In contrast, wound count optimizes models with higher saves
But it really doesn't, some of the most devastatingly powerful tactics I've seen don't rely on Saves. Using just Seraphon as examples, there are four powerful general builds you can do and
one of them uses high saves. The rest use either all out attack, a domination of the movement phase, or both. And while I think that they're all pretty much equally powerful, if I had to rank them gun-to-my-head, the Saves army would only be the third most powerful. Third! Out of four!
n this system, save and wounds are factored in an algorithm to balance so each side to be equal. Sure, some units have the ability to cause mortal wounds but that is why wounds is factored in addition to save. Also both sides can have mortal wound causing units. In AoB you get 12 forest goblins, which may cause as many as 24 mortal wounds. In comparison, a unit of 3 spirit hosts may cause as many as 18, 5 paladins may cause as many as 22, etc. My point is, both sides can have ‘Line Breakers’.
There are two things wrong with that. For starters, not all Line Breakers are made equal. Spirit Hosts, for example, are not reliable for Mortal Wounds because they have a pitiful chance of activating them, and even then they're weak enough that they do little damage anyway. The point of Spirit Hosts are to be hard to kill with the Rend immunity and summonability, they harass you, not kill you. On the flip side, Forest Goblins are just as weak in terms of Mortal Wounds and are without the Rend immunity and with a weaker Save, they only become powerful in large games where they can take a full synergiesed army and can rail off the damage. Retributors are extremely brutal and hit the hardest, but they're also slow as all hell, allowing a good enemy to kill them off before they reach a defensive line, and they require synergy to become effective.
Which leads on to the second problem with this quote, it's not just about Mortal Wounds, it's about all abilities. Because there's no way an algorithm can figure out the potency of something so incorporeal as the many many synergy abilities,
it would require somebody to go through every ability and min-max their potential in order to figure out how powerful these abilities can be, and to do so without bias. That's pretty much impossible.
Models over 10 wounds are most commonly the most powerful modes on the table, the core of synergy and/ or potent wizards. This is why they are 2 scrolls.
Commonly maybe, this is not a concrete rule and isn't common enough to really warrant basing a system around. I have four armies. Discounting the
two armies where I have no models that are over 10 Wounds, both of my remaining armies count models with fewer than 10 wounds as their strongest models, and only one of them has a model over 10 Wounds that's even in the running for the strongest and I really would not count it as my strongest for that army. Furthermore the thing that makes these smaller Wound models stronger are their
abilities, which I covered in the last point.
As for limiting the number of models - every system is doing that. In regards to abilities and synergy, these things simply cannot be balanced, so AoB doesn't try. GW has done a great job of making all the warscrolls fun and useful to a certain extent. As for this ‘handicapping minor mooks’ well, 30 skeletons have 91 attacks. They can easily be 3+ to hit and can attack twice when buffed by a necromancer. Who’s to say what’s minor and what’s not?
But don't you see the inherent flaw in this? By trying to balance the warscrolls through an algorithm while ignoring the effect of abilities, you're making some units unplayable. Say I wanted to choose between the Skink Priest and the Skink Starpriest, right now it's very heavily debated which one is better, even I don't have a real clue and I just go for the one that I personally like the feel of more rather than the one I think is more powerful because they're so evenly matched, I don't think that one really is more powerful than the other. But as soon as this algorithm looks at these two and assigns them different points values because one has higher numbers without looking at the abilities, the cheaper one instantly becomes the more powerful warscroll because you're getting the same power for cheaper. At the same time, the more expensive model becomes inferior. And that's a minor case, my favourite example is Kroak vs Starmaster. Kroak has higher numbers and a greater damage output, but the Starmaster has far more utility through more fluid abilities. This puts them as stark equals, it's why I count Kroak as the same number of Wounds as the Starmaster even ignoring all my mathematical reasoning. But systems that use algorithms take one look at Kroaks higher numbers while ignoring the Starmasters more powerful abilities, and instantly make Kroak waaay more expensive than the Starmaster, often two or three times the price! This makes Kroak way to expensive to field and relegates him to uselessness, somebody you only play for a casual change while leaving him off competetive lists. Seriously, take a look at any 8th Edition tactica and you'll constantly see things like "a cool character but too expensive to be worth fielding," it's an epidemic that we've only just escaped from and you're trying to bring it back, only worse because the old systems at least paid attention to abilities, even if they were flawed in how they did so. It's why I like Wounds, the fact that we have a mostly standardised Wounds system for Warscrolls results in a balance in the game. Guard and Warriors are equally as powerful when factoring in abilities and synergies? Great, they're also worth one Wound each so they're exactly the same, allowing you to pick the one you like the most rather than the one that's got a better price. Same goes for Heroes, as the standard Wound count for heroes is 5, monsters are often 10, and ridden monsters 12. And even when something is more expensive, you still get a good deal because they're harder to kill, so Orcs or Knights are mathematically worth twice as much because they're twice as hard to kill exactly once you factor tactics in. Think of it like a MOBA where both sides bring different characters to the match but both have to cause the same amount of damage to the enemy objective, only instead of a Nexus or other objective, it's the army as a whole that you need to damage. The Wounds system is so shockingly balanced, I'm almost ready to start a conspiracy theory that they always meant to use the Wounds system.
As for your Skeleton comment, they hit well but they're also total glass cannons who have Saves equal to a wet paper towel, they die en masse really quickly. And really I'm hesitant to call them cannons too because they lack any Rend, or any abilities that improve their utility, they're very bland and basic in what they can do. Even our Saurus get bites too. The Skeletons are not strong, they're meant to win through numbers because they all suck in terms of power. Like a slow zombie horde in media.
Undead are not limited to summoning 'small units', they can also summon Terrogheists and Zombe dragons. Even Spirit Hosts are extremely effective units. Seraphon can summon Carnasaurs and Bastiladons. I personally play Undead regularly and have won many games without ever needing to summon. If allowed to summon, my games would be terribly one sided when against an army without summoning options. I personally don’t enjoy one sided games. AoB is for people who feel the same.
Because I apparantly need to spell it out again for the millionth time, monsters are not a solid base for an army. You need infantry and a lot of it, Zombie Dragons and Terrorgheists cannot win a game against a good opponent because the enemy can shut them down in seconds with a Crippler or Monster Hunter and it's not even hard, I could do it in one Hero Phase and still have the rest of the turn to tear into your Skeletons, who die en masse due to their worthless defenses and then you're not allowed to summon them back fast enough to give me a challenge. And I did it without summoning because here's the thing,
summoning is not a game breaker! Maybe it's an advantage, I wouldn't know because there's nobody else at my level at my place who plays a summoning army, but I've been pushed hard by non-summoning armies like Beastmen and Bloodbound, the one time a summoning army threatened me was with a tactic that used no summoning (it was the Ripperdactyls diving with the Shadowstrike Starhost, which is again an ability that you're not considering when balancing,) and I regularly use summoning armies with no summon limits as essencially basic training to test out my new ideas and tactics for my non-summoning armies like Stormcast and recently my Fyreslayers, so I know that if there is a divide of power between summoners and non-summoners it's not that much, so inhibiting general summoning is a bad idea. Handicapping monster summons and what-not is fine, I think, but the summonings of Skeletons, Zombies, and Warriors leaves those units pointless as soon as you're up against a smart opponent. I can tell you with a very clear certainty that a great number of the players here could, without summoning at all, wipe the floor with your inhibited summoning armies and it wouldn't even be a challenge, where unlimited mook summoning would even the odds without causing an imbalance.
I have heard that Daemons, Seraphon and Undead are ‘weak’ and need summoning to be strong and for their identity. As a player with all three armies, I completely disagree. Many others disagree as well and are simply not playing AoS because of how one sided it can be to play these armies. In my experience so far, at least 80% of all players I have met would not be opposed to simply banning summoning altogether do to its inherent flaws. AoB was developed to give more balanced options for summoning to allow all kinds of players to enjoy summoning in a more balanced way. I really enjoy summoning as an ambush technique, as outlined on the 'Summoning Summary' page, and would not be opposed to allowing a summoning pool when playing games against other armies that can summon.
It's not the armies that are weak, it's the mooks. Sure the elite mooks like Guard and Knights are strong, but Skinks die if you look at them and Warriors are geared towards horde aggression and lack any powerful defense or low-number attack. Undead just have weak-as-hell mooks in general but have a great focus on getting that high summon to get in as many new mooks as possible in order to keep up the constant attack, it's the same as how they worked in 8th and will always be their thing because that's a unique and cool style for a whole faction. Daemons are the most powerful and would be the hardest to argue for allowing unlimited summoning for, but at the same time several armies have
abilities that deal severe damage to Chaos Daemons, making the Daemons an army that is powerful against half the armies out there while weak as hell against the anti-daemon armies, making them a risky army to field competetively because of this status of being either really powerful or really weak depending on who they're up against, and summoning only amplifies this interesting quirk in a way that I think gives some fascinating depth, making them more dangerous to the armies they're good against but having no effect against the ones they're unprepared for, while never quite making them unbeatable to the armies they hold an advantage over and never quite incapable of beating armies they're weak to, even if one side holds an advantage.
So there, entire paragraphs and even text walls explaining why you're wrong. I appreciate that you're trying to help the game, but you're not seeing the grander picture and are not taking into account how exactly the game works, nor are you spending the necessary time building it properly because making a cheap algorithm is easier than the (quite understandably hard) task of doing it all by hand. If you want to make a balancing system, you need to spend time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were any good points systems. You need to take it slow and consult with people who know what they're talking about, multiple people who know what they're talking about because second and third opinions are always great, and really dedicate yourself to making this ruleset. Otherwise its cheapness is going to be felt in a very negative way.
