AoS 4th Edition is nearly here...

Countering the opponents battle tactics seems to be harder now in my experience. since lists are being built with these tactics in mind, instead of picking the most opportune one each turn, they are really resilient.

 

I really think it would be interesting if there was a move away from objectives as just points on the board and battle tactics as random weird moves that can only be completed with specific units.

It would be interesting if there were points for units killed and specific objectives that didn't have to do with board control. Maybe something like "keep the enemy general out of your territory" or "destroy your opponent's faction terrain"

 

GW seems to have been moving towards more abstract gamified designs for a while now, and I can't say I'm a fan. It all ends up feeling very disconnected from what the game is supposed to represent. And even ignoring the disconnect between the fantasy & actual gameplay, the endresult often just isn't very fun with how contrived the optimal strategy ends up being. Which isn't just limited to the way objectives work. The interactions of certain mechanics can result in equally contrived weirdness even if you ignore the objective. Just look at some of the examples of "orders please" in the white dwarf (or whatever that section is called). The "correct" anwser is nearly always a long contrived sequence of actions, regardless of the specific example. You'd think that at least occasionally there would be a straightforward "just attack the thing"-type solution in there.

Combined with their move to a more "seasonal" gameplay model I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they hired some game designers from videogame companies, or at least some consultants. Which wouldn't be particularly great news.

It's almost like more narrative-style objectives that actually connect to the fantasy of the game are more fun.

But no, we get points for standing near imaginary circles.

 

I'm still not a fan of the "season of war" model they've come up with. Despite the fact that I'm quite happy the most recent season makes the Carnosaur good at fighting finally, it's only for one season and will go away in less than a year. I definitely think they have videogame designers on the team, the move to constantly try to shake up the "meta" by altering unit stats or making new rulesets that favor certain factions and units over others is straight out of games like League of Legends, where they constantly nerf and buff characters to force players to keep changing who they play in order to keep winning.

Having to build your list around a specific battle tactic sounds really annoying to me, to be honest. I know that GW's probably trying to get people to do something other than spam the most powerful unit in the army like people have always done, but I wish they'd do it by making all the units in each army actually playable and making armies bigger again. The constant shifts to smaller boards and smaller armies really cuts down on the feel of it actually being a battle.

 

I honestly don't understand why they're going with this competitive video-game balance/design approach. It really doesn't fit well with a hobby where you're supposed to collect things. Sure, some people will be an entire new army, but loads of players are going to be annoyed if the meta shifts and suddenly half their collection is terrible.

 

Exactly! I bought my models, I want to be able to use them in the game without handicapping myself. Some people just buy stuff for the hobby aspect, but people who want to play get shafted when only a fraction of their models are considered useable in anything other than casual, narrative gameplay.

Or even worse, they cut a third of your model range like they did with Stormcast, lol!

 

Yeah, the stormcast thing is weird. First they release way too many models and subfactions with overlapping roles. Then they cut out half of it, seemingly at random. It's rather messy.

 

That's what happens when they decide from day one that they need a single faction with beyond Space Marine level support in their new game. They were pumping out new models for Stormcast every year, usually multiple times a year. They got new heroes with pretty much every major release and new units with every edition and often randomly just got new units for no reason other than being popular.

So GW ends up in the inevitable position of having a faction with over double the number of units that most other factions had and still wanting to keep releasing more on a regular basis. But now they are over production capacity and can't keep up with making more of the current models and continuing to release new ones regularly, so they decide to scrap a large portion of the range and give Stormcast a Primaris makeover after three editions to justify getting rid of the old models (which aren't actually old, lol!)

 

I don't understand why they didn't just make the chambers similar to space marine chapters rule-wise.
So every chapter fields the same troops, but with some visual distinctions & with maybe some differences in factions rules for flavour.
That way they can release different looking stuff without having to worry about creating too many units.
For the sake of production-capacity, they could put them on a semi-rotating basis.

 

They attempted to make "chapters" with the various Stormcast chambers, but never really did anything with it rules-wise. I'm guessing they wanted to avoid having to release new rules for each chapter, but that would have been a neat idea.

 

This literally happened to me in 40k.

Back during 5th edition 40k, I had accumulated about 10,000 points of Space Marines. 60-100 tactical and devastator Marines.

Then they released Primaris Marines...