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I hadn't read or heard any details about AoS until today when I was looking at the Ogre warscrolls. They seemed pretty cool. Then I decided to come to dakka to see what people were saying....bad idea. Just took a long look at Tzeentch Daemons. The issue goes way beyond the infinitely replicating Heralds.
Tzeentch daemon armies can quite easily come close to doubling their numbers each turn. Most of their summonings have a casting value of 5 or 6 while the bigger stuff is a 7 or 8. Lords of change are a 9. Needing 5's or 6's on 2 dice is pretty good odds, and even 7's is slightly over 50%. That said, Kairos and other Lords of Change have a 75% chance of succeeding on any Tzeentch Daemon summoning spell with the Lord of change Command Benefit. Any 4 or higher rolled on either die means the casting result is 8 or higher. Add one to that from the command benefit and its 9 or higher. Then we also have to consider that pink horrors get another +1 to their casting attempts while close to a Horror Hero (Heralds). So they replicate themselves on a 4 and summon a Lord of Change on a 7. Heralds can also use 3d6 once per game to replicate themselves or attempt to summon other things with higher casting values. The Blue Scribes can give every Tzeentch wizard within 18" rerolls on casting attempts.

Without any house rule, Tzeentch Daemons could, in theory, continue replicating until the dice fail them. Even with a house rule stating summoned units cannot act in the phase that they're summoned in, we'd still see the army come close to doubling its size each turn.

All of that is ignoring the possibility of your opponent unbinding the spells. But how many other factions out there can bring enough wizards to unbind each summoning attempt. An army that intentionally brings a lot of wizards will run out of unbinding attempts eventually, and an army with 1-3 wizards doesn't even stand a chance at stopping this.

Lets say Andy the Daemon player is about to have a battle with his fried, Joe the Orc player. Andy has a large sized force of Daemons from a mixture of gods. Joe also has a large force of Orcs (only slightly smaller than Andy's Daemon collection). They used to play between 2500-3000 before the points were removed. He and his opponent set up and start playing. Andy had to leave a couple units from his collection out of the battle so that he and his opponent's army seemed pretty even. With little else to do with his Hero phase on turn 1, Andy summons in the units he had to leave out. Let's say Andy suffers some solid losses on turn 2. He loses a good chunk of Bloodletters, some Daemonettes, and some Flamers. His friend Joe has lost some models as well. Andy has kept his Tzeentch wizard units near the back of his force and allowed his other units to take the hit of the Orc charge. Because of this, he can just summon his dead models back; effectively suffering no casualties. Two turns later, Joe's poor Orc force has been ground down quite a bit, but at least he gets to pick a sudden death win condition. Assassinate and Blunt probably wont work since Andy will just pick his Tzeentch units hiding in the back. Seize Ground would quite possibly work if Joe was the player who went second. But he was the player who had the first turn, so Andy could simply fight the Orcs off whatever piece of scenery they decide to claim. So his only solid option is Endure. Hardly any fun for Joe the Orc player since an Orc wouldn't run and hide. Even if he avoids being tabled by the constantly regenerating Daemon force and wins by Endure, it'll hardly feel like any sort of victory.

Did Andy play like a dick in this game? He used a balanced chaos force that happened to have some Tzeentch units. He didn't borrow any models from friends, didn't proxy anything, and only added a couple units to his force on turn 1 (not a huge difference at the size they were playing at). After that, he was simply summoning whatever he was able to from the dead pile. Andy and Joe are both pretty casual players with balanced armies, This new edition is tons of fun for Andy but not so much for Joe.

Even at a causal level, summoning is a problem.


So, overall question: I have not played fantasy in a few years, so I may be somewhat out of touch. For those of you who have Daemon players in your group, how do you plan on handling this? Houserules, force size advantage to the non-Daemon player, etc..? I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this.

Summoning can be done by 4 armies... Lizardmen can do the same thing.

The game sucks. Its that simple.

I play daemons, and i like tzeentch, and how im going to deal with it is this:

Be a non-dick and refrain from summoning anything, at all times, unless it's tactically needed to avoid losing, or if im facing an army that is also set up to do plenty of summoning and i see that it is my opponents intent.

Honestly summoning has never felt very fair to me. In 40k, tzeentch isnt quite as good at it as he is here in AoS, but i still avoided it unless it was needed to face the list across the table from me. I feel it's alnost inpossible to balance something like summoning, where the model chosen to.be summoned is so variable as well as the properties of the model summoning. It's a mechanic I use only as a last ditch effort to save my ass or a force builder when i feel i'm overwhelmed before i can do damage.

If i summoned like that, i cant see my opponent sticking around to finish even the first turn, so i think the strategy is pointless even if it is overpowered. All the easy win buttons in this game will just be met with cold, judging stares.

Icelord.
Wow, I was not aware of this. I assume the other 2 that can summon are Tomb kings and Vamps. To be fair, Daemons, TK and VC make sense for summoning, but it should be more difficult. But Wtf.... Lizardmen.... Really?

AncientSkarbrand.
Interesting point. I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of the daemon players. Is your group considering adding a point cost system people have been popping up with? Really, no matter how flawed these systems are, they're better than nothing.

Lizard men are now demons. Each warscroll in their army has a spell that if you have a slann he knows. The spells summon that unit.

So the Saurus give the slann summon Saurus. 6+ gain 10 Saurus.

Maloghurst
to be honest i foresee having a hard time getting the rest of my group into it, im the only one who seems really interested in it. If i can convince a few to play some games they may come around but i think a points system would help them get used to it.

The systems ive seen have seemed fairly okay to implement but i think starting off im just going to tell them to bring what they want and then put what i think is even on the table for my army.

Hopefully scenarios brighten my prospects on possible opponents. Haha.

I personally just dont think that any army needs to summon to win. If my opponent has the upper hand, it just rebalances the game... Sort of like a survivability buff. But if i do it right off the start, it really feels dirty to me. Like... I should have just brought twice the points from the get-go if i wanted to be like that.

The odd player in my group enjoys steamrolling opponents though, so if they want to summon against my tzeentch daemons, it's on. Bigtime.


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Honestly, I probably wont summon at all until we are much more familiar with the nuances of this game. I noticed it was broken and planned on not doing it at all until it felt right. There are other spells to cast anyway.

The exception would be a "lets try summoning" game of wizards only and their summons fight eachother. Necromancer arena.