Kadeton

Ah, I have such mixed feelings about this aspect of the game. On the one hand, these models look awesome on the tabletop and bring so much presence to the game. On the other hand, it really dilutes and diminishes what it means to be a "god" when you see them get beaten up by a bunch of goblins with sharpened sticks. (It also more than slightly annoys me that since those characters can't gain the General traits, armies are often led by some no-name rando while their actual god just hangs around like an oversized cheerleader.)

Definitely mixed feelings. I dislike the lack of freedom of choice, and the bland sameyness when every army of a given faction uses the same trait and relic, but at the same time I think using traits and relics to help balance sub-factions is a better option (if done right) than making them cost points.

I think the game is in a pretty positive place overall right now. It's a solid rulebase for a relatively simple game, but still allows for special mechanics to create a unique "feel" for each army that aligns with player expectations based on their lore. The choice of faction aesthetics and playstyles is broad and varied, and it sounds like that's only going to increase with new releases. The inter-faction balance is, honestly, remarkably good. Games are smooth, engaging and don't drag on. My main criticism, purely self-interested, is the lack of price parity between markets and/or anti-competitive trade practices (e.g. the ban on worldwide shipping). I don't really understand how GW have managed to get away with that, but it's pricing a lot of people out of the game here in Australia, and we're not even the most egregious example. Otherwise, I just want to see the Wood Elves come back (and I'd happily settle for Kurnothi as a fully-developed faction).

@Macha I think your quote should be attributed to @HollowHills, not to me.

This is the core flaw in your position, IMO. Cities of Sigmar and Skaven aren't "ancient WHFB armies" any more. They're now AoS armies - they have proper battletomes, which update their lore for the Mortal Realms and bring them fully into the Age of Sigmar. The fact that they also existed when WHFB was around is no longer relevant, because GW made the choice to recreate them as a proper AoS faction. The "ancient WHFB armies" would be, for example, a force of Duardin using the unit profiles from Grand Alliance: Order. The forces available to anyone using the Grand Alliance battletomes are pretty much universally weaker than any force using a battletome for a proper AoS army, so WHFB armies are already on a lower tier than all the proper AoS armies. You just need to shift your perception of what an AoS army is, because you're drawing an arbitrary distinction that's not supported by GW.

I... kind of agree with the OP, from a certain point of view. There's some sense to the idea that armies which have been properly brought into or created as part of AoS, i.e. have well-rounded lore describing their place in the Mortal Realms, along with models that have been designed using AoS aesthetics (which are quite different from WHFB), should be promoted over those that haven't. This helps to establish AoS as its own setting, and not just WHFB redux. However, I totally disagree on the approach. Making old armies bad is just a terrible thing to do, and will make lots of people upset. To my mind, the correct approach is to make old armies new. I think this has been done very successfully with several armies already, and that process should continue.

Sad to see so many people down on Mawtribes. I've been having a blast playing Boulderhead Beastclaws - the alpha-strike of a herd of Stonehorns has been enough to immediately cripple a lot of opponents. Prior to this book, I had a lot of games where they would initially hit hard, but then run out of steam and get beaten on objectives. Now the monsters can actually hold objectives, so they've got a much better chance of holding out and winning even when they don't just steamroll over the opponent's forces. Between buffs and points adjustments, my army got way better and is still really fun to play, so I'm super happy with this book.

Heh. It's a valid point. For me, AoS looks like a team driven by a very conservative design philosophy taking its first tentative steps into a new paradigm. Yeah, a lot of the old clunky stuff is still there, and overall it might be hard to notice what's changed. But I think the changes there have been are significant. The double turn is a great example of that, but it's probably been talked to death by this point. In brief: yes, it feels a lot like a tentative half-step away from IGYG predictability rather than a brave leap, but even taking that step shows an acknowledgement and understanding of the problem. That's a really important change in perspective, and hopefully suggests better things to come. Another example is damage allocation. 40K's damage process is a finicky, pedantic, gameable mess that slows down the game, locks weapons into specific roles, promotes certain classes of weapons to be "OP" or "garbage" depending on meta shifts, and thus makes balance even harder to achieve. AoS smoothes all of that out with a dead-simple damage abstraction that transitions away from "What types of enemies is this weapon worthless against?" and towards "How reliable or spiky is this unit's damage output?" It's still got a lot of clunk, but it's a step in a good direction. Unfortunately, the bigger the game, the more unwilling a big company like GW is going to be to "mess with the formula". They can afford to take a lot more risks and be more experimental with their specialist games (and I think it's worth noting that they experiment simultaneously in different directions - Warcry and Underworlds have taken a very modern route, while Necromunda is a polished-up throwback to earlier times). 40K is their golden goose, so it will always change the slowest. AoS represents the middle ground - small enough to take a few conservative risks, but big enough for GW to sit up and take notice when those risks pay off. Even though it's a long way from perfect, that's why I still think it's important to talk about those elements that do genuinely make the game better (even in small ways) than its big, plodding brother.

Oh, I get where you're coming from. I just wondered if examining your analogy from a different perspective might help you to understand the other position, and why some people prefer to push for a more balanced game rather than embrace the imbalance. Or, for that matter, why people with the resources to chase the meta are often resented by those who lack those resources. If not, no worries.

No doubt for some there's a kind of tribalism, sure. For me personally, it's just an opinion based on my experiences - I've played a lot of 40K, and a lot of other games, and I have a keen interest in game design. 40K feels to me like a dull, clunky system that's very much a relic of old wargame design. Once the course of the game is set, it's almost always a slow grind towards an inevitable conclusion. I imagine a lot of players here would have similar experiences. That's not to say that 40K can't produce it's own exciting, surprising or hilarious moments, and it still has great models and one of the richest and most interesting settings in all of wargaming, so I totally understand why people stick with it. But I can't play it any more, I get too bored and frustrated by the mechanics to enjoy the game.

I find the racing analogy a bit of an odd one. Car racing is heavily restricted specifically to preserve competition, no? I don't think I've ever seen a race where it's production sedans versus V8 supercars versus Formula 1 teams. The cars are generally all in the same "class" of performance, so that team and driver skill are the most important factors. Otherwise, wouldn't it just be a competition of "Who has the most money?" Imagine you went out and bought the best car you could buy, modded it and tuned it as best you could. Then you take it to the track and it turns out you're racing against Scuderia Ferrari - would you think of that as a fair competition, and you just weren't good enough to win?

The double-turn mechanic definitely "changes the maths", in that having a single roll (or series of rolls) with such a potentially large effect on the outcome of the game introduces a lot more variance, leading to a greater number of unexpected outcomes. Whether or not you think that's a good thing depends a lot on how you react to being surprised, both positively and negatively. If you're the kind of person who is really happy when something unexpectedly goes your way, and otherwise tends to expect things to go against you (so negative surprises have a reduced emotional impact), then you probably quite enjoy the double turn. Similarly, if you're the type of person who just likes to roll some dice and see what happens without getting too invested in the result either way, then the positive experiences of double-turns will probably outweigh the negatives over time. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who feels happiest when things go according to plan, and feels like the work you've put into planning means you deserve a commensurate reward, then you probably hate the double turn because it feels unfair. Alternatively, if you just generally feel like things should go your way and feel an acute sense of persecution when they don't, then it's probably not your cup of tea either. Crucially, neither of those positions are better or worse, or more or less reasonable, they're just different. Everyone has their own individual psychology that changes how they perceive things like this. Personally, I prefer the double-turn mechanic and its more varied outcomes. When a game is going badly for me, it can either give me an unexpected chance at victory or at least ensure the game is over quickly. When a game is going well for me, it preserves the tension for longer and prevents the outcome becoming a foregone conclusion. I definitely prefer it to 40K's "I won the initiative roll, so I win the game" mechanic. For those claiming that people only defend double-turns because they're an official GW rule, that would be my strong counter-point example.

I've also been putting together some tools for efficiently mapping out the complete possibility space for these complex chains of rolls, which similarly turned out to be easier than I expected. It will be significantly faster than a simulation, but I'm nowhere near as far along as you at this stage.

Yeah, that's basically the heart of the problem. It's all very well for us, as players, to lament the fact that GW doesn't balance the game very well, but unless that results in a shift in purchasing habits (the only meaningful metric for a profit-driven company) then nothing will change. 40K is even worse for this - the game is a boring shambles, and yet players consistently spend a lot of money on it. Wishing the game was better doesn't make it happen. Given that a significant change to GW's design habits is unlikely, @Dead Scribe's approach makes a certain kind of sense. It's the "if you can't beat them, join them" strategy... idealistically bankrupt, totally pragmatic. If you don't have any power to change the system, you can either reject it, or work with it. If your goal is to win games, the easiest path to achieving that is to pick whichever army GW have given the greatest advantage to. People often react badly to that, because they still hold some idealistic notions about the game - there's nothing wrong with that either, of course! There's just a natural tension when it's clear the system is broken: some people will cry "Fix the system!" while others will say "I can use this to my advantage." I think it will be really interesting to see how the tweaks in the latest round of FAQs affect tournament results going forward. Balance is a very delicate thing, and can swing dramatically and unpredictably based on seemingly minor changes.

I'll see if I can come up with a less computationally-intensive option to give you the SD of a complex set of linked rolls and modifiers.

The problem with taking a data-driven (statistical) approach to this is that you have to pay attention to the significance of your samples... and where you don't have a large enough sample size, you can't support any conclusion with confidence. In the Honest Wargamer stats, for instance, he hasn't provided any measure of statistical error. The small sample sizes for some of the factions means it's impossible to draw any statistical conclusions. To illustrate the problem, this can be taken to the extreme: In the data, a single tournament had a single player fielding Tamurkhan's Horde. They happened to get 2 wins, and thus the entire Tamurkhan's Horde faction is listed with a 40% win rate. If they'd managed to pick up a third win, Tamurkhan's Horde would instead have a 60% win rate, among the highest in the game. Would that make it one of the strongest armies available? Clearly, it isn't "fair" to draw conclusions about the relative power of that army based on a single tournament's results - we need a certain amount of data. So how much data do we need? There's some complicated statistical analysis that goes into this question, and I don't want to get too deep into it here. But essentially, we want to generate a p-value against a null hypothesis of "This faction wins 50% of its games." If a faction wins significantly more (or less) than that, it would be fair to say that it's stronger (or weaker) than factions which don't. Given the data set we have, and taking a fairly typical confidence threshold of 0.05, we actually can't draw too many conclusions. Most factions simply don't have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis with confidence. There are a few standouts where we can reject the null hypothesis with confidence: Hedonites and Daughters definitely win more often than you'd expect from balanced forces, and Stormcast Eternals are garbage. There are also some factions which come close to the threshold, which in statistical terms is a "maybe, but we can't be sure". Hence, I'd say the data-driven tier list actually looks like this at the moment: S-tier: Hedonites of Slaanesh Definitely strong: Daughters of Khaine Probably stronger than average: Skaven Flesh-Eater Courts Ossiarch Bonereapers Probably weaker than average: Nighthaunt Sylvaneth Beasts of Chaos Seraphon Definitely weak: Maggotkin of Nurgle Stormcast Eternals Middle tier: Every other current faction

This is exactly what I was thinking. People focus on averages far too much in statistical discussions (because they're much more straightforward to calculate), and the importance of variance gets lost along the way. It would be awesome to see a statistical tool that made this information easily accessible!

An example of this exact scenario is in the Designer's Commentary for Maggotkin of Nurgle: Q: What happens if the Blighted Weapons ability is combined with the Blades of Putrefaction spell? Do I inflict D6 mortal wounds on a hit roll of 6+? A: No. The 6+ roll simply triggers both effects – therefore you inflict D6 hits (roll to wound and save normally), and 1 mortal wound in addition to any other damage. Edit - There's also a general case clarification in the Designer's Commentary for the Core Rules: Q: Sometimes a dice roll will trigger an effect. For example, a weapon might have a rule that says a hit roll of 6 causes two hits on the target instead of 1. What happens if another effect applies to the same roll? For example, the weapon from the previous example might have a rule that says it inflicts D6 mortal wounds on a hit roll of 6 and the attack sequence ends – would I get to inflict two hits that each inflicted D6 mortal wounds? A: When a dice roll triggers more than one effect, each effect is triggered once. For this example, this means that the hit roll would cause two hits, but only one of the hits would inflict D6 mortal wounds (you would carry out the rest of the attack procedure for the other hit normally).

Are Kharadrons really a separate army at this point? I thought people just included them as part of Tempest's Eye CoS armies, which seems to make them pretty strong.

I play my Beastclaw Raiders at tournaments, because: They're effective without being complex. You drive your Stonehorns up and smash them into the enemy's face until either there aren't any enemies left, or they all die. That's a battle plan which works just as well at the end of a long day of several games (and ideally a few beers) as it is when you're fresh, and I really notice how much less tired I am than when I play an army with lots of intricate mechanics. Win or lose, they make for fun, entertaining and short games. I often wrap things up with half an hour to an hour to spare in the round, which gives me time to relax and unwind before the next game, watch other games in progress to get a sense of how my opponents play, get something to eat or drink, or just take a nap. They're really easy to transport, deploy, and pack away. And relatively quick to paint! Nowadays I tend to focus on "quality of life" at tournaments rather than standings. I love getting to play several games in a day, but I'm not in my twenties any more - I'm no longer willing to do things that make me feel physically and mentally wrecked at the end of the day. I'm after fun, chilled-out games where I can roll dice and have a good time, and I'm not that concerned about winning and losing. Beastclaws are perfect for me. :)

Just briefly following up on this, because the maths are kind of interesting (to me, at least). Anraheir's Claw sounds good. because you should get more 6s than usual and 3 damage is awesome, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work out, at least for the Beastlord. At 3+ to hit (rerolling 1s) and 3+ to wound (rerolling failures) against a 4+ save, the Blades of Symmetry deal an average of ~5.5 damage, and Anraheir's Claw deals ~4.1. What the Claw does is increase the variance - on a supremely lucky roll, you might deal 18 damage! But it's really unlikely, and most of the time you'll be worse off. Interestingly, the Claw's average damage would match up exactly with the Blades of Symmetry's if it added +4 damage on 6s instead of only +2. At +2 damage, it's still worse even if you've got something giving you +1 to hit. TLDR: Anraheir's Claw is trash.

That remains to be seen. Bear in mind that the Warscroll Battalion itself also has an allegiance (which we don't currently know) - if the warscroll has both the Beasts of Chaos and Khorne allegiances, then it can be included in a Khorne army without being counted towards allies, but if it's only a Beasts of Chaos warscroll then it has to be allied, even though all the units in it have the Khorne keyword. It being Beasts of Chaos only (and therefore allies for other Chaos forces) is rather strongly suggested by the wording of the article: "if you’ve already got a Chaos army, an allied detachment of god-marked beasts could be calling…". That's by no means a guarantee, but it's all we've got to go on at the moment.

If the Herdstone is taking care of melting the enemy's armour off, why not give the Beastlord a Blade of Symmetry instead? Dealing double damage seems like a good way to make them more killy. With no other buffs, Man-ripper Axes of Symmetry would deal ~5.5 wounds on average to an enemy Hero with a 4+ save. If the Herdstone provides the equivalent of -1 rend, that goes up to ~6.9 on average (max 12), which seems enough to reliably take out most normal heroes in one round? We also have no idea what Allegiance artefacts, buff spells and other auras might be available to make the Beastlord more deadly. I wouldn't write them off just yet.

Having watched a few of your videos now, I find myself rather enjoying your particular brand of bloody-minded pessimism. Life is a struggle for the Beastclaw, but damn it, it's our struggle and we'll own it. Keep it up. The list you ran does seem unusually slow and passive for Beastclaw though, which I imagine could not have helped against Ironjawz. Things like Thundertusks and Ogors are just sitting ducks waiting for the green tide to come and sweep them away. But then, my Beastclaw tactics aren't very sophisticated. I would have just slammed four Stonehorns into the Ironjaws front line at the top of the first turn, and hoped for the best.