Balance, part 1

So today, I am going to fulfill the promise implicit in my blog's title (well, half of it, anyways) and talk about wargaming. Today, my topic of interest is balance. Duh.

Balance is a concept near and dear to the hearts of wargamers everywhere. My own personal wargames-of-note are Warmachine/Hordes, put out by Privateer Press, and Games Workshop's own Warhammer Fantasy Battles. These are both games that regularly hold tournaments with an extremely high caliber of player, and as such balance in the games gets a lot of attention. Today I am going to talk about what is balance, why it is desirable, and how it can be achieved.

Balance is, quite simply, the degree to which army choice does or does not matter. The ultimate "balanced" game, to my mind, is something like Chess or Battleship. Everyone has the same forces. In chess, each player has identical pieces in an identical formation. Sure, White gets to go first (and I am not a chessmaster, so that may or may not be a significant advantage or disadvantage), but Black and White are on a completely even footing. Warhammer and Warmachine are inherently asymmetrical games. If two players are playing two different factions, they have different options available to them. If they are playing the same faction, they may still have different army compositions. The point is, except in the rare cases where two players are running identical lists (something I have never seen happen in all my years of wargaming) they are not on an equal footing. But are they balanced?

That is the purpose of the "point" system. In almost every game, each model is worth a set number of "points" corresponding to how good it is on the table. Therefore, in a match of equal point values, both players should have the same power in their armies.

Here it is important to differentiate between within-faction and between-faction balance. Both are important. I would argue that the second is more important, but that's neither here nor there. Within-faction balance is how different options available to a player when constructing an army stack up. If I am building a Skorne army, I will always always always take Praetorian Swordsmen over Praetorian Karax. Swordsmen are just a flat out better unit. This is a failing of within-faction balance. Between-faction balance is the advantage one faction has over another, regardless of precise build. This is often difficult to establish, since some players may simply pick poor choices from within their faction (a consequence of within-faction imbalance) and consequently repeatedly lose against better-constructed lists from other factions. However, at tournaments and other events, players are often highly skill and practiced army builders who take the absolute best options available to them. Indeed, tournament results indicate a large degree of between-faction imbalance. The classic offenders are the Warhammer Fantasy Daemons of Chaos; an army so powerful, and so imbalanced, that anyone else playing against them was automatically at a significant disadvantage merely for not playing as Daemons of Chaos.

Balance, then is two things. To be balanced, a game must have all of its factions able to compete with each other on an even footing. To be balanced, a faction must have all of its choices bring something to the table so that none is simply inferior (or too corner-case; because lists must often be built as generalists, having a unit that can only do one thing often means it will rarely or never show up unless it is truly superlative at that thing). It is important to note that balance need not be mathematically perfect. We play games with dice; if the difference between factions is small enough to be entirely swallowed by the natural "random noise" of dice outcomes and individual player skill, it is acceptable. In the absence of broad data sets and statistical regressions (of which some have been done, actually) balance is inherently a subjective thing. However, results from tournaments and broadly agreed-upon ideas from the playerbase form a solid foundation upon which to build.

Next time: I discuss why balance is a good thing for games, and how it can be acheived.