Neil Arthur Hotep

A lot to consider with this question. From my own perspective as a selfish player: Please put two of the factions I already play in the starter so I can get their models for cheap. Awaiting Cities vs. OBR for 5th, please and thank you. But of course, that's not what the question is really about. I don't know that Stormcast have to be in every starter box like Space Marines have to be. AoS is not quite that polarized. For what it's worth, I think they have been doing a good job making Stormcast cooler with every starter, to the point that I will probably get into the army in 4th. So I don't feel the releases have been a waste. But it's a well known problem that the Stormcast range is bloated right now. Let's see if the upcoming index can fix that. But even if, I think that is a problem to be conscious of, and I think the AoS guys at GW are conscious of it. They are redoing some old kits this time around, after all. I will defend Stormcast as being the best "default starter" faction out of all the factions that are currently in the game. It makes sense, since they were purpose-built for it. Big dudes, elite, easy to paint (getting easier, in fact, compared to the old Fatcast). Overall pretty cool guys, especially if you are into the superhuman divine warrior trope. But their fluff is actually interesting beyond that, as well. I play Cities and I love them. They are currently my favourite AoS army. But they would be a bad starter faction. Too intricate models, of which you need too many to field an army. Cool in a downtrodden way, which not everyone likes. And the army rules are really atypical, too. In my opinion, until they design another easy to paint, elite faction with wide appeal, Stormcast need to stick around in the starter. But I don't think that faction necessarily needs to be GA: Order. I could imagine something like Slaves to Darkness taking the spot. However, that still leaves open the question of who to pair them with, if not Stormcast. Certainly not Cities, IMO, unless the next Cities release looks quite different from the current one. And the other Order factions don't really have main-character energy.

Get a load of this Grungnard over here.

I suppose the mildly spicy take is that Liberators and Vindictors are more or less the same thing and it's a quirk of history that they are separate units instead of "Liberators with hammers" and "Liberators with spears". They will certainly end up playing the same role at the table, most likely. In that sense, it's fine if they looks similar, but it is good that the old Liberator kit finally gets its visual update. I think people have been getting more positive about the reworked Stormcast design recently, and retiring their old kits which had a much more mixed reception is a good step, IMO.

I wouldn't say AoS is all about the gameplay. The lore and models are a major driver for people to get into it, after all. But I think there is room for a game where fun gameplay can take precedence over in-fiction believability at some points. The cannon thing you mention is a good example. I don't think most people have a strong intuition about how many bows should equal one cannon. I think intuitively, you would want bows to be good against bigger units of lightly armoured dudes and cannons to be good against big, highly armoured targets. If the game does not capture that (as AoS sometimes fails to do right now), I think that's fair to criticize. But going down the path of trying to accurately model how bows vs. cannons would behave in every situation just leads to insanity. Sure, it makes sense that a cannon is better than a unit of bowmen against a Steam Tank, but should it also be able to do high damage against a Chaos Lord? How realistic is it really to snipe a single guy with a cannonball? What about a flying unit, can a cannon even tilt upwards? If a unit is deployed in a line formation, should a cannon really be able to kill more than one or two guys at once? I really believe that if you get lost in the minutia like this, it can make a game worse, even if it becomes more "sensemakey" at the same time. AoS really is not that much like chess, though. Capturing the flavour of what is supposed to be happening at the table and making it work with the mechanics is important for the kind of game that AoS is. There is a reason people hate stuff like the Screaming Bell being spammed as a screening unit, because it goes strongly against the fiction.

The side-by-side between the new and old Liberators from the article really puts things into perspective: I wonder how the reception of Stormcast would have been if they had looked like this from the start.

I hope they manage to strike the balance somehow. But even with a coalition system that is just "allies can benefit from your allegiance abilities", if players feel forced to run 400 points of units from a different army that's kind of a feel bad. I think that some players feel the pull of having to play "optimally" more than others. For some people, leaving good mechanics on the table in the service of a fluffy list just feels bad.

Put realm artefacts back in and you've got yourself a deal!

It's a bit sad that Chaos does not get to mix their troops as much anymore, but then again thinking back to the time when the best way to play Cities was to run 1200 points of Dracoths, I get why it might be necessary.

I think what you are saying is right, I just don't see it as a problem. To me, the ability to win on points while losing on models is an upside. It simulates the ability to achieve your mission objective in a Pyrrhic victory. "I won. But at what cost?", you know? But to be fair, the AoS could do more to make that fiction easier to grasp. I think battle tactics and objective control feeling a bit disconnected from the fiction is a very fair criticism. I get the appeal of a game where the rules are less abstracted. Maybe the fact that I prefer more abstract games is due to my own history with gaming, where for a long time I played really detailed systems with rules for every eventuality. And then I found that, in practice, those rules either never come up, or are not as fun as you imagine. And then I played more abstracted games and just found that I was not missing the extra level of detail at all. But this is not really about the double turn/priority anymore.

I agree, there are a bunch of areas where the game flows badly right now which will hopefully be addressed in the next edition. Battleshock and battle tactics are some of the worst offenders, whenever they become relevant people need to pause and go "how does this work again?" or "let me look at the list of tactics for a few minutes". For me, in many cases, I am comfortable with rules that don't really make sense in the fiction if they at least play quickly. Like the rules for moving over obstacles in AoS, where you pay movement to go up, and then down again. Yeah, it probably doesn't make much sense that Pontifex Zenestra gets carried up a sheer cliff face in her palanquin, but do I really think the game would be better or more fun if we had list defining which units can climb and which cannot, or a rule to determine whether a unit needs to climb or just walk up an incline? I personally don't think so, and I think it's good that the designers made the trade off in this case.

I don't know if what you describe is best put in terms of gameplay and balance. It seems more like a tension between something like maybe game flow and detail. By "game flow" I mean the desire to have the game run smoothly and not be interrupted by having to look up stuff or people stumbling over hard to use rules. And by "detail" I mean the desire to represent what is happening in the fiction closely by having dedicated rules and systems. I think you always want both in every game. You want the game to play fluidly, but you also want the rules to reflect the flavour of the fiction. But when doing both at the same time is not possible, you need to come down on one side or the other. I think AoS comes down on the side of game flow (or at least tries to; it's not always successful) rather than detail most of the time. Older editions of WHFB and to an extent also TOW err on the side of detail more often. Personally, I prefer leaning into good game flow more, which is why I like AoS better than older WHFB editions.

I think this is a good point. It would definitely be better for double turn enjoyers to be more enthusiastic about it. I think people are too defensive when talking about the mechanic: For me, it's not just "you get used to it", I actually think it's interesting and fun. I think the game is better for having the priority mechanics it has. But of course, taking two turns in a row is super strong. And, accordingly, you should have to pay a price to do it. This is already the case right now, by having to take Battle Regiment and being forced to give away the first turn. I think the new rule where you also can't score a battle tactic is a good addition, too, because I think the double turn has a problem that is mainly psychological: If you are on the receiving end of a double, you feel like you have probably just lost the game. In my experience, that's not actually true most of the time and if you play the game all the way until turn 5, there is always a chance to still win. I hope the fact that the player taking the double needs to give up points to get it will make people feel like they have more of a chance to still win when it happens. Because I think that's how it is in reality.

Including morale in the game as definitely one of the big innovations of WHFB. I think for AoS, though, it's less of an obviously good match in terms of what the game is trying to be. I don' think AoS needs battleshock (because it has historically been pretty irrelevant), and I think we are getting an objective control stat instead of bravery this time around, so maybe they have just decided that the juice was not worth the squeeze with psychology.

I hope so. I like AoS in the role of the Warhammer game where list building has a lot of freedom to it. Especially now that TOW exists.

It's a difficult situation, because on the one hand, I want AoS to be a game with a low barrier to entry, but I also think the priority system of AoS has a lot of good effects, adresses problems that are turn based games traditionally have and leads to interesting decisions in game. I think a lot (not all) new players could learn to like it if they gave it a real chance. There are so many "I go, you go" games out there. Can't there be room for one game with a double turn mechanic? Wasn't "simplified, not simple" a phrase they used in the lead up to 3rd already? Regardless, I feel it's a phrase that mostly appeals to what players think they want, rather than what they actually want. I seriously think people generally overestimate the level of cognitive load and rules conplexity they can handle at the table. Or even, the level that is actually fun. Especially in Warhammer games, where you can take months just thinking about your army before actually playing.

The double turn can be pretty contentious at times, but we should not lose sight of the actual mechanic everyone truly hates: Mysterious terrain. The one mechanic in AoS that everyone just always ignores without discussion and coordination, even though it's right there in the core rules.

For my personal experience, the more I play AoS, the more I appreciate the double turn and the dynamics it creates. It always feels impactful, but has not been the sole deciding factor in any of the games I played in the last 6 months or so. In pretty much all games, there are two play styles that are naturally strong: Alpha strikes and ranged attacks. This is almost independently of the game in question. Alpha strikes are strong because of Lanchester's laws (even a small advantage in firepower gives you an big advantage when it comes to destroying opposing units; striking first gives you such an advantage by removing units from the opponent's side and the impact of this compounds over time) and ranged has an inherent advantage over melee to the point that ranged units in AoS attack half as often as melee units and cost 1.5 times the points and frequently still feel oppressive. The double turn is a mechanical that weakens both, because it allows the player going second to potentially catch up and makes it so that even slower armies have a chance to cross the gap/get through screens against ranged lists. If the double got removed from AoS as it is currently, I would predict that alpha shooting castles would just completely dominate. With how priority interacts with list building and deployment (and apparently in 4th, scoring), I feel the mechanic is implemented well and leads to interesting decisions, which is why I overall think it is good to have in the game.

Just play I go you go in your home games, dude. Literally the easiest thing in the world to house rule. 1000%, if they removed the double turn we would be seeing nothing but "going first is too strong, alpha strikes are too strong, shooting is too strong" every day.

If they manage to make the GHB truly an optional module, that sounds like a big improvement IMO. I have said in the past that I think it is kind of sad that no "non-seasonal" version of 3rd ed exists. Battle plans, tactics and grand strats are too closely tied to the themes of the season to play them outside of that. I'd love to play some "basic" 3rd ed, but you kind of need to homebrew it. Core book only just has too little going on.

I don't think that's real.

You can probably take them as enhancements if they no longer have point costs.

I generally don't keep harping on it, but @Whitefang back me up, who we can now definitely confirm has inside knowledge of 4th ed, literally said that Beasts will soon no longer be playable in AoS. And Whitefang did indeed back them up (through reactions). IMO, the evidence is against Beasts staying, as sad as it is.

If Bravery gets replaced by Objective Control, OBR will likely be good at it, and Zombies weak. So I would not worry too much about that.

In my personal experience, the coolest, biggest guys were always the one with the highest bravery. Underpowered units like grots, rats and normal humans were usually the ones that suffered. In fact, they got doubly hurt by both having worse bravery and losing higher numbers than elite units.

The stealth reason for this is probably to save money on translations again. It's why they use symbols for Warcry and Kill Team, and in warscroll cards. But hopefully it also makes rules easier to read at a glance.