About points..

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Sangfroid
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Re: About points..

Post by Sangfroid »

Barking Agatha wrote:
Sangfroid wrote:A true points system should cover the models offensive capabilities against wounds, bravery, move and save some how.


Warhammer has never had a system like that!


Yeah but this is age of sigmar "add suitable raucous cheers and shield bashing noises here"

If we are looking at ideas for points this route seemed the easiest to fathom as it quantifies the strength of a model/unit for me though a rough approximate wound count will do for initial games while the world accommodates :-)
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Diobarach
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Re: About points..

Post by Diobarach »

Ok, one more attempt at this :) It's not points but there are people who are claiming this is legit:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3iUmocmCYCUWFRzcWdQTGcxS0U/view?pli=1

If not some people sure have some spare time on their hands...
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Re: About points..

Post by The Mattler »

You guys are missing the best part of the game: the fact that the deployment rules obviate the need for both a points system and a set army list. So you have to think about unit evaluation instead of accepting the (flawed) points values of previous editions? That sounds like a good thing to me.
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Re: About points..

Post by Jvh792 »

XD more rules! I'm so happy. I truly hope that is legit. What a dick move if it's not
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Re: About points..

Post by Sangfroid »

@the mattler that aspect of the game while interesting to explore is something that I cannot se working at a competitive tournament level which is a side of the game I really enjoy. Part of the enjoyment of "comp" is knowing that you are facing off against armies that while not balanced as such are at least comparable strength.

This then makes the games fun for me at least because it's means you set up and fight off and it's your skill and interpretation of the comp (as well as the match up and your opponents selection and tactics) it makes for a great game imo.

That said playing against club mates and people I know and like/trust making use of the new system may work but even then I'd probably want a loose structure of X warscroll max etc..... As it is not fun (for me at least) playing totally unbalanced games.

You would play a game of chess against someone who began the game with 8 rooks instead of pawns....
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Re: About points..

Post by The Mattler »

Sangfroid wrote:@the mattler that aspect of the game while interesting to explore is something that I cannot se working at a competitive tournament level which is a side of the game I really enjoy. Part of the enjoyment of "comp" is knowing that you are facing off against armies that while not balanced as such are at least comparable strength.

This then makes the games fun for me at least because it's means you set up and fight off and it's your skill and interpretation of the comp (as well as the match up and your opponents selection and tactics) it makes for a great game imo.

That said playing against club mates and people I know and like/trust making use of the new system may work but even then I'd probably want a loose structure of X warscroll max etc..... As it is not fun (for me at least) playing totally unbalanced games.

You would play a game of chess against someone who began the game with 8 rooks instead of pawns....

As I said in another thread, choosing your army in Age of Sigmar is like choosing a team composition in professional Dota, League of Legends, or Heroes of the Storm, which takes an enormous amount of familiarity with the various Warscrolls and the ability to evaluate units and their positions as the composition of both armies evolve from mutual pressure. When the skill gap between players is small, you get balanced games (much moreso than with GW's points systems), but if the skill gap is large, the games will be lopsided. Oddly enough, Age of Sigmar is more competitive than 8th edition because you now have to engage strategic skills during deployment as well as tactical skills during the game; a significant deficiency in either area will result in defeat. The main difference is that, in Age of Sigmar, the cerebral part of the game is deployment, whereas it was movement in WHFB 8th edition. I'd happily lose a little of the complexity of movement for a huge gain in nuanced army selection and deployment.

In Age of Sigmar, you and your opponent get to write the comp rules for every game you play, as you play it, and if the armies aren't balanced, it's because one player didn't know what they were doing. If you like getting handed someone else's canned system, fine, but all of the elements you claim to enjoy about tournament comp are present (and then some!) in Age of Sigmar's core rules.

Translation into your chess analogy: you and your opponent draft pieces, and if one player ends up with all rooks and the other all pawns, the player with all pawns doesn't have the brainpower to distinguish a rook from a pawn in the first place. The pawns are an exaggeration, though, since none of the units in Age of Sigmar are as bad as pawns are in chess; instead, you build your forces from the back row pieces.
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Re: About points..

Post by Sangfroid »

I agree with a lot of your points and I am actually very excited by AoS, but in DoTa (i have never played it) do you not both have a equal member team (I.e 5 people)? That's the only thing lacking in AoS you can take 5 I can take 500 even though you get sudden death conditions its a non game really.

Now I know that people will not get many games if they continually field silly armies (at either extreme) and also that most peeps will agree a sensible game and have lots of enjoyment, but at the end of the day the lack of structure has ostracised a lot of long term gamers and so peeps are looking for it. Here the thread is about points so if you were choosing to go down that route then a true analysis of the capabilities of each model should be made (hence my Half baked attempt at maths above :-) ) then leaving the special rule and scaling combos of army section as open for selection/manipulation by the general to get the best out of their choices. When I first played warhammer you paid a cost for each point of characteristic GW moved away from that (thankfully) and this has evolved over the years now into the warscrolls which I think if you compare like for like scrolls they are pretty well balanced or at least within acceptable deviation for both fun and competitive. 10 dwarfs v 10 orcs is a dice off but add in the depth of abilities, heros, etc... And you have something very different :-)

Personally I actually like the warscroll limit or wounds limit, I know peeps think that just means everyone is going to take stormvermin over slaves but like you have noted sometimes the slaves will perform a function on the field better, I need that structure currently as I only get to play a game a week maybe two if I'm lucky and I want to distill that free time into as fun a game as possible.

I played a few games against the horrific uncomped end times characters and lists to help some club members prepare for tourneys and they were just awful non games I hope that when AoS tourneys do take off they do not degenerate into similar, spending a weekend away from family and hard earned cash for that would be disheartening
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Re: About points..

Post by The Mattler »

Sangfroid wrote:I agree with a lot of your points and I am actually very excited by AoS, but in DoTa (i have never played it) do you not both have a equal member team (I.e 5 people)? That's the only thing lacking in AoS you can take 5 I can take 500 even though you get sudden death conditions its a non game really.

You're right, the teams in those games are all five characters, but the catch is that all of the those characters players are designed to be roughly the same power level even as they fill different roles. Effectively, the balancing is at the model level in those games. However, Age of Sigmar is balanced at the unit level, and those units contain a variable number of models. The catch is that the player, not the company, does the balancing based on the context in which the unit is operating in a particular game. In Heroes of the Storm, you can't have one player selecting an elite hero on a dragon and another selecting a peasant bowman because choices those aren't balanced at the model level. However, in Age of Sigmar, the player gets to determine how many peasant bowmen they'll need to form a unit capable of taking down that hero on a dragon. The player fielding the hero on the dragon then gets to select another unit that can deal with the bowmen, etc. It's a kind of bidding war with the added gamble of Sudden Death objectives.

There aren't going to be '5 vs. 500' games you described. Let's say I decided to deploy 5 models and pass after you deployed 5. If you then wanted to field another 495 models, I'd make you deploy every single one of them and play the full game while I pick Endure for Sudden Death and hide behind a rock. Even if you won, you'd still have to pack up 500 models. Who really lost that one? ;)

Sangfroid wrote:Now I know that people will not get many games if they continually field silly armies (at either extreme) and also that most peeps will agree a sensible game and have lots of enjoyment, but at the end of the day the lack of structure has ostracised a lot of long term gamers and so peeps are looking for it.

As I said, the silly armies aren't going to be a problem once people wrap their heads around the fact that counterbuilding against anything is the point of the deployment rules. You do need a diverse collection, though, which is the hidden incentive to buy more GW products. As for the structure, I find it hard to believe that Warhammer Fantasy Battle can have eight editions, and now Age of Sigmar is supposedly the straw that broke the camel's back. I started playing in 4th edition, back when magic items were truly bonkers and the magic system relied on a deck of cards, but over the years the fundamental considerations remained unchanged despite mechanical revision. You still have to figure out how to remove your opponent's models while keeping your own on the table. Age of Sigmar is no different in that respect, but I worry that some members of the community are just too set in their ways to realize how much freedom they've been given.

As for the rest of your comments, please accept the following article I wrote as proof that GW's points system is nonsense at the best of times: The Mattler's Mathhammer: Eldar Tanks (7th Edition). If you want a points system (or equivalent), you have to be able to evaluate units correctly, and that takes an enormous amount of time. The learning curve for Age of Sigmar's deployment phase is extremely steep, and there is no quick fix; since you build your list to an ever-changing subset of information over a short time, it will be experience, critical thinking, and intuition that will be more of an asset than the calculations you're asking for. Those calculations give you a crude starting point, but the implementation is much more complex even if you had all that information at your fingertips. The maths will help you decide which models you want to bring with you (i.e. a selection of the tools you're most comfortable using in various roles), but the appropriate unit sizes and exact combination of units are only determined in game.
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Re: About points..

Post by Diobarach »

Jvh792 wrote:XD more rules! I'm so happy. I truly hope that is legit. What a dick move if it's not


Sorry mate, they are from a GW store in Toronto apparently, so take that for what it is worth.
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Re: About points..

Post by Rork »

Looks like they've copied and pasted from PP's tournament scenarios ;)
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Re: About points..

Post by Dalamar »

I'm sorry The Mattler, but you are dead wrong.

There is nothing cerebral or tactical about "one upping" your opponent by countering his every deployment.
All you need to do is put down a similar (or better, the same) unit at 132% the number of models so you never reach the magical 33% sudden death scenario.

That is if you want to actually push models around. Otherwise you put down Screaming Bell and Kairos and win automatically in your first hero phase.
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Re: About points..

Post by Calisson »

Dalamar wrote:you put down Screaming Bell and Kairos and win automatically in your first hero phase.
Would you care to elaborate?
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Re: About points..

Post by Jvh792 »

screaming bell, you roll a 13 on 2d6 and win the game... Kairos lets you choose what any one die roll will be. Nothing says you can't choose an impossible to roll number, so...
ANYWAYS. Those goofy rules are more of homage to the old world and it's characters and lore.

I still find that this is the one thing I just cannot get on board with about AoS. I can't write a list... Which means I don't know what to bring. It's this big anxiety causing thing that is constantly standing between me and EVERY SINGLE GAME OF AOS. It drives me nuts.
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Re: About points..

Post by Jvh792 »

Also, Dalamar, I've found that if you play a smaller game with a LOT (I mean way more than what is suggested in the rules) of LOS blocking and impassable terrain, it can actually be tactical and fun. Give it a try. The terrain really makes of breaks this game IMHO.
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Re: About points..

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Jvh792 wrote:Also, Dalamar, I've found that if you play a smaller game with a LOT (I mean way more than what is suggested in the rules) of LOS blocking and impassable terrain, it can actually be tactical and fun. Give it a try. The terrain really makes of breaks this game IMHO.


But if you want to play a skirmish game , go play Infinity its amazing, not just rather fun.
I thought my kids would enjoy AoS, (8 and 9) they didn't. My 9 year old mid game said, "Dad this game is stupid, I don't want to play any more", and it took like 2 sec for my 8 year old to agree to play something different.

My gaming group (5 clubs total in 5 cities) are slowly looking for other game we could just play, Kings of War is my choice, because I will be allowed to use all my WFB armies. But there will be a big vote so we all play the same game, and can do tournaments.
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Re: About points..

Post by The Mattler »

Killerk wrote:But if you want to play a skirmish game , go play Infinity its amazing, not just rather fun.

I agree, Infinity is an amazing skirmish game, but ranking up your dudes is still a smart idea in AoS. The large scale battles still work, and as some of the other forum members have already posted, many of the same maneuvering tactics are still valid despite different mechanics.
Dalamar wrote:I'm sorry The Mattler, but you are dead wrong.

There is nothing cerebral or tactical about "one upping" your opponent by countering his every deployment.
All you need to do is put down a similar (or better, the same) unit at 132% the number of models so you never reach the magical 33% sudden death scenario.

Notwithstanding the fact that you won't have identical collections, the maximum size of the deployment zones prevents you from implementing your quick fix even if you wanted to go to those extremes. Moreover, if you have any terrain at all, you won't be able to deploy symmetrically, initiative rolls will create swings in game state, and the gap in skill and personality between players will result in different decisions being made in otherwise identical situations.
Dalamar wrote:That is if you want to actually push models around. Otherwise you put down Screaming Bell and Kairos and win automatically in your first hero phase.

Jvh792 wrote:screaming bell, you roll a 13 on 2d6 and win the game... Kairos lets you choose what any one die roll will be. Nothing says you can't choose an impossible to roll number, so...
ANYWAYS. Those goofy rules are more of homage to the old world and it's characters and lore.

It's a permissive rule set, so you cannot select an "impossible number". The possible results of a D6 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6; Kairos does not have the ability to set the dice roll to any other number. In the Oracle of Eternity rule, if you replace "result" with "top face" you'll see how the grammar supports that interpretation. It doesn't say "a" or "any" result; the definite article indicates that the result must be drawn from the set of possible results. It's annoying that GW likes to use "dice" for both the singular and the plural, but the same logic applies regardless of the number of dice and how broadly you want to interpret the word "roll".
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Re: About points..

Post by Killerk »

Mattler sorry but your clearly working for GW, or are on some nasty drugs. Making you ither a lair or deluded. In short unreliable.

And the all your bable defending aos as something less then worthless is just sad. Example. You claim some maneuvering is usable. Well moving in a strait line doesn't count.
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Re: About points..

Post by Daeron »

Let's tone down the hostility shall we?
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Re: About points..

Post by toots »

Blood for the blood god!!
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Re: About points..

Post by Killerk »

Hostilities ? .... my response should not be taken as such in any possible manner. It's a taunt to answer his mockery. But in no way hostile.
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Re: About points..

Post by Falstaff »

Hi there,

I'm getting into AoS after I had to take off several months of WHF due to baby-break.

Immediatelly, I realized that there were no rules on how to pick an army and how army sizes are agreed upon. In this forum, I stumbled over the approach of counting wounds. I'm not sure that this will be viable for tournament play (clog field with dreadlords and sorceresses on dragons?)

So here's the approach of my local gaming store for our first tournament in August.

Each player selects 7 battlescrolls. For each game, the opponent may deny 2 battlescrolls from being used.
Max 3 warmachines
Max 2 monsters
Each battlescroll max 1
Minimum of 2 and maximum of 3 heroes (the opponent cannot deny all of your heroes but must leave you at least one)

Maximum unit size:
Formula: (wounds + attacks) * Bravery = cost/model. --> Each scroll is limited to 300 points.
If the warscroll is a heroe, he may cost 150 max (thus excluding some of the most powerful heroes).

What do you tink about this rather complicated approach? I think it has some potential and will certainly be tweaked after having been testet.
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Re: About points..

Post by Killerk »

It still doesn't fix the part that the game is dull boring, do to lack of rules that could make it interesting, pushing models forward and rolling 4+ best boring after an hour.
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Re: About points..

Post by Falstaff »

Hi KillerK,

I understand that you are frustrated so far. So was I when I first read the 4 pages of rules :) However, it's the game we all have loved for years.. so let's give it a chance.

The rules leave ample room for interpretation, so maybe we'll discover possibilities for strategy along the way!?

I am determined to give it a chance before I throw it away altogether.
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Re: About points..

Post by Killerk »

I've played a games with 1 page of rules, and had fun. So the lack of rules isn't the issue for me. Infinity had about 6-7 pages of core rules (I'm not fully up to speed on 3 ed.)

It is not true that ApE doesn't have any point system as it does, it uses wounds to calculate army strength.

What gets me is the stupidity of the rules, where the only way to have fun is to sit down with your opponent and negotiate how to play so the game is not going to be one sided, and then you just push a few models forward rolling 4+, as moving is irrelevant other then to get more models in to combat so you can roll more 4+, bringing what used to be any viraity of units is now pointless, you just want your best shooters and best combat models, rest is totally pointlessl to field as it is inferior, and you have no advantages by taking them as they the only thing that matters is wounds. Malekith is worth the same as 14 goblins or rats, and 4 ogers are worth more then he is, to me this is a whole new level of stupid.

And I played many stupid games because they were fun, playing AoS is not fun.
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Re: About points..

Post by Calisson »

Moderator @ Falstaff
This thread is about points.
You want to talk about comp. Please do it in your thread, which I will not close despite your suggestion.
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