The Rumour Thread

[Flippy]

18 minutes ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

I guess it's karma for dunking on fyreslayers, but to me they're the best looking. I mean, a well-painted flamespyre is a work of art.

The phoenix is ok, though a bit static. But was he really better than this?

[Jagged Red Lines]

3 minutes ago, Flippy said:

The phoenix is ok, though a bit static. But was he really better than this?

I found that model quite fragile, but yes it is beautiful. And relatively recent. 

I don't like that GW squatted anything, and I have my fingers crossed that nothing else goes to legends.

I mean look at the general on griffin, demigryph knights, wild riders and wildwood rangers. A lot of the stuff that rumours suggest is going to legends are better sculpts than newer ranges like bonereapers and fyreslayers imo.

I don't agree with the random invalidation of anyone's armies, which is why I've been opposed to the concept of dawnbringers since it was first announced. Cities are perfect as they are.

[JerekKruger]

4 hours ago, Gitzdee said:

I would love a something like this. But i would like them to be more like Qulathis the Exile than the warband. Oh and bring back Wardancers and Glade Guard please. 

I quite like the Warband, but I'd be happy with either/both. I would really like to see the Centaur dude made into a unit (I loved how he was reminiscent of aspects of wild Riders, except merged with their mounts).

What I really want is Kurnoth though. The old Mark Gibbons art was great, but to model never did it justice. Modern minis could do I want them to. Only thing I didn't like in the art was the spear, but Alarielle had that note so he can have a cool new spear instead 😄

[Flippy]

11 minutes ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

I mean look at the general on griffin, demigryph knights, wild riders and wildwood rangers. A lot of the stuff that rumours suggest is going to legends are better sculpts than newer ranges like bonereapers and fyreslayers imo.

I really like my Bonereapers, but you are not entirely wrong. The Wildwood Rangers / Eternal Guards box is another level.

[JackStreicher]

44 minutes ago, Flippy said:

The phoenix is ok, though a bit static. But was he really better than this?

I love the Trident elf. It's sad that it's gone.

[Chikout]

24 minutes ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

I found that model quite fragile, but yes it is beautiful. And relatively recent. 

I don't like that GW squatted anything, and I have my fingers crossed that nothing else goes to legends.

I mean look at the general on griffin, demigryph knights, wild riders and wildwood rangers. A lot of the stuff that rumours suggest is going to legends are better sculpts than newer ranges like bonereapers and fyreslayers imo.

I don't agree with the random invalidation of anyone's armies, which is why I've been opposed to the concept of dawnbringers since it was first announced. Cities are perfect as they are.

Aesthetics are a difficult issue. To put my stall out I much prefer OBR to Tomb kings and Lumineth to High Elves. I'm not so sure about the Fyreslayers but the first time I really fell in love with the new setting was when I first saw the KO.   For me the wildwood rangers are nice enough sculpts but not really that special. The griffon has had complaints from some that it looks like a chicken since it came out, though I do like it myself. I find the  pallador's  mounts to be  far superior to the demigryphs. I absolutely agree that GW should make an effort to keep the kits that aren't being updated but there is an argument to be made that people can always substitute in their models. There are already cities armies playing at official tournaments that are entirely made of haflings. So long as the new book has spears, cavalry and shooting units, you can use any unit that is armed similarly and is on the correct size of base. 

As for cities not needing a change, I don't agree with that. The lack of a well defined 'normal' faction that isn't just the same as the old world has definitely hindered the development of AoS as an overall setting. I do think that faction should include humans, Aelves and Duardin but I think they should be new versions in the way that the Lumineth are new High Elves. For me the upcoming old world game makes establishing a unique identity for AOS humans more important. 

 

[Jagged Red Lines]

29 minutes ago, Chikout said:

The lack of a well defined 'normal' faction that isn't just the same as the old world has definitely hindered the development of AoS as an overall setting.

I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't add to the cities range.

But actively stopping people from playing with the toys they bought and spent hours painting doesn't improve the game at all. 

Imagine if they just decided to squat the original stormcast line in favour of the new thunderstrike. The only people who would be fine with that are those that don't own the miniatures already. 

Edited December 1, 2022 by Jagged Red Lines

[madmac]

Well, taking all these rumors with a grain of salt, it does make some sense to me that Wanderers would be the first major subfaction to leave Cities. They are the only one that currently has an obvious unique AoS direction laid out for them with the whole Kurnothi angle (which I love, personally) Though we'll maybe see some change on that front with the next Underworlds Warband.

Keeping Phoenix Temple is a little bit odd with LRL being a thing now and apparently having their own Phoenix motif (Tyrion is frequently referred to as the Phoenix Lord), but they do have a major city associated with them, and I suppose long term they could be placeholders for the generic Nicer-Aelves-of-Sigmar representation.

Dispossessed staying where they are also sounds about right, unfortunately. Judging from the Fyreslayers 3E tome and lack of rumors generally it doesn't appear that anything much is happening with dwarfs in either lore or models this edition.

[Neverchosen]

I am really loving the rumours for the Cities Book. I was worried they'd loose the cosmopolitan approach to having different fantasy races. I think the loss of Wanderers is unfortonate but there was a ton of pre built redundancy and now you can run your wood elves as which ever Aevlen unit that fits the bill. It also gives me hopes of a Kurnothi expansion down the line. 

I hope that this initial wave covers all the pre-requisit free-guild/iron weld units that are needed for the book and future updates can tie the Aelves and Duardin into a slightly more unified aesthetic. I do not hope for the same armour or clothing but just for the ability to share iconography across the Aelves, Duardin and Humans. I assume in terms of waves it will be 1st Humans, 2nd Aelves and finally 3rd Duardin. As much as it would irk many Longbeards it would also let them continue to develop the Duardin lore and aesthetic before rushing them to print.

Either way I am happy to see a coalition of different peoples united for the forces of order. It was always a little sad that the ostensible villains of the narrative were the most internally diverse faction(s) in the game.  I cannot afford to even think about starting a Cities army but maybe a unit of Sisters of the Watch/Shadow Warriors plus a hero and Long Beards plus a hero as coalition allies to my Stormcast will give me a chance to have a fun painting project.

[Pariah7echo]

Its a little weird honestly. Over in the Mortals redesign thread I felt fairly confident (based on @Whitefang Likes) that the Darkling Covens and Order Serpentis would be the ones to leave (and eventually get redesigned in Malerion's Shadow elves). With this new rumor IDK how to feel. On the one hand I get to keep playing Cities, on the other it means no new models for years.

[Asbestress]

Wanderers leaving would be a surprise to be sure. Maybe if we think GW has some plans for the future we could be getting some Coalition rules for Kurnothi whenever they happen to pop up as an army. Although I don't have any Wanderers (damn Sylvaneth sympathisers...), if I did, I know I would be pretty damn bummed about suddenly not having (as far as we know) any support outside of Legends.

Disposessed and Phoenix Temple staying I expected (although never in a million years would I have thought we'd be getting Phoenix Temple instead of Wanderers), so I'm pretty happy my predictions came true on that front. I'd be a bit "disposessed" about not having my dworf flamethrowers.

Darklings and Scourge Privateers staying are unexpected but, logical, I guess? Privateers have Misthavn as a city, so they have the same reason to stay as Phoenix Temple (although the Living City will be left with just Sylvaneth without Wanderers as 'unique' stuff), and (kinda weird to type out) Darkling Covens actually have some pretty unique and interesting lore, with each city's Covens being controlled by a single Sorceress, and mostly secretly being loyal to Morathi (and/or perhaps Malekith in the future?), so I think they could be sorta analogous to Genestealer Cults I guess. And maybe whenever we get Malekith Aelves some Darkling units could be coalitioned into that army. Add to that the fact that the current old DE units are imo some of the better looking sculpts in Cities that wouldn't have anywhere to go (apart from being refugees in DoK I guess?). Also, could this be some evidence for these "Arenai" being Darklings or Privateers instead of another DoK warband (how many have we had anyhow)?

Edit:
Also, how many new kits do people think this CoS refresh probably have? Lumineth had 9-ish in their first wave I guess (Freeguild + Flagellants + Ironweld humans make up around 8-9 kits), and Soulblight had 11, so I'm thinking around those numbers, as it would give us a good human core, and allow for perhaps 1-2 more "esoteric" units (new "Azyrite human" battlemage? Phoenix Guard? Steam Machine?)

Editedit:
Guess I was right in thinking this was going to be a spring release based on Lumineth and Soulblight. Changing my mind thinking it was summer is going in the grudge book, I suppose.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Asbestress

[KingBrodd]

Praise Behemat and the Everdank we have actual rumours people!!

[KingBrodd]

I might be in the minority and am biased as I have no minis of COS but to me it id visually the least appealing Faction.

A lot of random armies and minis thrown together out of neccesity.

It has far too many holdovers from TOW and am looking forward to almost, dare I say, a culling of bloat within the Faction.

COS need to have an identity within AOS as they are the Faction that grounds the setting. 

I mean no ill will towards fans of current COS these are just my thoughts.

[Jagged Red Lines]

7 minutes ago, KingBrodd said:

It has far too many holdovers from TOW and am looking forward to almost, dare I say, a culling of bloat within the Faction.

Actually, there's not a lot of bloat. There are 50 warscrolls - broadly in line with slaves to darkness (52 I believe) and gloomspite (51). 

Also, it's nothing compared to stormcast (78 warscrolls) which has almost as many leader warscrolls (38) as the entirety of the cities army.

And honestly, I find it a bit rich for someone to say 'I don't like to look at your army' as justification for vast amounts of it to be binned.

GW has done plenty of 'soft squatting' recently, with stormcast as already mentioned, but also in ogors and slaves to darkness. There's no reason they shouldn't keep the warscrolls valid and allow people to continue to play with their miniatures. 

[willange]

3 minutes ago, KingBrodd said:

I might be in the minority and am biased as I have no minis of COS but to me it id visually the least appealing Faction.

A lot of random armies and minis thrown together out of neccesity.

It has far too many holdovers from TOW and am looking forward to almost, dare I say, a culling of bloat within the Faction.

COS need to have an identity within AOS as they are the Faction that grounds the setting. 

I mean no ill will towards fans of current COS these are just my thoughts.

I mostly agree with this assessment and i say this as someone who plays cos, and specifically owns 20 phoenix guard, 2 phoenixes, 20 eternal guard, 1 nomad prince, 20 sisters of the watch, 5 sisters of the thorn plus a lot more that isn’t on the squat list!  And the majority of this is painted too!

 

 I’ll be genuinely sad to lose most of this, but we really do need a more modern look for cos that just doesn’t exist today. I wish the update was going to bring more non-human models and i wish all the models not getting resculpts would stay , but i also think that most non-elite freeguild models today look like ****** and never bought any. Needless to say, I’ll at least be consoling myself with cool new humans, though i might be slightly annoyed if i end up needing to paint a new version of demigryphs all over again (not annoyed enough to stop me doing it though)

I also wouldn’t really mind seeing the non-humans of the book get integrated into other factions at some point (especially with new sculpts). I still hold hope for a true dispossed faction and i think wanderers could be wonderful in sylvaneth or on their own

[willange]

I also feel like, while the mixed race vibe of the cities is cool, it’s narratively going away a bit. Having recently read dominion, they made it clear that the vast majority of duardin aren’t occupying the same positions in society that humans are, same for aelves. I predict that long term (10 years or so), this will eventually become a human faction with neat coalition rules and the occasional non-human, unless they start pushing mixed-race squads (which would be awesome, but they haven’t seemed willing to do it so far). The other races will move to other factions (possibly even new ones) or be squatted. Just my prediction

Edited December 1, 2022 by willange

[RyantheFett]

10 minutes ago, KingBrodd said:

I might be in the minority and am biased as I have no minis of COS but to me it id visually the least appealing Faction.

A lot of random armies and minis thrown together out of neccesity.

It has far too many holdovers from TOW and am looking forward to almost, dare I say, a culling of bloat within the Faction.

COS need to have an identity within AOS as they are the Faction that grounds the setting. 

I mean no ill will towards fans of current COS these are just my thoughts.

As someone who recently bought into Cities the faction had a lot of issues, but their choice of solution I think may be the worse.

GW built up the lore as a diverse race of normal humans, elfs, and dwarfs working together. Now it feels like that was really just a placeholder for when they could just do a normal human Faction.

Shame really since the idea I thought was really one of the coolest they had Faction wise.

[Beliman]

4 minutes ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

There's no reason they shouldn't keep the warscrolls valid and allow people to continue to play with their miniatures. 

They can do what Horus Heresy already did: a Legends Compendium completely legal.

Throw there all the kits that you can't support or whatever, and update them from time to time. Nothing big or broken, just enough to be played or updated with new editions, ghb or basic rules.

[Marcvs]

3 minutes ago, Beliman said:

They can do what Horus Heresy already did: a Legends Compendium completely legal.

Throw there all the kits that you can't support or whatever, and update them from time to time. Nothing big or broken, just enough to be played or updated with new editions, ghb or basic rules.

wit the talk of squatting (bretonnianing) picking up again, I really wish there was a customer respecting policy on this. My preference would be to either provide a new home in different armies for models going away (which in itself is a second best, but at least it's something) or an official equivalence of the models which should trump WYSIWYG rules and the like.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Marcvs

[Chikout]

7 minutes ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

Actually, there's not a lot of bloat. There are 50 warscrolls - broadly in line with slaves to darkness (52 I believe) and gloomspite (51). 

Also, it's nothing compared to stormcast (78 warscrolls) which has almost as many leader warscrolls (38) as the entirety of the cities army.

And honestly, I find it a bit rich for someone to say 'I don't like to look at your army' as justification for vast amounts of it to be binned.

GW has done plenty of 'soft squatting' recently, with stormcast as already mentioned, but also in ogors and slaves to darkness. There's no reason they shouldn't keep the warscrolls valid and allow people to continue to play with their miniatures. 

I count 63 warscrolls on the app, 61 not counting Underworlds. The biggest problem with cities as a playable army is that there are seven foot unit with great weapon options three foot units with spears, two foot units with crossbows etc. An interesting option would be to have a single  'canon' option but official permission to play whichever foot unit with great weapon option you wish. 

[CommissarRotke]

2 hours ago, Jagged Red Lines said:

But actively stopping people from playing with the toys they bought and spent hours painting doesn't improve the game at all. 

Is it really *actively* stopping people though? When COS was first announced it felt like the people who wanted to play it had a general understanding that they could proxy most/all of their old stuff with the warscrolls provided? For example, it didn't include High Elf spears or archers, yet you could easily count them as Eternal Guard and Crossbowmen respectively.

Like I understand the frustration but also this should've been expected, and proxying has always existed with wargaming.

[novakai]

5 hours ago, Grungnisson said:

May I please bring you back to this particular part of my post. I tried to emphasise the comparative originally, but maybe it did not stand out enough, so let me apply a highlight as well. Hope it'll be harder to miss this time.

 

Also, almost ironic you bring up the crossboos as an example here. After all, their rules are so fabulous, gaming tables are literally swamped with them, so that proved your point big time, I guess?

 

i mean you seem to want to die defending on a weird hill here, rules and models are completely different things and aspects of the hobby here. it's more that there room for expansion for every newish small range army in AoS like KO, calling that they are complete and not need new stuff is rubbish. Sylvannah and NH were just example of a new army that got expanded upon recently, yes they got better rules but they also pretty rad models

 

[Gitzdee]

I feel like CoS should stay mixed race. Imho its the big selling point of the faction. What i dont understand is why some people are afraid of an updated range of models and losing some in the process. Soulblight Gravelords lost a bunch of old models but are imho one of the best looking armies in all of the mortal realms at the moment. I would jump for joy if they got rid of bonesplitterz and spiderfang and replaced them with modern sculpts. 

I guess everyone has their own reasons for being in this hobby and dont want to offend anyone but i am proud of my old models and all my squated O&G models are sitting gloriously on the shelf. I am mainly here for the models at the end of the day and i like new shiny toys XD.

Edit: I do think we should take this rumour with a bucket of salt though.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Gitzdee

[Jagged Red Lines]

2 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:

Is it really *actively* stopping people though? When COS was first announced it felt like the people who wanted to play it had a general understanding that they could proxy most/all of their old stuff with the warscrolls provided? For example, it didn't include High Elf spears or archers, yet you could easily count them as Eternal Guard and Crossbowmen respectively.

Like I understand the frustration but also this should've been expected, and proxying has always existed with wargaming.

It wasn't expected. It wasn't announced as 'stop gap'. It was a fully fledged battletome, and the army was supported with Black Library fiction.

None of the 6,000 points of cities models that I have were inherited from the old world. All of them were bought on the assumption that these models were a permanent part of the range.

If you can find where GW said that the current Cities book was temporary pending a full squatting, I'd appreciate you pointing that out to me.

[Jagged Red Lines]

7 minutes ago, Chikout said:

I count 63 warscrolls on the app, 61 not counting Underworlds. The biggest problem with cities as a playable army is that there are seven foot unit with great weapon options three foot units with spears, two foot units with crossbows etc. An interesting option would be to have a single  'canon' option but official permission to play whichever foot unit with great weapon option you wish. 

 

By your own logic, more than half of the stormcast range should be squatted.

Yet they didn't do that then. There's no reason for them to do that now.