Balancing AoS, hidden in plain sight?

[grimmas]

AoS has been out for about 6 weeks now and is creating a fair amount of controversy. A lot of it has turned out to be mere hyperbole. "No tactics" turned out to be "different tactics", basegate was just actually the bases don't matter gate and summoning far from being the easy way victory often actually makes victory harder.

However what about points and balance there's still no way beyond set scenarios? Well I think it's there it's been there all along right in front of our noses.

For the purposes of basement gaming points don't matter. If you have a group of people who play together and started the hobby together points are actually a waste of time. For example if a group of friends start together buy a few starter sets and split them up and may be one or two buy a battalion. They are all roughly the same in power terms. So everyone plays along quite happily and then one buys an extra unit. This make theirs a bit more powerful so everyone buys another unit and so on. An arms race starts until everyone spends as much as want and it all settles down. This is of course what GW wants. It does work rather well between groups of friends as they tend to be of a similar economic level which means they have a similar available spend. I do recall that is how it worked in my gaming group as a lad playing 40K yes we did use points but that was effectively a paperwork exercise as the points were always adjusted up to accommodate our full collections we really shouldn't have bothered. Of course this doesn't fully answer the question but I'd like you to keep the concept of buying the models in mind.

For organised play or where people are arriving adhoc to have a game a simple way of totalling up the relative forces is needed. In one word price. Add up the cost of the miniatures in each force and viola that is your "points". Play a £100,£200 game whatever you fancy.

Will it work though? I'm only one person with one gaming group. But yes it works for us. GW has long priced it's miniatures based on power level. It doesn't cost any more for them to produce Greatswords over Swordsmen but they do charge twice as much. It's simply a case of thinking like GW.

This works best with the new and re releases. I'm sure it hasn't escaped anyone's notice that Bloodreavers cost £35 for 20 and Liberators are £30 for 5. Coincidence? may be but it does work work out nicely. For some of the older, metal, miniatures it might not work as well but it's still pretty good and let's face it they're going the way of the Dodo.

Totalling up your cost is pretty easy as in most cases you'll be using full boxes or multiples of them. To work out the individual cost divide the box cost by the number of models in it and round up to the nearest whole pence. Use the existing cost from the GW website not Wayland Games' discount bin. The same goes for GW multi deals/battalions use the full single unit price. If you are using proxies it's no drama just use the price of the unit they are representing. The same goes for venerable units it's the current price that counts not what you bought it for. I would of course advocate using Pounds Sterling, it is The Queens Money, but it would work with colonial shekels or whatever they are using in the Euro zone after Greece's antics. Just make sure it's understood which currency is being used.

Now it's still early days for AoS and we are waiting on the individual release some of the units from the starter set so this does present a problem at the moment (though not if both sides use the models from it). Some of the units from the Warscroll compendiums may also be problematic (I certainly haven't tried them all) but this should lessen as more and more units are re released for AoS.

I'd urge you all to give this way a go. It's easy to grasp and explain. Let's face it isn't the sort of game that really lends itself to anything too intricate. I don't know if it will give enough for you hardcore balance enthusiasts but I'd argue that if you're after a minute level of balance you'd probably be better off playing a different Wargame or computer game. I feel this way does buy into the primary GW Wargame principal, it's all about buying miniatures, so why not use it?

[Mr Mystery]

Biggest balancing factor? It's now abundantly clear if you've set out to power game your way to victory.

99.999999999999% of gamers, no matter which system they play are perfectly reasonable, perfectly pleasant individuals who totally get that 'hey, we're both on downtime here, looking to pass a few hours with like minded nerds'. That is your balancing.

Seriously. Anyone who would use army lists to power game isn't going to be fun to play against. They're quite likely not a particularly pleasant person to hang around with socially either. Now? Ain't got nothing to hide behind.

[grimmas]

Tough day at work dude?

I would agree broadly with your sentiment. Still it does take time and experience to be able to set out forces so that both have a fun close match ( not that it has to be close to have fun). It just seemed like a good way two people could quickly know things were roughly equal so they could get on with the game sharpish or if someone was planning an event they could let people know what to bring. The question has been asked a few times and I thought an solution was available.

[Mr Mystery]

Ah, but that's the trick, isn't it?

The fear is that every opponent has a larger collection than you, and will drag it along to every game, and simply out deploy you to bag an easy win.

We're not seeing that.

Figuring out 'could have done with another unit or two' is as much part of the required learning curve as developing your tactics - and it's a mutual experience.

[Ben_S]

An interesting idea. It's obviously imperfect - even going by current GW website, Chaos Lords (on foot, not special characters) seem to range between £8.20 (maybe less if you count the four-pack of 'chaos champions') and £15, while HE spearmen are 16 for £20 and Dark Elves the same price for ten. I wouldn't be sure whether it accurately balances characters against units in general, but no points system is perfect and it does give a start - not obviously worse than counting models or wounds.

[Rev. Tiberius Jackhammer]

It's far from perfect, but I suppose it might be better than "same number of wounds" balancing. Personally, I'm keeping an eye on Auticus' Azyr comp for solid balancing (he's already got people conflicted over whether a unit is too cheap or too pricey, which is typically a good sign!).

Figuring out 'could have done with another unit or two' is as much part of the required learning curve as developing your tactics - and it's a mutual experience.

For me, that's always been the greatest benefit of a point system. Instead of trying to guesstimate how many Drop Pods a Carnifex is worth or work from hindsight, we can work with the recommendations of the developers.

In my eyes, the biggest loss of ditching the points system is that nothing was really gained - we've never been bound to a points system, and in my gaming experience we've been happy to introduce unbalanced battlefield terrain/rules, or simply given one side a points bonus, to address a perceived inequality between the forces.

[grimmas]

Well I did say it wasn't going to give a minute level of balance but it will give enough for a fair game and deal with the issues of both model and wound count.

Those cheaper Chaos champions are Exhalted Heroes so they should be cheaper, the Lords are similarly priced to each other and the 4 pack doesn't have a Warscroll so they would proxy as something else so they would use that price.

The older sets are the issue but I suspect they will be the ones replaced first, the High Elf Spearmen and Chaos Warriors being notable issues. I doubt people are going to be so beardy they going to buy boat loads of outdated models just to try and take advantage of it.

This method does have the advantage of it being readily available to all and it does acknowledge the difference between elite and common 1 wound models and the obvious problems of model count.

[daboarder]

Biggest balancing factor? It's now abundantly clear if you've set out to power game your way to victory.

99.999999999999% of gamers, no matter which system they play are perfectly reasonable, perfectly pleasant individuals who totally get that 'hey, we're both on downtime here, looking to pass a few hours with like minded nerds'. That is your balancing.

Seriously. Anyone who would use army lists to power game isn't going to be fun to play against. They're quite likely not a particularly pleasant person to hang around with socially either. Now? Ain't got nothing to hide behind.

Because theres only one way to play with toy soldiers and thats your way right

[Erik Setzer]

Just stop trying. Please. Stop trying to balance. You just make up a bunch of house rules that can only be used in your local group, which doesn't remotely solve the issue of pickup games with new people. And even then, it'd take a good bit of effort.

The game isn't meant to be balanced. It's stopped being a game, really. If you win or lose doesn't matter, because - and I'm sorry to point this out to the special snowflakes who feel good about their AoS wins - the game is too unbalanced and messy to have a fair idea of who won. You want to tell stories? Go for it. Tell your stories. Just don't brag when you win.

They tried to do an AoS tourney over the weekend, even tried to balance it. Didn't really work so well. A kid steamrolled everyone, including at least one very good player, with his Ogres. Not even trying. He had to fight hard to get a win in WFB, but now he doesn't have to work at it at all. And you know what he did after he won? Shrugged it off because it was boring. He didn't feel like bragging because it was too easy. He wasn't even making a douchebaggery list. Didn't matter. Ogres are seriously OP, and you can't balance that with any of these tricky methods.

Maybe some big tournament with more pages of balancing rules than the "game" has rules will be able to find some way to make things balanced, but I doubt it.

Treat AoS as a very, VERY rough set of guidelines for telling a structured story. Don't think of it as a game. As a story telling device, it can be fun. As a game, which involves winners and losers, it doesn't even bother trying. There's no way to fairly determine who the more skilled player is in any particular match. You can have fun with it being what it is, and I can see plenty of fun to have with that, but I'll never brag about my AoS success or feel bad about losing because I know it doesn't really matter. And that's the beauty. You don't have to feel bad about losing, because you're not fighting matched battles or anything. You're just telling a story with no winners or losers.

Which is probably a good thing, because I rarely see people actually manage to complete an AoS game at the local GW store, especially the multiplayer games. Singleplayer ends up being one-sided in one direction or the other, multiplayer becomes a bogged down mess that somehow takes longer than it did before (which just doesn't seem possible).

I wish the pro-anything-GW-does people would stop treating everyone who wants balance as being awful. And stop making bogus claims like "Now it's harder to take a beatface army!" It's not. It's a lot easier, because there's nothing to stop you, and everything to encourage you taking just the elite (not coincidentally, the more expensive) units. You can take an all-elite army and ROFLstomp someone with a "fluffy" army (except there's not really any fluff for factions or how armies are structured right now) and point out that you're actually the one at a disadvantage according to the rules because you have a smaller army.

[Caitsidhe]

What the last guy said. The outcome of AOS games is entirely random, or entirely predetermined (in the case of just bringing enough to roll the opponent). There is no middle ground. Your personal input and skill are really unimportant.