Can’t wait to put out all the lists for our new tournament format to see if readers can identify the winner in advance and thus test the list vs player hypothesis.

But as I wait thought I’d put out a few thoughts on the threads that I referenced in my last post.  As I’ve discussed in previous posts I came to Age of Sigmar from historical war games and a lot of these thoughts fall into the dynamic of “Yes it’s is fantasy but...”

I’d be the first to admit that much of this in the end is personal preference.  But as somebody who grew up reading tens of thousands of pages of high and low fantasy, and watching hundreds of hours of fantasy movies but came to AoS not directly from this love of fantasy but indirectly as I was also reading a lot of history books and watching a ton of historical movies and tv shows and thus first sought out historical war gaming as a way to better understand history (only to eventually be turned off by all the hidden abstraction in the name of veracity indulged by certain historical war gamers...) I thought I might offer a slightly different perspective on these issues.  And rather tha spread them out through a series of different threads, given the common link I thought it was useful to put it all together in one spot.

There’s a Reason They Call Them Uniforms

Lack of model diversity comes up in a lot of threads so over the last few weeks I’ve had a recurring vision of Eisenhower inspecting the troops before D-Day and turning to Bradley and saying “we’ve got to call it off.”  Bradley is obviously confused and pushes Eisenhower on why and he just keeps mumbling something about it being too visually confusing.  Bradley finally demands an explanation and Eisenhower tells him “Omar, they’re all in green uniforms.  It’s just going to be too hard to tell them apart on the beach.  How are we supposed to coordinate all the actions when we can’t easily tell the different units apart.”

Thank goodness Eisenhower wasn’t an Age of Sigmar General so D-Day was allowed to move forward even though the Allied Armies “design aesthetics” didn’t clearly differentiate between different units.  To be clear, there are definitely cases where armies are praised for having a common look and color scheme but there are definitely cases where, fair or not, an army gets targeted for being too uniform.  Which again, just sounds strange if you’re coming to AoS from historical wargaming where so much focus is often paid to get the uniforms accurate and, yes, uniform across an army.

So yes it is fantasy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting your armies to look fantastical.  I’m all for painters coming up with diverse and creative color schemes not just across an army but within it.  Even the factions most associated with a particular uniform color scheme such as Ironjawz in yellow armor or Fyreslayers with the orange bodies and hair still always show multiple different color schemes in their battle tome so no one should feel restricted.  But even the most standard of AoS units still typically provide plenty of other visual signifiers besides the “uniform” to distinguish them on the table so if a player wants to go with a more classical approach to their army design I don’t think this should be such a focal point for animus as it seems to be in so many threads.

Allies Aren’t Easy

There are very legitimate complaints to be made about how allies work (or don’t) in AoS.  The only reason, for example, I can figure out that the KO wouldn’t let Gotrek in their flying boat is because he must get violently air sick and they’re just tired of having to clean up.  But I accept it because I know enough about game design to know how difficult it is to write rules that work across literally millions of different potential combinations without breaking the game.

The one complaint though I really struggle with is the complaint that allies don’t get all the faction buffs and benefits.  Sticking with WW2 for a moment anyone looking at the dynamic between Patton and Montgomery would easily see how difficult it is to coordinate actions between allies even when there is a central authority issuing orders to both.  Thus it was for very good reason that when the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy each country’s army units basically landed on their own front.  So the US landed on Utah and Omaha, while the British landed on Gold and Sword and the Canadians on Juno.

Yes, it’s fantasy so there is nothing wrong with wanting your shiny golden boy Stormcast to work with your tree folk Sylvaneth and your armor bound dwarves.  And I’m thrilled that Cities of Sigmar has found a reasonable way to allow these combos to function a little smoother while also providing a good logic that said smoothness comes from regular interaction in the cities themselves.  But even a basic read of the lore of AoS is still consistent with the concept that the issues that make coordination of allies irl would be just as prevalent, if not more in AoS.  So even before we get into how game breaking certain combos would be if ally rules were looser I’m personally comfortable with the underlying logic to the ally limitations.

They Have a Cave Troll

Some of the logic regarding allying in units from other factions carries over to interactions between units within the more diverse factions.  As with the above my point isn’t that there aren’t legitimate complaints about how keywords work in AoS.  Again, my tolerance is probably higher because it is easy for me to see how easily looser usage could lead to an even greater degree of power creep/OP combos.

Here though I think I pretty clearly have fantasy on my side (particularly  cinematic fantasy) as it is only slightly easier to coordinate vastly disparate types of units in live combat than it is to coordinate with allies.  Since GW has LotR franchise as well thought I’d use a “Fellowship of the Ring” reference here and the scene in the Mines of Moria when they first encounter the orcs who, as Boromir is sure to note “have a Cave Troll.”  In the battle that ensues the cave troll does as much or more damage to his orc “allies” as he does to the fellowship.  Friendly fire incidents are unfortunately common irl but if anything in fantasy they are even more common. 

So absolutely yes, it is fantasy and it is super cool that it allows us to field trolls, sorry Troggoths, with our Grots or our Ogors, but given the prevalence of the friendly fire trope in fantasy arguably AoS isn’t penalizing such combinations nearly enough.  Forget synergies, if we are to believe the fantasy we read in our books and see on our screens we should be seeing mismatched units dishing out a decent amount of friendly fire damage each turn.  Now in this particular aspect I’m an NOT calling for AoS to implement a harsher friendly fire system.  But versus truly penalizing you for taking mismatched units as fantasy source material pretty consistently does, not allowing you to cross buff seems pretty fair to me.

The best historical comparison to the fantasy I would say was the novel use of War Elephants in the Mediterranean.  Sure Hannibal made them famous with his relatively successful deployment but that wasn’t exactly the base case from the historical evidence.  Don’t have the details in front of me but where they were a novel unit (if any one has a good source for areas where they were more common/standard, such as the Indian sub-continent I’d be fascinated to follow up on the differences) my recollection is that in about 1/3 of battles they were a decisive factor for the side deploying them.  In another 1/3 they were basically non-factors (at least one opposing military leader realized they don’t exactly stop on a dime or turn around quickly and thus had his lines open to let them pass and then closed again to meet the charge of the foot units very successfully).  And in ~1/3 of battles they ended up directly contributing to the loss of the side deploying them (another military leader realized you could panic them by harassing fire with missile weapons and get them to stampede through their own lines). 

So whether in fantasy or irl mix & match has been a difficult strategy to pull off.

The Heart Wants What it Wants

Again, my interest here has not been in arguing people are wrong for wanting what they want out of the game.  I can’t and won’t argue with them about their preferences.  Preferences don’t of course have to be consistent with real life or have properly noted sourcing from the fantasy literature and filmography.  The quality of the game experience, also, isn’t perfectly correlated with fidelity to either.   My confusion arises when these preferences though get rationalized by calls to fidelity to fantasy or realism.

On that note I’ll end with the complaint about how battalions are often configured too narrowly.  While I know of a few exceptions in general the real military definition of a battalion is a group of the SAME TYPE OF UNITS with a Headquarters unit (to coordinate them and improve their efficacy)and a support unit (I.e. to resupply them).  While I’d be curious to play a version of AoS that forced you to manage your army’s logistics (if for no other reason than it gives an advantage to my FEC and Mawtribes armies whose rations are so conveniently delivered to them by their opponent...) leaving so direct a translation we are left with the basic concept of by bringing together a group of units with a common skill set, giving them enhanced leadership, and ensuring they are supported, you get a more effective force than you would have individually.

Which to me pretty much sounds like most of the battalions people are complaining about because they reduce diversity.  Hey, I love diversity and in another context could cite plenty of the literature that shows how increased diversity improves performance.  And in AoS there are advantages to the additional tools diversity brings you.  But as my old economics professor always said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  In other words there is always a trade off.  Specialization provides the benefit of improving the efficacy of a given solution, which is great except if that solution doesn’t work for the problem you are facing.  Having more potential solutions then can be an advantage over the long run when you are likely to face multiple different problems (in this context say over a two day tournament).  But the trade off is you might not have enough energy allocated to the solution to the specific problem you are facing (say in a specific match up in a tournament).

Thats just how any complex system works.  Yes, it is fantasy but without flattening the game space significantly you can’t avoid it.  Nor, is specialization at all inconsistent with fantasy.  In fact many fantasy worlds are built around racial, cultural or socioeconomic specialization.  Which gets to what I guess is my final point.  Yes, it is fantasy, but with a few rare exceptions in order to get us to relate to the characters and avoid breaking down our suspension of disbelief fantasy authors tend to base much of their material on examples from the real world.  These examples of course may be exaggerated or twisted but when you look you can almost always see the through lines connecting these fantasy stories to the real world, whether the present or historical.  Given this I am not surprised at the consistent through lines to real world combat I see in the ostensibly fantasy battle system that is AoS.

Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings as I eagerly await Zoom League list deadline.