Saxon

I think you have made a very good point in this post i have been trying to make for several messy and unco-ordinated posts regarding my second problem and the difficulties I personally face in the game. To expand on personal experience. My opponents (2 in particlar) love the optimisation side of things. They get joy out of a combo coming off. 1 of them is a terrible loser. I would expand the social contract to ensuring that both players get to play their style even if it means getting regularly stomped. I've played a specific nurgle list about 8 times with 3 different armies and im 0-8 against it! I guess this is the gripe with GW. A lack of diversity can be punished due to under performing warscrolls and very specific requirements to obtain any reasonable synergy.

That is entirely dependent on your gaming group though. Even if you dont play tournaments there's no guarantee you won't have regular opponents who create very optimised lists. Sometimes it's not even on purpose. Some models people like are just really good compared to others.

Well only because I suggested cities weren't much better since the battletome came out and I think it was actually you who linked me to tournament lists. Carried from there as a precedent. Perhaps I expected too much for my free people in particular from a book covering several factions in one hit? Simple answer to what you're asking is because its still nice to win every now and then without spending hours math-hammering and this social contract in gaming is idealism. The frequent issue i have is that I create a list based on models I like and try to incorporate a diverse one. If my opponent just happens to love models that happen to actually have good synergy and be extremely good too, isn't it unreasonable to expect them to do things differently? My group is also 50% waac players which complicates it further.

I think I actually agree with the part about the massive amount of moving parts in AOS. Its an extremely complex game compared to other systems available. Its a fine balance between boringly the same and convoluted and tedious. I dont really like 40k but the primary/secondary objectives is a step forward for GW.

Well of course because I'm not talking about what's winning events, that tends to change every time a new release comes out. If you restrict your view of what is competitve to what wins tournaments specifically, the range gets even smaller. I dont think I ever mentioned winning them specifically. I also never mentioned that not winning a tournament made something uncompetitive? Diversity is good. Singular builds are bad. Given the volume of units available to cities of sigmar, the common lists popping up on the websites tracking tournaments and competitive play isn't as large as i would expect it to be. As far as limited range coming up across many gaming systems, probably true.

Isnt that a problem when there are so many units available? So much diversity to make it seem like several units in cities are actually useful. Armies doing this well: -cities spamming pistolliers/outriders -mortek -eels be they offensive or defensive ones. -grimghast spam in nighthaunt. -horrors in tzeentch I exclude fyreslayers due to their tiny range. OBR are similar but mortek guard in big blocks is a boring list to fight.

Several as in 2 or 3 max with 1 being phoenix guard heavy and the other two using sigmarine support heroes? My difficulty was having a singular faction (freeguild), in order to have a somewhat decent list i had to bring in models from other armies. On its own, freeguild even with the update are low tier. As for spamming, for me it's running singular units outside heroes and monsters. Remember when running blocks of grimghast reapers was a thing when nighthaunt weren't bad? These days I see eel only armies in IDK. No thralls. To me it indicates that warscrolls need to be more balanced to give these units a purpose. I dont get why GW wouldn't address this to ensure their full range sells well.

Whilst i agree it limits it, doesn't this suggest a lack of diversity in GW in general. Instead of throwing out new armies maybe they need to improve the units available to existing ones first and make warscrolls more balanced for underused units. Like does any play ever use glaivewraith stalkers? They're the most pointless model in AOS with the coolest lore....

It was a very popular list because at 1000pts it was very difficult to beat with a lot of scenarios. Dogs ran at objectives, nagash murdered everything. I think they upped points on dogs so this list is no longer viable unless Nagash got a reduction which i don't know about. I brought it up because it was a niche example of how unit slots would stop nonsense lists like this. The thing i find hard is when you see someone dropping one of those lists on the table, you're the bad guy for not wanting to play against it. It's legal so how can you be against it. Rather than upset the apple cart because 3/4 of the players i play regularly play min battle line lists with bulk monsters, i usually just humour them resulting in a boring game for me where i usually get stomped in 3 or 4 turns and then get accused of being a bad sport if i don't want a rematch. I don't play particularly competitively.

The freeguild which i have is basically a minor stat improvement to hit for most units, yawn. The artefacts are meh, the battle traits are meh. You're also locked into the cities which really makes magic hard unless you go magic heavy and the wizards are woeful unless you bring sigmarines. I like to use a diverse list which is easily punished in an AOS game these days where spamming units seems to be the way. I have a pistollier/outrider list with Demigryphs which goes alright. It's a bit boring to play though.

This looks better than my win/loss/draw ratio spreadsheet 😛

I really hate playing against armies that bring the absolute bare minimum battleline. I remember when it was all the rage to bring nagash and 2 units of 5 dogs to small games. Or minimum units of tree revenants and then Treelords and Durthu until the cows come home. Yawn..... I do like the idea of slots to try and 'flesh out' armies to prevent 1) spam, 2) bland repetition 3) playing against monsters only.

Honestly I cant even deal with 15 blightkings 😁

Interesting to see the heavy use of darkshards and outriders/pistolliers! Thanks. Some of the other lists on those pages you linked are disgusting and the reason why I play casually. 50 blightkings 😬

I would love to know how armies without phoenix guard and irondrakes do.... or armies that dont incorporate stormcast heroes.

The other benefit is that they've been hit hard by the nerf stick so a lot of people are offloading their OBR so you might be able to get it on the cheap 😆

Best books? According to everyone? OK.... It's as if rules have been quickly hashed together to mash the forgotten model ranges into a somewhat playable force. It's an improvement on the tome-less rules but it's not one of the best. Sadly i have armies collecting dust because cities of sigmar vs. something like Orruc Warclans, OBR or Lumineth is hilariously outclassed. The only joy i get out of three of my armies these days is when we put our low tier armies up against each other.

Whilst not a big fan of how 40k plays (even the new edition), their secondary objectives seem pretty cool. In a game where the primary motive may seem impossible, you can give yourself a fighting chance by taking your secondary objectives and preventing your opponent from taking theirs. I think it also diversifies the list building as well as the tactics as you're not solely focused on one thing. Definitely feels more dynamic and variable which I think is a positive thing.

I now play different game systems more frequently. GW won't ever change when their profits are so high so i don't give them my money. I play with what i have.

Edit: Double Post

I think the biggest issue AOS faces is the staggered nature of the army releases as well as the frequency of the releases to keep the hype going. Add this to the extremely high price point for a playable army and its a difficult situation to manage. It would be hard to fit new rules which need to be both balanced and thematically appropriate into existing sets of rules. I think it has been frequently discussed on this forum that play testers are not given sufficient time to fully test out rules which results in some really offensive rules (Slaanesh, Petrifix, Tzeentch and KO to name a few). You also have non-game related factors such as marketing to think of. Whether true or not, it's not a big stretch to expect the marketing team to suggest a wow-factor rule or two to make the faction stand out. Personally, I was defeated by how quickly my Legions of Nagash army went from relatively top tier to virtually unplayable within the time it took me to paint a mortarch and a hundred skeleton warriors/zombies. This is extremely discouraging given the very high price point for games workshop. You invest into an army with a reasonable expectation that it will be playable and gets stomped every game. I can see why a lot of people would leave the game if this happened. I was sucked back in when cities of sigmar got a battletome but that tome seems like a half baked effort to shut people up like me who were vocally annoyed by some many WFB armies being neglected. One or two builds are playable but its not a particularly competitive tome unless you build deliberately offensive armies which isn't my play style.

GW rule making is lazy. I think its been argued to death on this forum. Fun is subjective. But bottlenecking tactics to beat an army is just poor. My favourites: --just tar pit them - kill the heroes - but they're slow! Yawn. Its a shame because the mortem crawler is a really cool model. GW will always have trouble when they stagger releases the way that they do. Hard to maintain balance when things change periodically instead of all at the same time.

It's also extremely boring tactics to have to use every time you play a faction which for a time was extremely popular.....

People got salty because the original rules were super potato but it made a lot of WAAC players buy a heap of models really fast haha. Triple negation is a terrible mechanic. What it has done is make people think about tactics rather than running the same boring core list and murdering.

It's hard to argue that the nerf for Petrifix wasn't necessary. Whether or not they got the nerf right is another thing. The way Petrifix played originally was just unfun to come up against. You know it's bad when multiple Youtube channels have to put forward warnings on videos about the army.