Overread

REAPERS https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/10/19/what-is-the-tithegw-homepage-post-3 So this confirms much of what we knew already, that the reapers are built of bone and many souls; that they treat the living like a farmer treats cattle (stock for the harvest) and that they posses their own independent thought and goals (even if slaved to Nagash's overarching directive). There's more detail on them acting like immortals so coming to take tithes from peoples who might have been left without a harvest for generations and thus forget the old agreements. There's also aspects of them having squabbles or territory expansions of their own might might cause them to turn on a tithed settlement and the, ever present, fact that some might turn against them and thus have to be harvested in a more direct way. There's also rough details on 3 variations of the legions, giving a hint as to the source of bone having an impact on their performance. From an army given into bestial rage in combat; to those formed from the dark Pyramid and resistant to magic. In addition there's several new works of art!

Updated a few rumours into the first post, also added a model warning for the Gutbuster and Beastclaw model lines since with Ogors likely fast approaching as a tome release, any of the finecast/metal models are potentially "at risk" in going out of production. Nothing is certain nor known at this stage, save that a new Tyrant in plastic is coming.

Stories from BL offer no protection to models. Often the authors have no idea about the future of games and the products; and even when they do sometimes the stories they write are started many months ago and production and sales and such can result in changes coming through the system. So a "confirmed to stay" model suddenly becomes one being removed only a short while after a story featuring that model is published. You can't even predict new things as authors will use concept ideas from GW as well as their own ideas when writing stories. So you can see really cool new monsters and races and factions that will never come to pass. Or which might have been considered but shelved etc.... Heck Araby, Cathay and Nippon all featured in Old World stories and the closest any of those got to an army was the Warmaster army for Araby. Meanwhile Kisleve was featured heavily and yet was eventually cut as an army for the game. Even some publications come short like the recent mercenary rules for dwarf artillery which were removed in the Cities of Sigmar model removal before that book came out. They'd also been heavily present in the lore as well. Of course sometimes things go away and come back, just months/years later. In general I would say anything in Beastclaws/Gutbusters in plastic is safe, whilst anything metal/finecast is at risk of being removed. If you love any of those sculpts get them now before they go. Plastics have tended to be safer, mostly because form GW's end they are a much bigger investment and the material is a current one they are using not retiring like metal and finecast. Gutbusters/Beastclaws don't have a huge number of plastics and they are all fairly modern with what they've got so I don't see a need to remove. Of course we have lost plastics - Greenskins and Cities of Sigmar showed that we can indeed lose some quite modern plastics. I did predict that we might lose some of the repeat orruk concepts (you don't need 3 armies with the same boar-riders, shamans, choppa boys etc... concepts); however the losses in Cities armies were almost impossible to predict including things like dragon kits etc.. - many of which were not all that old.

There was a general fantasy soup around the time that Warhammer came into life. Moorcock, Tolkien, Conan, Cuthulu, DnD - a lot of big names were formed around the same period of time and there was a lot of influences bouncing around. Of them I think Cuthulu has actually had a bigger revival in more recent times which has put the name into more peoples minds. However I agree that whilst Warhammer and 40K likely had some influences either direct from it or by association from other brands, I don't think its as heavy an influence as some others. Also don't forget that for all its popularity the Cuthulu material is actually quite small and light in content. It's mostly short horror stories without extensive overarching world building. As a result its really easy to start saying "Oh that's cuthulu because its got a tentacle mouth (eg a lictor)" when in reality its just a tentacle mouth without any link. Because the source material for Cuthulu is limited and fairly casual (by today's world building standards) its really easy to see potential casual links were they aren't really present. So I think if its there its subtle, a little bit here and a little bit there. You might find some in the Black Library short stories (eg old inferno) and tales which might take some inspiration or use the same story structure etc... in homage.

It really depends. Sometimes things go on Last Chance and you've got a while before they go, other times they go on Last Chance and are gone within a day. The Cities of Sigmar factions that had removed models only lasted around one day before the vast majority was gone from the GW stores when it went on Last Chance and the popular stuff went within hours. Many times "Last Chance" translates to "we won't cast it any more" which means whatever stock GW has gets burned through until its gone. However they've also done it with things like Sisters of Battle where its got a set end-date and they keep casting until that point. So its variable, though typically its the former - no more production grab it whilst you can. Sometimes stuff can also just vanish for no reason or warning from the store.

We know for certain that a new Gutbuster leader model is being released by GW in plastic. It was shown at the 2019 Nova event. However we've also seen strong hints of there being a combined ogres battletome which links up Gutbusters and Beastclaw Raiders. The first casual hint was when they did their last survey and in one of the questions about favoured factions there was only "Ogres" instead of gutbusters and beastclaw raiders. Since they share the very same visual design and were once part of the same model line in Old World and we've heard a few "met at the event and asked" reports from people that basically confirms its going to happen. There's also a shipment report from a firm which does casting for GW of their overseas plastics (terrain and spells and such) which has a great cooking pot on the inventory for ogors which would be a very well themed terrain feature for them. WE don't know if they'll lose any models - anything metal/finecast is easily up for the chop in both forces.

Good spot, its gone from the UK site too; likely reflects GW running out of stock and then not ordering any more and also likely shelving what they had. No sense selling it now since there's an update likely very close (months - but before end of year).

Welcome to the site! A few answers to help out 1) You are correct that there are not as many articles on strategy as there are on painting or list building. This is more a failing of the community than of the game. There most certainly is strategy on the tabletop, its just that many people have a poor grasp of it and a poorer grasp on how to describe and explain it to others. So you get realy generic stuff like "play to the objectives" and suchlike. Now there ARE more strategic games and many of the smaller skirmish games like Infinity certainly play very strongly into the strategy whilst Warmachine/Hordes plays heavily into the combos and supporting units aspects as well. AoS certainly has strategy of its own kind, some consider it too basic, others don't really understand it and thus often view it as simplistic. But the lack of discussion is more a community failing than a lack of it as a feature. 2) When it comes to how many armies do people collect its a personal thing really. There is no set answer. Some people dabble in an army for a while then sell it on and buy a new one; others flit from army to army all the time; some build 40,000 points worth of just one single army and keep adding to it. There is NO set pattern really. You might see some patterns in "meta chasers" who basically chase the generally viewed best/most broken army in the competitive scene; but overall they are a much smaller percentage of the userbase in general. In short people do what works for them given their attitude, finances and situation. Keeping in mind that all these can change through time. That army you lovingly built might one day be one you part with for another. 3) Some armies are smaller than others and some are bigger. AoS isn't totally new, its built off the back of the Old World. AS such some armies are simply at different points. Armies like Skaven, Stormcast and Gloomspite have multiple viable builds; whilst armies like Gloomspite even have sub-armies within their battletome that focus on specific niches. Orruks and Cities of Sigmar are very much the same deal, with Cities being very flavourful with their different builds. This is a bit different to 40K where there are fewer sub-armies within the factions, but where the sub-factions often have a themed bonus (eg close combat or ranged focus) so you'd have one army, but it might have detachments from two or three sub-groups within with the detachments focused on a specific aspect. Smaller forces will have fewer choices, typically, however a lot depends on how the Battletome is setout and at what power level you are aiming for. For example Daughters of Khaine has several viable builds within its battletome which reach roughly similar levels of power (eg you can go heavy with witches, or you can go for a full army of half snake women); meanwhile an army like Slaanesh and its depravity generation system heavily favours taking 3 or 4 keepers of secrets and a minimum number of troops. Other builds can be made but are not as effective (its a point many of us slaanesh fans lament and hope might get changed in time). So a LOT depends on the Tome itself, but in general smaller armies might ahve less variety here and there. Of course allies can be taken (at 1/4 of the army size) to help makeup for that. 4) Armies are in general very diverse in what they offer, with a good few having nice diversity within their Battletome. This varies army to army. Skaven, for example, can easily build a huge swarming hoard of 1 wound rats; or they can go for an artillery heavy force which is backed up with multiwound ogres and stormvermin etc... Chaos armies can be really diverse depending how you build them as you can be pure to a single god or build a slaves army (a bit lacking in power at present due to them not yet having a tome) with more mortals with demons brought in as support. So there's lots of diversity; though again competitive angles might make this appear a bit less army by army; but it is there. 5) AoS is in a better spot in general, partly because it doesn't have the alliance problems 40K has. The way allied units work in AoS and the way Grand Alliances work in general means that whilst there are a lot of options to take allied units; they are strictly limited. This prevents the "min max soup" problem that somewhat plagues 40K (and in fairness is mostly due to the fact that the Imperium has a LOT of army choices - way more than most other races, which leads itself more open to abuses of min-maxing between armies) Overall don't forget that there is bias in the answers you will get. Some local scenes are very competitive focused with very niche viewpionts; whilst more casual or even just diverse local competitive scenes might give variable answers. It's also always in flux so a year ago Daughters of Khaine were the "OMG they are so broken its impossible to win" whereas now the situation has changed. One pattern that is constant is that armies without a 2.0 battletome fair poorly, however with the rate GW is releasing them then in the first quarter of 2020 AoS should be fully onto the 2.0 system (there's only Slaves to Darkness, Seraphon, KO and Tzeentch to get updated - accepting that Ogres are being updated later this year which will merge the gutbusters and beastclaw raiders)

I think if you can change the hands for claws/talons/paws then you might be fine. They have a fairly animal look and on the right base without their normal scythe weapons and with claws instead they'd look good as faux-dire-wolves. The trick would be ensuring that you get the forearms looking right as right now they have regular hands. I'm not sure what parts you could use for that

Another aspect is that with digital data you can at least review it somewhat and break gamers down into skill blocks. All those gamers losing to the easy AI in your data pool - you can take into account that either there's a problem or they are just really bad players and the data isn't worth it. For GW its much harder because online and email reports have no real database of info. Heck most battle reports don't fill in the full details. So GW likely gets a lot of "X is OP broken" from random people with no context. It takes a lot longer to pool data to actually see if there's an issue because you've got to have a LOT of data supporting itself before you can start to identify it as a pattern rather than just bad players. Plus you've got the issue of house rules and getting the rules wrong (things that can't happen in a digital game and if they do then its consistent because something in the code is wrong). And then we add the time aspect on top. A single 2K game might be as many as 4 or 5 hours long and that in digital terms could be 8 or more matches in some games; sometimes even more. So suddenly you've got a system that generates less data and has far less reliable data reporting. Ontop of that the data likely takes longer to input and collate. That said there are still some glaring aspects that its surprising slip through the net.

The Skaven content is all supported, its the high elf from Island of Blood that was basically dropped. Skaven actually survived AoS transition with pretty much everything more or less. A few things like the warpglobe thrower were lost.

Island of Blood was a starter set for the Old World that survived for a time into AoS. Hence why I think we didn't see any of those models resculpted for the Skaven release at the time. However it was a short sighted release because GW put all the elf and skaven models on the same sprues so the only way to sell Island of Blood was as Island of Blood. I think it got caught up in those dark early days of AoS when everything was basically a mess and GW was having to change direction (game and company wise). Hopefully now that the set is gone we might well see those sculpts, at least for Skaven, return to being made. We might even see some like the weapon team get advanced up to a multi-kit setup.

Aye the casual scene is always larger, plus GW pushes Nighthaunt well as a starter army so there's likely many who have started and can easily build into a battleforce at christmas; just the same as there are for Stormcast. Heck I've no idea how Tyranids are doing but I'd be sorely tempted by the box if I didn't already have two of the old ones sitting on a shelf waiting to be built.

Actually several AoS ones sold out really well last year. The ones that lingered were those that didn't have Battletomes and I recall one at least sold out very fast once a Tome was released for that army. Slaves to Darkness has held on through the year, but its also an army without a Tome. Heck Seraphon sold out and they haven't yet got a 2.0 Battletome (though they do have one at least).

It's very hard for me to choose, made harder by the fact that we don't yet know the point values nor structure of the army for things like battleline troops. Nor do we fully know all the potential weapon options with them nor how they affect their play style and stats. When a full block of 30 troops can cost quite a bit for any army (most tend to operate around the 30 value, though of course some operate with less and some more) it can make a serious dent in a budget just to get the army working right. I'll likely pass on Katakros because whilst its an awesome model its likely going to be expensive and I tend to prefer to build up a solid variable army core before adding really big expensive things. Going with my gut on things I really really want: Liege-Kavalos and Arch-Kavalos Zandtos - ergo two of those cavalry leader kits. I've really loved the look of that model since the teaser in the leak. That it can build two different kinds of leader - one hero one generic - just reinforces my love of the sculpt. Kavalos Deathriders - cavalry for the leaders to lead. This assumes that the cavalry is battle-line and priced as such. If they turn out at varanguard prices then, well, that plan might be a lot slower coming to fruition. Mortek Crawler - a walking trebuchet! Do I need any more reason than that to want to get one of these? (or more than one if funds allow) Those three would be my top three picks however following fast on from them I'd really love to get Necropolis Stalkers Reaper leader (I forget its name) Reconstruction Leader (the one we've not had previewed yet) Gothizzar Harvester! Mostly this leaves Katakross, troops and the chair guy on the last legs (see see pun there). There's also the other support products such as terrain features and the like. So basically I want it all! Though I suspect I certainly won't be able to afford it all (asides getting it all at once would backlog me so heavily I could lose enthusiasm to battle the mountain of plastic)

I've no idea honestly. Stormcast do have a lot of options though. That said don't forget GW pitches these boxes typically as beginner to expansion sets. So often they are great for someone just starting or recently started with an army looking to expand what they've got. So the SC could be quite similar to the last one, or gw might vary it up some. They tend to err away from really expensive single models though and that's about the only pattern. Of course the other aspect is that at present AoS hasn't got its own "Apoc" style rules for mega games; although several armies do have battalions made up of other battalions which can end up costing very high point values (from memory I think the Daughters of Khaine one is in the region of 5K points). But as AoS is quite "new" I don't think there's the same pressure (yet) to get GW to push for Apoc style games in marketing. In time I fully expect to see such rules either as its own set or in the GHB one year. Heck with this years being focused on the 1K game and with Warcry in the smaller point values and Skirmish still kicking around; I could well see next years feature being 5K+ games

Yeah Ogors Ogres whatever are most likely the next Battletome after Ossiarchs. Following on from that we've no idea until we get a new GW reveal event really as Ogres are the last thing GW has teased us for in the main game. That said there's only Seraphon, KO, Tzeentch and Slaves to go anyway. Seraphon, KO and Tzeentch are most likely just bare bones tome updates with terrain+spells, whilst Slaves appear to be going for a big release sideways through releasing models into Warcry first. Still that's likely the last big Tome for the game. Thereafter it would be new armies and updates.

Eh from what I saw there wasn't a huge amount of unity in the community. Granted part of that was a large split between "AoS" and "Ninth Age Fantasy"; but you've also got huge issues because: 1) Not everyone comes online 2) Not everyone can agree what the game should be. This is a huge issue and even at a local level different clubs might have used different rule sets. Heck just start a thread on Open Play and see how many vast difference you get even in a small sample of online users. Some are simply games without a campaign using the core rules but with some story context; others are full blown custom rules sets. Could AoS have built its own international community of gamers around their own rules system? Perhaps but I'd wager it would have been a nightmare to get there and that's before having GW on the "outside" and liable to drop or add models/armies/units without much warning.

GUYS I got one - an actual RUMOUR!!! https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/2460/780018.page#top part way down From someone in France relayed through Dakka: *translated with google apparently* Also they think Ombrelance is "shadow spear" or something like that.

He might well have started life as a character and then become generic later. As for running more than one its really hard to say at present since we don't know the rules nor points. At present we only know that he might well be good for supporting the artillery which suggests you might well only need one of him in a supporting role.

Nice find @michu and very interesting reading. Nice to hear from the designers of the game! Also interesting that it was a pit-fighting game that evolved over time (which fits with GW releasing a lot of pit-fighting focused short stories). Kind of glad that it did evolve because its far stronger for having more than just Chaos models within it and letting other factions in really expands the playerbase of the game.

Eh I think its more that its a game that kids and adults jointly enjoy. Keeping in mind it was developed by adults who enjoyed playing the game they were developing and the game itself has retained its adult customer base really well. It's just not a kids nor an adults "hobby" its cross generational. Plus kids actually LIKE clearly defined boundaries and rules. Most people do because they provide a framework that is predictable to operate within. Introducing rules that are fuzzy or hard to understand or which don't work the same way every time etc... can actually be hard for both kids and adults. Tighter, better rules are better for all parties involved. From that foundation anyone can then far more easily branch off in their own direction.

@Charlo the best we've had is from the leak here https://war-of-sigmar.herokuapp.com/bloggings/4134 About half way through the photos. It's not a clear nor big picture of it, but thus far from the leak that and the terrain feature are the only things we've not officially seen in GW photos.

Yep its a huge part of why GW are so much bigger than many others. Another aspect is that marketing is VERY hard these days as many avenues are simply too expensive for most games. So they often rely on local clubs since they don't have stores; they don't have game licences; they don't have books or school programs. Just look how much Warmachine and Hordes have suffered since doing away with their Press Ganger system - even something as simple as one person in each region having a vested interest in pushing the game made a huge difference in someone locally promoting the game; organising events; introducing new people to it etc....

Low, I would say Slaves are FAR more in line for a full Battletome. Technically its still the big bad enemy of the whole game.