yukishiro1

You can't really run away from the enemy in AOS as a strategy. Board size is too small, movement numbers are too big, and, above all, you lose the game by doing so because you need to sit on objectives to win. Later in games stuff like teleports (coincidentally given mostly to ranged factions, GG G-dubs) is very powerful, but more as a tool to jump onto another objective that's empty than as a tool to let you run away and still shoot.

Looks like a coincidence to me, only the middle gem is actually similar and that's just caused by the metal around the edge happening to look like a star.

Cathay is definitely because of the China market; there is very little argument for it from a story/lore perspective, and certainly not for making it one of the core factions in the release when Ogres and Chaos Dwarves aren't even included. I don't think you are going to see Araby in a TW game because of concerns about causing offense. And it's even more peripheral to the End Times story than Cathay (though more central to the old world generally), so it's all potential downside with very little upside.

Things like LRL Sentinels should never have existed. Mortals on a 6 at range should never have existed. The ability to boost it to a mortals on a 5+ at range especially should never have existed. And then, on top of all that, to also give them a spell to reroll hit rolls so that more than half the unit's ranged attacks end up as mortal wounds...that's just insane. And then taking it to truly absurd, caricature-level territory, if by some miracle you actually manage to stay out of LOS, they can shoot 30" without LOS and still do the mortals on a 5+ (though probably without the rerolls)! That GW stacked all these things on top of one another - any one of which should have triggered the "uh, that's a bad idea" sensor - is enduring proof of just how bad at balance they are.

Yeah, but the big secret is that Nagash is a chump who has no idea what he's doing, just like Teclis. GW really struggles with the evil genius archetype (or the non-evil genius, for that matter).

That's not the point. The point is that the kits GW produces are indicative of the kind of terrain they expect you to use. When the rules don't work with GW's own models, it's undoubtedly a problem with the rules. The fact that you have to use other models to make the rules workable is a good clue there is a problem with them. Again, they explicitly said they were changing the rules in 9th for 40k precisely because the rules didn't work with the kind of terrain they were producing. This isn't me editorializing, it's just me literally quoting GW itself. The fact that you can somewhat mitigate the design problems in the current AOS ruleset by plonking down huge LOS-blocking walls doesn't mean there aren't design problems with that ruleset. GW is not secretly expecting you to use huge LOS-blocking walls while simultaneously making none of them. The fact is that the current AOS terrain rules do not allow for meaningful LOS blocking unless you play the game in a way that is not intended by GW, even if it is technically allowed under the rules (largely because there are no rules at all on the subject). I mean you could say: "There's no problem with the rules for shooting at all, just play on a board with 50+ paper-thin walls that block off all LOS every 3"! That's allowed under the rules!" But I doubt many people would find that a convincing argument.

I think we mostly agree that the double turn is workable in theory, with the right sort of game design. The point is that it doesn't work with how the game has evolved. Yes, if you don't play competitively, you can obviously work around it. But competitive shooting lists break the double turn on a fundamental level, and it's not just one list so you could dismiss it as an outlier - all the competitive shooting lists break the double turn, and GW has kept releasing these books that allow for these lists over and over again for the past year and a bit, so they seem happy enough with the concept. Something needs to give here, because right now, the game just doesn't work when either player takes one of these lists. If they win the priority role at the start of T2, the game is just over, all that's left is rolling a bunch of dice and cleaning up. A game shouldn't work that way. If GW wants to dramatically tone down shooting and admit that pretty much all the tomes it has released over the last year were disasters, believe me, I wouldn't mind - but if they don't, they need to recognize the game they've actually created and remove the option for a double turn on the T1/T2 transition.

Nobody's talking about getting double turned by that dude with a single weirdnob shaman. Kroak can hit anything anywhere on the board. Teclis can portal and then cast through it, on minimum 10s and on 12s if he really wants to, hitting potentially your entire army twice. KO will drop an uncounterable WLV on you and have it go off 3x before you can do anything about it if they get the double. A LoC's average casting roll is about a 9.5, or an 11.5 with the trait to reroll casting rolls. Shooting focused-armies all have either teleports that don't even require a casting roll (KO, Tzeentch, Seraphon) or 30" range and ability to ignore LOS (LRL). Not trying to be rude here at all, but it sounds like you don't play against the sort of competitive ranged lists people are discussing, because you absolutely cannot screen them out, and you absolutely cannot weather their firepower for two turns of their whole army going at you. These lists are all capable of destroying over 50% of the opponent's force over the double turn.

Yes, it is a fault of the rules. Saying "well if you use totally different terrain from the terrain GW clearly intends you to use based on what they sell for use with the game, you can hide" is not an argument that the rules are fine, it's an argument that you can get around the inadequacies of the rules by using a totally different kind of terrain. Incidentally, it's also an argument GW itself rejected in the way it changed terrain rules for 40k 9th edition - they explicitly announced they were changing the rules because they didn't work with the kind of terrain GW makes and wants the game to be played with.

Because the LOS rules don't allow it. It's essentially impossible to hide in AOS the way it is actually played. The only time you can hide in AOS is maybe a single character behind a terrain piece, if you're lucky and line it up just right behind a pillar or something. Virtually none of the models themselves will ever block LOS for anything. And then even if you do manage to hide that single character behind a pillar just right...Lumineth will just shoot you anyway doing mortals on a 5+, because they don't even need LOS. Now in theory if everyone started using totally different terrain - big, long, tall walls with no gaps - you could hide (except from Lumineth and a few other units nobody takes). But that isn't how the game is played, and it isn't how the AOS terrain GW makes itself is built.

Except that you often do lose because the double turn in AOS as it exists today, period. Not because of a million other things. That's the basic problem with it: quite often in modern AOS, that one priority roll at the beginning of T2 does determine the game. If you come up against a low-drop ranged-focused list, many lists will simply lose if they win the roll-off and get a T1 to T2 double turn. There's nothing to be done - you just lose, because they won that roll-off and deleted more than half of your army before you have a chance to do anything meaningful. Now I guess you can say "but you lost that game at the list stage, because you didn't take a 1-drop or at max 2-drop list." But that means that the number of viable lists in the game by that definition can probably be counted on one hand. I think most of the opposition to the double turn would go away if we had the mythical version of AOS a lot of the double-turn promoters envision where you don't get effectively removed from the board before you take your second turn with no counterplay. But that's not the actual game we have right now.

Yeah, Morathi was a good book overall, but they seem to have screwed up and created yet another option for an oppressive shooting army, which brings it to five (six if you include CoS). Balancing it via points doesn't really work, because if you nerf the points enough that most armies don't auto-lose to a double turn on T1/T2, you end up with a situation where if that army doesn't get the double turn, now it gets stomped. The basic dilemma is that having two turns in a row is just too powerful with the way shooting (and magic, to a lesser extent) are set up in this game. If your opponent didn't fight in your fight phase, the same would be true there; the reason the double turn works with combat is that your opponent can interact during your turn. Disabling the double turn on the T1/T2 transition only - i.e. allowing T3 to be the first chance for a double - fixes the problem with ranged armies neatly, without the need for a huge amount of balancing. It retain the element of chance people like about the double turn, it just puts it off long enough into the game that both players are guaranteed to be able to do something meaningful in the game before the winner is determined. It's just brutal to play an army without a big T1 alpha strike capability that gets doubled on by a ranged army - you literally do nothing in the game besides one turn of movement, maybe a few token wounds...and then the game's effectively over before you even get to move another model. I can't imagine anyone actually enjoys this gameplay pattern. I am convinced that even most big fans of the double turn would actually agree if they try it that the game is better with the first double turn coming on T3, not T2.

I don't disagree in the abstract...but this is the game we have. And it's not just one army. It's a consistent pattern that's been replicated with every ranged army release since the KO tome, and it's getting worse - hello 30" non-LOS shooting with mortals on a 5+ to hit, possibly even with rerolls to hit! - not better. So there comes a point where you have to admit that the double turn doesn't work with what they have turned AOS into, even if it worked with what AOS used to be. One option is obviously going back to what AOS used to be, but that option is completely at odds with the direction GW has shown every indication that it wants to take the game in. So to fix the problem they could fundamentally rework at least three (edit: oops no, four, even giving CoS the benefit of the doubt and not including it - KO, LRL, Tzeentch, Seraphon) factions that all got tomes within the last year...or they could remove the double turn on the T1 to T2 transition. One's super complicated and difficult and requires GW to admit that the direction it's been sending the game in for the last year was a big mistake...the other is simple and easy and doesn't require admitting that. I'd prefer they tone down shooting on a fundamental level too, don't get me wrong - but if you make me choose between leaving things as is or fixing the auto-lose that is getting double turned by a ranged army if you don't have the capability to cripple them with a T1 alpha, making the game work is more important to me than keeping the double turn unchanged.

Yes, but does that make for a satisfying game? Has anybody in the entire history of AOS rolled for priority on T2 against a shooting army that just removed 1/4 of their army, lost, conceded the game because it was obviously over after another round of shooting, and then been like "that was totally awesome because we just accurately depicted the degree to which luck can determine battles?" I really doubt it. Maybe we should roll before the battle and if either side rolls a 1 they get cholera (or bone-eating parasites for death armies, you can come up with something for everybody) and 25% of their army gets removed before the first turn and the rest gets a -1 to everything? AOS, of all games, seems like the last where we should be worried about accurately simulating what war is really like. edit: Missed your edit. Going YGIG for shooting only fixes the issue when you have two ranged armies; otherwise, there's no functional difference if your combat army gets double turned as you aren't doing anything in their shooting phase either way. Fixing Look Out Sir etc would help deal with shooting generally, but it's not the fundamental problem with the double turn. The fundamental problem is a ranged-focused army can remove more than 50% of your army on the T1 to T2 double turn with no ability for you to mitigate it or react. I mean if you want to go to YGIG for every phase sure, that'd fix things in the sense that it would make whose turn it is much less important. But I really can't see GW going that way for AOS or 40k, and that's a far more fundamental change to the game than limiting double turns to start on T3 or something like that.

Yes, but that's true in any game of reasonable complexity. And if you want to compare to 40k, player skill is more relevant there at the moment than in AOS, thanks to AOS' terrain rules bizarrely impacting melee more than ranged. There's very little player skill involved in double-turning your opponent's army off the board with ranged attacks they can't hide from. AOS is a frustrating game right now because it has the basic bones to be a really good tactical game, but the way they've allowed the game to become a shooting gallery really minimizes how much the basic game can shine. With just a little more care and attention it could be so much better.

GW characters don't do what it makes sense for them to do, they do whatever the story requires them to do. GW has always been good at world-building and abjectly terrible at creating believable, consistent characters. It's what comes of having a content creation system that has a bunch of different people writing stories for each character, with the only overarching quality control being "you have to get to this point at the end." When you have results-driven stories, characterization always suffers.

Something else you could do is just not let people have a shooting phase on a double turn, period. Sorry, your army was so busy taking the initiative and moving again that they didn't have time to reload! That would nip the problem right in the bud, and it would also create a natural reason not to go put all your eggs in the shooting basket in the first place, as the opponent could then give you the double turn to neuter your damage output. Magic-based armies would still be able to get a big advantage from a double turn, but I'm not sure that's so oppressive without the shooting component too, and with magic there is at least the trade-off of having to try to get your buffs off a second time vs letting them last through another of your opponent's turns. I agree with this. If I wasn't clear before, my problem with the double turn is how it actually plays out in AOS right now, not with the theory of it. It works out ok in games where both armies are combat-focused. But it doesn't mix with the game we have right now where most of the dominant factions are built around shooting and magic.

That isn't borne out by the data, though. The reason there was T1 advantage in 40k in 9th was because GW screwed up the missions; 2020 ITC had a T1 win rate of like 52%, i.e. nothing. Prior to them ****** up the missions, the conventional wisdom was that you generally wanted to go 2nd to control the scoring if you were a better player. AOS is far less balanced by who takes what turn than 40k right now. A ranged-focused army that gets the T1-T2 double turn has an overwhelming - we're talking about 75% or more - chance to win the game in AOS right now, magnitudes greater than even the 58% going first win rate that pre-FAQ 9th had. Now if AOS had 40k-style terrain rules and you could hide from shooting, this would change. But the combination of ranged attacks you cannot hide from and the double turn is literally game-determining. There is no tactical depth to getting low-dropped and then double-turned by ranged armies right now, because there's no real way to mitigate it.

Yep. Pretty much all the 40k campaign books ended with nothing at all happening, I think people may be making a bad assumption that just because something happened in Morathi, things are going to happen in all the books.

The big thing about the double turn is that it is so divisive. Even people who like it have to realize that it's a massive turn-off for a huge segment of the potential player population. "Whoa? There are double turns in this game? Awesome!!11" says nobody, ever, but "What? Double turn? Count me out" is one of the most common responses you get when trying to get new people into the game. I'm not opposed to it existing in some way, but I think it's really clear by now that within the framework AOS has developed into - where magic and shooting are a massive part of the game - it simply doesn't work the way it's currently implemented. I have yet to find a single person who thinks it's good gameplay to have a game system that allows a shooting-focused faction to take the T1 to T2 double and delete 50-75% of the opposing army before it gets a chance to do anything back.

Honestly, the best solution would be to just change it so there's no possible double turn until T3. This strikes a good compromise between keeping the unpredictability it introduces, without making games literally end at the start of T2. If both players are guaranteed two turns before anyone can get a double, it allows meaningful interaction before you get blown off the table, and also allows the player who doesn't get the double the chance to make a meaningful dent in their opponent's force before they just stand there for 20 minutes getting mowed down. Whatever they do, right now the interaction between shooting and the double turn creates a joke situation with shooting-heavy armies, and that surely, surely has to change. In addition to that and independent of it, characters need to be more protected from sniping. It's terrible, unfun design to create a game where your heroes just get focused down in a turn or two and immediately killed. Stuff like 30" non-LOS shooting that does mortal wounds on a 5+ is mind-bogglingly bad game design and it really makes me question how the same company can be responsible for Lumineth Sentinels and the Morathi book, as they are such polar opposites in quality of design. Finally, terrain needs to make a bigger difference to the game. Move away from "on a 6 X mostly irrelevant thing happens" to actual terrain effects that are reliable and impactful, above all LOS-blocking.

That was completely fair game and presumably even the people responsible for the PR post laughed at it, assuming they have any sense of humor at all. They are presumably more aware than anybody what a poor job was done on that FAQ - and, if they are good at their jobs, will realize the value of those sorts of posts for letting off steam in general. As a good community manager, you're thrilled if the negative feedback you get is in the form of cheeky jokes, that's an absolutely ideal situation. Laughing customers are still customers; angry ones may not be for much longer. Incidentally the AOS community is one of the most positive and polite of any on the internet. You have to do something pretty remarkable (like releasing a blink-and-you-missed it "comprehensive set of FAQs" while blatantly lying to the community about the reasons you didn't do a more serious job) to actually rile people up, and even then, almost nobody makes things personal even while venting their frustration with the company generally. I wouldn't even know where to start looking to find a generally more positive, friendly, and supportive fan base for a product.

AOS has the best models for sure. The rules, however, are even more wildly inconsistent than the ones you see in the rest of GW's products. Sometimes they nail it (BR: Morathi), sometimes they create absolute disasters (Kroak at 320 points) then do nothing about it for a year because "they don't have the data."

The 40k FAQ was only out 3 weeks ago and they're already putting up data-filled articles analyzing the changes. Meanwhile, AOS gets no changes in its FAQ because there wasn't enough data in 6 months to figure out that Kroak at 320 is a joke. If we didn't know for a fact that the right hand at GW has no clue what the left hand is doing, it would feel like they're deliberating rubbing in how bogus their reasoning for doing nothing was.

Charging money for new rules doesn't raise the hype around them vs just releasing them for free. That's the point of a free rules model - it gets people going out to buy more models by not locking their rules behind a paywall. I'm sure GW doesn't actually lose money on their books, but the margin is definitely way lower than it is on their plastic - it has to be, unless they have some magic way of printing glossy color books that nobody else in the world knows about, that sort of printing is exceedingly expensive. Even if GW makes some nominal amount off a $50 battletome, they make far more off selling you $50 of plastic instead. So it'd make business sense if they could give away the rules for free online and shift people from spending that $50 on the tome to spending $50 on more plastic instead.