3.0 Actual Games Conversation

[Kadeton]

On 8/20/2021 at 6:10 AM, Mutton said:

I've played more than a dozen 3.0 games at this point, and unfortunately it doesn't fix the fundamental issues with AoS, which are the clear have and have-not battletomes. Generally, the rich got richer and the poor mostly stayed where they were.

I agree that this problem is still dominant over the scene, but I can't see why it was ever the expectation that a core rules change was going to address it. It seems kind of self evident that in order to change the battletomes, you have to change the battletomes. Once the 3rd Ed tomes finally start to be released, the meta will be shaken up all over again.

On 8/20/2021 at 6:10 AM, Mutton said:

Until the rules writers figure out that writing books like Seraphon's or Lumineth's are inherently damaging to the community, we're going to continue suffering through non-games between higher or lower "tier" armies with massive rules disparities. This isn't a "meta" problem; it's an army design problem.

Lumineth certainly have a divisive and controversial army design, though I don't think they pose a balance problem. Conversely, I'd say Seraphon do pose a balance problem, but there's nothing especially wrong with their army design - they're just badly tuned and have too many strengths. Being too good at every aspect of the game is the perennial problem with Lizardmen since long before AoS.

On 8/20/2021 at 6:10 AM, Mutton said:

The less we obsess over tournament statistics and the more we talk about the casual games 90% of people are actually playing, the clearer the true issues of the game are going to shine through. It sucks having to hear yet another player talk about wanting to quit AoS because they played multiple unwinnable games against an egregious faction.

Talking about casual games is tough, since it's fundamentally just comparing anecdotes without any data. Nobody is collecting meaningful statistics for casual games, and the games that tend to generate comment are usually outliers anyway - when people just have a normal, fun game, they don't often post about it online.

As an example of anecdotes, I haven't had anyone in my circle talk about wanting to quit because of unwinnable games. I have had people wanting to quit because they don't like how the 3rd Ed changes affected the game - they can't stand the way that save stacking means monster heroes are extremely hard to kill, for instance, or they don't like the additional complications of heroic actions and monstrous rampages, or they think battle tactics are stupid.

[Skreech Verminking]

1 hour ago, Kadeton said:

Lumineth certainly have a divisive and controversial army design, though I don't think they pose a balance problem. Conversely, I'd say Seraphon do pose a balance problem, but there's nothing especially wrong with their army design - they're just badly tuned and have too many strengths. Being too good at every aspect of the game is the perennial problem with Lizardmen since long before AoS.

On 8/20/2021 at 12:10 AM, Mutton said:

Luminteth have a huge problem, although in a different aspect.

Rather then being the meta pick, they are just bad play experience for most players.

-they basically break every rule in the book

-and I yet have to meet a person that really enjoys playing against one of these armies.

Edited August 23, 2021 by Skreech Verminking

[Kadeton]

26 minutes ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Luminteth have a huge problem, although in a different aspect.

Rather then being the meta pick, they are just bad play experience for most players.

-they basically break every rule in the book

-and I yet have to meet a person that really enjoys playing against one of these armies.

Indeed - as I said. Their army design focuses on denial and disruption rather than raw power. Divisive and controversial, a pain in the ass to play against, but not unbalanced. They're the Blue Control deck of AoS.

[Mutton]

10 hours ago, LuminethMage said:

The rest is just conjecture - you don't know if these books "damage" the community more than all the negativity and gatekeeping around almost any new book or faction that comes out. I've heard from LRL players that they give up on the game because of all the negativity they encounter. I think in both cases that's more of a fringe situation than anything that happens all the time. 

It's absolutely not conjecture. It is a real problem in our community. Poorly balanced battletomes are incredibly damaging. We've had at least two people stop playing the game after being destroyed by Seraphon/Lumineth armies. We've had multiple other players with low tier armies leave because they just weren't having a good time anymore. And guess what, the only people who have stuck around are those with higher-tiered armies.

Just because it isn't happening everywhere with statistics to back it up doesn't mean it isn't real. This is one of the problems--everyone is obsessed with numbers and data. These can be helpful, for certain, but they don't tell the whole story.

[readercolin]

So I've gotten a few games in over the past 2 months.  My local store started a "Path to Glory" campaign, starting at 600 points and growing.  We didn't read the rules closely enough to figure out that my army was actually "illegal" at 600 points, but after the first games it got increased a bit to be legal and no one cared.

My Army:
Tempest Eye
Starting:
Warlord - Annointed on Frostheart Phoenix, Master of Magic, Arcane Tome
10 Phoenix Guard
Emerald Lifeswarm
Addition 1: 20 Darkshards
Addition 2: 10 Phoenix Guard
Addition 3: Flamespyre Phoenix

I've played with that army in about 9 games (that I can remember) so far, and here are my results:

Game 1: 600 points vs Ironjaws, win for me.
My opponent couldn't break 10 phoenix guard inside a -1 to wound aura, which then got healed back up by the lifeswarm.  He tried pulling off a turn 1 charge with a squad of pigs, but the pigs couldn't kill the guard with a 4+ save and +2 save between tempest eye turn 1 and all out defense.  The counter charge then took out his megaboss, and his remaining units coudn't break the guard with lifeswarm healing them up.

Game 2: 600 points vs Lumineth, win for me.
On a small board, tempest eye basically can have a guaranteed turn 1 charge, and going first meant I could get in and do enough damage that he didn't have enough damage to go through phoenix guard backed up by lifeswarm.

Game 3: 600 points vs Lumineth (different player), win for me. 
Same story as above.

Game 4: 800 points vs Sylvaneth, loss for me.
Brand new darkshards and my opponent hid in the woods, making them utterly pointless.  Kurnoth Hunters sitting in the woods defending his hero's also meant that I had to try to go into the woods to kick him out, or lose to repeated dryad summoning, but Kurnoth's were rocking between +2 to +3, and his wizard was able to return slain models AND heal them up, making them impossible to move.  This lead the game to be one where I was able to get an advantage early on, but wasn't able to keep momentum up and my opponent was able to take the game back.

Game 5: 1000 points vs Tzeentch, win for me.
My opponent wasn't playing path to glory, so we played a matched play game with the 3 shifting objectives in the middle.  Fast movement allowed me to get the objectives early and tie up his forces, and then I was able to eliminate the units that he had that could actually go through a block of phoenix guard, which basically lead to an automatic victory as he couldn't shift me off of the objectives.

Game 6: 1000 points vs Sylvaneth, loss for me.
Battle plan was the one where you try to get across the board and leave, which was an interesting alternative to the "engage in the middle and smash for a while" that most of the other path to glory battle plans are.  Adding in more phoenix guard gave me more melee punch, but my opponent added Durthu.  Once again, darkshards were mostly useless, but at least this time they got shot off by Durthu rather than just sitting around doing nothing.  Lucky rolls by my opponent on two separate turns prevented me from killing his revenants, which prevented me from getting units off the board.

Game 7: 600 points vs Cities, loss for me.
Path to glory is funny, because 2 Dreadlord on Black Dragons is as a matter of fact a valid 600 point army.  The tankyness of the dreadlords in a Living City army, combined with the Heroic Recovery ended with my phoenix guard wiped by turn 2, and then 2 dreadlords managed to take down my phoenix on turn 4 due to some lucky rolls with the bite attacks and some very unlucky ward saves for my phoenix (double 6's on damage followed by 10 failed ward saves does that for you...).

Game 8: 1250 points vs Tzeentch, Loss for me.
Different Tzeentch opponent, and another matched play game.  This time my opponent was playing guild of summoners and was able to summon their first big bird on turn 1, their second on turn 3, and I underestimated how annoying pink horrors would be, so got stuck in them for 3 battle rounds.  The fact that the Flamespyre now only deals "wake of fire" damage on a "Normal move" is also a rather extreme nerf to the unit, as I can no longer retreat out of combat and deal some mortals, or deal mortals on a charge/pile in.  Technically I also can't run and deal mortals, though we didn't realize that till after the game.  As it is, the Flamespyre either needs an errata or a new warscroll, because as it is it probably isn't worth the 290 points compared to just running another Frostheart.

Game 9: 1250 points vs Stormcast, loss for me.
Another matched play game, one with 3 objectives along the diagonal.  My opponent put a stardrake down with staunch defender and Amulet of Destiny, and then was running Vindictors for Battleline.  The stardrake was actually able to go through a squad of phoenix guard in just 2 rounds of combat, but then got stuck in a slap fest with the Frostheart, and not much happened after that.  The Flamespyre got unlucky on his wake of fire, and then got stuck in with some Evocators on Dracolines and proceeded to die, and then the remaining kitty was easily able to handle the darkshards that were controlling one of the objectives.  Finally, Ghur ate the one objective that I was in control of on turn 3, putting my opponent far enough ahead that there was no path to victory available.

Overall, I can say that Path to Glory is pretty fun, and gives me a good reason to stick to the same army for a bit.  I think it is a huge improvement over the previous path to glory campaign, because you choose how you are going to grow your army rather than having to roll and see what models you get.  This is especially important with large factions like the cities, because while I have a decently sized collection, I have less than 1/4 of the units in the cities, making it very hard to roll on the units I actually have and want to expand my army with.  Additionally, the ability to play your path to glory army against non-path to glory opponents means that you can still experiment and play with your force without having to make allowances for having a really off army.

As for game impressions, big hero monsters are a problem in small games.  In larger games where you can just throw a bunch of stuff at them they are less of an issue, but a lot of my smaller games have come down to them being unkillable because there just isn't enough damage possible for a faction to go through the unit at that points level.  There is a similar issue with high-save units, especially when backed up by some healing/resurrection.  Those units do need a bit more support than the hero monsters though, which makes them a bit more balanced as you do have the option of trying to go after their support.

There is also a very strong case of "Haves" and "Have Nots", even within battletomes.  Phoenix Guard are good.  Darkshards... not.  Pink Horrors are good.  Tzaangors... not so much.  This isn't even getting into the differences between battletomes, where some are clearly better than others.  If everyone is willing to balance their armies around other people, this can be worked around - I'll bring more darkshards against opponents who are running "bad" units/armies, and more phoenix guard against the "good" ones.  However, if you don't have large collections already, it can be really hard to build collections that allow you to have fun games against all comers.

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, AOS is so egregiously unbalanced in power level and inconsistent in design quality - even for a GW product - that it is kind of remarkable really. Beasts of Chaos and Lumineth could be from completely different games in terms of the design philosophy behind them - it goes well beyond just being outdated (and these differences in design philosophy are evident even among just-released tomes too). 

And it really doesn't help that the secondary design and lack of terrain rules are so focused on playing to the already strong instead of empowering weaker armies. 40k has major balance problems too, but one thing it does have going for it is that the mission scoring system and above all the terrain system work in ways that mitigate some of that unbalance by at least giving you the tools to make a decent fist of it with less powerful armies. AOS' scoring system and terrain rules are so underdeveloped and nuance-free by comparison that it jacks up the importance of just having powerful units and rules to begin with, which creates a strong-get-stronger, weak-get-weaker effect. 

The person saying that it makes sense that the move to 3.0 didn't fix theses issues is sort of right, but sort of not right. Unbalanced tomes are always going to be a problem, but you can have a base rules system that emphasizes things other than just unit and rule strength, and therefore mitigates power differentials through the basic rules of the game. And for all the ways it improves over AOS2 - and it does, don't get me wrong - AOS3 is not that sort of ruleset. If anything, several of the basic choices in the new edition - empowering 3+ saves and heroic monsters, deemphasizing the importance of spreading out for board control by lowering objective counts - make it even worse than the base AOS2 ruleset in terms of rewarding the strong and punishing the weak. 

Edited August 23, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Kadeton]

12 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

The person saying that it makes sense that the move to 3.0 didn't fix theses issues is sort of right, but sort of not right. Unbalanced tomes are always going to be a problem, but you can have a base rules system that emphasizes things other than just unit and rule strength, and therefore mitigates power differentials through the basic rules of the game. And for all the ways it improves over AOS2 - and it does, don't get me wrong - AOS3 is not that sort of ruleset.

This is a thought-provoking perspective, could I ask you to expand on it a bit more? I realise we're veering off-topic but I think it's an interesting discussion.

For instance, what is "unit and rule strength" (and/or how can it be quantified) other than the ability to succeed within the game's framework? How can a competitive game emphasise anything other than the ability to win the game, whatever form ("strength") that might take? A ruleset change can redefine what constitutes "power", but how is that mitigating power differentials rather than just creating new ones?

12 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

If anything, several of the basic choices in the new edition - empowering 3+ saves and heroic monsters, deemphasizing the importance of spreading out for board control by lowering objective counts - make it even worse than the base AOS2 ruleset in terms of rewarding the strong and punishing the weak. 

This is kind of an illustration, I think - I don't particularly remember 3+ saves and heroic monsters being "the strong" in 2nd Ed. With a few notable exceptions, they were easily killed and rarely worth their points, i.e. "the weak". 3rd Ed's changes redefined the measure of how much of a strength that was, and the power differentials adjusted accordingly.

Or is this more specific, along the lines of Beasts of Chaos and Nighthaunt being "the weak" and Seraphon and Tzeentch being "the strong", and that broadly carrying through into the new edition? Does it matter whether "the strong" armies (or "the weak" armies, for that matter) have needed to (or been unable to) adjust their composition according to the new set of "strengths"? Would a new Beasts of Chaos battletome's power level be anything other than a typically random shot in the dark?

[LuminethMage]

13 hours ago, Mutton said:

It's absolutely not conjecture. It is a real problem in our community. Poorly balanced battletomes are incredibly damaging. We've had at least two people stop playing the game after being destroyed by Seraphon/Lumineth armies. We've had multiple other players with low tier armies leave because they just weren't having a good time anymore. And guess what, the only people who have stuck around are those with higher-tiered armies.

Just because it isn't happening everywhere with statistics to back it up doesn't mean it isn't real. This is one of the problems--everyone is obsessed with numbers and data. These can be helpful, for certain, but they don't tell the whole story.

What did they play? What lists? You have someone leaving after they lost one match against a LRL/Seraphon player with what? There are a lot of battletomes which can compete with both of those.

This seems a bit weird, not saying it's impossible to happen - like I said we also had people quit because of all the negativity they are encountering. But it doesn't mean it's prevalent, nor that's it's a net-negative effect. 

Nor that it's a problem of "high powered" battletomes over a prolbem "low powered" ones. Why make a problem out of the battletomes which have fun rules and good internal balance? The problem are the battletomes which aren't doing that. They should have less battletomes with boring rules, bad internal balance and funky stuff that doesn't work well. 

 

[Backbreaker]

3 hours ago, LuminethMage said:

Nor that it's a problem of "high powered" battletomes over a prolbem "low powered" ones. Why make a problem out of the battletomes which have fun rules and good internal balance? The problem are the battletomes which aren't doing that. They should have less battletomes with boring rules, bad internal balance and funky stuff that doesn't work well. 

We have a Lumineth player in our group. He decided to stop playing the army because a lot of us were complaining about it. Mostly because we really didn't have fun when playing against him. The guy has 9 armies in total so he just switched but he really love his LRL. And honestly, he painted everythinghimself, convert his Teclis, it's just amazing to see the spears line up in front of you.

But it is a fun killer. I honestly think that the LRL battletome is more a curse for Lumineth player than for their opponents.

Look, there is light! Yes because we all agreed that it was a shame to stop playing an army beause of something like that. First he started playing new units instead of Teclis, Cathalar, Sentinels and Warden. We saw Avalenor hit the tabletop for the first time last night  And we decided to house rule. No more double turn, we hoped that this edition will fix that but it's still a balance breaker. We might change point costs for some armies (Gloomspite Gitz, dear god, Gitz players are either masochists or martyrs).

[Skreech Verminking]

5 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Beasts of Chaos battletome's power level be anything other than a typically random shot in the dark?

Maybe?

hopefully?

But truthfully said, I have no idea

[yukishiro1]

10 hours ago, Kadeton said:

This is a thought-provoking perspective, could I ask you to expand on it a bit more? I realise we're veering off-topic but I think it's an interesting discussion.

For instance, what is "unit and rule strength" (and/or how can it be quantified) other than the ability to succeed within the game's framework? How can a competitive game emphasise anything other than the ability to win the game, whatever form ("strength") that might take? A ruleset change can redefine what constitutes "power", but how is that mitigating power differentials rather than just creating new ones?

We're talking about two different sorts of power. There's power to win the mission, and power to smash your opponent's army. In AOS, they tend to be one and the same, because of a host of basic decisions about how the game is constructed. In other words, in AOS, the army that is best at tabling the opponent is almost always also the army that's going to win a game. This is in stark difference to many tabletop games, and even to 40k, GW's other big game. There are a lot of reasons, some little and some big, why this is.

Terrain is the biggest one - the lack of meaningful terrain in AOS means that there is no real way to shield your army from the enemy's attacks. So hiding and hunkering down and trying to win by holding out is not really a viable strategy.

Objective placement and size also play into this. AOS has fewer objectives, and they are clustered closer to the center. This naturally promotes unit power over mission power, and death stars over small tactical skirmishes, because it allows you to concentrate your army in one spot. Even the choice to make objective control zones larger in AOS than in 40k has important consequences that promote smashing your opponent's army rather than playing the mission, because it's easier to stay on objectives or get onto objectives while doing it when the radius of control is larger. 

Then there's the mission scoring system itself. 40k has many non-interactive secondaries that, combined with the primary, allow you to build lists that can win games even if they never kill an opponent's model and do nothing but die all game. AOS really doesn't have this. A few of the BTs can be done without interacting with your opponent, but not nearly enough to make it a viable way to compete on the scoreboard with someone who is tabling you. The GS options don't really promote survival either, because to actually get a differential score in your favor, you have to not only survive, but also wipe at least a large portion of your opponent's army too. 

Look at a list like the Tau list Richard Siegler took to Atlantic City and managed a 7-1 with, nearly winning the tournament. Tau are widely recognized as one of the worst armies in 40k right now. But a good player can still do extremely well with them by building a list that doesn't try to go toe to toe with the opponent, but instead focuses on leveraging its mobility to score points even as it is getting tabled by an army with stronger on-paper units. AOS' ruleset just doesn't really facilitate that kind of strategy. Which exacerbates balance issues because it means there's no real alternative way to go at the problem of an army that's simply stronger than yours is. 

The move from AOS2 to AOS3 doesn't really change any of this. It makes multiple rules improvements, but it doesn't really move the needle much in terms of offering you passive victory paths that don't involve winning the tabling battle, and some of the changes, like reducing objective counts and table size, and adding GSes, actually make the problem even worse. 

Edited August 24, 2021 by yukishiro1

[NinthMusketeer]

Balance is terrible, but balance was terrible in 2nd, and in 1st before that. The only time balance wasn't terrible was when fans made the point costs. The point being that it isn't a 3rd edition thing, so maybe better for another thread? 'Balance in AoS' would make for an engaging topic.

[yukishiro1]

I think discussing the impact of the AOS 3 ruleset on balance inequities is certainly on topic for a thread about what actually playing AOS 3 feels like.

The most common feedback we are seeing right now on the internet re: 3.0 - in this thread and elsewhere - is that it's more fun to play than AOS 2 generally, but that that fun is often diminished by a lack of balance that make many matchups feel like foregone conclusions. My point is this isn't a coincidence - specific changes made (and not made) in the 3rd edition ruleset explain why this is. Even if the actual imbalance isn't any worse than it was before - a debatable point - changes in the ruleset expose that imbalance even more than it was previously. 

[NinthMusketeer]

Sure, but if one looks back over this page it is easy to see the discussion is not about imbalances related to 3rd and mostly about the broader concept which isn't really on topic for a thread about gameplay in 3rd edition.

[LuminethMage]

18 hours ago, Backbreaker said:

We have a Lumineth player in our group. He decided to stop playing the army because a lot of us were complaining about it. Mostly because we really didn't have fun when playing against him. The guy has 9 armies in total so he just switched but he really love his LRL. And honestly, he painted everythinghimself, convert his Teclis, it's just amazing to see the spears line up in front of you.

But it is a fun killer. I honestly think that the LRL battletome is more a curse for Lumineth player than for their opponents.

Look, there is light! Yes because we all agreed that it was a shame to stop playing an army beause of something like that. First he started playing new units instead of Teclis, Cathalar, Sentinels and Warden. We saw Avalenor hit the tabletop for the first time last night  And we decided to house rule. No more double turn, we hoped that this edition will fix that but it's still a balance breaker. We might change point costs for some armies (Gloomspite Gitz, dear god, Gitz players are either masochists or martyrs).

Awesome.

That's how it should be done locally (and also how I think it's solved most of the time). I don't play with Teclis, except against people who ask me too for example - because I know many people don't like playing against Teclis. If someone wants to play against a more melee focused list, I'll bring our Mountains and some Stoneguard.

I haven't had any complains about the fun level of the army so far. I mean it's not like everyone thinks Total Eclipse is the most fun ability ever, or getting your heroes shot by Sentinels is the best feeling (that's why I bring max 20). But we still have fun, exciting games most of the time. Especially in 3rd Ed.

And "Fun" is subjective, and I hear both on the LRL discussion boards. Some people have absolutely no problems at all locally, some do like in your group. I think it also has something to do with people already expecting a not fun experience because they have heard a lot about LRL being not fun. Doesn't matter in the end of course.

I just think the take that they should change successful battletomes (both Seraphon and LRL players like how their armies play and have attracted a lot of players as far as I can tell) is not a good proposition. It's easy to get likes with that kind of post, but I think it's not better for the game in the end. You also often see tons of posts from players who say they'd quit after something like with the new Slaanesh battletome happens. That's why I think it's better to uplift the bad books than make what are good books worse (except for obvious OP combinations that should be reigned in). 

Anyway, awesome that you found a good solution for all of you 😃

Edited August 25, 2021 by LuminethMage

[Kadeton]

11 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

We're talking about two different sorts of power. There's power to win the mission, and power to smash your opponent's army. In AOS, they tend to be one and the same, because of a host of basic decisions about how the game is constructed. In other words, in AOS, the army that is best at tabling the opponent is almost always also the army that's going to win a game.

Fair enough - though I do think "power to win the mission" is the only form that's actually worth talking about in the context of game balance.

Interestingly, this actually one of the things that I feel has majorly shifted in 3rd Ed - the power to kill and the power to win have become far less aligned. Yes, tabling your opponent is still a guaranteed path to victory, if you can do it... but at the same time, it's become an almost impossible task. With all the extra save bonuses and healing available, in my experience so far, tabling simply isn't happening like it did in 2nd Ed. The armies that win games are those that survive, capture and hold objectives, and consistently achieve a battle tactic every turn.

For instance, to bring the conversation back around to "actual games", I played against a Lumineth army last night. Forty Sentinels, the works. The most impactful unit in the army by far was the Loreseeker, because locking down an objective for several turns got them much closer to victory than all the damage output the archers could muster.

Other players' experiences will vary, of course. But I've been going up against armies that I would have tabled easily last edition, and simply been unable to do so now. (Again, the Lumineth were a good example here - I played this match-up several times last edition and they never survived past turn 3.) The ability to survive has become so much more important that I'm switching up my tournament list, sacrificing killing power in order to pack in more resilience and more healing.

This has also been the source of most of the dissatisfaction about the new edition from players in my local scene who aren't taking to it - their expectation is still that killing power is the key to victory, so they build their list to maximise damage and then get frustrated when it doesn't work. They come away thinking that monster heroes are "too tough" and the game is "broken" as a result. In reality, it's just that killing power and winning power have diverged, and they're stuck in an outdated mode of thinking.

11 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

40k has many non-interactive secondaries that, combined with the primary, allow you to build lists that can win games even if they never kill an opponent's model and do nothing but die all game.

While I generally agree with your points about objectives and that there could be significant improvements made (though fortunately this is something that could be addressed in the annual GHB missions rather than needing an update to the Core Rules), this one did stick out for me. The ability to do nothing but die all game and still "win" seems... I don't know... tedious? Frustrating for the opponent? I'm all for paths to victory that don't rely on killing, but I really don't think allowing passive victory is a good design decision. The players should always be actively engaged in the game.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Kadeton

[Kadeton]

Double post, sorry.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Kadeton

[yukishiro1]

It's not passive. You still have to do stuff - what I meant by "do nothing but die" was vis a vis your opponent's models. And your opponent still has ways to stop it. It just means it doesn't rely on doing anything directly to your opponent's models. It's a vital thing to build into a game to provide some buffer against unbalance. When your win conditions all basically come down to beating up your opponent's army, power differentials between armies become decisive in every game instead of only influential. When the rules of the game are set up to allow a weaker army a path to victory that doesn't involve going hammer-and-tongs at the other army, it means a certain level of imbalance can be tolerated because there are ways to play around it.

AOS unfortunately doesn't really have that, so army imbalance is a bigger deal than it is in 40k. In theory objective scoring provides this ability to score without interacting with your opponent's army, but in reality, it doesn't, because the objectives in the new battleplans are so clustered, so few in number, and so exposed by the lack of a terrain system, that there's really no option other than to have a big scrum in the middle on most maps. 

A lot of this is theoretically fixable just by fixing the mission pack, without having to touch the core rules much. But it would require a quite fundamental rethink on the way the missions are designed and what BTs and GSes are. 

Edited August 25, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Kadeton]

1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

It's not passive.

Ah, I was thrown off-track by the term "non-interactive". I assume you just meant "non-lethal" instead.

On the face of it, all that's doing is changing what constitutes "power to win". I would presume that some armies are better equipped than others to achieve these non-lethal objectives - they might have more survivability, more mobility, other unique advantages. Do correct me if I'm wrong, and the ability to complete non-lethal objectives is somehow independent of all those factors.

In which case, you haven't reduced or mitigated power differentials overall. You've made some power differentials less important, and others more important - there are still relative "haves" and "have-nots" in terms of the ability to win. That might, by chance, mean that balance improves, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it - an army with an overwhelming advantage in completing non-lethal objectives can produce just as "unwinnable" a matchup as one that can table you.

So really, it sounds like you'd just prefer that the game de-emphasised killing. Which is a totally fair preference!

[yukishiro1]

Are you not perhaps familiar with how 40k works? You choose 3 secondary objectives before the game starts. This means you have a large degree of customizability in terms of what you can choose to focus on. Not everything comes down to your ability to kill your opponent's army more effectively than they can kill yours. It's not that it's de-emphasizing killing per se, it's that there are more choices available to you than only focusing on killing. If you want to build a list that's focused on killing, you can certainly do that, you just don't have to.

So yes, it is all about "power to win" in a broad sense. But the point I am making is that 40k has a substantially more varied scope for what "power to win" can be. This broader range of potentially useful attributes, coupled with a terrain system and a character protection system that actually work, makes it possible to play the game in a variety of different ways. If you want to play a killing-focused game, you can do that, but you aren't absolutely required to; there are other paths to victory, and there are ways to actually stay alive while doing it. This means that it's much less likely that there's going to be just literally nothing in your book you can do to be remotely competitive against a book with units that are better at killing than yours. Even if you can't compete in a simple brawl, you can probably find different ways to make a game of things.

Baking this sort of multi-dimensionality into a game's design makes it less consequential if armies have different levels of strength when it comes to killing power, because that's not the only attribute that matters.  The issue with AOS3 is that on almost every map, the game basically just comes down to a big brawl in the center, with the army that's better at killing having a decisive advantage. There's potentially the systems in the game to change that, but they're not effectively implemented in the mission design, which is actually substantially *more* focused on brawling in the center than AOS 2  was. 

AOS2 maps had more objectives, and they were worth a much larger percentage of your overall score. The AOS3 maps exacerbate imbalance in killing power because they reward it more, by lowering the importance of objective control, centralizing objectives, and above all, by adding in new scoring mechanisms which directly reward your army's ability to brawl better than the opponent's. 

Now we can obviously have our own preferences. Lots of people prefer a game that is extremely focused on killing. The point I was making is not that such a game is necessarily worse than a game that has multiple paths to victory, but that a game with only one way to win is a game more prone to balance problems. If the only way to win is to smash your enemy, one book being better at smashing than another is substantially more of a problem than in a game where there's several ways to win. 

 

 

Edited August 25, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Kadeton]

Yeah, I'm not at all familiar with how 40K works these days. They lost me in 5th Ed, I was briefly interested in 8th Ed but found that the reasons I quit hadn't been addressed, and I haven't looked back. But that does sound like they've made some very positive changes to missions and scoring, which is great to hear. Hopefully some of that makes its way across to AoS in future.

I think I'll reiterate the change that I've seen, though. Killing power was entirely the determining factor in 2nd Ed games, and it meant the meta was dominated by the armies that could put out the most damage (especially at range) into the most valuable targets.

Now, though, that's not the case. The most valuable targets simply can't be killed (at least reliably) in a lot of cases. The glass-cannon armies that dominated 2nd Ed just get hosed, because the "cannon" part of their strategy has been blunted but the "glass" part is as much of a weakness as ever. Instead, the armies that dominate are the ones that can tank it out while also competing for objectives.

The most notable effect was for the Sons of Behemat, a lower-middle-tier army in 2nd Ed which is now a top-tier powerhouse in 3rd. Their killing power is poor to middling, but their survivability is pretty good and their objective-holding abilities are off the charts. In 2nd Ed only the first one mattered, but in 3rd it's the other two that are pushing them to the top.

That's really where I'm coming from when disagreeing that killing power is the path to victory and 3rd hasn't mitigated that. It has! There's still only really one clear way to win, but it's no longer bound up in how well you can remove your opponent's models and nothing else. Where I think you might be coming from is that you'd like to see more than one way to win. I totally get that, and I would love for that to be the case. And hey, if 40K has managed that, maybe I should give it another look.

[yukishiro1]

Yes, by the game being focused on killing, I mean that fighting your opponent's army head on is the only way to win, and that the army that does that better will almost always win. Not necessarily that glass cannon lists are better. You can adjust balance along that continuum, but it's still a continuum where the relevant factor is an army's ability to beat up the opponent better than the opponent is beating up them. Having a really survivable unit is a different way to win the killing game, but that's still the game you're trying to win.

And I'm not saying 40k is in a great spot overall. If anything, its balance issues are even worse than AOS. But the difference is that when I play a game of 40k with a weaker army, the base rules give me far more room to still compete on the mission even if I can't compete in a head-to-head brawl. I don't feel that in AOS3. It's still overwhelmingly about who can smash the opponent's army faster than they get smashed.  You can take different approaches to smashing your enemy faster than they smash you, but that's really the only way you can win games. More cagey approaches just don't work, because there's no terrain system and the mission objectives are too few and too clustered near the middle, and the secondaries don't do enough to enable you to win in different ways. 

 

Edited August 25, 2021 by yukishiro1

[whispersofblood]

2 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Yes, by the game being focused on killing, I mean that fighting your opponent's army head on is the only way to win, and that the army that does that better will almost always win. Not necessarily that glass cannon lists are better. You can adjust balance along that continuum, but it's still a continuum where the relevant factor is an army's ability to beat up the opponent better than the opponent is beating up them. Having a really survivable unit is a different way to win the killing game, but that's still the game you're trying to win.

And I'm not saying 40k is in a great spot overall. If anything, its balance issues are even worse than AOS. But the difference is that when I play a game of 40k with a weaker army, the base rules give me far more room to still compete on the mission even if I can't compete in a head-to-head brawl. I don't feel that in AOS3. It's still overwhelmingly about who can smash the opponent's army faster than they get smashed.  You can take different approaches to smashing your enemy faster than they smash you, but that's really the only way you can win games. More cagey approaches just don't work, because there's no terrain system and the mission objectives are too few and too clustered near the middle, and the secondaries don't do enough to enable you to win in different ways. 

 

Have you tested this theory? You could easy play AoS3.0 by modifying AoS2 battleplans to include the new scoring. 

If it is shown that the suggest boardsize from GW negatively impacts games I can see tournaments going back to 6x4s especially considering they are already deeply invested. 

I do think however that part of what you are describing is a feature and not a bug. The designers seem quite keen on satisfying the Timmy's need for experience, by forcing impactful combats for the showpiece models. 

[yukishiro1]

I don't think the board size is the main culprit. It's the objective placement, number, and the secondary objectives. GSes in particular. I have no doubt that if you removed GSes you would give a boost to less powerful armies, right now they're basically just a free 3 points for having a stronger and/or more skewed list. It's classic "the rich get richer" game design. 

You could try playing AOS3 using AOS2 scoring, but you'd have to rework the whole system, and at that point, you may as well just come up with your own system instead I think, it'd probably be better than using AOS2's scoring in a ruleset it wasn't designed for.

I do think you're right that it's largely intentional. GW isn't so clueless about design that they didn't realize the general impact of what they were doing. They presumably think that players enjoy a big scrum in the middle of the board; if they don't, they really aren't very good at mission design, considering what they've come up with. 

And that's not necessarily terrible. But it does place increased pressure on them to get the balance right, and right now, it's not even close. 

Edited August 25, 2021 by yukishiro1

[AaronWilson]

10 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I don't think the board size is the main culprit. It's the objective placement, number, and the secondary objectives. GSes in particular. I have no doubt that if you removed GSes you would give a boost to less powerful armies, right now they're basically just a free 3 points for having a stronger and/or more skewed list. It's classic "the rich get richer" game design. 

You could try playing AOS3 using AOS2 scoring, but you'd have to rework the whole system, and at that point, you may as well just come up with your own system instead I think, it'd probably be better than using AOS2's scoring in a ruleset it wasn't designed for.

I do think you're right that it's largely intentional. GW isn't so clueless about design that they didn't realize the general impact of what they were doing. They presumably think that players enjoy a big scrum in the middle of the board; if they don't, they really aren't very good at mission design, considering what they've come up with. 

And that's not necessarily terrible. But it does place increased pressure on them to get the balance right, and right now, it's not even close. 

How many games of AoS 3 have you played / how many were decided by a GS?