yukishiro1

Yeah, this was honestly the first thing that occurred to me (I think I mentioned it in the other thread). Think how powerful Fulminators or Longstrikes would be for getting Sin list points...if they weren't on the Sin list themselves. That's what any new overpowered, undercosted unit is going to be like for the X weeks or months until someone bothers to add it to the Sin list.

The vast majority of AOS players have not even memorized all the scoring rules for each battleplan, much less all that other stuff. If you can memorize and hold in your head all those things you're not representative of even the average AOS player who plays regularly and attends some events, much less the average AOS player (who plays probably once every couple months on average). AOS3 is already butting up on the edge of being realistic to finish in the 2.5 hour rounds you need to be able to finish games in to play in competitive events (which is what these rules are aimed at) with both players playing thoughtfully and not having to rush. We obviously disagree and to you this doesn't add significant complexity and therefore time to the game, and that's fine and I will take your word for it that it won't do so for you, but I am quite confident that it will for the people I play with (assuming the result isn't just that nobody ever takes Sin list units any more). I mean FWIW I agree it's not the looking it up per se that takes the most time, it's integrating that into your strategy as you play. For example battle tactics probably add a solid 20-30 minutes to a game of AOS3 vs not having them, but even if you have to look them up every time, 75% of that time is spent thinking about them rather than looking them up. But thinking about the consequences of all the moving parts is part of having said moving parts. In any game where Sin list units are involved it is going to add significant time to the game (or force you to compromise elsewhere) in order for players to take into consideration the Sin list rules while planning and executing their actions, especially if there are Sin list units on both sides, in which case you end up with this weird minigame on top of the normal game where you're trying to wear down their Sin units with yours without actually killing them, so you can score the points by finishing them off with something else. Or where the owner of said Sin unit is deliberately trying to fail battleshock on their last model to deny the other player the points. Etc etc. There are a lot of non-obvious ways this can come into play and impact strategy and therefore game time and mental load.

The things you now potentially need to know to determine a score: 1. The objective scoring rules for the mission 2. The battle tactic 3. Whether any of your units you killed something with is a monster (depending on (2)) 4. Whether any of the units you killed is a monster 5. Whether you play a Bin army 6. Whether your unit is a Sin unit 7. Whether their unit is a Sin unit 8. How many times their Sin unit was reinforced 9. Apex Predators on top of all that if you play that mission 10. Your grand strategy. That's a ton of things to have to think about every round, and I'm not convinced that it makes for a better game than if you only had maybe 3ish. It undoubtedly slows things down and creates more decision paralysis the more layered scoring rules you pile on top of each other. There's too much score-related book-keeping already in the game, it didn't need more.

I just don't think it's a level of complication and book-keeping that is worth piling on top of all the other weird scoring modifiers the game is already awash in. You shouldn't need to consult like 3-4 different tables to score at the end of a round, it's almost comically excessive at this point.

Warscroll changes > point adjustments > this weird handicap system where you get compensated for having bad overpriced units by getting extra points for killing your opponent's busted underpriced units.

Yeah, I knew I was forgetting at least one more layer of ridiculous scoring rules. It's actually hilarious when you think about it: they took the Apex Predators gimmick that almost never sees the light of day in competitive mission packs because competitive players dislike it , and they made a whole new, slightly different, stacking version of it and applied it to the whole game. It's impressive in a way - they came up with a "solution" that never would have even occurred to anyone to ask for. Like the mechanic who "fixes" your broken brakes by changing the transmission so you can "brake" by going into reverse then flooring the pedal till you reach equilibrium.

If it's enough to make current top picks not the best any more people will just switch to the next best thing, I don't see any world where it really boosts list diversity in a meaningful way. At best you'll have the current meta list and then you'll have the "takes the second best unit in that role to avoid giving up points" list instead. And of course gargants don't even have a choice. They give up these points no matter what. Even if you only take 1 mega and a bunch of minis...in which case you give up bonus points *and* have a bad army. Honestly the worst thing is just the added bookkeeping in a game that's already getting too full of it. I don't want to have to consult multiple scoring rubrics and cross-reference multiple units to figure out how many points I scored at the end of a turn. We now have literally like 7 different things that impact the amount of points you score: 1. Points for holding objectives. 2. Points for battle tactics. 3. Points for grand strategies. 4. Points for killing monsters. 5. Points for doing (2) with monsters...sometimes. 6. Points for killing units on the Sin List, as long as they weren't killed by other units on the Sin List. 7. Even more points for (6) if your army is on the Bin List. That's just absurd. There is no reason a scoring system needs that level of layering.

Yeah, pretty much. It's just a big mess. If you want to be positive about it you can say "well at least they've finally in a roundabout way admitted what a mess they have on their hands," and if you want to be less positive, you can say "yeah but they are also basically saying they can't fix it and are just going to try to stick on a whole new band-aid mechanic because they can't fix the underlying problem."

It definitely has the vibe of a MOBA or something where they periodically buff and nerf stuff to push people to different things they'll spend more money on, with all the abuse of whales that can come with it. I actually kinda hope this was just a "oh no we forgot about the balance patch, just push something out, we can always pretend it ever happened if it bombs" and not part of some more planned-out scheme to push the game into MOBA balance churn.

This also makes broken stuff in new tomes even more broken, because it is now not only broken by being underpointed or having fundamentally busted rules, but also broken because it's not going to be on the hit list for a couple months at least. Like think how broken Fulminators would be if you have a hit list and they *aren't* on it. That's what any new broken unit is going to be like.

Or just...fix the bad armies, either by rules or points. GW already has two levers to pull, they didn't need to add a new third one while ignoring the first two.

It's not going to get a good reception from competitive players, and they knew it wasn't going to get a good reception, because they even plead with you in the announcement not to complain about it: Translation: "We know this is a band-aid on a bullet wound and not the ideal approach, but please be happy anyway." Honestly it is somewhat worrying to see how limited the resources being allocated to these updates are, that this is all they are able (or allowed) to do. This feels like even more of a "Friday afternoon special" than the last one.

Which is again why updating points values via a printed book that has to be to the printers months ahead of time is literally crazy. "Here's our online update to try to fix the fact that our actual update that is supposed to balance the game can't because we don't release it often enough and it's always out of date by months by the time it does release." It's utterly bizarre when you actually think about it. It's also another level of complication, more things for people to forget, and another level of strategy b/c now you want to use your "prime overpowered" units to wear down their "prime overpowered" units but not quite kill them then plink them off with something else to get the points, which feels gimmicky. Which I don't think the game really needed. AOS3's base rules are complicated enough without introducing yet another scoring minigame. When you are dealing with a monster doing a battle tactic against another monster that gives the bonus points that is also a prime overpowered unit you are getting into accounting territory to figure out how many points you score. I don't think "I won the game b/c my longstrikes brought his gargant to 2 wounds instead of outright killing it, so I could plink off the last wounds with my hero instead to get 2 extra VP" feels like a good way to win a match in a miniatures game, it feels gimmicky.

It's basically community comp...from the company itself. Which is bizarre. It's an admission the game is so imbalanced that you have to give handicaps to bad factions and penalties for taking overpowered units...when you're the designers, so you could just actually correct the problems and then you wouldn't need to comp them. Totally bizarre. I have to hand it to GW, it never even occurred to me that they'd try something like this. OTOH, it is a straight buff to bad factions and a straight nerf to overpowered units. So the game may be better off than it was before the change. But I still don't like it as a matter of principle. Handicaps are not the way a company should be balancing its game.

Yeah, basically. Though I think AOS at this point is probably beyond "not good." Maybe "pretty decent"? The core mechanics I'd even call "pretty good" at this point, while the balance has gone from "atrocious" to "tolerable if far from ideal."

Iron Golems get +1 save if they didn't make a normal move, too. Which is odd with the new AOS3 rules because it says normal move, so you can run or retreat and still get the +1 save, but not move normally. 😁 LRL Wardens get some kind of buff for being charged, too. I can't remember if it's a bonus to rend or wound or maybe both? GW can be quite creative when they want to be. The sin vs bin thing is oversimplified but it does feel like GW still suffers from the writers having different levels of enthusiasm for different factions and that coming out in the rules.

They have a bunch of those in Cities for ranged units. usually +1 attack if there's nothing w/in 3" and they didn't move.

Increasing rend on an X is bad because it makes dice rolling more fractured and take longer. GW used to do this; it has now changed to just increasing rend period or giving MWs on an X because both of those don't involve bracketing out the future dice pool. The problem I see with those choice mechanisms is that they also extend game time by forcing the person to make a decision, but it is a decision that typically has a clear right answer in a given situation and just depends on mathing it out to see which is better. From a game design perspective I think it is usually just better to give a unit X ability than give them a choice between two due to the delay the latter causes, at least in games like these that run for several hours. I think a lot of GW's design choices are motivated by a recognition that they are up against the 2.5 hour barrier in both 40k and AOS at this point and therefore anything that adds time to the game has to be compensated by something else that reduces time. Now of course you can say there are better ways to reduce the length of games that GW hasn't taken - cloud coherency is a super obvious one that would cut huge amounts of time out of the game that GW has stubbornly resisted, for example - but that's GW for you, they are very resistant to adopting design innovations pioneered by other companies. FWIW I don't disagree that there is more room to give stuff more interesting rules. I just think it's a bit more complicated than it looks at first glance to come up with mechanics that are interesting but don't bog the game down.

It's baby yoda. You heard it here first.

I just bought a resin Shaggoth, so plastic Shaggoth confirmed.

They could also have you pay a points premium for each identical unit beyond the second that you bring. It could be listed like this: Stormdrake Guard: 340 (60) - so the first two (whether taken individually or as a reinforced unit) cost 340 each, then each additional one costs 400 each. This value could be zero for the "true" battleline choices, i.e. ones that are always battleline no matter what, and it could be set higher or lower depending on how much you wanted to punish spam of that unit. So things that are particularly problematic when spammed could see large penalties, while other stuff could see much smaller penalties. I.e. SDG maybe get a hefty 60 point penalty, but stuff that's conditional battleline in Cities like Pistoliers could have only a 5 point penalty, because spamming that isn't such a concern. That allows people who really, really want to run spam armies to still do so, but it ensures that such armies are (hopefully, unless GW gets stuff REALLY wrong) not optimal from a competitive point of view. You could tweak the threshold too - it could be you get 3 at the base price then a BIG penalty for the 4th onward, or you could even put it at only 1 at the base price and everything beyond that at the premium, but with a lower premium. I just picked 2 because that allows you to take a reinforced unit or two small ones of anything without triggering the penalty, which seems reasonable.

Yeah, the coherency change was just badly implemented. It felt like something they just ported over from 40k because it works there, while forgetting that it works in 40k because the base unit of coherency is 2", not 1", and the melee ranges work differently too. It's the worst kind of mechanic because there are workarounds to it in a lot of cases, but those workarounds all involve finnicky, precise positions and formations that don't actually add to the strategy, they're just done to try to get around the ineffectiveness of the base rule. They ditched rank and flank for AOS...and now instead of ranks we have bizarre cavalry formations that involve horses riding sideways or rotating their noses into one another to keep "in coherency." It's comically bad in some cases. The easy fix is just to say that models in base to base contact with each other are always in coherency. It's still a band-aid rather than an elegant fix, but it'd work until next edition when they can think about it more carefully.

This is an interesting topic to me because I have never considered myself particularly interested in AOS lore - I've always felt it was a bit thin and underdeveloped compared to WHFB, and I kinda just stopped paying attention as a result. But now that it isn't going anywhere any more, I kinda miss it. GW seems to go in cycles on this. Like there was a big flurry of stuff happening at the end of 7th and the start of 8th, but not much else happened in 8th and nothing has happened in 9th yet either - they've released a few campaign packs, but they feel more like "here's an area to fight in" more than "here's a story." So I dunno if we had our story development with BR and now there's nothing coming until the end of 3rd, or whether it's just a case of not being able to get even battletomes out, much less story supplements. For whatever reason GW seems to have moved away from any sort of real story development in army books themselves a long time ago, and it doesn't seem like that is going to change.

Ah, ok, I don't follow 40k that carefully any more. It's kinda weird they don't allude to the new model in the codex announcement.

Saying that most people who have less than entirely positive opinions about the state of the game "have just been stewing in negativity, or been listening to the complaining echo chamber for too long" is definitely playing the man rather than the ball. My post was a request to try to stay on the topic of the merits of the game, rather than shifting the topic to the merits of people who disagree with you. Unfortunately the request seems to have had the opposite effect, so I won't belabor the point to the further detriment of the thread.