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 Orock wrote:

They only thing he understands is he had better damn well find a way to shill this thing in a positive light, because his companies future, and thus his job, relies on convincing the community that this change was a positive, and not a disaster.

Are you suggesting that he does not legitimately enjoy the game? I, personally, feel that calling his credibility into question and insinuating that he is corrupt and a liar is kind of excessive for a somewhat positive, vaguely constructive opinion posted on a personal blog that largely mirrors the same commentary I've read a hundred times from AoS fans in the past year. I get that you disagree, but there's a world of difference between disagreeing and what you are insinuating. Dick move, dude.

Got to say I find this article terribly biased. I get that liking a game is subjective but he contradicts himself and makes just plain false statements in other parts.

1) he states that a lack of points isn't an issue , but his reasoning of why is just because GW didn't do a good job with balance.
1A) then he says that AOS isn't balanced but that's not an issue because he's never played against people using broken army's and doesn't plan on playing against them in AOS.
1C) using this logic there was nothing wrong with WHFB because he could just avoid players that would aim to break it just like he does now. He states that any imbalance is solved by a quick discussion but this once again isn't a good argument because you can discuss balance in any game.

2)he claims that the game scales well up and down but this is just not a fact. While WHFB didn't scale down it was easy to scale up games because of the ways units work. I played an all goblin force with 200+ models and it was easy to move, set up, and play because the way units were assembled. I could add 100 troops to my army and that could easily be 2 groups of 50
2B) scaling up in AOS is just terrible. The amount of times you move a model per turn and measuring from the model make game length grow exponentially. Stating AOS plays well with large army's is as disingenuous as saying WHFB played well at 250 points.

He also says that army selection is a big part of the tactics in AOS but that just isn't true when you can take anything in the game. If he's stating that its true with some comps thats true but simply not true if he's discussing raw.

Yeah. AoS does not scale up well to mass battle. The rules are far too detailed on the level of the individual model to do that. It's Skirmish style rules but they still want to shill 100+ models to a prospective player.

Frankly, I think this attitude is doing a disservice to the strengths of the ruleset.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Yeah. AoS does not scale up well to mass battle. The rules are far too detailed on the level of the individual model to do that. It's Skirmish style rules but they still want to shill 100+ models to a prospective player.

Frankly, I think this attitude is doing a disservice to the strengths of the ruleset.

IMO AOS has two strengths
1) it plays well at small levels and as you said they are doing themselves a disservice by trying to sell it as a replacement for large mass battle games..... It just isn't
2) online rules is the second strength but then instead of being able to balance units whenever they are still set on making hard copy books with unit rules

AoS plays well with anywhere from what you get in the Starter, with 17 models in the Stormcast army up to around 70 or so models.After that it starts to get too grindy I think,plus the games just take too long.

I think the point that people are making about AoS being smaller armies,is that you don't need to have 2 groups of 50 night goblins then 30+ Savage orks as your troop blocks then another 25 or so models in the elite and support areas.Sure you can do that if you want,but its just not really made for those large blocks of troops.

I don't think GW is pushing people to build huge armies with AoS,but what they would like people to do is to branch out and have a playable amount of models from all the factions.And that could be as little as 15 models of an elite army to around 35 or so for a more horde oriented army.The "Start collecting" boxes are a great way to get headed in this direction.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Yeah. AoS does not scale up well to mass battle. The rules are far too detailed on the level of the individual model to do that. It's Skirmish style rules but they still want to shill 100+ models to a prospective player.

Frankly, I think this attitude is doing a disservice to the strengths of the ruleset.

That's the problem with 40k at the moment too.

Minijack wrote:
AoS plays well with anywhere from what you get in the Starter, with 17 models in the Stormcast army up to around 70 or so models.After that it starts to get too grindy I think,plus the games just take too long.

I think the point that people are making about AoS being smaller armies,is that you don't need to have 2 groups of 50 night goblins then 30+ Savage orks as your troop blocks then another 25 or so models in the elite and support areas.Sure you can do that if you want,but its just not really made for those large blocks of troops.

I don't think GW is pushing people to build huge armies with AoS,but what they would like people to do is to branch out and have a playable amount of models from all the factions.And that could be as little as 15 models of an elite army to around 35 or so for a more horde oriented army.The "Start collecting" boxes are a great way to get headed in this direction.

I never have to take 100 night goblins.... I love taking a few hundred. I never played WHFB to play small forces. I loved the feeling of my goblins getting slaughtered left and right but flooding the board with too many bodies to kill. I could never do this with AOS because the game kills it in two ways. Firstly the game would just be beyond long in the movement/ pile in phase. Secondly you are punished for taking lots of models by giving up sudden death easily with a horde army.

Minijack wrote:
I think the point that people are making about AoS being smaller armies,is that you don't need to have 2 groups of 50 night goblins then 30+ Savage orks as your troop blocks then another 25 or so models in the elite and support areas.Sure you can do that if you want,but its just not really made for those large blocks of troops.

You know, this is something I find interesting. Was I alone in enjoying the idea that you should have to bring so many spearmen and so many bowmen before you can bring your elite units to the table? That felt practical, it felt realistic, and above all it felt fluffy to me. I liked the 25% core minimum and I say that as a Vampire Counts player who felt like if he brought 502 points (out of 2,000) of core because a zombie was 3 he had waited 2 points.

Leaving the zombies and skeletons at home would have allowed me so many knights or grave guard or just more ungodly beatstick vampires... but that wasn't how the army was supposed to play and that was not how they functioned in the fluff. I much prefer that to 'bring whatever the you want'.

 jonolikespie wrote:

Minijack wrote:
I think the point that people are making about AoS being smaller armies,is that you don't need to have 2 groups of 50 night goblins then 30+ Savage orks as your troop blocks then another 25 or so models in the elite and support areas.Sure you can do that if you want,but its just not really made for those large blocks of troops.

You know, this is something I find interesting. Was I alone in enjoying the idea that you should have to bring so many spearmen and so many bowmen before you can bring your elite units to the table? That felt practical, it felt realistic, and above all it felt fluffy to me. I liked the 25% core minimum and I say that as a Vampire Counts player who felt like if he brought 502 points (out of 2,000) of core because a zombie was 3 he had waited 2 points.

Leaving the zombies and skeletons at home would have allowed me so many knights or grave guard or just more ungodly beatstick vampires... but that wasn't how the army was supposed to play and that was not how they functioned in the fluff. I much prefer that to 'bring whatever the you want'.

Agreed, that was my preference as well. The whole point of the core requirement was to help present semi-fluffy armies. Armies wouldn't be made up of all elites, because if they are, then the elites are CORE. If everyone is special, then no one is.

But I also felt that core units shouldn't be worthless. it shouldn't be a core tax, they should be a useful part of an army. With my dwarves,8th edition made even vanilla warriors a valuable unit who were useful in the right situation. They had their strengths and weaknesses, but I never complained about bringing them.

Aye, core should be useful. My example of zombies with VC was just that the way VC worked was that I arrived with the minimum number of zombies I could and then summoned more to the table to tarpit the enemy until my count was ready to ruin someone's day.

 Orock wrote:

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Does this man not understand why troops were organized into block formations until the wide-spread adoption of modern military firearms?

They only thing he understands is he had better damn well find a way to shill this thing in a positive light, because his companies future, and thus his job, relies on convincing the community that this change was a positive, and not a disaster.

Sorry, I can't let that go.
Guy is a great bloke. Yes, he edited WD once upon a time but he is no longer employed by GW, he's freelance. BL have been offering him plenty of work over the last couple of years which is why I'm *still* waiting on the next Richards & Klein novel.

He didn't have to write that post, and he makes it clear it's only his opinion. Repeatedly.

He's still demonstrably wrong. Block formations are not "absurd". There are many valid reasons why armies before the advent of machines guns would use them. Additionally, the best known battles in Fantasy films have made wide use of block formations. They look professional and badass.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
He's still demonstrably wrong. Block formations are not "absurd". There are many valid reasons why armies before the advent of machines guns would use them. Additionally, the best known battles in Fantasy films have made wide use of block formations. They look professional and badass.

Sorry Lime, wasn't defending the content of the post - but the insinuation that he is forced to like AoS because of association with GW.
I think his opinion on blocks may be coloured by the fact he's been an O&G player since year dot.
Using the LotR movies as an example - Elves rank up, dwarves rank up, humans rank up... Orcs and goblins *start* in ranks, then it all kinda falls to bits...

I can't think of any big fantasy film that didn't have rank and file formation, beyond some of the LOTR skirmishes (like the barrel escape in the Hobbit, or Goblin Town).
I think they've been trying to replicate the heros, in some sort of "all heroes, all the time" game. Legolas & Gimli were never in formation, but they were usually tearing through a formation.

At the scale I think AoS is meant to be aiming at I don't think it needs unit blocks, but it also shouldn't have unit cohesion and should have better skirmish rules. i.e. it's a small warband skirmish game, which is intended for maybe 20 minis a side. WHFB definitely needed blocks.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I've never said anything against WHFB. I'm talking about points used for balancing. They are innately poor at their job, and it does not appear that WHFB does anything to assuage those faults. Maybe it does. I don't know.

Points are the absolute best way to approach it; all of the other systems are really just emulating points anyway (and pretty badly, in the case of model counts).

Any sort of effectiveness is based on comparison; an armoured knight it objectively better than a rag covered goblin, but by how much?

All of the comp systems have been focused on coming up with a points system; something that'd have been served much better by the people who wrote the actual rules and did the *ahem* playtesting, instead of the customers.

Sure, points will never be perfect, but they give you the best starting point. Even if your points system gives you, say, 75% accuracy (so 1000pts of X is worth the equivalent of about 750-1250pts of Y), then you're still going to have a much more balanced game than just guessing and going with a gut feeling, until you've played it enough to have formulated pseudo points in your head anyway.

And something I keep saying; it's so much easier to drop the points (like we did playing 3rd Ed WHFB on the floor) than it is to re-invent them.


Also; there's literally nothing you can do in AoS that you couldn't do at least as easily in WHFB, and it really says something that even the biggest advocates of AoS (including Guy Haley, who gets paid to write AoS fiction) admit it has flaws or they don't like the way some things work.

I get the arguments about "you were always free to do whatever you wanted", but the whole point of any rules system is to standardise.
People have said AoS doesn't work for pick-up games.
But from my experience, WFB pickup games were invariably equal-pointed pitched battles - only the terrain ever differed.
The difference between AoS and WFB in that regard is that the WFB baseline was even-pointed army lists, pitched battles and the victory point table.

AoS' baseline is to discuss with your opponent what sort of game you want, which automatically lends itself to mucking around with the system and tailoring the experience.

I personally have come to prefer the AoS baseline. I am not claiming that I never enjoyed WFB games, but it just never occurred to me that an AoS-esque approach could work.
But I'm glad that I've found it does.

That was because even points with pitched battle and standard victory points is perfect for pick up games. That's all of the back-and-forth negotiation done in like 8 words:

2000 point, pitched battle, standard victory conditions? Done.

So you can spent all of your time playing the game and engaging in banter, instead of spending the first 20+ minutes deciding on *how* you want to play.

I'd hate for the negotiations to last longer than it takes to unpack my army and start deploying.


AoS has also become far from standardized; it's the first GW ruleset I can think of where houseruling became the norm. Everyone plays it differently.

Herzlos wrote:
That was because even points with pitched battle and standard victory points is perfect for pick up games. That's all of the back-and-forth negotiation done in like 8 words:

2000 point, pitched battle, standard victory conditions? Done.

So you can spent all of your time playing the game and engaging in banter, instead of spending the first 20+ minutes deciding on *how* you want to play.

I'd hate for the negotiations to last longer than it takes to unpack my army and start deploying.

I'm not denying any of that. But once you have a few games under your belt if it takes more than 5 minutes to organise a game of AoS then something's not right.
As I said, the baseline of WFB was a standardised size and format.
The baseline for AoS isn't.

I don't think it matters at all if a game adopts rank formations like historical armies, or loose skirmishing groups like modern infantry (who it must be said, still form up in loose skirmish ranks or blocks to develop maximum firepower.) Either is a completely valid way of playing a wargame, and more power to your elbow for playing the game you like.

What's silly and almost verging on a lie, is to say that AoS provides a mass battle visual experience that looks like awesome fantasy films when everyone can easily see that fantasy films with mass battles in them always show the armies formed up into ranks and blocks.

Formed ranks are seen in all the LoTR and Hobbit mass battles.
300 (essentially a fantasy film, though based on historical events) shows blocks.
The Narnia film mass battle scenes are in ranks.
Troy (2004) shows troops in rank formations.
Princess Mononoke shows troops in ranks.
The Mummy 3
Red Cliff 2
El Cid, Kingdom of Heaven, Kagemusha (all semi-historical)

To be sure, there are plenty of fight scenes in fantasy films that look more like the AoS style, but these are all fights with small numbers involved, not large scale battles. Usually involving one or a few heroes versus some monsters or a group of mooks, or sometimes small warbands fighting each other. In Excalibur, for instance, you get scenes with a couple of hundred knights fighting, which is the typical size of a large game of AoS.

RoperPG wrote:
But once you have a few games under your belt if it takes more than 5 minutes to organise a game of AoS then something's not right..

Even with a complete stranger? Does that time also include deciding what forces you are fielding?

Herzlos wrote:

RoperPG wrote:
But once you have a few games under your belt if it takes more than 5 minutes to organise a game of AoS then something's not right..

Even with a complete stranger? Does that time also include deciding what forces you are fielding?

In my experience, yes. Full disclosure, I've only played two games of AoS against people I hadn't arranged with previously, buy we got from "fancy a game?" to turn 1 inside 20/25 minutes. This included arranging the game, deciding what we were doing, setting up the table, setting up terrain and deploying forces.

Herzlos wrote:


Even with a complete stranger?

Pretty much - happens at the Warhammer World events all the time...

I stand corrected then. Thanks

Edit: I'd regard WHW differently, since the events already have pre-defined comp packs and they probably don't approve of fan-made comp packs in open play.

Do the WHW events encourage players to decide amongst themselves what to house rule, or is it RAW + event comp?

Well, that post from Mr Haley isn't really surprising.

But I still note the tone about the mantra "people don't get AoS, they are in the wrong".

I think he actually and truly believes that - like many people working for GW or being quite close to them. That was also the same stance I had from GW representatives when they came in Belgium to show AoS.

That's quite understandable, to be honest. But I believe it can be a problem - absolutely no objectivity at all and oblivious to criticism. Being passionate is fine. Willingly ignoring some parts because they don't suit you is not, IMHO. I get that a lot from fans who just don't want to listen to anything that may be even slightly going against their vision.

Being a long-time 40K player who’s now moved across the AoS, one of the main attractions for the move was that they’d shifted to 1” coherency skirmish-style formations, and a more “realistic” ground scale for small patrol-clash stories, rather than a “mighty unit of the Empire’s finest warriors” being represented by a rank and file unit of…er.. 20 blokes.

I’m one of those weird types who’d happily lose every game so long as there was a compelling story and a more skirmish-y, cinematic feel to a game, and I think AoS provides this more successfully than WFB ever did. Taking the rigidity of the rules / points away from army books and putting the onus back onto players to behave cooperatively and game in the tradition of a compelling narrative and mutual cooperation can only be a good thing, in my experience. Maybe it's just the people I've gamed with in the past, like

Is it even possible to fight a mass battle without ranks from either a historical or fantasy perspective?

Historically the barbarians tried it and the roman legions, known for their formation fighting had none of it. Phalanxes and Hostilities where common among other armies because, again, it worked. Sure guerrilla warfare worked to some extent without formations, but was a distinctly different type of warfare.

Moving into more medieval warfare with proper ranked spearmen, crossbows, knights, if you weren't fighting with formed ranks you broke, ran and got cut down pretty easily. I'm no historian but in the real world the strategies that worked tended to be the ones that became well known and carried on through hundreds or thousands of years of warfare.

In fantasy things need to be less realistic, but there is usually still some reason to it. If archers behind disciplined spearmen is a winning tactic then what about AoS makes inferior to loose rabbles of people crashing into each other?

 argonak wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:

Minijack wrote:
I think the point that people are making about AoS being smaller armies,is that you don't need to have 2 groups of 50 night goblins then 30+ Savage orks as your troop blocks then another 25 or so models in the elite and support areas.Sure you can do that if you want,but its just not really made for those large blocks of troops.

You know, this is something I find interesting. Was I alone in enjoying the idea that you should have to bring so many spearmen and so many bowmen before you can bring your elite units to the table? That felt practical, it felt realistic, and above all it felt fluffy to me. I liked the 25% core minimum and I say that as a Vampire Counts player who felt like if he brought 502 points (out of 2,000) of core because a zombie was 3 he had waited 2 points.

Leaving the zombies and skeletons at home would have allowed me so many knights or grave guard or just more ungodly beatstick vampires... but that wasn't how the army was supposed to play and that was not how they functioned in the fluff. I much prefer that to 'bring whatever the you want'.

Agreed, that was my preference as well. The whole point of the core requirement was to help present semi-fluffy armies. Armies wouldn't be made up of all elites, because if they are, then the elites are CORE. If everyone is special, then no one is.

But I also felt that core units shouldn't be worthless. it shouldn't be a core tax, they should be a useful part of an army. With my dwarves,8th edition made even vanilla warriors a valuable unit who were useful in the right situation. They had their strengths and weaknesses, but I never complained about bringing them.

This is my preference as well. Unfortunately I have found that this preference has long gone away from the mass of other people I know for two main reasons:

1) buying all of those models - it seems preferable to buy a smaller number of models because smaller models = faster game = preferable
2) having to paint all of those models - it seems preferable to buy a smaller number of models because smaller models = faster to paint = preferable

 jonolikespie wrote:
Is it even possible to fight a mass battle without ranks from either a historical or fantasy perspective?

You could, but you'd lose any semblance of control or coherency immediately, and each individual soldier would be exposed on all sides. So you'd have a giant messy brawl with no idea what's going on and a real risk of friendly fire.

Tightly ranked units usually bet loose formations for that reason; with tight units you have to attack on their front (or flank them) where they are most heavily armoured and often have a shield wall to overcome. You also get better visibility (who is where, what state are they in?) and control, as well as making it easy to do things like swap ranks out to keep the fresh fighters at the front. Once you broke into a loose formation you could get swept up by cavalry; most casualties happened that way due to being harrassed on the retreat.

There's no way you could fight a big battle (10's or 100's of thousands of soldiers) pre-radio in the "skirmish" style. I'd even argue that most of the big modern battles (like the Somme in WW1 and the Russian Front in WW2) were closer to rank-and-file than skirmish. It was certainly the case in Napoleonics or the American Civil War too.

So once you get above some given size (maybe 100 men?) formed units has been the way to go for more or less the entire history of warfare. There's no reason that'd change in a fantasy setting unless the physics were vastly different.

There are several reasons why in real life troops fight in formations:

To develop maximum possible combat power facing the enemy.
To avoid friendly fire casualties.
For mutual support.
For morale reasons.
For command and control reasons.

All these can be ignored if you want to. Game rules do not need to take into account the real world.

However the thing that cannot be ignored is simply that to move lots of figures is quicker if they are moved in blocks rather than individually.

The forum poll on the topic showed that 81% of players like to play games with 100 or fewer figures.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/jforum.page?module=posts&action=list&topic_id=677659&viewResults=true

The experience of 40K players bears this out. Players of horde armies have real trouble completing the moves under tournament conditions.

jonolikespie wrote:Is it even possible to fight a mass battle without ranks from either a historical or fantasy perspective?

I'm not really an expert on historical military maneuvers, but weren't ranks used in battles with thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of troops, not a few dozen? And ranks never survived contact with the enemy. They were largely an organizational effort for positioning and tactics, but once they broke rank, it was just a jumble of sweaty, shirtless men rubbing up against each other in slow motion (at least, according to Spartacus)

Herzlos wrote:Points are the absolute best way to approach it; all of the other systems are really just emulating points anyway (and pretty badly, in the case of model counts).

That shows a lack of imagination and isn't even remotely true. Points are probably the simplest way to do it, the most unilateral way to do it, but it isn't the best way. It's just so ingrained in the way people think about miniature games that it is difficult for them to let go of the idea. You literally don't need any army building rules beyond mutual agreement, and points are a neutral way to confirm that agreement ahead of time - but it isn't the only way, and I'd consider many, many more options before I declared it the "absolute best" approach.

Also; there's literally nothing you can do in AoS that you couldn't do at least as easily in WHFB, and it really says something that even the biggest advocates of AoS (including Guy Haley, who gets paid to write AoS fiction) admit it has flaws or they don't like the way some things work.

If the presence of flaws were reason enough to ignore a miniature game, there wouldn't be any miniature games left. Everything is imperfect. Doesn't mean we can't still enjoy them for what they are. Besides, I'm sure if he didn't admit the flaws, you'd just be complaining that he was blinded by loyalty and refused to admit that the game wasn't perfect. There's no (positive) opinion that this guy could have that you wouldn't find some way to trivialize and dismiss.

 Sqorgar wrote:

jonolikespie wrote:Is it even possible to fight a mass battle without ranks from either a historical or fantasy perspective?

I'm not really an expert on historical military maneuvers, but weren't ranks used in battles with thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of troops, not a few dozen? And ranks never survived contact with the enemy. They were largely an organizational effort for positioning and tactics, but once they broke rank, it was just a jumble of sweaty, shirtless men rubbing up against each other in slow motion (at least, according to Spartacus)

You need hundreds, at least, before ranks make sense. And a lot of effort was spent trying to maintain your ranks / disrupting your enemies ranks; you want to avoid a total scrum. It just doesn't make dramatic cinematography.

Herzlos wrote:Points are the absolute best way to approach it; all of the other systems are really just emulating points anyway (and pretty badly, in the case of model counts).

That shows a lack of imagination and isn't even remotely true. Points are probably the simplest way to do it, the most unilateral way to do it, but it isn't the best way. It's just so ingrained in the way people think about miniature games that it is difficult for them to let go of the idea. You literally don't need any army building rules beyond mutual agreement, and points are a neutral way to confirm that agreement ahead of time - but it isn't the only way, and I'd consider many, many more options before I declared it the "absolute best" approach.

The only other approach I can think of in terms of balance is mirroring, and even then it's imperfect if you don't compensate for the turn order. It'd make boring games though so I discounted it.
I have absolutely no idea how else you could do it.

There's historic orders of battle, but that's specifically not balanced (if you follow Sun Tsu, you want to avoid a balanced battle).

What other approaches are there to attaining balance?

Also; there's literally nothing you can do in AoS that you couldn't do at least as easily in WHFB, and it really says something that even the biggest advocates of AoS (including Guy Haley, who gets paid to write AoS fiction) admit it has flaws or they don't like the way some things work.

If the presence of flaws were reason enough to ignore a miniature game, there wouldn't be any miniature games left. Everything is imperfect. Doesn't mean we can't still enjoy them for what they are. Besides, I'm sure if he didn't admit the flaws, you'd just be complaining that he was blinded by loyalty and refused to admit that the game wasn't perfect. There's no (positive) opinion that this guy could have that you wouldn't find some way to trivialize and dismiss.