Kadeton

Since I can't quite fit a Eurlbad with 2x4 Mournfangs and two Frostlords into a 2000-point list (and I really like my Frostlords), I've been running a 4-pack and 2-pack. The Eurlbad tends to put out a significant number of mortal wounds over the course of the game just from the Mournfangs, and it gives a nice boost to the otherwise lackluster Huskard as well. It's very noticeably a better investment than the extra two Mournfangs I could have got for those points instead, and the extra CP and artefact are gravy.

Yep, livin' that Beastclaw life. My (2000 point) tournament lists are either: 2x Frostlord on Stonehorn, Huskard on Stonehorn, Stonehorn Beastriders, 2x Mournfang Cavalry (Eurlbad Battalion); or 2x Frostlord on Stonehorn, Huskard on Thundertusk, 3x Stonehorn Beastriders. I love the simplicity and directness of such a focused list. It's easy to remember what all your units do and how the game plan fits together, even at the end of a gruelling day of tournament games. And (at least to me) it feels thematic and not particularly spammy - just a proper little band of Ogors and their beasts trying to stay ahead of the snowstorm and find things to eat. Plus the collection of big monsters looks great on the table! I guess these lists technically also include a warscroll for the Great Mawpot, but I realised I made an assumption for this thread that we were just talking about units, and not scenery, battalions, endless spells and so on even though they also have warscrolls.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I've always felt Mawtribes offered an unusually high number of solid choices. (Even though the Ogor armies I've run use a maximum of 4 warscrolls, haha.)

I think there's something to that, honestly. Once you have "enough" "good" warscrolls to make the army or armies you want to play, every other warscroll in the book is basically chaff and you don't even think about them. The actual number for "enough" will obviously vary from person to person, but it doesn't surprise me at all that a majority of people would be happy with 15 or fewer unit choices for an army... as long as they were all good choices. (A good choice might be a unit that's strong, has interesting mechanics or great synergy, is really thematic, or is aesthetically cool, depending on the player's priorities.) Are there battletomes out there that people feel realistically present significantly more than 15 good unit choices? Not a trick question, I'm genuinely curious.

The first step to understanding is recognising that GW's release schedule has never been guided by which armies "need new stuff" the most...

Right? This makes me feel like some mad conspiracy theorist, but that photo is actually so bad it's suspicious. I could whip out my phone and take a picture in under three seconds and it would be a thousand times better than that. That said, as someone who just came into possession of a large collection of classic Vampire Counts, I would like to know more.

I'm definitely in the very small minority on this one. I really like small, highly-focused battletomes, in the 5-10 warscroll range (or even the 1-5 range, if those choices are expensive enough that you'll only have a few of each in your army, like Beastclaws and Sons of Behemat). I wouldn't mind at all if every battletome offered more or less a mono-build choice with only slight variation for personal preference. My reasoning is mostly design-focused. The larger the number of choices available to an army, the harder (I would imagine exponentially harder) it becomes to make them all solid, relevant choices that contribute meaningfully to that faction's thematic approach to warfare. That makes it increasingly more likely that armies will end up with "dud" units that look cool but play badly, which is disappointingly common. It's also much easier to balance a small, coherent set of choices against other small sets of choices, while minimising unintended interactions that end up having to be patched out. It's also pretty true to say that no matter how many choices you offer, the competitive scene is going to boil them down to the optimal choices, which is usually one or two netlists using the same handful of units for each faction. Then even non-competitive players are going to notice and feel compelled to make similar choices, since it doesn't feel good to lose the game before you even start. If people are going to ignore most of the warscrolls, you're wasting development time on them that could be spent on making a focused army really well balanced, or creating a whole new army to add to the range with warscrolls people will actually use. From a collecting perspective, limited choices makes it much easier to "complete" a faction, as it's more or less the same as completing a single army. Then you can move on to a new one to get what you need in terms of variety. There are some big caveats to the above: I don't think it needs to come about by reducing the number of warscrolls in the game, just increasing the number of (mostly separate) armies. So you don't run an Idoneth Deepkin army, for instance - you might run an Akhelian army or a Namarti army, or ally them with each other using specific battalions that give thematic bonuses for the combination. Instead of 24 armies to choose from with an average of two worthwhile builds each (and a lot of garbage), you could have 50+ armies to choose from, each with a single basic approach to building a list and winning a game, in keeping with their theme. That seems like plenty of variety to me. Anyway, I know that approach doesn't appeal to most people. Put down the pitchforks.

Part of the problem when discussing "variety" is that different people want different kinds of variety. Some people focus on what we might call "unit variety", where the number of unique choices within any army build is maximised. An army with one unit of Crossbowmen and one unit of Handgunners is "better" than an army with two units of Crossbowmen, for instance. Some people focus on what we might call "build variety", where the number of viable alternative armies that can be built from the same battletome is maximised. A tome is "bad" if it can only produce one optimised list, regardless of whether that list has strong unit variety. A tome that can build multiple optimised lists is "better", even if those lists have poor unit variety. These sometimes (but not always) coincide, and that's where the discussion can get derailed in miscommunications about preference and intent. Idoneth Eels (prior to Broken Realms: Morathi) had poor unit variety and poor build variety. After BR:M, it has better unit variety, but it's still up in the air as to whether it has better build variety. The designers aren't immune to this division of focus either. A book like Gloomspite Gitz seems to me to focus on build variety at the expense of unit variety - they've done a reasonable job of ensuring that Gitz, Troggoths, Squigs and Spiders are all unique builds with strong internal synergies that more or less "work" (some more competitively than others). However, they've done so by removing any cross-thematic synergies, thus making "soup" armies (with greater unit variety) inherently less effective than "pure" armies. You could release Gitz as four separate mono-build battletomes that divided the faction between them, and lose almost nothing in the split. To my mind, this manner of build variety feels hollow and fake. All of this obviously ties into discussions of balance. Those discussions often miss that units and armies can't be balanced in a vacuum, but are subject to context. Just as a rough example: Unit A and Unit B are identical except that A has two attacks per model with 3+/4+ for 1 damage, and B has one attack per model with 4+/3+ for 2 damage. These units deal the exact same amount of damage on average, so it makes sense that they should cost about the same points. However, if you have the option to take a support character who can cast a spell to give a unit +1 damage on melee attacks, then Unit A is always the better choice should you take that character in your army. If on the other hand you can take a character that can give a unit +1 attack, then Unit B is always the better choice. And that's just within your own army list - if you come up against a lot of Seraphon opponents running Coalesced, Unit B is straight-up garbage. So as soon as you get beyond a comparison of basic profiles and start getting into the context in which those choices are made, it will pretty much never be the case that these two units represent "equal value". Players might find one or the other to be better in their own army (depending on their context), but it will never make sense to take one unit of each compared to two units of A or two units of B. The only way to avoid this is to give them a specific variety bonus: If you have both A and B in the army, you get an extra boost that's not available otherwise. (This gets out of control fast, it's worth noting. If you've just got A and B, you only need one variety bonus to make this happen. If you've got A, B, C, D, E, F, G... the number of interactions you need to cover goes up combinatorially.)

People often say this, but constant releases of bad rules never seem to make much of a dent in GW's success. It's one of those things that feels self-evident and true, but in practice just doesn't properly represent how human behaviour works in the real world. GW certainly churns customers, but doesn't seem to be reducing their customer base overall - quite the opposite. New editions come out primarily to generate a spike in sales. Sure, they might also address some rules deficiencies (and usually introduce a bunch of new ones) but the edition doesn't change because people are "tired of it". New editions are released on a business-driven schedule, planned years in advance. AoS 2.0 is a perfectly fine ruleset that could last for several years more if they wanted it to. But there will most likely be a new edition this year anyway, because releasing it will boost profits.

Actually there's a bunch of other reasons to release fewer miniatures, including tooling costs, stock management, and SKU bloat in limited shelf space. If they could shift the same volume of product by selling more copies of the same product, they would absolutely do so. The main reason they can't is because a lot of customers want a greater variety of units. I don't really understand this viewpoint. GW isn't offering any excuses. They just do what they feel makes the most business sense. They don't care whether you or I are happy with it or not. It seems really unlikely that they'll suddenly decide to throw a mountain of money at the problem of insufficient playtesting - that's a huge risk. To me, that suggests two options: either they keep the current level of playtesting quality, or they focus the playtests on a smaller number of units to improve quality. Yeah, we can all raise our voices and demand they put more resources into playtesting, but complaints on the internet rarely translate into business decisions.

It's a question of development resources and focus. Yes, in theory we could have 30 warscrolls where 10 were great, 10 were okay and 10 were situational. But it would be more or less pure luck for that to happen - we could just as easily end up with my scenario, 30 warscrolls where most of them are just terrible. If an army was instead 10 warscrolls (and crucially, given the same amount of development time!) then the dev team could spend three times as long on developing and testing each unit. This would make it far more likely that those units were well balanced internally and externally, and performed as expected in their intended role. I really don't think people understand how arduous playtesting is, or how fast-paced GW's release schedule is. Every additional warscroll adds a large overhead - the more there are, the more the overall quality of the battletome becomes a matter of random chance. All I'm really saying is that I would prefer to have consistent quality over broad variety. I get that's not everyone's cup of tea, but I think it's important to acknowledge that given finite resources, there is a give-and-take tension between those desires. You can't have it both ways.

Totally agree with this. There are always people demanding more new releases for their armies, but that doesn't make sense to me. I'd be much happier to have only 8 warscrolls available that were all excellent, than to have 30 warscrolls available where all but 3 of them suck.

Whenever I consider playing a new faction, it's usually because I've focused in on one particular "theme" list or specific unit available to that army. It's easy to tell the "story" behind such a narrow army, and that themed narrative background is what gets me enthused about playing the list. Lists with lots of internal variety just feel like a messy mish-mash of random stuff by comparison, and it's therefore much harder for me to get excited about them. To borrow @Neil Arthur Hotep's Magic analogy, they're more like a midrange value deck - everything they have is good, but there's no core mechanic or keyword that you're building your strategy around, you're just focusing on out-valuing your opponent. In that analogy, the skewed list is more like a tribal deck, with strong internal synergies and a single thematic "trick" that gives it a clear path to victory. There's nothing wrong with either approach in principle (and it's awesome that Magic allows for both to succeed) but for me, a lack of narrative coherency quickly makes me lose interest. In general I would much prefer that any given battletome was able to support a wider variety of (competitively viable) lists, rather than trying to make every list utilise a wider variety of units. I think it would be quite sad if every army just became a "bit of this and that" soup. That said, I do agree that battalions as they are currently implemented can be quite stifling of creativity in list building. I don't think it's a fundamental failure of game design, just a weak implementation of an otherwise sound concept.

Yes, that's a bit of a misinterpretation, though I can see how you took it that way. What I'm saying is more along the lines of "You will never get everyone to agree that the problem you see is everyone's problem. Instead, work out exactly what your problem is, and how you can personally take action to address it." Discussion with other people can be really helpful in giving you alternative perspectives and possible solutions for your problem, but the key to making that discussion useful lies in recognising that nobody is "correct". Power creep (and balance) are matters of subjective opinion, and you will never find consensus. There is not one single "power creep problem" or "balance problem" - every player has their own set of problems, and ultimately only they can find the solutions to address them. Talking can definitely help... but action helps much more. My main point is that there isn't one solution, and if you try to find a robust definition of the problem stated in such a way that a majority of people agree with, you will never get past the discussion stage. Don't look for a consensus solution, and don't expect anyone else (including the GW design team!) to solve "the problem" for you. That way lies inevitable disappointment.

Whether or not you agree that power creep is bad, that it's prevalent in AoS, or that any of the numerous nuances of the exact nature of power creep discussed in this thread is a factor... the ultimate question around power creep is, "Okay, so what?" What's your plan? Just talk about it online? People have been complaining about power creep in GW games (and every other game which develops over multiple releases) since the dawn of time, and opinions seem to vary on whether anything has substantially changed as a result. Seems like a waste of time. GW's design team are extremely unlikely to adopt whatever ideas you have about how to 'fix' power creep (whatever that means from your perspective), for many reasons. You'll feel more empowered if you can find something you can personally do to address the problem for you. You might adapt to it. You might address it with house rules. You might choose to play a different game. Or you might just learn to live with it. But getting stressed out about it, while feeling powerless to actually do anything about it, is a good way to achieve nothing other than making yourself miserable and bitter. GW doesn't care. For those of you who see power creep as a problem, what do you plan to do about it?

Stonehorns are back at top tier, IMO. Mine have trashed pretty much every "competitive meta" list out there.

I like the Lumineth aesthetic overall. My main issue with them is that, for some reason, GW decided to make them all hulking aelven giants. The whole range is scaled about 10-20% too large - they tower over the "classic" aelves from the Cities of Sigmar, and are closer in stature to Stormcast. It's really off-putting.

Personally I would prefer this, as I have no real interest in the Sylvaneth but would go crazy for some Kurnothi. But given that's where Skaeth's Wild Hunt ended up, I'd expect them to end up combined, albeit hopefully able to build pure Sylvaneth, pure Kurnothi, or a mix.

Sylvaneth have one of the most aggressive and lethal lists in the game, loading up a ton of buffs on a big unit of Hunters and getting an easy and devastating first-turn charge. Pretty much every other way of building a Sylvaneth list definitely suffers from the book being outdated and a lot of the warscrolls being relatively bad. But you could say the same about Idoneth - just because they're a mono-build doesn't mean they don't have teeth. I would absolutely love to see the Kurnothi elves join them, though.

Yeah, I wouldn't see this is a problem. The position of the model on the base barely matters at all, other than perhaps when you're taking photos of the battle and want it to look cinematic. My Stonehorns routinely charge butt-first into battle because it's basically impossible to get their horns to fit among other models.

Seems like nonsense to me. What kind of store owner thinks in terms of discounted percentage of retail, and not in terms of profit margin per unit? (One who goes out of business, I guess, but that's a bit of a 'duh' answer.) The retailer sells one game at the normal margin. He reduces his margin by 40% and sells two. "Oh my!" he thinks, "What if I sell at only 10% of my regular margin?" He discounts that amount and sells eight. "Hmm," he thinks, "That's less profit than I was making on a single unit. But with a 60% margin, I was making 20% more money. I'm guessing the 'right' amount is somewhere in between!" He continues to experiment with prices until he finds an optimum balance of units sold to margin earned. And yet he's still made a profit on every sale.

I hear you. Ultimately, though, it doesn't really matter whether we think the people involved are dumb or just the corporate processes are flawed - it's a safe bet that both are true some of the time. Even the best people have bad days, and no set of processes will ever completely eliminate errors. That's why it's impossible to "prove" any of these theories one way or another - anything could be taken as genuine evidence, or ignored as a one-off exception, depending on whether it matches your expectations or not. The crucial fact is that these errors and lapses (whatever their source) don't seem to be meaningfully impacting GW's revenue streams, and therefore there's very limited business value in attempting to address them. (Once again, from the outside this looks a lot like "Management doesn't care," but it's probably rather more nuanced internally - it's more about setting acceptable thresholds and mitigating risks.) Insisting that GW needs to fix this situation is a form of "learned helplessness", and it leads to feeling disenfranchised, not listened to, hopeless, bitter, angry, etc. A far healthier approach is to determine actions that each of us can take to address the problem according to our own individual needs, and based on the assumption that GW will not change or improve in this area. Taking action (of any kind) will always make you feel better than hoping someone else will do something. Unmet expectations of what other people or organisations "should" do is a major source of unnecessary stress. Before the usual objections come in response to that, no, I'm not saying that GW gets a "free pass" in this area, or even that you shouldn't complain. But turning those complaints into an ongoing source of personal frustration isn't good for you. The simple reality is that GW changes policy only in response to market forces, not to individual complaints. If you decide not to buy GW products any more (perhaps play a different game instead, there are lots out there!) and a lot of other people do the same, that (and pretty much only that) will provoke corporate changes. Plus, in the meantime, you actually get to enjoy your hobby and not sink into bitterness.

Thanks I take your point, but to me the situation you propose (the developers suck and management doesn't care) is indistinguishable (from our perspective) to the developers being awesome but put under extreme time pressures due to the marketing cycle. I just prefer a kinder and more charitable interpretation, because I sympathise with the devs. My experience of balancing games has been that it takes a lot of time. Also, you get weird situations where things that look fine on paper turn out to be really damaging, and things that set off all sorts of alarm bells when you look at them turn out to be totally fine in context. You can definitely get a "feel" for what's good and bad in terms of balance, but things will still surprise you when you put them in the hands of players. (Again, you might call "Not being able to spot balance problems at a glance" as evidence of incompetence as a rules writer, but honestly, I've never seen a boardgame or wargame with good balance in the beta phases, even from the best designers at the absolute top of their field. The difference between bad balance and good balance is literally just months and years of playtesting, feedback and tweaking - I don't think the GW rules team gets that luxury.)

Huh! That hasn't been my experience at all, I run my BCR as in-your-face bullies and keep the opponent locked in their deployment zone until they die, for the most part. But I always run two Frostlords, which have considerably more hitting power than the list posted above. I've certainly never had to be "cagey". I look forward to actually watching the video - sounds like an interesting discussion.

Yeah, exactly. I'm offering the counterpoint to all of those positions: there is no "dominant" reason. It's a big mess of lots of reasons, none of which consistently dominate.