Balancing the Grimdark Future (and the Age of Fantasy) - Pt. 1 (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

So, this week we'll be releasing the AI rules along with a series of smaller updates, which means that finally we get to focus on the new armybooks and the balance updates that's coming with them.

We've going to be posting a full list of all the things that are going to be changing as part of the balance update, but first we'd like to give you an insight as to why exactly these changes are coming.

Balancing the Grimdark Future (and the Age of Fantasy)

Since the beginning of the project we've been making an effort to try to keep our games as balanced as possible whilst not straying too far away from the source material that everyone is familiar with.

This has served us well for a while, but as time passed and we started working on one edition after the other, we decided to change things to strive for a more balanced game.

For example we decided that all units should be able to damage all units so that there is never an enemy that's impossible to kill, or make it so that a roll of 1 is always a failure and a roll of 6 is always a success, putting a cap on modifier shenanigans.

We made a lot of small changes and efforts to try and combat the main thing that plagues the balance of our games: the inherent rock-paper-scissors system in them.

Rock - Paper - Scissors (or Flamethrower - Battle Cannon - Fusion Rifle)

Take Grimdark Future for example. In the game Flamethrowers are great at taking out Infantry units, but they can easily be countered by Battle Tanks. In turn Battle Tanks are weak against Infantry with Fusion Rifles, which are of course going to suffer against Flamethrowers.

This means that no matter what type of unit you take there is always a counter for it, meaning that no single unit type can ever prevail... at least in theory.

What we noticed over time is that whilst this system works well, it doesn't work well for every army, because not every army has access to all types of units, and therefore not every army can actually compete with all others.

Again let's take Grimdark Future for example. The Battle Brothers work very well because their basic troops have access to Flamethrowers, Plasma Rifles and Fusion Rifles, so they can take on all threats. The Alien Hives on the other hand are kind of screwed, because their basic troops don't have access to any of that, meaning that they have a harder time competing.

So, what are we going to do about this?

Whilst there are a ton of small changes that we will make to balance the game further, the biggest one you will see is that we're going to be re-working how spells casters work, as well as providing all basic infantry troops with more weapon options to deal with different types of threats.

The Unit Types (and how to kill them)

Before we move on to details on the changes, a word about unit types to give you a better idea of the logic behind these new updates.

Currently in the game we have some broad "unit types" when it comes to rock-paper-scissor mechanics, which we separate like this:

• Infantry - Regular units with average defense
• Hordes - Units with lots of models and low defense
• Spam - Multiple small units with low defense
• Heavy - Units with few models but high defense
• Tanks - Single models with high defense and high tough values
• Heroes - Single models with tough values that can hide in other units

Each one of these can be taken out easily using the right tools:

• Infantry - Weapons with lots of attacks like Flamethrowers
• Hordes - Spells that deal as many hits as models in the unit
• Spam - Special rules that affect multiple units in a close radius
• Heavy - Weapons with AP(2-3) or Rending like Plasma Rifles or Miniguns
• Tanks - Weapons with AP(3-4) and Deadly(3-6) or spells that deal multiple wounds
• Heroes - Spells that target single models or weapons with the Sniper rule

If you look at your army lists right now you can see that they probably have tools to take care of some of these threats, but probably don't have tools to take care of all of these threats.

This is what we intend to change. We want to give everyone access to different weapons, spells and special rules so that they can take out each one of these unit types if they bring the right tools.

In order to make sure that the armies don't all start feeling the same we'll be splitting up how these tools are giving into different categories, so whilst one army might be great at taking out Hordes with Flamethrowers, another might use Spells for that instead.

This way we can maintain some of he flavor of each army, whilst making sure that everyone has access to all the tools they need to take care of enemy threats.

I'm going to stop here for now not to overwhelm you, but I hope you enjoyed this little insight into how things are changing. :)

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Interested in finding out more about the upcoming balance changes? Stay tuned for next week's update where we delve deeper into changes to spells, upgrade lists, melee combat and more!

Cheers,

Gaetano