Kadeton

He's got sea legs, and isn't used to walking on dry land.

That's a more interesting question. Unfortunately I can't help you there - every other wargame I play already uses non-fixed initiative, because their turns are structured around alternating activations. Removing IGOUGO would be much better for the game than removing random initiative.

Would any of AoS' gambling mechanics improve chess? I try to capture your Queen with my Bishop, but I roll badly and he doesn't do enough damage, then she kills him instead. Winning and losing at the whim of fate is utterly alien to chess, but it's the core foundation of AoS. Adding random initiative may not improve the experience, but do you know what it would do to chess? It would make the outcome far less predictable from any given position. Just like it does in AoS.

Man, those are some tough problems. I don't think there are any easy solutions, and it will take a lot of work. Competitive negativity: this can be really poisonous for a small but growing community. Any enthusiasm among the players gets spent pushing back against the pessimism instead of encouraging new people to join, and it's very off-putting for curious potential players to hear complaints about balance right away. To try to turn this around, you'll need to find ways to encourage a less competitive mindset, and focus more on the fun and engaging aspects of the game. Narrative events, multi-player games, wacky scenarios like castle sieges or aerial-only battles - anything that you can do to make it clear that these games are about rolling dice and having fun, not about who wins and loses. Be prepared that some of the grognards from your regular group will be unhappy and will refuse to participate, but also recognise that excluding the most toxic attitudes might simply be necessary to build the positive atmosphere you're after. The serious competitive games can come later, once you've got a solid local community built up. Playing with children: this is honestly a much harder problem. Nobody is doing anything wrong, but for most adults, playing a complex game with children falls somewhere between tedious and frustrating. It's not fair to ask a player to give up their normal gaming experience (social engagement, mental stimulation) in favour of what is effectively babysitting. That said, these kids are the future gamers that will help to build your local scene, albeit in a few years' time. If there are any local players happy to volunteer to shepherd them through their development stage, encourage those people as much as possible. If not, decide whether this is something you're willing to take on yourself - and there's no shame in it if the answer is no. In that case, just let the parent politely but firmly know that their kids are currently too young to be a good fit for your group, but that they'll be very welcome when they're of a more appropriate age (e.g. 13+). If you do decide to spend your time helping the kids, I'd suggest teaching them to play against each other is the best path. Start with fully-supervised games where you help them through every step, then gradually step back as they get the hang of it. They might not like coming to the club just to play against each other, but they should understand if you explain that they need to know the game really well before they can start playing against the adults. Switch it up occasionally with games where they combine their forces and all play collaboratively against you. The most important thing to reinforce with them is to make sure everyone is having fun - when they get upset for whatever reason (there will probably be a lot of this), be merciless in stopping the game and forcing them to take a break until they recover their emotional stability. Good on you for being proactive about building your community. The other really important thing to recognise is that this process takes work, can be genuinely exhausting, and involves you sacrificing some of your enjoyment of the hobby in order to build others up - and it's totally normal to need to take a break from those responsibilities. Make sure you stay in touch with how you're feeling, and pay attention when you need some time to just enjoy yourself without worrying about everyone else. Avoid burning out at all costs. Best of luck!

Yep, pretty much. I certainly wouldn't say it's an unfair rule - it's equally available to all players and any advantage should completely average out over enough games - but it's most certainly a rule that is deliberately designed to introduce a significant, unpredictable point of imbalance into the game. Not unfair, but definitely anti-competitive, and pro-drama.

Neat. And the stats for AoS double turns that you're comparing it to? This is the very definition of an 'afterthought'. Write the rules to be exciting and dramatic (and saleable!) first and foremost, then figure out what adjustments need to be made in response to community outcry later. But I'm more talking about the rules that GW produce, which speak for themselves in their intent to focus on unpredictable events instead of the reliable outcomes needed to support competitive play. They make everything reliant on random rolls, often with spectacular effects only occurring on outlier results. One of the most striking examples of this design philosophy is Kragnos - charge him into a monster and deal anywhere between zero and thirty-six mortal wounds. You can't 'balance' an ability that swings so wildly - depending on what you charge him into, that single roll can easily mean the difference between a total loss and a crushing victory. They absolutely could remove it, but they have consistently decided not to... because they're not trying to make a balanced game as their primary goal. If they were, they would approach the majority of their design decisions very differently.

Hmm... source? Just anecdotal, or is there actual collated data for this available? Just about every mechanic in the game has a random element injected into it, often for no reason other than to add an extra dice roll, and therefore the possibility that something unexpected will happen. I have no idea what you're talking about with "GW doesn't put many random elements." Honestly, I'm not sure how we're even talking about the same company. GW have consistently demonstrated that they don't "want to make a competitive game" with AoS. That's never been their objective, as far as I can tell. Their whole design approach suggests they want to make a game which combines the thrill of gambling with the themes of high fantasy, and produces dramatic narrative outcomes for the purpose of entertainment. Any considerations of competitive balance are purely an afterthought.

If you have a "close and balanced" game state at the end of a round, then whoever goes next will gain the advantage. In AoS, this is the person who wins a roll-off at the time. In 40K, it's the person who won the single roll-off at the start of the game. Are you saying that having one initiative roll to determine the outcome is better than having multiple initiative rolls? I get it - for some people, a double turn will always be a feels-bad moment, and no amount of discourse on why those feelings don't necessarily match up with the probabilistic outcomes is going to make it feel better. That's okay. Some people don't like Vegemite either. As long as those people don't try to stop anyone else from eating Vegemite, it's fine. Yep, I agree. The more interaction they add to the game for the inactive player in order to reduce this effect, the better (all the way up to and including reworking the core system for alternating activations, IMO). Right now, the top meta list is Fulminators, Longstrikes and/or Stormdrake Guard. Everything else is second-tier at best. I don't think it's about balance, except in the broadest possible sense. It's about creating unpredictable outcomes. It essentially emphasises the "gambling" aspect of the game, which is honestly one of the things GW does best. (They're certainly not very good at balance!) That increased uncertainty pushes the outcomes of games closer to the overall average, but it doesn't (and I imagine was never intended to) make any given match more balanced.

I don't think anything I've said contradicts this. GW's design paradigm, especially in their flagship games, is clunky, outdated, and emphasises gambling rather than tactical expertise. Yeah, it would be lovely if they changed their approach in any number of ways. In the absence of that, the double turn is much better than no double turn, and by GW's standards it shows a relatively high degree of creativity and willingness to experiment.

In a fixed initiative game, the player who is winning continues winning. You see this in 40K all the time - as soon as one player has gained an advantage (generally during the first shooting phase), they then leverage that advantage to consolidate their lead in subsequent turns. Once you fall behind, it's almost impossible to turn the game around. When a double turn occurs in AoS, generally one of two things happen: The player who is winning wins faster. They would have won anyway without the double turn, but now they crush their opponent immediately; The player who is losing now has an opportunity to turn the tables and win when they otherwise would have lost. I like both of these outcomes, personally. The first provides a clean, decisive end to the game rather than the "Are we bored enough to call this a foregone conclusion?" ending you often get in 40K. The second provides uncertainty and hope, which helps you stay engaged with the game even when it's going against you. I would still very much prefer a system with alternating activations. But the double turn is, IMO, a surprisingly clever piece of design to mitigate the inherent flaws of an IGYG turn structure.

Yep, you're thinking along the right lines. Those tactics in particular should be opportunistic - don't take them unless the target is already on its last legs, doesn't have many defensive buffs available, etc. There are enough tactics that you should have an easier choice you can announce instead, and you should get used to having a rough (but flexible) plan for which tactics you can do right now and which ones you're setting up for future turns. That said, it also sounds like you had some bad luck in that game, I'd expect three Stonehorns to sort out a GUO most of the time. Sometimes things just don't go your way.

One of the best things about "dead" systems is that there's no longer a corporate interest telling you what models you're allowed to use. There are a ton of companies out there producing models that are compatible with any of these systems. Generally, the rules for defunct systems are readily available online, and are often maintained and updated by a passionate community.

It might just be the whole global situation we've got going on, but there seems to be a huge appetite for gaming nostalgia right now. It's actually easier to find a game of WFB (7th ed, using 6th ed army books) at my local gaming club than AoS (or 40k!) at the moment. A lot of people have been preparing warbands for an upcoming Mordheim campaign, and I wouldn't be surprised if Gorkamorka started popping up as well. Obscure games don't die, they just lie dormant, waiting for some enthusiastic player to spark a surge of local interest.

AoS is primarily my "don't take it seriously" game, which I play when I just want to spend an evening pushing models, chucking dice and cracking jokes with a friend. I also play competitively, but mainly because friends drag me along to events. As such: 1. Price increases don't really affect me. I already have two armies and I don't feel the need to expand on them just because new stuff gets released. If I was going to get into a third army, it would be because someone was selling it second-hand. 2. This doesn't worry me, it's just a few more files to open. 3. I play my armies regardless of their current "power level", against whatever my opponent is playing. I find the luck of the dice has way more influence than the strength of the list. 4. I played Beastclaw Raiders in tournaments back when they had their own book and were absolute trash, for years. Learning to find satisfaction even in the games you don't win is something I'd strongly recommend. 5. Meh. I don't need the "new hotness". If I'm in my local store and I see a model I like, I'll buy it. If not, that's fine too. 6. Not sure which specific debacle you mean, but every time there's a FAQ people always get in a flap about it. The excitement usually dies down after a couple of weeks and everything carries on as before. 7. This is the big one, which basically enables all the others. I'm not worried about missing out. If GW dumped the entire AoS line tomorrow, I'd shrug and move on to another game, there are tons of great games to choose from. I'm not invested, which is very freeing.

I wouldn't say that Flesh Eaters stopped being top tier because people learned to play against them. GW just eventually noticed that they had a particular combo that was too strong, and nerfed them into the bottom tier with their usual subtle approach. Competitive AoS is a game where very little adaptation is possible in response to a "new meta". Most established armies are already restricted to picking from a couple of maximum-efficiency units propped up by whatever broken mechanics their faction can still muster - if that already-optimised army can't handle the new thing, there's no way to improve it, it's just dead in the water. "Learning to play" generally means building a different faction that can handle the new thing, or waiting for the new thing to die a natural death under the tender ministrations of the GW nerf bat. "Over time" is still very much the right answer, but that's mostly the time it takes for GW to acknowledge that there's a problem. In six months, it'll no doubt be the Stormdrakes' turn to be battered into oblivion too.

Equivalent durability is easy to ballpark. For every save, look at the proportion of wounds which get through - for a 5+ save, four out of six are unsaved. We can express 4/6 as a fraction, and simplify it to 2/3 if you prefer. Then just invert the fraction - 6/4, or 3/2 - and multiply it by the number of wounds. You can repeat this process for additional saves, such as wards. This doesn't take Rend into account, but you can just repeat the process with different save values to get an idea of how Rend affects the outcome. The final result is the amount of damage that it takes, on average, to remove the unit. Rend 0: Leadbelchers: 32 x 3/2 = 48.0 SHBR: 12 x 2/1 x 3/2 = 36.0 Rend 1: Leadbelchers: 32 x 6/5 = 38.4 SHBR: 12 x 3/2 x 3/2 = 27.0 Rend 2: Leadbelchers: 32 x 1 = 32.0 SHBR: 12 x 6/5 x 3/2 = 21.6 So the simple answer is no, a Stonehorn's 12 wounds will not (on average) hold out as long as 32 Leadbelcher wounds, even though it's much better defended. There are a lot of other factors in that choice, though!

It's an interesting question. Ultimately, a battletome exists in a state of compromise - the overall balance can't be too powerful or too weak, the choices can't be too obvious or too obscure, the mechanics can't be too simple or too complex. The thing about compromises is that even though they may be the best workable outcome for all concerned, everyone tends to be disappointed with the result. The underlying principle of balance is that nobody gets exactly what they want. The main things I look for in a battletome are a variety of interesting builds, and strong links between theme and mechanics. Even in the tomes that largely do this well (e.g. Soulblight) there are still plenty of things I'd like to change (e.g. Vampire Lords should be way more dangerous). Best just to find the things in your chosen tome that you like, and ignore the things you don't.

Keying things off wounds is another of those "only makes sense outside of the game world" restrictions that really gets my goat - but yeah, I hear what you're saying. I'd just prefer if GW addressed those non-consistent edge cases individually, and had the core rules only referencing simple keywords. (For example, IMO Eidolons should be named characters, and should have the Monster keyword; either of those changes would address this case.)

Separate artefact lists for Monster and non-Monster Heroes would be the distinction I'd prefer to see. The original Amulet and the Tome would both be totally fine on the non-Monster list, as would a Priest-keyword artefact.

Did you have an on-topic discussion point you'd like to raise?

I think there's a few threads of this conversation that are getting tangled. The original complaint was that some armies don't have diverse battleline choices; my contention was that battleline choices shouldn't be mandatory, in which case a lack of variety would be fine (and IMO thematic, since the "battleline" of most military forces is not highly varied - this has been disputed). I'm not sure I agree that this is even the case, since I can't honestly see any evidence for it. Are there examples you'd cite where the limited selection of battleline units helps to balance the army? Heavily skewed lists are still certainly possible in many forces due to battleline-if, so my suspicion is that the Battleline concept was originally intended to enforce "thematic" (rather than necessarily "balanced") armies - ones that featured at least some of the most common units in the army fluff. Hence my other contention - as a game designer, you shouldn't create knowingly sub-par units and then force people to take them. You should just make them decent choices to begin with, so that armies on the table look like armies in the fluff without the need for artificial restraints.

In which case, minimum Battleline requirements still aren't appropriate, which is my point.

Two seems fine if your forces typically separate melee and ranged. Arkanauts thematically seem like they're intended to be capable at both, even if their game profiles don't reflect that? And I think the point of what I'm saying is that you shouldn't have to take 30 of them if you don't want to. Instead, they should provide something valuable to the list, so that you want to take them. If removing minimum battleline (and battleline-if) means that you wouldn't take any battleline units, then those units need to be improved until they're worthwhile. If you then decide that you only want 20 because you want more variety of units, that's great - you do you.

Sure, me too. Given the choice between two evils, I prefer "Bring as many Boyz as possible" to "Only bring as many Boyz as you're forced to", which is where AoS is at right now. Obviously "Bring a variety of units" would be lovely but no GW game has managed to get there yet. I like the concept, but hate GW's executions of this. Objectives already feel meaningless and artificial, being just a spot where you stand until bing! you "win" and then everyone stops fighting and goes home. Layering the idea that certain troops have such a magical talent for standing around that nobody else can compete, on top of that abstraction, just becomes a step too far away from any sense of what is actually being represented in the game. Achieving objectives should always be more important than killing. To my mind, the reason to use Battleline units for that would be that they're very cheap, and you don't want to spend your more expensive units' valuable time faffing about with an artefact or whatever it is they're doing to "score points" when they could be fighting. That's a valuable form of efficiency. To be honest, I was mostly thinking along the lines of Roman legionaries, or medieval pikes and crossbows. And yeah, AoS is ultra-high fantasy, but all the magic superheroes must still be vastly outnumbered by "ordinary people" of all races, who should have a role in warfare.

I think that's sensible, personally. Most militaries are overwhelmingly made up of a single "unit type", a standardised basic infantry. Most AoS armies should have one or two basic units that make up the bulk of their forces. The bit that's missing from AoS is that real militaries deploy basic infantry not because they're forced to take a "battleline tax" by some arbitrary rules of engagement, but because basic infantry are the most cost-effective general-purpose military asset. You shouldn't need to force players to take Battleline units, they should just be good value for their points and army composition would take care of itself.