Age of Sigmar: Second Edition

[Furuzzolo]

I think that the warhammer community posts are meant to cover all aspects of the game. The majority of the tga community seems to read them as Pitch Battle change.

Feel free to correct me but only 1/3 of the game is matched play, so, maybe, we should't read it as every change is explained like a matched play rule.

I'm sorry for my bad english. 

[Chikout]

3 minutes ago, Killax said:

Because sales is what drives Games Workshop first. In the end the game is a byproduct of selling models for them. Not so much the other way around.

No matter how I look at this, I do not think 'free stuff' is a boost to the game. It is a direct way to sell more stuff however.

I don't agree with this. The absolute best way for GW too sell more models is to make the game more fun to play. 

If ten people buy more models for summoning but 20 quit in disgust at the lack of balance it is a loss for GW. 

I am sure they have included 'free' summoning because they think it improves the game. Time will tell if that is true or not. 

[Killax]

1 minute ago, Chikout said:

I don't agree with this. The absolute best way for GW too sell more models is to make the game more fun to play. 

If ten people buy more models for summoning but 20 quit in disgust at the lack of balance it is a loss for GW. 

I am sure they have included 'free' summoning because they think it improves the game. Time will tell if that is true or not. 

With the way compagnies want to see direct turn over I wouldn't count it out. Otherwise I agree with you that on the long term it could be a loss for GW. But GW has gotten into the habit of errata-ing stuff the moment it is released also. So they will and can do it all.

I have yet to play a game where free stuff lead to more fun. It has lead to total game dominance of said army/deck with the most free stuff. I could give you examples if you want to know.

[CyderPirate]

I'm going to jump in on the side of excited about the new edition. 

I'll admit I was initially quite worried that it was going to get 40k'd (I've really gone off that game recently, but I'm not 100% why...) but the steady drip of info has got me chomping at the bit for 2.0. 

To me it sounds like they've added a load of toys for everyone, but built in some safety valves to stop things getting too absurd. 

• Heroes are more important, so here's a way to help keep them alive.
• Magic is more powerful, so here's a way to keep it in check.
• You no longer have to keep reinforcement points for summoning (I always found that a headache - I dread to think how intimidating that would've been for a new player!) - but your army has to jump through hoops to get those extra units.

Most importantly, it's opening up a whole new world of tactical play by creating armies that feel individual and unique with more specialised mechanics. It's something that GW are getting a lot better at, and hopefully will continue to develop. As an example, I played against some Wanders recently - a GHB faction - and had to be really careful about where and what I tried to fight, due to their ability to disappear off of the board edge and reappear somewhere else. It made for a really interesting, tactical game, but also captured that 'cinematic' feel you'd expect from fighting tricksy elves. The army felt powerful but not unbeatable.

Same goes for the new LoN. You really, really don't want to fight on their terms, but if you can draw them out of position or target their support, you can create opportunities to attack. Allowing them to bring back units plays into the theme of the army, and is a powerful ability, but the restrictions - from what we know so far - seem sufficient to give opponents room to play around it. 

 

New GW has also been quite good so far at listening to feedback from the community and addressing the issues raised. 'Free' summoning of new units (that's not actually what we're getting though, its just a different cost) was problematic for 40k and AoS when it was first released and they developed a workable solution to it. I recognise that on the face of it it makes commercial sense to give every army the chance to create new units - as that will get players to buy more kits - but I think that's a logical trap. As has already been pointed out, making players enjoy the game more is more likely to result in them investing in the game than creating unfun mechanics that force players to make additional purchases. 

 

[Killax]

3 minutes ago, CyderPirate said:

but your army has to jump through hoops to get those extra units.

I don't think killing units and gain Blood Tithe points is a hoop.
I don't think obtaining Contagion points is a hoop.
I don't think having something destroyed and return it again for free in Legions of Nagash is a hoop. 
I don't think having 9 Fate Dice because you choose the Tzeentch Allegiance is a hoop.

While I think the idea to make players enjoy the game more is a nice but I have yet to see free units, cards, glory, heroes lead to a direct improvement of fun. As it leads to a game segmentation of you having it and counting to the top meta, or not having it and basically get ditched aside. It isn't much different in the current edition of Age of Sigmar when you look at Mortal Wound output requirements and current good Shooting requirements to matter. 

[ledha]

30 minutes ago, Furuzzolo said:

I think that the warhammer community posts are meant to cover all aspects of the game. The majority of the tga community seems to read them as Pitch Battle change.

Feel free to correct me but only 1/3 of the game is matched play, so, maybe, we should't read it as every change is explained like a matched play rule.

I'm sorry for my bad english. 

thing is, summoning was always free, except in matched play, where you needed to pay. If they annonce that the summoning is now free, then it's obviously a matched play change, isn't it ?

[Chikout]

So,  I wonder how many faction focuses they are going to do. They have done 11 so far of which just one and a half have been battletomeless armies. 

There are just 7 battletome armies left to do:

KO, Deepkin, Seraphon,  Slyvaneth,  Bonesplitterz,  Beastclaw raiders, pestilens, and FEC.

I expect them to do a few more other factions like Skyre, Free peoples and moonclan but I can't imagine they will do a whole article on Aleguzzler gargants or Lion rangers. 

I think that 15 more factions is the most they are likely to do which suggests that the launch may be sooner rather than later.

[Gotrek]

1 hour ago, stratigo said:

 

</snip>

VC were one of the strongest armies in 8th, in part due to their summoning (More a positional tool there, but positioning won games in 8th)

</snip>

And. Yet. They. Did. Not. Win. GTs. They. Were. Not. Disproportionately. Represented.

As for 6 units not being enough to babysit 4 sites and objectives:

1)  i agree. That wasn't the the question. The question was how many units do i expect people to bring. 

2) you dont need to babysit all 4. You need to babysit ONE. Well, really babysit 1 model. Death's general. The summon is a command ability that ONLY THE GENERAL can use (says so in the command ability itself), so unless you get caught on a bad double turn, or you cant disengage your fast movers to shadow the general you can just move to whatever gravesite is closest to the general and shut it down. Since legions cant move in the hero phase we have to position the general the turn before we summon to make use of it.

 

Seriously, once you get it on the table you'll see its not that much of a game changer for death. There are limits, from the types of units that can be summoned, to zoning out, to killing the general (and no, look out sir does not make our footsloggers immune to sniping even with the artifacts. I listed a bunch of methods to snipe in a previous post)

[stato]

6 minutes ago, Gotrek said:

2) you dont need to babysit all 4. You need to babysit ONE. Well, really babysit 1 model. Death's general. The summon is a command ability that ONLY THE GENERAL can use, so unless you get caught on a bad double turn, or you cant disengage your fast movers to shadow the general you can just move to whatever gravesite is closest to the general and shut it down. Since legions cant move in the hero phase we have to position the general the turn before we summon to make use of it.

You can of course be more tactical with your gravesite placement, putting them more central or some just behind where you intend your general to be on T3 when you expect your unit to need to come back. But thats the point isnt it, its actually tactical and requires the Death player and their opponent to think about whats happening, what are the objectivies, what are the risks.  As an opponent do I build my armies with multiple faster units to try and avoid that killer death unit, or 1 big strong unit to delete it and then somehow manage where/when it will return (or just kill the Death general). 

[smucreo]

I'm going to go for Sacrament with this new edition, not only because it gives great buffs to magic and has great artifacts as well as a usable battalion, but because if they decide to block a gravesite I can try to proc the allegiance ability to resurrect one killed unit from the gravesite the enemy was blocking haha probably won't happen much but it's kind of a fail safe in a way since it functions in the opposite way that the endless legions trait works. You need an enemy close to the gravesite instead of far from it, it doesn't cost command points and can be used without needing your general close at all. 

[Rogue Explorator]

Looking at the summoning issue from a different perspective.

Purely materialistically speaking, this affects how accessible certain armies are for newcommers and players short on cash or hobby time:

- For LoN players (maybe all Death players), this is great news in this regard, as their summoning revolves entirely around bringing back summonable units. This means the units will propably go way up in pointscost, meaning the armies have a much lower model count no longer neccasitating buying, building and painting such a vast amounts of model.

- For Monogod Chaos players, this looks rather detrimental. If you can reasonably expect being able to summon a Greater Demon, that means you have to own one to make full use of your army. Bottom line, to make full use of their army, Monogod players would need at least one unit of every summonable unit they have access to, in addition to anything they actually want to field in their list, to play their army to full ability. Fielding a minimum unit of horror would at least require 30 miniatures now.

 

I do not really see much of an issue with LoN summoning, all affected units must be bought at least ones to make use of it. So this can be handled by increasing points cost.

However, for monogod, the story is different. Increasing the point cost of the summonables does nothing, as a unit does not have to be included initially. So point cost would need to be raised across the board to compensate for the free extra units. This would have two pretty bad further effects:

-All markable Slaves to Darkness units would need to go up in cost to compensate for summoning as well, as otherwhise players could build a monogod list from StD units and get a "normally pointed" army list plus the free summons.

-This in turn makes Monogod and StD vastly overpointed for use in GA armies and as allies.

The easiest way out of this I see is all of Chaos having access to the summoning system and all of Chaos rising in pointcost to compensate for the easy availabillity of additional units.

 

This is not an unsolvable problem, but it does show that a lot of big questions have been raised by the announcement. I hope GW sees fit to adress such questions and explains their reasoning before the game drops in full, if only to soothe the "sky is falling" crowd.

 

As annoying as the current and especially some of the connected rethorics are, I can see where people are coming from. GW dropped a huge, controversial game changing announcement with the stance that it is an undisputably great thing, without providing necessary context or even remotely explaining the reasoning behind the decission.

It is another marketing blunder in the midst of a rollout that was otherwhise going swimmingly, disrupting their own hard work. Sooner or later "they are still relearning public relations" will no longer cut it as an explanation for such blundered announcements and it will start to really damage their overall great effort on the community work.

To put it another way, announcing "We have made this huge sweeping change with massive repercussions on every part of the game because we think it is rad and you will like it because we say so" is an unpleasant reminder  of old times.

[CyderPirate]

Just now, Killax said:

I don't think killing units and gain Blood Tithe points is a hoop.
I don't think obtaining Contagion points is a hoop.
I don't think having something destroyed and return it again for free in Legions of Nagash is a hoop. 
I don't think having 9 Fate Dice because you choose the Tzeentch Allegiance is a hoop.

Perhaps 'hoops' wasn't the right term, but you're also conflating a few things there. Only the top 2 are what I meant by 'hoops' for summoning. The LoN one is your reward for getting through the hoop, and the Tzeentch one is just their alliegiance ability. 

With the cases we've seen, the armies present choices and challenges for the player and their opponent. 

I'll take the Khorne one as its an easy example to illustrate. As the Khorne player, you have the following choices with Blood Tithe Points (BTPs):

• Allow them to accumulate naturally through the course of the game and spend them for incidental bonuses once they've been accrued but otherwise ignore them for the purposes of army building/gameplay strategy
• Create a list that enables you to rapidly gather points (lots of cheap, expendable units) with a specific goal in mind - summoning Bloodletters or a Bloodthirster, or giving a key combat unit a buff at a crucial time
• Go somewhere between the above two, with a few cheap units you can throw away in a pinch to get BTPs when you need them.
• In game, you can look to trade units with your opponent, throwing your chaff into theirs, in the hope of getting more BTPs
• Focus on wiping out units that you're sure you can eliminate to guarantee getting the BTPs
• Deliberately throw your units into fights they'll lose, again to make sure you get BTPs

As the Khorne player's opponent, you can choose to:

• Ignore the BTP stuff and stick to your own plan
• Play defensively until late game, trying to deny them BTPs
• Concentrate on the most threatening units, ignore the throwaway units
• Spread out your attacks to try and leave units with one or two models left
• Target the supporting characters, so units buffed with BTPs are slightly less deadly

etc. etc. 

So whilst you get BTPs from doing what you were planning to anyway, your opponent has choices in how they interact with that rule, and you (as the Khorne player) have options in how you build and play your army to make use of the resource as you see fit. 

 

[smucreo]

2 minutes ago, Rogue Explorator said:

Looking at the summoning issue from a different perspective.

Purely materialistically speaking, this affects how accessible certain armies are for newcommers and players short on cash or hobby time:

- For LoN players (maybe all Death players), this is great news in this regard, as their summoning revolves entirely around bringing back summonable units. This means the units will propably go way up in pointscost, meaning the armies have a much lower model count no longer neccasitating buying, building and painting such a vast amounts of model.

I honestly can't see drastic point changes coming for LoN. After all they did say the book was designed with the second edition in mind. What I can see happening is maybe skellies going up to 100 and wolves to 80, but not much else.

[Twitch of Izalith]

1 hour ago, stratigo said:

but positioning won games in 8th

Not as reliably as throwing max dice at  a super charged Purple Sun and hoping you rolled a 2 6's did....  

_

I actually have a reasonable amount of confidence in the people play testing the game with Games Workshop. I don't know any of them personally but I think they have done a good job so far, of bringing a good degree of balance to the last 4 battletomes and picking up on the more game breaking mechanics that may have shown up in the alpha versions of the rules.

I really can't imagine that they will miss any of the most obvious skyfall scenarios some people are presenting.

Sure a small number of playtesters and GW rules writers are not going to catch everything - Which is where we come in once we start playing the new rules. We have a mechanism to provide feedback through the FAQ email. GW have a mechanism to correct and clarify things through the FAQ Schedule.

As with any game, the people playing it are the actual problem. just because the rules allow you to do something which is unfair or exploitative doesn't mean you have to do it!!

[Karol]

How do people think games are going to be played in the transition phase? Our store will have 12 starter sets, and over 30 people playing, do you guys think the updated rules that changed from 1.0 are going to be posted online?

[Kaylethia]

3 minutes ago, Karol said:

How do people think games are going to be played in the transition phase? Our store will have 12 starter sets, and over 30 people playing, do you guys think the updated rules that changed from 1.0 are going to be posted online?

It's been said already, that the core rules (currently four pages) will go up a bit in page count, but will still be available for free online.

[Rogue Explorator]

15 minutes ago, smucreo said:

I honestly can't see drastic point changes coming for LoN. After all they did say the book was designed with the second edition in mind. What I can see happening is maybe skellies going up to 100 and wolves to 80, but not much else.

The rules where designed with second edition in mind.

We need to keep in mind here that AoS is following a model wherepoint costs are subject to more frequent changes than the actual rules are.

Why would they point units for rules coming months later when they knew they would be dropping a new GHB (and thus, new point lists) alongside those rules?

[KillagoreFaceslasha]

4 minutes ago, Karol said:

How do people think games are going to be played in the transition phase? Our store will have 12 starter sets, and over 30 people playing, do you guys think the updated rules that changed from 1.0 are going to be posted online?

So you got the starter sets already alloted? Mind you, I am virtually positive the pre-order will open on june 2nd, just a day before the fiscal year ends.

[Jamopower]

45 minutes ago, Gotrek said:

 

Seriously, once you get it on the table you'll see its not that much of a game changer for death. There are limits, from the types of units that can be summoned, to zoning out, to killing the general (and no, look out sir does not make our footsloggers immune to sniping even with the artifacts. I listed a bunch of methods to snipe in a previous post)

I'd also say that it's an ability of which full picture can't be seen until it is played on the table. However I wouldn't be so sure that taking it to the table will make it automatically worse. There are lots of stuff you can do with that ability alone and due to gravesites, different units and possibility to use several command abilities at the same turn, there are a lot of different combinations that are not so straightforward to tinker out on the paper. Shutting all gravesites is as trivial task as keeping them open etc., but transferred to a table with terrain, different armies, etc. it is always its own case. Also, raising units on the end turns (for which the other summoning mechanisms seem to be better) can often be also a very important in an objective driven game, even if those models are not used directly to destroy your enemy. Sometimes 5 direwolves can be a better unit  for winning the game than 40 skeletons.

I've been thinking about an army where you have say unit of 10-15 black knights and similar unit of hexwraiths or spirit hosts that you buff up from a "castle" and send against the enemy one at a time to wreak havoc and when they are destroyed you can resurrect them back and do it again. Now I won't say that this army is particularly good (although I have understood that the Tomb kings did well with similar strategy), but it's an example that the end result from a simple rule like that, can be a totally different kind of gameplay as previously.

[Deadkitten]

19 minutes ago, Rogue Explorator said:

To put it another way, announcing "We have made this huge sweeping change with massive repercussions on every part of the game because we think it is rad and you will like it because we say so" is an unpleasant reminder  of old times.

Agreed.  Never under estimate GW's ability to ****** up a good thing.  Especially when they know it.  Up till now all the changes have been tweaks or House cleaning sort of stuff.  This is a structural change and it might not be as smooth a transition as hoped.

 

1 hour ago, Killax said:

While I think the idea to make players enjoy the game more is a nice but I have yet to see free units, cards, glory, heroes lead to a direct improvement of fun. As it leads to a game segmentation of you having it and counting to the top meta, or not having it and basically get ditched aside. It isn't much different in the current edition of Age of Sigmar when you look at Mortal Wound output requirements and current good Shooting requirements to matter. 

This will continue to be a problem with wargames in general until someone comes up with a meaning handicap mechanism.  I doubt that will be GW with AoS 2.0.

[Jamopower]

22 minutes ago, smucreo said:

I honestly can't see drastic point changes coming for LoN. After all they did say the book was designed with the second edition in mind. What I can see happening is maybe skellies going up to 100 and wolves to 80, but not much else.

Considering that they copied the points costs straight from the previous GHB without any adjustment for the rules in LoN, I would have expected the points to be adjusted in any case even without a new edition. Skeletons are prime example of an unit that is bit too good for its points.

[The Wanderer]

25 minutes ago, Rogue Explorator said:

Looking at the summoning issue from a different perspective.

Purely materialistically speaking, this affects how accessible certain armies are for newcommers and players short on cash or hobby time:

- For LoN players (maybe all Death players), this is great news in this regard, as their summoning revolves entirely around bringing back summonable units. This means the units will propably go way up in pointscost, meaning the armies have a much lower model count no longer neccasitating buying, building and painting such a vast amounts of model.

Maybe, anything that reduces model counts should be welcomed but it doesn't seem very likely. There are some exceptions but GW have a long term habit of generally lowering points costs as time goes by, matched with a trend towards needing bigger and bigger units.

[smucreo]

Hey I'm open to point changes if it means they reduce the cost of Blood Knights  I'd love to use them again in a legion of Blood list with Double Dragons.

EDIT: and as I said I do expect minor changes, but not the drastic increase in points some seem to predict. And Skellies and dogs are for sure in the chopping block imo

[ageofpaddsmar]

Aslong as blightkings get an increase i will be happy

[AaronWilson]

Wow this thread got dark like a DC universe plotline real quick. 

Summoning changes sound interesting, always a bit nervous when free points are spoken about but nothing that can't be contained by a ITC pack for the comp players, House ruled by casual players and embraced by narrative players if needs must. Still very excited for the new edition, might help breath some life into the game locally Already had 2-3 perking up about it.