 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me as always my only co-host who ever has existed and ever will exist. It's Tyler. What's up, buddy? Number one. How you doing? Good to see you gets everybody. Absolutely. Also joining us this week back on the show, and I couldn't be more thrilled from the Antipity Antipity and the other side of the world Scaleless coach Anthony. What's up, brother? How you doing? It's the side that didn't get any increases on GW prices last night So I'm sure it's looking more of a talking point today, but I couldn't be happier to live down under. Yeah, there you go Absolutely. It's the middle of summer. You have it's beautiful weather. You're not getting a price increase What's what's to complain about? It's a great time everything's coming up millhouse. That's right You've got a beautiful new venue for your event It's it's it's it's exciting all around so Tonight we're gonna talk about something very interesting and new brought to us by our one and only co-host Tyler as well as many others who I'm sure he will he will Thank Appropriately as as many people have had input on to this But we're gonna talk about some new battle plans But and we're gonna talk about why we think they're necessary and the nature of the current state of battle plans and 3.0 IE what makes them good what makes them bad because I think after there, you know, we've all attended a good number of tournaments now and I've got some opinions. That's what I'll say But first of course the news Tyler. What do we got? So Vince despite you getting a education engineering. I am hearing audio issues coach. Are you hearing that? What are you cutting out a little bit? No, that might just be on our end. I'm sure I'm sure the chat will Rage up when it's like literally one of their favorite things is like is Tom late is that Vince's sound okay? So If I was you think so I would incorporate this engagement with like a YouTube poll, right? Will we be late is my voice okay? I Don't know Everybody else that's good. It might just be Discord being hot garbage sometimes it can be a bit funny that can happen to just be me But anyways, take us through the news make sure you sound crystal clear regardless of how I sound so Okay, excellent. All right. Well, I'm on the show again. So of course, it's 40k rumor engine. Yes. Oh, yeah Let's move on with our lives. Yep. Next. Who cares? Yep Let's see we've got we had a Sunday preview So another sign that they're behind on Shipping things we're getting the 2021 Tome of Champions for War Cry in 2022 I Like the look of these boxes though We're getting a Thunderstrike stormcast Eternals looks like three annihilators with big hammers I've been big dictators. We're getting some snakes for daughters of Cain I see these boxes Luminous Linesh and cruel boys The first of all every single Box thing they have there's gonna be a slanesh version because they're like look we got to move this product somehow Okay, at this point. It's like day old Like day old tuna salad we got to get it out of here. It's not it's not aging well But yeah, I thought they were real good the the Like these war cry boxes were traditionally a really awesome place to get A good amount of miniatures at a really good price and so I'm glad to see them back again coach. What about you? What do you think? Bad if you're looking for models, I think they they're cool If I was looking at them for match play and to incorporate into my next tournament list I think question mark, but I think from a war cry point of view, you know, they're cool Yeah It's it's a good way to pick up a couple of units Like I like the grand hammer boys getting in there because I think those are obviously a very solid unit That's underrated right now and I think that the I think for gong showed that you can use those quite effectively and my answer is the You know, like if you remember back when these first came like these this first go round of those boxes Picking up a couple of those was just a super good way to get high units So it really depends on whether or not the units are ever good because they generally were pretty pretty strongly discounted So I hope to see the same thing again definitely Let's see we have golden demon Deptcon 2022 since you want to say anything about that Obviously if you're gonna be participating it is a very good idea to download your form and fill it out in advance to be a responsible person I don't I don't know how they're gonna run this in the US this time I'll just very quickly walk everybody who might be attending who's who hasn't previously attended a UK event The way this works previously is in the UK events. You could sign up on Saturday you have to go in you fill out the form one for each entry you turn the form into the desk people They give you a little entry card you take that in Basically that gets torn and then handed to the person who puts it in the case now Golden demon runs. It's only recently. They started allowing the Saturday's entries. It used to be just on Sunday You would show up Sunday morning. You'd fill it out. You turn it in You'd And then they do the judging in a couple hours Like you had a couple hours to turn everything in a couple hours to do the judging and then it was over I mean it's like a five-hour thing total. It was insane Which is always crazy to me because I want to sit around and stare at the things in the case. That's half the fun Obviously, you know, we're in refest is usually a much shorter thing But adept con is basically four long days So are they gonna start allowing people to come in on Thursday and submit? I hope so and let things sit in the case I think that would be the way you go just like the previous competitions of all the art and all the ones that are running have done And then you close they close it down at some point whenever and then do their judging But fill out the form in advance. I promise you it'll make things a lot faster because you don't want to just sit there at the side of the desk and be Writing all this out. It's a decent enough form and then you just walk up turn them in they hand you your cards You're out a couple seconds. So that's what I'll say. I'm looking forward to see everything is gonna be there I think it's gonna be an absolutely bonkers year. So It should be a lot of fun good All right, so some news that I'm very excited about We got a couple of skew codes for Sylvaneth and it looks like July is when the battle term is gonna be dropping So you guys see anything else? No, I've not seen anything else, but I'm excited about it too coach I want to get your take on this. I Hope that this proves I was wrong last week and that it's not that that summer book is not luminous That would be so great. I would love it to be Sylvaneth. That's the one that really needs it It's the one we all want So if I'm wrong and you know and and my my prediction of the worst of all possible worlds is not true That's a win for me. I've never been more happy to be wrong Clearly we're getting something for Sylvaneth released in July at least as of right now. So yeah, I hope so coach. What's your take? Happy it's what I thought it was going to be I put my line in the sand to say Sylvaneth because it also ties well into the narrative Nurgle has risen. I think it allows things like Skaven to come in as well Especially maybe for Clam pestilence to return back to the fold but certainly I think the Sylvaneth with the When you look at broken realms and you imagine that broken realms will be off the shelf eventually Which were the war scrolls and the allegiance abilities most up-impacted by the broken realms and Sylvaneth with the war song revenant Arariel the the trees that have changed a million times Like they they are in a good position. So I'm happy I heard rumors that it was going to be Seraphon versus Skaven and I'm not happy with that Say Sylvaneth is a big win for me. I Have to imagine they do a battle box for this, but what a weird showdown Like this Skaven versus Sylvaneth. It's just a weird match I don't they don't seem to have many occasions to run into each other So it was just gonna be a strange box But who cares the narrative of the boxes are all clearly just whatever they happen to shove together like it doesn't matter We just had two order forces fighting each other Like it's their boxes have not always been logical. So it doesn't really matter Josh a said does the Tome of Champions 2021 mean we get AOS models for Skaven. No No, but what they have said is in the Tome of Champions is all of the underworld's Warbands finally having rules and war cry, which is fantastic that I am very excited about so that's a great thing thumbs up to that That is good And I am I am all for this I am more of this kind of thing So yeah, but anyways, you know If we get the box Maybe it'll all be pestilence because that would be kind of the logical thing to fight the Sylvaneth Which means that I which would be cool because then I can just not care at all about buying the box and it'll be great When when being as being a Skaven person Vince. Yeah If there was a hero in the box Is there a hero that's kind of missing at the moment from the pestilence side? Obviously it could be anything Skaven It could be a vermin Lord. It could be some minor hero, but if it was like scryer or pestilence Do you think there's a gap at the moment that could be filled with this hero? So my answer is there there is a lot of Skaven heroes already like a lot many that are pretty worthless and The You know like what pay what pestilence doesn't have is sort of a foot melee hero I suppose they have, you know, their foot priest and then their wagon priest So maybe if it was like some kind of pestilence melee guy, which means that it will be doubly worthless because Because generally melee foot heroes are worthless unless they're allowing something on utility Which would be pretty easy to do, you know If you if you went to the Marty route and gave some kind of re-rolls or something like that That would actually be pretty good for the pestilence guys around there But you know the the regular plague priest is one of the best models in the range right now He's one of the best heroes in the game Being in like an 85 point priest who can who can take curse So it's not really a huge amount of space But if it is gonna be a pestilence thing yet be probably some kind of melee sensor bearer type of guy. I Mean you used to be able to give hero sensors in the old, you know in the in the in the old world Right, you could you could build basically the equivalent of a pestilence hero by giving him a big sensor and letting him swing that thing around But you know, I'm still I'm still questionable on the scaven getting any kind of re-sculpts for the new for for The potential book release, which I'm still putting my money on the right I Mean if it's July you would imagine there'll be some form of bigger release given that it's the start of their Financial year that June kind of period so they want to start with a bang They're not just gonna throw down an army like a book a book They'll want to have a good amount of sales and especially since it's the off-season for a OS and it's the off-season for 40k There'll be something else whether it's war cry The Hobbit whatever it might be Yeah, I mean, we're on the 30-year cycle for work right right so the it's a strong possibility We'd get quote-unquote new addition of work right a thing probably not needed where Christ fine like it's fine It's great. It's a great game But yeah, I agree with you coach right they've got to put out something that's gonna move plastic in that time period That that's their time period, right? I don't know anything about new scale models, but I have heard from a few different folks over the last six months that of at least a new unit We'll see and New unit for super nice that is yeah, just just make doing wheels great again. That's all I want So we give me a hero that that surfs at the doom wheel and we have doom wheel meta It's what we all want it's what we all want absolutely absolutely All right boys, so we've got pricing news everybody. Yes favorite topic This course been going around today on Twitter is on the two on the social medias Let's see getting into details looks like about five percent of what they're claiming on average of course coach Given they've already squeezed as much blood out of that diamond of Australia And the Japan yen is fine China fine Then a number of details in this article. I'm sure everybody has seen it by now the price effects gonna happen March of 7th I know, you know, there's some things that are not gonna be going up paints brushes tools paint sets They said the majority of starter sets are not gonna be going up You know, we've gone through this a number of times before I saw a blood bowl Go up and think They said a few things 10% blood bowl around 20% blood bull teams and metal miniatures so Personally, I you know like I didn't ever know what to say about these things Without turning this into a political economy show Which Vince knows I'd be happy to give a two-hour lecture on The past century of political economies and my views on those things and the state of our structural our structures Within a global society, but sitting that aside. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that Yeah, I mean coach you go ahead you go first Obviously as an unaffected party you're neutral, right? So I'm a corporate white-collar dude. So I have a different perspective and I can appreciate at a Macro level that you know a lot of things have gone up and this is already an expensive poppy So to squeeze 5% extra out of us and then you know your uber eats has gone up and your Netflix has gone up And everything else goes up. You know, there's only so much disposable income and that until something's got to give right So I and wages aren't going up. So I appreciate and I apologize at the same time Games workshop has also had increased Increased profits, but they've certainly increased their expenses and being shared having shareholders and you know profitability There's a lot that kind of underlines this so Look at the end of the day as well most people are buying retail from games workshop to be honest You're all getting 10% 20% off from some type of FLGS. So Like it's not that big of a deal, but I do empathize and I do know that this will hit the pockets somewhere Yeah, I think that's pretty reasonable. I mean look, this is certainly the topic to sure and lots of people have lots of strong opinions on it You know Prices will rise politicians will Philander and you two will get old the You know my general feeling on it is that It was inevitable we had dodged it for a couple years because I suspect because the pandemic and even they're not tone-deaf and know that that is Would be insane So they they do this You know my advice as always is try to get the most out of the miniatures that you have you like there's lots of other games You can use your miniatures for make your hobby dollars count. Don't spend the money if you don't want to I am I'm less concerned about them Rising the price Some small amount on X number of kits and more concerned about like what are they paying their people? and that kind of thing like with recent things like that they they've derived an Mitigated amount of profit and they've delivered great shareholder value and all of that and I'm sure that I'm sure that's great If you know if you're a shareholder of GW. I'm sure you're quite happy with them over the past couple years I'd like to see them take good care of the people who are there and that doesn't mean like A bonus at the end of the year that means actually increasing their pay and stuff like that Those are real kinds of things not just a one-year thing If I knew they were doing that and moving up to market rates for a lot of their standard jobs Honestly, I would have much less of a concern with You know an extra couple dollars on my plastic toys So that's always my chief concern because I can always just not buy a kit Right, but the people who work there have to feed their families and put clothes on their backs and stuff like that So and I you know that Given recent stories, that's what I want to see them do So there you go, and I don't think they'd report that in the news, but they should They should address that and then and then talk about it But anyways, there you go That's that's my my feeling on the whole thing like as always there are lots of good options out there for miniatures And only more every day so you know If if if the price increase offends you and you don't want to give them your dollars, I say Yeah, okay, do you know good? There's lots of there. There are lots of good options We live in the golden age of miniatures and it's a it's a great time to decide exactly where your budget is gonna go and always try To use those miniatures as many games as possible to get maximum fun from them There you go Cool. Absolutely Anything else I think that's all I had for the news. Nope. All right. Awesome. Very good Well gentlemen with that Vince suddenly remembers he asked time stamp stuff and quickly grabs his notes to do that Let's do some pick of the week Coach, what would you like to share with everybody? So many great content creators so little time My first shout-out would be the azir weekly Which is a Twitter also on Facebook, but certainly a lot of laughs great great person in your chat as well They're always, you know, very witty and they've always always on the pulse with it comes to mean the worthy news So I definitely shout out the azir weekly Hudge a bunch of new podcasts to kind of hit my radar lately You know ruin acts is a really good one that I've really enjoyed from my local scene But there's a whole bunch of new little podcast popping up. So madmen. I think it's madmen gaming as well Has been a couple of really good uk interviews lately, I think Steve Curtis and there was a couple of Alex ghost arm as well. So Shout them out and then I'd be remiss not to shout myself out who has Well, I got you But yeah, I've been booking sure Pump your ego up a little bit. Yeah, Tyler jump right into it. Go for buddy You've been kicking ass on all these shows you've been doing and We were checking before the show that uh, coach makes our lives vastly more complicated Because he gets all the guests before we do and so you always have to You know, look at coach's channel to see if he has already first covered the topic that we had a mind to cover And then is he booked the guests that you had a mind to cover the topic that we were going to cover And usually the answer is yes. He's done both of those things. So But no, the Phoenician show was awesome. I had a chance to Hang out with James Tapia and Jeremy Lefebvre Who went 5-0 we were at flying monkey together some some friends of mine We had dinner Jeremy great guy incredibly good at the game. Obviously, you know, uh, that was a really excellent show And yeah, Joe Vuchic Joe Vuchic I've actually never said Joe's last name out loud I hung out with him over the weekend a number of guys on sunday At this a beginner friendly tournament that mission earnest organized in oklahoma and Mitcham is the guy behind the great plane masters So that really really awesome. And that was a great video on living cities too. So yeah, man, you're rocking it A couple of interesting shows. I've got Gavin coming up next week I think it is to talk about like mindset and like what does it take to actually do really well in a tournament But I probably give a shout out in particular to a beast of chaos list I'm going to be talking about with matt newan Known on twitter and i'm sorry on discords and twitters as ross Um, we're four in one with beast of chaos at the lvo. So What an absolute legend matt is and he's in there when celebrating with actually a beast of chaos tattoo So That's amazing Wanted to mention a couple battle report battle report channels the first the die is cast So some wisconsin gentlemen. Yeah, they've been doing some great content They're actually going to be releasing a battle report on sunday. It's looking like featuring one of the new battle plans We'll be discussing tonight. I think it's going to be focal points. So Yeah, if anybody, you know, I've been crazy busy with working having a chance to reach out to many channels inviting them You know, if they'd like to obviously be amazing to see some of these battle plans and youtube channels But anybody's interested that that would be fantastic. We happy to talk about on the show mentioned They're doing great stuff. Another one is hammer of war that i've been following for some time Uh, coach, have you seen these guys what they're doing? Yeah, yeah, they're quite active in my disc good funnily enough Really good. There's some really good ones even like bulldog hammer, which Did really well at the lvo yuri and um, who's coming on my channel There's a lot of like, you know, you you scratch the surface with like Rerolling ones and season of war. There's a lot of really good unknown battle reports that you're calling out And we can probably do another five or ten Oh Well, leave it there, but yeah, I've watched quite a few of those lately It's cool format a little bit of season of war a little bit of narrative. They do a nice job of Giving their analysis of the decisions that they made, you know, for better or worse Which really thought that that's a nice element that I haven't seen a whole lot. So yeah panels Uh, I was sold on hammer of war when I was doing the I had not heard of them until you sent me the link Uh, but when I was doing like copying the links into the description as always links in the description for all These things mentioned, um I noticed that the the like thumbnail image picture for their channel was Sineza was a slanesh model and I was like, all right. Well, I'm in for these. So Whoever they are, they've got my vote. So, you know, I'm down Uh, my pick of the week is slightly different little more hobby focused content. Uh, 52 miniatures Fantastic content producer and painter and human being Put out a really really cool video about painting a little miniature library For a library. It's it's it's a strange story. You'll have to watch it But he's painting a tiny library To go to to be a library for libraries to celebrate libraries You'll get it. Um, but I really loved it because it was just such a really cool Uh, like it was such a really cool project and watching how he sort of got into all of it and created it and it was it Uh, I just love diorama scenes like that and people who kind of create interesting stuff Out of out out of just kind of nothing, right? He started from nothing and then had this little mock-up of The I think it's in Stockholm or something. I'm not sure but they're they're big special Library, so check it out. It's super cool. It's a great little project It'll give you lots of ideas for for your own, uh, many dioramas or display boards or anything like that If you're a gamer, uh, I think it would be awesome Like I could totally see translating what he did there into a display board coach That was that had a like a city's sigmar theme for the collegiate arcane or something where you're actually in The like collegiate arcane library Right, it'd be amazing. There was a diorama last year that was like an undead ballroom. It was like, uh, you know, elizabethan type, um Rune but they'd use the war not the war cry the um under worlds Warbands and different things to create You know, I think there's a lot we could learn and that's something I've been watching a lot of is like the gun plows Looking at dollhouse videos looking at things outside the community to go How does that translate into age of sigma? How can I take that effect and bring it in and you'd be amazed? Yep 100 percent It just got me really interested because most of the most the display boards I've built are really like exterior locations right, uh It's it's sort of easy to do dirt and stuff like that like here again. This is my finished display board. I mean, it's an exterior location, right And the more I thought about and watched what he did. I was like, oh man, we could do some really cool interior location Display boards of like putting people in a space a place in the world The world of like 3d printing because that's a lot of what he used like he 3d printed a lot of the little accoutrements Tables and chairs and the stacks of books and stuff for it. And I was like, wow Yeah, we really have opened up. You don't have to craft that stuff from scratch anymore, right? Like those stl files exist So just really got me thinking so it's a very cool video great journey. Check it out Uh, and I think like the prime. I think he has a photo of the prime minister or something like that. Um Actually looking at his his thing that he made which is super cool Um, anyways, so yeah, check it out. All right, very good Gentlemen, let's talk about some hobby time Uh hobby time coach. What's been on your desk? What are you been up to brother? So I got tiktok shamed the other day So I tagged me on tiktok and like like they heard me talking about tiktok and they're like, where is he? And actually tagged myself and rob simes the honest wargamer and actually went right I'm going to get back onto tiktok and I'm going to fill some hobby videos and this week or the last couple of days I've been working on two pieces One I have stripped back my old warhammer citadel because it's going to be a part of my armies on parade board So I wanted something just, you know, low key that I could paint And then I've got a toilet coming up at the end of the month and I've decided I'm going to bring the big boys out again because I don't want to I'm in the middle of projects. I've just finished door as a cane. I'm starting up storm cast for armies on parade And I could just paint one of these guys. Um, and I can run my son's army. So This is my war stomper Nice. Nice. Very awesome. I love it. Uh, that's fantastic. Uh, glad to see that the The boys have been having a rough time lately, but they are still it's funny They're such an interesting they're in such an interesting place in the meta right now, right? Where it's like some armies, they just out and out trounce and beat basically at setup and other armies. You're like, well, we're dead Speaking of things I'd love to see get a new book. Maybe don't mess the second one up. Okay, so Um, but I love the sons. I really do They're so cool and I think for me at the moment, um, you know For anyone who's followed my channel in the past I went through four months of hard lockdown and you made a comment at the start of the show and you said, um We've all been to tournaments. Actually, I haven't this is my first third edition tournament I'm going to because literally everything's been cancelled and I was in hard lockdown for four months So for me, I'm going to take four boys. I'm going to push them around I'm going to have some laughs and I'll get back into that tournament mindset because right now Everything's been so stop stuff for us. I can't get into QR itc kind of focused competitive play because right it's been hard to commit Yeah, no makes sense. That's right. Absolutely makes sense. Tyler Did you paint anything this week? I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life that I'm on this show. Aren't you correct that question? Yes. Okay, cool. Just just everybody knows that's that's that's Tyler. I want you to imagine the week Where you do paint something I want you to think about the payoff that's gonna have Maybe if you sweeten the pot a little bit I don't know I figure something out Sure, absolutely hit like if you want to see Tyler paint something sometime and surprise me hit that like button. There we go That ain't gonna do it. That's hey, I'm just saying that's something Five or something I'd pay somebody a couple of dollars to paint your minis. I at least try At least try Did you get some games in you mentioned you were doing a little game hangout. What was what was happening? I know Uh, I love the this whole beginner friendly tournament idea and it works Mitchum had we had 20 guys and gals out for it I was probably about half really experienced players Be a third truly new players and you know, the other third maybe gone to a couple of tournaments, but still pretty new It was nice mix. Yeah, I had all of us old timers playing We're supposed to be playing tone down list I think some of us maybe myself included accidentally didn't quite follow the script as well as we should have Turned out my stormcast list was pretty good I didn't have any fulminators long strikes or you know, I didn't have any of the junk, but you know stormcasts. They're they're good What do you want? Anyway, yeah, it was a good time And the other side of the hobby we're going to be talking about here in a minute. I work on it Oh, I do need to put out a ask for everybody who is listening including me coach. So I am I am desperate need of people who have 3d printers Can print stuff print terrain So I about nine months ago I talked about this community terrain project and then got sidetracked by other projects like workoda Now finally getting back into it We're going to get as much done as we can before the may events the gt We've got coming up locally, but this project I'll have more to say about it soon I mean, it's really going to be oriented for the entire community around the world But I need to get some 3d printers So if anybody has any cycles available Let me know comment shoot me hit me up on twitter scrubbing wells wherever Let me know If only you had a public voice that you could ask people for this donation Only exactly Only people knew about you and your cause I'm sure that the the community will will rally there. There's a couple people in this chat right now. I know who are who've uh Who participate in that 3d printing lifestyle? All right, deeply appreciate it Awesome awesome My hobby time was very busy week. It's been a ridiculously busy week That thing Is basically done. I need to print out my little name placard for the front of it That's the only thing remaining to do. I finished everything up before the show So that's the new stupid display board done So that giant waste of time The you know after the I went to a tournament this weekend, obviously So bruhammer was this weekend great great time Very nice venue. It was in a brewery It's funny because all of us nerds are walking through all the normies who are like sitting out because they've got like coffee And other drinks too It's clearly like a chill place where a lot of people in that area of town just go to you know read and Work on their scripts or whatever And you know us nerds keep filtering in and out because we're in the back like in the brewery Area where it was set up next to all the tanks And I just imagine they have to be like, what are what is this? What is going on here in my in my coffee shop or my my You know my beer hall and so It was a great time Chris and everybody who was involved. They ran a great Great tournament smooth. It was easy Had five very fun games. I was running obviously Karzai You know like a very Karzai focused list Who's who really does dominate sort of the the the rest of the list? Very quickly to give everybody just a very very fast rundown. Here you go. I played Takeover Mars game one that was just random pairing. It was great. He was there the first time I've ever met him in person and so got to talk to him and Play him game one If he was playing slanesh, of course that was a win for me game two Was I'm trying to remember the order of all this. I'll probably get something wrong um Okay, so I played that I've never been able to use an order Because already it's all slipped from my mind. I I played lumineath and That person ended up getting fourth And they had 30 sentinels and three foxes I got up against my all melee stormcast list So that was a loss Uh, that was pretty pretty straightforward there No, any anything you could have done differently anything any You know openings opportunities things you missed he out dropped me I mean I was two drops his one drop. So he gave me first Okay, because I had actually set up as such where he couldn't alpha strike me because of what I had kept in the heavens And because the range of how I had set the board So there was no ability for him to alpha strike me with all of his stuff with all of his shooting Okay, which meant he gave me first turn which meant my best hope was basically to drop on him and then hope to breathe hard with everything that had a breath weapon And reorient the battlefield completely like I you know because it was a it was one of the It was one of the it was the five point scenario Not yeah power struggle. It was power struggle. That's what it was Which is a really hard way. She got to hold things for two turns and all this the problem was he first of all, a very good player Ben was his name and Really nice guy like super duper nice guy very enjoyable game despite the fact that I was on the heels from the beginning I basically tried to he castled so I tried to punish him for it by pushing him over like dropping everything on his left And trying to sweep down the line That was the idea like land a couple lucky charges um, I had my triumphs like a real two charges in a turn, right? And land a couple lucky charges and then start sweeping into his line where I was chewing him up And he couldn't go forward to get out into the board Was basically the idea of the thing. Okay Okay That did not work. I landed my breaths all did nothing And all my charges failed and then he double turned me So, you know, I'm lucky to see cogs man. That was that was to solve all your problems Well, nobody would have been near the cogs because I didn't have a cast or I could have dropped over there But and solve all your problems and he's aluminum if he would have unbounded anyways, um But so that was a loss, but it was a very fun game But you know like every time I tried to move three foxes were suddenly in front of me Right until until it was time to charge and then they were a million miles away. Like that's that's what it was Like every unit I had did not move because there was always three foxes in front of them Um, I think I actually made one real charge in that game Ed killed a unit of ten wardens Yes Good times um the uh I played Skaven like a crazy Skaven list with four What's that? John, I've I've just pulled out bees here. Oh, I've actually got your roster now. So there you go. Yes, you do Um, the Oh, no, I appreciate that You're you're I love from the other side of the world. You can know the list and who I played against Yeah, it was great. Um, it was a very fun Skaven list He had a ton of bodies bunch of clan rats and storm vermin and four vermin lords four four vermin lords and uh My dragons proved ineffective yet again as they were um as There's like two of them stuck up fighting various vermin lords and rats and stuff And the funny part of this game I'll just tell I'll share the funny moments because who cares about anything else The funny part about this game was there was a death master You know the stupid Skaven assassin guy who's like totally worthless fighting my dragons Amongst some other stuff. They're not really paying attention to him. So he's just kind of over there stabbing them I could not make a save this guy would be like hit every time wound every time I drop every save This dude was just a murderer. He's just putting wounds on dragons One ran d3 damage or something. It just it just wasn't anything and he just kept tearing through me He he had like eight wounds on one of the dragons before finally I turned to him and was like That's it squish this guy and just just squished him out of existence. But he sat there and just was just chipping away um The other fun part about that game just to give you a good example of how I tended to roll in this tournament Um, not that like blaming rolling isn't a good way to go But this was a particularly interesting one because even this game and player was like wow, you're not very good at rolling so I had Karzai hit the Karzai's a big 160 mil base And he had set up his his storm vermin and his clan rats in this sort of like cloud formation That left exactly the right size pocket for Karzai to sit in the middle Okay, so where he could charge everything he charged both units and he had a vermin lord within three inches One of Karzai's attacks is his tail Which has a which has a number of attacks equal to the number of models within three inches of him Which these are 25 mil base skaven. I had 19 models within three inches of me. Okay So 19 tail attacks he was fully buffed. So he was on twos and twos Neg two rend two damage each I was like 19 attacks. All right. Look, I'll I'll take I was like I'm gonna split these This many are going into the the storm vermin and then I'll take seven I think I put seven into the clan rats. I was like twos and twos seven clan rats to a piece I'll do some big damage to that unit I killed six clan rats They didn't get a save against this attack. I want to point this out. This is a they do not have a save against that attack I killed Six clan rats. I was like, yeah, it feels good. All right, right on but that was a fun game So that was a win You guys before your next opponent because your next opponent would have given you a real tough time So you've got to get like those dice jl you got like guys See what those those dice did do not do that. Are you going to be like this is your warning guys? Yeah I I fought then I then I played anthony actually who's in the chat right now is my game four just randomly paired up So that was pretty fun He again commented on my dice after cards I went up again on twos and twos and I missed with half of all his attacks like literally half Would roll I'd roll and I'd pull out whatever number I rolled a half of those would be ones I was just like this is unreal But it was a fun game. Um, it was the fun moment from the game with anthony was A thunder strike Thing happened, you know, like when skates when stormcast die, you roll the thunder strike dice So cars. I had like one wound left. He killed a thing That thing exploded killed cars. I cars I exploded killed a thing and then that thing killed something else It was just like boom boom boom boom boom like this thunder strike nuclear Mushroom cloud went off as everything took everything out In thunder strikes. So that was a fun game. That was a win. And then my game five Started a little contentious with some playing by intention type of confusion. The player was really nice really good guy He's from up in milwaukie. Um, we sort of reset real early I was I just stopped and was like, okay, we got a talk We had a little talk and the rest of the game was real good And we we understood how each other was sort of playing and and and had a really nice game That really came down to like the clutch Um at the end of the game, I was one point up on him from battle points, but he got his grand strat And I didn't so he won by two So that was my game five really really really fun game but lots of very back and forth. So it's a good time So there you go. Awesome, man Congrats in particular to tom guan finally getting that five. Oh, yeah, that was great A long string of four ones. Yeah It was uh, it was a heck of a match too against that few tonight nest list I'd net list like that was a that was a banger of a game five that people should look up that idk few thin list on bcp It's brutal Uh, because again, it's 120 shots on twos and twos coming out of those revers Just just death just death Throw it out and curse and you're in a real bad time. Yeah. Yeah. So, um at any rate It was a it was a very fun tournament. They're gonna do it again next year. I hope to see everybody I'll see some people there again next year. But yeah, great great great time great players great opponents great games Can't complain. So now and then holy wars is this weekend so There you go. Yeah, I mean I'm incredibly jealous. I live vicariously through lvo and bcp right now because My tournament scene is resetting And hopefully we'll be back soon, but um, I'm certainly living vicariously through, you know, people like rob Who's streaming from mobile phones from bcp. Is any way I can get a just sigma in real life right now? There you go. Yeah, absolutely Uh, all right. So with that done, uh gentlemen, shall we turn to the main topic of the the main topic du jour? Uh, so do it tonight. We're gonna talk about battle plans Let's put this guy away And go over here I'm just gonna bring up this picture of first blood to to lead the first part of the discussion That's so we're gonna start off talking about battle plan Sort of strengths and weaknesses. Okay Um Okay, uh, let me thesis statement Uh, yeah, a quick shout out by the way before we get into this j erby who uh was there I did not get to play j jeta beautifully painted slanesh army He ended up taking second in the the best painted and it was very well deserved j your your army was absolutely gorgeous I I want you to know that you did get uh my vote j. So um, that's just so you know that Um, really really wonderful looking army. So I hope to see you again there j and I can't wait to see what you got um, okay so um the Uh The current crop of battle plans. Here's my thesis statement. You ready? They're not very good Um, a lot of them have flaws That make them lead to iniquitous blowouts too easily There is about five ish Of them that I think are tournament worthy And I think the rest when you put them in there You're basically accepting that you're getting a subpar battle plan That is going to be swingy weird or all in all not that great for having a good Even match up that can actually go and give a good four or five rounds of play And to me the distinction between that Is how close does it hue? To the sort of what I would think of is the standard setup and I've got the image for first blood up here on the screen right now Because to me first blood is almost the perfect scenario The deployment zones are tight They are distant. It is harder to alpha strike It is interesting to chaff because of the nature of the sort of tetris peace Uh line, right? um Your like if you want to be under one row of chaff and have your whole army in a tight castle You have to back corner Right you if you think about length versus length, you know length versus length You can court you can castle right in the middle and you've got relatively clean access to the whole board right At the same time it hues very close to the score one score two score more Right, that's how you get the points. It's benefit to controlling the thing that you care about is not more victory points It's an interesting in game thing an extra cp Right It doesn't get unusually screwed by seismic shift, which many of them do which were that we'll talk about Uh and instead it gets really interesting with seismic shift because the nature of where the three objectives are They're they're sort of hypotenuse distance from each other and and and in this one Deciding to go second or give away the priority on three to like take their objective away from them Is are actually a really impactful choice Yeah, right because cutting it to two really matters a lot Okay, so To me first blood is as near to the platonic form because it doesn't allow for just like all of a sudden points go wild right The bad scenarios to me are the ones that use something more like the old scoring systems That have a random element that makes them sort of impossible to really understand what's going to be valuable and what's not looking at you veins of gur Uh and uh and or allow you to just suddenly rock it on points almost accidentally Okay That's my thesis Coach I want to start with you actually because Tyler's going to get to talk a lot later What do you think about what I just said? I do not disagree with anything you just said When I looked at those initial battle plans and still to this day They feel like transition battle plans. We went from a way of playing age of sigma in second edition We're moving to a way of third edition There's a lot of things that still got to come around and ways that you stratagems or you know battle tactics and things like that and And there are too many incentives right now up to particular builds Um, I've got some thoughts. I know when I was thinking about like what does good look like? What does bad look like and just some of those thoughts It's just wild inconsistency right now. But I guess it also depends on what hat I'm wearing. Is it the tournament organizer hat the match play Person that wants to go, you know podium or the average joe And I think depending on how you look at it will depend on how you see the current battle plans But overall, I don't think they're they're that tight and I think I'm curious to see what the next realm looks like Yeah, the next battle packs. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I mean some of these bad battle plans really accentuate the Issues of a less skilled player or a newer player against a slightly more seasoned player Right. Um, when you look at veins of gurr, almost anybody can lose that accidentally Okay, but a new player is going to be far more likely to accidentally lose that because they just don't understand How they need to sort of spread cover anticipate when the things drop have things ready in position Set up their movements a two or an a two in advance, etc. Etc. Right um You know, it's uh It just really occurs to me that that The ones that are more even it's almost harder for a skilled player to run up the score Right, they can sort of like a great turn as they got six points Because maybe they killed a monster or something where they did about Good one of my points is it's so easy to blow out the scores and you know, there's so many games that I'm watching That get blown out and you can call it by round three Like you can just absolutely call it if that because the scores have gotten so big Objectives are being burnt, you know, battle tactics have been denied and you're not seeing and then you've obviously got Battle plans that you know have the auto win conditions, which are just sometimes too easy to to to do. So Um, I think it's just way too loose Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're talking about some real offenders here in a moment But taylor, what do you think what's your what's your overall your your sort of story to take care? Yeah, I just want to follow up on coach's point there. I mean I We're we've always had an issue with the double into The double and round two So that's always been with us. I do think it is particularly pronounced right now With the damage output that many armies can do where many games are just turning on that round two So you're a size of the storm One drop or you're living cities and you put your dragons and your fulminators off board And you give away the turn and then you come in bottom of one and then you have top of two And you've done so much damage that you're putting, you know, there's that's that pattern has always been with this But it's very pronounced right now. So I would I would tend to start with that like even setting the missions aside I think we're there. We've got a number of units that need to get rained in a little bit to help with that issue on I'd love to get into some discussion around some of these battle plans that I think are widely viewed as Poor battle plans and just to try to give, you know, the steel man take, you know A counter take on them and to see how it comes out. So veins of gur Foods and nail apex predators those three particular come to mind even a little bit on savage gains Oh, I would add in marking territory to that list or power in numbers I got a list of like bad. That's pretty long Yeah, back to the show that you guys did around ranking, you know, the the battle plans and you know If we ask this two years ago three years ago, you'd still have a quality high, you know These are the good battle plans and there's a couple error Don't recommend but you'll show you had majority don't recommend here is like five or six that we would actually use Yeah, yeah, exactly Go ahead Tyler, please Yeah, yeah, I suspect that holds up pretty well the but I do agree in general that there's some gaps in the current battle plans that I have favored personally the more standardized scoring And the differential scoring battle plans. I do think there's something to be said with some of these I'm still not entirely, you know, like savage savage gains. We've had quite a bit of conversation Around savage gains. I know a lot of people who still consider savage gains one of the best battle plans out there They love playing it even with that fact change. So if anyone doesn't know Savage gains the way it works now is the way That border war battle for the past always used to work where You would score one point for your objective You could potentially get four points for the objective in your opponents territory You're boarding your territory now and then two points each for the two middle So there's potentially nine points available plus the battle tactic a lot of points You know, that's a potential major differential We we had been playing it for a while many of us to where We read it in the way where it was any objective in the middle Meaning that you can only do a max of two points, even if you control both, right? So I I'd love to get a little bit of discussion around that You know, I'm not sure personally and that will come into play with For coda because we did have battle for the past As one that we wanted to bring back because that was one of the true classics of age of sigmar's history Yeah Yeah, I mean like my hit list here and again, I'm not I'm not ranking these out But I can summarize let's let's talk about the bad ones and what makes them bad Like let's let's talk about what makes a scenario sort of bad And we if we want to steal man them on the defensive we can as well All the things I would pick for my like scenarios that I would never want to see at a tournament goes something like this marking territory Too easy to accidentally lose Like it's just it's crazy to me that it also has this weird thing going on Where battle tactics are a thing now like the number of battle tactics you complete is suddenly very important And so nothing like the game accidentally ending in the third turn and just being like well the game's over That's it. You don't get to your other battle tactics. So Sorry about your luck. Um and So like I just I hate marking territory marking territory would be fine If seismic shift didn't exist Or it'd be more fine. I shouldn't say that it would move from like Truly awful to average. That's what I mean seismic shift The the removal of the objective Is such a big deal in some and how it impacts some of these scenarios and not others and not just because of prime objectives Right, but just because of the nature of how it plays Like it can flip to three and because of the nature of how the objective get removed and when it checks Right for for who won. It's just like it took to three Priority is this I win Um That's it. I have I have seen some players so season of war for example, they actually play it on their channel So vince you and I were talking about this to where Let's say that happens. So let's say ridge and jordan are playing and ridge wins the role for around three Ridge decides to go second and he burns one of the three objectives Jordan the way that they do it will have the game doesn't end immediately because ridge right now is controlling the other three Jordan will have a shot Getting one of those objectives under his control meaning they'll Rule that to where you have you check at the end of the first turn Round three as opposed to immediately. So it gives a little bit of leeway for the play which would again I like I love that interpretation that would also take a step toward making it better As it is right now played sort of by book. It's just it's it is Garbage I have no better words for it. Okay. I do not like this scenario and I think it's just a trap Like the number of people who are going to lose in that scenario and have a terrible time and not know They were about to lose is way too high It's fine It's fine If you are playing at your local game store because then I can go home I can go to do some shopping when you're at a tournament And I now have to kill an hour an hour and a half Just walking around and then it's going into lunch, you know It's a really bad experience for a competitive point of view and there's obviously a lot of other things to talk about that um That's probably like one of the hats that I've been putting on lately being a tournament organizer and doing it doing events is What is the experience that I'm trying to create and that obviously leads a lot into randomness and the types of battle plans and The types of incentives, uh, and I know when I was thinking about some that have like no reserves I don't really don't like that either Yeah, yeah, yeah Because it doesn't doesn't there's no other incentives against like shooting armies Like where's the fog of war where shooting armies can't shoot? 100% Outside of a certain distance, you know what I mean like we're gonna punish, you know People coming in from reserve, which is literally their allegiance ability Well, then there should be other battle plans where we punish other abilities Yeah, I want you to steal man tooth and nail for me. Tyler go ahead I'm fascinated. I can't see man this it's another one that I think is just utter utter Worthless trash, but go ahead get what's the defensive? Well, so part of it isn't necessarily my view on it. It's more from what I have heard from quite a few others there You know experience tournament players who will tell me about their local meta their experience of tournaments that I've played this and So some of the views that I've heard one is that Deep striking is common in a number of metas that are out there A lot of our factions nowadays they have You know, I think traditionally when we thought about total commitment was the prior version of this We would tend to think about storm cast and knight hunt. So why would you do this when it's these two Armies, this is a core part of their allegiance abilities. That's kind of part of the argument Now it's all over the place this deep striking and you have There's more of it Let's be reasonable. Certainly. There are a lot that don't but yes, I'm with you Yeah, yeah fireslayers. I mean, it's it's a size. I actually went through it's a sizable list, right? So that's that's part of it I would say that there there's a pattern of a number of lists that are leaning into this play style And that this would serve as a clear interruption of that play style Fair point. Okay. Good. Good defense. Here is my counter a lot of those other armies It's not an allegiance ability. It's the choice of a unit So all that's going to make those armies do is pick a different unit Right, they didn't need to build their list to deep strike Whereas some armies have an allegiance ability and clearly rely on it as part of their thing And I'm not even going to talk about storm cast because storm cast are generally in a pretty great place right now, right? but um My my real problem with tooth and nail it also has now they added more things it screws up like When stuff gets summoned or whatever it can't charge or shoot or whatever nonsense Okay, cool. Um, what's the best strategy in aos right now? If you want like one of the best strategies if you if you're trying to win games of aos What type of unit do you almost certainly have in your army? Power projection units right ranged mortal wound dealers, right of some variety Uh, or I guess just like a hundred and billion shots from a nemarty There's just a lot of power projection in that way, but But like shooting range shooting, right? Okay, what's one of the best defenses against being alpha struck by a range shooting army? All of which are the top of the meta right now Sure being off the board being off the board not existing at that moment, right great Let's take that away like let's make the most powerful forms of lists even more powerful Like the alpha drop claim Of what it's stopping Nobody's that scared of melee units dropping at nine inches and then potentially charging That's not the fear Right, I mean outside of living city where they get to cheat, right The fear is you drop a bunch of bows like or not bows takes a bad example. You drop a bunch of uh 15 judicators. Sure. Let's go with that. I don't care pick your thing, right And they don't care that they're nine inches away. They might even set up further than nine inches away They're just setting up in range Right, so the problem's not the the deep striking. The problem is the same thing. It's been the the the overwhelmingly powerful ranged mortal wound tower projection Right, you like you mentioned salamanders. Great. That's another example, right? Like yeah, hearth guard can do it or whatever Okay, roll a nine man. If you get that nine congratulations, you did it Most armies can now get to a melee point where if they just run forward or have some ability to run in charge or move forward They can often get less than a nine inch charge to get into melee. Anyways Right Yeah, man, I hard agree, you know, the main arguments that I've heard their symptoms. They're not addressing the root causes, you know root causes Yeah, or the power projection One drop, you know, there's I'm actually curious your guys current view on the one drops, you know We we've had some conversation for a little while now about Is this really an issue in the meta? And you know, I feel like the argument's getting stronger as the months took by sure Yeah, I mean, it's it's a bit sideways, but yeah, I agree. It is it is a problem Just in terms of root root issues that need to be addressed Looking for a battle plan like tooth and nail to try to address these root issues. Yeah It's the perfect storm of the combination Like when you look at battle regiment on its own, it's fine Like one drop cool who cares? But when you start then adding in a whole bunch of things like the pure power projection being able to You know burn objectives and you know, really could dominate those first couple of rounds knowing that The game is really owned right now in those first Really by round two round three in a lot of games you can predict where it's going and you know who's gonna win It's that perfect storm where I really ask you the question You know, is is this particular problem or is it the whole incentive structure to what you're saying Tyler? So yeah, I would agree when you start looking at all of the incentives together And what do we want from the game and how we what are the controls that we have to to rein in certain elements because points is not enough You know, we saw bow snakes luminous, you know things go up Cool. I just dropped something else to keep my 15 bow snakes to keep my 30 sentinels So points is not the guard rail that we all think it's going to be Yeah, I agree and and also yeah, I mean yes, it's a problem, but but it's an inequitously distributed problem Is anyone afraid of a one drop gets list? You you roll up to your opponent. There's a gets player at the table. They have a one drop list Are you like oh no? No, you're like, okay, cool. That's fine. All right, you're one drop. All right Who do you have priority? I guess You know like fine But you roll up and you face like the one drop storm cast or one drop lumeneth or one drop whatever list Totally different feeling in your gut Right and what that tells you is there's something else at the root of it All right That's it so Okay, to me then what we've what we've said here about what makes these things bad is marking territory is bad because it interacts very poorly with the With seismic shift the existing season rules All right, and it's very and it has very poor timing into how points are how the win is determined I really like your point about battle tactics events I actually hadn't thought about that because a number of tournaments, you know coach I'm not sure how you were planning to do Sydney GT You've seen a number of tournaments that are using battle tactics A separate scoring in terms of like a victory point system, you know Where you might get x number of points if you get a major victory And then if you got you'll get like a point per battle tactic, right? But you could get up to say 15 points. Well, yeah, this could potentially screw you If out of getting a battle tactic, so I hadn't thought about that before and it's funny you say that because you know I've had some good chats with you know, I've got a to community, you know in my server and we talk a lot about you know Event incentives and how you think about it and you're just going to look at like the warhammer open and You know the way that they were incentivizing like win loss and you know who who was at the top of the ladder One of them was based on the amount of victory points you scored And I think one of the five was one of those one-to-no kind of battle plans So if I can only score one one point or no points Okay, cool. I got one point But if I had a scenario previously where I rack up 20 30 40 and have an absolute blowout You can't catch up So from a standardization point of view and how we and I know you had a really good chat with our kernel cabbage A few you know a few months ago about to and how we do differential and things like that I think that's where we got to look at the incentives as well to see how do we How do we incentivize outside win lose and draw, you know, and just keep adding on as as we get bigger and bigger and bigger If top players are all going five and oh with their um their their battles They then going five and oh, they're getting all five battle tactics. They click the green strategy How do you cut how do you cut up the top outside of like strength of schedule? You don't want to add just another layer of complexity um So I think it's it's an interesting things to think about as we progress through Um, this new version of age sigma. Yep. Yep. Absolutely All right. My next one on my hit list is veins of gurl. I've mentioned it a few times already I'll I'll I'll tear this one down very easily It's not hard at all to accidentally lose this game because all of the things drop on the wrong side Or in the wrong place where your army is not and their army is and the reality is they will just accidentally own them Right like the second one drops on the right side They're maybe mainly on the left They're screwed until the neck until until round three happens and then boop boop They both fall on the left and they go cool and they just arrange their whole army In rows of chaff and and anvils that you're going to get through and it's going to be like Good luck. Good luck punching through in time You know, like I'm just going to win this Okay, so have you ever like obviously we've had yeah You we've had many variations of this going Danny back to what was the original? I can't remember what the original was called back in Yeah, that's what it was Which is funny because I really enjoy randomness. Tyler, please like please continue your point, but I Well, I'm curious. Yeah. Yeah. So you so you you look okay Well curious your your views in a minute So Vince have you ever liked any of the iterations that we've seen over the years of this? The only the one I liked more was the one that almost forced them more into a tighter area in the middle Which I think was the last like in a os 2.0 It was like you it was like on a one two a tier and three four a tier and five You know something like that like it had more than just three points, right? And it squished them all toward the middle where statistically they were highly likely to be in the middle The current iteration there's only a 16 chance roughly that any one of them ends up in the middle So they they're very prone to end up on the left or right side because it's like one through six seven A through 12 right is how that's the board is broken up. So in this case Yeah, good Modification would be four three four two through five two three four If you add two through five the left side six through eight Middle nine through 12 on the right. How much does that improve things? Some I need to look at like the any dice 2d6 to remember exactly what the aggregate percentage chances are of all of those together But like you could it would help some if it was more forced towards a middle line Okay, but honestly, it would just be cooler If they kind of just came down in a place Like boom boom boom this they drop on the vertical if it looked like first blood that's on the screen right now Right. Hmm, but it was like round two drops here Like almost set the thing up exactly the same like imagine if first blood Or sorry if veins of Gurt looked like this and if the round two drop was the center point And then the round three drop were those two on the sides And you just knew that's how it was going to go And this was the deployment for it Right, that's a more interesting scenario immediately to me because now people can actually start like thinking Strategizing trying to make some decisions and not suddenly like oh, I tried to make the best decisions I could to spread out to cover the most space, but then oops Oops all berries right um like You know Uh assistant ref said you could roll for where the objectives come down before the game starts So you know sure that'd be fine too like I you know, yeah, that's fine I don't I don't hate that either so like it there's still some randomness But it's a decision you're making with knowledge in the game I just think Yes, it often might be the case with veins that it doesn't work out like that But it's a pretty sizable percentage time that it just like sucks That it just doesn't it's pretty easy It's not exactly a low percentage chance to roll an eight or more twice in a row like That's not a super low chance for that to occur Right or or a six or less And if you don't happen to really have presence on that side of the board because your army can't cover the whole board Right, it's just not it's just not how things work if you do you probably already lost because you spread yourself too thin right So like this is that this is this is my my challenge with it So my my third point would be overt randomness is a is a for no real benefit like why what's the game? What is the actual game What is the just a fine point? What do you before I get into a few more thoughts what are your thoughts on veins of gur and kind of this topic in general randomness and It depends on what hat you're wearing I think ultimately right if I am uh at a tournament and I want to do well I hate this scenario I just hate it because I don't like randomness and I like predictability If I'm going to win or lose the game I don't want to lose it on a priority role And now this is another excuse of if only the objective landed on where my force was as opposed to completely There's been plenty of times where I played this or an equivalent And the objective has landed in perfectly with from my opponent And literally there's a very little I can do to scramble from one side to the other But there's also been times where it's kind of gone in the middle or in my favor If I am in the middle tables and I enjoy randomness and I enjoy the The the ability to counter play to go well I'm open to where it drops and then it's the mad scramble and then you know the unpredictability And we've had we've had plenty of scenarios like this. We had What was it? What was the one that we danced around the middle like in second edition was it? Relocation all yeah We've had we've had a whole bunch of those and some people like it But I think the vast majority do not like the unpredictability. So I think season of law also made a really good comment. I think the scoring structure is also weird Like just stick with one two and more as opposed to having right right to randomness. Thank you. Yeah, that's Excellent point The scoring structure on it is also bonkers bonkers Yeah, I don't I don't know like we've had this I mean I can I get that view on the other side. We've had that scoring structure with this mission template for What I think since 2017 we've had this where they predicated on the battle round and the number objectives meaning there's 15 points available in round three I've always liked that a lot actually because it was the one mission that Opened up more space. I would say for the long game planning And orient to orienting toward the long game toward round five and coming back at round five Now that's biased on how I like to play the game where I tend to like to play list From a social contract point of view that kind of lean into that structure where you're not Dps checking your opponent off the table in round two But anyhow, I that's been my experience of star strike slash veins of gore is that I think it that's that's been a great structure in my view Sure. Yeah, I mean I I get what you're saying. Yeah, geocoach. What do you got hit me? I'll throw a hypothetical question so the first objective in range veins of gore drops in That around two and then this this the other ones drop in battle round three What if it was incentivized and brought forward around so let's say the first one drops after deployment before the first battle round Commences, so it's much earlier in the game Which means you've got much more time to go fight for the objectives with your bodies as opposed to two turns of moving one way And then you got to scoop 180 to go the other way It's a hypothetical as opposed to Like what as is the root problem of these types of things? Is it the objectives come too late and you know, it takes me too long because my arm is too slow Or is it the randomness? yeah, it's Yes, is my answer because that's you just got to exactly the point. I wanted to get to coach which is Tyler, I appreciate that late game Concept and I you know assistant ref mention that it's the comeback ideal And I appreciate the the the ideal of the platonic form of this game But what actually happens is they end up holding like in the bad situation, which is quite prevalent They end up holding two and round three Probably two and round four Maybe they lose one and round five by the time you get over there But because they've still got one slash two of them It doesn't matter you can't catch up enough They blew too far ahead of you because you help you got like some one-pointers and two-pointers and they ran the score way up Right and you can just math it out You can just math it out and go you're gonna get that one. I don't care. I'll literally just abandon it So I lose nothing All a steel man my one point Right And I win I just insta win so it doesn't but we've arrived at the same place Right. The second thing I'll say is that this game is already highly incentivized to favor extremely mobile armies And to D and and to like make it so Things like gits or hordes of goblins are not a good play. There's already lots of reasons why those things are true Okay Making it so little foot slogging troops that need to move in tight coherency and a big horde or something like that Now have to run from this side of the board to the other That is a massive massive effort for them Like you might as well just say those armies don't get to play if it comes down on the wrong side because they'll never get there Like sure if you're playing all dry like if you're all if you're oops all dragons and it drops on the wrong side You're like hey yolo hero phase move everybody hero phase move. Let's do this And we're across the board and breathing fire You know like what a great day Yes, let's make dragons and super highly mobile armies that are already dominating even better again Like because that's what it does Right It it does nothing to to it only that kind of a thing only further hurts Slow armies that are already in a bad place in the meta And makes it even worse now The only upside I have is that it is harder for sons to win this this one because they just can't go stand on a thing So But that's because sons are designed poorly. All right, like that's That's my answer there It's interesting with them. Yeah, because it gives you more time Theoretically least, uh, I don't know. We don't have to play that. I haven't played since that much But potentially gives more armies more time to pass the dps check as opposed to correct They don't you don't have the time to do it. But yeah, coach To the teachers Oh, just the poor internet in Australia. I don't want to keep interrupting you you all another another hypothetical question for you and probably the people in the chat is how much of this is created because of the girish heartlands Because we do have a monster hero meta right now And it's heavily skewed in a certain way and there's more things rewarding those types of people And I know we're not we know game when games workshop is kind enough to send me documents in advance Um, I'll look at them and I think like right. This is how they act right now But what does it look like three months from now or six months ago in now for gbh 22 Let's say hypothetically the the girish heartlands is no longer there and we're in a wizard meta or we're in a Horde meta or an artillery meta. Who knows that How many of these problems are coming from the monster incentives? Which are mobile which are doing mortal wounds which are doing these things that the meta is kind of creating And I wonder if you just remove that one element from the the jigsaw What would change And are these problems still a problem? I think it has a huge impact I agree with you like part of it is the weird victory point run-up that can happen by overscoring on battle plans and overscoring on on you know Sort of monsters doing things and or killing monsters. They're a little more constrained They only tend to be points around the margin The problem is in some of the they matter the most In the tight battle plans where the the scoring does remain relatively evenly, right? So in those situations in in the tight battle plans That the the girish sort of rules actually matter quite a bit, right? And so it does encourage you highly to have a monster In the in the blowout ones like who cares? Oh, you got an extra point for killing my monster Like congratulations, man. I scored like a million more points than you this round. So I guess like good job You know I made five extra points this round over you you got one. It's okay cool You know so The all right, let's I want to move on because I do want to give plenty of time to work hoda so The the other ones that that to me are falling like the bad category are stuff where their rules are just very much Misaligned with with the the current state of the matter the game in a real hard way So this would be your apex predators Okay You know where it's just No, we don't need to further incentivize ultra powerful heroes. That's we got that covered. We're good ultra powerful heroes are Are already fine In an arm in a safe stacking meta, etc. Things like apex predators. It's just that's it. That's a no that's a no go for me That's a no go Some of this before about how Archeon the gash they still have To all of us you've got to have a leader hanging out on that point to keep scoring it You know, you know, you can you can certainly find yourself in situation where Oh negash is going to continue hanging out here because I don't have another leader to come take his place Now that that will come up periodically Where so that limits what he's doing in a game, you know, so that's one drawback one healthy balancing factor I mean I've actually played a lot of good games on apex predators surprisingly like when I look at this on paper My expectation is that this is a crap mission. That's mainly predicated on the What what's always made apex predators slash Sevar king power etc That mission is power projection is is shooting and I do still think in my mind That's the main concern that I still have about this is that with a lot of these armies you shoot heroes off the board Then you go and score But now your opponent might have you know, like in a missituation where it's power projection versus power projection Well, whomever kills the other heroes first wins You know all that sequel and they move on the objectives I mean is that in your guys mind still the main problem fundamentally with this mission is range damage Or is it something else? I think it's Yeah, maybe maybe not. I don't know. I think it plays into it to me and it's not even necessarily by the buy about Uh, like range damage certainly matters It just matters too much not it But my answer is it matters more because in the current meta we're not just talking about god models We're talking about the ability to rock anybody up and and a lot of them can just go to an almost bulletproof save Right. So if you don't have range power projection, you just lose because you put any old hero on a three up on the point Chaff them and then be like well, you never get this now Like even if you have shooting unless it's hardcore mortal wound shooting, you're not getting any off of this right This this yeah the general work this will come up as The major concern the main concern not so the major but the main concern that I have with the game of heroes Which is our version of total conquest in war kota. It is one that's oriented around Leaders slash heroes tied to leaders that excludes go trick. But yeah is this issue. You know, we've got bodyguard rules Uh, obviously you can do screening and yeah, save stacking. So there are a number of ways Yeah, that that leaders can be fairly survivable on a mission where you're accumulating points So coach, what's been your experience with apex predators? See I have always enjoyed these hero type of Scenarios we've had it was a duality of death back in the year old days We've had iterations of this So at a at a battle planned level like ignoring the meta for a second Because I'm thinking about games workshop when they wrote this book and they wrote the general's handbook Did they want to speed up the monster hero meta and help us reduce the amount of chaff on the board to put points in Because we we are fundamentally moving towards more 40k where it's less models on the table more survivable on the table Are we just trying to fast track that through the the likes of god tier heroes? Or did they not expect the monster hero meta we've got with the save stacking all the craziness and Because you got to imagine that if they didn't anticipate it, they wouldn't have known what type of monster they're creating here because I like apex predator predator at a fundamental level But when you add in everything you've just talked about you see that we're in for a bad time Now if you change the mechanics of the game, I think we're okay again because If you rerun one a weekly years years previously no one was winging about duality of death No, and I winging about these types of scenarios. Totally agree. Totally agree Should have been because it was a crap mission. I always conceptually I No, I agree you a conceptually. I like this mission. I the coach. I I'm dead on with you here Like conceptually, it's a cool idea of like the king of the hill the the the hero holds the point Like it's it's a sweet idea, right? And it should be doable It just feels like the as you said all the other stuff put on top of this is making this like Marathi's very existence almost makes this very bad time just by her that one war scroll Right As long as she's holding on to the iron heart I'm mega gargant like, you know, I'm building a list for this tournament. I've made one of my mega's 40 wound mega Okay, cool. Like it's gonna sit there. It's gonna sit there for a long time. So Uh, it's just unfortunately the incentives right now. I just make it a really bad time But fast forward 12 months from now. It's actually could be a really good one Yeah, I'll be able to see the iterations of these In 2022. Okay, go ahead time I was gonna say my honest answers. I don't have experience with this mission We're gonna be playing it next month at one day or locally gets more experience I would love to hear comments just in general folks experience, especially at tournaments You know that I played this I did play at a gateway open last year and I did have Marathi Marathi if you're playing against someone who knows what you have to do, which obviously is chip off three damage Like you can get off the board pretty quickly guys as we know I mean, I get it conceptually that Marathi has an inherent advantage on paper And and yet yeah, so anyway, I did I I was gonna say I come from a position where I'm the potato and I'm running around free guild guard on foot I'm running around scraggle up the lune king. Like I'm running around potato five wound six wound heroes But Greg we didn't three inches all that he's just gone like that Yeah, yeah I feel like there's more to say about apex and it may be Better than meets the eye But we'd love to hear some thoughts from others about it Yeah, the final thing I'll mention is we have to be careful about how before we move on then I want to get into work order that's the final thing I'll mention is that We have to be really careful about win scenarios encourage Already bad behavior. So my example for this one is survival of the fittest Okay So survival of the citizens is the with the thing where you both pick three predators right Now again conceptually I have no issue with this mission. It's kind of silly to go through all this extra picking and stuff and blah, blah, blah But it's fine the issue with it is I'm going to give I'm going to now tell you two units Okay, and I want you both to tell me which one is the better predator All right, here is unit number one Fulminators for the they're both good units by the way fulminators Unit number two long strikes. Who's the better predator? Obviously long strikes. I'll be my friend. Yeah, it's obviously long strikes because The ability for your predator to kill the other predators at a distance is better than having to go chase them down in melee and kill them Right like it's not complicated math when you can just sit there and be like that predator Dead, there's a point for me. God forbid you picked a monster. There's two points for me right Next Dead next dead Now not only have I maxed points, but you have no predators to speak of and cannot get those back right So if you're picking all melee predators against a person who has powerful shooting predators Well, enjoy your loss like It's almost instantaneous because they just have the easy ability to get the points Whereas you have to go you have to physically go over them to them Reminds me of the the joke about the creation of the flamethrower like yeah I really like setting people on fire, but I don't like walking If there was only some way I could just set some person on fire from From far away if I could just throw fire at them somehow You know, that's that's what it feels like Um, so anyways, okay cool with that all out of the way So we we kind of understood what's good. What's bad right like what's making these good and bad By the way, if people want a quick list here would be my list of the things that I think Are good tournament stuff. Let's do a quick check on this and get see what you guys think ready. Here's my tournament ready-ish list Stuff that I might not love, but I'm okay with seeing in a tournament So these run from like good to neutral in no particular order Okay, if you're a to by the way screenshot this screenshot this very moment and give this to your to or your Local game store because I've done this actually before but like oh what battle plans like just do this pick from here Yeah, savage games first blood Uh tectonic interference the vice feral foray That's my fine Coach, what do you got right now? What would be your five? Look, I don't have an opinion mostly because I wanted to ask you a question then Because again, I'm going back to the year old days where general's handbook only had six Battle plans that's right folks who in first edition age of sigma It was literally six battle plans and you go to a tournament and you would be basically playing the same battle plans non-stop So if people go around taking your list events and we start seeing the same five And all the upcoming events Would you be happy with that or do you think we need a little bit of diversity coming from some of the others? Because I think for me it comes down to what's the type of event you're trying to run If you're a pure competition, I would agree with you if you're trying to run something a bit more fun A bit more flexible. You're worried about the middle tables. I think there's some things you pull in Yeah, my answer is very simple No, like those five are the only good ones worth using in a tournament Okay And but I but I do want variance coach because you're exactly right I think that the problem is you don't want to just play the same five missions every game Every tournament, right? So but but those are the only good five ones right now What do we do? right What could we possibly do? Uh solution Uh Paul right the reason I don't like survival the fittest is because of the reasons I just said it can run the score up in weird ways Like people can suddenly spike up and it it only encourages the worst Elements of the already existing overpowered meta the most powerful units that currently dominate in the top armies are only better On survival the fittest and all the weakest armies are only weaker. So there you go. But other than that. Yeah, sure Um, I don't have that much of a problem with with With um power struggle. It's It's just weird. It's fine enough. It would be my sixth. It'd be my on the cusp six Okay, but what do we do? We don't have enough scenarios. Well, it sounds like we're going to need to get some more scenarios fortunately boom Tyler is here Tyler and a group of other Uh members of the community have resurrected Uh play tested and put together A some some some favorite scenarios from the past We're going to bathe ourselves in the nostalgia of past scenarios like the waters of lake minnetonka And uh and get into these these are all available online. They are on aos shorts website You can see you can go there and get the full detail. They all have the pretty art and everything like that Um for use in your games But but os shorts on aos shorts.com slash war coda. Yes, they are all it's it's linked in the description So just just click that link Um but the uh and and so Tyler before I get to the specific battle plans now is the time where you're going to talk a lot Why did you do this other than what we just said, right? I mean, I think we just gave a long justification for why and we'll evaluate your scenarios according to those things But but but why did you do this? Yeah, it's really good. I mean the first reason was obviously a lot of us didn't get to play the general sandbag 2020 battle plans Getting what all was going on in the world and I mean unfortunately a coach you still haven't been able to play many games or hardly any games or 3.0 yet, but You know tournaments no game tournaments. That's there you go fair enough But we we had some amazing battle plans really great battle plans I I think I remember we did a show vince or maybe not But saying that I thought that was the best ghp set of battle plans we had seen back in 2020 So that was the first motivation is you know some good ones and let's but they were designed for a past edition It's a very different edition now in many ways and they At least three of them in particular needed to be updated You know a little bit one was quite straightforward battle for the past. So yeah, that was the main motivation Nice. I love it. These look we've got some really good Past battle plans and I think that We throw them away too easily is my answer Now we obviously had to when we got to aos 3 because the rules just changed so so dramatically, right? There was no other choice So you resurrecting them and putting them on to the the 3.0 framework. I think it's a fantastic idea. Let's take the core goodness of those Get the rules over to something you know in the right way round With what we've talked about it makes a scenario good in 3.0 And let's get these because I've had a lot of good games on some of these scenarios that you you included in here, right? What's funny because 2020 I actually had an absolute cracking tournament season and I'm I'm really looking at the list and I'm like, yep, that was a great battle plan That was a great panel plan love total commitment love blades edge love places of arcane power Love love. I'm looking at these going. Yeah, these were great because I was fortunate to play in those season Where I know some people weren't so to to bring that back is incredible I I can't wait for you to do chain colossus the ultimate best battle plan ever created Oh man, you were always the biggest fan for that. Yeah, let's get some more The the only problem with chain colossus, which was you know, coach. I'm with you. I'd love that I've played that scenario a bunch of times The only problem with it was it was too hard to wake him up Like it was really hard to get him awake and running because you had the number of objectives You had to control just I want to see that again As is a fun scenario not a tournament scenario, but I want to see that again It's way easier to wake up the purple sun. So there you go See it was it was really good when no one took the purple sun because it was like a hundred points It was trash. Yeah, too hard Then they dropped it to 50 points and everyone started taking their list He like oh, I can't have chain colossus and people running around with purple sun. So That was my problem All right, so let's get into the specific ones here Oh, what'd you say? I'm sorry Brian asked you'd be happy to know that The project was called originally battle kota. I had mentioned on a show a number of episodes ago that we had to change the name and Yeah, I mean, it's not that ingenious to stick warhammer or war in front of the name But if anybody's I mean kota means essentially I mean, it's got a different meanings But it's kind of an addendum a supplement kind of like a concluding chapter concluding the musical piece Yeah, it's a kind of that you know that I thought really resonates with the idea here I do like melee manuscript and solid. Okay. So here we go Uh, maybe maybe this is the lieutenant's handbook something like that We're not you're not a full fledged general yet. Tyler. All right. Here we go So, uh, here's your first one I have on screen right now is a game of heroes Let me see if I can make this a little bigger so we can all see it There we go I'm gonna shave the name off there just so we can all see what's going on So a game of I'm wondering if this is tyler's, um him to land's equivalent and we're gonna see him as the new sand piece and I hope they're not upset by this like hopefully this will be Yeah, absolutely man, this is you're just doing their work for him. All right. Yeah hit me walk us through a game of heroes. Okay Oh, absolutely All right. So the inspiration for this was little conquest Conquest had a hero element where you would get a bonus victory point if you had a hero near an objective that essentially how it worked and the that was the starting point and then of course the We've had a lot of chatter particularly on this show over the years about how We have these small foot troops that or sorry small foot heroes that You know tend to not really reflect what their narrative is their lore is like Bad asses that are almost never taken in a list or you know, they're hard to fit in the list Altherian mega boss on foot like a long history of these things So part of the idea was what might it look like to have a mission That gave a clear reason to run A leader or two of nine wounds or less Be a clear benefit for doing that That was the core idea behind it In terms of how this one works while I'm talking about it, I'll mention the special victory point condition Which is score one victory point if you have a friendly leader You're starting army With a wounds characteristic of nine or less Within three inches of any objective you control Starts the game outside of your territory because obviously when it makes sense Just allow you to get a free point for having a leader meeting those conditions on yours Okay, so and then on top of that we have the regular hold one hold two hold more and battle tactic This is the only special thing And we We had some different versions of this where you know in terms like they're all prime objectives Got it down to doing prime objectives for the players territories And we did that for a couple of reasons You can burn in round three The other two Yeah, the other two On the on the ends there the bottom left and and upper right All right guys good so far. All right good very good so far Okay, so we also all right Oh, that's Obviously really anytime you have a potential bonus point available somehow some way. I mean that can be a major incentive And we were finding that there wasn't enough incentive to actually go after your opponent's objective in their territory there's a lot of play on the on the on the upper right and lower left and What we added was no middle ground to try to give a little more incentive to go after your opponent's objective To kind of make that relevant Of that one is if you control the objective Starts the game wholly within your opponent's territory Objective counts as two objectives when scoring victory points at the end of each turn We've seen that with a few of these missions I'm thinking about I think rising power Yes, this is this is a mechanic in the base core rules Uh battle plans like in the in the core books battle plans uses this mechanic That we don't see really pushed out into the ghp and I don't know why it's a good mechanic Because it's actually pulling double duty. Yes, it's incentivizing you to go after theirs But it's also incentivizing them to protect theirs Right, so they have to be more like because otherwise they could just drive their whole army off into other places And kind of leave the home when undefended just relying on the distance if they knew you didn't have a teleport or a drop Or a way to jump their lines right But now that becomes a lot harder because if anything sneaks through all of a sudden They're going to vary they're going to almost instantaneously overtake you on the score one or a hold one hold two hold more Yeah, I love it exactly It has yeah, it helps Said it can it can help offset seismic shift It has yeah, another nice elements. So we're using in terms of this map. This is just pulled directly from total conquest Yeah, and we're I think this is a map that we've got On apex predators, I believe actually is using this as well of of our current crop So really love this map. It does tend to Incentivize more play across the board. We've had a lot of amazing games. So Oh, this has been this one probably is the most unique I would say we actually renamed it because then it seemed like the narrative You know total conquest really tells you about what this one is supposed to entail And then you know, there's kind of an obvious not so clever reference to a game of thrones with the name here Of a game of heroes including the the no middle ground based on the original quote So, yeah, one of the things I want to say about this in terms of a concern You know, all of these we're really looking for feedback as folks try them You know the good the bad and the ugly and we did spend four solid months play testing these things. We had multiple one dayers A quick shout out to the queen city sigmar group in missouri Constantino kill us in sweden. Jeff naman and the st. Louis crew and other one day events just a large number of People were involved in this project giving us feedback But the main concern that I still have with this mission comes down. We were talking about earlier With sort of the inherent potential challenge of these leader missions Let's think about let's say venture play in soul black gravey lords and you go first And you put obviously you put a grave site probably on both of the bottom left and the upper right objectives And you put a necromancer on the line. Let's say on the top right And you maybe ought to run that necromancer Which will get you within three inches of that upper right objective cool You've got that condition met and then of course you bring up 60 zombies from the grave That's going to benefit that necromancer is going to benefit from the bodyguard role of a 3 plus shrug You know to help keep them alive. Oh, I could see Situations like that, you know, maybe leading to some imbalances in some games So that was the main concern that I have at the moment, but what do you guys thoughts? I'm gonna say two things first off. It reminds me a lot of One of my favorite scenarios, even though battle plans even though I said I hate auto wins Knife to the heart was one that I always really enjoyed because You couldn't bring your whole force to your opponent's objective It was that I've got to leave some troops and go attack with some troops and always like how much was always a An interesting conundrum The other part though and then potentially the challenge that we've all just complained about throughout this episode Is that we have a lot of a mortal wound character sniping troops out there at the moment? And does this incentivize that behavior even further to pop those little nine wound heroes and then Go rack up sector vp Yeah, yeah, it might yeah, I on that on that point coach. Yeah, I mean I don't know if this is meaningfully contributing too much in that regard because it at least putting Some potential benefit on the tables. Let's say before those heroes die There are a number of those heroes a list that have ways to offset some of that damage where maybe they're not dying immediately You know, so where you would have a chance to at least get some extra points before they they fall off You know fall off the table and get killed Yeah, but that's what I think about that was just because like when I played daughter's a cane In a rs3. I was trying to not build the snake You know people have heard me whinge about it. You know, I tried to do witch elves with without without the Snakes and I'd run a lot of witch elves with little foot troop Had queens and sort of queens and things like that And as much as I wanted to pick pillars of faith as a grand strategy I didn't want to incentivize my opponent to focus on these fragile support heroes that offered me so much So I think for me like I really love the concept, but I worry that as well if I was playing it I'm just further enhancing. I I need you to avoid touching those five point heroes. So sure Yeah, we we defined that a number of games Where that's part of the I think the issue is that a lot of the times you only find these nine moons or less heroes as support heroes Their asses are hanging out in the backfield and that's all that they're doing Whereas with a number of those heroes this gives you A reason maybe the necessity to compete on the mission to actually get them in harm's way or to run Someone that could actually maybe survive in harm's way on an objective That was also partly why what incentivize doing three inches Of the objective, which you know, it's pretty standardized for some of these missions over the years Like apex predators is three inches places of arcane power was three inches as opposed to six inches Which obviously would just allow you to do a you know tiptoe in and then you're you're pretty far away You've got a screen a couple screens whatever But yeah, we did find in a number of games that you know a lot of these lists that have support heroes It did give you real reason to have to maybe put your hag queen in harm's way your branch rate your war song Revenant, you know, sorry, you're not just going to hang out and do your mortal wind bomb You may actually need to get your war song Revenant in the fight to get that bonus point, which I thought that was pretty cool Yep No, I like it a lot and just to clarify you get a maximum of one like if I have a hero within two points I get one point still right because it's if within any you're using the any term But we're we're reading this correctly, which is the right limit that is correct So I'm not over incentivized to have heroes spread out and take everything. It's still only worth one point It's constrained I actually really like this one a lot. Tyler is my honest feedback It incentivizes things that are on the weaker side now Which is the nine wound or less heroes being used an interesting way And it's different from things like apex predators because it's not holding and controlling the point It's just a bonus, right? It doesn't stop me like his presence doesn't stop I can still take the point away from you if that do to the three inches Right. It's just adding as a small bonus. So yes, I like this quite a bit I like the no middle ground. I like the incentive on the other hero. I really like this setup That is to say the square against the square with the two other corners like just as a deployment I quite like this setup. I think it's a really good setup and the way it moves Forces kind of your armies to move around and make a decision I mean what tends to happen in these is the is the the whirlpool Right like armies tend to sort of rotate around each other But then no middle ground is kind of also helping to stop that Right so because the the normal thing that happens when this goes is every the both the armies just go like this And rotate around each other, but you can't do that Obviously if you're going to give up they get the game by by you know, rotating away from your point. So yeah I'm wet. I'm with it. I'm with it. All right. Let's keep moving You're obviously you're nine off the center point. Yeah, so yeah, we've got a lot of missions like that But just to say it. Yeah, yeah I saw somebody had a cool Game aid this weekend that was like Uh An arrow like a sort of arrow at a right angle on a stick that then had a half moon on the bottom And it was that the edge of the half moon was nine inches So you just measured out the center point and then you set that down and that's your deployment line It's like that is the greatest game aid I've ever seen because measuring on all the all the diagonals where they meet each other and you've got a Bunch of nine inches away is super annoying You get another reason to hate survival of this Uh, okay Next up, uh battle for the pass Our old lengthways Sort of situation with the two in the middle Uh, talk to me about battle for the pass Uh coach, did you like this one back in the day? Yes or no Yes, because it was a great battle plan No, because at the time tournaments were all about putting you as close as many people As possible and tables were always connected. So to play with it. It was so awkward And I was literally just thinking about this going in this covid world right now where tables are more spread out Would there be more space to be able to move around the table and play this game? And I think that's where if you create the space Awesome, if you are rose and you're trying to play a game like reaching over it's just it's it's hard Yeah Yeah, my ask Please keep the tables like this always toos of the world. I understand that you have to make your money back I will happily you can up your ticket price if it means covering the other people who aren't there If it means we get to have the space I would much rather have a more generous amount of space to set some stuff on the side of the black of the mat Put my dead figures put my stuff in reserve have me my book or things off to the side Not be shoulder to shoulder with everybody or butt to butt If it means I have to pay like 20 more for the weekend I will happily pay that every time Because my goodness. Is it a better experience? So yes, all right Take us through battle for the best While i'm thinking about it, I do just two more names to mention Andy Andy long. He's designed a lot of the amazing, you know graphical assets tokens and so on A lot of work with Dan a lot of day was short Andy did the design for this So thank you Andy and then travis boyson good friends from the queen city group travis was my chief partner in crime with this project So thank you travis for everything. Okay, so battle for the past Yeah, I mean this is one of the absolute classics And it was the most straightforward to translate of all four by far The main question was so just to say it Basically this works the exact same way as savage gains Except we did go the other way on that fact question Just to spell it out if anybody doesn't know so we've got two prime objectives in this one Objectives that border the players territories are the prime objectives. So in round three you could burn one of the two in the middle All right, and then traditional scoring structure Score why we talked about it earlier. So everybody pretty much everybody knows about for the past scoring structure Oh, one thing to point out. All right. What the main actual change I would say that we made universally with these battle plans relative to ghp 21 was It did not have any language in the ghp 21 battle plans that Would mitigate confusion and I would say weird consequences Around get off me lands the objective kicking sure. Yeah, son's no big hemmets how I Got asked a lot of people their thoughts on this because it's a sizable change particularly if you're a son's player You may not like this What we did was and I'd be curious coach your view on this I think you're underestimating what we're about to say but go on. Okay. All right fair enough my friend. So Give you an example of it's a simple change. So let's take the Arguably one of the biggest benefits to sons on savage games was so the score one One victory point if you control the objective that starts the game Well, how I wrote it is score one victory point if you control the objective that starts the game On the board of your territory. They did not have to start the game language in savage games So, of course, you just kick that one pointer into the middle or god forbid into your opponent's territory To rack up more points and savage games can get out of control in my experience pretty quickly when it comes to sons of bay I'm not kicking objectives around. So we just decided to tether Objectives to where they are at the start of the game to minimize this stuff We've been drilling on that before I keep going on. What are your guys thoughts on that? Love it yeah Love it. I have no more feedback Yeah, one of my house rules for Sydney GT was actually you can't kick primaries I wanted to try that out. I wanted to see what it would look like if gargants couldn't kick primaries So, yeah, I like it. I like it's a little bit of bookkeeping, but it's not major Um, and I think it probably is one of those feel bad, right? Like it's As a as an opponent to a son's player. There's literally nothing I can do to stop you from changing the points of an objective And people dislike the ability it's why people hate central shooting off the hero because there's literally nothing I can do to stop you So that is another great example that community would go yet. Um, I'm down with that. Yeah, it's such an elegant simple change I'm totally behind it. Yeah Yeah, it's just like first principle view I'm more rather than even as sort of the impact It's just in terms of like scoring and the ability of the sons to win games It's the confusion that I've seen it create in 3.0 with players, particularly some of these missions. Yeah, so Right. Uh, yeah guys, I mean other than that this one is pretty Endured, you know center fair savage gains. Oh the fact question. Yeah, so again got a lot of opinions On how we should roll this should we just go with the way that they rolled it for savage gains? Where you can get two points per middle if you control both for four points from the two middle Or do we cap it at two points? I did have some people who thought you should just stick with the fact I'd say two out of three people thought that we should actually revert back To the way many of us were playing it where it's two points for any objective in the middle So yeah, that's that's how I get love feedback on that if if you think that's the wrong ruling Let us know let me know but yeah, that's the way it is right now Yep, I mean you know where I stand It's absolutely the correct ruling and they decided wrong in the ghp and they should feel bad about it If anyone hasn't played battle for the past because they've come into you know the game in third edition I'd highly recommend playing this particular one because it was a tournament Standard like people have run the battle for the past since that day one. So Highly enjoyable battle plan and I'm glad you brought it back. Yep It just makes it much more tactfully interesting to play like this. All right. We we know this one. We love this one I think this is universally a winner It's great and and even though it does use an unusual scoring scoring system It's actually interesting how well the math breaks out to being the same Right like the average play of this is still five points per round When when when it's set up correctly with the the FAQ going the opposite direction like you have it So it actually does stay quite tight Uh, so yeah, I'm with this. All right focal points. Okay, take us through focal points Yeah, so focal points we've had it over we've had three iterations over the years of focal points I think getting back to 2018. So we've had different deployment maps Usually it was five objectives. So often you would have one in the middle As well as this exact layout. So We started off with one in the middle Along with this layouts, uh, Vince. I'm actually looking at the screen. I'm guessing you got the battle plan maps on the screen Yep, I do. Okay. Very good. Very good. So the Left, uh, the west objective is number one North objective number two east objective number three South objective number four. Okay, so A few core characteristics of focal points over the years It incentivize play across the entire board and this advise you, you know, having a reason to go after Like if you're a coach, you're the defender for you to go after your opponent's objectives You got to Cross quite a bit of ground. I'll see we'll potentially do that and particularly to get the main special victory point condition that it's always had where Obviously, you would get like in the 2020 version If you'd held one and three you'd get three points You held two and four as well. You'd get another three points six point swing Out we tried something we've tried different versions of those differential scoring differential scoring orientation It was the same pattern that we talked about earlier guys Like scoring just got out of control in too many games. Yep, something like that Yep, we we kept wheeling it back wheeling it back to where what we settled on for the again, it's Hold one hold two hold more and battle tactic And then the special the single special victory point condition score one victory point if you control objectives one and three Or two and four. So again, no doubling up It's a max of one extra point being on the battlefield. Yep, try doubling up Welcome feedback on it from folks who are trying it. It wasn't quite working for us That was one thing in terms of the iteration on this These are all prime objectives We felt that they had to all be prime objectives given the nature of how this mission works Particularly with the special victory point condition. Yeah, maybe that's something that maybe there's some debate around that And then finally the big one in my mind Was so we were trying out first blood's deployment map I think generally about everybody's a fan of you know, the three boxes a little l He added a fourth, right? We added a fourth box. Yeah, you went full touch. We added that upper right Tetris piece. Yeah so We were finding that there were too many games where And because you're incentivized to get into your opponent's Deployment all less equal, you know go after that special that that bonus victory point you want to you really want to incentivize that It just for some armies it was too much ground to cover do that sufficiently well and right now This is owing it to where let's say you're an iron jaws player And you're defender deploying the defenders territory you might You're maybe not iron jaws player because they can give you where the hell they want to go anyway But you're you're planning to play aggressively so you deploy on the upper right, right? You're you're 15 inches away from your opponents from that north objective that number two objective I mean that's obviously really close So your opponent has to be thinking about that, you know But your opponent can do the same on the other side with the tetris piece, right? So we were we were finding it It was interesting in terms of kind of what there's a lot of deployment space You can play aggressively. You can play conservatively. There's not a lot of extra scoring coach I'm going to shut up and let you talk I'm trying to think about it because that we had a scenario like this where It wasn't quite like the tetris piece that you've created But we did have where the deployment map was slightly aggressive on one side Because I remember distinctly I can't think of what the battle plan was because I'd always put like a five unit cavalry like a bunch of pistol ease And I'd run up to the objective that was close to the border And then the rest of my force would kind of swing I can't think of what it is But I love that ability to go a little bit aggressive in one area An area right because you can't do that on the on the lower on the lower side, you know There's there's quite a bit of space there. Yeah, I just can't think of what the better Like I'm I'm racking my brain trying to think of what the battle plan was but I dig it Yeah, assistant ref just made the exact point I was going to make which is the extra box is interesting because it forces castle armies to think about spreading out too And I will like along that line What it does another reason? Yeah, absolutely. It's a soft penalty to one drops I'm not going to claim it's the hugest thing But when you one drop you have to make a decision about going hard in that corner or not because you're just going to deploy everything right So if you're like a one drop against a nine drop They can see are you pushing hard for that top spot or not and suddenly their ability to reactive deploy Is way more valuable Because of the way that the deployment situation is allowing for them to make a decision If they didn't go hard You can go hard like if they said no and don't go into that top spot at all and they cast it on a lower point You can choose then in your reactive deployment to go hard after their point Right or whatever, okay So it's like it's it's not the biggest thing in the world It doesn't completely stop out of a shooting list or all that but it is a nice soft incentive against one drops Because they have a much worse time Uh like sort of making a decision as to how they approach this Without present without being able to see the enemy force also deployed right Yeah, definitely On the so I mentioned there was always a middle objective in this mission over the years We started out with that middle objective They wanted to keep it. We were just finding in way too many games It was incentivizing too much play in the middle and not enough play around the rest of the boards And in my in my opinion focal points, it's all about like that's one of the core Uh characteristics constants of this mission is play around the board Which we actually did one of my massive Feedback was is it are they too close to the center? Should they be slightly? Um up a little further. So it was an extra five inches or whatever it is like Either way Coach we that was what so specifically Meaning would you say? Well, what would you do like one we did try just yeah, go ahead So like number one for example, if you shift it in the middle of um The that first box. Um, so it's just I don't know like I guess the question is are they too central? Uh, are you just going to create like a big skirmish in the center? Or if you spread it out a little bit Further not completely to the sides of the board, but a bit closer like does it create more space and maneuverability? Yeah, it's not too bad, you know with this diamond formation I think there is we've generally finding there's enough space there We also we're trying to stay consistent with the grid, you know and not necessarily doing the objectives to go on the cross sections Yeah To go on the cross sections. Yeah, but we keep my it is 30 inches or you know 22 inches or something like that I think so it's yeah, there is some difference there, right? Probably the only Probably the only Challenge is obviously the two and four are actually closer than one and three right, but I don't know that that's actually a problem It might actually be interesting in that way into how it resolves sort of movement Um, but yeah, it's it's I like this one a lot. I like that again. It's limited to one I love this this scenario traditionally. I think this is the big winner of the pack for me is my honest answer Um, just because this brings I love the alternate deployment. I think it's really creative. I love all the soft decisions It's making there or implications for it And I've always liked this scenario and the sort of competing objectives to push versus just be sort of safe Oh, that's good to hear. Yeah, I'm so excited in it. This is good Yeah, thanks guys I'm excited to have people try it and yeah send send their feedback in Yeah, we can't All right one more Forcing the hand. So this is our six objective scenario. So take us through this bad boy Uh, so this was one of the two new ones that we got to ghp 2020 this and the blade's edge I love this mission. I think a lot of people did No, and we again tried a number of different iterations with it Uh, I won't even go into the details and well, I mean I get a little bit of detail with it But like we we tried a lot of different versions of this and we eventually we kept coming back to the original recipe so The battle plan map Is using feral foray One of my favorite Again, we we tried out a lot of different maps In terms of this and nothing was quite working as well as just this the simplicity of this one And we tried out prime objectives with some of these wasn't quite working We settled on just making none of them prime like I think feral foray is the same as well actually it is Yeah, and so Yeah, that I'm kind of getting some details on why we ended up there with seismic ship and how this works But the core element of forcing the hand Was I can do what they called it at the time? But what we're calling is basically you had a vital objective ghp 2020 in your vital objective So vents coach and you were playing bench you go first coach Six one of his his three objectives to be the vital objective Objective was worth three points Which is other two objectives in his territory worth worth one point each Events if you got that objective that vital objective you would get three points, right? It was you know pretty easy to defend your vital objective in rounds one and two Especially like early in the game. You got that thing on lockdown most games. I would say So that was why we were a little worried about just copy pasting that Into this one, you know, we thought well, maybe it's It's too easy to lock down what we're calling your vital grounds But that's where we ended up in the end coming back to the original recipe with this So vital ground at the start of each player's turn The opposing player picks one of the objectives again that start the game wholly within their territory to be the vital grounds And for the scoring on this one hold one hold two hold more battle tactic Or one victory point if you control the vital grounds So again, it's another mission where there's only one extra victory point that's on the table Relative to the traditional we tried it with a little more in terms of victory points. It kept being too much we We were finding, you know, again that a lot of games the it is hard to get that bonus point But it was often coming up in rounds three four and five Right, that's where it starts to matter Especially when you combine in seismic shift. Yep I love the interplay of seismic shift and vital ground in rounds three four and five Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to jump right on that This one is one like this and honestly faro for he does this to a degree already So it's there is that it uses seismic shift in a good way, right where it actually does Make the game more interesting right when it happens It does tilt sort of the way the game plays the way it feels the way the way it's motivating you to move or not It's a big decision And you know, somebody asked you think it incurred rewards castles too much No, because of the space that it's covering here again because most armies can't build a 30 inch castle And they certainly can't hold it that 30 inch castle for Into those rounds three four and five. I think the six objectives is the right call. That's what makes the this run Right, there's another thing then so we tried out smaller number objectives And it just wasn't quite working. We were originally we were at four most of the time And it was a kernel cabbage had put actually the thought in my head of maybe just going back to the original six So we started trying out the six and yeah, it was working better, especially with the seismic shift Always trust kernel cabbage. That's just a rule to live by right there. He's a wise man Uh, yeah coach, what do you think about this? Yeah, I like it. I think to your point I was going to call out that comment as well because a 30 inch castle, especially in third edition where there's less bodies Coherence is a lot harder That definitely would be much more difficult today than it ever has been Um, the only other maybe comment I would say is you know an alternative approach with the vital ground could be At the start of the battle you declare one of them to be the Vital ground and it just stays there. So as opposed to rotating in each round You're committed And now it's about building the strategy to go for that one and defend that one So I know there's been plenty of times where I know the scenario you're talking about where I've gone Oh, I'm kind of losing that flank. I'm not going to move it to the stronger flank and it's just a game of moving it around and It's interesting coach. Yeah, we'll have to try that out and That's uh, that's an intriguing idea. Yeah, we didn't try out that Iterate that that that possibility. So I'll definitely make a note about that and and I think about that for the future Thanks Yep All right, good stuff. So that's that's warcoded. Yes as to answer the question These are all available for download on a y shorts. You can find the link in the description Use them in your games hit tyler up with feedback as he mentioned On twitter in the comments anywhere like that Uh, and so Good events at aowashorts.com Tyler merson at gmail.com scrubbing wells on twitter Yeah Really looking forward to hearing as much feedback as possible I mean in terms of future steps with this project like first and foremost It's about is this in fact going to be useful to the community. So I'm just curious to see This goes down and like people find this useful, you know event organizers, especially We've you know, obviously we've started with missions that came out of games workshop I think it's a little bit different conversation in terms of potential like more directly custom battle plans and What that process might entail and all of that, but you know, we'd love to update this annually I think that would be really interesting like have an annual supplemental pack that we could do Then maybe uh every six months You have a refinement like a six month window of refinement based on the price six months feedback for that annual pack Kind of where my head's at right now, but yeah Thanks guys. Let me blabber on about this. I'm super excited about it because look to return back to what we just said Uh, we had five maybe six. I think valid battle plans for a gt in my Uh, in my estimation from that the actual existing set right now I think all four of these are perfectly valid for for attorneys and what does that put us to basically the magical number of 10 Right now all of a sudden we've got now now coach to go back and answer your original question that you brought up before We started this boom now. We've got variants right because when you're mixing from 10 We're in a great place That like we you can you play a bunch of tournaments have different mixes every time Perfect. That's what we want. This is the world we want to live in right so totally I'm probably the other thing I'd want to call out here is I love that the community is exploring Ideas and it's not just the the law of the generals handbook and what game to workshop says You know, we got introduced to that by like, you know, Dave Dave that runs nashville, right? I'm a nashville nash con. He could run nashville. I'd let him do that He introduced an alternative He introduced an alternative approach to secondary objectives, you know and some really meaningful and deep ones You know, we saw face hammer try some house rules around gottrek and things like that It's good. Like I think we should explore it and try it and see what ifs And if something doesn't work cool, we learned from it, but there's so much available and bringing back some great battle plans I'd even challenge people to look at maybe some of the white dwarf battle plans the narrative battle plans like from open play to see can we turn these into match play battle plans and You know, like you look at 40k in their deployment maps and the way they do things There's lessons to draw from them As much as they're drawing things from us Yeah on the deployment maps that's something we didn't even talk about is that I mean there's a conversation around How do different deployment maps change the existing battle plans that we have in ghp 2021? Conversation itself which we're definitely going to see in ghp 2022 right because at minimum They love to do that to shake them up by maybe it's the same battle plan But with a different deployment strategy That that has often happened in ghp to ghp, so I imagine we're going to see that in play real soon Uh, I agree with brian s the lieutenant's leaflet is a hit Uh, so The captain's coda, uh, there you go the sergeant supplements figure out I love all these trying to figure out one word like a small number of words or yeah small number of letters Work work coda. I tried guys That's quite a war coda is just fine official name war coda. Yes So tyler, thank you all these are available for download. I want to see people use them I hope some toos grab them and put them in their tournaments more I should say more to you because some toos have already used them in one days So I'd love to see more toos grab them put them in their list uh shout out to ziggie and Stats rob from the honest wargamer you're gonna have some new battle plans to uh to calculate into your into your stats Once they start getting out in the wild, so I you know load those on up into the database Uh, but coach, thank you so much buddy. This is super fun having you on and glad we got your back on here It's absolute pleasure. Thanks for the invite. I'm glad I took Thursday off I I decided not to watch pro wrestling aws right now going on some big things have happened But I couldn't think of a better way to spend it with you lads Well, I appreciate that greatly brother and as always coach's channel is linked down below as well If there's any reason you aren't subbed yet to coach and watching all his incredible videos is incredible conversations that he's having with With so many amazing guests that you have made a wrong choice in your life So go sub him out find that link click it and hit the sub. It's so easy Look you're a better booker than us. There's no doubt about it For all of you hit that like button subscribe do all those fun things click all those fun buttons. It's great. It's rewarding And in all honesty, it does help other people find the show and help us in a big way. So we thank you for doing it Tyler, thank you coach. Thank you all of you out there who are watching. Thank you so much We really appreciate it and as always We'll see you next wednesday