As Balanced as a Rock...

'Broken' armies are somewhat of a myth...

Certain units are inherently powerful and certain combinations of units have a power level beyond that of the sum of their parts but quite often that perceived level of power is an illusion based primarily on the 'myth' of their invulnerability rather than the 'fact' of their invulnerability...

Many are the complaints surrounding the Grey Knight Codex and quite a few of those complaints are a result of the Draigo + Paladin combination that for some reason people are worried about. Here's a clue...There's not many of them, their fucking expensive and they die to las-cannons, meltaguns and even bloody Termagants if you pick your moment. Nothing's unkillable as long as you bring the right tools.

Of course people don't always bring the right tools...

But I only wanted to hang a picture frame.....

Rock armies rely on an extremely hard unit or unit combination forcing it's way into the middle of your army and making such a mess of it that your unable to recover or as is more often the case become so demoralised that you stop caring. The ability to generate panic in an opponent is often as big a weapon in their arsenal as their actual weapons...at the risk of repeating myself...'Nothing is unkillable'.

That's where balance comes in.

A balanced army should have a mix of anti-tank and anti-infantry, survivable scoring units, unit redundancy (so one dead unit doesn't fuck-up your army), unit duality (so a unit can actually accomplish something vs. virtually any enemy unit it may face) and should be deployable in a consistent and reliable way regardless of terrain. If you can fit a counter-assault unit in there somewhere then that's a nice bonus as well.

There's a few issues with that as well though...namely that some armies have trouble including all those elements (usually due to poor codex design and occasionally due to edition changes making armies obsolete) and secondly that balanced armies are a bit trickier to get the hang of because they don't have that obvious rock to throw at your opponents head. What they do have when done correctly though is the ability to give you a chance of winning against absolutely any army you might face.

Though there's a niggle with the last part of that paragraph...

Any guesses?

If you said 'points level' then give yourself a pat on the back ;-)

It was the general consensus for quite some time that the game was designed to be played at 1500 points, but I'm not convinced that was ever really true. Certain codices can be used at any points level due to the way their FOC's are organised (Imperial Guard being the most obvious example) while others struggle at too high a points level because their essential slots are filled* almost immediately (Certain Marine builds suffer in this way as do a number of others). Army configurations that fit into the 'rock' category inevitably have an advantage at low points level because often their opponent just doesn't have enough fire-power to defeat them or have insufficient units to sacrifice in order to slow their advance...Fortunately most players have their games at the 1750+ level, with most being quite happy to play at 2000 points (which is in my opinion the optimal value for balance).

* feel free to insert your own 'filled slots' joke here if you like.

I personally prefer the balanced approach and I rarely have issues facing somebodies shitty, over-pointed 'death-star' and taking it apart under a hail of firepower, tactical assaults or whatever I find is the most appropriate path to victory.

Rock armies might appear to be scary but given the circumstances I've listed above a Balanced army should give even the best of them a run for their money.

The floor is now open for those people who defeat the same four children over and over again with their piece of crap deathstar and think that they're awesome to talk bollocks about how good their shitty army is.....

Bigger more powerful Death Star you say?