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.