A unit that costs four points is going to be absolutely shit but hopefully can hopefully survive and win through sheer weight of numbers.
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| BEST UNIT EVER..... |
Any unit can make a difference if the circumstances (and dice rolls) are in it's favour so that can hardly be banked upon as a measure of it's worth. The amount of times that the statement "well in game 'A' against army 'B', unit 'C' did this improbable thing and therefore it's awesome..." has slipped from the mouth of some idiot attempting to justify the inclusion of a unit that everybody knows is shit is a depressingly large number. If they just said "Well I just like it..." then they'd save themselves a lot of criticism.
Anyway...
Unfortunately with any system this simple there are a number of inevitable problems. Given the number of codices that are available for use, each with their own selection of special rules and combined with the myriad number of options for each unit it's understandable that some units become more useful than their relative points cost would indicate and balance will predictably suffer.
Though I mentioned earlier that it's impossible to take dice rolls into account with any degree of accuracy when working out a units relative value there's some value in the statement "Quantity has a quality all of it's own". If you roll a single six sided die then your going to end up with one of six results at least one of which is going to equal failure and in most circumstances the chance of failure is a great deal higher. Obviously this means that a unit rolling ten dice for it's attacks has a far greater chance of a catastrophically below average result than a unit rolling a hundred....If some smart-arse would like to explain that with a graph of some kind then feel free...I won't be bothering, that's for sure.....you'll just have to take my word for it...
I could go on, but you'll be happy to know that I'm not going to...My point is that with so many variables to consider it's not only likely that the game designers are going to make the odd fuck-up but it's actually pretty inevitable...
...and fuck-up they often do*
* Not that I'm saying that I could do any better, just that I understand completely why these things have the potential to occur.
Which brings me to my actual point...
Even the only marginally competitive gamer is going to want to pick units that are actually useful on the tabletop and even those people who use the 'I only play for fun' card get bored of losing eventually...
Any of a dozen blogs, forums and websites can tell you what the best units from the new codices are (often before they're even released) and the older books optimum unit configurations have been well documented for a long time. We all know how useful Long Fangs are, how much fire-power three Predators can lay down, how useful a hundred point Librarian can be in support of your army, etc. and there lies the fundamental problem that some stuff is just better than other stuff. No matter how hard a developer attempts to create a balanced system there will ALWAYS be an optimal set of units that make up the best army possible I'm afraid...
Of course the Games Workshop party line is that '6th Edition' 40K is going to shake-up the system, include units that were never viable before and generally be the war-gaming equivalent of *Insert your deity of preference appearing/disappearing/doing something miraculous here*. I hope that they're right...but I have the feeling that we're just going to swap one set of mono-build armies for a completely different set of mono-build armies and that's a bit depressing.....
Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.
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