sam585:
So played a couple of games of age of sigmar, 100 wound limit 25 for heroes, and NO sudden death due to it seeming to be a kind of silly rule at first.
The thing that jumped out to me about this game is not the balance between units, it being a simplified game, or anything like that. The biggest negative is how long the game takes to play.
Sudden death is necessary just because how long it takes to chew through 80 models.
Shooting into combat is necessary because of how difficult it is to kill things.
I would be more upset at you if you dropped down 100 night goblins instead of 8 greater demons.
This is the main issue I find with the game. To have battleshock be meaningful you need to dump a lot of shooting into one unit, and or a lot of attacks. If you don’t then you are stuck in a grind. Solo monsters seem to be a total waste for how they perform in battle. Any unit that does 2 or more damage is AMAZING in close combat, but only when they are throwing out 10+ attacks a turn, and have some form of rending.
Now, if you played games of a smaller size a true skirmish sized game, then this becomes a non issue, BUT at the same time so does battleshock because by the time you test for it you will likely already be wiped out as a unit.
Moving on to heroes, taking heroes is actually kinda weird. They did not really do anything for me in combat, and the abilities they provided for my armies were also pretty meaningless. Magic plays such a small part in the game that I did not bother with casting my one spell and I was never in range to ever dispel any of my opponents spells. I can only see heroes worth it if you slap them on some sort of mounted beast where they will have enough wounds to get into combat, and do enough damage to have a meaningful impact. Moreover, having a higher wound pool on a hero protects them from being sniped by warmachines that can shoot at you without needing LOS (stonethrowers, hellcannons, etc) which on average will do 7-9 wounds per round of shooting.
Now solo monsters I am not sold on them, and they should really be delegated to just supporting other units in killing, and distracting warmachines.
Monsterous Calvary is amazing being able to move onto a flank, or rear charge, and then maximize the damage onto the unit and minimize the damage they receive. These units are game changers.
Shooting infantry, at first I thought they might be over powered with the ability to shoot into any combat, but this is balanced out by them sucking terribly in close combat. So I don’t see this as being an issue in games, same goes with warmachines, anything you can do to kill more guys to make the game go faster the better.
Now onto warmachines, an interesting issue I found is target priority. Yes I can spend turn 1 and 2 poping solo heroes or monsters, but then the enemy will have a block of infantry screaming for your lines. I found that I was dumping all my shots into enemy units to weaken them so my dwarfs could then have a better chance to kill them in close combat, and then turning and shooting my opponents characters.
Lastly, any ideal force in AOS (if you are playing with any sort of restrictions or comp) should try to have the following:
A hero on monster preferably flying, doing a lot of attacks, and having a lot of wounds
A block of infantry
A block of shooting infantry
2 Warmachines preferably the ones that only do mortal wounds and have a high ranged
Monstrous calv or beasts of some sort for flanking and delivering high damage
A Monster to support the infantry
Lastly some unit that can deep strike OR ambush seems to be an auto include if your list has it available.
Final word, the game is fun.
Lastly, the games took like 2.5 to 3 hours each and we had a firm understanding of the rules and units. Both of my games I qualified for the sudden death but tested without it.