Greybeard86

I honestly don't see why. If I put a very big "PICK AND SHIELD" marker next to my unit of vulkite beserkers, do you really care if I have modeled them with two axes?

Yes, of course. And tournament organizers often being companies carrying the GW product themselves makes them very vulnerable to that sort of pressure. That's why I love when there are strong "intitutionilized" player organizations. GW should do what they do best, gorgeous models and over the top narratives. Players need to stand up a bit for themselves when it comes to playing with the models

While it would be neat to be able to have everything perfectly coherent with the army list, I think that it is a bit much once we consider the meta swings, the addition of new models, and the fact that this precludes completely 3rd party options (which will never be 100% identical). There are many creative ways to identify units on the table without strict WYSIWYG . For example, you could place them in a base next to the unit (a pile of weapons), or at the feet of the champion of the unit, or in a drawing and attached to the standard, or with a standard bearer next to them that is just a marker, or printed in a piece of plastic that you leave next to the unit. The possibilities are endless, and arguably some pretty cool visually. It reminds me of the old discussions about unit fillers in oldhammer. It is not a necessity, to have the exact same models, and the current fairly strict rules go too much, for my taste, in the way of making it hard for players. At the end of the day, allowing for 3rd party options and loser representations (not strictly WYSIWYG) does require some work on tournament organizers and players. But I believe that if we all made that effort it would help expand the tournament scene, and in general the hobby. Surely GW could use a bit more competition

I never understood that mentality in tournaments (I understand why GW stores do it, of course). As long as you give your opponent a list and nothing is confusing, demanding that a gargant is a true GW garant (tm) seems like throwing stones on our own roof. Same goes for WYSIWYG and the need to magnitize everything, or end up using sculpt variations you dislike for that. I wish more conventions for avoiding this would be adopted, as players only stand to win by it. You are right that current prices reflect market dominance.

There is a market for this kind of stuff; in 40k it is knights and titans and gargants are the very equivalent for AoS. I guess here one has to keep in mind that, as consumers, we are only tiny fish whereas GW is a big fish. Sometimes they won't be targetting our demographic, and I guess that is fine. It is important to try to stay as rational as possible when making these purchases, GW has "good" marketing and nice sculpts. To sum it up, just keep your cool and don't spam the buy botton (swatting my hand away from a 300 bucks NIB Giants of Albion set).

My recommendation is to set a budget and adopt a playstyle that works well with it. For example, perhaps you need to focus on only one army. It is easy to overspend, and GW certainly has some nice models, but I think that's when the rational part of the brain must kick in

Yep, I think we "converged". Is this possible in a public forum discussing something that might involve competitive play?

Epic! I am going to use it, I hope you don't mind.

It is hard to make that happen without stronger differentiation between units. Which then opens the door to players getting better engagements and winning through that. You can make it more or less punishing (I lose my anti monster, I can't kill a monster or alternatively maybe I can't kill it as "efficiently"), but specialization does logically imply that getting worse trades means getting a disadvantage. An example of specialization: hearthguard berserkers with poles seem good against high saves, whereas axes are better against lower saves. Some questions: Is it enough of a difference to matter in real play (for hearthguard and others)? Do other armies have a sufficient degree of specialization across units, or do more suffer from the "eel disease"? And more generally: Are the current saves enough to make behemoths feel trully "epic" or are they still too vulnerable to hordes with rend? Should hordes get easy access to rend (e.g. chaos marauders), or should horde buffs be related to other things (e.g. more leadership)?

Hi folks! I was looking into it to create a warscroll for a dwarf king on throne of power. It does seem though that mounts are limited to beasts? Any inspiration / tips would be appreciated.

It is a matter of degrees. Should dragons be totally impervious to grots? Or perhaps just not as vulnerable to witches? Also, is the game more fun if we reward seeking the proper engagements (each unit attempts to target its natural prey) or if we simply spam "bestamest" units (hearthserkers are good against most things, is it fun to see eel spam)? Without bringing it hyperbole, it seems that having "universally good" options leads to lower diversity. If a unit is good against everything, and the codex has poor internal balance, we see those very spammy lists. That's my take as a rookie to AoS, with more experience in other GW systems.

Of course, we do have that and could expand on it. The issues I see with going for special rules are: Rule bloat: now every unit has special rules, making it hard for the other players to know / remember. Rules outdated: we all know that this is a thing; so what if the "new" battletome has special rules that are better than the old special rules for X unit? That's why I would advocate for universal rules, and only very rarely go for unit specific special rules. At most, army specific special rules. For example, special rules for behemoths (e.g. +1 to saves vs non behemoths). And maybe then introduce another special category of "monstruous" for large models such as trolls, with also some advantages. That would be not going for T-S but trying to bend the system to accommodate for toughness. It all depends on what you want to see on the table; I like variety. One way to encourage variety is to give units niches; in other words, avoiding "bestamest" types of units. For example, eels, hearthserkers, witches, and similar things I have seen are often spammed. It is not always perfect. For example, in 40k now vehicles are perceived to be weak, so competitive armies don't go all out in AT weapons. So if you have weak archetypes, counters aren't brought, and so on. Also, skew can become a thing (old all knights lists) if it isn't balanced. No system is perfect but, again, what do you want to see on the table? That is, I feel, the angle that will get the most traction. Because while we might like S-T, clearly GW doesn't want it in AoS. But Behemoths / elites / monsters might not "feel" / "play" as such, then that is complaint GW might look into.

I am planning on painting a full 80-90s mostly metal army with "iconic" sculpts. I was just wondering to which extent those would be usable in AoS. If I like AoS enough, I will probably get a more modern set of sculpts to complement the old ones and be able to play.

Skew lists are the result of poor balancing. I would argue that, from what I have seen, current AoS competitive lists are pretty spammy too. Murder blobs, eel spam, essentially lots of picking highly "efficient" units and spamming them (keeper of secrets galore). It just seems that there are big issues with internal balance. The typical counterargument to S-T is that it can be "unfun" to play against. What if Timmy brings only high T units in a very skewed list and half my army is useless against them? The answer to that should be within the simulation. Maybe fully surrounded behemoths become more vulnerable (+X to wound). It all comes down to how you want the game to be played, and where you want the complexity. Should it be about finding combos? Buffs stacking units to multiply their performance. As a result, you see large blobs of units. Or perhaps about picking the "good fights"? That is, using units to fight the enemy units that are particularly ''efficient'' at targeting those enemy units. Then army composition ought to vary, although this is vulnerable to internal balance issues (if a unit is bad for its cost, you don't need to bring a counter for it). Personally, I would rather see a variety of units than spam.

Then issue of spam though seems directly related to this, as others have noted. In part this seems to be an issue of permissive army compositions, e.g. battle Iines that are actually the best unit in the army, like heart serkers. But also because there aren’t that many differences in attacks: the expected damage and the level of rend (with mortals being an extreme). That’s it, the to wound and to hit and re rolls and what not are just combinations to allow for granularity. It really seems like some units have been allowed to concentrate too high values in these limited possibilities to differentiate units. Which isn’t strange, since, again, you have very few dimensions to make them different. With only a few parameters, it is hard to have good units if you don’t give them high values in all those parameters. That is why, imho, Very streamlined games can be hard to balance too.

Swarm style sounds fun to me too. Just wanted to point out that more than "lowly" vs "elite" or "monstruous" it is about the specialist nature of the unit. For example, you could have a monster specialist in fighting hordes (flame spiting creature with damage based on number of models) that might be bad against low count units or behemoths. Also, the current 40k toughness tables are quite forgiving, and most often you wound on at least a 5+. What bringing toughness would do is allow for more differentiation between units. Currently, it seems that naked elf ladies are equally good at shanking grots or giants. One would imagine that the tactics involved in figthing those two types of enemies would be different, and that the weapons effective against one type would not be as effective against the other. The question here is whether a game with more specialization is more "fun" or not. Since coming over to AoS I have noticed that there is a tendency in more "competitive" armies to spam certain units (e.g. witches, hearthserkers). This, in part, is a consequence of the lack of "specialization" in damage dealing. When a unit is a high damage dealer, it seems to be a high damage dealer against a majority of targets. Large blob with multiple attacks and rend seems a theme. Am I wrong? Very true! Rend or, conversely, better saves make a huge difference. I guess the issue here is that stacking buffs benefit hordes a lot more (force multiplier), and that the current existing buffs do eliminate such weaknesses. For example, allowing witches to get rend. Again, very true. But doing this would require introducing more special rules ('This model gets a 4+ ward against attacks made by units with more than 20 models' ), or being extremely disciplined with giving rend. Probably a combination of range considerations, rend, and giving behemoths / elite units some form of save could do great for their defense. Then again, the same could be achieved with toughness while allowing "armor" to retain a differentiated design space. The next issue would be their attack, but I am not sure I fully get what the current "combos" are yet, plus it is not the topic of the thread.

Thanks a ton! I used the https://www.warhammer-community.com/warscroll-builder/ and somehow managed to get miners in a pitched battle list. Cannot replicate it, so there's that.

It seems that the complain is that due to the simplified system hordes are too effective, and some big centerpieces just aren't. Even in a toughness based system you can have a grot kill a dragon, it would just be less likely and "epic" as opposed to an effective method. To those who dislike the system this ruins the "fantasy". Truth is, I don't think people are killing dragons with grots. Maybe someone can give a common example from the current meta where a unit of "regular" folks in a horde are "too good" against "big guys"?

It seems that this is a design choice. GW took away WD, initiative, then toughness; all those were the defenses of "elite" and "monstruous" units. Instead, they added more buffs and force multpliers. Personally, I would prefer routing (and returning) units as a way to avoid silly tarpits.

You make a sacrifice: you say a rifle can hurt a tank. If that is acceptable to you, with all that it entails, then all is good. That bring back the idea of units that are so tough that need special counters. Giving tanks a crapton of health does not take away the fact that you can use rifles against them. Taking out "toughness" checks means you remove a layer of differentiation between units. GW chose to simplify this and then add more force multipliers, buffs, and so on instead.

I very much prefer the "footprint" approach; requiring the number of models to represent the actual size of the unit always seemed more of a marketing demand than anything else to me. If you just care about the overall base, then you can have wonderful dioramas in the middle, and there is far more freedom with poses.

You can add more wounds to a monster, but that won't change the relative effectiveness of different units against it. That is what S/T does, it no longer is about "damage", but rather damage against what targets (same idea with rend). Unless I am missing something, does someone have an example at hand?

Folks, I am having a hard time figuring whether the old dawi units are legends or not (slayers, unforged, miners, flame cannon, king in throne, etc.). Could anyone help me out, please?

It is the same thing we have in RTS were small arms damage tanks vs needing specialized AT. Do you want the game to have that layer of simulation, or not? Do you want to have tiny knives bringing down a dragon, or do you want to require dedicated anti monster units?

Is this true, though? S-T mechanics allow for completely new way (but very old :P) to differentiate units, adding depth. There is no way you can achieve the same result with the universal to-hit and to-wound. The typical examples are goblins fighting dragons, or fighting other goblins. Under universal to hits and to wound rolls, goblins are equally likely to hit and wound either unit, when clearly from a simulation standpoint this seems unlikely. Same as agility / initiative did, and WS vs WD. If you now want to restore part of that complexity you can add ad hoc rules, e.g. scaly skin for the dragon, but that gets difficult to handle over iterations of the game and results in special rule bloat. Whereas knowing that a dragon has high toughness is intuitive and ultimately more streamlined. Adding more wounds to a unit clearly does not solve that, as others have pointed out already. You cannot effectively replace a dimension in this way. GW eliminated T-S and other checks to streamline the game, with the ultimate goal to add complexity through force multipliers and combos instead of through simulation layers. At least that's my reading of it.