Neil Arthur Hotep

Having recently played a Cities army with counter shooting and counter charging abilities, if I have to choose I'll take the counter charge. Especially if I am shooting at -1 to hit. If you like, swing over to the Cities discussion thread where I frequently post about counter-charge based shennenigans.

Counter charging is really strong, can totally swing combats and triggers relevant "on the charge" abilities like impact hits. Flying units can even charge over screens on reaction. 2 CP seems justified, IMO. At least relative to All Out Attack and the like. As for shooting, if they forgot to remove mortals on hit again, I think that ability will eventually move to 2 CP, too. But maybe they actually cut that out of the game in their warscroll overhaul. Let's wait and see.

Not 100% sure if that means they did away with giving and receiving commands. I think they might have, and it's just "a unit uses a command" now.

I really like the ability to shoot and cast in a limited form on the opponent's turn. Those are fun innovations. Variable command point costs increase complexity a bit, but I think they might be a good change overall because it allows for more impactful commands to have an appropriate cost. Like the counter charge ability, which I was initially worried about. But also potentially unique commands for special characters.

That's how I usually see it, too. I only posted this guy WIP before because I expected the base I ordered for him to take a few weeks and I wanted to contribute to this month's thread. But it arrived quicker than I thought, luckily But a nice base really changes the framing of the model. For this one, I find that the warm reds and browns on the base make the cool blues of the model stand out a lot more (compared to the primer white of the temporary base I had him on).

Fimir for Old World if anything. AoS players don't care about Fimir (by and large) and 40k players double don't care. TOW is the nostalgia-driven "remember this?" game.

If Beasts of Chaos are squatted from AoS only to be replaced by Fimir, I'll have some choice words for GW.

If "lore" and "realms" are important, my first idea would be Lumineth Realmlords and their Loreseekers.

He is a fancyman I wanted a model that looked a little less haggard than the normal Cavalier Marshal, because my army is from a city that is proud of their wealth and artisan skill. But I still wanted him to look like a soldier rather than a knight. I think I got there in the end, and I think the added AoS bits actually make the model read as Cities of Sigmar instead of Imperial Guard at a glance. I swapped out his gun for one from the old Pistolier kit, as well. You can see it a little in this picture.

I got my kitbashed Cavalier-Marshall painted, finally. I think the Lord Solar kit is a pretty cool option if you want an alternative Marshal (although the regular one is pretty great). The robot horse is pretty great if your army is based in Chamon. I used foot Marshal and Freeguild Cavalier bits on this guy. You will need to source a base if you are interest in doing this conversion, because the base size of the Lord Solar is quite significantly different from the Cavalier Marshal.

Once again, a proper base uplifts the model by a lot.

It's a business choice, IMO. If you want to grow the player base, you make your games easy to get into (sharing models). This is the purpose of Kill Team and Warcry. They are games in their own right, but also entry poinzs for 40k and AoS. If you want maximum monetization, however, you make people buy separate armies for each game, like AoS and TOW. GW is already the market leader in tabletop games. They don't need to spend extra resources to grow their player base. So they frequently don't.

They updated a few Legends warscrolls at the start of 3rd ed, if I recall correctly.

Personally, I think the big advancement is the variation in poses. I think that will make these guys look a lot cooler compared to the IoB sculpts, even painted to the same standard.

Are Clanrats the worst infantry unit in Skaven? If so, 20s, considering the changed reinforcement system. Since double unit size is the max now, I think any faction that can be characterized as a horde (Zombies, Skaven, Gitz) needs a 20 base size unit to make that workable.

I think this is more or less the most plausible explanation right here. GW plans their releases pretty far in advance, but not decades in advance. The decision to remove Beasts from AoS was probably made before the announcement of the TOW core factions in May last year, but probably not long before that. This is conjecture, but I think Beasts were in the same boat as every other old WHFB faction for most of the lifespan of AoS: The plan was probably to update them eventually, but there was no clear time line beyond the current and next edition at any time. TOW getting greenlit made it a necessity to divide factions/model lines between the two games, due to the GW-internal separate profit sheets. I imagine it was at the meeting where this was discussed that the AoS/Citadel team decided that they'd rather give away the BoC line and focus on building another original faction in the future, or something like that. I don't think there is a long running conspiracy and re-distribution of BoC models to other factions or anything like that.

I agree, factions that are legacy in TOW don't have to worry about being removed from AoS. The path for legacy factions to graduate to core faction status is by having their old kits re-released instead, which I think is very possible for Vampire Counts. They have a bunch of old models that some people might want.

Yeah, I was also thinking that it sucks that we have to consider which model lines are safe or in danger at all. It's one thing to note "models that are originally from WHFB are going to very likely get reimagined at some point", but the whole Sacrosanct thing really is a big detriment to the community trust GW has been building the last few editions.

It's a Lord Solar kitbash

An Arch-Cavalier and Freeguild Marshall on Chamonite Cog-Horse

You see a lot of new players asking about optimal weapons for models and worrying about "would you have a problem if I build x but use y rules?" online, though. Perhaps irrationally, since weapon options very rarely did anything significant or when they did the optimal choice was obvious. Plus, as you said, the WYSIWYG police won't come to your house and confiscate your models, anyway. But it is a thing I have seen casual players struggle with in the wild, nonetheless.

I think I'm just kind of burnt out on micro-optimizations. I used to spend ages building characters in RPGs, carefully thinking about every small decision. Before I actually started actively playing, that is. It made me realize that none of those decisions mattered very much except broad strokes once the dice hit the table. The truth is, I don't feel super strongly about this choice, though. I just want either a real choice or no choice. If they had kept separate warscrolls for double hammers and hammer and shield, that would have been impactful enough to justify it for me. It does run up against the realities of painting and modeling units, as I described above, but it's fun. Not the old "swords are 3+/4+, hammers are 4+/3+" design though.

I agree with you and everyone else who likes the idea of having different weapons and loadouts in the rules also reflected on the models. It is cool, in theory. In my experience, it almost always runs up against different barriers in reality, though. People build and paint models one way and then just tell you "these guys have swords but I'm using the spears warscroll, actually". Maybe it's because of a rules change, maybe it's because they built 2 min size squads but now want to try running reinforced, maybe swords just look cooler. And I think everyone agrees that it's unreasonable to expect people to buy, build and paint another unit just for a +1 to hit. Personally, I am more glad that I will get the skip the 15 minute "loadout talk" in future games than I am sad about the loss of fidelity.

Certainly a big change. Looking at the Tomb Guard with shields that I have been proxying as Grave Guard with great wrapons for the past edition, though, I know it's not as big a deal as it feels at first.

Yet, reading most of that I feel like I know exactly what it means. Damage and health are extremely intuitive: You have health, you take damage. Skull ability? Bad stuff that happens when you take damage. Big number on a spell ability? Must be cast value. Wizard (9)? 9-cast wizard. Rampage is just monstrous rampage. Only power level is unfamiliar, really. Of course, I am only able to understand it easily because I know how AoS works and what Nagash's warscroll did before. And I am sure there will be some new wrinkles when the full rules are out. Monstrous rampages seem to work differently now, for example. But as far as intuitively and quickly communicating info, I think the new warscrolls look pretty good.