Saxon

In Oz we are having major issues with supplies. Most stores have had lets say 20% of their items out of stock for months now. Paints seem to be the worst. Dryad Bark almost doesn't exist in Australia at the moment.

Designing models? They'd be making a fortune on those potato space marine releases they've been vomiting out lately which look like half baked attempts to Frankenstein two existing kits together to make a new one.

No argument from me on that one. Kroaks comets call is a rather unpleasant spell when it can be cast anywhere. It encourages seraphon players to hide Kroak behind terrain so you can't get near him which is pretty frustrating and given his abilities, its not a model you can ignore. I'm not a huge fan of mechanics that encourage narrow tactics. I played freeguild as my first army and the hit bonuses for shooty boys meant all i ever did was hermit and murder which wasn't fun for my opponents. Haven't had much luck changing it up though 😆

Exploding 6's smashed my 20 man ghoul units which i was using to tie them up and i had the zombie dragon which whiffed only taking 6 wounds off the GUO. I just find it hard to deal damage on the big guys who heal so well.

- I would agree that battleshock has become a complete joke. Too many armies ignore it with abilities and silly CP generation. - Remove spells that affect the whole board/don't require line of site.

I absolutely loath playing games against armies with minimum battleline. I think it provides more balance to games and needs to be improved to stop people running lists of 3 x 5 tree revenants and then treelords or the equivalent to fill the rest of the points.

I feel like the rules around battlelines are too loose. I absolutely loath coming up against 2k lists with minimum battlelines. I don't know if the solution is to make point scoring battleline specific or make minimum battleline points based on the size of the game.

I'm not a Nurgle player but a friend in my group plays a list i just cannot get past (tried FEC and nighthaunt and been stomped both times) in 1k point games: Great Unclean One (Bloated with corruption trait, blades of putrefaction) - 320 Rotigus ( sumptuous pestilence) - 320 5 x Blightkings - 140 5 x Blightkings - 140 5 x Chaos Warriors - 90 Yeh it goes over by 10 points but they're only friendly games so we don't stress too much. I just can't bring down the two big boys and keep the blightkings tied up in 5 turns. Nurgle is tough.

PE are not a fun match up for a lot of armies. A lot of commentary is that they just weren't fun to play against. I certainly didn't enjoy a game against OBR. The OBR player knew what you had to do to avoid their cheese and it was wash rinse and repeat for most games against them. Yawn,

BA a miniature board game. I get that it makes people uncomfortable that other games might be more balanced thus reflecting poorly on GW but it is comparable. BA isn't perfect. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm suggesting that AOS has atrocious balance which seems to conveniently align with flashy new models. I play Cities of Sigmar, Nighthaunt and Sylvaneth. I still play AOS, i'm even still painting it. I have just decided against investing in another army given my concerns with the state of the game. I take further issue with the huge gap between new armies and older ones. Legions of Nagash are in an absolutely awful state right now and they had a 2nd ed tome. It's greatly concerning that an army can be so badly affected in such a short period of time.

My biggest pet hate is people who roll dice without explaining what they're doing. Spell-casting is the worst. I have frequent opponents who just roll the dice and then claim "oh that one failed it was only a mystic shield, now i'm casting my f*ck you spell" after spending 3 turns casting the 'f*ck you' spell first. Another one is not explaining their artefacts/spell choices before the game and then surprise its very convenient that you chose a very situational spell without telling me. I frequently get accused to trying to slow the game down for asking an opponent why he's rolling 21 dice instead of the 14 from the previous turn. How am i meant to know you've used a command ability.... how many command points are you up to now...... Communication in a game is key. If you can't explain what you are doing and how you are doing it you're probably doing it wrong. Furthermore, it's important to never get upset about rules queries. Your opponent has a right to know how you are doing what you are doing. There can be a lot of special abilities in a game and people do make mistakes so it is more than fair to make them double check something.

A myth? This is another deflection to avoid criticizing GW for some really stupid rules in new factions. In our community, a lot of people will spend a fortune and get an army commission painted to get the best. We know this because after the inevitable nerf from our masters after they've pushed enough product the amount of them coming up for sale with commission painted specified to try and recoup as much money as possible on buy/swap/sell sites in massive. If i wasn't significantly reducing my spending on GW products i would be able to pick up some really cheap full armies of bonereapers or Slaanesh haha

BA is up to 2nd edition which is pretty well balanced. Germans can be hard to play with but the gap between the best and worst factions is not even close to AOS. It's also not homogenized, each faction has its special rules that do factor into the game. It's a lot simpler and that is quite different to AOS. Some people would like that, some don't, each to their own. There surely has to be a reasonable expectation of balance. These forums become tiresome when people will make any excuse to defend GW and their tendancy to cheese new abilities and then nerf them later as if it was accidental. The cynic in me feels like the regularity that this now seems to happen means that its part of the marketing plan to appeal to the power gamers who will drop a fortune to have a flashy new army. Sure it works. But it's a collective eye roll from my gaming group seeing these flash rules come out each time a faction is updated.

I was going to bring up Bolt Action. I have been playing this game recently and find the balance enjoyable (mostly because i have older AOS armies that get stomped frequently by command point spamming +++ save new armies). Bolt action seems to come down to list building and tactics and making the most out of your armies special rules. In the dozen or so games we have all played we rarely have absolute stompings like we have seen with AOS. I think GW's problem seems to be sales driven where new AOS releases (Slaanesh and OBR come to mind) completely blow everything out of the water which attracts a lot of interest and makes them a lot of money. When us rusted on players whinge too much they just nerf it. I'm not a fan of this approach.

I have rarely seen anything but huge blocks of mortek guard used. Honestly i've only really seen the same core build used. This is a problem GW have though. Too many newer releases have seen people zero in on almost singular builds

Thank god for this. So so sick of seeing single builds for OBR. I have found PE to be the most unfun list to play against. It will encourage players to look at alternative list builds and will improve GW sales as people scramble to remain WAAC 😄

I am the same. I destroy my small layer brushes. They're lucky to last a fortnight. I have purchased a couple of army painter brushes to test them out and so far they seem fairly durable in comparison. Like many things you get what you pay for.

As an example, a Waffen SS starter set (1000 points) is 90 Pounds Sterling (equivalent to $167AUD). It retails in Aus for $202.50 (we don't have warlord all stockists are independent retailers). The mark up is therefore about 22%. It's still a lot, but you can get a playable army for way cheaper with Warlord games. I think its not terribly dissimilar to GW but the price point for what you get is a fair bit lower. Quality of sculpts etc. can be argued. GW has some fantastic models whereas the WWII era games is lower. As per some of the earlier comments in this thread, in Aus we have extortionate rents, high minimum wages as well as import costs (freight and tarrifs) so we are always going to pay a higher amount. I'm just disappointed that GW would choose this time to raise prices when affordability of their games is already very difficult and 6 million people in our country are now out of work.

Well absolute terms is how I justify buying or not buying. I don't look at something and go "oh it's only gone up by 2.5%". There is a point when only a few dollars is just too much.

Sounds ignorant i know but i had no idea it was that expensive to make. I was thinking $20 or $30 would be fine and id pay straight away but i can't justify $52 on a book!

This is a fair assessment . Do you think the average person is going to analyse these sorts of things when entering a game? I'd think they're going to look at the upfront costs on the box. As those costs increase, the harder it will be to justify to new players. $100 for a small box of Sigmarines is a hard sell. Thank god for starter sets. At least GW got something right I looked up GW to see what things cost these days and interestingly the cost of space marines (A basic tactical squad) hasn't risen that much since i started playing 15 years ago. They're $55 now and were $40 when i first started. $1 a year increase. I have also discovered that i know nothing about 40k because there are now about 20 types of marines you can buy when back in the day there were about 5 haha!

All very fair points but surely there is a point where even regular purchasers such as you and i go 'enough, that's too expensive'. Most people in my gaming group use buy/swap/sell pages and discounted sellers to reduce our hobby costs. A lot of my group have moved on to Bolt Action due to costs. I'm a little more stubborn and insist on completing a project before i start another one.

I may be incorrect on the tarriffs. I was under the impression that it was considered a luxury item and thus taxed differently but i can't find anything. We have high rents, absurdly high minimum wages in comparison to other countries. If you want to talk about rents, i could chew your ear off about how absurd our government (at all 3 levels) are when it comes to affordability of bricks and mortar. Realistically though, in the UK you pay 25 pounds sterling for a box of Drayds which is $46 AUD. We pay $70 for the same box which is almost a third higher. If you want to talk about shipping, Canada pays an equivalent of $56 AUD for a box of Dryads which is 20% cheaper than us. No matter which way you look at it, any price rise hurts us badly when we already pay more for the same thing. Local gaming pages on Facebook have reacted extremely negatively to the price rise which has been magnified by the current Covid crisis.

Probably unrelated somewhat but i wanted to buy audiobooks to listen to when i exercise and wowzers $52 AUD for a book (about 28GBP). That seems really expensive for a book and they were all the same price. I had no idea the Black Library charged so much for audiobooks.

In Australia we already pay about 30% more than the rest of the world for the same product (thanks government). I honestly haven't purchased anything brand new from GW in about 18 months (other than my recent trip to the UK) due to costs. Honestly, i'm going to start collecting Bolt Action before i start another AOS army.