Skabnoze

To be fair, in 40k they are already rolling out codex 1.5 versions in order to add extra units in a new splash release wave. That is what they did for Chaos Space Marines. I would not rule out GW possibly starting to do that in Age of Sigmar once they get all of the armies updated with a book.

If your main issue is the heads on the Ardboyz, and not the rest of the model, then it would be pretty easy to replace the heads with something from a 3rd party or just get some from another orc/ork kit from GW via an online bits seller. The company Spellcrow makes a large assortment of alternative orc heads. They have the widest assortment that would work for a fantasy game. You could also look at offerings from MaxMini, Kromlech, or Puppetswar. The other good alternative is to just buy some heads from other GW kits as bits from another online bits seller on ebay.

I honestly don't really know what people have been using in regards to endless spells for Ironjawz as I have not been playing them much lately. However, the spells I would consider using would be cogs, geminids, qjuicksilver swords, or the burning head.

If nothing else I hope that summoning is at least restricted to only min-sized units. But I expect they will also have to do something to tweak allegiance abilities since some of them could get crazy pretty fast. For example, Khorne Blood Tithe might potentially be pretty bonkers given that there will be a ton of minimum sized units in both armies to get killed. Maybe they did not have to make any adjustments and it works out fine, but I hope that they at least gave some thought to these things and addressed them if necessary so that we don't have a promising start of a game mode that simply falls flat on it's face because of features designed for the core game that are left untouched. GW has been pretty good so far I think when it comes to Age of Sigmar and so they have earned some trust from me, but I have seen enough issues in the past to be wary as well.

We will have to see if there are any other restrictions than the stuff that was posted in today's article before we can really tell. What the scenarios look like and how scoring works is going to be very important as well. But my initial suspicion is that list-building is going to be very different for this play format than it is for standard matched play at 2k points.

That is an interesting take. I don't really get that feel because KillTeam still plays with a small campaign force that has experience, skills, and whatnot. The campaign portion of that game is sadly very bare-bones, and hopefully they expand it with future content, but it is still a progressive campaign that follows a small force and splits units into individual skirmishers. It is honestly not different enough from the current iteration of Necromunda for me to claim there is much of a difference. Meeting engagements feels like it is simply a different format for Age of Sigmar. From what we know it still uses all of the same core game rules and simply uses an alternate set of match play rules. If the core rules do remain the same then I expect that this game format is going to feel radically different from a standard match play game simply due to things like the impact of battleshock on small units, the forced fragmenting of your force into different types of reserves. But regardless of which other GW product Meeting Engagements most resembles I am extremely interested in it after the article they posted today. More ways to effectively play smaller games is a good thing as it gives people more options to play with their collections. Different game formats also means that different forces may be more useful in one or the other - which is a boon for both GW and people that like certain models. An example is that within main Age of Sigmar many people don't care for the Gargant rules. But in a game that uses mostly minimum sized units, is set at a lower point size, and requires a degree of splitting your army up there may be increased effectiveness for a cheap behemoth. People may find that they still don't find it to be a good unit - but a big structural change for the game could create a big shake-up in regards to what is good in this game mode versus the traditional game. I am all for anything that makes more models have interesting or compelling uses - and I am just in favor of variety in general.

I don't disagree. However just a spell lore and nothing else could do a lot. It would be nice if he could double cast or did not potentially kill guys around him when he rolled doubles but I still say that a spell lore could make these less important depending on how it is written. If the spells are inherently powerful and designed to synergize with Ironjawz then casting one spell is not necessarily that bad. The same goes for damage blow-back. If the spells are strong enough then dumping D3 wounds onto a nearby unit is easier to handle. Protective abilities would be nice, but it is possible they tweak the allegiance ability to make the whole allegiance more like giant meat-bags. All I am saying is that they have a lot of levers they can pull before they have to touch the warscrolls if they choose. Who knows how much they will want to do. I hope that the Weirdnob gets a warscroll rewrite when they release a new updated book, but for now I don't think we should expect the warscrolls to change with this update (although they could).

I think a dedicated Spell lore for Ironjawz, and synergistic spells in that lore, are more important for the Weirdnob than a CP generation ability. Give him some good spells to work with and watch his stock rise.

The fungoid is surprisingly durable and he works quite well to get out some endless spells. He is probably the best ally option for Ironjawz I would say.

I get it, and I agree. Those builds can certainly be fun for a time or two, but if they did not strictly prevent them or structure the game so that those builds are unlikely to win then they will quickly end up being what a lot of people use. Thankfully this is just a preview and so we have not seen the full rules yet. So I have hope that they considered these things and have done something about them. I find it very hard to believe that the designers did not consider these ideas since they were some of the first things many of us thought of. However, in my long time playing GW games it has not been a rare occurrence to pick up a newly released book and find a way to break it on the first read-through and so I am not ruling that possibility our here.

While that could be fun for a game or two, these are honestly the sort of things I am hoping this system deliberately prevents.

This is true, but the examples he posted could still be split up and structured to meet the composition of: 1 unit, leader + 1 battleline, and 1 unit.

It depends on the hero. Some of them, such as Gordrakk, are pretty capable of annihilating smaller units. In the case of Gordrakk, it would not be surprising for his Wyvern to be able to crush a small unit with it's Destructive Bulk and trigger a charge into another. Normally triggering this to happen multiple times in a row is rare in a game since units are too big and at most he can do only 8 wounds - but a game such as this where unit will tend to be minimum sized means there is much more opportunity for this. I would hate to see a potentially fun game mode such as this that does not adequately prevent certain models from heavily skewing things. Many large hero models could have the potential to do this.

In addition, the Main Body requires 1 leader and 1 unit of battleline minimum - so you need 2 units in that portion of the army and 1 in both of the others.

This will depend upon the army. The article implied that you only need a single unit in each detachment and only the Main Body has minimum unit requirements. So I expect there are forces that could squeeze a big character in. For instance, Ironjaws could take Gordrakk + 3 min Gore Grunta units and hit 1000 points exactly - assuming the points for those units does not increase in the upcoming GHB. Given current points you could do the same thing with Nagash and some units of dire wolves, zombies, skeletons. Hopefully these build do not end up being effective due to the way scenarios are structured, but I would simply rather see these characters barred from this type of game at 1k points. But that is simply my preference.

They are not that great for competitive purposes but they can be a lot of fun to play with for some people. I usually have fun using mine. They are also fun models that you can do a lot with creatively. I can see why some people would not be excited if they are interested in things competitively, but by the same token these are something that more narrative players can really have fun with. Whether it is worth getting hyped about depends upon what you want from this addition to the game. Bingo. I would suspect we see another set of points drop for Gargants in this book considering the mercenary rules they previewed for Gargants, the general competitive dislike for the unit, and the fact that they did not take the opportunity to adjust the warscroll itself in the Gloomspite book. If they drop the price to 130 or below then you could fit 3 of them into an allies slot.

This was a really cool article. I was already quite interested in a dedicated 1k play mode - but this looks really neat. I like the idea of splitting up the force into a few "detachments" that are specifically used differently for the scenario. That makes the game both somewhat thematic and also potentially very tactically interesting. The size restrictions on units seems good also. I hope there is also some restriction to prevent some of the more powerful/expensive heroes from being used in this game mode. I was pretty excited for these rules already, but this teaser has made me more excited.

Which heroes do you think would become useless by these generic command abilities?

Are you referring to new units, conditional battleline, or either?

It is too close to call for either force to be honest. Neither army really uses double-bladed weapons. You are correct that Ironjawz weapons do not have hilts that bolt onto the blades. They typically appear to be designed so that the blade/head of the weapon slots into the haft and then is usually leather wrapped - or else it is simply forged as a solid metal piece. The Ogors have more weapons that are a blade that has the haft bolted on. However, when I look at the blade itself for the weapon it does not appear to be forged by either Ogor or Orruk. To me it appears to be a weapon that is either stolen or taken as a trophy from a fallen enemy and then was fitted into an Ogor/Ironjawz weapon by getting a new hilt and having various choppy bits bolted onto the weapon. In the past for Warhammer Fantasy both Orcs & Ogors were prone to taking enemy weapons as trophies. Ogor models often had human shields & weapons bolted onto stuff as trophies. Orcs had the most notable example with Gorbad Ironclaw carrying an Empire Runefang (the Solland Sword) that he took off the corpse of Count Eldred during his invasion of the Empire. My guess is that this is going to be a character hero model of some sort. I would not be surprised if this is a single hero model from some sort of 2-force box set similar to Looncurse or Carrion Empire. The next GHB is supposed to have an expanded section for Ironjawz, and I would not rule out 1-2 new warscrolls. I don't think that is necessarily likely, but doing that would probably give them some breathing room and give the army more legs so they can do a bigger update further down the line. But at the same time, it seems likely that GW is going to make a combined Ogors army book similar to what they did for Skaven and since they did not mention anything about them for the GHB preview I suspect we will probably see that book this year. I would not be surprised if they made a 2-forces box set with Ogors VS *insert other force* and slotted a new hero model into that box for each force. That said, the Ironjawz model range is very good and I would not be surprised to see them stick those models into a 2-forces box also - especially if they do a good update in the GHB. So I can honestly go either way on this one - but it is obviously either Ogors or Ironjawz.

The recent trend is that a physical army book release gets an errata issued somewhere within a month of release. If you go back for the last couple years the trend is roughly 1-3 months after release.

They need to be willing to utilize their existing tools (errata documents, GHB, etc) to address issues with things like courts, temples, enclaves, etc. This means buffing some of the lacking ones up in addition to tuning down the overly good ones. I am of the opinion that they have been too hands off in regards to this so far. There are some circumstances where they could make big impacts with just a couple small changes.

After reading the recent community article I can come up with a number of fun ideas. I don't have to do much for the giants other than put them on the table. I could make the necromancer detachment and convert up a Grot wizard and a bunch of mushroom-zombie grots to follow him. I already had a bunch of dwarf artillery that I had converted up into my old WFB Night Goblin army as stolen/repurposed goblin artillery - now I have a good excuse to use them again. I might take the Ogre company and make a unit of fancy character troggs. So many ideas.

@Shankelton I hope my prognostication is correct. I get the feeling that it is. But I would like to reiterate that I have zero inside knowledge and no rumor sources. I have some experience with how eCommerce companies operate and I have been a GW customer since the late 80s. I am simply making educated guesses based off of what they have officially told us and how they have been evolving the game and armies of Age of Sigmar.

It sounds like that is the case: They specifically called out those forces as having expanded rules. I would imagine this is more than a simple reprint. My suspicion is that these factions are not going to be the ones getting a new Army Book this year and the GHB is going to be used to prop them up for a bit longer. These are probably going to be the existing allegiances that will be addressed last (for whatever reason). It seems pretty likely that the next destruction book is going to either be Bonesplitterz or Ogres. A couple months ago the manager at my local GW told me that he was instructed to return all copies of the Bonesplitterz book back to GW HQ. I doubt they would be pulling physical copies from their retailers unless they were getting ready for a reprint. That would make sense to me because it seems like Ironjawz are on the whole in a better place than Bonesplitterz. Bonesplitterz have problems that can likely only be solved by rewriting warscrolls but Ironjawz feel like they can make a lot of mileage simply through expanding allegiance abilities, spell lores, artifacts, point costs, general traits, etc in the GHB. I would not be surprised if GW identified these books to be last in the rewrite order because they feel they want to incorporate a model release. The books that were not named may possibly be coming sooner because GW feels that they can handle them with just a small book + terrain + spells release.