From what I've read there is a little balance provided by the sudden death rule in terms of playing against a vastly outnumbering opponent but I am yet to play so I don't know how well it works out.
I do agree somewhat with Darknight though, even WH as it was required a bit of organisation to play a decent game. And this isn't regular warhammer anyways. I see this game as a chance to play simple games, and even encourages more narrative games which is kinda cool on some level.
The problem with Sudden Death is that while it purports to offer an easier alternative for victory I don't think it really does a lot for balance. Most obviously, with two of the options in Sudden Death you're reliant on your opponent to pick your target, and there's not really any point in their picking anything other than their toughest character/unit. Depending on the armies in question, Endure could easily be unbalanced in favour of the outnumbered player (an army of elite troops against a horde of goblins, for instance). Seize Ground is probably the least inherently flawed but it also runs into the problem of being rather difficult to defend against, since you only need to get a model to the right place with no consideration for how many troops your enemy has there, and with units being able to move potentially extremely quickly in any direction.
With quite a lot of the rules I feel like there's a good idea fighting to get out, but implemented poorly. Sudden Death is one of those. Really the Sudden Death conditions are budget scenarios, but without any of the other features that make scenarios really interesting or balanced. In common with much of the rest of the document it feels like a concept draft rather than a finished product.
More generally, while in any game you have to have a discussion with your player beforehand in order for the game to work, I feel like AoS requires much more cooperation between players in the pregame stage in order to be functional at all. In previous editions of Warhammer all you really had to
agree on was points values and the game did the rest of the work for you, even if it could be improved by further discussion and agreement about composition, scenario, etc. AoS doesn't really do any of that, which is one of the reasons I think people are saying it's not really a game. I guess it
is a game in the way that, say, poker is a game, and the bare bones and the winning hands remain consistent across each variant, but the rest of it is all down to agreement between players before the game starts. But even there there are established variants: maybe AoS will later have some published for it, but at the moment it really doesn't look like a finished product.
I'm inclined to agree that "narrative gaming" is preferable to "competitive gaming" (though nobody likes to lose and I respect that) and Warhammer was always a better fit with the former than the latter. But I feel that by making balanced competitive gaming virtually impossible by RAW, AoS has thrown the baby out with the bathwater - especially since they've also destroyed the background that previously made narrative gaming worthwhile and replaced it with a barebones setting in which nobody has any investment. Sure, people can build their own backgrounds, but if players are going to be expected to a large extent to build both rules and settings themselves, why should they pay to play your game rather than someone else's?
