AoS 3 New Rules Discussion

[SorryLizard]

47 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

Most people who buy GW miniatures don't even play the games, at least not more than once in a blue moon. The rules are just an excuse to get people buying miniatures. GW is still a miniatures company, not a rules company - they're just smart enough these days not to say it out loud. 

 

 

 

This is me, for example. I play 1-2 wargames a week but GW games (with the exception of Epic or Warmaster's current community updated editions) are infrequent. Maybe once a quarter? Most of my games are things like Bushido, Mortem et Gloriam, Infinity (arguably the best designed rules - for sci-fi skirmish - on the market right now), Flames of War, Epic, etc. Over lockdown I've been buying into and getting hyped about my first game of Marvel Crisis Protocol. Something like Warlords of Erehwon fits into the same general niche as AoS (large scale fantasy skirmish) and has a much smoother rule set whilst retaining character in the factions.

IMO AoS has the main draws of

1. large established player base making games easy to arrange

2. some good models

3. the feel of an evolving setting (40k feels incredibly stagnant)

4. characterful factions you want to play

Edited June 9, 2021 by SorryLizard

[zilberfrid]

6 hours ago, Enoby said:

You're correct, but people have to want to play another game. If someone got their army mostly shot off the board turn 1 then there's a good chance they wouldn't want to play another game for the day. Tbh, if I table my opponent quickly I feel bad for them and it doesn't really make for a fun game.

McDonald's putting nails in their chair would make people not want to hang around very effectively, but they'd also probably not get many visitors full stop. 

You are correct, but it wouldn't be the first time a late process business decision ended up making the product worse (not just GW, in general). I'd say a rework of bravery (or outright removal) with a different result than current 9th would speed up things as well, because that's a lot of dicerolling.

I also thought of other people wanting to play, not the same ones.

[zilberfrid]

6 hours ago, Golub87 said:

There is truth to this.

Reduction in table sizes was a decision made precisely for this reason. I suspect that UH was made because T1 charges are going to be the norm or at least they think that they will be.

Even once per game UH will have a huge impact. Most games are decided by T3 and with these table size reductions that will not go away.

It is a complete mess of a game right now and that does not seem to be changing in 3.0. That really should not come as a surprise to anyone who paid attention over the years and who tried to play any other wargame.

AoS has an identity crisis on the most basic level - is it a skirmish game or a full battle wargame?

I agree it seems at a crossroads without committing either way.

And yes, I do prefer games that made that choice.

[zilberfrid]

9 hours ago, Reinholt said:

McDonalds does not charge premium prices.

If you deliver McD's quality for fine dining prices, you don't have a market.

GW nuked WFB for a while during Daemons of Chaos era, and it's part of what lead the game down the path in terms of popularity that caused AoS to happen. This was during the darkest Kirby days of "we are a models company jewels of wonder rules LOL" thinking, but the brand damage persists to this day.

Unleash Hell is the kind of thing that needs a literal day 1 errata or you're heading down the path of massive NPE for many players that will turn them off for the game again.

Edit: this would also be far less of a problem if they turned the lethality up to 11 for everything. But this is a narrow section that was already very good. A better comparison would be one area of premium super nice seating at McD's and every other seat having nails on it. So people all jam into that one area, and if that area is full, people won't eat there at all. So you both crush your customer base and create a bunch of resentment at the same time.

I think GW makes good models, but everything they put in words is subpar. (Not all paper, the artwork and photographs are good).

It doesn't rise to average in writing quality (fiction) and game design.

Which doesn't stop them from still charging premium prices for that though.

I had hopes that 3rd edition would be better, and would even draw me back in, but so far, no.

I have two armies: TE battallion and Kharadron. Gave away/sold the rest of the models.

TE battalion is probably gone, if there are general rules about what you must field it's probably no longer legal, and Pistoleer placement will be a right pain with their short range.

They have neither good MW output, nor defense against that.

Then, if shooting becomes less interactive instead of more, it might even be bad to play against.

The other is Kharadron, and if they get their identity ripped out by applying a god to their faces, I can't care about them. Apart from having a good chance of being an NPE army.

New Orcs look good, but model prices are probably too high to care about them if the game is just bad. Maybe one or two boxes box of infantry.

Edited June 9, 2021 by zilberfrid

[zilberfrid]

6 hours ago, Golub87 said:

By that logic we should be all playing Flames of War because it has tanks and artillery and planes and machineguns.

...which is a rather brilliant idea actually, might take you up on that. Thanks!

Put tank threads on Kharadron ships and you're there!

6 hours ago, Televiper11 said:

Shooting should be stronger. That’s how warfare has evolved and this is a war game. 

It is also far from realistic.

[Envyus]

1 hour ago, Vaporlocke said:

Nah, I'll complain now, thank you.

 

Everything we've seen have been buffs to problematic areas for the game and nerfs to struggling areas. The more they release the worse its gotten, and having been playing GW games since the 90's I'm fully aware that there isn't some magic fix they've been hiding. 

Monsters and heroes got buffed, predatory spells got buffed. Command points got buffed. These are all good things. 

[Bosskelot]

How relevant are the monster buffs though?

All I've seen is ways to make monsters slightly more killy, when really their issue has been survivability. With shooting (seemingly) not being touched and in fact made better with Unleash Hell what's really stopping them from being yeeted off of the board very quickly?

Also depending on how missions are constructed they could also be made extra useless.

Also points changes could relegate them to irrelevancy.

Look at 40k 9th; pre-release GW went on about improvements to monsters and vehicles and people were looking at the previewed and leaked core rules and predicting a monster and vehicle meta. We're a year into 9th edition and outside of Drukhari Raiders that has not materialized. Massive point over-corrections because of severely overestimating those buffs, a mission design where vehicle usage doesn't win you many points, a rise in average lethality without a rise in survivability for vehicles/monsters and the introduction of the Core keyword have led to a 40k edition that discourages those unit types pretty heavily.

Not all of this might apply to AOS of course. But with changes to a game there are often so many unseen interactions and unintended outcomes that Monsters getting 4 unique "command" abilities could be the wettest ****** imaginable in terms of actual game impact.

[SorryLizard]

20 minutes ago, Envyus said:

Monsters and heroes got buffed, predatory spells got buffed. Command points got buffed. These are all good things. 

Yes. I think the objectives here are to make us

1. bring more monsters as they're better

2. bring more heroes as they're better

3. bring fewer cheap horde infantry as they're more difficult to use

4. bring more small units of elite models as it packs more output into a smaller area whilst avoiding the awkward coherency rules

I believe that the 'ideal world' GW wants to see is an army of 30-40 models that looks like a Lumineth Alarith army. 2-3 Cowtains, 30 elite infantry in a few units and a handful of heroes (with you buying into multiple factions rather than getting a massive collection of one).

I wouldn't be surprised if they were seeing 100 Mortek Guard lists or 40 strong blobs of Skinks as a problem.

From a 'product logic' point of view I think they want us to treat 1 box = 1 unit where minimum sized stuff is everywhere.

I'd be interested to see how the Path to Glory rules pan out in relation to unit sizes.

Edited June 9, 2021 by SorryLizard

[zilberfrid]

1 minute ago, SorryLizard said:

Yes. I think the objectives here are to make us

1. bring more monsters as they're better

2. bring more heroes as they're better

3. bring fewer cheap horde infantry as they're more difficult to use

4. bring more small units of elite models as it packs more output into a smaller area whilst avoiding the awkward coherency rules

I believe that the 'ideal world' GW wants to see is an army of 30-40 models that looks like a Lumineth Alarith army. 2-3 Cowtains, 30 elite infantry in a few units and a handful of heroes.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were seeing 100 Mortek Guard lists or 40 strong blobs of Skinks as a problem.

From a 'product logic' point of view I think they want us to treat 1 box = 1 unit where minimum sized stuff is everywhere.

I'd be interested to see how the Path to Glory rules pan out in relation to unit sizes.

Heroes and elites also have the highest profit margin. Less plastic for more money.

[SorryLizard]

1 minute ago, zilberfrid said:

Heroes and elites also have the highest profit margin. Less plastic for more money.

Precisely.

Also if armies are generally 'complete' as lesser model counts it's easier to shuttle you onto the next faction on the hype train so you buy into multiple factions. Which means buying the higher margin 'essentials' for that faction like the monster and heroes, the books, etc. for each thing rather than building out an existing faction with a few more lower margin line infantry stuff.

[Greybeard86]

6 hours ago, Golub87 said:

AoS has an identity crisis on the most basic level - is it a skirmish game or a full battle wargame?

They want skirmish, but they still want to sell boatloads of models per army. That's my guess anyway.

At the end of the day, "organic" formations and so on end up being a hot mess. Whenever they try to keep "free-form" and fix the resulting "creative geometries" it just ends up being a whole lot of new gamey arrangements.

The miniatures, their footprint / bases, are not designed for gaming purposes, but for display. From the pokey bits to the longish awkward profile of cavalry, those things are not designed to fit "properly" in a very literal sense of gaming. That they keep insisting on restrictive model based rules is baffling to me.

Stop patching the sinking boat. Either reduce model count and embrace skirmish, or go back to shapes.

Also, I get the idea of previewing the rules to generate excitement. But coming from an iteration where shooting felt "too powerful", it seems tone deaf to preview a rule that makes shooting even scarier.

 

[PrimeElectrid]

40 minutes ago, Envyus said:

Monsters and heroes got buffed, predatory spells got buffed. Command points got buffed. These are all good things. 

And all that good work is completely undone by Unleash Hell. 

[SorryLizard]

7 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

And all that good work is completely undone by Unleash Hell. 

Only if the opponent has meaningful shooting units being the prime caveat. Monsters etc. are better when facing Ironjawz or Khorne for example.

Another thing to remember is the missions might make having that 9 inch radius from your shooting units impractical. Not sure how you're planning on keeping that bubble effective on something like Scorched Earth where you need to push forward and spread out to capture enough whilst also defending your home.

Edited June 9, 2021 by SorryLizard

[PrimeElectrid]

2 minutes ago, SorryLizard said:

Only if the opponent has meaningful shooting units being the prime caveat. Monsters etc. are better when facing Ironjawz or Khorne for example.

List tailoring is a really bad argument.

The point is that Unleash Hell is so powerful it will warp the meta around it. Everyone will be designing armies to take advantage of it, or to deal with people taking advantage of it. 

[Erdemo86]

4 hours ago, Envyus said:

Still think overreacting. Unleash Hell does not seem that strong to me give it can only be used once per turn.

Where is that information from? Once per turn?

[Magnus The Blue]

While I get people being worried about unleash hell, missions/objectives/points changes could easily move the meta away from shooting. 

Similarly with the coherency rules, cavalry or large based models in general could have an exception which would fix this (less confident that this one will actually happen, but you never know).

So while I'm not 100% happy with what we've seen so far, I want to see more before I go looking for another system.

[Beliman]

2 minutes ago, Magnus The Blue said:

While I get people being worried about unleash hell, missions/objectives/points changes could easily move the meta away from shooting. 

Me too.

There are a lot of things going on and we just look for the most powerful one to use in the current 2.0 meta. It's just that, it happens every edition.

 

[Erdemo86]

Where is that information from, that you can only use unleash hell 1 time per turn?

[warhammernerd]

8 minutes ago, Erdemo86 said:

Where is that information from, that you can only use unleash hell 1 time per turn?

There isn’t, it’s speculative 

[Beliman]

12 minutes ago, Erdemo86 said:

Where is that information from, that you can only use unleash hell 1 time per turn?

Only the Inspiring Presence is the only one pointed to be used once:
 

Quote

you really need to think about Battleshock now, as only one unit can benefit from the Inspiring Presence command ability.

And it's not clear if it's Once per phase or Once per battle (like 40k Stratagem). I'm not sure about the other CAs, but there isn't anything to think that they are limited. As @warhammernerd said, pure speculation

[Enoby]

I think new rules would be taken much better, or at least with more understanding, if the designers gave a reason for each major change. It'd never happen (for a number of reasons), but I think people would feel better about big rules changes if the designers said "We added X because the new battle plans and missions heavily disfavour these units, and so we have given needed buffs to remain relevant". It would mean, even if we didn't like the changes we could see where they were coming from. If we wanted to write into the rules team then we could address their exact reasons rather than speculate.

Without these comments, as we've seen here, people are wondering whether GW plays their own game.

[Furuzzolo]

What a complaining bunch of shortbeards

Knowing unleash hell is in the game you can actually start to prepare your charge into the hero phase, dunno, -1 to hit spell etc. THEN since the unit need to be disingaged you can prepare a doublecarghe, with strong shooting you could send in a 20 wounds pool of Dire wolves, against not so scary shooting a trio of fell bats...then you charge with the vampire lord on zombie dragon.

On top of that every battletome has overlooked command traita and items to reduce the effectiveness of enemy shooting on the general/hero. No one ever pick those, well, time to begin. Instead of +1 to hit and wound during one phase for your Hammer take -1 hit shooting....

[PrimeElectrid]

Just now, Furuzzolo said:

What a complaining bunch of shortbeards

Knowing unleash hell is in the game you can actually start to prepare your charge into the hero phase, dunno, -1 to hit spell etc. THEN since the unit need to be disingaged you can prepare a doublecarghe, with strong shooting you could send in a 20 wounds pool of Dire wolves, against not so scary shooting a trio of fell bats...then you charge with the vampire lord on zombie dragon.

On top of that every battletome has overlooked command traita and items to reduce the effectiveness of enemy shooting on the general/hero. No one ever pick those, well, time to begin. Instead of +1 to hit and wound during one phase for your Hammer take -1 hit shooting....

Because -1 to hit does so much for MWs on 6s

[peasant]

6 hours ago, Envyus said:

I think people are really overreacting.

Forgive my poor english

So is better to keep our opinions to ourselves?

IS a bad rule because It will make shooting armies scarier giving extra shoots (may be we should change designacions to good shooting units and call the AD Carry).

Do sentinels need more dakka? Why is that an improvement of the rules?

[Feii]

I agree with this man.