Ganigumo

Us leafs can dream right?

OK so there are a few levels to this, and I'll try my best to explain. Drakes are broken. They are fast hammer-anvils with mortal wound shooting that don't need buffs. This lets them get where they need to and apply the damage to take out your opponent's key pieces easily, while being spammable because you don't need support units to pump up their damage. The only units that work with that design are prohibitively expensive units like archaon. AoS is a predominantly melee-combat focused game designwise, and you get a combat phase even in your opponent's turn, so theoretically you're not defenseless. The double turn really does push shooting over the edge and the designers clearly haven't figured out a solution for it yet. You can strategize around it. I know it gets repeated a lot but I'll go over a few points. only the player going second in a round can get a double turn. So that player can be extra aggressive if they're behind (Which they should be, first turn is a big tactical advantage in a game like this, if the game is "really close" without a double it means the player going first is behind). The player going first needs to be open to the possibility of a double, and plan moves to protect key pieces by holding them back, screening, or boxing the opponent in. Most buffs last until your next hero phase, so defensive buffs have extra value if you're going first. It makes sure the game isn't solveable by removing some "right" answers from the game. This point is super important to me, and I think is the most important one. Coming from a background in Magic the Gathering, almost all games of that feel solvable, in that, no matter what, 99%+ of the time there is a "right" answer (even if you lose the game). It gets old once you look past luck of the draw and see this, so games either come down to luck (in terms of draws or matchup) or player error. You can throw as much complexity as you want on top of the game to obfuscate this fact, but in order to fix it you need controlled, impactful RNG which can be strategized around. The double turn adds real depth to decision making, as often what would be the right move in a purely igougo game (putting your unit just outside of charge range or whatever) immediately becomes a question with multiple answers. Putting your unit right out of charge range works if you don't get doubled, but if you do you're caught out, or can't make that charge next turn. Its not a perfect system for this, but its certainly a solid example of controlled impactful RNG. This kind of RNG is more interesting than pure RNG, like dice rolls where all you can do is pray. As a bit of a tangent AOS actually still kind of works as a game if you remove dice rolls from damage completely and just go with averages, mostly because of the priority roll creating enough variance to prevent the game from being solveable. GW game balance is generally pretty awful, we have our top armies at like 60% winrates, and poor gitz are at like 30%. The game has a lot of RNG, almost every tournament is decided by luck. If two equally skilled players with equally strong armies face off the determining factor is luck. Most of the time the only difference between 4-1 and 5-0 is just luck, as the chance of at least one of your games going one way or the other based on luck is very high (Luck could be through dice rolls or matchups). On a side note I think aos 3 gives too much too the player going second now, where in most games going first gives you a higher chance to win, between bonus CP, double turn potential, and the other various bonuses I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

IMO Aos 3 went way too hard in giving the player going second free stuff. Just the potential double turn was probably enough, but now the player going second: Controls the flow of the turns, only the player going second can get a double turn gets extra Command points has powerful reactive command abilities can remove objectives on many battleplans on the most crucial turn They definitely shifted the balance towards second turn being more powerful, especially since most alpha strike armies have fallen out of favor.

Good to see it, but it looks like we're off to a pretty slow start to the edition. At least I know none of my armies are getting updated so I don't need to worry about my painting projects needing to switch course

Endless spells and faction terrain were manufactured in china (as well as battletomes), and they're moving away from manufacturing things in china.

They've re-used cover art before. IIRC most of the 7th edition 40k books had the same covers as the 6th ones (or at least the ork one did) which was super confusing because they didn't change the color of the bindings or anything.

It was actually a logistical change, I don't know the exact math off the top of my head but basically 60x44 is better because 30x22 squares fit into things like shipping containers and trucks better. The change was made for their smaller games initially, but having a 40k/aos board be 4 warcry/KT boards put together makes some amount of sense from a business perspective.

I'm biased since I love gitz but I'd be down. The only other destruction army that needs an update is ogors. Bonesplitterz just need plastic characters. Gitz players on suicide watch. Terrible rules, Terrible winter update, no battletome, no tome celestial. There's still fall I guess though.

I wouldn't say that myself. Aos1 was kind of chaotic and them just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it would stick. AoS2 they went into with a proper plan, squatted what didn't work or they didn't want, and started consolidating what they wanted to keep around. Consolidation will continue in aos 3, mostly to help keep the armies up to date ruleswise, because 24 tomes in 36 months is already a lot (at this point we need 21 in 30 months... and don't have any announced) and doesn't leave much room for supplements/campaigns, but we're also expecting new armies. Also because aos made the design decision to focus on small, highly thematic armies, as opposed to the grand diverse forces of wfb (which is something I like about it). Short of GW going fully digital for rules, soup is the realistic solution to the logistical problem of having so many armies in the game.

A new solo tome could mean literally nothing of those things. Your new solo tome can be competitively weak/garbage (see slaanesh/khorne/BoC) Your soup tome can be competitively strong (see warclans, cities, Soulblight) Your new solo tome probably won't come with a big release. The game has 24 battletomes at the moment, during the entirely of 2e we only saw Lumineth, Stormcast, Slaanesh, OBR, Nighthaunt, Gargants, soulblight and Gitz get a significant model release (~1/3rd, roughly 4 armies per year) so the majority of releases were solo battletomes without a big release. Your soup tome can come with a model release (see gitz/Soulblight) It being a soup tome has literally ZERO bearing on the quality of the book or the release. Sure you probably get less lore dedicated to the faction of your choice in the battletome, but don't conflate soup with bad rules or lack of model releases. Some amount of armies need to either not get a release period, or get just a battletome with no significant model releases during an edition. Its just the reality of the situation. Soup means they can better fit the rules updates for every faction into an edition's release schedule. I'm not saying you need to like that an army gets souped, or that the apparent fyreslayer nerfs are justified (it feels like it was written with 2e in mind) but understand that the alternative isn't significant support for your army, its less support for it. Maybe I'm just conditioned from years of playing and watching stuff get squatted though, not getting a tome in an edition was often a bad sign. 3e's design is entirely backwards. Simple rules with complexity in the tomes (like in 2e) is just a better design than 3e's complex rules and simple battletomes. since with the former design the player can control the complexity of their game by choosing a less complex army. Their solution half the time seems to be to just remove rules from warscrolls with no compensation, put one or two of them in the allegiance abilities page and call it a day. Thats what happened to bonesplitterz, and what might be happening to fyreslayers. Sometimes they do a good job, like with ironjawz though, where they actually think through the changes, although ironjawz had simple warscrolls to start with. As a player of both those armies I was pretty happy with those books existing, for no other reason than it meant those factions weren't getting squatted, Ogors were looking pretty suspect for a squatting for quite a while, with no tome through 1e, a big part of 2e, and not even getting GHB allegiance support. Greenskinz and Gitmob didn't survive the souping. Also kind of related to the topic at large, we've seen potential fyreslayer nerfs, but are assuming KO will be just as strong. I'm not so sure, if this potential book was written during 2e (which I suspect it was) KO would've been at the height of their game, and possibly viewed as due for a nerf by the devs, despite them being in a pretty healthy spot at the moment.

No battletome is worse. Historically its the actual sign an army is getting squatted. Being souped means they see value in keeping the army around.

To be fair we don't know much of the process, maybe the feedback itself is poor, or the books are rushed out and it can't all be addressed, especially when maybe the book should have a second round of playtesting or something.

Not to throw shade at anyone directly because I don't know much about the process and the decisions behind it, but even with playtesters we still manage to have stuff like bonesplitterz and sentinels/gargants/drakes/horribly broken thing of the moment, so there's definitely something broken about the current process anyways.

Could be a new wanderers hero too. If dispossessed get souped into a dwarf book it could make sense for wanderers to get souped into sylvaneth and we had that cryptic whitefang rumor. Could be wanderers vs skaven, which could make more sense than sylvaneth vs skaven since I'm not sure how you'd make the contents much different than looncurse. AFAIK wanderers haven't been featured in a box set for all of AoS.

first warscroll in Destruction/Mawtribes/Warscrolls. Might want to check and make sure your app is updated though.

Not that great overall imo, 105 points for ~11 wounds on a 5+, statswise he's a maneater with an extra shot and 1 more rend on the melee weapon. doesn't have a subfaction keyword so he can pick up some abilities there, and he can turn off artefacts if he gets close to something at the start of the combat phase, but its a bit unreliable. I'd like him a lot more if he had the gutbuster keyword, but it seems like a fun scroll. I'll probably just use him as a maneater or something.

@madmac you can be relegated to backburner support even if you are a separate army, BoC have been like that for ages, and other GW armies have been put in similar scenarios in the past, its the status quo. 40k orks were using a codex from 4th edition in 6th edition as an example. Something else to keep in mind is their release schedule, they tend to have 3 year cycles for editions (too short imo unless the editions rules are bad). AoS currently has 24 armies (after souping warclans), which means fitting 24 battletomes into 36 months if they want them all to get a release in an edition which barely leaves space for narrative campaigns, supplements and new armies. The way they can keep up with the battletomes without doing something drastic like going all digital is by souping armies where it makes sense. In terms of warclans, it was souped in 2e, and was generally well received with both halves being reasonably competitive and interesting, I'd argue the 2e warclans book was a good soup book, but the 3e one dropped the ball entirely. @zilberfrid To be fair MOST factions in the game don't get many new models. Lumineth and stormcast are the only ones to have gotten second waves and there are a bunch of armies that haven't gotten much of anything since fantasy. Something to keep in mind about AoS's design direction is that they make small, highly focused forces, as opposed to more broad concepts like in 40k or WFB, constantly expanding the rosters of the armies generally isn't the priority and as I alluded to before this means souping armies to an extent to keep up with their release schedule.

Not saying you need to be optimistic, just that I don't think the major reason they might be worse is due to being souped, just regular GW ignorance of how their game actually works.

Fyreslayers don't need to be nerfed to go into a warclans style book, which is what they'll get, not something like mawtribes or cities. Strongly tying the buffs and synergies only to that faction is enough that running them together won't break the game entirely (i.e when the faction has strong linear design). That said it might happen, since GW has written literally every 3.0 battletome so far with modular design in mind, despite it definitely not being the best way to approach at least one of the books (stormcast). There's also the possibility that fyreslayers were nerfed intentionally, because the book was probably written during 2e when fyreslayers were actually very strong, and they didn't consider that the army would've suffered from the 3.0 rules changes so heavily (Which is par for the course, they seem completely ignorant of the fact that some armies got absolutely destroyed by the 3.0 changes). Bonesplitterz was just terrible rules writing, it was a complete failure on the writers/designers/playtesters and I don't think it should be used as an example for that exact reason. Honestly they should probably apologize for it and do a hefty FAQ to fix their mistake...

They do have template stats in aos, its just less clear when they use them. In 2e 'ardboyz, liberators, and chaos warriors were all very similar statlines for similar costs(you could probably dig up a couple more 2w models that fit the bill as well, like boingrot bounderz), and there was absolutely no shortage of 1 wound infantry that hit on 4s and 4s.

Literally the only reason mournfang are bad is the fact that they still count as 1 for ogor charge and might makes right. If they got the better impact hits at 4 models, and counted for 3/4 models on an objective you'd probably see them played quite a bit.

I mostly just want updated books, 3.0 rules were not kind to many armies. Although if they dropped the coherency change and reinforcement limit the wait might be more tolerable. I've also been getting a lot of painting done in the meantime though, I've nearly painted 2k points of ogors this month.

The 2.0 warclans book was very well received, so I think it would make a lot of sense for them to go that direction with armies when they can. I think tomes like that are fine, although the 3.0 warclans book was half baked. I think they'll get "souped" like that, but also with the dark elves joining malerion/morathi. Basically CoS will be slowly pieced out over 3e until near the end, when we get a humans line refresh/expansion, although I imagine they'll still get lots of coalition options.

Awesome thanks

The artefact states you add 1 to the bearer'****** rolls, would that include the mounts attacks? If possible could you point me to the rule clarifying it? Thanks.