madmac

I do not like the bland battle formations replacing the cool subfactions 40K style. I'll just leave it at that.

True, I wasn't thinking about the old kit, not that anyone actually built them with double weapons but this way they can handwave backward compatibility without bothering to stat out weapon options.

GW battletomes are simply insanely expensive. I personally stopped buying them outside of army box deals a while ago, and it not because I dislike physical media, it's just impossible to justify spending $50+ on a slim hardback with rules that will be out of date before it even ships, not to mention all the copy-pasted lore, reused art, etc. Making them digital but at the same price point just makes the price-gouging feel that much more acute.

As someone who has read a lot of Black Library, it has always been thus, even back in the days of yore.

And you won't be able to buy the models if you don't already have them, either.

I would never burn my army, but being real with you selling (and shipping!) used models is a lot of work for likely a pittance of pay. I'm not going to judge anyone for just quietly tipping a box of models into the garbage bin instead of bothering.

Now that I think about it, the hero thing is potentially really awful for armies that have very few heroes available, like BoC(I know I know, I don't care) or Bonesplitters. In a lot of cases you might end up not only having to buy heroes you don't particularly want, but even multiples of the same hero just to fill out regiments. Not to mention the inherent "Oh you want to run a spare cavalry unit? Better own this specific hero or pay the auxillary tax!" problems that could arise.

Yeah, as someone who plays both KO and Fyreslayers the last LAST thing I want is for KO to get nerfed movement and shooting and Fyreslayers to get nerfed melee and durability so that they can be played as a "balanced" army. But I've been over this a thousand times already, souping only appeals to people who don't like two armies by and large. I don't expect it to happen though, at most it'll just be Grombrindal having his own Army of Renown rules for people that do want to go down that road.

Harlequins were merged in the 9th edition Eldar codex, tho.

That actually seems reasonable, hmmm.

Votann really don't have anything that remotely looks like the RE, lots of futuristic bits and it's nearly all plasma blades to start with.

I think that if GW wanted to completely purge dwarfs from CoS and move them to TOW they would have done it already. They certainly didn't hesitate the drop the axe on Wood Elves and Phoenix Temple even though we are still waiting for Kurnothi and Tyrion. Also being a primarily human army doesn't preclude sprinkling in other races for variety, even IG has Ogres and Halflings in it.

That's the thing that stands out to me too. It's partially a callback to old dispossessed designs, but it's more an evolution of them, like I noticed with past releases like Seraphon weapon and armor designs in stuff like their UW warband before the full release. In particular the style of gem and the square geometric shaft design are different, while the trim is very much like the 8th edition dwarf models. Also as I said earlier, that's no greataxe, it's too stubby. It could very well be TOW and that wouldn't surprise me but it's a lot more fun to think it something for AoS.

The only real jarring thing about Darkoath is that there's no generic Shaman/Sorcerer model. You've got an abundance of named options, including both the Underworlds warbands and the new cartoon based box of heroes, which can also be used as proxies of course, it's just a weird oversite.

New Darkoath reveals are amazing, I'm actually stunned. I started a small STD army some years ago purely because I liked Darkoath so much. I think that army is about to become a lot more darkoath focused. Now I just need the Sylvaneth army I started because I liked Kurnothi so much to get the same payoff...

I agree with you, but the way things tend to work out in practice is that armies that have recently been worked on are often more likely to get more content soon compared to armies that haven't darkened the desks of the design team in 5+ years. It's the classic "we made a ton of stuff we'll dribble out in waves over the next couple of years" vs "Wait, we still make dwarfs for AoS???" To me, CoS feels like an obvious first wave that will be added to before long. FEC, I dunno, I'm not really expecting anything major there unless their battletome hints at a lot of stuff or something, I wouldn't know. Fyreslayers have actually been getting a lot of attention lately, I fully expect they'll get at least a small wave of new models in 4E.

I really don't expect Kurnothi anything to have leather straps tied to their antlers, so that's an obvious headfake. Darkoath strikes me as a reasonable guess since we know more of them are coming.

We're likely still missing 1-2 new models. There was five new models in the army box, and that's supposed to be about half of the total new units. Since then we've seen three more models.

I don't think the Kroot box will go up until all the new models are revealed, since the codex will spoil them anyway.

I have negative interest levels in an index edition because it's just another hint that we're getting changes similar to 10E 40K and I LOATHE most of the changes they made in 10E. I didn't even like 40K that much to start with, I just have zero desire to see similar changes made to AoS. I'm fully prepared to sit out the whole edition if it comes to that.

This is actually a character from the very first broken realms story, which explored how he become a Bonesplitter.

Love the new Kroot, but five dogs to a box seems guaranteed to be overcosted in real money. At least it's gonna be a better deal than Dire Bats, probably.

We already have spoilers on that though, and it seems So it's not like he's making a directed effort to wipe them out. Also the preview for Book 5 says they are saved in some capacity by the Croneseer so it's not over for them yet.

The preview for Book 5 says that the Ghyran crusade is rescued by the new DoK character, so they do not appear to be out of the running yet.