yukishiro1

Not to to completely miss the point of what you wrote, but Saurus Knights can actually work in the right list. It's the regular Saurus that are truly hopeless. 🤓 I think there's something to what you wrote generally, but it's nothing that can't really fit into the general fact of rolling dice. I don't think one dice roll needs to be so massively important to do that; any dice game is always going to be less than totally cutthroat competitive. And there are probably better, more effective ways to cultivate a good sense of community than with the wargaming equivalent of "every once in a while we give someone a wedgie, because if you're the sort of person who can't handle a wedgie, you probably aren't going to be fun to hang out with anyway."

Let's try to avoid having the discussion degenerate into "ur bad if u don't like the dbl trn!11" vs "no ur bad if u do liek the dbl turn!!11," we have the whole rest of the internet for that. 😁

Glad to hear you had a better experience. Learning how to effectively screen is one of the most important skills in AOS (less than it used to be thanks to the proliferation of shooting, but still really important) and it takes a while to figure it out with each list, especially against stuff like FEC that has a double pile-in that messes with the movement calculations you need to do.

The AOS terrain rules are such a mess that you can actually technically put some of them up on top of the branches of the trees if you want, and you can certainly place them on the narrow bits on either side of each tree. It's possible to fit in 10 wholly within even one tree base, as long as it's one of the larger ones, if you get creative enough. Needless to say, the way woods work is an absolute travesty and totally stupid in multiple ways, not just this one. It is a classic example of a mechanic that was clearly designed by someone who never actually really tested what they had come up with on an actual table in actual game conditions, or it would have become immediately apparently what a mess they had created.

Sounds like you need to screen better. One terrorgheist shouldn't be able to get into 1145 points of models, that's bad positioning on your part. It also sounds like he's (unintentionally?) cheating since you can't take both the +2 movement sub-faction and the delusion that lets you get the free Feeding Frenzy once per turn, it's one or the other. And in that situation on a 4+ you make him fight last and Durthu potentially kills him before he even attacks so it's still a very risky play. Also on a 3+ you're roaring him and he isn't attacking twice. So the odds of that play working are like virtually zero. Without knowing your list it's hard to say more but if you leave more than half your points value within activation range of a terrorgheist occasionally you are going to be punished badly for it, which sounds like what happened here.

There's no way they are bonesplitterizing fyreslayers when they just came out with a new model for the faction IMO, that's just not how GW works. Now I mean maybe the new rules will be bad, that's always a possibility. But if they were doing a bonesplitterz to them they wouldn't be releasing a new model.

I think we maybe need to step back a moment and reevaluate things if we're seriously saying "the double turn is good because it lets dominant armies stomp weak ones even faster and nobody should complain about that!" 🤣

I think some of the issues with the DT would be mitigated by GW finally admitting defeat and giving up on the "player who finishes dropping first gets choice of priority." It's not even in the core rules any more, which makes it doubly puzzling why they put it in the GHB. It's totally out of place in a game like AOS and it interacts very poorly with the T1/T2 double turn. I would wager that by far the most common complaint re: the DT is from melee armies (that don't have strong alpha capability like e.g. IJ) facing low-drop ranged armies, who get given the turn and then get doubled off the table if the ranged army gets the T1/T2 double. This is the circumstance where the DT makes you feel most powerless, because there's really very little you can do about it - there's just a ~45% chance that you lose that game with the roll-off for T2. You can't hold back to mitigate the impact of getting doubled because they're a ranged army so they'll happily shoot you off the table either way, you can't set yourself up to double them back if you get doubled because you'll have so little of your army left that it barely matters, etc. The meme "play around it!" doesn't really have any application to this situation, and it's also the most frustrating from the perspective of playing the game, because you spend a bunch of time setting up and then the game's effectively over after you've moved your models one single time and maybe had a token combat. If you had to roll off for T1 priority (or even better, you just rolled for who goes first, no choice involved) you wouldn't be able to abuse the T1/T2 double turn any more and I think a lot of the complaints with the mechanic would go away.

Pass / standby tokens cure most of the issues with AA games re: activation mismatches. Based on its past track record of being very stubborn about not learning from other games, though, if GW did go to AA I suspect it would probably insist on making all the same mistakes those other games have made before figuring out how to structure things right.

FWIW, I didn't say AOS was a badly-designed game, I said this particular aspect of AOS was badly designed. Because, you know, that's the topic we're discussing. I'm not sure it really makes much sense to talk about games being well- or badly- designed in the abstract. Almost all games have some good aspects and some bad aspects, and AOS certainly falls into that category. But if you insist on making some sort of totalizing judgment, SW: Legion is a well designed miniature game overall; I didn't quote it here because the main area it actually suffers in is in snowballing. LOTR is a well-designed game overall. Apocalypse is a well-designed game to the extent you can call it a game. I answered your question in a topical way. You said that wasn't good enough, and asked me for a wargame. I answered that question too in a topical way with an example of a GW ruleset that addresses the snowballing problem more elegantly than with a double turn. You responded that that wasn't good enough either. Let's keep the thread about the double turn, not about Yukishiro1; if you don't want to take me seriously and don't want to engage with my opinions that's just fine, but please do it in a way that doesn't derail the thread.

I gave you classic examples because they are easy to understand. Everyone knows basically how Chess and Go works (or can figure it out in 2 minutes on the internet) and can appreciate the difference re: how one snowballs compared to the other. It's a lot harder to go read up and understand the finer points of some other miniature game. Again, good game design in what way? Things are good and bad in different ways. Chess snowballs badly, but that doesn't make it a bad game overall, it just means it's bad on that particular design metric. Since we're discussing snowballing / comeback mechanics, so I'm going to assume you're talking about that particular aspect. GW itself has a ruleset that does a much better job at this: Apocalypse. The way activations and damage are handled in that ruleset quite dramatically lowers the efficacy of alpha strikes and therefore mitigates the snowball effect in the first place. Now that doesn't mean that it would be great to just import that wholesale to AOS. But the point is that even GW itself is capable of coming up with game mechanics that keep snowballing in check without something as crude as a double turn mechanic. The other problem with the double turn is the chicken-and-egg problem. The game wouldn't have the overwhelmingly strong alpha strikes it currently has without the double turn, because not even GW would design a game that way (see how they've tried their best to mitigate first turn advantage in 40k with all sorts of approaches designed to lower the efficacy of the T1 alpha and/or compensate with better scoring rules for going second, with mixed results). The reason AOS is so front-loaded is partly because of the double turn, and the need to provide a strong incentive to go first to balance the strong incentive to go second in order to get the double.

Well-designed in what particular way? In terms of offering a player who gets behind the opportunity to come back into the game? To use a classic example, Go has more comeback potential than Chess, because of the way the game mechanics work. Chess is a classic snowballing game, where every mistake impacts the final result because every mistake is permanent and cannot be remedied; once you lose a pawn, it's gone forever, and if you lost it without a good reason, you're simply down for the rest of the game. In a very high-level sense this is true in Go as well, but in practice the near-infinite possibilities and the segmented nature of the board mean that an early mistake doesn't usually create a snowball the way it does in chess. You still pay for the mistake, but you can often write a line under it in a way you cannot in Chess. To apply this directly to AOS, one way you could incorporate a comeback mechanism could be to reward players more for recovering an objective held by an enemy than for capturing an unclaimed one or holding one they have continued to claim. Another way you could incorporate this is with more recursion mechanics like the one Soulblight has that allows them to restore destroyed units from grave sites (although in this case the SBGL mechanism could be designed better for that purpose, i.e. your chances could increase per your units destroyed, not per your opponent's units destroyed). You can also attack the issue by simply making it less possible to get that initial snowball. One way AOS does this is by having alternating activations in combat, compared to 40k's "the active player resolves all theirs first (minus interuppts)." But it could go a lot further. There are all sorts of ways you could tune down first-turn advantage in AOS that don't depend on a double turn. What if you only had 18" visibility on T1 (or you just can't shoot further than 18" period, to account for Sentinels), and models suffered a -1 (or even -2!) to their runs and charge rolls? Suddenly going in for a T1 alpha becomes a lot riskier, and ends up more likely to put yourself into a vulnerable position than to establish immediate dominance. Basically there's a million ways you can do this. A double turn is a particularly crude way to attack the problem, in that it as often as not ends up helping the snowballer rather than the one being snowballed.

In a badly designed game, sure. Which certainly describes a lot of iterations of GW games over the years, admittedly. But there's no reason this necessarily has to be the case. There are better ways to build some comeback potential into game design than randomly giving one player two turns in a row. Which brings me back to it being crude game design designed to mask even cruder game design. Which is better than no masking, but still not great.

It's one of those things that generates stronger negative reactions than positive ones. The people who hate it, REALLY hate it, while the people who like it tend not to be so passionate about it. Every once in a while you find a true believer, but they're much rarer than the true haters. There may well be as many or more people who support the double turn as oppose it, but their support is much more lukewarm than the opposition. For a game designer, that isn't a great place to be. You want to minimize mechanics that create stronger negative than positive reactions, even if on balance the positive reactions outweigh the negative ones.

The game would be better without the double turn, but only if they also did the necessary things to adjust for it. Just removing the double turn on its own would make the game worse right now. It isn't a good mechanic, but it keeps even worse design choices (like strong T1 alpha strikes) in check.

If you pick Archaon to be your general, he'd give battleline to all cultists units because he has every mark of chaos - the mark of chaos keyword doesn't actually mean anything other than KHORNE, TZEENTCH, SLAANESH, NURGLE or UNDIVIDED - any time you see one of those keywords, the model has a mark of chaos. If you instead make someone else your general and he's just "a general" due to warmaster, he wouldn't be "the model that was picked to be the army's general" so that wouldn't happen.

Lust For Blood says: "You complete this battle tactic if your general or two other friendly VAMPIRE models used The Hunger and/or Mortarch of Blood ability to heal any wounds this turn." Warmaster (at least the SBGL version, in this case Mannfred) says: "If this model is included in a Soulblight Gravelords army with the LEGION OF NIGHT lineage keyword, this model is treated as a general in addition to the model that is chosen to be the army general." Is "a general" the same as "your general," such that a warmaster using its ability would qualify on its own? Or is "your general" only the general you selected to be your general? I know that for e.g. Slay the Warlord you can't do it on a warmaster because the warmaster isn't the model "chosen" to be the warlord, but the text of this battle tactic is somewhat different. My inclination is to say that "a general" and "your general" are the same thing since it doesn't refer to the model chosen, but I'm interested to see if others agree or disagree.

A lot of that is true...but it also wouldn't be a problem if they hadn't made dragons an "everything" warscroll. That's always bad design, no matter how you shape your book. Everything scrolls just shouldn't exist, they are poison to strategic gameplay.

Rule of 3 in 40k doesn't apply to troops anyway, so it wouldn't do anything to curtail most AOS spam lists, which typically rely on conditional battleline (i.e troops) to make the spam work. I guess there's some rare exceptions like Salamander spam, but they're much very much exceptions.

That's not what was being suggested I don't think. The suggestion was the "to hit" roll is done by rolling equal to or under the amount of models in the unit, and if you succeed, it'd then do d3 MW per dragon or something like that. The output against a horde would end up roughly the same as it is now (actually a tiny bit better, but much less spikey) while the output against single heroes would go way down, so no more no-scoping support heroes with pinpoint dragon breath. You could even make monsters worth like 4 if you wanted, a 4+ to do d3 mw to a monster doesn't seem abusive.

Oh for sure. The point he was just making is that until the FAQs/app are updated, those rules in the box aren't active. They're rules that will become active at some point, but they don't apply to the game until they're memorialized somewhere besides in the box. If the app gets updated on release Saturday, they'll become the new rules at that time. I mean, maybe that's wrong. But I don't think boxes are official sources of rules that update the rules of the game on their own until they're incorporated in some sort of printed document. It doesn't seem right that a box would overwrite existing rules with the only way to get the new rules being buying the box - that should occur when the new warscrolls make it into the app or a FAQ. This actually just happened with the 40k box for GSC and Custodes, which came out a week before the new Codexes. I can't find any info online about how people treated it. Presumably on Saturday they'll update the app and/or do a FAQ and it won't be an issue, but if they don't, it's a bit of a strange place to leave those warscrolls at.

Yeah, you're right. I think people are assuming they will release a document next Saturday when the box "goes live" that has the warscrolls, and/or update them in the app. But until that happens, they aren't real rules.

I really like the idea of making dragon breath have to roll under the number of models in the unit. Dragons sniping out heroes with their pinpoint scoped breath is just stupid and they shouldn't be encouraged to try it. You could let monsters count as 3 models for purposes of the breath if you wanted to give it a chance to do mortals against big targets too.

It is extremely stupid of GW to release new points for units without releasing the new books those new points values are obviously based on. But this is GW, something being extremely stupid has never stopped them from doing it in the past, and it won't stop them from doing it in the future. It's just another example that GW's release schedule is based around money, not around creating a good game. In the past, it wasn't unusual for AOS events to prohibit the use of a new book until the first FAQ had been released, because quality control was so poor. That seems to have faded away recently, however - which I am not convinced is a positive change. If that were still true, however, it would seem analogous to the situation here - if you can't use a new book until the first FAQ, it would follow that you shouldn't be using rules from a new boxed set at least until a FAQ is released, and presumably not until the book the boxed set is based upon is released as well.

270 is probably too low even if they removed the hero phase move entirely; it might be appropriate if they lost both the spell shrug and the hero phase move, though I'd guess they'd probably still need to be 290ish in that case. But I'd certainly prefer them at 270 with no hero phase move or spell shrug to what they are now at 340. Karazai and Krondys are definitely overcosted, though not by as much as you claim; pricing them at 400 and 450 is a bit silly when you compare them to, say, a frostlord at 430. Karazai could probably be around 475ish and Krondys around 525ish, though.