Post battletomealooza what are you hoping for/expecting?

[Satyrical Sophist]

My assumption was that battle tomes kind of fall into 3 broad categories.

1) Whole new army/basically whole new army. Examples would be bone reapers/gloomspite. Earlier on I'd say Deepkin/daughters. Obviously require a lot of work to make a new army, but can more or less start fresh. Potential upcoming lists might be kurnothi or Ulgu/Hysh elves. 

2) Shine and polish job. An army where it doesn't require much work. Mainly updating, adding spell lores, traits and the like. Doesn't get/need many new models. Examples might include Slyvaneth, FEC, Iron Jaws, Bonesplitters. I'd include the merged lists in here, stuff like cities of Sigmar, beasts of chaos, Skaven. These lists do need more work to function, and definitely have some models that could use an update, but the armies are functional without. You can make a definite argument that Skaven belong in the next category though. Future examples of this type for me would include Tzeentch, which doesn't need much to get it up to date and potentially Seraphon if they decide they are accepting some of the old sculpts.

3) this is gonna take some work. The armies where there is a fundamental problem. I'd include KO in that. KO have some stuff that other factions don't, and are also shooting based. I think they erred on the side of having them too weak rather than too strong because of it. They need to decide how the army is going to play, and I can definitely see how KO could be just awful to play Vs if they were on the powerful side. Combining mobility and shooting is a risk. I can also see that they don't want to buff them only to need to nerf them again.

Other examples that I think needed more work than you'd expect would include S2D. I'm excited to see what they have done with them. The problem S2D have under the current system is that regardless of points changes or warscroll tweaks you are basically always going to be better off running your S2D army as a god army. Right now Slaanesh gives the clearest indicator of this. You get the (really really really good) exploding/double exploding hits on 6. That's noticeably better than any boost from being S2D currently. So any buffs they hand to S2D are basically being handed to Slaanesh/Khorne/Nurgle/Tzeentch.

Them saying that they are aiming to make the S2D units best in their own alliegence makes me hopeful that they have come up with something.

I'd probably also include Seraphon in this category, mainly because it seems like the non slann based lists need a heavy rework, along with potentially a fair number of redone models. That said if they get basically the equivalent of what S2D got then I could see the model situation improving enough. I think with one new hero model (I think a slann/skink on throne model), new Saurus (potentially a dual kit) and a herding beast kit (salamander or razordon) would get you an appreciable chunk of the way to updated. A side note would be that seraphon lore needs some developments or at least choices being made. If they were making the Saurus kit dual build then I would love to have the other option be feral Saurus, and play up the difference between the Azyr Daemon memory seraphon and the younger natural born seraphon. 

[Chikout]

I feel that when speculating about the future it is important to remember they way that gw works. 

At a seminar soon after the release of Ko gw said  that the range had done very well and they were going to look at the possibility of new minis in the future. 

Gw's production schedule is about two years between the start of a project and release with concept work sometimes being done as much as 5 years in advance. 

So the earliest possible time frame for a new selection of Ko minis is this autumn. 

This year gw will  have done a major release of minis for 4 factions a medium sized Khorne release and and single fig plus terrain/spells for 5 more factions. 

This is comfortably the most gw have done for any form of fantasy. 

So we can probably expect about 5 major releases next year with a few extras here and there.  At that rate of progress it means a major mini release for each faction once every 4 years or so, so get used to waiting a while for your favourite faction to get an update. 

That said I would love to see Ko and Seraphon getting a bunch of new minis alongside their books. Add grotbag scuttlers , soulblight and some kind of Aelves and I would be pretty happy in 2020.

I love the idk but for the reason I mentioned above, I don't expect to see anything new for them expect maybe an underworlds warband until at least 2021. 

As for rules I would like to see a year of minor changes and refinement. 

I would like to see some beta rules in the next ghb, like making fight twice command abilities cost 2cp or giving Nighthaunt an ability to force battleshock tests in units that are usually immune and things like that. 

I hope they continue to refine meeting engagements. There's some potential there, but this year's version felt like a first draft.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Chikout

[Kamose]

18 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

That's not really helping me make a bit of a mixed set of guards. (cheapest are 10 euro per piece for female humans, in Corvus Cabal and Godsworn Hunt and I think 4 per piece for elves in Sisters of the Watch). If your play location accepts non-GW boxes, go for Frostgrave Soldiers 2, which are all female and have a good selection.

My solution was to purchase some of the female heads from Victoria miniatures.  They are mostly sci-fi themed however they do have some that are just women's heads with no helmets or wargear; just somewhat finer features and longer hair.  They were a decent price so I bought 20 of them and added them to my Freeguild Guard on the assumption that they're militia and not all of them have helmets.  Also its hard to tell a man from a women when they're wearing puffy shirts and bresatplates so the head was all the needed changing in my opinion.

https://victoriaminiatures.com/collections/female-squads-and-bits/products/bald-female-heads-x12

PS:  That's for 5 heads with hair...not sure why it says "bald female heads x 12".  😛
PPS:  They do have bald lady heads though!

[zilberfrid]

2 minutes ago, Kamose said:

My solution was to purchase some of the female heads from Victoria miniatures.  They are mostly sci-fi themed however they do have some that are just women's heads with no helmets or wargear; just somewhat finer features and longer hair.  They were a decent price so I bought 20 of them and added them to my Freeguild Guard on the assumption that they're militia and not all of them have helmets.  Also its hard to tell a man from a women when they're wearing puffy shirts and bresatplates so the head was all the needed changing in my opinion.

https://victoriaminiatures.com/collections/female-squads-and-bits/products/bald-female-heads-x12

PS:  That's for 5 heads with hair...not sure why it says "bald female heads x 12".  😛
PPS:  They do have bald lady heads though!

I have browsed victoria quite a bit, and almost ordered the female pith helmets and female cuirasses. There is a good chance I'll be mixing in some of them in my troops soonish (I like the greatcoats as well).

How is the quality of their heads?

There also is a good chance I'm just going to build and paint stuff from any vendor, regardless of whether it can be used in AoS. I like building and painting, but am not really smitten with the lore of AoS, nor do I neccessarily feel the need to play all that much.

[EccentricCircle]

I remain quite skeptical of the rumoured Light and Shadow elves.

I know that there have been numerous mentions in the background, and maybe we will get them one day, but it seems as though everyone has been confidently predicting them for years. They always seem to be just around the corner, but never actually show up. At this rate, if they do come out towards the end of next year, it could well be because GW saw how keen on them everyone was, and decided they'd better go and design some, not because they were planned from the start!

A lot of folks I talk to seem to always be surprised when a faction is hinted at repeatedly in the background, but then a video teaser or announcement seminar drops, and something else comes out of left field which no one was expecting. The thing is, thinking back over the lifetime of AoS, I can't think of a single faction which got lots of mentions in the background, and then got released shortly afterwards. It might have happened with some of the initial wave (stormcast, Khorne, fyreslayers, Ironjaws etc.) However I wasn't following things back then, and am not sure how representative that era is of AoS as a whole. At that point, all the lore was being spun up from nothing in parallel with everything being released. They were sort of doing it all at once, from whole cloth, rather than dropping hints for things in years to come.

Looking back over the last couple of years, Bonereapers, Idoneth, Kharadrons, Tzeentch, Gloomspite etc all really came out of nowhere. They were foreshadowed for sure, but only by their own marketing campaigns, not as part of the more general fabric of Age of Sigmar. I can't think of one occasion where a faction was alluded to in a novel, or a battletome, and then came out a year or so later. There are a few cases where a battletome or novel has contained spoilers for whatever was coming next, since clearly they were written at the same time, so there wasn't much point in not mentioning Idoneth in DoK or whatever. But I think that's a different phenomenon entirely.

In short, most armies are surprises, and foreshadowing isn't really something Games Workshop do...

Clearly there is enough of a fandom for Malekith and the Twins that some people are keen to see their armies, but its actually been a while since we've gotten a big centerpiece god model for a faction release. There are already a lot of elves, and I'm not sure how many different takes on them are really sustainable at this point.

Time will tell, and hopefully I'm completely wrong, but I'm not going to believe in more elves until they are sitting on my painting table.

[Barkanaut]

Actually at a seminar they even said not to expect any more elves soon after Deepkin were released. I keep telling people form the time of the IDK release its going to be a few years before we see the next one. 

[madmac]

34 minutes ago, Barkanaut said:

Actually at a seminar they even said not to expect any more elves soon after Deepkin were released. I keep telling people form the time of the IDK release its going to be a few years before we see the next one. 

Sure, but a new Aelf army in 2020 is a good two years after Deepkin and Daughters. It's not implausible at all, especially with the big battletome drive almost over and the gradual accumulation of more Aelfy looking rumor engines.

For sure, we're not going to get Kurnothi, Hysh Aelves, and Ulgu Aelves all in the same year, but I think getting one of them is quite likely.

[Barkanaut]

20 minutes ago, madmac said:

Sure, but a new Aelf army in 2020 is a good two years after Deepkin and Daughters. It's not implausible at all, especially with the big battletome drive almost over and the gradual accumulation of more Aelfy looking rumor engines.

For sure, we're not going to get Kurnothi, Hysh Aelves, and Ulgu Aelves all in the same year, but I think getting one of them is quite likely.

Good point. 

[Storm]

4 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:

Looking back over the last couple of years, Bonereapers, Idoneth, Kharadrons, Tzeentch, Gloomspite etc all really came out of nowhere. They were foreshadowed for sure, but only by their own marketing campaigns, not as part of the more general fabric of Age of Sigmar. I can't think of one occasion where a faction was alluded to in a novel, or a battletome, and then came out a year or so later. There are a few cases where a battletome or novel has contained spoilers for whatever was coming next, since clearly they were written at the same time, so there wasn't much point in not mentioning Idoneth in DoK or whatever. But I think that's a different phenomenon entirely.

Kharadron had at least one very early mention in 2015 as Steamhead duardin, if that counts, though there was nothing particularly concrete until they were actually announced. 

[EccentricCircle]

2 minutes ago, Storm said:

Kharadron had at least one very early mention in 2015 as Steamhead duardin, if that counts, though there was nothing particularly concrete until they were actually announced. 

Interesting. I'd thought that Steamhead Duardin were something else, but maybe I had just heard people speculating about what they thought they could be, and thought there was more to it.