yukishiro1

This works from a hobby perspective, but from a game perspective playing low point values is a totally different experience from high point values. It's one of the major problems with getting people into the hobby. The rules just don't work at lower point values unless you deliberately take it easy. I mean we complain about the rules at 2000 points...but they're even more dysfunctional at lower points values. It's one of the reasons I always tell people not to get into warhammer unless they really enjoy the hobby side. Because you are going to be hobbying for a very long time before you get to use your models in the game as it's actually meant to be played, and there's no guarantee you're going to actually like it when you do.

It's badly worded and somewhat ambiguous, but RAW it seems to say that a wizard w/in 6" of any of them will proc on a 4+ from all of them. It's anybody's guess if that's what they meant; I rather suspect they didn't.

There are free, legal alternatives that don't involve piracy that give you complete access to GW's rules without breaking any IP laws. It isn't an either-or situation. If people really stop buying books I assume GW will move to shut some of them down, but that's in the future. Right now you can get the full text of every book GW produces for free on youtube from GW-approved sources.

Yeah, if this was the first GW price increases in years I think people would be a lot more willing to accept the "economic climate" rationale. But it isn't. GW raises prices every year. It's a "boy who cries wolf" sort of situation. Maybe this time there really is good economic justification for the price increase...if they hadn't already increased prices multiple times during boom times. GW's answer to every situation is raise prices. Great economic climate? Raise prices. Bad economic climate? Raise prices. Sunny today? Raise prices. Rainy tomorrow? Raise prices. Do that often enough and people are going to rightly stop taking your PR seriously. This is an elective decision GW made to prioritize maintaining their already extraordinary margins. It's a decision they can make, it's not illegal or anything. But that is what's going on here. It's a bit pathetic to see GW pleading economic conditions when great economic conditions never stopped it from increasing prices before. One of the rationales people used to support those prior price increases was that it'd cushion GW from the need to adjust prices to match the economic cycle...well, that obviously didn't turn out to be true.

Start Collecting was a great thing. It's unfortunate that they're replacing them with more-expensive, lower-value bundles instead, but GW tends to go in cycles this way. When GW runs into its next downturn and the current management gets shown the door and new people get brought in, one of their first initiatives will probably be another form of Start Collecting. And then the cycle will repeat.

Boiling the frog works. There's probably no point at which a lot of people would stop defending them...as long as they're boiled slowly. If GW suddenly doubled prices tomorrow, you might see some people who couldn't stomach that. But 5-10% price increases every year forever? That's probably never going to read the point people can't defend it. When something is part of your identity it takes a lot to shake you out of your holding pattern. You could say the same for the people who are reflexively anti-GW on everything, it'd take a lot to move their opinion too (though at least those people aren't being unpaid defenders of multi-billion dollar companies).

I think this is very likely in the longer term. We haven't seen new endless spells since...I want to say the LRL ones? Despite like 5-6 books coming out since then that don't have them. It's not going to happen any time soon, though. I would be very surprised if they're phased out before AOS4.

Of course it is. Companies do it all the time, particularly when they think cost increases may be transient or when they believe expanding their customer base is more important than margins in the short term. The myth of activist investors is just that, a myth. Companies make decisions all the time to prioritize other factors over margins, and investors almost always go along with them. If anything, investors tend to undervalue margins in favor of "sexier" attributes like growth potential. Now GW is not in the sort of industry where customers are sensitive to price or likely to turn to budget alternatives, so they are unlikely to make that choice. But that doesn't mean it isn't an option they could make if they wanted. GW investors were not about to replace the board if they didn't raise prices.

They'll keep raising prices yearly until their sales start to fall as a result of it. It's just the way GW works. They're out to make the most money possible, not to make life better for you. They have the margin to easily absorb these sorts of costs if they wanted to, but why would they when they have the perfect excuse for a price raise right now? Never let a good crisis go to waste. The books and terrain were already spectacularly bad value for money, so raising those by an additional 10% seems the thing most likely to eat into their sales, especially given that it's 2022 and the community has never been known for its enthusiasm for buying the books anyway. $55 for a battletome is getting towards borderline absurd territory, to the point where even GW customers may balk. But I've been wrong before. Obviously they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think people will suck it up and buy anyway.

Yeah, the way Legion handles priority is quite clever (in contrast to the way it handles, or rather doesn't handle, activation spam). AOS goes in precisely the opposite direction, by encouraging you take the T1/T2 double but then punishing the player who gets doubled T1/T2 if they get the potential for a T2/T3 double. So it's a double whammy - not only is the T2/T3 double generally less valuable than the T1/T2 double because you have less of your force left, you also get kicked in the teeth for doing it by a mechanic that rewards the player who just doubled you if you try to double them back. You can see what they were going for with the "remove an objective" thing but right now it just makes taking the T1/T2 double even more attractive and impactful.

I actually think the point of view of people who haven't played the game is hugely important, because it's one of the most common reasons you hear from people - "I'd try the game but the double turn." I understand that can be frustrating for AOS players to hear, but from a game design perspective, a feature that alienates a significant portion of your potential player base is probably something you want to think twice about. I used to be hardcore against the double turn, now I'm less against it as I've played more AOS - but I do think it still needs some work to lower the impact it can have, particularly on the T1/T2 double. I would be really interested to try how "the first player to be doubled in the game gets to remove an objective" would play out, as opposed to the current "player going 2nd on T3 gets to remove an objective."

I think the very fact that you've framed it as controversial gives you the answer you surely already know: no, don't do it. The hobby isn't about trolling people. SoB are literally tribes, so painting them in a "tribal" way is not an issue (putting aside the fact that you seem to be taking your ideas of what "African tribesmen" look like from Tintin in the Congo). What is an issue is the rather obvious attempt to trigger people. I don't care what the paint scheme is, if you're doing it to trigger people, it's really not in the spirit of the hobby.

I don't think it's No True Scotsmen, because that's not what I'm referring to when I refer to playing defensively. If you want to call the alpha bunker a different way of playing defensively that's fine, I don't really care about that - but it doesn't change the point that you can't play defensively in AOS in the way I'm describing, a way that is a core element of most other game systems. Even compared to a game like 40k that's not exactly a tactical masterpiece either, AOS gives you far less options for avoiding engagements and playing for a five-turn game (and whenever GW screws up and empowers alpha lists in 40k like they did with ad mech and orks, they inevitably get nerfed a few months down the road - because everyone recognizes that isn't how the game ought to be played). Almost all of the mechanics in AOS are geared towards forcing both armies to the middle from T1. Scoring, terrain, threat ranges - all of these are set up in AOS to mush armies together from the very start of T1 (with rare exceptions). Even the lack of cheap objective-cappers feeds into this - in 40k there are lots of units that are sub-50 points that you can use as sacrificial scorers that you don't really care about losing while keeping the rest of your army safe, whereas in AOS there are literally no units in the game under 50 points, and the definition of a "cheap" unit is basically something under 100ish points rather than under 50ish. The cost of throwing something away in AOS is therefore roughly double what it is in 40k. The result is that defense in AOS tends to rely more on unit stats and less on avoiding the line of fire in the first place. By and large there is no option in AOS to take a "null turn" where you just keep the vast majority of your forces in safe positions they can't be engaged on the opponent's next turn; that's just not how the game is set up. The T1/T2 double turn would be much less decisive if there was a viable way to take the top of T1 that didn't put you straight in the firing line of the enemy army. But by and large there isn't. So the T1/T2 double turn tends to be decisive.

You can play a wound sponge list in AOS, but that isn't really playing defensively - an alpha bunker is actually an offensive list, not a defensive one, it just plays offensively by existing rather than by doing damage. Playing defensively is playing in a way so as to limit damage to yourself in order to prolong the match and wait for your opportunity. You can't really do that in AOS (again outside of a small handful of lists that mostly leverage reserve deployment) because of the lack of a primary cap and the ease of scoring battle tactics combined with the general inability to mitigate damage through use of terrain. If you try to play defensively in AOS you tend to just fall behind on scoring and lose and/or get picked off and lose. There are occasional matchups on specific battleplans where you can play cagey for a round or two (the vice is a good example; the one where you auto-win if you hold 4 is another) but it isn't typically an option. The AOS scoring system and most missions are very much focused on pushing both armies into the middle right from the start for a decisive engagement, to the point where any other strategy tends to be situational at best.

I'm not sure there's really enough tactical depth in AOS to be entertaining without the RNG. Doesn't mean the RNG has to come as a double turn necessarily, but unless they substantially increase the depth of the game, I can see it becoming pretty easy to "talk out" games due to the limited number of variables if RNG doesn't play a large role. Which goes back to there not being enough ways to play the game. Because battle tactics are very easy to score and primary isn't capped, there are only two ways to play the game currently - go for max points every turn, or win by tabling your opponent early. Aside from very specific lists (the Phoenicium list that did well at LVO is a good example), there isn't really any way to play defensively in AOS currently, and that drastically reduces the tactical complexity.

Yes and no. There is actually a problem here. With the double, player 1 strikes with their whole army, then player 2 strikes with 3/4s of their army twice. At the halfway point of T2, player 1 has had 1 army's worth of alpha, and player 2 has had 1.5 armies worth of alpha. With no double, player 1 strikes with their whole army, player 2 strikes with 3/4s of their army, then player 1 strikes with 4/5s of their army. At the halfway point of T2, player 1 has struck with 1.8x their army, while player 2 has struck with only .75. This is substantially more uneven than the situation the double turn produces. Where the double turn is really problematic is when you have an army that can't go in hard at the top of T1, because then giving away the turn has no real cost. Player 2 gets to alpha twice with their whole army. But just removing it rewards armies that can alpha hard at the top of T1. It's a chicken and the egg sort of situation and just removing the double turn on its own or limiting it until T3 would arguably make the issue even worse without other changes. The biggest structural issue with AOS right now is not the double turn per se, it's the inability within the ruleset to hold back and mitigate your losses, because terrain does nothing substantial to mitigate damage, there is no cap on scoring so you have to try to score max points every round, and the best lists have power projection across the whole board in a single turn. If you could hold back and reduce the damage incoming to you substantially, the T1/T2 double turn would cease to be an issue as the player going first could just play it safe and make the player going second unable to do damage for at least the first half of the double. tl;dr The double turn works out ok if the player who goes first can go in hard with a strong T1 alpha strike (or accomplish something else significant, like boxing player 2 into their deployment zone with an alpha bunker list). Where it gets toxic is when the player taking first turn can't really do much going first.

I'm not sure it really mattered, game was really won on the bottom of T1 when his alpha destroyed literally half the soulblight army. It definitely made the game end quicker, but I don't think the soulblight player had much of a chance after T1 even if he had won priority. The dragons oneshot his vengo lord, the fulminators oneshot his gargant, and the crossbowmen killed 45 zombies all in one turn. That's like 900 points down in one turn. And he didn't even charge with the dragons!

For sure. But you can't tackle one without tackling the other. The reason we have such strong alpha strike in AOS is because of the double. It's a chicken and the egg sort of thing. And to be clear, I don't think they should keep fixed turn priority T1. It's a terrible mechanic and should 100% go away and be replaced with a straight-up roll-off after deployment instead. There should be risks to deploying all your stuff going all-in on going first or second, and right now there just aren't as long as you're lower drop. Alpha potential would naturally be tuned down if you have to deploy in a way that works for going both first and second. And it would also mean everybody gets to play with more enhancements, which means more interesting and varied lists. Battle Regiment could then become something that allows the units in it to deploy after all non-Battle Reg units deploy. Still has value, but it's no longer the obvious choice, and it becomes viable to mix it in with just a couple units if you have a few key pieces you want the chance to drop after you see where your opponent drops their stuff.

Yeah, if they are 100% set on keeping fixed turn priority on turn 1 (which is a terrible mechanic, but they do seem committed to it), they need to change the "player who goes second T3 burns an objective" to "the player who gets doubled for the first time in the game burns an objective" instead. Still might not be enough to deter taking the T1/T2 double, but at least it'd be something. The other obvious option is disabling the possibility of a double turn until the T2/T3 interval. At least that way everyone gets two turns before the double starts.

Chess isn't asymmetric (except for who goes first, which produces the biggest problem with the game competitively). I think there is something to the idea that a lot of the RNG in wargames is designed to compensate for the fact that the two forces typically aren't balanced and therefore to introduce some reason why the stronger side doesn't just win. Now that doesn't mean this particular kind of extreme RNG is good game design, mind you. But just because it wouldn't improve chess doesn't mean it's a bad idea to have in a wargame.

I don't think either was really intended TBH. They just decided they didn't like the daisy chain and did the quick and easy fix of "just do what they did in 40k" and said "job's a good 'un," forgetting or not caring that there are big differences between the way 40k and AOS work that fundamentally alter how the change plays out. I really can't believe GW really intended to do what it did re: nerfing random units for no real reason simply because of the conjunction of big base sizes and 1" range attacks on them, there's just no rhyme or reason to it.

GW has always struggled with the mm to inch conversion. The fact that having 25mm bases are a super power that allows you to do things fundamentally different from what every other base size can do is stupid, but it's been a feature of the game since launch, and they only made the discrepancy worse in 3.0, not better, so it seems unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. The move to w/in 1" of two for units of 6+ was terribly executed given how many elite units come in 3s, but again, they went through with it anyway so it doesn't appear to be much of a priority for them. The problem it was meant to solve was units of 30 being strung out across the entire board, and it sort-of solves that, but at great cost to a lot of stuff that wasn't problematic at all. A less proud, more openminded company would have adopted some version of cloud coherency the way most modern systems do. But that isn't GW. GW always wants to come up with its own solution, even if it's far inferior to the solution everyone else came up with years ago.

"Hey, what have we got a ton of lying around in the warehouse we can't sell?" "Um, Idoneth and Fyreslayers? Nobody plays those factions. Hmm, actually, there's a bunch of Nighthaunt and DoK stuff back here too in a side room buried underneath all the Primaris Lieutenants..."

Wow, talk about overhyping a reveal. Everything varies from fine to great, don't get me wrong...but this was billed as " seismic changes" and it's anything but that. Even the Eldar stuff is just a refresh, and lots of it has already been shown. Nothing "big" here for any GW system, AOS or otherwise, except maybe the Necromunda thing (which is just a piece of artwork).

Ooph. Not even Idoneth and <Dwarf> tomes, just yet another double box. At least this one has more than 2 new models I guess, though I gotta be honest, those spectres with crossbows...I dunno. I wonder if there's some big problem getting books shipped from China or something, seems really weird to be teasing a new double box before you even reveal the tomes for the last one. Sweet Eldar Corsair, tbf.