stratigo

There have been periods where ex GW designers have gone, flat out "Yeah, the corporate suit at the top told me to make this unit overpowered" Like, this happens man. I'd like to think modern GW is no longer falling prey to this sort of design philosophy, but I'm not entirely sure they've learned to not hand army book writing off to people who are too passionate about an army and want to load it up with rules, and then handed a next book about an army they don't care about and they give it very little.

It is so very bizarre to see competitive players argue against their game being balanced in AoS. Like, that's the exact opposite of what I see in 40k. Even the big names go "Yeah, I'm using this OP BS, but I know it is OP BS and want GW to nerf it". What army are you playing again? Are you just trying to maintain the current state of the meta for your own benefit? AoS is NOT a good competitive game and people who care about competition won't be supporting the current state of the meta.

I think frosthearts are gonna form a core for competitive citying.

There is a gotrek for each grand alliance. Most of them are just much bigger than he is. I keep trying to hype myself up to start playing again, then I see a battle report with three keepers jogging across the field and go "Uuuuuugh". The cycle of power creep is getting kinda nuts right now. Like, demons codex at the end of 7th fantasy nuts.

Also this issue is pretty much "And let us make skaven kill gotrek even easier". This is a problem because skaven are just a gross army that can counter gotrek several easy ways already, they don't need that counter to include the same non interactive nonsense they use to murder every other character in the game. WLCs already skip past almost all the tools people use to protect characters.

they will roll him over, yes. I am a bit worried about orruk warclans tossing out such obviously powerful hardcounters to a bunch of armies. It makes me feel like they're not going to address the issues of multiple rerolling feel no pains that sort of.... allows some of the front runner armies to be far more durable than they really should be (looking at you DoK) because they're just gonna have an army the wrecks that ability. But, like, what if you don't want to play them? I am hoping the GW answer isn't "Well you're just ******"

I plan to use my dwarf gunners and crossbows as their human counterparts and that seems to be an obvious substitution to me.

GW isn't an artistic commune. They update sculpts based on what they think will sell the best. Artistic input has its place, But they have an eye on what will sell first, second, third, and fourth. Profits first. Miniatures second. Rules last.

I have found people, in fact, do mind. I don't actually like losing to "Oh yeah, you didn't know I could do this huh?" And I feel uncomfortable when I win because the player I was against went "Oh, I didn't know you could do that". Offloading the gotchyas to warscrolls and battletomes doesn't make them feel less bad. It might make a lower barrier to entry for the base game because you can go "wow, there's only four pages of rules" And then get handed the remaining 396 pages through the GHB, warscrolls, battletomes, expansions (like malign sorcery), and FAQs in pieces as each of those rules rolls them repeatedly (Like i have had to tell people playing KO that I've seen "Sorry, but, uh, those drill cannons don't do three damage any more. I'm sorry"). Like, just at a basic level, you have to know the scenarios, the base rules, and malign sorcery and your armies battletome and scrolls. That right there is probably around 200 pages mate. I personally haven't memorized every single army's rules. Despite being pretty engaged with rules, I haven't even read all of them yet. I haven't read the sylvaneth book yet, and I never got around to beasts of chaos. And I know players with those armies. And this is beyond people who simply get rules wrong (I do plenty) or have weird interpretations, or just cheat (yes those guys exist). Do you sit there and ask them to prove every single special rule in the book? Or do you let them get away with it cause, hey, it is their army? The bespoke rules era sort of obfuscates complexity, but it actually does nothing to eliminate it. I do find it somewhat better for book keeping. Unless you're playing an army that is 90 percent FAQ now (*cough* kharadrons *cough*). While AoS isn't as complex, as, say, infinity (Cause, wow), it is easily as complicated as, say, Middle earth SBG, for all that SBG's rule book is chunky. I don't now which approach is strictly better, but we're no longer in the halcyon days of AoS where the rules fit on a dozen pages for everything (They weren't very halcyon days). Today a strong army consists of loading a unit up with a dozen different spells, prayers, and special abilities, often enacted in a very specific order, some with counter play, some without, and then hurling that unit at the enemy's lines and watching them blender what they touch. I mean, have you seen how daughters of Khaine play? "Oh, this unit has mind razor, reroll save blessing, more saves, more attacks, more speed.... etc". Necromunda takes a long time because Necromunda is a mess. A great amazing glorious time, but also a mess. I adore the game, but an example of tight rules it is not. Say, do you know if a flame template can go through smoke? How about if models can move through friendly models? Hey can enforcers buy stuff not in their house list? Why are Van Saar so Bloody overpowered!? On the other hand, I also play kill team, have played warcry, and play apoc. All these games take significantly less time than AoS with alternating activations. Necromunda isn't long because of alternating activations. Alternating activations would, without changing a single thing, extend absolutely no time, as you would be taking exactly the same amount of actions as you would in your turn. I mean, I think one of the most elegant ways to address a lot of issues would be to take from Apoc and have all damage and saves apply at the end of a turn, both players having gone. That's be neat and hamstring activation wars and super duper glass cannon units hurtling across the field in one turn. But GW is not gonna rock that boat any time soon. SBG, on the other hand, doesn't take appreciably less time than AoS because every fight and sometimes every shot occurs individually, since there are no squads. The excuse of GW being a model manufacturer doesn't mean it is okay for them to put out any old game and we should be glad they deign to do so. They tried this with AoS at the start and it slopped HARD. It is neither true nor acceptable. As consumers, it is not our job to understand that GW doesn't want to do things. We are under no obligation to accept anything GW does. GW is under obligation to provide a product we want to purchase so that it can get more money to shareholders (and also other things that are way less savory because that is how business works. For now. Glimmers of hope in the future if you follow economist news. Faint glimmers).

Remember that the lead time on new models is often a year or more

You have to be really engaged with the game to avoid the gotchyas. And even then, unless you play against armies, you often still don’t grasp it. This is fine for competitive players, who practice often (even then though I’ve seen tournament players getting caught out by an army they don’t experience much), but for a casual or new player, it is murder. I’ve had players not understand me when I say “hey, I can drop in a gun that if it causes a casualty you have to take an immediate battleshock and I can teleport him in with a ship” and leave a big unit out to get nuked

you just described all the armies that break the game. But, like, the combat activation thing just pushes you to make one big super unit where you dump all your stuff on. Or play a faction where you usually fight first anyways. Or play skaven and don't care if your units die, because they just attack in death anyways. AoS has a lot of gotchyas. Like more than most balanced games. Have you not played slaanesh before? "Oh, no, on a two plus you have to fight last. Gotchya" Skaven? "Oh I cast two spells that allows every dead rat to attack twice. Gotchya". Like this is a big thing. The complicated rules are offloaded to battletomes, but they exist.

note that a lot of tournies, for whatever reason considering they were hardly overpowered, refuse to allow firestorm cities.

Gotrek look like, in a KO army, best utilized as a way to scare the enemy from approaching your companies. With him as a sort of countering force, you may need less screening. Sadly he really eats into what you can budget for mobility, so your army is gonna have trouble getting from point A to point B

Here's a secret, a game isn't competitive if it isn't balanced. Feeling good you can lean entirely on lists is bad for being a competitive gamer. 40K isn't though. Its outliers get wacked way faster than AoS. The last too good list was forgeworld custodes. It lasted for a couple months. And then was nerfed. The game has increasingly implemented rules to make the first turn is no longer the dominating position. Extra saves, deep striking, scoring at the bottom of 2 have all helped. It will always, of course, have the problem that I go you go has where getting the opportunity to kill the enemy before they can act. But, like, AoS has that issue EVEN more. Every issue in 40k is magnified in the current AoS balance. And then there's the addition of things like free summoning being a further spanner in the works of balance that, let's be frank, GW has not gotten remotely right. And then there's the double turn which takes all the balance issues and obfuscates them with just a random roll that has such an overwhelming effect on the game so that when things fall apart is it cause a double turn happened, or because something like skaven are just a ridiculous book? AoS needs an overall balance pass. And it needs to get rid of the double turn to facilitate the ability to even do balance. You're one of those people. I don't begrudge someone using all the tools in the game to win, but I do begrudge the rules writers for allowing them abusive tools. You're not going to restrain your play, and why should you? It is in the rules. But GW should write a ruleset that helps emphasize skill and positioning and not whether your wombo combo went off first or not.

Yes, I in fact did say that GW needs to tighten up their rules set. The game should NOT be allowed to be played like this. That GW allows it makes the game worse. It is less fun. AoS has dropped off to nearly nothing in my local shop, and my shop is one of the busiest in America. A little over a year ago, we had a dozen people competing in the NOVA open AoS GT. This year we had... two I think. Maybe three. And for all of them, one of the biggest factors was... the game's balance fell apart. And these are quite competitive people. We've all largely jumped ship to Middle Earth SBG because the systems are tighter. And it would be a hard road to get AoS to be as well written as SBG, but it can at least be as well written as 40k.

That isn’t how the game should be played. Not on a prosaic self restraint level, but on a gw writing a tighter ruleset level. Gw has given us a ruleset ripe with some hilarious abuses at the most competitive level. I literally can’t look as a skaven army now and not roll my eyes The double turn is a part of this, but it bothers me that gw manages to tighten up 40k each pass while aos is like the Wild West where you put your three keepers on the field and end the game a thousand points up on your opponent.

Your first line is literally “ash should have made an army that would allow him to win in the first turn”. Like this is sort of illustrating the point winning the game in one super combo is kind of a bummer for both balance and fun

The fundamental question is not actually one of high or low fantasy. It is a question of world building and verisimilitude. “Low” fantasy often has the benefit of being able to shoulder a lot of those issues into real world assumptions. How does a gyro copter fly? It’s a helicopter run by basic combustion. How does an Arkanaut ironclad fly? It’s powered by magic floating gold. As modern humans we instinctively grasp that helicopter and combustion engines work, even if we individually don’t know how. Magic floating gold requires more effort to make it seem real. This combines with the issue that AoS is a setting and not a narrative. In a novel, world building can function being limited to the view points of the protagonists and the compelling story will see us through without having to worry so much about what people on the other side of the world eat AoS has a harder time creating verisimilitude. But the amount of that a person cares about varies

Super hero stories spend a significant amount of time focusing on the plight and struggles of the common man. Remember that scene in avangers when the old man stood up to loki and told him off. It was a great scene. Comics and movies are full of scenes like this. If you lack this you start to lose touch with the setting. You need pathos to make a good story

Pfffft, I’m the only ko player allowed in this community!

The idea that the likes of khorne or goramorka, or even the ever petulant and entitled Nagash, could actually have the self control to restrain themselves from fighting for any reason is a bit silly. Khorne isn’t gonna sit on his throne going “I better not take my big ass axe and hit dudes with it cause I don’t want to throw down with Sigmar” on the contrary, if he could, he’d probly bust his way into azyr and throw down right then and there

Your blightkings are gonna have their buffs up though. How does the math shift when your plus to hit and wound and all that Jazz, because you have the strategic initiative, and your kings have several buffs that are not hard for you to get them?

The double turn also incentivizes across the board in one turn murder armies. You don’t have to plan for the double if you win in one battle round, but if your army isn’t fast and can’t bring overwhelming damage in that first turn, going first is strictly worse than going second. Which helps feed feed into one of the biggest issues aos faces, the first turn murder armies

I mean, there’s a trend I notice in all threads talking about rules which is “but then you have skaven who....”