Neil Arthur Hotep

The squad is now all finished.

I think the experience in individual stores will mostly come down to the store manager. But it does illustrate some of the maybe unexpected barriers TOW faces. To be honest, I don't know if it will ever make sense for GW to start producing hills again. There is very little they can add to a hill that would justify their usual markup. Other GW terrain has some upsides. It's themed to the Warhammer universe, it comes in injection molded plastic and it is sometimes genuinely innovative (the Aqualith comes to mind). But none of those apply to a hill, so people will probably just make their own or buy them from companies that sell foam terrain.

I just saw someone mention not being allowed to use hills and walls when playing TOW at a local GW because they don't sell them anymore. That kind of seems like a problem. I hope they sort out their terrain troubles soon. It has been a problem since 2nd edition AoS at this point.

The most recent AoS terrain is very nice, but I agree that there really need to be just a bunch bunch of houses and walls. I painted the old Fortified Manor and Watchtower kits last year for that reason. They are very nice kits, but hard to paint compared to the new stuff.

Fun story. But this passage has to be straight out of "How to not write fantasy 101": Absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't already know what the setting. And probably even a few people who do.

Since there is only one of them out, I think it's not impossible that they are eventually removed entirely. Having an extra set of rules for just one model really is a bad example of rules bloat. And nobody even really likes the Krondspine very much.

Whitefang wants to share sadness with us.

Season of War: Thondia probably.

I hope we get insight on this at some point. Because it really feels like that is what happened, but it would be nice to actually have some evidence for it. @Whitefang, since you said that the spider incarnate is connected to Gallet at the time, do you have anything you want to share about this?

I somewhat feel the narrative was bungled this edition. I consider myself pretty plugged into AoS and its lore. But if I was forced to explain why this edition was in Ghur in the first place, I don't know if I could do it convincingly. So during Broken Realms, Teclis shuts down the Necroquake and Alarielle does her life spell. That invigorates Ghur and Incarnates start to appear there. OK, so far so good. That was in Thondia. But why exactly did we go to Gallet and Andtor again? Warcry and Underworlds are in the Gnarlwood, and that's in Ghur. It's a fun location and there is a reason to be there (the crashed Seraphon realmshaper everyone wants), but it doesn't really affect the overall narrative of the edition. And then Dawnbringers is not about the Incarnates, Talaxis or Ghur at all, but instead set in Aqshy and Ghyran. Overall, I kind of feel like even though we were in Ghur for the whole edition, I didn't really see much of the realm at all and it didn't really matter very much that we were there.

The old open world game problem of lots of space but nothing to engage with.

When people get the choice between a normal option and a few weird ones, I think there is generally a tendency to want to be special. The old role-playing paradox of "If most people in this world are supposed to be humans, why does our party look like they escaped a circus?". But also: Exiles get cannons and cannons are cool.

Slaangors primarily live in Slaanesh and Tzaangors primarily live in 40k bundles. The Underworlds unit is already OOP. The Beastlord is the required hero you get with a battletome update. Earlier in this thread I took the position that BoC would not be removed because they are a faction with their own battletome, which is what I personally viewed as the deciding factor. That is what puts them above other "factions" like Spiderfang or Dispossessed. But if I have to entertain the idea that a faction with a battletome can be removed, then BoC are the most likely one, in my opinion. Among battletome-havers, they have the lowest amount of support overall, IMO.

I agree with most of your post on the topic, but have to disagree here. If GW were to cut any of the current AoS factions, Beasts would probably be the most likely candidate. FEC just got their update. Skaven are due for their refresh soon. Spiderfang, Cities of Sigmar Elves and Dwarves and Bonesplittaz (debatably) are subfactions. I think that's all the old WHFB factions that never got any real support in AoS. IDK, KO and Fyrslayers are not getting cut since they are AoS originals. EDIT: Forgot about Ogors, but I think they are more popular than Beasts and they at least got the Gorger Mawpack recently.

A lot of factors go into these kinds of stats, it's never just one thing. Since these are tournament stats, the most important factor is probably competitive viability. This chart doesn't show that BoC are the 17th most popular faction overall, but it can support the point that they have a pretty dedicated fan base that consistently brings them to tournaments even when the meta changes.

"Keep checking Warhammer Community" would certainly be weird way to say "nothing in store for BoC".

I don't know, man. I was pretty skeptical about BoC being removed from AoS, but all recent Whitefang hints really seem to point that way. Kind of looks like assuming they will be reimagined for AoS is pure copium at this point. The message was always "BoC will be gone", not "BoC will be updated".

The game experience is never going to be 100% perfect at 1000 points, but it becomes a lot more playable when you are not expected to contest up to 6 objectives with half an army.

And then also support the format by actually writing battle plans that work at 1000 Points.

I agree with this. It's not like AoS actually struggles modeling the difference in toughness between a Chaos Warrior and Grot. If there is an actual problem here that would justify moving to d10s or whatever, it must be something else. Maybe something about how easy/difficult it is to tell at a glance and get an intuitive understanding of how defensive a Chaos Warrior actually is. The "best" argument for moving to d10s or d12s is probably that it would allow us to get rid of the wound roll. But that would probably necessitate redesigning everything about the game, so the juice is not really worth the squeeze here.

Yeah, but the dog is horizontal.

Kind of insane that they added battle packs in the beginning of the edition and then did nothing with them. Because they solve this exact problem.

Throwing out the path to glory rules nobody uses and replacing them with non matched play legal character building rules would be a good way to get hero customization back into AoS, IMO.

40mm for the Soul Shepard, 32mm for the Gargoylian, 28.5mm everyone else.

It probably really is a combination of factors. Old World is in the fairly unique position of both being an established IP with a lot of invested players, while also technically being a completely new game for a lot of people. I can imagine how that might make initial demand hard to gauge. There was an interview with the owner of an independent store on Guerilla Miniature Games a few days ago. He said that on his end the launch of Old World was smaller than that of Horus Heresy 2nd ed, but that a lot of the sales actually went through GW stores directly. Which suggests that people buying into Old World are not established players who frequent independent stores. A large percentage of the sales coming from new customers might not have been something GW expected, given how they marketed TOW as a game for established players.