AoS Fixing Serephon

see above statement about me not giving warscrolls to things without models. but i do plane to make a battalion that does something close to this.

 

rippers woo not much to change hear i do wan't to make blote toads less clunky but im not shur how to accomplish that ideas are welcome

 

Saurus warriors
move 5"
bravery 10
wounds 1
save 4+

club 1 1" 4/3/-1/1
spear 1 2" 4/4/-1/1
Jaws and shield 2 2" 4/4/-/1

alpha same
wardrum same
shields 6+ shrug
icon this unit can pile in 4" instead of 3"

 

Saurus gaurd
move 5"
bravery 10
wounds 2
save 3+

pole-arm 2 1" 3/3/-1/1
Jaws and shield 2 1" 4/4/-/1

alpha same
icon see above
shield 6+ shrug
wardrum same

sworn guardians if a hero within 2" takes a wound this unit can take it instead if it does roll a dice on a 5+ it takes 2 instead of 1

 

Eternity warden
move 5
bravery 10
wounds 7
save 3+

star-stone mace 4 1" 3/3/-1/2
fearsome Jaws 2 1" 4/4/-/1

selfless protector if a hero within 2" would take damage this unit can take it instead if he does he can make a free pile in and attack once per attacking unit.
alpha warden unchanged

 

Ah sorry, I copy paste the quote command back in when splitting posts like this into responses, must have used the wrong one

The whole idea that Saurus are specificly bred for war, while skinks are the artisans, priests, and various specialists seems to be fairly important in our fluff. I base the idea on that. After all, if you're going to have a subrace who are literally born to be battleline-troops why would those not be the core of your army?

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Yes and no. Utility focused units are fine, but I dislike it when it's used as an excuse to keep them extremely weak in combat. Now obviously a utility unit shouldn't also be a combat monster, but it shouldn't be completly harmless either. Skinks for example in a group of 10 are harmless to the extent there's simply no point in killing them if you don't have to. Even a 6+ save unit doesn't have to fear them. I'm not saying 10 skinks should be a terrifying threat, but at the very least you shouldn't be able to outright ignore them.

Apart from that I also think that utility focused units should still activly participate in the game, the easiest way of which is by having them participate in combat. They don't necesarly need to be super effective, but they need to at least provide supporting fire, or at least activate abilities during multiple phases during the game. Their activity shouldn't be limited to "and now I do my supportive thing" each hero-phase or "cuz I stand next to this guy he gets a re-roll". They need to either provide some supportive fire, so they do something usefull in the combat/shooting phase or give them supportive abilities that require some kind of active play during multiple phases, the eternity warden jumping in front of the Slann is a good example of this, he actually gets to use his support at multiple points in the game instead of just blowing his entire load during the hero phase and then doing nothing for the rest of the turn. The easiest way however to keep a unit "active" throughout the game is by allowing it to do significant supportive fire.

The point is that they're not an unorganised horde when used in an actual army, so no perfectly fine choice of words

I'd count that as something new as it's a non-existing unit.
Also, sticking to the currently existing stuff will pretty much guarantee you're going to keep several of the issues we currently have. As an example you will not be able to turn skinks into halfway capable troops if the 1 warscroll is responsible for a melee version, a skirmish/objective grabber version & a horde unit version. It's simply too many different things for one unit and will make your balancing wonky.

As for the units:
Eternity warden: I'd drop alpha warden and give him a good ward-save.
Guard: depends on what you do with their battalion. Also your sworn guardian rule is a bit odd. Based on what you've written there on a 5+ they take 2 damage instead of 1 when an allied hero is wounded? Why do they take more damage?
Warriors: I'd drop the larger pile in. Probably not worth the additional pointcost.
Rippers: Either allow us to place more toads (say a toad shows up each hero phase), or allow us to move the toad more efficiently. That or just completly remove the toad and solve it a different way.

 

Saurus knights
move 7
bravery 10
wounds 3
save 4+

Lance 1 "1 4/3/-1/1
Jaws and shield 2 1" 4/4/-/1
vicious bite 2 1" 3/4/-/1

alpha unchanged
icon see above
war drums unchanged
shield 6+ shrug
blazing lances change to hit rolls of 6

 

O and I forgot 1 bit. Support, or utility, that is based simply on your mere existance, but doesn't involve you actually doing much of anything for most of the game. Like the chameleons threatening to jump on an objective by standing on the side of the table, the oldblood simply standing next to an ally for his re-roll (and not doing much else), or the Slann sacrificing actions to "generate" summoning points. I view as extremely inactive and thus don't like as those mean the unit in question isn't even activly participating for their 1 utility ability. They're merely existing. The only way to get away with something that passive is if it's a terrain piece and not an actual unit.

Also @Erta Wanderer your knights are almost sturdier than your guard. Depending on what the guards can get in a battalion I'd swap their wounds.

 

Gaurd: to prevent 40+ wound heroes and to represent the warden being much better then them at it
warriors: there is no point increase for taking banners and it's better then the awful bravery debuff
rippers i just wan't to make them less weird ill look into your ideas

 

i wan't to make them into our heavy cavalry option to counter balance our rippers

 

For guards, chance it to "on a 2 or lower they take an extra wound". It's weird to have a negative effect trigger on a high roll. Also it obviously is gonna need a fluffy explenation.

For warriors: issue is that movement is something that is potentially super usefull. So it's gonna be expensive for those times where it's amazing, while being fairly insignificant otherwise. I'd rather just drop the banner completly and have them be slightly cheaper.
Also, the bravery debuff is actually decent.. issue is just that battleshock immunity is stupidly common for some reason.

That's fine, but then guards need to be sturdier still.

Also same remark about the icon goes for all the saurus of course.

 

guard that's fair i can switch it

warriors ungors have a better version and they are super cheep. yhetees have an even better version and they are also really cheep playing with a unit on the field that can be janky with the pile ins is great. it helps with skreening and i don't know how many times someone has piled into 3" without meaning to let alone 4" it's a good buff that can't be called broken and with bravery being almost irelivent now thanks to the above mentioned immunity and inspiring presence

 

Ungors are also significantly weaker in every other aspect. The only thing they seem to excel at is speed.
Yhetees are 20 points more expensive than warriors (and 30 than guard and knights) currently. They're comparable in terms of effective wounds. Their damage is actually surprisingly comparable to knights (they have rend, but both average roughly 6 damage/turn that needs to be saved). So a good chunck of their higher cost comes from that added mobility.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad ability. But it seems rather expensive for what it does.

Also, putting it on every saurus unit just seems out of place. But that's a different discussion.

 

i don't know why you are compairing chaff units with line core ungores are much closer to skinks then warriors. gors would be the warrior parallel and it has it to and are 20 points cheaper they have better saves but not as much damage but is evened out with smaller basses.

 

Yup combat too have fun!

 

The point was that claiming the ability is "cheap" cuz it's on a cheap unit doesn't hold up.

Hence why I generally favor the idea that support units should have ranged attacks so as to be able to actually use said attacks from the backline.
The skink priest actually comes pretty close to what I'd like, I don't like the D3 attacks though. And I think it should have more than 4 wounds so it's not as suspectible to getting annihilated by a stray spell. But beyond that the skink priest's profile I actually decently like.

Also, their attack profiles do need to actually achieve something. A starseer might be better than 1 warrior, but he still struggles to reliably score a wound even against cannonfodder. Hell, a squad of 10 warriors already completly wipe the floor with him, and they're almost half as expensive. He should at least stand a decent chance against those..

As for their melee profile, a support hero should be capable of defending himself. There need to be opponents they don't have to run away from in fear, even if it means using their supporting abilities on themselves to survive. Right now the only situation in which you won't retreat with our support heroes is when you're fighting a unit that's already all but annihilated and there's only 1 or 2 stragglers. Being able to fight off 1 or 2 warriors at a time isn't exactly impressive.

I think it might be one of the bigger flaws of AoS though. LoTR solves the issue of minor (support) hero-statlines by avoiding units, instead just having individual soldiers, and generally having smaller battles, this makes it far easier for a hero to be special with only a slightly above average stat-line. Also, there's very few heroes riding dragons and whatnot. So it's not like a minor hero has to be better than a regular soldier, but weaker than the fancy dragon. A starseers model in LoTR would make a decent hero relativly speaking to their regular soldiers. WHFB solved it by sticking the hero in a unit, which makes em less special and thus removing the need for them to have massivly better stats. And 40K seems to solve it by having the proper hordes generally only consist of cannonfodder with terrible stats. And again it doesn't have a lot of super fancy mounted versions of heroes either, so they don't need to compete with them for the fancy statline. The minor regular heroes can be kitted out to be smashcaptains and whatnot, which is ultimatly still just a regular captain.
However, AoS leaves minor heroes in a weird situation. They can't possibly compete with the bodycount of a 40 man horde but they also can't compete with the stats of a fancy mounted hero. On top of that the battleline hordes generally don't have a terrible statline to begin with. So making a minor hero with better stats than say 10 of that battleline unit would already push him dangerously close to the stats of a fancy mounted hero. Leaving them with nowhere to go.

Statwise they come close, although they end up a tad expensive for what they do (and I really don't like 1 wound on a 5 model unit..). I just really dislike how their utility requires them to be absent from the battle for significant chunks of time. But yeah, their statline isn't my biggest gripe with them.