Neil Arthur Hotep

Doesn't it make sense for GW to pre-produce a certain amount of stock even for a planned Made To Order release? The last MTO release I participated in was the limited edition Vampire Lord, and they had clearly pre-produced a fairly significant amount of them at the time.

A little rules interaction I only just realized: My last game against Stormcast made me look closely at the counter-fire order. Since Stormcast can shoot in the hero phase, I wanted to check if the order could trigger off of that. Turns out it can! There is actually no timing restriction at all (unlike, for example, suppressing fire, which is only in your shooting phase). Which means you can trigger it off of any shooting attack. In particular, you can also trigger counter fire off of Unleash Hell if you are in range. Which, if you are charging with a Steam Tank Commander, you might well be

100%. The Cities of Sigmar are not constrained by weird Bretonnian hangups, they can get knights on foot anytime.

Guys, we have already seen regular Cities knights: An Arch-Knight is just a Cavalier unit champion.

I think something 100% happens with the Command Corps. But to be honest, I support that. In my last game, they really felt like they had an outsized impact for their points. Which, by the way, I think is fine if they are limited to 1 per list. Steam Tanks, I don't know... They have been doing well. They might be too cheap at the moment. I could see them go up 20 to 30 points and still being worth it. I think the bigger problem is that you are strongly incentivized to spam them, since the easiest way to build an army that has more than one Steam Tank but can still perform well is to fill your battleline requirement with them. Running 3 Steam Tanks in a combined arms list is actually pretty hard due to list building restrictions.

I had to look it up, too. It's a 40k robot.

I just came back from a TOW thread on reddit where people where the majority opinion was "It is good that there are (nearly) no characters in TOW right now, actually". It's actually super funny seeing people take the completely opposite position on here. Not making a point or criticising anyone, just noticing the difference.

Kind of expecting 40k today and Horus Heresy on thursday, to be honest. I don't know what they could even show for AoS right now.

AoS needs to start building up its own cast of characters that people care about at some point. I think giving Ionus and Khorgus Khul new, cool models is a good step in that direction. Nobody would likely care if they didn't get new models, but picking up their narrative from the Realmgate Wars again is a good way to avoid the whole "This new guy who came out of nowhere is actually super important to the setting" situation.

With all these armies and regiments of renown, plus all those battleplans and triumph and treachery, this book might be the first one I buy. That's a lot of interesting content.

Thanks Jack! That's the GW Cleansing Aqualith. You might even still be able to buy it through normal hobby stores.

I had a very close and exciting game against Stormcast yesterday. After LVO, I wanted to try bringing all my Steam Tanks in a 2000 point game. My list was: Steam Tank Commander, two tanks, Battlemage on Hurricanum, Battlemage, Alchemite, Zenestra, Command Corps, 20 Fusiliers, 10 Steelhelms. Hallowheart subfaction. My opponent brought: Lord-Relictor, Lord-Imperatant, Knight-Incantor, 2x3 Annihilators with Hammers, 3 Annihilators with Shields, 2x6 Questor Soulsworn, 2x3 Longstrikes, 2x3 Aetherwings. Schon of the Storm, Knights Excelsior. Deployment: Most of my opponent's stuff is in the heavens. I won the game in Round 5, something like 18 to 16 points. --- Stormcast took priority and held it the whole game. I did my best not to present good deep strike opportunities during deployment, because my opponent was obviously geared toward the Annihilators alpha strike. It somewhat worked, but I lost my Steelhelms, Zenestra, Warforger, Battlemage and most of the Fusiliers quite early. Some of these, like the Battlemage, were deliberate sacrifices. It seemed to me like I had no real targets for Pall of Doom that game and used him to just block deepstrikes and draw Longstrike fire. By the way: The Command Corps can block Holy Commands, so don't be like me and just eat a round of double shooting for no reason. For the first two turns, things looked pretty grim. Some of my Fusiliers and my Alchemite survived the alpha strike, but later died to Longstrikes or the Stormcast mortals on death. However, I at least managed to destroy all Annihilators and some other small units the round they came down. That's one of the good things about the Steam Tank army: Power projection is really good, so I could always attack priority targets when I needed. Orders were oncr again very impactful: The threat of Counter-Fire helped me direct the Longstrike attacks away from valuable targets (and gave me free shooting once or twice). This worked really well turn 1, where I deliberately left a Steam Tank not covered by counter fire, knowing that my Command Corps would be able to heal it on my turn. Effectively blocked a round of Longstrike shooting completely. Counter-charge helped making combats more favourable to me and helped me chase down objective holding units. I had Divine Champion as my command trait this game. A Steam Tank with +1 to hit (Hurricanum), wound (prayer) and rend (counter-charge) is quite scary. Around turn 3 I only had my Hurricanum, Tanks and Command Corps left. My opponent chose a battle tactics where he had to destroy my Hurricanum. I tried my best to prevent it, but it died to mortal wound kickback in the end. My Command Corps ended up coming in super clutch in that combat, though, with the Whisperblade getting through 5 damage and killing two Annihilators by himself. What a cool guy. That very much marked the turning point of the game, though, since without any Annihilators left and his Longtrikes damaged, my opponent just could not deal damage to my Tanks fast enough to outpace the healing the Command Corps was putting out. In the third round, my opponent scored no objectives (Limited Resources battle plan) and round 4 and 5 could not manage any of his battle tactics. Meanwhile, I managed to get Mount the Charge with the Tank Commander and Raise the Banner with the Command Corps, while also hunting down his Lord-Relictor to secure my Grand Strategy (Banners Held High). Just goes to show that you don't win AoS games by killing alone, but by focusing on objectives and scoring. I needed some luck to do it, but I managed to just pull out the win through careful decision making in the end. End of the game: --- So, overall: The Command Corps is really good, even if you bring just one. It was 100% instrumental in allowing me to win this game, by healing my Tanks, stopping commands and scoring me a battle tactic. Even the 1d3 reatreat movement bonus came in handy. In regards to the list: I think you need to make a choice. Either run Fusilisers or run Tank spam. Fusiliers need screens and support so that they don't die to melee alpha strikes, but that costs points. I spent 400-something points this game on Steelhelms and Fusiliers that basically just died. Two extra Tanks would have been way more useful. Conversely, in my other games where I had two extra screening units of Steelhelms, the Fusiliers did a lot more work even after melee units charged my line. Fusiliers have the potential to be good, but they have a significant opportunity cost and definitely need to be built around. On the topic of Tank spam, if you are not spamming the tanks, paying the extra 40 points for a Tank Commander feels like an extremely good investment. Self-issuing orders and commands and access to Heroic Recovery are super worth that price tag. Overall, I think I will be sticking to my two Tank Commander list for the time being. Tank spam may be strong, but it's not very compatible with Fusiliers. Pictured: Stormcast cowards hiding from the wrath of the true Sigmar-male Steam-Chad Commander.

All I will say about it is: AoS is definitely the kind of setting in which Skaven should have warpstone-powered mech suits.

I'll write up some reasons why I believe it, but you need to make a new thread for them first

Come on now. There are a lot of non-business reasons to be in favour of non-restrictive list building. I am saying this as someone who builds pretty much only combined arms lists.

IMO, that kind of system is more at home in The Old World. I like that AoS is generally more permissive and allows for a limited amount of spam, such as in Monster Mash lists. All-mounted Beastclaw Raiders is a list that should definitely be able to exist in AoS. Because where else could it exist?

I think that might have been the plan for Seasons of War before they stepped back from them.

I'm in favour of making the command corps UNIQUE because it allows it to stay powerful and exciting. It also fits the fluff of the unit better. Tournament grinders who bought two sets between their release in November and now can go sell the extra models on ebay, as is custommary in their unique and beautiful culture.

On the plus side, it might mean that I have to paint 10 fewer Steelhelms to play at 2000 points 😎

They are two separate issues: Better structured rules can help people understand how to build a legal list. Grand strats could be a form of signposting content that helps people build lists that actually feel good and perform well. They do this in Magic with every set, for what it's worth: There are always uncommons in every colour that signal what kind of play styles the designers intend for those decks.

Excited! Although I am a little worried about incoming Cities nerfs.

In this case, they would not primarily have a competitive/gameplay function, but instead a communicative function. Their purpose would not necessarily be to change how the game plays, but to help (new) players understand what they should be trying to do at the list building stage. That's not necessarily redundant, even though it will look like it to players that already know how to figure out what armies want to do. I could pull some extra arguments out of thin air that giving everyone three victory points base line is actually super smart game design or that there would still be interesting tactical elements added through trying to deny your opponent their grand strat, but I don't strongly believe that. I think the other function of grand strats is valuable, though. Do you remember that youtube video Miniac put out a few months back? Where he talks about how difficult he finds it to understand list building? Even though he was widely meme'd on at the time, I think there is a bit of an impenetrability problem with list building, especially for beginners.

On the one hand, I think you are right and strong rules are not as big of a driver of miniature sales as most people think. On the other hand, I was unable to buy any of the good OBR units for probably like 6 months after their new book released.

Personally, I was kind of surprised to see the TOs feel the need to add an extra anti-spam measure, when AoS tournaments by and large get by without one and TOW list building is already way more restrictive than AoS list building. I guess it's a consequence of TOW not being an objective control-style game? AoS would probably see more spam if kill points were the only thing that matters.