It’s less balanced than chess or Settlers of Catan, and more balanced than Malifaux 1st ed or Confrontation. It’s definitely the case that some units are stronger than othesr and some builds are stronger than others. It doesn’t suffer from the Malifaux 1st ed problem of a handful of crews being so good, that barring a massive discrepancy in player skill/experience, they couldn’t realistically be beaten by a crew outside the upper echelon. I personally find the balance to be about average for the type of game it is. I’d rank it slightly lower than Warmachine purely because WM has so many more options, which means a greater number of stronger builds are available to each faction than is currently the case with RK.

“And that the card-power mechanics essentially force you to just ignore your weaker stuff to be able to power the really good attacks on the expensive units?”

The short answer to this is “No, but…”. As it uses a deck of cards to power abilities, then RK becomes a game of resource management. In this respect it is basically the same as Malifaux. The difference between the two games is in RK, you reset your hand every activation, and you burn through your deck quickly. Throw in Held Esper and the fact that completing objectives often involves using a generic action without spending any esper then it’s very rare that you would voluntarily do nothing with the currently activated unit because you want to save the cards for an upcoming unit. If you find you’re doing this a lot with a “weaker unit” then the problem is the cadre doesn’t work, not the card mechanic.

Which brings me to the “but..”. What does make RK difference to other games in this respect is the activation queue. In most comparable games, you play out a turn in which you and your opponent activate everything in your army. Whether that’s taking turns to activate the entire army, like Warhammer or Warmachine, or taking turns activating individual models, like Malifaux of Wolsung, every model will eventually get to activate once at some point during the turn. That’s not the case in RK. Instead you queue up models and take turns activating the first model in the queue. In a 50pt game, which the is the standard game size, the queue consists of three units. Given you’ll rarely want to be constantly activating a cypher, then a cadre of four units will fill up the queue. Five units is usually fine, but once you start getting to 6+ units, your cadre is likely going to have at least one redundant unit.

To illustrate with an example. The Diamond Corps are a cheap unit (5pts for 5) that can put out a 2 cost ranged attack that does 8 damage. That’s an incredibly efficient ratio of esper to damage and you’ll rarely be in a position where the DC activate and you can’t do the attack. One of the strongest Black Diamond builds (and IMO the strongest build) is –

Leopold Magnus
Static
Sophia Drake
3x Black Dragons
3x Suspect 7

It comes to 45pts which means enough points are left over for a unit of five DC. In most other games you’d probably take them because you get to activate them every turn and do their attack. However, in RK what would happen is you’d come to the end of your activation and have to reset your queue, and the DC would be competing with one of the units for that place, and it’s rare that they’re going to be better option. So what happens is you wind up with a redundant unit which will only come into play if your opponent starts killing things, which often isn’t the best route to victory in RK.

In all wargames, the best builds are usually the most efficient ones, but this is to an even greater degree in RK. It’s also a game which puts a lot of emphasis on board control and objective running. Combat tends to consist of surgical strikes rather than getting stuck in. Some cadres can happily go about winning the game without ever trying to kill an enemy unit. Which is not the same as saying they don’t interact with the enemy units, they’re just a lot better at running disruption whilst they go about completing their objectives.

If lining up two armies on opposite sides of the table and then marching them into combat with each other or have them stand still and shoot each other is what you like then you won’t like RK. In many ways it suits a boardgame or card game strategic mentality better than a trad wargame mentality. It suits me down to the ground and because you have to be very efficient with your builds, your cadres won’t have many models, which means you don’t have to buy and paint loads to play, which I also really like. As the models and the objectives deploy right across the table and models tend to be fast moving then the game works very well with small cadres so you’re not left with sparsely populated areas and the two cadres taking a few turns of movement just to do anything. You’re getting stuck in right from the first activation.

If none of the above has put either of you off and you’re interested in giving it a go. The feel free to start a thread in the sci-fi forum and I and the other RK players would be happy to give some guidance on getting started 🙂