That was fun. Had my first real game of AoS

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**Lord Kragan**

Wight Lord wrote:
Thanks mate. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and pleasantly at that. It seems like the community is very fractured now. Reminds me somewhat of Pathfinder vs D&D that happened at my FLGS years ago. Never thought I'd see it happen to my game. Looks like I missed a lot of the drama thankfully.

We are used to using points, and I have the GHB, may start with that. I'm interested to try the no points down the road, at least once, just to see how it goes. I'm sure my buddy would be down to try at some point. He's still got a DE army, I talked him into trying an AoS game with me before he put his stuff on E-bay.

I used to be that guy, that would anchor my center with a regiment of 40 skeletons and a regiment of zombies, with a necromancer on a corpse cart between and behind them to heal/enlarge units. So if hordes are okay, I think I want to try a huge mob of zombies at some point, just to see what happens. Plus I've got all these figures just sitting on my shelf, feel like I need to do something with them.

I like the look of the round bases but rebasing 70-something zombies doesn't sound appealing right now, may have to sick with my squares for now. Plus I hear there's something called "9th Age" out there I've been told I need to look at before I rebase...

9th age is good, but from what I've heard "some" people complain is too ETC oriented in its ruleset. Not sure what they meant, tbh. I haven't tried it myself.

As for rebasing, it's not needed. Bases aren't needed to be round.

So you can have to games in one.

**Wight Lord**

Excellent!

I have not the foggiest notion what too ETC would actually mean either. Eh, whatever, if I'm keeping a fair amount on squares, which right now I look to be doing, maybe I'll give that a shot too.

**Charistoph**

Mulletdude wrote:What spell summons a vampire lord on zombie dragon? There's the outdated Zombie Dragon warscroll that allows summoning an inferior dragon, and no spell I know of summons vampires.

Bray Shamans are allowed to summon a Monster, no notes on it being a Chaos Monster, so it depends on how reliant on Alliances your armies are.

Lord Kragan wrote:9th age is good, but from what I've heard "some" people complain is too ETC oriented in its ruleset. Not sure what they meant, tbh. I haven't tried it myself.

Wight Lord wrote:I have not the foggiest notion what too ETC would actually mean either

ETC is the European Tournament Circuit. They would put out a "balancing" FAQ for the tournaments in Europe could follow to "balance" the game via composition scores. Things like weaker armies getting a higher points available to them, certain unit types were even more limited or affected your baseline "legal" score, etc.

Some of it was good, some of it was bad. Much of how you looked at it depended on which army you had and which ones you regularly faced.

**Ghaz**

Charistoph wrote:
Mulletdude wrote:What spell summons a vampire lord on zombie dragon? There's the outdated Zombie Dragon warscroll that allows summoning an inferior dragon, and no spell I know of summons vampires.

Bray Shamans are allowed to summon a Monster, no notes on it being a Chaos Monster, so it depends on how reliant on Alliances your armies are.

https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/AoS_Warscrolls/aos-warscroll-great-bray-shaman-en.pdf

**Davor**

If you are going to be playing a lot with a friend Wight Lord, there is no reason why you guys can't come to your own "house rules" when you play.

I was finally able to find a stranger who wanted to play a no points game. We agreed within 30 seconds that if the game is too lop sided either I have to many points or he had summoning when his units died, that someone gets their units back to make the game fun.

Unlike what the Internet says that this is horrible and impossible to do and takes hours and hours maybe even days of negotiations, we did it in less than a minute.

I say keep your square bases. They still look great. I would even add in house rules like I said before that if you are in a "formation" (not GW or 40K formations but formations like a square triangle etc) that you get a bonus movement, or add in Lord of the Ring Rules that the front line units can "shield" or in AoS case have a bonus to defend and the units directly behind them can still attack.

While I only played once so far, I find Age of Sigmar a great game and if you have a buddy with the same mind set, can tweak what is already made into an awesome game that would be for the two of you guys or who ever you play with.

**Wight Lord**

Davor wrote:
I say keep your square bases. They still look great. I would even add in house rules like I said before that if you are in a "formation" (not GW or 40K formations but formations like a square triangle etc) that you get a bonus movement, or add in Lord of the Ring Rules that the front line units can "shield" or in AoS case have a bonus to defend and the units directly behind them can still attack.

While I only played once so far, I find Age of Sigmar a great game and if you have a buddy with the same mind set, can tweak what is already made into an awesome game that would be for the two of you guys or who ever you play with.

I think those will definitely be somethings to consider once we have the basics down. I always did like the rank and flank of Oldhammer. However, I'm trying to wrap my head around measuring from the model and not the base right now, that just seems really weird to me.

If I do like the game, I'll probably press gang my old 40k buddies into trying it out later. I want to have a strong understanding of what I'm doing before I experiment though. On the other hand, I haven't seen anyone playing it yet, so if I get something started down the road maybe I can set a precedent in the Detroit area...

**Folomo**

I would suggest keeping the square bases. Less work and you will have more games to play with them.

Wight Lord wrote:

I think those will definitely be somethings to consider once we have the basics down. I always did like the rank and flank of Oldhammer. However, I'm trying to wrap my head around measuring from the model and not the base right now, that just seems really weird to me.

If I do like the game, I'll probably press gang my old 40k buddies into trying it out later. I want to have a strong understanding of what I'm doing before I experiment though. On the other hand, I haven't seen anyone playing it yet, so if I get something started down the road maybe I can set a precedent in the Detroit area...

If you like the Rank-and-file style of 8th and live in Detroit, you can look at the T9A map for people to play with. There are some guys there, so you can get some demo games and a gaming group if you are interested.

http://www.the-ninth-age.com/index.php?user-map/

**Wight Lord**

Thanks, I'll check that out, time (i.e. wife

) permitting. My priority is grasping AoS first, then trying the other rank and flanks. Just got my KoW book in a few days ago. It's interesting, not sure it's what I'm looking for though. 9th does sound interesting. Probably wait until spring or summer to get around to it however.

**Davor**

I think one house rule almost that is universal in Age of Sigmar is people measure from bases to minis. I think that is almost universally accepted.

**Lord Kragan**

Davor wrote:
I think one house rule almost that is universal in Age of Sigmar is people measure from bases to minis. I think that is almost universally accepted.

Indeed, I mean, GW said that once 2nd ed comes (or GhB 2.0.) they'll remove that specific rule.

**Wight Lord**

Oh praise be the Gawd-Emperor! That just seemed... wrong to me. So base to base is acceptable?

**Davor**

Wight Lord wrote:
Oh praise be the Gawd-Emperor! That just seemed... wrong to me. So base to base is acceptable?

Yes it is. GW even acknowledges this in the Generals Handbook when giving example to use "house rules" GW even encourages house rules as well.

**Wight Lord**

Whew. Jolly good. I think I'll need to write these down sometime, post them at the FLGS (as "Detroit Rules" of course). Get the word out to anyone not checking around on-line. I think that one especially could really effect what people think of the game. Everything else seems fairly streamlined from before (except it looks like a whole bunch of special rules for every unit), measuring from the figure itself seemed open to abuse, and unnecessary complication. Delighted to hear base to base is fairly universal.

Shooting into and out of close combat will take some getting used to.

You roll a one to hit, you should hit your own.

**dracpanzer**

We still allow firing into close combat but generally split the hits in respect to the ratio of friendly to unfriendly models in the close combat.

If units fire out of close combat we have them forfeit their melee attacks that turn.

Works for us, house rules let you tailor the game to your group and GW is finally recommending doing so!

As far as AoS and rank and flank. If you dont see it in the rules, try charging 32+ bretonnian men-at-arms two deep behind a row of archer spikes with a Paladin at the front and a Damsel or two to buff them and the bowman unit behind. So much better than 8ed.

**Wight Lord**

Alas I've not seen a Bret player in years, probably not since a decade ago.

**Charistoph**

Ghaz wrote:
Charistoph wrote:
Mulletdude wrote:What spell summons a vampire lord on zombie dragon? There's the outdated Zombie Dragon warscroll that allows summoning an inferior dragon, and no spell I know of summons vampires.

Bray Shamans are allowed to summon a Monster, no notes on it being a Chaos Monster, so it depends on how reliant on Alliances your armies are.

https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/AoS_Warscrolls/aos-warscroll-great-bray-shaman-en.pdf

Ah, they finally changed it. I haven't kept up with them as much as some.

**jouso**

Charistoph wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:9th age is good, but from what I've heard "some" people complain is too ETC oriented in its ruleset. Not sure what they meant, tbh. I haven't tried it myself.
Wight Lord wrote:I have not the foggiest notion what too ETC would actually mean either

ETC is the European Tournament Circuit. They would put out a "balancing" FAQ for the tournaments in Europe could follow to "balance" the game via composition scores. Things like weaker armies getting a higher points available to them, certain unit types were even more limited or affected your baseline "legal" score, etc.

Close, European Team Championship.

They used to make a massive balancing comp back during 7th and 8th edition. Quite a few of the minds behind 9th age are ETC people, plus the guys who used to make Swedish comp (which you may be more familiar with, since that was used by several GTs stateside).

It's a re-written, re-balanced warhammer (so cool to use in pickup games or in tournaments) with all the proprietary GW stuff expurged for IP reasons.