Balanced Non-Symmetrical Match Play

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

I know for many the idea of non-symmetrical match play is a bit oxymoronic.  
 

But as my handle suggests I primarily come to Age of Sigmar from a perspective of having fun vs being competitive.  The reality is though if you want to play frequently and/or play outside of your own small gaming group in order to experience the breadth and depth the game has to offer you’re going to play a lot if match play.  And that typically means playing the mainly symmetrical battleplans in the General’s Handbook.  
 

Why?  Because symmetrical objectives has become pretty synonymous with “fair” for match play.  And while I “get it” I also usually quickly get bored with it.  In part because it is very repetitive and thus allows the gameplay to fall into some pretty basic patterns.  But mainly because as a student of history I know that rarely, if ever, do two armies fighting each other have the exact same objectives.  One army is defending a position, for example, while another tries and take the position.  Or one army is attempting an orderly retreat while the other is trying to envelope and crush it.  Maybe one army is trying to cross a territory and the other is simply trying to harass it and slow it down.

Now this is fantasy but that doesn’t mean we have to settle for the abstraction of symmetrical objectives.  And in many of the battletomes we have some great examples of non-symmetrical battleplans that better reflect what I discussed above.  But with many of them it is reasonable to suggest that they aren’t very well balanced.

By that I mean that the probability of achieving your objective and or denying your opponent theirs is not relatively equitable.  This is fine for fun or narrative play of course but trying to get a more match play oriented player to agree to these conditions can be tough.

Are there good ways to balance non-symmetrical objectives for match play?  I have a few ideas but I am really interested in learning what others have to say about the issue.

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

The first option I considered was for 1v1 matches, as opposed to a tournament setting where multiple games will be played against multiple players over a day or to.  Still, upfront it’s biggest drawback is the time requirement.

The first and simpler variant I’ve always been interested in trying is where any battleplan (symmetrical or not) is played through once with each player controlling the army they brought to the table.  At the end of the first game the players then switch armies and play through the same battleplan.  The appeal of this to me is that it can neutralize some asymmetries in lists (e.g, as was frequently created by older vs newer tomes when I first started playing) and get to who is the better tactician.  In other words if I can not only beat you with my own army, but then turn around and under the same conditions beat my original army with yours chances are I am not just a better list builder than you but a better player.  Playing an unfamiliar army of course raises the difficulty but both players should be facing the same basic difficulty.  (The added appeal for me if this scenario is the ability to experience playing armies I may not otherwise have a chance to.

But as noted above this plan works equally well with the symmetrical battleplans in the General’s Handbook as it would in non-symmetrical battle plans.  Given my focus on the latter an alternative variant would still involve two run throughs of the battleplan but instead of swapping armies (which I admit may create more issues than I’m addressing here for a variety of reasons) the players swap objectives.  In other words if this battleplan calls for one defender and one attacker the players take a turn in each role.  
 

Ultimately though this “balance” is external to the individual matches.  (It’s probably an excellent way to identify unbalanced battleplans in fact through simply seeing if one objective almost always wins regardless of who is playing each side.)  And my interest is far more in identify methods that would provide internal balance to non-symmetrical battleplans....

[DerZauberer]

I personally love the idea of asymmetrical battle plans. But somehow, in age of sigmar, i've never seen an example of a "good" asymmetrical battle plan. There was at least 5 attempts in our gaming group to find a good, fun looking asymmetrical battleplan which isn't outright whacky and absolute one-sided. Would be really glad if people could suggest me some and where they are printed.

In 40.000 (where i've started the hobby) we somehow managed to get a lot of those asymmetrical games in and they were always huge fun. And even when not using the pre-made asymmetrical missions, the Mealstrom of War cards and the objective placement phase made each game very distinct. But, ofcourse, sometimes people got outright unlucky with their draws or their army composition could not handle the mission. But games were always fun where you did the impossible to achieve this one objective card and gain a good laughter out of it. It's the way to go in 40.000 i think to have the most fun. Especially with the new rules for selfmade decks in Mealstrom of War since ChapterApproved 2019.

AoS handles symmetrical battleplan much better then 40.000. Eternal War missions (the symmetrical ones) in 40.000 tend to shoot each other up and decide in turn 3 who has more stuff on the board and wins.Tactical decisions are mostly how to split or arrange their firepower to disarm the enemy and meta is defined how good certain rules/weapons handle those situations.  Age of Sigmar  makes you really think about positioning and movement as engaging/ doing damage isn't as integral to the game as in 40.000. But those AoS games get dull so fast... take and hold objectives, with the only factors being 1)who can hold it 2) where is it and 3) how many points does it give. 

I agree that playing two games with alternating objectives on a asymetrical map makes a cool competetive experience - but playing two games of AoS to decide one matchup is very time consuming. But it would up list building to another level as you need to keep an eye for good units in the role of the attacker but also in the role of a defender. It can be truely a competetive experience.

Armyswap sounds like an competetive experience, but in experience it can get the opposite. If player A wins with army 1 and player B wins with army 1, it only says that army 1 is stronger. But yeah, when player A wins with army 1 and 2 it speaks for player A that he knows both armies well and knows how to play them, impressive if you consider the amount of rules and bookkeeping in play.

I would love eternal war cards for age of sigmar, it would probably cause me to only ever play age of sigmar, but currently, while i like the rules and models in age of sigmar the most and we play more AoS games then 40.000, the greatest and most fun games for me, to date, were fought in the far future.

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by DerZauberer

[Phasteon]

36 minutes ago, DerZauberer said:

I personally love the idea of asymmetrical battle plans. But somehow, in age of sigmar, i've never seen an example of a "good" asymmetrical battle plan. There was at least 5 attempts in our gaming group to find a good, fun looking asymmetrical battleplan which isn't outright whacky and absolute one-sided. Would be really glad if people could suggest me some and where they are printed.

In 40.000 (where i've started the hobby) we somehow managed to get a lot of those asymmetrical games in and they were always huge fun. And even when not using the pre-made asymmetrical missions, the Mealstrom of War cards and the objective placement phase made each game very distinct. But, ofcourse, sometimes people got outright unlucky with their draws or their army composition could not handle the mission. But games were always fun where you did the impossible to achieve this one objective card and gain a good laughter out of it. It's the way to go in 40.000 i think to have the most fun. Especially with the new rules for selfmade decks in Mealstrom of War since ChapterApproved 2019.

AoS handles symmetrical battleplan much better then 40.000. Eternal War missions (the symmetrical ones) in 40.000 tend to shoot each other up and decide in turn 3 who has more stuff on the board and wins.Tactical decisions are mostly how to split or arrange their firepower to disarm the enemy and meta is defined how good certain rules/weapons handle those situations.  Age of Sigmar  makes you really think about positioning and movement as engaging/ doing damage isn't as integral to the game as in 40.000. But those AoS games get dull so fast... take and hold objectives, with the only factors being 1)who can hold it 2) where is it and 3) how many points does it give. 

I agree that playing two games with alternating objectives on a asymetrical map makes a cool competetive experience - but playing two games of AoS to decide one matchup is very time consuming. But it would up list building to another level as you need to keep an eye for good units in the role of the attacker but also in the role of a defender. It can be truely a competetive experience.

Armyswap sounds like an competetive experience, but in experience it can get the opposite. If player A wins with army 1 and player B wins with army 1, it only says that army 1 is stronger. But yeah, when player A wins with army 1 and 2 it speaks for player A that he knows both armies well and knows how to play them, impressive if you consider the amount of rules and bookkeeping in play.

I would love eternal war cards for age of sigmar, it would probably cause me to only ever play age of sigmar, but currently, while i like the rules and models in age of sigmar the most and we play more AoS games then 40.000, the greatest and most fun games for me, to date, were fought in the far future.

 

I don‘t know if its in the core book or a ghb, but there were actual maelstrom cards for AoS so you could randomly generate objectives for each of your turns, making the game more dynamic. 

[chord]

Asymmetrical battle plans can be a lot of fun, but you need to redefine the terms of winning.   For example maybe you're the rear guard and you just need to survive for x battle rounds, or need to destroy y pieces of terrain.  

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

3 hours ago, DerZauberer said:

In 40.000 (where i've started the hobby) we somehow managed to get a lot of those asymmetrical games in and they were always huge fun. And even when not using the pre-made asymmetrical missions, the Mealstrom of War cards and the objective placement phase made each game very distinct.

The Maelstrom of War option for AoS sounds very interesting with objectives shifting turn by turn.

Obviously they weren’t that dynamic but I was initially very excited by Hidden Agendas.  My very first tournament game was against the White Dwarf Slaanesh battalion with the extra summoning points.  By the end there were six KoS on the table.  Before any units were placed or any dice were rolled I knew I couldn’t win the battleplan.  My Hidden Agenda if killing his highest wound model gave me something to play for and I’ll admit a real sense of satisfaction when I took down one of the KoS.

But the reality is that Hidden Agendas seem largely to be used to separate out undefeated lists at the top.  In addition, your opponent has nothing to lose pts wise if you achieve your Hidden Agenda.  In combination this means that Hidden Agendas really don’t offer that true alternative objective I am looking for.

They did get me thinking though about potential ways this might be accomplished within the symmetrical battleplans that define match play today.  One concept I am playing around with is Faction-specific Objectives.  The idea is that based on its key traits and characteristics each faction would have six potential objectives they could be trying to achieve.

I’ve been doing a lot with Khorne lately so I’ll give a pretty simple example using them:

1) Skulls for the Skull Throne: collect half the skulls (e.g. half the models, rounded up) of your opponent’s army by the battle’s end

2) Blood for the Blood God: generate wounds equivalent to half (rounded up) your opponent’s starting total by the battle’s end

3) Khorne Cares Not: generate Blood Tithe equivalent time half (rounded up) the total combined starting units of your opponent and your own army

4) Hatred of the Arcane: unbind 8 spells and kill at least one of your opponent’s wizards before the battle’s end

5) Leave None Before You Alive: destroy all of your opponent’s units that are on the table at the beginning of Round 1 (e.g. excludes units in ambush/reserve and any units summoned during game)

6) None Left Standing: your army has displeased Khorne and must sacrifice itself.  All units originally on table at beginning of Round 1must be destroyed by end of the battle.  I like this one for going up against OP lists and it is something that could be modified for each faction.

Again, adapt objectives to each Faction’s specifics.  Sylvaneth for example could have an objective where they need at least half their army to survive to protect the seed pods.  Tzeentch could have spell based objectives.  And so forth.  The key is that they have to be big enough objectives that achieving them stands as a true alternative to the battleplan objective.

The way I’d have it work in a tournament setting is as follows:  

- each match would be worth 10 potential points

- winning a major victory in the battleplan is worth 4 pts, minor victory 2, and minor loss 1

- achieving your own Faction Objective is worth 3 pts

- preventing your opponent from achieving their Faction Objective is worth 3 pts

The last one is worth going into a little more detail on my thinking.  Like Hidden Agendas you would not tell your opponent what your objective was before or during the game.  This reflects the reality that in war the specific objective of the other army isn’t always clear.  But certainly you would be trying to figure out what it is during the game.  In the above if you were playing Khorne you could be asking yourself if your opponent is just trying to generate some Blood Tithe by charging that unit into a bad situation or are they trying to sacrifice everyone?

To me this creates a win the battle, lose the war dynamic to even basic match play battleplans like Knife to the Heart (which seems to be everyone’s favorite intro to match play plan).  Let’s say this is a Khorne v Sylvaneth match-up and the Khorne player is going for Skulls for the Skull Throne while the Sylvaneth player has chosen that preservation objective.  Due to some very timely teleports and what the Sylvaneth player thought was a good job of dragging the majority of the Khorne player’s units off their objective and into the middle of the battlefield they win the battleplan and score 4 pts.  But they lost more than half their models in holding that middle ground which means that they failed their faction objective AND the Khorne player achieved theirs.  So Khorne scores 6 pts, making the Sylvaneth victory a Pyrrhic one.

 

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

6 minutes ago, chord said:

Asymmetrical battle plans can be a lot of fun, but you need to redefine the terms of winning.   For example maybe you're the rear guard and you just need to survive for x battle rounds, or need to destroy y pieces of terrain.  

I love these types of battleplans.  How have you approached the idea of balancing them so that the survival of the rearguard and its destruction are reasonably proportional?  Personally I’m fine playing a game where the odds are stacked against me.  Love a good challenge and at worst usually learn something in my failures.  But with so much focus on fairness from many (most?) match play centric players how have you addressed this?

[chord]

1 hour ago, Beer & Pretzels Gamer said:

I love these types of battleplans.  How have you approached the idea of balancing them so that the survival of the rearguard and its destruction are reasonably proportional?  Personally I’m fine playing a game where the odds are stacked against me.  Love a good challenge and at worst usually learn something in my failures.  But with so much focus on fairness from many (most?) match play centric players how have you addressed this?

Oh,  for these style games I just play with people who understand its not a matched style game.  Its competitive but not "fair"

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

3 hours ago, chord said:

Oh,  for these style games I just play with people who understand its not a matched style game.  Its competitive but not "fair"

Same.  Fortunate to have a great gaming group that’s into narrative and thus down for stuff like that.  We’ll kick off or next narrative cycle this weekend.

But it isn’t just an AoS gaming group and a lot of the time we have more players than can comfortably play AoS so we’ll switch to a board game like Scythe or even something like Wings of War.

And again the other downside is that playing these type of games only in my gaming group means playing a limited number of factions.  If I want to play against Fyreslayers, or IDK, or DoK, or Slaanesh, or Gitz, or myriad other armies I have to expand my play out to the larger local gaming community...  which almost inevitably means match play.

Again, not end of the world and realize I’m lucky to have 3-4 other players who are usually down for narrative/asymmetrical  but given how much fun w have can’t help but wish there was a better way to bring it out to the larger local gaming community.  Hence this thread...

 

[Evangelist of Cinders]

A lot of the battle plans in the battle tomes are quite non-symmetrical (Cities "call for aid springs to mind).  It can be tricky to find (a lot of deep dives in the web or ebay purchases) but the old WHFB skirmish, Black Gobbo and white dwarf magazines had asymmetrical games which some tweaks could be adapted to AoS

Two that come to mind and I've crudely done off the top of my head.MAybe I should just make a blog of this

Simple  (Storm of Chaos Rearguard/last stand)

Defender deployment zone is 2/3 of the board

Attacker gets twice as many points as the Defender every-time a non-unique attacker  unit/hero is wiped out they can be redeployed on the attackers table edge at the start of  their next turn.

Defender's goal is to have any units survive at the end of turn 5

may need some restrictions on what can be take(ex. Defender can only take generic ORder,Chaos artifacts and command traits, no named heroes )

Ambush(Complicated from Warhammer skirmish)

for example fill a board with woods segments(or some other similar obstructive thick fantastical terrain Flesh Coral, Mercury Swamps,Crystal Kloofs ect.) in a manner where you can you can mark segmentss with numbers, foot print, 4"x4" squares,grid the board ect .  have a winding path of a decent enough width to move down for the models bases foot print to  walk down the length of the board in say 5-6 turns.  one army  can only take Battle line and a single hero they are the attackers. The other can build how ever they want.

the Defender deploys on there end give them 10-15% of the board on the Road, their goal is to get their heroes to the end of the road on the other side of the board. If a hero moves off the table edge on the other side of the board they are taken off the table and safe

The attacker doesnt deploy their units all are kept in reserve their goal is to kill more then half of  heros with an artifact, a general or a Named hero

Every turn (attacker or defender) at the defender rolls a d6 and can then place up to that many units or their hero in a terrain sector if its the defenders turn they cant do anything else, if its the attackers they may behave normally. Lastly the Terrain conceals traps and further ambushes at the end of Every phase A defender unit is wholley within a segment (or Wholly off the road if you don't have the terrain for a thick Forrest) takes  a Mortal wound

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

As a side observation in my limited experience many of the non-symmetrical battleplans in the tomes can be made symmetrical.  For example in the Khorne tome there is a battleplan where the opponent’s objective is to destroy the Skull Altar.  In January we modified this for the second battle of a Khorne vs LoA Execution Herd narrative.  As the latter doesn’t have its own faction terrain we swapped in a Herdstone (dedicated to Hashut of course!) so each side could have one.  Used the 20 wounds, no Save for each from the original battleplan.

For a little more flavor we also determined that the gods themselves had launched Endless Spells/Judgements at the other’s “temple” with Hashut sending a Wildfire Taurus straight at the Skull Altar and Khorne sending a Wrath Axe.  Was a fun way to incorporate these models as we didn’t include them in the cost of the army, they couldn’t be dismissed, but they also only traveled in a straight line and when they hit their target they exploded.

I have to believe we can do the reverse though to and find ways to provide balance in a battleplan with asymmetries.  The “flavor” above may be one way as one of the issues with making the terrain a target is that the Damage going into that is NOT going into your opponent’s units.  Effectively then the Defender gets a “free” extra 20 Wounds.  Could these be balanced out with a free Predatory spell capable of dealing out an extra 20 wounds over the course of a game, even if some restrictions, as in the above, are placed on its use?

Another potential insight from that game related to the placement of the objectives.  We were playing with territories on the diagonal and the terrain pieces in back corner 12” from each edge.  In hindsight this was a little too deep and reduced the probability of a major victory.  If, then, only one of us was going after a terrain piece where that terrain piece is put could make a big difference to the balance.  (I believe in the original battleplan the Skull Altar is dead center.)

[Carnelian]

I know it’s not what you meant, but I always think it’s worth reminding everyone that even in a “normal” matched play game, it’s not a symmetrical experience unless you use exactly the same armies and lists!

so much of what makes aos so fun is the asymmetrical abilities that each army has

Edited February 29, 2020 by Carnelian

[chord]

On 2/28/2020 at 1:47 PM, Beer & Pretzels Gamer said:

Same.  Fortunate to have a great gaming group that’s into narrative and thus down for stuff like that.  We’ll kick off or next narrative cycle this weekend.

But it isn’t just an AoS gaming group and a lot of the time we have more players than can comfortably play AoS so we’ll switch to a board game like Scythe or even something like Wings of War.

And again the other downside is that playing these type of games only in my gaming group means playing a limited number of factions.  If I want to play against Fyreslayers, or IDK, or DoK, or Slaanesh, or Gitz, or myriad other armies I have to expand my play out to the larger local gaming community...  which almost inevitably means match play.

Again, not end of the world and realize I’m lucky to have 3-4 other players who are usually down for narrative/asymmetrical  but given how much fun w have can’t help but wish there was a better way to bring it out to the larger local gaming community.  Hence this thread...

 

I moved last summer to a new area, and have not found anyone yet who is not super competitive so I've not played AOS in about a year.  But I was lucky to have people who would play in skirmish leagues, narrative games and enjoy it.  

[Beer & Pretzels Gamer]

So I think I’ve attached the picture below of the basic set up for a narrative game our group will be playing in the next week or two.

The match will be a Khorne Mortals vs Sylvaneth.  

The  Sylvaneth have tricked the Khorne army into splitting in half with the Cavalry now on one side of the Awakened Wyldwood line and the Infantry on the other before sprinting their trap.

The objective for Khorne is to reunite their army by getting 2/3 of their units (and leaders) on one side or the other before more than 50% of their army (measured by Wounds) is lost.  The Sylvaneth objective is to destroy one side of the army completely.

Given it is narrative I don’t have to be as worried about perfect balance (particularly as this match is part of a larger narrative) but thought it was a good example of a battleplan I’d want to see in regular match play if I could find a way to balance it.