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Having not bought the new white dwarf i was wondering if there are any details on what the new skirmish looks like?
Can anyone share?

I bought the Skirkish pamphlet separately from a White Dwarf.
It assumes you know the core rules, unlike Kill Team.

It includes some fluff about Shadespire. It describes the modifications to the core rules (that I’m not familiar with :’( ) and several scenarios to play. It also includes rules for campaign gaming, growing your Warband and some Magic Items / Warlord Traits.

The back is the “codex” of units available to each Grand Alliance. For the most part, Charriots and smaller are included, though war machines like cannons and catapults are NOT included.

Games are suggested to be between 50 and 100 points. Most characters are around 20 ish points. Basic grunts seem to be valued between 1 and 5 points each, depending on quality.

If I knew the basic rules, this would be comparable to Kill Team in 40k, but with around 20 models on the table instead of 7-ish for Kill Team.

Thanks gbt

No problem, UNAA.

The new WD update has changed some of the rules, like how renown is calculated. As units are only priced based on their points divided by minimum members, their cost in the WD version is going to be about 5 times what the renown costs in the pamphlet are. There is also a 5 point surcharge to make a basic fighter into a champion or special weapon fighter, among others.

Basically, the WD article is the new, updated version of the basic Skirmish rules, but as far as I have been able to find out, it includes absolutely none of the campaign rules from the older softcover version of Skirmish, with those rules coming out in NEXT month's White Dwarf.

Finally got around to reading them. Been cleaned up and certainly an improvement, but did little to nothing about game breaking imbalances. If anything now that any model can be taken things are worse. I still haven't thought of a 250 list that could beat just a Lord of Affliction.

That's disappointing.
What make it any different from just saying let's play a 250 point game of aos?

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
That's disappointing.
What make it any different from just saying let's play a 250 point game of aos?

The biggest difference is that in Skirmish, models are taken as a unit, but each model in the unit functions as an independent unit when the game starts. That's also the reason for most of the balance issues. An attack that does d3 mortal wounds to each unit in 8" suddenly does d3 mortal wounds to every model within 8".

It is also an issue of scaling. The Lord of Affliction, for example, is quite durable with 8 wounds, 4+ armor, 5+ fnp, and healing a wound every turn. But in a 1000+ points game that is quite killable. With 250 points though, being able to deal enough damage to overcome his healing before he beats your face in is tremendously difficult. This is his AoE mortal wounds aside. A flat rule to say that no single model can take up more than half the warband's points would help with this and many others but also be unpopular for hitting options that are not an issue.

Even beyond AoE abilities there are issues with models like the Grundstock Thunderer champion where an enemy unit that charges him takes one MW on a 2+, or Tree Revenents where the unit gets to re-roll one dice per phase. These aren't AoE abilities but are game-breakingly strong when each model is its own unit. Perhaps more importantly these are models players are likely to want to run without even trying to min-max, creating a situation where the game can be cheesed even by sheer accident.

Though I do want to say that the new rules are nice for being cleaned up, allowing any model to be taken without relying on its own renown list, adding an appropriate cost for special weapons & champions, and having mini-allegiance. The main issue is that the balance is so bad things are not a matter of just not min-maxing but rather some areas needing to specifically tailor a list so it is not complete cheese.

I wonder if its possible that we'll see even more rules in future white dwarfs?

I still believe Bottle was hired specifically to help with creating Skirmish, so hopefully this is just a brief preview of what is essentially an official version of Hinterlands. Even the issues Ninth mentioned are pretty easily fixable. Just adding Hinterlands' 3 MW per round rule would go a long way.

Yeah, I was surprised it was not in there tbh.

Yeah, so far it sounds like unless the next month's skirmish rules are a huge change, it's just as good to use the older Skirmish pamphlet with a PDF of Hinterlands, if you can get it.

Next month's Campaign update would have to add in things like skills and injuries to warband progression to make it worth it, otherwise, because if it's just an update to what's in the pamphlet, it seems like when using existing Skirmish book+Hinterlands, only the +5 champion and specialist tax is any major change, as Hinterlands adds the Rules of Three (which adds significant balance) and already uses Points versus Renown. Also keeps high-cost characters out of the game somewhat, as a warband in Hinterlands MUST have at least three fighters, as well as having a rule where at least three units from a warscroll must be in your warband before one of them can be upgraded to a Champion or Specialist (Hinterlands had no additional points cost).

If they don't give anything like kill team and just leave it like it is now, I will just write my own.

auticus wrote:
If they don't give anything like kill team and just leave it like it is now, I will just write my own.

I would love an AoS equivalent to kill team.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Yeah, so far it sounds like unless the next month's skirmish rules are a huge change, it's just as good to use the older Skirmish pamphlet with a PDF of Hinterlands, if you can get it.

Next month's Campaign update would have to add in things like skills and injuries to warband progression to make it worth it, otherwise, because if it's just an update to what's in the pamphlet, it seems like when using existing Skirmish book+Hinterlands, only the +5 champion and specialist tax is any major change, as Hinterlands adds the Rules of Three (which adds significant balance) and already uses Points versus Renown. Also keeps high-cost characters out of the game somewhat, as a warband in Hinterlands MUST have at least three fighters, as well as having a rule where at least three units from a warscroll must be in your warband before one of them can be upgraded to a Champion or Specialist (Hinterlands had no additional points cost).

The skirmish rules do say you must have at least three models, but that does very little since two 6-point models still leaves 238 points for a hero that is unreasonably strong in such small games. The rule of three (or an equivalent) is sorely needed, it would not fix every game breaking imbalance but certainly a majority of them.

On the flipside there is a really nice fan expansion on the Grand Alliance forums called Forgotten Heroes for the original Renown system which added TONS of other models to the renown list. It also has a rule where models over 30 renown cannot be used in Skirmish (although that still allowed some pretty powerful heroes, like the Knight Incantor at 28 renown). Something similar REALLY should have been included in the updated version to limit heroes.

I don't have the White Dwarf issue, but it sure seems like a half-measure of an update to a set of already somewhat underwhelming skirmish rules.

The WD issue does a great job in terms of point costs; everything is done by points and models are taken as individuals using basic division (rounding down). So plaguebearers are 120 per 10, thus a single plaguebearers would be 12 points. Champions (unit leaders) and any option that is 'X per Y' (special weapons) cost an extra 5. It isn't perfect but it is simple and works surprisingly well. So there is no need for an extra renown document since everything is done by its point cost and everything is thus included. Just the standard game size is 250 points so obviously a swathe of big things are too expensive.

A warband must have a hero to lead it and at least 3 models in total.