Neverchosen

Which furthers my complaint about Space Marines they are inherently similar looking. Even stormcast have exotic mounts and more varied animal iconography between units and models. When I played WHFB in my teens, I remember Space marines simply being a big range like Empire or Orcs and Goblins now they make up the majority of releases and the only thing differentiating them is often the weapon load outs. It is a shame because I actually think primaris are such an improvement over the old sculpts. Ogor maneaters with a varied sprue like Chaos Spawn but with different fashion elements would be so fantastic. Of course having to choose between ninjas and pirates is impossible so a whole unit of Ninja Pirate Ogors might make my Maneaters vissualy confused but will make me very happy.

I think that this is a terrific point and it also goes into a number of other places that GW seems to be rather guarded about that could net them more profit and community support. Like someone on Youtube mentioned that they could sell files for older outdated but fan favourite models to be 3d printed to combat piracy. For example someone might buy the file to print off WHFB Achaon and then build an army of varanguard around that model but are not interested in the current model for Archaon. Also let people print Bretonnian helmets for their stormcast and you will see that army get played more than space marines. Having free warscrolls really helped me invest in this game and hobby and I always ended up getting the battletome, but I could start out buy purchasing models and having low point games. But the most important part of the free warscrolls for me was just the idea that maybe GW was changing but clearly I was wrong. I think the other thing is that the expectations are also much higher. If they gave me a free Slaves to Darkness book and it lost every match I would be less angry than paying a premium for the same results. So it would help satisfaction and create more enthusiastic fans. I think the bare minimum for me would be if they had a delay on releasing warscrolls to encourage people to buy the new book but still give everyone eventual access. Like maybe the Warscrolls are provided after the first FAQs that way if they need to change anything cough*keywords*cough they can be providing a service to those that purchased the book with the updated warscroll and still provide broader access to their game systems?

Clearly sarcasm as we know the Primaris Lieutenant team is the only thing keeping the company afloat. That is until they learn what this Forum already knows that Ogor Pirates are the new Primaris Lieutenants.

I think that the Sardaukar always work best with only minimal insight into their culture. They did have some influence from throat singing which is best recognized from Mongolian traditions but does exist in some other cultures. The thing that I took a lot of pleasure from seeing with them is how they made them power armoured religious warriors kinda like a certain miniature game that borrowed quite liberally from Herbert in the past... but also made them much more explicitly the villains. I will say that I typically do not like armoured space marine types but I do think they pulled them off really well in the film. The film really reminded me of Jackson's Lord of the Rings in that it captured the essence of the story perfectly but lost a lot of nuance in translation. Yeah I feel like the rest of the warband will look even cooler, if we just looked at the leader of the Irongolems and the Untamed Beasts we would have missed some of the cooler models in both warbands. I am glad you like my proposed solution and I even admitted in my initial post it would need work. In terms of redundancy I think that is already an issue with these units and I feel this would alleviate (but not resolve) the issue. One thing I like about my suggestion is that it would permit flexibility in terms of reinforcement. Using only the original release you get some varied and useful options: Untamed Beasts and Corvus Cabal would make a great speedy option, Iron Golems and Cypherlords would make a good defensive option and Unmade and Splintered Fangs would make a good offensive option. Then you can also mix and match to create more evenly balanced options as well. So I think that even if there were more competitive options the mixing and matching of specific warbands for different effects would still breath more life into the various cultists especially compared to their current place in the army. I can say personally I would go out and grab a box of Corvus Cabal right now to mix and match with my Iron Golems, Untamed Beasts and then the upcoming warbands from the new set right now if they tried this out. Sadly I doubt that my plan would ever come to fruition as it has been a long process of trying to think of how to make these units work. And considering that they did not do anything to improve Underworld Warbands in Warclans and SCE books showcase that they will likely do nothing to make the Warcry warbands work out. It would also just look cool to have a motley crew of random cultists marching around the highly disciplined ranks of heavy metal vikings.

I think it would be cool if they shared a single Cultist profile with different special rules but that they could be reinforced by each other making the unit more and more specialized with each reinforcement. For example using the initial core box, Iron Golems can let the unit reroll saves but re-enforcing with Untamed Beast will allow them to run and charge. I think it would involve a lot of work to balance them out to make up for the fact that some Cultist units are smaller than others. So in a way you would sacrifice some of the uniqueness of the individual units in favour of creating a more interesting and dynamic unit that can have more varied units depending on how you build it. It would also encourage more people to buy Warcry warbands to mix and match and try out new synergies for reinforcements.

A big part of the lore in Warcry is that these warriors feel the pull of Chaos but do not fully understand it. So most of them have elements of the named Chaos Gods but often presented in a manner in which you can interpret it in multiple ways. This is why it is so fun that they can now take marks as it allows more interesting paint schemes and themes to be applied to the units. Do you want hedonistic Untamed Beasts, Bloodthirsty Cypher Lords, Diseased Splinterfang or Scheming Unmade then the models are your canvas. So rather than worshiping Khorne maybe the Slaughterborn are Khorne inclined.

Obviously Pirate Ogor Pistol ☠️

Dangerous times for my bank account, if only I didn't see Dune las night and want to make a Sardaukar themed Custodes army... and a Fremen themed Admech army. With that, Warcry and Battleforces... I am going to maybe have to ignore the news from Warhammer Day in hopes of one day paying off my student loans.

I still feel like Marauders will not last much longer and that Warcry Warbands will be the default choice for Slaves to Darkness horde units. My biggest concern is that they change the unit sizes to reflect the boxes that have two units in them as it would make my Untamed Beasts and Iron Golems undersized and no longer of any real use. 😕

I think that Kragnos hints at a form of animistic faith for destruction centring around the concept of natural disaster. Currently we have the God of Earthquakes but also the concepts of the Bad Moon, and the Everwinter. Currently these are both presented as part of the worship of GorkaMorka, but I think they can be expanded to include members of a new pantheon built around Primordial God-Beasts. Each of these God-Beasts may have encountered the Dual God(s) and taken some degree of divine power from that encounter. In essence I would love to see fantastical interpretations of natural disasters as embodied bestial gods. I would also hope that each Destruction book would feature a new Godbeast that can be used by each army but has significance to the specific tome they are featured in. Like how Kruelboyz worship Kragnos, or how the Gloomspite worship cosmological occurrences, and Beastclaw Raiders are tied to the Everwinter/Blizzards. Obviously we have many named Godbeasts as potential 'Gods' of destruction. Boingob, The Great Spider God, Shattatusk, and Vulcatrix could all make great options. Due to the massive size of these creatures it might be a requirement to explain that they have avatars, descendants or reincarnations that are more appropriately sized to be represented after the Era of Myth. Personally I would have the Spiderfang belief be partially true and a massive spider god to hatch on the Badmoon that can descend like a meteor onto the battlefield like a disturbing arachnid Celestant Prime. The ever winter could be the breath of a massive mammoth or an ancient ancestor to the yetis. No matter the case, I think that Destruction could have some really fun options for massive Godbeasts to counter the Gods of other factions.

I am happy with the look as it will fit well with my army visually and it is a great sculpt. I do get the disappointment as I alluded to in an earlier post, namely that Warcry is AOS pushed to an even more extreme aesthetic. In other words they will look alright in a game of warcry but fit better into most S2D armies. Part of me wishes that the Warcry warbands shared a 'cultist warscroll' in AOS and you could then determine the type of cultist and gain an additional special rule. So then older Marauder's could then function as a generic version of 'the Cultist unit'. However, due to the strange unit size and varied base sizes this would never make practical sense.

Well as someone that was very in favour of seeing the Varanguard getting infantry models I have to say it kind of goes against the narrative of Warcry which is about winning Archaon's favour. The Varanguard are in essence those that already made it through these trials. Also I am really, really stumped if I want to go with the heads or the dope open palm what are you waitin' for pose!

And a fantastic looking model! Thanks for the heads up @Whitefang but that sadface was for naught as I love this new warband!

I think @Whitefang is at least trying to remind me to pick it up because I really want both warbands. But I am assuming it will maybe be related to the aesthetic in that box or at least maybe Darkoath might be getting expanded in some fashion maybe even in Warcry. I was complaining but I would actually really enjoy that, I just imagine my friends never picking the barbarians over the spider people when we play using my models. In a similar fashion I always played Untamed Beasts as my friends always wanted to be the Iron Golems. The thing is, the Aelves are already in a weird sort of conspiratorial pact with each other currently and so feel like they are part of an unstable grand alliance already. I agree that having a grand alliance focused on a species is not the best idea but I do feel like a grand alliance based around Aelven Culture is a different idea. Sylvaneth, Kurnothi and Idoneth can easily expand the scope from Aelves to include other species and orders. However I say they include more Natural Kingdoms. We have Plantae and Animalia lets get wild and throw in some Protoctista and Lapideum. I don't know why you didn't use the real money shot?:

But that would make the Varanguard rumour untrue! If we can't trust 4Chan rumours then who can we trust? I think that your guesses seem pretty accurate but I really hope that the other warband for Warcry is more interesting than Marauders with bigger axes...

I just think that the very divided factions that AOS started with are being merged either narratively or expanded upon thematically with distinctive subfactions. Early in AOS I think the intention was for these armies to be run in grand alliances and that is why we got so many small releases like Ironjawz and Fyreslayers as you were expected to bolster the collection with other factions or older WHFB models. Now we are having those alliances built into the battletomes letting us choose between having a focused army or a more expansive one. I for one am happy for the greater number of options but sad to see them spend less effort in expanding on pre-existing concepts. However, I think that they will eventually return to these ideas and expand on them in the future. The era of soup is upon us:

This has me wonder how would you feel about Ogor/Gargant soup?

I think that is why so many of these unpopular opinions seem very popular here. It isn't that people agree with us but that we have developed a shared community with certain ideas and theories that are internally consistent but not reflecting the community at large. Is there an audience for Chaos Dwarves, Malerion/Umbraneth Aelves, Silent People, Vampirates, or 'The Little Game of Big Action' Critters and Keys? Honestly, I have no clue! But it is fun for us and I hope that GW staff get to visit these forums and see the love for the more oddball ideas that we latch onto here.

I completely agree with this idea. I think it would be cool if they had to 'join' the unit sharing the movement characteristic of the lowest movement between the hero and unit. It could also result in the unit gaining the hero's bravery characteristic to help mitigate the effects of battleshock and make heroes bravery actually have a functional purpose. Also Behemoths would be unable to join units.

None at all, but there are some unfounded rumours and ruminations. I am not banking on either occurring but I am keeping both in mind just in case 😄

Somehow I forgot the most important thing ☠️ I am really hopeful for Chaos Dwarves but I still think that they will likely be part of Slaves to Darkness and they will wait until closer to that release date to reveal them. However, if they soup Beasts and Slaves to Darkness then I would imagine Chaos Dwarves being an independent faction or a massive Chaos Undivided book.

Big things: I am with you though and I really look forward to seeing what is in store for us and our hobby. I am getting more and more excited about Old World and Warcry personally, and I am trying to hold back my excitement about the possibility of creating a Nighthaunt Navy. However, I am trying to not get excited over Ogors or Slaves to Darkness as I do not expect news for either of them (beyond the Warcy models for S2D).

Oh no now I am getting hyped off of my own suggestion. I was just thinking they would add a barrier to new freeguild units but didn't even consider the fun customization options: Ouroboros of hype!

This is a fun article that indicates a return of focus to AOS. I know it is silly but I worry the most about delays and stuff when Warcom is delaying these silly articles. It makes me feel like they do not have enough throwaway content to make up for the lack of content. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/10/20/warhammer-community-investigates-which-is-the-best-hammer-in-the-mortal-realms/ Also this is a fantastic image: What are the odds that Dawnbringers will be armed with mallets and claw hammers? A whole army ready to raise a barn at a moments notice. Joking aside I really hope they get rules for setting up makeshift barriers right before the battle.

Easiest way to tell the difference, Slaves to Darkness understand armour is for protection not just a means of accenting muscles and to hold up skulls*. But I think the real difference is in their adjacent archetypes: Khorne followers tend to be more of the traditional Barbarians and Slaves to Darkness the Evil Knights. The issue lies in the fact that Khorne has heavily armoured variants and S2D have Marauders which both blur the lines considerably. However, with the rise of Warcry cults I think Marauders may be saying a last goodbye to the mortal realms and the two factions will be more visually distinct. *I say this despite my S2D army having enough skulls and horns to pay Katakros the bone tithe for Hammerhal two times over.