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Carrion Empire I think sold out because they released the BAttletomes alongside. No guesswork, no waiting for months it was a BAM new Battletomes and new kits.

This meant it got everyone really excited from experienced people with huge armies who only wanted the exclusives through to new people getting started as both sets offered a fantastic saving on the contents for each army. Plus everyone in the middle!

I think its GW reacting to feedback from the other duel sets where there have been months or even half a year waiting for a Battletome/Codex; only it took a while for the feedback to filter through and reach a stage where they could change the listings and schedual to work it.

We can hopefully expect a few months before both unique models go on sale on their own. Perhaps even less time.


I think the whole "overpowered" aspect is there, but its not as big as many would like to think it could be. I tihnk they sold out because they were new 2.0 tomes for factions for AoS and they made both armies work. Heck lets not forget Flesh Eaters were running on an old Tome whilst Skaven had been shattered into half a dozen smaller armies; so for skaven alone its a huge release and update





As for balance I think GW's hurdle has been the same for a long while. A combination of internal rules writers who are so in-tune with each other that many "rules" are unspoken between them and just common sense to them as they play. Coupled to the fact that, at their core, they are more casual players by heart rather than extreme competitive ones. You can see this in how GW hasn't chased the competitive game scene at all despite the potential lucrative offerings. If anything whilst everyone else in the whole geek market (video and model) has tried chasing once they were at a good size; GW walked away quite firmly from it.

I don't agree with that. I follow the developers on twitter. They are all competitive tournament players. They know how that scene works. Every singe one of them does. They all, every one, celebrate the tournaments that they go to on the regular.

Their primary supporters such as the tga crew are pretty much all about breaking warhammer into the professional tsports gaming realm. They have those guys on their podcasts and webcasts constantly. They drink beers with each other at the pub on the regular and post about it on their twitters.

That they let things like their regular offerings be as imbalanced as they do for the duration of the lifetime of their game is either intentional or gross incompetence.

If the fan based comps can get closer to balance, and the fans are just fans, there is no reason why people who are paid to write rules can't get as close if not closer.

Unless thats really not the goal at all. Which is what I believe. The imbalance is known before release and intentional.


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Let's not forget: this time last year, everybody was constantly moaning about Tzeentch armies and now they are just fine.

Thats true, but thats not because people needed to just figure out how to get better to beat them; GW nerfed them hard.

And before that it was beastclaw raiders and kunnin rukk builds. And certain stormcast builds. Same cycle.

There's always something gross and then GW will nerf it later.

When free summoning returned this past summer they SWORE up and down that we shouldn't worry, that balance was their top priority and that free summoning wouldn't be oppressive at any level.


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I base my PtG campaigns around free-for-all battles being a major thing (alternate by phase instead of by turn, two combat phases). Players have 6 weeks to hit a 12 glory threshold for the final battle, which is a FFA where the winner wins the league. Even players that do not hit that threshold get to play and can theoretically win, though when it is a king-of-the-hill scenario and they have to deploy on the hill...

I've done similar. The problem comes in when your final games are between four or five people and three are running hard nose power LVO/Adepticon style lists. At that point the two that arne't are the first targets to harvest sweet sweet victory points.

Thats why I switched to the sudden death model which has up until now worked great. (it may still work great, I will need to get playtest games in involving skaven and FEC filth builds to see how well the sudden death model holds out against them vs casual or for fun builds)


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The other alternative is to break out azyr comp again and re-streamline all the points to a more accurate representation of their power level.

There is the little matter of my group gave the green light for alternate activation which may also solve some issues since we wont' have double turn teabagging so I'm optimistic about that.

I do remember that the sky was totally falling when BoC came out with their free turn 3 Chimera and now apparently they're fine, so let's give it a few months.

I wouldn't say they are fine. The line was always "there are some problem elements but overall they are pretty good, and even those elements don't put them on the level of standard tourney cheese" and that remains true. Hell I said exactly that just above. Turn 3 Chimera (turn 2 is not difficult, even) is one of those problem elements.


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Anyways, when I say they need to do better if they want to push Warhammer to the next level, the tsports is what I mean. The "balance" of 40k/AoS would be considered a joke for any other game electronic or otherwise. It isn't going to get mainstream appeal like this. Sure it can build something out of the community that is there, but history shows us that popularity suffers when balance does.

The reason fan comps are always more balanced than official products is exactly because those fans don't have to care about anything more than to balance the game.

And is very clear when GW old rule writers wrote their own rulesets for other companies, those are much more balanced (Rick Prestley, Cavatore) than anything they wrote for Games Workshop.

People should stop calling them incompetentes and just realize that is GW the one that doesn't want tightly balanced rulesets.

Yeah, I stopped saying they were incompetent because it was quite clear that the effort simply was not being made.

Thats why I say its either intentional OR gross incompetence... and that I feel its the former (intentional) because I read the designer's twitter accounts and some have interacted on forums in the past and none struck me as being incompetent.

The imbalance is most definitely intentionally injected into the game for whatever reason (i suspect rolling sales but gw has never admitted to intentionally imbalancing their games and have lately as I mentioned above have been vocally protesting complaints about imbalance stating that balance is their #1 priority) so we will never know why this is done as fact.

FWIW the "praise" I meant was the whole "Oh GW is really nailing it with these new models!" and rushing to buy the box, resulting in increased profits for GW so they see that these sort of limited boxes with exclusive models get them money.

FWIW I do agree with auticus. Most of the AOS designers (unlike the 40k ones, not counting the ITC playtesters) are competitive guys. Ben Johnson, in particular, was a known tournament player before he joined the studio. So they seem to want a solid tournament game, but then they do things like this and it's just weird but maybe not since as auticus says a tournament player thinks that having kewl whizzbang armies with broken mechanics is part of the competitive scene. I don't necessarily disagree but it's rather hypocritical to say how you want a solid competitive game, that has a ton of game-breaking mechanics built in as designed. That's the MTG approach which is the opposite of what a solid competitive game should be.

I don't go to TGA that much anymore (and auticus was banned for being too negative about the direction AOS was going) but yeah, the guys who run TGA are buddies with the designers (I think Ben Curry, the guy who created it, was already friends with Ben Johnson before the latter joined GW, Ben Johnson was in his gaming club) and with guys like Dan and Wayne (Heelanhammer, guys who made SCGT which became the GHB). So it's basically a clique of Brits who all love GW, love Warhammer and love competitive gaming with Warhammer and think that everything GW is doing is the best it's ever been. And each new release is better than the last despite all of it's flaws and potential brokenness.

However, in their defense, this also boils down to players. Auticus' crowd are all tournament guys, who will bandwagon jump on whatever is the most broken. GW has and always will expect you to police yourselves, and I have seen from their interviews and talks that the GW design team do this too; Ben Johnson, for example, knows when to bring his A-game tournament cheese and when to play a relaxed game with his mates. But that's not indicative of many players.

Ultimately what is missing is some Designer Commentary to understand what they were thinking in the creation of the Battletome. Basically we are missing the developer diaries like they do with Overwatch(with Jeff Kaplan). It gives you an insight into what the developers are intending with certain changes/modifications.

Ben Johnson, for example, knows when to bring his A-game tournament cheese and when to play a relaxed game with his mates. But that's not indicative of many players.

For a lot of people in my anecdotal environment, its a matter of money. They go out, they research what will give them strong tournament placings and strong pick up game results, buy and paint that. They don't have the models to tone down or play more casually and have no desire to buy more models to be able to do that.

Ask an FEC player to maybe take more ghouls instead of yet another terrorgheist and what they see is having to assemble and paint 30-40 ghouls or whatever to "tone down" and they are going to be violently against having to do that. (as an example)

We all know how much a GW army costs so I can sympathize with this. Its a big reason why I jump up and down about their crap balance, because I can't honestly expect most people to shell for extra models just to play casually when casual for fun play is abhorrent in events.

Ben Johnson and the GW staff have whatever they want at their disposal so can play like that.

Ultimately what is missing is some Designer Commentary to understand what they were thinking in the creation of the Battletome. Basically we are missing the developer diaries like they do with Overwatch(with Jeff Kaplan). It gives you an insight into what the developers are intending with certain changes/modifications.

This would be awesome.

That's the MTG approach which is the opposite of what a solid competitive game should be.

If world championships like how Ben Curry wants is to be a thing then the MTG approach would be good to emulate, siince Magic has ESPN content. However cards are different from models. One is playable out of the pack. The other requires painting and assembling time.



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I think a more constructive and positive direction to spin this is how to have casual and for fun games work with these new army lists.

We already know its busted. Maybe in the tournament sense its not "that bad" but the question is how to approach running skaven and FEC in casual for fun campaign style games without running everyone off to another game system.

FEC and Skaven FAQs are up.

Feeding Frenzy reworded so there's no doubt you can use it every turn.

Medal of Madness fixed conservatively to only work with the 3 basic Core Rules command abilities.

Savage Strike (Gristlegore trait) reworded so there's no doubt the mount also gets to fight.

Chalice very randomly nerfed so that in the enemy turn, the enemy chooses which FEC units get healed.

Throne confirmed to work as many times per turn as you havedudes to sit on it.

I do absolutely think that GW needs to have design commentary. Part of the issue with a lot is we don't get to see WHY they do something; they don't explain "We gave this ability because XYZ" so it's just "Ivory Tower" design still despite them being more open. I've long felt they need to be more transparent about what they are doing and why.

however, the last time they did anything like this that I recall was during the then-weekly White Dwarf when the Knights came out, and it basically boiled down to "It sounded cool to be able to do this" No real design talk, just a lot of how kewlzors awesomesauce it sounded:

This quote was from our old friend Jervis Johnson:

So, though it may surprise some people, my first concern with rules is always that they are a fair reflection of the background behind the model. Once we get that nailed down, and we're happy with the character of the rules, we then turn our minds to other practicalities: how long will it take people to figure out the best ways to use them? Will people be able to develop counter-tactics once they have played a few games?

Note what's missing? There's nothing about how it interacts with the rest of the game or how it impacts other armies. No talk whatsoever about balancing it out, just does it fit the background.

Granted that was the 40k team (the current crop of which seem to be way less competent than the AOS guys although they have issues too) and this was a few years ago now (before GW's "turnaround") but I suspect that's why they don't provide design commentary; it would show unequivocally that they aren't taking actual balance or game design concepts into consideration.

ALSO here's something hilarious:

When BCR came out, GW said that if you had a Behemoth count as Battleline, it had both keywords so you were still limited to 4 in a 2k point game. The FEC FAQ released today says the OPPOSITE for FEC only. If you have Gristlegore, Royal Zombie Dragons and Royal Terrorigheis do NOT count as Behemoths. So you can take more than 4. You can take an actual entire army of monsters with no restrictions according to their FAQ for some inexplicable reason, despite the other army that has Behemoths as Battleline can't

Why they rule one way for one army and a different way for another army is simply mind-boggling.

So now, you'll see dragon spam with Archregents summoning the rest of the army. No limiting Archregent. No limiting throne to 1 model per turn. Nope. They just let you ignore behemoth restrictions.

Why have Matched Play, again?

Its because they change their mind after going to the pub and their buddiies tell them how cool it would be if they could do something.

But instead of making things consistent, they just leave it a mess.

They operate like most software developers do. Where your code bases are a mixture of N different architectures and debugging and maintaining the code is a nightmare.

The funny part is I play FEC. So I should be excited about this change and plan to use my tax return to buy like 5 dragons

Honestly at this point I'd be all for just removing the concept of battleline and leader caps and monster caps anyway since GW has basically also done the same.

Wow, gristlgore monsters lose behemoth.

Fec are clearly op, which is ironic because I sold off my DoK because they just weren't fun to play. The good news is that while I did cwt carrion throne to start my collection, I don't have any of the monsters. Just ghouls, lots of them. And it's looking like another DoK situation where the monster kits are getting snapped up completely.

I still say the monster battleline isn't that good, but it ultimately means little in the grand scheme of how busted FEC are. They are the dark mirror to Kharadron; the core functionality is broken.

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:
Wow, gristlgore monsters lose behemoth.

Fec are clearly op, which is ironic because I sold off my DoK because they just weren't fun to play. The good news is that while I did cwt carrion throne to start my collection, I don't have any of the monsters. Just ghouls, lots of them. And it's looking like another DoK situation where the monster kits are getting snapped up completely.

Yeah, it's ridiculous and FEC are my primary army. What I find more ridiculous is that they explicitly said the opposite for Beastclaw; they got both Keywords. For some strange reason, they ruled opposite on FEC. This tells me that they aren't even bothering to look at previous rules they've already written. There's no consistency. An army can have the same thing, and they will function in two completely different ways because the team won't remember that they ruled a certain way for the first army in an FAQ/GHB/etc. and rule it a completely different way for the second.

It's like the old joke when GW had the "Roolz Boyz" hotline you could call: Call three different times, get three different answers. Only the designers themselves are doing it.

Wayniac wrote:
FWIW the "praise" I meant was the whole "Oh GW is really nailing it with these new models!" and rushing to buy the box, resulting in increased profits for GW so they see that these sort of limited boxes with exclusive models get them money.

Thing is those models were going to be released individually anyways. And while them being exclusive to the box until that happens no doubt increases sales somewhat, I think if they released alongside it the overwhelming majority of people who bought the box would still buy the box, because it is a great deal on a ton of miniatures. People love start collecting boxes, these sets are just two of those put together with a (further) discount and some extra accessories tossed in to boot.

The alternative is not getting the exclusive models available at the same time, the alternative is getting them launched in individual boxes for $30 straight off the bat and not getting a box set at all. That is simply the realty of how the business works.


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Wayniac wrote:

 Skimask Mohawk wrote:
Wow, gristlgore monsters lose behemoth.

Fec are clearly op, which is ironic because I sold off my DoK because they just weren't fun to play. The good news is that while I did cwt carrion throne to start my collection, I don't have any of the monsters. Just ghouls, lots of them. And it's looking like another DoK situation where the monster kits are getting snapped up completely.

Yeah, it's ridiculous and FEC are my primary army. What I find more ridiculous is that they explicitly said the opposite for Beastclaw; they got both Keywords. For some strange reason, they ruled opposite on FEC. This tells me that they aren't even bothering to look at previous rules they've already written. There's no consistency. An army can have the same thing, and they will function in two completely different ways because the team won't remember that they ruled a certain way for the first army in an FAQ/GHB/etc. and rule it a completely different way for the second.

It's like the old joke when GW had the "Roolz Boyz" hotline you could call: Call three different times, get three different answers. Only the designers themselves are doing it.

It honestly makes me sad a bit. I do not like to see a game I really enjoy made worse just because the developers' apathy towards problems.

The FAQ for behemoths was the most ridiculous call in there. The rest is seemingly ok... Although a limitation to archregent summoning was probably needed too.


I guess that call was just them protecting royal menagerie lists, but it's still pretty *ss backwards reasoning. You could make a 6 monster 2k list now and nobody really wants to be sat across that in a battle.

 Elmir wrote:
The FAQ for behemoths was the most ridiculous call in there. The rest is seemingly ok... Although a limitation to archregent summoning was probably needed too.


I guess that call was just them protecting royal menagerie lists, but it's still pretty *ss backwards reasoning. You could make a 6 monster 2k list now and nobody really wants to be sat across that in a battle.

"It's a legal list bruh maybe you should just git gud" - some random guy, probably in auticus' meta

But yeah. This means one of two things:

1) When BCR inevitably get their re-release (maybe combined with the other Ogre Kingdoms stuff) they will also get this so can spam Thundertusks unless they get changed
2) BCR will *not* have it changed, leaving FEC inexplicably able to do it and BCR not.

It doesn't sit well with me that there are different rules with different precedents for them. A rule should remain common across armies, not be changed for this army but not that one.

i tried to make a bcr list spamming as much of them as I could, could only manage 5. They are more expensive that terrorgeists for the 2 dudes who can't do much damage on top.

I have a feeling BCR has a tome in the chute and is ready to deploy and that they won't have to adhere to monster limits either.

Which again causes me to say lets stop bothering with battleline requirements and monster limits.

Why take three unmounted terrorgheists when you could take two mounted ones, though? Cheaper and a heck of a lot more effective. If I was running Gristlegore it would be 3x mounted terry, min ghoul battleline, 2x archregent.

But regardless, one already broken army also breaking behemoth limits hardly means we should get rid of them all together. Maybe there will be enough outcry for them to reverse it, it has happened before.

Light at the end of the tunnel is that FEC will inevitably be nerfed next GHB and potentially hard. Sucks now but at least we won't be dealing with it a whole year like Tzeentch.

Yeah, but by then there will be something else that will be on top of the teabag mound.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Why take three unmounted terrorgheists when you could take two mounted ones, though? Cheaper and a heck of a lot more effective. If I was running Gristlegore it would be 3x mounted terry, min ghoul battleline, 2x archregent.

But regardless, one already broken army also breaking behemoth limits hardly means we should get rid of them all together. Maybe there will be enough outcry for them to reverse it, it has happened before.

Light at the end of the tunnel is that FEC will inevitably be nerfed next GHB and potentially hard. Sucks now but at least we won't be dealing with it a whole year like Tzeentch.

I agree... The breaking limitations on behemoths is only really a thing for royal menagerie builds. And I doubt this are going to break up the current horde meta that much.

Also, I do not think FEC are THAT broken yet that they are just going to be 50% of top 10 tables like Tzeentch was. But time could prove me wrong there.

But the army will be broken in a more casual setting... A AGKoTG hits like a truck without many combos to begin with. It's powerful on its own. So just including one mounted AGK will be enough to make the list feel "non-casual"

If I can make a prediction: I think it'll be like BCR 6 MWs snowballs... Feels terribly unbalanced in casual play, but might not be enough to overcome the sheer effectiveness of mass bodies in the highest echelons. Not much of a counter argument if you only play casual games though. And seeing how both FEC start collecting and BCR start collecting boxes include these types of models, I'm sure it'll cause a lot of "feel bads" with newer players where one model feels unstoppable if you don't play in a 2k matched play format.

That is why I personally feel Blisterskin will be the better tourney build, the ability to counter play is stronger.

Though speaking of, thematically the grand courts are really cool and I like that GW added them. The expanded FEC fluff is also very nice. I would also compliment the wealth of options in artifacts/traits but really something like 5% of those are so vastly superior I don't thing the battletome deserves that compliment atm, which is a dam shame.

Not much of a counter argument if you only play casual games though.

That is the keystone piece right there. If you're a tourney power guy, it likely won't be that bad since you will also be fielding the filth.

If you are a casual player or narrative player, its game breaking.

auticus wrote:

Not much of a counter argument if you only play casual games though.

That is the keystone piece right there. If you're a tourney power guy, it likely won't be that bad since you will also be fielding the filth.

If you are a casual player or narrative player, its game breaking.

Its pretty much impossible to balance the game for all powerlevels. There will always be stuff that will not win top tables at tournaments, but will totally wreck stuff on a local lvl. Which armies that is also depends on your local meta. Apart from the clear top tournament armies different clubs in my area have different armies that do really well.

Right now it seems they are trying to balance for tournament play. There is clearly some stuff that could be better, but seems to me they are doing pretty good at this. Not everyone can compete, but more than I ever remember seeing before. Also I could be wrong, but 3 books already this year gives me hope that they are trying to give most armies up to date rules, which could help. Or just speed up powercreep, both possible.

It is impossible to balance the game for all powerlevels.

Yet there are a bunch of games that do very well at it in terms of making an experience that isn't about fielding the top 10% of the game all the time.

And the fan comps did a hell of a good job doing it as well before "official points".

So no free pass to the developers for continuously releasing this stuff in the state it is.

My question for years is why is this ok and why are people ok with this? Or is there really just a huge dearth of casual or narrative players and everyone is powergaming so doesn't mind it as much?