Game balance is a crucial issue, in war gaming. A game that is not balanced well at all will be no fun to play....unless a person takes great joy in crushing an opponent when there is no fairness involved. Personally, I find competetive play to be a great concept and it sometimes is a ton of fun. What makes it less fun is when armies/companies/forces are unbalanced and the winner is decided upon by the army lists and playing the game itself becomes irrelevant. Thus, game balance is critical. Some games (ie, Flames of War) are near perfectly balanced. I have even heard of some (Chain of Command and Bolt Action) that take it to another whole level....which is just crazy. Then there are other games, that are not so well balanced. Unfortunately, for a long time now, it has been a tradition for GW to make great games that lack balance. They are fun to play, but they require a lot of balancing to be done by the players. Now on to the Age of Sigmar...
The Age of Sigmar deals with game balance in a really creative way: the game tells the players themselves to balance their armies. For many long years, the fantasy game produced by Games Workshop (Warhammer Fantasy) was declared to be balanced. That game system used points: each model or item in the game was worth a certain number of points and this is how fairness was established. However, given that the game was amazingly complex and that the community of people who played the game were notorious for playing like total jerks, this system almost never really worked. Good tournaments would have their own, additional rules added in to try to stop the stupidity that would result. However, people always did figure out a way to abuse the game. After decades of this happening, the leadership at GW decided that a new solution was needed. Now, players control the fairness level themselves and they do it very directly. To be fair, the game was never balanced like Flames of War. It was good, but much was required to make it fair for tournaments, events and people who play very frequently (as do most Warhammer players).
An intuitive approach
Right before this game was released, much of the contents was leaked online on the rumors sites and popular blogs. To say that it was a surprise is a massive understatement. In particular, one part of the game that was so surprising is that of balance. As stated above, the game tells players to balance it out themselves. Now, when this first came out, I realized that it would be great. Why? This way, two or more people can play a game and they can make sure that there are no super powerful units that just totally destroy the enemy army. The players can make sure, finally, that the game is actually fair and fun to play. In tournament play, this type of fairness almost never happened.
When the rumors first started hitting the sites, I had thought that it would be really easy to make a good guideline for fair and fun games. The guideline is incredibly simple and is as follows:
- neither player may have more total "wounds" then their opponent: both players agree to a "wounds" total
- neither player may "purchase" the same character more then twice
- no more then one-third of the "wounds" may be spent on characters
- no more then one-third of the "wounds" may be spent on war machines or monsters
- no special characters in games with less than 100 total wounds
Of course, players can take this a lot further. There are a ton of limitations that may be applied, such as: number of wizards, monstrous units (like Kroxigor or Ogres), ect. For a game that is meant to be played in a casaul fashion, this sort of guideline will be great. It can be modified, as more people acquire more experience and find out what works and what does not work. For example, a really great modifier would be to take into account "troop quality level". All units would be assigned a quality level and this would balance it further by making it so higher quality level units cost more wounds then did lower quality level units.
Now for those players who want to take this to a tournament, bear in mind that this system was specifically NOT designed for tournament play. This is not Warmachine/Hordes...this game is designed for more then super competitive, obsessive (and often jerk) tournament players, as the current tournament scenes aptly describe (Warhammer and Warmachine/Hordes). Now, there was a tournament scene with the old rules but they were never designed for that super close level of play. The rules just were not designed to be inspected that closely by that many people and found to be perfect. They were not made for that sort of play, anyway. This is part of the reason why tournaments were so awful before...people would abuse the points system horribly and most games were decided before any dice were rolled. Note that this way of playing is gone forever, however, the players have to take some time to balance out their armies more if they intend to play super competitive games where winning matters a real lot.
As time goes by we will see if Games Workshop adds any more complex force restrictions for more competitive play, but I would bet that to not be forthcoming anytime soon, if at all. The old tournament scene is part of what destroyed Warhammer in the first place, as so many people stopped playing when they realized just how messed up the tournament scene was: army list design and abuse was practically the only thing that mattered.
Go play some games!
Go and try out the guidelines, then depending on how much winning and competition matter to you and your gaming group, modify the guideline to better suit your games. It is only a guideline and what matters is having fun with friends/family. The Age of Sigmar is here, go have some fun and enjoy the new rules!
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