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Some people in the office are advocating power level play for our games because it's quicker to calculate, but I'm feeling skeptical. I frequently see people bashing PL for being unbalanced but I haven't looked into the specifics of it and I'd really like to get some good arguments before bringing defending sticking with points.

What are people's opinion on PL games? What armies are the winners/losers?

 knas wrote:
What are people's opinion on PL games? What armies are the winners/losers?

I'm going to be straightforward with you. This is just my experience.

PL games are great for newbies with 'Babby's First Space Marines'. And I don't mean that to dig on people who get those Dark Imperium boxes, those Space Marines are actually pretty awesome the way they're posed and that box is a good bargain. PL is awesome for teaching someone with some stuff right out of the box.

Now, when you start adding upgrades? ANY army can get disgustingly OP really quick. Think about it this way- look at the PL for Devastators. Now, imagine kitting them out any way you want. Imagine what can be done with some of the tanks. A Deathwatch Kill-Team. Some folks say Tau can get really nasty, but I don't know the army well enough.

Balancing PL out for these upgrades to a squad and weapon swaps is work. A lot of work. Work that would be pointless, only if someone had made some kind of more detailed point system to account for these upgrades and point changes...

I sound sarcastic, I know. But in the end it is just more work to balance it than it is to just say, "Screw it, we'll use the standard point system". It's a little bit more math, but it's not hard. I promise. I've got a public school education and I can still manage to do it with pencil and paper. It just takes about 10 minutes. Grab a coffee and do your maths.

And just my personal experience? Every person I've seen saying, "Let's just do power level" with a stranger? He's a sleazeball trying to use maxed-out units that he can't fit into a regular game.

PL games are great on small scale with just a few units between friends.

At bigger scale games, there are just too many little quirks that could allow a particular army to have more "points worth" in upgrades than their opponent.
2 players could be playing a 100PL game in which Player A actually has 2200pts and Player B only has 1800pts.

Nothing wrong with power aslong as you and your opponent has a mutual agreement that no unit/hq uppgrades are allowed.
If you dont add this house limit, armies will quickly become unbalanced, and this game allready struggles hard whit balance issues.

PLs are not perfect. Points are also not perfect. The PL advocates will doubtlessly claim that points merely provide an illusion of balance, but you can't really claim it's any different for PL either. Just because neither are perfectly balanced, doesn't mean one system isn't more balanced than the other.

Points at least have the potential to provide better balance through greater granularity and also prevents certain abuses, such as deliberately maxing out on the free upgrades PL allows. I'd go with points every time. Also, points seem to be generally more popular as a way of building an army so by using them you'll probably find it easier to take your army to other gaming groups or events if you want to.

I adore power levels.

As said, they are far quicker to calculate.

I rarely ever have time to play these days and I don't want to spend forever agonizing over the minutia of list-building (though PL does allow some limited degree of this).

It doesn't matter whether or not PL takes upgrades into account...9/10 times everyone builds/uses units with the upgrades they way, anyway, so it's safe to assume that the upgrades you want are "part" of your unit's PL costs. It's not terribly unbalanced because, well, your opponent is/should be doing the same thing with their list.

I'm sure this skews "balance" (such as it is), but I doubt the impact is really anything more than shuffling around which units are better within the context of each army.

TLDR: I'm a big fan of the power level system and really glad it was added in 8th. Makes it a lot less burdensome to just get to playing a game for those of us who don't have a lot of time for that.

If everyone is using PL, then the upgrade argument falls apart.

The plasma gun is the perfect example, everyone in their sister argues that power level is broken because I can just take as many plasma guns as I want.

Except you don't always want plasma guns, in fact it can cause major issue if you face something like tyranids, cult spam, (soon daemons), guard infantry spam, etc. You need to bring a flame thrower or two if you want to survive those mass infantry lists.

This PL hate is obnoxious on Dakka, have any of you actually tried it in a comp environment? It's not like min/maxing points in each unit leads to any different results. Everyone brings their stuff, it's not really broke if you both have all the things.

And try building lists both ways, those super duper units that can take 4 special weapons tend to COST MORE PL....So do super heavies.

The difference is we wouldn't need to argue about some dude accidentally having 5 points over the limit in a tourney, and you may start seeing people take units they never would in a points game because the upgrades are free.

Get over points, it's tiresome, annoying, and a pain if you are running a tourney.

Pepper thy angus. The Power Level hate train is en route.

If the need to calculate is the only reason for you to take powerlevel, use battlescribe or other list builders.

If I played with PL I'd call for a strict wysiwyg as well to keep the upgrades reasonable.
On the whole I think PL works good if you play CSM vs. SM or Necrons vs. Daemons, but if an army with a lot of upgrades faces an army with little customization I think it could get onesided.

 sfshilo wrote:
If everyone is using PL, then the upgrade argument falls apart.

Doesn't it benefit upgrade heavy armies though? Daemons for instance don't get many war gear options compared to say Eldar, Tua or SM.

 sfshilo wrote:
If everyone is using PL, then the upgrade argument falls apart.

So, the solution is 'everyone should max out everything as much as possible'. I'm pretty sure this won't end well.

 sfshilo wrote:
...everyone in their sister argues that...

 sfshilo wrote:
Except you don't always want plasma guns, in fact it can cause major issue if you face something like tyranids, cult spam, (soon daemons), guard infantry spam, etc. You need to bring a flame thrower or two if you want to survive those mass infantry lists.

Which of course implies that you'll always be playing armies that you don't know about. Now, say for a moment in the local meta everyone generally knows what the other armies are...

 sfshilo wrote:
This PL hate is obnoxious on Dakka, have any of you actually tried it in a comp environment? It's not like min/maxing points in each unit leads to any different results. Everyone brings their stuff, it's not really broke if you both have all the things.

You mean in an ideal environment. You seem to forget that for every 5 great 40k players, there's at least one powergaming scumbag. 'Everyone brings everything'.

 sfshilo wrote:
Get over points, it's tiresome, annoying, and a pain if you are running a tourney.

It worked for how many years? Math is easy. Again, I have a public school education and I still manage it with pencil and paper.

PL is the worst thing GW did come up with. Let me give you an example. A unit of two company veterans are PL3. Adding one more model increases the PL to 8 ! A dreadnought has PL7. Three veterans with bolt pistols and chainswords are more powerful than a dreadnought with assault cannon and CCW ? Thats ridiculous. Comparing points tells the truth. The vets are 48 pts., the dread is 132 pts.

I've had zero problem with power level. In fact power level games usually operate with the same result as point level games.

Point level games offer a safety blanket soothing pretense of "balance" that is a false illusion.

They are both flawed in terms of balance. They both give you the same type of game.

The major difference is one (points) lets you tweak and min max at a granular level while the other removes tweaking at a granular lvel and you simply min/max at a general level.

If you like granular powergaming and granular WAAC style games and love deckbuilding games, you'll want points more. But the current points are not balanced one iota, so balance as an argument for using points is extremely flawed IMO.

I won't play with points unless i go to an event that makes me. Otherwise any events that I run always use power level. Yeah there will always be people that won't participate and thats fine. We have a lot of people that do participate so its working out great.

Calculating an army list isn't really that time consuming in the first place. Spend maybe 15-30 minutes once pointing out the units in your army, and select from those up to the allowed limit.

Power Level makes the numbers lower so the math slightly easier, but it's a difference of maybe 4 minutes to make a list with PL and 5 minutes to make a list with points. For a 1-3 hour game, the extra minute to achieve a great deal more balance is well worth it.

Oh my boy this again. I'll just wait for Peregrine

I don't really see the big math problem. If you use PL then you have to add numbers to get to a total. With points you're just adding more numbers to the equation. What's the matter with a few more numbers? It can't add that much time to your army building.

Power Level favours armies with more upgrade choices, and wargear choices with higher impact and regular points costs. Other armies are punished pretty heavily, and some units have equal power level without having an equal impact or use.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Nothing wrong with power aslong as you and your opponent has a mutual agreement that no unit/hq uppgrades are allowed.
If you dont add this house limit, armies will quickly become unbalanced, and this game allready struggles hard whit balance issues.

Only problem with this is, when you can't add upgrades onto models that are supposed to be taking them, you're really restricting lists...

Take chaos for example, Chosen and havocs are supposed to field special and heavy weapons respectively. Introduce your house rule, and both units become worthless...

Tau Crisis suits, Enjoy only having 1 burst cannon.

Tyranids, What would even be the point?

Heck, even taking additional models in a unit is technically an upgrade.

When To Use Power Level:
- Two people have stuff lying around and just decide to have a game. Power levels here help you get to the game sooner!
- You are playing a narrative game, where the scope of the game matters more than what individual units are armed with.
- You are playing a Mega Battle, and you say that models completely WYSIWYG.

Basically, you use Power Level when you're trying to get to the action fast, and you're trying to let the game speak for itself. You are purposefully avoiding list-building, and are just using what models in your collection look cool. Mega Battles are great spots for most Titanic models, since with Chapter Approved these models cost obscene amounts of points, but their Power remained unchanged. These models are really meant for such crazy games.

When Not To Use Power Level:
- You're trying to beat someone else, and get to customize your army to fight them.
- You're looking to take every upgrade on every model you can.
- You're playing Matched Play.

In my experience the difference between PL and points isn't too significant unless you're playing Deathwatch. I've checked both costs against each other after building lists a few times and they don't seem to vary by more than 10% or so.

p5freak wrote:
PL is the worst thing GW did come up with. Let me give you an example. A unit of two company veterans are PL3. Adding one more model increases the PL to 8 ! A dreadnought has PL7. Three veterans with bolt pistols and chainswords are more powerful than a dreadnought with assault cannon and CCW ? Thats ridiculous. Comparing points tells the truth. The vets are 48 pts., the dread is 132 pts.

All true. Then you add two more veterans to the squad and PL doesn't go up. Then you add upgrades, power fists and combi meltas and other fancy doodads (because why would you ever take naked veterans) and the PL doesn't go up.

All said, through like two minutes of fiddling with battlescribe (which I assume you're also doing) I see that dreadnought will cost, at maximum, 177 points, VS the 230 and change you can potentially bulk up the veteran squad to be.

Power Level is a very broad abstraction, you can field the exact same unit with a huge range of upgrades or not and they'll be the same PL. That lends itself to certain applications, I find it useful when playing against newbies, where I can gradually scale up my army without actually having to math it out as they get better.

Me and my buddy have a VERY strict wysiwyg policy for PL games.

If your model does not actually have the thing, you cant use it; up to and including stuff like metal bombs, homers, target locks. A power sword cant be the burning blade because it has no flames for instance.

cuts down on the cheesing a little.

What do you do about unit equipment that GW doesn't provide bits for?

Still worse, what do you do about equipment that GW makes but don't provide enough of on the sprue? Stuff like bolt pistols and grenades.

Ultimately the issue is that PL has basically zero granularity. Units of the same PL can be up to double or more the points cost difference. It is not a balance mechanic so much as a game size boundary.

Points aren't perfect, PL doesn't even try. It's not really intended to. PL's are a low level guideline for new players or people who don't really care about a balanced game and just need some sort of basic game size limit as they grab random stuff off the shelf to throw dice for a couple hours on the living room table.

PL is a very poor mechanic for anything else, and GW basically comes right out and says so.

My power level games have generally been more balanced than my points games, because we tend to play WYSIWYG and not hyper-competitive take all the best upgrades when we play power level.

Then again, it would also be far more balanced and enjoyable if you didn't take all the best upgrades and units with points, too. It would just be more of a PITA to get it all added up in battlescribe.

Also, obligatory "take the worst of a given system, declare it stupid" argument. Take a look at points vs power levels on Fire Raptor Gunships vs Tau Supremacy Armor for instance - power levels there is more balanced. In points, weapons that are low cost and high effectiveness are more useful. In power, weapons that are overcosted but still generally effective are more useful. Both have imbalances, the increased obviousness of the imbalances in power level arguably aids in making powergamed combos easier to pick out and identify.

 Captain Joystick wrote:
What do you do about unit equipment that GW doesn't provide bits for?

Still worse, what do you do about equipment that GW makes but don't provide enough of on the sprue? Stuff like bolt pistols and grenades.

100% no exceptions made; If you model does not have it, then you don't get it.

Its harsh, but it puts a kibosh on shenanigans too. Can't even use equipment that comes free/default if the model don't have it.

 Captain Joystick wrote:
What do you do about unit equipment that GW doesn't provide bits for?

Still worse, what do you do about equipment that GW makes but don't provide enough of on the sprue? Stuff like bolt pistols and grenades.

Good old conversions and kit bashing. nothing is impossible with plastic and greenstuff.

but im sure 99% of the time if its an item that the unit naturally comes with like normal grenades and pistols then it could be excused.

edit: Dayum thats some restrictive rules. if it works for you it works and im ok with it. (i model all my stuff with grenades pouches and bolt pistols anyway so that wouldnt bother me)

It makes it so my upgrade can be taken, as, if you don't, you're a bad player. You now have 0 reasons to take Power Weapons on your Guard Sergeants or double Combi-Weapons on your Marine sergeants. It's ludicrous.

Love PL. It’s certainly open to potential abuse, but as with so many of these things, it’s fine if you don’t play with dickheads. If that’s unavoidable, yeah, maybe swerve it.

 sfshilo wrote:
Get over points, it's tiresome, annoying, and a pain if you are running a tourney.

PL falls apart badly, especially when you start comparing units.

10 Brimstone Horrors at 5PL vs 10 Bloodletters at 4PL? We're not really entertaining that comparison are we?

Honestly, that's one of the better PL comparisons. Depending on how your troops are setup you can find ones that are significantly worse.