Marcvs

Leaving aside the suggestion that people with a different opinion about the game have "brain fog", I just want to point out that people who play "over and over" are a tiny minority and the moment you use them as the yardstick to measure acceptable complexity you can generally justify anything. I would also question the usefulness of a reminder sheet for the problem we're mainly discussing (battle tactics): the problem is not to remember them, as you generally have them in front of you, but a) having to consider them before you hit the table (i.e. at list building) to just have a chance to play the game and b) dynamically choose one depending on the given situation.

In case you want a digital alternative (not yet perfect but getting there) https://old-world-builder.com/

Square based got you covered

Gargants. They survive the first salvo, they can spread their deployment, and then they just go stand on circles.

those damn competitive players! or rather, it was a half-hearted test, quickly stapled to fill in some pages and abandoned as the direction they wanted for the game was one of "bad" simplification and streamlining. Remember the battles in the sky? wonder if competitive players killed those too

I think a lot of critiques are very fair about the whole OW strategy. That having been said, I think when formulating those one should try to have bit of nuance in light of sold out products and queues in front of WHW. There seems to be a market for it and we should not discount the pull effect of so many community "leaders" (from local to internet level) having fond memories for WHFB (because it was their first miniature game). I was not interested in it at first, but with 6 players in my relatively small club being very excited and ready to play, of course I'll get into it. Again, we should not underestimate the effect of the "old guard" in smaller realities -and these are all people who also play AoS and other systems, not some sort of dusty relics, just to be clear

unclear when they will be published, there was no commitment to have them available on launch day

Digital books are also up for buying https://www.warhammerdigital.com/new-exclusive 12€ for the digital arcane journal is a decent price point, 33€ for each forces book still feels steep if you're only interested in one army

Same. The fact that it didn't work before doesn't mean it couldn't be made to work. With the current approach to balance and items costing points, it's not impossible to change the item cost every 3 months if something shows up too much in competitive lists. On the flip side, you give plenty of cool trinkets to play with for the vast part of the community who just wants to kit up their heroes

I must say, I kind of like this aspect of TOW. The (seriously, embarassing) literal impossibility to buy models for most of the armies means that everyone in my community who doesn't have a pre-existing collection is looking for alternative ranges, 3d prints, kitbashing and so on. Add to this the almost mandatory use of movement trays and the game is, at least at launch, a miniature agnostic system set into the Warhammer Fantasy world. We don't have a presence of "official tournaments" in my area/community so I hope this initial direction will remain part of the Old World experience. Speaking of which, here's my first unit of Glade Guards made out of the Northern Alliance minis for Kings of War + a home-made mini-movement tray: The project is called The Winter Court (hence the icy/snowy theme) and will be a Winterheart Wood Elves army.

I play the game almost exclusively in a competitive (i.e. tournament) setting and still didn't like the direction of 3rd. To me, games have been feeling increasingly like accounting and having a good algorithm for battle tactics more important than a having strategy for how to engage the enemy army. I would say, the direction is more like a emotionless idea of what an AI-generated-tournament-player would want: they want to win, so we can fix weaker armies by giving them easier battle tactics. As for the rest, I agree with a lot of the critiques expressed by @Beliman in the previous post. I feel the paradox is that the game has been adding a lot of "bad" complexity (more rules, more downtimes, more checkpoints) without adding to the "good" complexity (the game is still very abstract: no arcs of vision, no flanks/rears etc).

concerning the now possible/likely 6th dawnbringer book: - I am a bit annoyed by the (surely, intentional) secrecy around the roadmap/number of books of this series. Showing a initial roadmap with 4 books just to then surprise-drop 2 more (if we're stopping at 6, who knows right?). And sure, I know there's the escape clause of "but that was just a roadmap for 2023 they never said there were only 4 books in the series". - we're around 240€ of just books to follow the narrative arc. that's a good chunk of an army (even without looking outside of GW systems)

literally all SCE foot heroes quietly sobbing in a corner 😂

There's a relatively straightforward solution to that: once the named character dies and gets removed from the rules, the mini can just be used as a generic version of the hero. It would also be a nice way to add "seasonal" rules to armies through said "temporary" named characters

Tbf, CoS mount traits were not in the previous battletome either, but somewhere else, can't remember if it was in broken realms or the tome celestial

Stormcast are my main (only) AoS army but I am not as positive about some of those: Hamilcar Bear-Eater: he's cool and funny, and great (together with Neave) to show that Stormcast do have individual personalities and free-will... but he's got one novel, has no representation in the game and had zero presence in the non-BL narrative. Yndrasta: is she a great character? I have not read the BL novel (they fight against so much good fantasy that is not burdened by the need to tie-in with games/miniatures I struggle to find the time recently) but in terms of the overarching narrative what is she doing? where is she? Did she make an appearence or is she even mentioned in the Dawnbringers arc? Even in the Stormcast battletome she feels like a pure afterthought (as opposed to Vandus or even just Astreia Solbright) because a cool mini was sculpted.

Squinting activated

it is of course not so simple (increasing dividends paid to shareholders, management bonuses and so on), and there's the matter of how ineffective or badly planned/forecasted were previous investment in production capacity, but still probably beyond our ability to meaningfully discuss here

At the moment it's very bad. Leaving aside the sad story of Yndrasta, all these thunderstrike but no Imperatant (which is essentially mandatory for annihilators in particular) are painful to see. Maaybe this means that the 7" deepstrike thing will be decoupled from the Imperatant in the 4.0 BT, who knows.

since unit fillers are an official thing, you could also do (let's say for a rank of 5) 4 32mm bases and a unit filler on a 20mm

yeah that's the problem of using trays for 25mm rounds (the situation I am in): basically you have no "spare" space and your rounds must touch the sides of the trays if you want to stay in the correct measurments. However, I have no prior experience with WHFB so I don't know if some amount of flexibility was allowed for trays, since I see a lot of trays with rauised borders

Base sizes were "officially" confirmed in a Facebook post (of all things). It was discussed here around 2 crises ago https://www.tga.community/forums/topic/24482-warhammer-the-old-world/?do=findComment&comment=642647

and in like... 5 hours!

If memory serves, we have already seen in one of the almanacs that you can have a damsel on pegasus but they're not selling the mini, so I am not sure this will be entirely true for the old world

My plans are mostly non-AoS related. I have felt a bit of fatigue with AoS during the last year: gaming-wise I don't have enough time to engage with the game how I like (that is, competitively) and paint-wise I have now close to 20k painted Stormcasts. Starting a new army is a red line I set for myself to avoid excessive investment into a single system. So, the plans are: - paint my recently started W'adrhun army for Conquest. The goal is 1500points but getting to 2000 would be sweet - paint my Winter Court army for Old World (Winterheart Wood Elves) and SAGA Age of Magic (Lords of the Wild). This is a big recycling project as it is completely made with minis I already had (ASOIAF Free Folks, KoW Northern Alliance and a couple of 3d prints)