sandlemad

There’s a good bit of cog/industrial imagery wrapped up with the GSC, mostly but not entirely connected to that one subfaction. Some sort of tech-y infected AdMech dude could actually be a gap in the otherwise packed GSC character roster. There’s also some bits that could wind up looking like cogs while not being cogs, like the bottom of the doctor’s staff. RE: fyreslayers, they might be worse but tbh it’s not a problem as the GSC characters are all clearly distinguishable and they have actual visual variation between their miniatures…

Actually this guy puts the lie to the idea that everything in a starter box needs to be easy to paint. I count at least a dozen different materials and textures. Granted he's a character but the Ruinators are positively restrained by comparison.

Love to see the return of robed background weirdoes. Good minis otherwise. I don’t care for the high collar but that might be the coolest GW axe design in a long time.

Tbh this rumour sounds like it was made up by someone who isn’t aware of what’s been stated already about the trajectory of TOW and also doesn’t have any knowledge of Tamurkhan or the plans for Thrones of Chaos books.

This is the key point, I think, how a full force looks. FS and CD would be very different, even with the uncertainty about how FS might might change or CD pan out. Different profiles, different spread of unit types/heights/silhouettes, different dominant textures and colours. These are the things we know GW designers think about, how a faction looks on the table. Fyreslayers: infantry horde of nude dwarves with axes, a few monsters and (who knows) cavalry. Predominantly bare flesh, gold, metal weapons and orange beards/hair. Chaos Dwarfs: armoured dwarf infantry with missile weapons and shields/axes, hobgrot/greenskin auxiliaries, war machines. Predominantly metal armour, metal structures, dark beards, hobgrot/greenskin flesh.

My suspicion is we'll see something like how FW approached the hats, like below. Still there (albeit perhaps not everywhere in the faction), still elaborate, broadly similar shapes, but more like 1-2 feet tall instead the towering things you saw in the WHFB 4th ed range. For a comparison, think here of how they took the old 40k squat bikers, one of the most comically OTT (and internally disliked in parts of GW) aspects of the range and updated them to fit the spirit of the new Leagues of Votann: bikes become hover bikes, harley davidson culture becomes sci-fi frontier explorers... but they still have their Hulk Hogan sunglasses and horseshoe moustaches. Incidentally, I'd never noticed that for Total War, Creative Assembly took the design for FW Drazhoath the Ashen and actually doubled the size of his hat!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone say they wanted Warcry’s rules to be more like Necromunda’s. One’s tight and modern, the other’s a charmingly janky old school affair. They’re different beasts and everyone knows that. I feel that angle’s actually a distraction, in fact. The Necromunda comparison is to a (semi-hypothetical as it wasn’t even fully realised in 1st ed) version of Warcry focused around multiple e.g. chaos warbands or CoS gangs duking it out in a particular fleshed out place. It’s about the range and the setting, not the rule system.

This is well put. I’ve worked in similar siloed organisations and what is missed by the GW discourse is that this isn’t reducible to flashy headlines about how “wow, this department haaaates that department”. It’s not necessarily a personality thing, just a casually accepted way of conducting business You can see it even in the public sector. Pick a local authority or council and you’ll find that Parks might barely talk to or cooperate with Sports/Recreation, and neither talk to Operations. With the right leadership and approach they could collaborate but generally, where’s the incentive? The credit for any success could go to the other guy (even if you generally get on with them, you’re on some level jockeying for attention with them) and they might well try to get you to do their work, to keep their numbers up. Outside of special instances, why bother? Easier to demarcate your turf, keep things clean and separate. It’s stupid and ultimately counterproductive but it’s a common pattern and fits the picture provided by tons of ex-GW people.

I wouldn’t put this down to an amalgamation or anything larger and more thematic. You could see it in the verminus/“regular skaven” before, where maybe one has some pustules or mutations, another has some simple tech stuff, another has a hood. It’s very clear in the OG skaven underworlds warband. A bit like how most undivided chaos kits have the vaguely Khorne-ish head, the vaguely Tzeentch-ish head, etc, without those necessarily demanding that the minis be exactly that.

I really don’t know what ‘AoS-ification’ of skaven would look like as a design direction. They were already the most unique (and the only actually original) faction in WHFB. If it’s more mad science, that was already substantially there with Skyre. I mean besides advances in sculpting and detail and whatnot.

They’re good. The gaunts comparison is apt, a glow up on the old ones which I’d maintain was not vital but works. The sculpting technology (or just the technique of sculpting and/or painting) appears to have come on in how sharply they distinguish between fur and skin. They’re really made for contrast paints. Everything is a bit more textured and mangy, the better to get that shading. Fur, flesh, metal, maybe two shades of fabric and you’re set for about a hundred on them.

The whole idea of dead/dormant gods, with their followers trying to resurrect them, is a thematic well that GW has come back to a lot in AoS. Khaine, Grimnir, Morai-Heg, Kurnoth, the various death gods Nagash ate, the old sea gods of the Idoneth, Slaanesh. They’re not all the same or fulfilling the same functions - the idoneth gods are less than echoes and Slaanesh is active in a sense - but it’s an idea the writers keep using.

The attractiveness of the books has also been seriously diminished by shortlived examples like DoK and Lumineth, or guard/votann/world eaters in 40k. Moreover, and this is something I think we'll see in AoS soon, a lot of 40k players have had to deal with having free indices and then shifting to paying £35 for almost exactly the same thing they got for free, with only a few tweaks and a handful of additional faction rules.

A further concern is that even if something like Fyreslayers or ogres are revamped - and fyreslayers really need it - this news shows that large parts of their range may still be outright dropped. Not revamped (no reason to believe the sacrosanct range or Warcry units will be re-done), not folded into other warscrolls (GW carefully not saying anything about that here), and not even necessarily suitable for proxying (no sign of anything you could easily use the Celestar Ballista or some other units as). Even if we see, for example, a full fyreslayers overhaul, it might be without the battlesmith or auric hearthguard. Or an ogre revamp where Maneaters or yhetees are entirely dropped and not replaced or proxyable.

Thinking more about this, if I were a Nighthaunt player, I’d be anticipating a bunch of units potentially getting squatted. The WHFB heroes, the glaivewraiths, maybe either the grimghasts or bladewraiths, the harridans… There’s a lot of conceptual overlap between different units in the range, a bunch are frequently out of stock, and 4-5 years is clearly long enough for even prominent starter set minis to be worthy of discontinuing. And yeah, ogres are currently touch-and-go as to whether they get a refresh or if they get pulled into some future TOW expansion. Fyreslayers too, possibly more likely for an overhaul but obviously have no resort to TOW.

A real sour point in particular is the release of the BoC vanguard box only 15 months ago, a kit specifically targeted at onboarding new players into playing BoC in AoS… only to have them dropped from the game. They had to have been fully aware that this would be happening in the near future. I mean damn.

No, it’s not. That was throwing up stuff for views and actually destroying mini. Folks here are signalling their disappointment and anger by saying that they don’t want to play AoS anymore. This is a really lazy, thoughtless comparison, and moreover actively inaccurate because that incident was back at the WHFB/AoS transition, years before TOW even existed.

Separately, ogres have only received a handful of new minis since AoS started. Two characters, two terrain pieces and a Warcry unit. More than BoC but not by a huge amount, and less than the Sacrosanct chamber release. I don’t think it’s actually super likely that they’ll be squatted and/or rolled into TOW… but I’m a lot less confident than I was yesterday.

Actually this is incorrect, it is reasonable.

Beatsmen and savage orcs are one thing. Dropping so many stormcast is quite another. The range is full of redundancy, horribly so, but the explanation rings false when we don’t really have any reason to expect actual efforts to manage warscroll bloat. Liberators and vindicators are identical but for their hand weapons/spears. And when some of the stuff being cut was highly prominent launch release minis from only a handful of years ago, well, it’s a sign that even recent AoS plastic are fair game for being squatted. But it’s the Warcry stuff that’s true real shock. Some of those minis are only a year and a bit old! Anyone outright quitting AoS over this is taking a pretty reasonable response tbh.

Ooh not wild about those hammers. They look like big chunky lego things, really quite striking on the dudes with dual hammers in particular. Can’t believe I’m saying this but the original liberators have them beat on this front.

This is effectively taking the same approach to subfactions as 10th ed 40k, as has been pointed out, but moreover it’s taking the same approach to overall list building as *drumroll* the Lord of the Rings! And good, it’s a cool and thematic approach which worked very well there and sounds cool here. If anything, AoS is better set up for it with all its cross-subfaction elements. There has to be a better term for that but I’m thinking of e.g. the different Idoneth castes, the Grundstok corps for Kharadron, the Lumineth elemental guys the article mentions, the Stormcast vanguard, etc.

Might be a quirk of the angle and the highlighting but this dude (unintentionally?) has a fun little smirk. Sylvester Stallone vibes.

I get how this is easier to balance from a points-per-unit POV but it does lead to warscroll bloat on a faction level. Fulminator, concussors, desolators, tempestors; that sort of thing.

Exactly, rot and disease without the cycle of life/decay element of Nurgle. Tzeentchian scheming and ambition, just as convoluted, but always incredible petty and stupid. I do think it’s a little more of a stretch for Khorne (the blood flows but motivated by hysterical fear-rage) and Slaanesh (the fertility element is largely gone from Slaanesh, though the skaven do breed like rats and see very little pleasure). But still, it’s an interesting lens to look at the GHR through. Even their path to glory, so to speak, is basically not there, with their god being both more interventionist in some ways but way more grudging with his favour.