madmac

Skaven for underworlds, easy guess. We have a roadmap for UW, next warband is Chaos, UW is one of the games featured, there you go.

I don't pay much attention to Blood Bowl, but my understanding is that all the "expected" releases are filled now, right? Could mean that when the next BB news eventually comes it'll be something big, like an entirely new/remade team, or maybe a new edition even.

Fyreslayers are not some flash in the pan meta faction though, they've been played pretty consistently across all three editions with very few dips. While they're not KBs bad, they've never been an S-tier army either, there's no particular reason for someone who is only interested in winning to main Fyreslayers of all things. They've been consistently good enough over the years that you can basically always run Fyreslayers in tournaments, if you like Fyreslayers.

Yeah, this is a point I've been hammering on for a while. People who don't like Fyreslayers get this idea in their head that practically everyone also dislikes Fyreslayers and that they're a waste of space, etc etc. When the reality is that they actually have a solid and dedicated fanbase by all visible indications. Like, their tournament percentage alone has always been higher than a lot of factions that are widely considered to be "popular" armies, and it's always been that way. I think partially the reason this happens is because even Fyreslayer players will agree with a lot of criticisms, like the models being samey or the infantry models not the best looking GW has ever made, but that doesn't mean they don't love the army. For me personally, I play a lot of armies, so me saying that I also play Fyreslayers doesn't have a lot of weight necessarily, but I've realized over the years that of all the armies I get worked up and excited/depressed about, Fyreslayers are the top of the list, so in a way you can say they're secretly my favorite AoS army. Surely they've been neglected by GW over the years, but the core of what they are is really cool and has a special resonance unique to them. In any case, I do think Fyreslayers will have their due soon, I don't think for a second that them being one of the four harbringers of the new Narrative Campaign is coincidental.

This is my opinion as well. They removed 90% of the High Elf models just prior to LRL coming out. Wanderers and Kurnothi are obviously thematically linked for similar reasons. We all expect all or most of the existing human models to get wiped out by the CoS release this year. It's really the same approach GW uses for all the other army ranges, stuff gets removed when it's being replaced and not before.

I concur, this is classic Ogor weapon engineering. A mix of wood, leather, bone, and stone elements reinforced with metal bolts. Ironjawz use metal weapons, bonesplitters and Troggoths don't use bolts, definitely an Ogor.

The objectively best Orc subfaction, Bonesplitters, will stay and get new models. I have spoken.

If we assume it's true that the next Starter Box is Skaven vs SC, then in terms of large ranges made mostly of old WHFB models and resin, at that point only BoC and Ogors are left to get the big range update treatment, which leaves plenty of slots for updates of smaller factions and/or new armies, and I don't think we're suddenly going to get a ton of new armies in 4th, considering we've so far only gotten KB in 3rd, and technically as a new sub-army only.

Yeah, Realms of Ruin is shaping up to be the first "real" AoS video game. It could potentially sell quite well too, there hasn't been a good DoW 2 style game released in a long time, if it's good enough the market is there. The only painful thing for me is hoping for DLC with more factions, even though 4 is fairly standard for RTS games, it's not even 1/5 of the factions available in AoS...

Just watched the trailer, honestly not much of interest, other than showing more of the KB roster and confirming that it still looks a lot like Dawn of War.

Well, just going by previous experience. Malign Portents kicked off with 4 new models-A Sacrosanct Stormcast, a Night Gobbo, a Ghost, and a Darkoath Barbarian, and in the end we got a whole wave of Sacrosanct Stormcast, Gloomspite Gits, Nighthaunt, and loads of Slave to Darkness stuff, including a whole barbarian themed sidegame and multiple waves of models. Broken Realms was a bit of a headfake in that it kicked off with Morathi vs Deepkin vs Slaanesh, and aside from Slaanesh none of them really got anything big. Every new model released for Broken Realms after that though was tied to at least a fairly large release, or massive in some cases. With the new narrative campaign we're kicking things off with four new heroes, called Harbringers, and each of them seems tied to the plot being set up, and each representing a GA. We know the second book in the series will probably be Orc themed and they're definitely getting some good stuff, and of course FEC and CoS have big releases already earmarked for later in the year. I feel like it's more likely than not that GW is going somewhere with this, model-wise. I think the reasons it tends to turn out this way is pretty simple, GW isn't sitting around cranking out models specifically for narrative purposes, it's more that the factions they are actively working on already have lots of models in the pipeline so it's easy for GW to just toss out a couple of them early to tease what's coming later.

I think I remember someone randomly leaking the Vamptaur there years back. Mostly though I've never seen a real leak posted there that wasn't sourced from somewhere else.

Yeah, that's the thing with a DoW2 style game. DoW2 and it's expansions had a really great campaign mode(s) and were also a lot of fun in MP but long-term SP content was severely lacking. The style of MP those games had just weren't any fun so play vs the AI, frankly. Alternate game modes like Last Stand would definitely help, but we'll have to wait and see the gameplay reveal to get a better idea what's coming I guess.

Realms of Ruin, judging from all the screenshots and other information seen so far, looks like it's pretty much an unabashed Dow2 clone. Which isn't a bad thing, DoW2 was a good game and one that still doesn't have a lot of imitators to this day. I worry a little about the single-player side of things, though. It'll probably have a good campaign, but feel very different in skirmish mode, we'll have to see.

Just focusing on this one point for now, those of us who have been playing GW games in the last few years have been down this road before, and it's not a good road. Those free PDF rules for old armies will get updated once at the start of the game and then probably never touched again, quickly becoming outdated and functionally useless. There's a reason getting moved to "Legends" in both AoS and 40K is rightfully considered a death sentence.

I never held much hope for The Old World in the first place, but yeah, this is enough to snuff out whatever last tiny spark of interest I may have had in it. I was never hoping for much, maybe some cool models I could poach for AoS, or a chance to play WHFB with some of my AoS armies, or just looking forward to table top versions of Kislev and Cathay, who I consider pretty neat factions. Instead I'm seeing a mass reprinting of old models, armies that were potentially cross-compatible with AoS being shoved in the forgotten closet category, two new resin character models shown that don't impress me at all, and pretending they never mentioned Kislev and/or Cathay as being a thing. Unless you're really a die hard fan of one of the 9 factions being supported, (while hating their AoS spinoffs like LRL and Sylvaneth, etc) I'm not sure what's even left to look forward to really.

You're not wrong, but this is what new hero prices have looked like for a while now, it's not anything new.

I don't expect him either, but keep in mind that Broken Realms started small and ended up giving us Kragnos, Kroak, and the Slaanesh Twins.

There IS a forest dragon skull on that Broken Realms Sylvaneth hero...

Yeah, I think people forget how unbelievably slow the CoS rollout has been compared to usual. In an entire year we've gotten like two pictures of renders and 1.3 unit reveals.

In both Underworlds and Warcry, mages usually have basic pew pew attacks, so that tends to get translated over to their AoS rules. It's also starting to show up in some new mages that aren't sidegame crossovers, like the new LRL mage, it just hasn't been standardized yet as a concept I think.

Eh, how many more armies are they even planning to add at this point? 3E hasn't actually added any new armies so far, Chorfs and Malerion are only+2 if they ever arrive, that's not going to break anything. With the current number of armybooks GW has completed the usual update grind in record time, so it can't be that much of a strain.

I started out 3rd Edition being depressed about Fyreslayers and other small armies, but honestly? At this point I think it'll happen, GW has done a lot recently and there aren't that many armies left in the cold anymore. After the Seraphon, STD, and Cities updates this year, the only armies left with old, resin heavy ranges left are basically just Ogors, Skaven, and BoC. I can't imagine it will take more than one edition to get all of them up to speed. As for small armies, Syvlaneth got a good update and apparently more coming with Kurnothi, FEC look to have a big update late this year, Ironjawz/Warclans are getting stuff, so for small-sh new army ranges what does that leave really? Fyreslayers, KO, DoK, IDK, Bonesplitters(unless included in the overall Warclans update) and OBR? That's not really a lot, and we aren't talking about ranges that need a ton of stuff to feel fleshed out, and Fyreslayers definitely stand out for needing the most work here, so why not?

Absolutely. The only downer I have with Warcry is they spent two years making slightly different versions of Chaos Marauders before finally deciding to branch out a bit. Still, we look to be getting at least 8 not-chaos Warcry bands this year, that's fantastic.

I do feel a little smug as an AoS player that even after GW revamped Killteam to be more like Warcry they still get a bunch of re-used models and upgrade kits whereas every Warcry Warband is brand new.