I’ve been thinking about this every now and then since the thread about the army composition in the WPS tournament.
Would it be possible to balance the composition and certain aspects of certain armies simply by tweaking the points costs of units and items? If a unit/item is rarely used because it is ineffective for its cost, drop it by a few points. If it is seen in every army of that type because it is so good, then raise the cost. In many cases, raising the cost will also knock out a killer-combo, but there could also be an extra points cost for taking certain combos. No changes to any rules or stats, so nothing extra to remember except when doing the army roster (and a hell of a lot simpler than the WPS system). I could probably come up with a basic list of points changes for most armies just from analysing the WPS army composition lists, which in some armies would only have a handful of changes. I certainly don’t expect it to be perfect, and some of it would be subjective, but it will hopefully make people think more about which items/units to take if they are costed more realistically. You could even have slightly different points changes for different army sizes so that every army is also more balanced at 1000pts and 3000pts, but that would come much later after all the kinks are ironed out of the basic 2K version. A big advantage of this over the WPS system is that you can use it for any game, not just tournaments.
This seems to be such a simple thing to do, but I’ve not seen anyone suggest it before as anything more than a single army tweak, rather than across the whole game. I shall call it, Tweakedhammer. Am I just talking crazy, or could this be the simplest way to level the playing field for armies that have a deserved reputation for being weak/strong?
Example for CD army:
(these are just off-the-top-of-the-head and not proposed at all!)
Lammasu -30pts/model
Armour of Gazrakh +5pts
0-4 Bolt Throwers +5pts/model
5+ BTs +10pts/model
Death Rocket -10pts/model
Bull Centaur -2pts/model
Bull Centaur Musician -6pts
2+ Earthshakers +25pts/model
This might actually be too detailed for my plan, which is not to micromanage the points of every single option on the list but to tweak the most cheesy or useless parts of the army.
Ultimately, it won’t work, not because it isn’t a good system, but because no one will agree upon what is and isn’t cheesey. GW writes the rules and it should be left at that, regardless of how beardy someone says so-and-so unit is. I also really don’t think it would make things any more or less level than they are now, just different. And thats before we even reach the debate of what ‘balanced’ means.
Isn’t this the idea of points costs anyway? The whole reason they exist is to create balanced armies. Essentially, you’re just in disagreement about what certain things should cost.
Thommy, the problem is that unless every army has the same thing or a similar thing with a different name, you can’t exactly balance that. If every army has the same thing, then it’s going to be a boring game. Essentially, you’re just disagreeing with how GW points out certain things too? What’s the difference?
Cornixt is the one suggesting the new system, not me. I’m telling Cornixt that his idea is just disagreeing about points cost - not some new, revolutionary idea.
Yep, the whole basis of the idea is that GW screwed up, the points system just seemed to be the easiest way to fix it. In other ways it adds an extra layer of complexity to points costs, penalising one-dimensionality which is the source of most cheese.
The whole “agreement” over what should be changed is where crux of this system lies. Obviously there was some sort of agreement over the WPS system, but that only applies in a tournament setting. Likewise, the US-GT rules for our army were only for a tournament but some people use them in regular games.
Ultimately, anything like this depends on player participation, and given the fact that fan-rules not published in WD or similar have never got any wide support, it does seem like it would die on its ass rather than be paraded in the streets. I just thought I’d fling it out there to see if it was a viable method in itself, even if unlikely to ever take off.
Yep, the whole basis of the idea is that GW screwed up
cornixt
Well that's where the disagreement is going to start - I don't necessarily hold with this and, furthermore, I don't know that player consensus is the best way to deal with the problem if it does exist. I mean, if we were to hypothetically throw this open to a random cross-section of Warhammer players online, there'd be all sorts of changes made: that's not because there's a problem, but because the strongest voices always belong to the people with the most gripes. The vast, vast majority of Warhammer players are content with the current points values and simply trust GW to get it right - they, like most of us, buy into the implicit contract with the designers, that it's their game and they define how it's balanced. When a new book comes out we don't think "hey, they got that wrong", we think "that's interesting - that seems too cheap/expensive, but I'll guess we'll see how it plays."
In other words, why do you (or anyone else...) know better than the guys who do this for a living? Either we buy into your assumptions or we buy into GW's :P
I feel a bit of devil’s advocate here, but that is fine since it would be silly to discuss something without a solidly established base. I wouldn’t say that my personal knowledge is great for most armies, but based on a thousand people playing a thousand games, GW hasn’t done as much playtesting as the real world has. If all of the armies were nicely balanced then there wouldn’t be tournaments with comp scores. There are very few that don’t, and they are known as cheese-fests. So if you disagree that some armies have an inherent advantage or disadvantage, you’ll find a lot of other people to disagree with (although even with that I’d concede that popular opinion is often wrong)
The nature of those advatages and disadvantages is certainly open to a huge amount of discussion and has been since the Warhammer was first discussed on the net.
You’re assuming GW don’t want power builds to be possible though - Warhammer is not optimised for tournament play. Sometimes it’s fun to play games where cheese-fest armies face each other, and it’s only not fun when you’re being competitive. That’s the issue, and that’s why tournaments have things like comp scores: certain extreme builds, while amusing in friendly games, warp an army’s performance in a more balanced environment. That doesn’t mean these extreme builds shouldn’t be allowed in all permutations of the rules -most of us don’t play in tournaments.
ok so people want to play cheese… Ok, Ill take that argument.
In early 6th edition people came to gw and said just that… Basically they wanted a way to play games with epic odd… GW came up with the Appendix Lists in the books. these let players wanting to play epic kinds of game with minimal points I don’t know but facing down 8 great cannons or 4 warp lightning cannons is pretty epic. but they didn’t have to allow them in the tournaments. In effect keeping the balance somewhat. What Happened to them you say… 2 things.
1: they were Opponent Approval Only and people found real quick that they would never get approval. and so never collected them.
2: They had something called Storm of Chaos… See they decided that they would make lists for this book which were basically appendix lists, but they would have to be fully legal as they wanted to use tournaments to “write” (i use that term loosely) the story of the Storm. They found real quick that if they wrote basically broken lists with minimal playtesting and balancing with the game as a whole they would get the profit from it. Speaking for experience in my local area of 30 or so players we had 5 playing Slayers and 2 playing Sylvania. 2 of the argueably most broken out of that book. and not a single slayer player took less than 12 Doomseeker… And oh yeah… when they came out saying they were no longer legal once the parent book was reprinted I havent seen a single one of those slayers players back… oh wait… they did comeback when VC and Daemons were printed
Ending… I see why GW has as of late seemed to leave balance to the side… Profit pure and simple… GW is a business. they would print Lists of utterly unstoppable power… if they could prove it would gain profit… but it wouldnt as doing so would segregate their player base and they would loose in the Long run.
Warhammer at the moment can be equated to a gunfight. with the Armies being the guns. Some fighters have revolvers, some have shotguns, some have fully automatic assault rifles. Whether or not its fair… Im not one to say. but you get my meaning. It comes down to there are 3 Types of people in this game these days.
The player who wants to play the game for it being a GAME. They want it to be reasonable and not give others unfair advantage. and will voice their opinions in anyway possible to get their voice heard somehow.
The player who takes warhammer and makes it a SPORT. where competition is the only important thing and that the game is supposed to be for that aim. and when they hear the prior voicing their opinion they have to themselves point out theirs.
And then there people like me. Who were once a member of one of the prior groups. But, have become so sick and tired of the debate they don’t give a rats ___ to see who wins or looses. and just continue Playing the game or quit it.
Now that said… ON WITH THE MATCH OF THE: Everyone! VS Reality!
Now with the off topic part of the conversation being addressed… I find Cornixt idea interesting… all i can say it try it out, and see how people react… if it work well take the critisisms and work to fine tune it.
What Cornixt describes is exactly how they started off with the recent re-write of the Dark Elf book. It’s how GW already work.
Secondly, with balenced lists and extreme combos, GW are now trying to do the following things (in this order):
1. Make army lists incusive, so you don’t need a varient list for each varient army. If I want my Skaven to play a particular clan, I shouldn’t have to resort to a list in the book and indeed, I really don’t, even with an army book that’s six or seven years old.
2. Make the armies characterful and fun.
3. Try and keep them fairly balenced to apease the Tournament players.
They have said themselves that the last few years they locked the games down to the tournament players too much. That’s why they released Apocalypse for 40K.
If I understand correctly, what you are proposing Cornixt is effectively a points re-write in between updates of a list? Because GW only updates books every 5 years (or more), there will be some things that are obviously over/under powered in hindsight.
So I agree in principle that they should learn from tournaments what needs balancing the most, but I don’t think they should do semi re-writes as unofficial updates, even if it’s only for tournies. It just makes things more confusing?
Servius, you have it backwards. It’s okay, everyone does.
People assume that extreme builds are for tournaments and balanced builds are for friendly games. It’s supposed to be the other way around: in a tournament, the object is to find out the best player, so lists should be very carefully balanced so it doesn’t devolve into a game of rock/paper/scissors. In a friendly game, that doesn’t matter, and it can be fun to take on mental lists. Also, you can tailor your lists to your opponent’s in a friendly game, which you can’t in a tournament.
That’s why tournaments have comp scores which go above and beyond the limits already imposed by an army list. And the whole reason we have things like the Core/Special/Rare is because concepts like that were first pioneered by Jervis in the GW tourneys: back in 4th/5th Edition, army lists were very open and easy to abuse, so they introduced tournament limits that forced people to take lots of rank and file units and reduced character power levels - in 6th Edition, these kinds of changes became part of the real game.
Ultimately, we only have the opinions of the loudest, most disgruntled people on the internet to judge the current state of Warhammer. You might sit there and say it’s unbalanced, but that doesn’t mean anything. I sit here and say it isn’t. So what? We all have an opinion. Yours is no better than mine, and the published books say what they say. So we can all join in a big project to fix a problem that might not even exist, and the details of which no one will ever agree on, or you can just house rule what you think is bad in your own games.
I bet you’ll find that any changes you make won’t change things as radically as you expect though…
But there are no comp scores outside of tournaments, other than you pointing at an army and saying “That’s cheesey”, even if it isn’t.
Saying things on the internet is just that, but what if a large group of experienced warhammer players came up with a system that showed the inbalance? Would that hold more weight with you? At what point do you concede that maybe some non-GW opinions do count?
How could you “show the imbalance”? You’d have to come up with your system first, then playtest it, then demonstrate that there was a noticeable improvement in the fairness of the games being played when compared to Warhammer’s existing system.
I’m not saying anyone’s opinion “doesn’t count”, I’m just saying I don’t necessarily agree with you and see no reason to fix what I don’t feel to be broken. Maybe I’m wrong - maybe Warhammer is a total mess and GW are making every Army Book stronger than the last just to sell more models (though it seems like there would be easier ways to flog toys to me…), but what you don’t notice when you hang around the internet is what a minority opinion that is.
Remember, those of us that are satisfied with the rules don’t bother complaining, because we have no reason to. As always, the discourse is dominated by a vocal minority. Hang around on Warseer for a little while and you come away with a very warped idea of what’s going on in the world of Warhammer.
And, also, there’s nothing stopping you playing a totally different game. If you’re willing to house rule this much stuff, why even play Warhammer at all? Just find something that fits your needs better. RPGers don’t just play D&D - most will go through dozens of different games, and play various games that fit certain genres or play-styles. I’ve never understood why Warhammer players seem to think Warhammer should be all things to all people - if you don’t like it, play a game you do like.
