"Age of Sigmar: How to balance forces/games????" Topic

Gentlefolk, Age of Sigmar has now been around for almost a year. What clever ideas have been developed to balance games/armies/battles??

My 12 year old loves the simple rules that flow more easily and are only 4 pages long. So we are trying them again. But we are still struggling to find a way to balance our battles and scenarios??

We haven't bought all the books that have been released because they're expensive in Australia and we dont play Stormcast or Khorne.

We can houserule the silly thing about measuring from the extreme tip of the model rather than the base. But the lack of a points system remains a frustrating problem for him. Counting wounds, or warscrolls still produces very lop-sided battles.

We are planning to try using the WFB 8th Edition points system just to generate forces?? Has anyone else found that method works ok?

Thanks, Nick

do you need an age of sigmar comp system
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Since GW's pricing structure seems to be more about how effective a unit/figure is in-game, instead of material costs, etc., why not just use Recommended Retail Price as a points cost. [Not what you paid, what the price is on GW's website.] So, for example, you have a aus$500 battle.

Jericho Smith beat me to it.

i believe a lot of people use the number of starting wounds in the force as a rough balancing mechanic.

the couple games that I have played have been more scenario based, so I haven't tried it. Its a fun, fast, wild game overall, so my group hasn't worried too much about balance.

Strangely enough we haven't had any problem balancing the games.

I don't know that a points based system is going to work with the games being as scenario based as they are. You more have to fit the army to the task at hand and that is going to depend on terrain type and placement as much as anything else.

Since the forces work more-or-less the same as they have in previous editions using 8th or any of the older editions points systems should give you a reasonable approximation for just a straight up fight. But when you combine that with the scenarios you're going to need to field 1000 pts vs 1400 pts in some scenarios vs. even points in another.

One trick would be to have one person pick the scenario, the armies and set up the board and let the other person pick which side they want to play.

Also depending on the armies there are some fairly equivalent units, again, depending on the scenario.

The way that AoS plays even if you had a points system inherent to the game it probably wouldn't work anyway.

The idea is to have story driven games, not really competitive ones.

Maybe if you came up with a story line for a given war band and then had them encounter the other force in relation to that it wouldn't be as frustrating. Alternately have one of you be the game mater and set up the scenario with a bunch of random stuff built in.

I use the retail price idea as a guide for my games and have ended up with 4 pretty equally balanced forces.

I have the 7th and 8th edition starter boxes plus a battalion box each. Plus each army gets a roughly equal priced box/model in turn. Dwarf, Night Goblin, High Elf, and Skaven.

Each plays different yet all have had a pretty equal win/loss ratio to each other at this point.

The only house rule we have used is the measure from base rather then model.

My first recommendation is that you play scenarios (they call them Battleplans) that you can find in the books (or in pdfs you can buy via the Age of Sigmar app.) rather than lining up the two forces and letting them just kill each other. The scenarios are interesting and I think they help with the force balance.

Beyond that, in the games I've played we've just "eyeballed" things or used the number of wounds as a rough guide. Yes, neither method will produce perfect balance, but I haven't found the lack of perfect balance an obstacle to having a fun game.

Honestly, if you have even a little experience with playing the game you'll be able to tell from intuition whether force balance is far out of kilter.

Two guidelines we use:

1. Use Wounds as a rough guide. If both forces have (roughly) the same number of Heroes and Monsters, it will balance quite nicely. If one side has more Monsters or Heroes, give the other side 10-20% more wounds. You son is 12, so give him 10-20% more anyway :)

2. Use Battleplans (this will mean picking up a book :)). The Battleplans have a _lot_ of self-balancing mechanisms – plus you will enjoy the objectives more anyway.

Do those two things, and you will be well on your way.

RRP for points cost? That is just a brilliant idea, so simple, yet so apt!

Of course it would mean grand point numbers for Australian games, though your force would suddenly become massively cheaper as soon as you take it abroad.

They are working now to put out points for Age of Sigmar.

Yep, just saw it. Great news, they might start to sell me figures again. My 12 year old will be excited.

Wonder what changed their minds? Slow sales …. ?