"All this hate for AOS lack of a point system" Topic

I keep seeing people who are saying how not having a point system in AOS is the stupidest thing they have ever seen and how now the richest players can just win. I personally think that the lack of a point system is one of the best things to come out of GW in a long time. Before this change I would play warhammer with my two other friends who played it, whenever we tried to bring someone else in to play it we would get to the point about explaining armies and they would back out because for new people it was confusing. We would go in to how you had to have a certain number of 'Core' units per 'Special' unit and then if you wanted a second elite you had to do this or if you wanted another HQ you had to add this thing or what have you. The point being they couldn't just walk in to our local hobby shop, buy the models that looked cool and come play. With this update they can do just that. They can walk in and say I like the look of those Dark Elf Cold One Riders and some awesome looking HQ guys, but I don't like those core units of spears, so I won't buy them! And to be honest if you have any brains at all you can roughly balance forces so that the richest player doesn't auto win.

TLDR: Friends weren't able to get in to Warhammer before, now they can, update is great for casuals like me and my friends!

Good friends can agree "that seems about right…" without a points system.

And whoever said that a points system leads to "even" games?
All points systems are broken by one army or another.
Whether it's historical, fantasy or science fiction.

The people who make these complaints are tournament players who want to game the system.

The people who make these complaints are tournament players who want to game the system.

Ummm, no not really. Some are casual gamers that don't want to spend their precious pre-game time arguing about what would be a fair game or not.

Damon.

The people who make these complaints are tournament players who want to game the system.

I've never played in a gaming tournament- ALL my games have been friendly ones, against (almost always) rational and thoughtful opponents. No one has EVER called me anything like a 'power gamer'. I'm too busy living the battle and the world, and having fun with (hopefully) wonderful, painted minis. I have won far more GW games than not, and I'm fine with that.

But I can still see their frustrations.

And it's not like GW hasn't been beating that doctrine into players for decades. It's the horrid presentation of what this bold, new system is really all about that is most of the problem.

I can understand why people are upset. They have been providing players with points based lists for decades; that is how you and your opponent determine a fair game. It is not like you can look up an order of battle and re fight a historic action. Good friends can probably come to an agreement. It may be more difficult with some random guy at the store on game day.

It's not that there's no point system, it's that there's almost no rules whatsoever for army composition.

Also while points don't guarantee perfect balance, and you may look down on min/max-ing, being able to say to your friend on Wednesday, "Hey let's play 2500 pts on Saturday" is very convenient.

What do you do now?

…Is all we have to go by. Who's in?

Hmmm, points…

So…

Take 300 Spartans add a dash of Thespians and Thebans against 100-150,000 Persians…

Or

On a dark and stormy night Napoleon sat with his generals desperately trying to find his next elite unit knowing Wellington had spent his exact points allocation… Ney reminded the Emperor, Blucher had a get out of jail free card!

@The Beast Rampant,

What you said exactly! I too have never once played in a Warhammer tournament. All my games are played privately with a small group of like-minded friends.

I would be classified by the Youtube Warhammer community as a "casual" player (a term which I despise because it implies that I take the game less seriously than tournament players do, which is nonsense. My armies are painted to a higher level and my gaming tables are of the stuff that most tournament players only dream to have – just saying. I take the visuals of the game VERY seriously.)

Being a non-competitive player doesn't mean you don't care about the rules. If you want to see a sample of the sentiments and mindset of the tournament brain, check out "The Sustainable Center" on Youtube. His rants are both entertaining but also maddening and insulting.

One of his biggest rants is related to how AOS has destroyed the tournament community because the new game has been dumbed down, and that it is catering to moron casual players like me who just want one page of rules so we can just play soldier in the sand box apparently.

And check out his attitudes about the miniatures themselves. Essentially as far as he is concerned, now that AOS is out, all of his 8th armies have been invalidated and no longer belong in the Warhammer world. Therefore, it's time to give all his expensive minis to his son to play with and destroy, or it's time to put the torch to them. Ridiculous.

The old point system is both a good and evil. Yes, it most certainly does bring some elements of balance to the game – but NOT ENTIRELY. The thing that kills me is, just because for example you and your opponent both have 2,500 points of Skaven and Bretonnia on the table, it does NOT necessarily mean that those two armies are evenly or fairly matched. Far from it.

Not if one player knows exactly how to exploit every advantage out of the Skaven book and knows exactly what trips up a Bretonnian player. You can still make a bad list that your opponent knows how to completely shred. Now, one could say that that aspect of the game is what will drive you to create better lists and hence better armies, but there are also huge downsides to the point system when human players get a hold of army books and turn army-making into a spreadsheet exercise of mathematical ruthlessness.

If you read 8th edition, GW almost admits that their game was meant to be played primarily privately among friends, (i.e. privately among mature friends, i.e. with your "casual moron beer and pretzel non-caring friends"). Why? Because ALL OF THE COOL THINGS that GW has covered in the rules, such as special scenarios, objective scenarios, rescue scenarios, surprise forces coming out of a hidden cave on your flank, battles fought on different tables and then resolved on one table at the end, unevenly matched campaign forces, outnumbered rear guard scenarios, protecting a village from a giant….etc. etc.

….you can't do ANY of those awesome things in a tournament. A tournament is 500 4 x 6 tables with two spreadsheet armies staring straight across at each other. There is absolutely no wonder or spontaneity in it. The Skaven Doom Wheel is about as scary or wonderous as a penny on the ground. A tournament to me is like Warhammer with the flavor taken out of it.

And that is what I don't like about the point system. Because it makes fantasy armies into mathematical equations, and that is NOT what they are supposed to be. Yes, points are a guide to helping you build an army, but points do nothing to stop human ego and human idiocy from exploiting and sucking the life out of the game.

Listen to one of The Sustainable Center's army book reviews. Your ears will bleed. It sounds like he's interviewing for jobs and the minis are the prospective employees. It's maddening. In his review of 8th edition Dwarfs, he concludes that the core units of regular Warriors, Thunderers, Quarellers, Ironbreakers, AND Longbeards should not be used in a dwarf army because they "have no apparent application" in a point-based army. "No apparent application." All of the best looking and coolest miniatures in the dwarf army – excluded because they don't fit into his ninja-exploit maximized spreadsheet. His dwarf armies will consist of a brick or two of Hammerers with a throne in the center, along with gyro-copters in the background. Lifeless and boring. Point system maximized, and at the same time all the life is sucked out of the game.

That's not a dwarf army. It's a point-based dwarf spreadsheet. And that's not Warhammer. That's not fantasy.

So I think that AOS is refreshing in not having a points system. The reason is that you can still build armies, nothing is stopping you from coming to some agreement with your opponent over total number of models allowed, total number of powerful monsters/heroes/creatures/wizards allowed. Nothing is stopping you from agreeing to a balance in your game among the people you play with.

And that is why as I have said, this huge and radical change to AOS is a stick up the kahoot of tournament players more than anyone, because they are the ones who are bound to the nonsense of only playing the current, official edition and only they are bound to the nonsense of the spreadsheet grind of having to "out-equation" your opponent who knows every single thing about your list and how to exploit it.

I agree with everything you said except "….you can't do ANY of those awesome things in a tournament. A tournament is 500 4 x 6 tables with two spreadsheet armies staring straight across at each other."

I went to a number of GW Grand Tournaments in Baltimore back in the day and the games consisted of five cool scenarios with interesting victory conditions on exceptional modular boards. Many of our local tournaments over the years were done in a similar fashion. So don't lump all tournies together. There are many run in a much more creative way than you think.

That being said, I far prefer playing one-off games.

The other thing I hate about that tournament mindset is how they do combat resolution. Rolling dice, counting bonuses, removing figures, measuring stuff. Bah.

My Like-Minded-Friends and I just push our armies together and then congenially decide who has won the battle. Anybody who needs to do math to play a game is clearly not a sportsman!

@mdavey,

There is a difference between rolling dice, counting bonuses, removing figures, and measuring stuff…

…and speadsheet armies that have no fantasy or flavor about them. Big difference.

As I have said, I am one of those "casual" gamers, and I care every bit as much as you do about all of the technical aspects of Warhammer. We just do it privately in our homes instead of in a cookie cutter table layout in a gymnasium with nearly identical tables all massed together.

@mdavey,

…and there is also a big difference between doing math to sort out a battle, and competitive players excluding practically all of an army book's core troops from their army list because they can't do backward somersaults while casting spells between their legs like their elite troops can.

Would seem to me that the game would be much more interesting if you did take those supposed "useless" core troops, weaknesses and all, and take them because they are part of the spirit of the army – and then figure out a way to win WITH them. Or lose WITH them.

Just saying.

@Baranovich
First,

I too have never once played in a Warhammer tournament. All my games are played privately with a small group of like-minded friends.

I'm not power gamer, but I've played tournaments for all sorts of systems. And I don't have any idea where you get your ideas about tournaments. For someone who claims not to have experienced them, you sure have a lot of problems with them.

Regarding min/max-ing, that has nothing to do with points. There is some limit on how many figures you can field in the army even if it's, as the AoS rules state, the number of figures you can fit on the table. To use your example, what's to stop me from fielding 17 gyrocopters and an anvil of doom? The purpose of a composition/balancing system is to keep people from playing ridiculous armies. The armies you see in tourneys would be a lot worse without a point system. As a matter of fact, many tournaments work hard to keep things fun by adding MORE restrictions, not getting rid of them.

If you only play with your friends and you can all easily agree what to field, than having a point system doesn't stop you. But suppose you want to develop a game that can be played in a pick-up game with people you don't know, then let's hear your system to balance it.

. I have won far more GW games than not, and I'm fine with that.

EDIT: That was supposed to be "lost". I suppose it goes without saying that most people are OK with winning!

and competitive players excluding practically all of an army book's core troops from their army list because they can't do backward somersaults while casting spells between their legs like their elite troops can.

Again, I have no idea where you're getting this from. WHFB 8th edition army rules required 25% of your points come from core. In AoS I can build an army with no core troops. That's why people are upset.

Heres an idea for a tournament-You build 3 lists,one with 75% core troops,one with 50% core troops and one with 25% core troops. You play 3 games and you can only use each list once.

The Warhammer setting was at least a setting that had some internal consistency. Using armies from that 'setting' in a game set thousands of years later in a different dimension seems to grate with a lot of people. I am sure that as a game to pull in pre-teens it will be great. Might even do as a game over a beer or twenty. As a strategy game – nah.

All very well-stated, Baranovich, truly.

But Mgdavey is right. It just makes "gaming" the system worse. All aspects of gaming will invariably attract the "in it to win it" crowd. I don't think this fixes any of that. It just feels like they got rid of all the fire extinguishers, since they probably just encourage people to start fires.

I'm not hung up on points. And I'm definitely not going to bat for wargamers who only get their jollies beating someone with a finely-tuned, flavorless army painted for them by some guy they never met. I can SO not relate to that.

But if someone has an "in" on AoS's grand scheme that effectively supersedes a point system, I'd like to know what it is.

Beast, I think its coming. They say they will be releasing a system for assembling armies.

Yes more than likely they will.

The question is just how much will it cost you.

@mgdavey,

I am fully aware that 8th edition armies require 25% of their point totals to be core troops. That wasn't what I was talking about when I was referring to the bricks of Hammerers and gyrocopters.

The point that I was attempting to make is that it should be much higher. 25% allows for too much of the ninja-ing that you see often with competitive players.

In other words, a MUCH higher percentage of core would limit how much of the exploit-ninja stuff that tournament know how to spam and manipulate to always win.

And not only that, but tournaments and the point system take all of the rarity out of rare units. There is a reason that the Skaven Doom Wheel is called a rare unit. That's because it's RARELY SEEN on the battlefield. From a roleplaying perspective, most armies in the Warhammer world wouldn't see one of these monstrosities more than once in their lifetimes, if ever. The thing is meant to evoke terror in the hearts of the Skaven's enemies.

Now, I realize that if you are having multiple games played, you obviously can't fully honor the lore of a war machine's rarity, it just becomes another piece on the table with a points value that creates difficulties for the opponent.

BUT, when you are playing privately, you can agree to limit the amount of rare units that one can take, and in the case of the Doom Wheel, it should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be more than one! It's RARE!

And that's why I can't stand tournaments. Because a tournament player playing Skaven knows full well that with 2,000 points he looks in the army book and says, "Ummmm, ok so it'll be three Doom Wheels, two Warp Lightning Cannons, and a football field of Skaven Slaves. So YES, TECHNICALLY the core requirements are fulfilled. The LETTER of the law is fulfilled, but NOT the SPIRIT of it.

So here comes the dreaded Skaven army – fielding FIVE rare units on the field on the same day in ONE army! Ludicrous. But not against the rules, and it doesn't violate the point system requirements. But the player knows how stupid it is. But they don't care because it makes the Skaven just stupidly strong and manipulated.

Now if you are playing privately, and it's AOS, without a point system, all you have to do is agree to limit these things.

AND, if you are playing at a club or a store, yes it is harder to do that because you are playing against people you don't know. And so without a points system, yes you are right there is much more opportunity for spamming and manipulating. You are right, nobody can stop you in AOS from taking 17 dragons and 10 gyrocopters.

But wait…is that a GW flaw? Or a human flaw? How is it GW's fault that some gamers are immature and don't care about a truly realistic army and don't care about spamming and don't care about lore.

Why is it GW's fault that people are d***s? How can GW control human ego and immaturity? See what I'm saying here?

All the problems created in the imbalancing of Warhammer aren't created because of a lack of a points system.

It is created from a tournament or gaming club/store that is forced to adhere to the current edition and current rules, while mixing in victory ninjas who only care about the win, at any cost.

And I have some bad news – GW is under no obligation to support the tournament community. Never were. Don't quite get why tournament players seem to think that it's GW's job to cater to them first. Just don't get it.

Ok, I see now. It's not a bug it's a feature.

You see GW have realized that only bad sports need points to know how many core troops you're supposed to have. Real gamers intuitively understand. As a matter of fact, GW is actually having a joke on those awful power-gamers by putting out so many high end models, like Nagash and the Glottkin, as a test of their character. And when they raised the hero allowance in the end of times to 50%, it was just to sucker them into buying more Karl Franz's and Mallekith's, allowing the virtuous players like yourself to spot them a mile away.

Seriously though, this is my last contribution to this thread, I've got Steamtanks and Doom Wheels to paint for my Empire Skaven Chaos Stormthingy Army. But if you feel up to it, please let me know what the legal WHFB list with 5 rares looks like.

link

mgdavey,

Yes, I'm up to it. With all due respect to you defending the point system;

Here's a 2,000 pt. Skaven army from a Skaven forum. It's got two doomwheels and two lightning cannon. Four rares, one army. Link above.

So excuse me, I was wrong, you can only legally fit four rares into a 2,000 pt. army. Same principle, same point, still ludicrous.

And if that was a 2,500 pt. army you can easily include a fifth rare unit.

So what exactly did I miss here? Please clarify. That is a legal 2000 list with four rares. Questions?

@mcdavey,

And my previous post also brings up another huge flaw in the point system – that some rare units are WAAAAY too cheap, in the Skaven example skaven tounament players KNOW those rares are way underpriced, and they spam the living daylights out of it. And everyone who plays against them talk about this. In the tournament scene this stuff destroys the spirit and flavor of the game. Period

Skaven players love it because they got low-risk, high, high benefit units that are dirt cheap.

So point systems don't guarantee balance, they are still at the mercy of human ego and and human greed for winning at any cost.

@mcdavey,

Two doomwheels and two lightning cannon cost about 480 and change if I recall their points cost correctly.

That is less than 25% of the point total of 2000 pts., perfectly legal. Add another 500 points to the total and you could accomodate yet another lightning cannon.

If that's not broken I don't know what is.

I'm not playing with semantics over four or five, point is you shoudn't have four or five rare anything on a single battlefield.