by Pat Nevan

“Sirs, I believe the Penetration you refer to is known as rend in Age of Sigmar”

So with the recent, huge AOS 4 reveals in Dallas, Texas it was decided amongst the Craichouse writing staff that someone should do a review of the big streamed game of AOS and the task fell to me. Was it because I have the best critical eye and insight into our beloved game? Or was it because my colleagues felt it would be a good chance to wind up the old man, get him ranting and raving and dropping steaming piles of shit on the hard-working folks at Games Workshop? I think the Craichouse Patreons all know the answer to that one.

‘Say “One of the amazing things about 4th Edition!” one more time, I dare you! I double-dare you, Motherfucker!”

Anyways, before we get into the nitty gritty of the article let it be known for the record I have nothing personal against the commentators.¹ I haven’t followed GW much since Duncan and Peachy were a thing, so I really don’t know who these guys are. They have a job to do and it’s obviously to get out there, sell stuff and talk shit all the way up, and more power to them. If GW ever accepts my Archaon / Allarielle slash fiction for the Black Library I won’t be saying anything bad either. I’m criticizing the product not the people, even if one of my criticisms is that the style of presentation is fucking irritating. Good luck to these guys, they’re out there living a dream I never had the sand to pursue myself.

So with that disclaimer aside, the great big streamed Matched Play battle was a rematch between Nicolas Tassone’s LRL and Tom Mawdsley’s Skaven. They were the finalists at last year’s GW AOS Championship, so they are seriously top-flight competitive players. The game was commentated on by Paul Murphy, Adam Camilleri and Nick Nanavati who seemed to be getting into the Vegas spirit with shiny suits and cowboy hats. Annoyingly, the stream skipped deployment and got started with the first battleround, so on with my takeaways. Number six will shock you.

1. It’s a sales pitch

Duh! Thanks for the valuable insight Pat, how can I give my hard-earned money to the Craichouse Patreon? Well, hypothetical straw man reader, there’s a link at the bottom of the article. Obviously the whole thing is a sales pitch but it’s important to remember that there won’t be any honest feedback on the new edition in the official product.

The GW line is one of continuous improvement on a product that was already almost flawless. Presumably heading towards some final form of rules perfection. The reality is they have a business to run and a room full of rules writers to keep busy, and in some cases we are getting changes for the sake of it. Nobody on the commentary is going to mention that the new coherency rules suck. Nobody is going to pipe up that they miss Heroic Actions, regardless of what they are thinking.

Everything in AOS 4 is awesome and everything in AOS 3 was nearly as awesome. The same thing happens when a political party gets rid of its leader mid-term. Sure things were great under the last guy, but they will be even greater under the new Prime Minister. It gets a bit tiresome and I was praying for a hot mic incident were they cut to the commentary team saying “Jesus wept, what the fuck were we thinking with LRL Kangaroos for this, we are trying to sell this shit!”. It never happened. Watching the stream, like any official product, is a matter of not believing the hype, reading between the lines and making up your own mind.

2. The commentary was irritating

And then some. I get that they were trying hard to be positive, upbeat, witty, PG-rated, and were obliged to mention the full name of the actual product in every other breath. I’m here to give you an opinion on what that meant as a viewer. The overall affect was a sort of tedious slog where you were trying to pick nuggets of information out of a stream of inane babble. One of the guys seemed to know next to nothing about AOS. I think only one had played much of 3rd Ed. Not to mention they went at the job with the demented, chipper enthusiasm of Kryten from Red Dwarf. Now, Kryten is hilarious when he has Lister and Rimmer to play off, but wears pretty damn thin when you have three of him babbling over a three hour stream. If you don’t know who the boys from the Dwarf are, the fault lies with you and whoever did such a piss poor job of raising you.

Educate yourself, Smeghead

Personal taste comes into this and there is a slight possibility that the intended audience for the stream wasn’t embittered, middle-aged men desperate to know what was going to happen to the toys that give meaning to their otherwise hollow existence.² Still, it was damned annoying and a real slog to get through. I’m told that much the same thing happened on the earlier stream with the wrestlers playing Spearhead and it’s definitely something they can work on. Tabletop commentary can be pretty dire at the best of times and approaching it with the chirpiness of spokesmodels hawking rice cookers to pill-addled housewives watching morning television doesn’t help.

3. Lumineth were a terrible choice for a display army

Unless the intent of the Masterclass battle report was to reassure cheat-rule-loving, Order army fun-sponge players that they would have a forever home in 4th edition. In that case the LRL were an excellent choice, mission accomplished. The Sevireth / Wind Rider build doesn’t look or play anything like a ‘typical’ AOS army and it really showed up in the battle report which gave a sort of Huh? impression of the game, with the Kangaroos bouncing back and forth over the table until they were finally put out of everybody’s misery.

The increasingly manic attempts by the team of Krytens on commentary to talk up what everybody knows perfectly well is one of the most truly miserable play experiences of AOS was honestly a real highlight as the stream dragged on. On the bright side, no Total Eclipse or other command point fuckery was in evidence, so the LRL themselves do seem to be a lot less nauseous to play against, this side of their battletome at least.

Image credit games workshop

Sorry Krytens, insisting these things are fun 100 times won’t make them any less fucked to play against.

4. Reports of the demise of shooting have been greatly exaggerated

Admittedly Hurrakan Wind Douchebags probably wasn’t a great army to test nerfs to shooting with, but having watched as much of the battle report as I could bear, I really didn’t notice shooting being any less impactful. The Skaven Longstrikes³ seemed to be pretty impactful given that they vanished from Skaven lists quite a while ago and the Stormfiend shooting seemed to be taking care of a fair amount of business, despite the determined whining of the Rat Fanciers in the Craichouse Discord when confronted with a few minor changes to one of the most OP warscrolls in the game. Needless to say the Lumineth came out blasting in their traditional fashion with the normal results.

Rules credit Games Workshop

I didn’t keep a count of the number of times Covering Fire was used throughout the game⁴ but it seemed to be every time someone had a half-decent shooting unit that wasn’t in combat. And why not? With a cost of 25% or 20% of your available resources, it’s a cheap way for everybody to play Morathi and the Bow Snakes. If you were hoping that the miserable turd with the KO in your local gaming circles would go back to 40K and occupy himself with his natural pastime of quarreling with online strangers about female Space Marines, then you are probably out of luck. Which brings me to my next point.

5. Replace the batteries in your chess clock, this will take a while

The length of a typical competitive game of AOS has crept ever upwards over the journey, to the point where most tournaments set 3 hour rounds and routinely have time outs. It was hoped that AOS 4 would reverse this trend and while the jury is still out, given what I saw on the screen I would say long games are here to stay and probably getting longer. I don’t want to read too much into the streamed game taking over three hours (without including deployment); it was the first time around and so on and such forth, but it just doesn’t seem like a quicker game.

As the Krytens were at pains to point out on numerous occasions, in AOS 4 both players have something to do in every single phase of each turn. That’s fine in principle, but it’s a time sink if both players actually do something, never mind the time lost when both players think about doing something. Similarly the number of crucial decision points in the game around battle tactics and priority rolls hasn’t decreased, all of which add up to a hell of a lot of thinking time on top of time spent shooting and charging in your opponent’s turn. Maybe things will improve when we have a firm grasp on the rules but I think any advantage in time will be lost by giving every player the opportunity to counter-charge, counter-move, counter-spell in every phase.

It’s the regular opponents of Editor Pete and people like him that I really feel sorry for. Pete is the classic talk-you-through-his-turn hypothetical chin stroker. When you add the agony of listening to him in every phase of your own turn, plus his turn, I’ll be surprised if he survives 4th Edition without being stabbed with a 9″ gauge.

‘Say “Now, if I move up to here, lemme just measure that, [pause] 5 inches out, if I move up to here and you Redeploy (looks at opponent for visual queue)… If you Redeploy an average roll would make that a seven inch charge [pause]. But I have a command point [pause]. But I was saving that for All-Out Defense over here. Hmm [pause] I could do that battle tactic next turn though…” one more time! I dare you, I double-dare you, Motherfucker!’

6. It’s still Age of Sigmar

4th Ed is a hard reset with some pretty major changes but as Billy Joel once said, It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me. Once you get past the irritation of the stream, then the models, the table, the terrain, the chatter of the players and the background noise of the tournament room are all a balm to the soul. Still the wargame I’ve invested untold thousands of dollars and hours in. Still the game most of my friends play. Still the best gaming community going, and still worth the time and effort that we collectively have put into building it.

I can sneer at the shills of Games Workshop to my heart’s content, but they’re keeping the hobby I love going. You won’t see me being relentlessly positive or recruiting youngsters anytime soon. I can and will piss and moan about the state of the meta and the expense of the game, but it’s the cost of taking part in a living hobby. There’s 200+ people playing AOS at Cancon and 12 people playing WW2 fighter games.⁵ The simple truth is they’ve got their hooks in me. I’m reading the daily hype articles, working out my box splits and booking my 4th Ed tournaments. If you’ve made it this far they’ve probably got you too. Just lie back and well, you know the rest…

Just don’t think of the UK prices if you are Oceanic, you’ll give yourself an aneurism

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1. Except for the people who worked on the Khorne Battletome, obviously. ↩︎
2. Although we are a growing segment of the player base. If you bothered with the footnotes for this article, you will be one of us eventually. ↩︎
3. Jerseys, Jazzhands. Jonzes? ↩︎
4. In the modern journalistic style, I don’t like to let tedious old-fashioned notions of factual accuracy get in the way of the vibe of my reporting. ↩︎
5. Not that Achtung Spitfire! doesn’t rule, I’ll be joining you fellas one day. ↩︎

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