better when their rules were changed and Commissars were nerfed.

PenitentJake wrote:

 catbarf wrote:


You'll have an easier time balancing out two armies if they're both starting at 2000pts than if they're both 50PL.

Only in the sense that they're somewhat more likely to be closer to balanced to start.

That's all I'm trying to say. If points are more likely to get you closer to balanced, then it's a better balancing mechanism by definition. What the players do afterwards to close the remaining gap is a separate thing entirely.

PenitentJake wrote:
If you actually have to make changes to achieve balance, that's WAY harder to do with points, because every change you make raises or lowers the value of the list. I mean, unless you're okay playing with point deficits- I know someone else earlier in the thread suggested just playing a handicap- not sure if that was you.

Yes, that was me. Because PL not changing when you make substantive adjustment to your list is a sign of its imprecision, not an advantage over a points system that recognizes that the ostensible power of your army has diminished when you drop all the heavy weapons and 1/3 of each squad. If we recognize that two 50PL lists are not equal and one may need a boost, we can recognize that two 2000pt lists are unequal and apply the same tweaks.

If we both showed up with 50PL lists and it was clear that mine was underpowered relative to yours, and we both agreed that my army needs a boost, would you object to me taking an extra 1PL unit to balance it out, rather than adding in extra models or equipment that result in no PL change? How important is it that our armies are both 50PL or 2000pts on the dot, and how necessary is it that we only adjust the balance in ways that result in no change to measured value?

 Mezmorki wrote:
Our ProHammer campaign we're launching is map based, and as a consequence players can have multiple armies of various different sizes running around the table.

The way to normalize the fights a little bit is to have "fielding limit" for how many points you can have on the table at once.

It's interesting to ponder - what if 40K had players assemble 3,000 point lists but only 1,500 points could be active on the field at a time. Alpha strikes would be less of an issue as you'd be able to (consistently) bring reserves onto the field as fresh troops, and also modify the units you bring on to deal with the threats of your opponent.

My Crusade campaign (also map-based) does this all the time.

Each territory must be held by a legal detachment. Territories are grouped into settlements.

So your army can call in an allied detachment as reinforcements (this isn't a slam dunk- it requires a com unit equivalent to perform an action, which can be blocked in various ways). If the detachment they call is within the same settlement, units can arrive as reserves in the following turn. If it is from a territory in another settlement, units can arrive as reserve two turns later. Either of these options move the reinforcing army, leaving the allied territory undefended at the opening of the following campaign round.

Rather than calling for a full detachment of reserves, an army can call for individual units, but only if it leaves a legal detachment in the allied territory. This does not leave territory undefended.

Thats why I love alt activation and games where your forces come onto the table.

Alpha strike is not as much a thing because you can actually respond to it instead of just standing there on your thumbs watching your army get removed while you do nothing.

 vict0988 wrote:
Changes you make to your PL list changes the value of the list as well, just not the PL of the list because PL is an abstraction of a mediocre model of value. The ability to change lists is simply not an argument that can be made in favour of PL, it's against the rules for both formats. If you're making yourself the expert and willing to change one or both lists before the game in an effort to balance things then you stop being beholden to GW's points. When I do an intro game I usually bring 450 pts instead of 500, I don't switch out my units for worse or less synergistic units. I don't need to play 500 pts more than someone needs to upgrade all their VanVets with jump packs and TH SS or give as many Guardsmen as possible plasma guns in a PL game.

I think the point hes making is that changes to a unit using the matched play construct often have to be reflected in points adjustments, whereas because a Power Level is wider you have more latitude for changes that wouldn't require you to change a PL.

Those game designers are dumb and haven't thought it through, Errata clogs up the game a lot more than a pts change. If Sandy Peterson said that units in Age of Empires should have their stats rather than cost changed then that's a very different thing from a miniature wargame because the game engine handles the rules, you don't have to put sticky notes on your PC screen to remember that your ballista has a lower range than what it says on the unit card. In 40k a Gretchin should not be more difficult to kill than a Guardsman on account of Guardsmen being twice as tall and wearing body armour. The same is true for Age of Empires, if you accidentally assign a stupidly high cost to ballista then you cannot just increase their speed, armour, range and firepower because at some point they stop being ballista and start being a modern tank.

I'll care about your opinion when you pull a few million dollars on kickstarter or launch a multimillion dollar video game franchise. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Until then your opinion about what professionals with a track record of designing and producing actual games are and do is meaningless.

(FYI Sandy Petersen does board games now, and the context he was discussing these changes in was also a board game).

Conscripts never cost more than Guardsmen and they stopped being better when their rules were changed and Commissars were nerfed.

You're right, they didn't go to 5 points, they went to 4ppm (AFTER commissars had already been nerfed) which was the same as guardsmen at the time. Even after nerfing Commissars and hiking their price they continued to be a better choice than guardsmen and competitive lists continued to field them over guardsmen.

 auticus wrote:
Thats why I love alt activation and games where your forces come onto the table.

Alpha strike is not as much a thing because you can actually respond to it instead of just standing there on your thumbs watching your army get removed while you do nothing.

I did have an idea once I never really ran through that could kill two birds with one stone: have it so everything but troops and hq’s have to start in reserves, and you can only bring in a certain amount per turn. Might encourage bringin more normal dudes and decrease alpha strike.

Definitely something to try out and see how it goes.

chaos0xomega wrote:


You're right, they didn't go to 5 points, they went to 4ppm (AFTER commissars had already been nerfed) which was the same as guardsmen at the time. Even after nerfing Commissars and hiking their price they continued to be a better choice than guardsmen and competitive lists continued to field them over guardsmen.

This is a very fine example of how a trivial mathematical fact, that not all functions have roots (is that a proper term? I'm not a native english speaker, I mean a zero point of a function) translates to wargames and point systems. There are a number of cases where no matter what point value you set you will always miss the mark.

The bottom line of this example is that conscripts couldn't be properly balanced through points and a solution required changing how entirely separate unit worked.

I'm a fan of that. I know in Conquest (the fantasy game) they regularly change both points and unit stat lines and special rules to tune the game and I like that.

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Thats why I love alt activation and games where your forces come onto the table.

Alpha strike is not as much a thing because you can actually respond to it instead of just standing there on your thumbs watching your army get removed while you do nothing.

I did have an idea once I never really ran through that could kill two birds with one stone: have it so everything but troops and hq’s have to start in reserves, and you can only bring in a certain amount per turn. Might encourage bringin more normal dudes and decrease alpha strike.

I would argue that you should start with Fast Attack on the board, followed by troops and hq, and then the rest.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I will also point out that the big problem with points changes (especially matched play points) is that you cannot accurately collect follow-on data to gauge the impact of the change because it pushes other variables out-of-control. If a unit is underperforming and you compensate for that by dropping its points cost, or if its overperforming and you compensate by hiking its points cost, in both cases you have necessitated a listbuilding change as units and models will need to be added/removed in order to make it fit. If you see a change in win rate in either scenario, you have no basis by which to determine that the units performance issues were resolved and that it is actually "balanced", instead you have shaped the army as a whole by either forcing the addition/removal of certain units (and as a result any adjustments to win rate are a result of reshaping the army list rather than balancing a unit), potentially including the unit it is you are trying to fix in the first place. If you use a non-points based methodology to address balance concerns, you can more accurately measure performance of a list against itself, as a listbuilding change isn't automatically necessitated as a result of the edit (and will only come about if players feel that the changes render the list as being no longer effective).

This is why you will sometimes hear certain game designers say that points systems don't measure what players think they do and are not meant to balance the game on a weapon-by-weapon/model-by-model/unit-by-unit basis, but rather to balance the army as a whole. When you take a weapon/model/unit and change its points cost and see a change in an armys tabletop performance measured by win-rate, you aren't actually seeing the points change balance a unit, you are seeing it balance an army, because the context in which that unit existed has changed as a result of other changes needing to be made in terms of the units relationship to the rest of an army list.