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AoS NEW *rumor*

I think those two back to back responses from @Kilvakar and @Canas explain what i was trying to get at better than i could.

@Kilvakar mentions Mawtribes as a good example of favoritism. @Canas seems to be saying (and correct me if i'm wrong) that mawtribes is NOT an example of favoritism. Cities is used an example of the negative, when its already been noted that this book was actually a very clear, easy example of a true passion project. It's one of the few books that's been publicly acknowledged as a "passion project" by Sam. How can SCE be a favorite but also fall by the wayside?

I'd also like to think that not giving seraphon mount traits is an intentional choice, not just an "oopsies, we don't like them as much so we gave them less."

It feels like the examples are all over the place and inconsistent even between people who "agree."

I would say that it definitely feels like favoritism when some books are written poorly, are lacking features that are commonplace in the game nowadays, have weak or useless rules, or lack a clear coherent theme to their army
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe some armies are just harder to balance or the end result isn't as effective as they thought.

It feels strange to me to blame it on favoritism when so many other variables seem to be more obvious. Business decisions (not a popular range) or just plain inconsistency in rules writing seem to explain a lot of this. Especially when throughout the 30 year time period we are referring to, the "favorites" have changed dramatically. I'd argue that lends itself more to the sheer difficulty of rules writing rather than true malice or favoritism.

I also think armies like SCE, LRR, idoneth, and OBR had a leg up because they weren't "brought into" aos. They were designed, from a model and a rules standpoint, together for Age of Sigmar. No other armies can make that distinction.

I dunno. I'd say it still seems odd to lump all your painpoints under the umbrella of "i guess GW just didn't like this army." I think it's just really, really hard to create this many unique, distinct armies, while also maintaining some semblance of balance.

I'm loving the discussion, so please dont' take this as an insult but your argument makes it seem like unless every army has amazing rules and incredible lore that all tie into a distinctive model range with regular updates... it suffers from not being a "favorite." Which is kind of every army, you know?
 
I do agree with @Putzfrau that it's not necessarily favoritism per se. It's just that it feels like it when some battletomes clearly have better written, better fleshed out rules than others. It's definitely not malice, not liking a particular army, or wanting one army to be better than the other. And it definitely is subjective, depending on how you look at it. I tend to look at things less from a "how strong is this army compared to Seraphon" viewpoint and more from a "did the writers seem to know what they were doing when they wrote this" perspective. Our army is strong, though not overpowered, but they clearly did not know what they really wanted to do with us when they wrote our new battletome. And you're right, a lot of that probably has to do with the difficulty in writing rules.

And I 100% agree with you that the armies that were designed brand new for AoS do seem to be in a better place overall. I still think it boils down to enthusiasm more than anything else. This also ties into the "new armies are OP" argument. With new armies, they get to do pretty much whatever they want. They're writing new lore, and they don't have to worry about trying to adapt a pre-existing theme into a new battletome. They get to start from the ground up. I still think that personal enthusiasm probably plays into it at some point. And I still think there is just a lot more energy and passion being put into the new tomes when compared to updating existing ones.

Putzfrau said:
Business decisions (not a popular range) or just plain inconsistency in rules writing seem to explain a lot of this.
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This is a good point. I'm curious as to what your opinion is on why they're inconsistent when writing rules, because it's clear that they are inconsistent and I think that is the core of the discussion. Why are they inconsistent? I know that some armies just aren't as popular as others, and there's always that aspect of new releases needing to be attractive to encourage people to buy them. Would you call that favoritism? Or do you think it's just by chance that some rulesets are very well thought-out while others appear lackluster or haphazardly put together?
 
Putzfrau said:
@Kilvakar mentions Mawtribes as a good example of favoritism. @Canas seems to be saying (and correct me if i'm wrong) that mawtribes is NOT an example of favoritism.
Cities is used an example of the negative, when its already been noted that this book was actually a very clear, easy example of a true passion project. It's one of the few books that's been publicly acknowledged as a "passion project" by Sam. How can SCE be a favorite but also fall by the wayside?
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Mawtribes is a weird one, there's aspects that seem to be done with great care and love (e.g. the allegiance abilities) but it's also a weird tome were the subfactions don't really interact for some reason.

With respect to cities, if that's a passion project; I would assume that what he's passionate about with respect to these factions is not what I'd say is important. If he's passionate about the old elves, dwarves & humans simply having a place to exist & preserving the legacy of the old armies. Then yeah, he's done a decent job. Though it'd have been infinitly better if they had become several seperate tomes but I assume that's outside of his control. If however he's passionate about making an actual cities of sigmar faction, where a mix of races live and work together, then I think he's done a rather terrible job as there's very little in there to encourage mixing of races. And well, it seems to be presented as the second, at least within the context of AoS.

With respect to SCE I meant that their status has changed from favorite to not favored. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Putzfrau said:
I'd also like to think that not giving seraphon mount traits is an intentional choice, not just an "oopsies, we don't like them as much so we gave them less."
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It might be intentional, but it does seem like a bad idea to leave out a potentially very fluffy ability like that. Especially as all the other factions with heroes who ride big monsters get them. Yeah it might be a intentional balance choice, but it feels kinda bad to be the one faction without traits despite being one of the factions for whom these mounts are one of the main draws.
Similarly, it seems extremly weird to me that we have no prayers. All our skink heroes are priests of some sort. Slann are called mage-priest. We constantly use divination, as well as ritual sacrifice. They're inspired by the aztec and mayan priests. The only thing more priesty in warhammer is the freaking ecclesiarchy. How in the world do we not have prayers? Hell, our skink heroes all already have special abilities they can use, why not just call it a prayer, throw in a list of 6 mediocre additional prayers which are outshined by these basic abilities anyway and get some easy fluff points?

Putzfrau said:
"I would say that it definitely feels like favoritism when some books are written poorly, are lacking features that are commonplace in the game nowadays, have weak or useless rules, or lack a clear coherent theme to their army"

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe some armies are just harder to balance or the end result isn't as effective as they thought.
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I think a lot of this is unconscious bias, not necesarly someone going out of their way to give their favorites the best & fluffies tomes. Like @ILKAIN said, people work a lot better when they're motivated. Maybe they just need to be a bit more carefull whom the put on which project, instead of bouncing them from tome to tome seemingly at random.

Putzfrau said:
Business decisions (not a popular range)
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That'd still be favoritism imho, just driven from a different point of view than "look at these cool dudes" :p

Putzfrau said:
or just plain inconsistency in rules writing seem to explain a lot of this.
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In all honesty, the extend of the inconsistencies is depressing at times. But I'd say that those are a matter of professionalism. Check the already written rules, don't write in a vacuum. Set up a basic database for it if needed. You've got 30+ years of experience, you should not be writing inconsistent rules in every other new rulebook anymore.

Putzfrau said:
I also think armies like LRR, idoneth, and OBR had a leg up because they weren't "brought into" aos. They were designed, from a model and a rules standpoint, together for Age of Sigmar. No other armies can make that distinction.
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Fyreslayers, Nurgle, Sylvaneth, KO, DOK, Slaanesh, Gits, SCE, basicly the entire undead range (the rewrite the went through was so extensive I'd say it counts as being redesigned from the ground up).

All of those are new to AoS. Not all of them seem to be favored. Though generally the proper AoS ones do seem better and more consistent.

Putzfrau said:
I dunno. I'd say it still seems odd to lump all your painpoints under the umbrella of "i guess GW just didn't like this army." I think it's just really, really hard to create this many unique, distinct armies, while also maintaining some semblance of balance.
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Not all of the issues are due to favoritism. Some will simply be due to incompetence or greed :p And sometimes it's just an honest mistake.

Aside from that maybe we don't need 20+ armies, maybe keeping the number more reasonable and instead of releasing 3-4 new armies per year they should release smaller updates for a larger chunk of armies each year. It'd go a long way to fixing the inconsistencies as well as they'd be looking over existing rules more often and you wouldn't get armies that fall behind years because the cyclus takes taht long.
 
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Kilvakar said:
This is a good point. I'm curious as to what your opinion is on why they're inconsistent when writing rules, because it's clear that they are inconsistent and I think that is the core of the discussion. Why are they inconsistent? I know that some armies just aren't as popular as others, and there's always that aspect of new releases needing to be attractive to encourage people to buy them. Would you call that favoritism? Or do you think it's just by chance that some rulesets are very well thought-out while others appear lackluster or haphazardly put together?
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Honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to the sheer difficulty of creating rules that feel distinct, but still balanced across an entire range of armies. I'm a writer in a professional, creative setting, and the amount of approvals, reapprovals, brainstorm sessions, dictated ideas and last minute changes can totally warp a great idea into a crappy one, or vice versa.

I also think some armies just lend themselves to more distinctive ideas. Sometimes people just have a stronger idea, and sometimes that's just the name of the game in a creative field. You want creativity to be this even layer you can apply to everything but it's more volatile than that. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, all you can scrap together is B+ ideas. Also, I think GW always tries to walk a fine line between what they think and what people expect. They may have had a really awesome, unique idea for the seraphon book, but they didn't want to alienate people who fell in love with the Space Lizards lore, OR the old school lizardmen stuff.

I do think they probably spend more time on some releases than others, and i think that's where the business decision comes in. LRR is a larger business investment, so they probably spent more time on the release than they might have on say, the BoC (or even the seraphon) release which coincided with no new models.

I'm sure they also have a ton of writers that rotate through these books, and i'm sure they all have unique skills and design philosophies. Combining those in a way a larger company like GW does will inherently create some weirdness in how it all blends together. A smaller company working on a game with a smaller audience can inherently create a tighter ruleset because there's just less people involved, less minds, etc.

I guess overall, it's a combination of a lot of things that are just inherent to working on a creative project, especially within a larger company. I think steps can be taken ro mitigate them, but sacrifices would have to be made elsewhere.

Canas said:
With respect to cities, if that's a passion project; I would assume that what he's passionate about with respect to these factions is not what I'd say is important. If he's passionate about the old elves, dwarves & humans simply having a place to exist & preserving the legacy of the old armies. Then yeah, he's done a decent job. Though it'd have been infinitly better if they had become several seperate tomes but I assume that's outside of his control. If however he's passionate about making an actual cities of sigmar faction, where a mix of races live and work together, then I think he's done a rather terrible job as there's very little in there to encourage mixing of races. And well, it seems to be presented as the second, at least within the context of AoS.
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Hm, I think you are simply looking at cities of sigmar in a different way than GW. Cities IS a conglomerate of separate city states. It's by definition, and by design, not a single unified faction. Id argue they succeeded in that.

It appears in this scenario, the problem is with your perception of what it should be.
 
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@Putzfrau I think you have a very sound argument there. While I never thought of it as literal favoritism, the inconsistency between rulebooks definitely makes it feel that way, and your points sound like a very logical explanation for that.

Now that doesn't mean that people don't have a right to not like it when certain battletomes get the short end of the stick, but I can say that I am agreeing with you on the point that it's not due to people liking or not liking a particular faction. Still sucks that they don't strive to achieve better cohesion with their writing, but I can admit that in a large company that can be difficult.

We know that new armies will probably always continue to have slightly more effort put into them, because they're new and they need to be good otherwise they won't get a good return on their investment. But another thing I definitely do agree with is that we don't necessarily need multiple new factions every year. If GW keeps up the current system of pumping out 2-3 brand new factions per year, then eventually the faction bloat will get so bad that we'll eventually get into the same situation as 40k where Space Marines get new books and models constantly, while other armies have to consistently wait years for rules updates, let alone new models.

There are so many factions in AoS right now as it is, and many of them are old imports from Fantasy. I wish they'd be willing to at least attempt to update the model range on the ones who are still stuck back in the finecast and metal days. And that goes for all armies, not just Seraphon. If they did this somewhat similarly to the way 40k will release new models for individual characters or update old sculpts on occasion, that would be amazing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think AoS has ever "updated" a model. They've released quite a few new ones, but I don't recall them ever going back and saying "here's the new version of this unit, or this character." I think that's the sort of thing they're going to have to do more of. They can't sustain the constant influx of completely new factions. At some point you have to find equilibrium. Just look at games like League of Legends where new characters are introduced constantly and the characters you like are never playable for long due to the constantly shifting meta. Hopefully they won't go that route with AoS!
 
Kilvakar said:
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I 100% agree. Age of sigmar is quickly approaching army bloat and I dont think they should add any more, but they will because money. I think a ton of problems would be solved by just cutting back on the amount of armies. Updating model ranges is IMO a smarter direction but i dunno. I guess we can only cross our fingers and hope lol.
 
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Putzfrau said:
Honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to the sheer difficulty of creating rules that feel distinct, but still balanced across an entire range of armies. I'm a writer in a professional, creative setting, and the amount of approvals, reapprovals, brainstorm sessions, dictated ideas and last minute changes can totally warp a great idea into a crappy one, or vice versa.

I also think some armies just lend themselves to more distinctive ideas. Sometimes people just have a stronger idea, and sometimes that's just the name of the game in a creative field. You want creativity to be this even layer you can apply to everything but it's more volatile than that. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, all you can scrap together is B+ ideas. Also, I think GW always tries to walk a fine line between what they think and what people expect. They may have had a really awesome, unique idea for the seraphon book, but they didn't want to alienate people who fell in love with the Space Lizards lore, OR the old school lizardmen stuff.
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True as that may be I do think they should be able to do a better job at it.GW is very consistently inconsistent with it's output. And after 30+ years I'd kind of expect them to be a bit more consistent as they should have systems in place to prevent the worst. Checking if a rule is phrased inconsistently shouldn't be difficult. Nor should it be difficult to do a quick check "have we included all the basic mechanics for unit-type X in this faction with loads of X". Yet somehow we get priests without prayers and inconsistent rules frequently get published that are F.A.Q.-ed 2 days later because how obvious the inconsistency is.

As for not wanting to alientate people; I think you win more fans by sticking to your creative plans than trying to appease everyone and giving a watered down comprimise.


Putzfrau said:
I'm sure they also have a ton of writers that rotate through these books, and i'm sure they all have unique skills and design philosophies. Combining those in a way a larger company like GW does will inherently create some weirdness in how it all blends together. A smaller company working on a game with a smaller audience can inherently create a tighter ruleset because there's just less people involved, less minds, etc.
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A bigger company with more resources can more easily set up rules and mechanics to check their output though. Yeah you run the risk of getting soulles design-by-commitee nonsense if too many people have a say. But setting up basic rules, like any faction with a focus on mounts get mount traits or any priest gets a list of prayers or even limits like "a maximum of X% of the units may be able to directly cause mortal wounds", shouldn't be too difficult and shouldn't immeadiatly create those soulles results

Putzfrau said:
Hm, I think you are simply looking at cities of sigmar in a different way than GW. Cities IS a conglomerate of separate city states. It's by definition, and by design, not a single unified faction. Id argue they succeeded in that.

It appears in this scenario, the problem is with your perception of what it should be.
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Might be, but I'd argue the CoS are presented as city states within which the various races live and work together. Now City A might have a bit more of a elven population and city B a bit more of a dwarven population so you'l see some inherent differences sure. But ultimatly none of those cities should be solely populated by say dwarves. Yet there's nothing in their playstyle that really indicates this. Dwarven heroes only buff dwarfs, Elvish heroes only buff their particular flavour of elf etc.. There's no battalion that encourages a combination of troops, there's no subfaction that encourages it either. Hell the only racial variation that's encouraged is that some cities are allowed to bring units from a completly different faction, like SCE or Sylvaneth. Why is that not encouraged for the races within the tome itself?
So yeah, it doesn't match with my perception, but I'd also say that my perception does correspond with what they advertise. Unless there's a bit of fluff somewhere that basicly states "non of these races actually live together, at best they all live within the same city walls but they all keep to their own districts and don't interact any more than strictly necesary cuz don't like eachother in the slightest". But I don't think there is, nor do I think that'd make any sense.

Putzfrau said:
I 100% agree. Age of sigmar is quickly approaching army bloat and I dont think they should add any more, but they will because money. I think a ton of problems would be solved by just cutting back on the amount of armies. Updating model ranges is IMO a smarter direction but i dunno. I guess we can only cross our fingers and hope lol.
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Has GW ever stated what amount of factions they're aiming for actually? Cuz just continuously releasing new factions isn't sustainable. Even if we ignore the health of the game, just practicly the amount of machines you need to keep up a steady supply of all your models is going to be a pain.
 
ILKAIN said:
Now why cant our Stegadons be that bad ass in the tabletop lmao!

epic video!
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Ofcourse you could make it look like this awesome action is happening. Tilt the head slightly up- or downwards(depending on the frame of the clip ;) ) add some greenstuff to fix the gap, and set up some enemy model, or body parts, in front or in the sky, just leaving the horns. :cool:

Grrr, Imrahil
 
Imrahil said:
Ofcourse you could make it look like this awesome action is happening. Tilt the head slightly up- or downwards(depending on the frame of the clip ;) ) add some greenstuff to fix the gap, and set up some enemy model, or body parts, in front or in the sky, just leaving the horns. :cool:

Grrr, Imrahil
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I more along the lines meant a mechanical rule to hold objectives. they have a decent mortals on charge rule.
 
unfortunately I see points rise to razordons/salamander
 
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