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So not to go off topic in the AoS 2.0 thread I thought good points were made. Some people agree with me that Lord of the Ring rules are better or great rules. You may have a differing opinion on those rules. What was brought to my attention is while some people agree that they could be the best rules GW made or are better than what 40K/AoS is now that the list building is not fun.

Also in the thread it was said that people don't want balance because it's boring. I never thought of this before but now I can see the other side and understand it more now.


While I know we can't change AoS 2.0 out now, who knows maybe our ideas can be implemented for GH2019 or have some Errata added in the next big FAQ. Lots of us want balance as someone said "I want my 2000 points be able to go up against your 2000 points." So that is balance there. Then another valid comment was " we are humans people will look for ways to make the game unbalanced so they can have an easier time to win." (I am trying to remember what was said so I can be off here. Sorry to the posters if I said was wrong.)

So how can we make AoS balanced but yet have a great rule set with synergy and not make it boring?

Davor

Tangentially related, I think the best rules GW ever wrote were the WoTR rules.

There are in essence two ways to achieve (the perception of) balance.

One is the KoW way: a tight ruleset where units all function the same way and it's easy to point up their damage output and damage capacity. There is still a need to write a coherent army list, mind you - you're not going to win any games if you just spam huge deathstars that can't navigate terrain and get outflanked easily, and you're not going to win any by spamming chaff. List building is therefore still important, just not particularly exciting, and the gameplay can be very deep but again unexciting.

The second way is Warmachine (especially early in its lifecycle). Make the interactions between game elements so complex that the impact of clever plays far outstrips the impact of any individual unit's raw power and points cost. There are obvious constraints to this approach and Warmachine itself was continually dumbed down over the years, diminishing this aspect, while massive bloat in the number of units created overlap in their functionality and opened the door for min/maxing that was impossible back when every unit had a unique function.

This topic will likely get moved to the general discussion forum.

There is a slider at play here. that slider represents the overall sales potential of a product.

On one end of the slider you have balanced gameplay, where player skill matters the most, and whatever list you bring doesn't matter. Chess.

On the other end of the slider you have imbalanced gameplay where listbuilding plays a massively heavy influence in the outcome to the game, where player skill ONLY matters if both players bring comparable lists power-wise.

This slider will vary from person to person, so this thread will likely see a rainbow of answers. However the trend that I have seen is that the slider sits at about 75% towards Listbuilding, with the other 25% of gameplay hinging on player skill.

In essence... the majority of player skill is identifying what is over powered in any series of combinations and list building those elements.

Those numbers come from a good dozen polls I've conducted on various wargaming forums as well as PC strategy game forums for my own marketing research in my game design.

Very few people want the extreme ends of either case.

Now I also firmly believe that the GW rules team sits in the camp of listbuilding priority #1, and the issues that they fix are the extreme outliers (ie kroak doing 105 points of damage in a magic phase).

I base that off of rules devs themselves talking about how important listbuilding is on twitter, when I was on the TGA, and former posters here who are now gw rules devs like Bottle who discussed why balance could be bad because it runs into the boring ballpark.

We live in a game world defined by magic the gathering design ethos, where combos and synergy are what games are built around, and the old tropes that simulated actual battles have been discarded.

Balance is important, but only to a lesser point. Too much balance is boring. That is the overall overwhelming community consensus.

Listbuilding is the main event of GW games, and I don't ever see that changing because it has largely always been that way.

The more you make all units viable, the more you slide power away from listbuilding.

I don't really see a way to have both in the same game. It is something I have struggled with for many many years.

Differences between scenarios, rock-paper-scissors effect, realm rules, artifacts, etc. Means that even if every unit was perfectly balanced individual matches would themselves not be so. For the most part people are fine with this. An army that is particularly disadvantaged by a certain context will also come with an advantage in others, and there is a risk-reward element to choosing/building an army that is generalized to overcome varied situations verses specialized to perform better in some but worse than others. Look at the popularity of Path to Glory where the concept behind individual matches revolves around making the best of the pieces one has managed to collect in the context they are dropped into rather than making sure each person's pieces weigh the same. But the important element to this is a lack of control; while one player may get a large advantage in one match it is due to 'luck of the draw' and that advantage may be gone or entirely reversed depending on what the circumstance is in the next. Maybe the scenario favors one army but not another, maybe one player happened to bring units that are a strong counter to the dominant unit utilized by the other player, maybe the realm rule is particularly harmful to a certain kind of army, etc. Making the best out of elements of chance is inherent to Warhammer--it is based off dice rolls after all! By and large gamers at worst are willing to tolerate this while many are accepting or fully enjoy such.

It should go without saying that balance is about long term averages across hundreds of games played. Individual matches aren't even balanced in chess.

I'm on my phone, so please forgive the short answer, but in responsive to the thread-name/question, I would say "See: Lord of the Rings/Hobbit/Middle Earth as case-studies."

GW HAS made largely balanced, skill based, excellent, characterful rules... they just forgot how when they realized kits like the Imperial Knight selling, meant the rules had changed for how they can price things, etc... and still get away with it.

Imperial Knights could be balanced or even sub-par and they would still sell well compared to LotR kits. Because that kit has more appeal. In a broader sense, I feel like the Warhammer settings simply have a greater appeal to gamers when it comes to wargames than LotR does. Certainly in the US that is the case. If the rules for the two were switched there would still be an overwhelming preference for Warhammer (40k in particular). I would further argue that LotR needed better rules to appeal beyond a niche of heavy LotR fans because it had to compete against the more popular game. That it succeeded as much as it did (before Kirby shot it) could be taken as a sign that the better rule design was a notable draw. Now I have no idea if that is the case because there are so many other factors involved, but my ultimate point here is that using the popularity of the games as a measure for how appealing their balance was isn't a strong observation.

auticus wrote:
This topic will likely get moved to the general discussion forum.

While this is a debate of the topic, but it's also how can we apply it so Age of Sigmar is a better game as well. If it can be applied to AoS that is. So we need the debate and then see how it can be done with AoS.

For example I have said in a previous post that LotR rules are great in my opinion. Then I was given a reason why AoS can't do it. So I am thinking now how can we apply it to make AoS better.

I'll copypaste here my reply in the other thread because here it is on topic

Theres a difference in list building when you are building an army and when you are building a deck.

People like list-building to be like a deck in a card game. They want cards that are bad, they want cards that are ok, they want cards that are OP and they want others that are OP under certain circunstances.

The List-building phase in AoS and Warhammer 40k is what defines your strategy. You have your combos premade, and you just try to use them. The less interaction with your opponent, the better (This is why many people also love the double turn. If I can do all my stuff without interruption and auto-win, is better)

In a game with a list building phase where you make your army, like LOTR, you have some kind of strategy, but that strategy is always made with the idea of facing an enemy on the field (Ex: I will take this horse unit to support my right flank because I have heavy infantry protecting the middle.), and once you enter the battlefield, for your strategy to work, you need to have an interactive game because if your opponent does nothing you can't basically play, because theres no interesting choices.

Personally, I like list building of the second type. I like to build an army, think how every unit will work and what is gonna be his tactical job based in the different enemies I can face. I don't like to build a combo-based list, and then my games all coming down to trying to use that combo and winning, or don't , and losing.