Kadeton

Double post, sorry.

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 In reality, it's just that killing power and winning power have diverged, and they're stuck in an outdated mode of thinking. 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.

Actually a great question. I think I was just working off fallible memory, to be honest - I can't find it either. All abilities stack, unless they're contradictory.

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? 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?

Sure, it'll be a free beta... as long as you're already a Warhammer+ subscriber. No, we totally said that right from the start. Check those old articles again - see, they all say that, and they definitely haven't changed! You're the crazy one.

The rules for 22.3.1 Mounts, Companions and Crew states that "For rules purposes, companions and crew are treated in the same manner as mounts." So going forward, they don't need to include the "treated the same way as a mount" wording - it's that way by default. Sadly, even though it's totally thematic, the Stab-Grot doesn't benefit from Venom-Encrusted Weapons as far as I can tell.

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.

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. 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. 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.

Yeah, expecting a three thousand page thread to stay "on topic" seems like an unrealistic and pointless goal. It might be called the Rumour thread, but it has been and always will be the Personal Feelings and Reactionary Opinions thread. The spurious "rumours" and GW advertorials are just the fuel that keeps the reactions flowing.

Generally speaking, abilities with the same name do not stack. Abilities with different names do stack, even if they have similar effects. A unit can receive two different effects that each give +1 to hit, for an overall +2 to hit. However, the final bonus to hit is always capped at +1. Stacking the bonuses has no additional effect unless the unit is also receiving a penalty to hit, in which case the bonus will offset that. So if the unit has bonuses totalling +2 to hit, you only add +1 to the rolls. If they have +2 to hit and also suffer -1 to hit, you still add +1 to the rolls. Total up all the modifiers, add them together, and then cap it at +/- 1. For the wizard question, the rules are different between Open/Narrative play and Matched play. In Matched play, each spell can only be attempted once - if it fails, it cannot be attempted again, and regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, no other wizard can attempt it. (There are some exceptions for specific spells and specific wizards, e.g. Nagash can attempt to cast Arcane Bolt without restriction.)

I think this rule is broken in its current state, and will have to wait for another errata before we can properly understand how to play it according to designer intent. The launch errata does not adequately cover the interaction between the Flying Transport rule and the new garrison rules. There's no provision for whether a unit can move after leaving a garrison, because there's no provision for leaving a garrison before the end of the Movement phase. The use of parentheses in the Flying Transport rule suggests that phrasing is a clarifying statement (i.e. in the style of "You can still do other stuff as normal") rather than an explicit exception to the normal rules for leaving a garrison - if they were intended to overwrite those rules, they should also include clarification around whether the disembarking unit can move in the same phase. On the other hand, I feel like restricting units from leaving ship garrisons until the end of the Movement phase (which is what I believe the rules as written currently suggest) is a large and unnecessary nerf to Kharadrons. I would be happy playing it that they could disembark before the transport moves, but could not move further in that phase, at least until Flying Transport receives a proper errata.

In terms of the geometry, an objective is a singular point, no? An objective marker indicates where the point lies, but the point itself is the exact centre of the marker. A point has no area. It is impossible for a point to be "within" an area and not also, intrinsically, "wholly within" that same area. I would say that an objective on the edge of your territory is wholly within your territory. If it is on the border between your territory and your opponent's territory, it is wholly within both territories. That might not make intuitive sense, but that's geometry for you.

Probably depends on how argumentative you want to be about the semantics of 'error'. I would say that any discrepancy between the printed content of a battletome and the way the designers intend for that battletome to be played constitutes an error. That can include omissions. It doesn't matter whether the discrepancy comes about as a result of a decision made after the book has been published - the difference between intended play and written rules is still an error. In that context, the battletome not including the Grand Strategy and Battle Tactics that are intended to be played with that army is an error that should be corrected via errata, yes. More pragmatically, I simply want to have all the changes to the way any given army plays to be collated in one document. It's a terrible idea for players to have to reference more than one "source of truth". I don't care if they release the rules in White Dwarf first, and then follow that up by incorporating them into the FAQs in a reasonable timeframe. But I'm not padding out my collection of rulebooks with random magazine issues and having to remember which ones go with which battletomes. That's just poor data management.

There are errata documents for this exact purpose. No reason for it to be in a White Dwarf other than to try to squeeze out that little bit more money from people who don't otherwise buy the magazine. Hold the Line is also "as long as you don't get tabled" for Sons, so that's nice. The current batch of Grand Strategies are very poorly designed. Make the Land Tremble is markedly better, in that you need to do something actively to achieve it, not just survive. The saving grace is that the Bland Strategies will rotate out of play with the next GHB, and hopefully the design team can do better next iteration.

Perhaps I'm missing the nuance of exactly what you're looking for, but this sounds a lot like the Lumineth to me. Elite units with superlative combat skills? Check. Heroes that combine magical aptitude with fighting ability? You bet. They might not have guardian lions and Chinese dragons specifically, but the wind foxes and mountain spirits definitely fit with animist traditions. Plus the whole army has a very Eastern-inspired aesthetic. Maybe with a bit of tweaking, the game already has what you're looking for?

I don't think it's a matter of different-looking units - as you say, there are plenty of those in the game already. What I suspect makes people think the Kruleboys "don't fit" with the existing Orruk range is that they seem to be rendered in a different artistic style. As an example, think about cartoons, which are extremely stylistic - within the context of their own shows, you automatically recognise that Homer Simpson, Shaggy and Sailor Moon are all human beings, but if you stood them next to each other your brain would be telling you that something was really "off" about at least two of them. Ironjawz and Bonesplitterz have always had a highly exaggerated, caricaturish look to them - gigantic bulging muscles, unfeasibly prominent jaws and teeth, massive heads. Kruleboyz have a lot of the same features, but they're not exaggerated to nearly the same degree - they're closer to the more grounded, "realistic" proportions of the orcs of Middle-Earth. That's the disconnect. I'm not saying it's right, but I understand where it's coming from.

Oh for sure, it was brutally overbearing when dealing 6 mortals a shot. The best way to deal with it? Put a little bit of damage on each Thundertusk and drop the damage to d6, and then just ignore them because using a 300+ point model to deal d6 wounds is horribly inefficient.

I'll admit to being quite underwhelmed with that breath attack. It's basically a convoluted way of dealing 1 to 6 mortal wounds, but with a lower average (~2.33) than just a simple 1d6. For dragonfire, that seems resoundingly meh. (Remember the old snowball attack that Thundertusks did in the old Beastclaw codex? It started at 6 mortal wounds, and that was great... but then if you inflicted some damage on them it very quickly dropped to 1d6 and immediately went from awesome to disappointing. This dragonfire is worse than that.)

Short of implementing and maintaining an Elo-style rating system for players globally, it's basically impossible to quantify player skill in any form. Even in an Elo system, the player's choice of army would inherently be a factor in their "skill" rating, since the rating is determined solely by game outcomes. Maybe with enough data points you could start correcting for that and approach some kind of objective "army strength" measurement, but I doubt we'll ever get to the stage where the data is good enough to do that with any decent confidence.

Ah, okay. Yeah, I get that the sample sizes are so small that outliers can heavily skew the data. Not sure that's the best way to account for it - with your rating, if army A is played 50 times and army B is played 100 times, A's winrate would have to be more than twice that of B in order to appear higher on the table, which seems kind of weird. I'd prefer to see some form of normalisation of results. Cool project though!

The Beasts of Chaos should collectively defect and flock to the banner of Kragnos - a far more fitting leader for their faction. They could be the Beasts of Destruction instead. I think the thing that makes me saddest about them is that they were designed to be played centrally around their Herdstone. Now any monster in the game can stroll up and kick it over like a sandcastle.

Heh. I feel like that's more a pragmatic response to Stormcast specifically. And those crossbows are definitely "rule of cool" more than anything else - small crossbows can still hold a phenomenal amount of energy in tension, so there's not much reason to make them massive and unwieldy I guess. I think the main point of cavalry is generally to move fast, whereas those sound slow and careful. So is it just about some of the Kruleboyz not having to get their feet wet? Or just because riding stuff is neat, even if it's not very practical? (If I was designing cavalry for them, I'd go totally the opposite direction - long, narrow stilt-like legs, looking like one of Dali's elephants. Just as impractical, but IMO more fun!) I mean, the post I responded to was asking for a unit akin to Brutes or Nobs, so yeah... at least one person is definitely asking for that. But your idea sounds awesome and I would be totally behind it. Kruleboyz should definitely lean into the skill & cunning approach, not the powerful & heavily armoured - leave that to the Ironjawz.

They're noisy, and bad at concealing themselves and their trail. You can definitely use cavalry to launch a surprise attack (where you suddenly move troops quickly into a position your enemy thought you couldn't get to) but not an ambush (where you hide troops in a position and your enemy doesn't know they're there until they attack).

I feel like the restricted roster is somewhat thematically appropriate, though. The Kruleboyz are swamp-dwelling ambushers - they need to move quickly and quietly through difficult terrain. Cavalry and elite infantry are poorly suited to both swamps and ambushing. The whole idea that every force has to include at least one option of every unit type seems terribly outdated to me. Having a limited thematic selection of roles shapes a more unique playstyle, gives the army a better sense of character and grounds them in their own lore.

Interesting! I'm not sure what the purpose of combining the win rate and % meta into "DKHM rate" is, can you give a bit more detail on what that data point is supposed to indicate? Very surprised that Deepkin seem to be doing so badly (maybe they're still all just spamming eels?), as well as Ironjawz. Kharadrons on par with Blades of Khorne?! What's the reasoning on splitting Warclans into its three variants, and not any of the other battletomes which have similarly strong divisions? I'd be quite interested to see the split between Beastclaw Raiders and regular Mawtribes, for example. Surprised and delighted to see so many Ogor armies though!