Ganigumo

Its not about positioning, its about the fact that it is a random element that can be strategized around, and raises questions, unlike something like the bad moon or casting a spell on a 7. The random element adds more depth to the question as well, as a surprising number of the decisions we make in a game do in fact have a right answer (even if we don't see it). Like whether to run with a unit, or if we should make a retreat move. High level play has the issue of meta lists working to eliminate as much inconsistency as possible, with the end goal being an army where every decision does in fact have a right answer and if you make them the only thing holding you back is RNG. Good rng, like the double turn, creates a more complex question, where there can often be scenarios without a right answer. This isn't a defense of the double turn inherently (although I do like it) but in mechanics that similarly use RNG in controlled and limited ways to make dexisions less solvable. Also you can never get doubled twice without getting one yourself, because only the person going second in a round can get a double, and doing so puts the other player going second. There is a small possibility of a very volatile game though.

I've seen math on thralls based purely on the warscroll and 1-2 of the new hero and its already pretty nasty.

The priority roll is also the good form of RNG, in that it can be strategized around (even if its strong), it has you asking yourself questions about your moves like "is this a good move? Will I be out of position if I get doubled? Will I be able to capitalize on a potential double?" As opposed to truly random, where all you can do is pray.

@Ghoooouls warcry is an example of a game with alternating activations, but it got rid of phases entirely to manage it. Each model can make 2 actions in an activation. Actions are things like move, retreat, attack, shoot etc.

This isn't exactly the case because the strong armies mostly fit neatly into battle regiment, while many of the weaker ones struggle to do so, so strong armies have more control over the double. Obviously its not the only factor, or even the biggest factor (even if all gitz lists could 1 drop by default it would still be bad) but it can be the difference between mid and high tier, or high tier and top tier.

I agree, and I know there's lots of others that do as well. With static turn orders many games can be "solved" or are just as easily determined by the first and only priority roll (in fact that was the state of 40k 9th edition for a while after it released). It adds a wild element to the game that can be strategized around (as opposed to completely random things like dice rolls where you just need to hope for the best). 3rd edition has done a pretty good job of weakening the double turn as well, especially in critical turn 3, despite my gripes about the edition as a whole. Alternating activations is different design, not better. While it could make AOS "better" it would be nearly unrecognizable from the game as it is right now (which could be a good thing based on your perspective). I've got a feeling that it would end up making games longer in general though.

Stormcast was damned from the start of its design because they made the mistake of using modular design in a book with 76 warscrolls. What worries me at the moment is that every battletome released so far has used modular design nearly exclusively. There's nothing wrong with modular design, it certainly cuts down on buff stacking, but it has its place. Stormcast NEEDED to be linearly designed both as an easy entry point to listbuilding for new players, but also to make as many units viable as possible. As an example, with the current book, you just take the best stuff because buff stacking isn't overly present or keyword locked. The pieces are all modular. But in a linearly designed book you'd see those other units filling the same role show up, because they synergize with different parts of the army (i.e vanguard and sancrosanct chambers would have different hammer units, rather than just relying on longstrikes/fulminators). You shouldn't really trust GW when it comes to these things. They like to talk about design decisions they made, like simpler warscrolls, stick to it for a couple books, then just abandon it completely. Moving abilities off the scrolls into the allegiance abilities isn't even a design improvement, its a step back because it makes the rules less intuitive, and the only benefit is not printing something on multiple warscrolls. You could also get the bonesplitterz treatment, where they pretty much exclusively remove rules and don't add anything.

With stormdrakes you can price the drake spam list into meme-tier, which it probably should be as scrolls like that, which do everything without needing support, should be. Even if the scroll is overcosted a bit it might see some play, because of how flexible they are. SOB are in a situation where this doesn't work because there is literally no flexibility in the army, every "piece" needs to be ~500 points. Gitz actually uses linear design and pushes you down a build path, which they doubled down on with the white dwarf/broken realms update, so the all trogg list should be viable (and is probably the strongest gitz build at the moment actually despite the synergies being really weak...).

I remember him being available on the webstore pretty recently (past 6 months-ish in canada), but he's gone now. Maybe they were just keeping him around until they sold out though. To be fair that guy wasn't taken out of production until after the gitz book had been available for a while.

I think the issue with roles in aos is literally just poor warscroll design. S/T and not having damage spill doesn't stop 40k from having issues as well purely because of how bloated many of the army ranges are. Just as a reference for my point: Modular units are ones in which each piece (or power pair) is independently useful and you can mix and match the pieces, as opposed to linear design which encourages you to double down into one build path to maximize buffs. Both are valid, and having both in the game is a good thing. Most ranges in aos are small enough that you don't need variations of the same role for units to stand out (i.e swarm killer vs armor puncher vs monster killer). Many of the ones that do have this problem try to have thematic subfactions and linear synergy so players commit to a "subfaction" within the army (i.e saurus vs skink, or squig vs trogg, etc) so two similar hammer units have their own uses because of what you bring around them, rather than having different purposes, sure one might be better, but when done right the resulting armies look and play differently. The problem, is when you make a modular book with significant warscroll bloat. It works fine for nurgle and Ironjawz, because of how limited the ranges are, but in something like stormcast it pretty much instantly invalidates half the army because you just can't come up with a unique role for all 76 warscrolls. Combine the modular design with a unit like stormdrake guard, which are an "everything" warscroll (they're mobile hammer-anvils with shooting) and you have a recipe for disaster. If stormdrake guard needed buffs from other heroes and spells, possibly within auras the army would be WAY more manageable since the stormdrake player would need to spend points on support heroes to get the most out of the dragons, and it would be tough to buff multiple units unless you bring multiples of those support heroes. As a design decision pushing the stormcast book into a modular design was a failure on multiple levels. The first being my previous point about invalidating big sections of the units being inevitable. The second is that modular design is much more esoteric than linear design, and it makes it harder to listbuild and discern what is and isn't good. While thats not always a bad thing, stormcast are literally THE "starter faction" and linear design makes listbuilding much easier, especially for new players.

Agreed, being a 2W infantry seems to cost a lot of points regardless of the actual profile and bonesplitterz infantry is horrendously overcosted for their points. It would be nice if morboys could ignore coherency requirements too. Also what would be way funnier than savage big boss losing leader would be it gaining the battleline keyword. So you can spam them as a chain fighting "unit" without hitting leader cap, but they're still leaders.

Yeah maybe the ward is enough, I was imagining a grot/spider continuing to attack when it dies because it hasn't even registered its own death. Tying a bonus to being under the moon is a good idea though. I made it 3 mortal wounds because it overrides the normal spider venom ability the scuttleboss has which has some amount of synergy in the army. even with current spiderfang rules you can get up to 4 mortals on a 5+ if you stack the buffs properly, and it also works on the mounts attacks so while it is powerful I think in that context its probably fine. I could make it d3 mortals on a wound roll of 6+ but I kind of like it overriding the venom from a flavor perspective. The command trait is intentionally for the webspinner because they don't have access to command traits normally while scuttlebosses do, and if I made an ability that gave a casting bonus or was too useful you'd never want to bring a scuttleboss. Its something grimscuttle did as well but the grimscuttle one is too good to not have a webspinner general.

I honestly would've preferred them just not acknowledging the change narratively, for both cases. Primaris exist as a narrative concept pretty much exclusively to avoid any blowback from replacing the old marines that people already owned, which is insane to me but I guess people actually do get upset when they release updated models? Maybe people would've been upset at needing to rebase their marines? I view thunderstrike in the same vein, I would've much preferred them marketed as just updated liberators/judicators (maybe with a different weapon profile), and it probably would've been good for the SCE battletome to have a couple less warscrolls. Maybe that would've sold less boxes though.

Has anyone else done this? I find writing rules to suit some of my more narrative armies to be pretty fun. It could be fun to see how people would like to see their custom forces represented as rules. My army (the short version) The rules:

I've got a whole little write-up for my spiderfang army, the "frostvenom stalktribe". They hop themselves up on a "potion" that is a mix of arctic spider blood and venom that gives them unnatural resistance to the elements and pain. They are currently led by the shaman Sno'zag da blue, the most long lived of the tribe's shamans, who's skin has grown as hard as ice and the scuttleboss Frosgit Neckstumpa who wields a large iron-ice axe and is known for decapitating any gits who challenge his authority.

Troggoths don't really have synergies, just the dankhold's reroll 1's command ability. Rockguts are just the most useful because their bulk is more reliable (5+ ward vs 4+ spell ignore or -1 to be hit) and their clubs are rend 2. Worth reinforcing too since they have 2" reach. Haven't played much with bounderz in 3e, they were one of the better units in the army in 2e but their movement is unreliable and they were hurt a bit by the coherency rules (the grots have 2" reach, but the squigs only have 1"). They're a unit that really wants to be reinforced but sometimes it can be hard to find the reinforcement points. If you've got some snufflers around in the army anyways they could do some work.

I've set my expectations low for aos this year and am only expecting a single big release this year, so its ogors or skaven or Chorfs in my opinion (i'd be happy to be wrong though). Then we'll get a 6-7 tomes with a single model.

We've already seen the preview for the NH model in the new years teaser, which implies its coming in the next couple months so probably right after idk/dwarves.

Its more that we shouldn't expect a battletome for any of the armies getting white dwarf rules anytime soon, I'm not sure they explicitly said as much but they definitely implied it. I'm not saying the white dwarf means we won't see an obr expansion(as an example) during 3rd edition, but that we won't see it until at least 2023. Some of them make a lot of sense, since they were late 3.0 tomes, but BoC sticks out as one of the oldest tomes and one in direst need of an update. If BoC was just getting a tome + single hero kit (like nurgle) there wouldn't be much justification to kick the release back into mid-late 3.0. Having a significant model release alongside the book would be good justification though. For a bit of wild speculation in the rumor thread I think the WD rules releases point to a skaven or ogor refresh in the near future (my moneys on skaven by the end of the year unless we get a completely new faction instead)

BoC are the february tome celestial, hopefully it means they're getting a proper line refresh near the middle/end of the edition.

Grot builds are usually built around a couple of grot blobs and pumping them way up. Skragrott is great, even if he's a little fragile, loonbosses give mortals on 6s to hit for grots, sneaky snufflers give grots (or squigs) an extra attack, and gobbapalooza has a few useful buffs for grots. Useful stuff in the army that isn't just direct grot synergy: Fungoid Cave Shamans as extra wizards and CP generators, Rockgut troggoths as a hammer, Rippas snarlfangs as a mobile chaff/harassment unit, Webspinner shaman on arachnarok as a tough caster with bonuses. For useful allies the marshcrawla sloggoth is excellent, since it gives destruction units nearby +1 to hit which includes everything in the gitz book. If you're really worried about mega gargants the beast skewer killbows can help take chunks out of them, but can be a bit inconsistent.

So there are two scenarios you've outlined here The first is spamming units with ranged output until you hit a critical point where the output is too much. This would be just as big a problem if you were spamming different kinds of shooting units though, and just boils down to the shooting problem in aos. Ultimately not everyone will ever be happy with where shooting ends up but the community seems pretty united that salamanders and bowsnakes are too good at it for what they're pointed at. Cockatrice build is still a meme build though. The second problem is spamming units you need to overcommit to in order to beat i.e horrors and gargants. The problem here is just the rules, not the spam. Gargants basically auto-control objectives, so unlike something like archaon you can't just screen and ignore/delay them while playing the objectives. You need to kill them. I don't think current horrors are a big problem, but you usually need to commit like 500 points just to take out a 250 point unit quickly so if they're spammed you just don't have the resources to take them out effectively. The tradeoff is that a horror spam list will probably struggle with battle tactics because of their poor damage output. The thing that makes them problematic is hosts duplicitous preventing retreats, so you're forced to grind through them to be able to move. Edit: to make my point a little more clear, needing to overcommit to take out a unit like horrors or gargants is fine, but the problem is when the rules put a timer on when it needs to be done. Aggressive armies have a good shot at tabling SoB over 5 turns for example, but that often doesn't even translate into a win because of the gargants rules.

The new coherency rule was just straight up bad for the game. The only benefit it had was "making units look more like units" but when every oval based unit in the game is crabwalking or making wierd formations its pretty clearly a failure.

Consistent 4-1's is the sign of something being too strong, not 5-0s. The difference between 4-1 and 5-0 often just comes down to luck when you take all 5 games into account, so in general its acceptable to lump 4-1 results and 5-0 results together when talking about the top lists.

Also no clause on the hero's warscroll preventing a namarti unit from benefitting from multiple stances, so if you had 2 of them near a namarti unit they could benefit from both.