Kadeton

"New customers are our life's blood," is a positive-tone way of saying "We have trouble maintaining customer satisfaction in the long term." It's a clear acknowledgement that the underlying business practice is churn and burn. Burning out old customers is what generates churn. If you attract new customers while retaining old ones, you're not churning - that's just growth. Does anybody ever actually have "all the models they want"? Or do they just keep purchasing models until they either can't afford more or they start feeling that they're not getting enough value for their money? Yeah, yet again - I'm not saying GW will financially suffer due to their chosen approach. It's a totally sustainable way to generate income, as long as you can keep attracting new customers as fast or faster than you burn out the old ones, which GW clearly can. What it does inevitably lead to, though, is a wake of burned-out grognards that are bitter about the way the company has treated them, and people whose gaming buddies have had to move to other games or dropped out of the hobby entirely. You might say "Yeah, but they don't matter" - and they don't matter to GW's bottom line, that's true. But they do strongly influence the community, and that underlying resentment towards GW is the fundamental basis for most of the toxicity in GW-oriented gaming communities.

Of course. As I said, it's a business decision. I never said it wouldn't work. I think what you might be losing sight of in your incredulity about why people want a better value proposition is that the people asking for better value are the customers GW is, or will be, losing. Their business model is built on getting new players to replace them, burn those players out as well, get new ones, and so on. Endless churn. That works just fine from the business perspective (at least, it has so far) but it's awful from the perspective of those individual players who are on the verge of abandoning the game. GW won't miss them. But perhaps you might be able to see how other players in the community will?

People might be saying "I want more free stuff!" but that's not an expression of entitlement. Rather, what a lot of these complaints actually mean is "This game is too expensive for the value I get from it." That's not a sudden change due to the introduction of W+, it comes up every time prices are increased for any reason. It's a sentiment that gets more intense the more GW squeezes its customers. GW have obviously decided that they can afford to lose the players who are being priced out, by charging those who can still afford it (or who are holding out due to their sunk cost) more. Fair enough, that's a business decision. But the "Give us something for free!" posts are just a symptom of that - it's offering GW a chance to change their policy and improve the value proposition in order to keep those players, rather than lose them to other game systems.

I'm not surprised or offended. I'm just not interested or intrigued. I've seen this stuff before - I'd like some fresh ideas mixed in along with the stale tropes.

I thought the Cathay trailer was really slick and very well crafted. It was impressive for what it was. But... it was so predictable. The faction seems like a thin pastiche of "stuff that Westerners vaguely know about China" - fireworks, terracotta warriors, paper lanterns, junks, Chinese dragons. All of those elements looked awesome on screen, but it didn't bring any new ideas, just the same old stereotypes of Orientalism. I was impressed by the spectacle, but I wasn't interested.

Yeah, that's fair enough. As I said, in that case, put together some army lists that you want to collect, and work out the cost of each. There's not much point working out which army is the cheapest on average (it's Beastclaw Raiders) unless it's an army you would actually buy for yourself. For a (purely hypothetical) example, let's say that you work out that Seraphon have a low average cost. Great! You start thinking about what you'd like to run in Seraphon. The units you really like happen to be the ones with the worst cost-to-points ratio, and the cheap units that are bringing down the average are ones that you have no interest in. Doing all that work for the initial calculation didn't tell you anything useful at all, really - you needed to work out the cost of the army list you wanted, not the faction as a whole, to get a sense of what it would actually cost you to collect that faction.

I'm not sure there's much reason to do this in the general case, trying to get some kind of "points to cost" ratio for an entire faction. The cost that's relevant is for building a specific army that you might actually put on the battlefield - there's no use in knowing that a faction has a super-cheap option if it's one that nobody actually wants to field. I'd start by tracking down some lists for tournament-level armies that have been performing well, and costing those out. Or, if you're thinking more along casual play lines, just writing up some thematic army lists that you'd like to actually paint and play, and tally those. Personally I'd include any Start Collecting or other boxed sets if they get you to your army list at a cheaper price than buying the relevant units individually.

Yes. The invocation is removed from play, but the invocation warscroll remains part of your army, and allows any priests you have to summon that invocation again. While there isn't a rule that explicitly states that an invocation can be summoned again, it's there by implication. 20.3.2 Banishing Invocations makes reference to it: "An invocation cannot be summoned again in the turn that it is removed from play."

To be clear, you don't "take Flaming Weapon as a Spell Lore enhancement". You just take a Spell Lore enhancement - that enhancement allows every wizard in your army to select any additional spell from any of the spell lores available to them.

While not advocating piracy, I think it's worth noting that copyright and copyright infringement are a lot more complicated than "It's illegal." It's extremely jurisdictional: in many countries, it's not illegal at all; in others, it can even be criminal. Both the potential penalties and the actual rate of enforcement vary wildly depending on where you are. Everyone could benefit from being more informed about what copyright law actually states, at least in their own jurisdiction.

Yeah, unfortunately the unit needs to have at least four models before you can include a standard and/or musician. The rule about "1 in every x models" upgrades is 22.3.3. In our next battletome, I wouldn't be surprised if Mournfangs had four models as their minimum size, since the trend seems to be towards the contents of a single box being the basic unit.

Off topic, but: sadly not any more. I had a massive Skaven horde in WHFB but didn't have the heart to convert them to round bases after the End Times. I sold them, which I often regret. But back then, mostly what the Skaven warmachines did was explode! So just a guess from past experience.

Ooh, let me guess! Is it... explode?

As an addition to the above suggestion, Contrast paints are fantastic for blacklining. Black Templar and Wyldwood are my go-to choices - it's so easy to put them exactly where you want them, and they don't leave "tide marks" like washes can.

I like it, in the abstract. I feel like it promotes interesting strategic decisions - since most of the save bonuses can only affect one unit at a time (All-Out Defence, Mystic Shield, etc) you can stack them all on one target, and if you do then that unit is quite safe... but all your other units are vulnerable, so a savvy opponent will take the opportunity to spread their damage elsewhere. I think the biggest flaw in practice is the abundance of mortal wounds, making the whole armour and rend system superfluous. If you want to kill something, you don't bother trying to amass high-rend attacks. It's far more efficient and reliable to max out on mortal wound output, which for some reason is significantly undercosted compared to Rend -2 or higher. As I've commented elsewhere, I would also like to see some Rend stacking as a counterpoint to Save stacking. Like a universal command ability: Or a universal spell:

Yeah, it's so easy to fall into this trap. I was in that position for years. The thing that eventually broke me out of it was realising that I was being pulled in two different directions - I wanted the models painted as quickly as possible so that I could call them done and play with them, but I also wanted them to be done to a really high standard. You can't do both at once, especially when you're just starting out. Try to get your friend to instead focus on one priority and aim to make consistent progress towards that goal. I've tried both: super quick and rudimentary paint jobs to finish off a force fast, and focusing a whole month's attention on a single model just to really get to grips with a challenging technique or a particular effect. What I've realised is that you can still do both, just not at the same time - get the whole force done quick and dirty, then come back later and refine your work until you're happy with it. I get so much more painting done this way, and it really alleviates that paralysing stress of having a massive pile of unpainted models waiting.

Our local community tends to "enforce" painting standards through friendly ribbing. Nobody bats an eye if you show up to game night with a newly-assembled unpainted model. If that model is still unpainted after a month or two, you'll start to get an increasing number of comments along the lines of "What paint scheme were you thinking for that guy?" and "What, you still haven't painted that one? Come on!" Also, if the dice are being cruel to you, it's definitely because you haven't finished painting your army. But mainly it's about positive encouragement - we run monthly painting pledges where if you complete your goal (can be anything you like, a single model is fine) by the end of the month you go into a raffle draw for a voucher at the local hobby store. We've put a lot of work into making it a supportive, welcoming environment where we all share advice and cool tutorials we've found, give constructive feedback, and accommodate all skill levels. The local tournament scene always has a painting requirement for events, and often has prizes for the best painted armies.

So has every physical publication. GW literally cannot make a book impossible to copy without also making it impossible for their paying consumers to read. And in this pursuit, GW give up every advantage and convenience of digital publishing: fully indexed and searchable text, hyperlinked references, portability, etc. Most other games companies have settled on the modern solution of providing digital rules for free. Yes, it costs them some money to do so, but it's a loss leader; providing free rules dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, and they make their money on sales of miniatures, which are (currently) much harder to copy.

Skaven are Chaos right now, because of their lore, just like Beastmen. But yes, I agree with you - there is nothing in the Skaven model line to stop GW from rewriting the Skaven lore so that they are no longer aligned to Chaos. They could do this any time they wanted: just put out a new book with the new lore, Skaven aren't a Chaos faction any more, job done.

From the players' perspective, I totally agree. The lore has a deep and personal significance for a lot of people. Probably even for the game designers and authors who worked on it. From the GW corporate perspective, it's just words. If they saw a financial advantage in tossing out the existing Beastmen lore and replacing it with something else, I don't think they would hesitate for a second. When the lore is heavily represented in the models themselves, changing the lore requires a massive financial investment to create new molds. If the lore can be changed without significantly altering the models, then all bets are off. Writing and printing a new battletome would happen eventually regardless (assuming the faction isn't discontinued) - changing the lore it contains is dirt cheap. That's all I mean by "just words" - fundamental lore changes could happen to any faction, at any time, according to the whims of GW.

Absolutely. Not to put too fine a point on it though, how often has alienating the existing fans with established armies stopped GW from making sweeping changes in the past? I daresay they've lost a few Bretonnian and Tomb Kings players along the way, for instance. I would be quite intrigued by a faction with a "children of the forest" aesthetic that wasn't inherently "evil" or tied directly to Chaos. I would prefer that to be the Kurnothi, but I wouldn't mind at all if it was the Beastfolk, or even a combination of the two. I'm inclined to agree. But GW moves in mysterious ways.

The name, and all the existing lore, is just words. GW can cast all that aside with the mere flick of a pen. It would be so easy to reflavour the Beastmen as the last surviving remnants of Kragnos' people, for instance - lost to Chaos for aeons while Kragnos was trapped, now flocking back to his banner. So instead, look to the models themselves. If they're so intrinsically and inseparably linked to Chaos, there should be a ton of Chaos iconography on their models, right? And there just... isn't. The Dragon Ogre Shaggoth has an eight-pointed star, and that's about all. (Obviously stuff like the Tzaangor and Slaangor belong to the Disciples and Hedonites in this scenario.) GW could choose to align the Beastmen with Kragnos more or less immediately, if they decided it would suit their design and marketing goals better. All it would take is a lore rewrite - they wouldn't even have to change the (vast majority of the) model kits. I think it's right to expect that they won't do that, but the path is definitely open to them.

That's really surprising to me. I'm guessing the Coalesced damage reduction does an awful lot of the heavy lifting there, because on the face of it the Stegadons look like they'd get rolled by Stonehorns in very short order. Stonehorns are much faster so they can control the initial engagement and ensure their charges, they put out way more mortal wounds, and they're a lot tougher. At 3000 points, you could run four Frostlords and four Stonehorn Beastriders, and I feel like that would obliterate ten Stegadons without breaking a sweat. Can you go into a bit more detail about why it ended up being such a difficult matchup?

The 4+ ward saves on models like Basteon and Yndrasta seems to me to be GW's admission that foot heroes have a survivability problem, and (as is often their style) "solving" it in the bluntest way possible. Can't give them 10+ wounds because a bunch of stuff keys off going over that threshold? Just virtually double their wounds instead. Give them bodyguards too. Let them resurrect their bodyguards, why not. Yndrasta is tougher than a mega-gargant.

I think the more relevant question might be: what did you gain? Unless you're running Tzeentch where the number of spells you cast matters, the bonus you get from Cogs is... you might get to cast an extra spell on your next turn, if it manages to stay on the board that long.