I’ve been thinking about AoS a lot following attending the SCGT 2016 tournament this weekend past. My thoughts have been in a spray of different directions and I’m going to try and organise myself a little through this blog post, topics to cover:
· SCGT wrap up
· Impact of SCGT pools
· AOS as a game
· Painting & modelling impact of AoS
SCGT Wrap up
I’ll open with saying I had a great time. The event felt very relaxed and social throughout, there was plenty of banter going on and hopefully it felt inclusive to everyone joining for the first time. Obviously I’m on old timer (did I go to the first ever SCGT, I think I did but can’t actually remember!) so I was seeing a lot of familiar faces plus a lot of new ones. Most of the usual suspects were there Facehammer, the Bens (Bad Dice), Black sun and Cheltnam Warchiefs. That said this was my first AoS tournament and I did notice a lot of people I didn’t know but clearly knew each other from earlier events under AoS so again really social and welcoming weekend was how I felt.
The games were all great. So much effort had been put into working up a pack of fun scenarios, similar to the prior year but a step up in effort and even further away from battleline of old and thank goodness for that. These were what made the weekend work. Had it been kills based I’d probably have won the same number of games but would have been very bored in doing so as the old formulaic ways of playing would have come back in.
I’m not going to go into individual games but I got to play Khorne Bloodbound & Daemons, Nurgle & Tzeentch Daemons, Tomb Kings, Seraphon, Skaven and a wholly mixed bag chaos army over the weekend. All these armies had different feel/synergy/themes to them. So for grand alliance that is 4 x chaos, 1 x order, 1 x death. More importantly (for my particular choice of army) I didn’t face Nagash, Archaeon or Stormcasts all of whom I’d expect to run roughshod over the top of my army! I massively struggled against the two summoning armies I faced. One I could have managed through better deployment & army selection, the other I have no idea what I could have done to work round it.
Impact of SCGT pools
Generally speaking the pools seemed to work well most of my games felt reasonably balanced but one thing I did notice was the scoring units of 5 models rules does favour large multi wound models as they can hold on as scoring models a lot more easily where I found my units got chipped away to 4 models losing effectiveness the whole time and then could be ignored once down to 4 guys.
The other thing that I found to be a frustration was the specific rules on my war machines meaning they didn’t score and yet often cost more pools than some equivalent monsters who had shooting on them that were scoring. I faced Bastilidons, Soul Grinders, Skull cannons all of which shot as well (or better) than me, were more survivable and were scoring units so I think there was a bit of historic bias in that particular restriction.
One thing I am curious over is the treatment of ‘legacy’ scrolls going forward. The two armies which I have put onto rounds are effectively out of the game, if legacy units aren’t allowed at events, which is slightly frustrating.
There will always be some balance issues and this year seemed to favour large monsters over other units. I’m ok with this given they were so under the cosh through a lot of 8thed so nice to see them hitting the table and it will be interesting to see how the scene reacts. Ultimately something has to be best under any pack so making it themed would actually be quite a nice touch.
AoS as a game
AoS was released to a fanfare of ragequitter pointing out that the game had removed all tactics and was skill-less. As predicted that was total nonsense. All the top players from 8th were still top in AoS and the focus & competition on the top tables was still apparent.
The smaller & more permissive ruleset seems to have actually cut out a bunch of the petty niggles that were ever present before, not saying it’s perfect there will always be some, with the unit specific rules being contained on the warscrolls there is less issue of internal conflicts which was often where 8th fell down.
Onto playstyle I noticed something that actually led to the title of this blog post. The gameplay and approach to the game appears to mimic Warmachine & Hordes quite a lot. People deploy to attack a front wave to soak up an opponents charge and then counter, moving the attacking style to waves rather than tank & flank (not that this was massively a thing before but waves definitely wasn’t outside bait and flee).
Armies often deploy tight and then, in WMH parlance, “unpack” to fill space and block options for opponents. I head chaos players talking of the importance of units like night runners to enable them to control space to restrict teleporting Stormcasts. Add in the command ability bubbles etc and the terminology seems to fit WMH.
That said there is a major difference in that it’s much lighter touch rules and premeasuring make it a less confrontational system. Interestingly the just announced v3 of WMH touts both of those things coming more into their game which I see as only a good thing.
The other difference in AoS is the combat phase being interactive I go/you go rather than just one army doing everything in their turn. This is possibly the change in game design that has happened over recent years that has most improved games for me. You no longer spend a turn developing elaborate plans to unwind across an extended period, instead you have to be responsive and reactive to changing situations.
AoS is still not quite fully interactive compared to modern skirmish games but at times gets some of that feel across, I don’t think WMH can go there without fundamentally changing the game to a pure I go/you go unit activation structure rather than army activation and I’m not sure they want to go there as it cuts across their competitive on the clock focus a little.
Not saying it’s a negative or positive thing but I wonder how much GW decided to retarget their game against WMH but aiming for a lighter less tournament focused market.
Painting & modelling impact of AoS
Overall I think there were maybe a few less ‘very pretty’ armies than prior years but not significantly so. Most people had gone to the effort of rebasing onto rounds and not just blue tacking on rounds for the games.
Looking at the armies on display as I went round the hall there was some army level impact which I felt was lost due to not being deployed in blocks/formations but that was mostly made up for by the look of individual models being improved. The big monsters were out in force (combination of pack & looking cool I assume) and many had clearly had a lot of love poured into them.
The model count in most armies was probably about similar given you have 150pools to play with for 100pts on the table. My army laid out 100 infantry, plus war machines and characters for about 120 models total. Of that I can think of 10 models that never got used across my 6 games, at some point every other option hit the table.
All that said I still really enjoyed looking round everyone's armies and seeing various cool themes or just unusual models I didn’t know well. One of the ones which got a lot of comments was an Idol of Gork wielding a realm gate over it’s head, I’ve no idea who’s it was but fantastic creativity.
That pretty much wraps up SCGT for me. In the week since I’ve been picking my brains over what to do next, I went into GW on a lunch break and picked up both the Order and Chaos faction books to help with crafting my next army. If I were painting a new army from the ground up I think it would be order. I’ve spotted a few combos in there that I’ve not seen anyone running yet that I think would be pretty powerful but in preference I’m just going to rebase some of my existing stuff and maybe add in a new unit or two. To that end I’m going with a Skaven heavy Chaos faction as my next port of call, maybe with some summoning and flamers thrown in for good effect/efficient pool usage!