If you didn't play it, your opinion is going to be disregarded. I would recommend playing a game first. If you're too salty about the issue of game balance, why not use equal amounts of units, or perhaps one of the unofficial game balance guides that have popped up on the Internet?
GW have produced half a game. The fact that people are willing, at their own expense, to write the other half of the game does not make me less annoyed that GW didn't produce an entire game in the first place.
Yes, I applaud the effort that goes into producing these fanmade fixes. But I can't help but feel that the people making them might be better served by finding a company whose game designers are willing to do their damn jobs.
Having played many games, I can say this review is spot-on. It's essentially impossible to balence the game.
I've played about 20 games, and imbalance was only an issue in the first 3, which is actually an improvement over my experience with 8th and 7th edition. Beyond that, we understood how it was supposed to work and everything's been alright.
Balance occurs through counter-play, players are supposed to alternate placing models/units on the field, reacting to what their opponent places with a unit they believe will be able to deal with the new threat.
It is a casual game, and there's a certain amount of good sportsmanship involved with that, which is pissing people off because they can't hide behind a points system anymore. Before, they could say "Oh well, I rolled you completely and you had no chance of winning, but we both brought 2000pts so it must've been balanced". Now if they rock up and throw 10 Nagashes down against a newbie's single hero and monster, everyone knows what kind of person they are. Honestly, it sounds like you've read what reactionary keyboard warriors have said online and not actually played the game as it is meant to be played.
Very accurate review. There are a lot of battered GW housewives that will take anything GW gives them and ask for more, but they get fewer and fewer with each new revelation.
...Doctor, there are people who are simultaneously interested in "competitive" play and building the most powerful armies they can, and who are *not* total jerks about it. They deserve the same support, the same fair shake, as every other non-total-jerk in the playerbase. Your thesis falls at the first hurdle: namely, that it assumes, by default, that *any* "competitive" player has to be the sort of person that would do that.
Now, the "points" issue is a different matter. Yes, Warhammer's rules have been broken garbage for years, surpassed by countless other wargames. If you sincerely believe that the solution to this problem was not better rules but *no* rules, a laissez-faire attitude of "I dunno, think of something yourselves," well... I can't prove you wrong, but you've failed to refute his argument that GW put out an incomplete product and expected you to finish it for them.
See, here's the thing: I consider myself a casual player. I briefly dipped my toe in FNM-level competitive MTG and found it not to my tastes. I have never attended a WHFB or 40K tournament. My regular opponent and I had a soft ban on Skaven for something like seven years because we found them just too powerful. I am not some hardcore tournament addict who would cheerfully field as many Nagashes as would fit into his deployment zone.
But that doesn't mean that, when I ask "How large should my army be?", I want to receive a shrug and "I dunno lol just buy as many models as possible" in return. Nor does it mean I want the rules to incentivise bringing those tons of Nagashes, with the burden of preventing it lying on the gaming group rather than the people writing the system. It doesn't mean I want up-front balancing to depend on me bringing seven of every countermeasure in case someone turns up with more of a given thing than I had expected.
And it especially doesn't mean I want a rules-light, beer-and-pretzels casual game to charge me AU$65 for two plastic models are you kidding me
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This isn't casual gaming. Casual gaming is supposed to be affordable. I don't know what this is.
10/10, well articulated.
I've been a longtime fan of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, I have played old things like Hero Quest and well... this game sucks. It's not even a game so much as a random jumble of rules and bad jokes that someone must have thrown together after a severely long bar-crawl, then immediatly send to the printing press. I simply cannot explain to myself any other way how this was created.
The review is absolutely right here, especially when it comes to lack of force organisation, lack of balance and abundance of nonsensial rules. All in all verdict: don't go for it.
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Games Workshop is dead to me now
Age of Sigmar is probably the least functional product Games Workshop has ever released. It is just incredibly, unimaginably bad.
As a gaming product, while I applaud the free changeover PDF's and core rules, it is weak. There is no such thing as a pick up and play AOS game, because there is no way to balance forces at all. Equal Wounds don't work, because a Savage Orc and a Night Goblin both have the same Wounds value, and there are no points values, unit size limits, unit number limits (like the old "0-1 Black Orcs" restriction) or force organisation charts, meaning that getting a fair contest will require psychic powers or a degree of expertise that the game will not reward you for earning.
As for the changeover rules for your old armies, they're terrible.
Let me put it this way. You know how, when playing a game, occasionally jokes emerge spontaneously because you're having fun? AOS tries to force that by making several units, including both special characters and some regular units, encourage you to dance, shout battlecries, pretend to ride a horse, have a moustache, bribe your opponent to throw the game...basically, it takes the jokes you may have made while playing the game, when you were having fun, attempts to make you make those jokes, and then expects fun to come out of that. They are trying and failing to force memes. It is embarrassing to read, and I actually like yelling "WAAAAAGH" when charging with Orcs.
This is without getting into game balance issues. For example, the High Elf Repeater Bolt Thrower needs to be rewritten so it doesn't look like it gives you 72 shots per turn. Night Goblins have no incentive to turn up with any melee weapon other than nets because nets are functionally spears with 3 attacks each, and while the warscroll says "a few" have nets there are no actual hard and fast limits.
I will confess that I haven't actually played a game yet. That's because I'm not sure how, given that I cannot, more or less by definition, construct a fair army for it.
I'm sure there will be fans of it, although probably not enough for GW to survive its incompetent management. But to me, this is Warhammer: Bad Youtube Poop edition. It is taking a game I loved and turning it into a not particularly amusing joke. Avoid at all costs.