AoS NEW *rumor*

Nope, it was oriented around massed ranks of Saurus in Fantasy, certainly lorewise, and it's definitely possible to build a viable Saurus army in Fantasy to replicate that lore, even if some people think Skink Skirmishers are better (and it's easy to counter Skink Skirmishers in Fantasy anyway, either use armoured, non-Frenzied units - just move toward them, wait for them to run out of the way to avoid getting caught in melee and attack everything that isn't Skink skirmishers - Magic Missiles or skilled missile troops who can still shoot Skirmishers even with the -1 to hit penalty). Saurus were a solid Core unit, definitely in the top 5 alongside Chaos Warriors, Ironguts, Ogre Bulls and perhaps Bretonnian Knights. Aggressive with Strength 4 and 2 attacks, tough with Toughness 4 and a 4+ armour save and not willing to run away thanks to Leadership 8 and Cold-Blooded. What's not to like?

This cannot be said for their AoS counterparts, and the rules are clearly wrong when Saurus can't even beat Dwarf, Elven and Orc Core troops in combat when they were able to do so in Fantasy quite often. I wouldn't be surprised if the fluff for AoS is wrong as well, given how obsessed GW are with marketing Skinks.

Also Lizardmen definitely aren't meant to be a shooting army (at least not non-magical shooting) - Dwarfs, Empire and Skaven held that crown in Fantasy, and other armies do in AoS - blowpipes and Lustrian javelins are both short-ranged weapons that rely chiefly upon Poison to any damage, and even then it's negligible on armoured units.

Hell all of our books have had Saurus on the cover, Saurus are meant to be front and centre. It's Saurus who guard the Slann, ride the most dangerous creatures, kick arse and conquer the legions of Chaos, Skinks only appear on the battlefield as militia, beast tamers and vassal wizards. Most of the battle art features Saurus leading the charge, with the Skinks hiding at the flanks or behind the main battleline. Lizardmen as an army is meant to be Saurus-focused, end of story, and if the AoS rules team can't capture that, then their ineptitude is clear (not that it wasn't clear already given how badly they've handled some other factions).

And is currently expanding significantly quicker than some of the other similarly-derived factions and playing more of a part in the lore. Smells like bias to me.

I do recall from reading a digital copy of the Beastman Battletome that Morghur allegedly still exists and the Gavespawn worship him, but he's no longer playable, and all of the other special characters have disappeared from the army list for definite, which is definitely a downside in a game where special characters are some of the most powerful things around.

Probably thanks to that White Dwarf that empowered the Herdstone to become a pretty strong scenery piece. It was good to see such an unexpected buff when most Tome Celestials have been next to useless, but will it last into their 3rd Battletome?

I don't want to see everything top tier personally - indeed I personally would like there not to be a top tier and for all the factions to be mid-tier, with a focus on tactics rather than army building, with some armies being particularly good at countering others due to key tactics they use (and not just ALPHA STRIKE INNIT BRUV GAME OVER), others being generalist forces that can take anybody on well with decent tactics.

Certainly they haven't done nearly such a good job with Beastmen, Ogres or Skaven compared to a lot of their newer factions in the lore department, and while I wouldn't see this as a valid excuse to write weaker rules, perhaps some of the rules team who care about them less do.

Oh absolutely, I agree that building a fun, thematic list that evokes how the faction would fight in lore is way better. If the rules team started advocating this approach, with customisable subfactions like in 9th 40K that allow players who want to build their lists around their own background and what looks most thematic to the army, without having to subscribe to GW-subfaction-devised tactics, perhaps people would put more focus on just having a fun game and not trying to win all the time like gawky powergamers.

 

You kinda ignored what I said, sure all their fantasy characters are not around, but they have gained a named character and are pivotal to the current narrative. That's no small thing. I do think this is a lead up to a big Beastman character reveal in the form of Morghur. But to your point about tabletop and lacking big god like characters or otherwise, yeah, they're lacking.

Only time will tell

Agreed, I also think a push for Narrative Play or such would help in this

Absolutely, 100%

 

Honestly I think Morghur returning as a giant, chaotic paragon of mutation able to take on enemies like Archaon and Alarielle and win in-game would be fantastic, and having a new Shaman character would also be great, but we will see what GW decide to do with the Beasts in 3rd. I'm concerned that given they're getting so excited about Warriors of Chaos they might gloss over Beastmen, but I won't count my Gors yet until they have mutated

 

Like I said, GW occasionally puts out an OP build because they don't actually know what to do with the mess that they've turned especially the starborn into with its summoning + teleporting + magic + shooting. It's a combo that's naturally quite good within AoS, so as long as we're not horribly underpowered you can make it work in a competitive scene. However, it doesn't exactly result in healthy builds that both the seraphon players & opponents enjoy. People still hate Kroak for what he used to do 10 nerfs ago, skink based armies regularly just degenerate into simply flooding the board with too many bodies for your opponent to deal with despite those bodies not being able to actually do anything other than die, Salamanders have only really been good because we can just teleport a bunch of them on top of an enemy to deal a boatload of mortal wounds with little to no real counterplay. Without the teleport their short-range would mean they're considerablly less problematic. Most of our tactics that have been effective haven't exactly been the best designed fun armies that players and opponents alike enjoyed...It's nearly always some weird edge-case that players simply took maximum advantage off, regardless of it being fun/logical/fluffy/whatever.

Don't get me wrong, occasionally it also leads to something decent that's fun for everyone, hell once in a blue moon our dinosaurs are even vaguely functional. We're a large enough faction that something is always going to be at least decent-ish, no matter the meta. But we're definitly not recieving a lot of love.

Things like the fact that we still don't have faction specific prayers despite having had multiple priests from day one makes it very evident that we're not a favorite. Or the fact that we were the last faction to get mount traits, and needed a freaking white dwarf article to get them and they're not even that good. Or the fact we don't have endless spells despite having some of the best casters in the lore (or a particularly good spell-lore for that matter). Or the fact that bound spells, our consolation prize for not having endless spells, were essentially invalidated by the next major update to the game. Or the fact that our fancy new faction terrain needed an update pretty much the moment it was released cuz of how unpractical it was. Or how it took them years to finally give us vaguely functional allegaince abilities after realizing infinite summoning was rather OP in AoS 1.0. The list of weird lazy mistakes like this just goes on and on.

It is very obvious that we're not a favorite at GW, for whatever reason.

They have some weird obsession with allarielle in AoS. She keeps being pushed into the limelight despite not really doing anything. They're also one of the few factions with a steady, but small, stream of new units. Most other factions either get virtually nothing new, or they're the SCE/Undeath and get a new (sub)faction every other year

Honestly, Sylvaneth get kind of the right amount of love and every other faction should get that amount. They're a nice middleground between the lack of updates some of us get and the overwhelming absurd amount of updates SCE & Undeath get.

We are often "involved" but only ever as a deus ex machina. Usually it can summarized as "Some seraphon showed up. Noone knows why. They did a thing (or got killed) and then dissappear again. Aren't they mysterious.", and often this isn't even really a summary because our whole involvement is frequently limited to only like half a paragraph anyway.

Even with Kragnos this happened. Kroak shows up to banish Kragnos and save a city, a bunch of seraphon attack a silver tower which triggers Bel'akors curse, and the skinks give the dragon eggs they've been protecting for eons to the SCE cuz of reasons. But nothing actually happens for the Seraphon themselves, cuz all of the seraphon immeadiatly dissappear again after doing the one plot-related thing they were supposed to, and none of those plotpoints actually affect the seraphon.

And the rest of the era of the beast lore for seraphon so far has been "occasionally some seraphon show up and help a dawnbringer crusade, either by acting as scouts/pathfinders and guiding them past an ambush or by defeating an army that would attack the crusade". Which again. Doesn't exactly do anything for the seraphon themselves. They're literally more active in progressing the CoS/SCE story than in progressing their own stories.

We're used to progress the stories of others, then we dissappear into the background again. But our own stories are virtually non-existent.

If only balance focused on Narrative based list, and not just on how things work out in the competitive scene...

 

I dunno what version of fantasy you guys were playing, but comp lizardmen armies had 1 unit of saurus/templeguard max and spammed skink skirmishing units or they ran skroxigor units when that was still a thing. You supplemented that with salamanders, terradons, probably a single ancient steg and 2-4 scar vet cowboys.

Saurus have almost never been the "primary" damage dealers for any kind of well put together Lizardmen list.

The way the army has always played on the tabletop, in its best form, has been magic and shooting heavy. Always. Comp lizardmen armies won games by scoring points with magic sniping and poison shots while pinning units with unkillable scar vet cowboys.

Which isn't what i was talking about.

That's interesting considering every single iteration of the army over the past 20 years has been a primarily shooting and magic army. It would seem like if GW didn't want them to be a shooting/magic army they wouldn't give them so much shooting and magic and make it clearly the best way to play them.

Talking about fluff agian. I prefer saurus. Just said i think its funny that people seem to think the way the fluff is structured is more important than the way the actual rules are. It's a game first that has fluff to support it, not the other way around. It would seem like the way the army plays in the game (since its, you know, a game first) would dictate what the "right" way is. Again, just said I thought it was funny. No need to really argue about it.

Conveniently that's exactly how the game is right now with like 2 exceptions.

Dunno how "all the time" matches up with "occasionally" but whatever. Kroak/starborne isn't even the best build right now and wasn't the best build in fantasy, or in the first book. And it's not just one build now, and it wasn't just one build in the last book either.

Seraphon has consistently been A/S tier since minimum 6th edition fantasy.

You're saying a lot of hyperbolic things about what makes the army good that aren't true. Salamanders aren't only good because they can teleport. I literally play 3 salamanders in my thunder lizard list with no teleport. and i literally just won a GT with it.

Kroak hasn't always been the best way to play, even if they have consistently gotten his balance wrong.

No part about the seraphon plan since the bitter end of our first AOS book has been about "flooding the field" with bodies. It's just not how we play.

If only the fluff was actually based on how the army plays on the tabletop, maybe our Narrative-based lists would be more balanced.

It's a matter of perspective.

If literally always being good and having one of the largest ranges in the game, with our only downside being that our fluff is a little underdeveloped is "not liked" i'll take it. We need a handful of new models to replace some very old sculpts, but even then its still a pretty great looking range. Stegs, carnos, terradons, bastis, new kroak, even templeguard are all great kits. Even skinks are fine for what they are. Lots of stuff in finecast which is a bummer, and the saurus cav/warrior models are quite dated at this point.

Grand scheme, i'll take it with the tentative hope we get some more model updates in the near future.

 

Wargames are primarly a type of simulation game. AoS very much explicitly makes the claim to be a (somewhat) accurate simulation of war in the Age of Sigmar. This means that the fluff comes first, as the rules not fitting with the fluff means it fails as a simulation. And since the simulation aspect is core to the genre, people get rather annoyed when it fails.

A game were the rules do come first would be something like chess, poker or qwirkle. Which are purely abstract and don't claim to be a particularly realistic simulation of anything. Or if you want something a bit less abstract, risk or catan, which don't have to simulate much more than the map and some very broad high level mechanics like resource gathering or the moving of troops from one country to another.

 

Saying the fluff should more accurately represent the rules or the rules should more accurately represent the fluff is the same thing. They didn't release a book and then build the game out of it. If anything, they design the models first and then build the rules and fluff out of that. Saurus have shitty models, so maybe the rules are right and the fluff needs to be more accurate to the spindly shit models saurus have

It's the same argument from a different perspective and saying one is "right" while the other isnt, is just gatekeepy nonsense. What if someone actually likes how the army plays on the table? Telling them that's not the "right way" to play the army doesn't feel like a very welcoming community to me.

 

Pretend for a moment we're not playing AoS, but we're playing bolt action. A historical wargame instead of a fantasy wargame.
In this case the fluff is replaced by reality.
The rules represent reality.
You can't change reality to make it fit the rules of your wargame. So you can't say include tanks that fly. If your tanks did your rules would be bad because they fail to represent reality. And thus it fails to be a WWII wargame.

This is why the rules come secondary to the fluff. Cuz the fluff is what is supposed to be "reality" of the world we're playing in.

I mean sure, you could do that. It'd anger some of the existing fans and would be kind of a waste of the saurus archetype, but it solves the problem of your rules not representing the fluff.

Another solution for example would be to just remove the saurus completly. Again, it'd result in a bunch of angry fans, but at least your all-skink faction now has rules that (mostly) match its fluff.

They're perfectly acceptable solutions if all you care about is making the rules match the fluff.

 

Big difference is the "historical" part of that equation.

Edit: gonna remove everything else cause it doesnt matter. You can play saurus right now to decent effect IMO. They should still be better and the skink keyword is too good. I like the suggestion of mixed arms you made below.

 

What? Welcoming? This is warhammer. Last week I saw a guy make a 10 year old cry because he chose to paint his space wolves black mostly.

 

Which is the absolute worst part of this hobby and if anything should be consistently rallied against is that there's a "right way" to paint your models, play your army, and enjoy your own hobby.

 

Dude was a total Melvin. I never understood how anyone could approach anyone and say and I quote. "You would never see a space wolf wear black colors. Why would you go and make a dumb decision like that?" (Me from the next table over. Playing with black painted carcharodons) "When you remember that the colors of the deathwatch are black you can shut the fuck up."

 

I mean, at that point you don't care a whole lot about the fluff as you're willing to change it depending on the whims of the meta and balance changes. Which is fair enough, but not something a lot of people will agree with. For a lot of people the fluff is supposed to be fairly immutable.

You're allowed to play however you want. People constantly play stuff the "wrong way". It's why you have things like speedrunner communities, which are pretty much dedicated to playing a game so wrong you can skip (nearly) the entire thing..

It only becomes an actual problem when that "wrong" playstyle starts influencing the "right" way of playing. Either because it becomes a dominant strategy and starts pushing out the "right" way of playing, or because designers are implementing stuff to hold back these players that ends up hurting the "normal" players (e.g. how WoW constantly introduces timegating because otherwise the Mythic raiders finish too quickly). That's when you get some really weird stuff.

I'm not saying you should do anything. I'm saying the designers need to do their job and design rules that match the fluff of their own game (or alter the fluff if they insist that these rules are supposed to be accurate)

And how many others do it? Is it just 1 really good player that can win with pretty much any strategy he tries. Or can the average person use it viably as well without regularly getting crushed?

Fluff-accurate rules that are more or less viable and avoid the optimisation arms-race.

Which is also the main issue that we keep running into in casual games, even without ever going to a competitive tournament. Casuals might not care about hyper-competitive lists, but they don't want to play with an obviously flawed army either. Very simply put, being say 5% below optimal is fine for a casual, being 20% below optimal is not. And due to the amount of powercreep & the fact that other casual players will want to play with their own cool new toys, like say a casual SCE who bought one of those dragons, avoiding that arms-race is nigh impossible, even if everyone tries their best to avoid it. Eventually you'll find your saurus warriors having to fight some of those SCE dragons, and achieving very little. And then you're kinda stuck.

Sigh.. that's just sad.

 

That's the one that really irked me the most. Like don't be a cunt to fuckin kids. I could understand people being Dicks to me for running a double feral carno in 2013 because it isn't a good list but a lucky one. But like leave children alone and let em use the edgy colors for their bearded boys on dogs

 

My whole point has always been that if you're not playing competitive games it literally doesnt matter. There's a social contract between players you can use to your advantage. If you want to play saurus, simply ask the sce player not to spam dragons, or the IJ player not to bring all pigs.

I also don't know why the gold standard should be "you can play this bad and still win." That's bad balance, not good balance.

which is impossible. There's no avoiding the problem of having a best build BUT if there was a book that got really really close... it's seraphon and you're still saying thats not the case.

There's a social contract in this game for a reason. I dont know why every argument we have devolves into this idea that you shouldn't have to have a conversation with the person you're playing against in an environment that not only allows for that, but encourages it.

Your SCE player can bring dragons. He just can't bring only dragons. Saurus are not so bad that you are going to lose every game and always have a problem on the table. It's simply not the case. You will lose against competitive players playing better lists, which i'd argue you should.

Also, saurus are not "obviously flawed." Using hyperbolic langauge sounds great, but a lot of the time it just means you're factually incorrect in what you're saying.

Lastly, I don't think you really understand how far getting better at the fundamentals of this game will go for you. Sure, it's one person that went 5-0 at GT's with KC... but i think we can both agree thats a drastically different environment than the casual one we are talking about. I exclusively play saurus based lists in all my casual games and all of my games are fun, enjoyable back and forths where I win more than my fair share. I am not an ITC champion or even a regular GT winner. I'm someone who has a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals of this game and plays a decent amount. That doesnt seem like a very high bar to set for someone to enjoy playing saurus on the tabletop.

edit: and thats without saying, as i've reiterated countless times... balance between the two half of the books could be better. Never said Saurus dont need a buff. Simply said it was funny that them not being the de-facto way the comp lists are played is perpetually getting everyones feathers ruffled... when they aren't even playing competitive games to begin with.

There is no build, I repeat, no build, in this seraphon book that can not compete at a casual level against anything in the game. I'd argue theres not a single build in there that won't go 3-2 at a tournament. If you want to play saurus, you should and if its not working you should figure out what you're doing when actually playing the game thats not working.

I just find these hyperbolic arguments to be just that. Hyperbolic. It's not reflected in how seraphon currently play or even how aos plays as a whole right now.

And if you just wanna push stuff forward and smash face, ironjawz exist. So do ogres. Seraphon don't also need to do that.

 

While spamming can be avoided even a few can already be tedious to deal with.
To stick with the dragons cuz they're just an amazing example for this;
SCE Dragons

• Have better saves than our behemoths
  
• Better wounds/points ratio than our behemoths
• Better mortal wound output than our behemoths
• Better movement than our behemoths
• Comparable if not better melee potential (provided you correct for points)
• Random magic protection for some reason
  
• Doesn't have a damage table
• Can fly, which our behemoths can't (at least not without external help, like an artifact)
• Are comparable in terms of looks & feel to our behemoths, just newer and fancier (It's a big centerpiece monster-type unit)

This means that they're just better than say a carnosaur, and in rather an obvious way. All it takes is having their carnosaur get slaughtered a couple of times by a model that's 70 points cheaper, yet is inexplicably better, before you'll start seeing some rather frustrated players. And sure, you can play around it, get that first charge, screen properly, shoot it, etc. But you really shouldn't need to work all that hard to win a fight when you are fielding a monster that's more than 30% more expensive. And that's when you're fielding the relativly cheap and efficient scar-vet, it's worse with the oldblood. Even casual players will notice that that is weird. A 30% point advantage should be enough to make up for some (minor) mistakes or bad luck. And sure, asking your friend to not bring a mono-dragon list helps. But you're still going to run into this issue every time he brings even a single dragon (let alone 2, or 3..).

It isn't, noone says it is.

There'll always be a best build. However, keeping the margins small enough that the difference doesn't matter for (most) players is by no means impossible. Like I said earlier, a casual player won't mind playing say 5% suboptimally. The difference in this case is small enough that a few lucky rolls can be more influential. But once he's playing 20% suboptimally he'll start to notice that it's not just bad luck that are the cause of his losing streak...

The issue isn't losing every game. The issue is seeing your carnosaur die to his dragon that's 70 points cheaper with surprising regularity. And as much as you want to tell that player to get better, it's still something that's going to happen every so often (even without him making any real mistakes, occasionally a bad roll or inconveniently placed objective will force his hand). And that player is more likely to just conclude he should switch to a shooty skink-based list that can deal with that dragon far more reliably and far more easily.

Sure, in that case show me a unit that's:
1) Considered "good"
2) Has comparable fluff to the saurus unit in question
3) Has comparable (or worse) rules (preferably at around the same pointlevel) and doesn't rely on external bonusses to achieve this

Cuz I can't really think of anything that fullfills all those three requirements for most saurus units. And that's why the various Saurus are rather obviously flawed. Their competition tends to just be better.

O and preferably find a different example than the scar-vet on carno. As that's about the only saurus unit that's actually somewhat decent. Mostly cuz it's rather cheap.

The saurus are consistently depicted as the posterboys of the seraphon's army. They're the ones on the front of the book. Up till recently they were the only start collecting box. Most artwork favours showing off a nice big hulking saurus kicking butt, or a roaring Carnosaur with an oldlblood general on his back.

To illustrate this, when I google "seraphon artwork" out of the first 17 pictures: 2 focus on skinks, 11 focus on saurus mid-battle (with the occasional terradon/ripper in the background) 2 focus on something else (slann, razordon) and two shows a mix of saurus and skinks simply posing.
And that's not even going into the fluff in the our books describing saurus as paragons of war (have you read the sunblood description? According to their bit of fluff there should be very little, if anything that can best them one on one.). Saurus are very much presented as the military might of the seraphon. So it makes sense that people expect to play as them when playing a wargame.

As someone who's constantly trying to create two lists that are balanced when one player is quite a lot worse than the other for casual games. No no they're not. Seraphon lists either struggle massivly if you purposefully handicap yourself to keep things interesting, as that usualy results in them having no real tools to do much with. Or they are overwhelmingly powerfull cuz you have to rely on alpha-strikes/behemoth spam/magic spam/shooting spam/teleports/summoning/buffed up hordes that quickly become too overwhelming for the weaker player to deal with. There's very little middleground.

Unfortunatly, Saurus are, fluff-wise, a very similar sort of primal rip-and-tear type fighter. Just with a bit more brainpower behind it for actual flanking and whatnot. So yeah, there'll be some overlap and seraphon should very much have acces to your basic "charge and smash the hulking monsters into the enemy"-type lists.

Though my personal favorite solution would be to actually use the combined arms aspect to create something really unique that no other faction really has. Instead of the current approach where skinks & Saurus are essentially 2 seperate factions with little to no interaction. Given the completly opposite nature of skinks & saurus this should be fun and most importantly it makes sense so much more sense than this weird split.

In all seriousness, why does GW not encourage mixed lists?

 

I distinctly don't find this to be the case, and i think that's kind of the crux of the whole argument. As usual, i think we may have to agree to disagree.

I do get what you're saying and I think part of me just wants to be blindly optimistic about everything which is kinda lame haha. I think I just have a lot of fun playing seraphon and sometimes wish that a little too hard on other people.

I'm not sure, I think they should absolutely be a mixed arms list. I think you adjust what models have the skink keyword and give the saurus models a little love and you're golden.

I don't think saurus are great in all scenarios. I just don't think they are "obviously flawed". Slaangors are obviously flawed. Gluttons are obviously flawed. Plague Monks are obviously flawed. Point for point, saurus are not that bad.

105 points for (in coalesced):
4+ save
2 attacks at 4s/3s/-1/1
2 attacks at 5s/4s/0/1
-1 damage

Compare that to demonettes, pbs, freeguild, bloodletters, ardboys, even wardens. It's not THAT far off. The biggest problem with saurus is they are on 32s and 3.0 hates infantry on 32s. Still, they should definitely, definitely be better and there's been tons of great suggestions scattered across the internet on how to do that. I also think if skinks were worse (or more of the skink buffs worked on saurus) you'd see them more as is.

 

Will probably make some comments on the current conversation when I'm not tired, but here's the warscroll for the Sylvaneth flying archers. Like most 3e flyers, they get looser coherency. Their basic attack profile is meh, but d3 mortals on 6s to hit and the ability to retreat after using Unleash Hell make me think they'll be amazing screens and objective takers. I'm thinking you take a max-sized unit of these guys to throw in front of your army, shoot with them, unleash hell when they're charged and then just fly away.

But another thing that came to mind is that this might be something we see for Skinks in our 3e book since the Fangs of Sotek CA is almost certainly going away. Return of Wary Fighters maybe?

 

yay, more powercreep.

In all seriousness though, D3 mortal wound on 6's seems like a lot, especially for what appears to be a relativly weak skirmish unit based on his other stats. How are they planning to balance this? Make them attrociously expensive? They come in super small units?