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stratigo

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Everything posted by stratigo

  1. Balance to me seems about as bad as it ever was. The games hasn’t become more balanced and the rules have simply shifted from one kind of death star unit to another
  2. I actually did start a new army this year. Eldar. For 40k. Life as a KO player has left me kind of down on AoS. The army oscillates from brutally overpowered to hilariously underpowered and either way it's... not that fun to play. I have largely concluded that KO is the tau of AoS, at a core design level it doesn't seem to be able to play the game in a way that's interactive. And there isn't another AoS army that inspires me aesthetically
  3. GW was a model company. They're an IP company now. But the reason people come back to GW is because GW dominates the market and a not good game you get to play is better then an excellent one you never do.
  4. I mean there was the Hewitt interview that literally said that. It doesn't happen as often as people presume. Rountree doesn't come down the the writer room every week and demand they up the power of X unit because the sales team told him they should. But it DOES happen every once in a while. But usually not, and you can never know why a particular unit got the love, wether a suit went "Make it good" or the person writing is was just "I am so full of cool ideas! Let's put all of them in" or "Eh, here's something for this unit, I'm not really gonna check it because i don't care about this faction". I mean, I think this one is because the rules writers went "Dragons are Fing cool! Give them all the rules!" It's a problem when you hire for people with passion and no experience cause they cheap. They tend to let their passion run wild, cause that's the thing keeping them in the job. And, like, they aren't paid to playtest thoroughly. Dragons are not fine. Deal with it. Match play is overwhelmingly the way the majority of players play because it is the only easy, no thought needed, way to create an army and select objectives. Even people playing narrative campaigns will default to match play games because it is by far the easiest way to play, and the one that give the most appearance of balance. Which is actually important. Vanishingly few people make an army to lose all their games. Narrative players never organize? they never feel done wrong by an op power list and complain about it? How many 'narrative' games do you play in a given week mate? Who with?
  5. You don't actually seem to get why the amulet was a problem. It isn't that it was just too good and no tome artifacts could compete. It was because it WASN'T balanced for every army, the save gets MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better the more wounds you have, because it is a save. A 5 wound hero with the amulet is nothing. A 36 wound Gargent is a nightmare. It was an unbalanced artifact that created winners and losers based on the quality of your hero monsters, and THAT is why it had to go away. The problem with the amulet is that it did what you are decrying here, make winners and losers based on quirks of tomes.
  6. battlelines tend to be so diverse that you can build any theme around them for most armies. Ultimately battlelines aren't for realism or logic. They exist for game balance. And I agree that they do a poor job in this regard
  7. This would make sense on a grand military scale, but AoS is mostly a skirmish. You get maybe 150 models at most. A good representation of a society's army this is not. Indeed at this size it is eminently conceivable that this is a specialized all elite formation.
  8. Sweet. I just want to reiterate that I really enjoy soulbound. It's a fun system in a fun setting. Wish I could get more gaming going with it, covid and life issues have really attritted down a lot of my gaming communities.
  9. I think you attribute incompetence too easily. I mean, yes, often GW is just bad at balance (and AoS is by far the most problematic. At least Necromunda the rules writers deliberately go "Balance? Never heard of her"). But they are also, well, obviously seeking money with a lot of changes. I mean, come on, they literally killed horde meta for monster meta in the edition change. They aren't THAT dumb, they knew what this would do. It isn't even meta chasers, it's just literally anyone at all playing the game. And, considering just how addicted people get to GW games, how powerful the social bonds formed in gaming groups are, I really am not sure that more people stop playing rather then grumble and buy the new meta stuff. I doubt the hand of corporate reaches down too often, but for edition changes, I am certain it does. The rest of the time they simply refuse to pay their writers enough to get good rules, which is the actual real problem, not that they are a bunch of narrative gamers. They're simply paid too little to put in all the effort required to craft, playtest, refine, playtest, etc.
  10. It isn't model count, it's overall profit. One big model or 30 smaller ones often cost the same GW deliberately upends the meta with regularity because that prompts people to buy new models or armies.
  11. They aren't wrong, but they seem to be under the impression that the way to do this is to add more rules.
  12. Both of which accomplish this by being smaller. ASOIF absolutely does not have a faster ruleset, jut less moveable piece, and rank and flank units move faster
  13. I mean, it's a big problem to me how mobile destruction (especially OWC) are. Like, they casually charge from one edge of the board to the other. The mobility in this game narrows the tactical space of the game and requires shooting to be super one shot powerful, or it is mostly useless
  14. Being a KO player is a wild ride, we rocket to the top or the bottom with little in between tome to tome and edition to edition
  15. *Checks in* Are KO still a trashfire? Yep? Okay *Checks out*
  16. KO don't have the firepower to eliminate key targets in the current rules at all really. KO has stepped off a cliff.
  17. Archaon getting binned is better than having archaon be the reason that 90 percent of the model range is binned. Archaon is good enough that he suppresses even other hero monsters.
  18. You absolutely have to kill things to score vps. You get vps for killing things. There's more than just primaries. And, again, a hero monster dominates the field. It makes careful movement impossible. I don't know what games you are playing where you manage to win by ignoring a hero monster. I don't think they exist. You reckon with the hero monster, or that monster kills all your objective scoring units. There are precious few ways to keep away from it. Can't score many points when archaon has killed your entire army after all. Archaon is a damage check, with maybe a scant handful of tricks that can keep him locked down. But he needs to go or be nullified, or you lose.
  19. And it is never good. Like, just because GW keeps stepping on this rake and smacking themselves in the face doesn't mean this is a good thing. GW should strive to make all armies viable, and most units in those armies. And they clearly don't even try. It's no mistake that threads complaining about balance are pretty much perennial. AoS balance is always trash, and players always want it to be better (Unless they are the archaon player and just like ruining their friends). So, keep complaining. GW isn't deaf, they get motivated to fix things by player sentiment. And I'd argue strongly that it is much worse now then it was in 2nd. There are fewer viable models, and they are mostly heroes riding monsters. The haves absolutely can still hit archaon with their hammer and kill him (or archaeon lists would literally never lose). 3rd has done nothing but made the vast gulf between haves and have nots dramatically wider, and changed a few haves and have nots. It has narrowed how you can play the game to such a tiny amount of models and lists. 40k 9th edition didn't do this. Archaon is just the effigy. His problem is shared by any 3 plus monster hero. He just concentrates it.
  20. Which renders a bunch of armies, and like 80 percent of all models completely useless. Like utterly and completely not worth bothering. Game's mighty boring with the same 5 armies using only the same 5 units of their books.
  21. Because KO lose when they don't kill Archaon. Your mindscape doesn't match the reality of the game man. Archaon moves too fast, KO are too combo heavy. The second Archaon hits the ironclad, game's over. And he'll hit it in the first few turns. There's no way to both avoid archaon and score objectives for KO. Archaon by himself, without literally any other models, has the damage output to table a KO army. He's fast, the board is small, and objectives are close. As a KO player, you kill archaon or lose. Simple as. Your anvils aren't anvils. They're battleships. They survive everything and kill everything and if your army doesn't have one, or the equivalent of torpedoes (MW spam) you are going to lose. Every. Single. Time There is no tactical choice to take when the 2 plus unrendable monster hops on the middle objective, in easy threat range of all the other objectives, and can trivially kill anything in your entire army. The only thing it can't kill is itself (unless it is a MW spewer like archaon. Then it just wins all things all the time). I'd be way more okay with tough low damage output units. We don't got that one mate, we have the strongest units being the toughest units, and everyone else is pretty worthless or uses mortal wounds. I mean the skill that current save stacking and mortal wound trends test for is how to build lists and how deep your wallet is.
  22. they need to do the FAQ again to clarify how fly high interacts with movement, and disengages explicitly
  23. The most prominent of reviewers could possibly make a career of being someone who stood against the shady tactics and use that to push themselves as the honest reviewer. An... honest wargamer if you will ( ). But this will be a minority of people who can do this. Smaller then the video game companies that managed this (And, well, giantbomb ain't looking so hot any more anyways. Least Jim's still doing his wierd wonderful thing) since the hobby is also smaller. It might be why there would be two kinds of NDAs, the thumbscrews to the little people, and a less draconian one to channels with some clout.
  24. Piracy is and always will be largely an access issue. The people who will always pirate are a small percentage of pirates if you make purchasing your product a giant hassle (and, like, are unreachable anyways. Even if piracy is entirely impossible, they simply won't partake). GW making the product harder to purchase WILL promote piracy. Also illegal is not immoral, and it is actually quite disturbing conflating legal with moral considering what has been and often still is legal. So pirating is not wrong, nor is it right intrinsically. Unless you are basing our ethical system on kantian ethics. Which I hope you wouldn't because kantian ethics is terrible. Under a better ethical system (like, say, variations of utilitarian ehtics) the morality of any action, including piracy, is what kind of suffering or pleasure it creates. And that often only has passing relation with what is and is not legal. Not allowing advocating for piracy is a good policy to have on a forum to protect it from legal action and preserve official relationships. Decrying piracy as always wrong is a moral stance that is... misguided. As in all things, context matters I mean they gone even crazier and done away with accessing digital rules entirely without a physical purchase. This is legitimately insane to me. You have to buy both the hard copy AND the app to access your rules digitally, in a format that strips out half the neat things I want the book for. I can't tell you the last time I bought a physical book (well I bought House of Shadows physical copy cause I am a necromunda fanatic, so I can actually tell you, but I am gonna be using a digital copy for 90 percent of any games I play with Delaque), and I purchase virtually all my books, from fiction to rules, to scholarly works online (usually through the monster that is amazon, to my slight shame). And this is quite common. It is a mind boggling move of GW's to force you to buy a hard copy and then pay a monthly fee for their app to access their rules online. And then they don't even have the decency of making a quality online product to force you to work through. If I pay 60 dollars for a book, give me the PDF please. Like I can't see this as anything but shrinking their sales. I know it has shrunk my purchases. I don't know what i'm going to do when GW finally gets around to updating the armies i actually play, for both 40k and AoS (they still offer digital copies of necromunda and SBG products funnily enough). The answer might be to simply stop playing. Or... continue not playing at this point, thank you delta variant and antivaxxers. luckily no amount of piracy can cause GW to fail. They're not a book retailer (and to be clear, piracy has done a number on many publishing industries). They're a miniature retailer, they make their bucks on models and a little on paints, and very very little on rules sales. I have to wonder, legally, what is getting a copy of the rules from a friend? That legal or not? How about borrowing their rulebook? I've seen big brained thinkers (on dakkadakka) saying borrowing a rulebook is tantamount to piracy. Is it piracy to transcribe paused minutes into image files? How about to take the information and transcribe it in plain text? People on this very forum do that all the time There's a lot of murky areas about IP laws that no lay person is going to know. This is... weirdly naïve. Plenty of actual existing companies in the same market as GW DO in fact produce rules for free. And aren't all going out of business because of it. Or, uh, writing rules that are worse than GW's to put it lightly. And, like, as we've established, they pay their writing staff peanuts anyways. Can't hardly pay them less. They'd all starve I think governments really REALLY need to step in to restrain the modern excesses of capitalism so we can enjoy the benefits of it without the horrible drawbacks, but that modern capitalism also makes it nearly impossible for governments to restrain via coopting the state bodies supposed to restrain and regulate it. And that this will continue to build societal tension until things snap (especially with how climate change is shaping up) and everything is then up in the air and could come down in some very dark ways. GW is just another company that should have its, admittedly far less serious than many companies, excesses reined in. Here's an alternative to saying elite. Old white men. I desperately don't want a hobby that caters to middle aged and older white dudes over everyone else. I'd rather they cater to excitable 12 year olds. Seriously the demographics of warhammer get real distressing if you price or otherwise block out anyone but the upper middle class and above. And the politics of a plurality of these dudes makes a community ultra toxic (this is certainly true in my local community) to people like me (you know, lgbt people. But also minorities and cis women, which is why its old white dudes and no old white ladies.) So even those non old white men who COULD participate leave because enough of the old white men are just too hateful to be around. The less accessible a game, the smaller and worse the community gets. It benefits most of us to have a broader more inclusive community, and only a scant handful to gate out everyone who is different.
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