Sception

I can't vote on this because my answer is completely binary based on game size. At 2k, which in theory is the standard game size and should get priority, then yes, I like the double, keep it, at least so long as we're keeping separate player turns at all. At anything less, though? In spearhead where new players are likely to first experience the game? or at 1,000 points which sees a lot more play locally than 2,000 points even among players who have 2k points painted for purely logistical reasons? then no, I don't like the double in those games, as armies just aren't big enough to fit the tools you need to play around it.

Yeah, warcry's a good game, very fun, but it's appeal isn't the same as what Mordheim offers. That said, you really don't need GW support for mordheim. Where Warcry is a pick up / bring and battle game, and thus needs some amount of current support to stay relevant, Mordheim is a campaign game where you need a regular group of pals to play with, and if you have that then the old Mordheim rules work just fine. Get together for a weekend, order some pizza, pull up the rules online, cut & scotch tape the empty pizza boxes into ruined building terrain, and play some games on the kitchen table. Even when it comes to minis support, if you have enough people to play a mordheim campaign, chances are one of them can get access to a 3d printer.

I mean, no demographic is a monolith. There are tournament type players who don't like the double, and smaller game or more casual players who do like it. As a broader trend though the double turn seems to get more complaints from new players and from players of smaller game sizes and less from people who regularly play 2k point matched play, which seems to come down to there being more options to play around it at larger game sizes, and players being more aware of and practiced in doing so as they get more experienced. The tournament type players (broadly, there are always individual exceptions) seem to complain more about other stuff (blizzard, battle tactics in general being kind of unfun and non-interactive, etc). Shooting is similar, a lot of friction for newer and smaller points players, but generally less contentious in tournament type games - though again there are players who are exceptions on both ends... ... and all that's only if my impression of the general opinion trends are accurate to begin with. It does fit with the double being a major complaint in my local scene of mostly small point players, as well as it being a common complaint frequently cited by online figures who are somewhat new and mostly play at smaller points (by which I mean anything under 2k). A good example is this video by Miniac which lists the double as their biggest complaint: Miniac plays a lot of different minis games, which on some levels broadens his perspective, but it also means he hasn't really dived as deeply as maybe he thinks he has into the particulars of AoS, not playing all that often and most of his experience being in smaller games, where, like many new players, if he goes first in a battle round he has a tendency to just shove his guys forward, which basically sets himself up to get devastated by a double turn. That's not a major criticism, a lot of people play that way for a long time, and in smaller point games there's not a lot else you can do, you just don't have the points left over for extra chaff & screens or second wave hammer units or expendible units to run up and claim objectives that you don't mind dying while your real hammers take a more cautious approach or whatnot. If the double turn is such a common complaint, though, are the devs just lying in the priority article when they say they asked a bunch of players what should stay in the game, and they overwhelmingly said to keep the double? I don't think they are, but I do think the responses they got were skewed by the people they asked, because the most obvious place to ask questions like that is at tournament events, where they have a bunch of people in the same place to talk to and those people are presumably the ones who play AoS the most and who thus have the most informed and nuanced opinions on it. If that's what happened than I expect they heard from very few players like Miniac, and instead heard from a bunch of players like Heywoah, who made this video in part responding to Miniac. Well, first he made a direct response video that was a bit more snarky, but acknowledged that wasn't helpful, so he made this video trying to help people learn how to play around the double. Heywoah's not a top tournament player, but he does attend events, and he regularly streams TTS games on twitch, and the difference in perspective between somebody who plays a few mostly under-pointed games a month and someone who plays multiple full sized games every week is pretty stark. This is a guy who knows how to play around the double, and who enjoys doing so. If that wasn't possible he'd have burnt out on and abandoned the game before even getting into it. Heywoah cut his teeth on TTS - he was playing 2k games before he had the sunk cost of a painted army locking him in. That also means he skipped right over the small point games that most players are stuck learning the game on while they slowly build up their physical armies and struggle to arrange physical games at local stores against in person opponents. Heywoah's done a lot to win me over on the idea of the double, at least in full sized matched play games. But... most of his advice on how to play around it just doesn't work in smaller games - hence why the last serious bit of advice in the video is 'just don't play smaller games'. But I don't play on TTS, for me the real joy of minis games is meeting up with people in person to show off the cool models I painted. Full sized games are hard to arrange and fit into a schedule if you're playing real physical models at a real physical game store that you and your opponent both have to drive to and hope the table's open and finish your game in time to clean up before the store closes. Recognizing this, that AoS just isn't designed for the sorts of games I have time to play, has led me to start picking up Warcry this year (and warcry is pretty great, def worth trying out if you love the models and setting of AoS but don't have time to paint whole armies or play full size games). Hopefully 4e fixes the small game experience with Spearhead, and the like. My fingers are firmly crossed. But wile I may think Heywoah's opinion of the game is more 'correct' or 'informed' or whatever than Miniac's, if the devs have designed 4e based primarily on the feedback of players like Heywoah and not so much on that of players like Miniac, then the small game experience for new players on-boarding and old players who just don't have the time for full 2k point games is likely to remain kinda bad. In the end, GW is a minis company. If they make a game that's fantastic for people who stream TTS on twitch but kind of a pain for people buying physical models to play on a real world table, that's probably not what they were aiming for.

Pretty much yeah. There's so much potential for improvement of the small game experience just in designing battleplans specifically for it. It's why I have so much hope for Spearhead. Actually ~trying~ to design something specifically for smaller games instead of downscaling rules & scenarios meant for 2k games can easily improve so much.

I think new/unique named skaven characters are likely. They do need some pretty badly, given the lack of named skaven currently that aren't old world refugees.

And as much as I agree that the double is bad in 1,000 point games, IMO it's not even the worst thing about small games of AoS right now! IMO the worst part of AoS 3e in games of 1k or below is the suggested table size - the current already small standard size cut in half down the middle for a weird long rectangle. This tiny table size typically has opposing armies starting 15" away from each other - in some cases as little as 12", and suddenly /every/ army is an alpha rush army, and games are often fully decided in the first half of the first battle round, before there's even a chance for a double turn. Really hope* that gets addressed in some way for Spearhead. Either by not locking table sizes to the war cry boards, or at least via scenarios that have opposing sides deploy on the short edges so there's some actual distance between deployment zones. *not sarcastic. I have high hopes for Spearhead. I'm legit excited for it, and am working on getting spearheads painted for each of the undead factions.

1k is low points games. The game is balanced for 2k points. That's the size of all the events that they draw data and feedback from for new battle scrolls, ghbs, points balance updates, and apparently for writing this new edition. At 2k you can play around the double - you can minimize your chance of being subject to it by limiting your drops in list construction, you always know in advance with at least one player turn to prepare if you're in danger of it coming, and you can use that time to pre-measure around danger ranges, set up layered screens, clog up enemy movement by tagging units with fast sacrificial charges & body blockers, set up 'until your next turn' buffs and debuffs, you could just focus down on scoring what you can while making it difficult for the opponent to do the same - it's not unheard of in this game to get tabled on turn four but still be so far ahead on points that you win the game anyway. And IF you get doubled then that automatically puts you in a position where you could potentially double your opponent back. Tough factions like OBR and Fireslayers can build to weather the storm and counterpunch. What mitigations you have available varies from faction to faction and needs to be considered in both list construction and deployment. Once you're playing big enough games that you can lose two whole units without the game being over then the double doesn't decide games early so much as it *prevents* them from being decided early. If you play 40k or tOW, think how often you can look at the game state at the end of round 2, heck even at the end of deployment sometimes, and just know how the rest of the game is going to play out. It shouldn't be surprising then that when the devs asked a bunch of players, presumably at competitive 2k tournament events, whether they should keep the double turn, the players they asked overwhelmingly said 'yes'. None of that works at 1,000 points. Even at 1,500 it's iffy, but at 1,000 points & below if you get doubled and lose two units then your army is just gone and there's no fighting back from that.

I could take or leave it in matched play games. Would prefer an alternating activation 'we go' system like middle earth, or like we already have in the combat phase, but if separate player turns remain I don't mind the double overmuch. It becomes more problematic in lower point games where there's less you can do to play around it, so hopefully spearhead has some targeted mitigation, especially as the battle tactics thing doesn't apply there. We'll see. My fingers are crossed pretty hard for spearhead, I really want it to be good.

No, but it is the major detail played up in the article. I'm not casting judgment, that obviously needs to wait for the entire ruleset, I'm just commenting on the bits they're showing us as they show it to us. And in this bit the thing they seem most excited to show us is a 'fix' to the 'problem' of the double turn seemingly precision targeted to hit exactly those games where in the double turn isn't currently a problem while missing those where it is. Admittedly though, that's a sentiment that didn't need nearly as many words to express as I used in the previous post.

Hrm. See, to me the biggest complaints about the double turn come from new players and people who mainly play small games. Because less experienced players don't know how to play around it, and because at smaller points values it's less possible (you can't fight back after losing your front line to an unlucky double turn if your front line was your whole army). Experienced competitive players, those who play a lot of 2,000 point matched play games, mostly seem to like the double turn, because it keeps games from becoming predictable past the first couple turns. AoS has become rather responsive to feedback and data, but most of that feedback is coming from events, from tournaments, from experienced competitive players. That fits with the article stating that the devs polled players and got back overwhelming support for the double turn even though the double turn is kind of infamously the thing that casual and non players refer to as reasons why they don't like & don't play AoS. While I'm not super upset they're keeping the double turn, I do worry that they're addressing it in exactly the wrong way by tying it to Battle Tactics. On one level Battle Tactics have become the dev teams most effective go-to tool for balancing the game. adjusting faction battle tactics has been an easier, quicker, and more immediately successful way to tweak tournament win rate outcomes than points or even warscroll adjustments, so of course they reach to Battle Tactics to try to tone down the double turn. Except that Battle Tactics are, at least ime, mostly a tournament thing. In casual games? Small point games? Games with new players getting their first exposure to AoS? Slow grow campaign games played by people building up their first armies? Those games tend to skip Battle Tactics - and why not, they're an extra layer of complication, easy to forget, and not particularly fun or engaging if you do opt and remember to play with them. And the devs recognize this at least in so far as we already know that both spearhead and path to glory won't use battle tactics. Meanwhile tournaments don't just use battle tactics to decide individual games, they're also used as a tie-breaker to decide relative placement between players with the same number of wins. If opting to take a double turn costs you a battle tactic, then tournament players may be especially disincentivized to go for it. Sure it might guarantee a win in this game, but you ~might~ pull off a win anyway, and giving up on a battle tactic will take you out of contention for top spot. So by tying the penalty 'balancing out' the double turn to battle tactics, 4e is potentially heavily punishing it in exactly the full size competitive games between experienced players where the double turn not only isn't a problem but is actually a good thing that those players actually like in the game, while doing nothing to address the smaller, more casual games between less experienced players where the double turn is actually problematic and actively turns potential new players away. Costing a battle tactic doesn't fix the double turn in those games because those games aren't using battle tactics to begin with.

If I understand correctly, units have different warscrolls entirely in Spearhead (necessary to balance vanguard boxes that are otherwise like 700 points of dudes against boxes that are like 500 points of dudes - which boxes are more or less points are likely to change but chances are there will still be pretty big discrepancies). If spearhead does use different warscrolls then it's easy enough to give wizardly units unique abilities similar to the type of thing they'd be doing with magic in a regular game.

IIRC they already confirmed that the dawnbringer regiments and armies of renown will stay playable in 4e, though of course the rules of the individual units and the formations as a whole will have to be completely re-written. So Troggoth army should still be at least technically playable (the best kind of playable), though there's no telling whether it'll actually work well on the table. Likewise, I should still be able to simulate my long lost Legion of Sacrament by attaching the Hands of the Liche King to a Soulblight Gravelord army.

I think it's not so much 'play how you want- after all the different formats say which modules to use* (spearhead doesn't use any, so if you're playing spearhead then you don't use the magic rules in spearhead even if you'd like to; matched play uses all the modules, so if you're playing matched play then you do use the battle tactics rules even if you'd rather not). Rather it's more 'if a ghb season wants to tinker with the magic rules it'll sub out the magic module entirely instead of layering changes on top of it, so you don't end up looking at two different rules texts to figure out how magic works'. *yes you and an individual opponent could agree to change what rules you're using in a particular stand alone game, but that's always been the case, as evidenced by the fact that ime many local store pick up games were already ignoring battle tactics and mysterious terrain rules.

The downside of this modularity is that if they want to really commit to it then one module cannot reference another. For example, if unit champions can still issue commands to their own units, then 'commands' and 'command models' can't really be fully distinct modules. Same for 'command models' and 'magic' if Lumineth champions are still wizards.

Having seasonal rules replace a chunk of rules entirely rather than add onto them is probably less confusing, so I don't mind that. But in the end it's just a difference in framing. I know June is still a few months away, but I'd still like to see some details in terms of what the actual rules actually look like.

It'll be weird, but I don't hate the change. Wounds as in your the unit stat indicating how much damage kills a model vs. wounds the die roll to convert hits into damage vs. wounds the amount of damage a model has suffered has always had an issue with clarity.

Advice for new players: on choosing factions: Choose your first faction for aesthetics, lore, and play style rather than competitive power. A warhammer army takes a long time to put together and paint, while GW publishes balance tweaks for their main games on a regular basis. Chances are the competitive meta will have changed significantly between the time when you choose a faction and when you have a standard game size painted for the table, but the models, lore, and overall play style of your faction will still be there. factions to avoid: all the above notwithstanding, if you're tempted to start chaos beastmen or orc bonesplitters maybe hold off. There are persistent rumors these armies might be re-imagined into something completely different or even dropped altogether in 4th edition. I don't personally believe those rumors, but better safe than sorry with your first faction. on low point games: AoS up to this point has been balanced around 2000 point games, and scales down poorly. Of particular note is the infamous double-turn, which in 2000 point games keeps outcomes exciting and unpredictable but can reduce the outcome of smaller games to a single die roll. 4e is /attempting/ to address this with changes to turn priority and a separate 'spearhead' format for small games, but 2nd and 3rd both attempted to address this issue and failed so odds are against 4e succeeding here. The main point is that, as a new player, you'll inevitably play a lot of low points games while you're learning the rules and building up your army. Just try not to get too hung up on the outcome of those games. They're for learning the rules for the game and your faction, not for refining tactics or making overall competitive assessments. Otherwise, there's not a lot of specific advice to offer with how little we know about the upcoming new edition yet. I'd suggest choosing a faction with a spearhead/vanguard you like and work on getting that together to start learning the game with the upcoming 'spearhead' small game format, except that the 10th ed 40k version of the same, combat patrol, kind of fell flat. It's entirely possible spearhead might follow suit, in which case you might only want to pick up the vanguard/spearhead for your faction if you happen to like the specific units in it.

Sounds like they're simplifying away the complexity that i like in unit and army rules, and keeping the obnoxious complexity I hate in interrupting command abilities and especially battle tactics. Double turn stays which I don't feel strongly about, but not going to alternating activations or units actually attached to heroes like I've been hoping for. Initial impression isn't great to me, but so far it's a lot of talk without anything concrete, so I'm not getting worked up over it yet.

Dogs are ok, I like the chickens, the beefy guards half way between mortek & immortis look like they're the stormcast scale soldiers that I imagined mortek guard would be before they actually released and turned out to be the short kings they are. The centaur is closer to the kind of weird bone amalgamation I always want to see out of this faction, and spine whips are always great, so of course I like him. Fluff wise, failures demoted into bestial forms and sent as expendable vanguard and scouts into the deadliest territories of the realms, such as the gnarlwood, works well imo. In Warcry this box should open up a whole new way to play OBR with a bunch of smaller, faster moving options. In AoS... I would love to eventually be units in their own right. As a warband unit, I think putting them all in a single unit probably undercuts them a fair bit. The chickens can't fly because the rest of the box doesn't, the hounds and centaur can't be fast because they're tied to the infantry dudes. The guards & centaur can't be particularly tough because they're the same unit as a couple chickens. I'm not saying the unit can't be good unit in AoS, but they can't be a good representation of what the individual models look like, the way they probably will be in Warcry. Sadly this de-confirms the long hoped for morghast hero, as that rumor engine turns out to be an ossiarch chicken wing. I gave up hope of that after it wasn't in dawnbringers 4, so I'm already over my disappointment, but I imagine some will be feeling that pretty shortly.

I would have replaced the head & neck with like a regular mortek guy's face, sunk a bit into the boney shoulders like a suit of high-collared armor. Then put some mantis-folded limbs on the back with curved nadirite blades in place of forearms pointed forward as the weapons. The human-like mortek face emphasises that there's an actual (composit ossiarch) person in there, not just a beast. Have their fluff be that they were mortek soldiers who demonstrated excessive aggression/insufficient discipline and the mortisans decided 'if you're going to fight like a dog, then you might as well just be one'. Then subvert the usual 'Nagash is a ****** who likes punishing people and the undead suffer under his tyranny' narrative by having these dog guys be super happy with the new bodies that came with their 'demotion' and revel in the unrestrained violence of their new battlefield role. But that's just me. Again, these guys are still cool as they are, and we don't have their fluff yet so there may be an interesting twist in there. Plus, if it's a bespoke warcry warband as I expect then it won't be a whole unit of these dog guys, just one or two of them plus a bunch of other, potentially more interesting stuff in there we haven't seen yet, likely including that thing with the morghast wing - which could just be a new morghast, but I think might be something smaller that just has morghast-style wings. Of course, the downside is that, while a warcry warband would be playable in aos, they'd all be crammed together into a single unit that wouldn't really work as well as bespoke rules for separate specific units. And while we might see separate units in the future, the wait could be a long, long time. After all, we still don't have those mortek archers implied by the underworlds guy.

New OBR! WHOOO!!!! Preview coming at adepticon. This almost assuredly won't be a direct release for Age of Sigmar, surely if OBR were getting a direct AoS release it would have been tied to Dawnbringers 4? I suppose anything's possible, but this is overwhelmingly more likely to be a Warcry release. It's probably not an Underworlds release, because those typically have pre-molded bases, where this looks to have a normal base with normal basing applied. That said, warcry is a cool game and obr are a fun faction in it, and it'll be nice for them to gain an option for some faster fighters that aren't as expensive as cavalry or morghasts. Otherwise, I'm a sucker for OBR aesthetics so I generally like this guy, but it is probably my least favorite ossiarch so far. the wide bone shield plates on the back of its neck and front of its forlegs feel like they should have been proper armor plates, and that's before we get to the overall bodyplan of 'just a dog/cat' being a bit dull. Yeah, the ossiarchs have 'just dudes' and 'just horses', but their narrative concept allows for wild monstrosities with atypical numbers of limbs, human-like faces on bestial bodies & vice versa, multiple separate faces & personas integrated into a single creature, weird blends of ghostly spirit and boney corporeal form, etc. This design isn't bad at all, but it is a bit tame when you consider the weirder possibilities implied by the stalkers, crawler, and harvester. Still, I'm definitely excited for new ossiarchs no matter the form, and as I've only recently been getting into warcry with models already painted for AoS, this could be the first warband I paint specifically for the skirmish game.

Except based on the preview article these 'siege rules' seem tied to the specific range of AoS terrain pieces GW currently sells, and sadly those piece are not very conducive to setting up a siege scenario. no walls, no towers, no moats, no palisades, etc.

Wanderers were a faction unto themselves before cities of sigmar were a thing. But that was the elden days and things weren't really set in stone back then.

Some good looking marauders. Nice.

It's probably just that I play Death factions, but the description for Dawnbringers 5 feels really light on content compared to book 4. Hopefully we get a preview on the strongpoint assault rules this week, that might turn my initial impression around.