The Warhammer Studio takes matched play seriously. It’s not only the framework for thousands of games played at competitive events throughout the year, it also forms the common language of more casual games played on kitchen tables, at gaming clubs, and in stores around the world. A balanced game is good for everyone.
This article marks the return of regular Warhammer 40,000 Metawatch articles, which will be penned by the Warhammer Studio to keep you informed of the changes we’re making to the game – and provide some of the reasoning behind them. You may have seen a similar article recently from the Warhammer Age of Sigmar team – so today we’ll explain how and why the Warhammer 40,000 team has been collating data from events around the world.
The Goals
The Warhammer 40,000 setting is one of perpetual conflict – if one army was just better than the others, the identity of the game would fall apart. People who play predominantly for the challenge – rather than to tell stories with their models on the tabletop – would just choose the dominant faction, without considering aesthetics and playstyle. As such, there shouldn’t ever be one “best” army – each army should be the best at doing the thing it’s meant to be best at. That’s the ideal, both from a narrative and competitive perspective.
Game balance is really important – anyone starting a Warhammer 40,000 army, whether they’re brand new to the hobby or branching out, should be able to do so safe in the knowledge that they have a fighting chance against any other faction in the game. That’s true whether they’ve settled on an army because of how it looks or how it fights – in the setting or the lore.
The Calculations
When assessing balance, we use an army’s Win Rate as the key metric – which, just like it sounds, is how many of their games they win. If an army has played 100 games and won 50, they’d have a 50% win rate. That would be great – optimal in fact. In an ideal world each army would have a win rate of exactly 50%, but ideal worlds don’t exist in the grim darkness of the far future (where they are mostly on fire or being invaded by monsters).
Therefore, we afford a margin of error of 5% either way in the data we collect, and aim for each army to show win rates between 45% and 55% – if it’s higher, it suggests the faction’s overperforming relative to its rivals, and if it’s lower it suggests they’re struggling to keep up.
There are posters printed (regularly) and displayed in the Warhammer Studio to show each faction’s performance, as well as the overall trends in the game. This is the metagame, the state of Warhammer 40,000 as a game beyond each individual match. Influencing the trends to keep all the armies as close to 50% as possible is how we as rules writers get to engage with the game even when we’re not rolling dice.
The Data
Here’s the latest data, gathered from over 200,000 games played using the War Zone Nephilim mission pack since its release in June this year:
Most of the factions fall in that sweet spot, which suggests that overall the armies – and the game – are pretty well balanced. A few find themselves on either side – there are several reasons for this, and a number of things we can do to influence those results.
Factions and Factors
You’ll see that Adeptus Astartes armies (those made using Codex: Space Marines) fall into the underperforming category, with a win rate of just 39%. Space Marine armies are incredibly prevalent, as the iconic armoured face of the 41st Millennium. They’re often new players’ first army – and it’s fair to say that most people aren’t especially gifted at the noble art of Warhammer 40,000 when they first start playing. It also means most players are quite familiar with them – and how to play against them. This is part of why their results don’t quite match their indomitable reputation.
Although each army has its own characteristic fighting style, certain features are common to several factions. Space Marine Chapters, the various Traitor Legions, the Adepta Sororitas, and even the Necron dynasties have a great deal setting them apart from one another, but they can all call upon a variety of squads equipped with a 3+ Save and keep foes at bay with boltguns or other medium-range weapons.
Such forces are sometimes referred to as MEQ (Marine Equivalent), and there are tactics that apply equally when commanding or combating such armies. Factions like the Harlequins or Genestealer Cults, on the other hand, play very differently, with units and special rules that are harder to compare. As such, they have more of a learning curve, rivals are less familiar with them, and the players who master them tend to be more experienced than most.
Note that with fewer players commanding these esoteric armies, an individual string of wins or losses can have more impact on the data than it might with more popular forces.
For example, if one faction plays 10 games and wins five, and another faction plays 1,000 games and wins 500, both of those factions will have a 50% win rate. However, each win or loss for the faction with fewer games has a larger impact on their win rate – they each represent 10% of the total results, rather than 0.1%. Factions with more players therefore see smaller changes to their win rates with every result recorded.
The Future
While we’re pretty satisfied with the number of armies hovering around the 50% mark, every new set of rules brings changes with it. The Leagues of Votann haven’t had a chance to make their mark on the competitive scene yet – but we’ve no doubt they will, once they’ve been recruited into people’s collections, and enemy commanders have worked out how to combat them. They’re not currently included in the statistics, but we’ll include their results in our regular data-sweeps once the whole range is available.
The Adeptus Mechanicus, on the other hand, are still propping up the results table. We’ll continue to review their performance ahead of the upcoming Balance Dataslate later this month.
We’ve instituted the quarterly Balance Dataslates as a way of responding to the developing metagame – adding or removing keywords, restricting particular units that were dominating battlefields, and even introducing new abilities for armies that have yet to receive an updated codex. We’ll talk more about the Balance Dataslates in the next Metawatch article, as it’s getting close to that time of the year…
Making points values free to download in the Munitorum Field Manual also allows us to be more responsive to feedback from the community, and make changes to points where necessary in a format everyone can access. Changes to points values are much more granular and targeted than the changes found in the Balance Dataslates, but together they are powerful tools in building a balanced game for everyone.
It’s an iterative process, and something of a moving target – which gives us plenty of opportunities to talk about different aspects of it in future Metawatch articles!
We’d like to thank everyone who continues to help us in our quest for game balance, whether that’s by organising events, playing in them and sharing the results, or emailing us at 40KFAQ@gwplc.com with questions about the game. Let us know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see discussed in future!
* NOTE: Not all events specify codex supplements in the data they gather, so we've rolled most of the Space Marine Chapters together, except where we have sufficient data to give them their own entry. Stats for Chapters such as the Salamanders and Iron Hands, as well as the Deathwatch, are included in this number.