Age of Balance is a set of guidelines with the key goals of: - Being able to take any model you enjoy and still have a balanced game - Knowing that you will be able to complete a game within a specific time frame - Making it easy to organize games without any confusion www.ageofbalance.com It was developed with the hopes of getting people playing Warhammer again, especially those people turned off by the point systems, as well as wound or model counting. These systems may be fine to some extent but end up as "take X to win games, or lose". AoS can be an incredibly satisfying game, but many of us require a bit more structure to know whats going on in order to get started. If this sounds like something you are interested in, give it a try and let me know your feedback.
I have a list of questions that really stand out about this to me. -Why are you limiting general Warscrolls? How do they factor in to balance? -How does this account for the balancing of abilities? -Why is the Save such a big deal when every army has the ability to totally bypass Saves thanks to Line Breakers, with some armies consisting entirely of Line Breakers (looking at you, Forest Goblins.) -Why are larger units penalised by being forced to count as multiple warscrolls? Though this largely does tie in to question 1. -Why do you need to limit the number of models in a Warscroll? -How does this account for synergy and the subsequent extreme stat alteration that almost all synergies will cause, including the very minor synergies of the statline army that is Stormcast? -Why does this handicap the summoning of minor mooks such as zombies or skeletons? This balancing system, especially in larger games, is going to render the Undead and Seraphon Warrior armies, particularly the poor Undead who are reliant on summoning for any high power play, totally unplayable by cutting off their ability to spawn weak hordes that have their strength in numbers. -How is this more complex yet flawed system easier than just using a Wound limit?
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my thread. I like what you say about "flawed" system because it's true; this and all systems are flawed. 8th edition points were so terribly flawed, a major reason for the major reinvention of the game with AoS. All the new point systems are terribly flawed in the same way, as well as wounds and model count as well. The goal of AoB in contrast to these systems is that it attempts to optimize all warscrolls so that you can take any models you want to enjoy and still have a nice balanced list. In contrast, wound count optimizes models with higher saves, and model count optimizes models with higher wounds. Many people come to this conclusion quickly and it’s turning them off from the hobby. AoB gives a better option for people who feel this way in hopes to get more people playing AoS. In this system, save and wounds are factored in an algorithm to balance so each side to be equal. Sure, some units have the ability to cause mortal wounds but that is why wounds is factored in addition to save. Also both sides can have mortal wound causing units. In AoB you get 12 forest goblins, which may cause as many as 24 mortal wounds. In comparison, a unit of 3 spirit hosts may cause as many as 18, 5 paladins may cause as many as 22, etc. My point is, both sides can have ‘Line Breakers’. Models over 10 wounds are most commonly the most powerful modes on the table, the core of synergy and/ or potent wizards. This is why they are 2 scrolls. As for limiting the number of models - every system is doing that. In regards to abilities and synergy, these things simply cannot be balanced, so AoB doesn't try. GW has done a great job of making all the warscrolls fun and useful to a certain extent. As for this ‘handicapping minor mooks’ well, 30 skeletons have 91 attacks. They can easily be 3+ to hit and can attack twice when buffed by a necromancer. Who’s to say what’s minor and what’s not? (Also AoB doesn’t limit them; if you allow agree to a summoning pool in your games you can summon them as 25 per scroll, 32 if you get an 11-12). Undead are not limited to summoning 'small units', they can also summon Terrogheists and Zombe dragons. Even Spirit Hosts are extremely effective units. Seraphon can summon Carnasaurs and Bastiladons. I personally play Undead regularly and have won many games without ever needing to summon. If allowed to summon, my games would be terribly one sided when against an army without summoning options. I personally don’t enjoy one sided games. AoB is for people who feel the same. I have heard that Daemons, Seraphon and Undead are ‘weak’ and need summoning to be strong and for their identity. As a player with all three armies, I completely disagree. Many others disagree as well and are simply not playing AoS because of how one sided it can be to play these armies. In my experience so far, at least 80% of all players I have met would not be opposed to simply banning summoning altogether do to its inherent flaws. AoB was developed to give more balanced options for summoning to allow all kinds of players to enjoy summoning in a more balanced way. I really enjoy summoning as an ambush technique, as outlined on the 'Summoning Summary' page, and would not be opposed to allowing a summoning pool when playing games against other armies that can summon.
But it really doesn't, some of the most devastatingly powerful tactics I've seen don't rely on Saves. Using just Seraphon as examples, there are four powerful general builds you can do and one of them uses high saves. The rest use either all out attack, a domination of the movement phase, or both. And while I think that they're all pretty much equally powerful, if I had to rank them gun-to-my-head, the Saves army would only be the third most powerful. Third! Out of four! There are two things wrong with that. For starters, not all Line Breakers are made equal. Spirit Hosts, for example, are not reliable for Mortal Wounds because they have a pitiful chance of activating them, and even then they're weak enough that they do little damage anyway. The point of Spirit Hosts are to be hard to kill with the Rend immunity and summonability, they harass you, not kill you. On the flip side, Forest Goblins are just as weak in terms of Mortal Wounds and are without the Rend immunity and with a weaker Save, they only become powerful in large games where they can take a full synergiesed army and can rail off the damage. Retributors are extremely brutal and hit the hardest, but they're also slow as all hell, allowing a good enemy to kill them off before they reach a defensive line, and they require synergy to become effective. Which leads on to the second problem with this quote, it's not just about Mortal Wounds, it's about all abilities. Because there's no way an algorithm can figure out the potency of something so incorporeal as the many many synergy abilities, it would require somebody to go through every ability and min-max their potential in order to figure out how powerful these abilities can be, and to do so without bias. That's pretty much impossible. Commonly maybe, this is not a concrete rule and isn't common enough to really warrant basing a system around. I have four armies. Discounting the two armies where I have no models that are over 10 Wounds, both of my remaining armies count models with fewer than 10 wounds as their strongest models, and only one of them has a model over 10 Wounds that's even in the running for the strongest and I really would not count it as my strongest for that army. Furthermore the thing that makes these smaller Wound models stronger are their abilities, which I covered in the last point. But don't you see the inherent flaw in this? By trying to balance the warscrolls through an algorithm while ignoring the effect of abilities, you're making some units unplayable. Say I wanted to choose between the Skink Priest and the Skink Starpriest, right now it's very heavily debated which one is better, even I don't have a real clue and I just go for the one that I personally like the feel of more rather than the one I think is more powerful because they're so evenly matched, I don't think that one really is more powerful than the other. But as soon as this algorithm looks at these two and assigns them different points values because one has higher numbers without looking at the abilities, the cheaper one instantly becomes the more powerful warscroll because you're getting the same power for cheaper. At the same time, the more expensive model becomes inferior. And that's a minor case, my favourite example is Kroak vs Starmaster. Kroak has higher numbers and a greater damage output, but the Starmaster has far more utility through more fluid abilities. This puts them as stark equals, it's why I count Kroak as the same number of Wounds as the Starmaster even ignoring all my mathematical reasoning. But systems that use algorithms take one look at Kroaks higher numbers while ignoring the Starmasters more powerful abilities, and instantly make Kroak waaay more expensive than the Starmaster, often two or three times the price! This makes Kroak way to expensive to field and relegates him to uselessness, somebody you only play for a casual change while leaving him off competetive lists. Seriously, take a look at any 8th Edition tactica and you'll constantly see things like "a cool character but too expensive to be worth fielding," it's an epidemic that we've only just escaped from and you're trying to bring it back, only worse because the old systems at least paid attention to abilities, even if they were flawed in how they did so. It's why I like Wounds, the fact that we have a mostly standardised Wounds system for Warscrolls results in a balance in the game. Guard and Warriors are equally as powerful when factoring in abilities and synergies? Great, they're also worth one Wound each so they're exactly the same, allowing you to pick the one you like the most rather than the one that's got a better price. Same goes for Heroes, as the standard Wound count for heroes is 5, monsters are often 10, and ridden monsters 12. And even when something is more expensive, you still get a good deal because they're harder to kill, so Orcs or Knights are mathematically worth twice as much because they're twice as hard to kill exactly once you factor tactics in. Think of it like a MOBA where both sides bring different characters to the match but both have to cause the same amount of damage to the enemy objective, only instead of a Nexus or other objective, it's the army as a whole that you need to damage. The Wounds system is so shockingly balanced, I'm almost ready to start a conspiracy theory that they always meant to use the Wounds system. As for your Skeleton comment, they hit well but they're also total glass cannons who have Saves equal to a wet paper towel, they die en masse really quickly. And really I'm hesitant to call them cannons too because they lack any Rend, or any abilities that improve their utility, they're very bland and basic in what they can do. Even our Saurus get bites too. The Skeletons are not strong, they're meant to win through numbers because they all suck in terms of power. Like a slow zombie horde in media. Because I apparantly need to spell it out again for the millionth time, monsters are not a solid base for an army. You need infantry and a lot of it, Zombie Dragons and Terrorgheists cannot win a game against a good opponent because the enemy can shut them down in seconds with a Crippler or Monster Hunter and it's not even hard, I could do it in one Hero Phase and still have the rest of the turn to tear into your Skeletons, who die en masse due to their worthless defenses and then you're not allowed to summon them back fast enough to give me a challenge. And I did it without summoning because here's the thing, summoning is not a game breaker! Maybe it's an advantage, I wouldn't know because there's nobody else at my level at my place who plays a summoning army, but I've been pushed hard by non-summoning armies like Beastmen and Bloodbound, the one time a summoning army threatened me was with a tactic that used no summoning (it was the Ripperdactyls diving with the Shadowstrike Starhost, which is again an ability that you're not considering when balancing,) and I regularly use summoning armies with no summon limits as essencially basic training to test out my new ideas and tactics for my non-summoning armies like Stormcast and recently my Fyreslayers, so I know that if there is a divide of power between summoners and non-summoners it's not that much, so inhibiting general summoning is a bad idea. Handicapping monster summons and what-not is fine, I think, but the summonings of Skeletons, Zombies, and Warriors leaves those units pointless as soon as you're up against a smart opponent. I can tell you with a very clear certainty that a great number of the players here could, without summoning at all, wipe the floor with your inhibited summoning armies and it wouldn't even be a challenge, where unlimited mook summoning would even the odds without causing an imbalance. It's not the armies that are weak, it's the mooks. Sure the elite mooks like Guard and Knights are strong, but Skinks die if you look at them and Warriors are geared towards horde aggression and lack any powerful defense or low-number attack. Undead just have weak-as-hell mooks in general but have a great focus on getting that high summon to get in as many new mooks as possible in order to keep up the constant attack, it's the same as how they worked in 8th and will always be their thing because that's a unique and cool style for a whole faction. Daemons are the most powerful and would be the hardest to argue for allowing unlimited summoning for, but at the same time several armies have abilities that deal severe damage to Chaos Daemons, making the Daemons an army that is powerful against half the armies out there while weak as hell against the anti-daemon armies, making them a risky army to field competetively because of this status of being either really powerful or really weak depending on who they're up against, and summoning only amplifies this interesting quirk in a way that I think gives some fascinating depth, making them more dangerous to the armies they're good against but having no effect against the ones they're unprepared for, while never quite making them unbeatable to the armies they hold an advantage over and never quite incapable of beating armies they're weak to, even if one side holds an advantage. So there, entire paragraphs and even text walls explaining why you're wrong. I appreciate that you're trying to help the game, but you're not seeing the grander picture and are not taking into account how exactly the game works, nor are you spending the necessary time building it properly because making a cheap algorithm is easier than the (quite understandably hard) task of doing it all by hand. If you want to make a balancing system, you need to spend time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were any good points systems. You need to take it slow and consult with people who know what they're talking about, multiple people who know what they're talking about because second and third opinions are always great, and really dedicate yourself to making this ruleset. Otherwise its cheapness is going to be felt in a very negative way.
You're thinking way too much about this. AoB is not a point system its a basic set of guidelines to balance games for people who disagree that wound count and open summoning is balanced. I disagree with many of your arguments on the subject, and so would many other players. This is literally impossible to say, you know nothing about me or my armies. This is however, a very clear example of the power-gaming mindset of people who play with simple wound count for balance. AoB is for people who want to enjoy their models in balanced games, not people who only care about 'wiping the floor' with their opponent. This mindset is what is turning people off from the hobby and why it is still barely growing. Both a starmaster and kroak are 1 scroll for AoB, so there is no limitation on that. AoB was designed in contrast to point systems that make models arbitrary. As stated, one of its primary goals is to be able to take any model you like. Your last paragraph is completely inappropriate. AoB has been developed over 8 months. It is to find a solution for people who tried wound count and found it imbalanced, and has been tested in well over 100 games. If simple wound count works for you and your club, then I'm glad you are playing AoS and I wish you the best. This is not for you.
Ah, I'm sorry. I meant to be more neutral about this, but past experiences with a lot of people misunderstanding basic principles and then treating their misconceptions as facts has jaded me, it seems. And I don't mean people like you, not at all, you're fine. I'm talking about those lot who have no arguments and are just idiots who don't listen to a word you say while spouting nonsense that's all objectively wrong. Guess I got too defensive too fast. I still don't like your system, but I know that's just because it's not for me rather than because of any real reason, and I got too personal. I'm very sorry about overstepping like that, really.
Thank you, I appreciate that. I understand the frustration with the point systems optimizing certain units and reverting back to 8th. I understand there has been a lot of negative talk since the start of AoS. I wish I could be happy with wound count and open summoning but I have seen, heard and experienced too much to be happy with it. AoB is similar to wound count except it balances the wounds against the saves; you can take 25 skeletons or skinks, because they are so easy to kill whereas you get 20 Grave Guard since they have a 5+ save, or 15 Empire Greatswords with their 4+ save. Sure there are some nasty units that ignore the saves with mortal wounds, but there is not a ton of them. Technically the easiest way to do mortal wounds is with an Arcane Bolt. Forest Goblins are the only example I've seen of non-magical ranged mortal wounds. Also some units can reduce their mortal wounds received. In regards to summoning, with AoB you could allow for open summoning; the rule is simply you must agree with your opponent. The most important factor is game length; if both sides have a good number of wizards and open summoning, you have to be prepared for a much longer game. If one of these strong summon-less armies was sure of itself it could offer you open summoning. The reason for restrictions is to allow people who are turned off by the idea of adding 'free' units not being forced to play a one-sided game. While I agree that summoning doesn't have to be a game breaker, it still can be. For example, when you spend 3 turns breaking down a bastiladon and then your opponent immediately summons it back. When your opponents Lord of Change easily summons a Keeper of Secrets and a Bloodthirster uncontested on the first turn. Situations like this are the reason for the optional restrictions in AoB. I agree with some interesting points you made. All out offence lists that don't care about their save cant really be balanced as such. The advanced pages talk about "Hurty" units like this and how they must be restricted. I absolutely agree that taking a lot of monsters and big things is not as good as taking a lot of units. Typically in an 8 scroll AoB game I would recommend taking 1-2 chars and 0-2 monsters, at least half infantry models. Maybe you're right that it should not cost more for big monsters since its not optimal to take a lot, but the higher cost should work to prevent people from taking them, so it works out. So far it seems okay for this system. The manager of a local GW store made a good point that summoning is like the "Purple Sun" of AoS. This is a great point - where Purple Sun would take off a lot of models, summoning adds a lot of models. Well, i hated purple sun and never used it. When playing with friends we would not use it and our games were enjoyable. When i played against people doing 'tournament' practice, i would always get purple sun every turn, or insane lists where the only thing i could do was purple sun or lose. But, some people like purple sun. Some people like summoning. But for me and some others, we would prefer to have it restricted or limited in some way. A lot of people are cool and not taking it too seriously. In this case wound count or playing the RAW and just deploying until you are done is fine. This is especially true when adding Time of War and a Battleplan. I wouldn't be surprised if both wounds and AoB can produce some similar looking lists, so it doesn't really matter. AoB is developed to give another option for those who feel points, wounds or model count is just not enough for them to be playing games. I see why you think this was just quickly developed. Its designed to be deceptively simple. A lot of work and revisions actually went into it. For people who need more specific balancing there are some things in Advanced. Most of the complicated stuff was moved to advanced because, it doesn't really matter, tweaking everything is not going to make a difference, just use the chart, get your models on the table and see what happens. If you use wounds, or points, or AoB it doesn't matter. The point is to just be playing games.
I think summoning has the potential to be too powerful and too weak at the same time. Monster spam summons can imbalance the game for anyone who doesn't play more than casually. But at the same time, a lot of those casual players who play in summon armies need to be able to spam mooks. The most common advice I give to new players trying out Seraphon is to go for a spam Warrior army because it's the easiest to learn but has some hard-to-master high level tactics that keep the new player learning. But restricting mook-summoning negates that. It's why I like the idea of keeping anything that gets summoned in 10-20 man units unlimited, because those summons will not be that tough and will often rely on horde tactics, while still limiting Monster and Hero summons. That said, I will absolutely say that 10 Skinks or Skeletons are equal to 10 Greatswords. Said that from day one and experience leads me to stand by it. And for the record, I didn't like Purple Sun either. I was more of a Lore of Light fan, giving lizards that WS10 I10 ASF was the bomb, and countered Pit of Shades, Purple Sun, and other things that would decimate my low initiative units too. Light all the way.
I haven't tried this out yet. To be honest, I haven't had too many balance issues playing "unbalanced" AOS. Have lost my fair share, have had many games of so close, whether annihilation or objective oriented. I have managed to win a 4 player free for all against high elfs, dwarfs, and skaven with the only summoning I did was a unit of chameleon skinks. Lord Kroak was the best sniper/Hero killer that game. However I am not opposed to it. The store I go to regularly changes the balancing system they use every week. I do have a couple questions. Engine of the gods gives you half a summon and after that I can choose anything below, or is that a typo? Just want to ensure that 1-13 is accurate and it isn't supposed to read 10-13. Have you held any successful tournaments or clubs that regularly use these rules that I can look up? I would lie to see results. I work a lot. One day off and only play while my girlfriend is at work. So I'm not big into wasting time on a game that wasn't fun for me or my opponent. But do look forward to a system that made the game extremely close.
There really is no 'balanced' AoS. If you play with wounds or eyeing it out or whatever you might end up with a somewhat balanced game as long as someone is not trying to do something silly just to win a game. It sounds like you have found a 'gentlemens' balance at your club. The Engine of the Gods comment is just a guideline suggestion. I haven't played with it so, I'm not sure. Maybe since you can only get one unit and only if you roll well, its actually pretty balanced. (The free turn thing is pretty insane though). You would have to work out a limitation that feels feels fair while keeping the unit effective and fun to bring. Given that it has such crazy rules, I would bring it up and discuss with your opponent what would be 'fair' before the game starts. Having tournaments for AoS is the ultimate goal. The AoB system was developed by a club in NYC and they have been using the system since shortly after AoS started. They have over 100 games into the system. You can check out their Facebook page for battle reports https://www.facebook.com/NYC-Warhammer-Players-1057881630902207/ I started at GW and they were having super summon off massacre-fests using only wounds for balance and using mostly unpainted models. I quit for a while, but now I'm trying to start a new club playing more balanced games. I have been trying to get people playing AoB since early this year. It is hard, there are very few people showing interest in AoS at all. Stores have been having fire-sales on fantasy products. Slowly, people are coming out of the woodwork and the club is growing. So far I've only had 10 games between 5 of us, but they have all been very fun and my opponents agree that the system feels fair.