wayniac

Fair point I Haven't followed the media in a while, and when I did it was mostly if its not ITC then it doesn't matter, at least that was the impression I got. I do agree with you that Ghur is weird and probably is the "worst" of the realm rules. THe rest I think encourage balanced lists in most cases; sure you have something like KO where they have a bad book that needs work, but for most everything else I think they add balance.

On that note, not to deviate too much, the US seems to consider most of the UK events to not be "serious". The official GTs at Warhammer World especially are considered to not be "real" tournaments from most of the sentiment I've seen.

In the US from what I saw, there was near-universal panning of the realm rules and all the major tournaments I'm aware of said no way, not using it. At least from what I recall. I could be mistaken though my memory is hazy from that period but I do recall a LOT of gnashing of teeth and "What were they thinking" and just a near-universal agreement to ignore them.

In my experience all the realm rules were written off day one. I find way too much "but what if" rather than doing it. "What if my opponent brings X monster". Same sort of thing that was written off for pre-GHB AOS or Open Play. "What if my opponent runs 10 Nagashes" "What if my opponent fields all monsters", "What if my opponent fills every inch of their side of the table with the most powerful units in the game". Ghur is a weird place though because it A) requires you to have a monster and B) it gives you free reign to pick the most powerful monster. That's not possible to be balanced. It needed something else to not just open Pandora's box.

I would assume a tournament would have a house rule to prevent that anyways, or just not pick Ghur from the list assuming realms are determined before the round. House-ruling isn't a bad thing however. Ghur is one of those things I really don't see how it's even remotely balanced for gameplay.

I won't delve too deep into this tangent but people don't want randomness to dictate what they can't control, they want it to be actual skill and how you play, like wargaming of old where maneuvering and setting up charges and things like that were all the rule of the day. Well actually most modern players seem to want list building to be the only real tactic, but my point stands: The issue is it's just "We rolled the result on the chart which really hurt my army" isn't doing anything for tactics, it's just RNG ****** you over and making you adapt instead of adapting coming naturally during the course of the game. That said though, I still think the realm rules add some nice variety, even if I feel that having such huge swings of the game due to a die roll isn't actual tactics.

Yet wargames don't have random things like that in such polarizing ways. At least not any wargame I've ever seen other than Warhammer. This is neither here nor there so I won't continue down this train of thought but randomness is not strategy nor tactics, it's just randomness.

Sadly I'd guess that attitude is more common that people think. There's a lot of "it's not fair" approaches to terrain placement if someone has heavy shooting and you set up LOS blocking terrain. It's why you often see sparse terrain that ends up not mattering or symmetrical terrain, or the classic "terrain on the sides, middle wide open" sort of stuff. I don't get it. The terrain is supposed to help balance the game against that guy who brings shooting heavy armies, not let him just walk all over everyone or it's "not fair" that he can't. Yikes.

I honestly find most of the vitriol over the realm rules come down to "I can't play my one-trick skew list that I always play and only want to play" which is where the issue arises. I have gotten screwed in the realm rules myself (Maggotkin with the extra rule that slowed you) but it still made the game better than without it. I could see the issue for using t hem for pickup games, since then it is actually random and not known beforehand but if it's some k ind of event, whether a league, campaign or even a tournament you can predetermine what realm each round/week's games will take place in so people can prepare accordingly. I think the bigger question would be WHY the design team seems to think such a large random swing is a good idea to balance out the game as opposed to doing it at the army list and faction levels. The realm rules are cool but and as I said I like them but I totally understand the "WTF?" response to them since they are so polarizing to games.

It should be mandatory IMHO. Didn't a WHC article say that those realm rules and such are taken into consideration for balancing the game, so ignoring them is willfully ignoring intended design to counteract some army builds? Granted, we have no way of knowing if that was true or just BS, but with nothing to prove contrary it has to be assumed that it really is intended to be used for balancing. IMHO anything that encourages balanced lists as opposed to focusing on "winning during the list building phase" like you so often find in Warhammer is great; the realm rules should discourage heavy shooting skews, for example, in the event you get Ulgu. However i do think that events should predetermine which realms games will take place in; it should not be left up to random chance the day of. The tournament pack should say that the first round is in Ulgu, the second round is in Aqshy, and the third round is in Ghyran or some such, so at least you're aware and can adjust your list appropriately. I'm actually curious how many tournaments really use them. Almost everyone I talk to hates the realm rules with a passion and refuse to use it. The terrain stuff gets used, but rarely remembered. I have not played with the GHB19 terrain rules yet to know about that.

Magic support, bell to speed everything up, he's tanky as heck (planning to give him Witherstave). Would something else work better? I don't own a GUO yet and not relishing buying one due to it being pretty expensive, so I'm open for something I can replace him with.

However the LoA's command ability forces him to be the General IIRC. My current idea is either the typical Blight Cyst with Spume+10 BKs, 2x5 BKs, 30 Plaguebearers, GUO w/Bell, LoB and LoA (in place of the Harbinger as good as he might be. LoA with Rustfang to move in fast to support Spume and friends) or something like LoP, GUO w/Bell, Harbinger, 2x10 BKs, 30x PBs, 4x PGBL (or 2 and Lord, same price)

Sadly with how popular and often prevalent competitive play is, I think this would be disastrous in the long run. GW already has a very poor track record for balancing their games properly and a huge reason for that is the massive book bloat and myriad of options, most of which end up being blatantly worse than other options so are useless at best or a "newbie trap" at worst. AOS luckily doesn't have to deal with as many options as 40k but if there's any hope or desire to not have the balance all over the place, books have to be limited or it will spiral out of control.

Points, mainly lol. But that's partially because I keep wanting to put Pusgoyle Blightlords into a list, 2 or even 4.

I've been thinking, I get that the Blight Cyst is a go-to thing but it seems on paper that a Lord of Plagues, a Harbinger and then 10-20 Blightkings either in one or multiple units (probably 2, as 20 BKs is more prone to Battleshock) within 7" is a pretty tanky package. You get the 5++ aura from the Harbinger and the re-roll 1s from the Lord of Plagues which IIRC is not on a unit but an aura so it can affect both units, and that's before you consider something like a GUO with the Bell and plaguebearers. That's a big wall of meat moving forward faster than you expect.. You lose out on the -1 Rend from Blight Cyst, which is big, but that doesn't seem half bad in certain situations if you aren't using Blight Cyst as a generic all comers.

One thing I absolutely do NOT want to see though is the open-ended way 40k handles allies. AOS at least has a limit, and I hope there remains very minimal ways to circumvent that. There is no balance to even remotely be able to have when you can just take from another faction to cover your faction's weaknesses; at that point why even have a weakness? Assuming the design team are actually trying to create a balanced game rather than make things purposely unbalanced to do that Magic: The Gathering style of "system mastery" (which I feel is a ridiculous concept anyways, but that's another rant), then factions having strengths and weaknesses that can't just be removed by taking X unit from Y faction should be a key part of the system's design.

No, what I'm saying is they need to not give every single army a new book, or there will be ridiculous bloat. I actually like the recent consolidation they did, with Skaven, Grots into Gloomspite, now Human/Aelf/Dwarf into Free Cities, etc. Those should NOT be individual books for each group.

This is something that will always happen as communities will always veer towards "normal". But I agree to a point, ME seems like the sort of thing you have simultaneously or alternate with your typical 2k tournament style matched play stuff you usually see. Granted that's easier in a club than in the USA's game store mentality, and there's always the resistance from people who don't want to do "weird" 1k point games they just want 2k "normal" games but it sounds like a good idea.

Honestly I haven't seen any interest all in Meeting Engagement, even before I had my issues voiced previously. Haven't seen anyone even consider talking about it here. We have one group that tends to be more competitive which I don't think likes anything other than 2000 point stuff, and another group or two (overlap here) which are much more laid back that could be interested but I haven't heard anything. Personally like I said before, I am not a fan of dividing the armies, especially since you NEED all three parts, so you're basically forced into having to take filler to meet all the requirements. It doesn't work well IMHO with how you normally have to build lists, and adds an extra layer of complexity that can just make things more imbalanced depending on what you can field to start versus what your opponent can., and just from my playing around with it on Scrollbuilder it seems like it makes army building more difficult than it should be adding additional weird restrictions. I admit I haven't tried it, however, so it might be more fun than it seems. The 3x4 part is still bothersome to me, even though I get the reason now, but that's more because GW doesn't sell a 3x4 board (the RoB boards are 2x2 squares, so putting two together you have 1 foot that needs to be blocked off, that weird mouse pad mat they had was 4x4, and the Hallowheart or whatever it was thick cardboard was somewhere in between IIRC with some very odd measurements to fit on a dining room table). Which is interesting because the latest White Dwarf has a Meeting Engagement battle report and they show a 3x4 board (I assume it's some custom thing in the studio or VERY clever photoshopping). Which yes, you can make your own etc. etc. but this is GW. I would expect this to be sold if they plan to encourage Meeting Engagement as a play style. The concept seems cool, but the interest seems to have died on the vine here or died out quickly just like Skirmish before it, which I thought was also a great idea but done in such a way that it was nearly unplayable.

IMHO less is more. Look at 40k where there is just gigantic bloat to see what we could have ended up with for AOS; I think there's like 20 codexes? Maybe more? Of course 40k has its wonky ally system, but I think AOS is coming on "too many" already. The more books you add, the harder it is to balance things because you have so many things and combinations; there's a point where you're just throwing things out there to fit in. 40k is well past that point, I don't think AOS is yet and I hope it doesn't get to it because IMHO it will be terrible for the game.

That does make sense, I didn't consider that, I suspect because GW doesn't have to my knowledge a 3x4 board, it's 2x2 pieces so you'd have 4x4. Which now that I think about it is weird that they don't have something at that smaller size.

I was super excited for Meeting Engagements, I like smaller point games. But the combination of it allowing unbalanced combos out of the gate, the strange table size (why not just 4x4? Why make it a weird size?) and the extra splitting your army stuff that IMHO wasn't even needed made it seem incredibly bad after the initial "Oh cool a way to legitimize something other than 2k" thing wore off. It seems like they went too far in the wrong direction with what they decided to do with it. it didn't need all the extra things on top of it.

I don't think any of the daemons can be touched by the other Gods, although they can be tricked/influenced (see: Tzeentch and Skarbrand). I think they're immune to actually being corrupted by other gods, since unlike mortals they are intrinsically bound to the god. Could be wrong though, there might be precedent in one of the stories that it's the opposite.

What are people's thoughts on Pusgoyle Blightlords? They seem like really cool models but I'm not convinced even with the points drop. They seem to hit all the good parts: Fast, tough, can hit like other armies' heroes, but you don't see them a lot. I have two and am strongly considering getting a SC! box since I need an extra 5 Blightkings anyway, which would give me 4. The main issue I have is the unit size is 2 so you're screwed if you want to make one into a Lord of Affliction, you'll have to hunt eBay for a single Blightlord or trade with someone who also made a LoA or something. The LoA himself seems like he might be worth taking even on his own, since he's a pretty fast and hard-hitting character (I am considering taking him with a Rustfang and sending him to assist a 10-man Blightking Bomb w/Spume) but he himself costs as much as a unit of 2 regular guys.