CeleFAZE

It's really more of Frank Miller's reimagining of the Persian aesthetic than anything rooted in history, to be honest. A number of the design cues I've noticed seem to come from all over the Middle East and South Asian regions, and I'd be hard-pressed to really find one specific culture to point to as a sole focus. If anything from a historical perspective the weaponry and garb seem to draw more from Indian and Arabian sources, with a splash of Roman gladiatorial wear combined with modern bondage aesthetic. The heavier infantry also seem to have more in common with European armor designs than anything else, as ornate articulated plate armor generally was utilized more in those regions.

If this is the case, then I think that makes the palanquin the newborn. I think that brazier full of heads from the rumor engine is probably a part of that.

I think the rules have a good chance of sticking around for awhile, and possibly being rolled into the next battletome when it comes around. GW is most likely aware of how terrible the cultists are at present through sales figures, so I presume they'll see some sort of rework in the future, and it just makes sense for them to be battleline considering their place in the hierarchy.

I'd really love to see what they'd do with plastic vampires. We need more baroque armor in the game and they'd be excellent. Also possibly great conversion pieces for Slaanesh.

I'd go with those changes, as well as chosen, varanguard, the champions for warriors and knights counting as heroes for the purposes of the aura of chaos for S2D armies, like how you have it for mortek guard. This doesn't really change things for us, but gives them a larger purpose for their army of origin, and showcases their elevation in the eyes of the gods.

Thank you for the heads up, I'd been considering one of those for awhile.

That would function similarly to previous editions of 40k, and I remember it working quite well to make hordes viable.

Don't forget the statue. That's certainly what's sitting on the motorcycle wheel.

I appreciate that, and I apologize as well if any of my comments read aggressively. I'd also hate to see base sizes changed, as that really puts the onus of the work on the hobbyists for GW's oversight. My distant hope is that future point and warscroll changes recognize the disparity, and can rebalance things to where there's a good reason for bigger bases (which I personally think look better on the tabletop anyhow). As for the blissbarb archers, I think they'll provide something we really needed, which as you mentioned is a dedicated objective holder (hopefully battleline) that can still contribute to the battle without being in the thick of it. Our other three options in that regard either waste a lot of their potential by not charging in as soon as possible (marauders and daemonettes), or are buried under a major commitment to a battalion (ungors).

I don't want to belabor the point, as I can easily see this becoming a drawn out argument. However, your example supports what I'm saying. If you had two units with identical stats and costs, except one has a 32mm base and the other has a 25mm, it's a distinct disadvantage. Going by your image there, let's increase the number of 32 mm bases to the same as the 25mm shown (20). Presuming they have the same movement speed, they'll reach each other at roughly the same time, so we'll go with the formation above (with an additional rank of 32mm bases behind those tzaangors). Presuming both units have 1" weapons, the 25mm unit has double the offensive power of the 32mm unit. In addition, you can fit more of those 25mm bases on an objective, providing each model an additional unpointed advantage of being able to contribute more towards capturing objectives, which is arguably more effective than killing power alone. This offsets the only advantage to a larger base of having more blocking presence on the board. If every 32mm model was roughly doubly effective compared to those on 25mm, there'd be no issues. You'd take larger models for more punch, and smaller models for numbers and maneuverability. However, you mention mortek guard as having a generic statline, but let's compare them to a chaos warrior. For the benefit of a better comparison I'll use greatblades for the warriors to give them a lift, since we're not caring about mortal wounds here, and we'll assume they're in our allegiance so they have the same exploding 6's as the morteks: Mortek Guard With Nadirite Blades (13 points/model): Mv 4" W 1 B 10 Sv 4+ Rng 1" Atks 2 To Hit 3+ To Wound 4+ Rend -1 Dmg 1 Chaos Warriors (18 points/model): Mv5" W 2 B 7 Sv 4+ Rng 1" Atks 2 To Hit 4+ To Wound 3+ Rend -1 Dmg 1 The chaos warriors are doubly survivable with 2 wounds each, but the mortek are doubly offensive at a lower cost. Let's do a bit of math-hammer: 15 chaos warriors get the charge on 20 mortek guard. Let's use your above example where both units manage a frontage of 10. 32mm bases are larger than 1", so we only swing with the front 10. Turn 1 Chaos Warriors (15 remaining) : 21 attacks, 13.99 hits, 9.33 wounds, 5.18 unsaved, rounding to 5 casualties for the mortek. Turn 1 Mortek Guard (15 remaining) : 31 attacks, 25.83 hits, 12.92 wounds, 5.74 unsaved, which rounds to killing 3 warriors. Turn 2 Mortek Guard (15 remaining) : 31 attacks, 25.83 hits, 12.92 wounds, 5.74 unsaved, which rounds to killing 3 warriors, however for the sake of keeping fractional kills from adversely affecting things let's say it's 2.5 dead warriors. Turn 2 Chaos Warriors (10 remaining) : 21 attacks, 13.99 hits, 9.33 wounds, 5.18 unsaved, and let's be charitable and round to 6 casualties for the mortek. Turn 3 Chaos Warriors (10 remaining) : 21 attacks, 13.99 hits, 9.33 wounds, 5.18 unsaved, 5 casualties on the mortek. Turn 3 Mortek Guard (10 remaining) : 21 attacks, 17.5 hits, 8.75 wounds, 3.89 unsaved, rounding to 2 more dead warriors. Turn 4 Mortek Guard (10 remaining) : 21 attacks, 17.5 hits, 8.75 wounds, 4.375 go through due to the warriors losing their rerolls. For the warrior's sake will round this down to 4 wounds. Turn 4 Chaos Warriors (6 remaining) : 13 attacks, 7.37 hits, 4.91 wounds, 2.047 unsaved and kill 2 more mortek guard. Turn 5 Chaos Warriors (6 remaining) : 13 attacks, 7.37 hits, 4.91 wounds, 2.047 unsaved and kill 2 more mortek guard. Turn 5 Mortek Guard (6 remaining) : 13 attacks, 10.83 hits, 5.42 wounds, 2.71 wounds, rounding to 2 dead warriors (one full and one half-wounded). Turn 6 Mortek Guard (6 remaining) : 13 attacks, 10.83 hits, 5.42 wounds, 2.71 wounds, which we'll again alternate the rounding in the warrior's favor to 1 dead warrior. Turn 6 Chaos Warriors (3 remaining) : 7 attacks, 4.67 wounds, 1.56 wounds, which we'll say is 2 dead mortek. We'll call it there since that's the turn limit for most games. This leaves us with 52 points of mortek left on the table, and 54 points of warriors, out of a starting 260 and 270 respectively, both 20% of their points. This was with generous rounding and giving the warriors the charge, had the mortek charged they would have definitely won by the math. Base size matters, and unless a larger base size consistently comes with a far better profile a larger base is always going to be a statistically significant disadvantage.

It's the equivalent of an additional rank for 25 mm units (as 25mm is just barely less than 1"), which is far more noticeable in a game where units are not locked into formation. In addition, 25mm base units in fantasy usually had higher strength and toughness or ward saves, which don't translate into AoS in any meaningful way. Also the buffs in AoS are frequently "wholly within", which makes larger bases a liability for making that happen.

More than anything, larger bases need to be factored into a unit's cost, as they directly correlate to a lower number of possible attacks. Looking at certain units (like beastman gors and chaos warriors) it really seems like that's not really taken into account.

Yeah, what I'm really hoping for is something like the bloodsecrator, that gives us something we can use to buff S2D units and can work as a solid ally for S2D Slaanesh lists. Currently the contorted epitome is something that can sort of apply in this context, but it's basically just a solid addition regardless of the makeup of your force in a slaves army.

I'm personally hoping we get at least one or two support abilities on our new stuff that's only tied to the Slaanesh keyword, or at worst mortal Slaanesh. Or at the very least more targeted debuffs like acquiescence but non-magic, considering we really don't have the stacking + to cast that allows that go through reliably against at least 4 of the top armies that are currently in the meta.

Depravity should be changed to one point the first time a slaanesh unit deals damage each phase, and one point the first time a slaanesh unit takes damage in a phase, with no distinction as to whether the enemy died or not, as that's lopsided and obtuse. This encourages us to play aggressively and fling our units into the revelry, while also letting the ranged units have a solid reason to be doing something every turn as well. It's less bookkeeping, AND allows us a defensive edge against things like the Kroaknado, since we'd generate a specific amount of depravity in the hero phase separate from taking it in the shooting or close combat phases.

This is where I hope having a fairly large pool of mortal units to pull from is going to be a huge help. Daemons aren't really costed against the abilities that specifically hurt us more, and mortals fortunately don't have as much of an issue in that regard.

The way the poisons are written about for the archer's arrows make me think that it will go one of three ways: 1. The "poison" aspect is just fluff and they'll have a fairly basic shooting profile with some rend, which is still great, especially if they're battleline. 2. They might deal out some kind of debuff to units they hit and/or damage, maybe a strikes last, movement, or to-hit debuff. While this would be cool, I'm concerned they'd be too expensive to be a viable massed range choice for the army. 3. They deal a mortal wound on a six to hit or wound. Kind of boring and not something we're particularly hurting for, but again something I think would be costed for a little heavily.

I thought that too, but the color scheme is way different from the two slaangors that are more visible, and it doesn't appear to share the same silhouette. I suppose it could be standing sideways and positioned awkwardly (wouldn't be the first time GW chose an unfortunate angle for a photo) but if it were a slaangor, the areas that are peachy flesh-tone on the others would be an almost white on this one, which seems inconsistent. There's also definitely something large looming behind the one archer on the far right in the video, though.

I was looking back through the video reveal, and this caught my eye: Does that look like two legs danging from just above screen off of a long, snaky body, on a fairly large base? There is a slight amount of parallax rotation from the panning shot that indicates that the purple portion to the right of the raised myrmidon blade is a round tubular shape bent in a curve towards the viewer.

This is exactly the "boobsnake" I was referring to (a totally scientific and not at all reductive term I swear ;)) in my predictions for what I think these are. I would imagine it's going to be a dual-kit with an option for archers, which is what we're seeing in that accidental image. However, there is another possibility in that they could have very long whips which have a ranged profile, but I'd put my bet down for archers. I think the heads on the newer models are being tied in with the frills/spikes/fins paradigm we have with the seeker mounts and fiends, which explains the bit we see of the mount there. Also, it bears mentioning that there is artwork used in the current Hedonites book where this old mounted lord model makes an appearance. I imagine they'd jump on the opportunity to bring back an iconic design and reuse some phenomenal artwork at the same time. I also occurs to me that caster-types generally get a ranged weapon as opposed to spells in Warcry, so the other possibility is that these are monstrous cavalry caster unit.

Sort of. Warcry kinda takes some liberties with the way it does wounds, since they have that increased measure of granularity. So generally you see things like leaders on monstrous cavalry, like eels at around 35, which have 4 wounds, and you also have the leader fiend at 35. However the leader crypt horror has 40 wounds, despite also being 4 wounds in AoS, and you also have things like the orruk brutes, which have 35 wounds despite being 3 wounds in AoS. So generally it mostly works out to 35-40 for a leader is a 4ish wound model, but it's not a hard and fast rule. For comparison the seeker and hellstrider champs are both 30.

Are lances a decent choice for this? It seems like exploding hits and rerolls on basically everything when buffed would lend itself to a pretty devastating charge.

Is there a good way to run a mono-Slaanesh S2D army? With the new releases impending for Slaanesh mortals I'm looking at ways to still utilize my current slaves mortals, as I'm not sure they'll really still have a solid place in that allegiance.

Doesn't this basically describe the majority of the Death grand alliance, though? Replace the hivemind with Nagash, and biomass with bone, bodies, and souls and you have a fairly apt comparison. His end goal is even to render all the realms as undead in thrall to him, which while explicitly distinct from the tyranids motivations is thematically similar.

Assuming we take the idea of smaller leader choices as options, we can at minimum assume the shardspeaker and lord of pain as part of the list. This leaves 16 choices. We already know the unit leaders of generally any given unit will be leader choices, and we have seen that the hellstriders are in the same section as the daemon units, so we can extrapolate up to 8 new units from this. So we have: Painbringers Twinsouls Slaangors Boobsnake archers As our basically confirmed entries. We can maybe guess at: Boobsnake melee cavalry Spear dancers Bowmen ??? - perhaps an alternate build for the slaangors, evidence of 2 more small hero choices, or maybe blank space on the page (the three above look like they could have blank margin underneath.) This would give us a fully fleshed out release, even before adding in what that big thing is in the background of the promo video stills.