I am coming back after over a year hiatus to playing, and I have no idea where to start. I was kinda following after all the gh18 changes, but then stopped paying attention to focus on other things. Now Im trying to wrap my head around new rules, new spells, and new armies, all that have been added since I took my break. Im kinda lost and would love a modern beginners guide to help get caught up.
I don't believe anyone on the site has written a comprehensive guide to the GHB2019 yet for Seraphon. Maybe that is something I will look into doing. It might be time consuming to dig though, but there is a thread called New Rumors that has a significant amount of discussion related to the GHB2019 around the time of its release. I believe the conversation started near page 55.
I managed to get through that massive thread and I have been looking at the lists people are making this year. It seems odd to me that people are winning with lists that spend 500 points on battalion taxes and endless spells. Has the game gotten weaker or are the new battalions and spells just that much stronger? Before my break people were having a hard time justifying spending more than 200 pts on battalions and spells like vortex. It seems really odd to start the game with what is effectively a 1500 pt list.
I think battalions provide quite a bit for armies for different reasons. First it helps with your number of drops. Potentially allowing you to dictate who goes first in the first round. If you know your opponents list is built on one unit getting buffed you might want to try and kill off the buffers or as many as the buffees as possible. If your opponent wants to try and turtle allowing them to go first can get them to break out of their shell enough for you to capitalize. I think battalions (and to some extent the endless spells) add something to armies that usually makes up for its lacks. Our thunderquake is really good for making up for our mostly god awful saves while our shadowstrike gives us a nice delete button that can deal with a threat that otherwise would just chew through whatever it wants. Endless spells are effective mostly for their mind games. "Do I take this double turn but deal with my unit of witch aelves having -1 to hit?" "Do I dispel these shackles in front of my 40 skeletons or give them Van Hels Dance Macabre?" Faction specific endless spells are even more synergistic with their books and I'm super excited for ours whenever that happens.
Eh, during the years i wrote some tacticas, but nothing that includes GHB2019. the last one is the art of summoning I should really update the one about battalions and write a new one about a magic overview, now that we can count on a large number of spells (lore and endless). I promise i will try to do it asap. Hopefully starting this evening? If it can help, there's the tactica index, but it covers AoS since its beginning, so IDK how much helpful it can be.