by Peter Atkinson

Back when I played video games, if there was a game I was hyped for (or wanted to be hyped for), I would read nothing but the most glowing reviews out there. I didn’t need to find out whether I was going to like it, or whether it would be one that I should purchase: I’d already decided that I did, and that I would. So believe me when I say this post isn’t for everyone: if Cities is your release, and you just wanna surf the hype, you might be best off skipping this article, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. If you love everything about the book then I’m not here to be a buzzkill, although you might choose to cycle back to it once the initial party is over.

What’s the problem?

There’s a lot to like about this book. It’s not just an army, it’s an entire ecosystem: you could play and collect nothing but Cities for years to come without getting bored. From a hobby viewpoint, from a fluff viewpoint, from a gaming viewpoint – the potential is endless.

It’s also a well-crafted on-ramp, with plenty for everyone from new players right through to the most high-end competitive tourney smashers. There’s a glut of entry-level tech like dumping mega tough bodies on objectives, or banging your opponent off from across the board with mortal wounds, that will make games easy to play for newcomers and 4-1s easy to achieve for filth chasers. But there’s also more than enough scope to craft something unique and flavourful, to express yourself with a meme build or find a new angle. The book is broad and ambitious and a great accomplishment.

And yet. I look at what they’ve done with it, and what keeps troubling me is that it’s just too much. It’s not even a power-level thing, or not entirely: while I do think Cities is an S-Tier book, it’s only one of several in that category right now. There’s a feeling that the game has got away from them a bit recently, with a step-change in the capacity of the most recent wave of books that was largely avoided in the earlier 3rd Edition books. Of those, only Gloomspite has really copped its whack so far, and I’m sure that armies like OBR, SBGL and now Cities are looking at points hikes and rules tweaks over the horizon.

So my drama with Cities specifically is not that it’s way out on its own as the most powerful army in the game, because I don’t think it is. My issue is that they’ve overdone it, the book is overdesigned and it’s going to take a lot of unravelling. Let’s take a look at some specifics.

Issues with the design of this book

1) They brought back rerolls

Who thought this was a good idea? I’m only one person, but I talk about this game a lot, in public forums like Twitter, in person and in private chats, and I can say with the utmost clarity that the player base was about as united as I’ve ever seen it in congratulating the consistent effort across 3rd Edition to remove rerolls from the game.

Every book that came out, you knew you’d get some cool new stuff but you’d lose your rerolls, and everybody was fine with that. From the universal (mystic shield) to the specific (Alvagr Rune Tokens), it was all going in one direction and the consensus was: great job, GW. Rerolls are at best game-cloggers and at worst game-breakers, so replacing them with modifiers or proccing effects was healthy, efficient and widely praised as such.

Well if I was happy to praise GW for removing rerolls – and I was – I’d be a hypocrite if I wasn’t equally quick and loud to call them out for caving and bringing the bloody things back. If the change in direction was sad in its own right, the execution is even worse: rerolls for a shooting unit that procs mortals is the worst way they could possibly have done it. Urgh.

2) The game doesn’t need Rallying in combat

There’s been plenty said about Rally over the last couple of years, and although I’m (personally) broadly in favour of Rally, it’s had to be quite heavily nerfed and restricted to a cap of 10 wounds. Initial Rally was fairly benign but of course the Rally creep started near-instantly and accelerated from there, because they just couldn’t help themselves, ending in a pretty stark cap on Rally gamewide. What the game didn’t need was new ways for Rally to piss people off: even as a Rally apologist myself, I can’t make a case for Rallying in combat being an improvement to the AOS experience.

Probably the best argument in favour of Rally was that it was a soft counter to shooting, because it reduced the effectiveness of removing wounds from a safe distance. So it rewarded charge and tag, and technical play. There are multiple rules in this book that breach that covenant, which by its nature reduces the scope for technical play.

As with a lot of these issues, there is still some counterplay – it doesn’t reduce counterplay all the way down to zero. But it doesn’t have to eliminate counterplay to reduce it, and that’s enough to say that the game is a little bit worse off for its existence. I can only guess that this bullshit was written before the nerfs to Rally had to be imposed, but it does shake my confidence in the process that anyone thought this was a good idea.

3) Ethereal is usually a bad idea

GW really needs to get the memo on this one. Remember when the Ethereal Amulet was the only artefact everyone wanted? And then when Anvil of Apotheosis came out, and showed they thought Ethereal was worth a laughable 20 points in Matched Play, and again it was the one thing everyone took all the time?

They should have taken the hint that they were chronically undervaluing the opportunity to ignore all rend, and not by a little bit. And yet there they go again, slapping it liberally into the SBGL book, but this time Super Ethereal so it only ignores the bad modifiers. Man, we all make mistakes sometimes, but I’m not being wise after the event here: I can guarantee you that there’s no way I would have signed off on that ever being a good or even acceptable idea. And whaddya know, Neffy had to be nerfed. Everyone who’s played this game for a while could have told them exactly how that would play out.

I don’t like Pha’s Protection, I think it’s a mistake, and I think there are loads of units that have no business whatsoever being Ethereal. It’s one thing in Nighthaunt where the army and its save characteristics are designed around it, but history shows that when it’s à la carte tech that you can slap on anything, it’s usually too much.

4) It’s a tech jambaroo

Cities have got a lot of stuff going on that we haven’t seen before. They have a spell to apply infinite rend to their own units, which has made Hoarfrost and its rend -3 look quaint pretty quickly. They get to shoot in their opponent’s shooting phase, for fuck’s sake – that’s a new ‘un.

So why, with all of their own unique tech, did they need to steal from other armies so much? Why do they get the Ironsunz countercharge, without even needing to commit to a subfaction? Why do they get to move directly into combat out of phase, Khorne style? Why do they get Ogors’ charge mortals? It’s just letting the kids eat ice cream for breakfast, and while they might think it’s great in the short term, it’s not winning you Father of the Year.

5) Bloat is back

Remember when Warclans came out, and everyone said how good it was that they stripped back spell lores and Enhancement tables to a handful of meaningful items each? Well again we’re faced with a choice: now that those tables have swollen back up to and beyond the classic standard list of six, are we going to be consistent and say that’s a bad thing, or are we going to be hypocrites about it and brush it off?

Eleven subfactions and a whopping eight spells in the Human lore is bloat. Give every army that much candy, or take an axe to it, but be consistent – and I vote for pruning it back, every time. Which is exactly in line with what most people have been saying throughout the edition so far.

I could keep going

I could do this all day. I don’t like that the Fusil Major can snipe out unit leaders and break coherency from across the table – I believe that should be rare, and reserved for abilities within 3″ only. I don’t like that the Steam Tank has Stonehorn charge mortals, and a 2+ save, and enhanced shooting, and good melee attacks – we’ve already got the prototype for what a heavily-armoured warmachine looks like in the Mortal Realms, and that’s the Ironclad with its 3+ save and crap melee profile. What they’ve done with the Steam Tank is just Mary Sue to the core.

I don’t like that they’ve (superficially) built in trade-offs to make units interesting and challenging to use, and then immediately driven a horse and cart through those same trade-offs. They’ve betrayed their own design work with easy and automatic shortcuts.

Your shooting units get decent armour saves, and completely ignore rend (yuk), with the restriction that if they move they can cop rend like any other units in the game. So they’ve tried to make the units thematic and interesting to play, with important decision points as a skill test for the players, and then thrown all that out the window by making it preschool-easy to move and still stay Fortified.

It’s how you start off with a clear design philosophy for Duardin – that they should be tough but slow – so you give them a good armour save and Battleshock protection, sitting on a 4″ move. Then next minute you’ve got them zipping around at 7″ (faster than Aelf books), with good wards stacked on top of those armour saves, so you’ve gone from interesting to idiot-proof. And if you don’t think the difference between 7″ and 4″ is significant, your wife disagrees.

Closing thoughts

Back when I was a kid, you listened to music on CDs, and you knew that a new album was going to be crap when they made it a double album. It was always an established artist who was too big to say no to, and it was always self-indulgent audio masturbation that just needed a bloody good edit.

Having someone to push back and swing the axe is the difference between a timeless work of endless beauty, and whatever the fuck this was.

I want to like this book. I do like this book. Healthy Cities of Sigmar makes for healthy AOS: my favourite Black Library novel is City of Secrets, the new models are sick and this faction will bring people into the game. Cities make better poster boys than Stormcast and I want people locally to play them so we can get some campaigns going. But there are parts of this book that do them no favours – there’s not one big reason why it’s overdone, there are fifty small ones, and it was all so bloody avoidable.

The process isn’t working, so there’s only one thing for it. Every time GW releases an Order Battletome, they need someone outside the clique to go through it with a big red pen and scratch out about 20% of the sugar. I nominate me.

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