Warhammer 40K Tabletop Thread XLIII: "This Is A New LoW For Us All"

[Forum Explorer]

What WAS the big change from WHFB to AoS that people hate so much? I've never seen WHFB, but I've seen games of AoS and they look like a lot of fun, so wondering at the issue here.

Well it was a completely different game for starters. Secondly, when AoS was first released it had no army guidelines or something? I don't know, I can't remember exactly.

[DaedalusMkV]

What WAS the big change from WHFB to AoS that people hate so much? I've never seen WHFB, but I've seen games of AoS and they look like a lot of fun, so wondering at the issue here.

Aside from the fact that they have for all intents and purposes nothing in common? The release of AoS was so bad that calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to burning garbage. It barely even deserved to be called a game. It had no real mechanics for balancing anything, so the best you could do to have a 'fair fight' was eyeball it. The mechanics were incredibly shallow, the special rules were about a 50/50 mix of broken and useless, when they weren't just a straight-up joke. I'm pretty sure I could have come up with a better ruleset given a week and a notebook. AoS on launch was pathetically, insultingly bad, and the only thing WHFB fans could think was 'they killed our game for this?!'

AoS is probably a perfectly fine game these days. It's definitely a lot better than those horrid first months where even the most casual of gamers had to work hard to have fun, assuming it was possible for anyone to have fun at all. But it's a completely different genre of wargame from WHFB, which was all about ranked-up units, constricted movement and tactical positioning. Suffice to say that for many of us who liked WHFB, AoS was a slap in the face at best. Imagine if Age of Empires suddenly rebranded as a MOBA, and you'll get roughly the degree of genre shift we're talking about.

[Cheesegear]

Imagine if Age of Empires suddenly rebranded as a MOBA, and you'll get roughly the degree of genre shift we're talking about.

I'm kind of imagining WarCraft 3 to Heroes of the Storm, myself.

Or perhaps more accurately, WC3 to WoW.

[Saambell]

I'm kind of imagining WarCraft 3 to Heroes of the Storm, myself.

Or perhaps more accurately, WC3 to WoW.

Or relative to the thread: Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 2. Or Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 3. Or Dawn of War 2 to Dawn of War 3. The shift in each of those games was quite big.

[Avaris]

What WAS the big change from WHFB to AoS that people hate so much? I've never seen WHFB, but I've seen games of AoS and they look like a lot of fun, so wondering at the issue here.

I feel it was less about the game and more, as others have said, the massive shift in genre and expectations. AoS1 was a perfectly fine, if rather simple, game, but was one of the most mismanaged releases GW has ever done, and soured me on the hobby for several years. Understand that when I’m generally positive about how GW handles things nowadays, it’s because I’m comparing to how AoS1 was put out.

I feel the major issue was that the change occurred with basically no warning: in the year or so up to it you had 5 expensive (even by GW standards) supplemental books put out called ‘the End Times’. These should have been a fun send off, but they never actually said ‘we are retiring WHFB at the end of this’, so when they ended the game line a month or so after releasing the last, without announcing what was next, people were left very confused. In hindsight, the name is obvious, but it wouldn’t be the first or last time GW released something implying major changes and didn’t follow through (looking at you Psychic Awakening).

Rules wise, the shift to a straight roll to hit and to wound based on weapon (rather than comparing to the opponent’s stats) was a major shift, as was the change to round bases. The special rules also seemed to mock the players who had been invested in their existing armies, such as getting Bretonnian players to pretend to ride a horse. These were intended by the writers as a fun extra, but reports suggest management meddling meant it ended up being the core product.

There’s a pretty good insight into how messed up the AoS release was in an interview on Goonhammer, here: https://www.goonhammer.com/the-goonh...igmar-and-40k/

[LeSwordfish]

Warhammer Fantasy was a complicated tactical game, which included a lot of balance for competitive play and a very specific tone in the lore. It was very tactical, with positioning and resource/risk management very important.

AOS is a much simpler game designed to be easier to pick up and play, and AOS1 was even simpler. At release, it had essentially no rules suitable for competitive balancing at all. The tone of the lore was wildly different, and classic characters were originally tied to risible special rules. Positional play was essentially meaningless, and most of the tactical complexity came in through listbuilding, which was, initially, fairly hollow.

I enjoy playing AOS a lot, but it's a very different game to WFB, and in a way that people who loved old WFB often didn't like. (I think someone compared the difference as chess to checkers. Neither is a bad game but I suspect if you told Gary Kasparov he could only play checkers he'd be peeved. And to play checkers with his favourite pieces he'd have had to leapfrog his opponent to get Kinged.) In particular, those differences were most pronounced in the early days, and GW lost a lot of goodwill.

Like I said, I enjoy AOS. I've played it at the competitive level. But I don't think I'd recommend it to a WFB die-hard, even in it's current state, at least not beyond "well, you've got the models, might as well give it a shot".

[LCP]

I feel it was less about the game and more, as others have said, the massive shift in genre and expectations. AoS1 was a perfectly fine, if rather simple, game

That might have been something you could credibly say after it got the first handbook that patched it, but absolutely not on the day it released. AoS1.0 was fire-in-a-rubbish-bin, are-they-trolling-us bad, even putting all the joke rules about getting rerolls if you got your willy out aside.

• No way to balance armies against each other. 10 skavenslaves = 10 ogres. Take 9 ogres instead and the skaven player gets a handicap for outnumbering you.
• Models that legally couldn't throw attacks unless you overlapped bases.
• Summoners who could summon summoners who could summon summoners who could...
• The ability for 1 player to take an arbitrarily large number of turns before the other player got to take 1.

That's an interesting interview for sure, though.

[Adrastos42]

[SNIP]

In hindsight, the name is obvious, but it wouldn’t be the first or last time GW released something implying major changes and didn’t follow through (looking at you Psychic Awakening).

To be fair to those who didn't realise (including me, as I recall), it also was not the first time GW had run the End Times narrative, compete with Archaon, new models, and new rules. There was definitely precedent for this not being the actual end.

And yeah, AoS started to get much better once they actually had points costs and so on, but that start was....not great.

I do wonder how much things might have changed if Total War: Warhammer had come out before WHF was finished.

[Blackhawk748]

I do wonder how much things might have changed if Total War: Warhammer had come out before WHF was finished.

That was the other reason not to suspect that WHFB was dying, because Total War Warhammer had been announced and killing the tabletop game that inspired it would be dumb.

But this is GW and the release condition of AoS says everything it needs to about this era.

[LCP]

As a WFB fan who 100% got suckered into buying the ET books - it was crystal clear from about Book 2 at the latest that they were heading for a major shake-up of the setting and the game. Major characters were being killed off, major locations were being destroyed, the rules were evolving in ways that were clearly pointing at something beyond 8th edition. I never thought they were going to end up back at the status quo ante - I just didn't anticipate that they would actually explode the planet and make a new setting with almost 0 continuity with the old.

[Cheesegear]

Or relative to the thread: Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 2. Or Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 3. Or Dawn of War 2 to Dawn of War 3. The shift in each of those games was quite big.

DoW 1 was a fairly pedestrian RTS with a weird resource system. The fact that it had many expansions and QoL improvements helped it's longevity significantly. Soulstorm was a huge improvement to the game and I'm pretty sure gave it a second life.

DoW 2 to this day is one of my favourite games, ever. A hybridised RPG/RTS, that I wish there were more similar games. The multiplayer was...Frustrating though. I didn't like the multiplayer.
- Retribution kind of took out the RTS element. I'm not going to say I didn't like Retribution. But it just wasn't the same.

- The Last Stand was added at some point, which was a good mode. But had a very frustrating progression system. A PvE co-op mode, but your team-mates' gear is limited by their level (effectively time spent). Cool. You get paired with some Level 6s and that's game. But each Champion has their own progression system, and you have to level up (remember, time spent) with each of them, individually? FMD. Anyway, I liked Last Stand somewhat, even if the matchmaking is/was terrible.

DoW 3 was more like DoW 2's multiplayer - jarring for me, personally and I didn't like it. Oddly, a close example might be WarCraft 3? But I liked WC3. I did not like DoW3.
Although I will admit that a lot of my dislike for DoW 3, comes from love of DoW 2, and I know I'm not alone on that.

I just didn't anticipate that they would actually explode the planet and make a new setting with almost 0 continuity with the old.

I don't remember what release era was like.
But currently 'The World That Was' is mentioned well, more than zero times. There is some continuity (none of it matters, though), now. I can't tell you if it was there on release.

Mannfred has an entire audio book series. I did listen to those and I didn't hate them. He knows he's responsible for...Everything. Prisoner of the Black Sun was mid-ish 2015, and the rest of The Realmgate Wars after that.

[LCP]

that's why I said 'almost'

[Fergie0044]

Ah DoW. I spent a LOT of time with that game. Dark Crusade was the peak for me, I remember really disliking Soulstorm and quickly going back to DC. Why did you think SS was so good? As much as I loved DoW, I suspect it wouldn't hold up so well if I was to go back now, very much a product of its time.

DoW 2 on the other hand has the potential to be a timeless classic. Bringing together the 40k universe with the near perfect RTS base that the Company of Heroes games were built on.

DoW 3 looked awful, and at that point in my life time was limited so I never tried it.

[Destro_Yersul]

That might have been something you could credibly say after it got the first handbook that patched it, but absolutely not on the day it released. AoS1.0 was fire-in-a-rubbish-bin, are-they-trolling-us bad, even putting all the joke rules about getting rerolls if you got your willy out aside.

The thing that exemplifies AoS1 for me was one of those special rules. It stands in my memory as a symbol of everything that was wrong with that entire release; if your army included Settra the Imperishable, and you had to kneel for any reason during the game, you immediately lost. It is the only 'game' I have ever seen where you could accidentally lose by going to retrieve errant dice.

[Eldan]

As a WFB fan who 100% got suckered into buying the ET books - it was crystal clear from about Book 2 at the latest that they were heading for a major shake-up of the setting and the game. Major characters were being killed off, major locations were being destroyed, the rules were evolving in ways that were clearly pointing at something beyond 8th edition. I never thought they were going to end up back at the status quo ante - I just didn't anticipate that they would actually explode the planet and make a new setting with almost 0 continuity with the old.

Yeah, that's the thing, it was a huge shakeup even during the end times.

That said, a lot of people still expected this was going to be something like what 40k had in the last few years. Abadon's 13th crusade happens, the galaxy is hacked in half by the eye of terror, Ynnead is born, Guilliman returns, that kind of thing. Still the same world, but with an advanced timeline.

For the first two books, it looked like that. All the long-hinted at major shakeups were happening, but for some reason, all at once. Nagash, Archaon, Malekith, etc. And yes, named characters died, but they didn't start with the major ones.

Then they started killing everyone. Systematically. Imagine if someone opened up Lexicanum for 40k, got a list of all named characters from all novels for every faction, and wrote a short death scene for every one of them. Like, take this:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ult...e_Ultramarines
And go: Calistes: Eaten by Tyranids. Garus: stomped on by a chaos titan. Saul Invictus: shot with a plasma cannon.

That's what the books felt like. Not only that, but some characters (granted, characters of subfactions who hadn't been important for decades, but still) went out like utter chumps. I thought some of the ideas were quite interesting. Like the big shake up in Phoenix King lore. But then you also got entire nations killed off in a paragraph where they did nothing to stop chaos. I liked Kislev. The Old Widow of Kislev should at least temporarily stop the chaos invasion, that's her entire deal. Nah, forgot about that.

That already started to destroy a lot of goodwill before they even announced a new world and edition.


Then we went from a 300 page rulebook to a 2 page rulebook. With no points mechanism or similar, where the game just told you to bring equal number of models. One chaos knight, one goblin? Yeah, sure! Where we went from ten pages of terrain and formation rules to "all models move freely".

[LCP]

The thing that exemplifies AoS1 for me was one of those special rules. It stands in my memory as a symbol of everything that was wrong with that entire release; if your army included Settra the Imperishable, and you had to kneel for any reason during the game, you immediately lost. It is the only 'game' I have ever seen where you could accidentally lose by going to retrieve errant dice.

The one positive thing you can say about them is that they were at least factorisable. If you didn't like them (and who did) you could ignore them and nothing else depended on them. The thing that stuck with me the most about the rules at release was how much necessary stuff was missing.

[Durazno]

I was frustrated with Dawn of War 3 because it felt like each and every unit expected me to give my full attention to using their fiddly micro abilities as though they were a MOBA character. Jain Zar's abilities were kind of neat, but I had a hard time taking full advantage of them while fighting on two other fronts.

[Blackhawk748]

Ya, the End Times started off ok. I was one of the people that figured they were gonna kill off a few characters from each Faction to make room for new people. Get some real badass scenes where two of them kill each other, stuff like that.

Ya, no. A handful got epic stuff, most died like a redshirt.

Still like how Settra went down.

Still hate what they did to Mannefred.

[Eldan]

Also "Here's a list of mysteries in the setting the players have been discussing for 20 years". And then they again just went down the list confirming all of them.

[Hootman]

The thing that exemplifies AoS1 for me was one of those special rules. It stands in my memory as a symbol of everything that was wrong with that entire release; if your army included Settra the Imperishable, and you had to kneel for any reason during the game, you immediately lost. It is the only 'game' I have ever seen where you could accidentally lose by going to retrieve errant dice.

I...actually kind of love that one. First time I'm seeing it. Now, granted, I have always refused to take anything AoS-related seriously because of what they did to my beloved sandy boney boyz, but seeing something crazy like "Settra does not kneel. If you, his vessel into this tabletop game, even so much as crouch so as to put yourself below another, you immediately lose the game. Settra leaves the field, disgusted with your weakness." in the game would have brought me a twisted joy. It could be fun to try to convince/dramatically order other folks at the shop to retrieve your dropped dice, or tie your shoe for you...

If the game is a total joke. Beer, pretzels, that sort of thing. But never in a competitive scene, obviously.

The one special rule I always vaguely remember is that you got a bonus for playing Empire if you had a moustache (either natural or worn).

[Eldan]

Yeah, there were a few like that. I vaguely remember a dwarf rule involving having a beer?

It was just kind of weirdly tonally inconsistent. I've seen sillier rules in Beer and Bretzel Games, so if someone made Munchkin: the Tabletop, I could see it.


I think it's more that some people felt made fun of. The world was just blown up, all our favorite characters were dead, GW gave us two pages of clearly incomplete rules, but hey, here's a funny joke about Imperial Generals with moustaches.

[LCP]

It would be bad rule-writing even if the history hadn't been there. Some of the joke rules might have been reasonably fun the first time you ever played them. After that... if someone forgets Settra's rule and has to get something from off the floor, are you really going to say "gotcha, I win, pack away this game we spent an hour setting up"? If the rule says you have to sing "I'm a little teapot", are you going to make your opponent go through with that every time, or after a while are you just going to treat it as if they had done it without making them do it?

Others of the joke rules were difficult or impossible to use if you were not able-bodied and/or male, and that's bad even the first time.

[Destro_Yersul]

I...actually kind of love that one. First time I'm seeing it. Now, granted, I have always refused to take anything AoS-related seriously because of what they did to my beloved sandy boney boyz, but seeing something crazy like "Settra does not kneel. If you, his vessel into this tabletop game, even so much as crouch so as to put yourself below another, you immediately lose the game. Settra leaves the field, disgusted with your weakness." in the game would have brought me a twisted joy. It could be fun to try to convince/dramatically order other folks at the shop to retrieve your dropped dice, or tie your shoe for you...

If the game is a total joke. Beer, pretzels, that sort of thing. But never in a competitive scene, obviously.

The one special rule I always vaguely remember is that you got a bonus for playing Empire if you had a moustache (either natural or worn).

I get why they did it, and I enjoy Settra memes as much as the next Tomb Kings aficionado, but...

For how long is it going to be fun being an imperious jerk to the people around you? Especially for your opponent, who now has to put up with retrieving your dropped dice or what have you. The rule is obviously a joke, and trying to make the game less serious and more fun is something I'm all for, normally, but it didn't feel good. It felt rushed and kinda disrespectful. Like "hey, we blew up the world and characters you all spent years getting invested in. You can have this, instead! We blew it all up. For this."

[LeSwordfish]

Sounds like the kind of thing that would be really fun in a White Dwarf article for Open Play - give you a specific special rule for each hero or something and you and your opponent both have to abide by them for a casual game.

[Dragonus45]

As a WFB fan who 100% got suckered into buying the ET books - it was crystal clear from about Book 2 at the latest that they were heading for a major shake-up of the setting and the game. Major characters were being killed off, major locations were being destroyed, the rules were evolving in ways that were clearly pointing at something beyond 8th edition. I never thought they were going to end up back at the status quo ante - I just didn't anticipate that they would actually explode the planet and make a new setting with almost 0 continuity with the old.

As a notorious and proud AOS hater I may as well weigh in here. Same, around the time they did the big shakeup for Elf lore and had them all become one faction I thought that was so damn cool I started buying into the game against despite being so broke I had to by my hobbies off plasma donation money, and despite my all time favorite fantasy faction Bretonnia getting set on fire off screen like chumps. I thought this was going to be a major change going into a new edition and a new status quo to make the game a bit more accessible. What I got was a lot of my money wasted and one of my favorite settings strangled to death in a manner so embarrassingly badly written and insultingly poorly thought out I had to wonder if they hired a random child who had eaten a bag of sugar to outline it. I won't to go into the general issues of AOS on launch and the hilarity of things like Sigmarines, but it could have been the best game ever made with rules printed on pure gold written in mithril letters by Sigmar himself and it would have been leaving the gate with handicap. What it turned out to be was just insult to injury at that point really. I dropped GW official products pretty much entirely till Sisters.

[Eldan]

Sounds like the kind of thing that would be really fun in a White Dwarf article for Open Play - give you a specific special rule for each hero or something and you and your opponent both have to abide by them for a casual game.

Our game store used to have the Easter Game(s), a specific joke event. Some years, it was a humongously huge multiplayer 40k apocalypse event that went for 2 days, but sometimes also a team tournament for fantasy. Once even Mordheim. It always had the silliest rules, whatever the store owner could come up with, and most people brought strange experimental lists. We still fondly remember the game with the rampaging Bunny monster in the middle of the field that flattened a titan.

Those rules would have fit right in there. Used once. In an event that everyone agreed was a joke game beforehand.

[Forum Explorer]

As a notorious and proud AOS hater I may as well weigh in here. Same, around the time they did the big shakeup for Elf lore and had them all become one faction I thought that was so damn cool I started buying into the game against despite being so broke I had to by my hobbies off plasma donation money, and despite my all time favorite fantasy faction Bretonnia getting set on fire off screen like chumps. I thought this was going to be a major change going into a new edition and a new status quo to make the game a bit more accessible. What I got was a lot of my money wasted and one of my favorite settings strangled to death in a manner so embarrassingly badly written and insultingly poorly thought out I had to wonder if they hired a random child who had eaten a bag of sugar to outline it. I won't to go into the general issues of AOS on launch and the hilarity of things like Sigmarines, but it could have been the best game ever made with rules printed on pure gold written in mithril letters by Sigmar himself and it would have been leaving the gate with handicap. What it turned out to be was just insult to injury at that point really. I dropped GW official products pretty much entirely till Sisters.

I'm curious if you got into 9th Age.

[Blackhawk748]

As a notorious and proud AOS hater I may as well weigh in here. Same, around the time they did the big shakeup for Elf lore and had them all become one faction I thought that was so damn cool I started buying into the game against despite being so broke I had to by my hobbies off plasma donation money, and despite my all time favorite fantasy faction Bretonnia getting set on fire off screen like chumps. I thought this was going to be a major change going into a new edition and a new status quo to make the game a bit more accessible. What I got was a lot of my money wasted and one of my favorite settings strangled to death in a manner so embarrassingly badly written and insultingly poorly thought out I had to wonder if they hired a random child who had eaten a bag of sugar to outline it. I won't to go into the general issues of AOS on launch and the hilarity of things like Sigmarines, but it could have been the best game ever made with rules printed on pure gold written in mithril letters by Sigmar himself and it would have been leaving the gate with handicap. What it turned out to be was just insult to injury at that point really. I dropped GW official products pretty much entirely till Sisters.

Hi, I did this, but in the edition right before the End Times. I got into Vamprie Counts, actually how I found Mantic as I wanted cheaper zombies, and during the End Times I bought an entire VC army (with a Nagash even) and a all their cool End Times bits even.

Then 2 months after I got it they killed the game. Got to play a single game with them. Was incredibly pissed.

Now they are my Undead army for Kings of War and they've been having a grand old time.

Still upset about Mannfred.

[Eldan]

I'm curious if you got into 9th Age.

I did. I'm on the team. Background writer, Wiki editor, German translator and odd job person.

[Dragonus45]

I'm curious if you got into 9th Age.

By the time I was really aware of it it was kind of dead. I got into Heroclix and a couple of other games that needed less buy in and hobby work until more recently when Conquest really pulled me in.