plavski

Since Soul Wars we've had Forbidden Power and Wrath of the Everchosen, that's two expansion pieces to the narrative in 2 years, one of which was basically a pamphlet. Give us more, GW! More!!!

Definitely new Primaris Clubborators, another melee based infantry option with +5 attacks per model and once per phase you can change all dice rolls to be whatever the hell you want. 3+ invul.

It's £25 And €32.50 for all us cool Euros

These books are primarily for the lore and battleplans and campaigns. I'm getting it as even though I have none of these armies, I'm excited to play the narrative story. If you're purely a competitive player, there's probably very little of value - I wouldn't expect the battalion to be game changing or anything. But for the fluff and the narrative aspects, it's gold.

It's an interesting problem, because there are fixed time periods established in AoS: 300 years of the Age of Chaos, for example, and the Core of AoS takes places a few hundred years after the opening of the Realmgates and the Stormcast's arrival, marked by the establishment of the cities. If you wanted to establish a year by year timeline, you could only do it from a certain perspective without creating correlating timelines for every race. SCE are not a dominant force in the narrative of AoS - Chaos is still very much the dominant power across the realms, so with a single timeline, you'd end up kinda forcing the setting into a similar vein to 40k - humans vs everyone else. The range of races in AoS means that that bias wouldn't be very useful. A fixed timeline has the potential to generate chronology fluff problems like 40k has where hundreds of thousands of stories all take place in like the last 6 months in 999 m41, but all have galaxy wide implications. So overall, I'd say a strict timeline would hurt the setting more than help it and tying each race to events allows for a greater freedom. Saying "Between the Realmgate Wars and the Necroquake, X happened to the Gitz; between the Necroquake and the 'Morathi-Khaine Consplicing', X other things happened to the Gitz", gives authors and narrative people the option to fill in the blanks however they want without worrying they're stepping on anyone's toes. It's certainly an interesting discussion point tho, and GW learned the hard way that not having maps really hurt people's integration with the lore. Maybe a strict timeline would help that; my own feeling as laid out above, is that it would hurt it instead. Loose borders are better than hard ones for narrative purposes.

My playgroup's experience has been: 500 points - Unplayable, we just use Warcry at this level. 1000 points - Too few to do anything interesting and lean into anything fun 1000 points ME - Pretty decent with 2020 updates, but still gameable in ways that you need to house rule a lot 1250 points - Pretty decent as your army is allowed to do one thing well and games are pretty quick. 1500 points - Nicely fun. You can do a core strategy but with enough variation that you can properly play the objective game and you can finish at a reasonable time. 2000 points - Full strategic options, but games run on so long that it gets mentally exhausting and people start switching off. I've found 1500 the sweet spot for my gaming group. Games are reasonable in length allowing for variation between slow/fast players, and you get to do the thing you want to do but with some extra spice and tactical options. 2000 just tends to shut our group down. COVID put a dampener on crusade, but there was a lot of interest when it first launched. I ran a Path to Glory campaign using the excellent Road to Renown rules from @NinthMusketeer above and I highly recommend it. It adds all those lovely RPG elements and really brought a lot of competitive players into a more narrative mindset. Hopefully a crusade for aos will do something similar.

GW have had record sales over the pandemic. It's been a big boon for them.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/11/01/behold-the-master-of-festivities/ This years Christmas model

YABG Yet Another Boxed Game

My mind is aflame!

Yeah, it doesn't like Meeting Engagements - I've had a bug opened on github for it for ages - but the warscroll builder isn't perfect either! Heaven help you if you're trying to make a Barak Thryng list!

You have to add another Skaven force to the list and add it there. The devs have said that doing that will make your list invalid, but is better than re-coding the entire endless spells section to accommodate cross list pollination, just for the sake of a KO artefact.

The free blog of a corporate entity trying to sell its products doesn't seem like a crazy thing. It's what every business does. At least we don't have to pay for it like we used to with White Dwarf. Warcom being free advertising is fine, it's easy to click away from articles if they don't interest you. White Dwarf now being the haven for rules, articles, reports, stories etc. is a much better way to do it.

If the Kurnothi are finally getting expanded into a full line... oh brother, my wallet!

People would complain about prices less if they could just stick with one army... but they have to keep buying, and buying, and buying!

The new season of blood bowl was announced ages ago, so this will likely just be a couple more teams and maybe a new edition of Blitz Bowl.

Broken Realms I'd imagine.

What ever happened to those old shipping manifest searches? They were fun!

They release new Start Collectings and Battleboxes all the time with loads of savings. And Battleforces every christmas! And the core set boxes are crazy cheap for what you get. On many, many levels, it's never been more cost effective to get into wargaming. So many print rules for smaller force games, so much support for skirmish style gaming... There wasn't any of this in the Fantasy days that people harken back to. Sometimes I think people just intentionally ignore the massive amount of work GW do to keep the idea of tabletop wargaming alive and keep new blood coming into the hobby. I understand the desire to rag on them for expensive things being expensive, but barely anyone gives them credit for their cheap stuff being cheap.

They don't have to do so much R&D and expansion for the next few years of models, books, and ancillary stuff. Designing new box games takes money and everyone loves box games. GW crank out content like nobodies business and they are always pushing new things and building entirely new ways to play with toy soldiers. That stuff has to get funded by something. They don't live paycheck to paycheck. Ultimately, don't we all have enough armies already? New players have loads of cost effective ways into the hobby already; this SoB release isn't for them. It's for people who can afford to throw down the big bucks for yet another army or to add to their existing and already paid for army. If it's too expensive, it's too expensive. Take your hobby bucks elsewhere. Sigmar knows there's enough content in this game already!

My Magmadroth has "Ignores the first level of rend" which does wonders to remove low level threats. Similarly, Seraphon coalesced monsters reducing damage down by 1 to a minimum of 1 also gives a lot of benefit. Bastiladons having a 1+ unrendable save is another way of making monsters beefy. It's perfectly possible with warscroll rules to make Behemoths beastly. I imagine this is just a case whereby Warscrolls need to be stronger to handle hordes, something that gradually happens as the game itself shifts. Seraphon have definitely done that. Monsters like Morathi having a limit of wounds taken per round is another way - we've seen that with Ghazkull out in 40k too. I don't think you need blanket rules, just precision scalpel updates to warscrolls which will come in book revisions. But hordes should have their vulnerabilities too. I think you could heavily neuter hordes in general if you just got rid of Inspiring Presence, or made it limited to once per game. I should be able to melt a bunch of grots before they get to me and have them leg it, instead of just being able to command point brute force their way through. I think rather than monsters needing huge benefits, hordes need fewer benefits.

The existing lore and novels is riddled with all manners of combats where seemingly weak creatures take down monsters. In Shreikstone, an entire Lodge of Fyreslayers is taken out by Grots and Squigs. When I see something like that on the battlefield, I don't think a 5+/5+ Grobi slicing the belly open of my beloved Joren Grimnir is lame and lore breaking cos I'm not using strength and toughness. I think "Damn, that's one kick ass grot" and I give my mate spare Fyreslayerz bits to put on his base. No game of AoS I've played has been ruined by the loss of S/T. But I've asked "what's his toughness?" often enough in 40k for it to have grown quite tiresome.

This game doesn't need to be more complicated or time consuming to play. We already have -1 to hit or -1 to wound auras to represent extremely tough opponents, so I don't think we need it from a narrative standpoint either. If anything, I'd have no problem moving to a Warcry combined system, it would speed up games dramatically.

Neferata's new army lookin' nice!