AoS why wounds balancing does not work

[dwarfepic]

Over my short period of time on this forum, it has come to my attention that many people in amongst us use wounds to balance age of sigmar. This in my opinion, is not necessarily wrong, so much as not the best way. For example, one wound of temple guard verses one wound of saurus warrior with club, the temple guard will win. That presents a bias to one sort of troop over another, and it carries on into other races. Bestigors verses gors? Grave guard verses skeletons? High elf swordmasters or regular spearmen? And that's not even half! Now the point I'm making here is that if some one takes an army of gors because they are just starting and on a low budget, you will wipe the floor with them using temple guard, without any spells or shenanigans. This is because temple guard have a better save, immunity to rend -1, the ability to deal rend -1 (not that it matters against gors) and more attacks, even if unbuffed. Some people may say "oh, but you just need to put some spells on the gors/skeletons/high elf spearmen". This means that if you have enough wounds for a caster on one side, then the other side can have one if playing wounds. If you were in the finals to a huge tournament, and you had two choices of list, 30 skeletons, 5 black knights, and a necromancer, or 30 grave guard, 5 black knights and a necromancer, and your opponent must use the other army, which army would you pick? I personally I wound go for the second option, even though this should be balanced due to wounds count, and present no bias, the second option is better due to a stronger core of infantry. Though the same wounds they are still not balanced.

Now I go onto the comp systems that have been popping up every where. Admittedly some are not so good at balance as others, but they are universally better than wounds. I myself and my gaming community use clash comp, and I have found it very well balanced ( though some may disagree) and it has been great fun.

Here is the link to it.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88222296/1 AoS Comp/Independent AoS Pool Document v2.0.pdf

 

[Phoedinn]

I didn't think for a moment that wounds were balanced, I still use them though. I think people use them right now as its the best in keeping with how we want to play, just turn up with models and build a roughly similar army size without having to work out the maths and other complications that point systems bring. Its just more fluid.

Don't get me wrong, you bring up very good points and examples. Just use what your group finds the most fun to play and use that, it's a game after all

 

[Killer Angel]

Over my short period of time on this forum, it has come to my attention that many people in amongst us use wounds to balance age of sigmar.

Leaving aside for the moment why i could play saurus warriors over temple guards...
wounds are easier because they're immediate and they are based on those 4 pages rules: it's a common knowledge, and so we can debate about it without problems.
to talk about lists made with comp systems, it needed that you must know that particular system, its house rules, and so on. It's less immediate.

 

[StealthKnightSteg]

I think you took your thought process one step too far.
I seem to sense that you are list building before hand to take a set of models to a certain amount of wounds. Here you go wrong already with the initial idea of wound counting. You should bring a diverse stuff of models and while deploying you decide what you are deploying first or countering the opponent second and then making a stop at your wound level. That would give more balance then the way you put it

 

[dwarfepic]

I dont want to seem aggresive here but im just saying, there are better forms of balancing than wounds.

I think you took your thought process one step too far.
I seem to sense that you are list building before hand to take a set of models to a certain amount of wounds. Here you go wrong already with the initial idea of wound counting. You should bring a diverse stuff of models and while deploying you decide what you are deploying first or countering the opponent second and then making a stop at your wound level. That would give more balance then the way you put i

I agree with what you have said to a point, i normally play with 30 points to choose from, and you may only deploy 20, and leave the rest for summoning. This seems to work.

wounds are easier because they're immediate and they are based on those 4 pages rules: it's a common knowledge, and so we can debate about it without problems.

I think that most of the comp system rules are easily accessable and you just need to print out the pages of points for your army.

Again, I am just saying, there are better ways of balancing than wounds, if you want to play wounds, im not stopping you.

 

[StealthKnightSteg]

Well soon GW will provide us with a point system.. let's see how that will work out

 

[dwarfepic]

Well soon GW will provide us with a point system.. let's see how that will work out

Definitely excited for that to come out!

 

[Killer Angel]

Again, I am just saying, there are better ways of balancing than wounds, if you want to play wounds, im not stopping you.

The fun thing is that in my gaming Group, we play almost exclusively with Azyr...

Definitely excited for that to come out!

I'm really curious about points, but I'm also interested in the narrative campaign...