yukishiro1

My comments were based on the games I've played, sorry if that wasn't clear. So far I've won every game with my monster-hero-and-reinforced-shooting army, and the only one that was difficult was the one vs another similar list. Only 3 games period, not a large sample size obviously, and one of them was the FEC game that honestly I probably coulda won with half my army not doing anything but standing there.

For sure, it hits like a wet noodle (though not as wet a noodle as it used to be, stomp + ability to be a wizard so it can do d3 mortals and/or add 1 damage to up to 8 attacks, plus the ability to easily hit on 2s, and wound on 2s once per game, moves that calculus significantly compared to its damage output in 2.0). So it survives significantly better than it used to, it deals a lot more damage than it used to (but still not very much objectively for a 300 point unit), it has far more utility than it used to. And yet it went down in points. And this is a unit that already saw play in 2.0. it wasn't a meme unit like a Kharybdiss or something. I'm not saying it's necessarily a problem yet. It's just an initial concern I've had playing games so far, that the game seems to be really pushing list design in the direction of beefy heroic monsters. I hope we don't end up with a game where all the top lists looks pretty much the same, 1000 points of tanky monstrous heroes, a strong, reinforced shooting unit, and then some cheap chaff.

Yeah, their current approach is just bad and such a step backwards. It's really frustrating to see them go in exactly the opposite direction they should be going in.

If it's "just like 40k," then you don't get a digital version of the book. You instead get a code that unlocks the rules in the app in reference form. That's not the same as a digital version, especially not from the point of view of accessibility. There's no page by page copy of the book, there's just a jumble of rules you can access if you already know what to look for. And if the functionality is anything like the 40k app...it won't be great. The rules will be laid out strangely, there will be typos and errors in them that will remain unfixed for months at a time, etc etc. You can read up on the situation with the 40k app if you're honestly curious. But the tl;dr is that 40k currently absolutely does not give you something equivalent to a PDF or e-pub version of the book you bought. There's also no indication they're doing this for GHB2021, which is the actual topic of the thread. And at this point, I don't know how they even could - they've already sent the books out without digital codes.

I am concerned about high save monsters too, especially with ward saves. With rend above -2 essentially nonexistent in the game and even rend -2 quite rare across most armies, you do seem to end up in a place where stuff with 3+ base saves becomes impractical to kill without being able to output large numbers of mortal wounds. And if it then has a ward save too (like, say, the 5+ they inexplicably gave every non-unique hero in the game access to...) on top of that, even mortals become impractical. Even stuff with only a 4+ like an annointed on frostheart is looking incredibly difficult to put down. I mean, it was hard to kill before. And now it can be a wizard that can buff its own save so it's on a 3+ that can potentially ignore rend 2 (+1 from command, +1 from ability, +1 from mystic shield) with a 4+ ward on top of that (and -1 to wound too, of course). And then it can heal itself in every phase with around a 90% chance of success. Or cast flaming weapon on itself. Or function on top profile even if it has only 1 wound left. Or cast lifeswarm itself (at +1 to cast) and then heal itself 3d3 that hero phase. And it can roar, or stomp, or smash your faction terrain. And it went down by 5 points. Unless you've got something that can put out ~24 MW in a turn or ~72 normal wounds, it's not going anywhere. And that's only a mid-tier monster in the just over 300 point range, stuff like Archaon is something else entirely.

I think it really depends completely on your local community. There are places where there really are problems like Stratigo describes, and there are also a lot of places where there aren't problems anything like that, and if you come from one, it's probably really hard to appreciate what it's like to function within the other. If you read a rule like that and think "oh, people will just be sensible, so it doesn't matter," please take a step back and just realize that the reason you can hold that opinion is that conditions exist in your local gaming community that may not exist elsewhere. People aren't necessarily being drama queens if they say "this rule is going to empower bullies where I game" just because it would be drama queening in your gaming circle. And the thing about rules is that they generally need to be constructed with consideration for the lowest common denominator, because the sensible people don't need the rules in the first place.

Yes to both. It's in the new FAQ for the core book - "yes, unless the battle pack says otherwise," and the GHB book doesn't say otherwise. So allies and coalition can both go into core battalions.

It does seem inexplicable from the outside. I can only think what I said, that it has to do with a corporate strategy to nudge people towards the app. That, or they're concerned that providing electronic versions makes piracy too easy. Either way, it's a big shame, and definitely feels like they're rowing futilely against the tide of history. And by doing so, making things unnecessarily difficult for a lot of their customers in the meantime. If they're not going to offer electronic versions because they think it makes them more money not to, they need to be putting more effort into designing the physical version to be accessible to the widest possible selection of people.

There's no reason to think that's the case. They have abandoned e-pubs completely for 40k, starting with the latest edition. There seems to be no reason to think they haven't done the same for AOS. It is part of their strategy to force people into the app and therefore on nudging them towards paying a monthly fee. This, incidentally, is what makes the accessibility issue much more urgent than it used to be. If the font size on the physical edition was a problem in the past, you could just get an electronic version instead. Problem solved. But GW stopped offering electronic versions, and there's no indication they're going to start doing so again any time soon.

There are literally a bajillion things they could do. Go back to the old book and font size. Reverse the decision to abandon ebooks. Mess with the margins and fonts to find something more readable even without expanding the size. Again, this isn't reinventing the wheel here. It's not nobody has ever found out how to make easily readable books. This is a known science, not an unsolvable mystery or the universe.

Yeah, there are people who literally do this - visual design, with a focus on accessibility - for their careers. It's not some weird, arcane, unknown branch of theology. There's a reason that novels don't look like newspapers (and that newspapers today don't generally look like newspapers of 50 or 100 years ago). We've learned a lot about what's easy to read and what isn't. GW doesn't operate in some parallel universe where none of this knowledge is accessible. Asking them to pay a little more attention to making their books easier for people to read doesn't seem unreasonable.

GW's worth billions. Companies in this value bracket should be sophisticated enough to anticipate the possibility that reducing the size of a book is going to cause accessibility issues for their customers, and to investigate it. A lot of people act like GW is still five guys in grandma's basement. It isn't. It's a multinational company worth around 5 billion last time I checked. They should be held to the standards of companies in that bracket. Considering accessibility isn't like being an expert in quantum mechanics, it's standard in the publishing industry and has been for some time. It shouldn't be taking them by surprise that people are having trouble reading the book, and if it is, that shows they need to take the publishing side of things a bit more seriously.

If you're still confused, you didn't read the thread (or didn't pay attention to what you were reading), and I don't think anybody is going to be able to dispel your confusion more than they already have. Magnifying glasses and better pairs of glasses are not the issue here, nor the solution. The reason nobody's complained about it before (which is not actually true, but we'll go with it) is that they changed the format for GHB2021. It's not the same as it was in GHB2020 or prior GW publications. It's smaller, with smaller margins (well, I don't know if they're actually smaller, but they're more crowded, therefore they don't function as margins as well any more), and smaller text.

Build differently how, though? The problem with FEC is that they don't really have any options. You can either go heavy on monsters, or you can go heavy on elite units on 50mm bases. Monsters don't work any more because of the limitations on using multiples of command abilities or multiple commands on one unit. Elite infantry doesn't work because coherency means you can't run them above 3 without severely nerfing their damage, and you can't run them MSU because they rely on buffs so much to do damage and get around the field, and MSU neuters the effectiveness of all those things. The only other option is running ghoul-heavy builds. But those aren't competitive because ghouls just aren't competitive, especially not in 3.0, which is not at all kind to stuff that has no rend attacks and no ability to generate mortals. FEC doesn't even have a priest to try to curse something, which would actually make ghouls theoretically scary, if hugely unreliable and hard to set up. The whole army struggles because it doesn't have any shooting, very little high rend, or effective ways to get through screens, all things that became more important in 3.0. They just seem absolutely set up to fail.

It's also not even about whether you can physically read it. Small and difficult to read fonts put greater pressure on the eyes, leading to eye strain. Even if you can physically make it out with the help of glasses, that doesn't mean there's no problem with the chosen font size. It's 2021, we know a lot about this stuff now, there's no real reason to be releasing such accessibility-unfriendly stuff. GW's a company worth billions now, if it doesn't understand accessibility itself, its pockets are easily deep enough to dip into to hire a consultant to teach them about it.

On the one hand, yes, it is inconsequential in the sense that it doesn't really do anything on its own because it relies on (and empowers) players to be its moral enforcers, and as long as the players refuse to take on that role, it doesn't actually do anything. On the other hand, it isn't inconsequential, because it involves judging people for how they hobby and saying they're "spoiling" the hobby for the rest of people through their choices. And any time you start telling people they are "spoiling" the hobby, you're going to get some strong reactions...as you should. This a hobby, it works because people care about their armies a lot, and nobody likes to be told that how they hobby is "frowned upon" and "spoiling" it for everyone else. The whole point of the FAQ is to try to shame certain behavior and it shouldn't surprise anyone that when you try to shame people they get upset. There's always been an inherent tension in the hobby between those hobbyists who favor creative freedom and those hobbyists who favor adherence to prescriptive rules laid down by the company. This sort of rule brings that tension full into the open, and it's one of the major fault lines in the hobby, so it's not a surprise it gets people worked up, especially when the company goes out of its way to use emotionally charged words to ram home its message. If the FAQ had just said something like "some players may be confused by using a paint scheme that appears to be one subfaction to represent another, so check in with your opponent before the game if you do to make sure everyone is on the same page," I think the reaction would be totally different to them using words like "frown upon" and "spoil" and "seek permission," even though the actual impact is the same.

"This FAQ doesn't actually mean anything because TOs won't apply it and will instead use common sense" is not really a justification for the FAQ. The sole effect of the FAQ is to judge a certain armies as second-class and demand that those players go hat-in-hand to their opponents to be allowed to play the game with the combination of rules and colors they like. It's 100% about empowering and enshrining a judgmental attitude towards painting your armies in certain ways. That's the merit of it for the people who support it, and the sticking point for people who object to it. How people break down basically comes down to how they react to that idea of "frowning" on people who "spoil" the hobby by their choice of color and rules - if they like the idea of judging people for the combination of colors and rules they choose, it's a good thing, if they find that offensive and prone to create unnecessary arguments, they don't support it.

You would think so...but then GW apparently thinks that using a completely different model is effectively the same as painting your models the "wrong" color, because both are treated as identical examples of "proxying." So common sense and appreciating differences that the vast majority of people would appreciate doesn't seem to be high on their list.

I did have one game that resembles what the guy's describing, but in the opposite way. It was against FEK. I just absolutely blew them away with my Tempest's Eye list, it wasn't pretty. There was just nothing he could do except watch everything die. He killed maybe 400ish points of my army before I effectively tabled him at the end of T3. That said, I think FEK got screwed more by the edition change than any other faction. I just don't see how they ever win a game at this point, they have absolutely nothing going for them. Comfortably the worst army in the game at this point, IMO.

They could have said nothing at all. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to issue a FAQ telling people that painting their models how they wanted was "frowned upon" and that it "spoils the spectacle and aesthetic of the game" and that it was the same as using one model to represent a different one. Which yes, makes zero sense...but it's what they said. Even if they wanted to answer the proxy question, they could have just answered as to actual proxies, not thrown in the nonsense about painting schemes. They went out of their way to give people the message that their armies spoil the spectacle and aesthetic of the game if the colors don't match what GW considers the correct colors. People can say "oh well surely they didn't mean what they said..." but they said it. It's classic GW insulting the customer for no reason, something they just can't seem to resist the temptation to do at regular intervals. They actually used the word "spoil" to talk about peoples' choice of what color to paint their models. What sort of company does that? edit: Ok, I've said my bit, I'll stop boring people now. 😀

First, I agree re: the ridiculous font size. It's a shame that so many game companies are so flippant about accessibility. That said...you own the book. That entitles you to make a PDF copy for your own use under the law, just like you're entitled to make physical copies from it for your own use. It may or may not technically entitle you to download a PDF copy someone else produced and put on the internet...but nobody's ever going to know, and you bought the book, so GW already got its cut from you. This is one of those cases where I feel very comfortable saying that downloading a PDF would not be piracy in any meaningful sense of the word. It's just making the content you already paid for accessible to you, the paying customer, because GW dropped the ball and failed to do so itself.

I don't disagree that it's unlikely to come up in the real world. But "don't worry about what the rule says, it won't actually be enforced" is kind-of the point: those sorts of rule are very rarely good rules. Is my army likely to actually be disqualified? No...but then why have a rule that purportedly allows it? Why create a situation where that could possibly happen? Even if nobody ever disqualifies my army, I don't want to be going hat-in-hand to every opponent I play saying "my army is technically illegal because of the color scheme I chose, will you show mercy on me by allowing me to play?" It's not so much about the actual impacts, it's about the message GW is sending to people: no, it's not enough that you buy GW models, it's not enough that you paint them with love and care...if they're the wrong color, you're a second-class player who has to beg permission to use your army. It's so needlessly antagonistic towards someone who should be instead being praised for doing exactly what the hobby used to be about: creativity and building an army that perfectly resembles your own vision. Is it intended to come off that way? Maybe not. But that's what it says: that painting your army the wrong color is discouraged, ruins the immersion and aesthetics of the game, and therefore you must "ask permission" to be allowed to do it. If that is not what they intended...they should write their rules more carefully.

Yes and no. Some battletomes have that, some don't - e.g. the new LRL tome doesn't, unless I missed it somewhere. But even for the ones that do...the problem is they keep coming out with new ones. My Cities army (run as Tempest's Eye) is painted primarily in bronze and purple because I think it looks great. As far as I know - and again, I don't actually because I've never paid any attention to it - that doesn't match any of the cities they have yet come up with. But that number has increased greatly even since the last tome came out - Broken Realms added at least three, maybe four if there's one I'm forgetting? What happens when they add a new city that happens to be painted in bronze and purple? Does my army become invalid overnight unless I "ask permission" of my opponent, because my current army relies on pistoliers being battleline due to Tempest's Eye and the new rules I am now forced to use don't have that? I've spent dozens, probably hundreds of hours painting this army. Are you really telling me that the "immersion" of a tiny fraction of the player the base who would actually realize should mean I can't play any more without "seeking permission" unless I repaint my army? Do I have to try to argue with people trying to disqualify my army by saying it was painted before the new city came out, and/or that the shade of purple I used is subtly different enough that I'm allowed to still play my army? Why should anyone have to be put in that position? I don't see how the gain there possibly outweighs the loss.

Yeah, it's a significant nerf not gaining the CITIES OF SIGMAR keyword. On the plus side, it's pretty obviously just GW up to their old "we don't know what an editor is" tricks. Send in a message, if they get enough of them they'll fix it, and in the meantime surely anyone sensible will allow you to play them how it's obviously intended to be played. The fact that Stormcast, DoK and Lumineth coalition kept the keyword makes it super clear this is just a careless error.

Speaking for myself, the disbelief that anyone even knows what the "official" paint schemes are for more than a tiny handful of armies is genuine, I'm not making some dramatic point. I genuinely do not know what the official paint scheme for my own army is, much less anyone else's. Not a single one. And if anyone I have ever played a game with does, they've never told me so. I'm sure GW would love it if I did know the paint schemes, the same way that everyone knows that Ultramarines are blue. But that comes from 40 years of history, and when for most of that history, Ultramarines were actually their own army with their own Codex, or at least supplement. AOS doesn't have this history, and it doesn't have the history of having separate armies based upon how you paint identical miniatures. It's not like if you paint bloodletters red they're Khorne bloodletters but if you paint them pink they're Slaanesh Daemonettes. The game has never worked that way. I continue to wonder if anyone actually does have that level of knowledge and investment, because nobody in this thread has actually claimed they do - even the people on the side of "it's ok to mandate paint schemes." Unless I missed it, I haven't seen a single person actually claim to know what even, say, half the official paint schemes in the game are. Do these people exist? Maybe. But they're a tiny minority of the playing base. So holding everyone else hostage to their "immersion" by requiring "permission" to use your painted GW miniatures the way you want to seems crazy. It'd be like mandating that nobody is allowed to use miniatures painted green or red because I'm colorblind, unless they get my permission to do so. If someone doesn't want to play my army because they don't like the colors I've chosen, that's fine - but don't word it as me being the bad one who has to "seek permission" to use the colors I want to use, and don't put me in the same category as people who want to use a potato to represent Nagash. That's offensive, and it's completely understandable why it puts so many people's noses out of joint. If I have a fully painted army made out of appropriate GW models painted the way I like, I should be held up as the hobby standard, not pooh-poohed because of the shade of blue I chose. And beyond being insulting, it's stifling to my creativity, and that is what really rankles about it. I don't want to have to be worrying when I'm deciding what color I want to paint "my dudes" about how some other person might try to use the colors I've chosen against me to tell me I can't play "my dudes" as I envision them. Any rule that promotes that sort of stifling of creativity is a bad rule for a hobby to have, period. My dudes are my dudes, they are not my opponent's dudes, and they are not GW's dudes. I should be entitled to decide how to paint them according to my own preferences, not your preferences or the preferences of some corporate middle manager.