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

So, while I have often ranted against AoS for one thing or another and so have many others, so here is the question.....what would you have done different? Even if you like AoS what would yuo have done different? not a bash thread, but a "this is how I would have made it better" thread.

Make AoS a side game while keeping WHFB. There was no good reason to just axe off WHFB like they did. The two games have a lot of cross-over with the models and lore so doing two games isn't a total diversion of resources

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Make AoS a side game while keeping WHFB. There was no good reason to just axe off WHFB like they did. The two games have a lot of cross-over with the models and lore.

Yeah I would have done that.

Though I also wouldn't have released 8th edition as it was which IMO put WHFB on the path to death.

I also would have spent a bit more time on the AoS rules. While I like the idea of a game with rules on 4 pages, I think they could have been written a bit better and if it had expanded it to 5 pages I don't think much would have been lost.

I would have stopped short of destroying the Old World.

Still have a global catastophe which completely ravages the world but have the blasted ruins be somewhat recognizable to keep a stronger link to the history of the game.

reimagine the races in terms of the last survivors struggling to make it.

The first release would be a Mordheim style game. Make a limited number of terrain kits and minis that exemplify the new background. The bulk of the new design work would be upgrade sprues to adapt the minis to the new racial identities and world's aesthetic.

The second release would be a supplement which advances the storyline and has rules for larger games akin to 1000ish games in previous editons.

A final release which further advances the story and establishes how the world and its nations have settled. Have this include rules for full scale 2400-2500ish battles.

Throughout each release focus on persistant characters and units with robust campaign rules for playing from one game size to the next.

This would accomplish the dual goals of rebranding the more generic elements and breaking down the barriers to entry which plagued the latter era of WHFB.

Rules-wise, you’ve got to add points. Everything else is workable, as long as it had a balancing mechanic of some sort. A system with poorly-tested points is at least as good as just eyeballing your and your opponent’s forces. A system with well-tested points is tightly tuned for competitive players and a great baseline for modification by “fluff-driven” players. (Still think that’s a false dichotomy though.)

Fluff-wise, I’d have gone in an entirely different direction. Keep the Old World, keep the planet, but push it towards a post-apocalyptic theme. A lot of the factional changes could still work. Pockets of human civilization struggling to survive. Bands of Chaos marauders, roaming the countryside, still living large off of their End Times victory. Sylvaneth spirits under the command of the Everqueen, staking out a new forest home. The dwarves, in a move to stave off extinction, forging a closer bond with the plane of fire, particularly their slayers. And running between the forces of order are Sigmar and the stormcast eternals, supporting the downtrodden and marshalling the other races to fight against Chaos.

I’d even tweak the stormcast further, make them more authoritarian. Sigmar will move mountains to help your village fend off the oncoming Chaos, but you have to give up your sovereignty, swear fealty to him. The stormcast are useful, but cold and impersonal. Some say they’re reincarnated heroes; others say they’re enslaved demons. And woe betides anyone who turns their back on Sigmar’s grand plan…

Like so much of what GW does, there are nuggets of good material in AoS. They just missed the mark, as usual.

Not introduced Sigmarines.

The idea of a post End Times skirmish game happening in the ruins of the Old World has a lot of potential, but it needs to be tied to the setting we knew and loved. We should be playing in the ruins of Nul instead of a doodle on a map we've never seen before, and we should be playing the remnants of the Empire who are trying to eek out a living there, rather than people thousands of years later who have no real connection to the Empire.

I wouldn't have destroyed the Old World.

In my version of the story, the Chaos wins and ravages everything but little secret enclaves.
The dwarves would have taken refuge in giant sealed vaults close to the center of the planet, where they met with the magmadroth and become the fireslayers later.
The Slanns would have pulled their cities off the ground, becoming a conglomerate of flying kingdoms hiding in the skies and striking anywhere through teleportation magic.
Sigmar would have indeed become a god and created the Stormcast Eternals atop of a mountain perpetually hidden in a deadly storm of lightning and thunder. hundred of years later, once ready, he unleashed them on the world.
Nagash conquered Khemri and set his realm deep in the desert, where no army could reach them.
Orcs retreated far East and have been fighting the forces of Chaos for centuries.
Dark and High elves formed an alliance and emprisoned Slaneesh himself in forgotten caves far in the south pole. They have have been trying to vanquish him for centuries, fighting in the dark against corrupting magic and slowly becoming something never seen before: the shadowkin.
Wood Elves and Sylvaneth have survived in the forest of Athel Loren thanks to Alarielle's magic, which basically renders the place invisible. Remains of old Bretonnia live there with them as well. They bacome knights of the forest, lead by the Knight of Sinople himself. Now that the SE are trying to reconquer the world, Alarielle brought down the barrier, but Nurgle is coming after her.
The rest of the word is ruled by Chaos. The land has been transformed. The entire Great Ocean has become a land of everchanging metal, ruled by Tzeench, who built his throne on the remains of Ulthuan. Rumors say a Duardin enclave has sprouted from the ground not long ago and is fighting there since.
Khorne rules the north, where everyday, thousands of prisoners are brought by his legions from all over the world to be excuted or take part in savage combats in bloody arenas.
Nurgle has built his new garden in old Lustria.
Most of the ex vampire count and dwarf kingdoms belong to the Skaven.
The center of the empire and Altdorf itself became the capital of Archaon's empire. And at the center of it, the Spire of the Varanguard keeps an eye on everything.

That's pretty much it. I would have made a better fluff.

Make the combat resolution simpler and quicker. Just To Hit, To Save. Get rid of a lot of the little modifiers for combat that give you D3 attacks if you blah blah blah. Just make that unit a bit stronger.

Instead of range for melee, make a range 1 weapon work only in contact, a range 2 weapon work if in contact with a figure that is in contact (one layer) and so on.

Use movement trays for the multi-figure units. When positioning is so important, it's ridiculous that people can waft figures around within a kind of electron probability cloud and thereby magically have more of them in range when it's crucial. It's also very slow to move all the figures individually and precisely.

Alternatively, scrap the two previous rules and make it that the whole unit is available once one figure is in contact, so that positions don't matter. For large units, use the range stat as a limiter; range 1 means six figures can attack, range 2 means 12, and so on. To prevent people making very long linear units, coherency is changed so that you have to stay within three inches of the unit leader.

Get rid of IGOUGO and have some kind of unit activation system.

These ideas obviously need some working out in detail.

I'd have just put space marines in, rather than sigmarines. Best of both games then

 thekingofkings wrote:
So, while I have often ranted against AoS for one thing or another and so have many others, so here is the question.....what would you have done different? Even if you like AoS what would yuo have done different? not a bash thread, but a "this is how I would have made it better" thread.

Release it in addition, not instead of 8th edition, as a smaller in scale, mission-intensive game, campaign-oriented game.

A new Mordheim, brought up to date in the Infinity mould (activation points and such)

Slowly phase out 8th edition, but continue supporting it with dual releases AoS/WHFB.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Make AoS a side game while keeping WHFB. There was no good reason to just axe off WHFB like they did. The two games have a lot of cross-over with the models and lore so doing two games isn't a total diversion of resources

Oh please don't give Games-Workshop a way out of this. There is a perfectly good reason to axe of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. First off there was the high prices, then there is the poor writing/no editing. Then we have poor balance between army books, and then GW makes a rule set that a lot of people don't like. Also there is no support for their product in the way of answering questions of piss poor writing and or not a clear and concise rule set. Because of this a lot of people stopped collecting and playing WHFB. So instead of giving the people what they want, and GW not taking responsibility for what they did and blaming their customers instead they decided to axe a product they can't fix. So yes there is a perfectly good reason what GW did. It's their fault for letting it happen.

For what I would have done, is let Age of Sigmar be the introductory into WHFB. AoS could have been the starter/smaller rules set to play and WHFB could have been for lager battles. For me there was no good point to get into WHFB since the buy in was just way to big. Also I would support the game buy answering questions or actually updating every 2 weeks or at least once a month the FAQs/Erratas.

To get people into the fluff for AoS I wouldn't be charging a premium product for what nobody knows about. No way am I paying $100 for books of garbage. While they may not be garbage, that is what I see GW as now, great looking minis, but garbage when it comes to rules and books. So why would I want to pay a premium price for those? GW should be almost giving me these books for free so I would want to spend my time reading them, get invested into AoS and want to be paying a premium price for those minis.

Instead we are still getting the same old same old. While it's great we are getting the rules and war scrolls for free the problem still is that the Rules seem like little to no effort was being made. No support via FAQs and GW is not really serious about it. I still get the feeling I am suppose to become a sucker instead of a customer.

More Stormcast.

Making AOS a side game would have been useless. People hate change as it is. Making AOS a side game would have resulted in it largely being ignored. If you're going to invest energy into making a game, you don't make a stupid decision like that.

AOS could not exist side by side with WHFB as a fantasy themed tabletop game.

I don't mind the old world being destroyed. I would have likely destroyed it too.

What would I have done differently?

I would have made the game about 10-12 pages. Its still simple but with enough room to clarify.

I would have kept points because the vast majority of wargamers today cannot function without them and trying to go off back to 1982, while admirable, is foolish from a marketing standpoint.

Other then that, I love that battleline finally gets flushed. I really cannot emphasize enough how tired I am of that scenario. The various scenarios are great, give us a mechanism for generating them now.

The various realms are great, but give us the default rules for all of them. Right now we have time of wars for a few of the realms but not all.

The narrative is ok, but can we find out, even if its just short stories, what the other races are doing?

Thats what I would have done differently.

I think the new mechanics would be perfectly fine, if they were tightened up and the points cost style kept.


It's not even to the second page of this thread, and I have already seen several setting outlines that are more inspired than the official one. It's obvious that the serting above all else is what's making the game fall flat with so many people.

Well, that and the crazy army composition rules. But mostly the trippy as hell setting.

Add a points value to all units. Make it a scenario rule that not every scenario uses, but have one.

Add unit-type keywords to all units, not just monsters and war machines. Ie, have units tagged as 'infantry', 'cavalry', 'monstrous infantry', etc.

The base is considered part of the model for measuring purposes. Leave concerns over appropriate base sizes to tournaments, you never needed rules about that stuff before.

Up coherency to 2". 1" is just sort of awkward.

Remove the basic scenario from the core rules, (no victory bonuses, no sudden death, no deployment, etc). Put that in a separate scenarios PDF with a handful of interesting sample scenarios, some using points for forces, some using them for victory conditions, and some not using them at all. The game works far better with scenarios, make interesting scenarios their own free document like with terrain.

Take the generic terrain rules out as well, and put those in the separate terrain rules PDF that already exists.

Use the space saved to add the following rules:

Non-Monster Heroes within 2" of a friendly unit with the same unit-type keyword cannot be targeted by shooting attacks in the enemy's shooting phase.

add rules for bound spells - basically spell effects cast at a particular value that can be dispelled by mages as normal.

Expand on rules for reserves somewhat - make them units that are part of your army that you set to the side, but make clear that they're part of your army, so if a scenario restricts your army then your reserves count towards those restrictions.


Change most summoning.

With undead, go back to only zombies and maybe ghosts being outright summonable, and keep the current rules for summoning them.

Replace other summoning spells with healing spells which restore the same amount of models as the banners for similar units, and either d3 or d6 wounds for monsters, depending on casting value. Then make the banners bound spells, keeping the ability and fluff, but letting the enemy do something about it.

With daemons (including lizards), replace summoning with the ability to hold in reserve, then roll at the start of every turn after the first, and on a 4+ deploy anywhere more than 9" from an enemy unit and may not move that turn. Instead of a summoning spell, have a spell that lets the caster pick one daemon unit in reserve to automatically pass that roll that turn, and the unit can then deploy anywhere within 9" of the caster but more than 3" from an enemy unit, and may move normally that turn.

Greater daemons and daemon princes in reserve instead enter by possessing (desroying) a friendly chaos hero with the same alignment keyword, setting up the monster within 6", then removing the hero as a casualty.

Tree summoning would be deploying from reserve into forest terrain.


Fluff wise, move back the timeline to much closer to the end times. The old world gets sucked into the warp whole, causing catastrophic damage, shifting continents around, becoming a warped and magical wasteland, but the powers of chaos are still in the process of ravaging the world and hunting down survivors, and into that setting - with the world re-arranged and changed but still full of recognizeable places and people - have sigmar launch his sigmarine counter-offensive with the sigmarines.

auticus wrote:
Making AOS a side game would have been useless. People hate change as it is. Making AOS a side game would have resulted in it largely being ignored. If you're going to invest energy into making a game, you don't make a stupid decision like that.

Very good point there, never thought of that.

I would have kept points because the vast majority of wargamers today cannot function without them and trying to go off back to 1982, while admirable, is foolish from a marketing standpoint.

I think it's not the majority of wargamers but Nerds and Geeks. For some reason we need numbers that make us feel like we are smarter than others. I call it the Jock plastic toy syndrome. A lot of use need to be Jocks. Since we couldn't do it physically years ago, we try and do it mentally now. That is why a lot of people are having a hard time. They are not being athletes with plastic toy soldiers. Quite simple really. We no longer have fun, but need to win and for some, need to be validated. Pefect example? Read Privateer Page 5. You need to have balls. BALLS. Do we really need to prove that our nerd weiner is bigger than some one else's?

Agies Grimm said it best lol.

auticus wrote:
Making AOS a side game would have been useless. People hate change as it is. Making AOS a side game would have resulted in it largely being ignored. If you're going to invest energy into making a game, you don't make a stupid decision like that.

As opposed to now where it's super popular?

It is popular in certain geographical locations, and is selling much better than fantasy was. Certain comments here just show bias or personal dislike, which is fine as everyone is entitled to their opinion... but is just solely their opinion.

Fantasy was dead and bleeding cash from gw for its last few years. That's why they killed the system (with one last cash grab for the end times) and rebooted with aos. Financials and flgs showed this for the most part (again things differ based on geography). Feel free to speak with gw management and they will tell you WHFB was not doing well, not oas.

Aos is not doing as well among the fantasy crowd (many of whom are bitter about whfb and rightfully so after the end times cash grab), but aos has a growing following of 40k players, other gamers, etc. Negative slights here do nothing for the hobby, the game, or the growing fan base. If anything they push those gamers away from the forums, which is why aos has been quieter while the actual gaming community I growing. It is the bully and school yard mentality.

 Sqorgar wrote:
More Stormcast.

what kind? cav, light infantry? artillery?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 455_PWR wrote:
It is popular in certain geographical locations, and is selling much better than fantasy was. Certain comments here just show bias or personal dislike, which is fine as everyone is entitled to their opinion... but is just solely their opinion.

Fantasy was dead and bleeding cash from gw for its last few years. That's why they killed the system (with one last cash grab for the end times) and rebooted with aos. Financials and flgs showed this for the most part (again things differ based on geography). Feel free to speak with gw management and they will tell you WHFB was not doing well, not oas.

Aos is not doing as well among the fantasy crowd (many of whom are bitter about whfb and rightfully so after the end times cash grab), but aos has a growing following of 40k players, other gamers, etc. Negative slights here do nothing for the hobby, the game, or the growing fan base. If anything they push those gamers away from the forums, which is why aos has been quieter while the actual gaming community I growing. It is the bully and school yard mentality.

We are not talking about whether or not its popular or selling, just what we would have done different

I wouldn't have done the silly rules, especially during the introduction, as I think that was salt in a lot of people's wounds.

I would have thrown more of a bone to people with legacy armies, as clearly a lot of people, even many interested in the new game, felt left in limbo with whether their army still existed or not and therefore were hesitant to take it up/felt uninspired.

I agree with Davor to an extent that AoS doesn't cater to the "Alpha Nerd" personality (but that's not a bad thing in my view).

I side with everyone proposing a post apocalyptic version of the old world. Just a few ideas:

- The fall of Altdorf, capital of the Old Empire, was the symbolic End Times for the old alliance of noble races. Chaos has settled into the city as their new capital, and the new government resembles the absolute worst moments of the French revolution, with forced conversion to Chaos worship enforced by mass use of the guillotine.

- Archaon won daemonhood with the death of Karl Franz and the collapse of the various enemies of Chaos. But, in his ascension, he has left the Chaos forces in the real world leaderless. We start the new story with Archaon missing and Chaos largely dysfunctional - a large Archaon demon model would be released as the story progressed and he returned.

- The various non-Chaos races are in a state of guerrilla warfare, living now in the lands seldom seen before in Warhammer Fantasy. The southlands, Tilea, Cathay, all must now join the struggle, or they surely will be the next to fall. The remnants of the Empire live in exile, under the assumption that the gods have abandoned them, and into this growing lack of faith a new religion has taken hold: faith in science. The surviving engineers have become venerated, and many nations now put their faith in shotte and math more than hammer and prayer. Industrialization, where still possible, has seen steam powered war engines standardized. Within another season, the first Steam Tank Platoons will strike at the edges of the new Chaos Empire, under the cover of Dwarven air-mobile forces. It remains to be seen though, if their small numbers can really make a difference.

- Karl did not die of course, his body was spirited away, and he has become an avatar of Sigmar, the rebirth of the human god. Those who protect him are agents of the other surviving dwarven and elven gods, who hope to reforge an alliance that will save their dying races. Together, the gods forge a palace in the sky, far above the despoiled ground, and try to rebuild their power through restoring faith and hope to their lost kin, sharing their power more directly with those few who have kept faithful. And so, the first of the Stormcast are forged in secret. Where the men of the land have put their faith in science, the Stormcast will epitomize the will and power of the gods.

- The Lizardmen, being revealed to be essentially phone repairmen, finally receive a reply from the home office on their now thousands of years old report that the signal interference in the polar relay gates of the Warhammer planet have been due to warp feedback caused by the unresolved presence of undisciplined mortal minds. The home office relays back, and explains that the feedback could interfere with other planetary relays in the galactic spiral if unresolved, and requests the extermination of all mortal minds present to resolve warp feedback and restore the communication relay function. The Slann now must decide if they will obey the orders of the home office and set to work on the genocide of the broken world, or if they have any loyalty to the mortals that are causing these service interruptions, and will side with them against the Chaos gods that are equally to blame.


And so on...

Apologies to everyone who had this very similar idea. I'm not bashing your creativity. It's just my personal opinion.

Fantasy 2: Post Apocalyptic Boogaloo sounds inane.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

auticus wrote:
Making AOS a side game would have been useless. People hate change as it is. Making AOS a side game would have resulted in it largely being ignored. If you're going to invest energy into making a game, you don't make a stupid decision like that.

As opposed to now where it's super popular?

AoS isn't just a ruleset for kids with piss poor background made from the tears of people who owned a WFB rulebook...
Ignoring the act of playing the game, everything about AoS is a departure for GW, an attempt to overhaul the concepts of starting and collecting that GW had created for themselves, of being able to break the required chain of release cycles, of all their minis being judged solely on appearance, as without points values nothing "isn't worth taking".
If they ran WFB in conjunction with AoS, all of those business decisions that obviously had some effect on AoS would be pointless.
WFB was not making GW enough of a return on the investment of resources. AoS is a product that GW obviously hope will correct that.

For me, I'd have kept bases as the definition of the model for measurement. A couple of wording clarifications here & there, including a partially simulated LoS. The beginner's scenario has to stay in the rules (otherwise you can't actually play!) but it'd have a random victory condition such as kill general, etc. rather than the pitched battle idea.
Markers. GW aren't normally slow to try and monetize an aspect of gaming, so for a system that relies heavily on remains-in-play effects I'm amazed they haven't released some form of markers for this job.

Wfb wasn't making money because gw were neglecting it, look at how fast the first few end times books were sold out clearly there was a market there eager for wfb to get some attention.

They made the game too expensive with the whole hordes thing that stopped New people dead.

hobojebus wrote:
Wfb wasn't making money because gw were neglecting it, look at how fast the first few end times books were sold out clearly there was a market there eager for wfb to get some attention.

They made the game too expensive with the whole hordes thing that stopped New people dead.

So your suggestion is you would have lowered prices? again not talking abuot WHFB or whether or not AoS sucks,...just what you would have done to make it different or better..

I would have kept WFB going and used AoS as a "gateway drug" to get people into it. I had 3 smallish armies in 6th, skipped 7th and got back in during 8th. I quickly found that I had neither the points or the heavy hitters I needed to do much of anything.

If they had done AoS as something similar to Mordheim I think it would have done a lot better. Keep the End Times thing, but rather than destroy the Old World outright just leave it in ruins. The AoS/ Mordheim game would be based around smallish warbands/ scouting bands roving around seeing what's what and gathering resources.

As it is, not much really catches my eye in the new model range and I'm reluctant to drop much money on stuff for the older armies while everything is still up in the air.

 Lord Corellia wrote:
I would have kept WFB going and used AoS as a "gateway drug" to get people into it. I had 3 smallish armies in 6th, skipped 7th and got back in during 8th. I quickly found that I had neither the points or the heavy hitters I needed to do much of anything.

Putting aside the setting, a skirmish scale, campaign oriented game, using regular fantasy and 40k models, would be a boon to GW in my opinion. I've put a few hundred into fantasy after years of nothing, because I liked the idea of smaller armies. I got into orks for 40k because of the models I had started collecting in Gorkamorka.

There must be others out there who would buy GW products if the game didn't require hundreds of models for a "real" game.

Which is why, had i made AOS, I wouldn't have listed points - it's the points that create this artificial "real" game size. That said, I would have included a blurb that clubs and online communities should come together and build their own balancing mechanisms. Because, ultimately, I trust players and TOs to balance the game better than I trust GW to do it.

Oggthrok wrote:
Which is why, had i made AOS, I wouldn't have listed points - it's the points that create this artificial "real" game size. That said, I would have included a blurb that clubs and online communities should come together and build their own balancing mechanisms. Because, ultimately, I trust players and TOs to balance the game better than I trust GW to do it.

I trust SOME of the local players to self-regulate. A couple of guys around here would just bring literally hundreds of models and be like "well why isn't your collection this big?"

That's why I haven't even attempted to get into AoS yet.

I would have included a points system to allow for pick-up games and those that want them.

I would have also come out with a "campaign setting guide" for AoS in softcover that is about the size of the Grand Alliance Chaos book along with that price.

 455_PWR wrote:
It is popular in certain geographical locations, and is selling much better than fantasy was. Certain comments here just show bias or personal dislike, which is fine as everyone is entitled to their opinion... but is just solely their opinion.

Fantasy was dead and bleeding cash from gw for its last few years. That's why they killed the system (with one last cash grab for the end times) and rebooted with aos. Financials and flgs showed this for the most part (again things differ based on geography). Feel free to speak with gw management and they will tell you WHFB was not doing well, not oas.

Aos is not doing as well among the fantasy crowd (many of whom are bitter about whfb and rightfully so after the end times cash grab), but aos has a growing following of 40k players, other gamers, etc. Negative slights here do nothing for the hobby, the game, or the growing fan base. If anything they push those gamers away from the forums, which is why aos has been quieter while the actual gaming community I growing. It is the bully and school yard mentality.

If AoS was a success it would be pretty obvious. If AoS was a genuinely good game it wouldn't need to be coddled like this. This kind of attitude, the one that says AoS fans need to be sheltered or they'll run for the hills, either shows how little confidence it's fanbase has in the game or how fragile it's position is.

But that's neither here nor there. The fascinating cognitive dissonance displayed by it's most ardent defenders is worthy of it's own topic.