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It's time for another GMG rulebook review! This time it's the latest Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Battletome: Beasts of Chaos! Up for Pre-order today, this book updates this classic model line with some new options for building forces, unit rules and Endless Spells!

This book pushed me into kings of war territory. The doubling down of spam summoning coupled with the alpha strike builds of plop your units down wherever you want and charge broke my spirit.

auticus wrote:
This book pushed me into kings of war territory. The doubling down of spam summoning coupled with the alpha strike builds of plop your units down wherever you want and charge broke my spirit.

I started a long post about your comment but I dont see it going anywhere useful. I hope you find what you are looking for in kings of war.

Peace.

I did the same, Hulksmash.

Its a broken record. Even went back and got quotes from previous significant releases to hammer home the point. Its not worth it to derail Achilles post, though.

Enjoy KoW, Auticus.

Leaving that aside, The Beast of Chaos facebook pages are exploding with enthusiasm and activity. For myself, I just ordered everything thats new. Cards, Book, Dice, Spells and thought long and hard to get the Limited Edition to collect and a regular battletome to use and abuse, but I usually buy digital as well, so no Limited Edition for me.

Thanks for the review, Achilles.

Review was pretty good. I appreciated the actual composition and cost of the battalions as I hadn't been able to find that elsewhere. Overall it looks like a fun that's going to encourage other balanced list building (or at least require screens).

I see what appear to be several ways to play the book. I'm also glad that the summoning was kept reasonable. You have to build your army around it and still roll hot to get more than 400 extra points. In general I think you'll see most people adding around 240-300 per game which is reasonable compared to the other top "summoning" armies.

I'm excited I'll finally have something to do with the 4 old battalions that have been in my game room since I bought them as they were going out of print

As a non aos player what makes you excited for the new stuff and what's the spam summon complaining about?

Myself I'm excited for the Beasts of Chaos book for the following;

Mulitple ways to play the actual army (swarm, elite, mixed) with tricks and things for each style.

Inline with more recent books (outside of SCE which are bleh) without creeping past them.

Cleaning up of rules to make things more streamlined for the models in the faction and for some that share factions as a soft nerf to some OTT units.

The fact you can slot this stuff in with other chaos armies pretty easy, especially god specific armies for some neat and thematic armies.

The fluff from the book sounds like it expands pretty solidly on the age of myth and the current stuff which doesn't always happen.

Additionally I think BoC will force some building changes as they aren't a faction you can ignore possibly running into.

pm713 wrote:
As a non aos player what makes you excited for the new stuff and what's the spam summon complaining about?

KHORNE MINOTAURS

 Galas wrote:

pm713 wrote:
As a non aos player what makes you excited for the new stuff and what's the spam summon complaining about?

KHORNE MINOTAURS

You know what that is? The siren call of starting a new army again.

auticus wrote:
This book pushed me into kings of war territory. The doubling down of spam summoning coupled with the alpha strike builds of plop your units down wherever you want and charge broke my spirit.

Seems a bit early to say. Ambush needs to happen first round, needs to come in from the board edge, and has bad synergy with the herdstone in that it will be largely impossible to get the best use of both (which I think is good design to prevent compounding benefits). We also saw Skyfires and Tzaangors get less gimmicky. The summoning I will wait an see, but honestly from my view this is how deep striking should work; fixed elements that more readily allow counter play instead of just being anywhere anytime. In my eyes it is an improvement on design. I expect the fall through to be in point costs and/or some artifact/trait/ability that is OP rather than the fundamental design. Compare to Seraphon where even if summoning was balanced the allegiance ability is stupid strong any way you slice it.

To be honest I find the summoning mechanic to be a little uninteractive and uninteresting, and also a little unfluffy.

I think I would have been better if instead of killing your own troops the mechanic would be to kill enemy models near the altar, sacrificing them to summon more powerfull beasts. This way your enemy can negate your summoning by being away from your herdstone. But maybe thats punishes him if the objetives are near the giant rock. But at least he has options, instead of the Beast player being like "I'll keep this 3 10 man ungor raider units shooting and killing themselves every turn to give me more summoning points"

I think they just did not need summoning at all. It is a way for GW to sell extra minis, though.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think they just did not need summoning at all. It is a way for GW to sell extra minis, though.

Yeah. Thats was my impresion. Beastmen have always had this "Summon some random beast" hability but it was just that. Not a complete summoning mechanic to summon whatever you want. They would have been much less powerfull but I don't think it makes thematic sense.

At least they are very very cheap. 10 Gors are 14€ from UK.

My friends from China are going to sent so many cockatrice it's going to be crazy!

Yeah, I'm in.

Always wanted a Beastmen army, now is the time to do it. Might even pick up some dice moo, erm I mean too...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'm painting mine to look like actual cows. Btw.

So is summoning starting ruining Age of Sigmar like it did before? I thought people liked the new summoning rules. I am surprised by this when there was so much excitement before.

That answer will depend on who you ask. And that answer always depended on who you asked. There are a lot of people that loved the free spam summoning from AOS pre ghb and who loved it in 40k 7th edition and there are people that hated it.

Davor wrote:
So is summoning starting ruining Age of Sigmar like it did before? I thought people liked the new summoning rules. I am surprised by this when there was so much excitement before.

From what I have seen and gathered: Tzeentch, Khorne, Slaanesh, Flesh Eater Courts, the few one-off summoning abilities, and Nurgle (sort-of) are more or less OK; they are not breaking the game without some other element to min-max them. Or in other words; certain traits/artifacts/warscrolls can cause issues when combined with summoning but the summoning mechanisms on their own are not an issue. Nurgle does have a scaling problem; at 2000 points the summoning is fine but Nurgle summons just as well at 1k as it does at 2k so it unbalances smaller games.

Seraphon and Legions of Nagash are a different story. Both armies have seriously OP summoning on top of allegiances that are incredibly strong to start with. I can see how, for many, this overshadows the majority of summoning being OK simply because these two armies really are that bad.

This book sounds really cool. I'm glad they got the update and it looks promising for other split factions.

So, I've got about 200 gors and 100 bestigors and 200 ungors all mounted on old style square bases.

I'm thinking about giving AoS a whirl and I have a couple questions:

1. How many points of AoS are analagous to a 1k pt. 40k game? Is it pretty much the same? (1k pts of AoS = 1k pts of 40k?)

2. How many infantry models can I expect to fit in at 1K pts if I go with a Gor herd spam style army?

3. Do I need to rebase them all on round bases?

You only need to rebase them if you are planning on playing in tournaments. And then if you are only playing in local tournaments, you'd have to ask the organizer if they care. A lot of tournaments enforce proper size rounds now a days.

If you're concerned about rebasing (which, as auticus mentioned, is optional outside of tournament) there are companies that make conversion bits to round off your square bases.

I actually just played a 1000 point brayherd only list the other day. I had 40 Ungor Raiders, 30 Gors, 20 Bestigors, and 1 Shaman and Beastlord respectively. I would recommend playing some games with what you have before altering the bases, to get a better idea of where you want to take the army before hand.

To give you an idea 30 Gor (max size unit) is 210pts. 40 Ungor w/out bows is 200pts and 30 Bestigor is 300pts. All of those include a slight discount on the per 10 cost because they are full sized but it'll give you an idea. 1k points you'd probably be looking at 100ish models.

 Hulksmash wrote:
To give you an idea 30 Gor (max size unit) is 210pts. 40 Ungor w/out bows is 200pts and 30 Bestigor is 300pts. All of those include a slight discount on the per 10 cost because they are full sized but it'll give you an idea. 1k points you'd probably be looking at 100ish models.

so basically just 100 victims for my DoK, no problems.

 Hulksmash wrote:
To give you an idea 30 Gor (max size unit) is 210pts. 40 Ungor w/out bows is 200pts and 30 Bestigor is 300pts. All of those include a slight discount on the per 10 cost because they are full sized but it'll give you an idea. 1k points you'd probably be looking at 100ish models.

Here I thought Age of Sigmar was suppose to be a smaller model count game. I never realized this has changed.

Its been whatever people wanted it to be. To be honest, most of the games of 2000 points that I play have on average 40-50 models. People love them some elite low model count armies.

You can always concentrate on warherd, and then you are looking at a max 16 models at 1000 pts.

I am pretty stoked to use my Bullgors again. I had made the Bullgor Stampede and then it disappeared! Now it's mutated into a glorious Khornate form of the Brass Despoilers!

And even if I can't ally in Khorne models to buff them, I can use them in a Blades of Khorne army.

Those endless spells though look pretty solid, so no problem not using a Khorne army if those can get me more action!

Davor wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:
To give you an idea 30 Gor (max size unit) is 210pts. 40 Ungor w/out bows is 200pts and 30 Bestigor is 300pts. All of those include a slight discount on the per 10 cost because they are full sized but it'll give you an idea. 1k points you'd probably be looking at 100ish models.

Here I thought Age of Sigmar was suppose to be a smaller model count game. I never realized this has changed.

100 models at 1k points is pretty much assuming you go completely into horde units. Factor in heroes, monsters, and elite units like bullgor or dragon ogors and a more reasonable count is 100 at 2000 points. You could obviously do far more or far less if you wanted, anywhere from 300+ to less than 30 is totally viable. Goblins and (non-Skryre) Skaven are the only armies where you will actually have difficulties doing well with a less-than-triple-digit army at 2k.