Is this game well balanced?

[Gorrath]

I'm about to start playing this game and was wondering how well balanced this game is?

Every miniature has a lot of abilities so I'm guessing there is probably some broken combos out there.

So, is there any overpowered masters/crews?

Or is there any masters/crews that are a lot weaker than most of the others?

I saw a lot of people talking about Hamelin, Kirai, Leveticus and Pandora.

Are they just annoying or broken?

Right now, I'm thinking about playing a Lady Justice crew or a Viktorias crew.

Are they competitive at all?

Thanks

Edited August 1, 2011 by Gorrath

[Redd.Cohen]

Honestly, it's not an imbalanced game. Some people just know how to play their crews well. Lady J is pretty good and so are the Viktorias. Like I said the game is only imbalanced if you don't have the skill or right piece combos. Hope that helps.

[Q'iq'el]

There are three conditions to meet for Malifaux to be balanced:

1) Commit to it - not only learn the game, but understand you need Starter crew + options to play competitively (no need to buy it all outright, but assume you'll have to buy it over time). Depending on the master you choose, you may also need an alternative master for some missions.

- At the beginning play small. 15SS, 20SS max. That way you'll mitigate the fact you have no access to all the optional models which help in specific tasks. In small format game your opponent won't be able to bring too many of those either.

- Until you get the options, reflip strategies and encounters your crew cannot deal with. Obviously you'll need to play a bit to realize where your crew is getting a real disadvantage. You'll also need to realize it to choose the right alternative models and right secondary master.

I'm not sure what you already know, so as a reminder: In Malifaux you hire your crew after you learn your objectives and the terrain you'll be fighting in. You're supposed to pick up a master capable of dealing with the situation at hand and hire the right minions for the job. Obviously at first your options will be limited. 3~4 blisters later you'd probably be OK. It's not prohibitively expensive game, but starter is just that - a first step.

- If you lose to a crew you don't know how to beat, play against it until you beat it. This game is very complex and an experienced player has HUUUUGE advantage. You can mitigate it by playing very small crews (15SS) and by getting the experience ASAP.

After your crew gets bigger and you perhaps buy a complimentary second master, you should be able to choose a crew for any scenario and pull out all the brakes.

2) Play Strategies and Scenarios first and foremost. Game is not balanced around death matches and death matches simply don't work very well. Even Shared Slaughter (the closest you get to a Death match) is build around managing your losses and inflicting just the right amount of damage to your opponent, rather than outright tabling of your opponent.

3) Play on the right table. Malifaux is the most terrain intensive miniature game I've ever played - you play on a small table (3x3) and you virtually have to cover it with terrain (18~36 pieces is recommended in the Rules Manual). Without the right amount of terrain, some crews get out of hand (not only because of LoS for shooting, but also the movement penalties related to the terrain).

Edited August 1, 2011 by Q'iq'el

[Necromorph]

There is a thread below called "Malifaux Discussed on the Infinity Forum" that is pretty much a huge debate about the balance of the game, so there's no need to start a huge debate here.

However, for my 2c, I would say not completely. All crews have hard counters in the form of other (specific) crews, even the very good masters like Hamelin, Colette and Dreamer. However, many crews are vastly superior to the majority of others, and some are just downright underwhelming unless played in a scenario where the stars align in their favor. Thats about all I can say without offending someone and turning this into a flame war / multipage debate...again. I'll even go so far as to say that they have done a fine job with what they have, but there are 20 masters and 6 henchmen, and all of the minions are completely unique. There are very few "generic" abilities like Furious Charge, or Feel no Pain (i.e. like 40k) that are just combined differently between armies and units...every model has its own abilities, making proper balance very difficult to achieve.

I will say though, that despite my perceived imbalances, the game is wickedly fun and addictive, and so long as you're not a super cut-throat player, you will have a great time playing no matter the outcome of each game in a casual setting. If you're talking competitive, well, if you don't play one of the top, hell, I'll even say top 10 crews, you might find tournaments frustrating if you're out to win and happen to like a crew that doesn't stack up against the top tier.

Again, just my 2c.

[Mentat_Canis]

The short answer yes.

The long answer is this game is not balance master to master and was never meant to be Lady J will beat Nico 80% of the time. The game is balance on a faction to faction level for the most part the key thing to remember is that is balanced from factions and its about your victory points not who is best a killing. The best at killing is by far Guild and Neverborn but you can beat them by focusing on what you need to do.

I agree with q'iq'el that terrain is very key it should be 18-36 pieces of small terrain. But it is up there in my opinion in general balance and its fun.

[osoi]

I prety well echo all of Q'iq'el's sentiments.

I will expand specifically in relation to Lady Justice and the Viktorias. Both will perform well at a variety of strategies and schemes and while both on the surface have a very straight forward playstyle there are subtleties to each as well. Knowing this comes with experience and asking questions.

Lady Justice works well as a crew buffer and can realistically take almost any of the guild minions and have them perform for her, this gives you a wealth of options.

The Viktorias tend to operate rather independently of their crew as they wreck face, and are incredibly mobile. Their crew of mercenaries can fulfill a variety of roles but they are often higher priced models so you end up with a smaller crew (most of the time)

[glshade]

Hey thanks all these thibgs seem like good advice ... being familiar with skirmish games reading these makes decisions easier since Im ordering my first couple crews....

[Buhallin]

Coming from other skirmish games, there's a fair bit you have to unlearn. Q touched on a fair bit of it above, but I'll reiterate some of his points, and add one or two more:

- Strategies and Schemes are critical to Malifaux. People who play without them and then complain about Malifaux's balance are no different than someone who plays 40K without ranged attacks. I won't go all the way to "you're doing it wrong" but you're certainly stepping outside the box.

- Wyrd's aim for balance is faction vs. faction, not master vs. master. You can't get through a balance debate about Malifaux without someone digging out Hamelin vs. Gremlins. Yeah, it sucks hard, but it's also avoidable, because...

- You see your strategy, terrain, and know what faction your opponent is playing before you pick your crew. This is probably one of the hardest for experienced gamers to adapt to - we have a list-building structure imposed to us, where we know days and weeks in advance what we'll be playing. Malifaux gives you a capability to react - and honestly, anyone who would play Gremlins if they thought there was a chance they'd face Hamelin was going to lose anyway. This also requires a different way of thinking about your purchases - you really can't just pick a single list, buy that, and be done. You're far better off with at least 2-3 masters and a selection of minions available for your chosen faction. That said, you can still get to that point for dramatically less investment than most other minis games.

Some people dislike these things, and insist on arguing that it's a failure of balance - "What if I only WANT to play Gremlins? Why should I lose vs. Hamelin every time?" But they really are two different things.

So, there really isn't a huge debate over whether or not Malifaux's balanced, IMHO - I think it generally is, and most people accept that. The debate comes primarily from people debating and/or disliking HOW it's balanced.

[cain]

"What if I only WANT to play Gremlins? Why should I lose vs. Hamelin every time?"

Gremlins suck against a lot of crews. Not only Hamelin, vs Pandora or Dreamer its the same.

Thats why they get the allmighty Pigapult for. The answer to any problem. The only question left is if other crews have fun playing against it.

Apart from that, as it has been already stated, Malifaux is scenario based. Obviously no Crew is balanced for any objective. A slow hard to kill crew is fine for defense but bad in a race.

If you choose the crew first and the scenario after like some people do (because the like a certain crew or just have one) you just have to live with bad matchups. There can exist a lot bad matchups with the strategie you got, with the opponent, with the terrain or all at once.

Play with it and learn from it.

[Math Mathonwy]

- At the beginning play small. 15SS' date=' 20SS max. That way you'll mitigate the fact you have no access to all the optional models which help in specific tasks. In small format game your opponent won't be able to bring too many of those either.[/quote']

I kinda agree with the rest of your post (especially about experience against other crews) but this one I have a sorta differing opinion on. Or rather, I can see your reasoning and it's sound, but IMO 15-20SS games are sorta weird and not all that satisfying. You have too few minis on the table to have a good chance of completing some strategies/schemes while some others become sorta trivial. Also, since the control hand is the same size as in 35SS and cache pretty close as well, the game feels weird.

I know I felt disappointed in Malifaux during my first couple of games when I was using just starters and therefore really small crews as Masters seemed really overwhelming and the control hand seemed excessively large and the scenarios seemed kinda non-important in the face of just killing the five opposing minis.

So yeah, I kinda suggest trying on your second or third or fourth game at least one match with 35SS worth of minis per side as I feel that it really balances things out a lot.

I pretty much agree with you opinion on the whole, but wanted to ask about this specific subject - who do you feel are the hard counters to these three? Especially Colette and Dreamer? Note, I'm definitely not saying that there are no such things, just interested in your opinion on who fills those roles.

[Calmdown]

This question is easier if you distil it down a bit further.

Is Malifaux balanced as a tournament game? Absolutely not.

Is Malifaux balanced as a fun game? Definitely.

When I want to play seriously, I'll play Kirai or Collette. When I want to play for fun, I'll play Seamus, Rasputina, or Guild. Note that playing seriously is also just as much fun (personally I enjoy playing Kirai more than any other master), but playing some masters against some others (eg - most of the book 2 masters against most of the book 1 masters) is very little fun for the person on the receiving end, or the person playing with the huge advantage.

In the end, the game is what you make of it. It's always fun to play because it's so mechanically and flavourfully awesome. Just don't expect to go to tournaments and win often if you're not prepared to play the better crews.

I pretty much agree with you opinion on the whole, but wanted to ask about this specific subject - who do you feel are the hard counters to these three? Especially Colette and Dreamer? Note, I'm definitely not saying that there are no such things, just interested in your opinion on who fills those roles.

Yeh, there pretty much are no hard counters to these crews, and in all honesty there's pretty much no hard counters to any of the big crews. In fact, there's not really any hard counters to the lower power crews either. There are counters, sure, models that are more effective in certain circumstances; but because minion models have such hard variety, its very tough to hard counter a whole crew.

And no, Lady J does not hard counter Nicodem. She hard counters idiotically played Nicodem that tries to run a horde of undead up the board, maybe, but if Nicodem is playing vs Lady J then obviously a horde approach is off the menu.

Edited August 1, 2011 by Calmdown

[Soundwave]

Is Malifaux balanced as a tournament game? Absolutely not.

This statement always make me wonder what miniature game is. It sure as hell isn't latest-codex-wins-40k/whfb, and it's still a huge tournament scene. So I'd say that Malifaux is at least as balanced, imho even more, than most other miniature games out there.

[Calmdown]

This statement always make me wonder what miniature game is. It sure as hell isn't latest-codex-wins-40k/whfb, and it's still a huge tournament scene. So I'd say that Malifaux is at least as balanced, imho even more, than most other miniature games out there.

Warmachine is, and they also structure their tournaments to promote even more balance. Malifaux isn't, and the tournament structure does nothing to redress it.

40k is more balanced than a lot of people give it credit for, in the same way as Malifaux is; as long as you're playing a specific subset of the game (and not always latest Codex, but often last few codexes) it's OK.

Balance in all games - miniature, CCG, FPS, MMO, whatever - is generally a very relative concept, but that doesn't mean there isn't more that could be done. Malifaux's tournament scene could be wildly improved if they had an experienced and knowledgeable game design / organised play guy writing the rules instead of whoever wrote Gaining Ground.

[Soundwave]

Not to dig into specifics, but I play Necrons for 40k and Beastmen for WHFB, and I'm pretty sure I havn't seen either of them winning any tourneys in the last...10 or so years?

[Uncle]

Not to dig into specifics, but I play Necrons for 40k and Beastmen for WHFB, and I'm pretty sure I havn't seen either of them winning any tourneys in the last...10 or so years?

There are definitely some bad choices in the GW games, but, for the most part, it's possible to be competitive with quite a large number of books. And aren't Space Wolves and Guard the two internet best lists right now? Pretty sure they're kind of on the older side.

Malifaux is actually fairly close to balanced, although that doesn't mean that each master has an equal chance of beating every other one. Rather, they all are at about equal power-level across the board, with a few stinkers and a few that might need some holding back.

[CannonFodder]

There is a thread below called "Malifaux Discussed on the Infinity Forum" that is pretty much a huge debate about the balance of the game, so there's no need to start a huge debate here.

Please don't go there... I play a bit of Infinity and checked that thread and their comparisons are a bit off. Nuff said.

As for balance: If you only own a single Master, no. If you pick up 2 complimentary crews then yes. Some crews just can't realistically meet all the strategies, that's why you pick your crew after you flip strategies.

I'd say its as balanced as WM\H some casters are stronger than others, and there some models that counter others. It is as balanced a minis game can get while having diversity. There is only one model that people feel are not balanced, but that is for 1 strategy out of 10+ (stitched together & Slaughter), but that is because of a bad wording and a rules wrangler backing up the printed version instead of an errata. For a completely balanced game play chess or checkers.

[nilus]

Warmachine is, and they also structure their tournaments to promote even more balance. Malifaux isn't, and the tournament structure does nothing to redress it.

Well except that Malifaux tournaments are generally open faction, which means you can draft different crews each round to fit your strategy and your opponents faction. It does a lot to help the possible imbalance. I will agree that Warmachine is really well balanced at this point, but it took 4 rules sets to get there(Prime, Hordes(which changed up some things), Prime Remix and then 2nd edition). And to be honest although 2nd edition is much more balanced it feels a lot more bland then Prime/Prime remix did.

That being said I think a lot of reasons why some players think Malifaux has balance issues it that the game itself has a steep learning curve. Some crews are just a lot easier to play then others and it takes a lot of experimenting to really learn how to get your best bang for your buck out of some masters(looking at you Marcus).

[gru6y]

I still don't get the 'absolutely not balanced for tournaments'.

I would like to ask people who claim that Malifaux is not balanced to state which faction is the strongest and why and which is the weakest and why. I surely would not be able to come up with a solution to it. Hell, I'd go as far as to say that it is nigh impossible to say that faction A is better than faction B.

Also, Warmahordes is not be all end all of balance. It has factions which feel stronger/allow for more combos or are difficult to counter (Cryx/Legion) and Casters who feel much stronger than others in-faction.

[Allidor]

Warmachine is, and they also structure their tournaments to promote even more balance. Malifaux isn't, and the tournament structure does nothing to redress it.

Personally, I feel that Malifaux's tournament structure is fine. Warmahordes makes you bring 2 lists with different warcasters, whereas Malifaux just requires you to play the same faction. That allows you the full range of masters and minions of your faction to choose from to accomplish your goals.

Balance in all games - miniature, CCG, FPS, MMO, whatever - is generally a very relative concept, but that doesn't mean there isn't more that could be done. Malifaux's tournament scene could be wildly improved if they had an experienced and knowledgeable game design / organised play guy writing the rules instead of whoever wrote Gaining Ground.

What would you like to see done differently in Malifaux's tournament scene?

[Magno]

There are balanced systems out there, Malifaux is not one of them.

You can argue that Malifaux is balanced but this requires the boundary conditions to open up to the entire faction (I'm still not sure of that) and the required need of scenarios and schemes, sometimes very particular scenarios and schemes. So if anyone says Malifaux is balanced, then its not a robust balance. Its a highly conditional balance.

[mythicFOX]

Is Malifaux balanced as a tournament game? Absolutely not.

That's a fairly bold statement, given we've had Gaining Grounds for less than 6 months. Even in the UK where we've got a fairly developed tournament scene, we've still got less than 12 months worth of play to go on.

There is no way to demonstrate the absence of balance. I'm not sure there's even much theory you can use to support it.

IMHO right now the game feels fairly balanced faction to faction. That's about as strong an opinion as facts can support at this stage.

[Shadowopal]

The crews are not balanced. I just put each boxed set onto a scale and none of them match up.

However, the factions do all seem to be weighted the same .

[Necromorph]

I pretty much agree with you opinion on the whole, but wanted to ask about this specific subject - who do you feel are the hard counters to these three? Especially Colette and Dreamer? Note, I'm definitely not saying that there are no such things, just interested in your opinion on who fills those roles.

Again with my nondescript wording here. I should have put an extra line in there like "even these masters have counters" not to say they have really strong counters generally. Really though...the best counters to the "top 5" are the top 5. Hamelin and Colette can beat each other up pretty well. Colette is very noninteractive, and Odin, who plays her and Guild is pretty firm on the idea that guild can counter her hard due to their high cb, range, and dg output...I tend to agree...just takes some smart play to lock down the duet. Hamelin, depending on your list, will either get wrecked or do the wrecking vs. dreamer and pandora.

It's all pretty relative. That was more a comment meant to "easy the blow" of telling an unfamiliar player that the game isn't all that well balanced (in my opinion).

[Magno]

Ok, so we'd need to have data complied to support the claim of balance or no balance.

Are all master's played evenly over a spread of tournaments and locations? Or are a particular set of masters played, a set rarely played and a set that typically win quite often?

From the few tournies that I've been in and observed, there are indeed some masters that rarely ever get played and a set of masters that are very popular for their effectiveness.

Are there some masters that really do well against a majority of other masters? Yes. hence imbalance. If the factions were intended to be balanced, not the masters, then you would have individual masters have equal sets of opposing masters that they are better than and not better than, such that compiling all the master of the factions together, their "paper-scissor-rock" match-ups equal out.

Is this true?

Are there an equal number of masters that Lady J will typically defeat as opposed to loose to?

Is this true for Marcus?

For Hamlin?

For Seamus?

For Kirai?

If Lady J and Perdita are affective vs 75% of other masters, Sonia and Hoffman only 25%, then there still isn't really balance here, since players will majority of the time take Lady J and Perdita and have majority advantages. Now, if you were forced to play Hoffman and Sonia in certain match-ups, then you could say that the tournament/event was balanced and a truer test to individuals playing abilities.

[Sliver Chocobo]

At a simple glance no, if you get used to the system yes, if look at it too hard it collapses under it's own weight