Skabnoze

If they have flying whales then they probably don't need Realm Gates. Flying Whales can get from Mars to Sirius after all. That may just be the heaviest matter of the universe...

Personally I'm glad that the vampire clans have slid into the background for a bit. Undead has primarily been about the Vampires for about 3 editions spanning almost 20 years. Tomb kings were a non-vampire distraction in there, but GW always neglected them a fair bit. As someone who enjoyed all of the non-vampire undead stuff and was then sad to see most of it fade out of the lime-light for so long I am happy to see the current emphasis expand out from the vampires. I don't want them to go away, but I would prefer they expand death in other directions for a while.

To play devil's advocate, Orcs have a pretty clear-cut and ordered hierarchy. The biggest one is in charge and what they say goes. The only deviation from that now currently seems to be Bonesplitterz who follow the glowiest one instead of the the biggest. A simple but effective ordering system! All the other races seem to make things way too complex...

Probably not. But I would say it is a potential issue when half the alliances have the overwhelming mass of choices that can go into soup lists and the others are picking from a handful of scraps. Certainly not the biggest problem in the game, but I think it is fair to say that it is not an ideal situation to have and could possibly lead to issues further down the road.

If Grand Alliances went away, then there is little issue in regards to list-building for having so much junk crammed into one or two Grand Alliances and the others being sparse. You still have the issue of some armies and themes being neglected, but you don't have issues with some big giant soup lists having more possible ingredients than others. If Grand Alliances went away, then the game would have a very large and diverse selection of armies currently. And to be fair, the game does. But, the Grand Alliance system puts those diverse forces into buckets that then make the distribution of armies in the game look very very skewed (which it is). That was my point in the original comment.

It's a fine system as long as you don't overly neglect half of the Grand Alliances in the game.

Well, it is just various degrees of fun. Admittedly, it is less fun if they just sit there and let you bash them on the head - but that's still fun nonetheless! And why wait until the "Portent and wonky time business" has quieted down? The absolute best time for any scrap is right now!

Wrong. All scraps are fun.

Dice

I GREATLY prefer this rule to how 40k currently handles it - despite having played with the system where damage does not carry over for decades in most GW games. I really like the damage carry-over mechanic of Age of Sigmar, and without it I think this game would require a rebalancing of half of the weapons and wound characteristics in the game. It is very cleanly implemented and accounted for in the stats for Age of Sigmar right now. I was so used to damage not carrying over in GW games that it took me a while to realize that did not apply to Age of Sigmar. I only realized it after watching a battle report video and being confused as to why more models died than I expected. I had to go back to the rules and check that specific rule. But, again I have to say that I really enjoy it.

It should be: Age of Gork or maybe Age of Mork?...

Well, as long it is not the exploitable army-construction absolute mess that the 40k system is then I could get on board with it.

I mostly play friendly games at my house. In almost 100% of my games so far the game is over by top of turn-2 or early in turn 3. The vast majority of the board is dead by then. I don't hate the game, but every time i play it just feels anti-climactic and a bit disappointing. It is a game where a colossal amount of stuff happens - and yet nothing really happens. There is rarely a struggle over objectives, hardly any positioning or manuevering, just a small handful of movements, lots of people that appear out of nowhere for whatever reason, and then a ton of stuff that dies.

I have not looked into Malign Portents yet, but I like the concept of Command Points & Stratagems - but I really do not care for how they have been implemented in 40k at all. How did Malign Portents do it differently?

Having played both systems, I'd say it is cleaner in some aspects but not others. There are some things, such as the ability to pile-in during the opponents turn (sort of like a counter-charge) that I think serves to make Age of Sigmar stand out as different. Oh well...

Can units still pile in during the opponents turn if they are close enough? I like that part of Age of Sigmar compared to current 40k combat.

Ugh... please no. Having swapped from playing 40k 8th ed, to knocking the dust off of my old Fantasy stuff and finally getting around to Age of Sigmar, I prefer the way Age of Sigmar handles this stuff.

At this point for Destruction I just hope that the GC-2018 book makes a good effort at being a stop-gap until GW decides to do something serious for Destruction. And I hope that they do indeed flesh out the Death Grand Alliance this year with some big updates. Time will tell.

That was what I was referring to. When I mentioned releases I meant expanding the model range. I am under no illusions that they won't make new Stormcast models at some point, but I think they need to take a decent break from bloating that model range and play more catch-up with other armies. And I really think GW needs to make a serious effort to throw a bone to Death and Destruction grand alliances. For the existing established factions, and especially the earliest factions for Age of Sigmar, I think they could probably all benefit from getting new Battletomes. It makes more sense to me to address any issues with early armies such as Stormcast, Ironjawz, etc by simply creating a new Battletome.

I would rather see them go back and revisit some of the earlier battletomes and tweak them than just keep throwing new releases for factions that already have a ton of stuff.

I am not sure I understand this concept.

That may be true, but it also allows you to more quickly bring new concepts to life. Similar poses and designs were WAY more common prior to the CGI era of miniature design. Seriously, go back and look at the pictures of armies and tables from early 2000s or even farther back. GW even used the same dragon models for almost every army and simply changed the head and the rider. Does every guy riding a big giant thing have to be in a totally different pose? Why not reuse things that work? If someone needs their models to be unique snowflakes then do like many of us do and convert them up!

To be fair, steam work & magic air ships is a pretty damned old fantasy trope as well. I mean you can find that stuff going way way back from old-school video game RPGs to DnD supplements like Spell Jammer. Hell, there were a lot of descriptions of ships like that in the old Barsoom books from Edgar Rice Burroughs written back in the mid 1910s. I like both of these model releases - I am just saying that when it comes to Fantasy and Sci Fi there is really very little new under the sun if you look back. Most of the time you just get interesting interpretations of older ideas.

In regards to deep sea creatures and Turtles - maybe some Turtles in Age of Sigmar have gills and live far down in the depths?

That is how Sisters of Battle have worked out every single release since the late 90s. Although to be fair, I think they are also a casualty of GW being fairly lazy the few times they have done them and not actively promoting and spending enough energy to make them something that is popular. They have shown a number of times that they are capable of making something popular when they are willing to put the effort into good rules, creative and well done miniatures, and not immediately neglecting the release (which to me often seems to be their biggest problem).