Age of Sigmar: 4.0 What would you like to borrow from 40k 10th edition?

[RileyArlic]

Now that I've looked at some of the rules and such...

Attached Units/Leaders NEEDs to be an option in AoS. It's super cool.

Moving spells into other phases and giving different heroes abilities that can be done in other phases to keep them relevant would be nice.

Battleshock changes need to be adopted. They're SO much better than just removing models. 

[Skreech Verminking]

2 hours ago, RileyArlic said:

Now that I've looked at some of the rules and such...

Attached Units/Leaders NEEDs to be an option in AoS. It's super cool.

Moving spells into other phases and giving different heroes abilities that can be done in other phases to keep them relevant would be nice.

Battleshock changes need to be adopted. They're SO much better than just removing models. 

Looking through it all, I sometimes wish there was some kind of clarity between weapons.

something I loved in 40k or warhammer fantasy was the stats that every weapon had.

while the owner of that weapon could be stronger, more accurate, a weapon like for example a bow always had that givven stat that literally made it out to be a bow.

for example all bows were strength 3.

this is something which has been a total miss lately where an elve carrying a bow which isn’t even magical or anything for some reason starts wounding on a 2+.

while a rattling gun weapon teams that shots out literally warp bullets, only seems to be wounding targets on 4+.

i wish there was a more coherent way they could do that, latey it fees more like a miss then anything.

i mean just the fact that a goblin hero now hits, wounds exactly the same as a vampire or stormcast hero is already weird enough.

currently they all fee a bit blant 

[Beliman]

On 5/23/2023 at 12:07 PM, Skreech Verminking said:

something I loved in 40k or warhammer fantasy was the stats that every weapon had.

This kind of stuff would help a lot to understand the game. It would be a lot easier to understand for newcommers and we would have a lot less gotcha moments if the same weapons had similar profiles, same type of abilities worked close the same and defensive tools (shields, armor, scaly skin, monster skin, etc...) worked in a similar ways.

We already have that for most banners and musicians

Edited May 29, 2023 by Beliman

[Dogmantra]

3 hours ago, Beliman said:

This kind of stuff would help a lot to understand the game.

This is 100% the worst thing about AoS at the moment. There's a game design axiom I read somewhere, it was about TTRPGs but totally applies to all games: same fiction, same rules.

This really frustrated me recently with the new Questor warcry band. They include a Knight Relictor who can translocate them, but it isn't a priest, and doesn't use the actual translocation prayer. Just sloppy sloppy design that contributes to the game being more complex than it should without much reward.

[Bosskelot]

It's always gonna be a careful balancing act between standardizing a lot of stuff for ease of play vs having more unique things in order to bring out the flavour of each unit/army.

For all its issues WHFB was actually a pretty simple rules system, helped along by how much standardization and usage of USR's there were. Everyone would know what the base statlines of a human, elf, dwarf or orc were, and how these would change when being mounted, including any equipment they had and what it would do as things like Light Armour, Halberds, Spears, Shields etc were all universal. Of course this can lead to blandness, or tricky situations where for design or balance reasons it would actually be sensible to really change some of the core statline for a unit in order to help differentiate it or balance it in some ways. (like how a lot of elite units get +1 W over their normal counterparts in AOS)

Of course the designers can go completely overboard sometimes, the Stormdrake Guard being the best example here. Half of the abilities don't need to be on that warscroll and then on top of that most of them could be handled much better as weapon USR's as you're seeing with 40k 10th.

Of course 10th looks like its having its own potential problems already in that by making declarative statements about how many rules an army will have and having datasheets being physically limited to a set size, GW has removed all ability to expand their system. I know players of a few armies who liked their mechanics in 9th and who are really bummed at how their army now has 1 singular faction rule. Not only that you now have certain units which would actually benefit and be fine with being more complicated than others, but will have to lose a whole load of rules and mechanics in order to fit on those tiny rectangular cards.

Edited May 31, 2023 by Bosskelot

[Beliman]

For anyone interested, there is an oficial battle report using the Combat Patrol rules (note: They are tweaked rules to play with just the Combat Patrols):

There are some "advanced" tactics and how to play in Warhammer youtube chanel too. 

Imo, the game feels good, with enough tactical depth without being bloated, but after reading all Leviathan Warscrolls, I think that there are some missed oportunities. I will wait for the first Codex.

On 5/31/2023 at 8:10 AM, Bosskelot said:

It's always gonna be a careful balancing act between standardizing a lot of stuff for ease of play vs having more unique things in order to bring out the flavour of each unit/army.

100% agree. I think that 10th edition will have a good balance in that matter. Most of the weapons have the same stats and only two armies have "unique" USR. So everyone plays the same game. But each datasheet has at least an some kind of unique ability. Not enough "big" to bloat the game (some re-rolls here, +1 hit/wound, extra move when someone comes close, etc...) but spicy enough to make all datasheets unique.

Appart from that, I think that I prefer subfactions than detachements. Btw, I don't have any problem if there is no magic phase, but I prefer magic to have their own unique mechanics instead of being a bunch of auras or weapons.

[Fairbanks]

I hated 9th from the moment I cracked the core rules. What a breath of fresh air that 8th was, 10th is literal blowing smoke in my face. I hate the core rules and I think the game needs to go back to 8th.

As for unit cards and abilities, two sides. Simpler unit cards are a benefit, simpler Allegiance Abilities is something I feel AoS already has, so maybe the only need is to rewrite a massive number of warscrolls.

Unit Coherency: 2" is perfect. 1" is an unnecessary disaster for 6 cavalry models.

6.1 (Using Command Abilities): Replace with the rules for leaders attaching to models.

7.1 (Heroic Actions) and 21.1 (Monsterous Rampages): Put special abilities on the cards. These sections don't need to be here.

Command Abilities (8.4, 11.2, 15.3, etc): Put these as Strategems in one spot, and get rid of the really powerful ones.

The Only War Mission. 3.0 is actually unplayable for free, since the free rules do not contain a default Battlepack or Battleplan.

[Ganigumo]

Things I like from 40k 10th that could come to AoS:
-OC stat on warscrolls
-battleshock not being losing models, although I'm not certain I love these rules either.

-[Psychic] Keyword on abilities, I don't want to lose spellcasting, but it would be neat to throw a [magic] keyword on some abilities to let it interact with things like spell ignores.
-unit coherency, 40k coherency is a bit much, but ours sucks so whatever.

For the record while I do think the 10th edition rules are a huge step up from the 9th ones, they're still bad. As in very badly written. They REALLY need a rules editor or something, and an actual editor. Everything from the page format, to the way rules are written, to the ordering of the rules is such a huge step down from AoS. Like who's idea was it to break up the sequence of the phases in the rules to insert pages of weapon special rules in between the shooting and charge phases, or to still keep 2 very unique unit types with their own rules (aircraft and transports) and have those rules split up, or to put super important rules in margins/text boxes to the sides of the core rules.
Then there's the actual mess of pointless text and rules. For charging you need to declare a charge target, which honestly doesn't add much value in the first place, but you need to declare the charge against EVERYTHING you want to end up within engagement range of, so it creates a headache if units are close together, but it gets worse of course, pile-in range is 3", and engagement range is 1", so you can just declare and charge the closest thing and then pile in to everything else anyway. WHY?
I could go on and on about this, but the rules are filled with this kind of stupid stuff, pistols, extra attack [x] existing solely to cover for sloppy datasheet writing, imperium focused stratagems like smoke getting into the core list, etcetc.

I was a bit annoyed about how aos3 bloated the rules more than I liked, but every time I look at 40k I'm reminded of how it could be.

My biggest pet peeve though is the constant need for them to have transports be the ones to shoot for everyone inside of them. Its just weird and unintuitive that when my dudes get in a car their rules stop working, and they get more or less accurate depending on the car and its condition. Immediately after reading it I wished they had just lifted the KO rules wholesale.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

14 hours ago, Ganigumo said:

-OC stat on warscrolls
-battleshock not being losing models, although I'm not certain I love these rules either.

Kind of feels like those two could improvements should enhance each other: Failed battleshock tests could just impose an Objective Control penalty instead of turning off the ability to contest objectives completely.

[Painbringer]

After reading the core rules and some Indexes, I do not think that AoS should borrow a lot of stuff from 40K10E. Basically, the only things that would be interesting to see are (as many already pointed out) Battleshock and OC stat. Below you can read why I don't think that AoS should look at all at 40K. 

When it comes to changes, they way Psychic powers are handled now is probably the change I dislike the most. Stripping them away completely and turning them to some kind of weapon or abilities (that just happen, btw) completely killed the identity of all Psykers in the game. For example, Kairos Fateweaver and Lord of Change are not very different from the Bloodthirster now - they all have melee attack, ranged attack, one or two special abilities... And that's it. I'm not saying this won't work, but I really wanted my Kairos to be represented in a different way. The way things turned out - he became some kind of daemonic artillery

 I really enjoyed picking psychic powers. I believe that there were other ways of simplifying - like reducing the number of powers or not allowing Psykers to choose more than 1, etc. I enjoy spellcasting in AoS as well and would not want to see it turned into what it became in 40K. 

A lot of the rules changes just look like the changes for the sake of changes. I thought that 9th Edition had a pretty good core rules - the problem started with the amount of rules that armies had in their codices. However, a lot of rules for targeting and cover were logical in 9th - but now, they became very abstract for some unknown reason. Lone operative looks like a completely random rule, as well as strange limitation regarding cover, AP 0 weapons and saves of 3+ or better. Cover rules are also poorly written in my opinion. I really do not understand if different terrain effects, caused by the different terrain types would produce such cognitive load that new players would end up confused. 9th edition handled that pretty good, with terrain traits. Also, I would really like if GW switched to cover imposing a penalty to hit, instead of improving armour save. AoS could benefit from more complex LOS and terrain rules as well - I really think it suffers in that area from the beginning. However, I don't think that importing changes from 40K would fix anything. 

When it comes to faction rules, Marks of Chaos for CSM are... Horrendous (again, this is just my opinion). This is one more type of change that puts streamlining in front of any unique or interesting ability the model might have. Everything now improves critical hit chance and provides an additional ability - which is nice, but does not work for every model.

This was the list of main reasons why I think that AoS doesn't have much to "borrow" from WH40K. Similar set of changes in AoS could potentially result in many armies loosing thier identity and much of the flavour removed. Of course, rules and fluff are not the same, but I believe that there is some middle ground. 

[Beliman]

On 6/12/2023 at 11:59 PM, Ganigumo said:

Things I like from 40k 10th that could come to AoS:
-OC stat on warscrolls
-battleshock not being losing models, although I'm not certain I love these rules either.

I completely agree with that.

Imo there are a few more features that I think they could work and improve AOS:

Heroes joining units could be good too. It fix a lot of problems: Look Out Sir, Galletian Champion/ Galletian Sharpshooter, 5 wound heroes without any defense (magic users, buffers, etc...), Heroes with small auras that fail their charge and can't buff the unit that are supposed to buff, etc.

40k melee range for all weapons (every unit can attack in 2 lines). No more drifting pigs seems good for a game that is vastly improved by the visuals on the table.

Some type of USR. I don't think that special rules for weapons are needed in AoS because we have basic weapon profiles. But I think that our USR should focus on movement, charge bonus, control objectives, auras, deployments, etc... we already have this type of stuff in some form, so, it's more about polishing this rules than creating a new layer.

 

Edited June 14, 2023 by Beliman
grammar

[The Lost Sigmarite]

We're talking about all the things we would like to see AoS borrow from 40k 10th, but it could be cool to say the things you don't like to see borrow from 40k 10.0 to AoS 4.0. What I don't want to see in AoS 4th is :
- The terrible editing of the core ruleset
- The translation issues in datasheets
- The poor overall balance that appeared from apparently not enough playtesting
- The loss of psychic phase. I know in AoS spellcasting is more important that in 40k so I think we'll keep our hero phase.

To end on a positive note the things I would be cool with translating from 10th to AoS are :
- OC stat on warscrolls
- New battleshock system
- Small heroes leading units
- The A4 sheet with all the stratagems, but for the monstrous rampages/heroic actions.
 

[Ganigumo]

8 hours ago, Beliman said:

I completely agree with that.

Imo there are a few more features that I think they could work and improve AOS:

Heroes joining units could be good too. It fix a lot of problems: Look Out Sir, Galletian Champion/ Galletian Sharpshooter, 5 wound heroes without any defense (magic users, buffers, etc...), Heroes with small auras that fail their charge and can't buff the unit that are supposed to buff, etc.

40k melee range for all weapons (every unit can attack in 2 lines). No more drifting pigs seems good for a game that is vastly improved by the visuals on the table.

Some type of USR. I don't think that special rules for weapons are needed in AoS because we have basic weapon profiles. But I think that our USR should focus on movement, charge bonus, control objectives, auras, deployments, etc... we already have this type of stuff in some form, so, it's more about polishing this rules than creating a new layer.

 

I'm very against USR from a readability standpoint. If someone picks up a battletome to read what a unit does they shouldn't need to also flip to a page in another book for it to make sense. It also allows complexity to creep in because its super easy to slap USRs on a unit, since the scroll will still look plain, but in reality you've added a ton of complexity.
If they used USR but ALSO explained what the rule does everywhere its printed I might not mind, but at that point it loses the point of printing less words.
Its not an issue for players who've got experience, since you'll eventually learn them, but its a huge pain for new players, and unless a large number of armies are using that rule it doesn't really justify being a USR.

Heroes joining units is an interesting angle, and 40k 10th did it in a way that isn't painful, but aos would have growing pains if we added it. Most armies don't have any form of "sniper" units, so throwing something like a slann into a 30 block of something, or skragrott into 60 grots would make them nearly unkillable. We'd need new battletomes to accomodate the change, and I don't want an index situation. WH weekly proposed it as a Stormcast army rule during their 3e tome retrospective show, which I like far better. Give specific heroes an ability on their warscroll (or in their allegiance abilities) to join units, and give the unit a buff. Would give a bunch of those otherwise useless heroes something interesting to do, and maybe they don't even have the leader role anymore, plus since you're limiting the heroes that can join units like that you won't run into any painful edge cases like with the slann.

[Beliman]

3 hours ago, The Lost Sigmarite said:

it could be cool to say the things you don't like to see borrow from 40k 10.0 to AoS 4.0.

Yeah, it could be fun, but Imo, it's healthier to just focus on things that seems fun and cool to play with and ignore the aprt that we don't like (note: I agree with your list btw and add a few more points that I'm not a fun of, like losing subfactions).

56 minutes ago, Ganigumo said:

I'm very against USR from a readability standpoint.

Maybe, but Imo, we have the worst of both worlds:   Some abilities are copy&pasted (6s to hit= mw) and then we have a lot of completely diferent bonus for abilities that have the same purpose on the table: Charge bonus (add +1 to wound and dmg, maybe attack, maybe flying and doing mw, maybe mw alone...). All this kind of stuff could be done with a few USR (I'm talking about 6-9).

1 hour ago, Ganigumo said:

Most armies don't have any form of "sniper" units, so throwing something like a slann into a 30 block of something, or skragrott into 60 grots would make them nearly unkillable.

That's more about balancing than the rule itself. With a rules facelift, I expect some abilities, warscrolls, maybe spells, etc... to be tweaked.

To be honest, I don't see any 40k rule ready to be used in AoS without some tunning.

[Dogmantra]

4 hours ago, Ganigumo said:

I'm very against USR from a readability standpoint. If someone picks up a battletome to read what a unit does they shouldn't need to also flip to a page in another book for it to make sense.

This is an interesting conundrum because the battletome does serve two (gameplay) purposes - an out of game unit browsing tool, and an in game rules reference. The former does benefit from having more explanatory text, but the latter is often a lot easier to reference, especially once you know the game fairly well it is a big benefit to glance at the 5 or so keywords on a unit and not have to reread any abilities.

I'm not convinced that the keyword only approach is necessarily worse for readability than the current verbose AoS style, even if you have to look up nearly all the keywords. The flavour text being included in ability descriptions makes looking at warscrolls, especially complex ones like Nagash, very overwhelming at first as you try to filter out what is relevant to gameplay.

 

4 hours ago, Ganigumo said:

If they used USR but ALSO explained what the rule does everywhere its printed I might not mind, but at that point it loses the point of printing less words.

I think using fewer words is actually only the second priority for this approach. IMO, the most important thing is standardisation, it not only helps learn the game because the same concept in the fiction translates to the same rule on the table, but it also opens up design space that would otherwise be quite clunky to access and difficult to word. Take Wards, for example. Okay, at the start of 3rd ed AoS it was a little unclear exactly what counted, but after it was clarified, it's very straightforward and there's now more stuff that plays with wards because they're properly codified.

For another example, let's say we wanted to add a new phalanx type unit, and one of their abilities is to ignore impact hits. With the current rules we would have to write the ability something like: "When an enemy unit finishes a charge within 3" of this unit, this unit may not be picked as the target of any abilities that cause mortal wounds", or "This unit cannot suffer mortal wounds from abilities that cause mortal wounds at the end of an enemy unit's charge". This is clunky and also to go back to your first point, a little bit meaningless until you've come across impact hits elsewhere so you might not even know where to look in order to find out what this ability really does on the table. Compare with "This unit is immune to Impact Hits." Imo, much easier to parse what it actually does, and it can exist partially because impact hits are a codified part of the ruleset.

[Ganigumo]

39 minutes ago, Dogmantra said:

This is an interesting conundrum because the battletome does serve two (gameplay) purposes - an out of game unit browsing tool, and an in game rules reference. The former does benefit from having more explanatory text, but the latter is often a lot easier to reference, especially once you know the game fairly well it is a big benefit to glance at the 5 or so keywords on a unit and not have to reread any abilities.

I'm not convinced that the keyword only approach is necessarily worse for readability than the current verbose AoS style, even if you have to look up nearly all the keywords. The flavour text being included in ability descriptions makes looking at warscrolls, especially complex ones like Nagash, very overwhelming at first as you try to filter out what is relevant to gameplay.

Needing to reference multiple pages, is bad enough, but needing to reference multiple pages across multiple books is a nightmare to anyone who hasn't memorized 2-3 of them.
Already we need to reference: Warscroll, Allegiance abilities, subfaction abilities, enhancements, heroic actions, monstrous rampages & seasonal rules. 

Most of these generally come from your battletome, with a couple coming from the core rules (tbh I'm not a fan of rampages or heroic actions either but they're simple enough if you even remember, forgetting rampages or heroic actions is pretty common in my experience), and the seasonal rules on top.
Adding USRs means yet another point of reference, since it rips useful information out of the warscroll and puts it somewhere else.
Ultimately its a feature that ONLY has value for entrenched players, when playing against other entrenched players, when neither needs to reference the part of the rules where the USRs are written. Flipping pages and putting the pieces together takes time, and if you can remove as much page flipping as possible thats a good thing.
With regards to complex warscrolls like nagash I don't see a problem with it. They put the flavor text in italics, so theres a clear distinction between rules and flavor, and sometimes (not always!) complex warscrolls are warranted and appropriate. An 800+ point god model is certainly one of those cases, but if it were a 100 point foot hero we would have a problem.

39 minutes ago, Dogmantra said:

I think using fewer words is actually only the second priority for this approach. IMO, the most important thing is standardisation, it not only helps learn the game because the same concept in the fiction translates to the same rule on the table, but it also opens up design space that would otherwise be quite clunky to access and difficult to word. Take Wards, for example. Okay, at the start of 3rd ed AoS it was a little unclear exactly what counted, but after it was clarified, it's very straightforward and there's now more stuff that plays with wards because they're properly codified.

For another example, let's say we wanted to add a new phalanx type unit, and one of their abilities is to ignore impact hits. With the current rules we would have to write the ability something like: "When an enemy unit finishes a charge within 3" of this unit, this unit may not be picked as the target of any abilities that cause mortal wounds", or "This unit cannot suffer mortal wounds from abilities that cause mortal wounds at the end of an enemy unit's charge". This is clunky and also to go back to your first point, a little bit meaningless until you've come across impact hits elsewhere so you might not even know where to look in order to find out what this ability really does on the table. Compare with "This unit is immune to Impact Hits." Imo, much easier to parse what it actually does, and it can exist partially because impact hits are a codified part of the ruleset.

I'm against the standardization of rules in this manner for a few reasons.

1. USRs need to be created, codified, and handed out at the start of an edition
   1. It may require invalidating all books if you do a heavy FAQ or "Indexes"
   2. If you don't add them to existing books only the updated books use them, so they're playing with two different rulesets and don't add value for months to years
   3. It requires unrealistic foresight into all the rules you want to use commonly over the course of an edition
   4. It limits creativity and innovation in rules writing, since abandoning them or changing them can have huge effects on the meta. Finding a better way to do say, impact hits, is irrelevant because changing the USR, or printing the new version verbatim invalidates the USR.
2. Having different types of the same effect can be good, since it creates better distinctions between units and armies.
   1. We have multiple ways of doing impact hits, (rolling dice equal to the charge, per model, per unit, hitting multiple units etc). By creating a standard you force everything into that standard and can limit design space.
   2. As an example look at Deadly Demise in 40k 10th. It does the specified number of mortals wounds to nearby things on a 6+. Limiting the rule to a 6+ makes the entire thing unimpactful, and if you wanted to do a unit that uses it as a gimmick, like maybe a new unit of bomb squigs, by the time you get done writing the rules for the unit you've used more words than just writing the whole thing down
3. USRs obscure bad unit design, complexity creep, and balance.
   1. Less words on a scroll doesn't make the scroll or unit any more or less complex, you're just moving the rules to a different place. We have a perfect example of this in AOS. Kruleboyz should have Venom encrusted weapons on their warscrolls, but they don't, its an allegiance ability thats a core part of how every scroll works which makes them near useless without it. Every mounted scroll still needs a blurb explaining which of the mount weapons are poisoned (most of them are). The writers also mistook moving a rule that should be on the scroll into the allegiance abilities for an actual allegiance ability, hence why they don't get any. Spiderfang in contrast kept the rule on the scrolls, and still manage to interact with it and reference it in the same ways.
   2. Its easy to slap a few USRs on a warscroll and call it a day, because the rules still look simple, but you may have inadvertently created some really complex interactions.
   3. Not all USRs are created equally, but its easy to not think too hard about that, both as designers and as newer players. Liberators with "Deadly Demise 1" would be far worse than Liberators with "Lethal Weapons", but that's not immediately obvious.
4. Incestuous USRs are just bad design. (i.e "Flaming" turns off "Regeneration", or "Phalanx" is immune to "Impact Hits")
   1. These always run the risk of being far too niche a use case.
   2. units with these rules are only good if units with the other rule are good, unless they're good anyway, in which case running up against it with the other rule is definitely NPE. They're Paper, to something else's Rock, but your paper is only good against the rock, and their rock is good against everything that isn't paper.
   3. With the example of "Phalanx", "This unit cannot have mortal wounds inflicted to it during the charge phase" covers the use case, while being simple, and not incestuous. It has a side effect of blocking a few other rules, like stomp, but generally the majority of charge phase mortals are impact hits
5. Actually writing out the rules gives a better view on how complex things are, makes editing easier, and forces the player and writer to actually think about if the rule is even worth putting to paper, or if its enough to make the unit worth taking'
6. We can use terms like "deep strike", "ambush", and "impact hits" without them being fully standardized. Honestly they're better as general use terms for common types of rules in my opinion.

Now certainly there are a few things that could be standardized, Wards were a good example, and "bodyguard saves" are another, but the standardization of those is mostly to cover sloppy rules writing by the developers, which isn't a good excuse in my opinion. Wards are a case where standardization was actually necessary though, because limiting a unit to 1 ward save is a nightmare without a proper term to call it.

[Beliman]

I understand what @Ganigumois talking about but I don't agree on some of his points. But that's a chat for another time.

Btw, it seems that most of the mortal wounds from 40k come from To Wound rolls (mainly Devastating Wounds). There are some "shock attacks" that still do mw if you move over enemies or whatever, but I think that AoS could be improved with a lot less mw overall or at least focused only in To Wound rolls.

Btw, a weird choice to build 40k lists as if it was AoS. Free loadouts for a game that it's based on units with 5 to 10 diferent weapons is crazy. I'm not a fan of it. But maybe I will change my perspective after a few games.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Beliman

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

27 minutes ago, Beliman said:

Btw, a weird choice to build 40k lists as if it was AoS. Free loadouts for a game that it's based on units with 5 to 10 diferent weapons is crazy. I'm not a fan of it. But maybe I will change my perspective after a few games.

I generally like the AoS approach to special weapons (you just get one for free for every 10 guys or whatever), and I think that doing away with most of the micro-optimizations could benefit 40k as well. However, the change does not seem to be implemented very well currently.

That said, I also frequently read that people miss the days of playing quartermaster simulator that were old Fantasy list building, so maybe it's more of a question of taste than objectively good game design.

[The Lost Sigmarite]

About USRs, I don't mind them as long as they're kept at a reasonable number. I think 10th does a good job at that, especially when you compare to the mind boggling number of USRs in HH. I like the fact they also put the USRs on both sides of 2 A4 sheet (you can have it separate or memorise it's page 25 of the rulebook - simple number to remember). 

I wish AoS had some USRs too - good as long as they're not too numerous. New 40k has around 20 USRs, that's fine, but I wish that if AoS does it too, that they'll have less than that, like capping USRs at what can fit on an two face A4 spreadsheet (so like 12-15 USRs).

[Skreech Verminking]

20 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

That said, I also frequently read that people miss the days of playing quartermaster simulator that were old Fantasy list building, so maybe it's more of a question of taste than objectively good game design.

I di miss those days, and personally I think having some point differences for spear or sword skaven could make them distinctly more interesting.

 

[Flippy]

4 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I generally like the AoS approach to special weapons (you just get one for free for every 10 guys or whatever), and I think that doing away with most of the micro-optimizations could benefit 40k as well. However, the change does not seem to be implemented very well currently.

That said, I also frequently read that people miss the days of playing quartermaster simulator that were old Fantasy list building, so maybe it's more of a question of taste than objectively good game design.

List building can be (much like painting) a fun activity by itself. AoS, however, is very limited in this area and it could use a bit more room for heroes and units customisation. Where are my magic banners?

At the same time I’m seriously surprised by how much WH40k players are attached to WYSIWYG. All the discussion about the dire necessity of clipping off melta gun and gluing plasma gun… can anyone honestly tell the difference?

[Grimrock]

Speaking of weapon profiles, one of the things I liked about the 40k changes was the shift towards homogenizing some weapon loadouts. For example changing Tyranid Warriors to having all one melee weapon profile regardless of what they're modelled with. I know we've seen a bit of it in AoS (for example with skullreapers), but I'd like to see it changed over for everything. I know you lose some flavor, but all the various weapon options do is create feel-bads when a new book is released. You might initially pick a weapon type because it's stronger or maybe it fills a specific role like armor cracking or infantry blending, and then next edition GW completely changes what it does or tweaks the stats to the point where it's useless. Obviously keep making kits with weapon options because it lets people people build what they think looks cool, but make all the stats the same so people don't feel like GW is trying to rob them blind. 

[The Lost Sigmarite]

5 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

That said, I also frequently read that people miss the days of playing quartermaster simulator that were old Fantasy list building, so maybe it's more of a question of taste than objectively good game design.

This is true. I always feel like the community will always prefer the old, complex method of listbuilding where every single model, option and enhancement has a cost rather than the new "streamlined" one where you buy your units in "bundles of models" and you get free options (like capped to 1/5 models, etc). Even if the old system felt really byzantine at times (14 y/o me trying to do a WFB/40k 7th ed list certainly remembers that).

[Hollow]

1 hour ago, Flippy said:

At the same time I’m seriously surprised by how much WH40k players are attached to WYSIWYG. All the discussion about the dire necessity of clipping off melta gun and gluing plasma gun… can anyone honestly tell the difference?

No. People complaining like that are the worst of 40k forums. (I bet most haven't even played a game in years) Whilst it is of course important to listen to customer feedback, there is a small portion of the Warhammer "Community" that is just toxic sludge. They will never be happy. 

 

As for 10th I have been really enjoying looking through all of the rules. I remember a time when the idea of GW launching a new edition with all the rules free for all factions, as well as points, online was just a pipedream. Now they have actually done it and I don't think they are getting anywhere near the credit they deserve for doing so. 

Would really like to see Characters be able to join Units in AoS. Something I would really like to see explored in 4th is the idea of Transports. I think AoS is really missing a trick in regard to gameplay and modeling options. 

[HorticulusTGA]

I want AOS 4th Ed. to be like Warcry 2nd Ed. 

(That is, not many changes at all, to make up for the slow drip - because reasons - in AOS 3rd Ed., and the relative robustness of our current core rules). 

On 6/14/2023 at 1:33 PM, The Lost Sigmarite said:

- OC stat on warscrolls
- New battleshock system
- Small heroes leading units
- The A4 sheet with all the stratagems, but for the monstrous rampages/heroic actions.

As features these could be great too. Also updates and free online rules like in AOS1.