Overread

Another issue is that wargamers are fickle things. Armies that don't get many updates, don't see much overt advertising or attention and don't get many new models often fall to the side even if they are popular. Look at Sisters of Battle or any new/small army that doesn't see attention for a long while. It's a cycle that can have a bad feedback element. Army A doesn't sell outstandingly well so GW doesn't invest so Army A sells even worse so GW doesn't invest so Army A sells even worse! Smaller armies with limited rosters and limited attention end up in Army A positions. I'm sure things like Fyreslayers, Ossiarchs, Flesheaters, Tau Kroot models and more end up in those kind of slots. Heck Sisters of Battle were there for ages and yet now I'd wager (or hope) they are selling really well. Heck Old World in itself was a huge display of this same pattern. Dwindling attention leading to dwindling sales leading to dwindling investment etc... I do wonder if with GW's new massive marketing online if there are not more cost effective ways for them to help market armies that aren't seeing many updates outside of the odd battle report or video. Heck I'm almost certain that just mentioning things on the community pages helps. Look at Forgeworld for AoS. It's down to 1 model per grand alliance with the sole exception being Gloomspite models. Which I recall were the only FW models to get actual marketing display on the community pages when the new battletome for them came out. Almost everything else has been steadily dropped and almost everything else never gets a mention (heck I recall a FB community article on exalted greater demons that didn't even mention the ones FW makes which are technically the official models for exalted greater demons - or at least were at the time)

It sounds like the Skeletons and the zombies at least blend well enough with the regular ones GW sells that they will merge into units pretty well without standing out like a sore thumb. So I'd see the CC options are just a starting point for expanding. The Vargskyr is certainly a model I wouldn't mind two of as I think its a great looking model* and beast for the vampires. Plus GW charges £80 for the sprue with that one and I've a feeling it getting its own unique model might be a very long way off if never. I'm certainly not expecting the CC stuff to be a powerful setup, but certainly enough to make a functional army core even if not top tier. *I wish the Vargualf and other creatures would get re-made because I'm sure they'd look even more awesome now)

So Wayland Games have a discount on Cursed City going on and I'm half wondering about getting a second copy and using the resulting two sets of soulblight models as the start of a force. I know the zombies are pretty much going to translate over to a regular force pretty well, as will the Vargskyr, Vyrkos and Kosargi Nightguard. Since whilst the latter 3 are single pose, there's no other models for them out there and might never be (or the wait might be a long time). Plus they are more elite anyway rather than rank and file so having copies isn't as much of a problem. The Ulfenwatch are tricky though, do they mesh well with the regular skeleton kit? Styles look the same, I'm just curious if they "rank up" well. Spare bats can likely stand in easily as fell bats. So is it worth going that pathway? Is it a sensible viable start? Accepting that I'd likely have to convert/offload the spare parts from the second set.

I think the thing is a lot of elements of the Mortal Realms are hard to place. Going back to resources and visuals its actually very hard to envision some of the realms and how they function. Remembering that Realmgate travel is rare. The vast majority of peoples are born, raised, live and die within one realm. If they happen to live near a major Realmgate then they might have more access to travel, but even then its just to one realm. So things like food are hard to envision when everything is extreme high fantasy. When realms like the Metal realm have living animals with mechanical like parts and mechanical parts to them roaming around. GW has basically taken on multiple high fantasy settings all at once and this is a huge challenge to flesh them out into functional worlds and have that functionality something that the average person cna connect with and understand. In contrast Old World was basically your bog standard Middle Earth based fantasy setting. Which in itself is based on real world mythologies. So a vast amount of basic "how it works for the average person" information doesn't have to be established. We can work out pretty easily all the basics of how it works. Farmers tend fields; villages send trade to larger towns; most towns will have a pub; coins; trade; transport etc... We can pretty much work it all out. Mortal Realms is - really hard to work out. Eg are they using horses or oxen for transport and farm work? Are they using magic, or magical beasts, can they even farm at all. How do you farm in the Realm of Death; or in the Realm of Metal. How do you harvest; how do you tackle an iron rust blizzard going through your crops. What do you do when the fauna is huge hulking behemoths. In truth what I'd love to see is GW releasing a Realms Lore book that could answer these questions and more. Honestly at the core of the issue for me is that the MR was made as a setting with infinite options to allow GW to do what they wanted without being tied down to any kind of fantasy visual era or setting or style. It works great as a bare bones totally open setting. Thing is that makes it very hard to engage with because its so open. Because there are no limits, no structural elements or such its really hard to put together how it "works". It's hard ot add your own faction or write your own narrative when you've really no idea how to even start. Can you have farms; or hunting; what do they farm or hunt, how do you trade, what do you trade, how can you function if you don't have a realmgate nearby. IT also makes victories and losses harder to weigh the impact of. Take the recent event of Morathi taking a whole City of Sigmar. In Old World that would have been a REALLY Big thing. If Nuln fell entirely (as an example) to Skaven instead of resisting, then that would have been a massive impact. Maps would have been redrawn; lore and story elements would have had drastic changes; the political fallout would have been tremendous. Some of these things happen in the Mortal Realms, but also because of the scale of things its still just "1 city"

Some of this is answered through various lore and stories some isn't. Eg the Stormcast reforging is covered quite well and Soul Wars story has a good segment that basically shows you most of the process of how souls are recaptured, stored, then reforged. Basically the process for a soul being reforged is broadly the same as a fresh soul being forged into a Stormcast for the very first time. Which is, in part, why many of them degrade in quality over time. Losing elements of their past and mind, sometimes becoming more and more indoctrinated with Sigmar's instruction to fight and defeat Chaos. Though its random, some are reforged over and over and seem to suffer less; others suffer more. Realmgates though do touch on one weakness of the setting which is that GW started a brand new setting in the 3rd age. The history of the Mortal Realms from the 1st age to the 2nd age is basically mostly untouched and that's a huge issue because those ages were what was set the setting up. Instead we jumped into the 3rd and that leaves huge gaps. Sure it creates a mysterious past ,but it also creates oddities. Eg it often feels like the Old World only blew up a few hundred years ago, when in reality its thousands of years ago. In theory many of the actual living races should have no memory of it. Only gods, some of the Undead and in general super long lived creatures and exceptions, like Gotrek, should remember it in any detail. Every other character is basically coming out of the Dark Ages of the Chaos Age (2nd age) with many having no memories of before. Even elves and dwarves are basically born either near the start or during the Age of Chaos and thus the knowledge and information lost should be extreme. Granted for many the Old World is kind of like how we might talk about Dinosaurs, however we at least have constant references to them (bones) dug up. Old World in the Mortal Realms is basically 1 hunk of rock that Sigmar hides up This actually reminds me of another oddity in the realms. Resources. There's a realm entirely made of metals. Where gold and silver is plentiful; where there are lakes of quicksilver and more. This is all super high fantasy right off the front covers of old Record Albums (metal) and is really thematic and cool. However it begs the question of how you can build societies that trade between realms when basically each realm has an abundance of resources in the extreme. It works when the realmgates are dead as the Realm of metal would be food poor but metal rich; however when they trade how do you balance goods when about the only limited material is Ur Gold, which is supposed to be rare and also gobbled up by Khadorans whenever they can get their hands on it .

My feeling is that the setting lacks a sense of temporal and spatial scale. Now GW has started to give us maps so the temporal is slowly improving. Timeline wise its a mess though. We've no real idea what "age" or period of time anything is happening within. Some events seem to last hundreds of years ad then they are over in a flash before there's a 5 year event then a 50 and then suddenly a mortal human from the first event appears so wait was he preserved somehow; has the author just missed the huge span or time or did we infer the span of time wrongly. I really feel like GW needs ot stick dates in the book for events. Just what period of time is Gotrek passing through the Mortal Realms; just when are his events happening alongside other characters. This relationship is so critical. Right now the only points of reference we have are major events, like the Necroquake; like the Rise of Morathi etc... That kind of works when the heroes of stories are gods, which is where the primary elements of the lore's advance are placed. However it falls apart when you deal even with long lived species, let alone short lived humans. I'd love to see a full detailed timeline. 40K manages, even if they sometimes have to ret-con the dates; they at least can place things in relation to each other with numbers. We can tell what age and period characters are running around in; we can tell what will be happening during those times. Things like the Nercroquake should be dated so that a story or bit of lore can be before or after; so we can place things in a chronological sense.

If not Underworlds then also look at Warcry - might cost a bit more but for some factions there's a few unique models and at least a discount on the other sets.

So the only FW you could get with a GW voucher would be from the GW store itself and I dont' think any of the AoS stuff is there. For £25 if you had an itch for a new army then that would cover the battletome cost which is often a good solid first investment in a new army.

It wasn't just Indomitus. It was 2 years of super abnormal buying practice. GW saw insane growth of sales over that period because suddenly they had people in lockdowns on furlough money who weren't going out. So they had hobby money to spend. So its no surprise that its not so much something broke, but that GW has adjusted their production to try and account for a higher demand. Of course at some stage the demand will go down as things return to a level of normality. So GW will likely have a period of adjustment after that to settle into. Also don't forget that sales rates vary over countries and regions. So whilst one local region might not see a huge spike, others will. So some areas will end up with boxes left on the shelf whilst others will find it hard to keep them in stock. Another aspect that reared its head with the AoS 3.0 set is that many games stores run on very tight margins. So when that set didn't sell out within the first few weeks of sale, some stores had to sell them at discount to release that money to buy other stock that would sell faster. It's not that it wasn't selling, it just wasn't as hot ticket and wasn't selling out quite as fast as they would like/needed it too.

Suddenly I wonder if all those Aldari coins were all sewage damaged product. It would explain how they were able to get hold of such a vast amount of stock.

Morathi has had that since she first appeared. It simply means you can't "gang up" on her and wipe her out within a single turn. Instead you have to deal with her a bit like dealing with gotrek and a good few other big nasties in the game. You either ignore them because they are out in a flank so you focus on the rest of the game; or you distract and delay them. You accept that you'll take losses, but if you can tangle them up in close combat against some chaff or beefy units that also take damage slowly then you can hold them on the board and render them less useful. It's all about thinking outside of the kill box.

40K also went through at least one phase of recycled covers. GW might have a lot of resources, but the division of resources within them can often seem to be slightly random and strange. There are likely logical reasons and some of it is going to come down to how the budget gets spread out. Perhaps they put less of the budget into new art because they are putting it into more moulds for models; perhaps the artists are a limited resource and they are working on other projects.

Note that 180 days is one of GW's default time slots for "this product has no fixed slot so it gets cast when we get room." I've had models take that full allotment of time and some which arrived very swiftly. So it really varies, but GW will deliver, its just a warning that it could take longer than a week or two.

Summoning in general is always a huge issue to balance into the game when some armies have it and some don't. I also think that when its built into an army as a major feature that's always there it can also curtail design choices. Heck who remembers the first Tome for AoS - where no one took anything but almost all leaders because of summoning. So many build choices locked out because of the mechanic back then and even then you basically wanted to just take all keepers. It didn't promote choice but denied choice by giving one overwhelming mechanic that if you ignored you were always playing worse than best with the army.

Cities of Sigmar has always been a very odd Battletome and army as within it are several full armies and several parts of fragmented armies. Dark Elves are basically all there barring two units taken out for Morathi (the cauldron and Witch Aelf kit) and a few hero models and the Reaper bolt thrower. Basically the Dark Elf part didn't "need" anything else, it was a full and fairly diverse armed force. So I always had this feeling that when attention came to Cities again we were going to see some changes which could be the stripping out of more models. My personal hope is that GW does this by replacement of themes rather than wholesale removal. As for the whole human VS allied races angle there's good arguments on both sides. One side is that focusing on humans is fair as at present the only human faction is Slaves to Darkness. So having a Cities release that focuses on the human side is good as it expands a pretty important race that are, right now, exceptionally under-represented on the non-chaos side of things. On the other is that losing the allied element is kind of returning to fantasy tropes of one-kingdom-one-race; which flies in the face of quite a lot of modern fantasy developments and the history of the Cities of Sigmar. Of course you can still have allied races in lore. Heck lets not forget in some realms and regions there's justification for most races to be allied together. Orruks can trade and settle in human cities; trolls work the docks; morathi invaded and took over a whole major cities of sigmar settlement. Those elements aren't lost save in standard armies on the tabletop; they remain strong in the lore. Personally I'd welcome Cities of Sigmar splitting. One side a combined-races Cities of Sigmar that preserves a core of each of the component armies, perhaps with new models; but ultimately which provides a single armed force with some unified aesthetics and designs. The other is a fully human force which perhaps reflects newer cities being more heavily populated with humans as most of the other races steadily have good reason to join other major forces. The third is a split for the Dwarves with the Dispossessed returning as an army of their own. I'd also welcome the Dark Elves part splitting to its own force; its basically all there anyway and whilst it might not seem neat, its a very nice thing for fans of that army to not be thrown to the dogs after so long (not that dwarves, the remains of high and wood elves are any different ,but those armies have been crippled for a long time and the writing was on the wall from day 1 of AoS and Day 1 of AoS 2.0

So overall pretty exciting news! We get confirmation that Cities of Sigmar are getting a big update, its a long while off but chances are if they are teasing it this early it will be a BIG update. Though it might end up sending more models out of production ,but it might at least clean that army up and define it for the future more strongly than right now where its kind of a rescue battletome for bits left over. Skaven could have had a bigger update I won't deny, but they still have one of the most diverse model lines in the whole of AoS so they have a wealth of choices, even if some are still in metal (which is still a great material to work with). New Deathmaster looks awesome! Slyvaneth got a nice meaty wave of models and whilst its not Kurnothi, I do like the direction they've gone down in making the living tree side even more diverse than before. . Chaos got a tease which I suspect was squeezed in because of the leak since that's still a winter release so a bit early by GW's normal release rate. Character models are great and its nice to see some new books coming out and hopefully this means BL is going to pick up some steam for publications for AoS. Still salty that Maleneth didn't get a model because she deserves one just for putting up with Gotrek Overall a solid release line up for the next few months; accepting that we've got 30K dominatnig the middle of the year and Squats coming up fast as well so I wasn't expecting the worlds biggest AoS release. Though the signs are good that the latter half of the year might be more AoS dominated.

I mean I missed the start of the stream but I did see some ogrids somewhere in the updates I think

The Chaos Army Release is set for Winter. GW won't be promoting it for months. The leak is insanely far in advance.

In seriousness I'm glad to see BL taking attention to AoS and this is an interesting move toward pushing some new longer term stories for the setting and pairing in some new character models for the KO and Vampires. Great looking models.

GW HOW COULD YOU NOT GIVE MALENTH A MODEL HOW HOW

Or GW are repackaging them with new box art. Don't forget any change to a product pings the store to replace the "old" with a new code and thus models are removed and added. It is one of those kits that GW could do with multipart plastic and replace a chunk of finecast very fast with a single kit. Plus a Maneater kit with enough optional parts would sell really well for Ogre fans.

Oh gods I'd love both FEX and Ossairchs to get meaty updates. If both got second waves it would do wonders for both armies!

I think the face is actually a really interesting bit of work - I don't like it. It looks creepy and wrong and ick and that's EXACTLY what human transformed and mutated with chaotic powers should look like. Thus I think its excellent work. It's perhaps less "this is a devil" type demon prince, which is what the previous one was, and thus one is more "here's a human who wound up with a demon exploding out of them". I also really want to see the new kit's options and hope it comes with a lot of internal variety. What will also be interesting is if it has any 40K parts or if GW is going to do two kits - one for 40K and one for AoS

ALL the battletomes!!

I'm really excited about this Slaves release when it comes. It seems to be just what Slaves to Darkness really needed in terms of updating a lot of core models. I wonder if new marauders are part of the update as well.