stratigo

An army that can expect to make it to the top 10 in a major.

If you're playing against nighthaunt, your army is suddenly always zilfin. at the pure cutting edge tournament level, KO don't have really any good matchups. Not even tzeentch any longer.

We tend towards a myopic focus on competitive viability, but if your meta is not competetive, you can run KO fine and still win. You just have to be willing to be more refined in list building than your buddies

Drill cannons are strictly worse than normal cannons. Remember they nerfed the 3 damage to d3 ages ago. And, yeah, they're armies that can be slow. But.... not really in a competitive sense. Look at every list at, say, Throne of Skulls. In the top ten pretty much all those armies were blisteringly fast except the legion of azgorh, and the legion is a super shooter army like foot based KO (except they have more meat, some magic, and mortal wound output). And even then, fast was relative. Anyone playing a good army is playing an army that has options to get to you ASAP, or doesn't care about getting to you because the army's power is in its magic or shooting phase.

The problem with kiting is that most AoS armies are quite fast. There’s no way to really ‘get away’ from a nurgle or Khorne or sylvaneth army usually. If you are within 24 inches, you are in their threat range, and several armies can get you from anywhere on the board. You need bubble wrap, which KO do not get natively.

It's the single most important roll in the game and significantly game breaking and, again, GW isn't going to keep it around. Stop deluding yourself to think this is an intended rule. If you want to win a game that badly, go for it. But don't justify it by rules lawyering GW's mistakes.

what is missing is damage. The math just favors company at larger numbers, and at smaller numbers it just doesn't matter. Also company get a plus one to hit against several targets. Note that this is specifically company with max light skyhooks, but GW has made the light skyhooks so overwhelmingly better than any other weapon they can get so as to not even be close to comparable.

because GW specifically targeted Lords of the Lodge for a nerf for matched play last year, and its obvious that is their intention even if you ram through the loophole that they forgot to keep up with that rule just like they messed up the rules of one for ripperdactyls infinite attacks. Anyone does well enough with it for GW to take notice and they'll close the loophole, so if you really want to be that guy in your gaming group, go for it, but just know that you're only going to be able to pull it off for a short time before they faq it, so don't get attached.

internal balance making an army ****** just means the entire army should get discounts. But the idea that you would take thunderers over arkanauts for battleline is a actually a bit crazy as arkanauts strictly doo more damage with their hooks than the thunderers can do. Thunderers would only ever replace taking tax units because you don't usually want to waste the khemist buff on 3 hooks. They'd combo better in frigates, but do less damage overall, even for 20 points less. There's not much point to thunderers except to take a cheaper smaller battleline tax. Arkanauts are a good enough unit to build strategies around. Thunderers are the way they are because they didn't think through the implications of their special weapons and emergency fixed it, nerfing the unit hard. Into uselessness. Making them battleline with no other changes would just make them a 300 point tax as opposed to a 360 point tax it you are trying to minimize battleline for, say, riggers. But company can be massed and love the khemist buff to be a very dangerous unit for a cost, while thunderers remain fairly bad at any size.

They use faqs to enact balance changes, which was the primary purpose of this faq, to nerf command stacking, and then a few other outliers. They could have thrown a bone to KO

Oh hey, ko are literally the only battle tome that didn’t get a change in the recent faq

yep. Getting out is at the start of the hero phase, the hero phase move is not

I actually have a fairly comprehensive list of changes I'd like to see to KO. 1. Arkanaut Company. I want their point reduced to 100, I want the light skyhook to lose 6 inches of range and one rend, and I want the pike to become a 3+ 3+ weapon. 2. Grundstock Gunhauler. Make this go down another 20 points, add 6 inches to the range of its big guns 3. Frigate. Add 6 inches to the range of its big guns and give it a 4+ save 4. Ironclad. Add 6 inches to the range of its big guns, except for the volley gun, and make it a 3+ save 5. Gundstock company. Make the battleline if KO allegiance and either reduce thier points by twenty, or make their special weapons 2 per 5. 6. Endrinriggers. Increase their points by 20 7. Endrimaster. Reduce his points a further 20 8. Khemist. Reduce his points by 20 to 40. 9. Wardens. Reduce their points by 20 Reasoning: 1. Arkanaut companies have absolutely no reason to take anything but the skyhook, and the skyhook as it stands dictates a lot of how you can play KO. Weakening the skyhook and strengthening the skypike gives players a reason to take the melee varient, and adds some much needed flexibility into the army. To compensate for a weaker skyhook points were reduced. The Skyhook's overwhelming effectiveness was the only reason to be 120. 2. The gunhauler is still an overall poor choice. At 140 it will remain a poor choice in most lists, but the grundstock escort wing is actually on the cusp of greatness, and a slightly cheaper gunhauler may push that type of list into viability. Also, upping the ranges for all main guns adds a bitof flexibility in the KO lists once more and allows for a bit more synergy with other units, as the big guns are all rather weak statistically. 3. The frigate's save isn't reflective of its battlefield role, and since behemoths lost the ability to gain cover, there's no good reason for this unit to be a 5 plus save any longer. 4. The same reasoning applies to the ironclad from the previous two ships. 5. Grundstock thunderers were heavily nerfed and have subsequently disappeared from every KO list. KO needs another battleline unit as there is frankly no excuse to saddle them with just one. Literally no other battle tome has this restriction. And, at 100 points, they fail to preform a battlefield role. They either need the ability to mass their special weapons, though not to the extent they used to, with an eye to receive a khemist buff, or they need to be cheaper. 6. In light of the buffs to all other units, nerfing this one a bit is reasonable to keep the army well balanced. The points increase also later justifies a point decrease from the khemist. 7. The endrimaster remains the odd man out of the army, especially now that navigators have found a purpose, struggling to find a place in any list. At 100 points and increased ship effectiveness, he may actually have a purpose. 8. The Khemist was over nerfed, and with nerfing both units the khemist's buffs most strongly impact (riggers and arkanauts with skyhooks), reducing him back down to 140 or 120 is entirely justified. 9. Even returning them to 20 points cheaper than riggers via a rigger nerf, at 120, this unit still feels weak. I continue to suspect their nerf was more to hurt fyreslayers and KO were collateral, but please don't nerf one army's units because another army makes an effective use of them. Nerf that army instead.

The grind stock escort wing is, ultimately, too many points. By like 400 or so points. Not that your army is going to be that wing at min size, three companies and then roughly two characters, and the only variation you get is what characters you want to bring (I suggest an ordinater and then probly a couple navigators) Ultimately your force simply isn’t substantial enough on the board.

My main problem with the iron sky squadron is that it's 130 points. That's a company. Is, if you minmax, 4 shots on turn 1 before than three skyhooks every turn of the game? I don't think to, the math just doesn't seem to work out considering how weak your army is going to be to try and fit in 4 frigates.

The save for company and thunderers is fine. If anything, the save for fyrslayers is too much XD. But, like, magical plate armor clad dudes only get a 4 up. 3 up is reserved for things very large and bulky from what I can see, which I would hope includes the ironclad in the future.

10 arkanauts in a frigate shooting out would be really neat. 20 arkanauts in an ironclad shooting out might be too strong in the hypothetical future where GW fixes how ****** summoning is at the ironclad's point cost.

Why? No really, why? It is not hard killing a ship. And not hard killing a ship while surrounding it and thus killing everyone inside.

So, any word on the army's changes?

Age of sigmar isn’t baseball There are stronger ways to build a KO army, but none of them matter in the current meta, it’ll be too slow to stop enemies from hitting critical mass with summoning and so you’ll be unable to push them off objectives or hit synergy heroes. If you try and run a mobile list, you’re no longer fast enough, and most armies are much more resilient now and mobile KO have always been a glass cannon army, but they disarmed the cannon.

The continued changes GW makes to KO indicate to me that they want KO to be played with a lot of ships. They want to see a fleet on the table, that is their conception of KO. They’ve tried to buff those units, and they have conclusively nerfed any standout strategies or units not based around ships. The problem is that they haven’t made ships able to carry the army, they’re far too timid in buffing them and their synergy characters. On the other hand, they have been more than willing to come down like a hammer on any unit or rule that allows a strategy that doesn’t revolve around multiple ships

KO were never meta. Even when Paul was getting good results with them in tournaments, there was never a mass shift to KO for tournament players. Their saving grace was a strong match up against tzeentch, and fairly alright matchups against a few other torunament armies like murderhost. But, as new army books came out, there were increasingly poor matchups. Nurgle is a poor matchup. Daughters of Khaine could very easily become a poor match up based on the temple (which is now a far far worse matchup) and Deepkin are a poor match up. Maybe there is some exploitative way to make a KO power list. I don't see how at all, but anything is possible. Even then... few people want to play that list. And it will guaranteed get nerfed the next balance pass, as GW has done consistently to every KO build that doesn't fit their vision. I'd be fine if their vision of the army actually worked, but it doesn't, and I'm not sure they can make it work with just point changes, and I can count on one hand the number a actual warscroll changes they have done (and it was done to nerf KO specifically). Flatly, I want a good army. Not the best army. A good army that I like the look and background of. And KO are not that army any longer.

Some nerfs are, others make no sense with the general trend of GW buffing many of the already tournament strong armies (SCE got a buff. Nurgle got a buff. Seraphon got a buff. ETC). Why put so much effort in nerfing KO? It almost certainly has nothing to do with balance and how good the army is relative to others and most likely involves the way GW thinks you should play KO, but lacking the gumption to actually make that way good, instead preferring to just nerf any way the faction plays outside what they consider the true way until that's the only way to play, too bad you'll still lose most of your games.

Is it really KO if you derive your power from SCE allies?

forgeworld does this all the time. Forgeworld doesn't really have the people to balance their stuff.