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This is one of the reasons I went off the game with my Sylvaneth. I was constantly struggling to field an army with the 1500-2000 points restrictions. For example, if I wanted to take Alariele that’s near enough half or a third of my points gone. Tree lords were eye watering lot expensive as were revanents and even Dryads. There were a ton of options which I basically couldn’t take and I definitely felt like I wasn’t able to get the full use out of the army. I mean what’s the point getting a huge collection if you can’t use it?

Personally I like any game where you have lots of painted models on the board. I really don’t like “let’s get one unit and slam a hundred buffs on it so that it’s unkillble and can deal a hundred wounds on 2 plus and all that nonesense. I want to see two armies of toy soldiers kill each other I am really not interested in the mathhammer. It’s why I loathe how the game encourages dithering over which unit should strike next.

I mean with the new Stormcast I was genuinely toying with an army built around a load of Liberators and Sequitors backed up by Evocators. But I kept thinking that there wasn’t much point if people simply don’t field armies that much bigger than the starter set and a monster. Plus such an army would be cut to pieces because it’s not built around buffing a single unit, you have the rule of one. Big armies are also overcosted and at a disadvantage because not everyone can attack and the turn priority favours getting as much damage as early as possible (meaning smaller armies are better). Plus you have battleshock and more units means you can’t make that one unit immune to it.

Why don't people field lots of models?

* its expensive in money
* its expensive in time. Assembling and painting
* the more models on the table, the more you have to keep track of. The less models on the table, the easier to manage.
* less storage space

Skirmish scale games became all the rage around 2005 or so and that interest really blew up over the last 5-6 years.

Now a days, games that feature more than say 30 models or so a side really struggle to gain any acceptance. Warhammer/Age of Sigmar has its legacy namesake propping it up, but the days of massed battles with a lot of models is, in my opinion, a rare thing these days and often only seen in the historicals section of your stores.

auticus wrote:

* its expensive in money
* its expensive in time. Assembling and painting
* the more models on the table, the more you have to keep track of. The less models on the table, the easier to manage.
* less storage space

This.
Plus *Time in playing the game.
Money and storage are probably the biggest factors I find.
Building a 1000pts force ain't too hard and neither is carrying it around for 4-6 hours of travel.

auticus wrote:
Why don't people field lots of models?

* its expensive in money
* its expensive in time. Assembling and painting
* the more models on the table, the more you have to keep track of. The less models on the table, the easier to manage.
* less storage space

Skirmish scale games became all the rage around 2005 or so and that interest really blew up over the last 5-6 years.

Now a days, games that feature more than say 30 models or so a side really struggle to gain any acceptance. Warhammer/Age of Sigmar has its legacy namesake propping it up, but the days of massed battles with a lot of models is, in my opinion, a rare thing these days and often only seen in the historicals section of your stores.

If I was concerned about any of the above I would just invest more in video games. This would save you even more of the above and with a video game it’s far easier to access and meet new people. Once you’ve collected a full Heresy army the notion of getting 30 Liberators is not daunting.

Those are all reasons for small games. But structurally the game discourages you taking big armies even when theoretically you have the option. Like, I own a hundred Dryads. I could dump them in a battle and take the formation they go with. However, is that army as good as me taking my minimum troops and spamming Kurnoth Hunters? Also the game encourages you to focus all your buff spells/abilities on a single unit rather than lots of average sized blocks. So I don’t think it’s just people choosing to play the game a certain way. I think people don’t take a lot of troops because your armies perform so much better by taking less stuff.

Plus I hate how all the Warhammer games from 40k to Heresy make troops a tax rather than a necessary part of the army. Like I do not understand how Breacher marines were costed, even tactical s barely make sense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ValentineGames wrote:

auticus wrote:

* its expensive in money
* its expensive in time. Assembling and painting
* the more models on the table, the more you have to keep track of. The less models on the table, the easier to manage.
* less storage space

This.
Plus *Time in playing the game.
Money and storage are probably the biggest factors I find.
Building a 1000pts force ain't too hard and neither is carrying it around for 4-6 hours of travel.

Well most of the time I spent in an AoS game was pointless rangling and hand ringing over which unit I or my opponent should strike with next. As well as looking up all the spiders web of buffs. You cut those out and the game would go a lot faster.

Thats just the direction the gaming community has moved in the past 10-15 years.

Small, quick games are what sell. The days of epic huge battles are long gone. I still do one a year or so but any game that takes longer than say two hours and people start complaining.

What I don't get is why Matched Play points exist for warscroll battalions that are too big for any Matched Play game. Take the BCR Alfrostun for example: just to get the minimum units required to field it is nearly 5000 points, and includes way more Behemoths than are ever allowed in the Matched rules. Yet it has a points cost, because... reasons?

Anyway, to the original point, I feel like the AoS points costs are high and the limits restrictive in order to encourage more people to play non-Matched games. GW really seems uncomfortable with it being the "default" style of play, and they'd much rather people played more Narrative or Open games. You want to field a big army, maybe a whole Alfrostun? No Matched Play for you.

 kadeton wrote:
What I don't get is why Matched Play points exist for warscroll battalions that are too big for any Matched Play game. Take the BCR Alfrostun for example: just to get the minimum units required to field it is nearly 5000 points, and includes way more Behemoths than are ever allowed in the Matched rules. Yet it has a points cost, because... reasons?

Anyway, to the original point, I feel like the AoS points costs are high and the limits restrictive in order to encourage more people to play non-Matched games. GW really seems uncomfortable with it being the "default" style of play, and they'd much rather people played more Narrative or Open games. You want to field a big army, maybe a whole Alfrostun? No Matched Play for you.

I know, if you look at Warscrolls and what the max unit sizes are it really strongly implies that games are meant to be significantly larger than 2000 points.

Well TBH most people will point blank refuse to play a narrative game; even among friends and I don’t have that luxury since my mates mostly play Heresy. People really do not trust the idea of winging it and you need some arbitration on what everything is worth relative to everything else.

I mean the last game I played. Where I had just made some Hallowed Knights and it was basically:

Neave (We ignored her Hammers only rule)
Lord Castle
10 Ret Hammers
10 liberator
10 liberator
10 Judicator

Now IMO that’s not a troop heavy list. You’ve got three characters and one big stompy unit.

Against Bonesplitters where he basically had one block of arrow boys which he buffed to high heaven. So he was just deleting units and easily put gunning me. At the same time the rest of his army was cavalry and cheap but super tough guys with big sticks for objectives. Since it was multi objective I had to keep most of my army back and it was pretty much a massacre. But what got me was his advice that I should split the Liberators into units of five to take objectives. I mean I can’t stress how much I detest min maxing. 10 Liberators is not a lot. They are sold in units of ten, I take that to imply they are intended to be fielded as such. You wouldn’t have five of them operating on their own and it’s gamey to use small units to pad out your battle line and then focus on that stuff. That kind of left a sour taste for me because it was pretty obvious that the meta is built around that and I was going to keep running into silly looking lists like that bone splitter one.

Most of GW's battle reports tend to be around 3000 when they use points at all (in White Dwarf I mean). But basically, 2000 points is the norm because that is what tournaments decided was the "sweet spot" for balancing time and game length. As a result, 2000 is the default because it's the tournament standard and tournament standard tends to dictate policy.

It's a sad fact (auticus can 100% testify to this) that what is "tournament standard" tends to trickle down to all games from local tournaments to game night at your store/club to games in someone's garage. If the big tournaments decide that X book is not suited for tournaments (where the implication always becomes "because it's not balanced"), it will be an uphill battle to get them to be considered for any sort of Matched Play game, whether it's a tournament game/tournament prep or just two strangers having a pickup game because the perception becomes it's "unbalanced" since tournaments won't use it. Even if an area has no tournaments, that mindset will pervasively invade the community.

 kadeton wrote:
What I don't get is why Matched Play points exist for warscroll battalions that are too big for any Matched Play game. Take the BCR Alfrostun for example: just to get the minimum units required to field it is nearly 5000 points, and includes way more Behemoths than are ever allowed in the Matched rules. Yet it has a points cost, because... reasons?

Anyway, to the original point, I feel like the AoS points costs are high and the limits restrictive in order to encourage more people to play non-Matched games. GW really seems uncomfortable with it being the "default" style of play, and they'd much rather people played more Narrative or Open games. You want to field a big army, maybe a whole Alfrostun? No Matched Play for you.

Well, points can be used outside of Match Play, too. It helps to balance Narrative and Open games.

 kadeton wrote:
What I don't get is why Matched Play points exist for warscroll battalions that are too big for any Matched Play game. Take the BCR Alfrostun for example: just to get the minimum units required to field it is nearly 5000 points, and includes way more Behemoths than are ever allowed in the Matched rules. Yet it has a points cost, because... reasons?

It has a points cost because it's meant to be used in the Gathering of Might rules or for crazy people who want to have Armageddon level battles but still have points so things are "even".

Simply put, people dont have time for games that goes on for several hours, or dont want to spend the entire evning playing just 1 match.
Then you have the transport issue. The more models your army have, the more problematic it is to transport it. When you are dependent on public transport, you dont want to bring anything that is bigger then a small backpack or bag.

And then finaly the time issue. How are you going to find time to assemble, paint and base it all to an desent state?(desent beeing minimum 3 colours plus shade and layers)
Simple fact is skirmish is better then full army in allmoust all aspects for 28mm. Fast to play meaning many games per evning, easy to transport and you can finish the force in a few weeks.

If you want army size games, find 6-15mm scale game systems, they do it far better.

I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Davor wrote:
I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Not as featured but
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Age-of-Sigmar-Skirmish-ENG-2017

 LunarSol wrote:

Davor wrote:
I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Not as featured but
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Age-of-Sigmar-Skirmish-ENG-2017

ye it is the only option we have for the time beeing but it havent been updated cuz shadespire takes all fokus for small scale games.
for the record, no failcast models are represented in that booklet and the point cost of heros is somewhat high for the recommended startpoints.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Davor wrote:
I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Not as featured but
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Age-of-Sigmar-Skirmish-ENG-2017

ye it is the only option we have for the time beeing but it havent been updated cuz shadespire takes all fokus for small scale games.
for the record, no failcast models are represented in that booklet and the point cost of heros is somewhat high for the recommended startpoints.

Pardon the thread derail, but check out my pet project, AoS28; Warband - I think you’ll like it.

http://www.aos28warband.blogspot.com

LunarSol wrote:

Davor wrote:
I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Not as featured but
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Age-of-Sigmar-Skirmish-ENG-2017

Thanks for that. I have that. I guess when I bought it, and people didn't use it, was when I took a break from the hobby. I totally forgot about that. Is it still compatible with 2.0?

GuitaRasmus wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Davor wrote:
I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Not as featured but
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Age-of-Sigmar-Skirmish-ENG-2017

ye it is the only option we have for the time beeing but it havent been updated cuz shadespire takes all fokus for small scale games.
for the record, no failcast models are represented in that booklet and the point cost of heros is somewhat high for the recommended startpoints.

Pardon the thread derail, but check out my pet project, AoS28; Warband - I think you’ll like it.

http://www.aos28warband.blogspot.com

Thank you for the link. Looks good. Hopefully I can get people to try this. Nobody wanted to try Hinterlands sadly, let's hope they will try this. This might just get me into AoS more since I am in a mood of small games not large games.

Another point to consider is that one reason that Fantasy was suffering before was the time and money investment required to get "up to minimum" at most places to get into a decent sized game. That was a pretty big barrier which caused many to slip off and try other skirmish games or to simply go for 40K.

Yes there were skirmish modes and such, but they weren't marketed as heavily (And in truth I suspect that for several years GW focused their fantasy advertising and push on the Lord of the Rings product line and licence until the end of the films basically tore that casual market up for a long while).



I suspect that Sigmar is basically treating much of it like a full relaunch. There's been a big gap of time and the market moved on in the time that fantasy was dwindling down so whilst there is a large legacy community; there's also a lot of new people getting on board. Having a smaller model count does make it easier for those people to get on board and get into games.


I fully expect that over a few years as Sigmar grows we'll likely see armies steadily get bigger (as has happened with 40K) and we might well see powerful units get a bit weaker and a bit cheaper so that as the community matures and more and more players have larger collections; the games default scale will adjust to suit.

GW can also give it an artificial boost every so often by releasing something like "Sigma Apoc" and essentially market the game with set of rules designed for larger scale battles.



I do agree that that I feel with my Daughers of Khaine its hard to get a lot of really juicy good models into a single army and that it gets even harder with Battalions (honestly whilst I understand the point increase to account for the command point; it hasn't helped the price of many battalions). When you're almost having to either run the whole army as one battalion or run units in that battalion at almost their min-fielding number then its a little worrying




But honestly I expect that give it 3 or 4 years we will see the size of armies increase even if the games "2K points" value doesn't shift (they can just shift unit costs).

Also consider that many of the earlier AoS armies have very few units to begin with, so smaller games are preferable because people may not want to buy ten boxes of fyreslayers vulkite berserkers. The newer armies seem to be a bit more varied, and Nighthaunt are friggin' packed with options, so that may help encourage bigger games in the future. Hopefully they will revisit some of those older AoS creations and add a unit or two. Allies help a bit but some folks want to focus in a single faction.

I still can't work out what GW's long term plan is for Sigmar. They took groups like High and Dark elves - which were large varied armies; and shattered them into a myriad of factions. Some only have one unique model to their name.

Personally I want them to focus on a few as core armies and then have the others as fringe factions designed to work in alliances with others; perhaps releasing a single battletome for a group of them and some relaxation of the allies limits when allying within those groups. That would at least keep the number of factions more sensible; otherwise Order is going to wide up with 20-30 factions within it alone; which whilst nice means that its very unlikely any will see new models for them for a VERY long time

 Overread wrote:
I still can't work out what GW's long term plan is for Sigmar. They took groups like High and Dark elves - which were large varied armies; and shattered them into a myriad of factions. Some only have one unique model to their name.

Personally I want them to focus on a few as core armies and then have the others as fringe factions designed to work in alliances with others; perhaps releasing a single battletome for a group of them and some relaxation of the allies limits when allying within those groups. That would at least keep the number of factions more sensible; otherwise Order is going to wide up with 20-30 factions within it alone; which whilst nice means that its very unlikely any will see new models for them for a VERY long time

Unless they're the posterboys, who at this point have almost as many individual kits as the entire Death Grand Alliance.

Having just played a tournament; the answer to the OP is going to be 'your local scene'.

I was running over 70 models. This was not uncommon.

The things you mention in the OP are, er, very powerful. They're expensive because they take chaff up and smear it over the battlefield. Want a horde? Run Skaven.

Davor wrote:I wish Age of Sigmar had Kill Teams now. Yes I know they have Shadespire but it's not the same.

Well, GW did hire Bottle (who wrote the Hinterlands skirmish game) shortly after their version of Skirmish was released, so I won't be surprised to see them re-release Skirmish with some of his rules mixed in (and Hinterlands was a much better skirmish game IMO).

FrozenDwarf wrote: ye it is the only option we have for the time beeing but it havent been updated cuz shadespire takes all fokus for small scale games

That's sort of like saying there's no market for chess because checkers exists. Shadespire is a completely different game set in the same universe. The mechanics are different enough that both can comfortably exist in the same space.

Overread wrote:I still can't work out what GW's long term plan is for Sigmar. They took groups like High and Dark elves - which were large varied armies; and shattered them into a myriad of factions. Some only have one unique model to their name.

Personally I want them to focus on a few as core armies and then have the others as fringe factions designed to work in alliances with others; perhaps releasing a single battletome for a group of them and some relaxation of the allies limits when allying within those groups. That would at least keep the number of factions more sensible; otherwise Order is going to wide up with 20-30 factions within it alone; which whilst nice means that its very unlikely any will see new models for them for a VERY long time

The direction of AoS has changed significantly since they split up the factions. In some cases, they've re-joined some of those armies they split up. Tzeentch, Khorne, and Nurgle all had separate factions for their mortal and daemon armies, but now each has a combined tome. I think what we'll end up seeing is some of those armies (like most of the former High Elf range) will be merged back into one army while a few of the others will be used as the basis for a new AoS army (like Sylvaneth and Daughters of Khaine). In the Core Book, several Order "factions" (Free Guilds, Dispossessed, Collegiate Arcane, Ironweld Arsenal, etc.) were collectively referred to as Free Peoples, for example. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see those factions combined in Battletome: Free Peoples at some point in the future.

If you want to play with two armies consisting of 50-100 models, playing sylvaneth is not a logical choice.

Usual Sylvaneth Core (at 1k): Treelord ancient + 20 Dryads (540pts for 21 models)
Possible skaven core (at 1k): Skaven warlord + 80 Clanrats (500pts for 81 models)

Ok, you dont know if your opponent will bring a horde army, but if you bring a small elite army yourself you will never see 2 horde armies clash against each other.

Also a problem with this is, the treelord ancient would propably kill 80 clanrats all by himself, if he had enough time. Which is why the ancient is the much more popular choice.

Pretty much always take the Ancient myself if for no other reason than he makes more Wyldwoods.

My experience with model count depends on the army. Armies like Stormcast are technically elite armies and are therefore going to have fewer models.

I play DoK and I can easily have 50-60 models in 1000 point game while still running a Cauldron. Same with my Blades of Khorne Bloodreaver army. Some armies just lend themselves better to be played as a horde.

Talk to your opponents. Let them know you want an epic massive game and ask if they're up for it.
I'd do that for you

 Eldarsif wrote:
My experience with model count depends on the army. Armies like Stormcast are technically elite armies and are therefore going to have fewer models.

I play DoK and I can easily have 50-60 models in 1000 point game while still running a Cauldron. Same with my Blades of Khorne Bloodreaver army. Some armies just lend themselves better to be played as a horde.

Ahh but the DoK most of those models are going to be one of two types - Witches or Sisters of Slaughter. Those are the high count units; almost the entire rest of the DoK range is elite style. 5 medusa runs over 100 points, a cauldron is 300. So whilst there is a swarm unit in there, the rest of the army is more elite in structure.

Time playing the game is the big factor. My attention span is about 90 minutes. I do enjoy the first few rounds of escalation leagues as well as skirmish games. Having to stand up for 2.5+ hours looking at the same board, same models, and rolling dice... just really lose interest after about 90 minutes.

That's why I'd rather keep games around the 1000 point mark. Now, I think going to LVO and maybe AdeptiCon would be a lot of fun even though they are 2000 point games. I'd probably just end up playing for fun, though... not being competitive.

SG

Play bigger games, bruh

The solution is simple.
Just re-base your models on some nice square bases...