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?