How do you learn a new army?

[Trout]

The complexity of AoS has increased so much over the last few years that there's now a significant learning curve when it comes to learning how to use your army. Even after you have designed it, it takes a lot of practice to memorize the major stats and remember all of the: stacked bonuses, special abilities, etc. From a practical perspective, how do you do this so that your first games with your new army don't take you 3 hours?

 

I know an escalation league or Path to Glory campaign are great ways to do this but that requires convincing a few other players that it's time to do such a campaign even if you're really the only one learning a new army.

 

I'm thinking maybe I should split my army into two and somehow play a number of solo games against myself using those army halves in order to familiarize myself with the units and the army in general. Has anyone done this?

 

What other tricks do you use to learn a new army?

[Sputnik]

I find watching battle reports of your army useful, but only certain channels! They have to actually know the rules and spend time describing what they are doing. Personally, Wargamer Online has really helped me learn Sylvaneth. 

[Tropical Ghost General]

Short answer is you can't really learn everything without practice. 

Personally I remember 2 or 3of the new rules relating to the faction and then play using those. Then next game do the same thing. So you don't overload yourself with too much info all at once and can play the game at normal(ish) speed. You'll lose games for sure, but after 4 or 5 games, most of the info will have sunk into your brain and you'll be able to start to learn the smaller nuances of your new faction. 

[Skreech Verminking]

By playing the game.

and reading the rules.

it usual takes me about 2-3games to kinda learn the army and around 5games to know it in and out without having to take a look in the book, ones.

but that’s just me.

And I play

the game frequently.

A player that plays the game like ones per month might need a bit more time 

 

Edited September 18, 2020 by Skreech Verminking

[Angela]

AOS reminders helps me a lot.  I like to read through the reminders before a game and take notes-like what model has what ability and anything the reminders might have missed.  I also re-write some reminders in spots that make more sense to me.  And when I was really new, I also had to write in the phases that weren't in the reminders sheet, or I'd skip right over them! 

I also make custom tokens to remind me what artifacts models have and more importantly what the artifact does.  I've printed pages of  token labels using a circle label template from Avery.  But at this point, I have coin capsules and I use a paper punch to punch out a circle that fits and then write the reminder on the paper for anything I don't already have.

I've also played both sides of a game, but if you are starting a new army and have an old army-I'd play the two armies against each other.  I'm doing that right now, as a matter of fact. My husband and I have played mirror matches against each other in which we have split one army and it gets hard to remember which model is in whose army.

[Euphanism]

AoS reminders, all day every day. I rotate between 8ish armies (well, before the apocalypse at least) and having reminders for each of them really kept me in line. I certainly wasn't mastering any of them, but I was competent enough to have a good time, and more importantly, not hold the game up while I looked for rules.

When I really wanted to get down to learning a list (for me, Nurgle/SCE/Ossiarch) I'd queue up tons of battle reports while I painted. Hearing the army in relation to the phases helps immeasurably, especially on channels like Rerolling Ones where they explain what they are doing. It's actually super helpful when they go back and correct themselves too, because that particular rule/ability gets lodged in my brain as something to watch out for.

Full disclosure though, I'm no where near a competitive player at heart, so my bar for 'learning an army' is that I remember 95% of my abilities and don't slow to a crawl on my turn while I examine ever war scroll.