Skabnoze

Sorry man, but as a goblin when we go for low-hanging stuff it has to be REALLY low...

I am guilty of getting really excited at the Idoneth model reveals but then disappointed by the army rules - despite elves just being so yucky as a thing. For me I think it is mainly that the army is so heavily driven by Namarti. If you want to play just mainly fish then half the army drops out - including most of the heroes. And then the final thing that did me in was the rules for the Allopex. I don't hate them - I just am not excited by them at all. They don't really do anything interesting. I like the Turtle, I like the Eels, the lord on big sea-horse is at least interesting, but those sharks are just really dull. The shark models are great though. Seriously GW, how do you manage to make people riding big flying sharks a boring thing? You guys should get a trophy for that accomplishment... I'll probably put together a small force at some point just because they look neat, but I had a hard time reading the book to find a gameplay hook that was interesting to me. But, not every army needs to be for everyone and at the end of the day these are still a bunch of yucky elves.

Guilty. I cannot name a single rule from the Swifthawk Agents battletome...

Inflict 121 mortal wounds?

I agree with you. Personally, I don't really care exactly what competitive "tier" armies fall into. I realize that is very important for some people and that is a perfectly valid thing to consider. For myself it is just not the thing that drives me to pick up an army. My main criteria for collecting an army is if the models really inspire me and I find the rules fun to play with. I can regularly lose with a force and have fun and I can also regularly win with a force and have fun. There are lots of things that I find interesting and fun. I would like to see Kharadron Overlords updated because the army has fantastic models but it simply does not function well as it was designed. When it was good it veered so heavily into the negative play experience for opponents, and now it is just in such a poor state that it is not really fun for most players to play with. Armies should ideally be fun to both use and play against. The more armies that fall into that space the better the game is as a whole.

Eh, I expect that sneakily dropping hints about the location of our super secret weapons, or a major cache of warpstone, when in reality the location is a massive squig breeding lair - will still work like a charm. Tunneling into there will be a fun surprise! I would also expect that Skragrott might have some fun ideas as well. Maybe some warpstone powder that has tiny spores for an amusing fungus that infests the brain and takes over the hosts body? Everyone should get in on Fun with Fungus!

Skarsnik already provided the blue-print about how to deal with Skaven neighbors that get uppity.

Why make the Hag the general? She can't take any of the Gloomspite general traits so there does not seem to be any reason. You can still give her the relic without needing her to be the general. If you make the Loonboss your general then you can give him Fight Another Day or Dead Shouty. Fight Another Day would probably be better for your list since you don't have many targets for the Loonboss command ability - but using it on himself is not terrible. If you make the Fungoid the general then you can get a number of interesting & fun command trait options such as Boss Shaman, Great Shaman, or Loon-touched.

If you don't have at least 500 grots then I don't know what to tell you...

I don't disagree.

These are not pre-orders, they are pre-sales. GW does not announce that the products exist, or make pre-orders available far enough out for them to be able to determine what the demand is and order a product run to meet that demand. They have been bitten in the past with large product runs that they had trouble getting rid of (GorkaMorka - pains me to say that) that they are probably erring on the side of caution and making smaller runs for these 1-time things. They could change this and allow themselves to better gauge what the market for various products is - but that would probably require them to significantly change how they currently operate. They might eventually do that - or maybe not.

My point in regards to changed warscrolls is that they already do it when they errata the text of a rule. Your physical book or physical warscroll is obsolete the second they decide they have to change a sentence in the text for whatever reason. And it is not wholly uncommon for them to do so. It is fine to err on the side of not messing with the warscrolls if possible, but I would personally rather they were willing to make that choice when it is the best choice and simply deal with my physical rules needing to be accompanied by printing the errata. I am sure some people will complain but honestly there is always someone that will complain about something. I would prefer to have better working rules for my army and if the consequence is some of the printed materials become outdated then I am ok with it. I would rather play with something better than stick with something inferior just for the sake of keeping my book text current. And bear in mind that I play other games and I have seen how much it can suck when some games issue multiple versions of rules cards. Early Malifaux was pretty bad about that, but even then I appreciated the updates to the model rules because it almost universally made them better to plan with or against. Their rules update methods were a pain - but the game itself always got better.

To be fair, tweaking a rule by changing a keyword or adjusting the basic keywords on a warscroll is in line with other errata they issue that changes a sentence in an ability. That is a rather small change that does not fundamentally change what these units can do - it just shuffles around who can be effected by buff abilities. That said, when they say they are going to adjust the allegiance in the GHB I expect that they main mean points. They may also tweak some of the allegiance abilities. But, it also could be the case that they plan to be more proactive with the next GHB in regards to altering warscrolls if necessary. GW has been pretty reluctant to do that so far, but GW has also never really been known for sticking to things for the long term. They historically have a tendency to pick a plan, stick with it for a while, and then drop it in favor of something different at the drop of a hat. I simply brought up the keyword alterations for buffs or units because that is a pretty low-effort change that could potentially have big impacts to shake things up in the army. Personally, I would really love the Brewgit to be more universally useful because I think he is a fantastic model but is way too niche and ends up practically being a tax for the Gobbapalooza. The Spiker would be amazing if he could buff Squigs, Troggs, or Spiders. And the Scaremonger would at least be interesting if he could effect more targets. But, I think what we should probably expect mainly point changes. If their position is that Gloomspite is underperforming then my guess is that we will probably see costs go down on a number of things and I would be surprised to see Boingrots adjusted upwards (as I have suspected in the past). Short list I would say we should expect the obvious units adjusted - Dankhold Troggoths, Troggboss, Loonboss on Mangler. I would probably also suspect changes to some of the Grot heroes who seem high in cost compared to similar heroes in other books. In addition, I would also expect to see a cost decrease in some form for Squig Hoppers to make them compete a bit more with Boingrots. So either a standard decrease or a horde discount. If GW was feeling really really nice they would also include a horde discount for Squig Herd units - which would be stupidly awesome.

They could do a lot with minor errata such as some key word alterations either for abilities or on some units. There is so many buffs that play keyword bingo and some buffs that are seriously restricted that you could open up a lot of interesting things through small adjustments like that. For example, I personally love the models for the Gobbapalooza but I also feel they were one of the biggest misses in the book in regards to rules. They have a lot of character, but you have to buy all of them for a not insignificant price and you can only take advantage of all of the buffs in a couple very specifically designed lists. Basically you have to be really heavy into just grots. If some of the buffs could apply to Squigs or Troggs. Or even broaden some of the buffs such as the Brewgit so that his character buff could apply to a broader range of targets. Currently not many heroes have the "Moonclan Grot" keyword and so he is not terribly useful unless you have Skragrott for him to buff. They could also potentially tweak some of the Battalions as well.

I ordered one from a local store. I am not sure how many copies they will get - if any. I would honestly preferred 2. Whether or not I actually get this box will probably determine if I purchase a Sylvaneth army or not. No box set and I will most likely just not bother with the trees.

I would guess that you can use the old trees individually to mark out the area but not necessarily use the old woods area footprint base. It may also indicate that you don’t have to place the new trees so that they physically touch each other to create the wyldwoods area and there is some variance in how you can place them. I guess once the slow boat from China gets here we will know completely.

I understand your point. I think it works out fine on the table though. It probably has something to do with Squig Hoppers having 2 wounds prior to this new battletome and GW deciding not to change that even though they decided to increase the wounds from 1 to 2 for Squig Herds. I just view it as a nice bonus for regular Squig Herds rather than an issue with Hoppers or Bounders.

Well, that seems like a pretty huge difference. Glad to hear that you got it sorted out.

Endless Spells would make sense. I did not think of those. Thanks!

I like Fantasy Flight a lot. They make some excellent games. But I am pretty sure at this point that the shipping method they use for their products developed in China is simply to toss the boxes into the ocean and hope the current eventually gets them to the US.

Do they still manufacture the terrain kits in China? They used to. That might be the hold-up issue here.

Glad to see the Wyldwoods have been changed. This new set should clear up some issues simply due to the previous terrain piece not being originally designed for the purpose they adapted it to. Looks like this new one is designed so that the trees fit together to define the area. I hope they have tweaked the rules so that it still provides the army with great use but removes how awful the old version was to play against and don't require Sylvaneth players to purchase an absurd amount of them. I'll pick up some of these just to use as extra terrain for my tables. I had already turned my old Citadel Woods into gnarled spooky dry trees so they fit into my desert & graveyard tables and work in other games such as Malifaux. I am more than happy to pick up some of these new ones for more vibrant forest tables. They also look like they would work very well as individual scatter terrain trees for various skirmish games. It also looks like it should not be too hard to convert the old Wyldwood models so that they use the same footprint as these new models so that existing players don't necessarily have to buy more if they don't want to. This seems like a really good compromise solution on GW's part.

To each their own. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. For my perspective as someone that has played GW games since the late 80s - I really like what they have done with Age of Sigmar. GW wears it's influences pretty heavy on it's sleeves for all of it's games and none of them are truly unique. What is unique is the fluff-stew they have created by tossing a lot of varying influences into a pot - but the ingredients are often taken almost wholesale from other fictional or historical sources. Up until the release of Age of Sigmar every game world GW created was heavily rooted in a form of the Dark Ages. Dark Ages fantasy is nothing new as it is how Tolkien structured his world. It is common in Sci-Fi as well - just look at Dune or BattleTech for example. It is a good framing device since it has historical and story-telling precedence that stems from the fall of the Roman Empire. It worked well for GW and allowed them to create both the Warhammer Old World and also the 40k universes. What I enjoy about Age of Sigmar is that they decided to change this and rather than set their world in a medieval dark ages setting and story-telling style they instead looked straight at classical mythology. Everything about Age of Sigmar is rooted in classical mythology (especially from the narrative) and I find that to be a breath of fresh air. I enjoy that, but I can see how others may not like it as much.

I'd buy that. I do miss Ruglud's Armored Orcs, Long Drong's Slayer Pirates, and the Richter Kreuger's Cursed Company. Those were all very fun and characterful units. I really enjoyed the Cursed Company because it had skeleton models for non-human races and a few box sets was a really cool way to diversify normal skeleton units. I do hope that GW considers bringing the Dogs of War into Age of Sigmar in some way. It was a great way to explore neat concepts without having to go all in on an army for them.

Because obviously a grot does not really count for much compared to a squig!