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The thing is people have been hacking the game in the listbuilding phase since at least 3rd edition when I started.

I dont think you'll ever get rid of that totally but its main cause is simply undercost abilities that tournament players hone in on and maximize.

Going all the way back to a 3rd edition blood angels marine costing 15 points, the same as a Dark angels marine and same as an Ultramarine, except that the Dark Angels paid 15 points a model to not be able to move at all if they rolled a 1 for their squad because they were stubborn, the Ultramarine had no extra abilities, and the Blood Angel had +1S +1I and access to turbo charged rhinos that moved extra AND had the option to take a couple power weapons additional.

The color of one's model basically painted itself in that edition (space wolves were a close second with true grit and their armory access giving them toys to play with to help erase people easier).

(thats just one example from a litany of examples in every edition stretching back to the early days)

The lethality of the game is certainly a big negative aspect for a lot of people, but is also a big positive for a great number of other people because they want to get as many games in as possible and to do that you need stuff to die fast.

If the game wasn't as lethal, the listbuilding would change from minmaxing lethality to minmaxing mobility and objective capping, as it was in sigmar when I left GW finally in 2019 (so if it changed today I don't know about it) where one min/maxed mobility combined with mortal wound spam and if you had it the ability to spam summoning free extra models that the community somehow absurdly believes was "baked in" to the points cost of the already underpriced hero models doing the spam summoning.

auticus I will never understand why you spend so much time talking about GW games given your lack of any recent experience with them. Move on! It has to be healthier for you.

Because everyone around me plays them and I enjoy talking about game design - even the really obviously bad game designs. I find the 40k and AOS phenomenon fascinating from a game designer standpoint because the rules and design are just so bad but its still so successful that I really love discussing to find out more on why that is and just talk about that phenomenon in general to apply to the games I work on in my professional day to day.

 auticus wrote:
Because everyone around me plays them and I enjoy talking about game design - even the really obviously bad game designs. I find the 40k and AOS phenomenon fascinating from a game designer standpoint because the rules and design are just so bad but its still so successful that I really love discussing to find out more on why that is and just talk about that phenomenon in general to apply to the games I work on in my professional day to day.

Seconded - discussing about bad game design can even be a better learning experience than discussing good game design. You can borrow an already solved solution about a thing or two from good design, but with bad design, you're motivated to be creative and the discussion itself can turn in a good brainstorming exercise.

@brainpsyk: what is discussed here is nothing controversial or heretical. It is a piece of game design knowledge, which is commonly utilised by designers to target specific audience.

brainpsyk wrote:


List building is a skill, just like planning 2-3-4 turns in advance, just like Richard Siegler plans out the entire game before he gets to the table. That's not imbalance, that's tactics. Designing a list to be able to do multiple secondaries is tactics (well, strategy really). Building a list to score primary points on missions is strategy.

But he doesn't do that. He plays a ton of training games vs known and expected match ups, so he doesn't have to rethink stuff each game. There are probably very few moments in games where he actually has to think. And it is probably limited to stuff like drasticly over or under avarge rolls. Or match ups that have split way of playing, for example what ever he gets or doesn't get first turn. It is like in sports most of the time you don't think, if you think the opponent is going to choke you out, all the training you do durning camps etc are there to limit the number of times where you have to think what to do in this or that situation.

Umbros wrote:
auticus I will never understand why you spend so much time talking about GW games given your lack of any recent experience with them. Move on! It has to be healthier for you.

My wish is that he writes these posts because he knows how much I, for one, enjoy reading them. Dude is a treasure, patient as a saint. Maybe reason enough.

I appreciate the sentiment - thank you for your kind words.

 auticus wrote:
Points have never been for balance in gw games, they are for structure to min max within. They are the boundaries for the box to build in and nothing more.

No, they're stated in designers notes and so on to represent their power/utility.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nou wrote:
Just to add to the excelent points Deadnight listed above, let’s not forget, that 40k competitive players DO NOT want balance, they actively DEMAND imbalance and just obscure this desire by calling it „list building skill”. As long as „a bunch of assorted units should lose to carefully planned army” remains to be a value in a game, there will be problems of seal clubbing the newbies, there will be problems of „this cool looking unit means I auto lose/win”, and the more listbuilding should matter, the bigger this problem will be. We’ve been over this many times over - „nobody expects perfect balance, just good enough” in reality means something different entirely - „we expect just a right amount of imbalance, not too little, not too much”.

I think there are some toxic elements of the community, sure, but after hanging out with tournament players this weekend, what they want is for each faction to have multiple thematic builds and for win and loss rates to be constrained within the 45%-55% bracket.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:
Wanting list building being a skill explicitly is a desire for imbalance. Almost nobody will say that, but thats exactly what they are looking for.

For internal imbalance, sure. Not external imbalance.

It can also be a matter of synergy - every unit can be viable if it requires in-list synergy to function.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeff white wrote:
Today was listening too one of my fav podcasts, walking dogs, and one of the co hosts confessed that it had taken him a while, but he realized recently the overtly competitive bent taken by WarCom articles and suggested that it was not so good, because people get the impression that what is cool about a model or unit or faction is the buffs, the table-top in-game performance in the current so-called meta, rather than the background, the artwork, the story and what each model or unit or faction bring to the table in this way..

Point being, the so-called meta affects everyone, and the hobby, and is effectively corrosive, reductive, and counter to the spirit of both the game and the community that supports it.

Have to say that I agree with this assessment, completely. GW management should be ashamed.

Ashamed that they make such shoddy rules, you mean?

No, they're stated in designers notes and so on to represent their power/utility.

Yeah but no. Designer notes also state matched play is the balanced mode of play. We all know how much BS that is.

People use points as a structure to minmax within. Not as a balancing tool. Many tournament style players are not interested in a balanced game, because listbuilding is about building the most imbalanced list that has an advantage over your opponent. Points SHOULD be about how powerful something is so that when I come to the table with a 2000 point list, I have 2000 points of power and you have 2000 points of power, but thats not what listbuilding is about today or been about for over a decade now. Its about taking those 2000 points and making them function like 4000 - 5000 points.

They are wanting imbalance. We can nitpick and say "ACTUALLY its just internal imbalance not external imbalance..." and thats fine go right ahead. Imbalance to me is imbalance. Its garbage internal or external.

Someone stating they want external balance so that all factions have a 45-55% win rate so long as there is a viable build within is still very much anti what I want out of a game, because they are saying its ok to have gak builds and units that are not viable - you just have to be "skilled" enough to not take those.

Every unit. Every single unit. Every LAST unit in a codex should be viable.

It can also be a matter of synergy - every unit can be viable if it requires in-list synergy to function.

That is not applicable to GW games in terms of the reality. Every unit is most certainly not viable no matter what you do with it in 40k or sigmar.

As a general rule of designer intent - yes thats a great thing to strive for. GW fails very hard at this.

 auticus wrote:
The thing is people have been hacking the game in the listbuilding phase since at least 3rd edition when I started.

I dont think you'll ever get rid of that totally but its main cause is simply undercost abilities that tournament players hone in on and maximize.

Going all the way back to a 3rd edition blood angels marine costing 15 points, the same as a Dark angels marine and same as an Ultramarine, except that the Dark Angels paid 15 points a model to not be able to move at all if they rolled a 1 for their squad because they were stubborn, the Ultramarine had no extra abilities, and the Blood Angel had +1S +1I and access to turbo charged rhinos that moved extra AND had the option to take a couple power weapons additional.

The color of one's model basically painted itself in that edition (space wolves were a close second with true grit and their armory access giving them toys to play with to help erase people easier).

(thats just one example from a litany of examples in every edition stretching back to the early days)

The lethality of the game is certainly a big negative aspect for a lot of people, but is also a big positive for a great number of other people because they want to get as many games in as possible and to do that you need stuff to die fast.

If the game wasn't as lethal, the listbuilding would change from minmaxing lethality to minmaxing mobility and objective capping, as it was in sigmar when I left GW finally in 2019 (so if it changed today I don't know about it) where one min/maxed mobility combined with mortal wound spam and if you had it the ability to spam summoning free extra models that the community somehow absurdly believes was "baked in" to the points cost of the already underpriced hero models doing the spam summoning.

There are some people that will always try to do that, until you get a game like Chess/Checkers, where each faction is absolutely identical. But you're dead on, the main source of that is points & faction imbalance > skill.

Totally agree on today's level of lethality, it's just over the top. I did like the level early last year, before DE came out. If you exposed too much you got wiped out. Not enough and you couldn't hold the objective.

Tyel wrote:
Its not really surprising - even before we get into rules imbalance - that this forward planning has an advantage over someone who has just gone "uh... I've just grabbed whatever cos I liked them". And realistically I think it should.

Spot-on. My ideal isn't for listbuilding to be completely irrelevant, to where throwing darts at a board to pick your army is a viable approach- and I don't think anyone really wants that to begin with. It's more that I would love for army-building to be about, as you say, building a game plan.

If listbuilding were all about forward planning, constructing a force that synergizes well together and covers all its mission-relevant needs, and not about taking good units while avoiding bad ones, the difference in effectiveness between a typical casual list and a top-tier competitive one would be much slimmer. At that point your listbuilding is fundamentally about strategy and tactics, not about min-maxing.

8th Ed. ITC Missions and the 9th Ed. Missions they inspired reward list planning more than ever, though. They are much more similar in basic structure then previous missions. And fixed secondaries you have knowledge off at list-building obviously affect that.

Throwing out stuff that you "know" and can build for such as To The Last or Psychic Actions in favour of a randomised system that forces you to be "ready for anything" and shaking up the primary more in line of previous missions, sometimes only end-game-scoring, sometimes-progressive, sometimes kill-point focussed, sometimes kill-points are irrelevant, etc.. by its very nature takes emphasis away from list-building and places it on quick thinking and skill at the table in the moment.

 auticus wrote:
Because everyone around me plays them and I enjoy talking about game design - even the really obviously bad game designs. I find the 40k and AOS phenomenon fascinating from a game designer standpoint because the rules and design are just so bad but its still so successful that I really love discussing to find out more on why that is and just talk about that phenomenon in general to apply to the games I work on in my professional day to day.

It's actually a great case study on how you can have the worst product at the highest prices and still be the biggest seller in the market because of ubiquity, kind of like Apple. I have moved around a lot and everywhere I've ever been, including a deployment, I could find people to play 40k. I played WMH a lot when it was a popular tournament game, but moved to a new state and there's 0 WMH players here or even stores that carry it. We have a decent Infinity group here so I can play that. If I move somewhere else, they won't play WMH or Infinity so I'll have to play 40k or go to Battletech or whatever the niche game of choice is in that town. 40k might be the worst game in the history of games, but I would rather play 40k with a group of friends than push WMH models around on my kitchen island by myself. Also the quality of the models keeps people in the hobby even when the game is terrible. PVC and metal models are awful to work with compared to GWs plastics. I really couldn't find the motivation to paint my WMH stuff because the models were so bad they were just game pieces to me. Infinity is still 90% metal. I think GW has already captured too much marketshare and become too popular in pop culture for another company to really establish themselves and get to the same level.

You say a lot of true things Toofast.

That was the same thing I had to grapple with. Play the game and shovel money at GW for a game that I hated because my community were all wanting to be pro-gamers, or stick to games with few, if any, players.

Thats kind of how I've become more and more into solo gaming lol.

However - I've been hit with the bug to want to paint some gw models again - I just have nothing to use them in - so my game studio is working on a ruleset that I can at least enjoy and motivates me to want to play with them again.

I agree that for a long time now GW could basically walk out, take a giant crap on stage, put googly eyes in said crap and sell it as a poopmaris space marine and it would still sell.

They are in fact too big to fail.

As an aside too fast, I never had an issue with metals.

Corvus beli's are some of the best in the industry - I'm repainting my ariadna and yu-jing stiff after having them.stripped and bagged for about 3 years now, and im really enjoying it. Seriously tempted to buy some frontoviks and the new kazak starter as a painting project.

And pp's had their charms. I wanted to buy some 'pre-modern' pieces of theirs for a wee project of mine (so riflemen and artillery, with men o war being the 'tanks') and bought some of the ugly old metal trenchers. Gawd, they're ugly. Buuuuut... a decent paint job on them and they become remarkably charming wee models and the 'ugly' is away. Now ro be fair I've seen only a handful of pp models since the female totem hunter from minicrate that made me go ooh, but quite a few of their older ones still have some charm.

I don't mind the sculpts as much as the actual quality of the minis. The mold lines were just awful and the material isn't easy to clean up. I had to carve them away with a hobby knife and resculpt detail. After the first model I did that, I decided it wasn't worth it and just slapped them together with minimal cleanup.

 auticus wrote:
Yeah but no. Designer notes also state matched play is the balanced mode of play. We all know how much BS that is.

It's not bs from the people actually writing the rules. They might be incompetent, but it's what they think.

 auticus wrote:
People use points as a structure to minmax within. Not as a balancing tool.

Who is people? Why are you making this grandiose claim with no evidence? You act like you're privy to some secret knowledge about game design, and are making condescending and insulting points to people who understand what you're saying and have evidence to not believe it.

 auticus wrote:
Many tournament style players are not interested in a balanced game, because listbuilding is about building the most imbalanced list that has an advantage over your opponent.

Even if your conclusion is true, it doesn't follow from your premise. "Balance" can mean a lot of things; players can want the meanest, most optimized space marine list they can make to be a fair fight with the meanest, most optimized Tyranid list their friend makes.

 auticus wrote:
Points SHOULD be about how powerful something is so that when I come to the table with a 2000 point list, I have 2000 points of power and you have 2000 points of power, but thats not what listbuilding is about today or been about for over a decade now. Its about taking those 2000 points and making them function like 4000 - 5000 points.

And the reason for that is incompetence on the part of the underpaid, underqualified designers that GW hires, not because their philosophy of points is as you say.

 auticus wrote:
They are wanting imbalance. We can nitpick and say "ACTUALLY its just internal imbalance not external imbalance..." and thats fine go right ahead. Imbalance to me is imbalance. Its garbage internal or external.

Well if are incapable of understanding the difference, leave the conversation to people who do have that level of insight.

 auticus wrote:
Someone stating they want external balance so that all factions have a 45-55% win rate so long as there is a viable build within is still very much anti what I want out of a game, because they are saying its ok to have gak builds and units that are not viable - you just have to be "skilled" enough to not take those.

Nobody's saying that there should be non-viable units. gak builds, sure - you should have to build for synergy in your list, or have a plan to deal with the enemy's army. If your opponent goes tank-heavy and you bring nothing but the tools for killing infantry, that means the game isn't "balanced," internally, but maybe it shouldn't be.

 auticus wrote:
Every unit. Every single unit. Every LAST unit in a codex should be viable.

Nobody's saying that, so have fun arguing against scarecrows.

 auticus wrote:
That is not applicable to GW games in terms of the reality. Every unit is most certainly not viable no matter what you do with it in 40k or sigmar.

As a general rule of designer intent - yes thats a great thing to strive for. GW fails very hard at this.

Well in a hypothetically more balanced version of 40k, it *would* be possible, so it's very applicable to GW games, and you trying to ignore it is just your attempt to have your boneheaded arguments called out.

I DO think every unit should be viable. And every option.

Not necessarily in every list, but there shouldn’t be a unit that is NEVER worth taking. Same with upgrades and whatnot.

Well if are incapable of understanding the difference, leave the conversation to people who do have that level of insight.

Well in a hypothetically more balanced version of 40k, it *would* be possible, so it's very applicable to GW games, and you trying to ignore it is just your attempt to have your boneheaded arguments called out.

Once the conversation goes into this toilet level of garbage, the best I can say to you is agree to disagree. Thanks for your input. Your discussion skills are... quite extraordinary.

When you are ready to have an actual conversation and not resort to bullshittery and alpha keyboard warrior posturing, let me know.

Well, I can’t take all my ork planes I’ve had for a while, and running two scrapjets is a massive pain now. Oh yea, my hordes are also complete garbage and any shooting rerolls are gone because comp players complained.

Actually, I think every unit should be viable (as in, there should be a reasonable situation where there's a reason to take that unit). All units won't always be viable for all situations (e.g., AT units against a list with no tanks), but all the units should have a viable use. If their only use is to gum up the works, the points cost should be very low to reflect that imho. If the unit is good at everything, the points cost should reflect that as well. And if they only do one thing well (e.g., AT), that too should be reflected in the points.

Now with the number of units available to some factions, there might be multiple units that fill the same roll with varying degrees of success and, again, the points system should be able to address that as well.

As someone with zero game dev experience, 40k seems like a devs worst nightmare to balance. I remember thinking the same thing about StarCraft: three factions with completely different units that behaved very different from one another. Compare to something like age of empires: a bunch of factions, but the vast majority of the units were identical between factions, so balancing the factions came down to making sure the handful of unique faction traits fell in line with those of the other factions (and for units, most of the unique units were some riff on an existing unit). I'm sure even that is nontrivial. Expanding to the scale of 40k ... I can't imagine how hard it would be to even figure out a starting point for balance. And just to be clear, I'm not saying GW is off the hook (we know they can do better... we've seen them do better... I really want them to do better).

 auticus wrote:


Once the conversation goes into this toilet level of garbage, the best I can say to you is agree to disagree. Thanks for your input. Your discussion skills are... quite extraordinary.

When you are ready to have an actual conversation and not resort to bullshittery and alpha keyboard warrior posturing, let me know.

You're the one who tried to big league me with his "Actually, the game wasn't intended to work this way..." when there's evidence the contrary. Accusing me of "alpha keyboard warrior" posturing when I pointed out you weren't making sense is projection and deflection; you're the one who's making arguments with the sole purpose of making yourself look good rather than contributing to the discussion.

I disagree, and as long as you continue to make bonehead arguments with no basis in fact, that are purely performative argumentation to fuel your ego, I won't agree with you.

Feel free to disagree. All of this other stuff you are going on about about "fueling my ego" etc is comedy.

If you want to discuss without resorting to personal attacks and alpha bad assery, cool. If you want to continue down the path of personal attacks because you disagree - cool. You'll go to the ignore pile /shrug/

I'm sure you are a very impressive specimen but once personal attacks start getting slung, there is no discussion to be had. Only a rabid shaking of the top ropes and chest puffing. Discussion boards are already full of that.

 auticus wrote:
Feel free to disagree. All of this other stuff you are going on about about "fueling my ego" etc is comedy.

If you want to discuss without resorting to personal attacks and alpha bad assery, cool. If you want to continue down the path of personal attacks because you disagree - cool. You'll go to the ignore pile /shrug/

I'm sure you are a very impressive specimen but once personal attacks start getting slung, there is no discussion to be had. Only a rabid shaking of the top ropes and chest puffing. Discussion boards are already full of that.

It's incredibly patronizing and disrespectful to act like you know better than other people, and then when presented with evidence to the contrary go "Imma ignore that and say you're wrong anyway."

You aren't factually correct about the purpose of points as intended by the rules writers, and you're intentionally conflating internal and external balance with the goal of saying that tournament players don't want fair games. It's all BS and you deserve to get called out on it.

The fact that you perceive anyone who won't go along with your invalid and inaccurate claims as "alpha posturing" just tells me that you need some more humility about your own faculties.

Never quoted myself before, but given the toxicity of the last few exchanges, maybe this bears repeating.

 jeff white wrote:
Today was listening too one of my fav podcasts, walking dogs, and one of the co hosts confessed that it had taken him a while, but he realized recently the overtly competitive bent taken by WarCom articles and suggested that it was not so good, because people get the impression that what is cool about a model or unit or faction is the buffs, the table-top in-game performance in the current so-called meta, rather than the background, the artwork, the story and what each model or unit or faction bring to the table in this way..

Point being, the so-called meta affects everyone, and the hobby, and is effectively corrosive, reductive, and counter to the spirit of both the game and the community that supports it.

Have to say that I agree with this assessment, completely. GW management should be ashamed.

Curious to hear if anyone can name that podcast. Hint: most recent episode, I think number 94.

@Hecaton: the thing is, you only think you have provided the evidence on the contrary, while the reality is, that you seem to not even understand on what level the discussion is happening. The fun thing is, that you have, probably unconsciously, substituted „desire imbalance” with „don’t want a fair game”, went rampage to prove auticus wrong, but have in fact proven him right in the process…

 jeff white wrote:
suggested that it was not so good, because people get the impression that what is cool about a model or unit or faction is the buffs, the table-top in-game performance in the current so-called meta, rather than the background, the artwork, the story and what each model or unit or faction bring to the table in this way..

Different people are going to prioritize those things differently, and none of them are wrong. I am primarily interested in how a model performs on the tabletop. I don't really care about background or story as I never found any of the background/story material for 40k to be all that inspiring. It's a fantastic SETTING, but the actual stories within that setting range from amazing to high schooler 4chan fanfic levels, and the majority are in the latter category. Someone who will never play a game and just wants to paint cool models will have totally opposite priorities, and that's fine. I'm not going to drive to someone's house, kick down the door, and put a gun to their head while they gather up their army so I can drag them down to the FLGS for the monthly tournament. Similarly, they aren't stopping me from buying and painting 9 voidweavers to club all the baby seals in my local meta. I actually think it's refreshing for a company that makes a tabletop wargame and charges hundreds of dollars for rules of said tabletop wargame to acknowledge that it exists and a model isn't just something to paint and set on your shelf. Maybe in a couple years that focus will translate to a decent ruleset and better balance.

nou wrote:
@Hecaton: the thing is, you only think you have provided the evidence on the contrary, while the reality is, that you seem to not even understand on what level the discussion is happening. The fun thing is, that you have, probably unconsciously, substituted „desire imbalance” with „don’t want a fair game”, went rampage to prove auticus wrong, but have in fact proven him right in the process…

No. Auticus made statements which were wrong at the most base level, the factual. I definitely understand the "level the discussion is happening," more than you or Auticus.

And yes, Auticus was saying that tournament players didn't want a fair game, to make himself seem like a saint by comparison. It wasn't unconscious on my part, I understood the sleight of word Auticus was trying to pull - he was trying to say that his own custom tournament rules set was balanced and that nobody would just accept how right he was because they're all evil. He's done it before.

Hecaton wrote:

nou wrote:
@Hecaton: the thing is, you only think you have provided the evidence on the contrary, while the reality is, that you seem to not even understand on what level the discussion is happening. The fun thing is, that you have, probably unconsciously, substituted „desire imbalance” with „don’t want a fair game”, went rampage to prove auticus wrong, but have in fact proven him right in the process…

No. Auticus made statements which were wrong at the most base level, the factual. I definitely understand the "level the discussion is happening," more than you or Auticus.

And yes, Auticus was saying that tournament players didn't want a fair game, to make himself seem like a saint by comparison. It wasn't unconscious on my part, I understood the sleight of word Auticus was trying to pull - he was trying to say that his own custom tournament rules set was balanced and that nobody would just accept how right he was because they're all evil. He's done it before.

No, Hecaton is utterly correct.

@Hecaton again:

Maybe this will help to clarify things a bit on why it doesn't matter if we are talking about internal or external balance:

"Competitive players desire imbalance" is not an insult in the first place, which many posters have a hard time understanding. The "just right amount" of imbalance provides a necessary space for competitive players, like you seem to be yourself, for the pleasure of finding best units/builds/synergies to even exist - you need the sandbox to build sand castles. Now on top of this, competitive players may say, that they want external balance as well, but that is also not entirely true, again, by the same sandbox requirement - they want to be able to identify better or worse factions and better or worse builds inside. Of course, this should not be too obvious, so all factions should stay close, but not exactly on par with each other, "just the right amount".

There is exactly zero controversy in any of this. None.

Now, "competitive players want a fair game" is also not as obvious as you may think, because there is a catch in this sentence - a "fair game" to the typical competitive 40k player means that they expect the other player to have the exact same approach to the game as they have - the "git gud" expectation of playing in the same sandbox of internal imbalance with the goal of identifying units/builds/synergies, so they can have "a challenge of the list building skill". But both those players "wanting a fair game" understand it as "first min/max the hell out of the 'just right amount of imbalance', then test if we both have done it to a decent standard".

This may all look like a fine game design goal and whatnot, but is actually the root cause for seal clubbing, because it doesn't matter at all, if the imbalance which causes a newbie with a Combat Patrol to loose all games because Combat Patrol units are gak is internal or external. Casual players are fethed up by both kinds of imbalance just the same. Focus hard on the following example - player A and player B both play the same faction, both draw units from the same source, but when presented with a choice between unit A and unit B, which fill the same role, one chooses A, the other chooses B, both do so for aesthetic reasons. Repeat that with all roles to fill. Both of them have legal 2000 lists drawn from the same codex, so there is no consideration of external balance whatsoever, but if one of those players just so happened to choose only "competitive choices" and the other "sub par choices", then the game is not fair, is broken, is an imbalanced gakshow, etc... Now realise, that competitive players, including yourself, openly desire, that unit A and unit B should not be on par, there should be a skill in identifying which of them is viable and which of them is not. Without this fundamental difference, with the perfect interchangeability of those units, there is no sandbox to listbuild in.

That is the crux of the discussion here.