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Hello
I may be missing something, but warscrolls do not specify point costs for units/upgrades.
How do we construct 2 armies of the same size now?
surely not by wound total, for 10 marauders and 10 chaos warriors are same wounds but not same power...

Chaos warriors are 2 wounds each. So 10 Warriors would be double the wounds of 10 Marauders.

Oh, and yeah no points. Bring what you want :-D

 Bottle wrote:
Chaos warriors are 2 wounds each. So 10 Warriors would be double the wounds of 10 Marauders.

Oh, and yeah no points. Bring what you want :-D

I understand that this is "beer and vodka" edition, but
How are turnouments supposed to be run?

AoS does not have points. GW has said they will not be doing points. I'm working on both tournament rules and a points system for use at my shop. Feel free to ignore or adopt anything you see here.

We are halfway through our first tournament using this system: https://www.facebook.com/events/395673163966348/

Based on feedback we learned from this tournament, we'll tighten things up and do another. It's not balanced, and can't take into account the differences between 1 wound models. What we found though is that everyone is just taking their better units, and lots of monsters.

Some observations:
-Cavalry is very good, because of the enhanced movement and their large number of attacks.
-Large monsters are frighteningly effective when you have several.
-Warmachines are a lot less effective than people think, especially when they get charged quickly in the game. Many things move very fast.
-Everything seems to die. While some stuff is tough, nothing lasts for long when you keep tossing dice at them.
-The game has been a hell of a lot of fun to play, very fast paced.
-When we work on the next version of a points system for the next tournament, we'll be differentiating between a lot of the different types of infantry, so we can make bad troops cheaper, good troops more, and monsters and very effective units a LOT more. Just using wounds didn't give players a lot of reason to take much 1 wound infantry, plus we all like playing with big stompy models. While some people took infantry, especially missle armed troops, others took mostly chariots, monsters, and 4-5 wound models.
-Because players were trying to learn new rules on the fly, we used normal woods, hills, and buildings. The tables looked great. The system has no problems with making great looking tables with a lot of terrain.


Some of the rules we are going to adopt in the future:
-Players will roll off to see who gets the choice of going first or second on Turn 1. The player who deploys his army on the board first recieves a +1 to his die roll.

-Wizards do not need LOS to the enemy wizard to dispel. We find it's hard enough to be in range of the enemy unless you are taking a chance of being far foward in your lines. In all the old fluff wizards felt their opponents gathering the winds of magic. We are going with that as a justification, vs trying to spot nagash doing hand motions and mumbling something

-We are placing restrictions on who can go in buildings, and saying that large monsters and cavalry have trouble fitting through the door of normal buildings. This came up in a game when a players was asking about putting his dragon in a peaseant hut Legal in AoS, but we are amending the Garrison rule in our events.

-We aren't allowing stacking of the Mystic Shield spell.

-We are going to continue to limit summoning, and looking hard at abilities from banners that bring back models. 1d6 zombies isn't a problem. 1 five wound model per turn was very powerful. We will be working on costs for banners with powerful abilities.

-Shooting through a unit, or shooting through a woods, will give the target the benefit of cover. This does not count for Warmachines that don't need LOS.

We'll take what we learned, go back to the drawing board, and do this again.

 Bottle wrote:
Chaos warriors are 2 wounds each. So 10 Warriors would be double the wounds of 10 Marauders.

Oh, and yeah no points. Bring what you want :-D

In 8th, marauders were 6, warriors were 14. Now marauders are 1 wound, warriors are 2. That's really really close to a 1:2 ratio in both versions to me. About as close as they can get. I realize that's a small example.

 Ratliker wrote:
Hello
I may be missing something, but warscrolls do not specify point costs for units/upgrades.
How do we construct 2 armies of the same size now?
surely not by wound total, for 10 marauders and 10 chaos warriors are same wounds but not same power...

You aren't supposed to make army lists ahead of time. Really try to embrace this.

This is how it works...

1. Show up with the models you like to play with and think might be useful.
2. Roll off.
3. Winner puts down a unit.
4. Other player sees what he put down, looks through his collection and then puts down his own unit.
5. They go back and forth until someone is done.

If, at the end, one army significantly overpowers the other, you have only yourself to blame. You saw what your opponent was putting down and could have put down something different.

 Kriswall wrote:

If, at the end, one army significantly overpowers the other, you have only yourself to blame. You saw what your opponent was putting down and could have put down something different.

Not if the opponent saves all of their big stuff/their endless hordes until after you're done deploying.

Say it goes back and forth like this:

A: 10 dwarf warriors
B: 10 marauders
A: A cannon
B: 10 marauders
A: a runelord
B: 10 marauders
A: 20 quarrellers
B: 10 marauders
A: 10 ironbreakers
B: a chaos lord
A: a dragon slayer, declares he is done.
B: a giant, a chimera, a chaos lord on a manticore, 4 units of 10 chaos warriors, a daemon prince, 20 bloodletters and a bloodthirster

It was my own fault for deploying poorly...?

Yeah, it's a really stupid system and will revolve around knowing your opponents and agreeing on an approximate level to play. You NEED to know that the guy you're playing against isn't a dick who's going to feth you over.

And for people going somewhere to play, knowing what to take. That new little army of 50 woodelves you are working on? Your older army of 300 chaos models? All your armies all the time, just in case?

I

 mikhaila wrote:
And for people going somewhere to play, knowing what to take. That new little army of 50 woodelves you are working on? Your older army of 300 chaos models? All your armies all the time, just in case?

I

This is nothing new though. You make an arbitrary decision on what to bring and then you have a super quick chat with any potential opponent...

"Hey dude, I brought this 50 model Wood Elf army I'm working on. Care to get in a quick, low key game?"
"Sure thing. I'll see what I brought that will make for a good game."

How is this any different from how we've always done things.

If you show up with 50 Wood Elves, tell your opponent that's what you're bringing and then he drops 500 Greater Daemons on the table... walk away. The overwhelming majority of people I've met in gaming stores are decent folk. Mikhaila... I game in YOUR store, actually. I've NEVER had any issue with asking an opponent to tone down a list if I've brought something small and new I'm working on.

 Kriswall wrote:

 mikhaila wrote:
And for people going somewhere to play, knowing what to take. That new little army of 50 woodelves you are working on? Your older army of 300 chaos models? All your armies all the time, just in case?

I

This is nothing new though. You make an arbitrary decision on what to bring and then you have a super quick chat with any potential opponent...

"Hey dude, I brought this 50 model Wood Elf army I'm working on. Care to get in a quick, low key game?"
"Sure thing. I'll see what I brought that will make for a good game."

How is this any different from how we've always done things.

If you show up with 50 Wood Elves, tell your opponent that's what you're bringing and then he drops 500 Greater Daemons on the table... walk away. The overwhelming majority of people I've met in gaming stores are decent folk. Mikhaila... I game in YOUR store, actually. I've NEVER had any issue with asking an opponent to tone down a list if I've brought something small and new I'm working on.

Because they now have no obligation to even pretend to try and play on an even field. They don't even have to come close. They could say "50 Wood Elves? That's cute, my 600 Beastmen are backed up by 50 Minotaurs. Gonna be a good game." and it would be 100% within the rules. Yes, I know, just don't play them. How many games do I turn down before I permanently shelve my now-useless armies?

Having to decline a game due to balancing reasons gotta be the worst thing ever in a game. Sure, it works most of the time to chat with your opponent about it, but should that really be a requisite to play? I'd rather spend that time chatting with my opponent AFTER the game about all the cool stuff that happened

 Ratliker wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
Chaos warriors are 2 wounds each. So 10 Warriors would be double the wounds of 10 Marauders.

Oh, and yeah no points. Bring what you want :-D

I understand that this is "beer and vodka" edition, but
How are turnouments supposed to be run?

This is not really a tournament game, so Don't run tournaments?

This is a game which is focused on a co-operative approach to scenario design and army selection. You and your opponent field what makes sense and what's appeopriate. Your responsibility as a player is now more than justthe army you bring to the field.

 Ratliker wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
Chaos warriors are 2 wounds each. So 10 Warriors would be double the wounds of 10 Marauders.

Oh, and yeah no points. Bring what you want :-D

I understand that this is "beer and vodka" edition, but
How are turnouments supposed to be run?

AoS is as much of a tournament game as Beer Pong is a discipline at the Olympics.

 Kriswall wrote:

 mikhaila wrote:
And for people going somewhere to play, knowing what to take. That new little army of 50 woodelves you are working on? Your older army of 300 chaos models? All your armies all the time, just in case?

I

This is nothing new though. You make an arbitrary decision on what to bring and then you have a super quick chat with any potential opponent...

"Hey dude, I brought this 50 model Wood Elf army I'm working on. Care to get in a quick, low key game?"
"Sure thing. I'll see what I brought that will make for a good game."

How is this any different from how we've always done things.

If you show up with 50 Wood Elves, tell your opponent that's what you're bringing and then he drops 500 Greater Daemons on the table... walk away. The overwhelming majority of people I've met in gaming stores are decent folk. Mikhaila... I game in YOUR store, actually. I've NEVER had any issue with asking an opponent to tone down a list if I've brought something small and new I'm working on.

You're misunderstanding. I literally mean, "What do you pack up from home and bring to the store?". You obviously want to get a game in, so not playing isn't the answer. You probably also don't want to bring all of your collection. While you can talk to your opponent at the table, you've past the 'Pack up your stuff" phase.

At my store we are working on guidelines and a point system so that when 10 guys show up to play we are all roughly even. But just walking into a GW store? Who knows what the other guy brought? Most people aren't comfotable walking around asking lots of questions until they can find a suitable opponent.

 mikhaila wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:

 mikhaila wrote:
And for people going somewhere to play, knowing what to take. That new little army of 50 woodelves you are working on? Your older army of 300 chaos models? All your armies all the time, just in case?

I

This is nothing new though. You make an arbitrary decision on what to bring and then you have a super quick chat with any potential opponent...

"Hey dude, I brought this 50 model Wood Elf army I'm working on. Care to get in a quick, low key game?"
"Sure thing. I'll see what I brought that will make for a good game."

How is this any different from how we've always done things.

If you show up with 50 Wood Elves, tell your opponent that's what you're bringing and then he drops 500 Greater Daemons on the table... walk away. The overwhelming majority of people I've met in gaming stores are decent folk. Mikhaila... I game in YOUR store, actually. I've NEVER had any issue with asking an opponent to tone down a list if I've brought something small and new I'm working on.

You're misunderstanding. I literally mean, "What do you pack up from home and bring to the store?". You obviously want to get a game in, so not playing isn't the answer. You probably also don't want to bring all of your collection. While you can talk to your opponent at the table, you've past the 'Pack up your stuff" phase.

At my store we are working on guidelines and a point system so that when 10 guys show up to play we are all roughly even. But just walking into a GW store? Who knows what the other guy brought? Most people aren't comfotable walking around asking lots of questions until they can find a suitable opponent.

Guidelines? A point system? Roughly even games? Heresy!

What is this, Nazi Germany? Keep your TFG WAAC Comp Smurf malarky out of my perfectly fine game!

Age of Sigmar isn't about having a game of tactics and strategy, it's about having a conversation with your opponent before you play about what game to play exactly. It isn't about winning or losing, it's about two people sharing a story (provided that story is limited to being a battle, between two armies, in a previously specified overall setting). You're stuck in the past, maaan; wargaming has evolved. Who cares about points and lists and RULES anymore? This is the New Deal; it's Woodstock meets Lord of the Rings, it's Free Love, it's the pre-AIDS part of the 1980s with loads of cocaine and hookers. We've been emancipated from the tyranny of structure, and now the real wargaming can finally begin.

WOW! That's a fair amount of BS. I'm not attacking you, I'm just saying that you've found a lot of interactions that made it necessary to come up with all of those modifications to play the game.

I'm still not convinced that this system needs points to balance it however. I've said in a previous thread that I think points are a relic of the past, but have been used for so long that we gamers assume that it's the only way to balance a war game.

I believe balance can be better achieved through a 'simple' composition system.

In a post in a different thread I referenced the Necron Decurion Detachment and the Space Marine Gladius Strikeforce Detachment. These detachments are essentially enforcing a simple composition system.for those factions in W40K. This same concept can easily be applied to AoS. This can resolve everyone's fear of the 10 Bloodthirsters vs. 20 Gobo's idea and prevents spaming as well as 'taking only the best units'.

My original post...

@Oni: I will charitably say that your position is hopelessly optimistic.

In case you haven't noticed, your proposed idea for how things will go in the future sacrifices options and customizability of a force. The benefit of the points system was in providing a great degree of freedom in creating your army while still (ostensibly) allowing for balance. The current system in AoS allows for absolute freedom in army creation at the absolute expense of balance between players. Replacing points with sets of formations might (or might not, depending on their respective design) fix the balance issue, but it would do so as the expense of freedom of design in army creation.

 oni wrote:

Spoiler:

mikhaila wrote:AoS does not have points. GW has said they will not be doing points. I'm working on both tournament rules and a points system for use at my shop. Feel free to ignore or adopt anything you see here.

We are halfway through our first tournament using this system: https://www.facebook.com/events/395673163966348/

Based on feedback we learned from this tournament, we'll tighten things up and do another. It's not balanced, and can't take into account the differences between 1 wound models. What we found though is that everyone is just taking their better units, and lots of monsters.

Some observations:
-Cavalry is very good, because of the enhanced movement and their large number of attacks.
-Large monsters are frighteningly effective when you have several.
-Warmachines are a lot less effective than people think, especially when they get charged quickly in the game. Many things move very fast.
-Everything seems to die. While some stuff is tough, nothing lasts for long when you keep tossing dice at them.
-The game has been a hell of a lot of fun to play, very fast paced.
-When we work on the next version of a points system for the next tournament, we'll be differentiating between a lot of the different types of infantry, so we can make bad troops cheaper, good troops more, and monsters and very effective units a LOT more. Just using wounds didn't give players a lot of reason to take much 1 wound infantry, plus we all like playing with big stompy models. While some people took infantry, especially missle armed troops, others took mostly chariots, monsters, and 4-5 wound models.
-Because players were trying to learn new rules on the fly, we used normal woods, hills, and buildings. The tables looked great. The system has no problems with making great looking tables with a lot of terrain.


Some of the rules we are going to adopt in the future:
-Players will roll off to see who gets the choice of going first or second on Turn 1. The player who deploys his army on the board first recieves a +1 to his die roll.

-Wizards do not need LOS to the enemy wizard to dispel. We find it's hard enough to be in range of the enemy unless you are taking a chance of being far foward in your lines. In all the old fluff wizards felt their opponents gathering the winds of magic. We are going with that as a justification, vs trying to spot nagash doing hand motions and mumbling something

-We are placing restrictions on who can go in buildings, and saying that large monsters and cavalry have trouble fitting through the door of normal buildings. This came up in a game when a players was asking about putting his dragon in a peaseant hut Legal in AoS, but we are amending the Garrison rule in our events.

-We aren't allowing stacking of the Mystic Shield spell.

-We are going to continue to limit summoning, and looking hard at abilities from banners that bring back models. 1d6 zombies isn't a problem. 1 five wound model per turn was very powerful. We will be working on costs for banners with powerful abilities.

-Shooting through a unit, or shooting through a woods, will give the target the benefit of cover. This does not count for Warmachines that don't need LOS.

We'll take what we learned, go back to the drawing board, and do this again.

WOW! That's a fair amount of BS. I'm not attacking you, I'm just saying that you've found a lot of interactions that made it necessary to come up with all of those modifications to play the game.

I'm still not convinced that this system needs points to balance it however. I've said in a previous thread that I think points are a relic of the past, but have been used for so long that we gamers assume that it's the only way to balance a war game.

I believe balance can be better achieved through a 'simple' composition system.

In a post in a different thread I referenced the Necron Decurion Detachment and the Space Marine Gladius Strikeforce Detachment. These detachments are essentially enforcing a simple composition system.for those factions in W40K. This same concept can easily be applied to AoS. This can resolve everyone's fear of the 10 Bloodthirsters vs. 20 Gobo's idea and prevents spaming as well as 'taking only the best units'.

My original post...

Spoiler:

My whole tone on AoS has taken a complete 180. This game is sizing up to be AMAZING!

I'm going to lay it all out here... We don't need points. A points system is a relic of the past, one that has been solidified in our ideals of how a war game should achieve balance, but he cold, hard reality is that a point system can unbalance a game as much as is can balance a game. I see and understand this clearer than ever now.
Let me tell you how this whole balancing act fiasco is going to play out... I hope.
When the new army books arrive they will have detachments similar to the Necron Decurion Detachment and Space Marine Gladius Strikeforce Detachment. You'll have a compulsory Core and some optional Auxiliary formations. These detachments will bring the balance that everyone desires. These style detachments are a built in composition system without the complexity of that nonsense above.

I have to believe that the core AoS rules allowed the whole "unbound" style format just to get the ball rolling for all existing armies. They will not be getting books any time soon and because the idea of the Decurion Detachment and Gladius Strikeforce Detachment are specific to their factions, carrying this over in the free compendiums wasn't realistic as all of those armies will be drastically changing; there simply wasn't anything left except to temporarily open the flood gates of "unbound".

I'm happy for whatever system anyone wants to come up with. Different people will have different ideas. I'd love to see a half dozen people actually do systems, and would encourage everyone to get to work.

We'll all have different ideas. For me, points make sense, for other people something else might be better. Different groups will have different goals. My goal is that the players at my shops can make an army, bring it in, and play a game with a reasonable chance of some parity between armies. To that end I think points are best.

Did anyone get to the end of their army book? There are some cool warscroll formations to make a good army out of.

Im going to do the night goblin one, then add fanatics as necessary to the units to balance the game lol.

 chaosmarauder wrote:
Did anyone get to the end of their army book? There are some cool warscroll formations to make a good army out of.

Im going to do the night goblin one, then add fanatics as necessary to the units to balance the game lol.

I have a game in front of me right now where Bretonnia uses its Peasant Militia formation, and the Orcs use their Ironjaws Big Mob... Pretty scary!

... Of course, we still use points costs in our game

Saldiven wrote:
@Oni: I will charitably say that your position is hopelessly optimistic.

In case you haven't noticed, your proposed idea for how things will go in the future sacrifices options and customizability of a force. The benefit of the points system was in providing a great degree of freedom in creating your army while still (ostensibly) allowing for balance. The current system in AoS allows for absolute freedom in army creation at the absolute expense of balance between players. Replacing points with sets of formations might (or might not, depending on their respective design) fix the balance issue, but it would do so as the expense of freedom of design in army creation.

I understand your position, but consider the following.

1. "Unbound" is still an option.
2. The freedom via points you discuss facilitates the abuse of taking only the best units and the best wargear available. What good is freedom and customization in army construction if it's never used? Terms like 'math hammer' and 'points efficiency' come to mind to further my point - points gives a player cause to never take unit X because it's simply not as good unit Y for Z points. This all leads to one dimensional armies more so than a composition system, in my opinion.

A composition system, if done correctly, will still allow for a wide variety of balanced army builds.

Hopefully optimistic... Yes! Someone has to be.

The freedom to make suboptimal choices is inherent in the freedom to choose.

Demandread wrote:
The freedom to make suboptimal choices is inherent in the freedom to choose.

So why even have more than one option per troop type?

feth it, while we're at it why even play? Let's just roll a single die each and whoever gets the highest roll wins.

Just recieved a huge PDF with warmachine style points costs for all units. 1 point for 10 orcs, 3 points for a giant, heroes in the 1-5 range, Skaven slaves 1 for 20, clanrats 1 for 10, stormvermin 1 for 5, etc. Supposedly this is something one of the designers was working on before the powers that be decided on no points at all. He also has some rules he would have used for scenarios.

It's at least a decent start and one of the directions we had open to us.

Of course, today was the day I decided to get all the unit names typed up into an excell format. Figures

uh what pdf?

 chaosmarauder wrote:
uh what pdf?

http://www.louisvillewargaming.com/Files/AzyrComp.pdf

That....actually looks like a good idea.

Out of curiosity... and this is mainly aimed towards mikhaila... how do you plan on handling new players who don't have a background in Fantasy or 40k and aren't used to a points system? As an example, I've shown a friend who is a big board game nut the game and he's super excited. He thoroughly enjoyed the easy to pick up rules. We're actually going to be coming up to your store next week to get him started with some models.

I'm not a big tournament guy, but I know he's into league type play. So, the general question is... how do store owners/operators handle fixed house rules? Will there be some sort of "rules supplement" available? I'm obviously interested in your store in particular, but I'm also interested in the greater community. A large number of people are obviously not happy with the current rules for army construction. Do we strive for a fixed, published document (similar to the INAT 40k FAQ), or do we make do with a series of poorly documented, store specific house rules?

I'd much rather be able to say, "Here are your 4 pages of official rules and here is your Community Update v1.2". Explaining that he'll have to learn different rules for different venues will immediately turn him off.

 Lord Corellia wrote:

Demandread wrote:
The freedom to make suboptimal choices is inherent in the freedom to choose.

So why even have more than one option per troop type?

feth it, while we're at it why even play? Let's just roll a single die each and whoever gets the highest roll wins.

That's not really a counterpoint to a support of freedom of choice. Besides the answer is almost always $$.