Landohammer

Ok I can at least understand that argument. I feel like saying "hey we can do better with BTs" is a lot more reasonable of an argument than "secondaries just need to go". Those arguments are just crazy town to me. Personally I prefer battle tactics that require you to actually engage with your opponent. Magical Dominance, Intimidate Invaders, and Surround and Destroy are the worse offenders. They reward avoiding interaction with your opponents models. Into the Maelstrom, Bait and Trap and maybe Reprisal are better in terms of gameplay because they actually require you to commit, sacrifice, or risk units and have active counterplay.

Ok so keep in mind that we had 8 editions of Warhammer Fantasy and 2 editions of sigmar where battle tactics weren't really a thing. What we learned from those editions is that if you make a game solely about killing power, lists become homogenized as the most lethal/survivable units become clear and the rest of the units fall to the wayside. An "ideal list" becomes obvious quite quickly. Its why we have objectives and secondaries now. The BT system is meant to reward preparation and strategy in addition to raw killing power. You can argue that the secondary system is not good, but arguing that secondaries themselves are bad for the game is a bold argument and goes against like 20+ years of game development. I have played game systems where you just push forward and fight and whoever gets the most kills wins. That's essentially what TOW is now (with a bit more nuisance of course). But IMHO its not what AOS is meant to be.

I mean if you are playing against guys that only play a few times a year or are new then that is completely understandable, but for a typical matched play game among adults that is crazy to me. In the matched play games that run at my FLGS, 90% of games finish within 2.5 hours. Maybe some pickup games will run to 3 hours if the guys are goofing around and chatting. I don't mean to yuck your yum, but that is definitely not my experience within the hobby.

If we exclusively focus on the GHB tactics, I don't agree with anything you said lol. Secondary objectives require you to build your army a certain way or to take units that excel at things besides dealing massive damage/absorbing damage. Remove them and you just end up with armies purpose built to kill with maximum efficiency. AOS is the simplest of the big four games and I do not see new players struggle with generic BTs. Most just use those little cards that come in the GHB and may take a minute to read through them at most. I'm not saying its super easy, but its not any more complicated than learning their warscrolls/spells/allegiance abilities etc. I play every week and I am never bored with BTs. They require planning. For example deploying so you are outside of 30" from enemy wizards for magical dominance, or positioning so you are able to get Surround and Destroy next turn.

What do you want as the alternative? Without secondary objectives, games often end up just being decided by the most lethal of the two armies. They promote building diverse lists rather than just bringing the most elite units. There is a reason secondaries are a major feature in 40k and AOS nowadays. I think 3.0 was the best edition ever but faction battle tactics were likely the weakest part. They never quite got them balanced. My Tzeentch army can easily complete 3 faction tactics every game while my Sylvaneth army will probably never get a single one.

Are you saying that your games, on average, last 4.5 hours?

If the faction BTs are going away as rumoured then I am totally fine with it. If every faction has access to the same BTs then this is a great change. The issue with BTs has always been that some armies require you to jump through crazy hoops (see Sylvaneth, Nighthaunt) while others just require you to just stand around (See Tzeentch and Slaves to Darkness) I play/assist with tournaments every month and most games get completed. I don't think incomplete games is a wider problem, but more specific to certain players/playstyles.

I think the same rumour said that Bretonnians were underperforming but I also find that hard to believe considering half the kits sold out in minutes lol. So yea I am definitely taking all this with a grain of salt. Regardless of Underworlds future, I 100% believe it will be separated from AOS though. They are clearly disinterested in making functional rules for them in AOS.

If I remember correctly THWG mentioned on his youtube that per his stats AOS saw a whopping 70% uptick in new players attending events during the course of 3rd edition. With that majority of those coming around the middle of the editions cycle. My personal local AOS scene absolutely exploded. We went from 8-12 regular guys to having 25 signups for a recent league.

Per THWG the entire company is striving to better separate their game systems so profitability of each system is more clear. This seems silly at the surface but its actually a fairly common business practice for companies with distinct departments. It seems to be true because the wildly popular plastic leviathan dreadnought was removed from 40k and is now an HH only model. The BOC of transfer to TOW, and the widespread purge of the STD Warcry units only further supports that. The speculative/rumour part is that some believe a large percentage of Underworld/Warcry sales are from AOS players, and overall Underworlds is not performing well. So there are rumours that underworld will be killed off and those resources diverted to other systems. Personally i'm indifferent to underworlds bc the kits get lazy AOS rules anyway and many are out of production. But Warcry actually significantly contributes to AOS so I would hate to see it go.

Some of the purged Warcry models were released as late as May 2022. Its absolute insanity. I wish they had included an "alternative uses" list like they did with the Cities purged units just so I have SOME kind of use for my 30 Horns of Hashut other than sitting on a shelf or going to ebay.

This is how I feel. As soon you introduce the concept of elites unlocked as battleline, then it loses all value as a concept. Of course this all depends on them properly balancing who comes with what leader. If you put cheap heroes in regiments with the best units then its not really any different that unlocking them with a subfaction. Ideally the best units will be tied to expensive heroes and the basic units will be tied to cheap heroes.

Yea I'm sure there are pockets that can and will exist indefinitely. But those are relatively sparce and its really luck of the draw on if you are in driveable distance. I'm in the US so if a pocket doesn't exist in my state then i'm driving 7+ hours for an event which is challenging lol. To me, the joy of a wargame comes from weekly local pickup games and monthly RTTs with fresh opponents. Without that constant community pool I personally struggle to enjoy it.

Other than finding new opponents. 😬 /begin personal whiney story I truly believed as you do, and tried to go this route when 8th ed fantasy died by continuing to play 8th and ultimately switching to T9A but it personally led to a lot of heartbreak. The events stopped happening and the player pool dried up. It went from 100 guys showing up to a Brawler Bash GT, to 30, then to cancelled events. Its really frustrating, at least for me, to buy/build/paint an army just to struggle to even get local games. I think I got to the point where I was playing 1 game a month of T9A, usually vs the same person. Recruitment was virtually impossible. So I know an unsupported game technically can be played in perpetuity, but for all practical purposes unsupported wargames are effectively dead within a year. I ended up with a happy ending bc literally the month I picked up AOS the community sprung up around me, and I eventually learned 40k and enjoy it now as well. So I consider the years of me "clinging" to the dead edition a relative waste and the worst of my hobby career. /end personal whiney story

Yep I'm pretty sure they did. But to be crystal clear 40k 10th edition was received extremely poorly in my region. Tournaments and pickup games dropped off drastically. It was previously the dominant game system by a large margin 😬 So while i'm personally very optimistic about 4th, many in my group are quite concerned about how it will impact the playerbase.

So the issue that 40k ran into at the launch of 10th was they made objectives occupy space. But this created issues with larger models where they couldn't reach their intended targets in combat, or in some cases couldn't actually navigate past the objectives. I would actually love to have physical items to fight over rather than the mats that everyone (including myself) uses nowadays, but there are some practical issues to that.

I was thinking they will just keep the current rules of only 1 endless spell per wizard, and each wizard can only cast one endless spell per turn. So if endless spells become free, they therefore become locked behind how many wizards you bring.

I mean yea any kind of secondary scoring system is fine. Whether you wanna call secondary objectives, battle tactics whatever. You just never want the game to become too focused on killing because there are armies who are clearly better at killing or not being killed. Faction battle tactics are a balance problem because you will never properly balance ~200 battle tactics. Their mere existence is the problem lol. I think you are being too hard on sigmar. If the primary scoring mechanism for the game was "busy work" or causing "halts" then it wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is. Sigmar 3rd edition is extremely popular in my region. It has even eclipsed 40k here. It was/is a really strong edition.

Removing BTs altogether is a bad idea, because without them the most lethal/efficient armies will naturally just win the melees/shoot-outs over the primary objectives. BTs reward building flexible lists and make units (like furies) useful. Battle tactics are good, just faction battle tactics don't work.

Its more like a 3+ year wait at this point because the SM codex is already out. I don't agree with selling, but I understand why its happening. Here is my anecdote: I liked the fabius bile books. So I made a Creations of Bile army a few years back. My Creations of Bile army formerly had its own chapter tactic, stratagems, warlord traits and items. So when i fielded them on the table, whether good or bad, they reflected the character/playstyle of that army. And when I actually played vs another Chaos marine player of another legion, our armies felt extremely distinct. Even if the models were mostly the same. Now, we are both just "chaos marines" with identical rules. Yes I can take Fabius in my army, and yes my paint job still makes me look different. But they play identically to other legions, and for all official purposes they are the same as other legions. TLDR: People like to be snowflakes including myself. If my army loses its flavor and character its no longer interesting.

Agreed. There are some mindboggling choices made in 40k 10th though. Like overwatch potentially being after EVERY movement. It always seems like players end up looking at each other expectantly after every move lol. Also stripping chapter identity out of marines and chaos marines has straight up made people sell armies in my area. I haven't sold any of mine but they are def on the back burner. Agreed on AOS too. AOS is far from perfect but as it stands I think overall its a better experience. I just hope they revisit faction tactics and grands in 4.0. The Leviathan Deck in 10th 40k, love it or hate it, is an objectively fair way to achieve VPs.

All I can speak for is my local scene. And while there are quite a variety of opinions regarding 10th, I don't think any of my 30-40 local players would call it "the best edition". Not even close. But I will agree to disagree. However I 100% will agree with you on AOS tho. If they revamped Battle Tactics and Grands and continue rolling out the battlescrolls I would have zero problem playing AOS for another couple years. Its in a really good place.

Worst thing about the game is overwatch during enemy movement and the stripping of sub factions/chapters/legions. Along with the absurd amount of hotfixes they had to apply. It just killed a lot of interest in my local group. Codex/Battletomes becoming obsolete is nothing new. Its been a thing for many years and ~3 year cycles are ALOT better than 5-10 year codex cycles. The index is the only fair way to allow everyone to play in an edition with overhauled rules. Now one could argue that changing the rules to the point that old codexes become obsolete is a stupid idea. AOS 3.0 is overall in a great place and so I would probably agree with that. But indexes are not by their nature a bad thing necessarily. There are enough online resources that any of us could easily play AOS or 40k without a book in hand. They are completely optional. And as a TO I am more inclined to check the app or other resources for rulings than a hard copy.

I think a lot of 40k players, myself included, think 10th edition 40k was the most botched edition change since end times/AOS 1.0. They found a way to simultaneously suck the flavor, fun and balance out of the game all at once.

The cities example won't really work here. Because the book was gigantic. And huge sections were purged entirely. Whats interesting about Cities is that they announced the purging in detail several months before it happened. So if its coming up we should see a post about it in the next two months. So as a BOC player, your options aren't great, bc in likelihood one of the below is going to happen Option 1 - You get an index/codex and your range is politely neglected for another 3 years with only occasional heroes/underworld kits. (see fyreslayers/idoneth) Option 2 - You get a complete revamp. TOW continues with old models while AOS uses the new models. (see Humans in cities). Many of your old models are likely now obsolete. (unless you proxy them) Option 3 - You go to legends (or get scattered to other factions like tzeentch) and remain a core TOW army. ( see wanderers ) If we are being objective, which seems the most likely? I would put my money on Option 1 or maybe Option 3. I just don't see Option 2 happening at all. Would be happy to be wrong though.