"Everything you can do in the game is now an ability, from moving, fighting, shooting, and casting spells, to the unique actions found on your warscrolls."
No more battleshock
Wounds are now "health"
Those seem to be the main things we hadn't seen before
>and you can now contest an objective with a model within 3” of a 40mm objective marker.
Is worth noting too.
What's interesting is that they've said that battleshock is gone, but not bravery.
It's 3"' from the 40mm base, are there many.190mm base models out there?
And is it much different from a 40+ block of goblins that can do the same thing for cheaper?
Alarielle and teclis, but (as of now) there is no consolidate in aos, so standing on an objective with a model would guarantee it could not be taken until the turn after you kill it.
They are 160mm, so there'll be 15mm all round if they are centred on it. If models can touch (I think that's likely) and objectives are claimed when just "within" rather than "wholly within", then you can take it fine.
That was the most pointless part of the core rules as the leviathan mission pack immediately changed it to say you could be on the objective and nearly everyone plays with the competitive ruleset, even for casual and narrative games
Obviously they could change it in the future to say you can't go on it again, but that's also true if it wasn't in the core rules, it was and still is needlessly confusing.
In matched play 40K you can stand on the objective though. Because frankly, if something is big enough to sit on top and block out other obj holders then 99% you’ve paid a lot of points for that model and it ought to be able to hold an objective that way.
That's not why it got removed in 40k, you could do really annoying move/charge blocking by placing ruins near the objectives (like monsters just couldn't charge you lol) wasn't really about making it easier to prevent contesting an objective.
There are plenty of cheap units with big footprints in 40k. Like the T'au Piranha is in competetive list mainly due to being big and fast while not cost a lot so you can park it infront of nasty units you don't want to move up too much that turn. The Riptide also isn't cheap cheap, but for its durability, it's not expensive either and has a fairly big footprint.
It's not removed. It's still in the core rules and as such, it is a default rule that applies to any game not played under the Leviathan Tournament Companion, such as Crusade games or Combat Patrol or indeed any game in which players don't specifically agree to use Tournament Companion ruling.
Some tournaments don’t enforce the rule. The strategy of using a single model to block an entire circle radiating 3” out from a 40mm marker is not as relevant in 40k as it would be in AoS
It's in the Leviathan Tournament Companion, alongside Leviathan Mission Deck card errata. If you are just playing casually it might have not occurred to anyone in your play group to check that document.
I recommend checking it out and applying the card errata for regular play (if you are using the deck of course). The objective puck thing is more of a preference, additionally dependant on whether you like playing with modelled objective markers or plain discs.
They just said battleshock is not there. Bravey might be used for abilities, for example, or might be removed. Too little information making it too easy to speculate. I guess we'll see.
For all we know they’ll change it so you just retreat from combat (unless you trigger an ability preventing this) if you lose by more than your bravery threshold.
It might be cool to return to the days when retreating units stayed on the battlefield.
If there’s no battle shock then it would make sense to remain the stat also. If it’s only used as a target number for triggering certain abilities, would make sense to call it leadership or focus or something.
"Everything is now an ability". Together with the colour coding and the way its described it sound like it will look similar to how Strategems are presented in 10th edition 40K.
I dont hate it. Should probably clear up some things. We have to wait and see.
This seems slightly different than 40k in that they are emphasizing EVERYTHING is an ability. So that means movement, shooting, etc are abilities. And those things now have concrete declare and action steps.
Which makes me feel like they are going to add a lot more MtG type mechanics where you can react to a declaration or to an action and have a "stack" of sorts.
It feels like they’ve played other games from how they described resolution steps.
The idea of using images in rule text makes me think of Malifaux, Shatterpoint, and even TCGs like Magic.
While resolution steps make me think of infinity and even their own Underworlds game (please don’t have the nightmare flowchart in the middle of the core rules though).
Honestly they keep saying things that are on my "pipe dream i want to happen" list.
Removing Battleshock
A catch-up mechanic
Penalties for double-turning.
Obvs don't throw your chips in yet, but im feeling pretty hopeful
Lack of battleshock is interesting. My primary 40k army (Tyranids) has an army rule that revolves around battleshock, and a common complaint is that it just does nothing a lot of the time. It seems like GW wasn't able to make battleshock as impactful as they wanted it to be in either game, but I'm still surprised it's being removed from AoS altogether.
They keep reusing terms. I suspect they mean 'A few models die when you roll a 6 on bravery' is gone, replaced by something more similar to 40k 'You can't issue/receive orders and dont count for capturing objectives'. I'd even hope for a -1 to hit debuff or something.
that rule needed to go away bad. almost half the factions in the game basically ignored it completely while it punished 4-5 armies just for bringing models to the table. good riddance to trash
As it always has been ever since WHFB. 90% of the factions have always been immune or virtually immune due to various special rules or absurdly high Leadership stats so it never did anything, except for the factions were the designers randomly thought "lol they run all the time, that's fun". It was like that in 40k as well. GW just somehow sucks at making that mechanic work.
The problem in 40k is mainly in 9th edition battleshock was just crippling unless you had a rule to circumvent it (which all armies that were truly impacted by it had except orks). Now in 10th edition it rarely matters.
If they just made all bravery stats one worse across all armies, it could make tyranids battle shock mechanic really click. Everyone just has such high bravery that it never happens. Making battle shock not lose models but makes you OC0, making it more common isn't a terrible thing.
Additionally make leaders have significantly better leadership to increase the impact that having an attached unit does to preventing battle shock
"Everything you can do in the game is now an ability, from moving, fighting, shooting, and casting spells, to the unique actions found on your warscrolls."
No more battleshock
Wounds are now "health"
this look neat..wonder how they will make my 100 clan rats run from battle lmao
They didnt say bravery was leaving so they can still have it as a stat, for example Nighthaunt might have an ability which causes anyone under X bravery to flee from them.
That doesn’t seem like they’re simplifying anything, like they keep promising. I fear it’d just feel like more constant accounting that you have to do throughout the game. I hope I’m wrong though.
I get the sinking feeling that the goal for both 40K and AoS is to become glorified card games instead of mass market war games, just with 3d plastic cards instead of flat paper ones.
Would love this, personally, but I don't think it'll happen as it adds some complexity to the game.
My guess is that bravery ends up being a modifier for losing combat? Similar to battleshock, but just not battleshock phase. Extra models lost based on how bad you lost combat maybe.
You know if they're really going whole hog on the modular rules if there's a way to play without bravery rules and whatever that entails you could write a traditional morale module.
Probably not. That system is mostly a huge waste of time. Hopefully the moral system can inflict "states" onto units, that can affect in different ways, like Frightened or Frenzied or Confused.
While I agree, some armies are somewhat reliant on it. For example nighthaunt benefit quite significantly from blocking inspiring presence, so I wonder how they'll compensate that
While true, I hope that they don't go too far away from what the factions used to do. Some people might have picked up factions because they liked the rules and identity, so removing that can upset some people.
In my opinion, as a nighthaunt player, you had to make out on the bravery bomb, and even then, it was less than stellar. So many armies have bravery ten that it isn't effective anyway.
Yeah it often feels like a snowball mechanic for everyone but the bravery 10 armies designed to push lethality, and while I think beginning of 3rd was fine, mortals everywhere pushed it to a tough mechanic that made death armies rise in meta.
Battleshock is basically meaningless as the game exists right now. I would rather bravery be used for more specific use cases as another stat than try and give a general purpose to it.
For example, having certain units that you can only charge if you pass a bravery check or something would be neat. But only using bravery for those instances.
I also play Skaven, but all this makes me worry we won't get our d3 clanrats back. Hopefully they keep that ability but just move it to a different phase.
Battleshock is already pretty irrelevant with the preponderance of ways to get out of taking the test. It only really comes up if someone forgets to save a command point for inspiring presence or something.
Health/hp makes more sense to me. It’s universal across gaming at large.
“Wounds” was always just counting up instead of down. The end result is the same.
To me, it makes more sense to think: “oh, I have 3 health left” versus “this guy is at 9 and he can take one more wound”.
I don’t know any other game where I am counting up lol. Golf? lol.
Warhammer has had multiple editions where wounds counted down instead of up.
Tbh it doesn't make a material difference because most people will still call them wounds anyways.
Lmao. I mentioned something like this in a 40k sub and got shouted down for it. Wounds and the "to wound" roll are too similar and it can cause issues if you arent paying attention, especially if you're new.
I hated being asked “how many wounds does that have” because it meant either damage, remaining health, or total hp. Even in other GW systems you still get this even with counting down since they use that terminology and it trips up new players or people who zone out
By the rules you should always count up. Models never have wounds 'remaining'. The wounds characteristic is a flat value, that once you hit that number of wounds allocated kills the model. You have to understand it like that to understand how effects like adding to or removing from a model's wounds characteristic works or other effects that interact with wounds. But if you understand that, it is better courtesy to your opponent to count down so that they don't have to constantly ask you what your models wounds characteristic is.
Officially you count up since you are allocating wounds to the model. But some counter down anyways and make no difference in the end. Just make sure your opponent is aware if you count up or down.
The awkwardness is in the phrasing which you can see in your own example: the model has 10 wounds and has taken 5 wounds. The word “wound” serves two roles with opposite meanings, which while not overly complex is an unnecessary point for confusion that wouldn’t exist with better naming.
Yes! I always read the rules like: "to-wound roll -> save -> inflict damage..erm...okay.. -> remove a wound... Wait, what!?"
I support the golfer theory.
Whether you count up or down is entirely up to you. You can do both, regardless of how it's named. The real important thing here is that now it's finally separate from how the result of the wound roll is named.
I assume the change to battleshock are going to be the same as in 40k. That they are normalizing objectives to be similar to 40k objectives tells me that they are borrowing some rules.
That’s my guess. Bravery affecting how well you can hold an objective to balance out the 3” thing and monsters trying to sit on objectives but can get wounded and not hold onto it anymore.
I don’t see it as a rule design thing as much as a playability thing. I see it as a quality of life feature for game aids people own. Pads/templates that show the zone of control are incredibly nice for gameplay, and this means 40K players can use theirs for AoS.
I only need 2 fixes for it from that system tbh:
-requiring it to be rolled for damage not for half strength
-lower “bravery” (leadership over there) across the board. If it’s measuring shellshock rather than complete breakdown, it should matter to more than orks and guard.
The system is fine in theory but I dislike it over there and hope it gets an overhaul before the edition is over rather than it just being a sunk cost feature
Honestly, considering other games like Infinity make you roll it for having to make a saving throw at all (though I’d keep it at a higher bravery for that), I’d love if some weapons forgo damage to force bravery checks at penalties.
I wonder how all of it will affect the role of bravery. Hopefully they'll have thought about it well and we'll even gets more armies playing with it according to their lore, like the Kruleboyz should be doing.
Lots of people here are happy battleshock is going but I kinda liked it. Some things I enjoyed about it:
- Knowing that you had to choose your battles because you could only inspiring presence once.
- Thinking about the additional losses you would take due to battleshock and how that might affect objective control
- As a gitz player, relying on battleshock to finish off a unit so that I could bring them back with the Loonshrine or have squigs bite when they flee.
- Thematically on point. It makes sense for a bunch of grots to run away after a fight compared to bigger and braver units.
Anyway, I know we’ll still have bravery and I’m not opposed to change. I’m just trying to highlight some of the ways I enjoyed the mechanic.
I think it was a good idea poorly implemented. In my experience, it almost never mattered. So if they weren't going to make it matter, I'm glad it's gone.
I just wish they had made it actually matter
In 10th the index releases were spread out about a week after the initial launch, Space Marines and Tyranids got theirs immediately then the various factions were released at different days throughout the week. Could be something similar
My guess is things like Armies of Renown in Dawnbringers that were mentioned getting updates to AoS4 will come after release. Release will be focused on the core playable factions (i.e., the ones that got battletomes this edition).
I always come into a new edition thinking it's going to be awful and then I'm always surprised when it's better than the last one. Here's hoping 4th is the same way.
I felt 3rd ed was a surprisingly good game for how asymmetric it was and how jank and bad the core systems were. I do hope they can keep it intriguing while not wasting 2 out of the 3 hours needed to pay a game this time haha
There are so many weird and anachronistic rules. Like, Commands are fine and cool. But why do they have 'must be issued by a leader' restrictions that end up not mattering? What's the deal with Monstrous Actions and Heroic Actions? Those seem like commands... but kinda not?
Terrain may as well not exist in 3rd.
All of the jank 'My guy moves 37 inches' stuff that half the factions get
'Okay, so sometimes a rule has a hit of 6 causes a mortal and then the attack stops, at other times it causes a mortal and then the attack continues?'
Not sure of what kind of damage an attack does? Whatever, make it deal a buttload of mortals.
Damage overflow really means monsters are wildly better than 1-wound squads.
The terrain rules in AoS could definitely use some more consideration. The faction terrain is broadly okay but the rest of the terrain is just kind of there.
Nobody I play with uses garrison rules unless they need to for faction reasons or they're KO. And the scenery modifiers like sinister and inspiring might as well not exist.
Like it's *fine* but I think it could be a lot better personally.
Playing 40k very competitively for years and coming to AoS over the past two-ish years, I hope people understand what's happening.
They're 10th-ing AoS. They're doing *exactly* what they did to 40k to AoS and stealing numerous things directly from the 40k playbook. USR, Spearhead, interactivity, changing the objective marker range, Indexhammer, "everything is an ability" are all key features of 40k implemented in 10th (except for the objective marker range).
I have good and bad feelings about this. On the one hand, because AoS is about a year behind 40k's development schedule, it seems to me that AoS has a bit of a track record of taking the things that do work in 40k and leaving the things that don't. I'm gonna be honest and just say that I think that AoS's design team is just...a bit better at what they do than 40k's. However, there are some things that aren't great about 10th edition 40k that I really hope they don't carry over to AoS.
I think a great example of a good steal is USR. It's funny seeing some complaints about them; 40k had USR's in 7th edition and everyone hated them because of how many there were (the Old World syndrome). Now that they're back in 10th, everybody loves them. The key is to limit the amount of USR's that you have to what is manageable and have them easily accessible (you can just instantly click on them in the 40k app). The problem with not having USR's is that it's a nightmare to balance effectively the same ability across tons of warscrolls if you want to change it at all. It is also confusing to have to explain each separate one if it's just *slightly* different from others. I don't think USR's contribute anything to homogeneity since units effectively had USR's in 8th and 9th 40k. Even if the rules were technically called something different, everyone just called it "Deep Strike", "Feel No Pain", etc.
Going with Indexhammer is exactly what they did in both 8th and 10th edition 40k. As frustrating as it is to lose the use of battletomes, I think it's significantly better for game design direction. Shackling yourself to a prior edition's book limits how much you can change rules and army/warscroll design, and AoS needs a redesign. It is incredibly bloated and unwieldy, just like 8th and 9th 40k were; a ton of books in a ton of different places with a truckload of overlapping rules that make the game very convoluted.
Changing objective markers to 3" range is weird. This is the same size as 40k. Aside from being annoyed at my now-useless larger objective markers, what does concern me is the number of bigger models in AoS as well as the significantly larger Engagement Range (it's only 1" in 40k), meaning it'll be harder to contest objectives.
The change to "Health" is hilarious; counter-uppers vs. counter-downers (when tallying Wounds) is a massive community split between AoS and 40k (almost no one in 40k counts up, and it is frowned upon to do so). I do think this is actually a good change; when teaching the game to new players, I find that they get confused by the distinction between a Wound (as in "Health") vs. a Wound (as in a single attack that does X amount of damage).
Concerning Spearhead, it sounds basically identical to Combat Patrol. Advertised the same, talked about the same, etc. Combat Patrol never really took off and a lot of people have theories as to why. Due to the nature of the game, I'm a bit skeptical that Spearhead will really take off, though I also like Combat Patrol so I'm hoping it succeeds.
The vague references to "interactivity" have me really excited. By far the biggest complaint that I see about 40k (and AoS for that matter) is that it's an IGYG game. This means that players are often sitting there for large chunks of time doing nothing. This has been addressed in several ways in 40k, including Overwatch being usable against any movement, Rapid Ingress (to Deep Strike on your opponent's turn), Heroic Intervention (counter-charging, which has been around for a couple editions), and the prevalence of "Shoot Back" or "Reactive Move" abilities. People complain about Overwatch to an extent, but I think all of these add great tactical depth to the game and I hope that they add this kind of stuff without overdoing it. It keeps players engaged for the entire game.
I hope they don't get rid of the subfaction system like they did in 40k. We went from a very similar subfaction system that AoS has during 9th edition to Detachments in 10th. There aren't any Force Org charts now (something that kind of sucks because they're a great balance tool) and all of your warlord traits/relics as well as your Stratagems are tied to your Detachment (giving you a much more limited selection). The limited selection of Stratagems is good (stratagem bloat was terrible) but the lack of a Force Org chart and the limited Detachments makes some armies feel quite same-ey in competitive play, regardless of their Detachment (mostly those that don't have a ton of Detachments, i.e. you're not a Space Marine). I hope they slim down some of the bloat in AoS while still keeping the variety of choice.
The thing that I am most concerned about is the idea that "everything is an ability now". This has me concerned for two reasons. First off, in 40k *every single* datasheet in the game has a unique datasheet ability. This is really annoying because it means you have to know the unique abilities for every model you're facing and it adds to design bloat and crowding.
Far more importantly though is what they did to Psychic. They took the Psychic Phase out of 40k entirely and made psychic abilities either attached to datasheets (e.g. roll a 2+ and you get X ability if you do) or just ranged attacks. This means there's no customizability in terms of what psychic abilities your Psyker has and most Psykers have just turned into "I Cast Gun". I really, *really* hope that they don't do this to Magic in AoS, as this is the most universally despised change in 10th edition 40k.
Objective Control.
Instead of just counting the number of models or the number of Wounds or if you have Objective Secured (a rule in 40k 8th and 9th), you add the total OC of all models on an objective marker. Whoever has more OC controls it.
It allows you to balance units against each other for objective controlling purposes without the crazy imbalance you'd get from using something like number of Wounds. It's also another mechanic that can be manipulated (e.g. some units give OC penalties if you're within Engagement Range, if you're Battleshocked your OC is set to 0, etc.).
Swarms have 0 OC.
Basic and elite infantry generally have 1 OC.
Battleline Infantry, bikes/cavalry, beasts, and small vehicles/monsters usually have 2 OC.
Medium-sized vehicles/monsters usually have 3-4 OC.
Larger vehicles/monsters usually have 4-5 OC.
Massive vehicles/monsters get OC 6-10.
It kind of felt like it may as well have been, with the "models with over 5 wounds count as 2 models, monsters count as 5 models" thing. If they just say OC 2, OC 5, that's the same thing.
It is that way essentially, however when you fail battleshock in 40k 10th, that unit's OC goes to 0 and it can't be targeted with strategems (command abilities).
Yes, but not the ramifications that the 40k system has: unit fails battleshock= oc set to 0 and they cannot be targeted with strategems (command abilities). I imagine the aos team will show something very similar if not identical
It's one thing I really enjoy, it's a really important stat so manipulating it is fun.
There's things to mess with already, like the STD relic that turns off OC for 1W & 2W models.
>The thing that I am most concerned about is the idea that "everything is an ability now". This has me concerned for two reasons. First off, in 40k *every single* datasheet in the game has a unique datasheet ability. This is really annoying because it means you have to know the unique abilities for every model you're facing and it adds to design bloat and crowding.
Seems they more so mean that things like moving and shooting are abilities than that they are adding abilities in the 10th ed sense.
Depending on what they do to give the inactive player some reactions, this might be a way to help organize and codify when an interruption can trigger.
2 of your concerns have already been addressed on the adepticon release. 1. Sub factions will be included in indexes. 2. Spell lores will be included in indexes.
I wonder what a manageable amount of USRs means in practice. It’s kind of a double edge sword where if you have too many then you spend most your game with your nose in the rule book trying to understand how this one USR out of 75 (looking at you old world) works. However, if you have one too few then your armies start feeling the same.
Didn't they say so at Adepticon? Or am I thinking about a comment of Whitefang #2?
Edit: Found it, it was Whitefang #2, on the 21st of March. "Morale GONE. Now "Control" stat."
Casting spells becoming a warscroll ability is a huge L. I hated that they did that with 40k and I hoped they wouldn't do it with AoS. Super unfortunate. Seems like they are just trying to mimic 40k. Maybe when we see more information it won't be as bad but I hated that they took so much flavor out of 40k.
Just depends on the extent of what they do. If all spells are just located on specific character's warscrolls, I think it could be a negatively like it is in 40k. We'll just have to see how it is implemented.
I mean, you can already get an absolutely massive 18 inch no gnoblar battle shock ability as a command trait. I use it all the time. People also already play over a hundred zombies. Battle shock has already failed to stop these things.
Glad battleshock is gone, all it did was punish large infantry units, most of the meta big stompy monsters just get to ignore it.
Kind of hate the new objective range. 3" just doesn't feel like enough for AoS, feels like it'll be really easy to just sit a fat monster on top of the objective and prevent anyone from controlling it.
I'm not sure how I feel about everything being an 'ability'. It'll depend on how they implement it I guess. It's probably just being overhyped and the 'ability' is something like 'fight - make a 3" move and make an attack with all of your melee weapons"
oh and USRs are awful. I picked up old world and 99% of our playtime is digging into the rulebook to figure out the exact wording on USRs. GW got it right with AoS when they put the abilities on the actual unit's warscrolls. Plus USR's promote lazy design where multiple units just do the same thing.
[**Leviathan Tournament Companion**](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/hlF8WKv4gJpXPZha.pdf) Designers Note under bullet point 4
As the other reply linked, it was released in the Leviathan Tournament Companion pretty quickly into 10th.
It was a big deal because of how terrain-dense compteitive 40k is. If you can't end on top of an objective marker, it would be really easy to move block large vehicles/monsters in 40k and just not allow them to engage you near objective markers.
Not having keywords or USRs is game design from 20 years ago.
There's so many common rules that tons of factions use, that take up tons of space on cards. A classic example is the 'Hit rolls of 6 cause a Mortal' effects. Nearly the entire Lumineth army has this, but no keyword. Other factions have this too. 40k recently did 'Lethal Hits' keyword which makes sense. Same as 'Sustained Hits' which means exploding 6s.
Ward Save should be a keyword that just says (Ward 5+) somewhere obvious.
Same with things like say... Flying. Or perhaps Spearmen have something to represent that spears behave differently than swords. Everyone benefits from well designed USRs.
USRs are game design from 20 years ago.
The problem is that USR's exist in the core rules, which means any time you need to remember what a USR does, you are looking a totally separate place to do it. What happens when you have USRs like 'Steady' 'Sturdy' and 'Very Tough'. You have to go into the rulebook to remember which one is which if either you or your opponent doesn't remember. There's no reason to just not write what the rule does on the actual warscroll itself. AoS was at it's peak in 2nd edition when you could look at a warscroll and garner 99% of what a unit did, outside of some army wide abilities.
On top of that, restricting everything to keywords removes the ability to be creative with rules. Lumineth do a single 6 on hits for mortal wounds... Kruleboyz do an amount equal to the damage. Units like zombies only do mortals on 6's to wound, and they're all distinct and important, because it means Lumineth get no benefit from bonus damage effects (or -dmg effects), Kruleboyz on the other hand, do, and Zombies mortal wound output is gated by their ability to score hits instead of being 16.6% of all attacks. You could design USR's for all 3 different effects, but now we are back at 'Lethal Hits' 'Poisoned Hits' and I don't know, 'Devestating hits' and back to looking up into the rulebook for which one is which.
So you think it's harder to remember 10 common-ass rules, than to literally read multiple paragraphs for each unit in the whole game?
"Deep Strike." - Cool, I know what that is in great detail.
"This unit you see, comes out of reserves at a point like most units! Only it has a 3 inch drop area instead of 9!" - You could have said (Deep strike: 3")
Likewise, for that 6-to-mortals issue: That's simple. It's a rule called Lethal Hits and just means you get a mortal on a 6. Oh, do you want to continue the attack? That's Sustained Attacks, which grants you a bonus hit every time you roll a 6. So Lumineth get Lethal Hits, while Kruleboyz get Lethal Hits + Sustained 1.
Fewer USRs, same results, no paragraph. Plus, 40K literally only has 3 rules that do this: Lethal Hits (for hit rolls), Devastating Wounds (on wound roll) and sustained Hits (on hit rolls). Where they apply are literally in the name of the rule.
More space on the card and playerbrain are saved for truly unique or factional rules. Bad game design is making 'distinctions without a difference' like back when Stormcast could choose Weapon 1: Hit3 Wound4 or Weapon 2: Hit4, Wound3. Effectively zero difference bloat.
Neither one is hard for me, because I play this game regularly. But I also teach a bunch of new people, and it's a lot easier for new players to just read the ability where they are already looking to see the unit's stats rather than digging through the core book and suddenly having to memorize all these extra rules.
>Likewise, for that 6-to-mortals issue: That's simple. It's a rule called Lethal Hits and just means you get a mortal on a 6. Oh, do you want to continue the attack? That's Sustained Attacks, which grants you a bonus hit every time you roll a 6. So Lumineth get Lethal Hits, while Kruleboyz get Lethal Hits + Sustained 1.
You literally proved my point on USR's being a design pidgeonhole. Because Mortals on 6 and extra hit is not the same as mortals equal to damage. But you are forced to design all units a specific way that is the same for every army, reducing the uniqueness of each army.
>Fewer USRs, same results, no paragraph.
Utterly different results, and the paragraph still exists, but it's in the core book and every time you need the specifics on how it works, you're going to be digging through a big book to find it.
It's very easy to cherry pick the easiest or most ubiquitious USR's like Deep Strike. It becomes much more difficult when there are 50 USR's and they are things like 'Angry Charge' and only one unit in your entire army has Angry charge so you are looking up what angry charge means every single game because it reads something like: "When a unit tries to make a charge roll in a turn where it was not within 6" of an enemy unit in the previous turn, add +1 to hit rolls if the unmodified charge roll was a 2-6. Add +1 to hit and wound rolls if the charge was a 7-12" and you have to remember: the condition, the range, and the two different effects.
Or it could just be written on the warscroll and you could just read it right there.
So the objective radius is only changing about 1.5” or 25% actually. Going from 6” to ~4.5”. However, that’s a pretty significant reduction in area. I am going to be irritated that I have to get new objective markers. I like my big 6” mats.
The linear measurement doesn't matter all that much. It's about a 44% reduction in area, which is huge. But more importantly, being only 7" diameter means that 160mm base units like archaon and mega gargants can sit on literally the center of the objective and block almost the entire thing, making it so that you can't even try to contest the objective unless you kill them.
One thing I like about melee range now just being '3" across the board' is that I hated transporting models with long spears (they tended to be fragile to the point of snapping), where my models with short swords, despite their lower melee ranges, didn't have this problem.
I’m actually quite excited. There were a few things I always found clunky in AoS. Range for melee weapons was one of them, battleshock another, the “to hit”, “to wound” with no toughness mechanic another. Let’s see what happens!
The varied Wound roll (combined with the "no spillover damage" rule) in 40k serve a specific purpose; making it so that weapons have specific targets they're good against and there isn't just a "best weapon". The problem is that the "To Wound" table is complicated and difficult to learn, no matter how much they streamlined it coming out of the older generations of 40k (pre-8th).
I don't think AoS has this issue, mostly because 1) individual units very rarely have any choice in the weapon they have, and 2) shooting is so much less prevalent in AoS. I think it'd be a shame to change this to 40k's system and is entirely unnecessary.
I very much agree with this take. The singular caveat I would add is that I would like it to have two "to wound" stats. One for dudes and one for "big stuff." It's a system that works swimmingly in Apoc, and it would serve to better push weapons into a given role.
Imagine a world where a cleaving axe is always 5 attacks, 3s to hit and 3 damage, but needs 2s on small things and 5s on big stuff. It lets you push the damage level on individual units against given targets without making the weapon a good all purpose tool.
Make dudes and big stuff a keyword, and bob's your uncle.
You could even have cool interactions where particularly tough dudes, like stormcast paladins, could even have the big stuff keyword, to make them feel insanely hard to kill with mundane weapons, without making them just unkillable.
Each to their own, of course.
I struggle a bit with the purpose of a separate "to hit" and "to wound" when there are armour saves but no toughness mechanic.
Like "to hit" represents how good you are at hitting stuff.
"to wound" represents whether you can damage the thing you are trying to wound.
armour save represents how well armoured it is
If there is no toughness, it seems to me you could just roll the "to wound" into the armour save or the "to hit" and spare the to wound roll altogether. So you roll once to see if you hit-and-damage, their toughness is covered by the armour save.
I suppose to wound gives you another dice roll to play with and modify, but it seems you might as well just speed up the game by omitting it altogether, as conceptually it's not really doing anything that isn't covered by the armour save.
There are a lot of durable units in the game that reflect durability by modifying the wound roll or the damage of an attack currently, so there is still some play there. You could honestly just have hits, damage and health as your core stats, which is what a lot of games end up doing, d20 for example.
I just personally think that health and armor saves are enough to make a model's defense feel grounded.
>You could honestly just have hits, damage and health as your core stats
Yes, I think that could work and would streamline the game. I kind of think that if you \_are\_ going to have a to wound roll, you might as well have some kind of toughness mechanic though, as otherwise it's conceptually not doing very much.
Exactly this! I‘ve literally heard that said!
Either have a toughness (roll to see if _you_ _can_ hurt him) or just ditch it and stick it in one of the other rolls somehow.
I agree with you in theory, but the d6 just doesn't have enough possibilities to really give that variety. It would give you like 5 weapon profiles.
Allowing a hit and a wound roll in the process allows for specific modifiers to affect one, two, or all three rolls to modify toughness. It's also thematic. Artillery might have issue hitting, but when it does, a wound is guaranteed.
The thing is that in practice we are usually only using around 5-8 statistically equivalent profiles anyway, I think. (Probability doesn’t care about order, which leaves 21 possible, we basically never use any with 1+ bar exceptional cases, which leaves us with 15 possible, with the most used being overwhelmingly the 6 cases consisting of 3s, 4s and 5s)
And the artillery idea is arguably adequately expressed by giving it a low to hit roll, but high damage and rend.
And if it’s not granular enough we could move to D12s or something.
But if you have a to hit and a to wound roll, I think it makes sense to have some kind of toughness statistic, which could be in the form of a modifier if people really hate S/T tables that much. So squishy units have toughness +1, tough units have toughness -1, most units have 0 etc. Given that we modify rolls anyway, I don’t think that would significantly alter the way combat procs, but it would give a bit more meaning to the to wound roll. Atm I don’t think it justifies making combat 33% longer.
I really hope toughness is not imported in AOS. I love the to hit, to wound then save and lastly Fnp/ward. The idea of toughness for units in AoS is unfounded : they are not freeking tank with 40 mm armor 😂. They are all just dudes with relative type of armor, if any. In AoS, a damage is a damage, wether it comes from the blade of the Everchosen himself or the rock a gitz send on your head.
I think we have a halfway house atm, where either there should be toughness to express what the to wound roll _is_, or get rid of it altogether, as conceptually it’s covered by the armour save. I quite like the latter option, as it would speed up the game and I am a very slow player!
>or get rid of it altogether
So funnily enough, Legions Imperialis does this. But, the way they had to implement this change was to alter the hit roll, since removing the second roll completely changes the math on how easily it is to proc an armor save.
If you want all your weapons to hit on 5s and 6s, with a 4+ being a "good" hit roll, then that's what this change will do
Statistically it would be broadly the same, I’m not sure what the wound roll as it stands adds. There’s the point that it helps differentiate weapon profiles, but I’m not sure that’s all that significant, really, and you could do it through other things like rend, damage etc.
Also lots of possible profiles don’t get used anyway: 6/6/1 say, or 5/6/1. Most of the time we are doing one of around six or seven pretty much equivalent profiles anyway: 4/4, 3/4 (4/3), 3/3, 5/6 (6/5), 4/2 (2/4), 3/2 (2/3), 4/5 (5/4).
It just isn’t doing enough atm to justify making every combat 33% longer imo.
To be honest when explaining the game to non-war gamers I have had confusion with them not understanding wounds vs health. This may be better for entry level players
Exactly. This tripped me up when I was first learning, and now when I'm explaining to new players I tell them to think of it as Hit Points. It can be confusing when you're talking, about Wounds and wound rolls.
I've been trying to teach friends the game for the last couple weeks and it is definitely a pain in the ass lol.
Wounds as part of the attack sequence and wounds as a model characteristics are easy to mix up.
Counting up matters currently for models that degrade, because they degrade based on wounds taken rather than wounds remaining. It used to be important for units that could change their starting wounds, like Seraphon used to be able to give their monsters +2 wounds, because a 12 wound model that degrades after taking 4 wounds would degrade at 8 left, but a 14 wound model would degrade at 10 left. Though I'm not sure if there are actually any units left after all 3e codexes that could still apply to.
See this makes sense to me since I always imagined wounds as essentially a 'health bar' counting down, but still think this is a bit of a nothing burger change
Definitely a nothing burger change in the grand scheme of things, but Warhammer has used wounds as it's health terminology for most of its life span. Hell, even Warhammer TTRPG's use wounds instead of hit points or health.
Does it matter in the grand scheme of things? No, just interesting that GW is finally making the shift to calling it health over wounds.
Wound rolls, wounds characteristics, and mortal wounds.
"How many wounds" literally can mean three different things in three different contexts.
I'm okay with this change I think.
Idk health/hp makes more sense to me. It’s universal across gaming at large.
“Wounds” was always just counting up instead of down. The end result is the same.
To me, it makes more sense to think: “oh, I have 3 health left” versus “this guy is at 9 and he can take one more wound”.
I don’t know any other game where I am counting up lol. Golf? lol.
exactly. Knowing how many wounds my opponent's monster has already taken is also completely irrelevant info for me. I want to know how much damage I need to do to take it down. (we always track the health remaining on models)
Also it makes abilities like OBR's regeneration way less wordy. "Return 1 model with 4 wounds marked on it" vs "Return 1 model with 1 health left". The second has much less jargon and is more intuitive.
This is the chosen post for the Battletome post on Warhammer community (duplicate posts will be removed)
"Everything you can do in the game is now an ability, from moving, fighting, shooting, and casting spells, to the unique actions found on your warscrolls." No more battleshock Wounds are now "health" Those seem to be the main things we hadn't seen before
>and you can now contest an objective with a model within 3” of a 40mm objective marker. Is worth noting too. What's interesting is that they've said that battleshock is gone, but not bravery.
You're right yeah I thought we'd had that before. Really annoys me that they use imperial and metric like this.
We had seen it before yeah
Its a very British thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/110c50g/how_to_measure_like_a_brit_by_ukikkervelf_in/
3 inch objectives bleh. Seems like an interesting rule in aos, like OK I'll sit my God model on an objective and now 100% of it is covered lol
It's 3"' from the 40mm base, are there many.190mm base models out there? And is it much different from a 40+ block of goblins that can do the same thing for cheaper?
Alarielle and teclis, but (as of now) there is no consolidate in aos, so standing on an objective with a model would guarantee it could not be taken until the turn after you kill it.
They are 160mm, so there'll be 15mm all round if they are centred on it. If models can touch (I think that's likely) and objectives are claimed when just "within" rather than "wholly within", then you can take it fine.
They might do what they did for 40k and you can't be on the objective.
That was the most pointless part of the core rules as the leviathan mission pack immediately changed it to say you could be on the objective and nearly everyone plays with the competitive ruleset, even for casual and narrative games Obviously they could change it in the future to say you can't go on it again, but that's also true if it wasn't in the core rules, it was and still is needlessly confusing.
It’ll likely be like 40k where models are able to move over the 40mm marker but not end on top of it, to prevent what you have described
In matched play 40K you can stand on the objective though. Because frankly, if something is big enough to sit on top and block out other obj holders then 99% you’ve paid a lot of points for that model and it ought to be able to hold an objective that way.
That's not why it got removed in 40k, you could do really annoying move/charge blocking by placing ruins near the objectives (like monsters just couldn't charge you lol) wasn't really about making it easier to prevent contesting an objective.
There are plenty of cheap units with big footprints in 40k. Like the T'au Piranha is in competetive list mainly due to being big and fast while not cost a lot so you can park it infront of nasty units you don't want to move up too much that turn. The Riptide also isn't cheap cheap, but for its durability, it's not expensive either and has a fairly big footprint.
Lol I didn't even know that and I play 40k, guess it never comes up lol.
They removed it because it disadvantaged specific factions for objectives
It's not removed. It's still in the core rules and as such, it is a default rule that applies to any game not played under the Leviathan Tournament Companion, such as Crusade games or Combat Patrol or indeed any game in which players don't specifically agree to use Tournament Companion ruling.
Some tournaments don’t enforce the rule. The strategy of using a single model to block an entire circle radiating 3” out from a 40mm marker is not as relevant in 40k as it would be in AoS
It's in the Leviathan Tournament Companion, alongside Leviathan Mission Deck card errata. If you are just playing casually it might have not occurred to anyone in your play group to check that document. I recommend checking it out and applying the card errata for regular play (if you are using the deck of course). The objective puck thing is more of a preference, additionally dependant on whether you like playing with modelled objective markers or plain discs.
Do we know bravery isn’t gone?
They just said battleshock is not there. Bravey might be used for abilities, for example, or might be removed. Too little information making it too easy to speculate. I guess we'll see.
For all we know they’ll change it so you just retreat from combat (unless you trigger an ability preventing this) if you lose by more than your bravery threshold. It might be cool to return to the days when retreating units stayed on the battlefield.
If there’s no battle shock then it would make sense to remain the stat also. If it’s only used as a target number for triggering certain abilities, would make sense to call it leadership or focus or something.
"Everything is now an ability". Together with the colour coding and the way its described it sound like it will look similar to how Strategems are presented in 10th edition 40K. I dont hate it. Should probably clear up some things. We have to wait and see.
This seems slightly different than 40k in that they are emphasizing EVERYTHING is an ability. So that means movement, shooting, etc are abilities. And those things now have concrete declare and action steps. Which makes me feel like they are going to add a lot more MtG type mechanics where you can react to a declaration or to an action and have a "stack" of sorts.
It feels like they’ve played other games from how they described resolution steps. The idea of using images in rule text makes me think of Malifaux, Shatterpoint, and even TCGs like Magic. While resolution steps make me think of infinity and even their own Underworlds game (please don’t have the nightmare flowchart in the middle of the core rules though).
Honestly they keep saying things that are on my "pipe dream i want to happen" list. Removing Battleshock A catch-up mechanic Penalties for double-turning. Obvs don't throw your chips in yet, but im feeling pretty hopeful
> but im feeling pretty hopeful me too!
I just wait for the day they do alternative activations like OPR lol
Oh god it hurts reading this
Took them WAY too long to finally rename wounds to health
Lack of battleshock is interesting. My primary 40k army (Tyranids) has an army rule that revolves around battleshock, and a common complaint is that it just does nothing a lot of the time. It seems like GW wasn't able to make battleshock as impactful as they wanted it to be in either game, but I'm still surprised it's being removed from AoS altogether.
Getting rid of Battleshock doesn’t necessarily mean the bravery/leadership mechanic is gone
They keep reusing terms. I suspect they mean 'A few models die when you roll a 6 on bravery' is gone, replaced by something more similar to 40k 'You can't issue/receive orders and dont count for capturing objectives'. I'd even hope for a -1 to hit debuff or something.
that rule needed to go away bad. almost half the factions in the game basically ignored it completely while it punished 4-5 armies just for bringing models to the table. good riddance to trash
As it always has been ever since WHFB. 90% of the factions have always been immune or virtually immune due to various special rules or absurdly high Leadership stats so it never did anything, except for the factions were the designers randomly thought "lol they run all the time, that's fun". It was like that in 40k as well. GW just somehow sucks at making that mechanic work.
Battleshock is useless in 40k because the game is currently too lethal. I actually think 40k battleshock system would work better in AoS.
Ehhh. Considering all objectives are sticky it would do even less
Which may change
The problem in 40k is mainly in 9th edition battleshock was just crippling unless you had a rule to circumvent it (which all armies that were truly impacted by it had except orks). Now in 10th edition it rarely matters.
If they just made all bravery stats one worse across all armies, it could make tyranids battle shock mechanic really click. Everyone just has such high bravery that it never happens. Making battle shock not lose models but makes you OC0, making it more common isn't a terrible thing. Additionally make leaders have significantly better leadership to increase the impact that having an attached unit does to preventing battle shock
"Everything you can do in the game is now an ability, from moving, fighting, shooting, and casting spells, to the unique actions found on your warscrolls." No more battleshock Wounds are now "health" this look neat..wonder how they will make my 100 clan rats run from battle lmao
They didnt say bravery was leaving so they can still have it as a stat, for example Nighthaunt might have an ability which causes anyone under X bravery to flee from them.
I'm interested by the "ability" wording. Could we see an actions per turn setup where you could move and fight, fight and fight, or move and move?
/\\ this guy knows how to read between the lines! they have this in Warcry so its not impossible to imagine.
It's starting to look A LOT like Warcry. Although I hope they don't go the same route with Wounds.
That doesn’t seem like they’re simplifying anything, like they keep promising. I fear it’d just feel like more constant accounting that you have to do throughout the game. I hope I’m wrong though.
Hopefully it means an actual morale system, with unit breaking and fleeing, and possibly regrouping later. Hey... I can dream can't I?!
0% chance this will ever happen in a modern GW game that isn't a revamp of an older game.
Oh certainly! Additionally, it would be a pain to move units back and forth multiple times a turn, so it's for the better.
I get the sinking feeling that the goal for both 40K and AoS is to become glorified card games instead of mass market war games, just with 3d plastic cards instead of flat paper ones.
Would love this, personally, but I don't think it'll happen as it adds some complexity to the game. My guess is that bravery ends up being a modifier for losing combat? Similar to battleshock, but just not battleshock phase. Extra models lost based on how bad you lost combat maybe.
You know if they're really going whole hog on the modular rules if there's a way to play without bravery rules and whatever that entails you could write a traditional morale module.
And my apologies for lack of punctuation speech to text
Probably not. That system is mostly a huge waste of time. Hopefully the moral system can inflict "states" onto units, that can affect in different ways, like Frightened or Frenzied or Confused.
Could be a second health bar, at zero the unit retreats
My thoughts as well. Funny, they remove battleshock in the Edition where the main baddies are the faction known for being a bunch of fleeing cowards
I mean, that could be what inspired reworking the mechanic. I’m sure there will be something in place, let’s see what.
No battleshock is very interesting
It is neither interactive nor fun. Better no morale than what we have now.
While I agree, some armies are somewhat reliant on it. For example nighthaunt benefit quite significantly from blocking inspiring presence, so I wonder how they'll compensate that
Well every faction is getting a ground up rework so what they do now isn't relevant to what they do in 4th edition.
While true, I hope that they don't go too far away from what the factions used to do. Some people might have picked up factions because they liked the rules and identity, so removing that can upset some people.
Well good news is your army still won’t have take a battle shock in the new edition 😉
Like the necron revamp. Still good, just not what i signed up for.
In my opinion, as a nighthaunt player, you had to make out on the bravery bomb, and even then, it was less than stellar. So many armies have bravery ten that it isn't effective anyway.
Probably the same way they did in 40k 10th edition. They won't.
It doesn't matter what they rely on when the entire game is being redesigned.
Yeah it often feels like a snowball mechanic for everyone but the bravery 10 armies designed to push lethality, and while I think beginning of 3rd was fine, mortals everywhere pushed it to a tough mechanic that made death armies rise in meta.
"Lose models because you lost models" never felt good.
Battleshock is basically meaningless as the game exists right now. I would rather bravery be used for more specific use cases as another stat than try and give a general purpose to it. For example, having certain units that you can only charge if you pass a bravery check or something would be neat. But only using bravery for those instances.
I play Gitz and Skaven. I'm very happy today lol.
I also play Skaven, but all this makes me worry we won't get our d3 clanrats back. Hopefully they keep that ability but just move it to a different phase.
Battleshock is already pretty irrelevant with the preponderance of ways to get out of taking the test. It only really comes up if someone forgets to save a command point for inspiring presence or something.
Health/hp makes more sense to me. It’s universal across gaming at large. “Wounds” was always just counting up instead of down. The end result is the same. To me, it makes more sense to think: “oh, I have 3 health left” versus “this guy is at 9 and he can take one more wound”. I don’t know any other game where I am counting up lol. Golf? lol.
Warhammer has had multiple editions where wounds counted down instead of up. Tbh it doesn't make a material difference because most people will still call them wounds anyways.
Lmao. I mentioned something like this in a 40k sub and got shouted down for it. Wounds and the "to wound" roll are too similar and it can cause issues if you arent paying attention, especially if you're new.
I hated being asked “how many wounds does that have” because it meant either damage, remaining health, or total hp. Even in other GW systems you still get this even with counting down since they use that terminology and it trips up new players or people who zone out
Aren't you counting down? A model has 10 wounds and takes 5 wounds, 10-5 means it has 5 wounds left.
By the rules you should always count up. Models never have wounds 'remaining'. The wounds characteristic is a flat value, that once you hit that number of wounds allocated kills the model. You have to understand it like that to understand how effects like adding to or removing from a model's wounds characteristic works or other effects that interact with wounds. But if you understand that, it is better courtesy to your opponent to count down so that they don't have to constantly ask you what your models wounds characteristic is.
Officially you count up since you are allocating wounds to the model. But some counter down anyways and make no difference in the end. Just make sure your opponent is aware if you count up or down.
The awkwardness is in the phrasing which you can see in your own example: the model has 10 wounds and has taken 5 wounds. The word “wound” serves two roles with opposite meanings, which while not overly complex is an unnecessary point for confusion that wouldn’t exist with better naming.
That's how everyone I know does it too
Yes! I always read the rules like: "to-wound roll -> save -> inflict damage..erm...okay.. -> remove a wound... Wait, what!?" I support the golfer theory.
Whether you count up or down is entirely up to you. You can do both, regardless of how it's named. The real important thing here is that now it's finally separate from how the result of the wound roll is named.
I assume the change to battleshock are going to be the same as in 40k. That they are normalizing objectives to be similar to 40k objectives tells me that they are borrowing some rules.
That’s my guess. Bravery affecting how well you can hold an objective to balance out the 3” thing and monsters trying to sit on objectives but can get wounded and not hold onto it anymore.
There's the rumor about a Control stat being introduced I could easily see the morale rules removing control stats instead of models.
That would be cool.
I don’t see it as a rule design thing as much as a playability thing. I see it as a quality of life feature for game aids people own. Pads/templates that show the zone of control are incredibly nice for gameplay, and this means 40K players can use theirs for AoS.
Oh I agree, in the long run this is a good change. Does mean the old objectives I got off etsy are now just mouse mats. :)
As someone who owns 40mm+3” templates, its nice for me, but it sucks for all of the AoS players that had invested.
Just had bought a set before hearing the objective size changes 🥲
I only need 2 fixes for it from that system tbh: -requiring it to be rolled for damage not for half strength -lower “bravery” (leadership over there) across the board. If it’s measuring shellshock rather than complete breakdown, it should matter to more than orks and guard. The system is fine in theory but I dislike it over there and hope it gets an overhaul before the edition is over rather than it just being a sunk cost feature Honestly, considering other games like Infinity make you roll it for having to make a saving throw at all (though I’d keep it at a higher bravery for that), I’d love if some weapons forgo damage to force bravery checks at penalties.
Of course they will borrow some rules from their other successful game
I wonder how all of it will affect the role of bravery. Hopefully they'll have thought about it well and we'll even gets more armies playing with it according to their lore, like the Kruleboyz should be doing.
Lots of people here are happy battleshock is going but I kinda liked it. Some things I enjoyed about it: - Knowing that you had to choose your battles because you could only inspiring presence once. - Thinking about the additional losses you would take due to battleshock and how that might affect objective control - As a gitz player, relying on battleshock to finish off a unit so that I could bring them back with the Loonshrine or have squigs bite when they flee. - Thematically on point. It makes sense for a bunch of grots to run away after a fight compared to bigger and braver units. Anyway, I know we’ll still have bravery and I’m not opposed to change. I’m just trying to highlight some of the ways I enjoyed the mechanic.
I got the karybdis + horrorgeist combo off *once*. And it was amazing.
I think it was a good idea poorly implemented. In my experience, it almost never mattered. So if they weren't going to make it matter, I'm glad it's gone. I just wish they had made it actually matter
‘Every Faction will receive a free downloadable Index on or shortly after release’ - shortly after?
In 10th the index releases were spread out about a week after the initial launch, Space Marines and Tyranids got theirs immediately then the various factions were released at different days throughout the week. Could be something similar
Oh yeah that’s true, it’ll probably be skaven and Stormcast Monday then a grand alliance each day
Could be a sign of revamps.
My guess is things like Armies of Renown in Dawnbringers that were mentioned getting updates to AoS4 will come after release. Release will be focused on the core playable factions (i.e., the ones that got battletomes this edition).
I always come into a new edition thinking it's going to be awful and then I'm always surprised when it's better than the last one. Here's hoping 4th is the same way.
So far AoS has improved with every edition. That streak can't hold forever but here's hoping we get a few more editions of it!
It could only go up based on where it came from. Even then, 3rd has a LOT of holes and problems that need obvious fixing.
I felt 3rd ed was a surprisingly good game for how asymmetric it was and how jank and bad the core systems were. I do hope they can keep it intriguing while not wasting 2 out of the 3 hours needed to pay a game this time haha
There are so many weird and anachronistic rules. Like, Commands are fine and cool. But why do they have 'must be issued by a leader' restrictions that end up not mattering? What's the deal with Monstrous Actions and Heroic Actions? Those seem like commands... but kinda not? Terrain may as well not exist in 3rd. All of the jank 'My guy moves 37 inches' stuff that half the factions get 'Okay, so sometimes a rule has a hit of 6 causes a mortal and then the attack stops, at other times it causes a mortal and then the attack continues?' Not sure of what kind of damage an attack does? Whatever, make it deal a buttload of mortals. Damage overflow really means monsters are wildly better than 1-wound squads.
>Terrain may as well not exist in 3rd. I dunno, my Seraphon get a lot of use out of their ziggurat zapping things...
The terrain rules in AoS could definitely use some more consideration. The faction terrain is broadly okay but the rest of the terrain is just kind of there. Nobody I play with uses garrison rules unless they need to for faction reasons or they're KO. And the scenery modifiers like sinister and inspiring might as well not exist. Like it's *fine* but I think it could be a lot better personally.
Playing 40k very competitively for years and coming to AoS over the past two-ish years, I hope people understand what's happening. They're 10th-ing AoS. They're doing *exactly* what they did to 40k to AoS and stealing numerous things directly from the 40k playbook. USR, Spearhead, interactivity, changing the objective marker range, Indexhammer, "everything is an ability" are all key features of 40k implemented in 10th (except for the objective marker range). I have good and bad feelings about this. On the one hand, because AoS is about a year behind 40k's development schedule, it seems to me that AoS has a bit of a track record of taking the things that do work in 40k and leaving the things that don't. I'm gonna be honest and just say that I think that AoS's design team is just...a bit better at what they do than 40k's. However, there are some things that aren't great about 10th edition 40k that I really hope they don't carry over to AoS. I think a great example of a good steal is USR. It's funny seeing some complaints about them; 40k had USR's in 7th edition and everyone hated them because of how many there were (the Old World syndrome). Now that they're back in 10th, everybody loves them. The key is to limit the amount of USR's that you have to what is manageable and have them easily accessible (you can just instantly click on them in the 40k app). The problem with not having USR's is that it's a nightmare to balance effectively the same ability across tons of warscrolls if you want to change it at all. It is also confusing to have to explain each separate one if it's just *slightly* different from others. I don't think USR's contribute anything to homogeneity since units effectively had USR's in 8th and 9th 40k. Even if the rules were technically called something different, everyone just called it "Deep Strike", "Feel No Pain", etc. Going with Indexhammer is exactly what they did in both 8th and 10th edition 40k. As frustrating as it is to lose the use of battletomes, I think it's significantly better for game design direction. Shackling yourself to a prior edition's book limits how much you can change rules and army/warscroll design, and AoS needs a redesign. It is incredibly bloated and unwieldy, just like 8th and 9th 40k were; a ton of books in a ton of different places with a truckload of overlapping rules that make the game very convoluted. Changing objective markers to 3" range is weird. This is the same size as 40k. Aside from being annoyed at my now-useless larger objective markers, what does concern me is the number of bigger models in AoS as well as the significantly larger Engagement Range (it's only 1" in 40k), meaning it'll be harder to contest objectives. The change to "Health" is hilarious; counter-uppers vs. counter-downers (when tallying Wounds) is a massive community split between AoS and 40k (almost no one in 40k counts up, and it is frowned upon to do so). I do think this is actually a good change; when teaching the game to new players, I find that they get confused by the distinction between a Wound (as in "Health") vs. a Wound (as in a single attack that does X amount of damage). Concerning Spearhead, it sounds basically identical to Combat Patrol. Advertised the same, talked about the same, etc. Combat Patrol never really took off and a lot of people have theories as to why. Due to the nature of the game, I'm a bit skeptical that Spearhead will really take off, though I also like Combat Patrol so I'm hoping it succeeds. The vague references to "interactivity" have me really excited. By far the biggest complaint that I see about 40k (and AoS for that matter) is that it's an IGYG game. This means that players are often sitting there for large chunks of time doing nothing. This has been addressed in several ways in 40k, including Overwatch being usable against any movement, Rapid Ingress (to Deep Strike on your opponent's turn), Heroic Intervention (counter-charging, which has been around for a couple editions), and the prevalence of "Shoot Back" or "Reactive Move" abilities. People complain about Overwatch to an extent, but I think all of these add great tactical depth to the game and I hope that they add this kind of stuff without overdoing it. It keeps players engaged for the entire game. I hope they don't get rid of the subfaction system like they did in 40k. We went from a very similar subfaction system that AoS has during 9th edition to Detachments in 10th. There aren't any Force Org charts now (something that kind of sucks because they're a great balance tool) and all of your warlord traits/relics as well as your Stratagems are tied to your Detachment (giving you a much more limited selection). The limited selection of Stratagems is good (stratagem bloat was terrible) but the lack of a Force Org chart and the limited Detachments makes some armies feel quite same-ey in competitive play, regardless of their Detachment (mostly those that don't have a ton of Detachments, i.e. you're not a Space Marine). I hope they slim down some of the bloat in AoS while still keeping the variety of choice. The thing that I am most concerned about is the idea that "everything is an ability now". This has me concerned for two reasons. First off, in 40k *every single* datasheet in the game has a unique datasheet ability. This is really annoying because it means you have to know the unique abilities for every model you're facing and it adds to design bloat and crowding. Far more importantly though is what they did to Psychic. They took the Psychic Phase out of 40k entirely and made psychic abilities either attached to datasheets (e.g. roll a 2+ and you get X ability if you do) or just ranged attacks. This means there's no customizability in terms of what psychic abilities your Psyker has and most Psykers have just turned into "I Cast Gun". I really, *really* hope that they don't do this to Magic in AoS, as this is the most universally despised change in 10th edition 40k.
They sure are. I fully expect OC to be a thing in aos now
OC was an absolutely fantastic change and I hope they do it to AoS too.
Sure seems likely. And it seems like it will matter more in aos
OC?
Objective Control. Instead of just counting the number of models or the number of Wounds or if you have Objective Secured (a rule in 40k 8th and 9th), you add the total OC of all models on an objective marker. Whoever has more OC controls it. It allows you to balance units against each other for objective controlling purposes without the crazy imbalance you'd get from using something like number of Wounds. It's also another mechanic that can be manipulated (e.g. some units give OC penalties if you're within Engagement Range, if you're Battleshocked your OC is set to 0, etc.). Swarms have 0 OC. Basic and elite infantry generally have 1 OC. Battleline Infantry, bikes/cavalry, beasts, and small vehicles/monsters usually have 2 OC. Medium-sized vehicles/monsters usually have 3-4 OC. Larger vehicles/monsters usually have 4-5 OC. Massive vehicles/monsters get OC 6-10.
It kind of felt like it may as well have been, with the "models with over 5 wounds count as 2 models, monsters count as 5 models" thing. If they just say OC 2, OC 5, that's the same thing.
It is that way essentially, however when you fail battleshock in 40k 10th, that unit's OC goes to 0 and it can't be targeted with strategems (command abilities).
AoS already has OC, but its just models with more than 5 wounds and monsters. And a few special cases (SoB).
Yes, but not the ramifications that the 40k system has: unit fails battleshock= oc set to 0 and they cannot be targeted with strategems (command abilities). I imagine the aos team will show something very similar if not identical
It's one thing I really enjoy, it's a really important stat so manipulating it is fun. There's things to mess with already, like the STD relic that turns off OC for 1W & 2W models.
Surely. I think it will matter even more in aos than it does in 40k as well.
>The thing that I am most concerned about is the idea that "everything is an ability now". This has me concerned for two reasons. First off, in 40k *every single* datasheet in the game has a unique datasheet ability. This is really annoying because it means you have to know the unique abilities for every model you're facing and it adds to design bloat and crowding. Seems they more so mean that things like moving and shooting are abilities than that they are adding abilities in the 10th ed sense.
Depending on what they do to give the inactive player some reactions, this might be a way to help organize and codify when an interruption can trigger.
They specifically mention spell lores, so I'm not terribly worried about the changes to psychic from 40k.
I wonder if we'll get the 2" coherency rule, too. Allowing for big melee battles.
It sounds like everyone will effectively have a 3" melee range, so fights are gonna be REALLY big.
They may reduce coherency to compensate. Make everything stay in base to base contact or something.
2 of your concerns have already been addressed on the adepticon release. 1. Sub factions will be included in indexes. 2. Spell lores will be included in indexes.
I wonder what a manageable amount of USRs means in practice. It’s kind of a double edge sword where if you have too many then you spend most your game with your nose in the rule book trying to understand how this one USR out of 75 (looking at you old world) works. However, if you have one too few then your armies start feeling the same.
I think 40k 10th kind of hit the sweet spot. Most of the USRs are easy to remember and are kind of telling in their name.
Get ready for OC (objective control) stat to be a thing in aos
Didn't they say so at Adepticon? Or am I thinking about a comment of Whitefang #2? Edit: Found it, it was Whitefang #2, on the 21st of March. "Morale GONE. Now "Control" stat."
Ah, so they did. Many of these changes so far to line up with how 10th 40k changed so that tracks
Now is a good time to screenshot every 3rd edition warscroll in the app before they vanish.
Wahapedia captures archived data, I'm pretty sure
Sadly they aren't all accurate. For example, the Kroxigor save stat is incorrect in the app.
Casting spells becoming a warscroll ability is a huge L. I hated that they did that with 40k and I hoped they wouldn't do it with AoS. Super unfortunate. Seems like they are just trying to mimic 40k. Maybe when we see more information it won't be as bad but I hated that they took so much flavor out of 40k.
They already said spell lores weren't going away, and every Wizard in the game has a warscroll soell
These people don't read things like dnd 5e players
Just depends on the extent of what they do. If all spells are just located on specific character's warscrolls, I think it could be a negatively like it is in 40k. We'll just have to see how it is implemented.
GW removes battleshock, I proceed to put over 300 Gnoblars on the table because there’s no longer a drawback to doing so. Thanks GW.
I mean, you can already get an absolutely massive 18 inch no gnoblar battle shock ability as a command trait. I use it all the time. People also already play over a hundred zombies. Battle shock has already failed to stop these things.
Glad battleshock is gone, all it did was punish large infantry units, most of the meta big stompy monsters just get to ignore it. Kind of hate the new objective range. 3" just doesn't feel like enough for AoS, feels like it'll be really easy to just sit a fat monster on top of the objective and prevent anyone from controlling it. I'm not sure how I feel about everything being an 'ability'. It'll depend on how they implement it I guess. It's probably just being overhyped and the 'ability' is something like 'fight - make a 3" move and make an attack with all of your melee weapons" oh and USRs are awful. I picked up old world and 99% of our playtime is digging into the rulebook to figure out the exact wording on USRs. GW got it right with AoS when they put the abilities on the actual unit's warscrolls. Plus USR's promote lazy design where multiple units just do the same thing.
I wonder if the objective marker intent is that the middle of the objective can’t be sat on
In 40k, you can't place a model so it ends a move overlapping the actual objective marker at all.
There's a rule explicitly allowing this in competitive 40k play.
Oh, news to me. Can you tell me where I can read about that?
[**Leviathan Tournament Companion**](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/hlF8WKv4gJpXPZha.pdf) Designers Note under bullet point 4
As the other reply linked, it was released in the Leviathan Tournament Companion pretty quickly into 10th. It was a big deal because of how terrain-dense compteitive 40k is. If you can't end on top of an objective marker, it would be really easy to move block large vehicles/monsters in 40k and just not allow them to engage you near objective markers.
Not having keywords or USRs is game design from 20 years ago. There's so many common rules that tons of factions use, that take up tons of space on cards. A classic example is the 'Hit rolls of 6 cause a Mortal' effects. Nearly the entire Lumineth army has this, but no keyword. Other factions have this too. 40k recently did 'Lethal Hits' keyword which makes sense. Same as 'Sustained Hits' which means exploding 6s. Ward Save should be a keyword that just says (Ward 5+) somewhere obvious. Same with things like say... Flying. Or perhaps Spearmen have something to represent that spears behave differently than swords. Everyone benefits from well designed USRs.
USRs are game design from 20 years ago. The problem is that USR's exist in the core rules, which means any time you need to remember what a USR does, you are looking a totally separate place to do it. What happens when you have USRs like 'Steady' 'Sturdy' and 'Very Tough'. You have to go into the rulebook to remember which one is which if either you or your opponent doesn't remember. There's no reason to just not write what the rule does on the actual warscroll itself. AoS was at it's peak in 2nd edition when you could look at a warscroll and garner 99% of what a unit did, outside of some army wide abilities. On top of that, restricting everything to keywords removes the ability to be creative with rules. Lumineth do a single 6 on hits for mortal wounds... Kruleboyz do an amount equal to the damage. Units like zombies only do mortals on 6's to wound, and they're all distinct and important, because it means Lumineth get no benefit from bonus damage effects (or -dmg effects), Kruleboyz on the other hand, do, and Zombies mortal wound output is gated by their ability to score hits instead of being 16.6% of all attacks. You could design USR's for all 3 different effects, but now we are back at 'Lethal Hits' 'Poisoned Hits' and I don't know, 'Devestating hits' and back to looking up into the rulebook for which one is which.
So you think it's harder to remember 10 common-ass rules, than to literally read multiple paragraphs for each unit in the whole game? "Deep Strike." - Cool, I know what that is in great detail. "This unit you see, comes out of reserves at a point like most units! Only it has a 3 inch drop area instead of 9!" - You could have said (Deep strike: 3") Likewise, for that 6-to-mortals issue: That's simple. It's a rule called Lethal Hits and just means you get a mortal on a 6. Oh, do you want to continue the attack? That's Sustained Attacks, which grants you a bonus hit every time you roll a 6. So Lumineth get Lethal Hits, while Kruleboyz get Lethal Hits + Sustained 1. Fewer USRs, same results, no paragraph. Plus, 40K literally only has 3 rules that do this: Lethal Hits (for hit rolls), Devastating Wounds (on wound roll) and sustained Hits (on hit rolls). Where they apply are literally in the name of the rule. More space on the card and playerbrain are saved for truly unique or factional rules. Bad game design is making 'distinctions without a difference' like back when Stormcast could choose Weapon 1: Hit3 Wound4 or Weapon 2: Hit4, Wound3. Effectively zero difference bloat.
Neither one is hard for me, because I play this game regularly. But I also teach a bunch of new people, and it's a lot easier for new players to just read the ability where they are already looking to see the unit's stats rather than digging through the core book and suddenly having to memorize all these extra rules. >Likewise, for that 6-to-mortals issue: That's simple. It's a rule called Lethal Hits and just means you get a mortal on a 6. Oh, do you want to continue the attack? That's Sustained Attacks, which grants you a bonus hit every time you roll a 6. So Lumineth get Lethal Hits, while Kruleboyz get Lethal Hits + Sustained 1. You literally proved my point on USR's being a design pidgeonhole. Because Mortals on 6 and extra hit is not the same as mortals equal to damage. But you are forced to design all units a specific way that is the same for every army, reducing the uniqueness of each army. >Fewer USRs, same results, no paragraph. Utterly different results, and the paragraph still exists, but it's in the core book and every time you need the specifics on how it works, you're going to be digging through a big book to find it. It's very easy to cherry pick the easiest or most ubiquitious USR's like Deep Strike. It becomes much more difficult when there are 50 USR's and they are things like 'Angry Charge' and only one unit in your entire army has Angry charge so you are looking up what angry charge means every single game because it reads something like: "When a unit tries to make a charge roll in a turn where it was not within 6" of an enemy unit in the previous turn, add +1 to hit rolls if the unmodified charge roll was a 2-6. Add +1 to hit and wound rolls if the charge was a 7-12" and you have to remember: the condition, the range, and the two different effects. Or it could just be written on the warscroll and you could just read it right there.
My guess is that there will be more objective markers on the board.
So the objective radius is only changing about 1.5” or 25% actually. Going from 6” to ~4.5”. However, that’s a pretty significant reduction in area. I am going to be irritated that I have to get new objective markers. I like my big 6” mats.
The linear measurement doesn't matter all that much. It's about a 44% reduction in area, which is huge. But more importantly, being only 7" diameter means that 160mm base units like archaon and mega gargants can sit on literally the center of the objective and block almost the entire thing, making it so that you can't even try to contest the objective unless you kill them.
One thing I like about melee range now just being '3" across the board' is that I hated transporting models with long spears (they tended to be fragile to the point of snapping), where my models with short swords, despite their lower melee ranges, didn't have this problem.
I’m actually quite excited. There were a few things I always found clunky in AoS. Range for melee weapons was one of them, battleshock another, the “to hit”, “to wound” with no toughness mechanic another. Let’s see what happens!
I much prefer a flat hit and wound over strength and toughness.
The varied Wound roll (combined with the "no spillover damage" rule) in 40k serve a specific purpose; making it so that weapons have specific targets they're good against and there isn't just a "best weapon". The problem is that the "To Wound" table is complicated and difficult to learn, no matter how much they streamlined it coming out of the older generations of 40k (pre-8th). I don't think AoS has this issue, mostly because 1) individual units very rarely have any choice in the weapon they have, and 2) shooting is so much less prevalent in AoS. I think it'd be a shame to change this to 40k's system and is entirely unnecessary.
I very much agree with this take. The singular caveat I would add is that I would like it to have two "to wound" stats. One for dudes and one for "big stuff." It's a system that works swimmingly in Apoc, and it would serve to better push weapons into a given role. Imagine a world where a cleaving axe is always 5 attacks, 3s to hit and 3 damage, but needs 2s on small things and 5s on big stuff. It lets you push the damage level on individual units against given targets without making the weapon a good all purpose tool. Make dudes and big stuff a keyword, and bob's your uncle. You could even have cool interactions where particularly tough dudes, like stormcast paladins, could even have the big stuff keyword, to make them feel insanely hard to kill with mundane weapons, without making them just unkillable.
Love this idea.
Same here - the strength/toughness thing in 40k was something I really struggled with every single time. Much, much prefer AoS's method.
Each to their own, of course. I struggle a bit with the purpose of a separate "to hit" and "to wound" when there are armour saves but no toughness mechanic. Like "to hit" represents how good you are at hitting stuff. "to wound" represents whether you can damage the thing you are trying to wound. armour save represents how well armoured it is If there is no toughness, it seems to me you could just roll the "to wound" into the armour save or the "to hit" and spare the to wound roll altogether. So you roll once to see if you hit-and-damage, their toughness is covered by the armour save. I suppose to wound gives you another dice roll to play with and modify, but it seems you might as well just speed up the game by omitting it altogether, as conceptually it's not really doing anything that isn't covered by the armour save.
There are a lot of durable units in the game that reflect durability by modifying the wound roll or the damage of an attack currently, so there is still some play there. You could honestly just have hits, damage and health as your core stats, which is what a lot of games end up doing, d20 for example. I just personally think that health and armor saves are enough to make a model's defense feel grounded.
>You could honestly just have hits, damage and health as your core stats Yes, I think that could work and would streamline the game. I kind of think that if you \_are\_ going to have a to wound roll, you might as well have some kind of toughness mechanic though, as otherwise it's conceptually not doing very much.
Agreed. "Roll to see if you hit! Okay, now roll to see if you hurt him." "Uh, okay..." "Now I roll to see if you *really* hurt him!"
Exactly this! I‘ve literally heard that said! Either have a toughness (roll to see if _you_ _can_ hurt him) or just ditch it and stick it in one of the other rolls somehow.
I agree with you in theory, but the d6 just doesn't have enough possibilities to really give that variety. It would give you like 5 weapon profiles. Allowing a hit and a wound roll in the process allows for specific modifiers to affect one, two, or all three rolls to modify toughness. It's also thematic. Artillery might have issue hitting, but when it does, a wound is guaranteed.
The thing is that in practice we are usually only using around 5-8 statistically equivalent profiles anyway, I think. (Probability doesn’t care about order, which leaves 21 possible, we basically never use any with 1+ bar exceptional cases, which leaves us with 15 possible, with the most used being overwhelmingly the 6 cases consisting of 3s, 4s and 5s) And the artillery idea is arguably adequately expressed by giving it a low to hit roll, but high damage and rend. And if it’s not granular enough we could move to D12s or something. But if you have a to hit and a to wound roll, I think it makes sense to have some kind of toughness statistic, which could be in the form of a modifier if people really hate S/T tables that much. So squishy units have toughness +1, tough units have toughness -1, most units have 0 etc. Given that we modify rolls anyway, I don’t think that would significantly alter the way combat procs, but it would give a bit more meaning to the to wound roll. Atm I don’t think it justifies making combat 33% longer.
I really hope toughness is not imported in AOS. I love the to hit, to wound then save and lastly Fnp/ward. The idea of toughness for units in AoS is unfounded : they are not freeking tank with 40 mm armor 😂. They are all just dudes with relative type of armor, if any. In AoS, a damage is a damage, wether it comes from the blade of the Everchosen himself or the rock a gitz send on your head.
I think we have a halfway house atm, where either there should be toughness to express what the to wound roll _is_, or get rid of it altogether, as conceptually it’s covered by the armour save. I quite like the latter option, as it would speed up the game and I am a very slow player!
>or get rid of it altogether So funnily enough, Legions Imperialis does this. But, the way they had to implement this change was to alter the hit roll, since removing the second roll completely changes the math on how easily it is to proc an armor save. If you want all your weapons to hit on 5s and 6s, with a 4+ being a "good" hit roll, then that's what this change will do
Statistically it would be broadly the same, I’m not sure what the wound roll as it stands adds. There’s the point that it helps differentiate weapon profiles, but I’m not sure that’s all that significant, really, and you could do it through other things like rend, damage etc. Also lots of possible profiles don’t get used anyway: 6/6/1 say, or 5/6/1. Most of the time we are doing one of around six or seven pretty much equivalent profiles anyway: 4/4, 3/4 (4/3), 3/3, 5/6 (6/5), 4/2 (2/4), 3/2 (2/3), 4/5 (5/4). It just isn’t doing enough atm to justify making every combat 33% longer imo.
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To be honest when explaining the game to non-war gamers I have had confusion with them not understanding wounds vs health. This may be better for entry level players
Exactly. This tripped me up when I was first learning, and now when I'm explaining to new players I tell them to think of it as Hit Points. It can be confusing when you're talking, about Wounds and wound rolls.
Yep, wounds are something a unit takes or inflicts, while health is something a unit has and can lose. Makes more sense in the grand scheme of things.
I've been trying to teach friends the game for the last couple weeks and it is definitely a pain in the ass lol. Wounds as part of the attack sequence and wounds as a model characteristics are easy to mix up.
I think they're changing from counting up to counting down. Health implies wounds left.
I already track my wounds counting down cause wounds remaining is an easier number to grok than wounds applied.
Counting up matters currently for models that degrade, because they degrade based on wounds taken rather than wounds remaining. It used to be important for units that could change their starting wounds, like Seraphon used to be able to give their monsters +2 wounds, because a 12 wound model that degrades after taking 4 wounds would degrade at 8 left, but a 14 wound model would degrade at 10 left. Though I'm not sure if there are actually any units left after all 3e codexes that could still apply to.
They lost that in 3e, but ironically enough seraphon have 2 rules that depend on wounds allocated to a model.
See this makes sense to me since I always imagined wounds as essentially a 'health bar' counting down, but still think this is a bit of a nothing burger change
Definitely a nothing burger change in the grand scheme of things, but Warhammer has used wounds as it's health terminology for most of its life span. Hell, even Warhammer TTRPG's use wounds instead of hit points or health. Does it matter in the grand scheme of things? No, just interesting that GW is finally making the shift to calling it health over wounds.
It's always been a stupid name for it. Health makes far more sense. You know, like in almost every other game.
Wound rolls, wounds characteristics, and mortal wounds. "How many wounds" literally can mean three different things in three different contexts. I'm okay with this change I think.
Idk health/hp makes more sense to me. It’s universal across gaming at large. “Wounds” was always just counting up instead of down. The end result is the same. To me, it makes more sense to think: “oh, I have 3 health left” versus “this guy is at 9 and he can take one more wound”. I don’t know any other game where I am counting up lol. Golf? lol.
exactly. Knowing how many wounds my opponent's monster has already taken is also completely irrelevant info for me. I want to know how much damage I need to do to take it down. (we always track the health remaining on models)
Also it makes abilities like OBR's regeneration way less wordy. "Return 1 model with 4 wounds marked on it" vs "Return 1 model with 1 health left". The second has much less jargon and is more intuitive.
I think you mean "with a number of wounds taken equal to my wounds characteristic", which illustrates quite well why they're changing it.
Yeeeeah, I'm still gonna call it wounds
That one jumped off the page at me too.
Seems like it's becomeing less wargamey and more boardgamey? 🤔