Guest Author Simon Leen
It
is quite common to hear that everything else being equal, the more
balanced a list, the more likely you are to win a tournament with it and
that we therefore ought all to be taking balanced lists to tournaments.
The reasoning behind this claim, as I understand it, is that if you
bring an unbalanced list, there is a high percentage that at some point
over the course of a tournament, you will run into a list that counters
yours and therefore lose the game and fail to win the tournament. Taking
a balanced list does not ensure that you win the tournament, but it
does ensure that you’ll have a shot at doing so. It has long struck me
that this advice is only applicable to a certain narrow band of
tournament players and that it is more reasonable for the rest of us to
be taking unbalanced lists.
For
the sake of clarity, allow me to idealize tournament games such that a
game between two equally skilled players playing the same army is just
as likely to be won by one as the by the other. There is any number of
factors that might shift the probability in favor of one player or the
other, but I am here only interested in two. First, they might be
playing different armies, and this may or may not have an effect on who
is most likely to win. We can argue about whether lists have absolute
quality, but they clearly have relative quality. That is, there are
pairs of lists such that one of the two is more likely to win against
the other than to lose, given equal general skill.
An
army that is what we will call ‘perfectly balanced’ will not impact the
ability of the general running it to win any match, while what we will
call ‘perfectly imbalanced’ will ensure victory half of your opponents
and ensure defeat against the other half
The
other variable is player skill. The more skilled I am relative to you,
the more likely I am to win our games. While this is not obviously the
case, I believe that the impact relative player skill has on games is
partially a function of relative army quality. My assumption, which I
will only defend with examples, is that the closer the armies are in
relative quality, the more relative player skill matters. Take two
generals, A and B. A is moderately more skilled than B. Suppose further
that A and B are running perfectly balanced armies. A will, I submit,
win more games by a comfortable margin. Now suppose A and B are playing
perfectly imbalanced armies. If A is playing the better army, he will
still win all of his games, and if he is playing the worse army, he will
still lose all of his games. We see in the first example that relative
player skill has a large effect when the armies are evenly matched and
no effect when they are very poorly matched. This should make sense;
generalship has a larger effect on the game as the general has more
control over what happens, and we should expect a general to have more
control over a game as the effect of other variables is minimized.
The
point of all of this is as follows. Suppose you are an excellent
general. If you bring an unbalanced list and pull good match-ups, you
win. If you bring an unbalanced list and pull bad match-ups, you lose.
If you bring a balanced list, it doesn’t matter what sort of match-ups
you pull, as you can be assured that your army will, at worst, only be
slightly out-matched. And, since you are an excellent general, you stand
a good chance of overcoming a slight army mis-match. So, for an
excellent general, bringing a balanced list is a good idea.
Suppose,
however, that you are, like me, a mediocre general. It is quite likely
that you will, at some point, run into a better general. Suppose I run
into a better general with my balanced list. I am quite likely to lose.
Suppose however, that I brought an unbalanced list. If his list is a bad
match-up, I lose. But if his list is a good match-up for me, I stand a
decent chance of winning. I need the imbalance in list quality to make
up my deficient generalship.
To
use a real life example, Ben Mohlie, Alex Fennell, and their ilk play
at the tournaments that my local store puts on. By the time the last
round rolls around, I’m frequently playing on one of the top tables
against one of these guys. Baring extreme luck or a bad army match-up
for them, they’re going to beat me. I can’t control the luck, but I can
control how likely it is that my army will be a bad match-up for theirs.
The more one-dimensional my list, the more likely I’ll get lucky and
the tools to deal with his army. And if I get unlucky with my unbalanced
list and pull a bad-match up early against a worse general and don’t
even make it to the final tables, well, the end outcome isn’t any worse
than I had brought a balanced list and lost on the top table in the last
round.
The argument makes sense. Essentially, the better of a general one is, the less they need to gamble. I, frankly, am a lousy general, so I roll with 40k's biggest gamble in Daemons. Their strangeness has won me many more games than I have a right to claim by my own generalship.
ReplyDeleteIt also depends on your long term goals. Taking an unbalanced list will eventually win you a tournament, particularly a small local gameshop tournament, because you will eventually luck out and have just the right paper to the good player's stone.
ReplyDeleteHowever playing such an army rarely improves your generalship over time. Playing a balanced list over time should improve your generalship. Having to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your list vs their list and having to come up with tactics to exploit your strengths and their weaknesses will make you a better general over time. Playing a very unbalanced army that has little in the way of options means you have to make less decisions, and less opportunities to learn which tactics do and don't work in different scenarios.
Rathstar
Rathstar, very true. Although I do very much enjoy trying to pull out a win with an outclassed army.
ReplyDeleteso...part II?
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