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It's one of the great mysteries. We know Ben Johnson is an avid tournament player, and he's the AOS Lead (I think he's lead? He's on the team at any rate). So he has to be keen on what's broken/weak/etc. which would lend credence to the idea that it's deliberate to reward competitive players for finding the broken combos; The wrench in that idea is that the broken combos are often blatantly obvious to anyone with even the slightest idea of how the game is played, so there's no "mastery" involved in discovering them.

So it's either not realizing exactly how impactful they are (i.e. knowing it'll be "good" but not "broken OP") or knowing full well that it will bust the meta wide open and doing this on purpose for some reason which we don't get. Sure it helps the tournament/FOTM crowd but feths over everyone else so I can't imagine a real reason why they would deliberately do that. Especially since Ben Johnson seems like the type who can equally play a cutthroat tournament or a friendly narrative game, so he has nothing to gain by ruining one style of play to push the other when he does both.

Or it might not even be totally the team's fault, and they may just be on tight enough deadlines that they can't adjust as much as they'd like so have to push it out the door, or worse being told to not make it weaker to sell product (there's the anecdote from 7th? edition 40k where the Wraithknight was going to be made more expensive because it was super good and the designers were told to make it better but not more expensive so they could sell more. That happened under the previous regime but we have no evidence it doesn't still happen)

 auticus wrote:
The difference is the lead developer has a picture on the internet of him posing in front of his triple keepers with a smile on his face and thumbs up at a tournament.

He's also the dude who took a Squigalanche army, Stank Army, a Khorne Multi B-Thirster army to tournaments.

Perhaps dude just has a preference for small armies.

Also in this day and age of the internet its not as if power-combos remain secret. Once they are found they are very much talked about and spread about VERY fast.


Plus in the end wargames don't gel well with superpower lists. It's just not fun to spend hour upon hour building and painting an army only for:

a) The power list to beat you every time and no matter what you do if you go against it you will lose and that's 4 hours of life gone on the game

b) No one at the club will play you because you win every single time with that army (or at least have way more chance).

A much smoother power curve for well built lists is always more beneficial. The power players will still go for the most powerful, they just won't be "now I win and you've lost" on turn 1 affairs.


Honestly with depravity I do get the feeling that they were told to make it poewrful to sell leaders. Slaanesh had been doing so badly until then that there were more than a few rumours that GW was going to remove Slaanesh from the game entirely. Then GW released a new block of models which was mostly all leaders along with updated fiends. Plus a massive new Keeper (very expensive in both mould and model). That the best build is currently 4 of the most expensive newest model does really hint that GW wanted it that way to push sales and then seriously overplayed their hand.

Yeah but wargames still get infested (yes I'm specifically using that word) with superpower lists as people want to win and optimize and min/max everything. So you run into it regardless, even if it's not fun in the end.

 nels1031 wrote:

 auticus wrote:
The difference is the lead developer has a picture on the internet of him posing in front of his triple keepers with a smile on his face and thumbs up at a tournament.

He's also the dude who took a Squigalanche army, Stank Army, a Khorne Multi B-Thirster army to tournaments.

Perhaps dude just has a preference for small armies.

That is neither here nor there in terms of he had obviously been playing 3 keepers in their playtesting and had to have seen firsthand the power it brought to the table and how unbalanced that could be. His personal preference doesn't matter. He had played the thing likely for weeks or months and knew very well how gross it was and it went out anyway.

Him liking small armies has nothing to do with the playtesting and seeing how obviously broken it was. I've followed him for a while, dude is not incompetent. Same as Bottle. They are both pretty sharp dudes and would have picked up on how busted these things were right away.

And I have a long history of saying this same thing: I believe its intentional. It is a company directive to include things that are obviously bent at that level somewhere to appeal to the people that love to play bent things. And then the community enforces that by saying "meh its not that bad, just don't play those people" and shovel money their way.

Since their objective is to stack millions, it is only natural that stuff like Slaanesh or summoning are totally intentional. Power creep and chase the new shinny tricks are effective from a business point of view, especially if you are the most visible face of a niche product that guarantees a certain amount of customer desperately trying to keep up with release pace.

Before, a Greater Daemon was a rare thing and very powerful. Now, make it common and even desirable along with a new model. Make people buy three of them for the price of a regular army. Keeper Magic!
People setting in for 2k armies? No problem, make them buy more models that will have no point cost in game. Their 2000 point army will now require to buy 3000 p. worth of models. Summoning is genius!


Anyway, that is my cynical take on the current state of AoS, listing two of the many issues the game has.
As someone who knows well GW once put: The modern studio isn’t a studio in the same way [...] It’s become the promotions department of a toy company – things move on!
Unfortunately, it makes AoS (and more broadly GW) quite uninteresting.

Could always go for the obvious compromise and make summoning cost half points.

I think summoning costing any points at all will make it useless. Who wants to put aside points and risk them not getting onto the board?

I think the only viable solution would be recycled not add, and even that's not a good solution because it doesn't stop the outliers (if you bring 3 KoS you can summon another one when one dies, etc.). It's really just a bad mechanic overall. REplenishment is fine, but summoning a new unit is bad.

Summoning costing points is perfectly fine so long as the delivery becomes more certain.

There's already a lot of units that start the game in reserves and people don't mind it. Heck in 40K people can put whole space marine armies into reserves to deep-strike into the game.


Daughters of Khaine are more than happy to have Khinerai appear mid-game where they need them too. Summoning would just have to mechanically work along similar lines. It might even be that summoning could happen within the limits that regular placements can't operate - so summoning right into base to base contact etc...


AoS is actually happier than 40K with regard to this because ranged attacks are not on the whole as powerful. So you can't wipe your opponent off the table in the first turn thus nullifying summoning.

Yeah my gut instinct is people want summoning to be free points.

The point of summoning is to get a points advantage over your opponent.

That in and of itself may not be a horrible thing. It is when you can make it 4000 pts vs 2000 pts. Or 3000 pts vs 2000 pts.

There is a threshold you need to gun for and not cross that threshold.

Either that or every single faction in the game needs to have the same amount of summoning. If its going to be bonkers summoning to drive sales, then let every faction summon 2000 extra points in a game.

That way its not mule kick to the face if you aren't playing the biblical faction that gets those powers.

The way that 40k handles it's 'summoning' is a way I think it could work for AoS, if it were to go the route of costing points. Only, it needs to be much more reliable to actually get the summoning done.

In 40k, you set points aside (1500pts of models start in your army, out of 2000pt game size), perform the 'summoning' and it allows you to tailor your list to what the enemy has. Bring on some more melee murder monsters, or some weak objective grabbers or shooting or a big anvil unit to sit in front of the enemy. Whatever you may need for that match. In 40k, it's not reliable however. Your hero needs to not move, then you need to roll some dice and see what tier/pointcost of unit you can summon in.

That's just my two cents, if it were to go points-based. Model it after 40k's summoning, but make it reliable.

Summoning IS extremely reliable. More reliable than back when it did cost points; back then one needed to cast a spell to summon a unit. And despite what some may say people did indeed use it, even at tournaments because they were Schrodinger's points that could be tailored to the scenario at hand. What they didn't do was reserve more than a few hundred points, because summoning 'big stuff' often needed a 9+ to cast.

The ideal is to just make summoning balanced such that the cost is taken out of the benefit of allegiance, like Khorne. When Khorne summons it is specifically spending the same resource (blood tithe) that it uses to gain ability benefits. Most summoning isn't like that; it is just a free upgrade that most of the summoning armies do not even need. Slaanesh, FEC, Tzeentch, LoN, etc... All perform perfectly fine as armies even if they are given a blanket rule of no summoning period. (And before someone says it, saying something is worse than tourney winners just means it isn't the most OP thing out there, not that it is bad or even average.) Ideally I would like to see Tzeentch have to lose a fate dice every time it deploys a new unit, LoN lose the grave site they return a slain unit from, FEC either have their summon be general-only or actually baked into the cost of the summoner, and so on.

I could get behind that.

I never thought about Khorne summoning that way, but that's 100% accurate.

Completely agree with that one ninth.
Summoning is something that’s fairly difficult to balance.
It needs to have its perks but not destroy games.

A ton of players quit during the earlier stages just because of summoning alone as the army you faced grew at a faster rate than you could kill it.
Then it flipped into reserve points and people hated that too as you weren’t essentially gaining anything other than a more flexible list to a degree.

As long as they can implement something like you suggest then it will go a long way to improving the game.
Really don’t miss the original AoS matches where the enemy army doubles each turn or tzeentch lists just throw endless bolts.


Still though, I think it’s in a decent place right now.
While it certainly can be improved, it’s by no means bad.
I honestly prefer it over WHFB in its current state too.
Hero hammer got tiring quickly.
More so when 80% of players ran a HE army with telclis and banner of the world dragon in a blob.

I would say overall AOS took the concept of hero hammer and amped it to god level.

 auticus wrote:
I would say overall AOS took the concept of hero hammer and amped it to god level.

Hero’s are strong in AoS, but there is a lot more ways of dealing with them due to having plenty of abilities that let you target specific things.
Before, a hero would hide in a huge blob, buff it into a blender and you literally had to just avoid them all game.
At least in AoS you can pick off these hero’s and the buffs are far less severe.

The only hero I avoid on the table tends to be Gotrek as he just eats damage but is insanely slow.

I dont disagree that steadfast made the game stupid because it had no counter. But that was just more gw clown car rules writing on display.

Ug, steadfast. That does not bring fond memories.

STD is looking pretty good. Not S-tier but solid. Better in some cases than the corresponding faction; like Nurgle STD seem better than Maggotkin.

Thats good to hear. I'm glad. If they could make double turn an optional thing or get rid of it and nerf down summoning, I'd be all on board with the new changes!

 auticus wrote:
I would say overall AOS took the concept of hero hammer and amped it to god level.

AoS heroes aren't really stronger than kitted out 5th edition heroes. It's 6th ed that removed the "fantasy" part of Warhammer Fantasy and turned into a historical game with limp-wristed "heroes" whose main reason was to buff LD or be a dispel scroll caddy.
I know it's a controversial statement, but to me 6th ed is where Warhammer lost it's way and it culminated in the 50+ blocks of steadfast nonsense in 8th edition.

I see AOS heroes on the same level as 5th ed heroes or in the same neighborhood thereabouts.

6th ed whfb was my favorite because it put the "war" back in "warhammer" instead of it being a glorified D&D game.

5th ed was D&D with warhammer models. It was your heroes fighting each other being cheerled by a handful of escort models. That was a *massive* disappointment for me because I got sucked into buying into the game by the pictures of ARMIES clashing. The reality was that warhammer then was heroes clashing.

AOS I see as similar in many ways.

6th ed made the game about armies clashing instead of being about heroes clashing with their bodyguard. Which is why 6th ed is my favorite of all the warhammers, because I'm after armies clashing. And I remember tthe online flame wars about that change very clearly still, with a lot of people wanting the D&D version of warhammer because they didn't want to have to buy normal models (same arguments in 2000 as today)

Steadfast I think was a great idea... implemented horribly. In 7th ed the mechanics of the game favored MSU cavalry. So all of the games I was involved in, which included the top level GT games on down, were checkerboarded 5 model cav units everywhere doing "the dance" (fixed charge range, trying to see who toed over the line first to get charged)

Steadfast fixed that by making it so that infantry blocks couldn't just get shredded by tiny cav units. However, it had no cap and made the gamer public, extremists as they are, start fielding mega blobs of 100 or 200 models (which I hated).

Steadfast being cancelled by flanking or rear charge houserule made that part of the game to me perfect.

While an interesting and worthy discussion, perhaps it would be better suited for another thread?

I do understand where you're coming from, but if the alleged "hero" selection is only barely more effective than a unit sargeant at chopping down people, he's not a hero, he's a commander. I expect a fantasy game to have certain fantastical tropes, such as heroic characters doing heroic deeds, monsters that feel suitably monstrous, and magic that is something beyond "sharp sword +1". 6ed had the magic part down fairly well, but monsters were universally inferior mounts to just sitting on a horse due to artillery sniping, and heroes were anything but heroic. It was very clear that edition was written by someone who really wanted to write historical games, but GW was hiring.

AoS gets the balance better than WFB in this regard- most heroes are within 100-200pts range, and offer roughly the same hitting power as a unit of that cost, or heroic abilities that provide utility

Probably. Though honestly I don't see that thread going beyond a couple replies so the side track can probably die here lol.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Cronch wrote:
I do understand where you're coming from, but if the alleged "hero" selection is only barely more effective than a unit sargeant at chopping down people, he's not a hero, he's a commander. I expect a fantasy game to have certain fantastical tropes, such as heroic characters doing heroic deeds, monsters that feel suitably monstrous, and magic that is something beyond "sharp sword +1". 6ed had the magic part down fairly well, but monsters were universally inferior mounts to just sitting on a horse due to artillery sniping, and heroes were anything but heroic. It was very clear that edition was written by someone who really wanted to write historical games, but GW was hiring.

AoS gets the balance better than WFB in this regard- most heroes are within 100-200pts range, and offer roughly the same hitting power as a unit of that cost, or heroic abilities that provide utility

Someone made a really really good comparison to what AOS is that I can't remember the exact name, but there is a video game where you have armies clashing, and you play the role of one of the heroes, and that hero basically wades into the enemy armies by himself and destroys 3/4 or so of the army on his own. That was a level of fantasy that that player preferred, and a lot of players prefer, and the comparison to that video game was 100% spot on.

There will always be a contentiion with the folks like me that want to command fantasy armies that have to operate as armies, and folks that want fantasy armies led by heroic legends that can take most of the army on by themselves. Neither of course is wrong, but both are different games entirely

As a matter of fact: this conversation was had in a discord yesterday for Conquest where a player was complaining that the heroes weren't powerful enough because Conquest is an army style game where the heroes buff and help but are not the center point, and they wanted the heroes destroying enemy armies by themselves.

To AoS's credit, I really like where the game has gone from past iterations. I started on 40K and played some WHFB, but I believe AoS is a demonstrably better game than both. They axed a tremendous amount of convoluted tripe that was there for the common design mistake that complexity = deeper strategy. It's a simpler game than 40K which is a thumbs up in my book. The minis are absolutely the most beautiful out of anything that GW has made in the past or any other wargames on the market. And they reduced the required model count to something closer to 40K. I think AoS is on the right track and I'm loving diving into it. But GW balance is a peeve topic for me so I am going to rant a little.

I have always slightly resented how unbalanced and broken the games are in any edition. That resentment is due to how it is handled in the FLGS scene. GW does it's best(?) to appease both camps, by including narrative play and matched play. But I am a miniature painter first and a player second, and I prefer fluff builds and the stories that are developed in play.

I think GW supporting such a huge range of minis and factions in publication for what is still a relatively niche hobby with a small development team is a sisyphean task. The only way they'd be able to really get their hands on making the game anything close to balanced is if they greatly reduced their scope and cut down warscroll abilities even further. But we know that will make a lot of players riot. Perhaps balance would not be such a big issue if competitive play wasn't also a big issue. I live an hour-long drive from my closest FLGS, and after trying to get a casual circle of players for several years, I have learned that the only reliable way to find players is to sign up for an organized event. That means if I want to get in any games, that means a ladder, which means a tournament, which means anemic time limits to work through a complicated game, event worksheets, judges, coming up with 2K points of an army, and getting crushed by tryhards bringing meta cheddar lists with doodoo krylon paintjobs.

I can understand GW's unspoken support for this scene because it undoubtedly drives a lot of sales, but it means that narrative play or fluff builds or anything resembling beer-and-pretzels wargaming is out of the picture in a lot of places just because of availability of time, players and space. Where it approaches galling is when GW is confronted about the rampant cheese, cheating, imbalance, power creep and huge model count necessary to play in most FLGS communities, they hand-wave through it and say that Warhammer is a narrative game first and was never designed for competitive play. And they would be right - any game that requires player honesty is not fit to be taken seriously for competitive play. We all know that every FLGS wargaming scene has a "that guy" who doesn't use good distance measure discipline, but there's not enough judges literally anywhere to call over and run out the clock every time "that guy" gives himself an extra 0.5" for every move, run, shoot and charge. But still we have tournaments, trophies and cash prizes, which incentivise dishonest play. And that's not going to change because GW is a publicly traded company and competitive scenes at local shops are what drive a tremendous amount of sales.

 auticus wrote:
Probably. Though honestly I don't see that thread going beyond a couple replies so the side track can probably die here lol.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Cronch wrote:
I do understand where you're coming from, but if the alleged "hero" selection is only barely more effective than a unit sargeant at chopping down people, he's not a hero, he's a commander. I expect a fantasy game to have certain fantastical tropes, such as heroic characters doing heroic deeds, monsters that feel suitably monstrous, and magic that is something beyond "sharp sword +1". 6ed had the magic part down fairly well, but monsters were universally inferior mounts to just sitting on a horse due to artillery sniping, and heroes were anything but heroic. It was very clear that edition was written by someone who really wanted to write historical games, but GW was hiring.

AoS gets the balance better than WFB in this regard- most heroes are within 100-200pts range, and offer roughly the same hitting power as a unit of that cost, or heroic abilities that provide utility

Someone made a really really good comparison to what AOS is that I can't remember the exact name, but there is a video game where you have armies clashing, and you play the role of one of the heroes, and that hero basically wades into the enemy armies by himself and destroys 3/4 or so of the army on his own. That was a level of fantasy that that player preferred, and a lot of players prefer, and the comparison to that video game was 100% spot on.

There will always be a contentiion with the folks like me that want to command fantasy armies that have to operate as armies, and folks that want fantasy armies led by heroic legends that can take most of the army on by themselves. Neither of course is wrong, but both are different games entirely

As a matter of fact: this conversation was had in a discord yesterday for Conquest where a player was complaining that the heroes weren't powerful enough because Conquest is an army style game where the heroes buff and help but are not the center point, and they wanted the heroes destroying enemy armies by themselves.

You/they are probably thinking of KOEI's Dynasty Warriors (or Samurai Warriors, or the other variants). Which is exactly that; the PC hero just goes and blows through hundreds of enemies to fight other heroes.

I mean I like a bit of both. I like armies to be armies, but even ancient armies were often settled by what were basically duels between commanders. So having awesome heroes isn't a bad thing, it just can't be so far skewed that you don't need the army. In a fantasy setting you have some expectation of your mighty heroes on the battlefield facing impossible odds (who doesn't want to have say Hercules take on 50 guys?), but not when it turns into only heroes facing each other. IMHO you can't treat a fantasy game, even a rank and file one, like a historical medieval game where your commanders are often just directing in the back. That's alright for historical but not fun for fantasy. On the flip side though you can't make heroes so powerful that you don't need an army because your badass hero on dragon can destroy an army on his own.

Yep that was the game. Thanks man!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/783270.page#10656221

Created the above thread for that talk to continue.

Updated the opening post with current details and status of the game.

I've also added info about game expansions and side games to the list, please do feel free to mention if I've left something important out that's worth mentioning in those tabs.