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Another point that accelerated the adoption of the gun, despite early guns being kind of, well, not good, was that they're actually cheaper and easier to transport. Many people seem to assume a bow/crossbow and arrows/bolts is cheaper than a gun (including OP). A gun is more expensive than a bow. Bullets and powder are much cheaper and more compact than arrows, and you're buying a lot more bullets/arrows than guns/bows. A good arrow is actually a pretty difficult item to mass manufacture and transport. You need a chunk of decent iron for the head, far larger and more expensive than the mass casting of lead balls. You need a good quality piece of wood for the shaft so it doesn't warp in transport. Mass gathering undamaged feathers alone was a significant task. In 1417 in England an order went out demanding 6 feathers from every goose in the country. Then transporting the arrows without damaging the fletching was a difficult task, and at the final stage, actual battle, a soldier can't carry nearly as many arrows as he can bullets.

I want to like Hammerhal, but tying two of their abilities to player territory kind of kills them for me. Look at the territory in Duality of Death and Battle for the Pass for example. (Page 60-61 of gen handbook). Those abilities are hugely nerfed by the sheer fact that no significant fighting is likely to occur entirely in any territory.

You don't like guys running away. This is literally a thread about how many people think Inspiring Presence (and other abilities) result in too few models are running away, so that's obviously not a universal opinion. I definitely think psychology/moral should be part of the game, and the ease with which it can be ignored by many factions is a little lame. However, the battle shock mechanic itself is flawed, and there are some hammer units that can throw out insane damage that need Inspiring Presence as a bit of a counterbalance. Dropping Inspiring Presence would break the game.

This is some of the stuff that's really keeping me from truly enjoying AoS and the Realms. It just doesn't feel like an actual, functional universe inhabited by people to me.

The problem with polar coordinates around the center is that it gets really polar coordinates get really non intuitive the closer to the pole you get. Lets say you're trying to navigate in England, or California, or anywhere a lot of people live. If you were to orient yourself facing North, and walk a mile, you'd still be facing North. East would be to your right, and West to your left. Turn and face East. Now North is on your left. Walk a mile, you're still basically facing East, and North is still on your left. Now, lets say you're meter away from the North Pole. If you face East, North will be on your left. Go forward one meter. North isn't directly to your left anymore, and your not facing due East anymore. Your facing South-East, and North is to your rear-left. Step another meter, and you're facing South-South East. Walk a couple kilometers, and you're practically facing entirely South. The direction 'North', from your perspective, rotates as you move. Imagine trying to give directions using that. Mentally trying to compensate for how much or how little the direction East isn't a straight line? This works fine on our planet. Very, very few people live and work around the poles. But in AoS it seems the centers are the most populated areas. Having a system that's hard to use around the most important areas seems like a bad idea. A grid layout rather than a polar system would be far more easy to use. If the sun in the Realms had a consistent path, I'd pick that as one on the primary lines, ie, East/West is parallel to the direction of the sun, and North South runs perpendicular to East West. Set up a Cartesian grid with 0,0 at the center.

Thanks for the write up. There's a lot more pressure to drop at the 3-4-5 drop count than there is at the higher counts. At that level, you're probably banking a bit on having the choice, even though you've suggested the 9 to 8 sees the greatest improvement. By the time you're at 7+ drops, you've accepted that you're probably not going to have choice of turn, and have built a list/strategy that first turn isn't important. Even though going from 9 to 8 at first glance looks like it yields large improvements, it's going from "not likely to have the choice" to, well, still not likely to have the choice. Additionally, the math is accurate, but somewhat deceptive. It's somewhat similar to armor saves; depending on how you look at it, the change from a 6+ save to a 5+ save, can be the same, or very different to a 3+ save to a 2+. Sure, in both case, it's a +1/6 (+16.7%) improvement. But in the second case, it fully halves your chance of failure, while in the first the chance of failure is only reduced by one fifth. I'd restate the percentage gain as what the decrease in odds of 'failure.' The more useful formula, rather than initial% - new% is (100 - new%/initial%). IE, 20% improvement for 6+ to 5+, 50% for 3+ to 2+ armor save. Going from 4 to 3 takes you from about 80% to about 90%, meaning your chance of failure has gone from 20% to 10%. So your chance of not having a choice has been cut in half (50% improvement). For 9 drops to 8, you go from about 75% chance of no choice, to 60%. That's only a 20% reduction , significantly less than the 50% reduction in failure from 4 to 3.

Honestly, I don't use the Realm and terrain rules out of simple special rules fatigue. There's just too much stuff to remember. Unless I can see an actual improvement in how fun the game is, why bother? I've played with all the rules. I don't hate any of them. But I don't think they are worth the time.

@whispersofblood You're absolutely right in that in a competitive list, each unit should have a role, and absolutely wrong that points cost is the last thing to look at, and can't make a unit good. Points cost is part of determining the role. You can't decide if a unit is potentially good at a role until you've looked at its points, and any unit that currently exists in this game could become an effective choice in the game if you reduced its points enough. If the unit gets cheap enough, roles appear. The argument to the contrary is frankly bizarre to me. So yes, reducing a unit's cost enough will eventually make it competitive. Swarmofseals' makes some excellent points in his thread about why just massively dropping points until they're cost effective is a bad idea for GW long term, in that some units would just feel wrong being super cheap, and jerking non-book armies points down now and then back up again when they get better rules would go over poorly. And I'm not sure why you keep referencing sports teams. No one is saying analysis isn't useful, just that they don't agree with your analysis.

Well, I'm more or less happy with what I've seen. I've been playing GW games for 15 years. This update certainly isn't perfect, but it's about the closest to balanced GW has ever been. 😃 And I prefer an error on the side of caution in terms of changes rather than wild swings.

Well, you've only spent 1800pts of your 2000pts; you probably want to get some more Ghouls or try to squeeze in a battalion.

They don't quite cancel out. It's true that if you've got one unit that fights first and he's got one, you end up alternating like normal. Where it gets weird is when someone has multiple 'start of the phase' abilities. You resolve *all* of your start of the phase abilities, then your opponent gets his. The place you'll see this most often is Idoneth. Their tide lets their entire army fight first. In the Idoneth players turn, that means his entire army would fight before your guy who fights first.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/03/21/who-fights-first/ If you have a unit that gets to fight at the "start of the phase" and your opponent does not, you will get to fight twice before your opponent fights once, before we take any other special rules into account. Once with the "start of the phase" unit, and then your choice of regular units. If your opponent also has a "start of the phase" unit, say Fanatics, then it would go your "start" unit, then the Fanatics, then one of your regular units. Feeding Frenzy can be activated as normal, so if you had the command points, and your opponent does not have any "start of the phase" units, you could fight 4 times before they go once.

@Gwendar I'll use an example to explain. Let's say there's 3 valid units in range of your courtier's ability, and you roll 3 successful 5+. You can return one model to each, two models to one unit and one model to one unit while the third unit gets none, or three models to one unit. You do NOT return three models to all 3 units.

Hey @Laier, your list is extremely similar to mine! Have you played any games with it yet? How'd they go? I haven't played a lot of games yet, so not a lot of definitive advice. The differences between mine and yours are only artifacts and I went with less Ghouls and more Horrors (20 ghoul, 6 horror, 3 horror). I go with more defensive artifacts on the mounted guys. They already hit super hard, but aren't super tanky. I went with Gryph Feather on one, and the chalice of heal D6 wounds on the other. Also took the re-roll damage on the bite mount trait, which got me a lot of extra wounds in the last game I played. I went with more Horrors because they're the unit that gets augmented by the Haunter Courtier. But you're having me second guess that, 40 ghouls will get the +1 attack bonus, and better board control.

@Aleister I like having both the TG and ZD as well, for the reasons you mentioned. But to clarify the Charnel Throne ability only works for Archregent and GK on foot.

I'm on the fence with the chalice too, in part because I don't want to spend the cash when I don't think I'll use the other 2. I think it depends on what else you're taking. If you have 2+ archregents, I think it's almost an auto include. If 0-1 Regents, it's basically balanced, not definitively good or bad.

The authors supposition that the start and end of the combat phase aren't part of the combat phase seems a little off to me! 😃

I'm just starting up FEC, and I like the look of the Abattoir battalion. Has anyone here used it much? What're your thoughts on it?

OP didn't mention it, so just for clarity he's using a textured rolling pin made by a company called greenstuffworld. http://www.greenstuffworld.com/en/textured-rolling-pins/365-rolling-pin-hobby-roller-temple.html