Overread

Lore wise Daughters of Khaine are a few city states in Shadow - Malarion rules most of Shadow Realm. Right now he's more of a shadow in the setting because he's no army so GW hasn't pushed the lore for him. That said I fully expect to see him leading legions and armies. Note that his appearance in the short story is an astral projection. It's magical power and a show of great magical force rather than sneaky spy stuff (though that's also implied). It's why Morathi slicing off a finger is such an important part because it shows how she now has power to hurt him even in that form. That she's risen in power significantly. This coupled with her expansion activities is basically her showing that she's got reason and motivation to push her DoK forces to be more than a corner of shadow; to be a major player on the battlefields not just an ally of others. Heck perhaps it will unravel around her and her son has to lead his legions in to save her when she finds herself contending with vast Slaanesh legions at the gates and Sigmar and others unwilling/unable to aid her. Her forces are powerful and politically she's perhaps the closest to Sigmar in a fevered hate of Chaos and willingness to do something about Chaos directly; however at the same time she's always got her own agender

I think the power of the Codex/Battletome is very precisely that they are combined products. The idea is very simple, with a single essential purchase to play, the customer gets art, photos, lore, rules, painting all in one bundle. Yes the painting is a little short, but its designed as a taste. The idea is that its a scatter shot product that aims to please each individual need on its own. That's a powerful thing when you put it into the hands of someone new to an army. They might be new but an established GW customer or someone totally brand new to wargaming. The idea is that they get an introduction to everything and because its an "essential purchase" they are guaranteed to be exposed to it all. As soon as you disconnect fluff and rules what tends to happen is that the fluff steps back more and more. Because its always an optional purchase and people will generally lean toward getting rules and models first. As soon as you disconnect and start to try and appease each segment on its own purely, the art and lore side suffers significantly. PP did this and went full digital with their rules and the result is their fluff side has done so badly since that they've basically shut it down. Infinity actually pairs fluff a LOT with their products by producing limited edition models sold with graphic novels; by selling limited edition models with rule and fluff books and by having rule and fluff expansions. Yes they've an app and fully online rules - they provide for that market. However they also still approach the combined product system. Even with combined products the fluff and art side still sells way less. Ask yourself how many people at the club and group regularly read BL novels or buy into them. Heck I was gaming for over a decade before I read any. The story and art behind armies is often what helps us retain a connection to them and an interest. Yes the big rule book is impractical and needs a side (later) printing in smaller format for practical sake; yes a working app is neat; yes digital online free rules are great; but at the same time combined products are powerful. And sure after you've supported a single army for 20 years the lore might be a bit repetative and you might only have 1 or 2 new models and bits of story in there that's fresh. That said looking back at my Tyranid Codex I've seen the lore go from basically a few pages and a few little quotations to fully half the book - to tens of pages of stories, unit descriptions and more.

Question not where the wolf comes from - know only that when it comes it brings tidings of mystery and hints of futures yet unseen by mortal eyes.

I'm already part fearful that GW "might" soup Dark Elves back together. On the one hand I 100% get that fans of the classic army would be over the moon to have their army back together once more. On the other I kind of like that DoK have a huge established identity for themselves and I feel that being put back into Dark Elves would dilute that greatly. Especially since the original DoK models are really only the elite end of the Dark Elf army roster and that Dark Elf forces that are left could easily operate independent of the DoK contents. It's a bit like rebuilding Sylvaneth with Kurnothi/Wanderers - on the one hand great on the other do Sylvaneth players feel like it would dilute or grow their range? My gut feeling is it would feel more like a growth but then I think Sylvaneth haven't strayed as far from their roots (ooh look plant pun!) as the DoK have from the Dark Elf roots. At least in terms of asthetics.

*mutters and grumbles about the rumour cause stormcast getting all the new dragons* That alone is justification not to believe them!!!! Dwarf Soup could or could not work. Khadorans are totally their own thing, are popular and have a very distinct design. They just don't fit into the idea of being rolled back into the other dwarf groups. Fyreslayers are quite their own thing too and I think the only reason they aren't more used is that they are just not a diverse army in terms of model range. Meanwhile regular dwarves are just ignored thus far and have lost a lot of their flare (siege weapons and the like). Each of the three is very distinct. I could see Disspossessed and Fyreslayers merging quite easily, but Khadorans I can't see easily merging back into Dwarves not really a reason to do it.

Well both the new Battletomes had Battalions in them; however it might be that they are going to shift things around and perhaps "matched play" will only feature core battalions whilst open or narrative will make more use of battletome ones. Battalions were always a touch odd; some were almost auto-includes whlist others were 5K points just for min unit numbers and clearly aimed at huge games far out of the normal. Meanwhlie others relied purely upon alliances of different armies. So even if a tome had several you could easily say that 2 or 3 were rare to never touched for most people.

Plaster them all over social media sites tagged with GW or whatever the GW tags are that they use. Post enough times and I'm sure GW will notice. After that I hear you have to make sacrifices of first born children and oaths to dark gods and join a cult

I will remain strong and not buy into Soulblight I will remain strong and not buy into Soulblight I will remain strong and not buy into Soulblight I will remain strong and not buy into Soulblight *checks bank account* For once my bank account and the (sane?) part of my brain are in agreement!

Soooo Sigmar saw Ossiarchs with spears - stole them and made them three times as thick for his stormcast Darn gods stealing ideas from the might of Nagash!

Right now the money seems to be on either AoS 3.0 formal announcement and/or the TV shows perhaps getting actual release information (not just showing off a few clips from work in progress). That said there's a few others things I'd welcome 1) Big rework/update of Craftworld Eldar 2) Big news about "Old World" I've even heard some rumour that they are going to announce its scale is 6-15mm bracket. 3) Battlefleet Gothic - something the FW team was said to be working on but got delayed/shelved as things shifted around. In the end whatever it is I'm sure it will be awesome

Because big preview events attract a lot of GW's customers who are otherwise not online as much. So they have a far greater chance to miss one off articles or news; plus all those who might not be big gamers and who don't keep up with games, but who might well be interested in such a product. As for the time yes this could be put down into 1 or 2 days; which is basically what happens every year we don't have global pandemic. GW has just spread it out a bit this week to make it more of a marketing thing and not just one or two days of previews and then nothing. Plus don't forget GW's already got a lot of stuff still to come out so these are previews with GW already backlogged a bit.

And its time for a pause. This is not a ban on the topic of balance, but we have reached a point where we aren't really progressing in the discussion and its starting to get a little personal between a few of you here and there as you debate your different attitudes and stances on balance.

Because GW has practical limits. You can take any faction in AoS and instantly have one version of it for each different mortal realm (more or less). Then you can have a different version for each subfaction within the battletome then each subfaction in each mortal realm. Suddenly 1 army has enough forces to equal the entire current AoS model range in one go. Skaven were also not developed purely for AoS; they have a history and in that history they were 1 single army. They worked with that and were built around it. "Gaps" in one subgroup were filled by the others. Moulder didn't need a ranged siege weapon because it got the lightning cannon. There are also niches that don't work on their own, like Eshin. Assassin armies don't work because even in the lore they typically rely on a few key assassinations rather than a whole army of assassins. Even GW had to reign in and pull back on having Imperial Assassins as their own army in 40K. As a single battletome Skaven still have niche forces, but it more easily lets them work together as a single force when needed. GW could have done the same for Aelves, but they've chosen not too; however in the past the elves also had multiple armies any way. So we were already used to that concept, whilst Skaven was a single force. Perhaps in time who knows skaven could end up with more separate armies, but it doesn't seem like a direction GW wants to go with.

Wargaming in general has a heavily under developed sense of talking about the game itself. Tactics, deployment, movement, target prioritising are all basically unmentioned barring in the most general of terms. To the point where people think screening units is a tactic that has developed since Double Turns became a thing. Basically working with what you've got is less established and the online chatter focuses purely on the statistical best conditions. So any army that isn't, on paper, the best is instantly discounted. The problem there is that it is very open to hyperbole And balance and tactics discussions often go in circles. Heck look at this thread, we've limited actual balance discussion. We've a lot on what kind of balance we'd like (which is broadly the same idea just being reworded a dozen times or more); and a lot of showing of event stats (national and local level) in terms of showing what might be under/over performance of armies. But we've no real drilling into the hard core statistical numbers. Nor really hard core presentation of heavy data to adjust the balance by. It's all in very generalist terms. The sad thing is getting generalist terms boils down to "army good, army not good" which isn't helpful. I've also seen it in the past (sometimes more with other systems like Warmachine) where an army is underpowered until someone wins a big event with that army; then suddenly its overpowered . It highlights how the player is important in the game as well, on both sides, but its often the element we least remember to include and have the hardest time talking about.

Centaur Vampire - my capacity to resist vampires is weakening significantly now

The problem is that the UK in general doesn't do much paper printing; a lot is done overseas. The machines are expensive and I think also GW is in the middleground - big enough that they've good demand, but too small to really justify the vast costs of the machinery required. Plus its not just machines, its skilled operators, skill sets and base resources and all.

Some interesting chatter about this game up in Dakka forums and one person posted that they'd heard it was an issue with GW's back end stock and product management software. Ergo that there were boxes of Cursed City with missing parts because GW's ordering and tracking system had broken on some level. Ergo they'd under ordered on some parts and over ordered on others and neither end knew the problem was there until the shipments arrived. IT would pair well with GW having some issues with their warehouse system and their huge warehouse move - both of which wuld be highly disruptive even if there aren't issues with the system itself. Eg we've all seen that Forgeworld and the GW website have a glitch whereby products get shown "sold out" instead of just "out of stock". It's likely been there for ages, but been undetected because it was rare in the past; now with stock running out more regularly its rearing its head far more often. Cursed City is odd and it might be that the lack of clear communication is that GW itself has made sudden changes and isn't even sure what they are doing with the product.

Most forums auto-resize images too big for the forum to show normally. Either resizing so it fits the window before uploading it to a post; or simply clicking on it to open the fullsize view will resolve the issue That new model is very very cool!

Aye, but Battlefury didn't say list, he said army, which is a key difference. Sure if someone builds a really poor list or skews it to a specific theme very heavily they might find that they have a hard time winning or that they have an easier time against some armies but much harder against others. However a well built list should work and most armies should have within them the capacity to have several well built lists. This is again about flattening the curve, though it means less about between forces and more about within a battletome. That is having the power spread over the army in general rather than having one or two niches that are pure power options. The Slaanesh tome is a great example of this. The last version of the Battletome had a setup whereby taking lots of Keepers and summoning more Keepers was the powerplay. It was by far and away far more powerful than anything else the tome could do. Within the tome it was bad balance because it invalidated so many other options by virtue of being so effective. Even if it had been balanced against other armies, it was a bad internal balance because it limited choice within the book. Again we come back to this idea of flat/smooth balancing. The idea that we make the game more engaging, more fun and more exciting and more practical by having a smoother softer curve of power variation. Both within the book and between the books - armies. That allows players to have options and choices when building their army list. It allows variation in play and there will be strong and weak matchups, but ideally they won't steamroll just through the numbers alone. A skilled player or a few mistakes will turn the tide more than the fact that you'll just roll a huge bunch of dice and take half the opponents army off the table in one turn with no effort or thinking. Building real choice into the game is great for all involved. IT means that GW can expect sales on most of the models in an army range to customers of those armies; it means players have more choice and options to use the majority of their collection; it means that players aren't "left out" or unfairly challenged by their choice of army. It means that people aren't left feeling like they have to swap armies every few months to stay ahead* Now the real challenge is how we reach that point and GW doesn't make it easy. New editions can mess up balancing and GW's clearly got elements of its rules construction which are more casual than ideal. They have improved and I'd say that the tournament scene for AoS does show a far more broad range of armies being played at a general level. There are still those that appear more than others and some that hardly appear at all; but the spread is far more even. In general we are heading in what I'd consider is the right direction, though we still get oddities like the previous Slaanesh Battletome. *whilst you might argue GW would benefit from this, my observation is that people who army hop/swap very often tend to do it as cheaply as they can and are more likely to buy secondhand models and paint strip them or even whole secondhand forces. So they are far less likely to put fresh money into buying brand new from GW and are instead more recycling what's in the market already.

Based on game and lore balance I would imagine that they are close to the power of the gods we have from the Mortal Realms. So the chaos corrupted form of the Lumineth god twins - one for combat one for magic. That said hints of the new lore from the upcoming expansion book suggest that they might be more in line with an ancient Slaan in terms of power (remembering that ancient Slaan are about the most powerful creatures save the Chaos Gods and one or two godbeasts). With the bonus that as they are creatures of Chaos they are technically near impossible to kill - kill them and they are reborn within the teeming mass of Chaos that is Slaanesh. Their real strength will be providing a degree of unity to Slaanesh as a force. Hither too Slaanesh has been divided into 3 groups; which war with each other as much as the other races. This held Slaanesh back. A pair of united leaders would at least contain the internal battles and provide a sense of unity. Sure Slaanesh is still chaos, the worshippers will still fight each other; but along smaller lines now not huge divided legions all the time. They also know where their parent is; they know the weaknesses in the magics and it seems that the forces of Slaanesh are going to come down hard on the realm of Shadow

I think you are getting pushback because your point did not come across clearly to all in the thread. Essentially there are two points - the difficulty of winning with an army and the difficulty of playing an army. Some are taking your meaning that making an army harder to play means making it weaker and thus harder to win with, ergo that it is inherently weaker. This isn't helped by the fact that you are sort of dismissing flat balancing as an idealistic goal. However what I believe you're actually doing is advocating flat balancing, just within the boundaries of reality that it would never be achieved and that instead there would simply be smaller differences, but that there would be some difference. Just that the difference would be one where player skill still has a greater impact on results than the raw army stats. Which is basically agreeing with those who want "flat balance" just that they are going for the flat term as an idealistic goal, even though I assume most realise that its an idealistic goal not a realistic one. At its core I believe most players (the vast majority) want to be able to turn up to a game and have player skill be a key element in the game; not the core army stats. In addition most players are also hobbyists and they want their army choice (as a faction) to be viable at the tabletop. Even if some are easier to control and others are harder and require a little more skill to use; they want the raw stats to be in favour of neither force to an extreme degree. In short I think you're actually agreeing, just that you're coming from different angles which makes it easy to sound like you're arguing against each other.

One thing I will say in GW's defence since they shifted to the roughly 3 months preview pattern that they are in now, is that when GW previews it you generally get the model within that timeframe. There are exceptions and annoyances along the way* but broadly speaking once they officially release info you get the model. I've known firms to show off models in the past and then leave you waiting years and never getting them. To build marketing hype on info far too early which results in disappointment. Not just in tabletop games either, computer games I've seen many firms do a huge spread of info on an upcoming game only for 5 years later to change almost everything as a result of practicalities of design. In the end I like that when GW shows me something I can expect to get it within (typically) a reasonable time frame. I like that they don't show off loads of concept art for something that then never delivers. I still want to see concept art in books and such, but to appreciate it as concepts not as hints of what is coming, but might take 20 years *Forgeworld is a bit more haphazard, but I might put part of that down to internal politics and resource allocation that might be outside of FW's hands. Furthermore some models can take up to a year after release in limited edition duel army packs, before they hit the market on their own. Covid has also messed things up a lot but that's a unique situation

Licence holding had nothing to do with GW axing Bretonnia. Old World to AoS was not a clear cut sensible situation and was based on flared marketing and management ideas. Namely GW wasn't using user feedback and from interviews that are around the net its clear that even the plans for AoS got mangled by middlemanagers under the old system. Which resulted in them throwing out the rules for the game (yes it had serious rules and points) and adopting what we got at AoS's launch. It was also a monumental bad example of marketing. GW hyped up Old World, sunk resources into it; gave it attention, new models, updates and then dropped the ball on it like a lump of hot lead without any warning. I would wager that Old World could have easily become as popular if not more so, as AoS is is today if the management of today were running the show back then. That is not to say I don't like AoS, just that the reasoning for it existing was not sound management. Heck it took until 2.0 for Gw to really turn things around for AoS and its worked; freaking heck its getting some of the best creative work out of GW right now; but it took a huge amount to reach that including big changes to GW management staff. As for licences in specifics; note that nothing NOTHING in AoS is unique enough to be fully protected by licencing laws. The names can be, the actual sculpt of the model is, the full stats can sort of be. The actual concept of the models; the design ethos of them; the army type and nature; all that is totally unprotected. There are multiple firms making giant walking lizards and rats and winged women and vampires and all those other things. Heck considering vampires (soulblight) are next lets consider that vampires and zomebies and skeletons are popular and super old and there are loads of alternatives. GW could have easily protected Bretonnia by renaming things and it would have achieved the same level of protection as anything under AoS right now. It's removal was sales and other internal GW madness of the old management.

It's important to realise that after the Chapterhouse Court Case GW adopted the "no models no rules" policy in their battletomes and codex as a general policy. This means if GW isn't going to sell a model within a short span of time after the book goes on sale, then the models rules won't go in the book. This prevents 3rd parties providing alternative models and "stealing" the market from GW before GW can release the model. We also know that armies which go a long long time without any new models get frustrated fans. So drip feeding models, as well as big chunky releases, is a thing most people are happy with. By and large we all want new things for our armies. I honestly think GW could take a leaf from the old warmachine style and put warscroll cards into the box not just as a slip of paper but the proper cards themselves. That way new models would come with the "new rules" and be a complete package in themselves. Of course GW does this right now with expansion books and it seems to work well for them Slaanesh only feels odd because we only just got the book; however it would likely be closer to 6 months old by now rather than only a few because of the delays and snarlups around brexit/covid messing up GW's release plan and pattern. The actual campaign book is likely closer to its original release date (if we assume GW is releasing them in a run up to a mid-year release of a new edition or other major event). In the end these two models likely just add two new warscrolls the army; plus perhaps a theme list based around them. Otherwise the whole rest of the battletome remains 100% valid.

MODERATOR NOTICE Ok people lets all just keep our cool a bit. No one has stepped out of line yet, but a few are getting close with frustration bleeding into a few posts. Balance discussions often hit hurdles of getting your point across and can be challenging when trying to shift things from theory to practice and from local to larger data pools. Let's all respect different viewpoints and at least engage debate and discussion around the point and topic not around each other. MODERATOR NOTICE In other news I would highlight that one issue with balance discussion online is that tactical discussion and development is very limited online and in the community in general. As a community we have a lot of information and free exchange on building and painting and heaps on how to design an army list. However actually playing the game and actual tactical ideas are very limited. We have a lot of underdeveloped community aspects there which means we lack the vocabulary to convey points effectively and a lack of general common understandings in a practical sense. Bulletpoint simple concepts are often thrown around "play for the objectives" "screen your units" but often these are not presented in a way that people can easily comprehend and put into practice on the tabletop. In short there's a vast variety of player skill both in members taking part in the discussion and in players they play against. It's thus fully possible that two people of equal skill in different areas can have very different experiences even playing the same army; even if they were playing against the same opponent lists and forces. This can complicate balance discussions because it ends up with different people having different practical experiences of the game and this is before we even touch on things like board setup. Again a huge factor; some play on boards choked with too much scenery where big models might be useless; others play onboards so open that any army with a ranged focus is near an auto win. These (and more) are factors we have to consider which muddy the waters in terms of practical army play experiences.