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I’m lucky to be in a gaming group with zero TFGs, so these exploits aren’t really relevant to my personal play experience. Unfortunately not everyone is as fortunate, and it sucks if stuff like this puts someone off the game. To broaden the discussion, are there examples of games where these types of exploits are non-existent? That is, no matter how hard one tried, it would be impossible to build a list that, when played against a new player, would make them go “This is bs”. I think that for many games (such as historicals), the community is such that no one would even think of creating such a list, even if it was possible. Warhammer is a special case. It has gone from being a GM-regulated game, focused on asymmetrical scenarios and extreme randomness (1st ed WHFB), to a highly competitive tournament game, but the rules designers haven’t actually acknowledged or encouraged this until very recently. Especially Jervis has seemingly never had any interest in creating such a game, and judging from the launch of AoS and his vision of it, this hasn’t really changed. So what we have is what the designers imagined to be a narrative-focused game being dragged kicking and screaming into competitive play. It’s actually incredible that they have reached a point where the game has a thriving tournament scene. Can you imagine this sort of transformation for any other casual wargame?

Typically its not the game that enforces the lack of skew lists its the community.

Having experience in both historicals and battletech, if someone showed up to a game against a new player with a skew list, the community would quickly see that person out of their group.

We have a large historical and battletech group in my city and this kind of thing never happens except on the rare. But its not because the rules don't let you do it.

There's something about the community that centers around GW games that attracts the competitive players that want to run lists to try and break the game more than historicals or battletech do I suppose.

It might be a generation thing as well as a club thing

First up historical games TEND TO (not always) have an older roster of gamers compared to GW games. So part of a social difference could just be generation gap.

It could also be that many who come to historical games are often after as much recreation of history as they are a wargame; so that in turn influences how they pick armies. In short they are picking armies in a more visual/themed/fluffy manner rather than competitive because there's more of a social unspoken acceptance that people are recreating history not just playing for wins.
Warhammer lacks this totally because it hasn't got a battle history in the same way to base how people build their lists.


Club wise its much easier to keep people involved if you provide activities; esp for younger generations who are often busy with either school/uni/work/life/families and often don't live as "regular" life as those who are older who often settle into habits more regularly.
Tournaments and competitions are easy to setup and generate their own focus with little input.







As for the whole "big mean list VS newbie" that argument always gets thrown around in balance chats. It's likely happened or been seen to happen to/by us at least once. Most times its because of a breakdown of communications or simply that the advanced player isn't thinking with a teaching mindset. It's a game so they brought their army.
VERY few times is it someone just out to curb-stomp a newbie because its easy. Indeed I'd wager such people often get booted out of clubs; asked to leave or wind up with no one to play against.



Another aspect might be tht historicals and such simply have more mature rule systems that don't reinvent the wheel every edition and thus they achieve a higher level of internal balance. Thus meaning that "breaking" the game isn't as viable.


Edit - in my view MTG is actually worse as the game is built around complex interactions and deck lists that work fast with powerful combos; and the power difference there between entry or fluffy lists and proper lists is vast to the point where its not just hard to beat its actually near impossible unless the better deck gets a bad shuffle and either gets no land or all land

Most of the guys that club the baby seals aren't doing it for easy wins, they are doing it because they want the baby seals to immerse themselves in the OP lists so that they learn to build OP lists themselves and become competitive players to jump in the competitive pool.

They can often see it as a weeding out process.

auticus wrote:
Most of the guys that club the baby seals aren't doing it for easy wins, they are doing it because they want the baby seals to immerse themselves in the OP lists so that they learn to build OP lists themselves and become competitive players to jump in the competitive pool.

They can often see it as a weeding out process.

Yeah and in that case its often that the experienced player just doesn't know how to teach a newer player. Teaching is a skill of its own and just because someone is good at something does not mean that they can teach it. I know many skilled people who are really rubbish teachers.

The only person I know who actively seemed to seek out the baby seals to club did quite intentionally because he wanted wins and people who didn’t know rules well enough to catch him cheating. He wasn’t very good otherwise and eventually stopped coming after getting DQed out of a tournament for cheating.

I agree those people can exist (seeking out the baby seals for their sweet sweet easy win).

I'm just playing devils advocate that in a lot of cases those guys aren't gonig for easy wins they are trying to bone up their competitive player pool.

Overread very clearly pointed out a great fact though: teaching is not an easy skill and just because you have skill doesn't mean you are good at teaching the game.

I haven't seen a non-GW community in a long time (The closest was Warmahordes, which was competitive focused but the people were genuinely nice and helpful here. Even our top tier players would be glad to give advice and help out) but I would agree that GW games seem to attract the types that play it to win, despite GW games being often some of the most imbalanced games out there. I do vaguely recall some of those types in Battletech, but Battletech hasn't been seen in my area since like 1994 (I myself stopped playing Battletech when I discovered Warhammer). Historicals are unknown here (much to my chagrin as I'd love to play it). Infinity I think I saw played once. Malifaux never saw played or talked about. Kings of War has a small following here. X-Wing/Armada I've seen but had no interest in.

Luckily a friend and I have started getting people interested in AOS during the week, and while he has been a more competitive player he has an interest in growing the community with a variety of styles, and I would prefer to dabble in Open and Narrative play.

 Overread wrote:

auticus wrote:
Most of the guys that club the baby seals aren't doing it for easy wins, they are doing it because they want the baby seals to immerse themselves in the OP lists so that they learn to build OP lists themselves and become competitive players to jump in the competitive pool.

They can often see it as a weeding out process.

Yeah and in that case its often that the experienced player just doesn't know how to teach a newer player. Teaching is a skill of its own and just because someone is good at something does not mean that they can teach it. I know many skilled people who are really rubbish teachers.

That's why locally we have certain people 'forbidden' to teach new players. They would just throw the rulebook at them and expect them to know it inside and out, the teaching games would be over in 5-10 minutes and you'd never see the new players again.

We’ve definitely had a Guild Ball community as well as the GW, WM, and Xwing one’s. Batman and Infinity as well to a lesser extent.

 Kanluwen wrote:

That's why locally we have certain people 'forbidden' to teach new players. They would just throw the rulebook at them and expect them to know it inside and out, the teaching games would be over in 5-10 minutes and you'd never see the new players again.

Our solution just seems to be that I'm always wearing my TO hat; even on casual nights.

I was actually quite good at teaching new players the ropes. I would even aim to lose in their first match without making it obvious, because a win can really boost their confidence and get them hooked. I can't stand seal clubbing. I was on the receiving end of it, and I saw new players being driven away by it, and it sucks.

And I tell you all, if I made a game like AoS, I would make the power of the units quite restrained, so as to aim to avoid crazy unbalance. Like, as a rule of thumb, I'd keep the number of attacks of models in actual units under 4 unless they're something very weak (less than 4+/4+/-). Likewise, I'd keep the damage of attacks of the same under control too. No joke, I'd rarely go past 1, with multiple damage being reserved for special weapons or special bonuses, like a wound roll of 6+.

This is because there will always be something out there to boost the numbers of attacks or damage or whatever, and imo this is where things always get out of control, except for a few armies, who then get left in the lurch because of it. When units of 20 models are pouring out 150+ attacks, something is off. But this is all subjective though. People are bound to disagree. I just think that the game would work better if it was very hard to engineer 'unit deletion' units rather than that being easy.

So on the subject of TO hats, about to run my first AoS tournament here soon and I’ve got someone saying it’s a common rule where they don’t allow Allegiance Scenery such as Wyldwoods and the Nurgle tree near Objectives. I know the recent FAQs added that rule to the Idoneth shipwrecks, is it often used for the others as well and is that a thing I should do?

 AduroT wrote:
So on the subject of TO hats, about to run my first AoS tournament here soon and I’ve got someone saying it’s a common rule where they don’t allow Allegiance Scenery such as Wyldwoods and the Nurgle tree near Objectives. I know the recent FAQs added that rule to the Idoneth shipwrecks, is it often used for the others as well and is that a thing I should do?

I would strongly recommend that you do it.

Thats the first time I ever heard that before.

Just thought I'd change this post. No reason to dwell on jerks who damaged a local gaming scene now that they are gone.

One thing I'll say about the new edition is that I don't really like how the rules are strewn over so many books. I have the core book, ghb and malign sorcery and that combined with battletomes is a bit much for my liking. I'm thinking I'm going to take screen shots of my digital copies and make a folder of just rules page images on my tablet. It's annoying to have it all so spread out across multiple epubs. They don't load as fast as PDFs I have for other games and I think a folder of images in my photo app will solve the problem.

What do I hope is next for AoS?

A Legions of Nagash style book for all the other small factions. Spawn of the Horned Rat? Hordes of Gorkamorka? An army book about Free Cities that includes a place for all the orphaned order stuff even better than Firestorm did. Then after that, a version 2 of the initial run of AoS Battletomes like Sylvaneth, Seraphon, Ironjaws, Fyreslayers and the like. Then something new like Slaanesh.

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
So on the subject of TO hats, about to run my first AoS tournament here soon and I’ve got someone saying it’s a common rule where they don’t allow Allegiance Scenery such as Wyldwoods and the Nurgle tree near Objectives. I know the recent FAQs added that rule to the Idoneth shipwrecks, is it often used for the others as well and is that a thing I should do?

I would strongly recommend that you do it.

So what, like 6”, same as the Idoneth shipwrecks?

In fairness the Malign Sorcery book you really only need to read out the stats for the items you take or the spells and then put that on a cheat sheet; the actual magic page is the same as in the core rule book.

 AduroT wrote:

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
So on the subject of TO hats, about to run my first AoS tournament here soon and I’ve got someone saying it’s a common rule where they don’t allow Allegiance Scenery such as Wyldwoods and the Nurgle tree near Objectives. I know the recent FAQs added that rule to the Idoneth shipwrecks, is it often used for the others as well and is that a thing I should do?

I would strongly recommend that you do it.

So what, like 6”, same as the Idoneth shipwrecks?

Yes that’s right. It is probably for the best believe me.

This was posted to reddit today, and I would be interested to hear input from some of you. It's a list of tournament results thus far for 2.0. I'm trying to get more info on how and where the data was collected. Seraphon are a lot further down the list than I would suspect, and based on this, I would say Daughters of Khaine is actually doing the best given they have almost as many top 10 finishes as Legions of Nagash, but with less than half of the meta representation. Interestingly, all three Dark Powers with a proper battletome have performed about the same.

Sincerely apologize for the necromancy, but this seems like the best place to link it.

If its the list on twitter and making its rounds I will say that it is a tiny sampling based on a couple of "GTs". As such, while interesting and definitely has good debate points, I don't find it conclusive.

EDIT: saw the link and yeah thats the list. I posted my comment on twitter about it as well not being conclusive or having nearly enough data to make any solid conclusions with it.

Finally got a source. Looks like it was originally from TGA and features 7 GTs including NOVA

Using just GTs, where armies generally need to be painted, combined with them being scarcely more than two months after 2.0 release at the latest means this is not particularly relevant in my eyes.

I do, however, appreciate the effort whoever went through. It is still a point of data that can be combined with others down the road.