robinlvalentine

Yeah exactly - no one's holding the GMG review up as gospel truth, and lots of their minus points are straight up dumb, but it does raise some points that seem valid and it's two very experienced wargamers offering their honest opinions on how the thing actually plays, which is valuable even if we end up disagreeing. I also don't see how Warcry actually curbs the snowballing campaign problem? There are less different ways your warband can get stronger, but ultimately one player can still end up with up to 300 more points than their opponent - that's still a foregone conclusion of a match, especially in a game where simply having bodies on the table seems so important. Simple and streamlined can be great - I love Warhammer Underworlds, for example, which is a far less complex game than AOS and has similarly pared down statlines. But done badly it can be boring, repetitive, and lacking in character. My worry is that, out of the box, Warcry may be the latter - which, given how long we've all been waiting for an AOS skirmish game, would be very disappointing.

Yeah Owen particularly really drags it down - obviously we each have our own tastes, but he barely seems interested in doing the review, let alone the game itself. Still, definitely made me ponder more than I had been on the possible negatives.

Yeah I think I'll see if I can try a demo at my local store and see what I think of the core mechanics in play. GW certainly could add to it over time - but I think that can be a negative too. The new Necromunda, for example, was really exciting to me when I first heard about it, but the actual complete game experience ended up being split across all these different books and releases over the course of months and before I knew it it'd become this complicated, messy, expensive beast. If I'm going to spend £100+ I want to have what feels like a complete game before the expansions start flowing.

Watching this and overall the guys are pretty negative on it. Overall feeling seems to be that it's too simple, not enough going on, little customisation or progression - leading to warbands feeling too similar, not enough design space for the future, certain simple tactics dominating, etc. It's taken me from leaning towards pre-ordering to maybe waiting to see how it shakes out on launch... on the one hand, these guys play a lot of games, so they're probably inherently looking for more complexity and detail than me. But on the other hand it doesn't sound like a very good foundation for the game going forward, which makes me question whether this is really going to have the longevity and breadth to be the AOS Kill Team GW are promising. So... yeah, my hype's a little diminished right now.

Stormcast already have colour-coded chapters! They just don't have separate books/minis yet

The beard's optional, and the joke is that it's fake - it's her disguise so she can join the lads in combat (in old Fantasy ogres had a highly patriarchal society where women weren't really allowed to fight or do much of anything)

I don't think that's true...

For a change, I've got some video game info. It looks like there's an unannounced Age Of Sigmar strategy game in the works. There's a studio called Gasket Games formed of people who used to work at Relic (Dawn Of War etc) and Blackbird (Homeworld: Deserts Of Karak). In partnership with publisher Focus Home Interactive, "they will leverage their passion, talent, and more than fifteen years of experience making strategy games in the development of a brand-new Games Workshop title in a rich universe". This project is teased with a new piece of art of a Stormcast Eternal Retributor holding what looks like a severed daemon head.

Do the Idoneth actually cut out their eyes? I don't remember reading that. Regardless, taming a wild horse is literally called 'breaking' it, and we put blinders over their eyes when we ride them...

It's all a bit hazy at the moment but one of the Malign Portents stories suggested that some Seraphon are actually now being born from spawning pools and are 'real'. And, er, they live on spaceships.

This is a minor thing, but I don't get why GW is so in love with this idea of mounts/monsters being intelligent, equal allies rather than beasts. All the Stormcast creatures have the same thing. I think as a one off thing it's fine (makes sense for a Star Drake, for example) but it gets a bit silly when everyone has it, and the Idoneth Deepkin's practice of just taming animals like we do in the real world is presented as weird and a bit evil. Maybe just me but I think the image of a group of Fyreslayers trying to capture a Magmadroth, bringing it down with giant chains as it spews lava everywhere, is a bit cooler than them sitting down for tea to negotiate how long it's willing to let little naked men ride on its back for.

Ah, the fabled Deepkin Endless Spell...

So hammer enough runes into yourself and eventually you become a wizard in all but name?

If they're not the power of the gods, then what are they? Where does the power/effect come from? What makes them distinct from magic?

So they effectively have to forge their spells into runes before the battle, and then unleash them in combat?

Are these Prayers/Magic Invocations/whatever supposed to be the direct intervention of the Fyreslayer god, or just the will of the priest made manifest? My understanding is their god is dead, which makes all this stuff just look like wizards and magic by another name. Feels like the Khorne situation again to me, where the idea of dwarves not being able to use magic has become pretty meaningless.

'Benefits from' seems like a super ambiguous phrase in this context.

Interesting - extremely reminiscent of the Stormcast Sequitor/Exorcist ghost traps. Suggests it's some kind of soul-sucking device in a similar vein.

Interesting - so basically GW's solution to the limited model range is just to (presumably) turn them from a horde army to an elite one. Seems like a best case scenario in a world where the army's not getting any new models just yet - with the bonus that anyone with an existing army is suddenly sitting on a lot more points than they were (again, presumably).

I do think the rules for Forge World stuff are a tricky thing to get right. Too good, and they're a must-have, which I think isn't ideal for models that are a) very expensive, b) much more difficult to build and c) much harder to get hold of. Too bad, and no one's going to want them. For me personally, I'm not sure FW models should really have much of a place in Matched play. They seem ideal for Narrative and Open, where it doesn't matter how competitive or balanced they are. I was actually ok with the old GW rules where they were essentially unofficial for the purposes of tournaments etc - but I realise that doesn't suit everyone. But then, for me personally, I just don't like FW's sculpts these days. It feels like in the last decade or so, GW has made all these huge leaps forward with how they make models, and FW is just the same as it ever was. A lot of their recent Horus Heresy models are just straight up bad by modern standards (those White Scars... shudder), not to mention those dreadful Stormcast heads. That's just my opinion anyway.

I mean, if they just reboxed and rereleased that kit with AOS warscrolls, thumbs up from me. But having one of the models for what's supposed to be this big exciting new campaign set be a reused asset from a (presumably) failed Underworlds terrain release... that's disappointing IMO.

I think the implication, like with the Fiends, is that the stockings are actually just another layer of skin. Daemons, man...

Remember that, for Kill Team, GW released new boxes with old models in them. Could do the same here.

It's more than just similar... maybe it's just me but to my eyes these are identical. Maybe there's a couple more cracks on the pyramids? And it's been photographed from the other side. I guess the Forbidden Power one is probably a bit larger? I'm not one to jump on the 'lazy GW just reuses CAD files!!!' train, but this is weird IMO.

The Forbidden Power terrain piece with the two little pyramids is just taken from the Nightvault Arcane Hazards set, right? Weird to pluck out just that one model for this, especially as it was on a sprue with a bunch of others.