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Made in ca
Enigmatic Chaos Sorcerer





British Columbia

I've got a game of AoS planned with my brother in a couple days. He has been extremely jaded on GW games from playing factions which were well behind the power curve in both systems and becoming frustrated with the quality of the rule writing. He loved the idea of Fantasy but didn't like some of the minutia. He has since fully embraced WMH

I've been telling him about AoS and he has been fairly receptive to many of the changes. Specifically the increased viability of BS based shooting and the synergies between units.

I think it best to play under some kind of comp as he comes from a very regimented competitive mindset. As a long time MTG player I think he'd really like Clash Comp with its sideboard mechanics. So I'm leaning towards that Comp.

So what I'm wondering is what battleplan would work best to showcase AoS to someone coming from his background. ( I have the first three campaign books but none of the battletomes)

Also does Clash limit summoning? We will be playing Slaves of Darkness vs Seraphon. I know summoning has been a point of contention and I'd like it to feel like a strength of the system not a flaw.

Any other thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
A young business man named Tom Kirby, who was a pupil of mine until he turned greedy, helped the capitalists hunt down and destroy the wargamers. He betrayed and murdered Games Workshop.


 
   
Made in gb
Tough Treekin




1st, if you want to go "full summoning", then pick a scenario that triggers on a starting kills related number or ignores kills for victory conditions.
The intended balancing mechanic (as far as I can figure) for summoning is that any summoned models count as casualties against starting models on the board - e.g. if you start with 20 models and summon 10, opponent still only has to kill 20 models to count as having killed your 20 " starting" models.

2nd, others would disagree with me but I really don't think comp helps Age of Sigmar, especially if you go full blown scenario + time of War + mysterious terrain - there are just too many random elements to make the game 'balanced' on your relative skill / luck.

Try to focus on the cinematic aspect of the game, rather than the competitive.

My best suggestion as a starter game would probably be The Ritual. It's an extremely random game length and body count is irrelevant. As an intro game, I'd suggest only one 'balancing' agreement - equal numbers of models with the Wizard or Priest keyword on each side.
Other than that, go nuts, empty your collections onto the board, summon as much as you like.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/02/01 17:46:51


 
   
Made in us
Repentia Mistress





I've played more games without points than with.

Always play scenarios.

Watchtower, Breakthrough and The Ritual are a solid introduction trilogy; you could even have that as a mini-campaign with the winner rolling on the victory table for the next game. i.e. if the attacker wins Watchtower they get to see a "Breakthrough" point in the defences, leading to the next battleplan et al.

You could also use the same army selection for all three games to keep the theme running.
   
Made in us
Dangerous Skeleton Champion




Baltimore

Clash does limit summoning, and does so in, imo, the best way of any formal comp system for age of Sigmar.

As you're probably familiar, you start with your initial pool of choices for your collection or 'total army' of 30 pool choices, and then during deployment select a subset of up to 20 pool choices to deploy as your defacto army or 'deployed force' for that game. The Clash Comp rules don't describe other game sizes, but it's easy to extrapolate a 3/2 ratio for other game sizes (15/10, 60/40, etc).

The way summoning works is that if you want to summon during the game, then you have to start with a smaller deployed force to make room. For instance, you might start with a 'deployed force' of 15 pool choices instead of 20, allowing you to summon up to a maximum of 5 pool choices during the game. These summoned units are taken from the undeployed choices from your Total army.

This gives summoning armies a bit more tactical flexibility during the game - both in reactive unit selection and the normal summoning advantage of reactive deployment - at the cost of starting with a smaller force. However, summoning armies DO NOT get to play with a larger total force than non-summoning lists.

This is the balance that summoning requires in Age of Sigmar regardless of comp method. If you're going to summon a unit to the table, that unit needs to count towards whatever force organization rules you're using, be it a formal comp system or an informal gut check. If you and your opponent are limiting how many units you bring to a given game, that limit needs to apply to all units regardless of how you deploy them, making summoning an alternate deployment method, similar to deep strike in 40k, and not a means of bringing more stuff to the table than your non-summoning opponent is allowed to play with.

This is also closest to vanilla Age of Sigmar, where any unit you summon in game could have just been deployed at the start, which again makes summoning effectively an alternate deployment method. One should note that the armies with summoning access - daemons, lizardmen, undead - are not inherently weaker than other forces if you don't use summoning at all, it's not like the game expects you to have more of them to play right.

So yeah, clash comp does it right, but no matter what comp you use, you need to work it out in a similar way, where summoning is an alternate deployment method only. If that's not how your chosen comp does it by default, then you need to alter it to work that way, or you need to avoid summoning altogether, or your games will fall apart. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. My local scene didn't handle summoning this way at first, and as a result several key early games that decided some potential players' opinions of the game were completely overwhelmed by summoning, causing more than a couple players who tried the game to abandon it early on.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/02/02 14:56:28


 
   
 
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