The units I like v the units that work??

[Admiral-Badruck]

It seems to me that there is a lot of gaming to Win At All Cost A.K.A WAAC gaming going on these days. To be honest I am not to keen on it.

What ever happened to paying the model you have and making due when you do not have the right models.

A friend of mine plays a really cool looking army but has shelved it be cause in the current game environment the army sucks. What a shame...

In my case the reason for not taking my favorite army is a bit different.
Anyone who knows anything about Orks should know that they can be an extremely competitive army, even when I do not take all the best units, I can still crush most armies with a few cheezy uber units. it is the one reason I do not take them to tournaments or even friendly games they because they make people feel bad and that is not my goal... my goal is to have fun. I like some of the fun units that are easy to avoid if one knows they are coming.

I also like the units that are fun but totally random... they make the game more funny and give players something to laugh at... I also like using units in a themed list... this is really fun but if people build a list to counter them there is no way they will ever win they are more than likely going to get crushed... and as we all know it is funner to win than to get crushed. so at the end of the day what should I do??? Try to crush my opponent or should I play the models and units I like...

Your thoughts Boyz....

[job]

I guess it depends on the players you are playing. I think if you like tournaments, and so do your opponents, then you might expect tournament style lists, cheese and all.

If the group is hobby-oriented, I think you might play what is cool just fine.

And if you play GW games, particularly, you might expect lots of list building. Anyway, GW is greatly to be blamed (as usual) as they don't write their books to really balance against each other fairly. Instead they're all written individually in installments. (Warmahordes and FOW both publish lists for opposing sides together.) So, it seems you've got the 'good' units and the 'less competitive' in each book.

But, if the atmosphere was "casual" then I would totally, dig it. (I think it is for the most part.) I used to deploy two CSM dreadnaughts just for the kick of things when I played with the chill guys in the old gaming group. (You guys are of course chill, too.)

[Admiral-Badruck]

I thinks we are chill too... I may be a bit too chill sometimes

[Primarch]

@Job - GW have said that their army books aren't meant to be used for competitive play. The game has NEVER been balanced. It's not just GW. Historical wargames (no, not FoW) are inherently unbalanced because usually generals avoided fair fights if they could. There are certainly units/armies in FoW and Warmachine which are better than others.

@Badruck - Check with your opponent first if they are bringing cheese or fluff to a game. Thats probably the best way to do it. Personally, I prefer to lose a close game than win an easy one. Sometimes its fun to be on the back foot and its certainly more challenging.

If you look at every game as if it were comp-ed, you can easily see if your army is just for fun or WAAC. Did you spam a unit "Hey, I have 17 chimeras!" or build a big deathstar "Wow, this unit is worth 75% of my army!" Did you win easily with it last few times you played? (I'm going to try NOT to use pButcher in Warmachine for a while). I often find the internet a good place to get advice about oddball units (Parasite of Mortrex for example), that I wouldn't usually touch, but I avoid the 'competitive lists' that people post because they just aren't how I want to play the game. This means that sometimes I will get hammered by people's uber units, but most of the time that isn't how we (NagoyaHammer-ers) play. Plus I like to think that I can usually hold my own against a better list and make my opponent work for the win regardless.

[me_in_japan]

It seems to me that there is a lot of gaming to Win At All Cost A.K.A WAAC gaming going on these days.

where, exactly? I cant imagine its in nagoya. On the net, well, most people who play for fun dont post on the net. The ones who do post are the ones who want to get all competitive and raise their games and whatnot. If youre looking at gaming forums, then you'll be reading about gamers who take the game seriously enough to post on the internet about it. i.e. the (at least a bit) competitive ones.

I dont think you need to have a one-rule-to-bind-them-all kind of gaming philosophy. as prim said, just ask your opponent what kind of list he's bringing. Work it out one game at a time.

@Job - GW have said that their army books aren't meant to be used for competitive play.

Yup. Taking 40k and trying to force it into the shape of a fair, balanced, tourney friendly game is like going hiking in a pair of sandals. You can complain all you want that you got blisters, but the sandal-maker is just gonna say "but theyre sandals, fer crying out loud! You wanna go hiking? Buy boots."

[Admiral-Badruck]

I guess I will state it for for the record unless someone asks me to play my best. I will only ever take a rubish theme list units with units I llike. Unless someone asks me to take my beast.

[job]

@Job - GW have said that their army books aren't meant to be used for competitive play. The game has NEVER been balanced. It's not just GW. Historical wargames (no, not FoW) are inherently unbalanced because usually generals avoided fair fights if they could. There are certainly units/armies in FoW and Warmachine which are better than others.

Yup. Taking 40k and trying to force it into the shape of a fair, balanced, tourney friendly game is like going hiking in a pair of sandals. You can complain all you want that you got blisters, but the sandal-maker is just gonna say "but theyre sandals, fer crying out loud! You wanna go hiking? Buy boots."

Sorry. I will just say rubbish. GW has the where with all to balance the books if they choose to do so, but between having an established system of codex/army book updates in rounds that gamers are used to and cranks out cash, with probably some laziness mixed in, they've never balanced the game.

Both FOW and Warmahordes have produced a system that tends to produce greater balance between opposition. Not perfect of course, but I hear it reflected in the comments I read so often. If you publish opposing factions together, you are going to have time to balance new rules against each other.

I think this is also suggested in that recently published books of GW, or rather books published in chronological proximity tend to be more balanced against each other then with those separated by greater amounts of time. Take care Dark Angels book as an example. The DA are living in squalid misery, with a book that is hysterically out-dated by the revolutions in SM tech that has been written into the last three. (Drop pods, 3+ stormshields and hammers at 40p, psyhic powers, new LR rules, DS land raiders, teleport homers, etc.)
Or the CSM codex, which is starting to look "cheap" compared to the new codexes. The silliest thing is it was published a month or two before 5th ed. came out, but the possessed rules were unusable in the new addition. I don't think they ever FAQed it (at least while I was playing CSM) because I don't think nobody ever used the unit...

Which is to get back to Badruck's point. The possessed are one of the cooler models they made for the CSM, but the things of unusable, without any tactical sharpness and are way over-pointed. GW is super-lazy and/or stubborn. They should have updated or patched the CSM/DA/Eldar and others a long time ago to keep them at least not feeling out-dated factions. (Oh, wait is Eldar getting a new book?) They could easily amend things to create better balance (not perfection).

[me_in_japan]

GW has the where with all to balance the books if they choose to do so,

They choose not to.

Balance in a wargame is not always a good thing. As was pointed out before, most historical games are unbalanced. Why? Because more often than not, battles in real life are unbalanced. Yes, in ancient Japan noble houses would line up and wait for days until both armies had identical numbers of horsemen, pikemen etc, but in the vast majority of real life battles where honor is not at stake but getting shot by some bastard is, your average military commander is going to take every chance he gets to screw the other guy over before a single shot is fired.

This carries over into wargaming, albeit in a far less mortal manner. 40k is not designed to see which gamer is the most skilled tactician. It is not designed as a competitive tool. It is a game. For fun. Reading 40k rulebooks, background, novels, scenarios (back when they did em) and so on, something which is repeated again and again is the story of the unbalanced fight. You can look, but you will not find a single reference to "so the unnamed space marine captain with his 5 identically armed terminators, 2 squads of 10 tac marines in rhinos, land raider, and 2 dreadnaughts faced the enemy across the empty, flat grassy field. The enemy were an unnamed chaos space marine captain with his 5 identically armed chaos terminators, 2 squads of 10 chaos marines in chaos rhinos, a chaos land raider, and 2 chaos dreadnaughts."

because that would be really boring.

The best game of warhammer fantasy I ever had (as a result of playing Mighty Empires) was when my 5 skaven gutter runners faced off against 5 dragon princes of caledor, 10 swormasters of Hoeth, Tyrion, and Teclis.

Balanced? hell no.
Fun? hell yes.

GW could make 40k balanced.

But they dont need to.


*edit*

The possessed are one of the cooler models they made for the CSM,

good lord, no. Theyre hideous. horrible, horrible scuplts. Unbalanced, no dynamic, totally non-power specific, and generally ugly.
Rules-wise, they also suck. I still use em most every time I play my CSM, though. (I converted my own minis)
Why? cos theyre fun.

[The Other Dave]

Balance in a wargame is not always a good thing. As was pointed out before, most historical games are unbalanced. Why? Because more often than not, battles in real life are unbalanced. Yes, in ancient Japan noble houses would line up and wait for days until both armies had identical numbers of horsemen, pikemen etc, but in the vast majority of real life battles where honor is not at stake but getting shot by some bastard is, your average military commander is going to take every chance he gets to screw the other guy over before a single shot is fired.

Yyyeeeaaaahhhh...

But! Most of said not-concerned-with-balance historical games also don't have points values.

The moment you slap a points value on something, and say "a Marine is worth 15 points, while a Guardsman is worth 6" (or whatever they are these days) you're saying that one Marine facing two Guardsmen is more-or-less balanced. That's what numbers mean - people looking at the numbers in the army books aren't insane to expect it, especially when the rule book tells them outright that two armies with the same points value will be more-or-less evenly matched. When you assign numerical values to things, I think you have a basic responsibility to make sure those numbers reflect the reality of the gaming table, within some degree of hand-wavy mumbo-jumbo about reasonable margins of error or what-have-you.

(Incidentally, I think that hand-wavy mumbo-jumbo is shown best in PP's decision to change the points values in WM Mk 2 - they admitted that, while 1 of the "old" points was much smaller than the margin of error in the whole points-value-assigning thing, 1 of the "new" points was not. If that makes any sense.)

[Spevna]

Sorry. I will just say rubbish.

Nope, not rubbish. It is fact. It is a fact that GW has said the game is not balanced. It is a fact that they have said they have not written it for tournament play.

Of course they could write a more balanced game, but they don't want to.