Just curious about summoning as a whole (New player coming from 40K). If I summon 3x Kroxigor's for 15 points, do I have to have previously payed for those points in my 2000 point total for the match? or is it all included? I had this same question for Pink horros (and their blue horror and brimstone horror splits). It appears (at least the pink horrors) that its kind of included in the price of the unit. So I was curious what affect "Celestial Conjuration" did to your point values and what not. I keep trying to find this and get information all over the board (especially with AoS v2 and old forum posts and what not).
Welcome to Lustria. Summoning in AoS does not require you to pay the matched play points for the units. The summoning mechanic is factored into the army's balance as a whole.
In case you run into conflicting information here's the evolution of how summoning went in AoS: - Originally summoning was free, just do the appropriate spell/ability/whatever. - in the first GHB (I think?) summoning abilities became a glorified deepstrikes you had to pay for with matched points up front. - From the GHB 18 onward dummoning abilities where changed to work around some in-game point generation (like our CCP), and the Nurgle battletome was the first to actually include this mechanic. You now use these points to summon additional stuff during the game. (There's a few exceptions of summoning that's just a free ability not dependent on stuff like CCP, like the pink horrors splitting) This last system is what we're still on currently, and it works reasonably for most factions. It's usually fairly thematic and ties in to playing the army well. Tzeentch gets points for people spellcasting, Nurgle gets points for gardening, Khorne gets points for collecting skulls, Slaanesh for torturing stuff. We're a bit of an odd-one out as we're the only ones who need to make some sort of sacrifice to generate points. So yeah, if you see old posts claiming otherwise this is why. But long story short current system is that you don't have to pay matched points, you just have to do whatever the corresponding ability tells you to.
Thunderlizard EoTG command ability spam seems to be most efficient ironically... Plus at least you get a bunch of behemoths that can smash stuff in that case, instead of several casters that can't cast anyway due to the rule of one.