Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Ok. Well if the waywatcher is 120 points for you means that ranged units across the board are all undercost, bless you.

I've already been in this conversation multiple times. You want to needle and nitpick and pedant.

This whole conversation started with stating that a summoner can hide in the corner of the table means that saying ranged units being too powerful is some form of lying.

I don't care about the math, to be honest.

And with that we can end the discussion here. In a game that revolves around stats, probabilities, and number generators, math is the only source of information that matters when it comes to gauging numeric strength of odds and what is under / over costed.

If one person has a ton of math and calculations to back that up and the response is "well I don't care I'm just right" it isn't going to come across very well.

auticus wrote:
Ok. Well if the waywatcher is 120 points for you means that ranged units across the board are all undercost, bless you.

Compare a 120pt Waywatcher to a melee dedicated hero. I can wait.

A Waywatcher gets 3 attacks at 22" with 3+/3+ and Rend of -1. He can make two different shots; one where he gets 3 more attacks and to Hit rolls of 6 grant additional attacks OR one where he deals 2 damage with each bow shot and each time he makes a wound roll of 6 or more then the Rend is -2 instead of -1. He has a -1 to be hit during the Shooting phase and gets +1 to hit rolls with his bow if he stood still during Movement. He has a Command Ability allowing him to make it so that a Wanderers unit within 18" of him gets the same -1 to being hit during the Shooting phase as him.

Even when he was 100pts, quite a few of the Wanderers players that I've read their lists for tournaments and the like only take them to unlock Sisters of the Watch as Battleline. SoTW are considered a pretty damn good shooting unit simply because they get an "Overwatch" ability that very few units get.

I've already been in this conversation multiple times. You want to needle and nitpick and pedant.

And, to put it politely, you'd rather just drop stats and not actually engage in a discussion. You think that the math is the end all be all. It is for tournaments, certainly.

This whole conversation started with stating that a summoner can hide in the corner of the table means that saying ranged units being too powerful is some form of lying.

Now hold on one second. If you think I'm saying you're lying, that's something I want to clarify right here and now--that's not the case. Accusing someone of being disingenuous does not mean you're accusing them of lying--it means that you're saying they're purposely leaving things out for the sake of their argument.

It would be like if I pretended that Skyfires didn't exist when I make my arguments about ranged units. I try to make sure I always have a caveat in there about how there are SOME units that are just ridiculous in terms of ranged.

I don't care about the math, to be honest.

And with that we can end the discussion here. In a game that revolves around stats, probabilities, and number generators, math is the only source of information that matters when it comes to gauging numeric strength of odds and what is under / over costed.

And here's the crux of the issue:
You just want to run the numbers, you don't really seem to care what the actual unit does.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
If one person has a ton of math and calculations to back that up and the response is "well I don't care I'm just right" it isn't going to come across very well.

That's fair enough, but realistically I feel that simply talking about the math isn't actually addressing the issue at hand.

What can we, realistically, do to make ranged units worth their points without making them into Skyfires?

Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it. You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all. Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it.

What are you using as "melee equivalents"?

You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all.

I frequently express the sentiment of units that I play to be worth their points. I'd be absolutely fine with the Waywatcher to lose his Command Ability and ability to make Sisters of the Watch Battleline(never understood why that happened anyways--it should be the Waystrider doing that) in exchange for him to be a guaranteed character killer.

Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

Increase or decrease?

Because your statement makes no sense if you're truly meaning "increase".

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Well a waywatcher is totally worth 120 points. I've seen it played, I've run the numbers vs melee equivalents and it is very much worth it.

What are you using as "melee equivalents"?

You don't think it's worth it because you frequently express the sentiment of wanting units you play to be better at no cost at all.

I frequently express the sentiment of units that I play to be worth their points. I'd be absolutely fine with the Waywatcher to lose his Command Ability and ability to make Sisters of the Watch Battleline(never understood why that happened anyways--it should be the Waystrider doing that) in exchange for him to be a guaranteed character killer.

Further, I raise your evidence that they aren't very tournament viable as good evidence they are appropriately costed now; a unit that sees limited tournament play likely needs a small point increase to bring it in line.

Increase or decrease?

Because your statement makes no sense if you're truly meaning "increase".

So you just want the unit to be something different personally? That's totally fine, but it's about personal preference, not balance.

auticus wrote:
Ranged units being able to delete units off the board has nothing to do with being unable to pick out a caster purposely hiding in the opposite corner of the table out of range.

I've already done a complete math analysis of the entire game twice now to know that a good chunk of ranged units are by far and away not overpriced. A lot sit on the bell curve which is fine, but a unit being priced correctly or near correctly does not make it over priced because a solid 20% of the game is underpriced. It means that GW fails to balance their game for the 20% of the game that is underpriced, which includes a good chunk of units with ranged options. (the exact number sitting ABOVE the average bell curve was 18%)

The ranged units that I see day in and day out are usually the ones that sit above the bell curve of power, meaning that they are under cost for what they do.

I've already done several threads on dakka about this very topic several times now over the past three years. If you have some kind of math that shows the majority of ranged units are overcost, please present it because I'd like to see it.

Your math sucks. Sorry. I don't know what parameters you used but they failed utterly to simulate reality. Ranged units in general perform extremely poorly outside of the well known standouts (Skyfires, Balloon Kharadron, Judicators, Kurnoths...ish, longgunners assuming fully buffed) If your finding are utterly inconsistent with the reality of the tabletop across literally thousands of competitive games that means that you made an error in your assumptions or missed a variable somewhere.


The ability to do math is great and very helpful to ballparking the value of a unit, it is not an absolute correct doctrine of power on the simple basis of their being too many variables to account for. So you do damage output, great. How do you Valuate range? Movement? Wounds? Bravery? Save? Footprint? Buff-ability? Ease of Use? Presumably you're using some sort of weighting systems for these (even a child would know better than to take raw DPS output and call that done) and if even one of these weights is off you could be orders of magnitude wrong in your determination of strength.

And then you have matchup strength. Even the best shooting units in the game are largely useless against vanguard wing. Any shooting units that can't do reliable mortal wounds will be totally unable to do ANY damage to a Stardrake+Fulminator list, Murderhost and Beastclaw raiders can touch the back board edge on the first turn with a bit of luck practically eliminating the shooting phase, Deepkin make shooting units a sad joke for the most part, DoK have the ability to make their entire army -1 to hit for all shooting units, etc, etc, etc. How are you accounting for the likelihood of running into these lists?

Doing the math on units doesn't give you some deep insider knowledge of the inner workings of the game. Every competitive player does very similar math, though most tend not to bother with clear underperformers the same way as you. The difference seems to be: 1. They're not quite as conceited about their ability to do simple statistical analysis and 2. They're better at it. You've been consistently wrong about the strength of units and armies since the first day the general's handbook dropped. You fall months behind the powercurve and cite 'competitive' tables that are clearly average to mediocre players with a competitive outlook as being the absolute best dipstick of power.

Ive been waiting a few weeks to back your attacks and you still havent.

Your recent claim was that nagash is present on high tournament tables and that im full of **** because i made the claim nagash isnt seen very often, which im still waiting on evidence for.

A solid half dozen times before that you cite some example of me being grossly wrong without citing an example and then when prompted for one you vanish, only to appear later with the same song and dance.

Your posts are filled with nothing but bait and attacks so erjack welcome to my ignore list, you wontf be getting a further response from me.

As to kan’s response above that i dont want to engage in discussion, thats also not true. But your recent commentary has also been inflammatory andattacking and there is no discussion to be had while the talk is tinged with attacks.

The math is the only thing we have with substance. Everything beyond that is simply conjecture. Its running in circles going “this is op because i feel it is” followed by “no its not because i feel its not”. Followed by a jackanape going “git gud”

Accusing me of disenginuity is the same as accusing me of lying to me, because its a form of willfully obscuring what i know to be the truth; deception. Which im in no way employing.

You and i also very clearly have different objectives and goals and so i again chalk that up to agree to disagree and go from there. My primary goals are immersion narratively. Give me an idea for a buff to shooting units that makes sense bd is logical and not gamey for the sake of gamey and ill definitely consider it.

Regardless though it doesnt matter since neither you nor i are on the design team or have influence to change their opinion or designs. So getting heated over opinions that cant change the game are pointless to me.

This thread has been thoroughly derailed. Lets get back on topic.

It would indeed be wonderful if we could stay on topic and more importantly adhere to rule #1 while we're at it.

This actually stems from GW having a very traditional wargaming approach combining with how many player's of their game want a common framework so they can play strangers.

Probably the biggest eye opening experience for me was when I got boxes of wargaming books and newsletters from the 1960s and 70s in an estate sale. As I read them over time I started to see pretty much every mechanic GW uses present in the rules that predate the drive towards complexity that happened in the late 70s and into the 80s. In the 80s, games like Starfleet Battles, Battletech, tons of historical games and many RPGs were driving the complexity way, way up.

GW didn't follow suit in all their games. Warhammer and 40k stuck with the simpler ideas of the 60s. Roll a dice for a model, roll to hit, roll to wound, roll a save. Simple move-shoot-charge turn structures.

One thing that's in all these old games is that the actual set up of the game is negotiable. The original designers of warhammer still play that way. You can still see that in their more current projects like Black Powder or Hail Caesar from Warlord Games.

Rick Priestly wrote a book a couple years ago entitled Tabletop Wargames: A Designers' and Writers' Handbook

Rick Priestly wrote:There are essentially three things to grasp about points values –

They don’t work
nevertheless we have to have them
even so they can’t really be reduced to a mathematical formula.

He also had something interesting to say in an editorial in Wargames Soldiers & Strategy magazine:

Rick Priestly wrote:When we are dealing with commercial rules and ranges of models, it is the duty of the army lists to structure forces in a way that enhances the commercial value of the range, whilst using the points values and the internal rules of the list itself to maintain a reasonable balance during game play. This is the most difficult aspect of list-writing for fantasy games. You have to respect the commerciality of the list (or livelihoods will be lost … starting with yours!) but the commercial value of the whole game relies entirely upon its appeal to the gaming public.

This army building framework is about commerciality.

One guy in our local group exemplifies this. He's getting into AoS and the first thing he did after narrowing down a faction was to prebuild a 1000 and 2000 point army list and then started buying towards having that. The rest of us are just buying whatever we think looks cool or whatever strikes as awesome in the fiction.

For many people, the points system supplies them with needed direction in collecting. But that's not really what this thread is about.

In the old wargames people played for decades without point systems. They negotiated their way towards putting models on the table, perhaps agreeing to use approximations of historical formations or actual battles as inspiration. Eventually the army list and points were born, but it took a large amount of commercialization to make that approach the dominant one.

So you have this points and army building system that was really just about an easy way to get a game set up. And it was also about a framework for collecting models so a range could be even more commercially viable.

Now take that environment and try to make the strongest list possible. Start viewing the points as a game resource that you spend in order to get the strongest army you can. Gamify the very setting up of the game itself.

That's where this strange imbalance seeking comes from.

And it's not bad!

It's just different. As it's now part of the game itself (making strategic choices about what goes into your army) it's safe to assume that people enjoy it.

I'm not a competitive magic player, but a friend is and he always comments about how wargaming players haven't yet embraced the variety of ways to play that magic players have. That it's okay for people to take different approaches as long as their priorities line up. I'll let him know about this thread and maybe he can comment further.

The real problems are when imbalance and broken game play happen by accident. When people who are not interested in this approach find a massive amount of synergy dumped on one side of their game.

While it might be tempting to say it's also a problem when two people who want different things from the game have the exact same negative experience, that's actually socially correctable. You can talk about what you want out of the game.

And the accidental breaking happens way, way less. To make a tournament level army you have to think very differently about your allegiance and allies and command abilities and spells and the tempo of a game and how it all interacts with expected scenarios.

This is even more so in 40k where you design your detachments around stratagems and command points to make the best possible army. People were not building the Allaitoc/Ynnari tournament list by accident. Nor do they spam mortars by accident. When you are gluing the wings onto your 3rd hive tyrant, you know what you are doing.

Exalted your post for the well thought out response. Thank you for the input.

I have that book by Rick Priestly. Its a great read. Probably one of my favorites particularly if you are interested in designing games yourself.

Simple.

GW cult of loyalty trumps everything else. You play the game that has opponents. If the cheese du jour is what is being played, that's what you buy in to. It'd be simple enough to vote with our wallets and lay our complaints out on the different media outlets, but it won't happen because GW players for decades have been acclimated to the paradigm shifts.

This is why I went retro, simpler to stick with a dead edition and recruit players.

auticus wrote:
Exalted your post for the well thought out response. Thank you for the input.

I have that book by Rick Priestly. Its a great read. Probably one of my favorites particularly if you are interested in designing games yourself.

It was a little scattered, but I think my post communicated what I wanted to say.

The Priestly book does a very good job of showing the practical considerations that come up when designing rules. Like how table sizes can directly impact how you pick your movement rates. The book has been criticized as a "how to design Warhammer based wargames" rather than wargames in general. I think it's a very fair criticism, but it also reflects just how relevant the book is to any conversation about Warhammer.

We are accepting of imbalance because if you want to make the strongest army possible in a game with a points system, you obviously should seek out as many things as possible that either are pointed too cheaply or give you synergy so you get more power for each point spent. The other option is to make intelligent predictions about what you might face. So if there's going to be lots of infantry, your ability to spill out lots of wounding attacks is important. But if there's going to be lots of stuff with great saves, lots of rend is where you want to be. Or wow you respond to the expected amount of magic and so on.

That is way harder to do than just finding where the points costs are too low and then building synergistic lists using that stuff.

The truly great tournament player will do both. They'll make the best meta call in terms of what they need in the army and do it using the most points efficient and synergistic way possible.

It's not how I enjoy the Warhammer games. But i get why people do. I am also amused when people sign up for this arrangement and then complain about it. As if the points system is supposed to somehow never allow differences in power level in the face of people intentionally trying to create them. A lot of the time this reflects a social problem rather than a game design problem. The game needs to appeal to a wide variety of players who take the competitive side of things to greater and less degrees of seriousness. So many of these instances where people have mismatches in army power levels are actually mismatches about the expectation of how the game should work in general. Then add in ego based denial where people might not be able to accept their loses (it must be the other person breaking things or their opponent must be "that guy" or WAAC or whatever).

The other reason this acceptance of seeking out imbalance is so popular online is that matched play is seen as the language of warhammer when talking with strangers. Most of the people on this forum will never, ever play eachother in person. So it's a natural place for competitive matched play type thinking to dominate.

So we're selecting for it as well simply as a result of it being an internet forum.

The issue comes in the 'accidental' department, where we see time and again that it is actually very easy to accidentally create one army woefully imbalanced against another. Take the 2nd edition starter set; players lining up equal points will inevitably create a stronger Stormcast list because of just one unit being so wildly off. It's easy for experienced players to look at it and go 'oh just eliminate this unit and it resolves things' but for newbies or even just casual players the situation will be very different. It may take them a half dozen really lop sided games to figure the issue out, if they are even able to do so then or even keep playing that long.

There's also a brushing over of the difficulty in resolving things socially. Even with reasonably decent social skills it's common to find players who may not be breaking the game but will be spamming strong units, enough to make their lists unfun in a casual setting. It's easy to SAY 'well explain things out' or 'play against someone else' but many times people understandably do not want to get into a social conflict just to enjoy the game even assuming the other party would listen. Further, many people don't have a choice. This isn't mtg where there's dozens of players around so it's easy to find a handful that fit your niche, for most players they are more or less stuck with what they have.

So while it's important to understand that there isn't a wrong way to play, it's also important to understand that balance concerns are very legitimate from a social and financial standpoint. GW has a vested interest in making their games reasonably well balanced because they sell better when that happens. Note that drops in popularity inevitably coincide with periods of poor game balance, and for AoS note that even a extremely basic and loose balancing system (GHB1) created an actual market for the game where as a lack of one had merely a trickle. Balance matters more than just being a personal preference; it affects the community, and it affects sales.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Some additional thoughts...

Balance makes wargames more appealing. How many people played wargames before points were a thing? How many people played AoS before points were a thing? Some people don't mind negotiating things out to get an approximation, but many (the majority) want to be able to work things up to the same point values and have those armies be about the same power to each other. And they aren't wrong for that. When balance is really bad then the point value stops being a decent metric and things move to points just being a framework for negotiating (with the added issue of some individuals using them as an excuse to power game against players that don't want to deal with it). But players don't negotiate because most players don't have that kind of time or energy in their lives--they go do something else.

Honestly, I think the Evocators aren't going to be as impressive once the Myrmourn Banshees make an appearance.

Them being able to unbind Empower and getting +1A for doing so while being able to do D3 damage at a -2 Rend sounds like a potential counter.

Yeah but thats like... one unit. If this game would be just two factions then yeah, having one faction counter the other with specific untis its ok.

But it is not that kind of game.

 Galas wrote:
Yeah but thats like... one unit. If this game would be just two factions then yeah, having one faction counter the other with specific untis its ok.

But it is not that kind of game.

Talking specifically about the starter set and Nighthaunt v Stormcast--y'know, the thing that we'll be hearing a lot of since it's going to be the two armies people grow out from?

Outside of that--simplest solution is going to be to shoot them or kill them with ranged attacks/spells--or any units that can resolve their attacks and flee.

Suggesting that one unit with a theoretical counter (that doesn't work since the evocators can just not cast then beat the banshees in melee anyways) is anything resembling a solution is ridiculous.

Then 'shoot them or use gryph hounds'. Never mind if they deep strike, charge you, or just make saves with 3w and a 4+. Or you play one of the many armies without reasonable access to those solutions. It seems like you are just trying to disagree for the sake of it rather than come up with a sensible argument.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Suggesting that one unit with a theoretical counter (that doesn't work since the evocators can just not cast then beat the banshees in melee anyways) is anything resembling a solution is ridiculous.

You brought up the starter set and the idea that players will be able to create a stronger Stormcast list because of just Evocators.. My initial comment was specifically talking about the starter set and growing out of that.

Heavens fricking forbid I comment on a specific situation without making it abundantly clear, huh?

Then 'shoot them or use gryph hounds'. Never mind if they deep strike, charge you, or just make saves with 3w and a 4+. Or you play one of the many armies without reasonable access to those solutions. It seems like you are just trying to disagree for the sake of it rather than come up with a sensible argument.

This is assuming that they will have access to "deep strike" and that the Allegiance ability hasn't had its wording cleaned up in the Battletome due out with Nighthaunt's.

Anyways: In Order, everyone has access to the Gryph-Hound solution. Some can take other items(Khinerai Lifetakers can do it in combat, Heartrenders can do it after they shoot). There's probably more, but I have stuff to do and I don't want to waste my afternoon looking up more.
In Death, I don't know a unit off the top of my head that can do exactly this--but Hexwraiths can do this as part of Movement.
I don't know Destruction or Chaos well enough to comment.

None of those are solutions. They are all units that will get the snot beaten out of them in equal points vs evocators. And no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you clairfy context on the internet. And you still dodged that the banshees aren't a solution anyways. This is how it goes Kan, you raise invalid points to disagree for the sake of it, get called on them, raise further nitpicks that still do not validate your position, then eventually drop it only to start things up the next time.

Which is a shame, because it drowns out the numerous good things you have to say.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
None of those are solutions. They are all units that will get the snot beaten out of them in equal points vs evocators.

And this is the problem I have with calling, in my opinion, a specific unit out. Especially before we have the damn Battletome in hand.

And no, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you clairfy context on the internet.

Fine:
SPECIFICALLY DEALING WITH THE CONTEXT OF GROWING A NIGHTHAUNT ARMY OUT FROM THE STARTER SET, I personally feel that Myrmourn Banshees are going to be a viable counter to Evocators being grown out of the same starter set using the same path.

Remember that the various "grow your army" things tend to be based around themes, and with the Sacrosanct Chamber? Who knows what the hell the next "suggested" items are going to be past the Easy to Builds.

And you still dodged that the banshees aren't a solution anyways. This is how it goes Kan, you raise invalid points to disagree for the sake of it, get called on them, raise further nitpicks that still do not validate your position, then eventually drop it only to start things up the next time.

A "solution" does not mean simply that in a 1:1 fight, they'll push the snot out of the Evocators. A "solution" is something that gives you a way to answer the problem: in this case, that Evocators are a heavy hitting melee unit that also has a single spell that they can cast, and will likely be getting spells cast upon them to beef them up.

With Myrmourn Banshees, they get to Unbind spells as though they're a Wizard and for every 4 Banshees, they get +1 to their Unbind roll. They start at 4 and go up to 12 in Matched Play--meaning they'd be at a +3 to their Unbinding Rolls, meaning it's very likely to be 13 hits(the unit champ gets 2 attacks) that deal D3 damage at a -2 Rend. They're also Summonable, meaning they can be affected by the Guardian of Soul's "Spectral Lure" spell.
Are they going to walk all over Evocators? Maybe. Maybe not. But they can do something Evocators can't, and that's come back from the dead while dealing D3 wounds every time they make a successful attack. And let's not forget that what Evocators have going for them against many other units(Rend and Mortal Wounds) is partially mitigated by the Ethereal special rule.

Which is a shame, because it drowns out the numerous good things you have to say.

Meh. I've been taking to just simply walking away from arguments now if I'm going to be honest with you. It's not worth the time or energy in many cases. I'd rather discuss things in a positive manner than just shout and tell people "NO YOU'RE WRONG!".

So toodles. Back to Idoneth painting!

 Hulksmash wrote:


Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

But how many points is a Slann's spellcasting worth? Because a Slann generating 120pts per turn is contributing almost nothing else to the game (constellation and a possible Command ability). What would the value of those three spells be in terms of points?

A Slann that survives the whole game and does nothing but summon for 5 turns is going to end up producing around 600 points worth of units, give or take. That may result in a victory. But so might a Slaan that cast 15 spells. A 40-strong Saurus Warrior unit with Starlight (attacks against it -1 to hit) and the 2nd Aqshy spell (+1 dmg on melee weapons) is going to do some serious damage.

Some excellent discussion in this thread. Thanks!

I had never really copped the dichotomy between designing lists for "balance" when you know everyone is going to seek out the imbalance. Very interesting! I think with some distance from everything it is easier to see that now.

But I think it is important to look at the ways in which Warhammer is not like Magic. In Magic, you do not have much attachment to the cards, generally. They are cheap game tokens, and you have loads of them. The way you buy them even encourages you not to get too attached to one particular colour of magic.

In Warhammer, people pick a faction and then spend hours and hours assembling and painting VERY EXPENSIVE miniatures before playing. The emotional and monetary investment in what you have bought is important. People pick their faction for a variety of reasons - aestethics, gameplay, faction background or "feel" or even just price.

But that faction identity is strong, and it is a major part of the success of Warhammer.

But what a new player does not know, and what none of us can know before a new edition drops, is that from a gameplay standpoint some of these factions (and choices within all factions) are "right", and others are "wrong". I was an Ork player from the end of second edition to the start of 6th. I identified strongly as an Ork player, and brought Orks to tournaments for years. It didn't matter that I knew other armies were more powerful, I slogged on. But I was often disatisfied and found it difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for the game when I would face obviously unbalanced match ups so often. I did not have the money to invest in a new army or the time to paint one up - I wanted to have a fair shot with my Orks. But for most of that period I just didn't. I see that it is the same nowadays for Ork players.

I played Orcs in Fantasy, and I would say for 5th to 8th when I played, it was a lot fairer in general, but that things started to get really badly out of hand by 7th edition and by 8th it was just depressing showing up to play. I faced Dark Elves, Demons and Undead constantly, and usually unpainted or slapped together ones against my fully painted Orcs and Goblins.

This emotional side to it, the attachment we have to the factions we chose, is a big part of what keeps us from really seeing the wood for the trees. You might play Seraphon for the power, or you might just like the look of the models.

I think WM/H did a better job with this for a long time - most factions had their own flavour of power, but you could for the most part make it work with whatever you brought. Seems like they eventually fell prey to imbalance as well thouugh.

You need a hug, buddy?

 Glane wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:


Also explain to me how you stop a Slaan on a table with any kind of line of sight blocking terrain. He's generating about 120pts per turn with the astrolith bearer.

But how many points is a Slann's spellcasting worth? Because a Slann generating 120pts per turn is contributing almost nothing else to the game (constellation and a possible Command ability). What would the value of those three spells be in terms of points?

A Slann that survives the whole game and does nothing but summon for 5 turns is going to end up producing around 600 points worth of units, give or take. That may result in a victory. But so might a Slaan that cast 15 spells. A 40-strong Saurus Warrior unit with Starlight (attacks against it -1 to hit) and the 2nd Aqshy spell (+1 dmg on melee weapons) is going to do some serious damage.

Lets not forget that Slaan aren't the only spellcasters in a seraphon army. Slaan being a summoning battery to make a 2000 poiint game a 2600-2000 point game is going to be a very advantageous path to take. You aren't losing the ability to cast spells period, you're losing that one model's ability to cast spells to generate a 600 point lopsided game.

To me thats huge and a no brainer.

 -DE- wrote:
REMOVED - BrookM

Not sure if "Wake up, Sheeple!" or "Watch out, we got a bad ass over here!" meme is the appropriate response here.

How do you imagine fans demanding quality from GW would go?

But I was often disatisfied and found it difficult to maintain my enthusiasm for the game when I would face obviously unbalanced match ups so often.

I did not have the money to invest in a new army or the time to paint one up - I wanted to have a fair shot

This is why a lot of people that I know and enjoy playing with drop the game altogether after a couple of years.

This is one reason why I am always going on about balance and why I think its so important.

I think at this point the community has largely self selected people like me out, and the people left are those who are generally playing in clubs where they can gentleman everything that is a problem away. It seems that the market for that sort of game is bigger than the market was for old style Warhammer, which I am surprised by and find a shame.

I have recently been thinking of trying to get back into it, mostly due to playing some video games based in the universes. But when I look and see that there is no attempt at all to fix these sorts of issues I just sigh and turn away.

auticus wrote:


Lets not forget that Slaan aren't the only spellcasters in a seraphon army. Slaan being a summoning battery to make a 2000 poiint game a 2600-2000 point game is going to be a very advantageous path to take. You aren't losing the ability to cast spells period, you're losing that one model's ability to cast spells to generate a 600 point lopsided game.

To me thats huge and a no brainer.

If you're using a Slann as a summoning battery you're not making a 2000 point game a 2600 point game. You're playing a 1740 game that at best becomes a 2340 game. A Slann has to summon 260 points of stuff just to make his own points back. That's at least two turns worth of sitting around contributing nothing else to the battle. And that's just to break even.

Of course you can take other spellcasters in a Seraphon army. That's entirely irrelevant. A Slann sitting on his frog behind generating summoning points isn't contributing 3 spells a turn to his army's chances of victory. If you didn't summon with him, you'd have three more spells each turn to potentially cast. That's a big thing to give up, especially when we've all got new spells to play around with. What's the points value of tossing out a Banishment, Night's Touch or Inferno Blades on a key unit?

I don't see them having to get their own points back. If the slaan is generating 600 points in a game thats still 600 free points. Thats points showing up and popping objectives and reinforcing where needed for free.

Additionally spells like banishment can be cast by other casters. You're not losing anything by taking multiple casters. You're getting a summoning battery to bring in reserves that you dont' have to pay points for.

I heard this exact same argument in 2015 with AOS 1.0 to try and say summoning back then wasn't broken at all. I don't really buy it. Especially since I've seen what over a 25% bonus in free points does to a game if the other person is not doing the same.