 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me as always is my one and only co-host sadly the loser of the co-host showdown But that's all right. We still love him anyways. It's Tyler. What's up, buddy? Yeah, I mean I was gonna feel really bad for the OG The OG didn't win. I was pulling for the OG. I you you you were the whole time. You were consistent Yeah, so I now I Get it Absolutely, it's a Tom. I actually haven't told them congrats So Tom if you're watching which you're probably not cuz we both know you don't watch this show unless you're on now Congratulations my friend All right, well tonight we're gonna talk about we're gonna finally have that discussion We've been threatening to have for a long time around book Battletome or bat sorry Battletome battle tactics. There we go. That's what I'm trying to say Are they good? Are they bad? Spoiler, they're bad but we'll talk about why that is for the many reasons and Yeah, we're gonna get that but of course first the news News rumor engine all right, so Look like we've got four fingers there. Is that what you're seeing? I mean there could be another finger on the other side somehow holding it up like There could be a finger Probably means It's a skink Because it's either a 40k thing or it's a skink thing when I'm on this show. It's probably a skink thing We've had lots of 40k things So I assume That it's a skink thing Because it's also very small because the poor painter who was tasked with painting this you can see where the wash line is like You know sort of unevenly put up there. I always feel bad for the painters who have to paint like micro small stuff and And then and then have a cameraman zoom like You know and and show off your work like that's a nightmare for any painter. So yeah, probably a skink thing I Heard some slinnish guesses, but No, didn't it's quite register for me that that's slinnish. Maybe it's very smooth the hand there, but yeah, yeah Probably all right, we've got a bunch of releases this Saturday or pre-order this Saturday. I should we do we do Got the Clack I'm not savaging the painter not at all. As I said, I feel bad for the painter I don't blame this person one bit like that skink hand has got to be smaller than my You know my pinky fingernail and that's what I'm saying Like that's nobody's gonna paint that to look perfect, especially not at a thousand times zoom I'm saying I feel bad for him having to paint these things under probably an extremely tight deadline and then having some Jerk who wants to take a photo come in and be like, I'm gonna zoom in a thousand percent on your mini Everybody's minis would look terrible like that except for Dave Caldwell. That's it. He's the only human That's it because he's because he's a Incredibly talented person. He's a crazy person. All right at any rate go. I just wanted to be clear what I'm what I'm saying here absolutely So pre-order finally got the gentle sandbook and Then slaves darkness battle tone. We've got a new vanguard slaves darkness box It's gonna be the multi-part kit for ten chaos warriors five chaos nights So have all the you know the upgraded sprues. Yes, it's still very weird that they did what they did back when How did they do that like 2019? Oh my god. Yeah, that's insane So, yeah, where they didn't have the standard bear musician, etc. But whatever and then a chaos Lord So like that model, I think it holds up pretty well that chaos Lord. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, they're great Yeah, like Do I think the exact 2019 chaos warriors will get released again? I mean, I'm sure you can still find the the boxes out there They vanguard are getting started or whatever it was. I mean, those are those are around and out in the wild So if you want those exact ones without the banner and the The musician you can you can get them. These are clearly just slightly modified versions of those You know of those same sprues probably slightly repackaged with the new elements and then repositioned But yeah I've also got a chaos chariot in that kit, which of course you could do as a gore beast chariot and Then the releasing a bunch of things individually Some that we could have gotten in the army box. It just came out. So the demon prince house chosen in the castle or in carcadrack individually Exalted here of chaos couple build options there head wise and then a turn us which you could also make a castle Lord on demonic mounts Incredible model and man, I'm I'm digging to turn us. I got a game in against him a few weeks ago. He was doing yeah, his Scar, what's scar blood wrath the corn guy that keeps pop popping back up after you kill him. Oh, yeah He was playing that role. Were you running him with? Bellicor Was playing against a list. Yeah, what was the person using Bellicor as well? I should say yeah, he was yeah Makes a big deal if Bellicor is still alive if you lose Bellicor it hurts Yeah, I mean I I piloted him I played it I thought it was rather fun and interesting as we mentioned during the STD show that like that that was the surprise for me I thought I thought I didn't care at all about Legion and it was bad And I played it and I actually found it to be very interesting and rewarding the variability of what you can achieve the only problem with the turn us like he's cool and neat that he can pop back up, but the The problem with him is He has no more wound protection. So he will die like that the game I ran that was against You know like 50 was it was a S2D versus S2D mirror match, and it was against 50 or 70. I don't even remember now Snake like yeah splintered fang little snake boys. So it was just like Okay dead dead You know somebody spams mortal wounds like that that kind of a list would do it's just grotesquerie. So Yeah, glad to see all those fakes coming out. They're awesome Yeah, I got third ends the dice. They're still very hit and miss on these dice dice were very disappointing I mean, but so it's very simple right like we were all very familiar with Chessix and you know some of their like Gemini style dice kind of got a couple different colors Just they've done some dice like I think they did slinnish dice like that. They looked amazing I feel like just do that for all your different dice Sure, I mean, I'll tell you right now my go-to dice company where I get all my dice for like RPGs and stuff is Company called diffusion dice. Okay, okay If you just look up diffusion dice, I think that's not actually name of the company the company I don't remember their actual name, but they make a diffusion dice. That's the product and They're wonderful. They're like 20% bigger So it's just slightly bigger. They still roll completely normally You wouldn't really notice the difference if you held them in your hand, but they the text is so much more readable on every die face They're they're more targeted towards like, you know, the RPG crowd and come in sets with with, you know D20 D12 is some stuff like that, right? But I love them. They're beautiful. They may like they're incredibly gorgeous colors. So that that's my advice But yes, GW makes ugly dice That's the bottom line Sometimes I make nice dice, but yeah, it's it's very still hit and miss. Yeah Also saw there's a new novel coming out God Eater's Son by Noah Van Nuen. So Yeah, I'm like a hero and I don't know this I'm reading the story here It doesn't make much sense to me. So I don't follow the lore as much as I probably should and then also Soul Slayer other go-trick novel from Darius Hinks is coming out. So yeah Hopefully that will be interesting for some folks For warhammer lore is dumb. So, you know, that's sure we've had that conversation many times Like it's great and it's dumb I don't I don't that's it's both of those things simultaneously. So that's fine Got on her hero old world development diary. So I didn't check this out yet today. Yeah, so I read it It just confirms kind of the time period It's happening. It's not as far back as we had hoped I or I'd hoped I guess maybe I don't know we the royal we It's I think 200 ish years 250 ish years something like that before the end times or whatever So it's kind of in the time period. It's like the It's the warring states period in the Empire Is that the basic idea is the emperor dies and there's no there's nobody to take his place, okay? Mm-hmm. And so it's a big time of like civil war and it leads up to this big And then chaos goes in the March and it leads up to the the siege of Prague and all this So it's You know, it's fine. It's perfectly interesting time period I'm not like there that what it makes what it functionally means they can do is have really sort of four different Empire forces So there you go, so it's cool It's it's a perfectly compelling and interesting time period Because you you have, you know the different leaders who are all vying for control of the Empire It's like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on around this point in the world. So I'm sure it's a good time Was the name I think my favorite back in the day Ulrich is in my head I Mean Yeah, most of the Human Characters that you would know if you're like for old Warhammer lore are not alive yet because they're not born yet at this point Right, obviously now there are plenty of elvish characters who are still like who are around and kicking in this time period, right? Because obviously they lived thousands and thousands of years they you know, so I'm sure all of them will factor into the story and in various and sundry ways, but yeah, none of the like this is pre What's his name Magnus the pious or whatever like it's pre his Ascendancy into like being a spiritual leader, so As long as Teclis is around to make some wise decisions. I mean they're all very old so See on here Vince's paints. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I talked about this last week. I thought I'd mention it again They're available now So both John and I have our new signature series of paints from Monument Hobbies partnered up with Jason to make six new paints I've been using them a whole bunch Love them. Obviously. I hope so. I mean I picked the colors and get all this stuff. So So this is my six and This is the six from John There you go. You get those two sets I'll throw a link down in the description. I should have done that already, but then forgot To do that and so everybody can check them out. I'm they they had six new colors to the line. Those are not existing colors If they oh, that's it Kang said they sold out already. Well, don't worry. They'll be back very shortly This is a type of thing since these are all all these paints are made in the US They're made right there on site with Jason And so, you know, they like if that happens it we can there he'll spin back up more quite quickly So, yeah, absolutely. Oh that I'll count that as the gareth seal of approval there, buddy So yeah, check them out if you're interested in you if you like pro accrual I certainly do and and I think they're a lot of fun and good set. Okay There we go. That's that's my news. Check them out I think that's it man. All right news and if Let's talk about some pick of the week Tyler. Yeah, take us away. What do you got for us this week? Yeah, I haven't been watching too much, but I had a couple my Winnid doubt lean on battery poor channels So saga of dice. They had a new battery port Matias I could be butchering his name. He did really well at the New Mexico Championships Maybe came in second if I recall with his skaven list He's on this one Rob OCR versus skaven and they're using the new general sandbook Playing the position over power battle plan So, yeah, I really enjoyed that one. Check it out. I'm gonna get a feel for that mission One where it has seconds here Spencer. Yes, they're permanent additions. It's not it's not a limited edition or anything like that It's like this is just those they're part of the line now. Sorry. Go ahead. I just want to make sure that that was clear It's position of a power the one with the flank objectives that go away at the start of battle round your four If look, yeah, but speaking of which tune in next week for our GHB review when I can talk about And dude and then another channel and a chance to check out a little bit of a recent game It's a battle ready to the father and his son I Think the kids name is Jake Drake Jake. Oh They play Magick and Nurgle and disciple of Jane. It's just a lot of that cycle the same It's just a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm watching watching the dad and the kid Play a game of Warhammer together. So yeah, they they do little Various topic videos every once in a while like they just did one new year new army like you guys covered last week So, yeah, I get try to check out that channel periodically and I get a a sense of a younger gentleman's impressions of a of us Nice nice My pick of the week is very straightforward. It is the It is Roman Le Potts video on massive voodoo TV all about his diorama the last light And he kind of talks you through it and making it the process and everything like that And it is one of my favorite pieces of all time. I think it is just one of the greatest Miniature diorama seven rate. It's absolutely gorgeous It is a landmark piece as a as a work of art and as a painted miniature So I would highly recommend People to go check that out is linked all things mentioned are linked down in the description below So you can go check those out those I did all link before the show So there you go. Those are there right now, but don't click away and said if you're gonna click something click like click subscribe You know click those buttons. Those are real important. Hit those Then save that link for after we're done. You can go straight to those All right cool Let's talk about some some hobby time Tyler. What do you've been on? I? Actually have been working on something. Would you believe it? I don't know Yeah, had the first Thursday. Hobby night Last Thursday with some friends that I told you I was gonna start doing It was awesome. Yeah jam together. Absolutely. That's the way to go Yeah, so much fun catching up with friends, you know, you wouldn't otherwise maybe the time to catch up with and Just and the you know, we all we all are often bad sometimes about staying in touch with people So yeah got a actually here. Let me get it for the first time ever. I'm warm a weekly I can show you a model. I'm excited. I know I can't wait These are very exciting times we're living in here I'm just glad we finally broke Tyler. It only took years years the show, but we got him there main Not much to look at but look at that little it's a gross little tree Gross little tree. The thing about gross trees is that you can't screw them up. That's right. Yeah That's right. Yeah, that's not done. Absolutely beautiful. I love it My hobby time was finishing a very big project that I can't talk about so there we go But I'm looking at it. It's over here. It's done. I just finished it today There's a lot of work on this little idiot that I'm working on over here But it'll yield it'll yield some videos. Don't worry people will get to see stuff. So So thumbs up Alright Excellent Okay With that, I mean, we're ready to jump right into a main topic That's new year, man Absolutely year me by the way, I want to give a special quick shout out before we jump into the topic I see I see Emma Emily is in the chat the registered nerd so for people who don't know January 28th is our anniversary on where we will be celebrating our Ninth anniversary here coming up soon that Emily was nice enough to send me this little this little dice tray This little fold-up dice tray and it says if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer. Look at that. So, thank you Emily This is a wonderful gift to receive randomly for The anniversary of the show was deeply appreciated. So thank you very much. I Just wanted to shout her out because it's it's gorgeous. So at any rate With that, let's move over Let's get into it. Tyler. Let's talk about Battle tactics book battle tactics. Do they work? That's the question. I'm asking here now We're gonna have a little are they good or bad discussion first and then we'll get into the Then we'll get into the everything else from there. Okay All right, so boom Little quick history. Let's let's bring everyone up to speed here Okay, so battle tactics introduced in 3.0 with the goal of adding a second tactical challenge an orthogonal goal to your objective Capturing. Let's pause there for a moment Tyler Do you like the idea of a secondary objective in some of some fashion? I don't mean battle tactics I mean generically Right a secondary objective in the game now Arguably this battle tactics might even be a tertiary objective because you've got like kill the enemy Sit on points. Those are both things you're trying to accomplish, right? Although they kind of go hand-in-hand But anyways, this is like some other Goals it's not directly related to that some other thing you're trying to do. Yeah, so do you like that conceptually? Yes To be concise. Yeah the so warm fantasy battle We did a lot of at least I mean I had a 20 year gap But what I remember is a lot of kill slash survive. It was 1.0 2.0 Was get the gold hold the gold kill slash survive as well And now we have this which is yeah third elements that I think makes the game more intriguing It increases variety of list builds. Yeah big fan. Okay, okay Now this isn't part of the core rules that is to say like they could divorce this from the core rules Okay, it's not it's not in there anywhere. You can look section 1.0 through 28.0 does not mention battle tactics But yet the core battle pack does We've talked before on this show why I think that's a failure Okay Because I don't think the core battle pack should or at least I think there should be two core battle packs then There should be a simple core battle pack that is completely divorced from all of these other Things and it's just like play Warhammer simplest form Here are six missions that let you play Warhammer you want to put your plastic toys on the table and go punch your friends plastic toys in the face this Gets there on the shortest road possible All right, and then you could have like your contest of generals battle pack. That's like Blah blah blah looks like the one in there. Okay. Hmm. All right I'm aligned with that Okay, I think we all agree I mean we did that like it would be great to have a battle pack that was evergreen that did not have battle tactics and a lot of Other stuff by the by In it because those aren't necessary like they're not part of the the primary loop of the game They're just not Right and sometimes you just want the primary loop like there's a reason why you know boomershooters remain forever Popular because sometimes you just want to load up the marine and get a shotgun and start shotgunning demons in the face at like Hyperspeed right there's a reason doom is sort of this like this This evergreen concept because it has this super strong primary loop and often doesn't waste time with anything else Okay, I know I almost failed high school because I played too much competitive quake back in the day It was so addictive Literally almost failed. Yeah, I Understand I I started on I think I'm a bit older than you but I understand I started on when when My good friend's father brought home Wolfenstein on shareware like the shareware Castle Wolfenstein and that was that was about it for that strong primary loops Anyways, so have a version that's there The basic battle pack in the core rules introduces six battle tactics the GHB 22 battle packs is a current one season one Introduces eight battle tactics. No, we can't talk about what's coming next. I can't talk about what's coming next week But you know We'll get new ones That's that's I think a probably fair statement Sure pretty sure that confirms. Yeah, yes They have also been found in all new books and in the white dwarf tomes celestials. So at this point basically The armies have them, right? I think I missed one I think I missed an army or two in my in my summary as I'm thinking about it But look folks. There's a lot of workers when I when I put this together. So if I missed your army, I'm sorry But you know, we'll get there I'll look them up while we're going if I missed one now One of the things I've said about battle tactics in general is that I think they're the best when everybody's operating from a constrained shared list and the average we would all be achieving Right Would be three out of five like if you just universalized the average It was it would just across all games if you could magically do that It would be three out of five like they you should fail these things for them to be interesting Right Because if you can just get five out of five every time, what are we doing if both players always get five out of five Then they are pointless right We not missing anything here, right? Yeah, mostly well been operating Closer to that outcome than otherwise. I would say particularly when it comes to regular tournament players In both of the three point of seasons that we've had so far sure this this we thought I think you and I I'm sure Tom what he thought but I know I think you and I thought This last season would be a little more challenging than it turned out to be I don't think we were expecting it to be dramatically more challenging, but maybe a little bit more It wasn't much. I don't think there was much difference This maybe on the margins this season from the initial season that we had the launch of the new edition You know, yeah, it's but I agree there. They've been too easy I agree and so You know, they they I'm sure the actual average at this point has got to be something like Four and a half Right Depending on the demographic I mean, well, if it's if you're talking about like high-skill tournament players It's five out of five. I think it's four point nine nine right And you know as it stands right now, it's probably like four point three to four point five would be my guess I mean, I haven't I haven't regressed to this data. I'm sure that like we could look at the tournament data But again, that'd be a skewed version of it to some degree, right? But like But we have these core this core book, right? And it's these core whatever number Let's say we have eight in the general's handbook or six or seven or you know, I whatever we can we can argue about what the specific perfect platonic number is But if we're all operating from the shared number, then I know what you have available and you know what I have available Right and when you say I'm gonna do this thing Yeah, I could know what that is relatively easy Yeah, yes, I mean the number of tactics scored by the winner Eric. Yeah, you're exactly correct. Yeah, and So if we're And that creates this this easy lexicon Right because I only have to know like first of all it's not nothing I have to learn here every additional thing I understand it's only eight things or something, but everything is only eight things Right Warhammer is some part of being good at Warhammer is being able to memorize a Truly obsequious amounts of data Yeah, and hold it all in your head for easy recall whenever needed So the more more more you expand that world out the more complicated the game becomes and The more people can feel like they have a bad experience Okay now Once what I've said and Sean say or just said in the chat and I agree with Sean completely What I say is the biggest problem with book battle tactics is that they expand the universe from eight or seven I have to know or or whatever right to 100 Right, like to the point where there's no way I'm gonna learn them all it's just not gonna happen I mean, I'm sure there's a couple people in the world who who can literally roll a dex off all of the Books battle tactics, but I can't I Can tell you the stats on so many units in Warhammer, right? If you tell me like how does army play what are its good units? What are the what are the stats of those units? I could probably hit a pretty close approximation like I get 90% of it out there I couldn't even begin to tell you the battle tactics because I just don't have any room. I'm out. I'm out of room The disc spaces is empty Okay, and so that's not even hitting all the other fundamental problems with battle tactics Like, you know Sean made a good point of in an ideal world. We wouldn't be scoring two VPs for doing things We want to do anyways. They should make you make tough decisions. Yeah, I agree They should make you go places do things unusual move around the board encourage dynamic gameplay Right like all of those things would be ideal Yeah Yeah, you were telling me about some design you did. Well, actually that may yeah, we can't talk about that That's in the future That's for a future game speaking of things hard to keep track of okay and working on a future game I was actually working like the for the new I'll all share it here I I'm working obviously on the New game from snarling badger from Adam and I that will bring out this year 2023 Really excited about it. But in there there is a concept of secondary objectives not that surprising and As I was working on it I was very much thinking about it making you do things stay mobile, you know act in ways You might not otherwise act like it's it's it's meant to be a synergistic part of the overall architecture of the game It isn't just like Stapled on to the primary loop Right Okay, so The you know, there's there's all sorts of challenges to these things But I think let's let's just get our opinion out here right now, okay Oops there we go the concept of battle tactics is to create a second dynamic layer of interactivity Do we have both agree with that? Like some additional goals and interactivity that you can go for additional points you pick up additional things You need to be doing with your army Yeah, and there's a lot of ways one could go about that. Sure. Yeah, I mean 40k has quite a different system There's so many different ways you could take. Yeah the current form of battle tactics change it up You could have it where? You in the list-building stage you pick X number of battle tactics and that's your set You could do it pregame, right? You have to pick X number of battle to be one thing You're trying to do over the whole course of the game for for a larger set of points Like if you do this thing over the course of the whole game at any point, right? Then you get five VPs or something right like that could be the way it is or six VPs or whatever Right effectively a whole turns worth of extra VPs as we currently think about it if the if the current sort of If the current model is five VPs or the average, right? It creates additional skill testing that's again the concept here. I'm not talking about execution right I'm talking about Conceptually that's what's going on here. Yeah We want to separate the scores it can be determined it of when dealing with the The new objective scoring model the hold one hold two hold more right and Theoretically it should Allow more interactivity and counterplay Hmm, right because I announced that I'm trying to do the thing. It's not secret. I Say I'm going to I'll just pick an old one right because this was like the most obvious interaction And I actually didn't hate this. I like this one. I'm gonna pick slay the warlord Hmm, right? Okay, so Tyler. We're back in we're back in the early days where slay the warlords around right? I'm doing my start if you're a face stuff Okay, I say I picked slay the warlord now it goes to you you're the you're the I'm the active player But then it flips over to you, right? What's your immediate response to me picking a battle tactic of slay the warlord? finest hour boom which Raises a Debate that I Picked off in Twitter last week So I'll I'll try to simplify this, but it essentially Don't have a clear sequence of actions or start of hero phase Now most of us have played it It's the actor player completes all their start of hero face all their start of your player does all their start of hero phase This is absolutely the way it is So there are apparently People who think that the heroic actions need to go back and forth. They're wrong Yes, that that you can interrupt including a number of come high and competitive players. I've found out you They're wrong. It's super easy Like I'm I'm a hundred percent sure on this one I mean, it's the obvious way start items and then non active player does theirs That's obviously how it should be. Yes You think we would be better off by having though a clear sequence where you must do No, or battle tactic first or do you prefer it that you could do your heroic action first? You could do whatever you could do any of the start of here. Okay. Yeah, I think it's interesting Because it does allow for different choices to be made for you to declare things in different orders and stack other start of hero phase things No, dude. I'm a magic player. I love fiddling with the stack. Okay, like, you know, yeah I mean, that's the that's the idea here I I want to be able to arrange my order in the way that is interesting and beneficial for me Fair enough another thought that comes to mind is One thing I like about battle tactics. They can help with tiebreakers when it comes to tournament scoring methodology, so of course you can associate points with the grand strategies and battle tactics sure or achieving those but you could also do it for denying those Which so that I've noticed with the number of tournaments. Yeah, that can help address the tiebreaker issue Particularly with with good scoring systems. So anyway, yep, absolutely And now that can have a dark side, which is people if you drop a single battle tactic You're like, well, I can't win the tournament anymore or whatever, right? I can and as we'll talk about sometimes that will change but If we end up with a season Where you look at the main items and you think well, I you know It's probably three or four that are that are reasonably achievable in the game right Then if I explode out by number of options with book battle tactics, right? Not only do I reduce potential interactivity because I slide more easy wins into the mix potentially depending on the army But I also Reduce my opponents ability to just know what the heck I'm doing like I can tell you I'm going to do this battle tactic It's one of my stormcast battle tactics. It works like this Right and that's fine But you haven't probably played against that battle tactic a hundred times like you did slay the warlord or gaining momentum or You know, whatever whatever right where you kind of understood the direct counterplay You're like you're receiving new information at a time when you've already got a thousand things burning through your brain About what you're going to do to survive their turn and who's Re-deploying and do I need to rally at the start of the enemy turn and you know, where am I going to go? Which units are going to die? Where do I where should I be applying my all-out D? What's he going to kill? What's he going to charge? Right, but you got a lot of thoughts in your head even at the start of the enemy turn let alone thinking about what you're Going to do next right Yeah, and I've certainly I mean we talked about this Before I move was on a show, but we were having the discussion about to what degree do you and I plan Our list building around battle tactics and you were saying you don't really think about it and I think about it a little bit more It's at least manageable. It's more manageable to Think about eight battle tactics when you're at a tournament game And trying to mitigate you think about what your opponent might do like an obvious example would be desecrate their lands, right? Sure that can influence your deployment desecrate the land is a common Round one it particularly if you're wanting to hold on to you against the odds in the prior season Against the odds was the easiest one and prior season sometimes you'd like to try to hold on to it So you have an easy one when you when they're going gets tough, right? So you're looking for so desecrate the land would is kind of a classic example. You could actually plan for that Yeah, you can't really plan for trying to take into account obviously a huge number of battle tactics, right? right, absolutely and so Here's my my ultimate argument Book battle tactics are bad That's it end of like that's my end of story like they increase the amount of Knowledge you have to have to an unreasonable degree. They reduce interactivity. They reduce potential counterplay They increase the average number of these completed closer toward five which makes the whole which means the whole thing becomes pointless Right Like for all of these reasons They're bad Alright, and I can't figure out almost anything in the good column Like I don't know what sits on the other side of this equation So I've certainly heard a number of people express the view that they like the potential for more thematic list or sort of a feeling of military Like I'm doing a thing that my army would be appropriate. Yeah, I'm saying It's not the strongest argument Okay, it is an argument. Look you got a million ways to flavor your army. You didn't need this nobody felt like For the past 30 years that we were playing Warhammer Nobody said before battle tactics came along. No one was like well I don't really feel like I'm playing the forces of chaos Because I don't have a thing I do With a funny with a funny name and then I roll on the eye of the gods table get out of here with that. Okay No Pass pass on that argument Yeah, but all of this to say I'm expecting Essentially all tournaments Mostly all tournaments to use faction battle tactics in the new season. I Don't know to what degree we could get into that for why but that's like A strong expectation that I would have over the next six months Maybe we could come back to that next week, but sure the There are versions of this so there's a lot of people saying well, what about this or what about this right? The I Mean Dan that's still too many. I don't want to hold all those things in my head That's number one. He says it's not unreasonable knowing eight things. Dan is standard Right, like I can I can like easily hold that in my head I don't want to know these things and besides as I as I gave four other reasons. They're bad Okay, so like let's just assume that you don't care about that one at all great defeat the other four All right That's number one or that's that's point a you know a lot of people are saying like what if you had shared back to battle tactics? What if it was like a secret thing like schemes? Well, those are different because you complete those over the course the game And so like there's sure these could be redesigned in 50 different ways Right many of which I think would be better by the by Certainly I favor things like schemes Like a secret objective. You're trying to complete based from a small controlled pool That you determine at the beginning of the game and then flip your card. And did you get it or not? Yeah, I what it's worth do that. That's my view as well I mean obviously having been part with Tom and you of the effort around schemes and us having played it at Nashcon for a number of years I did enjoy that experience more than the battle tactics experience Yeah, yeah, I think it's better on a number of fronts But yeah, like there's lots of ways you could modify this you could have the book battle tactics worthless You could reduce the number of them So there's like one or two that are very in theme and very appropriate and very controlled Then that would solve part of the problem of needing to know less, right? Like there's there's a lot of ways this could be tackled and those are all improvements. Yes, there are many Many ways to improve this right They chose none of them And what's worse about it is they weren't even consistent in their choice of it as we'll see You know if it was just like, okay, everybody gets six and They're all roughly the same difficulty to complete Then I would be less harsh But I haven't but I'm just talking at the ephemeral level like the conceptual ephemera of this concept is problematic I haven't even gotten into the detail yet Where we actually go look at them and see how much they fall apart Right Then we get on the real problem Sure. Yeah, on that note again, I know you can't talk about this from in my experience so far with the new season minute experience You have enough battle tactics in the list of eight new list of eight that You're going to see Competitive players good players experienced players Get four out of five Consistently Now sometimes they'll get five out of five just from the list without leaning into These new battle tactics based upon the nature of the new season So the this glacial champions thing so the the issue that I have with that in this new season is That means you just need to have one faction battle tactic at at worst But you need to get and you could potentially Not not entirely ignore the glacial champs because of some of these battle plans Anyway, it's it's a lot of things. I know it'd be better. I mean, we'll pick up next week Like this is gonna continue next week when we talk about the new GHP and review it, right? It's just it's a way to say like I don't I'm not expecting things to change that much when it comes to What we have known for the last two seasons with battle tactics. I'll just say that yeah, okay So real quick. I want to answer some comments If they're going to be aesthetic says if they're going to be in competitive play They need to all be in the GHP and all written at once man totally agree with that. Yes Hades asked so is the argument that you don't like battle tactics as an idea or you don't like the tactics you've been given Neither I think battle tactic could be implemented. Well, I think the execution on this is poor I think the base battle tactics are fine for and they should exist for they they serve a very important purpose For a cohort of players. I do not think they should be part of the base game assumption because they are not a primary loop They're not part of the primary loop of playing the game lots of things aren't that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist It just means they need to be sectioned off and exist in the appropriate space in this case they're very good for things like tournaments events and a specific kind of competitive play right Okay So and again Hades, don't get hung up on the one thing. Okay. Let's take out my argument about it's too much to remember It reduces interactivity All right, because a lot of like the more easy ones you have from the book that have no interactivity Which by the way, it's a lot of book battle tactics the more things like that get ridden Less interactivity in the game Okay, less counterplay because I just got the new information right now that you're telling me you're doing this thing I don't know what it is So I don't have as much time to plan against it or list build against it or or any of those things like like Tyler mentioned He builds his lists thinking about the core Items that's not only his completion of it, but his play against it Right, so that's when you when you play a lot of games You just get a generally you get a feel for all right your opponents likely do a BC and you're likely to do this particular order because they're playing this list, right? Like they're playing disciples of the inch. They've got this list Therefore they're likely to try to achieve this order and that's a lot more manageable to do when it's just a list of eight And then you kind of deploy play etc to minimize their ability to achieve those things Yeah, they want to but yeah But look it what matters is the execution. So let's get into the execution like let's do this Let's let's do the detail. Let's talk book battle tactics Okay, so herein is going to be most of the books. I realize I left out a whole basically Grand Alliance. So sorry But hey, that's life This is gonna like I realized Tyler as I was thinking about it afterward that That I basically don't have any death in here. So oops Other than the the night hot like it's mostly the book when I pulled some of the white dwarf ones as examples I just didn't do it white orbs. So the TLBR is that we seem to be in agreement Let me know if this is wrong. We seem to be in agreement that faction battle tactics are a poor idea particularly based upon how they've been done right now. Yes the GHB list of battle tactics are An acceptable idea that could have been implemented better. I would go further. They're a very good idea Okay, okay that have been executed generally to a middling level Okay, and That would be fantastic if they were sectioned off to the appropriate type and cohort of play Right, okay. Yeah, that's that's that's my argument Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm aligned with that. All right, right Okay So like that's that's where I'm going with this right so so let's talk Let's talk again. I pulled all the ones from the books and then there's it there I pulled just a small I didn't pull all the white dwarf ones because there was a lot of them And they were annoying to find and pull together and stuff like that But I pulled some of them and we'll review here I pulled enough white dwarf ones to get it to get a taste So I'm sorry if you're if you've got a white dwarf update at home celestial and you're not included here I like this is the world Okay All right, let's just get into it. Let's talk about rating system first So we're gonna do these in sort of chronological order with the books because I feel that's useful To see if there's sort of a trend developing or whatever So we're gonna go all the way back to the beginning and I want to talk about my rating system I'm gonna rate all these things easy medium and hard right And So easy medium and hard means like this easy I'm counting as basically 90% plus almost anytime you can just achieve this now There might be a list dependency to that Okay, like you might need to have a specific unit as a gate, but if you put that unit in your list right and You have access to that thing Can you basically do this? Right with very little interactivity and very little chance of it being, you know Stopped in some way or another right, okay Medium is the as the sort of fat middle of battle tactics It relies on some amount of dice rolling So it is subject to fate in some way and there is often some amount of counterplay to it and So there's a skill testing mechanism to it because you have to know when it's the right time to do that thing, right? Mm-hmm is you know it like let's just take the very simple example of like kill an enemy unit Right like just kill an enemy battle line unit okay That's that could be that that existed at some point in time, right? Sure. That would be a medium because You have to have like access to the tools know you can get your your thing to them There are dice rolls that are dependent. Do you successfully? Charge them or shoot them or hit them. Do they make out? You know, do they roll bonkers on their saves so they have enough command points all at the fence Do they redeploy away from you like there's eggs on redeploy? Yeah, yeah, sure, right? Like there's there's things happening, right fate is taking a hand to there to some degree and Your ability to sort of interpret what's happening and know when it's the right time to like punch the whopper button And go for it and pull it off is is part of the skill testing mechanism, and I'm not against that I think that's actually quite valuable Okay Alright, so there's like that's that's what defines medium hard means there's multiple gates Like, you know, you can only do this thing on a Tuesday if your name is Steve and the enemy unit rolls a six You know, it's that that kind of wild crap they write in here. Okay. Yeah Or or like just the the even if it doesn't read that hard if you know fundamentally what's actually going on there It's just like it's extremely Unlikely to happen Mm-hmm you with me 100% and there's a fair number of those so yeah, okay Okay So that's that's how we're gonna break these up so you have little control over a hard one as well another another Hard one might just be like Roll a die on a four up you complete this thing or or roll two dice on two four ups you complete this thing, right? Like oh boy, you know, that means you got a 50 or 20% chance to 25% chance to achieve that thing right So that's that's conceptually how we're breaking these up Now it's obviously subject to my interpretation if you disagree with some of my ratings I expect you will viewers And that's totally fair. This is how I Rated them as I spent the week preparing and reading through all these dumb things Okay Yes, for somebody who hates all the book battle tactics. He doesn't want to know these things It was really fun to read every one of them. That was great So stormcast By my estimation Stormcast have four medium and two hard and they have heavy list dependency Heavy list dependency, which is like this sort of parallel x y Thing because list dependency can matter a lot or it can matter not at all If it's if the list dependency is it's the units you probably would have used anyways Great who cares then it's not really like whatever if it's taking some wackadoo Side unit that you almost never put in a list, right? That that's probably a an underpowered or inefficient war scroll You know, then that cost is much higher right so So there yeah I've been going through this as I mentioned to you with stormcasts of writing and playing stormcast lists nurgle list and this stood out to me in relation to the new season where I felt confident in getting four out of five those games That fifth one is tricky unless I have say a dragon My list to turn on some of these faction battle tactics number of these, you know draconith star drake Etc So, yeah, that's why i'm trying to carousel now in my new stormcast list Which i'm expecting this new season to be bodies oriented as well So anyway, yeah that you know kind of an example of these things impacting list building in my mind Yeah, and I think right off the gate We you can see some real list dependency gating here like pioneers the realms you complete this tactic if all the objectives Holy within your opponents territory are contested by friendly cities of sigmar units at the end of this turn Now the reason that one only got a medium is because it's contested not controlled Sure Right, they should literally have to walk up there and like live It's don't fight. They could just walk and do it. It's a walk one, right? The problem with it is it's all of them and the ones on the other side of the board and you have to have cities of sigmar units You know, so that's what moved it up into into medium Right, does that make sense? No, 100% agree with that. Yeah. Yeah shadow warriors can be good against that or good for that And there's some things but in general. Yeah, it's it's not easy Sure, or the classic pistolers, but again, you have to be using these cities of sigmar units in your army So it's like a very high cost list dependency Yes Yeah, right because a lot of players don't use cities of sigmar like they didn't start playing stormcast to play cities of sigmar units All right. Yeah, that's you know, I played the army to play the army. I just think this is bad design Uh because you're Why are we referencing another book In my battle tactics like again if we're going to do this if we're gonna go down this road Why in all that is holy? Under the great god sigmar Lord of the storms king of thunder the barbarian king Right. Why are we listing cities of sigmar units? Like I understand the nature. Yes. I understand stormkeep and stuff like that Who cares? That shouldn't be part of your tactics. It's nuts Yeah, look at the design a lot of these the way that they're written They certainly placed a much higher value on thematic design than your orientation or both of our orientation With this just as a first principle that that certainly stands out. Yeah But I really want to talk about the the the two Hard ones. Okay, because I think in this we see a lot of the uh The design that's just completely off base No challenge too great First of all with a name like that it should be automatic. That's how we do this, you know against all odds automatic, right? That's okay easy But instead we we actually get that You complete this tactic if an enemy hero is slain by wounds Caused by an attack made with a melee weapon by a friendly redeemer unit during this turn All right. Well redeemer units are your anvils. They are not your Hammers they don't kill anything It is entirely likely a five wound hero could fight an entire unit of liberators Which is a redeemer unit for example for the entire game and not die Okay So Yeah Again the math on this is insane Yeah, I mean I hear what you're saying but I mean it is What I would guess My interpretation of this is it's pretty clearly orthogonly designed in nature. I mean that's potentially the entire point of this Is that redeemer units are not usually killing a hero an enemy hero? Uh in in melee therefore This is designed as a hard battle tactic to achieve So I don't necessarily mind it as a hard battle tactic as long as it's balanced out, you know There's a decent list of the six. Yeah, I really don't like that because like I I don't I want you to make me play In a different way not make a unit act like it's clearly not designed to act Which there's a difference there. Yeah, okay Because all you're saying is be really subject to the dice If you get lucky Great cool like congratulations. You did this this ridiculous thing But statistically this has got to be you know, unless you happen to again the on a Tuesday thing, right? You happen to get near the hero with a low save and he's already got three wounds on because he missed cast earlier in the game You know dot dot dot dot dot dot, right? Then great. Yeah, okay, cool Like you can get this, you know, I'm not saying a hard one doesn't mean that it's never achievable It just means that the set of circumstances that has to fall in line The gates you have to pass are so myriad and multitudinous, right that like that it's just not It's not going to happen. You could play 10 games and never run into that situation Right. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I I Maybe we have a disagreement on this I can think about how to execute this as a storm cast player My in my list building and combo damage, etc. But I mean, it's it's certainly a hard one. There's no argument there Fair enough It's definitely hard. We're just arguing over the degree of hardness got it. Okay Yes Yes, and then we have one that is just so truly wild lightning shattered morale Pick one unit in your opponent's starting army that is on the battlefield and that has a bravery characteristic of 10 or more Okay, I can stop reading right there Because there will be many games Where that just isn't even doable. It's just not even like a thing. Nobody exists. The the set is null Right But let's assume I'm fighting undead any of the death armies or demon armies or something like that, right? Okay, so I've actually got and it's their starting army not a summon And they have a bravery 10 you complete this tactic if any models in that unit flee during this turn Are you for real right now? Bravery 10 People fleeing in this game. First of all, nobody flees in this game bravery four people don't flee in this game Okay, so I don't know in what universe you think bravery 10 people were peeling out right Like have you heard of inspiring presence? It exists, you know And if this is my battle tactic and I call it and choose that unit Like obviously the opponent's going to keep the one Command point in their back pocket To inspiring presence that unit What am I missing here Tyler like this is an auto fail. Yeah, no No argument with me. I mean storm cast I don't think they have any way to prevent someone I'm using a command ability in the battle shock phase I don't think there's an endless spell that does that obviously we've got horror gas But horror gas does not turning off your ability to use. Is there something that it turns off inspiring presence? That's an endless spell. I can't recall. Maybe somebody in the in the chat can tell me I know what horror gas does, but I don't think it turns off inspiring presence Yeah, the point is in you are correct in your statement that within this book there is neither uh neither bravery bombing nor uh big inspiring presence deprecating mechanics These these do not exist and as hey, we'll point it out on top of that if you accidentally kill that unit you lose Okay Like if you charge them and kill them you fail the battle tactic Awesome, right So yeah, it doesn't look like horror gas if wahapedia is up to date Which it may not be units within 12 this in the spell cannot receive the commands in the battle shock phase In addition, you know if there's a battle shock test within 12 in the spell add d3 to them It models it flea so horror gas could be your one mechanism to do it fantastic exactly what I wanted my storm cast army Sure Nonsense now now here's an interesting decision. Here's an interesting thing. I want to set up We're we're spending a little time on the storm cast one. We'll move quicker through the others But this is setting a lot of groundwork We need to get into the into the distinction here between Why things can be bad in two different ways Easy battle tactics are bad and hard battle tactics are bad Right But they're bad in two different ways Okay The more easy battle tactics that exist in books the more inequitous that mechanic becomes as a leveler Like that is to say some armies are just better at this thing for no reason right And as I've said before they could do that intentionally Right like that could be part of the design they could take weaker armies like an army that's meant to be less good at holding objectives or something and give it A better skill with battle tactics. Maybe that's what it does well and that's kind of it's it's balancing mechanism They could do that but they haven't done that in any way so far Okay, so easy battle tactics are bad because they reduce the entire point of battle tactics in the game as a whole Allowing armies to easily go five for five and just making battle tactics paperwork That's all it is. It just becomes paperwork. Check a box at the beginning of your turn Note a list and put an x in a box if you did this gain two vp. That's what it becomes Right becomes an excel checklist Okay, the more easy that occurred the more that it's like if I can do five for five without interacting with you at all That's all I'm doing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Yes, they're been of the like like said Look at the last season even of the ones that are recently straightforward You still often have to play well to execute them I mean like there's there is still a skilled expert not always, but I mean At there is still I think I mean, I don't think you had to play well to to satisfy against all odds No, that's true. Yeah, there there are certainly ones but like gaining momentum, right? You you have to be able to execute kill a unit and hold more objectives But I I generally agree with what you're saying, but I mean there I would that one's not easy though That one would never fall into the easy category, right? That would be a medium one That's my whole point easy is bad Because the more easy they are there are the more I can just go five of five without interacting and I'm just literally putting X's in boxes And you have nothing to say about it. That's why easy is bad, right? It invalidates the whole system And it makes it so certain armies get unreasonably strong for no reason because they can play that they can just play the vp game better Right. Okay. That's this side of bad Hard battle tactics are bad In a different way and an interesting way to me. Okay Because lightning shattered morale is so terrible on its face Right that what it does is two different kinds of bad first. It confuses new like Low knowledge low information players Who are going to read this and don't have the the wherewithal of the system mastery to look at that text and go that is liquid hot garbage On first read as any sane person should do Okay So it creates information noise that players have to sift through Now high skill players high knowledge players will do that instantaneously They'll read it and go. This is totally terrible. I do not need to retain this information and they will forget it exists and never worry about it Right and it will effectively just reduce the potential list to five Right That's all it's actually doing it just gets pushed out of the way Hard doesn't like in no in no way destroys the entire battle tactics system Like if everything was hard if every battle tactic was set to hard That could be an interesting world to live in Okay, we're like getting one or two battle tactics in the game was legitimately a victory All right, right like that was an amazing accomplishment, but people would find it very frustrating Playworks because players don't like to fail at things Okay Like I can sit here and put my game designer hat on and say The correct number is to get three out of five on a universal average But players hate failing at things They want like every player sitting here listening to me talk is thinking But but I want to go five for five every time in my game. I want to get five My game I'll get five. Yeah, everybody else can get three, but but I'll get five all the time I don't I don't like to fail because failure sucks Right, it's a negative experience It's that easy So you have this clash of a mechanic that wants you to fail sometimes and humans built in desire to not fail and hate it Oh Okay So the hard ones are bad because they create white noise in the system That that can trick people that can that it's it's some lorem text Without without being written as such Right You know what I'm you what I mean by that. Yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting. Yeah to see How many good hard battle tactics are Close to bad. I mean it it's very clear in my mind what you mean by bad, but it's a little Yeah, it'll be interesting when we get into yeah, what are examples of good Battle tactics sure Okay, I'm interested in your argument Nicholas. He said there aren't pointless of every player goes five out of five I'm I'm curious as to your argument before that like you're I see your point one They feel rewarding to complete Lots of things feel rewarding to complete the cost of them. They don't satisfy any of their design goals Okay, if everybody's going five out of five every time they're not creating interactivity. They're not separating scores They're not doing anything that they would seem to be there to do and we can have a better way to do that Right Like we can achieve that without a without a Without a very high cost choice mechanism because that's the other thing that I didn't talk about at all That's part of the larger battle tactics conversation We've had in the past is that there are a lot of players who feel the paralysis of choice with these I don't know. I don't know any players like that Right Like who sit there and agonize over exactly which one is the right one to use This is not a small number of people by the by Okay, so like if you're going to introduce something that's gonna that's going to make a lot of people uh that like that uh Frustrated It better be doing more than giving people some slight warm vuzzies because they ticked boxes Mm-hmm like again we can Completion is good. I agree with your point like it rewarding players for completing stuff is good But those things aren't if they're not skill testing if they're not separating points If they're not creating interactivity if they're not helping the primary loop, then what are we doing? That's why you put secondary objectives in the game Okay, cool. Now we can move faster now that we've set up the base I'm not going to talk about most of the mediums because they're just like they're there That the other the other thing you already mentioned about the mediums on this one, which is they're very stormcasts have this huge Listed dependency thing because you've got the drake all star drakes all this they Redeemer units cities of sigmar units all that stuff is just so like huge heavy list dependency Right Yeah, if you want to get five out of five battle tactics in the new season give carazide look Crandis is very list oriented. You kind of got a design a list around Crandis But Kara's eye can slot in so all kinds of different lists. So he's ready to rip and tear baby rip and tear Oh, no problem. Nick. No, I like I like the devil's advocate. I like the discussion Uh obsidian crane. Yes, I have I uh back during I played a lot of infinity 1.0 So it was quite a while ago, but I still have all my my hacky force Okay Uh, cool orc war clans This is the wildest one to score. Okay. Like when I scored this one Oh Because it's just medium All right Like as a list, it's just medium I went back and forth on whether the take dat you suckers should be Hard or not because that's it might be okay. I'll openly say that but what's Wild about this one is that even though this looks like a list of six That is a lie Okay Because three of them you you can't Do at the same time one requires an iron jaws general one requires a bone splitters general one requires a cruel boys general Right and then another one requires crag knows So like they're literally mutually exclusive not just list dependent but mutually exclusivity in the list dependency right and so that's I they never designed another thing like this and it's just an output of of The fact that you have three armies sitting in one book Because what that actually means is that for most ways you're going to run this army You have three not six sure So I think they they just needed to add More maybe even two by the way not six. I'm sorry. Even three is overstating it probably two so Is it just we need to add two or three No, we need to come like these would just be thrown out. I would throw these completely in the trash This is just bad design from top to bottom throw out the key words specific ones. Don't don't do don't do faction specific Yeah, absolutely. Don't ever do faction specific ones. That's that is crazy town Right and that that's that's what this is This is even worse than like sub faction specific, right? This is just this is just soup book nonsense period and by the way things like time to get stuck in which is Viable for all potentially all forces, right You complete this tactic if the model picked to be your general and all of the models in your army that are on The battlefield are within 12 inches of an enemy unit at the end of this turn Okay, so that's a movement one, right? There's no there's no real great interactivity there because you could Depending on how you do it and what we're talking about as far as models You may even be able to arrange it so they can't even redeploy away from you Right in any in any meaningful way to to to do that. So there there may be zero interactivity with that The issue with that one is if i'm playing cruel boys Is that really what i'm trying to do with my cruel boys is get my entire force within 12 inches? Is that yeah That's the idea here. It's not it. Yeah, probably not right or if i'm playing big one I have a cruel boy shooting mixed in like that's probably not running out the the Ballista there, you know So this is just I mean this is such a catastrophe like they're all ranked as medium Because in reality, they're all fairly medium to complete Okay I agree with that. Yeah the one that stood out to me As actually maybe easy to medium is cruel boys because of the shooting Yeah, doing 10 wounds or mortal wounds in combination by friendly units to enemy models And then if you can stay out of combat and have fewer than 10 wounds more than we've taken right I mean anybody who's ever rolled shooting with cruel boys will tell you that is definitely not an easy one because You know sure sometimes you'll just your bolt boys will go They'll they'll they'll go wild and sometimes it will not That's what'll happen there You know So it's definitely so medium like there's still dice rolling happening there, right? Like it's there's interactivity people can still all out defense against you and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Like it's it's you know, it's definitely medium That was that that cruel boys one is when I almost moved to hard just because it's it's Because it's so dependent on you having particular things in your list and so on but I kept it medium I think this is just a complete design failure Like this is a failure to launch Yeah, these first two battle tomes were quite rough on the battle tactics front Fair to say just a lot of design issues Both of them yeah Mogwai man, I I am aware of what big wa is I'm saying this entire book is a soup book because it's three separate armies They decided to shove into one hence making it a soup book. Maybe they're not all mixed into each other So maybe the more appropriate Uh reference would be to some kind of meat pie Where you can still see the individual elements that they've all baked together Uh, I don't know but but but whatever the case. Maybe maybe it's a lunchable book. Yeah. Yeah, it's lunchables They're all in one little package like here's your ham. Here's your crackers. Here's your cheese Put them all together in big wall. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe we'll call them lunchables from now on That's fair Yeah, orc war clients are now lunchables. I'm in for that. Okay Nurgle Uh, quite a amount of variation here. So I marked three of them medium Feed the maggots, which is seven enemy models are slain by disease roles again Like it's it's a dice dependency one You you pass out a lot of disease, but it's you know, what are you fighting and what kind of saves against mortal wounds? Do they have and stuff like that? There's certainly been many, you know Is this a turn where you pushed them down to a two up to save against disease and stuff like that? You know, there's a Right, or sorry two up to um to suffer the disease, right? It's like whatever It's medium, um nurture the gnarled moths like standard killer unit one that's that's Uh, that's going to be picked there, right that you got to kill something. So it's it's a medium Yeah, I've gotten that one quite a bit You know, it certainly comes up You have your gnarled moths not too far back where you put a second one out through befalling hosts or summon And yeah, enemy units will end up within 12. I mean, that's pretty generous range. And yeah, it's all right I'm going to kill this unit that's within 12 in the normal. So at least my experience over the last year It came up quite a bit Yeah, it's it still requires killing a unit and there have been times where it was dicey Yeah Uh gifts of nergal you complete this one. I marked as hard you complete this tactic of all friendly units That were on the battlefield at the start of this turn inflict at least one disease point on at least one enemy unit during this turn Oh boy Uh, like even your little plague bear hero or whatever and slobby bio piper's gotta get in there and start swinging in Roll of six, you know, like that's what we're talking about here now. Sure. Maybe maybe if the game's going to turn five and maybe if like, uh, You know Uh, there's only, you know, three of your units left at the start of the turn one of theirs And you all run up and swing on them and get your sixes like sure But it's hard, right? There's a lot again. How many how what's the situation hard is like What is the corner case? I have to construe how into the corner do I have to get? Before it seems reasonable to pick this thing Yeah, yeah, this one has never come up after many dozens of games at least for me. So, yeah Uh Glory to the grandfather you complete this tactic at the end of the turn if more enemy units than friendly units are destroyed during this turn Uh, I marked that one is easy because even though it is there is dice behind it because they're just the broad general nature of it You can almost like depending on what's going on. You could often achieve that literally without fighting Yeah, dude, uh, it's kind of like I for an eye part. Yeah, it's like yeah Fun functions similarly and yeah, I for an eye is one that most folks are getting in there Or a lot of folks are getting consistently in their games. So yeah, so It's probably the top of easy Just because it is there is still some dice rolling there. But but again It's one of those things that you're like, yeah, it's my turn I'm gonna pick my fights and I know who's diseased and yada yada, right? So, right, right. Yeah Um The droning I marked as medium you complete this tactic If there is different friendly unit with a rot fly mount in each quarter of the battlefield at the end of this turn Because it's units in each quarter. That's quite a lot of rot flies I I hate this one because it like to complete it. You almost have to be running rot fly spam of some kind Um Now again, that's not it's not just blightlords. It could be your little your plague drones as well, but Or your your actual boss, by the way Um, yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah list dependent, but yeah, if you got the right list probably doable Yep Not automatic And then sudden domination you can I marked as hard you this one's so crazy You complete this tactic if you summon a great unclean one to the battlefield during this turn And it is within three inches of an objective that you control in your opponent's territory at the end of the turn like Sure I guess it could be easy if it's late game and you hold an objective And it's in the enemy territory and you have enough points that you haven't summoned a single thing And you're just sitting on it to literally complete this tactic in round four or five And you just pop up your great unclean one and he sits his fat butt down On the objective, but but yes as pepo has just said talk about win more Right. Oh, yeah, that's that's a very confident nergal player. He's like i'm already dominating you so hard That i'm just going to pop out a completely pointless great unclean one on in your in your Uh, your starting zone basically not not summon anything all all game just just build up to the to the guo at the end Yeah, yeah Which is a really hard summon in in in nergal actually, you know, depending on the the counterplay going on and how much your enemy unit is You know Getting near your trees or being in your space and that kind of thing, right? So yeah, definitely a hard like that one is wild Yeah Okay, you know, I think we're at least this is certainly better than the prior two Sure, the bar was very low at the beginning, but you know, this was our third book So it's it's it's better upward trajectory upward trajectory okay fire slayers four of them are You know marked as medium settle a grudge be slayer grimdome knows no mercy and Sees by force all have pretty obvious failure conditions. I won't go in detail here, but they're all they're all Like you got to roll some dice. There's some interactivity that kind of thing right um Settle a grudge is probably the easiest one because if someone overexposed themselves to kill one of your units You can generally reprise and kill down, right? Um, but again, there's dice rolling there. So it it's it's you know, there it is I really like that one like that to me stood out and going through these dude In just in terms of like, yeah, there's there's some obviously a nice theme there It reminds me of one of our schemes that we did sure. I can't remember the name of it, but Yeah, it's I like that as a battle tactic. It's kind of right in the sweet spot not being too hard Not too easy. Yep. It's another. Uh, it's another sort of eye for an eye as you just mentioned, right? Uh, all right, and then the two that are hard Let's talk about them an honorable death pick one friendly hero You complete this tactic if that friendly hero is slain during this turn And any enemy models were also slain by wounds caused by attacks made by that hero during this turn so My dude has to my hero Has to go kill enemies Right. You got to slay models Yeah, yeah And then also die himself On the immediate strike back, okay Uh, highly situational obviously It'll be doable, but very situational sure Uh swaggy shadow says sees by force can be easy just walking and take a point. Sure. It can be easy All of these could be easy again. How far into the corner do we need to go like That one is a little bit not super far I need to have less and then I take more and you're right If there's like an open objective and I just go claim it Then I do it just by moving. Yeah, that could happen Right, that's certainly possible. It's not like the most fantastical scenario Right But I don't have a lot of shooting that I'm just gonna like peel somebody off and then and then you know Be there without fighting. So I probably have to fight there To do it and that means I probably are rolling dice. So it moves it into medium, right? That's the again It's trying to balance all these complex factors of like, what's the scenario I have to set up, right? An ignominious death is the funniest one. I think they've ever written The only one that rivals it is an ogre one that we'll look at later But pick one enemy hero you complete this tactic if that enemy hero is slain by wounds caused by an attack Made with a fire steel throwing axe Stop it Stop it Yeah, don't think I've ever seen that happen before Tom all the time goes on about these stupid axes like I've played with his fire slayers in in in Uh Like team turnies like two player turnies. Yeah, uh, yeah And all the time he'll go on about uh Nonsense about how like these fire steel axes can matter and blah blah blah They never do anything ever. I mean they they waste a lot of time rolling a lot of dice for nothing, but funniest thing hilarious Okay uh Yeah, I mean the the uh, who? Nicholas R said wouldn't grim near knows no mercy be hard since it penalizes you for killing things That alone wasn't enough to make it hard But you're right like because you have to vote you have to have Any friendly Volkite berserker units on the battlefield and all of them within three inches of any enemy units Like and it's at the end of turn check. I did waffle on that one a bit Nicholas R You're not wrong because like yeah, if you kill the enemy unit if you were too effective Or if they kill you, you know, you lose it either way Um So I thought about that one a lot in the end. I left it as medium because it is just a exist thing So like if even one dude is around in either unit, you know, you you can get it It felt like the right amount of medium like you You know just charge the right unit that you're not going to kill and isn't going to kill you like in most games You can figure that out most armies have a unit like that, right? It's not that hard, right? so like it's a It's not automatic certainly like I it's not easy. It's not The hardest thing it's like it's definitely in the medium space to me so Like I didn't have to construe that how how wild is the scenario I have to construe to make you To make me say this is this is one I would choose. That's kind of the The litmus test here, right? Okay I'm not deep kin five mediums uh one easy A lot of list dependency a lot Like list and turn dependency Okay, like assassins of the high tide no list dependency just i'd net deep kin units, right? um You have to destroy two enemy units not always the easiest thing to do certainly especially depending on the army you're facing Sure But and it's but it's when they're under high tide Right now that's a great thing to be under to go kill people Because you're striking first with all your units Right, but it's still a lot of dice rolling that has to go your way and could still have armies where it's like That's not gonna happen like am I bringing down two mega gargants in this turn? I don't know Sure, or whatever yeah The predators that deep requires the alopexes The revenge of the nemarty obviously requires nemarty Right. Um, the deny trespassers is your classic again just like the tree the nerbo tree, right? Same same thing again. It's we see a lot of variations on themes here and Isharan defense is Pretty crazy. I I was like back and forth on On whether to mark this was hard when you reveal this battle tactic pick one objective holy within enemy territory At the end of this turn you complete this battle tactic If you control that objective and there's a friendly Isharan Isharan unit within six inches of that objective So you're Isharan people that's like very specific person that would have to be very deep in enemy territory I ended up keeping it as medium because The situation that you had to constrict because like there's a this is one of those weird ones that's like either quite hard or automatic Or it becomes against the odds because it's literally just that guy stands there And I complete this But it depends a lot on what's happened around it To lead up to this situation. And so that's why I kept it as medium, right? There's no Not any potential required Dicerling to it Yeah, that one. I mean, I'm thinking of the classics Isharan. That's like the soul scryer soul render Little dudes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah, that's correct. So, you know soul scryer coming in on board edge with six offensive eels, you know I think we're seeing some play now with offensive eels once again in the game been seeing some less with those So, yeah, and then you potentially, you know, like the following turn you walking If you clear out the the threat in that area, then you walk like, yeah, it's like I again, I didn't have to stretch too far I had to make it happen Right. I just had to like I I did have to like Construe some scenario, but it wasn't crazy So let's take a pause if we could and what do you think about these Overall, I think Aideneth is kind of interesting to to dive into Well, let me talk the easy one real quick because this is a classic too easy. All right Trapped in the undercurrents you complete this battle tactic if three or more friendly Aideneth deep kin units are treated and made a Charge move during this turn Yeah, a thing that you get the ability to do automatically in this and your your tides of battle Yeah And So just do it Right, you walk everybody back to three inches. You charge everybody back in Theoretically you have your re-roll charge command in the in the wild event you roll snake eyes, right? But again, it's If you're if the if the bar here is almost no interactivity in 90 plus boy is this hitting that mark Yeah, all right so Yeah, with with how they can position with how fast they are, you know, even They they have positioning speed to minimize redeploy I would say more than a lot of armies like yeah, somebody could still pop a six at some point But you you have things that you can do, you know to wrap etc Well, in the fact you could just literally retreat your whole army every unit that's in combat and then recharge right So that's that's why I marked that one as easy So okay now back to your original question. What do I think about these? I don't think they're bad for the most part. It's a little more list dependency than I would like Uh, like I I'm not a huge fan of all of this list dependency. I generally don't like it I don't like them putting a thumb on the scale and saying play this this unit to achieve this thing I'd rather it was more as an army. You're trying to achieve something that's within your your thematic bounds right Um Nicholas are yes, you can redeploy from a retreat move, which is the potential challenge there, but by the way You don't have to retreat every unit fighting somebody Okay, oh, yeah, of course like you can just Retreat like leave one of the units in combat with the unit retreat the other one back three And then they can't redeploy away from you because they're still in combat So like you can you can just be clever about it and and stop them from from that kind of silly behavior Like just leave somebody in combat Okay, anyways back to this. I think this is better, but the list dependency thing bothers me Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's generally what I'm feeling It I could also see, you know, thinking like real top in iDeneth players like constantinos I'm curious his view on this list. Like I would guess that if he's used faction battle tactics He's able to get a number of these very consistently. Sure. Like assassins of the high tide. I bet he gets that consistently obviously trapped in the undercurrents List dependent as you said with some of these other and eastern defiance predators of the deep that Yeah, that it feels Better than the prior ones that we've looked at. Yeah With within the space that we're but again already we're seeing the variability. We're like four in Yeah, yeah This I don't know this it just it keeps hammering The problematic situation that we're in which I I think we're basically operating most experienced players tournament players regular players of this game are probably going to get about four out of five of Of the list historically and then they just need to get one out of their book And yeah, so if you've got even one easy even one auto, it's just it's very bad Okay, it's not not a great place to be in. Yeah Okay, let's keep going night haunt Uh, surprisingly not the easiest list. They had four mediums and two hards. Okay Um, the two hards which which we can talk about here are overwhelmed with dread when you reveal this battle tactic pick One enemy unit on the battlefield you complete this tactic if that unit is affected by the shriek Stun and petrify effects of the wave of terror. In other words, you have to have rolled All three potential charge rolls against them. That's hard Sure, right because that means you're literally rolling a uh 10 what is it 10 plus for one of them. Yeah, whatever the fight last Yeah, I think it's eight or nine for Yeah, eight not. Yeah, three to seven eight to nine ten plus, right? I'm not I'm not wrong. That's right. Yeah, okay I haven't looked at the particular table in a little in a hot minute, but I believe that's right. So I had to charge This unit with at least three units Uh, and then Um, and then, you know roll hot effectively, right on on my charges. That's that's crazy like percentage-wise That's actually a very very very hard thing to achieve uh And then ceaseless nightmares you complete this tactic if two or more terrified enemy units fail a battle shock test During this turn. I mean Okay It's hard. It's hard to make anybody fail battle shock. Now. I understand they shut off Inspiring presence. I get that Okay, but just actually causing triggering battle shock tests is so army dependent So list dependent like and again, uh, what if you pick it and then kill everybody you're fighting? Ain't nobody failing a battle shock test then. Whoops. I accidentally was too good And only one unit's left and sure that one guy failed a battle shock test Right, let's say it happened to be a type of unit that could actually fail a battle shock test You know, you didn't charge in and fight You know two fulminators And they're not failing a battle shock test They're either dead or not failing a battle shock test. That's the two modes Sure, right So there's just a ton of armies this won't work against a ton of situations both positive and negative in your favor This won't work against it's a very hard one to achieve Uh special shout out to one stop no return Uh, very cool name Uh, but which requires you to have a black coach Uh, which I feel like I almost marked it as hard Simply because it requires you to have a black coach So you are playing like 300 points down Uh, but but I didn't I mean it's not it's not actually that hard. It's just it's just Requires you to have a black coach. Yeah Yeah, I haven't seen one of those on the table in forever Good reason It's funny because you look at like death by a thousand cuts Which is an enemy you complete this tactic if an enemy hero or monster is destroyed by attacks made by friendly chain rasps or spirit hosts Those are not your offensive units or at least not primarily But the difference between the damage a chain rasps unit can put out and something like the original redeemer List like where I marked that one as hard is so vast right um, especially because They also have built in Like an easy ability to get uh plus one to wound an easy ability to reduce their armor saved by one and and so on and so forth Right like that because they have built into their allegiance abilities The ability to sort of manufacture any unit into a killing thing like I have watched tom play chain rasps a lot And those things are consistently underestimated Sure They will rock people Yeah Yeah, and nine spirit hosts are no joke either With 54 ties that they that they throw at you. Yeah Um, well, yeah We don't have to go out of that debate again, but yeah, I mean there are sequiturs and uh vindictors And sequiturs may may be playable. Uh, once again, they might be on the menu Uh, we'll we'll discuss to hear it So yeah, I'm happy He loves his sequiturs So yeah, I mean, this is a tough list. It's not It's that is to say there's no easy's which is nice I I'm praising of that There's one of these which requires a black coach which by the way, uh, Keith rogers says the black coach looks so cool though, totally agree. It's amazing And uh herald says i'm about to start assembling a black coach. Well, it's a tough assembly. It's a beautiful model I mean, it'll come around again It's worth having in your collection because like the the rules will come around again That they're not they're not so dumb as to realize that that or to not realize that they took their centerpiece model and made it Have bad rules like everything is a cycle All this has happened before all this will happen again Okay Cool Boo boop. Now the closest one to easy in my mind is probably tides of terror complete this tactic At least two friendly nine-out units within a half inch of the same enemy unit at in this turn You know, I feel like you could consistently set that up the only reason I didn't put it in there is because what happens when you try when you double charge a unit Roll neg one to save and fight last and then murder them and you're like, whoops Yeah In my experience night haunts have a tendency to wipe out what what they go into Yeah, I seemed to have a habit of getting charged by like five units at a time from night haunt players Sure, uh, and they they love to roll. Yeah 10 ups. So sure Yeah, hey, well, some of those cycles are longer than others, you know But what I'll say is look you had your time. It was, you know 2016 was a great year for for uh monster truck beast of chaos or sorry, not beast of chaos Beast claw raiders players because you know, you were you were terror of the tables with that incredible thunder tusk uh snowballs, so It's been a hot minute since then No doubt So but I'm sure the time will come where they'll figure out thunder tusks are bad Okay daughters of kane Probably the worst designed set of battle tactics in the game currently That's about right. Yep with three of them being basically automatic And two of them giving you additional victory points on top of that So, you know, we mentioned earlier, maybe one of the moves is have them be worth less Right like what if what if book battle tactics only worth one point? These guys are like, no, no dog. I got you. I'm right back in two-point land even in that scenario Okay, you've got clash of arms, cruel delight and tidal blades Right, which are just modified versions of some older battle tactics Uh And They're all basically automatic charge people A thing you're gonna do Again, yes, there's a little bit of dice dependency there But remember this is an army that gets built-in bonuses To charge so it's like it's they can't even often fail on two or on on twos That has re-rolls for this kind of stuff like they got that covered Do an automatic thing with canary like literally a thing you cannot fail on In cruel delight, it is unfailable as long as you use the the ones that don't roll a die to do their thing As far as I can tell essentially every daughter's cane list has this in mind to execute it. Yeah, sure like And then tidal blades go take your battle line units that want to race forward And kill the enemy and have them go race into the enemy territory Cool All right Clash of arms tides of blades Especially tidal blades. I would say I mean they are a little more list dependent right like with the Maratheon the bow snakes classic list you often might see two by ten witch elves as your screens And they might often die before you could achieve Sure for those but yeah list that lean into witch elves or sister slaughter. They should be pretty doable So yeah, I mean definitely there's there's there's still list dependency here way too much. I don't like it Right, but it but it's there And then then you have the other three which are all hard and all nonsense Like the high gladiatrix has to kill an enemy hero specifically using killing stroke, which like it happens Right Like that happens But When calling it out boy, that's a move. That's a power move That's like babe ruth pointing at the outfield at a particular seat Okay, that's not just like left field. That's seat 347 in deck r Enjoy your baseball. You know like that's a heck of a shot okay Hatred of chaos is sub faction dependent. You can only do it in these two sub factions You have to be fighting chaos Like and then you got to kill two units Right Like jesus Okay, like that is a wildly insane one. I who wrote this Three hoops. You have to jump through. Yeah It's crazy Like that one is just so crazy Uh that that got read somebody went ship it I take the cake so I'd be better than fire steel axes. I mean it's pretty crazy. Yeah And then unexpected attack Uh friendly canite shadow stalkers unit uses its shadow leap ability and makes a charge move So like I guess roll a nine up Dude, nines are easier than sevens eight sixes. I don't I don't care anybody says nine I actually I love that battle tactic. I'm all in on that battle tactic I mean you want to talk about an easy one to fail on a dice roll Putting your entire Bet on something with less than 20 percent because that that's your that is the math around rolling a nine, right? You have less than 20 chance to do it. Um Yeah, sure like go for it, brother Now again, they could be in the plus one charge range. They could be on an eight But still that would still easily qualify for my hard criteria, which is just A less than 50 and it's all in a dice roll and that's it. You're just like did I get this? Nope Okay, yeah, no middle ground here, huh? Nope, but something. Yeah, that's definitely the Forerunner for the worst set of designs battle tactics going back to night hot I mean, do you think that generally is where You would want to see these operate where it's kind of four medium too hard or is it A bit more like six medium I'm gonna save one of my platonic ideal for the end because I do have a way without these that I would like Like if this is the design We have to have these dumb things. I have I have like a a set of guides that I wish we would follow I go buddy All right, let's keep moving Of course gaven players. I mean actually do you feel bad for the rats? Like what is going on this list? I I begrudgingly made them all medium. Okay Because like first of all, this is the most list dependency list dependent One around because all four of them are Completely list dependent. Like you have to have all these units Okay Restore the beast. I've got to have wounded rat ogres that with at least three wounds And then I've got to heal them which is like not the hardest thing in the world. I've just got to have enough Pack masters and master molders sitting around that unit to just like hump it back to full Okay, rolling a d3 at a time so It's like it's Unable Certainly, but And there's not much the enemy can do to stop me. You know what I'm saying? Like if I have the wounded rat overs, I can just be like they all heal dice dice dice. Okay, I got them back to full Right But that is like I've I've the situation has to really Arrange I'm guessing the pack master seal hero phase Uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah Uh and then Death mark you pick an enemy hero on the battlefield that is wounds characteristic of ten or more and zero wounds allocated to it And you complete this tactic if the enemy that hero is slain in this turn by attacks made by friendly claneshion units Yeah, normally I would rate those kinds things hard because a ten wound plus hero is generally a very tough hero to bring down in a single turn Right, they often have the most heavy amounts of protection because we're talking often about monster heroes here Right. These are often guys on like three up saves five up ward saves like stacks on stacks Right. The only reason I left this one medium is because Eshin is Legitimately scary in the new book between the fact that you can use slink for this And his boys and like just you know throwing stars out the wang for mortal wounds just And throw mortal wounds at people like I I I have I have done this thing. I have not done this battle tactic because I've never used any book battle tactic ever not once but But I have accomplished this particular feat. It's asking me to do though. I would never bet on it Right But it's happened Uh Dormcast has one essentially exactly like this hammer strike assault. It's that basically the same conditions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Um The advantage here is like these are the killiest units sort of in the book and and they're doing a thing like The ninja rats are strong in this particular edition Uh fire fire more more pick an enemy monster and then destroy it with missile weapons from clan scryer Yeah, not the hardest thing Not the easiest thing it is what it is, right? Most people don't play easy monsters that you can just tip over like five up You know, you're not fighting a lot of side wars and crap like that. So again, you're gonna often be playing against toughish monsters It's it's doable. It's dice and so on And then crescendo of the disease choir three or more prayers chanting by different friendly clan pestrons priests are answered this turn I kept it as medium because Even though it is rolling three dice Um, those priests are if you have those three priests all doing it. They're basically all doing it on a two up Yeah, and they've got a way to get reroll as well. They do have a way to get rerolls. Yes So like normally I hate those kind of things that are just like roll some dice And if you don't get a three up you fail Because I think that's actually really hard. Like it's just an easy one to drop for no reason Like it's out of your control. You didn't you did nothing wrong right and It is possible to commit no mistakes and still fail Uh, and and so like that's that makes for a hard battle tactic So, yeah, I could but but in this case it's it's often enough that you can do it It's still right because you have so many bonuses backing you that's my point Yeah, right. Let's build if you're leaning into clan pestons priests Not that we're seeing a lot of people do that But if you're doing it I could I could see this one being on the easier side Like everybody's going to be on a two probably with one reroll In the turn or or rerolls period in the turn you pick this so yeah like It makes it so like yeah, I guess you could fail on just the dice, but now it's so unlikely, right? It almost moves to easy in that case right Okay All right Yes, indeed. I'm glad. Thank you, Emily Uh, all right. One of my favorite quotes of all time from any piece of media. Yes All right, sylvaneth Tyler I'm curious about your feelings on this one marked three of them as medium I eradicate trespassers harness the spear paths and march to the forest lords Because Two of them are dice release lay things right And like the classic again the nergal tree that keep people away from your your terrain And the kill people with your your monster or whatever a killer monster with your monsters Anybody who's ever swung with a spirit of dirt who knows well that he could just destroy the world or do zero Um, so that's that's why that's still medium and then harness the spirit paths that it's it's again You're slinging somebody forward and then charging on a nine. I am aware that spights warm hive exists I am aware of that thing, but you know, did you cast it? Did you teleport them and so on and so forth, right? It's still just roll a dice and you might fail Um, the two they're hard are balance the cycle Pick one an immune within 12 inches of an overgrown terrain feature or friendly awakened wildwood You complete this battle tactic if that unit is destroyed by an attack made by a friendly sylvanuth unit that was added to your army this turn Watch out for those tendriads that lady vines has been on the table vents Yes, that's that's pretty wild Oh Yeah, I'd love to hear some stories of when sylvanuth players have actually gotten that one And then that seems unlikely Yeah, and then unleash guiren's wrath pick one friendly sylvanuth wizard on the battlefield You complete this battle tactic if a spell successfully cast by that wizard or an endless spell summoned by that wizard destroys an enemy unit this turn not just like Damages them or slays a model Which would then very much turn this into a different thing but like you had to cast the spell successfully And then actually kill a unit a unit Yeah, it's probably on the harder side, but I'm sure this one gets achieved periodically Sure, obviously like war again. How into the corner did we get right? Like did we get the war song revenant and did he do his mortal wound bomb? And did you roll high and was he in position or did you unleash some in the spell against a very weak unit? Like again, you know, I can construe it But it's it's not easy like this isn't something that just like you're gonna complete It's generally less dependent for the most part. It's saying I'd say for the most part you're running a war song revenant in null routes With the season of war to give you the the re-roll And you've got spell singer as well, you know to sling the spells through your wildwood And yeah, like you need to kind of do all those things to make this possible Sure, not necessarily even then you're back You know like they don't have good mortal wound protection and or they didn't set up in such a way that like you just aren't gonna aren't likely to pull this off and So not playing women of your or zinch that could potentially just say no Yeah, Kairos one up, but yeah serif on the spelling you at any range like, you know, yeah, exactly Exactly like there's a there's a lot of trips on this Right. Yeah. Yeah So, yeah, these are definitely I would not put Sylvanas list among the top of the easy category in terms of faction battle tactics to go after I suspect quite a few players are getting harness the spirit paths Yeah, because they're doing about a mage foot plus two to charge or the and or they're doing the fights from hive That's still a pretty common direction with list builds A balance of cycle. It's definitely a bottom of medium. No doubt Yeah, yeah a balance of cycle You know Is the main thing that comes to mind there right a laryl pops her unit her summon unit out Maybe it's three bows and you do some combo damage play and you hope that your bows hit and kill something Sure, that's it. I mean you chose a laurel. So okay Rough from the beginning Maze that actually incidentally Uh, there've been some players that went 5.0 over the last year with a laurel list like very it is quite impressive No, I like I don't know. I'm just I'm just beating up on her because it's fun Sure. Yeah, that's that's yeah. Yeah, you know, I turned her into my archie on so You you yeah the poor girl Uh, let's keep going. Let's talk zinge All right zinchi zinch three mediums too easy. This is another bad one. This is like this is very bad Uh call for change you complete this battle tactic It could be summon a lord of change to the battlefield this turn The only reason I didn't mark that one is easy by the way When there's a whole sub faction that can just do this with a zero interaction and so easy is because it's sub faction dependent That's the only thing that kept this one from easy Right because otherwise you're generally not summoning a lord of change. You're summoning blue whores or You have to like you you're literally sitting on all your points up to 30, right? Right, but be I am aware of guild of summoners. I am aware of its power if you're in guild of summoners That one is easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? It instantly goes easy, but because it's behind that sub faction gate That's the only reason I left it as medium right so Just to just to defend that that choice because I had to balance it like I'm trying to think Across the whole span of the army, right? What kind of gates do we have here? Like that's a heavy list dependency Um And then mass conjuration Successfully cast three spells and none of those spells are unbound Like again, it's medium. It's a thing. It's very achievable in this but getting the three spells can be actually tricky in a couple different ways There's lots of people who can potentially unbind you in the game. It's a naturally interactive thing. So sure, right? And then nine fold dismantlement Like killing an enemy unit is always medium by its it's definition And then the two easy ones Reckless abandon pick one friendly mortal disciples of zin's unit more than 18 inches from all enemy units You complete this battle tactic if that unit completes a charge move Nor for most enemies for most sorry armies. I would absolutely mark that as medium instantly Right, but when you have dusty dice and you can just go I complete my charge no interactivity I'm going to move up to You know 9.4 inches no redeploy option. Then I pick up a five and a four. I complete the charge We're done I did it Give me points like When we had agendas in the past Then that was based on successfully charging. No one ever failed that agenda. It just happened. Sure, right Yeah, and you got silver tower with a gunt seminar soul screen bridge Yeah, just soul screen really has a massive range nowadays In terms of board presence with with the bridge. Yeah, pop out of that thing and destiny dice it So 100% very easy Yep, and then tides of anarchy you complete this battle tactic If you gain control of an objective that was controlled by your opponent at the start of the hero phase And you have nine or more friendly models than six inches of that objective when you gain control of it That should probably also be medium just because that but it doesn't Like I think probably that should be medium like if i'm going to be super fair here Like I think I might be partially inconsistent to be to be hard on myself Let's let's do this. Let's just let's just do this to to kind of Uh, well that should probably be like that Over here because it is taking something you probably have to fight people You have the models and then let's let's do the right thing here to hold the number consistent We're going to move this guy down and we're going to do the thing and say, you know what? Forget that forget the sub faction dependency Call for call for change is easy. It's when when you have a whole sub faction that can do it There you go. I'll reorient myself slightly. There you go Like some number there you go. It's like that. But again, two easy is not good. One easy is bad It kill it off kilters the game Two easy's now we're into like we're we're in the red. This is very dangerous And uh from my money these mediums are on the lower ends You know, they're absolutely they're not on the high ends like this is five very viable ones, right? Yeah I was surprised at how high zinches In terms of their set of battle tactics basically all being viable One yeah exception depending on whether you're in the sub faction to kill the summoners. Sure Yeah, I didn't realize they had so many good options quote-unquote good options. Yeah, exactly Good options Yep Okay, uh sons of behemoth That's behemoth. No, that's not right. That's very funny that I wrote that My brain was thinking that way sons of behemoth. There we go I know what the army I play is called right there. Um Four mediums too hard and even that is really pushing the definition of medium Okay Because they there's huge list dependency here massive massive list dependency Like that's mine. You have to have the appropriate giant wrecking crew You you don't you just need to have a giant who completes the monstrous action, but that's fine Who is near them? Um man man skittles is that really what that's called when I read that is that is that for real? Man skittles Does skittles mean something different in the uk is that like an established word? Did somebody write man's skittles in this book like is skittles an existing word? That that the candy just pulled off of Like that blew my mind Yeah, I'm looking it up It's what's the I want to know the entomology of the word skittles uh But anyways hilarious um Very hard it requires a war stomper And it's very hard to do because it relies on the dumb hurled body ability Which is like a four up and then another four up to achieve it and they have to actually suffer the mortal wounds Really it's on four ups That was on two ups for that thing depends on what you're rolling against like it's it's it is a It's a die roll that has to equal Uh double their wounds characteristic, but you have plus two to the initial role Okay, so like again depending on what you're going against you may have a greater or lesser chance Then You have to roll a four up to successfully do the mortal wound With the hurled body. Okay to like hit your target Then they have to suffer the mortal wounds, right? I not have mortal wound protection Oh, yeah, yeah, so, uh, very hard um Fury of the Titans is fairly medium. You just need to execute the three um The three monsters rampages. It's not the game to be played when you've done that you've executed all three uh Either deliberately or just just playing the game or going after battle tactics. I'm curious both You're deliberately pretty rarely have I done all three because earth earth shaking roar It's like I you have to be in the right fights because remember earth shaking roar is only useful against very particular enemies Like there's a if they're if they're playing an army that just doesn't have any of those troops You just can't do it Right, like it only works against a certain type of enemies and then bee scrapple and colossal slam are both three up rolls Right, but you only have to carry them out. You don't have to actually successfully do them That's why I still kept it medium. If you had to successfully do them This would be hard yeah Okay, because then not only would you have some soft list dependency where like a bee smashes the one who does this Well, but then also you'd be behind multiple three up rolls Okay Splat is incredibly stupid And hilarious you have to kill him with rocks like, okay Yeah, let let me throw some rocks at these guys who are already neg one to be hit or uh, who potentially in the coming season As we all know aren't even targetable Yeah, uh great time great time Sure, there is a battalion you fit in say that you you'll be okay. I'm sure And then colossal violence is uh You have to just titanic duel somebody Um, and and then kill them like the only reason it stayed medium was because you have to kill them Which sucks because you have to titanic duel them. So hopefully you had like two giants so somebody else Can roar them Interesting. I had never looked at these before with Sons of Bamette. So I'm guessing fear of titan is the most viable consistently. Oh the fury of titans Again, probably not just because I mean maybe Maybe I think wrecking crew is the most Uh doable because you can just kind of have multiple giants near Faction terrain and just blow your monstrous actions trying to kill the thing Like they have a big base. It's not that hard to be within a couple inches of it But again, there's a lot of armies that don't have faction terrain Right, exactly. Yeah But like if you are that's probably the most medium because you just need to like Be near it Yeah, and then and then roll dice. You have multiple shots on You have a shot on the goal there. It's it's still a three up or whatever to do it. So If you happen to have a gate breaker, it gets easier because he gets bonuses to it. So Um, yeah, but yeah, it's it's not None of these are easy not even close obviously I didn't mark any easy But a lot of these are just like this Sons of bad modest frustrating because it it lives by the thing I hate the most which is just it's stuck your your battle tactics are stuck behind random dice rolls that you have no control over That you will just fail like just oops just You didn't roll it's one die roll You needed a three you rolled a two Right it'd be like if you fail you get one prayer in your army every round And if you fail the prayer you lose two victory points to be like well, no one will do that prayer Right imagine like imagine if you had a prayer it was like It was like if you roll this on a three up some benefit on a two or one you lose two victory points No one would ever cast that prayer. Nope. Yeah, no one would be terrible and and that's what these are Hmm Right I haven't seen many play Krakenator seems to have disappeared from list. I haven't seen that guy around in a while sure because he's uh Not very good like he kicks and that's all he does No All right lumeneth Five mediums one hard The hard one is pick one enemy monster on the battlefield You complete that this tactic if that monster is slain this turn by attacks made by any friendly star shard ballistas Only the ballistas Like again, you don't have to do all the wounds with it. It could be a weakened monster You could soften them up with archers with sentinels first But then what if your sentinels pop off and you more to wound the thing into the ground and accidentally and then your star Shard never fires and in itself is not the most reliable wound machine and so on and so forth, right? So It's hard And then the other five are all just pretty pretty standard medium stuff Like do some endless spells which I've watched people fail, you know that kind of stuff I could see conservative the courts being achievable pretty consistently Again, obviously with the combo damage Combo range damage strategy that lumeneth employs And then yeah, sentinels obviously is a classic example of a unit to maintain their aether quartz reserve And finish off a unit to get that Yeah, the the reason can serve aether quartz in my mind very much stays medium and we can argue about how medium it is It's requiring you to announce that you're picking an enemy unit And a friendly unit And then kill them without using your aether quartz, which is fine. Like that's not actually a cost That's what's so stupid about it. The thing is completely incidental. It is. Yeah, right But the what makes it medium is it's kill a unit Sure, right. It's it's and anytime you're killing a unit, then there's The dice can fail you they can roll out of the box on their saves You know things happen, right? On the enemy for more spell successfully cast with different friendly lumeneth So you got to have four different ll rel units cast a spell successfully You got a lot of spellcasters. Yeah, I mean everybody in your army is a spellcaster, so it's not really that hard Yeah, you're like an army of wizards. So, you know But but again, it's spellcasting. It's a naturally interactive phase. You can fail those rolls people can unbind you And so on right and tech. Let's get do it all by himself because it's different friendly units So at least they put that word in there Yeah These were again a little higher than I realized with lumeneth a number of these I generally agree with your assessment on the medium range for these but they're quite Viable in certain matchups when it comes to the the medium range So hish made manifest is quite viable You're usually going to have at least one if not two endless spells in a usually two endless spells You're going to have a spell portal And ruin a petrification if you're a techless build If you're not techless builds, you'll have ruin a petrification and possibly something else if you want to achieve hish made manifest Then yeah, blind the enemy and conservate the core should be pretty doable in a lot of their list Yeah, it's funny that this army which does not have like which is it doesn't seem to want to be like a Go out and kill the enemy army has three different go out and kill the enemy battle tactics Right It's feel like iron jaws battle tactics like if I just scrubbed the names And sort of wrote iron jaws over top of appropriate things you'd be like, yeah, that makes sense Um, okay S2d Another one that's just all over the shop all over the shop. Yeah Three easy two medium one hard. Okay In throw to chaos and champions of chaos are both medium like one is only a move one the championship cast is only a move one effectively But it it requires like Very particular way you're using your army that is not Yeah Yeah, it's not like super likely so it's it goes in medium Yeah, right. It doesn't It's not generally going to match the list building patterns of slaves of darkness Right In throw to chaos is your classic kill a unit one. So it stays medium, right? Like this is the classic Medium example here unit near something make unit not be near something cool But then you got these three easy's just hanging out lust for power Roll on the eye of the gods table for someone like in the turn you select that that will be an automatic thing Not even counting the spell, right? Like you should just know that's going to happen for the most part Like you have but you have so many ways to backstop it to make sure it does happen Right Yeah, yeah for the most part there again Uh There are strong magic armies that you might play against that could turn off the spell option to do this Sure So you then have to set up the normal option to do it right like right your dude on an objective or kill something Take an objective kill something like you there there are so many ways to success There's so many paths to victory on that even though there's dice rolling It fell into easy because you have two backstops to achieving this right from any one thing you're trying to do Right But Yeah, like eight out of ten cabalus games so far. Yeah, the lust for power is round one It's just 3d6 it and have the master magic for the reroll and blah blah blah have undivided to protect against turning into a spawn All that i'm not a scamming player. We've established that I don't like risk Well, it doesn't matter if you turn into a spawn. Who gives a crap you just had to roll on the table I'll take my hero. Thank you. No, I understand. I'm just saying like to get the two points You literally just You literally just have to roll on the table. Who care? Like turn into a spawn. You're still successful at this. Okay, that's true. That's true Uh, that dude can like turn into a spawn and obliterate himself on the spell cast and you know, it's not gonna matter much Um, as long as he doesn't straight out kill himself Uh The march of ruin pick one friendly saves darkness unit that includes a standard bear with an insorcial banner and is not within enemy territory You complete this tactic if it is holy within enemy territory and within three inches of any other friendly units Yeah, so easy I mean like insorcial banners are raw power. You will often have units that have them There will often be a unit of chaos knights They will almost always have somebody with them and they just have to walk from point a to point b And you complete this That's it There may be a uh, yeah, there may be something in the new season Uh, these things called aspects of the champion that uh could make the power pair combo easy without mounts To to execute this particularly if you have a soul screen bridge some way to teleport. So yeah, this looks forward to reading all about it and after after the pre-order date on the 14th And then run them down charge with three units classic like yeah, okay sure Yeah, every game i've gotten that one as i'm sure most laser darkness players have as well Uh And then your hard one iconic class pick one enemy unit that is a priest or a totem and then destroy that unit Uh, sure. Okay. Why not like here? You have the classic destroy an enemy unit, but it's going to be of a very particular type Many armies don't even have priests. Many armies don't really have totems Uh, or their totems are very hard to kill. It's just uh, like yeah hard Oh Is your position that you do not like this kind of design categorically hate this. Okay. All right hate this Three easy this is wildly unbalanced What what i'm referring to is iconoclast. Oh iconoclast an example of that category of battle tactic that we've been discussing Where you have these Yes, because it's relying on the enemy army to do something It's not your list building if it was like with one of your priests or a totem in your army Go do a thing march to a place roll a die. Sure. It'd be fine, right But like it's it's relying on what you happen to be playing first off as a just initial gate right And then and then and then and then and then right Slaves of darkness is pretty high up there in my opinion having. Oh, yeah played quite a few games Yeah Now you've got some games in if you ain't five for five and if you ain't five for fighting Uh, what are you doing with your life in in s2d? Like you should just Be at five battle tactics more or less universally I can't imagine the world where you can't go five for five with s2d and that's a problem Yep, okay ogre maatribes Uh, they have four medium and two hard Uh, the mediums are unusual in how they are like eat your fill and savor the taste Are both weird because it's they're they're every unit in your army doing a thing right but uh At least they're timed correct like the eating is at the start of the combat phase each said like nail your charges It's they're they're late game ones. They're probably on the edge of being hard, but like they're doable okay Avalanche of flesh. I hate it. You got to do actually achieve ten or more mortal wounds You know, if you charge with ogres Sure, again, if you're in like beast claw raiders and you have a bunch of four up dudes and you Land multiple charges that are all good roll charges Then sure you'll probably get there, especially if you're charging stuff that doesn't have mortal wound protection or whatever, right? but It's just it's very list dependent very situation dependent very enemy dependent. So it's like Eh, it's it's a lot of good a lot of bad and then let them loose um, you got to do a bunch of monster scram pages high High list dependency Right, but certainly for the the people who are running monster truck lists. It's it's cheap Winter take the and boil their bones are just They're outrageous who wrote this That's what the other winter is that the d3 mortal wound thing that is the d3 mortal wound thing at the start of your hero phase Okay, where you have to roll, uh less than the current turn It's not even an automatic d3 mortal wounds Now lovely Because I believe the now here's the very funny ironic part about this one and your reference to earlier things Hey woes in the chat so he can correct me. I think The curse of the everwinter is a start of the hero phase trigger Okay Uh Hey woe can backstop me if I'm wrong. I did not go look at that to see if I'm correct on that I just I remember it being so If it's a start of the hero phase trigger And you ever accidentally completed this You get what I'm saying? Yeah, you could stack it so you roll this first And then say I'm choosing winter take the I completed it Which is ironic because it would make it then an automatic thing Right I personally hate that crap, but like I get your perspective on it, but I would rather us have Order rather than cleverness I don't know. I don't really value our our space to be clever with this stuff I would rather just have very clear sequencing when especially when it comes to battle tactics I hate that battle tactics are not the very first thing you have to do The start of your turn you could do these a number of these other things. It's stupid Oh darn it. Gareth is right. He got me. You have to because you're Yep, because you have to pick one enemy hero So if you killed them with grasp you couldn't then pick the one because they're not a good point Right darn it. Gareth. You got me. Okay, then it is super hard and insane. Yes, you can't pick a hero that's already dead Um, you're all you're both right. I'm I I have a mistake So in the 1% of 1% times where that would have been actually achievable. Nope never mind It's just completely stupid and insane And then the other one requires you to kill an enemy hero or monster near your mall pot Um, no one walks near your mall pot anyways ever So, um You know, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? Yeah, um, so that's a rough list ogres have a rough list Like even their mediums are like only mildly medium, especially for for depending on the army construction I don't know much about ogres. I still don't look that battle tone. So eat your fill save for the taste I mean, I'm imagining those if you're within three inches of an enemy you're eating If you're with it, if you're not within three inches of an enemy you're hungry In other words, eat your fill your entire army's in combat. Save for the taste. No one's in combat. Okay That's it Okay, so like it's It's they're they're they're Ogres have a very medium to rough road is what I'll say with their battle tactics You know, you compare this to something like s2d or doc or zinch and this is comical It is comical Right, but they do get easier as the game goes on. That's what kept them in medium and not hard Because like in turn three four five it becomes much easier because there's just like a lot of things have died right, so There you go Okay And that's very funny. Hey woe says I once failed it because I killed a unit with impact hits That's hilarious because yes, you can play this tactic. I do like the timing sequencing on it It's almost right if at the start of the combat phase every unit's eating So if you kill the unit That's not a penalty unlike some of the other ones we looked at Right, you just have to be eating at the start of the combat phase within three Just don't roll out of the box on your on your your impact at mortal wounds. Yes All right Beast of chaos and now this is where we're getting into the tomes celestial stuff Yeah To like here we only have three. Okay problem I have identified a problem. Why are some people getting six with like three Easy ones and two medium ones and just choice galore, right and then some people get three or two What what is going on here? We just couldn't bother with this Hmm Uh, I will say these are also written in a completely different format than the ones in the in the Battle tones by the way These have like narrative and stuff around them In ways that the battle tone ones don't Okay, like they have paragraphs of narrative. Okay, right like paragraph above the rules. Yeah Yeah, they're just like completely formatted and written differently, which is which is weird It's like there's two separate complete Groups writing these two things Did not talk to each other Okay, uh shadow the hurt stone and fury of the wild both pretty medium one is a classic kill an enemy thing and one is a Like run real far thing. I guess is what I would say, which is something you do pretty reliably in this army um And then wrath of the warp wilds just like the nonsense summoning thing You have to pick their objective then Control that objective contesting it with models that were summoned in with primordial call like a boy Okay So, you know Yeah, no hard definitely hard Yeah Yeah, I don't know if they have bonuses to charge As familiar with peace of chaos Not really Some not a ton. It's it's whatever like yes. No, maybe so is the answer like it depends on what you're talking about And what's your list is You know, some people like you can use summon stuff like you could summon the cherry very cheaply It has a built-in reroll to charge so But like why is there are only three But why though sure? Yeah All right blades of corn All medium just Shockingly medium right in the middle three of them Relatively in the sweet spot This is one of their favorite designs. Yeah, the pick one of you within nine or 12 And then get the bowtack units destroyed. Yeah, I feel like we've seen that the most relative to anything else To lay the sorcerer one of me here on the battlefield with wizard completes the hero's slain Okay, travel skulls pick one for the unit Let's act eight or more enemy models or slain by attacks made by that unit during this turn Yeah, all medium not too bad. Can I say something? This is some of my favorite battle tactic to sign. I was gonna say I don't hate these Yeah There are three They're all viable. They're all things you're gonna want to do you need to decide There's still a skill test because you have to figure out when is the appropriate time to do them There's counter play You can again you'd have to know this exists But you can just stay away from the skull altar until the person makes it an issue where you have to come get them right um They can protect their wizards Right, you have to know when you're going to hit a unit hard enough to actually kill eight models out of it And you know, like there is some list dependency there um Like there's a there's a there's very medium um They feel very much like corn Mm-hmm They are all completely viable at different points the game if you know when to kick them It's a nice simplicity. I can elegance to them. Yeah This is some of the best design they've done in battle tactics No nonsense nothing too super hard all on flavor It's good Right. I don't know what to say like way to go whoever wrote the blade to corn article You did good. You did probably the best anybody's done thus far with this bad concept. So Thumbs up Cities only have two And I wanted to put like a star next to their easy Okay, because it requires you to take like it's very easy Uh But it requires you to have a unit of flagellates And i'm like is that That is the highest list dependency cost That we have discussed thus far That is higher than taking cities of sigmar units in stormcast Taking flagellants They can't be that much For unit of 10. I don't know how much they are. Oh, they're cheapest chips, man It's like 70 80 points. I remember where they are right now, but yeah, they're they're super cheap but still it's uh It is hilariously funny to me that that that all of the units all of the viability and design space In cities of sigmar, right and we couldn't be bothered to come up with more than two That's funny thing number one, right And number two It's funny that we when we did come up with two We were like flagellants. That's the unit sure Not state troops classic state troops, right like not only, you know, not Handgunners or crossbowmen or spearmen or halberdeers all the classics of the empire line Not playing on the power pairs of like having a dwarven lord with your dwarven hammers and they do something together or you know your your Dark elf lord and your dark elf troops doing something together, right that the the whole design concept of the book Power pairs in the cities doing different things Nope flagellants a appendix Like a not a non excised appendix Sure from a mostly dead sub faction Insane Remembering if this was one of the early tom specials It feels like it, but I don't know if it was or not I think it was kind of in the middle because it had the fun thing that lets you bring your griffin back Okay, uh like the the the um monster Excuse me the the the the monstrous enhancement to bring your griffin back Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know All right Let's look at a summary. I I stopped there because I didn't want to go pull every tomes celestial And I knew this show would already take forever. Okay. Sure. Yeah um Let's let's talk summary Yep This shows this is the full list so we can look at it all next each other, right? So from all these total battle tactics, you see as you know Variants in the number here even amongst the people who got books For no reason Oh, yeah, so that's the inch only five each interesting, right? Um, there's more variants than tomes celestials. They didn't pull most of the tomes celestials are threes again three reason There is some there's like there's a decent amount of easy scattered around But it's very condensed within a couple of armies daughters zinch s2d Right within uh cities Giant asterisks having one And nergal having one right And there's lots of hard Right on there as well and you can see how inequitously this is distributed Mm-hmm to me This is the problem with this whole system Like this is where the the house of cards falls down if you don't believe any of the foundational issues that I talked about earlier the increase in you know, sort of like game knowledge you have to have to like Uh, the people need to keep at the top of their dome If you don't believe that like this reduces interactivity if you don't believe that it Uh, all those things That I talked about earlier. Okay I think you look at this chart and go there's no way this is This is correct This is a fundamental victory point system of the game that decides winners and losers, right? And it is wildly imbalanced Yeah, how is that not a problem? sure um Yes, the Well, just another thought like hypothetically well the last season you said you felt you were somewhere north of four out of five battle tactics particularly for experienced players but top-in tournament players you were saying five out of five, right? Sure Let's say it's four out of five And that means you just got to get one faction battle tactic and on that front How many of these would you say? You pretty consistently get one battle tactic. I mean it seems to me like it's most of this list At least get one pretty consistently. I think that's true. I think that's true Yeah, so I think there are some people who can't Like we did review somewhere even getting one would be a problem sure Right Uh, and boy, what a rough time for those armies like I guess you just don't get to win Many tournaments with those armies because like there are tournaments because you mentioned this being used as scoring Which I'm not totally against it does have some downsides to it, but I'm not against the concept I think it could be a good way to score But like if your first place in most of those tournaments that are using any kind of scoring system like that You're 25 for 25 Yeah, period like if you want first you're 25 for 25 if you want to go Be at that top list So I guess you just don't get to do that anymore with those armies Let's say it's three or four armies on here that don't reliably have access to that one or fail it very easily right Like I guess sorry about your look Yeah, or war clients potentially stands out again, you know, we we discussed the cruel boys one or potentially with some shooting Maybe you could get that one Over 10 models not have or get 10 wounds or more on enemy Units and take 10 wounds or less But the work war clients list is pretty rough It's really rough because again that six is a lie that should say like like really if we're being straight here With this it would look like this It would have a two in parentheses next to that Because for the most part you have access to two of them in any given individual army you're playing Like you literally just cannot choose the other ones. It's not they're bad or they're hard. It's you are barred from choosing them Right, you may not select them There's also yes, I absolutely Sean there's list dependency all over here like big time Some of these having like massive list dependencies up So it's constraining the field of what you put in your list if you want to be competitive It's creating a lot of weird inequity and who can sort of achieve the five out of five marker and who not, right? um You know Keith roger statement when you play stormcast want to play scions and don't want to run dragons Yeah, I'm sorry that you just basically Don't get any battle tactics then great point Keith. Yeah Yeah Right Yeah, um like this is so wildly imbalanced And and this is the problem um particularly if There if there's anything that plays with L tactics beyond what we've seen Uh spoilers for next week Or yeah, or a preludes next week That's that could be very dangerous In terms of amplifying inequity Yeah, so Yes Now, yeah, man. Yeah I want to say here I I totally have seen like obsidian crane and I haven't been on the exactly same page But I completely agree with the point you just made which is this is the problem with them doing these haphazard things Like you know across things instead of getting it all designed at the start having a firm concept of like what are the guardrails and these things? What are we doing? How many do we have how many like what should what kinds of things should they be? Right and just doing it all at once setting it up setting it up the start and then just and then going right But because they just rolled and and like some of these were designed under early 3.0 Some of these were designed under different ghb's with different assumptions about how easy they are Right, like there's all sorts of different underlying issues here Yeah, I'd love to hear more from I'm gonna reach out to some toos because like I told you benz. I expect Most gts 40 players or more Will run faction battle tactics and I'm still not certainly not convinced. That's a good idea I mean, I think it number one it will be done because I think by a number of toos because that's how the game is designed to be played like them's the rules Yeah, this is the game. We're playing. Uh, I'm playing the game how it's supposed to be played Therefore I'm running these things But I'm not yeah, I'm still not clear on what they're adding as opposed to just doing the ghb You know, one of the other problems here is this will be really difficult to suss out of the data to regress out of the data And understand where it's having an effect It's just there hidden Underneath right it's this it's this lurker in the depths That's just like causing problems, but being very hard to then disambiguate it from the the rest of the data to know What part of the game it's affecting Do you understand what I'm saying? Try to say it differently Okay, like it's causing changes to the system It is affecting the environment for all the reasons we just talked about it's making some armies perform better Some armies become harder, right, but it's gonna be very hard to suss out That it's the battle tactics doing that to establish a chain of causation To to even establish correlation is going to be tough because you have the skill of the player Like you have all the normal stuff the skill the player the the Battle plans that were used the nature of the tournament the armies that were there like all the normal problems exist for reverse engineering data Right, but then even if you pull out like what people completed as far as battle tactics go It's going to be really hard to make to ever make that leap from correlation to causation of like this is the challenge Because it's so hidden underneath the surface Yeah, okay that makes sense Do you know well, I would guess that games workshop has data on this Do you know if the honest wargamer that is t-sports stats network? I mean, I could just reach out to rob Ziggy and ask them but if they actually have data publicly about this, maybe somebody knows and I just haven't seen it They do they have they have battle tactic data. Yeah. I don't know about army battle tactic I know they have battle tactic data. Yeah, I kind of wish that I feel like I don't know There's some potential that my prayers are wrong And this stuff right at the top you said that you you gave the four, you know, little north of four out of five To what degree is that actually true? I mean it feels true particularly again. Sure But yeah No Let's be curious to what the what the data says. Yeah to what degree One of the things that occurred to me. Let's let's go here to outcome There are real winners and losers in the army battle tactics. Agree I'm sure Okay These may become quite important in the new season new battle tactics dependent right like again come back next week and we'll see Most of these books have too many and that that creates a problem in and of itself Because it's clear to me that when they're forced to design six They just miss the mark um It's it is too much one of the to go back to the fundamentals Of this There is only so much design space that they can explore with these And We went through all of these. Look how many times we said this is a variation on i4ni This is kill a unit standing near a thing. This is pick a hero or monster and kill the hero or monster right Like there are just fundamental concepts you're playing within this game Yeah And they're just this actually isn't a very deep well And you can probably design this is ultimately why like i'm sorry to keep going back to the fundamentals, but here we go like There's probably six to eight good battle tactics you can design in any given season variations on themes Right The guy standing near the thing kill the thing the all this stuff right But I don't think there's a hundred variations on these you can design in one season that are all good I just don't and this this this little journey Proved it to me like I can make 10 different variations of kill the unit standing near the thing Right so fine. Okay Right or kill the specific type of unit Or whatever. Yeah Mm-hmm But when you when it's clear to me that when they have to make six they just run out of design space almost immediately Like that runway is so short Sure Right If this was if they had limited it to three or one like you had one army battle tactic Like you often now are getting one army heroic action or one army unique enhancement, right or one army Uh monsters rampage or something right effectively Then then cool like we probably could have nailed some good design and lived in the space where they all look like corn And it kind of all clicked for me when I did the corn near the end of the presentation when I was putting it together because it's like, huh It really stood out to me. Yeah as as well. Yeah, there's only three of these. They're all in theme They're all on flavor. They all have some fail states and interactivity, but they're all doable Okay Just kind of you don't just feel elegance, you know, like yeah kind of subconsciously when you when you see when you see something And yeah, it really hits the mark 100% right and I think if I think six is just too many. It's just too much space Right because once they start trying to push out they really quickly drift into easy and hard Yeah, that resonates Let's I mean, let me just let's let's let me reverse the skin. Let's go back here. Okay Basically Now, you know once what when you look at this Everybody who has at least five right Has three mediums Except the daughter's a cane who has zero mediums because everything in there is just dominant either. It's super easy or super hard, right? So like This space was there We just over designed it Yeah, so and I mean like if we if we harvested the best three more or less we'd be in a much better place This wouldn't look like this Yeah, I think that's true. It still does not address in my mind the ultimate goal Which I do tend to be aligned around We have been achieving far too many of these things over the first two seasons Uh already, you know said I'm not seeing that change sufficiently in the upcoming season So, yeah, even even that doesn't sufficiently get us there one battle tactic might make a dent That that can run into some challenges You know if you have a terrible battle tactic in a terribly designed battle tactic, right? There's probably going to be some inequity, but at least constrain this constrains the space Hopefully you'll have higher odds of having the net be pretty good And then you're just looking at one plus the ghb Yeah, that feels like a much better world to be in in terms of the ultimate goal here Sure. I didn't do so but like I said, I didn't pull all of the tomes celestial because they were kind of hard to go put together um the um You know so like but but again soul blights one of those ones they have three um which is they're um they're like one of them is probably uh uh medium Two of them are probably hard honestly or or drifting toward it. So, you know soul blight doesn't have the best road here either honestly Um So, you know Yeah, I mean this is this folks. This is the thing. Yeah, this is what I've been rallying against what do you think about uh gt that says In your list building submission pick one battle tactic You can use that Paternment I don't think it solves the problem because doc's gonna pick their easy one All the people with easy still pick their eases and then everybody else I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm just trying to improve the situation Does that I'm not sure it improves the situation is my point that that's what I'm saying like Because most the time you like would it be better? Sure, but everybody's just gonna pick their easy one Yeah, that that's it that we just fall to the lowest they were already doing that tyler Like the one they were trying to complete at most points in most games Would be the easiest one anyways Yeah And that's a pretty knowable thing Right Yeah Interesting. All right. Yeah You know like if you're asking me how as a to do you respond to this information we've presented where this is a real problem in my mind How do we fix it? I will give you Two answers Okay The first one is you just don't allow these in your tournament. That's it Yeah, say book battle tactics aren't allowed next Okay, so I mean I I feel pretty strongly that tournaments that are making that call Going to not only be the exception, but that they'll take quite a bit of grief I'm a lot of players that decision I mean We made that call let for example, right? We made that call a vault wars out Uh, but we were certainly the exception not the rule Yeah, yeah tournaments last year. Yeah, look peer pressure is a hell of a thing. Okay But I mean there there were it wasn't an it wasn't much of an issue, but there were players Who were surprised by that decision? And for for various reasons wait, I mean fair enough, right? I thought it was the right call at the time I'm less confident. It's the right call Al not because I'm still not convinced I think we made a pretty compelling case These things are not doing us any favors not helping the situation Yeah, I mean my answer is just like I think it I think it's an I think it's a bad and it's bad design and you can say they're not allowed as the to so you should do so It's more or less that simple Right, I understand that's not the tide or whatever, but Sure I've always been a tall poppy. I don't know what to tell you man If you're a to be an individual, you know Are so so that's one. Did you have something else in mind make them worth less points? Like again doc is still gonna laugh all the way to the bank Uh score in there twos, but at least you're doing something you're pushing in the right direction You know make that make the book battle tactics worth only one point Or worth less in some kind of scoring matrix or whatever right like your book battle tactic doesn't actually count toward You know your your however, whatever the victory points in the game is translating through to your your scoring matrix Make them worth nothing or less in that Something like that right like all those different steps can happen in whatever way you want like I don't care where you drop the hammer on the less You know what I mean in the chain of events but De-incentivize them like classic economic incentives, right make them worthless and hence people are less attracted to them Okay Yeah, let's go food for thought. Yeah, we did this so there you go um Yeah, so I mean that's that's where I've come to I I've had a lot of opinions about this for a long time and I I hope this Illuminated people as to why I feel the way I do look. I know this is kind of a downer of an episode Just because it's just me talking about things. I think are mad But like I love this game right now. I think I am very excited like no no spoilers We'll talk about the ghp next week, but I am very excited about 2023 and warhammer That's what I will say like I am beyond excited for 2023 and warhammer. I think it's going to be a Banger year. I will put my flag down that this will be the best year in aos history for aos okay I hope I'm not proven wrong, but we'll see And Uh This to me is the biggest proud nail just sticking up out of the deck We have we just installed a new deck on the back of the house. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous You want to go out there? You want to have a barbecue? Sit in the sun, you know, it's you got a little fire pit. You got the grill going you're roasting some some locally sourced You know organic weeners on the fire. It's perfect You got some shish kebabs going maybe you get that smell of sizzling peppers and onions. Mmm Mmm Everything you want a summer day, right? And then as you're walking out there your barefoot steps on this giant Hooked nail just up out of the wood of your deck the one thing you look across that perfectly smooth flat finish surface and there's just this one nail just like And you just keep right on it. That's what this is to me Right. Yeah That that's it. I'm hearing my friends. It's one of the reasons I I like I'm so up in arms about it, right? It's because you notice Oh, you notice that one nail So anyways, all right, cool. Anything else, Tyler? No, I'm glad we finally did this. Yeah, hopefully it's been a useful exercise. I certainly found it valuable Yeah, kind of get a better understanding of what the actual landscape is right now with these things Yep Yep, uh, so hey everybody out there. I hope you enjoyed this. Like I said, I knew it was like a little bit less of a Fun show. Don't worry. Look look next week fun times ghp review. Very excited Uh, so come back then don't forget to hit like. Hey, it's so easy. Just click that little button It's like less than half of you have hit like so far. What's what's going on hit the like button It costs nothing and it helps support the show and other people to find it Subscribe if you haven't already really appreciate that if you want to support the show There's lots of ways you can do so in addition to just hitting those and clicking buttons There's a patreon down below you can join that that's focused on hobby and taking your next step on your hobby journey Review and feedback and things like that. Well, there's also a merch store 2023 has started. We're going to bring out some new designs this year. So look forward to that and As always follow us on the socials that kind of thing. Oh, that's also up there. It's all up there Um, we'll follow that for for if you want to know show announcements and things like that. Don't forget Yeah Don't forget the new signature series paints for monument are out and available They might be sold out right now, but I don't know. Maybe maybe not. They'll they'll be back in very soon The the production lines are running at full steam. I'm sure And uh, because that's how that's how production lines work, right? They're all still steam driven And uh, but thank you so much for watching everybody really really appreciate it As always, thank you for letting thank you for indulging all of you watching for indulging tyler and I On having this almost three hour deep dive discussion on this most We do it. Did we hit three hours? Not quite, but we were pretty close on this most like, uh This most detailed of subjects. So thank you for sticking with it For all of you out there. We really appreciate it. Welcome to 2023 more fun for the rest of the year As always We'll see you next wednesday