by Peter Atkinson

This week we sent off Warscroll Builder in its flaming boat, rolling down the river to Valhalla. Hundreds of thousands of nerds spent millions of hours pumping billions of reinforced Zombies into WSB over the last few years – it’s been a huge part of our hobbies, and therefore our lives, since 1st Edition. And it will be dearly missed, but never forgotten. Vale.

Now far be it from GW to leave a dick left unkicked, and as sure as a rejected insurance claim following a natural disaster, they immediately followed up their farewell to Warscroll Builder with the great news that you can now pay them even more money to keep on writing lists for AOS. Yay, where do I sign up!

So what are the options? Are we all just going to sign up to Warhammer+ like good little citizens, or is there a better option out there?

Today we’ll take a look at this from a few angles:

• What’s the value proposition of signing up to WH+?
• Can you continue using the app on the cheap – or for free?
• We’ll explore the alternatives that are out there currently
• This includes an initial user review of New Recruit

Ready? Let’s go.

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Option 1: Pay for Warhammer+

WH+ is clearly a strategic play from GW: for evidence, look no further than the heavy mention it gets in every set of financial statements, which is completely out of proportion to its current cash value to the company. Top Brass are desperate for WH+ to succeed, which is presumably in part because it’s a pet project they’ve hitched their wagon to, and in part for its (potential) value to the business: GW owns some incredibly cool IP, if they can demonstrate to the financial markets a serious ability to monetize that beyond selling little plastic soldiers, then the sky’s the limit. It’s also future-proofing the business for a potential negative impact from 3D printing, and while I personally think that threat is overblown (which is a subject for another day), GW’s C Suite would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t at least strategise around the threat of 3D printing. Nobody wants to end up like the proud owners of a huge DVD factory.

There’s only one problem: WH+ is a useless sack of monkey shit. You’ll cop grief for comparing the video on demand offering to Netflix or any other major streaming service, but of course the comparison is natural – it’s a comparable product category at a comparable price, so of course we’re going to compare them. Nobody forced GW to dump a tiny library of shit content on the world at a premium price – they can wear that one themselves, thanks very much. As an AOS player in particular (who has close to zero interest in 40K), the near-absence of AOS content 3 years down the track is nothing short of a cataclysmic failure on GW’s part.

I wanted to like it – I signed up – I limped along with it for a couple of years – I cancelled. A journey no doubt familiar to many of you. With my GW customer hat on they did an abysmal job, and with my GW shareholder hat on the people running the project have serious questions to answer.

So why did I sign up at all? For the promo model, obviously. The first one was an Orruk which I’d usually have bought anyway for say AUD $70, and that’s a big chunk of the annual fee covered off right away. The second year minis were of no interest to me but I forgot to cancel, so I sold the exclusive 40K mini online to recuperate a chunk of the money I was down, cancelled it and that was the end of the my WH+ journey.

So that’s what the WH+ business ultimately boils down to: pumping up subscriber numbers by bribing them with plastic toys. Like those ’00s era Xbox and PS magazines, where you bought them for the shiny cover disc full of demos and complete games, and the actual magazine itself barely got flicked through before it hit the inside of the recycling bin. An initiative to prove that GW can monetise its fan base beyond cranking out plastic soldiers has – thus far – demonstrated the exact opposite. And instead of improving the core VOD offering and maybe giving us some actual AOS content, they try to strong-arm us into signing up by tacking another service behind the paywall – and here we are.

So based on where the official Storm Forge listbuilder ended up by late 3rd Ed, how did it stack up to the competition? It improved as it went along, and though it never added wound count (one thing I loved about WSB) it did have a really pretty UI and output. I never found it as slick for building lists and especially not for adding units to battalions (you’re going to make me tell you which heroes in the Warlord battalion are in the small hero slots? Really?). It felt like the app created some “Busy Work” for you, but it was admittedly nice to click straight through to the warscrolls, and it did look really pretty.

Pros:

+ Output is clean for both copying and screen capping

+ Cost is effectively a lot less if you actually want the free mini, or sell it online to recuperate funds

Cons:

– Moral bankruptcy of allowing The Man to strong-arm you

– Pumps yet more cash into GW’s gaping and insatiable maw at a time when most of us can ill afford that

– Rewards GW for anti-consumer practices. And that’s not how you train a dog

Now you might argue that several of those Cons are repeating the same point, or at the very least they overlap, but that’s important here. I can’t tell you that you or I individually refusing to sign up to WH+ will give GW a bloody nose (much less force a U-turn), but I can only live my own life in a way that allows me to look at myself in the mirror every morning. I believe that integrity is important, and I’ll be fucked if I’m getting bullied into signing up for the Listbuilder – if GW want my money, they can make me want to sign up with better content.

At that point we can talk about it again, but until then, I’m good thanks.

Option 2: Continue to use Warhammer+ on the cheap

So can we keep building lists in here without coughing up for a sub? Maybe.

Importantly for tourney players like me, you can make one list at a time in the app for free. So if you’re playing in a tourney, and the official app is the required list submission format, you can at least knock up the list in here and then submit as required. This includes potentially doing the actual tinkering and list writing somewhere else (which we’ll come to soon), and then just bashing it into the app for list sub. I could see myself doing that, but convenience always wins in the end and I fully understand that a lot of people will end up saying “Fuck it” and signing up to do it all in a one-stop shop.

The other possibility is land-banking a whole bunch of lists in that early window after the app first launches. As per the screenshot above, you can build as many lists as you want for the first few weeks before the curtain slams down. Feedback I’ve had from the 40K community (whose app works on similar lines) is that once these lists are built and saved, you can still edit them afterwards. So what I’ll probably do is create a few dummy lists for every faction I’m interested in and park them in there, ready to play with as we go along. Hopefully the community steps up with something else that’s better, but if not, at least I’ll have staked out some ground to work in.

Option 3: Battlescribe

A despicable turd, used only by refugees from 40K who aren’t aware that AOS has (much) better options. Friends don’t let friends use Battlescribe.

Pros:

+ Better than pen and paper

Cons:

– Literally everything else about it

Option 4: New Recruit

The community’s next great hope – has its moment arrived? Is New Recruit the one?

You can find it right here: https://www.newrecruit.eu/app

There’s certainly been a lot of chatter around New Recruit this week. NR has been around for a while, but I’d barely heard anyone talking about it until this week’s announcements. From what I can gather it was already popular among the 40K and TOW communities; but in AOS, not so much. I play this game a lot, and I talk about it online a lot, and I don’t know anyone who was maining it. That’s not necessarily damning – the other AOS builders had the advantage of moving first to sweep up the market, and being hosted on official channels – but having played around with it over the last 48 hours (both on my phone and my laptop), I can see why it’s struggled to gain great mass traction in AOS until it was the only show in town.

New Recruit: The Good

The site is optimised for both phones and laptops, even if it arguably looks a bit “busy” on both:

This is quite important, because a lot of people like making lists on their work computer during break time – it was always one strength of WSB over the AOS app. So that’s the first good tick for NR.

Adding units by battlefield role is also pretty straightforward, and they’ve copy-pasted entire screeds of rules in there for your convenience:

And once you’ve finished crafting your list, the output is sublime:

There are a few options for how you want the output (pdf and so on) but this works pretty nicely as far as I’m concerned. The output Copies to Clipboard well for list submission at an event, and screencaps beautifully too. Big fan.

New Recruit: The Umm…..Less Good

But it’s when we start getting into the detail that it gets a bit crazy. While the attention to detail in here is admirable, I’d argue that it sometimes comes at the cost of a smooth user experience. Let’s tap on that eye icon to look at the iconic Frostlord on Stonehorn in all his glory:

It’s like this for every unit – when you tap on the Butcher for example, it will reproduce all sorts of crap on there, from every possible spell (in the Ogors book plus the GHB), right through to the Nullstone items that are actually illegal if you take a Wizard. This is just too much. It’s not that it’s actually difficult to use – at the end of the day, it’s mostly just hitting various check boxes – but there’s way too much going on visually, and I found that the dropdown boxes in WSB were much nicer to work with as a user.

Once you’ve got your core units locked in, how about we put a bit of zing in the salsa with some Allies or Universal choices? We know that Allies are gone for 4th but RORs are around, and it wouldn’t be a shock to see other Universals creep back in over time. Well, it took me ages to find Allies (they’re within “Child Forces” if you’re wondering) and I’m sure there’s some technically-correct reason why they’re buried in there. But as a user, the fact is that I found it way more intuitive to find Allied options in WSB:

I’ve mentioned before on the blog that list writing is a major part of the hobby for me – that day-to-day rhythm of thinking about army lists and messing around with ideas is (for me) the difference between a game and a hobby. This is probably the area where I found the most room for improvement in NR, because it’s just not that quick to use.

What you see once you’ve added a bunch of units in there is functional, if somewhat cluttered:

But if you want the 1000-mile view of the full list, especially to help with visualising your battalion slots, you will have to jump through hoops just that little bit more. Battalions are changing a lot in 4th, but you’ll still need to keep an eye on how many of the right units you have slotting in under each hero. You can eyeball this directly within the builder page, but it’s a lot of scrolling back and forth (as it was in WSB); so what I would normally do is bring up the full list view and just run my eye up and down it in there. If you do want to get that bird’s eye view, it’s gone from one click in WSB to three in NR. First world problems for sure, but it’s another little bit of friction that wasn’t there before.

Data integrity

The devs for NR have advertised the fact that this site is their full time job:

Which is obviously great for them, and they must be raking in a lot more money than we are. It’s also potentially good news for us as a community, if it keeps the devs incentivised to maintain and update the site. AOS is a vast and constantly-changing ecosystem and it’s a huge undertaking to get this information accurate – and keep it that way. How responsive they prove to be is going to be critical.

In the short time I’ve been mucking around with this app so far, I have already found glitches and errors. This isn’t me going out of my way to find problems and pick nits – these are issues that presented themselves as I’ve been using it, and I’m not reviewing the product in good faith if I pretend they’re not there.

First thing I noticed was an apparent data integrity issue, whereby NR assigns the number of models to a unit, and it seems to think that a Gobbapalooza has 2 models (rather than 5):

I wondered whether it was calculating that wound count based on 2 or 5 models, so I removed the unit as a test (to see whether it dropped by 6 or 15).

And when I did that, the wound count didn’t move at all. So that’s a bit weird:

I fully understand that AOS is a bloody big landscape, and mistakes are inevitable. With this much data, changing this often, it’s going to happen for sure. The main thing to watch out for is how responsive NR will be to cleaning it up – that’s going to be way more important than getting everything perfect first time (an impossible standard).

A greater uptake in the AOS community will hopefully incentivise the devs to fix this kind of issue, and they’ll start getting way more community feedback to help them get there, but just be aware and keep an eye out for this kind of stuff if you’re using the software as a player or TO in the immediate future.

New Recruit: In Summary

So for me, I’d say that NR right now has excellent functionality, but the user experience needs to be streamlined. Specifically, it needs to get easier to knock a list together quickly and mess around with configurations, including jumping in and out of the bird’s eye view of the overall list.

Where a good listbuilding tool really shines is tweaks and iterations: “Does this list fit? OK what about if I drop this unit down to one of those, can it fit now? Actually it does, and I can even put a small unit of these other guys in.” That’s where the joy of a good listbuilder shines through, and that kind of mucking around is just a bit too fussy right now in NR for my tastes.

Now you can say I’m being unfair here, because I haven’t gotten used to it yet; but the counterpoint is that I wouldn’t have to if it was truly intuitive. In truth I never took any time at all to get used to WSB. It was easy to use, from the first list onwards. It just was.

Pros:

+ Excellent list output formatting

+ Software in place and ready to go

+ Works well on both your phone and your laptop

+ GW rules text dumped directly into the app for reference

+ Motivated devs

Cons:

– List construction is less elegant than we’re used to

– Fussy to jump in and out of the high-level view to visualise the whole list

– User interface doesn’t look especially pretty

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Anyway. In my own case, I’ll be using New Recruit in the interim, but hoping that they make it a little smoother (or that something else comes along). NR is finnicky, but it’s functional, so at least we’ve got something good to work with there. And if they do manage to streamline the UI and prove responsive to rolling changes, I’d definitely consider signing up as a supporter, although I’m not quite there yet.

Oh, and I’ll also be doing that thing where I create a whole bunch of ghost lists in the official app, in the hope that we can edit them in future. Can’t hurt to have them sitting there.

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