Cult Of Games XLBS: Does Game Balance Actually Matter?
November 20, 2022 by avernos
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Happy Sunday!
Asymetric wargames, particularly when part of a campaign are always more exciting than ‘points even’ games. Who doesn’t love fighting a last stand with the idea of making the battle so costly for the victor that they wished they hadn’t fought it? Or holding out for just a few more turns than expected? That one berserker or trio of hoplites in the centre of a bridge holding the enemy in place whilst his friends escape? The best wins are the lobsided ones.
As a DM I used to love having a person telling a tale of the “Those two barbarians fighting an entire army to defend there village. The battle goes for hours, hundreds killed or maimed. Incredible carnage. Yep, those were the toughest barbarians we ever fought.”
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
— Omar Khayyam
Companies like GW shouldn’t worry so much about balance in between editions of the game . The more they try the more criticism they will get for lack of balance.
GWs production is like an old typewriter. As they hammer stuff out, the carriage moves across the page. Each thing more powerful and more desirable than the last. This drives excitement and therefore sales, and that’s fine, that’s business.
Then, every couple of years, the typewriter carriage has reached the end of the page, and it gets slammed back to the left. New edition. At that point, they tweak the rules, and try to roughly balance what exists at the time. Great. New baseline. Then the typing starts again.
That’s the model, and if they are open about it, everyone knows where they stand. Your army will peak and trough in power. It’s time in the sun will come with each new codex.
Leave balance to the tournament organisers if they are that keen to turn the game into chess! If the game developers focus on making their products exciting, and adding new units to low powered armies, they’ll achieve more balance that way than they ever will FAQing old rules.
The Bruce Campbell version of herbie I think had an evil nazi black bettle
Yay who let the dice out COGz.
The big part of 40k imbalance is the new secondary objectives. Some factions have great ones, that are super easy to score, and others have terrible ones that make no sense. Another thing is the prevalence of space marine players, and each new book excels at killing space marines. Now I’m a Space Marine player, and I could lean heavily into my Terminators, who are rather good, with their inner circle rule, but I don’t. I’m having fun with my Ravenwing stuff, with it’s zippy movement.
I think John’s family will be getting angry glare’s I hope they’ll like them?
Mega city 1 but in DnD…
Damnit Ben, you’re going to make me write that…
Also for confirmation, Gerry didn’t fail a cool roll until he was basically off the table. Which I was fine with by the way. Completely fine that Gerry whooped me at the game I brought with my minis that he had never played before.
Fine…
FAT BLOKE?
Somewhere Paul Sawyer is wondered who’s calling him
Aw shucks thanks fellas. Can confirm the cake was as delicious as it was brutal. Mrs G is a true cake genius.
Happy Sunday,
The idea of balance is interesting one, there is a difference between friendly and tournament games.
I play Mortem et Gloriam, both in a friendly setting and a competitive capacity. Ok this is a historical set of rules, which means there is a limited capacity for weird and wonderful.
However it does span a period of 4000 years. There are over 650 lists. But it is built around characteristics that give bonuses and minuses. The lists are reviewed annually and tweaked, but the they are free to access electronically, and over the last 5 years most of the lists have been refined to reflect their historical feel.
In the main the tournaments are themed to a specific era or period so it helps to balance things out, but there is an art to building the lists, but mostly it comes down to how well you play the game.
Even in the open tournaments where you can field any army it will come down to how you use the Army rather than whether you have a list that is op’d I fought a biblical list with a late medieval army I got trashed. But that was down to my tactics ?
Equally I’m MeG you can play unbalanced historical battles and it still plays out a good game. Even if I lose in MeG the games are always good.
The problem of balance comes when you have a poorly designed game, and although I may get hate for this 40k is an example of a poorly designed game… because GW are not interested in rules they are interested in selling figures and there have been many examples of GW changing rules to sell figures each new codex will be more powerful to sell the latest figures.
selling miniatures
So who’s the new big hairy guy on the show guy’s an what have you done with GERRY?!?
Weren’t the Spartans doing each other B,Sex when they weren’t fighting training ???
like most of the ancient world
Lol.
Happy Sunday.
That cake looks delicious and if I wasn’t scoffing my Sunday dinner at the time it would have made me a bit peckish.
As for game balance I was thinking about solo games. Joe McCullough has commented several times how tricky it is to balance solo scenarios for Rangers of Shadow Deep, not making them too difficult or too easy.
With games like Five Leagues and Five Parsecs the scenario and number of enemies are generated randomly so so games can be very different whereas others are much easier, but in either sense you walk away from the game with a story. If things are going bad you have the option to run away.
Maybe not call it unbalanced but maybe asymmetrical?
How very dare you Justin dis tank force’s.
A Brilliant fun show guy’s.
some things are just not going to be balanced. For instance, Lets say you get beaten up by a gang. You then go to a Kung-Fu instructor to learn the ancient eastern art. Then later you become a successful comedian who is shot by another comedy duo for being to good at what you do. Now your dying, but suddenly the devil appears before you to make a deal. You have to marry his daughter and give him a grandson, but the catch is she is just sooooo ugly. Now i ask you is that fair?
FYI, Dont forget to watch the Greatest movie ever made!!!!!!!!
is that fair? Awwwh hell naw
Dogy style for the win ?!? Lol
What was the rest of the deal!
Regarding Privateer Press, I have my own opinions about it. I don’t disagree with the two approach way to play the game – legacy and the new stuff, but I would have done things differently. I would of chosen several existing units of every faction that players already have (or are common in the armies), updated the model style and balanced the game around just those models. This way they would not have angered existing players who have supported the game or bought into the game throughout the years. A reduced model count, more manageable, allow players to use old models or buy newer versions of the same model, and better balance for a competitive game.
Regarding balance in general, I tend to agree with Gerry here. It is great when warranted – especially in fantasy games that are competitive. In historical games, I prefer to use troops that were present at the battle, over balance just for the sake of it.
Thank you so much for the Golden Button guys! Much appreciated, although I’d like to acknowledge @scribbs whose kind words and encouragement got me to pick up my brushes again after a personal, sudden bereavement knocked me for six. Our ‘Halloween Challenge” kickstarted me (take a look at @scribbs Aboleth – it’s fantastic) and as I reduced my own pile of shame, the Volkswagen model surfaced and it obviously needed to be turned into something fun – hence everyone’s unadulterated Herbie! I contemplated loads of Mad Max accoutrements, but Herbie doesn’t need them! If you scroll through previous entries on the blog, you’ll find the BoW/OTT crew represented in an alternative homage to Rorke’s Drift… enjoy! ???
Balance? What is this thing? Like a heavy vodka fueled Balkan birthday bender there are some things that seriously lack it. The nightmare fuel driven into our brains from lacking moderation can, and often does, leave its mark in the remembering of crash and burn moments in those high times of cavalier revelry. More is more is often not best.
Happy Sunday…..Long Live STILLMANIA!!…There that’s my thought on Balanced games.
For game balance it depends! If we take Saga for example, that has 1 pt units regardless of what they are. Then minor tweaks aside that should be a even point game with your opponent.
Lion Rampant and its ilk are 2-6 pts a unit depending what it is, with generally a minimum max allowed of 4-10 units and you have 24 pts. But those are going to be the same pool of units for each player, just composition will be different, similar to an ACW battle.
So points as a time indicator is fine, otherwise hopefully good game design should mean most of the time it will have a balanced feel.
As regards some of the other factors with asymetical element, I have army a you have army x I will get advantage b as a result of the matchup and you have disadvantage y, or turning up with a smaller force but having a points advantage. This sounds like leaning towards a prebuilt scenario.
You also have the game design already builds this in like Chain of Command has a points in the background hence different ratings which are used for game effects but otherwise what your getting is already built.
Balance in games is always such a tricky, subjective and emotive subject. If you’re going to play a game, you’d like to think you stand a chance of meeting some kind of objective (even if you’re not “winning” outright, being able to achieve an aim would be rewarding).
But there are loads of ways of making a game balanced – the most obvious being by changing who is playing it.
Chess was mentioned in the lead-up to this topic. Chess is a perfectly balanced game. Until a grand master comes up against a six-year-old. I’ve played games of chess where I’ve either started a game without certain pieces, or wilfully given them up early, to make the game more challenging (for me) and thus more “balanced”. I’ve also played against players and we’ve agreed to undo a move, simply because losing a particular piece at that point in the game would be devastating (and thus make continuing the game tedious for both of us).
My old favourite Blood Bowl is a great example of an unbalanced game. Nobody plays Goblins to win. You play them for a laugh. And your aim might not be to win outright, but to score just one touchdown. Or to injure your opponents big guy. Or to pull off some audacious plan, even if it ultimately ends in defeat.
And that’s the problem with “balance” in games.
It’s the people playing them that make a game balanced, no matter what the rules are. When I used to play rugby, I’d often look to join the “weaker” side, for the challenge of getting a great game out of it, not to be on the winning side at the end (I was no Jonah Lomu, but at 6’4″ and around 19st, I was very often my own kind of “balance adjuster” in the scrum pack!). We didn’t balance the game by changing the rules, simply by who was playing it.
I play tabletop games in the same spirit. The outcome is almost irrelevant.
From how John describes it, “successful” GW Tournament players aren’t necessarily the ones who play the best game – they’re the ones who have access to the most data; the ones who know why this unit is preferable to this one, that this unit has a higher percentage chance of success over that, or that if you play this faction, you get to use these rules in place of others.
“Normal” players just don’t commit this much information to memory, so simply play what is in front of them.
It’s a bit like playing Top Trumps; the very first time you play, you’ve no idea which is the best card (because you’ve not seen all the values, so a score of, say, 10 is meaningless without context). Tournament players not only know the value of every single category of every single card, but they look to pick out only the top 15 cards to play with, before the off. And then they stack them so they know the exact order they’re going to come out. It’s less about playing the game, and more about knowing more about the stats than your opponent.
If that’s how you get your kicks, then fair enough.
But even a perfectly balanced game system can end up “unbalanced”, simply by the abilities of the people playing it. An unbalanced ruleset can still produce a “balanced” game – it just depends if both players want to play it that way.
Game balance is for Euros! 😀
IMO, With Ameritrash, having a wide range of play styles is more important than balance. Balance should be a part of that — one “n00b” faction should be easy to play and “balanced” against two or so other factions (cf. Space Marines in WH40K, and the fighter class in AD&D). Then you can add other factions that may be more challenging to play for advanced gamers.
Happy Sun… Mon… Tu.. WEDNESDAY?!
How did that happen? oO
@avernos Great topic for a show. We should totally do this. Oh hang on… ;~]
To reiterate what I said when we covered it on our stream I think that game balance is an admirable aspiration in any game design but ultimately no game ‘requires’ balance.
As long as the way a game is portrayed in marketing and advertising gives a fair representation of the ‘gaming’ experience every style of game has a niche it can fill.
If a game is a more swingy, random, storytelling experience then as a manufacturer please don’t endorse and encourage a competitive gaming scene just because you think it will drive sales. All it will do ultimately is drive a torrent of negative reporting of your games play experience in social media.
Similarly, if as a manufacturer you want international competitive events to drive sales and growth of your game, then get your house in order and work out how you are going to balance the current game and new releases going forward.
When it comes to game balance I have found that people build their armies to fight just a few of their friends. So when a new powerful unit , vehicle , or army is released . They automatically say it’s broken instead of changing your tactics or buying something that your army already has and you are going to play with a stagnant army . Of course you are going to loose . Your army must Improvise, adapt, and overcome if you want it to be balanced.