yukishiro1

Yep, LOTR has far better game mechanics than either 40k or AOS. Though you'd have to do pretty major surgery on the system to make it work with the amount of models you have in the warhammer games. As good as it is, LOTR's system already splutters badly above about 700ish points.

It would be just like GW to put in the ability to get MWs on a 5+ to hit, rerolling, at 30" range, with the option to ignore LOS...and then suddenly decide from the next book that MWs on 6s to hit were too powerful.

How effective it actually is depends on base size, casting value, casting range, movement range, etc. But the point is that it is yet another insta-kill mechanism, and one that works on at least the same probability as hand of death on anything it can kill (50% at 6 wounds, 70% at 5 wounds, 4 wounds and below you're almost guaranteed to kill at least one model). Incidentally, the chance of hand of dust working on archaon is almost nothing: only 25% even before factoring in the chances of failing the spell and unbinding. It's like a 20% chance or something silly like that once you factor it all in, less if Nagash is bracketed. If someone is dumb enough to move Nagash into engagement range with Archaon to try to get hand of dust off, the Archaon player should be thanking their lucky stars.

GW must have heard this and decided to one-up it with this abomination: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/02/11/the-daughters-of-khaines-new-endless-spells-are-almost-too-bloody/ Against any 5 wound hero, that's a 70% chance to just flat-out kill it. Seems pretty stupid. Hopefully it's just another warhammer-community /fail and there is some restriction that you can't use it on heroes, or that you only get to roll 1 dice if you do, or something along those lines.

Just means you get another 3" move after you fight, like the pile-in before. Similar restrictions re: only being able to move towards the closest model.

One thing I just thought of in another thread: consolidation. I don't really know why this is missing from AoS, and it leads to the really weird situation of being unable to take an objective off someone who was blocking you in the same turn that you clear them out in melee, as well as also making it almost impossible to trap units so they are unable to retreat. It would also significantly ratchet up the tactical considerations in choosing which units to activate when.

A high lethality objective game is easy to design because you don't need to be clever with the objective mechanics. A lower lethality objective game is more difficult, because if you do it badly it just degenerates into "see who can cram more models onto the objective and sit there till the game ends." The fact that AOS does not have consolidation is particularly problematic here, because it means that you can't even move onto an objective on the same turn that you kill what was keeping you off it. Adding in consolidation is one thing I'd really like to see in AOS 3.0; yes, it adds time to the game, but it also adds a lot of strategy and prevents a lot of lame objective-holding tactics that shouldn't work but do.

Copy paste examples of what? You asked what I was talking about, I told you. It's the same for any competitive ranged-focused list. There isn't a competitive ranged-focused list in the game right now that can't comfortably remove half the enemy's army by points on the T1/T2 transition. The Snek DoK list can do it too, for example. This isn't a problem with one or two particular lists, it's a basic problem with how deadly shooting is in the game and how that interacts with the double turn.

Pretty much any competitive Lumineth, KO, Tzeentch? Seraphon too if they outdrop you, but usually they won't. They all do fundamentally the same thing: give you turn, deploy in such a way that at most you can hit their non-important stuff on your first turn, then systematically delete the important stuff in your army over their two turns in a row (assuming they win it, of course, which is the problem we're talking about). Any competitive list from those factions will be capable of removing at least half your army by points over that double turn if they get it, at which point their win rate is somewhere in the 75-90% range. Statistically, it is extremely unlikely to win against one of these armies that gets the double turn over T1/T2.

I'm not sure what you think you read there, but I don't think it's what I wrote. When you get doubled on the T1/T2 transition, obviously it is after you have taken the first turn, usually given to you by a low-drop army that is deployed so that you can't hit them very hard if you can hit them at all, but so they are then set up to double-turn you if they get the roll-off. Beyond that, I am not sure how to address your comment, since I'd only be guessing at how you misread what I wrote.

A lot of it is historical happenstance. It worked better back before the best armies were ranged-focused, because the double turn is substantially less advantageous when it's two melee armies going at one another. If AOS had been this ranged-focused at release, I can almost guarantee you the double turn would have been removed in AOS 2.0, and nobody would be mourning it. But because it's lasted as long as it has, there's a fair number of people who have decided it is part of AOS "tradition" and therefore sacred. A lot of this is driven by nostalgia more than by current game experience: I know a fair number of people (though it's not a majority) who say they like the double turn rule and say it is good for the game, but not a single person who actually likes getting double-turned by a ranged-focused competitive army. I've never met somebody who loses a game because they got double-turned on T1 to T2 and is like "wow! that was great! The opponent removing 60% of my army before I got my second turn really is a good game experience!" All that said, I would be extremely surprised if the double-turn makes it into AOS 3.0 in the same form it exists now. For pride's sake I wouldn't be surprised if they try to salvage it in theory, but I am nearly positive the actual mechanics are going to change substantially. Not even GW is clueless enough to think that how it actually works in practice right now is good for the game. and some of their recent fluff pieces on the website have even started tacitly admitting how much people dislike it (e.x. one recent article referred to it as "the dreaded double turn," not exactly the term you'd use for something you think is a good game mechanic).

The rate of attrition in the early game is largely what informs how the models left at the end are distributed. When you have a game where it's not only possible but imminently doable to destroy the majority of your opponent's army over the T1 to T2 double turn, that lends itself to snowballing - whoever gets that initial advantage gets so far ahead that it becomes virtually impossible for them not to table the opponent before the end of the game, and therefore a game that's likely to have a massive disparity between how much of each army is left. When you have high early-game attrition, you get blowouts. If you have steady attrition over the course of the game, even if the total numbers of models left on the table at the end are similar, you are much more likely to have a closer, more satisfying game. One thing AOS fails at quite badly at the moment is producing these sorts of symmetric games where both players end up with similar forces at the end. Right now, in the vast majority of cases, even when competitive AOS games go down to the wire it's usually because one player, despite getting dominated in terms of army losses, still manages to stay competitive on the scoresheet by playing to the objectives. And while that's better than that player having no chance at all, I do wish the game mechanics were tuned so that it was more realistically possible to have games where players trade blows evenly through to the end of the game, and that just hardly ever happens in AOS right now because of the front-loaded lethality.

Automatic successes are fine for standard parts of the game. I.e. it wouldn't make sense if you had to role a 2+ to be allowed to move, with a 1 meaning you fell over your feet and had to stay still that round, because moving is a core part of the game that everyone can do. But the probability of success should naturally diminish with the power of the effect being applied. Automatic, uncounterable teleports should be extremely limited - at most, maybe tied to one-use artefacts or allegiance abilities, not something you can just pop off one or more times per turn with no thinking about it. Ditto for automatic casts or unbinds. Unfortunately, GW doesn't seem to properly understand how to value automatic successes. Again and again in more recent releases, we've found them introducing new guaranteed mechanics that aren't adequately pointed for or assessed in light of the combos they can be used in. Something like the Barak Zilfin WLV-in-a-bottle is a prime example of this syndrome.

Monsters are really tough to do right in a game with no strength and toughness stats, it takes away the most obvious niche for them to occupy.

So I came up with an actual list of specific changes I'd like: 1. Have to take a bravery test (on 2d6) to shoot at a target other than the closest, except for artillery. Shooting shouldn't be a reliable way to snipe out whatever you want, it should be unpredictable and risky, and not something you can build your entire strategy around. Units that are specifically supposed to be snipers (e.x. Jezzails, that stormcast hero, etc) could have an exemption from these rules as part of their special rules (and pay points for it, obviously). This might need some tweaking on the specifics (e.x. maybe let targets be chosen freely within 9" no matter what), but the basic idea is to make shooting both less reliable and more subject to positioning-based counterplay. 2. Meanwhile, for artillery, you should be able to choose targets freely, except that you shouldn't be able to target characters with their attacks at all if the Look out Sir rule would otherwise apply. No-scoping that one character out of a horde of 30 models with a cannon is a joke that shouldn't be in the game at all. 3. Tone down the effects of magical dominance - it is fine if the great spellcasters are very good at casting, but they shouldn't be able to totally shut down lesser ones, to the point where taking them is meaningless and nobody does it. My personal recommendation is to cap the + you can get on a unbind roll to the amount of + that was on the cast - i.e. if you try to unbind something cast at no bonus, your dispel doesn't have a bonus either, even if you'd otherwise have +2 to dispel. In other words, unbinding should never be reliable, except for one-use abilities. 4. Trend away from teleports, especially away from teleports that just go off automatically. Like shooting, teleports should be unreliable, risky things that you can't simply bank on. There should always be a chance with a teleport that something goes wrong, whether that's failing to go off, taking mortal wounds on the unit, or even letting your opponent scatter them d3" in the direction they want after they come down. 5. No double turn until T3. This keeps the unpredictability of the mechanic in the game, but makes sure both players have the chance to take two turns before it can kick in, thus significantly limiting the amount of games that effectively end at the start of T2 when one player gets a double turn and just clears the opponent off the board.

Well sure. But when you see a breakdown like that from a design point of view, there's a pretty clear path to take: do what makes the people who care happy, because the people who don't care, won't care. I.e. if you have 5 people out of 10 who don't care about something, 4 who want it like A, and one who wants it like B, it behooves you to do it how the people who want it like A want, because you then end up with 9 happy people instead of 6. BTW I think the double-turn is quite distinct from overall lethality, though it obviously contributes to it. Even when nobody gets a double turn, a lot of games in AOS are over by the end of T2. I think there's plenty of room to not mind the double turn but want a game that isn't so extraordinarily lethal from T1. I know for example that personally, one of the first things I do when designing a list is try to find a build I can use to slow down the game and play it more methodically, because I hate those games where both sides go in hard T1 and the game's over by halfway through T2. I'm not a big fan of the T1/T2 double turn either, as people here are probably aware, but my bigger issue with the game is just how fast everything dies; I probably wouldn't care about the double much at all if it didn't result in such quick games when someone gets it on the T1/T2 transition.

Right, that's kind-of what I'm saying. I don't think there really are "three ways to play." There's basically matched play, plus whatever modifications people want to make to it to suit their group - which is totally fine and valid, I'm not for a minute saying that isn't an awesome way to play, just that it feels like a bit of an exaggeration to describe it as a fundamentally different ruleset. I'm not sure it's a distinction that's hugely important for players, but I do think it is important for GW to realize when it's designing the game. It's presumably a lesson they've learned, however, given what a fiasco early AOS was. I think at this point the "three ways to play" thing is just kind-of a tagline they maintain for the sake of not admitting it was a bust, the same way that 40k has PL on paper but in fact you almost never see it (yes, now someone will show up to say they play 40k with PL and that's fine, but it's super in the minority for how most people play).

To me the big takeaway from the poll is that people don't like an alpha-heavy game style where games are over or effectively in the first turn or two. Which also tracks with the results of Vince's NPE survey. People don't like games where they put down their models and then pick them back up before they've really had much of a chance to do anything, go figure.

I feel like you don't really know how to use the words objective and subjective. That is by definition a subjective opinion, and not necessarily one most people share. Most people interested in fantasy games like fantasy settings, and when's the last time you saw a fantasy setting where the heroes get sniped out with pinpoint accuracy at range by a hail of arrows before they even get anywhere near melee? 40k largely doesn't allow character sniping, and it works just fine. The idea that it is somehow necessary for a good game that characters can easily be sniped out at range is downright odd, and about as far from objective fact as you can get. If you subjectively believe that easy character sniping is good, that's your subjective opinion and you're entitled to it, but one thing it certainly isn't it an objective statement.

Actually, not that many, since I mostly play IDK myself and it's one of the few factions that still has a reasonable chance of success against one of those lists when it gets the double turn. But I've a witnessed a fair few, and getting double-turned by a ranged army is the pure definition of a negative play experience.

In the brave new world of ranged AOS, you don't even need to ****** up your deployment to get cleared off the table, all that needs to happen is you lose the roll-off and get double-turned on the T1 to T2 transition, and the ranged army has about an 85% chance of winning the game from that point. Unless you play a faction like IDK that can control where the ranged attacks go, screening won't typically stop you from starting your T2 with half or less of your army.

But there really isn't a lore argument, based on the existing IP. Cathay may be big, but it's nearly totally unexplored in the WHFB setting. A few mentions here and there, but nothing you could really call a real presence in the IP. It's technically there, like Ind or Nippon, but way off to the side of the main setting. Even the End Times stuff was just a barely-sketched backdrop to give the Greenskins something to do. I'm not saying that makes it a terrible choice or anything, but it is totally out of left field, and represents a very large departure from the original WHFB lore.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Even narrative games are just matched point games with some fluff stuck on top. I'm not sure I really buy the "three ways to play" thing. Everybody I know uses points and the matched play rules for everything, they just tack stuff on top of that for narrative purposes. I can see playing without points or objectives to teach people, though I'm not sure that's really an example of real open play either; what you do as a teaching exercise doesn't strike me as a real game mode, it's just a way to teach. Again I'm not trying to be confrontational here at all towards people who really play according to the actual narrative and open play rules, I just don't personally know any and they don't seem to have much representation on the internet either.

Does anybody actually play narrative or open games? Honest question, the impression I get from the internet and my local scene is that it's basically 100% matched play, and at most people will relax the list-building restrictions a bit to accommodate something fluffy, but no more than that. When people run narrative-style games, even then it's still within the matched play rules. Again these are just my impressions so I'd be interested to see if they're correct or not.

I'd like a game where you didn't end up with one side tabled in 95% of games, ideally one where in the typical battle both sides end up with about half their force alive. The problem with that is with the current scoring paradigm, that would be likely to just lead to contests to see who can get an extra model onto that objective. So you'd need to move to a more dynamic scoring system to make it work.