Overread

The problem with Faction Terrain is GW was very wild with the size variation. You had small things like gnawholes and charnal thrones that could easily fit into a predesigned board; and then you had insanely huge things like the Ossiarch Nexus which just cannot fit onto a well put together board after terrain and the function of which kind of makes you always want it in the middle which is silly for something so huge and so open line-of-sight wise.

Eh most people can tell a sword from a spear from an axe from a halberd. Heck its only the current edition of AoS that has made alternate unit weapon profiles the same or almost the same. Historically for the last 36 years or so fantasy weapons, and sci-fi weapons in 40K, have nearly always had different profiles. Sometimes quite diverse; sometimes just a little variation. I think the only time it becomes a serious problem is if you have an extremely large number of units on the table. Which could be an issue with the 3.0 over some previous editions because 3.0 has pushed for more smaller blocks of units instead of fewer bigger blocks of single units.

Think of the bonus though - you got some extra walking exercise!

I think one thing about flamers for Tzeentch is simply showing that the pure demonic parts of demon armies are actually very small. The updates all 4 gods have had over the past few years since AoS have focused mostly on the leaders and mortals. Actual demonic models are either updated or the same as they've been for a considerable time. I see it a symptom of the fact that demon armies were generally originally designed to work together. That's why Khorne has the artillery because you didn't need 4 artillery models; you'd just bring Khorne in your Chaos Demons army. Now that they stand alone there's room in each one for more demonic units that have simply not had design/production slots to come through. With most having fairly complete human and leader roles and fairly modern plastics in most slots I think the field is ripe that the next time AoS demons come into the light for updates we might well see new demonic monsters. Perhaps new fliers, new monsters, new artillery, new creatures and more. Heck knows the lore has more than enough room for each god to have a whole host of variety in those slots.

The global shipping is going to take years to settle down and that assumes no further major upheavals. That's going to keep having knock on effects for firms like GW outside of any internal politics/issues that arise for them. Still they are still releasing a massive amount of stuff, even if its a bit out of order. Heck I suspect that they'd love to just do a massive dump of stuff one month and just flood the market to catch up with their plans. Its' got to be so painful for staff to see stuff that they know is finished and ready just held back and held back because so much is trying to get out the door at once.

I've never understood GW and fancy dice. They've never done them for every army (Tyranids often don't get them); they always make them rather overlarge instead of your standard D6 size so rolling lots of them (which GW loves having us do) is a pain unless you've massive hands. If I were GW I'd have fancy dice per faction and they'd be regular D6 gaming size.

Or the surprise second wave of Ossiarch models......

Honestly I don't get why GW doesn't just bring the Dark Elf army back as a whole. It's all there to use

I wonder, they are fighting against vampires in that diorama. Could that be sneaky new vampire model going to ambush them from behind!!

The UK store has many of the Warbands sold out online including both the ones on the Warcry page (with cards) and in the Slaves to Darkness (the double model packs with no cards). I hope its just a repack since they've not advertised them going "last chance" nor "range rotation" and I've still not picked up the Unmade I want

Right now it looks like almost all of Slaves to Darkness will be updated save for the enigma that is the on foot Marauders which I'm still utterly baffled that GW hasn't had them updated through Warcry Also speaking of Warcry did GW say they were pulling them from sale? Cause a LOT of the warbands on both Warcry and their regular AoS boxed sets are gone from the webstore (sold out). I don't quite recall GW saying they were going to sell out/remove/range rotate warcry stuff. I know they did it for Underworlds semi-recently. Otherwise we are approaching a time where Chaos will have all 4 core Chaos Gods with fleshed out human and demon forces; Slaves to Darkness fleshed out. Leaving Skaven and Beastmen. The updating and additions are a steady grind with AoS, there's just a lot to get through between small armies needing more and big armies needing range updates.

The issue isn't the new editions. It's more that they rebuild the rules every edition in significant ways. It's always been an issue too for 30 years - they don't refine one rules system they shake it up almost every time. The difference between now and in the past is that now at least you can expect a codex/battletome fairly early in the new edition (excluding when you've got a global pandemic followed by a global shipping crisis and then followed by a rising costs issue). In the past you didn't always get a book. Some books arrived the last week before a new edition, some armies never got a book for an edition. Heck some even skipped two whole editions without an updated book.

I think its important to realise that the last 3 years or so have been a mess. Some of the release schedules have been messed around a lot and almost the only things landing "when they should" are major releases like christmas and mid-year big releases. Even then they've sometimes had delays in support material following after them. There are likely better ways to release things and GW likely would like to do them, but sometimes you got to go with what you've got. It's also a lingering problem because international shipping is still an expensive mess right now.

*Goes to polish the ban-hammer*

It depends. GW has started doing range rotation across most of their finecast model line. This means they pull models and bring them back for limited made to order print runs in the future. It seems to be a move to get finecast off their general sale rota whilst they can't replace everything with plastics super fast. A new maneater kit would make a LOT of sense; esp with multipart optional parts as that would let them replace multiple finecast with a single plastic kit. That said they might just have the maneaters on range rotation for a while.

Good opportunity to email GW and politely remind them to update the AoS basesize chart!

We really don't know what's going to happen. Cities was very much a rescue battletome that was also somewhat unplanned (a staffer did the work on their own time for the ground work). Right now its got a core of surviving human models, almost the entire dark elf line, a few bits of high and wood elves and a bunch of classic dwarf models. It's basically left over bits of Old World armies. What GW does with it is really hard to say. We know they are updating the human part of Cities so it might be that moving forward Cities becomes a purely human or human dominated faction. It might be GW creates human, dwarf and elf "cities of sigmar" forces. Heck they've had the whole "Dwarves might come back with vengeance" element in Gotrek stories for a while and its never really come to anything. GW has also teased merging the old dark elf army back together with the last expansion book which saw Daughters of Khaine basically take over a "not dark elf" city in the lore. I was half wondering if the 3.0 or now even a 4.0 battletome for DoK could end up just including all the old stuff for Dark Elves once more. Then again Dark Elves could just return as a force without the DoK models (cause they basically only lost the cauldron, witch aelves and morathi). Right now I'd expect to see most of the human models for Cities of Sigmar be replaced with either new concepts or upgraded ones. Even classic things like the Steam Tank are, lore wise, quite primitive. Cities are supposed to be almost steam punk levels of tech. So much closer to Khadorans in the level of tech on show.

Officially there isn't much. I think GW teased some design sketches a while back, but otherwise we've not seen any models nor heard any details of the update. So right now everything is rumours and wishlists and hopes and such. About the only thing we kind of know from GW is that its going to update the human line of models only. Which is an interesting take considering Cities was a catch-all faction of multiple races.

Just remember that reading reacts is like reading signs in the clouds - its near impossible.

@Scythian awesome! Love the idea to split the reds between the knight armours and their mount! Also looks like a really fun list to hit hard and fast with cavalry and wargs! Loads of fun! In the end I caved to getting a second box. Wayland had a nice deal on it at £87 which is honestly not far off what GW charges just for the single sprue of monsters from the set. So getting a second Vargskyr or more Vyrkos was near enough going to cost me that much anyway. Even if they aren't top tier I do like them as models in their own right. You're right that 20 Skeletons is a bit of a neither here nor there number, but with 20 in a regular box I can bolster up to two full squads with just 2 boxes of skeletons from GW. I've a slight eye to the future and feel that GW might not keep the whole unit restrictions system that 3.0 currently has in place forever (now wait and see GW make AoS a skirmish game by 4.0 :P) I'll probably be able to sell off some of the duplicate content or just keep it shelved for painting or converting in the future. A glance around ebay shows that there's plenty of CC stock around and with the boxed set itself coming back on sale chances are it won't be high demand stuff for many years (if never if GW keep things in general production). Also a favour to ask - could anyone measure the dimensions of a zombie dragon? Wingspan, length, width, height, neck length, head length/width etc... ?

It really is impossible to say when. On the one hand Death as a Grand Alliance is in a fairly good spot. Both Soulblight and Nighthaunt are really diverse in model options. Meanwhile whilst Flesheaters are lagging behind they share quite a few models with Soulblight so any update of things like zombie dragons and such hits both forces. So in theory when GA Death is looking for release slots, Ossiarch should be fairly okish to get a new selection of models through that. Of course the blowback is that Soulblight and Nighthaunt likely outsell Ossiarchs. We have seen an archer in Underworlds and that can suggest we'll see them in the main army too. It's no guarantee of course and we've seen things in Underworlds that never went any further (eg Kurnothi). Personally I feel like Ossiarch would do well with a chunky second wave of models coupled to a new rules set that perhaps weakens them a little, but also allows their points values to lower a bit so that when adding more model diversity there's more room to put them on the table. One downside if a very powerful elite style army is that adding new stuff is hard because there's just never the spare points. Then again we've seen armies like Necrons go from powerful, elite, limited roster to very large rosters with the ability to take a good number of models per army and a nice level of diversity. I've every hope for Ossiarchs and I think a nice chunky second wave would have a similar boost the same way it helped out Lumineth.

Thing is the people who have those models already are likely just the soulblight players. Everyone else has no "reason" to own those models over getting others for their armies. So chances are many people who would otherwise buy a model and rules expansion are currently not owners of those models. The risk with separating rules and models in the case of a boardgame is that one of the attractions of the board game is the model discount ontop of the game parts. There's an added risk because CC launched during Corona and that royally messed up new games getting actually played for anyone. So there's a graeter chance of there being more than a few sets that sold to eager people who have yet to actually play or play more than a few times. I do wonder if GW might do a limited time period bundle deal with models and the game content in one go. It's certainly bold and curious to have a model board game release an expansion with zero models but which requires models to actually use. Especially when those models, if bought on their own right now, easily comes to as much as Cursed City itself with far fewer models and zero boardgame parts. Price is going to be a massive consideration on this set and my worry is it might kill CC even more rather than be the spark that brings it back to life. That's a concern for the future as Black Fortress and CC both had great model designs and creativity and i'd hate to see a poor release of CC suddenly destroy the Quest game line as a whole. Especially when GW clearly made great pains to have CC integrate fully into the core AoS game. Suffice to say I'm very on the fence with how this will go down. Its clear that CC is still suffering from whatever disaster(s) caused its problems when it released and that, for whatever reason, things are still not smooth sailing.

I've never really understood why GW broke armies into only 4 parts Leaders - pretty simple and good Troops - just feels bloated and almost useless as a term considering how much is in there Artillery - almost useless because so few forces right now have any Monsters - makes good sense. Personally I'd like to see them release more general light artillery. Bolt throwers, catapults and more should be everywhere and they aren't. Following up I'd love to see them split things up a bit. At the absolute least I'd like to see Cavalry as its own thing (and cavalry style models for those who don't have cavalry and for models that fit the same general theme even if they aren't mounted). Heck I sometimes wonder if leaders should be broken into named and generic with perhaps a 1-2 limit on named leaders and then a 1-4 on generic etc... Just to add some limit variety and mix things up a little.

This is how a few armies are. Heck I don't know what GW is going to do with the elf and dwarf parts of Cities of Sigmar. The high and wood elf are tiny bits left over; the Dark elf is basically the entire line minus the few things Daughters of Khaine pinched. They could put Dark Elves back as a functional army with just a book and perhaps one or two new leader models and done. The Dwarves did lose most of their artillery, but otherwise its also pretty much sort of bits of it left there too.

That's an awesome leaving present! And yeah good luck to him moving on! To be fair I can see how a painter working for GW might well have ways to earn more now through other means than what GW can justify paying for him alone.