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 RiTides wrote:
Unbound is something to consider, certainly. But I think Unbound + no point values = a complete sandbox that most wargamers aren't interested in entering.

I missed your point on that earlier puree, hopefully this addresses it!

Is that what it is called, obviously my few years away from the game has left me with a terminology gap. If I had said unbound rather than army lists maybe I would have been understood better.

It's the 40k term for it so understandable to the vast majority of wargamers now. And yeah, I just think it's that combination that's making things difficult... I could consider one or the other, but not both.

With the option to play Unbound, most 40k players choose not to currently... the problem here is just there's no option, everyone has to play without points or army structure.

(Note that unbound refers specifically to taking away army structure, but still assumes point values are used)

Points are not completely arbitrary. They can be worked out in relation to the various strengths and weaknesses of units. It's obvious for example, that if two units are identical except for one of them being able to move faster, the faster unit is generally more effective than the slower one, and therefore ought to cost more.

I've seen some extremely simple balancing systems, such as

Arena Rex's each health track is worth 1 point, your whole army is 8", some big things can buy multiple health tracks

Black Crusade's x type of guy is approximately even against y player CSM or 2y other PC's

which are pretty loose, and there'll be guys at both end of the spectrum, but it's a simple balancing structure to at least approximate an even force.


I would have had no problem with something along the lines of heroes and units of 10 grunts are 1 point; lords and 10 elite heroes are 2; monsters are 3 (or whatever). The big problem is that there's absolutely no meaningful balancing structure.

GW are in certain ways embracing the modern age with AoS with regards to free rules and mobile app support. I think this would be the perfect time to introduce "living" points costs for everything in the game.

Give everything a point costs in the app and if something is unbalanced adjust it - it would be that easy in my opinion.

Just use the Nottingham staff as the feedback pool and make an event out of each adjustment. Imagine if it happened on the 1st of every month like a patch release and you could get a buzz of excitement around it. You would have everyone talking about the game all year round just by constantly amending points.

 RiTides wrote:
Unbound is something to consider, certainly. But I think Unbound + no point values = a complete sandbox that most wargamers aren't interested in entering.

I missed your point on that earlier puree, hopefully this addresses it!

I'd just like to disagree with your use of the term sandbox. Sandbox implies open ended structure where all the tools are in place to do whatever you want. AoS (for example) lacks content, there are no rules to 'do whatever you want' besides charge at the enemy and fight them. For some reason, when something lacks a working structure (eg video games) then the void in gameplay that is present seems to get called sandbox. Presumably because there's nothing to do so if you're playing you need to try and make some fun out of it on your own. A real sandbox has all the tools to do whatever it is you might want to do. AoS only has 4 pages of rules, and they describe basic movement and combat only. Lacking balance and structure in army composition does *not* make it sandbox.

Any wargame is a sandbox in that it provides rules for fighting certain types of battles. How you organise those battles is up to you -- campaigns, and so on.

 RiTides wrote:
Unbound is something to consider, certainly. But I think Unbound + no point values = a complete sandbox litter box that most wargamers aren't interested in entering.

I missed your point on that earlier puree, hopefully this addresses it!

Fixed that for you.

The Auld Grump, a litter box is much like a sandbox, but with added unpleasant surprises....

There you go

 Bottle wrote:
Just use the Nottingham staff as the feedback pool and make an event out of each adjustment. Imagine if it happened on the 1st of every month like a patch release and you could get a buzz of excitement around it. You would have everyone talking about the game all year round just by constantly amending points.

Using Nottingham staff is a terrible idea.
I think it was the last marine codex they spoke in white dwarf about how everyone in the studio used chaplains so they game librarians a buff. Problem was outside of the studio no one in their right mind would have picked a chaplain over a librarian even before the buff.

 Bottle wrote:
GW are in certain ways embracing the modern age with AoS with regards to free rules and mobile app support. I think this would be the perfect time to introduce "living" points costs for everything in the game.

Give everything a point costs in the app and if something is unbalanced adjust it - it would be that easy in my opinion.

Just use the Nottingham staff as the feedback pool and make an event out of each adjustment. Imagine if it happened on the 1st of every month like a patch release and you could get a buzz of excitement around it. You would have everyone talking about the game all year round just by constantly amending points.

What a potential disaster! Every group can come up with a different value and everyone wants his own army to be the strongest and biases against others.

wildger wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
GW are in certain ways embracing the modern age with AoS with regards to free rules and mobile app support. I think this would be the perfect time to introduce "living" points costs for everything in the game.

Give everything a point costs in the app and if something is unbalanced adjust it - it would be that easy in my opinion.

Just use the Nottingham staff as the feedback pool and make an event out of each adjustment. Imagine if it happened on the 1st of every month like a patch release and you could get a buzz of excitement around it. You would have everyone talking about the game all year round just by constantly amending points.

What a potential disaster! Every group can come up with a different value and everyone wants his own army to be the strongest and biases against others.

Thus, why a game needs an official set of values.

This is the forward of the earliest WFB army list I own. I think the design has come full circle.

"A colection of army lists, designed to allow players a wide degree of choice, while still forcing them to use armies which in some way resemble their 'factual' counterparts."

That is some good game design right there.

Personally I HATE the idea of all riptide unbound armies, sigmarines fighting alongside chaos and all those weird things you find with unbound/AoS.

They are unfluffy. It sucks. Yes, there could conceivably be a reason 6 riptides would spearhead an assault (if for some reason the support units that the tau base their tactics on are unavalible) or sigmarines might have to fight next to chaos when the larger orc and goblins army arrives (ok that one is total BS, but maybe they are chaos sigmarines or something), but these are the outliers. These are the cases that you're bending the fluff out of shape anyway, why not bend the rules or remove a few restrictions while you are at it?

Personally I think the vanilla space marine codex with the allies system is a good way to do things, you can make quite a few different lists (bike, drop pod, infantry, mechanized, I'd suggest terminators and assault marines should have the option to take a captain like that to make them troops like bikes but DA and BA codexes exist). Add in allies and you can have guard support, or you can fight side by side with eldar, watching them over your shoulder as you press towards a common goal. What you couldn't do is field an army of 10 land raiders fighting alongside chaos marines else (pre 7th) because they are supposed to be rare and chaos marines are their mortal enemies.

If someone wanted to sit down and justify to me that army of land raiders and chaos marines then that's fine, but the game is vastly improved, imo, by the default being a good amount of variety but still enforcing a structure.

The all dino lizardman list is a funny one imo. I like the idea, I think it is fluffy, but I think it would work best with only a couple of minor tweaks on 8th ed. If the cold one cavalry or the birds were taken as core, alongside a couple of little units of skink skirmishers (not dinos I know, but I think a couple of small scouts fit the theme well) you make that your 25% core. You then have 25% rare, %50 special, 25% heroes and 25% lords to fill the rest of the list with dinosaurs.

With my Vampire Counts the 25% core was always considered a tax. If playing 2000 points I would be forced to bring 500 points of core and I would be annoyed if I ended up with 503 on core, seeing that 3 points as wasted. Having said that I loved the way it worked, because a vampire army should have crappy zombies and skeletons as it's line troops before it can spend a whole bunch of points on it's vampires. I know others wanted ways to run an all cavalry force, which to me is not that fluffy as I always imagine the army as the slow, shambling hordes but I agree with, a way to go all cav would be welcome. We didn't need AoS to do that though, we needed a way to turn black knights into core (actually that could have been way OP, those things were great) or perhaps a reason to bring wolves in large enough numbers to make 500 points with them.

puree wrote:

Ooh lovely, semantics with a thick tasty topping of implications that anyone who likes the mechanic you personally don't care about are manchildren incapable of coming to simple agreements; classy response.

So like me you believe adults can work out balance and good games without list etc, as they will talk about it?

If the argument is that pick up games need the army lists, and that seems to be what is being argued that I can see (this whole lizard players and dino armies effectively comes about from that, not points or lack thereof) then working out whether armies that do not follow some list building rule will get rejected at some place where pick up games are played is a perfectly fair question.

If you will play such a list because the points are OK then you don't need army lists, if you need army lists then you do have a game that will get in the way of a set of potential players.

You're getting wildly off-topic here, but I will say this:

I used to play weekly with a medium-sized group of friends. We played in a local store, and to echo Grump - three of us even played a game of 40k in the evening of New Year's Eve on a secluded outdoor staircase at my University while I waited for my wife (then GF) to finish work for the evening. Still, even when playing campaign games of things like WarZone 1e, we always used points and army lists in conjunction with scenarios, because busy lives and not being 100% familiar with one another's forces we wanted to be able to have a "fair" game and not meticulously plan them out in advance. "Want a game next Friday?" "Sure, 1500pts?" "Sounds good. I'll bring either my Marines or Guard" "Ok, I'll probably play Chaos or I might do my Eldar or Dark Eldar." "Cool, see you then!"

This is my issue with AoS. 40 Elves are demonstratively better than 40 Goblins. How many goblins are roughly equal to the elves? What about Ogres? If only there was a simple and easy to use manner to measure these things...
And this applies just as much when running scenarios in fantasy and sci-fi games so you can work out ratios. Having and using points or lists doesn' t mean you can't create divergences from them with a friend and agreements, but it still gives you a basic balancing mechanic.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:

No, that's a fairly GW-centric way of thinking, in fact I'd be totally unsurprised to see something like that in a Jervis Johnson editorial. It's been fairly obvious for a while that GW manipulates the rules to promote model sales, many other games place a far higher priority on the gaming experience and work far harder on making their force selection (I won't call it list building ) as balanced as possible. If players want to modify those painstakingly developed systems, then nothing is stopping them. It's much harder to try and and turn an anything goes system into something that allows a fair contest. Because the nature of what's "fair" is entirely subjective, if there's no limits imposed on the situation and it makes games between star angers harder. It doesn't make games between players who know each other well any more difficult to alter if they want to break out of the status quo.

Very well put.

KoW is my fantasy battle game of choice these days, and no-one I've played yet has given me grief about using my old-school Wardancer models in an Elf army using the Twilight Kin Bladedancer (Dark Elf Witch Elves) unit entry. I use the "Elven Gladestalkers" entry for the Rangers of Osgilliath in my Kindoms of Men (Gondor) army, and "Elven Stormwind Cavalry" stats as Swan Knights of Dol Amroth. They're from a different army, but the stat block and points cost makes it easy to use models of my choice to field a thematic force that fits the theme of the army and can play in a balanced game, rather than having the list force the models or have anyone complain that my "human army has elves in it."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

puree wrote:

Why are you falling back on points to balance this match? The guy "only" has 5 Titans and he really wants to play them all together! Go on... play him

My argument was about buying and painting etc models that you want and not buying stuff that you don't want and hence not meeting some list requirement. I thought it was obvious but clearly failed in saying that both players would still have the same points in this 'pick up game' as the start point, but may tweak from there to agree something.

So, lets assume that 2000pts of hypothetical AoS points is a 'standard' sort of size game that most places use. I turn up with 2000pts of lizards that is heavy on dinos. You have a lizard army list book that says 1 monster per 1 unit of core or whatever. My list doesn't meet that, but you have 2000 pts of something else.

A) Will you just say that we are both 2000 pts so lets play.
B) Will you look over my stuff and say that looks nice, love the paint job and I see nothing too horrible for me, it might not be perfectly balanced to mine one way or the other but lets play and see.
C) Will you say happy to play but can you remove one of your 5 dinos or whatever (you take another unit if you have them), as my list based army can't handle 5 dinos, but only 4 or an extra monster slayer unit for me should be interesting .
D) Wave the list book and say I can't play here.

E) Your 5 dinos look awesome, but I have only played Lizardmen once before and am completely unfamilar with the rules for your Dinos - so I have no idea if your 5 Dinos will ROFLstomp my goblins or if it might be an even or at least competitive game because the game we're playing does not use points.

I'm fine with losing in a wargame game, but I want to have fun while doing so and have some sort of objective to shoot for. If we're playing Thermopylae and I'm the Greeks, I'm going to lose but my target might be to last for 5 or 15 turns for the moral victory. There's no fun in playing the closing moments of Blackadder goes Forth as a wargame. Especially as the British, but it'd be just as much like a broken pencil as the Germans...

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Any wargame is a sandbox in that it provides rules for fighting certain types of battles. How you organise those battles is up to you -- campaigns, and so on.

I'm afraid i have to disagree with you there. Starcraft is a wargame, would you consider it to be a sandbox game? What is it about wargames that you consider to be sandbox?

 Torga_DW wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Any wargame is a sandbox in that it provides rules for fighting certain types of battles. How you organise those battles is up to you -- campaigns, and so on.

I'm afraid i have to disagree with you there. Starcraft is a wargame, would you consider it to be a sandbox game? What is it about wargames that you consider to be sandbox?

The context we are talking about is table top wargames, not video game wargames. A table top wargame is sandbox because all the rules, scenarios, campaigns, etc are subject to change by the players. The players buy their models and the rules and then do whatever the hell they want with them.

In some areas i guess. When playing pugs we always went straight off the rulebook, which brings me back to my original question: what exactly is sandbox about AoS? There's minimal rules = freedom to do what you want with the game?

edit: and by that logic, a line of miniatures with no rules would be even more sandbox if you played a game with them?

But that was the point, ALL wargames are sandbox. It doesn't matter if it has well written rules or poorly written rules or rules with gaping holes, they're all sandbox because it's entirely up to the players how they want to play it (unlike a video game where you play it how the developers programmed it).

AoS isn't "more" sandbox than any other game.

Obviously being a 2 player game, you have to share the sandbox with another person, which is where having solid rules as a starting point is IMO the best way to do it. As has been said many times, it's easier to start from a solid base and adapt the game to your liking than start from something shaky and try and turn it in to something that works, especially if you don't have decades of prior wargaming experience to base your attempts on.

 Torga_DW wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Any wargame is a sandbox in that it provides rules for fighting certain types of battles. How you organise those battles is up to you -- campaigns, and so on.

I'm afraid i have to disagree with you there. Starcraft is a wargame, would you consider it to be a sandbox game? What is it about wargames that you consider to be sandbox?

I'm talking about tabletop wargames.

As said above, video games can only do what the programmer wrote into them. A paper game gives you a set of rules that you can employ however you like, modifying it, or using it to play scenarios that you invent for yourself.

For example, in 40K you could decide to fight a battle on a planet with 0.5g, and allow all units to move 50% faster than normal.

 jonolikespie wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
Just use the Nottingham staff as the feedback pool and make an event out of each adjustment. Imagine if it happened on the 1st of every month like a patch release and you could get a buzz of excitement around it. You would have everyone talking about the game all year round just by constantly amending points.

Using Nottingham staff is a terrible idea.
I think it was the last marine codex they spoke in white dwarf about how everyone in the studio used chaplains so they game librarians a buff. Problem was outside of the studio no one in their right mind would have picked a chaplain over a librarian even before the buff.

Fine, they should use a bigger feedback group.

I still think everything else is an easy to implement idea, that would benefit the game.

 DanielBeaver wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:
Had they just released AoS as a new/side game instead of killing off WHFB, they would be in a better position.

I'm still totally floored that they didn't do that. Especially considering the compatibility with square bases - there is absolutely no reason that AoS couldn't have coexisted with WHFB.

As for sales... we don't have any conrete data, but I can offer an anecdote:
I was talking to my FLGS about it, and they sold about twice as many copies of Betrayal at Calth on the Saturday release than they have sold AoS products since it's release.

Here's a question: How many Fantasy kits in general did your FLGS sell before AoS dropped? If they sold half as many or less before, then AoS could be considered a resounding success for improving Fantasy Sales to half as much as Betrayal at Calth.

Rihgu wrote:

 DanielBeaver wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:
Had they just released AoS as a new/side game instead of killing off WHFB, they would be in a better position.

I'm still totally floored that they didn't do that. Especially considering the compatibility with square bases - there is absolutely no reason that AoS couldn't have coexisted with WHFB.

As for sales... we don't have any conrete data, but I can offer an anecdote:
I was talking to my FLGS about it, and they sold about twice as many copies of Betrayal at Calth on the Saturday release than they have sold AoS products since it's release.

Here's a question: How many Fantasy kits in general did your FLGS sell before AoS dropped? If they sold half as many or less before, then AoS could be considered a resounding success for improving Fantasy Sales to half as much as Betrayal at Calth.

Not necessarily. How much money did GW spend to produce AOS? All those posters, new kits, books, etc cost money to make. Did they make that back? If so, by how much? With stories of shelves filled with unsold AOS boxes, it doesn't sound bright.

Rihgu wrote:

 DanielBeaver wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:
Had they just released AoS as a new/side game instead of killing off WHFB, they would be in a better position.

I'm still totally floored that they didn't do that. Especially considering the compatibility with square bases - there is absolutely no reason that AoS couldn't have coexisted with WHFB.

As for sales... we don't have any conrete data, but I can offer an anecdote:
I was talking to my FLGS about it, and they sold about twice as many copies of Betrayal at Calth on the Saturday release than they have sold AoS products since it's release.

Here's a question: How many Fantasy kits in general did your FLGS sell before AoS dropped? If they sold half as many or less before, then AoS could be considered a resounding success for improving Fantasy Sales to half as much as Betrayal at Calth.

We already had a few store owner in here that answer that question. The one that owns at least 2 stores say GW fantasy sells are down 60% since AoS dropped. That includes both WHFB and AoS sells. Easy enough to see the answer.

Noir wrote:

Rihgu wrote:

 DanielBeaver wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:
Had they just released AoS as a new/side game instead of killing off WHFB, they would be in a better position.

I'm still totally floored that they didn't do that. Especially considering the compatibility with square bases - there is absolutely no reason that AoS couldn't have coexisted with WHFB.

As for sales... we don't have any conrete data, but I can offer an anecdote:
I was talking to my FLGS about it, and they sold about twice as many copies of Betrayal at Calth on the Saturday release than they have sold AoS products since it's release.

Here's a question: How many Fantasy kits in general did your FLGS sell before AoS dropped? If they sold half as many or less before, then AoS could be considered a resounding success for improving Fantasy Sales to half as much as Betrayal at Calth.

We already had a few store owner in here that answer that question. The one that owns at least 2 stores say GW fantasy sells are down 60% since AoS dropped. That includes both WHFB and AoS sells. Easy enough to see the answer.

Looking specifically for DanielBeaver's anecdotal response. A local store bought into AoS after having not selling GW product for years. Another local store cleared it's shelves of products that had sat, dusty, for the entire 2 years I'd been frequenting it. Yet another local store (that I don't go to often) has a few boxes of all the new products for that week, and then next time I go in... no more of those boxes!
So while you have a few store owners posting a failure, I have 3 store owners showing success.
It's not as easy to see the answer as you'd think.

Not necessarily. How much money did GW spend to produce AOS? All those posters, new kits, books, etc cost money to make. Did they make that back? If so, by how much? With stories of shelves filled with unsold AOS boxes, it doesn't sound bright.

Well, going by how a lot of this forum is going, the rules were probably free (scribbled down in 15 minutes on a napkin during somebody's lunch, I hear). They've only been repacking old kits, except for a scant few boxes of Space Marines and Blood Bros.
However, with stories of once-full shelves now empty of AOS boxes, it does sound bright!
(Note: I am reciting hyperbole, mostly to amuse myself, and maybe others)

But you do raise a point, they obviously invested money into it, so one store improving Fantasy sales is most likely not going to make up that investment. But one store failing to sell Fantasy kits is also probably not going to cause trouble with recouping that investment. Despite this being one of the largest forums for wargamers, it clearly doesn't demonstrate a good view of the wider community. For example, historical wargames are pretty popular, yet on this forum there isn't much discussion about them (besides Bolt Action, it seems). It seems that this website attracts a very vocal minority of the wargaming community and ends up showing a biased view of it.

I'm not saying that outside of Dakkadakka AoS is all sparkles & rainbows, but on Twitter, Facebook, etc it's being fairly well received.

(I'm sort of distracted watching some videos at the moment, so sorry if this post devolved into some sort of incoherent babble at some point)

I keep hearing how forums aren't indicative of broader opinion. I say, it's the closest thing we have and shouldn't be ignored. Not taken as gospel, but it should carry weight as well.
Historicals probably don't get much traffic here because this forum is focused on fantasy and sci-fi games. Historical games probably go to their more historical minded forums where they can talk about the minutie of changes to Napoleonic coursair uniforms throughout the wars.

Just something to consider.

@rihgu that is funny they said the same type of stuff the guy I was posting about post in the first month of release. He even ran events he was so hyped and wanted it to do good (as most owner want the product they sell to do). This is months later after the rush and shiny wore off.

I like to see the guys you posted about, post how it is doing now. Wouldn't you.

I wonder if AoS development costs were significantly more than updating an existing faction in the WHFB cycle.

It was said that the same amount of resources were put into WHFB as 40k but for a fraction of the return, which is why it was dropped.

I imagine the start up costs of AoS were quite high, but on the flip side I bet the Seraphon update was much cheaper than the Lizardmen 8th edition update was. If in the long run it balances out that AoS is cheaper to maintain than WHFB it only needs to make the same amount of revenue as WHFB did to be more profitable.

 MWHistorian wrote:
I keep hearing how forums aren't indicative of broader opinion. I say, it's the closest thing we have and shouldn't be ignored. Not taken as gospel, but it should carry weight as well.
Historicals probably don't get much traffic here because this forum is focused on fantasy and sci-fi games. Historical games probably go to their more historical minded forums where they can talk about the minutie of changes to Napoleonic coursair uniforms throughout the wars.

Just something to consider.

Oh, I definitely agree with you! What I guess I was trying to say is that Dakkadakka is very clearly against AoS. If you measured only Dakkadakka, AoS is an abject failure with no hope.
If you look out to Twitter, Facebook (and while I haven't been there to check it out, I hear that 4chan's /tg/ board is warmly receptive of AoS), while not necessarily extremely bright there's not nearly as much of an outcry against AoS as there is here.
Makes me think that AoS is doing ... okay, at the very least. Rather than failing.

I like to see the guys you posted about, post how it is doing now. Wouldn't you.

I'm not 100% what you're going for in your post, but the stores I was talking about... that's all my experience from the past 2 or 3 weeks. In fact, I have no idea how AoS did at release at those stores, only the now.

How are their AoS event going.