sandlemad

Love the gladiatorial stylings, very sword and sandals. The net, the spear with a built-in sword-breaker, the murmillo helmet, the mail sleeves... It's a brilliant sculpt, proper old school chaos. Doesn't quite work for me as, like, a class of dude or warrior though? As a one-off, as a weirdo veteran mutant who's master of Archaon's fighting pits, an infamous special character, sure. But feels like it suffers a little for being stretched out to a 'generic' type of character, like there's a whole class of relatively similar centaur mutants who are all associated with this gladiator feel and have a role in the legions of chaos. Just a bit too specific for something that, on it's own, is wonderfully characterful.

The rune-cut scale armour on the Horns of Hashut is pretty close to those of the Hobgrots' banner and belt-plates. Same supplier! Obviously would be more exciting if these were chaos dorfs themselves but as a favoured serf class to the dawi-zharr or something, it's really cool and exactly the kind of expanded background detail that u luv to see.

Based on the WHC article, looks like there might be a slight tweak to or contextualisation of the existing ogroid background. As it stands, they're former worshippers of Gorkamorka who turned to chaos for strength and had all the hordes of destruction round on them in a fury. In the WHC article they appear to be a Gorkamorka-worshipping people whose empire was destroyed by orks and who were invited to settle the Eightpoints by Archaon. The minis still look a bit static and awkwardly posed unfortunately but it'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

That daemon prince is brilliance. The older plastic one was hamstrung by GW feeling out CAD sculpting techniques but this is marvellous. The 40k one is more impressive to me for how it emulates Adrian Smith’s art and the old metal DP by Juan Diaz. Still, brilliant AoS mini and more than any other multi-build kit I’ve seen, it seems that you could make two and not have them be in cloned poses.

Yeah I’d second this, though it’s very possible that better photos or 360s will remedy it. A shame considering both the thaumaturge and the myrmidon have incredible poses with brilliant tension. These dudes are rather flat by comparison. Cool to see more ogroids though. On one level they’re clearly just a substitute for the old chaos ogres but their background as former Gorkamorka worshippers who turned wholesale to chaos is interesting.

Exciting times! The Hashut boys are fascinating and I’m excited to see more of these chaos legionaries. From the blurry pics, they look like they might have some of the style of the old Realms Of Chaos-era weirdoes from Ian Miller’s art, before the viking/barbarian look became so dominant. Also… Eternus. First off, cool, I like these champion/lieutenant/right-hand man character. Might be reading too much into this but is he implied to be a fallen Stormcast? Or a knock-off Stormcast of some sort.

@EccentricCircle That idea of WHU offering the chance for small scale range refreshes has been untenable for a while unfortunately. GW never seemed to commit to it, if it was really there, and as a theory it was undermined by overall poor integration of these kits into the rules and wider ranges (i.e. inappropriate base sizes, mixed loadouts, weird warscrolls, WHU minis coexisting with their resin predecessors or even other new plastic versions). I think this is really a final nail in the coffin of that idea rather than a wholesale destruction of it. More generally though this suspicion that they’ll be repackaged to tie into the new Rivals format seems pretty plausible and honestly a good idea but then so many decisions around WHU lately have been disastrous so who knows…

The skaven are cool. The elves aren’t bad but they do suffer for being slightly more boring versions of their Warcry equivalents.

I think it’s pretty warranted, honestly. Complaining about a small and historically undersupported specialist game with a limited release pattern and its own specifically allocated resources is rather ugly and entitled behaviour, regardless of the admittedly irritating peaks and troughs of AoS releases. It’s essentially the same impulse as the no less unpleasant ‘please squat X faction/range so the one that I personally like can get more kits’, which has been the line thrown at a lot of AoS by some 40k fans. Or, like, the line that was thrown at about half the Lumineth range but a lot of people who didn’t personally like them.

Oh man that yhetee rules. Just the dude to stunt all over the opposing team.

GW really is marching directly backwards, aren’t they. A worse app than already existed and less accessible warscrolls than they had 7 years ago.

This lil dude doesn’t look that skaven-y, more like a squirrel or some Brian Froud-influenced generic small mammal. Weird little thing.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/03/06/sunday-preview-spec-ops-skirmishes-come-to-nachmund/ Next WD is supposed to have rules (Tome Celestial?) for Blades of Khorne, which I think is news? Could be taken as a suggestion that a new book for them isn't on the cards any time soon.

Tbh I think it was less sales - which admittedly probably weren't great, as with most WHFB stuff around then - and more that the ideas for that series of books ran headlong into GW proper's plans for the End Times and AoS. Even the version of Tamurkhan we got was apparently seriously dialed back from Rick Priestly's original concepts, another example of poor communication between FW and the rest of GW. Imagine how disheartening that would have been to discover.

New Valkia would rule. The holes in the wings do look close to those in the plastic bloodthirster. Could still be this jabberslythe but then the existing one has wing-spokes that protrude pretty far, unlike this.

New daemon prince would be great, the plastic one is an unfortunate relic of early work with CAD plastic kits. It’s not the absolute worst but has loads of weird angles and odd details. I think the B&C rumours suggested a daemon release in the works anyway?

Good that it confirms Cathay’s presence in TOW but doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know months ago from Total War previews. Map looks a little sparse too.

Grey is standard for when they sell WHU warbands as AoS units through the webstore, so to speak. Without cards and whatnot. They did the same with some S2 warbands for Mortal Realms. And cool, this should be an affordable way to get some more OOP WHU warbands, if I can rustle up some cards to print, as well as the old Beastgrave terrain. Also nice for oddball minis as painting projects: killaboss, gutrippas, goblapooza, maybe the megaboss… All the better that they’re pulling from several ranges. EDIT: for those who are interested, Fauxhammer has a breakdown of the first few issues: https://www.fauxhammer.com/partworks-magazines/warhammer-stormbringer-new-aos-partworks-magazine-from-hachette/ Killaboss w. Stab-grot; Knight-Arcanum 10 Gutrippas 5 Vindictors Paints x4 Seems the whole premium add-on thing is happening again, where you pay more per issue but get additional minis down the line. In this case it'll be the fancy sprues from Dominion: Yndrasta/annihilators and the Gnashtooth Killaboss/murknob/boltboys.

I think the gunpla question kind of touches on what @EccentricCircle pointed out, that it depends on what you’re evaluating things on. Gunpla by design doesn’t go for e.g. organic surfaces in the same fashion as GW kits, and I’d agree that in some ways the experience of working with them is a different one, often with different rewards and context for what you’re getting out of it. That being said, measuring on many technical metrics, it really is astounding how even older Gunpla kits they leave GW stuff in the dust when it comes to plastic technology, sprue layout, finely engineered moving parts, mixed colours, QA, etc. and all for considerably less than your average GW example. Maybe it’s apples and oranges to a degree (though they’re both fruit, they’re both roundish, etc) but to my mind it does firmly stomp on the idea of GW as a high-end luxury product. More ‘this is expensive so it’s luxury -> it’s luxury so it’s expensive’ as a cycle that GW repeats about its products. Jewel-like objects of wonder and all that. (at the risk of getting off topic and putting aside the wider context of rules and gaming, I think every lifelong GW aficionado owes it to themselves to buy an affordable real grade gundam kit just to see what incredible stuff can be done with plastic miniatures outside of the GW ecosystem, and for less than many AoS infantry boxes)

The LotR/30k comparisons are relevant but those were less planned range rotations and more wholesale trimmings of the model lines with no plan to bring them back. Some of those kits did return to production later on (apparently due to internal designer pressure for LotR), sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently, but not all kits. The idea of formal range rotations is really a slightly inaccurate after-the-fact term for the practice and this new space marine example seems to be the first instance of GW actually planning it that way from the start. That means there’s probably a better chance of these models reappearing some day than for LotR/30k but I completely understand people not holding their breath.

Yeah I think it’s hard to make too many inferences from this range rotation yet, for AoS or even other 40k ranges, as for now it’s targeting the most bloated and redundant range GW has, space marines. No one else has the same back catalogue of random subfaction-specific heroes and character variants, with most AoS model lines being pretty lean or relatively new. And as has already been brought up there’s the firstborn/primaris thing to take account of too. The thunderstrike/regular stormcast offer an analogous range divide but I guess we’ll get a better feel for this when they announce the next rotation.

Honestly "lower prices" was really more a matter of expanding slightly more affordable ways to buy their stuff through options like Start Collecting boxes or games like Warcry and WHU. It's been a real disappointment over the last few years to see GW steadily roll these options back or boost the cost of entry to the point where they're only affordable by comparison with the mainline games.

Yeah, it’s very Pacific Rim. Not just that the prices are going up but when you factor in these ‘inter-release’ jumps, the price increases are becoming more frequent overall.

WHU is a particularly relevant example due to the sheer number of ‘stealth’ prices rises its received, with new starter kits and new individual warbands being something like 60% more than their equivalent a few years ago, i.e. new products being more expensive than their equivalent. You do get this with e.g. new AoS/40k infantry/monsters/etc being more expensive than infantry/monsters/etc released a year or two before but it’s a particularly sore point in a game based around seasons. Regardless it’s worth remembering that this new price rise is coming on top of not just three other open price rises in the last four years but also these other, more subtle increases.

I think the rising costs thing, while a real issue, is a figleaf excuse. Cut out that sentence and it could have been identical to any of the last nearly-annual price increases they’ve carried out, like clockwork. They know that much of the market will pay another 5% (on top of the previous 5%, the 5% before that, the 5% before that…) and so they raise prices. They know that Australian prices are already unsustainable to the point where it’s impacting their market share, so those don’t go up. I was priced out of the main games ages ago and priced out of WHU with Direchasm/Harrowdeep so in a sense it doesn’t hugely matter to me but it’s nonetheless particularly jarring to see this regretful language come after GW having its most profitable few years ever.