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 Manchu wrote:
This kind of argument keeps coming up. Avoiding AoS will not help the kind of person actually willing to entertain such abuses in reality.

How about the following comparison:

20 Ogres
vs
50 Clan rats

The Ogres are outnumbered by far, so they will get Sudden Death. However, the Ogres are also way tougher than the clan rats. I would go as far to say the Clan Rats don't stand a change.

The problem I have is: How do I determine I'll have a fair game. An unbalanced match is fun for a single player, the one who has the superior army. How do we determine how many Ogres is enough against 50 rats?

Seems to be an overwhelming majority of folks on this poll who are actually willing to try Age of Sigmar. Reading the N&R thread you'd think it'd be the opposite lol.

I was thinking of selling my Nagash and Tomb Kings, but honestly, after looking at the warscrolls, I'm tempted to give the rules a try. Things seem more simplified, fun, and balanced. If only there was a points system or some kind.

 tydrace wrote:

How about the following comparison:

20 Ogres
vs
50 Clan rats

The Ogres are outnumbered by far, so they will get Sudden Death. However, the Ogres are also way tougher than the clan rats. I would go as far to say the Clan Rats don't stand a change.

The problem I have is: How do I determine I'll have a fair game. An unbalanced match is fun for a single player, the one who has the superior army. How do we determine how many Ogres is enough against 50 rats?

This is the exact problem. Not the extremes, i.e. 100 clanrats vs. 5 Ogres, but rather the grey zone in between. Are 70 Clanrats fair? 80? 90? 50 Clanrats and 30 Plague Monks? 50 Clanrats and 40 Plague Monks? You just cannot tell.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
Seems to be an overwhelming majority of folks on this poll who are actually willing to try Age of Sigmar. Reading the N&R thread you'd think it'd be the opposite lol.

302 players going to give sigmar a go

273 against AoS or leaving the game

Hardly overwhelming majority in favor, thats with the 'on the fence' lot not included because they're conditional on something that might or might not happen.

With nearly 700 votes up I am surprised by how little movement in the results there has been, the percentages are basically the same as when there were 50 votes.

To me it looks like there are 4 camps

1] Am going to give it a try and see if I like it.
2] I gave it a try and I liked it.
3] I gave it a try and I did not like it
4] I will never try it ever.

I have no issues with 1-3.
#4 though, to not even give a FREE!!! game a try?

Actually kinda excited by this movement. Like past posters have written, I too originally wanted to get into WHF but it just looked way too slow and far too bulky for my tastes. As someone who is playing a game or two on a weeknight with his girlfriend, this is perfect. Count me in!

EDIT: do I also get cookies for the fact I posted on 7/7 at 7:00:07?

 NecroPunk wrote:
EDIT: do I also get cookies for the fact I posted on 7/7 at 7:00:07?

Only if you pretend to ride an imaginary horse.

 The Shadow wrote:

 NecroPunk wrote:
EDIT: do I also get cookies for the fact I posted on 7/7 at 7:00:07?

Only if you pretend to ride an imaginary horse.

That's fine. I do that while I'm in the shower.

The its not a game camp I have to laugh as it is a game. You can play it, I have seen folk play it as a game hell I have seen people enjoy it.
Boo hoo its not fantasy, nah it not its AoS its a new game that GW want to make. Love it or hate it GW have chosen to go this way.
They don`t owe you anything.
If you hate the game which supposedly isn't a game even though it is fine. Say that and get over it. Nothing will change.

This is what GW see as the future a lot of us may not but that's really not anything to do with us. GW will either fail or succeed end of.
As for the rules there is and only ever will be 4 pages plus warscrolls. Frankly its enough. It doesn`t have to be complicated maybe it didn`t need to be quite so simple but again its what they have chosen to do. We can all accept it or move on. There are plenty more games to play and as AoS is free who cares if it sucks, IT IS FREE (for now)

So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

Motograter wrote:They don`t owe you anything.

On the contrary, most WHFB players have supported GW with brand loyalty and a lot of purchases for a long time. I understand that GW want to take their business in a new direction, but they could have at least kept supporting WHFB (even if it was mail-order only or whatever) for those people who have enjoyed and supported it for many years.

Haight wrote:
2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

From what I understand, in this instance, the Ogres would, in theory, be able to attack (as they are within 3") but as, I imagine, their melee weapons have a range of 1" they are unable to do so. However, you do get to pile in 3" so as long as that unit can physically do the pile in then I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to attack.

I do fully understand about all the unanswered rules queries that crop up whilst playing the game. I'm predicting the FAQ for AoS to be longer than the rules.

Nope, won't play AoS. Hate the background and the dumbed-down rules.

...And, just like someone who's life-long love has announced that they've made plans for the future and that you're not included in them (as well as giving you "the finger" on the way out the door with a bunch of ridiculous rules), I'm more than a little bitter about the way GW is treating the older gamers.

No, I already play the most bat**** insane fantasy game out there -- Warhammer 40K.

 Haight wrote:
So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

Fun little battle report :-)

Sounds like you played Sudden Death wrong, Sudden Death is chosen at the start of the game after deployment and Endure means any one of your starting units has to remain alive by the end of Battle Round 6.

You played the charges right, models cannot move within "3 of an enemy unit except in the charge phase if they can reach at least one model at 1/2 an inch.

And then as the other enemy unit is now within 3" they are eligible to make a pile in, even though they were not charged.

Yep, it's great fun and I think GW are onto a winner too. I bought 2 High Elf Heroes for my Empire army today. Can't wait to field them :-)

I'm buying the boxed set. I like what I see already.

He did choose it at the beginning, the battle report is written in a manner that doesn't illustrate that terribly clearly though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Coldhatred wrote:
I'm buying the boxed set. I like what I see already.

I'm REALLY pleasantly surprised. I went in wanting to hate it with every iota of my pedantic game designing core (there was a kernel of me that admired the simple elegance of many of the warscrolls, but i loathed every inch of the core rules and was actively looking for ways to illustrate their horridness).

I ended the game actually not only NOT hating it, but liking what i played, and i'm pretty sure i had a better time than the last few games of 8th i played.

THere's still issues. List construction weight (even the GW notepad leak doesn't address that, as warscrolls alone don't answer list composition weight problems) and measuring model to model among them, but it's a lot more fun and fast pace than i was thinking it would be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Commissar Molotov wrote:
Nope, won't play AoS. Hate the background and the dumbed-down rules.

...And, just like someone who's life-long love has announced that they've made plans for the future and that you're not included in them (as well as giving you "the finger" on the way out the door with a bunch of ridiculous rules), I'm more than a little bitter about the way GW is treating the older gamers.

I'm one of them, though not as long in the tooth as some (i'm 36), been playing GW in one form or the other since the 90's - started with 2nd ed 40k, which was a hoot.

Give the game a go. Despite the hot mess the core rules appear to be, it's a surprisingly fun and elegant game with just a few minor tweaks (the ONLY tweaks we did in our game was measure to base to base, and if there were any of the LULZ rules, they happened the first time automatically, and on 4+ thereafter.... this ended up not even being a thing as we had none of the lulz rules pop up).

Or not, that's cool too, but as my posts illustrated, I was an 8th fan, and on a mission to hate this game, and I came out pleasantly surprised and wrong. It's not perfect, but it's actually pretty damn cool.

People getting creative out there.

http://captiongenerator.com/48861/Age-of-Sigmar-interview

 Haight wrote:

 Coldhatred wrote:
I'm buying the boxed set. I like what I see already.

I'm REALLY pleasantly surprised. I went in wanting to hate it with every iota of my pedantic game designing core (there was a kernel of me that admired the simple elegance of many of the warscrolls, but i loathed every inch of the core rules and was actively looking for ways to illustrate their horridness).

I ended the game actually not only NOT hating it, but liking what i played, and i'm pretty sure i had a better time than the last few games of 8th i played.

THere's still issues. List construction weight (even the GW notepad leak doesn't address that, as warscrolls alone don't answer list composition weight problems) and measuring model to model among them, but it's a lot more fun and fast pace than i was thinking it would be.

That's pretty much how I went in. I was still getting over the fact that the Old World was gone and that this was different so it must be bad(?), but I was very surprised by how much I like it. I am very excited about it and a friend that hasn't been excited about Warhammer since he gave up due to painting intimidation back during 6th Edition is now quite interested in this more accessible game. Looking forward to it.

Ive played a few games. Not competitive at all but its a ton of fun.

 Haight wrote:

Spoiler:

So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

correct me if I'm wrong (sincerely saying that), but weren't you criticizing the hell out of AoS earlier?

 Haight wrote:

Spoiler:

 Bottle wrote:

 Haight wrote:
So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

Fun little battle report :-)

Sounds like you played Sudden Death wrong, Sudden Death is chosen at the start of the game after deployment and Endure means any one of your starting units has to remain alive by the end of Battle Round 6.

You played the charges right, models cannot move within "3 of an enemy unit except in the charge phase if they can reach at least one model at 1/2 an inch.

And then as the other enemy unit is now within 3" they are eligible to make a pile in, even though they were not charged.

Yep, it's great fun and I think GW are onto a winner too. I bought 2 High Elf Heroes for my Empire army today. Can't wait to field them :-)

He did choose it at the beginning, the battle report is written in a manner that doesn't illustrate that terribly clearly though.

Haha, that's cool. Just to point out Endure applies to every model you start with, doesn't have to be chosen. You might have known that already too :p

Endure is a bloody awful Sudden Death rule.

Any army that is capable of wiping out yours in 6 rounds should be able to do it in 7 or 8 or10, which is the standard victory condition anyway. This makes SD irrelevant. If the army can do it quicker than the normal time it almost certainly is not the weaker army.

Secondly it introduces possible confusion about models that are brought on to the table after the start of the battle.

Looks like about 52% acceptance vs. about 40% passing on AoS. That seems like a pretty bad acceptance rate to me, on par with D&D 4E.

 Coldhatred wrote:

I was still getting over the fact that the Old World was gone and that this was different so it must be bad(?), but I was very surprised by how much I like it.

Thats great but I find that a lot of the AoS are over compensating for the new games flaws by calling fantasy bad now. Ive seen it in a few threads AoS is new and replaces fantasy therefor somehow it means fantasy needed taking down and was bad and toxic now apparently and been a competitive game is the most evil thing it could have been.

 Dr. Cheesesteak wrote:

 Haight wrote:

Spoiler:

So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

correct me if I'm wrong (sincerely saying that), but weren't you criticizing the hell out of AoS earlier?

I'm going to take your "sincerely" at face value, despite having a raised eyebrow towards it's genuineness.


I had many initial concerns, some of which panned out immediately (model to model measuring ; we jettisoned this immediately). Sudden death's balance as well - we played "minimum formation size" to continue to get a handle on the rules, but i can see sudden death breaking when you get rid of that. It was a challenge with the min elf vs. min ogre formation already, i just got lucky. Movement is still clunky in places. Rules that do the exact same thing have different names, sometimes even within an armies scrolls (see dwarves : gromril shield, dwarven shield). Can you shoot into melee ? I dunno, and neither do you. If you can, can you hit your own guys ?

Etc.

It was better than i thought, however it's still miles from a tight ruleset. I enjoyed the pacing, flow, and fun. I didn't like some of the finer mechanical points, the vagueness, and i think we had to "Talk to your opponent" way too often for core mechanical things.

But yes, i'm man enough to admit it's more fun than i thought it would be. Hopefully you're man enough to admit the rules do have issues. Luckily both our concerns would be solved with a book that expounds upon and tightens up the rules.

 Bottle wrote:

 Haight wrote:

Spoiler:

 Bottle wrote:

 Haight wrote:
So I got in my next set of games last night. I played the spearmen / archer formation vs. the foot ogre formation. We played "minimum bodies in the formation" just to put the game through its paces.

The only thing that we hard house ruled was Base-to-Base measuring, not model to model. We played all other rules as written.



At first i thought it was going to be quite lopsided. The archers were really good putting a lot of wounds with stormfall arrows on his ogres, but due to a miscalculated distance, he got a charge on a spearmen unit with 3 ogres, and that unit of spearmen evaporated.

However i rallied pretty well. Archers finished off an ogre unit, and put hurt on his other ogres. Meanwhile, due to sudden death, he picked "endure" with his Tyrant, so the clock was ticking. I could have spear charged an ogre unit and gotten rid of it with my other spearmen, but instead went for the wounded tyrant, killing him, and ending his sudden death kill condition.

My prince killed off his iron guts but was in turn finished off by his second ogre unit. Meanwhile my helms were locked up with yet another ogre unit. His belchers and bruiser were positioned badly and so never really came to bear (the belchers got to fire but often were just out of range of their target with a guy or two).


All in all: he killed 36 wounds, i killed 35. I snuffed his kill condition by sudden death, but we both lost our general. It was as close to a tie as you can get, but he did get a marginal victory due to wounds.

Thoughts:


1) I liked it way more than i thought i was going to. Way more.

2) There were some rules that just... weren't answered. We were invoking "Talk to your opponent" way too often. For instance, my spearmen charged his tyrant successfully, which left them within melee range of his ogres (for one thing this is questionably legal, RAW, but we deemed it so because otherwise the game becomes unplayable if everyone passes out their own banner of "but for a charge, cant get within 3 of me"). The question became, can the ogers attack them back even though there was no charge / no pile in. Yes?

3) The 50% of the time you go first thing actually was interesting. I didn't hate it. I kinda liked it.

4) You need to measure base to base. There's no denying that to me. Model to Model doesn't work and is stupid. Playing his game (with very different sized bases in opposition) just reinforced that even more.

5) The game is REALLY fast paced. Melee is brutal, but shooting can be too. High elf archers are unbelievably good. Anything with multiple wounds on its melee will murderlize single wound infantry.

6) As there was nothing otherwise, we deemed that as long as you had LOS by the rules, charges could be in non-linear. This was actually really awesome.



All in all... leaning towards liking it. I want a more fleshed out rule-set out of that forthcoming book, but right now, It was a LOT of fun to play. I had 46 models on my side, and he had 17 i think, which is small compared to 8th, but it was still good sized, and our game was done in 90 minutes, as opposed to several hours. And that's 90 minutes consulting books every 10 seconds or so.

I will say this: i noticed myself looking at pieces that i would not otherwise : Franz, Steamtank, Treeman, etc... so if other vets are like that, then they might have a winner on their hands with vets buying news stuff if they can also draw in new blood / people from other games.

I'd give it a B right now in terms of grade, but i can see A minus from where i'm standing.

Fun little battle report :-)

Sounds like you played Sudden Death wrong, Sudden Death is chosen at the start of the game after deployment and Endure means any one of your starting units has to remain alive by the end of Battle Round 6.

You played the charges right, models cannot move within "3 of an enemy unit except in the charge phase if they can reach at least one model at 1/2 an inch.

And then as the other enemy unit is now within 3" they are eligible to make a pile in, even though they were not charged.

Yep, it's great fun and I think GW are onto a winner too. I bought 2 High Elf Heroes for my Empire army today. Can't wait to field them :-)

He did choose it at the beginning, the battle report is written in a manner that doesn't illustrate that terribly clearly though.

Haha, that's cool. Just to point out Endure applies to every model you start with, doesn't have to be chosen. You might have known that already too :p

I did not, but fair being fair, i didnt also check it when my opponent "picked" his tyrant. Unfortunately, i think i like Endure even less then. So if i play minimum foot elves vs. minimum foot ogres, i have to wipe out his ogres in totality in 6 turns or i lose.

Uhm.... what ?


This just makes me think that Endure is even more god awful than i was giving it credit for before. I shouldn't have to wipe out your force because i have 33% more models than you do. That's not balanced.

Sudden Death is just plain bad and does not help to balance the game in any way, shape or form. If you want a balanced game, try and even things out with wounds, formations or these points formulae that people have been coming up with, but don't even bother with Sudden Death.

To be honest, it doesn't surprise me the ratio of acceptance/refusal is nearly 50/50.

People who were used to WFB game system are generally upset with the way AoS works. Too many changes at once are understandably hard to accept.

On the other hand, those who were never brought to WFB because of...reasons take AoS as it is; a new game, with a new universe and new rules. And I can understand why they're saying it's fun.


The real question is to know if AoS will be fun on the long term. For now, since it's new and people discover it, it can be fun to make the same thing again and again. But always "killing everything in the middle" will eventually get boring.

So we will need stuff to use - and it seems that's what GW is intending to do, with that "big book" coming soon and having a lot of...scenarios, as if it was a campaign mode.

And strangely...I actually feel like they're making "new" with "old" - at the beginning, when WFB was just a way to play big battles for role playing games. With scenarios and campaigns, thus.


I'm still not sure. I'm actually interested by some of their ideas and quite bothered by others. Rules are what they are (and honestly, that's not something very hard to do when you're used with GW games) but well...

I think I will rather wait to see what we will actually get; new books, new models, new prices (?), new fluff. No need to buy in a hurry, especially with the way GW keeps everything they do secret.

But since the rules are free and you can actually use anything you want (since bases "aren't important", you can really use any figurine from any source for all the warscrolls if you want, nobody will stop you - well, except for your opponent ), there is no harm playing a few games from time to time. Of course, that won't give GW a lot of money but hey...that's fair game, I believe.

It's funny to see that I can actually use my old models from the game Confrontation with that new ruleset. The fact square bases a bit different from GW's isn't important anymore, according to their rules. And yeah, Wolfen will be nice ogres/minotaurs/big guys or whatsoever.