 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me not as always, but someone I'm always happy to have on it's Paul. What's going on, buddy? What's happening nerds? I'm gonna be here back once again. I have officially lost count of the number of times I have been here now You are one of our most frequent guests Absolutely And it's good to have you back on again Tom as unavailable this week. It's Tyler's week off Paul Her from from Radio Free Hammer Hall. I will link his channel down below He heroically stepped up and said he would co-host with me So thank you Paul for us to do this as soon as I had the concept I reached out to Paul and I was like and he was like I'm gonna love this I was like, yeah, I know you would this is like this is such a Paul topic, right? So I just I knew you had to be the stand-in guest here as long as you had the time to do it so I Realized actually I think I basically suggested this topic a few weeks ago like in the discord I was like hold on. I can't let me flip over real quick in there. I see that I said what I say. Have you ever done a General's Handbook retrospective show? That would be a good show to do when the news is slow Um, I think that's basically what we're doing today, right to some degree. You're not wrong like yeah, it's it's You're not wrong. It's pretty close pretty close. Alright, so yes tonight We are gonna take a look back at all the additions of a OS We're talking about the best and the worst elements of each of them and Paul I don't know about you, but when I was doing this There were things I was just like, oh, yeah, that's right that happened Right. It just Revelatory is the best way I could describe it Because it is amazing how much of our brain has just like smoothed over the past eight years or nine years Yeah, there's some even just things that Have just been normalized in third-edition age of sigmar that like are completely different than whatever it was Like just all the way up to the end of second-edition right that like Just forgot that that was normal for six years. Yeah, exactly exactly So at any rate that's what we're gonna talk about. But of course of course that up First the news there we go All right, so first off we got a little rumor engine But you there it is That seems like an a OS thing so the rumor engine is a Skully thing with some ties on it and another skull and a little Rooney thing So that's what that is Paul do you have any guesses for what this particular? tiny thing is What what what are we looking at here, Paul if you had to guess us? Buddy, I believe it was Martin Orlando pointed out in a chat that the that particular Rune is the same or really similar to one of the runes that's Engraved into the leg of one of the ogre or I'd therodon's now. Yeah, correct So probably a chaos thing okay, okay It looks like an altar of something me, okay So it's maybe some kind of altar, which makes me think maybe it's a new chaos war stride Wow, that's a big swing. I know that like God knows we need it. Okay That that chaos war shrine model is seen. It's it's it's aged. Let me just say it that way My chaos war shrines are all just like custom kitbashes because they want to use any of the real models Yeah mine is just Completely covered in like green stuff with tentacles and nergly things all over the place So sure I think that he was right to point out the ogreid connection, but I think it's piece of chaos I don't think this is something we're gonna see that's like FEC or anything soon So let me give you my particular guess and who knows In 40k there's a Model for the Jean Steeler colds it's like a guy in front of like a little hollow screen thing like directing Directing a battle or something. You know, I mean, it's like a little command console game thing in front of him Anyways, I think you're right on the altar. I think this is a piece of chaos thing That's gonna be like attached to a model right like part of the model like he's gonna have it with him So because this is pretty small you can tell from just like the nature of the paint here It's pretty small So that's my personal feeling like we're zoomed way in on this I feel like this is a little small piece of that dude with an altar That's my guess and look, I think we all know that yes that sickness said yes He's directing assault on Warhammer world That is correct That the the guy in 40k that is what's happening Like the map pictures is the actual Warhammer world corporate headquarters Um at any rate the so that's my particular thoughts But hey, who knows as always with these things. Okay What's up next? Well, oh good. What I will add though about You know a point for you on Only being right about beasts of chaos is that's one of the armies that just hasn't really gotten new releases or things Updated or replaced in Age of Sigmar yet. So it would definitely make sense that they would get Something coming up soon like they've gotten new stuff. They've got, you know, all of like the Zangor and like that one You know the one slaneshi gore other than that like He could use new all of the Land gore that we have in the army. So Yeah, I mean sure what what I look I wish that The relative age of a model range and the amount that it's been touched Had some kind of correlation to its likelihood to be touched or to get new models again But those are clearly two unrelated items Armies that have made it for a long time have had very little touch So, you know, I think it's whatever captures the the the fancy of either upper management of the sculptors is basically what gets touched Yeah, and I think we're just gonna keep that scaven plague priest around forever at this point Just for the funnies of it and just to annoy you. I mean look it's it's It's amazing that it still exists and is a thing. That's to have it be 30 years old Older than so many players playing Age of Sigmar is truly incredible. Like that's that's really really an accomplishment, right? so really like Like considering it's 30 years old. It's a good sculpt There's nothing wrong with that It's fine. It's fine. It is or it's age or it's age. I Not saying it has an age like a fine wine sure, but it Way worse like compare to other things sculpted in that time range. It could be worse. I I Absolutely agree and of course I see all your comments dear, of course Just I figured Paul can handle himself because you're making fun of him. I don't make it fun of Tom I suppose really we're not really making fun of Paul. It's really just we're we know Tom won't Watch back so we're just gonna make fun of him unless he happens to be watching on his on his drive home in which case ha We're making fun of you Tom take that Anyways, all right. Let's keep going so AOS or non update here. Sorry old world update. That's what I meant to say. We got another old world update we're going through the phases Paul and What we got is is a movement phase update here We see the close order and open order those can be in like fight fighting formation or marching formation it has to do with are they wider than are they long or longer than they are wide and then skirmish and obviously Lance and all of that and So I read the article and I immediately had more as per usual with these things I had more questions than I had answers But what did you did you read this article at all? Did you you know? Did you think about this at all? What you think of this? I? Didn't actually read the article, but I have listened to a few videos on it. Okay, um Like I just listen to videos in the background while I work during the day I don't like tend to sit down and actually like read the articles that much but It seems cool. It seems interesting. It's a little bit of a different take on On You know They're taking very similar things to what they've done in the past and tweaking them a little bit and Yeah, I As you said, there's definitely questions The first thing that popped into my head was okay like if you move faster When you're in a marching column and you get combat bonuses when you're wider than you are deep What happens if your unit is five by five and in the pipe five by five? That was the first thing I thought of too, right was like what about equal that seems possible so The the other thing that then immediately occurred to me was what about armies that traditionally had very deep ranks And we're obviously, you know, we don't have Scaven at this point in the in their their launch armies They've said they'll have like some kind of weird supporting PDFs for that stuff or whatever But obviously won't be official and it'll quickly be outdated and if you're not playing one of the launch armies You should probably forget about that Those things don't hold up those those things do age like old cheese left on the sidewalk on a sunny day You know as as the AOS we'll talk about in a moment as the AOS launch PDFs did Yeah Example this right you'd be like five wide and 10 deep, you know because you'd have a block of 50 So does that mean you go like ultra wide formation now like you're 10 by 5 or something like that? Like that's your your your fighting formation for those and maybe maybe you just got to be real super crazy high frontage You know the things that I really want the answer to aren't much of this stuff. It's like Are you gonna go back because in my mind? The best time for sort of the points and cost and formations of armies in Warhammer history Was actually in sort of the fourth fifth edition era so the late 90s mid to late 90s Because an army was very small ball very small. Okay, I This is hard for you like let me see if I can make this real for you Okay, a day Manette Yeah Like you can you know what I'm referencing a day Manette a single one that girl who we now buy in units of 30, right? a day Manette was 36 points apiece a model a lot Yeah, yeah a cast night in cast armor was more than we pay for one guy just like a dude Was more than we pay for a chaos Lord Okay What this meant now obviously these units were vastly different in performance He was there was actually a huge performance gap between the various models but regardless of all that one of the things that was fun about it was Your armies weren't that big like a full-size unit was like a five by three guys or four by three guys or something That's a unit and I really liked that. I liked that like that was the appropriate amount to collect right It armies felt attainable I think in a real way that help people get there and then I do have sickness at six addition with ravening hordes It's where I'm a fantasy battle perfection. I did love ravening hordes Well, I think it's a wonderful time wild in balance. It's super fun I I played the heck out of ravening hordes, but armies got way bigger Just like that trend just kept going and has not abated to this day Right like if you asked me to wave a magic wand and fix a OS I would make the instead of and we'll talk about it instead of sinking the average to You know like five liberators at a hundred points. It'd be like five liberators for 200 points I would just I would just knock everything way up and shrink armies just dramatically down Yes, that'd be the easiest way because that that speed up game time too by the way We're sure All right. Anyways seemed interesting enough. So cool beans My last thought on old world is boy, are they not afraid of complexity, huh? Oh, no, it's it feels like they are saying This is what you guys wanted enjoy Yep You wanted the complexity you'll get the complexity like each phase four sub phases different things happening different rules Interactions like just in their summary articles I'm like a lot going on and if that's in a marketing summary article woof I can't wait for the actual rules when you start laying army stuff on top of it. That'll be great. Okay, so It's gonna be a good time. If you like a complex game. This is gonna be Good for you. I mean and there are there's a group of people who like I'm not judging like just people who like that Yeah, I think they kind of realized that there is a subset of people out there that want that sure and They're they're trying to sell stuff to them. Yeah, so market. So sure For it And yes, that is a very real possibility. I see blankets that this could end up being way more complex than actual fantasy was I don't disagree and and like 8th edition was a pretty pretty darn complicated game All right, next up. We have this the key master. Hey, Paul. Are you the gatekeeper because this guy's the key master? Here we go. We had relevant Ghostbusters joke has been made This is our new FEC boy that was previewed. This guy looks freaking awesome Awesome gorgeous. What? Pose like that model is going to be all overpainting competitions like the pose is incredible the details incredible and it's like It's also not like overwhelming detail Yep, it's giving feel like it's giving people enough detail to work with but not overwhelming you It's giving like you a lot of room for artistic expression in there. Yep. I agree completely. I Love everything about this dude. His wings look great. I love the little like they look like bone clawed hands I mean, I understand. I know what how wings and flanges and stuff work But like I'm just saying they did a really good job of sort of capturing that feeling of almost them like Grasping down on something right those those big long. Yeah spines at the end his like Super extended fingers and nails. He has just enough stuff that you could believe and understand the delusion Right. My problem with every seat was always they told this amazing story But you're just a bunch of naked people walking around right like that is real crazy Like you're you're like there's a certain limit, right? And And I think it's at the line of like physical objects existing But this dude has actually has stuff like I can picture him thinking his his pieces in a kutcher Why he's carrying are like royal regalia when in fact, they're just leathers and scraps and bones I'm like, yeah, okay, but he's got a thing, right? Yeah Like yeah, that's cool I think part of Like the disconnect with FEC I think was that they had this great concept this great lore and story and all of that but it was for Like a kind of an old crappy model range that wasn't really reflecting it very well If they update the model range or at least infuse more models into it like this Um It's gonna be awesome. I agree and and no, I don't think at all silent sorrow that this means there's no summer king I think a thousand percent. We still see the summer king like every dawn bringers book It's just like then they were looking for the summer king and they're tracking down the summer king And who's the summer king? It's just like I mean they cannot drop more references in every single dawn bringers book To to this one character to to usher on or whatever so no, I think a hundred percent We're getting that dude. I just think you're gonna have lots of of new stuff with the FEC We've already saw the other sprue too. So we know we're getting a multi-kit release here. So Yeah, this was just like So casually dropped like oh here. Here is this gorgeous model Moving on like it. They just didn't make a big deal about this at all. Yep. Um, I agreed It just screams that there's a lot more when they do something like that Absolutely when they're dropping heaters like this just on a random Monday or Tuesday or whatever, right? That tells you everything you need to know about what's coming. You're exactly right like if this is their cast off right Like we're not saving this for a big show. We're gonna put this out as a rando article on a Monday Then yeah, I like man, this gets me stoked for usher on himself. I think he's just gonna be just fire So yeah, absolutely I mean, they just randomly drop like like if this was gonna be like the only model coming out with this release Sure, like they wouldn't have just dropped it this casually No, and there is no way that they would have dropped a model so casually That just reams paint me for golden demon. Yeah, yeah like this If there wasn't like a whole bunch more behind it to that they were even more happy about yep Absolutely totally agreed There you go. Okay Let's see. I'll hear guitar said reaction to the GW new website. We talked about it some last week. It's trash That is real. It's an e-real easy reaction. It is trash and Whoever they paid for that Did a bad job or if it was internal people. I'm sorry That was not good. It is not good. It is a pain to use. I do not like it at all It looks bad and they should feel bad. There you go. That's my reaction Yeah, they just need to go on to like go watch some YouTube channels for a while Find like an offer code for one of those website services If you build your page your skillshare you can get 10% off Yeah, and just like just have like an intern do it and it'll come out better than this website Alright, well, yeah, so that's my feeling on that. There you go. Um, okay Uh Yeah, sickness as I do like being able to order for a drill to normal GW GW stuff together, but this doesn't feel worth it Yeah, I think that's exactly right. All right next up. Oh, yeah, but it will cost. Yes, exactly Next week not this coming Friday, but next Friday Friday the 17th of November We have our next big preview show and Paul look at this buddy. That it's just it's everything 40k sigma heresy old world underworlds kill team necromunda war cry. Oh wait, no, okay I guess it's not everything boo. Why no work right? What's going on here? What's what this is complete lack of work right announcements, but that's a shame, but otherwise it's basically everything Yeah actually Actually gives me a good thought because that's gonna be dropping Just like the Friday night before the boys GT and last year I think we got like a TV or something because they did like the same thing then Yeah, you like a preview party or something. Yeah, yeah, sure have silly There was one year where they did this and I happened to be Like in Australia at the time I think it was like when Lumineth got spoiled and so like I was doing a painting class And we all just stopped the painting class and brought it up on the TV to watch it or something like that during lunch So, you know like we had a range to have the lunch break be at the time of the preview So but it was funny because it was like Saturday and I was like, oh, it's in the past The at any rate look forward very much to see in what we got for you know AOS and the old world and for underworlds those are the things I'm obviously most interested in but that well if there's a good enough Thing happening. I'll see if I can rustle up some folks to do a reaction show It's only it's a 10 p.m. Eastern next Friday. So That's not a bad time at all that would mean we'd be doing it, you know I don't know 11 o'clock or something so fully fully fully doable I Expect what we'll see for AOS is like FEC basically we'll see everything I Assume that's gonna spoil that because I can't imagine FEC. It's November. We can't be that far away from the FEC release, right? so I assume we're gonna see that and Don bringers Yeah, so Okay, cool, which are probably tightly tied together so Yeah, I'm feeling me probably have to go together Probably why FEC being delayed probably my guess is that like I think Paul again You're dead on I think they're very just given where the story's at. I think they're very tightly tied together and hence You know one book got off schedule and then the other one had to be delayed or whatever, right? Because otherwise why wouldn't they have just put out the FEC stuff already? It doesn't would make sense Uh last bit of news this Friday this coming Friday the 10th watch this space this channel as well as tabletop minions channel as We got it. We got something launching we got something happening as you can see here From this little image that I brought up so This Friday we're gonna be dropping something new it is our new zine And our zine will be launching some some exciting things So we'll see we'll see so check it out But follow here follow on Twitter socials up there. You can see it. It's right up there. There it is It's still the bird. I'm not gonna replace you with that stupid ex Um You can follow it up there And as well as the Instagram and I'll I'll be posting about it on both But we'll also have it on there also be things on both of our channels So there you go two days november 10th tune in And find out what's happening. It's it's not a preview. It's just the launch of the thing Okay, with that Why don't we go to some pick Of the week pick of the week paul. What do you want to share with everybody? Um, well, you know, I'm gonna pull a tyler. I'm ready. I'm gonna give you two. Okay two First of all, I'm just gonna go shameless self promotion for my own channel drop the little One of my occasional videos at this point. I like don't regularly do much of anything at all anymore Um, I just do stuff when it's I don't know fun and inspired So if you want to find out about how we make steam tanks great again Um, I did a little video yesterday about making steam tanks great again and how we're gonna make Rk on pay for the cog fort and uh all that good stuff Um, but yeah, I think steam tanks are actually really cool in new cities of sycamore book and uh, so I went through a little bit of that and uh, you know kind of relating it back to what they did in uh, warhammer fantasy battles and How they are still I think going to be serving a similar role is what they used to you. Yep. Um I watched your video. I liked your video. I agree completely you and I are on the page you even make mention of it Like gw or cowards make it a one-up save. It's a giant tank. It's made of metal It should be a one-up save. Yeah Yep, it's If anything if anything yeah, um Anyone hey, uh, and we were talking about old world before East hammer did uh has been doing uh some nice review videos of uh, the articles have been that have been coming up about old world Going through the details of it and all of that Um, uh, ross always does a really nice job. I think of going through things like his style a lot. Um, Definitely recommend that um, so I think he's like anytime anything's been coming out. He's been Pretty quickly after that. He's dropping review videos too for old world. So if you're into that interested Um, I'm not like really super excited excited about old world Um, I'm personally taking it is like an excuse to build Bretonians and um, I know people locally that are probably going to be playing it So it's like I might as well have an army. Why not? um So no, that's what I was gonna be I was gonna shout that video out as well I've been I've been watching all ross's new stuff because for exactly the same reason you said paul It's like oh cool But I don't have to read the article like ross is gonna talk through it and summarize it give me thoughts And I I like ross. I think he's a really insightful guy And uh, yeah, so I've been I've been following all his old world coverage because I'm the same boat as you This isn't like something I'm I'm super excited for but I'm interested. I'll be interested, right? I'm And so I'm gonna follow along and we'll take this journey and if it's good, I'll say it's good If it's bad, I'll say it's bad if it's good, but I don't like it. I'll say that too Right, so we'll figure out where we land um For myself one of the common questions I get is hey, I live in a place And maybe I don't have stores near me or I don't have the chance to go to cons But I want to participate in a miniature painting competition. Well Imaginary sock puppet person that I just made up. Don't worry. There's now an option for you Because my pick of the week is for call to paint who is bringing back their mpo their miniature painting open It's an online competition I will link the video down below henry and andy and the whole team over there are all really great guys Uh and they run a heck of a cool competition So if you're interested and you've wanted to participate in a painting competition, but you don't have any way to like Physically do that near you Which is many people I think in the world This can be a chance to do it as long as you have the internet, which I assume you do if you're watching this Uh, so otherwise, how did you get this? Okay, so that will be linked below. Uh, check it out Okay All right with that Let's turn to some uh some hobby time Paul what you've been working on buddy. What's been on your table? Uh, I actually had a few different things going on at the moment. Um, I have been working on so project that we've been working on for the boys is we're working on developing a Narrative doubles event. Okay. Um, we're piloting it at uh the event this year um, it's just gonna basically replace our previous, you know Our most gts like the day before the gt. Just do like a one-day doubles event Be common thing. Uh, so we just replaced it with narrative event this year that is going to be similar kind of to Similar to like what steve herner does with his events Where it's mainly like cool tables with cool custom rules Um a little stuff over it, but nothing really too overbearing it's it In like a huge narrative sense Um, it's mainly just, you know, cool narrative tables. So I've been working on actually the Uh, Nurgle table for the event Um, so that's been going on in the background over here. Um, I've also been working on Uh, bringing back my city's a sigmar army um working on rebasing stuff and uh retooling some things um, you know, uh All the handgunners are now going to be fusiliers which are now on a different base size and Some other things around different base sizes. So I was like, well, I guess I'm just going to do new bases for the whole army so, um you know, uh working on uh new bases and their paint jobs on things and converting up Things for the new war scrolls. Um You know, yep Various projects in there and of course, you just always have some nurgle-y stuff on the back burner too so It's the new city's book went from oh, you're Binning all of my pantaloon boys to Oh, this is just an interesting opportunity to convert all the things and have fun and Um, you know what you want to see that's what you want to see. Yeah Yeah, just ended up getting inspired because I liked I it turns out. I just really like the book a lot and um Oh, yeah 2024 is going to be the year of pantaloons and cod pieces and feathered hats very nice very nice Uh, uh an aesthetic that I personally have no love or taste for but again all aesthetics are personal and I'm glad that uh that you're that you like it and and agree Like there's no reason you can't just do the conversions. It's you're good Like it doesn't you're never you never go holding that a handgunner It's just as easy to be a fuselier in my book like bang bang. There you go and and on and on and on right so yep And I just for the record I have to say I don't really personally love the the cod pieces and feathered hats and all of that stuff It's more that I think it's silly and ridiculous and stupid. Sure. And I enjoy and that appeals to you. Yeah, that's fair That's a totally fair read. I don't think there's anything wrong with that Yeah, like I don't think it's awesome. I think it's silly and fun and that's about it. Um, I am very tempted uh to Cosplay like albert ear for anything to borrow the costume from coach. He's got one. Uh, so there you go Uh, clearly we need to do me and coach do like cities and sigmar doubles in both wear pantalons There you go. Now you're now you're cooking with gas. Absolutely Uh for myself my weekend was was very very busy as it may shock you but In the lead up to a launch of a new thing from uncle adam and I the last week before launch is very busy Uh full of a lot of different things. I spent a lot of my weekend working very hard on things that you you will see Very soon. Um Obviously not anything to do with writing the game that was done months ago, but you know everything else To support that launch Um, but I did get some paint time in so I'm working still on this Nurgle sister of battle girl here Um, she's a lot of fun. We're making we're making small progress, but we're getting there Uh, and I really dig her. I think she just looks super cool and she's she's finding her way She's finding her way. So still a long way to go, but uh, but we're making progress so In progress as well I fully endorse any time you want to throw yourself At the love of the grandfather Yeah, most nurgle things don't appeal to me But something about this this figure just really grabbed me the figures from um, uh from hardcore miniatures, by the way If anyone's curious, um, so they they have a bunch of different models for like Sort of alternative sculpts for for brazen sundry warhammer things, but this one's a 75 millimeter sculpt and I just I really dug it So there you go All right excellent with that With our hobby time sounds like and then obviously this is the coming weekend, by the way I am not last minute painting for holy havoc. I'll just say that I'm done That's been done for a while with my schedule. I can't afford to be last minute painting So that's ready to go But with that Why don't we uh, why don't we turn to the topic? uh, yeah Let's let's get into it. So Age of sigmar editions the best and the worst the best and the worst elements of each edition of aos Uh, and really we're gonna separate this you might think we're over on 3.0. So there's three editions, but you'd be wrong You foolish person you how could you think such a thing? No, there's been four editions so far. Okay, of course And the first edition was what we'll call zero Which was those are the drugs that we try not to talk about Yes, pre any actual thing happening in the game being in a very proto sort of form Okay, so that's we're gonna talk over I look for as we're going through this Chat I want to hear what you have to say. I want to know your thoughts I want to know what you think was the best and worst if you're watching this in the future Drop it down in the comments. Okay. I want to know the elements that you found best and worst And as we go along through this current chat, give me some thoughts. Do you agree with what we're doing? Do you disagree with what we're doing? George, I know is already calling me out for something. He's absolutely right on and George you're a lunatic, but anyways, I love you. Great guy. Okay. So let's get into a little overview As I said age sigmar's on version 3.0, but we're gonna say it's had four phases all right And I think that there's often this discussion of like You know This edition was the best or this edition was the best or whatever. That's already being discussed right three Three full editions in that that already comes up all the time And I always think those are wrong-headed discussions because I just don't No, no, no edition is without sin right Absolutely um I think that until you get multiple editions of a game in of this size and this complexity and then you do a concerted effort to go back and like harvest all of the best stuff and cut all of the bad stuff and Use all of your game design experience to like make something That is synergistically greater than some of its parts, which I do think by the way is what fifth edition dnd ended up doing I think that's one of the reasons it was so successful because it looked back over All of its previous work and said let's take a lot of the best elements of every edition and kind of Do that Maybe they didn't hit yours. Maybe maybe they did maybe they didn't okay, but that was a goal regardless of where they landed and So I and so I think all of these we just keep moving so much Paul one of the things that occurred to me and I want to get your take on this from a high level We have every edition changes so much It changes so much The core thing is still there. You're absolutely right. We went back and looked and we'll talk about this the four page wheels All that's still Basically the same But man does everything that orbit around that Just keep getting bigger or changing in dramatic ways like the beating heart remains the same But man, do we just reorient the solar system around the sun there? Yeah absolutely um and A lot of it is like growth and evolution from there. It's it's like the The original four page rules were like this germ in the middle and it's like it's just all growing out from there constantly and It doesn't feel like they've pruned many things back yet, right? And the thing myself looking through all of this There haven't been things in here where I was like, oh, they they realized that was a bad idea and they cut it like Like they just keep adding and adding and adding and adding Something's getting modified. Sure, but um Not a lot of things have just Gone away. Um A few things did, um, you know, like, uh, the realm rules For example, yeah, that's a good. That's a good pruned example now. We switched to like It became the meta narrative for the whole season instead of a thing that would just jump around all the time Or you could play in the all the different realms or whatever, right? It became like no We're just in ger or whatever or or so on and so forth, right? Yeah. Yeah Yeah, it was It that's one of the few things that they actually did cut back and change um But mainly this has just been this rule snowball Yep historically Warhammer goes three editions or about eight to ten years and then prunes Okay, prunes and reorganizes that's the traditional pattern over the first three cycles Of warhammer. So first second third prune and reorganize fourth fifth 92 to a thousand eight year period prune and reorganize Then we had this really long long gap of of 2000 basically late 2002 2015 right of six seventh eighth because those editions were just really really long and Then again prune and reorganize in a big way again like i'm being i'm simplifying right but but yeah, that's generally how the cycle is gone and It makes me wonder like for 4.0. Are we going to get some some heavy pruning? Is it time or are we or are we going to try to get like a perfected thing? Have we learned enough that we're just going to try to make a like Platonic version of aos. I don't know. I don't know Yeah, one of the things that i'm really hoping they don't do is some major revamp that just Invalidates all of the existing battle tomes And everything and just says okay hard reset All of your old books don't work with the new rules Throw it all out new game Yeah, I don't know. I I'm not as against it honestly. I don't mind it I like when they do that and then give us like indices as opposed to trying to limp books over editions I think if I like if we have if we have to do one of those two things Which is why the way we don't the real choice is is see stop making new editions every three years, but But If we're going to have a new edition if that's the the weight we must carry I'd rather they just go all the old battle tomes are invalid Here's an indice with everything in it ravening horde style or whatever Legitimately and honestly, I think with With what they've found with the general's handbook releases like they found this technology now where they don't need new editions Sure, like then. Yep. I don't think they need them like they they can just keep tweaking in evolving things Um, they don't need these major rules overhauls every three years Yeah, I mean if you go back to the the dnd example, right they made fifth edition that edition is now 10 years old Okay, or about to be I shouldn't say it's about to turn 10 And they've they've done this massive public play test for the last year Right of potential new content Taking big swings trying things and then deciding they're not going to do it being very open and transparent about what's going on They had some serious missteps as well along the way, but like really insanely stupid missteps um, but like the design process has been very open and transparent and ultimately They're not flipping to a new edition Like it's still good. What comes out is still going to be completely backwards compatible just fifth edition with polish effectively All right So they went 10 years on one edition and what they did is exactly what you said They used some of the supplementary books to be like here's optional class features and let's reshape things and and you know New versions of an options within a class or something like that, right? And so Whatever whatever, right? It does I I agree with you like one because of the general's handbook tech we can do a lot to reinvent the game Uh, like battle packs can upend any battle packs can overwrite anything in the core rules anything, yeah Right, you could have a battle pack that says all models now hit on ones All the time And and ones don't automatically miss one when rolling a hit roll like that you could write that The game wouldn't fall off. I mean it would be terrible, but like you could do it Right It's not as though there's some kind of limit as to what battle packs can change. And so that's that's that's my old point. All right so But ultimately in my estimation each Uh edition has strengths and weaknesses. And so we're gonna look back today Uh And We're gonna look without any rose colored glasses. We're gonna be cold objective observers of the good and the bad for me the these editions And uh, lastly, these will not be all inclusive. There will be stuff we miss and that's where I want you to say the things that uh, that you Feel we're missing out of any given edition. All right Paul, do you feel prepared? Are you ready? I Am as cold as ice and willing to sacrifice our love paradise And the feeling was a nice. All right, let's do it. Here we go Uh pop ages sigmar version zero All right Version zero dot. Oh I suppose we could call this Uh 0.5 Yeah, open beta. Yes I'm not sure We could call this lots of things But specifically what we're referring to is the period of time between july 4th 2015, which was the official launch of ages sigmar Uh independence day here in the united states Uh through july 2016 Either the release of the sylvaneth battle tome, which was the first Uh official battle tome With with like as we would currently view them, right? Like they have points and those kinds of things in them, right? Like real rules and allegiance abilities and stuff like that Or the ghp, which came out the same month basically at the same time There's there's a small difference in there in weeks, but it's historically irrelevant Uh, and that was sort of the end of this Let's call I think you agree. I think I agree with you open beta this exploratory period, right? Yeah Okay, so let's just tackle the good here first. Let's not talk the bad for a minute. We're gonna we're gonna stick on the good poll Okay So my good Uh is Community building this was a great time for a lot of initial community building I met a lot of great people there who jumped in early who we were like, you know willing to try to make this game Talking about it. There's a lot of like people who came into the community who hadn't been here before Or who stuck around who didn't leave and who built something out of the sort of Uh Fire that was like I suppose this is like a what i'm saying here is after a massive forest fire is when the forest sees the most growth, right? But it was a dark time like a lot of people left the game, you know Not that it was that big to begin with fantasy battles had already was I had already atrophied quite a bit but You know more left, but that but then that year was like a year of real Amazing growth and passions where I met tyler for the first time So I met chuck for the first time like a lot of these people So I came to know people I now call very dear friends, right? Um And so I think that's a strong strength because we had no option the mother ship was silent and giving us nothing We all had to fend for ourselves, right? We had to come together as a group and like make a game of this Um And you know, I would also put in this this section things like the people who Did the work to early put points on stuff like moe Just kyle nelson just mentioned moe comp, right? But there was there was other similar things at the time s scgt comp Right, which built in a sort of aligned with moe comp. But but these kinds of things, right? People who were putting points on things allowing tournaments to happen What's that? Like three or four different comp systems that came out around the same time. Yep. They were all fairly similar-ish Yep Agreed they were all in the same space that like people disagreed on exactly what something was worth Yeah, maybe here or there on some individual units, but it was similar structure. Everyone kind of coalesced around the same concept Five liberators is a hundred points. Let's go right like We had lots of I think the big differences were in like I think everybody figured out pretty easily how to balance like units against each other that were fairly vanilla-ish um, it was when you had uh, like heroes with weird abilities and wizards and You know things that had really less quantifiable abilities on them That that was hard to price. Yep. It still is it still is like those are some things that have wrong points, you know Yep, those like utility heroes were so undercosted at that time period, you know, like yeah, it just it was it was wild Uh The other thing i'll say for this early period is they did do a lot of experimentation in this first year Um, yeah, you know, they were they were trying a lot of different things Uh, like as far as what books they released You know, what what was it was that's that's true for the community and for them They were trying things So, I mean, you know Shout out. That's great. Like this is a good time to it. I I think you exactly nailed it when you said open beta It's a hundred percent what it felt like Living through that time right um, yeah, and I think you know in Kind of what we learned about that period of time afterward and kind of what they were At least what they said they were intending with all of this It seems like they really wanted age of sigmar to kind of be a sandbox and let all of us figure out what we wanted the game experience to be and they like they didn't put points on it and things like that because they wanted us to Figure out what we thought it all should be Uh, not that they Wanted us to balance the game for them, but that it was They what it wasn't intended to be that to begin with that it was an open sandboxy sort of Experience, you know, that it wasn't supposed to be balanced um And you know, I think mission accomplished Sure. Um, they they heard feedback. That's for sure Yeah, it I think they And they really I think they did seem to take a lot of feedback from that period and they responded very quickly Yeah Oh, this is they got They got that feedback really quickly that No points in this thing was a terrible idea and turned around a Coherent points system for the entire game In less than a year I mean The It's really hard to explain How hard it was to talk about playing the game at that time period Because there was actually no formal structure to play the game, right? You used like we used scgt comp mostly to play here, you know in my in my group of friends and to like try to explain to somebody who's who's just Dead new to this thing. Okay, so this is the game and then we go to this other random community website And they have points for how to actually build your army And then like rules around it is wild right, um and You know the other thing I listed is the good Four pages of rules was a real bold move Like that is crazy Right To think about your flagship game and I'm trying to crack it down to that Would you like a fun story Paul? Would you like a fun behind the curtain story? I love I'm behind the curtain stories. Those are like my favorite thing Okay, I don't know if everybody in the audience maybe maybe people know this. Maybe they don't but Yeah, I think I may have heard this story before if it's a story that I'm thinking of we'll see so Jervis Johnson who was a game designer for Games Workshop for many many years had a long and story career created many of some of the greatest games GW has as ever had And it's just widely respected in his field as a game designer somebody who I have a lot of respect for He was given charge to create this This rules the rules for AOS This was his like he wasn't the only person who contributed obviously But he was lead on it and it was the primary person responsible for writing the rules and He wrote the ruleset and the mandate was it had to be very very small when I say mandate. I mean this came from The top okay And It had to be short and simple and and easy right because they they really as an executive team had identified that complexity Had killed poor emmer fantasy battles. It's too complicated. It's too hard to start It's too late people come in they look at a book like that and they're like nope It's funny now that we're back to those books for both editions, right? But they look at that and they you know, we need a better way to deliver simple rules to people So he wrote a 12 page rules treatment Okay, that he was really happy with covered Most everything he thought made the game function And he turned in the 12 page document and they were like no we said it has to be four pages It needs to be four pages and he's like it's a pdf. Who cares? It's eight pages like the difference between four and 12. It's still an obscenely simple game right And they were like nope unmoving four we said four it'll be four we're launching with four. That's it do it Or don't work here. Okay So he went back and he gutted his 12 pages down to four pages Okay Now do you remember some time after the four page launch when we got the 12 page addendum? You remember that this eventually happened remember we got the like 12 page rule set. Yeah That's basically him restoring The the the original rules right now not completely some of it had to be switched around and changed because of things that had been cut and had to be changed because of the shorter size and so on but like Ish Um, so it's just very funny. I mean, I think he should feel vindicated as I'll get out for that one certainly But I I mean ultimately it was very I do think like I think if they had launched with four pages of rules and a points index Completely different response completely different response I think that's it And I feel like even now If you take those Initial four pages of rules I feel like That's still like the on ramp to learn age of sigmar now Like if you want to Introduce somebody to age of sigmar that hasn't picked up any miniatures game before You hand them that four pages of rules and you're like, okay, this is like the bare bones basics of this game Check this out. This will give you the base understanding We can run through a couple of games with that and then we can build on the the rest of the rules after that Yep And they really like that really was and still is the bones of the game. Absolutely. I haven't really changed Nope The bare bones of what's presented in that four page document or the 12 page addendum, you know that followed shortly after within this year were Pretty much the aos were playing today. I mean it's been refined and corner cases have been explored and And all of that stuff But I agree with you like I want to see that 12 page thing Still exist in some form right like the the onboarding methodology Still be there like I just I I mean I appreciate that we've well explained everything and had all these steps But boy does a lot of it not need to be kind of there right away. So there you go We need like a like an age of sigmar Start rules. That's exactly what George just said in the comments. I agree completely. Yep I mean, we've been harping on this channel about the need for a simple startup thing for a long time Apparently, there was some kind of thing Published in white dwarf that had some kind of starter battle pack But it's published over a couple white dwarfs. I don't know. I need to go first of all terrible delivery method for that Whoever keeps deciding to put this stuff in white dwarf. Please stop Please stop Okay, it is a magazine This is 2023 year of our lord. Are you for real? Okay Yes, stop hiding things in a publication It that is just an an antiquated Obsolete medium like yes, it shouldn't be there. It shouldn't exist I was complaining about tomes celestials. We'll talk about those a little later on. You remember those paul I was complaining about those the whole time they were happening. That was like four or five years ago And or whatever, you know, like like if they want to have them in the white dwarf Sure, but they should be in a pdf online for free too This shouldn't be exclusively paywall locked In this this paper thing that you have to go to a store and buy Exactly All right, that's all I have for the good paul Did I miss anything for the good from from the from age of sigma version zero the open beta test year? um, I think There were actually a lot of things in the Initial compendium war roles that they released were actually really good and actually really stuck around sure a lot of their initial Like a lot of the reorganization of the factions um that we ended up having now Where we have the like the subgroups within armies and the the bigger picture of how armies fit together um all of that Very little of that has actually changed ever since those compendium war scrolls were long Most of that was all already outlined in levels. Yep. Um, and there were a bunch of war scrolls that Hey, even though again, we're Now nine years down the line eight years down the line Um, a lot of these war scrolls have barely changed Yep. Um, and they're all basically holding up. So I think a lot of like the initial rules writing Was functional. It worked. It was pretty good. Um, one of the the silly things that like stuck out to me is that like RK on slayer of kings right right ability It if you look back to the old compendium war scroll When when he was just his little dude on a horse before the big Badass model came out that we had it which was just like a couple of months probably after age of sigmar launched Um, it's the exact same rule is that it's on his current horse roll, right cleaned up It's the same rule though. It's hold a hit roll two sixes on the wound in the sword you go Yep, get in the sword Um, and that's not the only rule like that. Um, there were a lot of things that they came up with Like they wrote a lot of cool interesting rules that have stuck around and were fair and fun and I think they Like there were there a lot of things in there that were crappy that were unbalanced that had all kinds of problems yes I think we really do need to give them a lot of credit for the things that they were very successful on though In those intercom war scrolls Yeah for for I mean the those core bones whether it be the core rules and sort of the hit and wound and you know rend and and damage and the way it saves work and You know leadership like all that stuff stuck around. It's all there It's all you know more or less become the the heart of the game, right? And a lot of the rules on the individual war scrolls you mentioned the slayer of kings But there's there's many more that are that are like that where you look at them now. You look at them then and it's still, you know, very similar Um, so yeah Uh, all right, let's talk about the bad Let's hit the bad paul There's a lot of bad Okay, do we even need to to harp on there was no points because there were no points Do we mention no points and we had any idea about abundance this game Yeah People are trying wounds. That's obviously nonsense. I can't like the obviously that didn't work from the jump We mentioned the community to like mo comp and scgt comp is something like that that would come in. Thank god uh, but like it is It was so hard to have a tournament Adepticon that first year So I went there. Okay That first year if memory serves I might get the exact number just slightly wrong I'm sure alex could correct me at some point But I believe it was 63 players And that was like one of the biggest tournaments in the u.s. This is in march of 2016 right That's rough And I mean don't be wrong. There are many smaller games that would kill to have 60 person tournaments Okay, if they get like a 20 person tournament, that's like their national event. All right But for for the sort of flagship fantasy game of the industry boy, that's tough You know because it was just really hard to organize a tournament Um, and you know related to this there was just no real on ramp to actually playing the game Because you had this great simple rules pack. It was great for going. Look, this is how you play the game It's so easy, right? But then you had no way to actually then connect that To doing the thing to making an army and doing the thing It's just like a shocking lack of insight there Uh, and I agree sickness. Everybody should be hitting like come on hit like for the for for Uh, the bad early years that probably many of us skipped but but you know, I was here. I was here Yeah, and I think the if you look at The initial four page rules there was um sudden death win conditions and I think that Like rereading that because I I forgot that that even existed until I reread the rules. Um That really shows like the clear disconnect that they didn't understand what the balance of the game was um, because that was you get a special Easier win condition if you have fewer models on the board than your opponent does right like That doesn't mean anything That should not mean anything to anybody at work. Um, so Um And I definitely remember playing with those rules and there were so many instances where you would get the sudden death victory condition Uh clicked on and it was like Yours you are at a huge advantage and if you have sudden death Right like this doesn't sense. No, absolutely. It's it's so funny Uh, I oh gosh, that's I again one of those things that I had forgotten like my brain just like Cut that out of existence, right? It was like no that was because I think to me we'd never use those It was just like nope and that is amazing to look at four pages rules and go and cut something This isn't making the cut like we're gonna skinny this down even more so yeah um The There's one more thing here I don't remember obsidian crane said wasn't their point initially to play more narratively and less competitively Yeah, I think they had that concept But again, it's hard to connect that how it is like narrative play still needs some kind of structure around it, right? Otherwise, you're just going bang. I shot you know, you didn't right that that kind of thing and um Cygnus said one more thing for the good round basis just looks so much better Yes, agreed like one of my Things I'm least excited about is the Free old world is a concept of square bases. I just think square bases are ugly I do not know why they didn't go to rounds in a in a Square tray like for for old world. Um, anyway, not what we're talking about Uh, a few other things that were really wild during this first year lots of strange books that wouldn't age well or sell well or anything like that Chaos dread holds my dog Yeah We would take two bites at this apple before we let it die by the by Okay two two cast red hold books Um, that is crazy the extremist chamber getting their own not book Right just just craziness Okay, now I want to talk about this one. This is the one george has been banging on the whole time in the chat Silly war scroll rules Okay, so this is like your beard is longer and more full and your mustache is better and you Don't kneel because that's your never kneels and you shout wah and so on and so forth Okay I submit to you And and and george, let me explain to you why you're wrong Because no matter how fun any of us think and or silly Thought those rules were We liked them. We didn't like them. I don't care Okay Those did more to damage the reputation of this game Than anything else that they have ever put out or done ever To this day I'll be watching people talk with the tangential familiarity of aos And they'll say yeah, that's the game with the silly rules or you got to like measure your mustache or something, right? Like it gets mentioned just this last week. I saw it pop up in a video Okay Like this did reputational damage To the game Because it became an unserious thing Right and and there is a difference between fun and funny and unserious Okay Warhammer has always been fun and funny and goofy and had you know, like various levels of satire and comedy and stuff like that to it And I love all of that and it should be there and I've often argued we need more of it Whether it be classic orcs in 40k or cyberpunk stuff, you know in necromunda gangers and you know talking about that kind of thing or whatever Your mention of cod pieces and silly outfits on the impact earlier in the show Right But it made the game feel unserious in a way that just was like, oh they don't care about this. This is stupid It's stupid That's how it read It read as stupid Okay, now it wasn't a deal breaker for me. I'm still here. I was still I was playing it then. I'm still playing it now And what every to did was immediately strike all of those rules And say they don't work there. They're nothing and cut them from this role, right? But nine years later If you hear y'all people will talk about this as why age of sigmar is a dumb game And those things haven't been there for eight years Yeah, it went from you know this is This is we're gonna do something that's funny to Do we're going to make it a joke? Correct. Yes Yes and And the thing is I actually I was curious recently. So I started going through all of those old compendiums just to see Yeah, what were all of these rules? There weren't even that many of them. No, there wasn't they were all so ridiculous They they were just so dumb That that they stuck out. They didn't They really were very lightly sprinkled in but It didn't matter. It was It was a potent enough poison that it Has poisoned everything. Absolutely. It was a hundred percent a poison pill, right? And and what sucks is it's still in the system. It's still in the zeitgeist because It the the statement if you only get one chance to make a first impression That was a lot of people's first impression And and as some people have said in the chat You you're coming straight off the end times. We've blown up the old world We've killed your game. We've killed everything you love and now what's replacing it is a silly game where you measure and compare mustaches Like now it's not just dumb and unserious. It feels insulting Okay Now look, I'm not one to spare a tear over most of the people That that we lost and still haven't regained if you're still butthurt about the old world being destroyed When it's coming back next year like I don't know man. You got to find things to like You got to find some happiness in your life. I really do hope that you find like some kind of joy because you got to stop You got to stop holding on to things like that. That's not psychologically healthy for you. Okay But I can understand the raw emotion in that moment of feeling like oh, well, this just isn't the game for me I'm not talking about people walking around with a grudge or being angry or burning their little toys On the internet like a child, right? I'm talking about just them like of the vast majority of people who would look at that and go oh, okay This just isn't for me. They're not walking away angry. They're not walking away hurt. They're just walking away Right and The it just made the game feel unserious unfinished And and and like a joke And it's I don't know what we'll ever do like eventually Will what that will pass out of the zeitgeist but but my god Almost a decade and it still hasn't and and you know It's it's going to take a while I think that is the worst thing about a os 0.0 0.0 was those silly worst-goals now I don't count in there Many game stuff Okay, so what I mean by that is there's a section of worst-goals with with rules that were introduced in this initial edition That had mini games in them That we ended up mostly cutting To this at this point in the game. So for example, here we go. You ready? You ready paul You ready We're gonna play a game All right, paul Right or left hand Which one? Uh With the left hand left hand paul you're dead Okay, so no but like hand of dust or the little skink priest mini game or you know stuff like that, right? I found those genuinely fun because I liked actually breaking up the game and just playing a little sub mini game I've always liked stuff like that and those don't feel too silly They feel like little blind man's bluff games and stuff like that Those I legitimately do not think damage the game if those have been the only things you saw in those And that was sort of the edge of the the quote unquote silliness. No problem. No problem Everybody in warhammer would have accepted that without a passing glance because that's just that's just another way to roll dice Right Like the dust is just a that a more fun way to do a roll a forearm Right. Yeah, exactly. It's just a way more engaging way to do it. It feels a lot more tense right So like people would have accepted that stuff Um, they they were the right space and that's what drives me the most crazy about those other rules Is that they had things like that in there again sprinkled lightly as you mentioned They were so well designed They were so cool And then they would just like and then they had these other things that were just they went off the the rails So, okay And they there were other ways they could have done it that have inspired Players You still participate in ways like that that didn't say you must do x to get benefit in game Right, like it could have flavor text that said you know, whomever has Yeah Was it like marius light dwarf with the mustache or something? Or no, he was the guy that like pretended to My favorite was the the no the vampire guy who was crazy conrad von karstein If you talk to your dice, you could re-roll hits if they talk back to you you get to re-roll wounds like come on now What are we doing? Yeah, it's They could have put something like flavor text in that That kind of had the implication but didn't tell you to do it And say had to do it that kind of like That maybe like nudged you like gave you like a wink and a nudge to do the role play Didn't tell you you had to right Um, and that would have been a completely different scenario. I think Yep. Yep. And the final thing I'll say on the bad is, you know, despite how many I think you're right Good rules and things that have carried on on some of the compendium scrolls Woo for those things wildly unbalanced like holy moses They were just I mean the deltas there were crazy internal and external it was Truly the wild west time, right? Yeah Adding on to that too, there was Other than grand alliance, there was nothing Like bounding your army construction in any way. So um You would just mix and match your war scrolls from any army. So there was no There were so many war scrolls that could interact with each other that they couldn't Possibly play test it all of that. There were interactions that nobody would ever have anticipated. Yeah, that first year I mentioned adepticon. I remember Uh, Brad From from the Detroit club just tearing up tables with the the true terror of that time of that early period which was like, uh, three thunder tusks and Uh, four hordes of goblins or something like that. Like it was just it was like goblin night Night goblin hordes and thunder tusks to snowball people Right because they just did like wild amounts of mortal wounds. The thunder tusk is still in a timeout from its initial Busted us. It was so busted in the first year. I got put in a timeout and now Eight years later. It's still in timeout and it's a garbage war scroll It's so funny to me how long some scrolls have to spend in timeout after they were too good Yeah Okay, so yeah, I mean the the compendium scrolls were like Not at all balanced. They were they were clearly just like someone's first pass Yeah, no development work was done there Yeah, and then then we got like the the second pass when we got the um the four grand alliance books Had like all of the updated war scrolls um, and then we that also just produced this limbo of like well All of these war scrolls that aren't in here and weren't updated Are they just not in here? Are they getting discontinued? They didn't really tell us what was going on with them It we just had this giant limbo of like What's going on with this? Like like it wasn't officially legends yet Like legends wasn't a thing yet. Yep. You've you have perfectly segued for us to leave behind so Here we are July 2016. We get ghbs. We get grand alliance compendiums That brings us to age of sigmar version 1.0. Okay So in 1.0 Uh, some things change Okay, so this is july 2016 through june 30th 2018 the launch box of second edition Uh, so What was what was the good? points points ball ghb 2016 And force organization it wasn't force organization charts. Yes Which by the way Has not been revisited other than adding other things onto the list of restrictions Uh people at gw That if i'm sure you're listening to this Please god look at this again. This doesn't make sense anymore Uh I mean, I would just love it if we took reinforcement points and just shotgun them to the moon Uh in in just eat them into the sun in a os 4.0. Why are they there? They don't need to exist We're fine. No No, the the sun is too good for them. They need to go Just in the cold dark heart of deep space They need to be jettison They need a one-way ticket into the center of a supermassive black hole never to be seen again. Absolutely I don't know what problem. They thought they were fixing with this But the only Thing that they have done is given me anxiety. Sure in anger I understand. I'm with you completely as a long-time scaven player. Believe me Who has to buy rat ogre units in in functions of two? Uh, yeah, I feel it. I feel it a lot okay ghb's from this time I submit to you paul were some of the best that they've made In fact, I will go a step farther and say the general's handbook 2017 is still the best overall General's handbook they have made in the history of aos now the match play Scenarios in like the current ghb. I think are better All right They're more balanced, but taken as a whole 2017 ghb all-time banger best of the best Number one win win looked at holistically. It had triumphant treachery. It had teams games and multiplayer scenarios. It had All this different stuff in it right Yeah, pass it like absolutely it introduced Allegiance rules they were good They were fun And it's so funny because we're gonna when we get to two point out We're gonna talk about this but we got basically like allegiance rules, right and it felt great Like I never I honestly legitimately I remember when the iron jaws book first came out. I was scared Because the original iron jaws Rules which were printed on two pages on the very back of ghb 2017 like it's literally the back cover Yep, right Um, it's so wild to me that that's that they printed rules on The front side of the back cover the different hard binding not on the piece of paper in the book On the back cover Was great I played the heck out of it It was one of my favorite time playing iron jaws and I was like they're gonna ruin it They didn't every iron jaws book is more or less gone from strength strength, but um But like they were fun Were they perfect? No, but they were good. We had grand alliance rules Right, so you could play grand alliance death or chaos or stuff like that Again, this should be a thing. It should still be a thing Maybe it's not a thing in the event battle pack Okay, like in the event battle pack, which is meant to be for tournaments There's no you have to play a court like how we think of it now Where things are balanced and tight and stuff like that fine But in a general battle pack or a narrative battle pack or some other battle pack We should allow grand alliance rules let people go nuts bring different stuff together. It's not for a tournament. It's not who cares Who cares? Just give people that like yes, you could do it you can just in your basement right now decide that's the rule But if you give people a permission structure, they will actually do it right Yeah, that's Even though we all intuitively know we can just do whatever we want People are still going to look at the rule book and say oh, these are the rules I have to play by the rules even though there's no one standing over their shoulder making them do it right right exactly I think the other good from this is this is also the time of just explosive community growth I mean once they got points back in and ghp 2016 hit. I mean we just saw aos take off like a rocket ship right The ghp's were amazing The rules were made were fun people felt like it was good. Now. There was there's many bad things here. We're gonna talk about them Okay, yeah Many but this is a time of just just unbridled growth people were like, okay. This is a game now We're out of the open beta Right It's it's it gave it gave us a game we could play Weird Yeah We got a real game Yeah, the difference in tone So I met with gw at adepticon 2016 and had to talk with some of the leaders and designers And we had a lot to say Like tom and I showed up with a Very big packet of feedback like a like a printed packet Okay, well and The difference in tone between 2016 and 2017 was so marked There was still feedback we had we weren't like into a great place, but it was so different and then 2017 to 2018 different world Like over the course of this edition, we would see the game. I think become a real game. It's a real boy Right. Mm-hmm. Okay Uh, all right, paul. Let's talk about the bad You brought this one up in the chat the first time I had to go back and remember because I I'll be honest This is another thing I blanked out paul. You want to talk about summoning a little? Yeah, so Initially the way summoning originally worked in Age of Sigmar was um, it was all spells that were on War scrolls But not in the way that you would probably expect it was spells on the war scroll of the thing getting summoned so If you had a say a chaos wizard They could just summon Any chaos demon that you happen to have in your collection They just knew all of the spells you summon those They roll the dice They hit that number That is on, you know, whatever the spell is to summon though that particular chaos demon just Popped that onto the board um, you know that was before points were a thing And then oh by the way now points are a thing um and they Yeah, they didn't really address that initially um If i'm remembering correctly So we you could summon anything and just go nuts Then we got points and then they realized summoning was a problem and so their fix for it was Oh now you have to just play down points Like oh if you want to summon things Okay, now you have to play a 1500 point list and you have a 500 point summoning pool Right, you can summon up to 500 points worth of stuff. Yep um It was like the worst fix. Yes Hey, I I don't know why they did that Um Other than they would have had to write real rules to fix all that Um, which they eventually did um God it took It brought all of those armies that were summoning things It took them from being like the best armies to They do not appear anywhere right no bring them because now they are trashed The one thing that that army did that was good It cannot do anymore. Right, right. Yep Yep And I think so assistant ref says let's be honest summoning is still bad now seven years later Not as bad true, but still bad the worst thing by the west in my opinion Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I call it the worst thing I think summoning for the most part has been fixed. I don't think summoning is actually a problem now I think recursion is actually the problem right now um like most anyone that summons For the most part is quite limited on your quote unquote summoning of like just generating new units If you play nergal you probably get a unit Maybe two over the course of the game depending on what you summon and they're they're going to be pretty minimal Units, right? It's like a plague. It's like a sloppy bio piper and Few plague bearers right. We're not talking about game altering numbers here um, you know the slanesh summoning Wildness was like that that was the problem. So that's why I think recursion like my problem is not summoning It's the whole unit died half of it comes back the whole unit died the whole unit comes back The 40 models out of the unit died. I rally half of them back on up four up Like all of that stuff to me is way more offensive than somebody bringing on 10 plague bearers and then In a in like a inopportune place on the board right um So like the recursion is actually a far deeper problem to me now than than summoning Yeah, it the it was just insane possible abuse in The first version of summoning though like Just because of the rules loophole to it like let's say you have a zinch demon prince He's a wizard. Oh He can cast the spell to summon more demons He himself is a demon. So he can be summoned. So you have you take him he In your hero phase he cast the spell summons another zinch demon prince. Okay. Now you have that second zinch human prince Well, there's nothing stopping him from now A third zinch demon prince that one comes on fourth zinch demon prince and you just chain them until you fail the diro Right or run out of models So like that that was the problem with it. Like it was just it didn't stop um, and then there was the um The original chaos lord his command ability was just summoning unit on the boarding Yeah, it was like what? Like just it was either knights or warriors. Just there you go. Bring him on. Yeah, every turn Yeah, and this doesn't have the Like a os does not have the depth of response to handle the that situation like something like magic does right Like you play a magic game where you're gonna your whole strat is like Commander for example, you like my whole strat is attacking with this one creature I will I will may very likely only have this one creature in play ever That's a hardcore tron build right i'm gonna kill everybody else this table with one person Right one dude one card, right That's a functional play style and then somebody across the table is going super wide. They're making potentially hundreds of little dudes tokens and stuff like that They're trying to swarm right and like magic has the sort of depth of resources and responses to be like Yeah, okay, those are both valid and both players can answer each other in a myriad number of ways right um And both will be advantaged and disadvantaged in different ways this had no such counterbalance Right it was just like no more free points is good. You're just doing more right Go wide was just good Uh and that leads to my second point here of the bad again during a os 1.0 We still had terrible balance. I mean we don't have data from this time period This is like uh, this is like when you're talking about elections, you know pre 19 whenever they started doing polling, right? I think started pulling in like the 40s or whatever You know, you don't really have good data historically to understand this stuff. You just have to kind of Into it. What was happening? And This is the same thing, but like if you played in that time, you knew it You knew it. There was just things that were bent sideways, right? Yeah, um there were there are a lot of Things that aren't exactly in the rules now as well that are just sort of in their design principles as well that Um Like now you don't summon things into combat or teleport things into combat ever, right? I don't think there's a single thing in the game right now that can do that um But there were multiple things In a os 1 that could do that. Sure. They're like the whole excuse me I'll see you the whole concept of the old vanguard wing list like all we're here Might as well talking about vanguard wing because this was like this just had a A laundry list of sins Um that made that list busted, right? What do you do? Well, I've got like 30 liberators And I teleport them into combat with you Hit whatever I want and then every round to re-teleport them and set them up to be chopping whatever I want and they don't die yep and All like they were getting buffs that were all based on being within a radius not wholly within So you could just tongue the line them across the board. Yep. It um the coherency rules didn't require Really anything you just had to the next time you moved you had to just reform back into coherency If possible if not you couldn't move Right, so So You just pulled models out of the middle And they didn't do anything And so you just kept your stuff in combat at one end and you kept your stuff getting the buffs at the other end and Yep, oh absolutely No improvement for doing that. Yeah, paul. Let me share a story with you. I believe this is this has to be That has to be Nashcon 2017 that sounds right So Nashcon 2017 I'm there round four. I come up against one mr. Lord of Death Brendan Melnick Who was running at the time? I was running iron jaws You know pigs malcrusher some brutes, you know iron jaws And Brendan was running Nagash A necromancer in like three units of 40 skeletons Okay, something like that. Maybe there was a couple other small pieces in there, but that's basically a twist Now Already i'm up against it Okay, like this is a terrible matchup for me because he can like recur his troops in an insane way and I was like well High chance of loss means I need to employ a high variance strategy so I Stayed out of a spell range for a round Moved all my pieces into place and then charged into his two skeleton units with everything I had just everything I hit him with basically my army because If I could wipe a unit the units out completely they couldn't recur right I killed one unit completely all 40 skeletons lifted him keep mine This was actually pretty tough because remember these things had like just lots of weird defense stacking at this time, right? And Then I killed 39 Of the 40 skeletons in the other unit And there was one skeleton way over here sitting on a gravesite I'm sorry. I killed 38. I apologize. It's 38. I was too short. I'm sorry. Paul. This is relevant Because one was sitting over here on a gravesite And the other one was in my lines still alive Right, I mean they were Three and a half feet apart but they were unit, right? rolls over to brennan's turn and he Then recurs a bunch of his skeletons and conga lines them Out from his line where I have engaged him like this is his side of the board up here, right? So I've engaged him here. My whole army's here And he then recurs his troops through all gap in my line and takes his skeletons and recurs them in a conga line all the way down And then tease them out and takes my points behind me Right, and then just negash starts killing his way through my troops right And his whole unit's basically back. I mean if the recursion was wild, right? So That's that's that's what we're talking about when we talk about balance in that time period, right? And the within thing Yeah, it It was just I mean part of the fun of that time period though was that It was like everybody was swinging for the fences like that. I mean not everybody wasn't There were a lot of different lists that were doing crazy swinging for the fences stuff Sure sure absolutely um, all right Other things lots of strange distinctions between armies. This is where we get the birth of the dangler factions fall right like shadow blades or whatever This is a thing now apparently And just like yeah completely arbitrary distinctions within the sort of broader force as to What these things are for no reason things that that way they would end up doing it Separating them and legending some and bringing some back together And that leads me straight into my next point, which was just that's you mentioned this right as we we transitioned right Which was complete uncertainty Over what would stay and what would go? Right because they were getting divided in weird ways You got some things put into legends over the course of this time Like what was here to say what was going to go away complete mystery complete mystery No roadmap at all right um, and also along those lines too is Yes, we did have those Uh, we did get allegiance abilities in the general's handbooks for a whole bunch of factions Sure There were a whole bunch of those related factions to those that didn't Allegiance abilities that's right, and they didn't get and they were just allies of this other stuff So your choice was either you have this like Very restrictive army that has allegiance abilities Um that you can't really pop in very much into this Ancillary stuff that feels like it's supposed to go with it. Yep Um, or you don't really get allegiance abilities You use the grand alliance allegiance abilities, but you get a wider variety troops and you feel like you have a real army Yep Yep um Yeah, that was I I mean I particularly felt that because I was playing You know like free guild at the time um, and that was before I really that was before Nurgle got their first battle tone and um You know, it was like yeah, like free guild got allegiance abilities, but iron will arsonal collegiate arcane um devoted of sigmar all of that stuff and Was it wasn't Heart of free guild It was separate sub factions right right Now lied into free guild Like if you want to build a free guild army and you want to take a celestial hurricane Like okay. Well now you can't bring a anything in Any of these other Beyond beyond allying them in yeah And like to your point the actual battle tone battle tomes that would then launch with full rules right at the start of this We're just like really weird and inequitously distributed, right? Over this time period. What what did we get sylvaneth? bone splitters beast claw disciples of zinch storm cast corn Carradron overlords their launch right and then they immediately got nerfed in the ghp for 2017 tom is still sore about that to this day Nurgle that wasn't even really a nerf if you recall. Oh the thunder was they It made them match the kit, but it was a nerf to their their potential as it were but yes I said the wrong version of the things that the printers It was but like that didn't change anybody's opinion of what happened, but yes, I understand Uh, like like from the player optics perspective like yes, right it all got from the the 30,000 foot view version of what happened They screwed up so bad, right? They just Like they they sent the wrong file to the printers and nobody noticed until they had a pile of books in their warehouse, right? Like Yep, nurgle negash daughters of kane I'd neth deepkin. It's the launch of them as well um And you know So that was our like pointed battle tomes in 1.0 By the by the launch of the daughters of kane battle tome still the best launch video of all time while we're talking about best and worst Uh, still the best one unchallenged Uh, just not even close. They have not come close to That initial daughters of kane launch video. It was incredible. It was perfect. It was amazing It blew me away I bought in a whole army because of it Which is not something I would normally do and It was great Uh, so there you go. Um at any rate Uh, the goat Right behind that too. They also had uh the Nurgle release videos that came after that and they had like the nurgle like At like 12 days of christmas. Sure. Yep. Yep That was also a great video like whoever was making the videos in that time period was like just making bangers They were doing great work then. Yep. I don't know where that wasn't up in But let's bring it back Uh, when did that tome come out? Sure. Uh, it would have been That tome came out in What march or april something like that april may Uh of 2018 if you go back to their channel, it should be That video should be like The the I mean, I have the video saved and and favorite. It's in a playlist um And I I have listened to that marathi launcher video on loop for probably four to five hours Straight on repeat. It's a 30 second video poll. Okay Uh And The majority of the views that gw has on that video are probably you at this point just me at this point Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it should be like something like december 2017 through January 2017 is when that should have come out probably at lbo reveal my guess Trying to restructure my brain um any who One last thing poll we got to talk about when we talk about 1.0 We got to talk about command abilities through the ages Yes When your command abilities could only be used by your general And there were no command points yet, right? And you only got whatever was on your general's war scroll and inspiring presence. That was it. Yep And if you needed to use that Had to walk uphill both ways in the snow It's like this your thing This person can use this one thing If they're the general Okay, that's it end Okay, um, oh, you know, there's another quick note In here too that that just made reminded me of um, this was also before They really stopped Duplication of things and stacking abilities um But what actually reminded me of that was uh that with In the first ghb came out there was nothing that said you couldn't take Same artifact more than once So if you took a battalion you got a second artifact, right? so I remember playing against des He was playing skaven all the time he would take He would take a battalion and it would be you know He would take two conquerors crowns that he would never take a battle shop test with his skaven um Because it mattered then Because like they they didn't get the like the any of the like no battle shock abilities on their war scrolls yet Like that came with the first battle tone. So um Also, like you could get lots of like plus one to hit plus one to wound um, you could go all the way down to A one up to hit an auto hit Right sign period, right. Um And Uh, you could get multiple wards Go like Oh, yes Yes, my but my dog. How could we forget? Everything's stacking. That's the take-home point, right? You're a hundred percent. How many wards do you want, Paul? How many wards do you want? I got a five up and a five up and a six up. Let's go. Let's go Yeah Yeah, you yeah you you people and you're stupid Daughters of Cain All of the stacking and all of the re-rolls re-roll we need to talk about re-roll The thing that we don't have anymore That we got rid of because they were awful, but everything used to re-roll sure And you know what? We had to re-roll ones all the time because we needed a more granular Way to modify things. So we're going to re-roll our ones Everything to you 1.0 was not one good thing that There's one good thing that came out of re-rolling ones. Okay. That is youtube channel. Sure jack and craig Yep Only good thing That 1.0 was not the height of re-roll madness Okay, it was not you are correct. We're going to talk about that in a minute Because it just wasn't printed in enough places That was the wasn't that there was any real restriction to it 1.0 was the period of of of stack a lack of cracker Right because it was just like how many bonuses to hit do you want and by the way everything stacks and it's not an unmodified bonus On a six up you do a mortal wound if you get plus four to hit you're now doing that mortal wound on a two up, baby Let's go Okay And Uh, there you go. Damn that trailer was dope. You're absolutely right. It was I linked both the trailers in the chat. There's like the initial one minute video and then the 30 second follow Where they actually reveal marathi because she's only like partially teased in the first video And just like that You know like you see the canary and everything else all it it's amazing. Anyways, now what you're talking about again goat um But yeah, man, this was like that dark time of just like stacking was incredible in our initial handout That that packet that we gave them We had a massive section titled we have to stop stacking Okay It was a huge point like we had pages on this Of just like examples and why it's unhealthy for the game and what it leads to and how it warps army design and like Everything and by the way eventually as with everything we said in that packet. We were proven right So I mean like I just I'm not saying they took from us because mostly they probably ignored us That's not what I'm saying. I am saying that history proved we were correct Okay, you're just claiming nerd supremacy. That's all I I am claiming only that I was on the right side of history I'm not claiming I affected change in any way only that I was on the right side of history Okay Uh at any rate, yes, so like stacking was the thing right you'd have You know just Saves that would go to the moon Uh hit wound rules that would go to the moon everything would just like stack to high heck and back and then trigger That was the problem. It wasn't just that you could super stack It was then you could super stack and trigger things that were like on an x plus Right there's this horrible combination of things, right? all right so 1.0 A lot of great times, but whoa, was there some bad stuff going on like jeez-al-peets Yeah Hey, I know I said it before I will say it again Part of the fun of it was all of the insanity that was going on. Sure It it was And it was it was a time Yeah, if you're like a chaos player, right? So like if in d&d the first character you play or you prefer to play is like a wild mage sorcerer Right, or it's just like whoo. Let's see what happens here. I just like Maybe I make flowers or maybe a fireball blows up and kills everybody like who knows It's gonna be a wacky time right if that's your bag Then you probably had a grand old time during this edition, right because it was just it was a it was a pretty wild time So there you go Okay Let us now paul jump forward And take our next step Uh into the next edition Let us go To aos 2.0. I would argue where the game really sort of came into its own But we still have a lot of like glaring issues. So this is june 30th 2018 Through july 2021 the launch box Uh paul fun story for 2.0. Here we go. It's fun story time I was at warhammer world for the launch of 2.0 I got to participate in some of the content and stuff like I got to be you know on the channel and Doing an interview and I got to play a game with with Byron I watched that game on stream And they gave him the new storm cast with like the kitty caters and I got handed a like a Like a truly ridiculous army of bad high elves Uh to say I got housed would be vastly undercutting the situation, but it was still a great time I had a lot of fun there and um And ben johnson tried to steal my usb cable to charge the phone that I stole it back. Um, no It was it was a really great time. Like it was honestly like legitimately two of the most fun days I've ever had hanging out with everybody playing warhammer um participating in golden demon like it was just It was non-stop. Um, it also This is this is too long of a story to tell so I would just summarize it as this The drive from warhammer world back to catch my aeroplane out of heathrow Was the worst trip I have ever had in my life And I have been in car accidents. I have had my transmission Fall out of my car while driving on the highway. This was worse Okay, so there we go, uh any who let's talk about the good of 2.0 Uh Yes, it was the sword masters and mages. Yeah, that's right. I don't remember what it was either. Um I'll actually you real quick here first. Yeah. Yeah, go for it There was kind of like a Like 1.5 Okay, like Six months there were I think the first book might have actually been daughters of kane Those books that remember when they changed The like the branding the bindings on the books. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. That's sort of lead up to 2.0 Yeah, where we were like clearly already in 2.0 mode. Yes Right. They were clearly all already 2.0 designed books They were released before the launch, right? Um and like I think the biggest thing out of that was like with the Nurgle battle tone we saw what summoning was going to look like right when We got rid of the Summoning pool. Yeah, and just had it strictly resource based um But we had the the summoning point Like we had like the contagious points But you still had the summoning point pool For a few months in that way awful Yep. Yep. Good very good call here. That's an excellent point to make. Yeah. No good. Good call. Good call All right, so as we move fully into 2.0 I think the good for me is we got a we reach maturity Right. We got a full rule set. We've got the corners explored Armies get books over the course of the edition like most armies over the course of this edition would finally get a book Right. We cover basically everybody We get some cool story beats. I think the story really comes into its own We get like malign importance and malign sorcery and a lot of neat You know zoomed in character stories here, right? This is where we get Soulbound launches during this time period Okay, which opens up a lot of the the world and and and like really has a like if you haven't played soulbound I do recommend it. It's a really really great RPG Um, and it's just like ridiculously fun Um, so we get that kind of stuff, right? Um And we actually get to like understand the world in a in a deep way um the We get command points and heroes in general using command points, right as a as a resource. This is a thing now right And we get broken realms at the end of the whole thing, which I thought was actually pretty darn cool Uh, like broken realms book one man was just like hey Stuff's going down Did you get get ready? This is for real right And so that all felt really good to me. I mean we'll stick on the good here Paul What what are your thoughts on sort of the good of 2.0? What what what what else did I miss or what what what do you want to expound on there? um It all finally Coalesced into a complete game Yeah, um You know we Over the course Of 2.0 we got rid of all of those allegiance abilities that we're hanging out in the general's handbook All of that stuff like All of the armies not battle tomes Anything that didn't get a battle tome got discontinued So everything was now like Contained in a book that you could go to a store and buy off the shelf Yeah, um So it felt like they closed the loop on the game like it is done. It is a finished product Yep It took them six years to get there Uh, but it it it finally felt done. It felt like it was um It felt like it was really Completed. Um, I think it made some really good additions with um adding endless spells and the faction terrain pieces in concept I think they might have overdone both of those a little bit Um, there's definitely some that are there that just don't really need to be there um But I think endless spells as a concept in general are awesome I like I I just personally really like that um Excuse me, um I think uh They started really like they cleaned up the mechanics of the game and tightened up a lot of things um You know first Years of the game You know, it still wasn't perfect But it was it was a lot better like having Command points, you know, you can have somebody other than your general use of command ability, right? But um Like your general's still important or still your main guy but You know, you don't just have like Your other heroes aren't just kind of there anymore. Right. Um, so I think I think they did they went in a lot of really good design directions with it um Yeah, I think there's There was a whole lot of good in Second edition. I think Honestly, if I had to Pick an addition of age of sigmar that I think rules wise was the best. I think it probably has been second edition so far okay, um but um Yeah, that's not to say that like where we're currently at is bad I think there's just There's just stuff in there that is excessively complicated and you know They've gone on. Yeah, we're not to third edition yet, but no, it's all right I mean, we also get a lot of really great armies over this time. We get suns of emma We get austere bone reapers. We get night haunt, right? All of those are second edition additions to the game right Yeah, um, and you know, I think those are are really really strong interesting tomes um, we get a city's tome which is basically We're in the last week of that being the official tournament city's tome now Is the new book comes out on saturday, right? Lasted for a long time That I think a lot of us really enjoyed and played a lot of Interesting games with it has an age super well, but it was it was it was really really interesting and stuff at the time Um, we get lumeneth I'm not counting that in the good, but it did happen uh You know, so like I think there was a lot of of army exploration at that time I think when we look at the bad for me It's like the army books were so uneven over the course of this release like Good lord these some of these releases were so unbalanced and it would keep happening that they put out two books on the same weekend Right, what would be all would be dry exactly It would be like one they clearly cared about and just like lavished with rules and capabilities And one looked like they put it to a guy in the back office and just fired it out over the weekend Right, and that's where we got to like the good rules writer the bad rules writer Whatever it was like the good guy the bad guy or you know that whole thing that went around for well And you know Like i'm sure that was annoying to them in the studio, but it was like how do you put out the ogre's book in the zinch book? in the same weekend And go yeah these this seems like we're in the same ballpark here like did you play these at all? You know the zinch book. I don't know paul if you remember the original zinch book when it launched, okay? That that not the original original, but the 2.0 zinch book when it launched I mean both of the like every zinch battle tome. I have tried to blank out of my memory So, all right. Let me re enlighten you this came out at the end of 2019 into 2020. Okay So I was over in Australia the aforementioned story right at the very beginning And the first tournament that those really got played in was can con And I had been shouting from the rooftops about the zinch book and and like you just do the math Flamers were like So wildly out of balance it was insane And just like the zinch player who was on top tables at the end You could just like the the army's he had Burninated his way through many of them. He had just lifted Just lifted I turned to just gone. They ceased existing Ash on the wind, right? It was crazy and like that book had changes so fast because it was so insanely out of balance Meanwhile, the ogre books over here like hey me too I got I got ogres. Is that something? No, okay. I'm bad then it was just terrible. It was shocking I got snowballs. Yeah Oh boy. Oh boy. Do you? um So it was just like it was crazy how different they were and I think what Kind of and yes sin and bin. Thank you the sin guy or the bin guy That was the two names for the the the reductive names for the rules writers and so Like I think what bothered me about that whole time period was this is also covers what we call the dark age of 2019 paul the the dual rulership of fec and slanesh uh of like The of just like being complete terrors because there was nobody with high armor and nobody with shooting So these two things just like ran wild across tables Your keeper secrets making everybody fight last on a two up just like running in the middle of the board and then And then spiking people like a football right Um, and so it's just like it was it was crazy the different books that would come out how different they felt okay The I also I put in the bad I put factions ran in the spells I really did now. Maybe that's with the benefit of hindsight, but I hate them I hate them And yes, the the activation wars of 2019. Thank you assistant ref. Yes that that was the dark time um I really hate faction training on the spells. I really do I just I don't I don't want them And the spells are almost perennially impossible to balance because Like an incarnate they can be used by anyone Right, so if they're even slightly too good They show up in everybody's lists. They're just they're all over the place, right? They get think purple sun Right when it was like printed got way too good, right? So like having to hit that nail on the head of like Sort of good sometimes in the right list But not terrible but not too good like you have a You know the the game on the price is right where the little red bar is moving up and down And you got to like make the price fall on the right so I gotta stop and then there's like Here's the price if it's in that area you win, right? Endless spell balance is playing that game, but with a red bar that's about an inch high All right, it's like ultra hard mode On it because every time we redo endless spells. What happens? Eight out of ten of them are junk One out of ten of them gets used pretty decently one out of ten of them gets used in some lists or something like that, right? Those are kind of how the numbers end up working out We've gotten better at this over time. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say there hasn't been progress There has are certainly better now than they ever have been But I just they were really wildly wrong initially and I just at the same time faction trains Just like oh cool this extra thing I get to paint and bring with me I have an allegiance ability that is that is stuck to a thing on the board as opposed to just being a rule hate it I don't want it Like there you go. That's really a really me are the the ones where The faction terrain doesn't really do much of anything, but you still have to That's where like the the feculent in our law is sitting right now It it like why am I even bothering to bring this? Yeah, like what just give me the contagion point every turn like yep, right Like oh, oh wait, hold on. I've got a battle tactic That I can if I have a guy with it like an enemy within 12 inches of it I score battle tactic if I don't have an enemy within 12 inches of it at the end of the turn So I'll have to try and put it in a place Where the enemy might be within 12 inches of it So I can maybe score a battle tactic. It's like oh my god. I hate this Yes, I love what Justin Sloan just said and captain or Corbin is in the same place Uh, it's an allegiance ability that costs money Yes That is the best summation Corbin. You were making the same points. I absolutely agree with you too But like what a what a concise perfect Like just damning verdict on faction terrain, right? It is an allegiance ability that costs money terrible Okay I think in concept they're cool I think if they could have done them better it could be cool like For certain ones like the the sylvaneth woods Are a cool concept although as you have beat the drum about for a long time just make You know that terrain over there is overgrown instead Yeah Um I think for nergal like the gnarl maws I do actually like but again that terrain over there is corrupted Right like that that would work Yep, um If a nergal unit moves on two ends their move blah blah blah and does this thing then the terrain counts is corrupted Blah blah blah blah blah right that that would be what it is You can start with one piece of corrupted terrain in your own territory something like that. Yeah Yeah, you could have the same allegiance ability. It could still even be terrain related. You just don't pay money for it And and I would love The concept of army specific terrain just not part of your army just like you want to make a cool table That's like an orc table, you know, here's some here's some iron jaws Settlements or terrain and a terrain box Right or here's a like like basically that's what we got with the Whatever it was with the stormcast cities or the the the dawn bringer who say building pieces, right It was just like this is them building a city at city's terrain, right? You could do the same thing with other armies It doesn't need to be part of your force or a charter or at your list It could just be a cool way to you want to theme a terrain board like that neat So Now I I just hope we're not getting a new cycle of Oh, the thermal pit is going to herald a new cycle of terrain Yeah, you you either get your pot of gumbo or your toothy butthole like pick one. I I pick one. I don't do this to us guys. Don't don't make this every me Yep another thing from this time period That I think we we've that I don't want to breeze over Because there's still one army fec right now still uses these sub factions. Let's not forget, but They're the last one As up to as of this Saturday the last one um sub faction design was way too heavy There was just too much going on It was like you do this thing and you get a rule and you get a command ability and you get a And you have to take this artifact and you have to take this command trait And just like it invalidated so much stuff in your book Right. Yeah, it was it was really annoying Um, I just didn't like most of the sub faction design I'm not sure we're in the right place now now. Maybe we're too light Like maybe the pendulum swung too far the other way, but I but I but regardless of that I don't know what the sweet spot is but what I'll say for sure is that it was way too heavy in 2.0. That is for sure There were a whole bunch of books that nobody ever looked at the command trait table in that book because All of the sub factions told you what your command trait had to be and you had to The command trait table you had to give up having a sub faction. Nobody was going to do that. Yep Yep, exactly. Exactly. Um, yeah, and it's just like complete nonsense um So yeah, I agreed Battalions were also way too important in this time period, right? Let's not let us not forget poll that this is like the height of ridiculous battalions Okay, um this we didn't have any problem anymore, but it was crazy Yeah, it was one drop It gave you a command point. It gave you an extra artifact. Yep It cost you points They also weren't that expensive right Like comparatively You you were just doing like so much like you buy a command point from 50 points You take the battalion right now the the nice part about it was I will say the thing I did Like one of these side benefits of having battalions cost points Is it reduced to the amount of models in your army? I know i'm banging on about this drum Right of like less models and armies But when we flipped to 3.0, they were like battalions are free now, but they're these core battalions But we're we're upping the points on everything right to to compensate for that So armies remain about the same size That has completely eroded over time as just like everything has kept forcing points down and down and down, right? Um, we're just back into a worse situation than we've ever been for the size of these armies the amount of time it takes to You know resolve a game But yes, the battalions gave you so much and like again, some armies had absolutely amazing battalions Some armies battalions were garbage right Uh, and and that was just they were they were so big in what they did Yep Books battalions were the make or break a lot of times. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely Uh, let us not forget this is all you made mention of it earlier I want to give you a moment to opine on this one But the constantly changing options and here I'm thinking of like malign sorcery artifacts and realm artifacts and And all of that stuff, right? Yeah, where it's like, oh, you can you can take a cloak that can make you fly Nope, you can't do that anymore. Now you take a different thing and it makes you do this other thing And oh, those are gone too. Now. It was just like it's constant throughout 2.0 We just could not find the system that we liked right yeah, and The the malign sorcery artifacts there were Your artifacts for seven of the eight realms never take azir right, right there is Two tables of six for each Right, there was like a table of weapons and a table of items of each one So 12 times 7 is what 84? Yes 84 artifacts 84 Generic artifacts that any Throw in the entire game could take right and you know what? 80 of them were trashed Uh, I that was a that's a bit strong I I had I remember we did a show on this and I said that eight of them were worth taking So but you're not that far off. I mean, I agree with you. Effectively what we're talking about here is like 10% or less Right, we're we're not garbage Yeah, um And some of them were cool. I mean, I wish some of them kind of stuck around Like the like sort of judgment was like I don't know like you at least did fun stuff with that. I don't know that that ever was like game breaking, but it was fun No, that's just it. There was like the you can fly now. I had a steam tank commander And I built I modeled a flying steam tank the number of times I modeled Things with artifacts on them that would then go away is shocking okay but like You could take the thing that made you fly you could take the four up ward against mortal wounds You know, there were there were like some really weird and interesting choices in there Like I said, that's probably about eight nine. Maybe that were like you could see in some lists Right. Most of them were just terrible just terrible Yep um We had that like one ghb where we had Like a secondary mystical terrain or a mysterious train. Yes the secondary mystical terrain table. Absolutely Yeah. Yeah, like at the start of the game you roll the die to see which terrain table you're going to use what right like And it then suffered from the same problem that the one we have Now like the but the original one had that There's like two things on it that matter and everything else is like it might as well just not do anything sure um and I don't know from Like a game design perspective If you really want Have like six different things that are all impactful on the game That every single terrain piece on the board could be Like I don't know if that is actually a good idea or not um But it certainly feels bad to Just like roll roll out the terrain dice And just have it be like oh, that's not arcane or mystical or whatever then okay, then I don't care Like it's the one that gives me plus one bravery Pass don't even bother marketing like um Yeah, we had a couple of different iterations of what the the realm rules were And one of them piggybacked off of the terrain rules as well like all of like if you're in The realm of fire that all of the terrain pieces on the board are volcanic in addition to Everything else which by the way volcanic was on the secondary table Which is probably one of the more interesting things that were on either of those tables Um, yeah, I really wish when they had when they had went back down to one table They had harvested the good ones from table one and the good ones from table two because we would have actually had a list of Basically six interesting options instead. We just set us in the secondary list to pretend like it never existed. But yes Yeah, like I think volcanic was like a legitimately Interesting. Yeah, it's cool. Like terrain Like Like yeah, you roll it. I if it's a six it blows up Like okay, like it does something Um It's not going to do something every turn It's not going to be game breaking, but it does something um Yeah Oh, man, it was It's just so much stuff Um, and in this period of time you had to decide what realm Your army list was from yep, absolutely. Yep and then that would then link back to the realm artifacts in which realm artifacts you were allowed to take So you couldn't mix and match From two different realms. Yep. If you were going to take, you know She artifacts you could only take your book artifacts and the acchi artifact you couldn't take The ger artifacts too Yes, yes. Oh my god. Yes, absolutely Although that's still hanging out on war scroll builder and people who've come into the game recently must be like, what does this even mean? It's still there What do you mean what realm am I from who knows? What does that what what does this do? Why is this here? Yeah, I love I love that we can still see those little echoes of of Former these these constant changes throughout second hours. We were just like throwing crazy crap at the wall to see what would stick. Yeah, absolutely Okay And then finally my last the bad was broken realms, which is also in the good Because broken realms also had a lot of silly crap in it. It's just like rules wise was mechanically insane Um, so yeah, it was kind of a mixed bag is my point Yeah, I mean it broken realms got cities of sigmar to 11 sub factions I think right, which I mean the new book also has 11, but they are very very light This was 11 sub factions. They all had like their own fellow lords and artifacts and man great Yep, yep exactly All right, so that brings us to basically bite so july 2021 paul I don't know if you realize what that means but that means we are officially in the pandemic All right, this is like that's what has happened here. We've transitioned into that time period and now it's time to transition into aos 3.0 The thing we currently find ourselves in in the end of where as we're as we're staring down within a week Probably the announcement and an explanation of the very last army book For this edition just in time to be six months away from the end of the edition Uh version 3.0 so july 2021 launch box through presents Uh my good Very cleanly formatted like our you know our numbered rules very cleanly explained everything has become you know They've got this like section 28.1.2. Whatever type of you know framing Though far from watertight rules Oh Oh jess I don't know if a marketing person made you say that But i'm sorry I'm sorry. You had to ever say such as such a silly thing um But they were cleanly formatted i'll give it that Uh I think we're in a world where we've had some of the best design scenarios We've seen a lot more balance in these things things are pretty tight You don't see runaway scores You don't know you've lost like a two when your opponents are like well, I scored 28 What? I'm at two You know like that doesn't happen anymore Uh, you've got a lot of improved quality of life items over the course of of 3.0, right Pile in cleanups and how it works Lookouts are just a lot of little things like this, right? Yeah Improved reach on most units so that like you know you you can deal with that the coherency change We finally got that was good like it took them most of the addition But we did eventually get there to moving it to six models should be 11, but six is better than five We've had much tighter balance like we've brought in remember when we started Tom and I were complaining about the fat middle We wanted to get to 40 to 60. That was the goal We were way outside of that Now we're back to the real balance, which is 45 to 55 All right, and most of our factions are falling in that space And even the ones who don't you still see them like four one and five tournaments Like you can be done by a good player And we get regular updates right every three months Get the the battle scroll we get updates to armies points changes so on and so forth, right? And then we removed a lot of the time sink items because we mentioned it 2.0 was the height of re-rolls Just re-roll madness Everybody re-rolls all the time constantly re-rolling everything Re-roll hits re-roll wounds re-roll saves re-roll ward rolls. Why not just do it all right We also cut a lot of like weight of dice spam attacks You know that kind of thing where it's like I make 160 crappy bow shots and I fire twice It's like oh god and and I have re-rolls. Oh god Tell me when you're done with your shooting phase. I'm gonna go get a sandwich and eat that sandwich and then go to the restroom and then Go to Jamaica and then fly back and you'll be done with your shooting phase like insanity all right I think those are all good things What do you Where where where you living on the good side? Yeah, I I definitely agree with you. I think they They brought a lot of things in a lot tighter in terms of How they're writing it, you know I I remember one of the first FAQs that I had to send in to games workshop In the early days of Age of Sigmar was um You know the the pregame move ability. Yep um, there were I remember there were four different war scrolls At launch that had abilities like that in two of them said Before the game starts you can make a move And the other two said you can move and run right and I was like Wait When you move you can run so that Does that mean that one can run but the other can't? and so Wait, no, it it didn't say move and run. It said move but not run. There you go. Yes. Yes. That's what it was it was like it was like Why would I why would I be able to run? right And then like they've cleaned up those things like they learned how to copy paste right rules So that it's consistent um fun fact 3.0 is when they created their rules Bible where they are actually copy pasting now for the books They did not do that in this edition which That just Did it take that long? Works like I feel physical pain thinking about that but You know I Can we just also I know we're still trying to be in the good at the moment But we can transition into bat. It's okay. Let's do it You know, we can give games workshop a lot of Praise for what they have tightened up over time. Sure um the things that The errors that escape into final product into customer's hands In my opinion anyway Completely unacceptable their quality assurance And their product and their rules writing Is it broke this It's so bad It's like they don't have A second person even read On something do you mean like editing or do you like you're talking about like grammatical and spelling errors and that kind of thing? Are you talking about like the the rules writing in loopholes like which one? uh The like the rules writing in loopholes, okay You're saying I think they actually have really good editors For the most part like they'll occasionally have some of those kinds of problems But they like their actual like book editors. I think are Are actually really good. I'm not trying to be facetious or or funny Because like that is a very difficult job to be an editor on a book like this And I think they've generally done a really good job. So I do want to credit those. Those are like invisible heroes um Yeah, exactly Bravo that that's a different group of people. I think entirely than what I'm 100 percent I'm saying, you know, how do you let things out the door That you know Have to have a rata right away. Sure. Sure that's like I again I don't mean to sound like I'm beating them up too badly about this But like what's this company's revenue? Hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Well, they're like a four billion dollar market cap. I believe something like that 45 yeah, they're probably traded Billions of dollars in market capitalization. Yeah, there is No effing excuse For them to let some of these errors out the door the way they do I just don't I Maybe it's my own professional experience like I work in accounting where Errors going out the door are basically unacceptable. Sure. Um So I look at this and I'm like Man somebody's gonna get fired And then nobody does And then it happens again. It's the same person letting it out the door again and not getting fired It's like I get you it's I I have I have always and firmly placed this at the feet of not having a formal game developer position You have game designers. You don't have somebody who's only job is to be a game developer Now my understanding is recently this year. They have actually filled that role and do have a formal game developer now Um, but obviously we won't see the fruits of that labor until probably 4.0. Realistically, right? I mean if you think about how far ahead they work, um, but I am happy to see that move Because like it was needed And I think that they are undergoing a change, you know, like I think a lot of the the The nature of the studio is such that it has it has changed Hands as it were um over the past over the 3.0 And I do think when you you look at the trajectory Having a formal developer position The you look at matt rose bringing like doing battle scroll and the meta watch and being very data driven and stuff like that I think I do see a lot of positive change there. I do want to give him credit for that I mean you're I'm that's not to excuse what you what you're talking about, right? And so, um, uh, no kyle, uh, the canadian dude is is matt rose. He was a and who's a Who is a very very very smart very capable? Excellent guy like we are very lucky to have matt having come from like who comes from video games Um, having decided to upend his entire life and move from canada to nottingham england to go do this job Because I do think he's been an incredible boon to the game Um, absolutely I have to say 100 every single thing I have seen come out of him Right. I have been totally impressed with yeah, absolutely. He has everything I have seen He's been a tremendous asset to make the company better Make the game better everything Like top notch love it Please more of that direction games worked up. Holy crap. Listen to what this guy tells you to do it Yep But when I think about the current bad like I you know, I think that I I see the trajectory that pulls us out of what you're talking about hopefully I've seen improvement and I hope we continue to see that like the trend line is going the right direction is what I would say right To me 3.0's biggest problems are and we've talked about it a hundred times in the show But I'm going to keep mentioning it the high complexity Through the introduction of like battle tactics and a ton of other interactions and game artifacts that make the game very complex to play And the complete ramp the complete lack of an on ramp for new players I like I think you've not seen Like over 3.0. I don't think we've seen the growth That we we did and I mean of course that's going to happen to some degree Tournaments are still growing. I think some people are finally getting out to tournaments that haven't gone before and that's good So it's not as though the scene isn't there But I know that like we're we're bleeding people out We don't need to and we're missing conversion opportunities that we could have otherwise had as a community Because of the complexity and the lack of an on ramp, right? Um, I just think and those are two very easy problems I shouldn't say the on ramp problem is actually very easy that is like That's very easy to solve and by the way putting out a white dwarf with some weird alternate rules and it is not the way to solve it um Making it part of your core game where you have a combat patrol equivalent that says go buy this box Paint this box and here is a simple battle pack to play this box Against your friends in a relatively balanced way Is the way to fix this we saw it happen in 40k I hope it happens in an even cleaner version in aos Right That is the correct way This is the way Okay The complexity thing is more challenging Because like we've written ourselves into this corner for some degree And so like It's there is where the pruning we talked about comes in like 4.0 is going to have to make some decisions And either that means you have a low complexity battle pack and a high complexity battle pack Which that's an option. You don't have to prune the whole game. You can just have different settings You can go that direction Right, or it means you got to get into them core rules and start start Start cutting One of the two Yeah, I'm wondering You know circling this back all the way back to the beginning of this evening I wonder if we're going to get a differentiation with the release of old world where Old world becomes the high complexity game And age of sigma r becomes the lower complexity game I would be fine with it It's great. I would do I mean 80 percent of the market wants a simpler lower complexity experience so I mean like if I was if I was the business person, I'd want to sell to 80 percent of the market not 20 percent or whatever Right, but you know, what do I know? so Okay, I think any changes they make to rules at this point they really need to Look at it and say is this increasing complexity or is this decreasing complexity If it's increasing complexity, they really really need to justify it and say like what value is this increase in complexity adding To the game. It is the increase in value Justified for the increase in complexity. Yep. Absolutely agree. Absolutely agree I think you have to you have to be constantly evaluating that right every time you write a rule You got to be like is this worth it? Is this worth it? You got to put it on the scales Right 100 percent It's the whole weight of a feather test for your soul or whatever, right? Um Absolutely, so I also want to call out the enhancement section of the core rules a legendarily terrible Section of rules writing that is impenetrable to a new person uh, like it is just Unbelievable how bad that section is as I've said many times the core rules of 3.0 are 27 sections of or 26 sections or whatever it is of like pretty easily understandable pretty well written rules and then one section of nonsense just nonsense, I mean like I Getting into a os 3.0 Right, I had obviously come from playing a os since the beginning since launch And I read this and I had to read it like four times. I was like, what is this telling me to do? I do not get this It is so wild how terrible it is It I it took me A long time it it took me probably like two years almost to realize That when you added a spell enhancement It gave you an extra spell slot on all of your wizards not just one Yeah, yeah, like Like it Why does that one thing have this weird exception? If you take that or same for for for claire expires if you take artifact, it's not like everybody gets an artifact, right? No, it's just like yeah, these weird distinctions and how they work. They all get lumped together There's like now a bunch of unique ones. We still got triumphs floating around for no reason And and like you can you can take an extra triumph. Okay, sure Like I'm not saying no one's ever done that sure there's like 0.1 of lists where that's the correct choice that doesn't need to exist right that kind of stuff um In 3.0 over the course of this we've still seen the case even now Where some battle tomes have been given far more love than others Right Uh, I look at um I look at The scaven book being my classic go-to example. I love the book. I like how it opened up list building I still think it's one of the most fun armies to list build with and I'm not really a johnny But like it activates whatever minor part of me as a johnny in the sort of list building way In that I've I've played that army paul. I can't explain to you how many games I've played with scaven since that book came out and I've never run the same list twice Right It's wild There's a so many different lists to build But boy is it not on the level with everything else right and that by the way I'm picking on that one because that's what I'm most familiar with but we could pick others that are Swinging over there. We're getting better. You can just you feel the inequity in The battle tactics that are on offer and had to be corrected in battle scroll Or the points that were there at the beginning and had to be like knocked way down or brought way up Or soul bright soul like grave lords Just period Right And then finally my last bad one and I'm curious. Let's let's get you take on this one And I think we can probably call it a night here. We've been going a while Swingy ghb seasons Like we went to six months season and year season But not just that but each season has been like so radically different like boy Do we upend everything monsters are amazing and ruling the game? We've got to reign them all in and then they're doing nothing and then you know just like And then every time we want to do it's like oh the monster season, but it's actually not it's bad for monsters or whatever Right, it always ends up being the opposite of whatever is intended It's just like these these the seasons just haven't worked out to my estimation as well as they could have What do you what you think? I think they I think they just need to reel it back like it Like they they tried something first of all Let me even just take a step back from this um Why are we even still in girth? Why have you spent three years in girth? I I still I do not understand the story reason that we have had four generals handbooks in girth Yep, is there a story reason for this? Uh, I mean none of the current action in the in the In I don't have the broken realm. So we're sitting behind me anymore I just have this wonderful copy of majestic 13 available now. Uh, you can find the link below Um as well as like I said, don't forget watch this space because coming this friday adam and I are releasing something new um at any rate, um I don't know man. I don't know Literally, there's no there's nothing narratively interesting happening in girth guy ran and oxy or and and arguably guy ran oxy and um Shadow realm and shadow realm and maybe shahish are where most of the action is focused I mean, I guess what's going on in girth is whatever's happening in war cry a spaceship crashed And we gotta go get to the heart of it. I guess that's happening So we got like meat trees and war cry releases for a year and a half Yeah, I I don't I don't understand I just it feels like we got stuck narratively in this one location The actual narrative didn't stay there And we didn't really get a good explanation of why the general's handbook narrative stayed there I Would like all the rest of the world seems to be moving on right? Yeah They could have done this in so many like They could have stuck with this this like themed battle pack idea And done it in so many better ways Like like instead of like we're gonna go to like different regions of girth Why couldn't we have just had we're gonna have a girth battle pack? Okay Cool, we did girth now. We're gonna we're gonna shift. We're gonna go to oxhi now Yeah, now we're gonna have we're just gonna have fired battle pack fire Yeah, that would mean you'd end up reprint. You'd end up visiting the same realm once every seven eight years that doesn't feel too often That really doesn't As it is now we'll come back to girth in like 20 57 Yeah Yeah, and it's I don't know it You could have a more subtle thing about like magic Or monsters or Yeah, you know whatever else In there it just make it more about the realm that you're in or or whatever overarching narrative thing is going on rather than Unit type flavor of the month. Yep. And like I agree Cw creator made a point about how like a year of bounty hunters would have been more damaging, right? But I do want one year seasons, but you're right about bounty hunters being terrible It was an office of dark time and that's part of what I mean under swinging ghb seasons, right? We got bounty hunters and stuff like that. It's just nonsense um The the horde season it wasn't about that at all it was the opposite of that because you just get Obliterated by bounty hunters But that's what i'm saying these ghbs shouldn't be having rules that are that strong that heavy that swingy doing that much Like in the ghb First of all, I mentioned ghb 2017 being the best I stand behind that now at 3.0 and I look at our current ghbs And although printed wise the book is higher quality than it's ever been like the actual physical thing is beautiful and extremely well made um I look at it and it feels anemic Compared to what those were because what we could have it's like paul to take your example because I agree with you completely is You go for a realm you tell a story in that realm You've got a narrative section with some pretty heavy crazy rules that does wild wacky stuff for people who want to Who want to deeply engage and have an experience that they don't expect to be necessarily balanced in the same way That's going to have swingy wild effects because you're telling a narrative story of what goes on in that realm You have some multiplayer stuff in there or team stuff in there Or triumphant treachery stuff in there or all the above And then you have your new event battle pack that speaks to that realm We're in and add some minor tweaks and touches to make people feel that that change not game busting Battalions and spells and like magic is totally different now. We use extra dice like none of that like It's fine and then just have 12 good scenarios most players Most warhammer players Probably play Three or less games a year Okay Like that's reality So They don't need Super heavy crazy changes Now tournament players who are doing five games on a weekend and doing two tournaments a month Sure, they might get To know the meta and it might be unlocked I would still argue it's going to be a highly changing environment because of new battle tomes coming out and battle scroll and stuff like that Like there's still plenty of churn Happening to keep it interesting But you could always just add the six month mark Publish six new scenarios for you for your event battle pack as a pdf All right, and that'll change up the tournament experience for the back half of the year, right? We don't need this. This is my problem I just feel like the ghp is is like despite having and I stay behind this I think the current ghp the one right now has some of the best design scenarios I've ever played I think generally they are most of them like nine and a half of them are tournament ready and fun And I enjoy playing them and I only think one of them is utter trash That's the two towers one. That's just terrible And that's great Like that's really good and should be heralded. But why is that all we're doing with this book? So I just I initially girls concept was a home run. I don't know why they Right, right By the way, the general's handbook, you know what that's built off of right that's built off of the general's compendium Which is the thing that was existed in warhammer fantasy battles which Had a bunch of different play types and supported a bunch of different ways to explore the game and You know, here's a map campaign section of rules and so on and so forth, right? Where's that stuff? All right, it just it just feels like especially since we got rid of points out of there Because obviously they're in the the you know, they're free now, which is great good You know, that's all the points updates are separate and and digital and stuff like that. Yeah Um But like put over something What's that remember season of mondia And we just had this like one random narrative supplement that had like all of the other stuff in it That should have been in the general's handbook and it was like, oh, maybe we're just gonna get one of these every year instead But then we just got one for the entire edition and they dropped it, right, right It was a great book, by the way It was it was a great fun book. We played through the whole narrative arc in there buddy, and I had a fun time Had a fun time It was great. Like we did it as a chained thing week to week, right? Like actually following the whole track. It was fun So Um, yeah, I I mean, I don't know you want my guess poll you want my guess Thondi is what gave us the original incarnate. The incarnate was received so poorly. They they iced it Whatever the next season was supposed to be So which if that's the case correct choice Yeah, so We've talked about pruning things. Yeah, what things Let's say three things. Yeah What three things would you prune out of? current Age of sigmar rules for a new edition Incarnates are gone. That's instantaneous. That's that's I'm not even gonna count that. That's not one of my three I'm just I'm just putting them in the bin Okay, like they're dead now Um, that whole concept is dead now Bye. Bye. Bye. Go away. Leave Okay Um, if I can't answer three or seasons Right, because that's what I would like to do. You're asking me like real rules that I would I would cut out um, if I have to do this as one thing and not a a Uh, not a new battle pack. It's easier if you ask me like what's my starter battle pack Because then I would just say I would cut battle tactics. I would cut Uh, uh, battalions and I would cut Uh Probably I don't know what's the third thing I've got. I don't have to think about third ones Those two would be easy cuts for a starter battle pack Um, either get rid of battle tactics or grand strategies or something or do something different with them I don't like that the way those two interact. I think they're silly. I don't like the army specific core battalions I think they're garbo. Um, I would definitely prune army specific battle tactics and grand strats at minimum Those are gone. Those are just yeeted into the sun instantaneously Those have no reason for existing So that that would stuff like that would make my list. Um, You know, I would obviously completely redesign the enhancement section a lot like that would be that would be ground up rewrite right I would redesign the core battalions because One of them is really good. Two of them are pretty decent and three of them are utter trash Though those need those need a second pass like we clearly got the first Pass at those Right So i'm hoping they learn from it and we we get a better version now this time around so That kind of stuff. I think that would be I mean, there's probably other stuff We could prune You know like we could probably Uh, we could probably clean up some things here and there I'd have to like really flip through and think like what's that? What's the right answer? But I'm sure that at least that A lot of ancillary stuff We've cut a lot of good stuff like the stacking is gone. The re-rolling is gone the You know multiple word saves and stuff is gone like all that stuff has been handled, right? So Yeah I would I really want them to re-look at the um like force organization Hmm. Um, good call Good call We're at a place where point structures have made it bear Let's just assume 2000 point game Or How often are you ever going to be able to reasonably fit more than six heroes into a list? It's almost always a bad choice Like it's almost always going to ruin your army and the armies that want more than six heroes They purposely deleterified the other heroes like like um rim rath berserkers and stuff like that How many artillery pieces even exist in the game at all anymore exactly And like three quarters of the mercenary Are we punishing one army? Yes Yes, um I like why like Behemoths like why is that restriction there because Anytime you have an army that would bump up against that restriction It has an exception Or you just blow over it Yeah Um, so it's a meaningless restriction and then battle line like There's very few armies. It feels like battle line actually is a real constraint Um So many conditional battle line out there so many things are battle line You know hitting three battle line units is not hard so I I I don't know What the correct answer for forced organization is um Also with uh like like why are we still restricting max three endless spells? Sure Why does that restriction even need to because of the time when they were we're we're like because of one go round where they were overcooked And people would spam them out there and they blocked movement and stuff like that right like this is what happens Yeah, and now and now it is a meaningless artifact in the rules. It's just bloke now Yeah And the ally rules and and um coalition Why do we have allies and coalition? Without like a really meaningful distinction between what those two things are Um, I don't know. I think they need to relook at that too A lot of it. I think there's a lot of room there I don't know what the correct answer is for what it should be But I know that what we have now is dumb and doesn't really mean anything Yeah, I mean at minimum the artillery one is a joke and obviously we know that that reinforcement points are just like Just obscenely punishing to some armies for no reason be other than how they decided to write the numbers in the back of the book Right. It's not That kind of thing you're pushing more certain armies for absolutely no reason and then every other army It doesn't matter at all to you so what is the purpose of having that rule in there at all? Right, right. What? Yep, agreed All right. Well that brings us to what did we miss everybody? Hey, you should tell us in the comments below drop us down Uh, Paul, thank you, man. Really appreciate it, buddy Thanks for having me once again. It's been fun Always a pleasure my man. Always a pleasure for all of you out there It's always a pleasure. 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