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shadowfinder wrote:

 pizzaguardian wrote:
Tervigons summoning was a bad thing and demon summoning is bad as well.

As an example to the question of "was gaunt summoning or scarab summoning that bad?"

The answer is a simple yes. In order to go any further i would like to see how it was a good thing. (Did people really forget in 5th where tervigons summoned 3x 3d6 models per turn? Anectodal evidence, the only that stopped our tyranid players was their model numbers running out)


Free summoning should have never existed and glad to see them gone. I even hope replacements are costed.

They create nothing but bloat for the game for rules such as how do you place them?, can you directly summon into combat since it is not a movement? .

You can have many many abilities that are fluffy and actually only work when they are answered correctly, which creates even more complex rules. Summoning is one of them and just too much hassle for what it brings to the game.

Tervigon had a 50% chance of never being able to spawn again each time you tried it. Also if you can't handle a 45 point unit of gaunt that die if you just kill the Tervigon something was wrong. and it wasn't the TYRANIDS. Tyranid and Necrons spawning was not a problem. Having unit that can summon other units that then could summon with no real risk was the issue. Not Necrons and Tyranids.

Ok, what did it add to the game than? Can we make the game work without that being free and giving the tervigon a discount?

Also lets go with your math,
*1st turn - 3 tervigons, 135 points of summon. (1 stops)
*2nd turn 2 tervigons 90 points of summon. (1 stops)
*3rd turn 1 tervigon summon 45 points summon (1 stops)

You can even make the math for only 5 batches, that still 200+ points worth of 5 different units. They can act as blockers or obj controllers.


These didn't need to be free and they don't need to be free now. Just make the tervigon cheaper and make summon cost points.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:

Really though, why is anyone even here then? Why not just shut down the whole N&R forum and replace it with a link to Atia and BOLS?

It's a discussion forum, for discussion, where we discuss things. The disclaimer that we're discussing incomplete information and so our discussions are by their very nature provisional is inherent to the place, it doesn't need to be stated constantly, and people don't need to be constantly reminded of it. This is by no means only directed at you, there's half a dozen posters on here who seem to come and contribute almost nothing bar accusations of negativity and demands that people stop engaging in the entire purpose of the forum; speculative discourse based on rumours as we understand them at any given time.

The reverse is also true, there's a good handful of posters whose sole argument is "this is change, and I don't like it" dressed up in any number of ad hoc justifications.

You know what, I typed out a big long reply to this, but I reached the end and decided to just take my own closing bit of advice to make greater use of the ignore feature.

Well, assuming I've not just been on the receiving end of the longest delayed piece of "I'm telling everyone I'm ignoring you, rather than just ignoring you" yet recorded, and you're actually just stating you're going to deploy ignore more often, then I'd say that runs contrary to what you're saying. After all, what's the point of discussion if all you do is shut down people because they think differently and hold different opinions? Then you really might as well shut the whole thing down and read a blog written by someone you agree with.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to have limited model generation that's accounted for in the cost of the model doing the generation.

They key being that both limited and the creating model costing more must be present.

So for example, a Spyder can create one scarab base per turn, and you have to buy a monstrous creature that's half the speed of the horde unit it's buffing to do said generation. Whilst Canoptek units have been a huge part of the meta lately, that's more for reanimating wraiths paired with 3 scarabs and 1 Spyder. When was the last time you saw someone running a scarab farm list as if it were super scary rather than a themed gimmick list?

shadowfinder wrote:
Tervigon had a 50% chance of never being able to spawn again each time you tried it. Also if you can't handle a 45 point unit of gaunt that die if you just kill the Tervigon something was wrong. and it wasn't the TYRANIDS. Tyranid and Necrons spawning was not a problem. Having unit that can summon other units that then could summon with no real risk was the issue. Not Necrons and Tyranids.

Regarding Daemon summoning, what do people think of the following suggestions?:

Summoned Units:
-cannot summon other units
-cannot score
-cannot contest
-do not come with upgrades or squad leaders, you only get the basic daemons (so no icons, musicians, heralds or whatever it is that daemon units get).

In addition, the Summoner must sacrifice a number of models from a unit within 3" (e.g. Cultists) equivalent to the Warp Charge level of the Summoning Power, or perhaps as a random D3/D6/2D6 (depending on the strength of the Summoning power and Unit) removing them as casualties.

This forces you to lose units/points in order to summon units/points, and you run the risk of incurring a deficit if you roll high for the sacrifices and roll low for the summoned units.

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
For the tervigon it appeared to spend 25-30 points on summoning gaunts. This meant that it had to spawn at least 9 gaunts to earn the points back. The average on 3d6 (not 3x3d6) is 10, but the power shut down on any roll of doubles (which is a 50% chance on 3 dice) and if it died it also killed nearby gaunts including ones percussed.

Seems perfectly fair to me.

Actually, the average is 10.5 Gaunts. An extra 5% is worth noting.

Honestly I think deep strike on all daemons is a perfectly acceptable depiction of them being summoned and the only awkward bit is simulating horror splitting (made all the worse by it apparently being decided last year they should double split)

Being forced to put points into reserve for summoning is still better than choosing before hand. Let's say you are playing a 2000 point game and have 400 points in reserve. It seems like you have no real advantage, but you do. On the fly you can decide that you need a super-assault bloodletter unit, a horde of Nurglings to annoy, or a keeper of secrets to wreck an HQ. It's like being able to write a new list on the fly depending on what your opponent does. That's a HUGE advantage.

With Tervigons and Necron Spyders you know exactly what they poop out. no surprise, and you can plan for it. If a tomb spyder could create Scarabs, Wraiths, other Spyders, or a C'Tan shard, that would be all kinds of broken, and about what daemon summoning was like in 7th.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Being forced to put points into reserve for summoning is still better than choosing before hand. Let's say you are playing a 2000 point game and have 400 points in reserve. It seems like you have no real advantage, but you do. On the fly you can decide that you need a super-assault bloodletter unit, a horde of Nurglings to annoy, or a keeper of secrets to wreck an HQ. It's like being able to write a new list on the fly depending on what your opponent does. That's a HUGE advantage.

With Tervigons and Necron Spyders you know exactly what they poop out. no surprise, and you can plan for it.

You shouldn't have to cast a psychic power to Summon it then, it should be treated as any other Deep Striking unit arriving from Reserves. Otherwise, what would be the appeal of putting Units that you have purchased into Reserve, and then having to cast a Psychic power with a chance of losing the psyker?

Icons of Chaos, Sorcerors, Dark Apostles etc might then act like Locator Beacons, reducing or outright eliminating the distance that the Daemons scatter on the Deep Strike.

Wait, nevermind. I misunderstood. You have 400 pts in reseve, but you don't have to actually choose what those 400 pts are until the moment you place them on the table? That is a cool idea.

The worst part of summoning in AoS is how easy is to snipe characters, so your summoners are easy removed from the board and you lose instantly all the points invested in reserves to summoning.

As in 40k you can't snipe summoners so easy, I think that It will, I don't know if worth it, but at least better than in AoS.

 Galas wrote:
The worst part of summoning in AoS is how easy is to snipe characters, so your summoners are easy removed from the board and you lose instantly all the points invested in reserves to summoning.

As in 40k you can't snipe summoners so easy, I think that It will, I don't know if worth it, but at least better than in AoS.

So far the only sniping we've seen in 40k involves actual snipers.

I await the spawn camping complaints.

I'm over the moon that free points is now gone. Free points from detachments, summoning, etc... has no place when you also want to discuss "balance".

 auticus wrote:
I'm over the moon that free points is now gone. Free points from detachments, summoning, etc... has no place when you also want to discuss "balance".

Some of those "free points" were abilities factored into the cost of the model. Summoningnwas a psychic power which was a mechanic seperate from the cost of any individual psyker.

The ability to generate extra models from a model that pays for the ability is not the same mechanic as the ability to summon free units by abusing a mechanic you didn't pay extra to use.

I'd still contend it's impossible to factor in a points cost for summoning non-daemon units and have it fair to both parties.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'd still contend it's impossible to factor in a points cost for summoning non-daemon units and have it fair to both parties.

I'd argue that it's possible to factor it it based on an arverage and be fairly well balanced. It wouldn't be perfect but it'd do most of the time. Especially if there is a risk mechanic involved for the user (losing wounds on a Spyder when you roll bad as it currently does as an example).

There is definitely a large gap between "can summon a unit with no upgrades" and what daemon summoningmlists where doing and using the hammer that was needed against the daemon lists on things like Ghost Arks, Tervigons and Tomb Spyders seems like an unneeded nerfing to models that don't need it.

In a vacuum, pointing based on averages is totally fine. I just think that given that averages mean nothing if your dice are swinging one way or the other, coupled with the sheer variance in the impact that the summoned unit can have (everything from capturing the final objective or blocking a potentially game ending assault to absolutely zero) mean that the average isn't likely to be terribly well represented on a consistent game by game basis.

In which case, I'm guessing that the conclusion I'm drawing myself towards is to allow units like Spyders and Tervigons to generate a fixed number of units of a fixed size, that way nobody gets lucky, nobody gets surprised, and the unit can always be costed appropriately. Of course, should a unit be killed before it's spawned all it's able then the controller loses out, but then that should be in the hands of the players, at least, and not the vagaries of dice.

Indeed, if the tervigon had a fixed number of spawns I'd be ok with the claim that the termgants were factored in to the cost. But it wasn't like that at all. Sure, the average is around 20 Gant's in 2 batches, but the possibility exists to create 90 per tervigon over a 6 turn game. I've been on the receiving end of to many lucky spawns and I'm not sad to see that go away.

This is why for my own house rules I did the obvious thing and made them a transport with capacity 20 with an appropriate point reduction.

Yeah, as I said, I believe in the old thread, summong is a thing that is fluffy, but is very very hard to balance in a Wargame like warhammer, both the daemonic and other types of summonings.

You can balance better a unit like a Tervigon, because is a specific unit make to summon other units, and those units are fixed. But balancing psykers that can summon what they want is pretty difficult. Thats why I think that the classic summoning to psykers should be restringed to a Summoner-clase of psychers, that did have that hability costed in them.
Thats why Pink Horrors, for example, should be costed with the hability to split included in themselves, but with a discount, because then the enemy player has a choice: Focusing the pink horrors to kill them all, and then the blues and brimstones, or don't, and having the player that has buy the pink horrors waste those points.

It shouldn't be a 1:1 total of points, because that way is just better to pick them separated.

But all comes to the same: Specific units that can be balanced around the fact that they spawn X specific unit.

Not really, its pretty darn simple to balance summoning.

See, if a specific daemon seems to be too good when summoned (as a counter summon), yet not too good when taken properly, you simply need to increase the difficulty of the summoning spell.


For example should bloodletters reach a point where nobody ever fields them, but they are a very common summon-you make 'em a bit cheaper, and make the summoning spell a bit harder.
If burning chariots are often taken in the list, but never summoned-you increase the point cost, and make the summon easier.


Its incredibly easy to balance when you got multiple valves to work with in regard to how the unit is used. you tune down the ones who are overused, and tune up the ones underused.

 BoomWolf wrote:
Not really, its pretty darn simple to balance summoning.

See, if a specific daemon seems to be too good when summoned (as a counter summon), yet not too good when taken properly, you simply need to increase the difficulty of the summoning spell.


For example should bloodletters reach a point where nobody ever fields them, but they are a very common summon-you make 'em a bit cheaper, and make the summoning spell a bit harder.
If burning chariots are often taken in the list, but never summoned-you increase the point cost, and make the summon easier.


Its incredibly easy to balance when you got multiple valves to work with in regard to how the unit is used. you tune down the ones who are overused, and tune up the ones underused.

But you are talking, assuming that you pay for what you summon, or that you summon them for free?

I think it's a large game with a lot of different things going on, so I think they can do things in different ways and still stay fair. I can see there being rules where Tervigons generate Termagants without having to pay reinforcement points and I can see them doing it in a way where they do have to pay reinforcement points. Is a Tervigon adding 1d6 more Gants to a unit each turn that different than FNP/RP or a Tech Priest restoring wounds to vehicle? Are those examples of free models?

I can see them requiring us to pay points when Tervigons spawn Termagants, despite them only having the choice of one unit and it only being able to deploy near the Tervigon. That wouldn't be so bad in the context of the Tyranids being a "summoning" heavy army. My understanding is that there are non-magical ways to "summon" units in AoS. For instance, a Chaos Lord on foot has a sort of super-outflank command ability where during the Hero Phase on a 4+ he can setup a Slaves to Darkness unit (he doesn't have to pick which unit in advance) within 5" of any table edge. This isn't a spell so it can't be countered.

Between burrowing griblies and spores raining down from the sky I could see Tyranids making use of a lot of non-Psychic summoning. Maybe Lictors will be "summoners" whose pheromone trails allow Tyranid players to place a unit of their choice within 9" of the enemy. Maybe Tervigons primarily will act as a buff for nearby Termagants, with their ability to spawn more Termagants (at a cost) being a secondary ability that acts to ensure they will have something around to buff.

It might be interesting if most or all armies have access to non-psychic summoning. It could be a way of essentially giving players a sideboard to help keep them from running into hard-counters to their army.

Obviously I have no idea how likely any of that is.

Seems like everybody is arguing for the same thing here, that excessive free stuff, whether it's summoned Daemons/Genestealer Cutlists, Termagant broods, tranports or upgrades, has no place in a game that wants a sembelance of balance and we're all happy they're gone.

Smaller things like re-enforcing a depleted unit or fixed summoning (where the summoned units cost can be accounted for) is much better.

 BoomWolf wrote:
Not really, its pretty darn simple to balance summoning.

See, if a specific daemon seems to be too good when summoned (as a counter summon), yet not too good when taken properly, you simply need to increase the difficulty of the summoning spell.


For example should bloodletters reach a point where nobody ever fields them, but they are a very common summon-you make 'em a bit cheaper, and make the summoning spell a bit harder.
If burning chariots are often taken in the list, but never summoned-you increase the point cost, and make the summon easier.


Its incredibly easy to balance when you got multiple valves to work with in regard to how the unit is used. you tune down the ones who are overused, and tune up the ones underused.

First of all, if they're free and you aren't punished for failing you just spam out whatever model has the best effectivenss/summonability ratio with no risks or drawback and still end up with a totally risk free extra few hundred points.

Secondly this would have fallen on it's face in 7th immediately because even if it was warp charge 8 you'd still see daemon armies casting it with very few issues.

 Galas wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
Not really, its pretty darn simple to balance summoning.

See, if a specific daemon seems to be too good when summoned (as a counter summon), yet not too good when taken properly, you simply need to increase the difficulty of the summoning spell.


For example should bloodletters reach a point where nobody ever fields them, but they are a very common summon-you make 'em a bit cheaper, and make the summoning spell a bit harder.
If burning chariots are often taken in the list, but never summoned-you increase the point cost, and make the summon easier.


Its incredibly easy to balance when you got multiple valves to work with in regard to how the unit is used. you tune down the ones who are overused, and tune up the ones underused.

But you are talking, assuming that you pay for what you summon, or that you summon them for free?

Doesn't matter, works both ways.

Its just that when summons are free, you need to tune up the summoning difficulty higher, making it more of an investment to pull off, and when they cost points, you need to make it easier, as you shouldn't pay TOO much for mere flexibility, especially when it also has a cost of time (and the risk factor of losing your summoners, and then losing out the things you wanted to summon)

Whatever the core system is, either reserve points or free-its simple to balance summoning around it when you can tune the individual difficulty to summon each unit.

ERJAK wrote:
First of all, if they're free and you aren't punished for failing you just spam out whatever model has the best effectivenss/summonability ratio with no risks or drawback and still end up with a totally risk free extra few hundred points.

Secondly this would have fallen on it's face in 7th immediately because even if it was warp charge 8 you'd still see daemon armies casting it with very few issues.

You are talking nonsense

If they are free, they are still not REALLY free. as you need the casters to actually summon them.
Sure, you can theoretically summon infinite numbers, but the game has a timer. and summoners gets killed.

As for the second point, the mere fact you try to argue anyone would even bother with summoning had it cost 8(!!!) charges baffles me.
Sure, deamon armies COULD pull it off. but to get a decent change (over 80%) it would take 19 dice. the sheer amount of points sank into generating 19 dice means that even if the sucess rate was 100% with 19 dice, you would never be remotely close to actually closing the gap between your investment and your output compared to just fielding actual units to begin with that can kill stuff.
Even at cost 3, daemon sumoning lists were strong-but not the very top. at 4 they would be relegated to once-in-a-while utility spells, and at 5 they would be utter trash.


Now, in the AoS system, you get a different summon spell for each individual unit-that means you got SO much more control over the power levels.
Even assuming its "free", by tuning up difficulty of summon you can EASILY reach the point that a summoner, on average, would not get over twice his points during the game.
"but its free points!" you say. true, but its free points LATER, rather than sooner. ask any drop pod army-the most important turn is turn 1.

Zustiur wrote:
Indeed, if the tervigon had a fixed number of spawns I'd be ok with the claim that the termgants were factored in to the cost. But it wasn't like that at all. Sure, the average is around 20 Gant's in 2 batches, but the possibility exists to create 90 per tervigon over a 6 turn game. I've been on the receiving end of to many lucky spawns and I'm not sad to see that go away.

This is why for my own house rules I did the obvious thing and made them a transport with capacity 20 with an appropriate point reduction.

If we go down this road it'd be best to give it a set number of models it can summon, say 30, and then allow the player to use them once per turn either use them to reinforce wounded units (up to their starting size), summon as a new unit of up to the max size, or summon in smaller batches over the course of several turns or all of the above. If the Tervigon dies then all remaining models die as well with no save.

This gives player agency while limiting the resource available and creates a series of risk-reward decisions. Do they just move and dump the max unit turn 1? Or do they keep summoning smaller batches of screening units over several turns while using the Tervigon's other abilities/wargear? Or do they use it solely to reinforce a horde that suffers casualties as it gets into range?

And each of these choices presents downsides and even a hybrid of the above choices may not be the best answer depending on play styles, opponents, mission type, ect.

On the flipside, this introduces more book keeping which is one of the perks of the random distribution system: you don't need to log expended models like you would in a fixed production model.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

shadowfinder wrote:
Tervigon had a 50% chance of never being able to spawn again each time you tried it. Also if you can't handle a 45 point unit of gaunt that die if you just kill the Tervigon something was wrong. and it wasn't the TYRANIDS. Tyranid and Necrons spawning was not a problem. Having unit that can summon other units that then could summon with no real risk was the issue. Not Necrons and Tyranids.

Regarding Daemon summoning, what do people think of the following suggestions?:

Summoned Units:
-cannot summon other units
-cannot score
-cannot contest
-do not come with upgrades or squad leaders, you only get the basic daemons (so no icons, musicians, heralds or whatever it is that daemon units get).

In addition, the Summoner must sacrifice a number of models from a unit within 3" (e.g. Cultists) equivalent to the Warp Charge level of the Summoning Power, or perhaps as a random D3/D6/2D6 (depending on the strength of the Summoning power and Unit) removing them as casualties.

This forces you to lose units/points in order to summon units/points, and you run the risk of incurring a deficit if you roll high for the sacrifices and roll low for the summoned units.

Geez, what's the point of even having summoned units? So many things against, why not remove them?

 Imateria wrote:
Seems like everybody is arguing for the same thing here, that excessive free stuff, whether it's summoned Daemons/Genestealer Cutlists, Termagant broods, tranports or upgrades, has no place in a game that wants a sembelance of balance and we're all happy they're gone.

Smaller things like re-enforcing a depleted unit or fixed summoning (where the summoned units cost can be accounted for) is much better.

Which was why I mentioned basically making the Tervigon into a kind of Ghost Ark equiv: can carry Gaunts (and only Gaunts) and can replace a small number of lost models per turn. 1d3, or even 2d3 extra gaunt wounds (up to the original unit size only of course) isn't going to break the game since they have such weak saves and are only T3. It'll make a unit more durable but requires a whole second unit to get the effect. An effect that may not see use at first since you could ride the Tervigon for a couple of turns for protection before dumping out to cover things in beetles, worms and ichor based things.

ERJAK wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
Not really, its pretty darn simple to balance summoning.

See, if a specific daemon seems to be too good when summoned (as a counter summon), yet not too good when taken properly, you simply need to increase the difficulty of the summoning spell.


For example should bloodletters reach a point where nobody ever fields them, but they are a very common summon-you make 'em a bit cheaper, and make the summoning spell a bit harder.
If burning chariots are often taken in the list, but never summoned-you increase the point cost, and make the summon easier.


Its incredibly easy to balance when you got multiple valves to work with in regard to how the unit is used. you tune down the ones who are overused, and tune up the ones underused.

First of all, if they're free and you aren't punished for failing you just spam out whatever model has the best effectivenss/summonability ratio with no risks or drawback and still end up with a totally risk free extra few hundred points.

Secondly this would have fallen on it's face in 7th immediately because even if it was warp charge 8 you'd still see daemon armies casting it with very few issues.

While Tzeentch Armies could certainly cast a Warp Charge 8 powers with little difficulty, it would come at the cost of casting other powers and would reduce the summon spam.

And it's not like there aren't risks. In the case of summoning powers they came at the cost of a chance of Perils and the opportunity cost of not casting your offensive shooting powers. The problem was that the advantages far outweighed the benefits for Tzeentch Daemon armies because most their psykers really don't care about perils (thanks to being Brotherhoods of Psykers) and that the cost of their offensive powers was outweighed too much by the utility of summoning.


Given that summoning in 8th will cost points Summoning powers better have a low-ish casting value, otherwise the opportunity cost will be too high. Why bother trying to summon unit X for situation Y when you're wasting casting attempts with a difficult to cast power when you could just bring it or a different unit as a part of your army from the very beginning and either start with it on the board or Deep Strike it from reserves?

There's a reason full on Summoning sees little use in Matched Age of Sigmar - Wizards are easily sniped, summoning powers tend to have too high of a casting value to be anywhere close to reliable AND you can only attempt to cast a single power per phase. 8th Edition 40k will lack the first for the most part, and we haven't heard anything about the 3rd being true, however if summoning values are too high it'll be to unreliable to be worthwhile most of the time.

 Retrogamer0001 wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

shadowfinder wrote:
Tervigon had a 50% chance of never being able to spawn again each time you tried it. Also if you can't handle a 45 point unit of gaunt that die if you just kill the Tervigon something was wrong. and it wasn't the TYRANIDS. Tyranid and Necrons spawning was not a problem. Having unit that can summon other units that then could summon with no real risk was the issue. Not Necrons and Tyranids.

Regarding Daemon summoning, what do people think of the following suggestions?:

Summoned Units:
-cannot summon other units
-cannot score
-cannot contest
-do not come with upgrades or squad leaders, you only get the basic daemons (so no icons, musicians, heralds or whatever it is that daemon units get).

In addition, the Summoner must sacrifice a number of models from a unit within 3" (e.g. Cultists) equivalent to the Warp Charge level of the Summoning Power, or perhaps as a random D3/D6/2D6 (depending on the strength of the Summoning power and Unit) removing them as casualties.

This forces you to lose units/points in order to summon units/points, and you run the risk of incurring a deficit if you roll high for the sacrifices and roll low for the summoned units.

Geez, what's the point of even having summoned units? So many things against, why not remove them?

I'm playing devils advocate, asking if people that hate summoning would be satisfied with this.

I have no vested interest in this either way, I haven't played since 5th Ed.

Psykers were reported to only get to cast a total number of powers up to their mastery level.

Also since testing is on a 2d6 vs target number system (a hybrid of 5th and 6th mechanics it seems) it means that balancing summoning will be easier since they can chane the target number if it becomes an issue.

Aside from that, we don't even know who will get to summon anymore. It might be reduced from an "anyone can do this" to something restricted to just Chaos to cut down the use of sideboarding daemons into any list with a psyker in it.

That said the points cost side board that you can freely spend to gain a unit that is tailored to hurt your opponent more is a good mechanic. You start down points, must actually cast the power to succeed, and the unit misses e chance to move since movement is before the psychic phase (assuming turn order based on the order of the released articles about turn phases) and in an army with very little shooting that makes them less likely to be an immediate problem for the opposing player.

From the looks of it, you can only deny a certain number of powers equal to your mastery level as well.