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How can summoning be fixed? At its root it cannot. Once you summon, even +100 or +200 points, you have created an imbalance. What you have to create is a tolerable imbalance between all states of the game (that being, we typically have three overall states in Age of Sigmar today, the maxed mortal wound state, the maxed summoning state where we are getting 1000-1200 points of freebies at the extreme levels, and the state where neither of those things are happening)

At the max mortal wound state, you are able to tolerate summoning excess because you do so much damage they are having to summon to keep up with your damage output.

At the max summoning state, you are able to tolerate summoning excess because you are doing it too.

I find the bulk of people that feel summoning is fine are also playing in one of those two states.

At the third state is where the issue lies and is the "foundation of my soap box". For me the fix was adding sudden death victory condition to those that are in the first or second (or both) state against the third state.

This way the third state can achieve a victory as well through sudden death conditions and a fun game at least feels possible.

I could go on, but the point is he does not care for good-faith discussion.

My whole deal is I've laid out entirely where my issue is but its hand waived as not an issue because at tournament levels its not an issue and at the casual level, you just either get good and build a powerlist yourself, or you don't play.

I find that a horrible way to grow the game. It works great if you are at the powerlisting level and enjoy it. Not so great otherwise.\

Its especially frustrating considering the 18 months or so of wailing about how points are supposed to bring balance and no points meant the game was horrible because no balance, but the reality is points were never wanted for balance. Once imbalances are introduced, they are embraced strongly and lovingly caressed like a true love.

Davor wrote:
How can summoning be fixed? Units that can summon should cost more?

Or how about say a 1000 point game, if you want to summon 250 points, you make a 750 point list and can summon as much as you want. This way you start at 750 points and can go up to 1250? Or say start at 500 points in a 1000 point game, and summon up to 1500 points then.

This way you are at a disadvantage in the beginning of the game, have to get your summons out and end game can be more powerful. So risk vs reward. Right now it seems there is no risk just reward.

So just like being a mage in D&D and video games, the mage starts off weak but can be the most powerful unit in the game later.

I don't know, just trying to throw it out to see what GW has is the best solution or not.

I would totally be down for that. And agreed on risk vs reward. I just want to see something done. I prefer the idea of it occupying what would normally be a major allegiance ability (for example Idoneth get their tides, Nurgle gets his summons) but that does not seem to be what GW wants to do as it keeps getting tacked on as a free bonus. Maybe a hard cap of points summoned would work? Like being unable to go above, say, 20% points summoned or having a penalty if you did. Maybe have a command ability that lets players block summons for a round. I still really like summoning being free in a general sense as it is a lot of fun to have a chaos spawn pop up from a mutalith, daemons drawn forth during the battle, etc. I do not want to see it go, just made reasonable.

Thats what I do. If you summon in more than 20% of your army and your opponent has not pushed 20 or more mortal wounds in a turn yet and has not also summoned 20% of their army, they get a sudden death card from the rulebook.

It doesn't say "you can't do this", but rather it puts a cost to doing so. It pushes a decision that has weight to it. It could cost you the game if you are too greedy.

auticus wrote:
How can summoning be fixed? At its root it cannot. Once you summon, even +100 or +200 points, you have created an imbalance.

I disagree; as mentioned above I think there are various methods summons could be addressed to fix the issue even at a fundamental level.

When I say that it cannot be fixed, I am speaking broadly from an introduction of imbalances term. You introduce an imbalance willingly you have broken the game.

You instead have to find a way to create a tolerable imbalance amidst all of the states within the game to keep the game a game and fun for all those participating, not just for the ones that are maxing out on one of the states of play and forcing their playstyle by maxing out.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Don't bother with him Auticus, Hulk has demonstrated repeatedly that he does not understand the subject matter and refuses to learn.

To be clear this is the guy who said at the launch of AoS 2nd that my tournament army -which he has never played, played against, or even read a battle report of- was going to do badly (it does fine btw). He basically just pulled assumptions out of nowhere and recited them as truth. This is the guy who said a unit was complete trash on one page and literally the next page of the thread said it was good in a casual setting and merely sub-par at tournaments. I could go on, but the point is he does not care for good-faith discussion. He is even dragging out the 'but summoning lists have downsides which compensate!' argument that you and others have debunked at least a dozen times.

Hey Ninth, the tip of your nose is brown again. I discussed numbers, styles of play, counters, and examples of play. I pointed out that your list wasn't in any way tearing up the scene (still isn't and never came close) and I said it would be sub-par at the tournament level (turns out it has been). Not my fault you got uppity, didn't respond to 90% of my arguments and then got holier than though in your responses and set me to ignore

@Auticus

I realize you don't see the problem. It's why you'll never understand why traffic is down in this area or why people get annoyed with your style of discussion. And here we have a single sub forum. I can only imagine how annoying it would have been on TGA seeing you pop up literally everywhere.

Moving on to your replies to my last post I'll try and break it down;

Only 2 armies can reasonably summon 1k. One is Seraphon and one is Legion of Nagash. The most you can get out of most other armies is 500pts on lucky rolls or building specifically to it. So let's look at the 2 armies that can do 1k+ in 5 turns.

Legion of Nagash. This is an army that can only summon back units that were eliminated and also requires the general to be near a grave marker. So much of this is dependent on positioning, grave yard placement, and your opponents ability to kill your units. Legions of Nagash really only excell on board control. To counter them you just need to be able to get into them fast and hard and have them spend the game hemmed in. Where summoning back dead units is cool but if you control the table for 2-3 turns you win. Summoning means literally nothing in this scenario. People getting hung up on killing stuff doesn't break the game. Preventing access to grave yards isn't that difficult if you plan ahead. Nagash doesn't suffer for their summoning but I also don't feel like they fall into the "summon" armies. They just do have the ability to get back 1k+ in 5 turns if their opponent is murdering entire units every turn.

Seraphon. To summon 1k+ over the course of a game you need the following; Slaan, Astrolith, Cogs, Balewind Vortex, Starpriest and Engine of the Gods. That's 820pts of stuff. It nets you 13+d3 turn one and 16+d3 turn 2 on. So an average of 15pts and then 18pts per turn. The average point per summoning point for Seraphon is 12.2. So every turn you're looking at 183 turn on (likely 120-140 since you can't hit 18) and then 219 turn 2+. That not including a 33% chance of 140pts back from the engine so an additionaly 47pts per turn (230 and 268). That times 5 turns does net you about 1,302pts per game. That's an impressive amount of free stuff. But out of the list of units taken the only one I took prior to summoning is the slaan so that's 560pts to get 1302. So now we're down to 742 "free" points. That's assuming the following;

-No one take out the astrolith bearer (unlikely as he is probably going to be fairly up the table so you can summon usefully)
-No one dispels cogs and balewind causing you to lose 3pts per turn
-No one hits the engine for a few wound to drop down the dice

So numbers start to drop fast if any of the above happen. If you can pull down the slaan (note, not something I put in the likely above) then the lizards are hosed because they built a list around summoning.

Name the other worst offenders because I don't see a single other army doing that. Most summoning 400-600 and have to built a specific way to do it (i.e. the Blades army mentioned or Beastmen or Tzeentch)

I understand YOUR local meta makes this a crusade for you because they don't care about anything other than min/max. The game is designed to be played at different levels. Pick up games will probably have imbalances. Why? Because people are bad at talking to people. Or seem to be. And it seems especially bad in your area. But you really should take a breath and not push your issues of your local meta onto the community as a whole. Summoning, at a competitive level, is just another tool in the box and you can win with or without it. Summoning at a lower level depends on your meta, the personalities in said meta, and peoples ability to adapt and skill level.

As for KoW before the nimble change on monsters you did see the equivalent of showing up 1000 extra point because you simply couldn't compete with flying units like that. Chariots seem to be on the same level for a few armies now. There are unit choices that you simply don't take and if you do then you are basically playing down. Sometimes significantly.

I think there is solid competitive balance that doesn't require mass summoning or mass mortal wounds. I think there is general balance as long as you simply say "don't max summoning" or "don't mortal wound spam" in anything less than the competitive level.

And in response to the reword my answer would be no. I think it would still be good fun and is pretty decently balanced.

I think the part about Seraphon summoning I find the most egregious isn't how overpowered it might be. No, my problem is that it is exhaustedly tied to Slaan Warlords. This effectively lock Seraphon out of other possible Warlord option, pushing them towards a more mono build strat.

 Hulksmash wrote:

Numbers don't currently bear out that it's broken at a competitive level. At the entry or narrative level it can probably feel that way because of lack of knowledge/systems in play.

Interesting. Could you show some data showing how summoning armies aren't dominating at the top? So far the ones I have seen, albeit not that many, shows summoning being pretty damn common at the top.


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 Hulksmash wrote:
The game is designed to be played at different levels. Pick up games will probably have imbalances. Why? Because people are bad at talking to people. Or seem to be. And it seems especially bad in your area. But you really should take a breath and not push your issues of your local meta onto the community as a whole. Summoning, at a competitive level, is just another tool in the box and you can win with or without it. Summoning at a lower level depends on your meta, the personalities in said meta, and peoples ability to adapt and skill level.

What you describe there is symptom created by incompetent game designers...

Right. Traffic is down in the AOS forums on dakka because when someone posts a summoning thread I post my opinion on it. (because I post in a lot of forums on here, not just the AOS one)

Traffic has always been down on the AOS forums on dakka since day 1 of AOS.

It was so bad on TGA that I was in the top 10 on their leaderboard for liked posts and had more likes than I had posts. I had hit #8 all time according to their scoring metric and standings site you can go to when I got booted. Additionally I was a content creator and had six different campaign supplements and the Bretonnian AOS conversion hosted on there. Three of those files were at their top ten most downloaded. At one point one of my items hit #2, which hitting #1 was impossible because it was Bottle's hinterlands ruleset and that was astronomically above everything else in the content pool.

All of those people that were having an awful time were just compelled to score me high on the TGA like-meter. (looks like you can still get to my profile, shows 1046 posts and 1108 upvotes)

So no that too is a crock. There are certainly people that strongly disagree with what I have to say and some love piling on when they get a chance, but no I don't feel the entire community was all wrung out with their panties in a wad whenever I posted and were counting down at the pub for my banning. Just some of them. As they were when I would gripe about terrain not doing anything in the game and how that would destroy the game. And then the design team put terrain that did stuff in the game again. Just as some were put out of their minds for when I discussed a form of look out sir because its not cinematic at all to have our leaders hiding in the back because of how easy it is to snipe. And then something was put in the game for it.

The point of all that not to be all proud that people upvote what I have to say and liked what I created, but certainly paints a different picture to the masses huddled around their screens wishing for my demise so that they could properly discuss things.

Those debates made visible some of the issues in the game. Not talking about them at all because some people would get offended or annoyed, well that defeats the purpose of a public forum in the first place where the whole point of being is debate and discussion.

Only 2 armies can reasonably summon 1k. One is Seraphon and one is Legion of Nagash

And tzeentch. And now we've seen a blades of khorne army offered up that can. My nurgle army can push 600 and I literally do nothing different or have to build anything different. I have no idea what slaanesh can do simply because I have not seen a slaanesh army yet. I'm building one up for next year so we'll see hwat depravity pointts do.

At the levels where people want to break the game, those are typically the only armies you see running amuk.

So even if you have 100 builds and only 6 or 8 of them are the worst offenders, it is typically those 6 or 8 offensive builds that make up the bulk of what you see in the wild.

Additionally as has been pointed out a great many times, most of these armies running "summoning specific builds" aren't giving up anything to summon more. Their guys are for the most doing exactly what theyd be doing if they weren't summoning. This concept that you're spending all of these hundreds of points so the summoned points aren't free is quite false for the most part. Those models that had the hundreds of points spent on them are contributing to the game (many exactly the same) in almost the same way they would be if summoning didn't even exist.

The game is designed to be played at different levels. Pick up games will probably have imbalances.

I have never read a dev blog that stated that they intended the game to be balanced for different levels so I have to say that unless you have some direct contact with the design team somehow, that I don't believe that.

The game certainly seems like it was designed at the powerlist level and the rest of everyone else can just get good and build powerlists too or roll the bones and pray to baby jesus that their community isn't going to have people in it that will do nothing but min/max all the live long day.

That is bad game design. Most certainly the farthest thing from tolerable imbalance that exists.

People aren't bad at talking to people in my area. They can say all day long what they want, the guys that are going to build to what the rules say they can are not going to change because they bought their armies to min/max no matter what you ask them to do.

Because of bad game design.

You don't adapt to a 1000 point disadvantage without yourself going out and buying and painting up an army that can do that or blow your load on mortal wounds.

So while this is all great for the competitive people (you yourself admittedly being one of those people) who are powerlisting anyway, it is most definitely not as much fun on the other end of the spectrum if you have a small community of players and have to choose between playing at all or playing against bob and mike the min/max kings that won't adapt their list because you need to git gud.

Because bad game design encourages that. And in this instance its such a small thing to make tolerable again by giving win conditions to those armies that aren't playing extreme min/max builds. They already put it in the game. They just need to expose it to matched play which is the only version of the game that it seems 99% of the playerbase consider.

Davor wrote:
How can summoning be fixed? Units that can summon should cost more?

Or how about say a 1000 point game, if you want to summon 250 points, you make a 750 point list and can summon as much as you want. This way you start at 750 points and can go up to 1250? Or say start at 500 points in a 1000 point game, and summon up to 1500 points then.

This way you are at a disadvantage in the beginning of the game, have to get your summons out and end game can be more powerful. So risk vs reward. Right now it seems there is no risk just reward.

So just like being a mage in D&D and video games, the mage starts off weak but can be the most powerful unit in the game later.

I don't know, just trying to throw it out to see what GW has is the best solution or not.

There are multiple ways you can do it in AoS. Units can simply cost more base to make up for it (see units like Pink Horrors). And there are multiple unpointed advantages and disadvantages many armies have in AoS. Deepstriking and at will teleportation, bonus close combat phases without the opponent getting a reaction, summoning, complete control of the opponents shooting phase, complete lack of presence in a particular game phase, lack of unit variety/versatility, the strength or weakness of different armies spell lists, are all just a few of the things in the game that are unpointed, and could be balanced around each other. Like the Necromancer in Diablo 2, summoning could just be what certain factions do.

@Auticus

I'm going to be honest. If you had someone like Ninth over on TGA I'm not surprised you had slightly more than a like per post. It only takes a few people who agree with you to hit that button on most your posts. There are a lot of people that don't post and your style of blitzing threads would lead to more of that. I'm just pointing out why you might have been booted and that I can understand booting you not because of what you say but at the frequency and exhaustive repetitiveness in which you say it.

Tzeentch doesn't summon 1k. Even assuming realm spells you'd be looking at 6 characters that all cast two spells and two pinks. That gives you a bit of depth and if you get them all off congrats, you got 120pts. You don't have to cast spells as an opponent so you're looking at 600 "free points" where your minimum investment is of 960 in characters and 400 in "battleline". So you're at 1360 if you only bring Curselings and 20 pinks. Now you take the important blue scribes and probably a lord of change and your points jump. You probably grab cogs because it's an extra spell and makes up for the curseling. Essentially you're building around summoning and eating up way, way more points that seraphon to summon worse stuff. You'll nuke one major unit and then you start to drop off.

Khorne gets nowhere near 1k. 3 prayers on turn one generate on average 2.25pts (i.e. not even 100pts) while doing on average 29.75pts of damage to you're own army. It's very dependent on losing models to get extra points and you're building around the summoning as you're losing some really good abilities out of the priests for your units. If you're opponent brings a lot of smaller units, you do too, and he doesn't kill you're priests then you'd still be looking at max 800pts and that's if things break right in every way (not some ways, EVERY way).

Slaanesh is even more specific. Nurge you originally posted over and over were fine and you were sitting at about 400pts and now in this conversation it's 600.

But this is the problem. I point out the ACTUAL numbers on these things and you ignore it (like the Seraphon above and the BoC in that thread) and shift goal posts. You say everything is contributing the same way even when I point out that it isn't, how, and how it's limited. You don't want to have a conversation about things. You've made a decision and bombard people with it.

I think it's interesting that in your area the hardcores somehow hold the entire area hostage to their game play outside of tournaments. In tournaments sure but outside of it I don't understand how it happens. Here if you do that kind of thing you simply don't get invited to play again in a casual setting. Where people talk to each other and dial back, creating fun and interesting games. But maybe we're lucky in that when it's gone that direction we've cut off that limb outside of events and built up a new group of like minded people.

So to me I find the game balanced because a lot of things work great if you're not looking to break the game (casual) and a lot of things work great if you are (hardcore tournament).

I've said it over and over again that your meta seriously influences your view of the game. And the more you post the more I see that.

Also yes, the people I've talked to have said it's geared toward levels of play but maybe they were feeding me a line. I'm still much more plugged into 40k that AoS at the design level.

I'm going to be honest. If you had someone like Ninth over on TGA I'm not surprised you had slightly more than a like per post. It only takes a few people who agree with you to hit that button on most your posts.

I see. So... everyone else that gets high marks over there, they are getting high marks because the community overwhelmingly agrees with them and they are good. But someone like me has high marks because I have a couple of sycophants that meticulously follow what I say and just like everything to give the illusion.

lol.

I'm just pointing out why you might have been booted

Per Gaz Taylor and Ben Curry - because negative posts have no place on TGA and criticisms of the game can be done on other forums or groups, but on TGA there will be none of that.

Per a couple others outside of those two that claimed to have some insight (so take with a grain of salt since I didn't hear th is directly from the horse's mouth but from some people that sit with the horse's mouth at the pubs over there)- because the moderation team are tournament players that felt the game is perfectly fine (much like you) and the dev team read those boards and they didn't want design influenced by people like me when they thought the game was just fine how it was.

I can understand booting you not because of what you say but at the frequency and exhaustive repetitiveness in which you say it.

And whenever anyone creates a topic about things that I don't like asking questions about it, I will continue to post my opinion on it. Because thats what a public forum is for.

I have a serious inclination that if I was posting about how balanced it was in every thread, you'd have no issue with the "blitzing". Its that you don't agree with it and don't want to see it.

I've said it over and over again that your meta seriously influences your view of the game. And the more you post the more I see that.

Everyone's local meta seriously influences their view of the game because a local meta is someone's experience playing the game in their reality. Just like a tournament player that powerlists is going to have a powerlisting meta and think the game is perfectly fine because in the powerlisting meta everything is fine so long as you are playing the top 5% or whatever tiny fraction of the game is viable. THe game is rosy up there.

I point out the ACTUAL numbers on these things and you ignore it (like the Seraphon above and the BoC in that thread) and shift goal posts.

I haven't shifted anything. My stance has not changed one bit since pre release of 2.0. You are putting out numbers. Your numbers are not absolutes. If I "ignore" something from someone it is because they posted something that has no way to refute it. I don't need to verbally agree with everything, if I'm not disputing it that means I'm not disputing it. I watch on a weekly basis every weekend a seraphon army cranking out over 1000 points a game and I see on a fairly regular occasion a legion of nagash army recycling over 1000 points a game with my own two eyeballs.

Additionally - the threshold for me to think summoning is too much is not capped at 1000 points. Like... if a force is only pushing 800 points then I'm suddenly ok with it.

To date I've either taken a part in or been a part of over fifty games of 2.0 and where summoning existed on one side beyond say 400-500 pts and did not on the other and the other wasn't pushing out tournament level mortal wounds, the summoning side has a 100% win rate based around the fact that they were getting new models into the game and the other side was not.

I think it's interesting that in your area the hardcores somehow hold the entire area hostage to their game play outside of tournaments. In tournaments sure but outside of it I don't understand how it happens. Here if you do that kind of thing you simply don't get invited to play again in a casual setting.

Its very simple math. You have been around the competitive circuit for a long time so you should already know how this works.

It only takes ONE guy to cause the arms race. We have several guys that escalate the arms race.

If you do public campaign events, you cant disinvite them.

Additionally those guys show up for pick up games and influence the new players there by curb stomping them.

Which causes the arms race.

Its not always that easy to do.

The game is fine - at the hardcore tournament level. The game requires effort on the players part to make it fine at anything less than the hardcore tournament level. Summoning is most definitely NOT fine at the casual level when someone wants to play tournament level summoning in a casual environment with someone that is not. The same as spamming mortal wounds is most definitely NOT fine at the casual level when someone wants to play tournament level mortal wounds spamming in a casual environment with someone that is not. In both instances the game allows those things to happen because the designers let that happen and a good chunk of the community embraces that level of imbalance.

Also yes, the people I've talked to have said it's geared toward levels of play

Again - I've never once seen any developer post about that or anyone ever having said that once until now and I follow a lot of different AOS groups.

You and I have nothing more to say to one another. You are a tournament player trying to assert that the casual game is just fine and the solution is simply not to play people that want to play tournament level everywhere. So long as the game encourages you to break the game and does not stop you from breaking the game, and the imbalances exist when you try to shove a tournament list into a casual environment this will be an issue. To make this not an issue there needs to be design considerations taken for lists that aren't running extreme builds or caps need to be put in place to stop from going over a limit which breaks the game.

At the tournament level you'll never worry about this because you are also actively breaking the game.

I am telling you Auticus, Hulk is not worth your time. He has a well-demonstrated unwillingness to carry out a good-faith discussion. Evidence does not phase him. Logical reasoning does not phase him. The reason he dislikes you so much is not your position but because you keep hammering those and he cannot counter it. We have dozens and dozens of posts to show this. There are plenty of others interested in talking to each other rather than at each other.

Put differently, this is all two of Hulk's responses to you:
-Your evidence is outweighed by my opinion, so your argument is wrong.
-Some people do not agree with you, so your argument is wrong.

Seriously, it is really difficult to find anything that does not fit into one of those.

Thats why I have concluded with he and I have nothing more to say to one another, its just turned into a ridiculous hamster wheel.

I've posted my say. There will undoubtedly be a return comment but I will not respond to that. We've gone over our opinions on why or why not summoning "ruined" AOS, who is most affected, who will not be affected as much, and alternative ways to make it not as heavily impactful as it is for those that it affects.

If anyone else wants to chime in, great. Otherwise... I think we've exhausted the topic.

At any rate, what do people think would be a good way to address summoning? Davor brought up the subject of summoning being about being weaker at the start of the game and I think that is ultimately the core of the issue. But for all the talk of what is wrong with summoning we might as well talk about how it can be made better.

Auticus has mentioned before using the sudden death cards for players that summon more than 20% points above the starting value. Personally I am not a fan since I would like any solution to be self-contained as much as possible rather than needing an outside rule source. There are also certain issues (perhaps you can elaborate Auticus), like if one player summons, say, 22% while the other summons 18% one gets the benefit even though the difference is small, or if one player hits the 20% only for the other to bypass that later in the game, etc.


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auticus wrote:
Thats why I have concluded with he and I have nothing more to say to one another, its just turned into a ridiculous hamster wheel.

I've posted my say. There will undoubtedly be a return comment but I will not respond to that. We've gone over our opinions on why or why not summoning "ruined" AOS, who is most affected, who will not be affected as much, and alternative ways to make it not as heavily impactful as it is for those that it affects.

If anyone else wants to chime in, great. Otherwise... I think we've exhausted the topic.

Though really you should just have rebuttals ready to cut & paste since the same arguments get dragged out over and over anyways

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am telling you Auticus, Hulk is not worth your time. He has a well-demonstrated unwillingness to carry out a good-faith discussion. Evidence does not phase him. Logical reasoning does not phase him. The reason he dislikes you so much is not your position but because you keep hammering those and he cannot counter it. We have dozens and dozens of posts to show this. There are plenty of others interested in talking to each other rather than at each other.

Put differently, this is all two of Hulk's responses to you:
-Your evidence is outweighed by my opinion, so your argument is wrong.
-Some people do not agree with you, so your argument is wrong.

Seriously, it is really difficult to find anything that does not fit into one of those.

Ninth,

To be fair, and I am a neutral party in this, I think Hulks posts have been pretty reasonable, and backed up by numbers and game mechanics. Granted, I am still learning the mechanics myself, but everything hulk has pointed out has seemed quite logical and reasonable. Would you or Auticus mind disproving the numbers he is putting out, if he is mistaken?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am telling you Auticus, Hulk is not worth your time. He has a well-demonstrated unwillingness to carry out a good-faith discussion. Evidence does not phase him. Logical reasoning does not phase him. The reason he dislikes you so much is not your position but because you keep hammering those and he cannot counter it. We have dozens and dozens of posts to show this. There are plenty of others interested in talking to each other rather than at each other.

Put differently, this is all two of Hulk's responses to you:
-Your evidence is outweighed by my opinion, so your argument is wrong.
-Some people do not agree with you, so your argument is wrong.

Seriously, it is really difficult to find anything that does not fit into one of those.

You have not provided a shred of evidence against his claims, you have constantly attacked him and his personal character rather then actually arguing in good faith at all.

Overall from what I've seen Summoning hasn't really dominated the tables over good play.. It helps some armies against players who don't know how to deal with it, but that's the extent of experience seen.

Would you or Auticus mind disproving the numbers he is putting out, if he is mistaken?

Can you give an exact line / number that you would like to discuss? In going over his posts he is focusing on my issue with 1000 point summoning armies by showing most armies don't summon 1000 points.

That doesn't touch on where exactly the threshold for armies that are not summoning can have a good game against an army that is summoning, its just trying to use semantics to say that in the pile most armies can't summon 1000 points.

It doesn't touch on competitive metas focusing on the more extreme builds though (while its true most armies cannot summon 1000 points or more in a game, in my area those are typically the armies you always see if you are trying to summon, its go big or don't bother)

I may be mistaken, but going over his current posts they are all about armies that are *only* summoning 500 or 600 free points (which I still believe is tipping the cart over against armies that are not summoning at all and are also not mortal wound spamming you to death either) because he feels i"m being hyperbolic and since most armies are doing 500-600 points, its not that bad and the armies that are doing 1000+ points are rare and you can just get around them by getting better at the game / building a stronger list. (git gud is not something that I feel is valid at that extreme, and building a stronger list is not a viable option to people that don't want to keep buying new models just to keep up and have a good game, no matter how common or accepted it is by the tournament community to do so, we are not talking about the tournament community here, I am talking about growing the game at the casual level and as I've mentioned probably 100 times now, the issues I have are not at the tournament level of the game, they are at the casual level of the game that I feel poor game design allows to get run amuk over)

Ninth has mentioned that there are other power builds out there that neither summon spam or mortal wound spam, and I defer to him on those builds since my only experience are with the former en masse. I don't see armies that don't do those things winning games against those style of armies, but I also realize that I'm only around the same 8-12 dudes every week and there could be other power builds that just aren't in my meta.

Then we see this line:

Khorne gets nowhere near 1k.

And then a page prior we have a khorne player saying he regularly gets 800 points in 4 turns and can get over 1000 points if he gets 5 turns.

The khorne players here (there are two) are both casual mostly and they are putting about 500 points on the table every game freely because they have to if they want a chance against the seraphon 1000 point guy or the legion of nagash guy doing 1000 points or more in recycled units a game.

(they don't ever beat those two, their 500 points aren't enough and they always lose to attrition)

The tzeentch player at our last group game weekend in september summoned roughly 650 points and complained he was being stymied because his opponents wouldn't cast spells to help him summon more lol.

So let me present you with my hard numbers from our last non campaign capped games that have happened since mid September on what has been possible to summon based on my note taking as I always ask them to list what was summoned and get me the point totals so I can adjust and work with future events on what is being done
Seraphon player #1 - 1000 points summoned - hasn't lost yet
Seraphon player #2 - 1050 points summoned - has only lost to seraphon player #1
Legion of Nagash Player #1 - 1000 points recycled - has only lost to seraphon player #1
Legion of Nagash Player #2 - 650 points recycled before general was killed - never lost to someone not summoning
Tzeentch player - 650 points summoned - struggles to win against mortal wound armies, has never beaten seraphon or legion of nagash player because they win on attrition
Khorne player #1 - 500 points summoned - typically always wins against no summoning, typically gets beat by a lot more summoning from the guys above
Khorne player #2 - 550 points summoned - same as Khorne player #1
Nurgle player (me) - 400 points summoned - have never lost against someone that didn't summon, nurgle mortal wound resistance keeps me up against the mortal wound guys and attrition always sees me over those not summoning - lose to the seraphon and LoN guys that summon more than me due to attrition
Sylvaneth player #1 - 350 points summoned - summoning is usually not that big a deal, wins due to a combo of summoning, mortal wounds, and ranged teleporting objective holding
Sylvaneth player #2 - 350 points summoned - summoning is usually not that big a deal, just learning her army and takes aleriele - wins as much as loses but as learning mortal wounds and teleporting becomes better

Other armies - 2 stormcast players (no summoning, they pump out around 40 mortal wounds a turn though and compete that way)
Fyre slayers - gets trounced because minimal mortal wounds and doesn't summon
Iron jaws - loses to attrition because of no summoning and his army doesn't push a lot of mortal wounds
Beastclaw raider - no summoning - does beast claw raider mortal wounds which helps him keep up
Bretonnian player #1 - uses Deus Vult list - does well due to mortal wounds and arrow storm
Bretonnian player #2 - uses Deus vult list - loses to summoning attrition because he doesn't summon and doesn't do enough damage
Tzeentch Player #2 - doesn't have the model count to summon - gets beat pretty handily because he doesn't summon and can't take a lot of damage

There are other armies on the roster that have not shown up

I'm not sure what else hard numbers are going to show here or what we are trying to state with showing these values other than if you aren't summoning a lot and you aren't mortal wounding a lot and you are up against an army doing a lot of either, you are essentially a jobber making your opponent look good

Personally I am not a fan since I would like any solution to be self-contained as much as possible rather than needing an outside rule source.

The sudden death rules are part of the core rulebook. I use them simply because they are not technically house rules, they are scenario rules using rules from the core rulebook.

Short of just saying "you cannot summon more than 20% of your army" this was the best solution that I could come up with to keep things in a casual narrative campaign setting from getting to adepticon levels.

Its actually not had a lot of negative heat either, which kind of surprises me, but thats mainly because its a rule found in the core rulebook and not an auticus spawned houserule that was created by me. They would be more annoyed if i capped their summoning completely at 20%, and I've had over half of the players say they liked it because it gave them an interesting choice in a game that has few interesting choices during the game that don't make themselves obvious.

I am open to other formats as well if a good one presents itself. So far, that rule has kept the mortal wound spam and summoning spam down and has made most of our event games fun for the guys that don't want to go out and buy new models so they can spam summoning or mortal wounds to have good games (otherwise my campaign would lose about 75% of its players)

auticus wrote:

Would you or Auticus mind disproving the numbers he is putting out, if he is mistaken?

Can you give an exact line / number that you would like to discuss? In going over his posts he is focusing on my issue with 1000 point summoning armies by showing most armies don't summon 1000 points.

That doesn't touch on where exactly the threshold for armies that are not summoning can have a good game against an army that is summoning, its just trying to use semantics to say that in the pile most armies can't summon 1000 points.

It doesn't touch on competitive metas focusing on the more extreme builds though (while its true most armies cannot summon 1000 points or more in a game, in my area those are typically the armies you always see if you are trying to summon, its go big or don't bother)

I may be mistaken, but going over his current posts they are all about armies that are *only* summoning 500 or 600 free points (which I still believe is tipping the cart over against armies that are not summoning at all and are also not mortal wound spamming you to death either) because he feels i"m being hyperbolic and since most armies are doing 500-600 points, its not that bad and the armies that are doing 1000+ points are rare and you can just get around them by getting better at the game / building a stronger list. (git gud is not something that I feel is valid at that extreme, and building a stronger list is not a viable option to people that don't want to keep buying new models just to keep up and have a good game, no matter how common or accepted it is by the tournament community to do so, we are not talking about the tournament community here, I am talking about growing the game at the casual level and as I've mentioned probably 100 times now, the issues I have are not at the tournament level of the game, they are at the casual level of the game that I feel poor game design allows to get run amuk over)

Ninth has mentioned that there are other power builds out there that neither summon spam or mortal wound spam, and I defer to him on those builds since my only experience are with the former en masse. I don't see armies that don't do those things winning games against those style of armies, but I also realize that I'm only around the same 8-12 dudes every week and there could be other power builds that just aren't in my meta.

Then we see this line:

Khorne gets nowhere near 1k.

And then a page prior we have a khorne player saying he regularly gets 800 points in 4 turns and can get over 1000 points if he gets 5 turns.

The khorne players here (there are two) are both casual mostly and they are putting about 500 points on the table every game freely because they have to if they want a chance against the seraphon 1000 point guy or the legion of nagash guy doing 1000 points or more in recycled units a game.

(they don't ever beat those two, their 500 points aren't enough and they always lose to attrition)

The tzeentch player at our last group game weekend in september summoned roughly 650 points and complained he was being stymied because his opponents wouldn't cast spells to help him summon more lol.

Personally I am not a fan since I would like any solution to be self-contained as much as possible rather than needing an outside rule source.

The sudden death rules are part of the core rulebook. I use them simply because they are not technically house rules, they are scenario rules using rules from the core rulebook.

Short of just saying "you cannot summon more than 20% of your army" this was the best solution that I could come up with to keep things in a casual narrative campaign setting from getting to adepticon levels.

Its actually not had a lot of negative heat either, which kind of surprises me, but thats mainly because its a rule found in the core rulebook and not an auticus spawned houserule that was created by me. They would be more annoyed if i capped their summoning completely at 20%, and I've had over half of the players say they liked it because it gave them an interesting choice in a game that has few interesting choices during the game that don't make themselves obvious.

I am open to other formats as well if a good one presents itself. So far, that rule has kept the mortal wound spam and summoning spam down and has made most of our event games fun for the guys that don't want to go out and buy new models so they can spam summoning or mortal wounds to have good games (otherwise my campaign would lose about 75% of its players)

Well, for instance let's look at the Khorne one. While I understand a player says he can get it regularly, can we actually go through the mechanics and circumstances that allow this consisently?

Khorne gets nowhere near 1k. 3 prayers on turn one generate on average 2.25pts (i.e. not even 100pts) while doing on average 29.75pts of damage to you're own army. It's very dependent on losing models to get extra points and you're building around the summoning as you're losing some really good abilities out of the priests for your units. If you're opponent brings a lot of smaller units, you do too, and he doesn't kill you're priests then you'd still be looking at max 800pts and that's if things break right in every way (not some ways, EVERY way).

Hulk seems to point out that you have to have everything go right to get even close to summoning near the 1k number that has been pointed out. Is this consisent with the mechanics? I'd really like to see the numbers, what has to go right and the averages on this. I'd like to understand what is hyperbole, and what is much more likely

Tzeentch doesn't summon 1k. Even assuming realm spells you'd be looking at 6 characters that all cast two spells and two pinks. That gives you a bit of depth and if you get them all off congrats, you got 120pts. You don't have to cast spells as an opponent so you're looking at 600 "free points" where your minimum investment is of 960 in characters and 400 in "battleline". So you're at 1360 if you only bring Curselings and 20 pinks. Now you take the important blue scribes and probably a lord of change and your points jump. You probably grab cogs because it's an extra spell and makes up for the curseling. Essentially you're building around summoning and eating up way, way more points that seraphon to summon worse stuff. You'll nuke one major unit and then you start to drop off.

This one seems to indicate the same thing as the Khorne one. How much are we really summoning here? What are the averages?


I just want to see some more fleshed out numbers and understand it a bit more. I'd do it myself, but I'm still kind of new to the rules and don't have all the books required here.

I posted above. The khorne players here are doing about 400-500 points.

Is that too much?

In my opinion, 20% of 2000 points is 400 pts, and thats usually not RUINING the game for a casual. 500 pts is very much pushing it.

The khorne forces that are optimized combine summoning 400-500 pts of summons with mortal wound bombs, so that goes back up somewhere above where I talked about the three states of AOS and that if you are maxing summoning, maxing mortal wounds, OR combining summoning with mortal wounds, you are going to be beating down someone that is not doing either (which again is the crux of my issue on the bad game design)

In that instance its not "OMG khorne player summons breaks the game" its "khorne player can summon a good amount of stuff to supplement his mortal wound beat down bomb" which is appropriate for tournament halls, but can ruin casual night in a hurry.

Now for those doing extreme buildings... the khorne list posted by the player saying he gets 800 points is maxing out summoning which has the same game experience as above. Against someone powerlisting at a tournament - no big deal. Against a casual player like half or more of the list of players I posted above, not a fun time.

To the original topic "Did summoning RUIN AOS again" -> largely by itself no. It contributes strongly to the divide between power play and casual play though and through poorly thought out balancing mechanisms ignores the third state of the game - that being the army that is not leaning on the summoning pillar or the mortal wound pillar. (and whatever other power builds may exist that I just haven't seen that I would love to be educated on for my own knowledge)

In my personal slice of the game, an army summoning more than 500 points against an army not summoning at all nearly always wins. The guys pushing 800 or more points only lose to each other. Every time, every week, every game.


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However I feel a lot of this is arguing semantics.

The real dirty issue is simply - if you have an army that is not pushing a ton of mortal wounds and not summoning a ton or at all, how do you have a good game against someone that is doing those things?

Thats where I feel summoning dings the game hard and why I have said if you are powerlisting you won't ever have to worry about that.

auticus wrote:
I posted above. The khorne players here are doing about 400-500 points.

Is that too much?

In my opinion, 20% of 2000 points is 400 pts, and thats usually not RUINING the game for a casual. 500 pts is very much pushing it.

The khorne forces that are optimized combine summoning 400-500 pts of summons with mortal wound bombs, so that goes back up somewhere above where I talked about the three states of AOS and that if you are maxing summoning, maxing mortal wounds, OR combining summoning with mortal wounds, you are going to be beating down someone that is not doing either (which again is the crux of my issue on the bad game design)

In that instance its not "OMG khorne player summons breaks the game" its "khorne player can summon a good amount of stuff to supplement his mortal wound beat down bomb" which is appropriate for tournament halls, but can ruin casual night in a hurry.

Now for those doing extreme buildings... the khorne list posted by the player saying he gets 800 points is maxing out summoning which has the same game experience as above. Against someone powerlisting at a tournament - no big deal. Against a casual player like half or more of the list of players I posted above, not a fun time.

To the original topic "Did summoning RUIN AOS again" -> largely by itself no. It contributes strongly to the divide between power play and casual play though and through poorly thought out balancing mechanisms ignores the third state of the game - that being the army that is not leaning on the summoning pillar or the mortal wound pillar. (and whatever other power builds may exist that I just haven't seen that I would love to be educated on for my own knowledge)

In my personal slice of the game, an army summoning more than 500 points against an army not summoning at all nearly always wins. The guys pushing 800 or more points only lose to each other. Every time, every week, every game.

Ah, Did not see the edits until after my post.

Ok, so then Hulk was correct about his numbers? Everything you've posted actually seems to agree with him on that front.

I am curious about the tournament results. I perused some, but there is not a whole lot of data out there. It seemed like LoN was the largest share of the meta, at about 12%, but I saw very few seraphon lists. And to that point, a lot of people seem to think that Nagash is the problem and not really the summoning.

This discussion has been quite informative, and I hope you and Hulk continue to have them as they are quite useful for newer people like me to see multiple perspectives.


EDIT:

owever I feel a lot of this is arguing semantics.

The real dirty issue is simply - if you have an army that is not pushing a ton of mortal wounds and not summoning a ton or at all, how do you have a good game against someone that is doing those things?

Thats where I feel summoning dings the game hard and why I have said if you are powerlisting you won't ever have to worry about that.

To be fair here, in nearly every game format an optimized list is going to usually crush an unoptimized one. You see the same thing in other games like magic for instance. It becomes about the social contract then, and expressing your desires to your gaming group and people you play with regularly.

I can understand your point of view about summoning, I haven't played enough yet to provide an opinion.

I haven't disagreed with his entire position. I've stated as much that if I'm coming at the game the way he is that I would think there's nothing wrong either.

The disconnect is that (as I understand it) he has felt that there is no problem at the casual level because you can just choose to walk away from a game, but thats not how our events work and it drives away casual players, which is why I'm the way I am on this topic.

To be fair here, in nearly every game format an optimized list is going to usually crush an unoptimized one.

To a point yes. I'm new player to Kings of War, and I've found that even the optimized lists going against our new group (we have vets running tourney lists and we are trying to find our footing) aren't over in turn 1 or 2 like AOS is though. You feel like you can have a good game, and you feel that you can build off your losses.

I also play a lot of LOTR. There are things over there that are unbalanced as well, but again not to the magnitude of AOS. You don't feel like you lost before turn 1 finishes due to gross list building differences. I've never had that over there.

In AOS you feel like you lost before the first turn is over in some of these cases and the only way to get a better game in is to open your wallet and buy more models with OP stats or go all in summoning and buy the models to summon.

Thats the major difference.

Summoning is a tool to give you free cards / points. You may "pay" for them in some way by having to have a certain build but often those models are contributing in your army even if you aren't summoning.

This could be addressed in several ways. Constructive conversation would be how to have armies not spamming summoning and mortal wounds deal with those armies that are. Thats the kind of discussion I'd rather have.

Not the chest thumping or hand waiving or anything like that. Actual conversation on how to address the issue I've pointed out other than by saying "then don't play people that do that and you don't have to worry about it".

Magic the Gathering WAS designed to appeal to three personality types from the mouth of their designers.

AOS 2.0 was supposed to be this monument to fair and balanced play.

 Sasori wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am telling you Auticus, Hulk is not worth your time. He has a well-demonstrated unwillingness to carry out a good-faith discussion. Evidence does not phase him. Logical reasoning does not phase him. The reason he dislikes you so much is not your position but because you keep hammering those and he cannot counter it. We have dozens and dozens of posts to show this. There are plenty of others interested in talking to each other rather than at each other.

Put differently, this is all two of Hulk's responses to you:
-Your evidence is outweighed by my opinion, so your argument is wrong.
-Some people do not agree with you, so your argument is wrong.

Seriously, it is really difficult to find anything that does not fit into one of those.

Ninth,

To be fair, and I am a neutral party in this, I think Hulks posts have been pretty reasonable, and backed up by numbers and game mechanics. Granted, I am still learning the mechanics myself, but everything hulk has pointed out has seemed quite logical and reasonable. Would you or Auticus mind disproving the numbers he is putting out, if he is mistaken?

Sure, I'll break down the last post he made:

 Hulksmash wrote:
If you had someone like Ninth over on TGA I'm not surprised you had slightly more than a like per post. It only takes a few people who agree with you to hit that button on most your posts. There are a lot of people that don't post and your style of blitzing threads would lead to more of that.

As Auticus mentioned above, this is basically stating that anyone with a high number of likes just has "a few people" who agree. So he is either arguing that no one's likes matter or he is saying that Auticus' likes do not matter because reasons. Also glossing over that Auticus was a content creator with objectively popular resources people were using. There is also the implied statement that I always agree with Auticus, which is a tired old strawman he has brought up before that also ignores the nuance of how much I may agree or disagree. To use Dakka's exalts as an analogy, I do not exalt even 20% of Auticus' posts, let alone all of them. That is because I do not throw an exalt onto every single post I happen to agree with and I am sure there are others that are the same, which ties into the above.

I'm just pointing out why you might have been booted and that I can understand booting you not because of what you say but at the frequency and exhaustive repetitiveness in which you say it.

This would be a fair argument if Auticus had not explained the matter in detail several times before. That Hulk made the argument in the first place is not the issue; it is that has has continued to bring it up again and again despite it being addressed previously.

Tzeentch doesn't summon 1k.

This, and others, is where he is making the argument that if an army does not summon 1k then its summoning is not an issue. That is clearly ridiculous, and then he accuses Auticus of moving the goal posts when he says that 800 or 600 points of summoning is still a balance issue, which is something he always said was. Not only if the argument disingenuous from the start, but the accusation of moving the goal posts is entirely falsified.

You say everything is contributing the same way even when I point out that it isn't, how, and how it's limited.

There is truth here in that Auticus does not point out how each unit is contributing. This is because the only way Hulk's argument works is to assume the unit is not contributing. There is another issue at hand that Auticus, myself, and others have indeed gone through his posts point by point before, only for him to ignore it and move on to do the same thing again (often with the same examples). But to go through it here...

Even assuming realm spells you'd be looking at 6 characters that all cast two spells and two pinks. That gives you a bit of depth and if you get them all off congrats, you got 120pts. You don't have to cast spells as an opponent so you're looking at 600 "free points" where your minimum investment is of 960 in characters and 400 in "battleline". So you're at 1360 if you only bring Curselings and 20 pinks. Now you take the important blue scribes and probably a lord of change and your points jump. You probably grab cogs because it's an extra spell and makes up for the curseling. Essentially you're building around summoning and eating up way, way more points that seraphon to summon worse stuff. You'll nuke one major unit and then you start to drop off.

There is a lot wrong here:
-6 characters at two spells each plus two pinks is a convoluted way of saying "14 spells at turn" he phrases it like that to deliberately make the situation seem more difficult, because summarizing it as 14 spells a turn from any combination of characters/units/abilities (Tzeentch has several models which can gain extra spellcasts due to a warscroll ability) it is immediately obvious that there are countless ways to make that happen without even considering a factor he glossed over; that enemy spellcasts count too.
-These spells are made out to be a cost to summon, when really even if there were no summoning at all many would still be there. Spells are useful, they have an effect. Further that is how Tzeentch plays; casting a lot of spells. What does happen is that a summoning-optimized army is built to cast more spells than it normally would, which is indeed a cost, but a trivial one because it is offset by the performance of the spells themselves before the summons are even taken into account. And again, enemy spells count too.
-I do not know where he is getting that 14 fate points = 120 pts, that is not the case. For 12 fate points one summons a 140 point model. One could average out the number of points summoned per fate point spent (maybe that is what he did) but such is inaccurate because players are only going to summon the best options and not the less-effective ones.
-He throws out specific "numbers" which are arbitrary since they are based off his cherry-picked scenario that entirely ignores the options available. And there is the implied statement that these models are somehow not worth their points in basic performance just because they were brought to enable summoning.
-He mentions Blue Scribes, a LoC, and Chronomantic Cogs, but these would be present in an optimized Tzeentch list even if summoning were not present at all. Mentioning it pads out his explanation and makes it seem like he has evidence when he in fact does not. Someone who does not play Tzeentch or understand the dynamic is trusting that Hulk is portraying an accurate picture (and there is nothing wrong with that). The problem is Hulk is not portraying things accurately, probably unintentional considering he does not seem to understand such very well.
-Hulk tops this off by making the argument that 'Tzeentch is not as bad as Seraphon so it is OK' which is laughable since Seraphon are the best summoning army in the game; every army is worse than them at summoning.
-"You'll nuke one unit" is his summary of the above mentioned units' performance. These are strong units and a huge chunk of points that without Tzeentch allegiance would achieve quite a lot on the battlefield. But Hulk is saying that because the army gets to summon from what those units were doing anyway they somehow do less.

Khorne gets nowhere near 1k. 3 prayers on turn one generate on average 2.25pts (i.e. not even 100pts) while doing on average 29.75pts of damage to you're own army. It's very dependent on losing models to get extra points and you're building around the summoning as you're losing some really good abilities out of the priests for your units. If you're opponent brings a lot of smaller units, you do too, and he doesn't kill you're priests then you'd still be looking at max 800pts and that's if things break right in every way (not some ways, EVERY way).

See above for the 1k thing. Khorne summons using blood tithe, and the primary means of generating blood tithe is when a unit is wiped out (from either side) that adds 1. As you can imagine this adds up quickly over the course of the game, yet only warrants half a sentence in Hulk's summary here. The rest is referring to a Khorne prayer that does d3 mortal wounds to one of your own units but generates a blood tithe. These prayers are used by a character option that shows up frequently in Khorne lists anyways (in fact, competitive Khorne lists often had 3 even before free summoning). The average numbers are again wrong (too high, actually) but also a misrepresentation both because they do not consider a number of factors that would alter them (positive and negative) and because they are merely a supplement to the main source. There are also other ways to generate blood tithe that do not involve prayers, and a strong battalion that buffs prayers which could change the numbers further. It adds up to making a math approach for calculating Khorne summoning largely pointless because in-game context matters far more. It also goes to show that Hulk really does not have the expertise he presents himself with. But more importantly to me, (IMO) Khorne summoning is not that bad because the blood tithe spent on summoning competes with spending it for beneficial abilities, meaning that to go all-in on summoning makes that the only allegiance ability the army is benefiting from.

Slaanesh is even more specific.

Auticus has never mentioned Slaanesh since by his own admission he does not know how it performs. Hulk is probably bringing this up to say that Slaanesh summoning is not unbalanced as evidence that summoning as a while is not unbalanced, which if true (I honest do not know) is completely overturned by the abundance of summoning that very much is.

Nurge you originally posted over and over were fine and you were sitting at about 400pts and now in this conversation it's 600.

Hulk is confusing what Auticus personally summons in his games with what Nurgle can potentially summon. But the issue with Nurgle summoning is a matter of scaling; at 2000 points it is not a problem but Nurgle summons the same amount at 1500, 1000, etc. The units brought in at 2000 points obviously have a much larger impact at 1000.

But this is the problem. I point out the ACTUAL numbers on these things

As established, he does not point out actual numbers but rather just throws out a scattering of points that misrepresent the situation.

and you ignore it

Because Auticus got tired of doing a time consuming, point-by-point breakdown only for Hulk to deny it and bring up the same arguments again later. So he instead addresses the larger concepts at hand.

You say everything is contributing the same way even when I point out that it isn't, how, and how it's limited.

As established, the cost Hulk is talking about is tiny and his argument hinges on assuming units perform significantly worse when used in a summoning army than they would otherwise.

You don't want to have a conversation about things. You've made a decision and bombard people with it.

Straight up hypocrisy. Further, while Auticus is indeed very stubborn in his viewpoints he also goes into more depth and detail about his positions than any other poster in the forum.

I think it's interesting that in your area the hardcores somehow hold the entire area hostage to their game play outside of tournaments. In tournaments sure but outside of it I don't understand how it happens.

Considering 'how it happens' has been explained several times, and the idea of powergaming is common knowledge due to its frequency, I think it is highly unlikely that Hulk does not understand unless he is willfully ignoring the evidence.

Here if you do that kind of thing you simply don't get invited to play again in a casual setting.

Which is great for him, but as has been repeatedly explained that is not the case for everyone.

Where people talk to each other and dial back, creating fun and interesting games. But maybe we're lucky in that when it's gone that direction we've cut off that limb outside of events and built up a new group of like minded people.

Points are supposed to crease a reasonably balanced game. The situation where everyone talks to each other to agree on things is what open & narrative play is for. Matched play is supposed to be the situation where two armies of the same point values are close enough in power that they can play a game where each side has a reasonable chance of victory. Hulk is throwing the most fundamental element aside as a protection, saying "well even if I am wrong about all of the above it is still OK because being unbalanced is OK" which is ignoring the central point of Auticus' argument entirely. If powergaming did not exist Hulk would have a point, but that is not the case.

So to me I find the game balanced because a lot of things work great if you're not looking to break the game (casual) and a lot of things work great if you are (hardcore tournament).

This statement translates to "because there are good things the bad things do not matter" as he is saying that simply because there are elements that work the game is therefore balanced as a whole.

I've said it over and over again that your meta seriously influences your view of the game. And the more you post the more I see that.

Auticus has said again and again that he does indeed speak from a competitive meta and explained, thoroughly, why that matters to the game as a whole.

Also yes, the people I've talked to have said it's geared toward levels of play but maybe they were feeding me a line. I'm still much more plugged into 40k that AoS at the design level.

Auticus asks for evidence of Hulk's claim, to which he gets "the people I've talked to have said" which really summarizes the lack of good faith discussion Hulk is engaged in.


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 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I am telling you Auticus, Hulk is not worth your time. He has a well-demonstrated unwillingness to carry out a good-faith discussion. Evidence does not phase him. Logical reasoning does not phase him. The reason he dislikes you so much is not your position but because you keep hammering those and he cannot counter it. We have dozens and dozens of posts to show this. There are plenty of others interested in talking to each other rather than at each other.

Put differently, this is all two of Hulk's responses to you:
-Your evidence is outweighed by my opinion, so your argument is wrong.
-Some people do not agree with you, so your argument is wrong.

Seriously, it is really difficult to find anything that does not fit into one of those.

You have not provided a shred of evidence against his claims, you have constantly attacked him and his personal character rather then actually arguing in good faith at all.

There was a time when I did go through his arguments and break them down, but after him repeatedly ignoring it and regurgitating the same thing later I decided it was not worth my time. As shown above, I am fully capable of backing up my statements but that is a ton of effort for effectively no gain. But what specifically made me give up was when he told me how my tournament army would perform badly in 2.0 despite never having seen this army on the table, or even the list itself. It is not some personal insult I have taken but rather a recognition of the 'logic' at hand. An army I have played for years, that he has never, ever, seen played, and he thinks he is the more qualified source on how well it will perform. Think about that and tell me how it is a good faith argument.

You guys are hilarious. Always makes me smile on my lunch break catching up with this thread.

Thats good I'm glad you are entertained and amused. Appreciate the contribution to the conversation.

My gaming group is very casual, so I don't know the extent of which summoning can overrun a table in a tuned list piloted by a win at all cost player. I seems to make sense to me though, that armies with access to summoning have an advantage over non summoning armies, its just free stuff you don't really need to sacrifice anything for.

What if summoning still had an in game cost through command points? Say like 1 command point per 100-200 points summoned. That should limit power armies from generating 1k summons, and make even smaller summons a weight of new unit vs powerful command ability.

Thats not a bad approach, but the flaw is command points can be farmed to max out summoning.

If a command point is worth 100-200 free points, and in a five turn game I can grab 5 of them, plus additionally I can get more for batallions, I have not solved the problem, I've just created an alternative to achieving the same result.

Now if summoning increased command point cost each time you use it (making it more expensive each time) then that would be something in the current system I'd be for.

First time 1 point, second time 2 points, third time 3 points, etc.

If its per summon, it does not stop big summons, like a bloodthirster per say.

If its 100 points per command point, you are limited to around 500-700 depend on build, and you put all your command points to it. Presumably, your non summoning opponent used their command points to get some sort of leg up that can counter your extra points. It at very least makes summoning some what of a tactical approach, instead of just free stuff.

The question to be asked then are these command abilities equal to getting say 600-1000 free points?

I would say largely no based on my own command abilities. I lose regularly to the seraphon 1000 point summoning machine despite some pretty cool command abilities simply because his army stays roughly the same size, while mine deteriorates because I can't replace as much dead stuff as he can.

So if the command abilities aren't as good as summoning, we largely would have a false choice presented to us, because the optimum choice would be to summon. The only reason we wouldn't is because we eiither have a super busted command ability that is just better, we are purposely holding back to not overwhelm our opponent, or we don't have the models to summon with available.

I think this is one of those cases where the initial problem (completely free summoning at AOS release) had a "fix" (summons use reinforcement points from GHB1) that went too far towards one side, so the next "fix" swung a little far towards the original idea.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the various summoning abilities requiring some kind of in-game resource. I think it's thematic, and has potential to balance things out. But likewise, I think the current methods are easily abused (meaning they're not balanced well enough).

Perhaps something that could be helpful would be keeping the current summoning mechanics, but each time you summoned a unit you granted your opponent a Victory Point. So sure, you could rebuild your forces, but at a bigger cost than is currently in place.

For the purely thematic feel, I would like to see keeping some form of the current "mini-games" that are in most of the summoning mechanics, but I do recognize that the scales are currently tipped towards summoning armies (with a sometimes counter of mortal wound spam).