AoS General's Handbook MKII Early Look!

My my my, look what time it is- sneak peek time!

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/02/07/the-generals-handbook-ii-wip-points-sneak-peek/

Looks like GW has been looking closely at all that has happened this year, I'm excited to see what comes next!

So, thoughts on this snapshot? What do you want them to change? Hopes? Fears?

Most importantly, how much will a Bastiladon cost now???

 

mm, I'd hope for some additions to magic, would love for an army headed by wizards to actually be usefull.. the rule of 1 and limited set of special spells right now makes having multiple wizards redundant quite quickly... simply not enough spells to cast... Not to mention that having only 3 spells makes it so that most wizards end up predominantly spamming 1 spell anyway, especially if there special spell is essentially a more powerfull arcane bolt/mystic shield.. some choice would be nice. And if you're afraid of mortal wounds spam with wizards, just make the spells deal (a large amount of) normal wounds....

O, and a way to interact with (some) abilities would be interesting possibly in the same vein as unbinding spells works. Some abilities are essentially just magic like the lord relictors lightning storms & others are just too powerfull like the lord celestant's immunity to battleshock to not have any interaction beyond "kill the dude"...

 

I think it's the players that are moving away from free to play. Freeplay rules are still free and available.
Competition style rules cost you a new book maybe once every year, but this may be the last one for a while, peple playtested for them, and they took the feedback to perfect it. Who knows. Though I haven't met someone yet, who has not been willing to let you look at the book, or been to a store that doesn't have a copy on hand that you're free to browse.

 

I think we need to wait to see if the book purchased through the app gets updated before we make any judgement. Some of the ePubs for 40K got free updates when superceded.

 

I think you'll see that they have been listening to a lot of matched play players and we'll see point adjustments across the board. The rule of one doesn't seem to have been taken into account for a lot of stuff (esp wizards) and I bet you'll see a points decrease for that. Also if you make stuff for the older armies and armies without a specific battletome a little cheaper and stuff with new battletomes a bit more expensive the game will even out to an extent (although not all armies, have you played against tomb kings filth?!). I have a feeling we'll see more scenarios and artefacts too, really excited for it tbh! Don't expect to see major changes to warscrolls though, that'll happen when the battletomes get rolled out

 

Maybe summoning will get fixed, or lower points for summoners? Would be nice to have a slightly cheaper slann and EotG.

 

Cant see summoning getting fixed but definitely see a points reduction

 

Lord Kroak may actually become playable!

 

Meh, there's several "easy" summoning fixes:

1) Each summoner can summon X points worth of stuff,especially interesting if you relate it to the cost of the summoner (e.g. a summoner can summon say three times his own cost). Limit could be per turn or per match. Per turn would be especially interesting since it'd allow things like stacking 10 "weak" summoners to summon 1 big monster, or taking 1 "powerfull" summoner to do the same.
2) You can summon a maximum of Y % of your points as reinforcements. E.g. lets say the max is 30%, in a 2500 point match you can start the match with 2500 points worth of stuff then summon an additional 833.
3) Only X% of your army may at any time be summond minions, if your summons would exceed this percentage it fails. E.g. take the 30% & 2500 points of the previous example . In the first turn you migh be able to summon 833 worth of points, but if some stuff dies and of your Original 2500 only 1000 still survives you may now only summon 300 points worth of stuff in this turn (provided you don't already have 300 points worth of summoned troops).
4) If the summoner dies all troops he summoned get badly hurt, e.g. for every summoned unit roll 2 dies, if higher than the bravery of the summoner they evaporate into thin air. Outright killing all of them might make the summoner to nice a target though. No point limit (though possibly a summoning per turn limit)
5) At the start of your turn roll a D3 your summoner may attempt that many summons this turn.

In each case, adjust summoner point cost to a sensible level...


seriously, fixing summoning might be one of the easier ones in all honesty... if I can think of 5 halfway sensible solutions in 10 minuts GW should be able to find something decent too

 

I'm not saying it won't be fixed to an extent, just can't see them doing much in the next handbook is all. From a GW point of view it makes more sense (money wise anyway) to updated it via individual battletomes. Guess we'll just have to wait and see!

 

I'd like to see an overall overhaul of the cost of units, especially comparing the cost between different armies of similar units.

There are som major differences now between the strenght of battleline units. There should always be a difference, but some battleline units are just way to overpowered for their point cost, Tzaangors for one come to mind.

I'd also love to see some new spells. The basic ones that exist now feel really lackluster, you cast what you want to cast and then just cast the rest for the heck of it. Some racial/army/GA unique spells would be cool

 

Putting general mechanics in specific battletomes seems like a bad idea though.. if summoning or magic in general gets fixed I'd expect it to be in something like the generals books, or perhaps one of the special books. But not in battletomes.

I'd love it if they'd chance the basespells to be dependent on the race of the wizard & then allow you a specialisation for 1-2 additional spells along the lines of how the battlewizard works, possibly for an additional cost... pay a 100 extra points, your wizard now knows an additional spell out of these options and can cast 2 spells per turn or something along those lines... Basespells depending on race would make the various armies more unique & an additional specialisation would allow you to fill out the correct niche. The specialisation should also be dependent on race, e.g. skink starpriests shouldn't be able to specialize in the same way a tzeentch wizard would....

 

meh, a general increase could still be a relative decrease for some... Plus, I could quite possibly see them increase the cost of some of the more powerfull heroes & monsters while decreasing the cost of some rank and file. As the Original link said, some had an increase others a decrease. Looking at the screenshot for the fyreslayers it does feel like there's a larger difference between the expensive elite & the cheap rank and file units than there used to be, but that might just be cúz I'm not that familair with them.

 

I mean beastclaws are ridiculously OP so it would make sense to do that.

Increasing points costs wouldn't be good for GW's pockets, if you think about it they'll get more money from people having larger armies, so my prediction is things will generally get cheaper.

 

Increasing the cost of elites and decreasing the cost of the rank and file might still work in that case.. the elite units you're not going to buy more than 1 or 2 boxes for an army regardless (unless you're purely collecting in which case points are meaningless anyway), but buying another box cuz the rank and file just became cheap enough to field an additional unit is mroe than possible.

 

A lot of the tomb kings cost increase has to do with how powerful they become when combined with the death grand Alliance traits. At least that's what I've read from a lot of the tourney players.

 

I hope they crank the point values up. If there are imbalances of different kinds the only way to fix it is to increase the resolution.

Chess players argue about the point value difference between Knights and Bishops. (Both are nominally 3 points. Some contend the Bishop is worth more, but no one thinks it is worth 4.)

The only way to fix it is to make all pieces worth more points. As so: Pawns=2; Knights=6; Bishops=7; Rooks=10....

By making everything a higher cost it becomes possible to value a Bishop slightly more than a Knight, but everything else retains the same relative value.