Are the Balloons Really OP? First Lessons from a Very Warhammer Day
Are the Balloons Really OP? First Lessons from a Very Warhammer Day
Some gaming days give us clean conclusions. Others give us the most Warhammer answer possible: “it depends, but also wow, that was nasty.”
This time the hot topic was, of course, the balloons in Warhammer: The Old World.
Stas summed up the feeling perfectly: it was hard to believe how much those things can do. Flying heavy chariots with nasty ranged output, bombing runs, lots of wounds, and mobility tricks? On paper and on the table, they look terrifying. The kind of unit that immediately starts a post-game discussion.
And yes, there was some dramatic commentary.
Ban the balloons!
But once the first wave of salt passed, the conversation got a lot more interesting.
The other side of the table
Michał pushed back on the “balloons are broken” narrative in a very fair way. In Warhammer, we all tend to focus on the thing that just hurt us the most, but the game is full of brutal interactions.
His point was simple: people complain loudly about balloons, but somehow there is less outrage about things like a sword that can remove a 7-wound Lord in a single hit. A 475-point character can disappear to one roll and everyone shrugs, but when balloons start deleting cheap infantry, suddenly it is a tragedy.
That is a very real part of Old World. Context matters.
If a unit kills a bunch of 2-point goblins over two turns, that feels bad if you are the goblin player, sure. But it is not automatically proof that the unit is beyond reason. It might just mean it is doing exactly what it was built to do.
A game of threat assessment
What made this discussion especially valuable was that it quickly moved away from pure complaining and into something much more useful: what could have been done differently?
Stas was pretty honest about it. With four artillery pieces, maybe one balloon could have gone down early with good rolls, but probably not enough to solve the whole problem by itself.
The bigger lesson seemed to be the fanatics.
He felt that they should have been released immediately, in Michał’s first turn. That is exactly the kind of thing we only really learn by playing: some tools are not just “nice to have,” they are essential to controlling certain threats. And if you have never played with fanatics before, it is easy not to realise just how important their timing can be.
The best proof? Once they came out in round two, they immediately took down one balloon.
That is a classic Old World lesson right there:
- a scary unit can still have counters,
- those counters often depend on timing,
- and after the game, the matchup looks very different once you understand what mattered.
Learning the matchup
Wilini raised a good point too: the game could have looked different if Stas had gone first and tried to smash the balloons immediately, especially with better early pressure and shooting.
That is the kind of question we love after a game. Not “was this unfair?” but rather:
What happens if deployment changes?
What if the first turn goes the other way?
What if the anti-balloon tools are used earlier?
Those are the questions that actually help with army-building and future games.
Because honestly, this is what army-building often becomes in practice. Not writing the “perfect list,” but figuring out whether our list has:
- early answers to high-mobility threats,
- enough pressure to punish expensive pieces,
- and the experience to use key tools at the right moment.
Sometimes the answer is “yes, but we played it wrong.” Sometimes it is “no, we need to change the list.” Most of the time it is a bit of both.
Meanwhile, in Kill Team…
The day was not just about The Old World. Ender also reported back from Kill Team, and despite taking a loss, it sounded like a genuinely great step forward.
He lost 16:17, with the opponent having to sweat and calculate in the last turn, and the final swing came from losing three operatives and giving up the kill op. That is a close game by any standard.
More importantly, Ender said it was his best KT game so far, because for the first time he really knew what he wanted to do. The dice did not fully cooperate, but that is a different story.
And honestly, that feeling is huge.
There is a massive difference between:
- losing while feeling lost,
- and losing while understanding your plan.
The second one is where real progress starts.
Our favourite kind of post-game discussion
What we liked most about this whole exchange was that it followed a very familiar path:
- something outrageous happens,
- someone declares it broken,
- someone else points out three other broken things,
- and eventually we all arrive at actual lessons.
So, are the balloons OP?
Maybe they are extremely strong. Maybe they are just one of those units that punish inexperience and bad timing very hard. Probably both, at least a little.
But after this round of discussion, our main takeaway is not “ban the balloons.”
It is:
learn the matchup, use your tools earlier, and do not confuse a painful game with a solved balance problem.
Also, if fanatics can delete a balloon the moment they actually get involved, maybe we should all remember that before the next panic post.