Neil Arthur Hotep

I guess I can just appreciate how much of a big deal a new edition is for a GW game, even if I don't play that game. It's fairly close to my interests still, after all, in so far as it's about miniatures and games. A 40k TV show is a lot farther removed from that, from my perspective. It's not really inherently more exciting than the announcement of a new Black Library book. But still, I can appreciate that some people get really into the lore, so I'm not going to claim that this is some kind of objectively correct way to feel about these things.

Maybe it's because I am not invested into 40k fiction at all, but I feel like ending the week with the reveal of an Eisenhorn TV show would not exactly be going out with a bang. I still remain hopful that we will see more AoS. After all, the Stormcast hammer banner and Ghal Maraz coin are still unaccounted for. Unless they were hyping up that auto battler phone game.

I personally would also like if there was more of a distinction between having many small attacks vs. one big attack. Right now, the only difference between one damage 5 attack and five damage 1 attacks is that the one big attack is more swingy/feast or famine. I suppose the two different profiles also benefit differently from +1 attack/+1 damage, which is something. But I think implementing a rule that damage does not spill over would overall be a move in the wrong direction, because in my opinion big monsters with large attacks need buffs in order to feel like they should, not nerfs. And being able to only kill one goblin at a time with a swing of their huge claws sort of moves into a bad direction for me, as far as that is concerned. I suspect removing damage spillover would require a larger change than it seems. Right now, big blobs of small models are still the best type of unit in AoS. In order for the game to support this rule change, we would need a lot more good reasons to take big monsters first.

Without knowing a lot about dwarves in general, I would think that if GW decides to combine any dwarf ranges, it would be Fyreslayers and an expaneded Dispossessed range, under the guise of a return of Grungni. Kharadron are already doing their own thing, they don't need to be part of this force. And Ironweld Arsenal has as much human stuff in it as hit has dwarf stuff. Although I have no stake in this, I think a warclans/mawtribes book where the two factions are Fyreslayers and Dispossessed might work.

Crabs are just the best meme animals after frogs. That said, I'd buy a crab-themed army. Or at least an Idoneth crab swarm.

The duality of man. Personally, I am into the 1-in-4 mechanic for armies that are supposed to be really close. I just like that the units you bring in actually get to benefit from your allegiance and other abilities. Since ghouls and ghosts used to be part of Vampire Counts, I could see it for those two.

I think that's a bloodline ability in the new book, the Janklords.

Mess with the crabbo, you get the stabbo. Hit 'em with the crab jab!

That has the weird effect of making small stuff tankier, though.

This one is an interesting case to me. The pose lines up perfectly with the Cursed City art, but the sword in the art is different from the one in the Rumour Engine and more closely matches the one on the Bloodborn miniatures that are already out. The hand and arm in the Rumour Engine are also significantly more muscular than any of the Bloodborn we have seen. When this Rumour Engine was shown originally, people speculated that it might be Flesh Eater Courts. I think that still seems possible. The pitted sword is Death for sure. As for Cursed City expansions, we have heard a lot of speculation about what models may or may not have originally been intended for use in Cursed City. I don't find it obvious that any of the Vyrkos heroes were, personally. They are all on weird bases and have never (even when they were originally introduced) been presented as anything other than AoS minis. Maybe the Gravelords battletome will give us some more insight, though. If it mentions Radukar the Beast and the mysterious events that happen at the end of Cursed City in any significant capacity, for example, I'd be inclined to think that the plan was always to use Cursed City to set these characters up in the world, but then properly integrate them into AoS later.

Good thinking! The new Anvil of Apotheosis supplement might also contain some more tidbits, like The Hunger being buffed to heal 1d3 as we already saw.

Same here. This is something that's nice about Gravelords being an LoN update. I expect myself to get a bunch of the smaller Vyrkos heroes day 1. Because even in the worst case, those guys will see use in DnD or similar games. I also want a manageably sized Gravelords force that plays very differently from my current Deathrattle LoN list, so that will likely be either Blood Knight or critter centric. Which one of those I end up building entirely depends on the rules, though.

You're not wrong, but it's for good reason. People care about the rules at least in so far as they want to know if their cool new models can do something on the table. I like Kritza, for example, but if he's a 120 points 6" move close combat hero, he's not going in my list. Realistically, we'll have to wait for the book to be announced for preorder before we can get a good look at the rules from Goonhammer, Sprews and Brews and Man Reads Book.

I just hope we get some rules previews soon so that I can start brewing lists. That's what will ultimately decide which models I get for me.

In general, I think you want people to have strong emotional reactions towards your products, both positive and negative. As far as I know, that's considered more of a success than everyone thinking your product is not bad or great, but just OK. I could not tell you whether a combined 65% better/worse achieves that or not. I feel like this was one of those releases that is kinda inherently unexciting, but necessary due to the amount of updates sculpts. Personally, I am happy we got it even though GW could probably have sold more models if they had released a majority of new kits and scrapped dire wolves/fell bats/zombies. It signals that they are willing to do overall less profitable long term support updates to factions.

I feel we are missing the actual big boys of the army, though. Look at the size of those Fell Bats next to the Terrorgheist. The true Age of Bigmar starts here.

It's not confirmed, it just looks fairly likely. It's actually kinda hard to say what will happen rules-wise in Kragnos. Obviously, we will get rules for all the new models, and I think it has been mentioned on stream that we will get rules for Excelsis, Gloomspite Gits/Spiderfang and an Alarielle warscroll rewrite. But apart from that things are little up in the air. However, BR rules updates can be as small as a single battalion and can fit on half a page. It's not at all impossible that we will see some minor rules for BoC, Khorne and Skaven in Kragnos.

Really good point. It's good to remember that writing rules is cheap and easy, while making models is expensive and hard. During the Great Battletome Rush of 2019, I think it was GWs priority to make all models playable with real, non-generic rules. This was a substantial change of direction from the AoS 1 days, during which all the factions were originally split up, and as a consequence it made sense to recombine at least some armies to give them enough tools to be playable. Now, with AoS 3 in the works, the situation is different yet again. It might make sense to now un-soup some previously souped factions again, if GW can commit to actually expanding their model lines enough to stand on their own. The only problem here is with people who went in for a combined force and are no longer able to field all their models together. But that blow can be softened by just introducing 1-in-4 subfactions to newer battletomes.

A bit weird to single out Cities as a "dead faction". Cities was released in October 2019. Since then, these factions have seen major releases: OBR Slaves to Darkness (start collecting) Sons of Behemat Lumineth Slaanesh Soulblight Maybe DoK, but not really. Everything else was single models, like the Witch Hunters Cities are getting right now. So in what way are Cities meaningfully different in terms of new releases compared to the majority of armies? At the same time, Cities have had rules supplements in three of the four Broken Realms books. Outside of straight new models, that makes them one of the most supported factions currently.

I liked that comment more for the part about people saying they want balance, even though they might actually want something else. If we think about balance soley in terms of win percentage, I think casual players could easily deal with winning only, like 40% of their games (play five games against your friends, win two) if those games are still fun, interactive and you feel like your choices during the game matter. But one faction sitting at a 40% win rate while another sits at 60% would be evidence of a pretty bad imbalance in tournament play. Recently we have come to talk about play experience in addition to balance, which I think is a good development. But I think there are still more facettes of the game that people do care about, but which are not yet common topics of discussion. One of those is, in my opinion, room for expression or creativity. I think a lot of people want to be able to build a list that is uniquely their own, without feeling like they have to make bad choices by including their pet units along the way. This aspect of the game is somewhat related to balance, but not in a way that would be expressed in tournament win rates, for example. If every faction had one build that could compete at the top level, we might see very balanced tournament results, but it might not help players who want to build their dream list of all dwarves Cities of Sigmar, necessarily.

I agree, it would be nice if having named characters as generals was not an overall downside. This was such a ridiculous situation in Legions of Nagash (hopefully not anymore in Gravelords now), where you would actively try to avoid running a Mortarch in their own legions, because if you did they would have to be the general and you would lose out on the good command traits and artefacts LoN had to offer. Come to think of it, being the general has few mechanical consquences in most armies. Easily the biggest is getting a command trait, but even those are not all that important to a lot of factions. I think it would be nice if the role of the general was rethought for AoS 3. Now that they are not your only source of command abilities (which is even more true in AoS 3 if the rumours are true, with unit champions now able to use them as well), they really serve very few generic functions.

I have seen that in a lot of other games, too. People discuss the numbers a lot, but the actual decision making component of the game very little. I think it's just because the numbers are more concrete and immediately accessible. Talking about decision making is a lot more ephemeral. Plus, I would guess that a lot of players spend 95% of their time engaging with the game working on lists and hobbying, because you can do those things on your own. That said, though, I think balance discussions are still worth having, even if they tend to repeat themselves somewhat. It's useful for people to participate in actually having to make their points and having others respond to them. Not necessarily to solve any particular problem about balance, but to get a deeper understanding about the complexity of the issue.

Remember, "every major faction will be getting some attention" in Broken Realms. So I guess we have to conclude that Beasts, Khorne and Skaven are not major factions. Also, going by the number of times Cities has been featured in Broken Realms, they are the majorest faction of all! Who is the retirement home faction full of old models NOW??? Oh, still Cities? Ok. Seriously, though, I am with the Warhammer Weekly guys on this: BoC will probably be amongst the first factions to get an AoS 3 battletome. Maybe we can even hope for a range refresh, since those seem to be going around right now.

Rumour has it that unit champions will all (or mostly?) be able to use command abilities in AoS 3, so we might get this across the board in the near future.

I would not hate it if skeletons and zombies capped at 30 models per unit in the new tome, to be honest. Although I suppose if anything is going to be a horde unit, it should be these guys.