Orsino

You might find your Eternal Guard work better as a single unit of 20 due to the reach of their weapons and their difficulty being an effective roadblock in small units. I really like the SotT aesthetically but I've always found them fantastically underwhelming on the table for their cost. How are you planning to use them? With a hurricanum and two battlemages it doesn't seem like you need them as casters.

I can understand that perspective, I'd generally agree with it, but in the case of necromunda the rules situation was such a clusterf...was such a mess that I feel comfortable with having used the compendium to get started, I don't feel like I'm ****** over GW too badly as it means I've spent a pretty significant sum on models rather than giving up on the game and not spending a penny. You are of course free to find that argument unconvincing.

Expense is all relative isn't it, it's a very expensive hobby compared to hiking or writing poetry. People have different priorities, different incomes, and different ways of hobbying. In my case I'm fortunate to be a slow painter and to enjoy scratch-building terrain which are two things that produce a favourable ratio of time spent to money spent. However if someone says they are disappointed by the price of something I would be inclined to take them at their word, rather than jumping to the conclusion that they lack self-control or are old and bitter, those don't seem like reasonable (or kind) things to assume.

There is a compendium of all the Necromunda rules as a free PDF online. I won't share it here but a search for "necromunda rules compendium" should find it.

Oooh that's tempting. As long as you're not expecting to use it in GW stores this seems like a good option. And not spending such a big chunk of change on the thing would make me feel more comfortable doing some crazy conversion.

Would that be stepping on FEC's mutilated toes? With something like Bretonnia it seems fairly easy. They're aesthetically pretty different to anything in AoS. What I don't so much get is how it'll work with stuff like the elven or dwarven factions. A lot of Warhammer Fantasy sculpts are still in use in elven factions. Elves in the classic style and in the same scale wouldn't feel distinctively different from an AoS army. That's why I kinda suspect it'll be a different scale, that would draw a clear line between the two games.

Aye, I think some expansion make sense as long as it's rooted in extant Old World factions. Truly new stuff would seem a weird choice, I think it's gonna be a challenge to distinguish and delineate OW from AoS as it is, particularly if they're the same scale, and truly new factions would compound that issue.

Would genuinely new armies make sense here? I expect a new slant will be put on Old World factions but what would be the point of truly original armies?Wouldn't they want to keep their concepts for new armies for AoS and focus on nostalgia appeal with this game?

These look really neat, I'll be very interested to see how they come out.

Generally speaking I think if a rule doesn't get mentioned in a superseding book, such as with Mercenaries and GHB 2020, we're meant to understand this as the rule no longer being valid. But making it explicit is always helpful.

So it's a fact...that everything is subjective. Think about that and tell me if you can see the problem. Tbh I'm not really interested in a dead-end epistemological discussion about subjectivity with someone who thinks consistency and coherence are just for high-schoolers. So I'll confine myself to saying the fact that you've so vociferously challenged the things I've said indicates you do believe that statements can be more or less true/valid, and your resort to "everything is subjective, I don't have to make sense" when the things you say are questioned is just self-serving. It also doesn't really leave any room for meaningful discussion so I think I'm done. Thanks!

Saying that all standards are arbitrary and all meaning subjective is the last refuge of someone without an argument. You claimed that the number of female miniatures is purely personal preference and there is no right or wrong, this is incompatible with your other claim that GW needs to "do better" at female representation. So which is it? Incidentally this is why it's necessary to examine premises, even though you find it boring, because otherwise you end up making arguments that aren't even consistent with themselves, let alone consistent with reality. As to my personal preferences on female miniatures, I've stated it a number of times. Accusing me of not engaging because you can't be bothered to read my answer is a little silly. I'll state it again for you: I enjoy my nearly all female CoS army (kitbashed Nomad Princess below), more models are always nice, I don't think there's any inherent limit on how many female minis you can have.

At no point have I suggested people can't want or shouldn't have more female models, my problem is with the presentation of personal preference as some sort of moral issue or failure on the part of GW. You demonstrate this in your phrasing that GW need to "do better at representing women in its games" which presents the subjective preference of how many female miniatures you want to have as a failure to meet some standard of representation by GW, a standard which you've admitted is entirely arbitrary.

Saying that a group is underrepresented requires you to know what you think the correct level of representation is. And I suspect GW's market research is a truer indicator of the level of demand for female minatures than some anecdotes in this thread, GW is unlikely to say no to money so it's reasonable to assume that the number of female miniatures is broadly reflective of the level of demand, allowing of course for the fact that producing new models isn't a quick process.

That was a bit of a historical sidenote, I'm not sure you really need to account for these realities in AoS lore, though it might add some nice depth.

But no one is complaining that lizards are underepresented. Again, my point is not that there shouldn't be female models, it's that you can't say female models are underepresnted when, by the only available standard you could judge it on, they would be overepresented. You can choose not to use reality as a standard to measure, but you can't then argue women are underrepresented.

The reason the vast majority of fighting in history has been done by men is not because people in the past were irrational, prior to modern weaponry/vehicles/aircraft which reduce the importance of physical capabilities and prior to improvements in infant mortality which reduce the need for people to have lots of babies ot made sense to have all male armies. Which isn't to say all their reasons were pragmatic of course.

You can absolutely do that, but you can't also say "this group is undersrepresented in this game" because underepresented compared to what if not reality?

I'm glad you find your own argument convincing, and I agree that there's no reason you can't have more female models. But when people talk about representation the implication is that fiction should be reflecting reality and that people are underepresented when fiction doesn't reflect reality. AoS is fantasy but our only possible objective reference point for male-female combat ratios is reality, and by that standard it's a vast over representaion, so talking about female models being underrepresented doesn't really work. Discussions of representation presuppose some outside reality that can be looked at to say "We're falling short of this". If you reject reality, which is the only reference point we have, from where are you deriving your standard for what the ratio should be?

Again, you haven't attempted to answer the question there, what is your yardstick for deciding that there aren't enough female models if not reality?

You seem determined to argue with a straw man of your own creation. Again, my point is not that you can't have women in fantasy combat, my point is that you can't describe women as underrepresentated in AoS when they're statistically over-represented when compared to every real example of combat. So if you're not using reality as a reference how exactly have you decided what the "correct" ratio of male-female models should be in order to conclude that females are under-represented?

I haven't shouted down anyone, I've sincerely engaged with what people have said and explained my thoughts. You've been deliberately disingenuous and just copy-pasted text. It just injects meaningless empty noise into an otherwise interesting discussion.

Stop trolling, act like you're an adult, and then we can have a meaningful discussion.

That's not true at all, AoS takes an enormous amount from historicals and historical combat and it's setting, like all fantasy borrows heavily from history. But that's sort of beside the point as I'm not suggesting historical reference points should preclude female miniatures, what I'm saying is the premise that the right level of representation should be 50-50 has no basis as it goes against all actual combat in history. That is to say, you can make it 50-50, but there's no particular reason it needs to be.

The argument that women are being excluded has been made several times, including on this very page. And the idea that we must get more women playing AoS makes no sense to me. It's a niche hobby, not a proselytizing cult. People can play or not play and if it doesn't appeal then that's fine. I've worked in quite a few hospitals that had weekly knitting groups and would go and join in when I had the time. I was invariably the only man present. No one in a knitting circle wastes a moment of their time worrying that there aren't enough men knitting or wondering what they can do to bring in more men. Men were welcome to join in but any man who turned up and declared that there should be more masculine knitting patterns to appeal to them would have rightfully been met with bewilderment.