imho, the costing of hordes should be revisited completly. Right now a minimum sized unit still pays for the ability, even if they can't use it. Force multipliers in general might need a look to be honest, quite a lot of them seem either massivly over or undercosted as they appear to assume the multiplier is either Always or never there.
Compared to the newer books, our battalions are both wildly better, and significantly undercosted for what they do. And our allegiance abilities (summoning + LOSAT) are arguably the best in the game, so I just hope we don't get slammed because of our strong allegiance abilities. The new books seem like they have pretty strong allegiance abilities, so things might be balancing out. I don't mind horde bonuses personally. With the way attack ranges work, you can almost never get a full 40 into combat, so you end up paying a lot of points for models that are more or less ablative wounds.
The issue with horde bonusses, and conditional force multipliers in general but horde bonusses just have it the most obviously, is how they calculate point costs for models, there's an article about it in a white dwarf a little bit back. Anyway the gist of it is that obviously they look at raw stats for models and that's straightforward enough, but conditional force multipliers don't let themselves be neatly represented in the same way say wound-values do due to the conditions not being a straightforward dice-roll. As a consequence it's basicly just educated guess work to figure out what the "average" value is you get out of this conditional force multiplier validated with playtesting. This creates issues when there's a large difference between the best-case and worst-case scenario for a conditional force multiplier because you'l Always be paying as if you're in your "average" scenario. Which in the case of horde bonusses means that minimum sized units will Always end up overprized.
Also horde bonuses is a huge barrier of play. Moving around groups of 32mm bases is just less fun than more dynamic units and also buying and paninting the darn things is a pain. If you want to play Seraphon in an optimal way and just switch between our two major GHB battalions that will be around 60 warriors, 15 saurus knights and as always at least 50 skinks to cover the most basic of needs painted up. That is a huge and overwhelming task to get through. I would dearly wish we get the Fyreslayer treatment, as that was just great in many ways I think all in all. Saurus and vulkites and temple guard and hearthguard seems all in all like they would be pretty much evenly matched, so getting rid of that horde bonus, up points, wounds and output a bit, and you get a smoother experience, cool units and movement phases not taking 45 minutes. That and give us cooler cold ones please and a spell lore, would go a long way.
I just want my Saurus to kill things and I want my Slann to kill things. A Slann should out-magic anything and not be a stupid ATM for Skinks.
In Total Warhammer 2, Saurus are great! They are super resilient and strong. Whenever I play a campaign, I can always count on them to do their job and come back alive. A single unit would sometimes have a kill count in the hundreds! In AoS, however, they seem less like “hulking, muscular warriors” and more like a horde of frail cannon fodder, especially compared to other infantry like chaos warriors and Sigmarines. Even dwarves have two wounds! DWARVES! I think their rules should be tweaked a little bit, but mostly I want them to have at least two wounds and better attack with fewer models, making them the elite badasses they should be. Saurus Warriors should be like Chaos warriors and Guards should be more like chosen(all I know about chosen is from tww2, so I’m assuming they are similar). I also think we should have new updated models and a plastic Slann. Speaking of Slann, doesn’t it seem strange that the strategy of supposedly the most powerful wizards in the lore is based on NOT casting? Also, aren’t they SUPPOSED to be the most powerful wizards in the world?
Saurus were decent when their warscroll was first released. That was 4 years ago, and a lot has changed since then.
A great way for this to be fixed is if the Slann's unique spell wasn't just for Chaos/Celestial Daemions. If the spell was useful to cast during fights vs Skaven, Orks, etc, then I may actually want to cast with my Slann.
Definitely, saurus have issues but if you use them well they can be formidable. However you need to invest the points to get much decency out of them, usually a sunclaw star host and skink priest does good with them, rend 1, 2 Celestite weapon attacks, two jaw attacks, and immunity to rend 1 with a five up save. While not as tough as they used to be, they still are fairly formidable with the right buffs. If we want them to be really powerful all they would need is a 4+ save or two wounds. Other than that saurus warriors can be good. If you compare them to some of the updated warscrolls for older factions (such as brettonia, believe it or not the AoS app has them) lizardmen units are still significantly better.
Giving warriors a 4+ save or two wounds would make them increadibly oppressive in a horde. To be honest the best thing they could do for warriors is to swap their horde-bonus with the sunclaw bonus. So make the extra attack & rend baseline (the bonus damage against daemons is less important) and put the horde bonus in the battalion. This way you fix the issues minimum sized saurus, or newly summoned saurus have, but you won't overtune horde units. And you'l only pay for the horde bonus when you're actually going to use it.
It definitely needs changing somehow. One thing I think is a big problem for new seraphon players (i started in january) is that the start collecting box isn't necessarily the best thing if you want to have an effective army. Okay the carnosaur is alright but the knights are meh and 10 saurus is just pointless. It's taken me until now (I've bought 80 skinks, 3 salamanders, a stegadon) to actually be competitive, and to do that I've been borrowing a friend's slann and bastiladon. I would like to see both a better saurus to make it viable to play with just saurus without hordes (at the moment I refuse to buy any more because painting 80 skinks is a task enough - please contrast paint help me!) and if possible a start collecting box with some skink units. A good start collecting box would be a slann, starpriest, 20 skinks and a bastiladon or something like that.
You'l end up with a disturbing amount of slann & starpriests & bastiladons that way. Imho that wouldn't be a good one because very little of it can (officially) be made into an alternate unit or even be kitbashed. That's the great thing of our current start collecting box, you can build and kitbash something like 9 or 10 different units from it even without being a great sculpter so you can get multiple boxes without wasting any bits on pointless doubles.
This is why I dont think they should be horde units - that's the skinks' job. Units of Saurus should cap at 30 or even 20 in exchange for a better save / more wounds OR more attacks. They are literally bred for combat, and their stats dont reflect that at the moment. They need to be moderate damage dealers that are hard to remove, or potent damage dealers that are fairly easy to remove. Currently, Saurus either fail or are outperformed by our other units at both of these roles in the current metagame. Sure, 40 warriors from a maxed out Sunclaw will do some good work. 30 Daemonettes or Witch Aelves will do it for cheaper, without the need for a battalion.
Looks like we have a new GH incoming this month: https://spruesandbrews.com/2019/05/11/generals-handbook-2019-out-june/ Edit: Seems my excitement got away with me. The post is 3 weeks old, probably old news
To be honest, I hadn't seen anything about the GHB yet, was wondering when we'd get some teasers or something about new rules. I'm halfway surprised it didn't coincide with the forbidden power release.
Sorry I'm a little late to the Saurus talk but my biggest hope is that they go Fyreslayer route and give both Saurus and Guard 2 wounds. I think it's more enjoyable to play with less horde units and we already have skinks. It would be nice to have units of 10 or 20 instead of 30 and 40.
Goes without saying but Hyish Aelves are all but confirmed. Just hoping the AoS RPG sheds some light on the Seraphon soon!