Neil Arthur Hotep

Community engagement for AoS relies on trust. I believe a lot of players have bought into AoS armies on the assumption that anything with a battletome will have long-term support. That's not unreasonsble. Most old Fantasy armies from the early days have received updates and reimaginings. I think it's somewhat callous to tell people they just had the wrong expectations at this point and that they should always have expected their army to suddenly lose support. I recognize that old kits can't stay in production forever and that we need to avoid factions getting to Space Marine levels of bloat. I recognize that giving people another year of full support before moving the armies to Legends is good. But I don't see it as a failure to set correct expectations that BoC players are now upset that their faction for which they just bought a battletome last year is being moved to the Old World. Only people who are really plugged in to GW behind the scenes stuff could be expected to see that coming.

Hard to justify from a player standpoint, not from a business standpoint. Bonesplitterz were one of the first AoS battletomes and BoC had endless spells, a terrain piece and lore significance as recently as Thondia. That creates certain expectations. These were both full factions and removing them 10 years into the lifespan of this game is bad. We were supposed to be out of the "full armies getting squatted" phase of AoS at this point.

That's definitely how I would handle it. My old Empire Outriders are currently serving as veteran Freeguild Cavaliers. I can understand that some people feel differently about it, though. Especially right after this surprising announcement.

That's bit was just in reference to Stormcast and the Warcry/Underworlds stuff. I agree that the full BoC/Bonesplitterz removal is pretty hard to justify.

Huge overreaction. At least some of those models will get replacements and then you can just keep using your old stuff. Perhaps even some Sacrosanct.

I suppose a nuanced take is in order. I think we can be broadly in favour of the AoS team taking steps to actively manage warscroll bloat while at the same time recognizing that this sucks for people who have armies mainly composed of those models. Sacrosanct were introduced at the same time as Nighthaunt. They are still pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Of course, after the first shock, I think it would be good to wait and see how things develop in the next few weeks. We are certainly getting replacements for some of the squatted Stormcast. And if not, I guess it's time to get used to proxying like people usually do. We have known that the BoC squatting was coming for a bit now. With Bonesplitterz, it was less obvious, but the signs were there. Still, have some empathy for the people who collect these two armies. It sucks that you were strung along without any real updates for 3 editions.

At least the messaging is direct and far enough in advance for people not to be blindsided. We have been expecting Beasts to go away, but Bonesplitterz and basically all Fatcast leaving on top of that is surprising to me.

> post that there is no reason to think we won't get a new Valkia model in the future > Valkia is removed from the game 3 hours later Wow, how embarrassing. Glad I'm not this cringelord.

A bunch of nobodies fighting over a place that was not previously described and never appeared in the lore again is not a significant change to the state of the world.

In AoS terms, an event that changes the state of the world on at least a medium scale. The fall of Anvilgard could be an example.

If I remember correctly, the boxes in 2nd ed usually had new models for one of the two faction at most (outside of a new foot hero) and did not meaningfully advance the narrative. I think that's the proposed change that would make these boxes feel more exciting.

Maybe they will succeed with pushing the popularity of narrative or casual formats up a bit with their new modular rules system. A casual battle mode that is matched play but with more freedom could be popular. Like, remove battle tactics, add in allies, that kind of thing. Otherwise, any rules that are in the "ask your opponent" zone are just kind of cursed to never see any use.

It seems to me that there are a million ways to solve that problem that are not morale/battleshock. Besides, is that not what we should expect in a match of between two lists that both focus on defense? The typical "this list/deck/team/character is not built to win, it's built to not lose" mirror match? With the current system, we you typically have 2 CP, +1 from going second, +1 from heroic actions potentially. If that stays true, I am not that fussed about another +1 CP per round, depending on my list. The benefit of the flexibility of a lot of auxiliaries might well outweigh it. High drops still gives deployment advantage, after all. They explicitly said warscrolls will no longer give extra CP. I would assume that also means they have at least toned down warscroll abilities giving free use of command abilities. But it's really up in the air how common free CP from command traits, artefacts, battle formations, allegicance abilities, heroic actions etc. turn out to be. If we take them at their word, though, and CP are actually scarce, it could be pretty significant. Like maybe you just get 2 CP per turn, nothing more. We have also had a leak claim that there is a new counter-charge command ability. If we really get a lot fewer CP, but they allow us to use commands at the power level of redeploy, unleash hell, counter charge and all-out defense, then I think the advantage of an extra CP is substantial.

It certainly seems like Spearhead boxes, the Spearhead format and the new Regiment system are all designed to work together to give new players an easier path from being a complete beginner to a full 2000 point army. I'm not so sure that they want players to buy multiple of the same Spearhead, though. Historically, it seems to me that they have been moving away from that kind of thing. In early AoS, we had boxes like the FEC, Fyreslayers and Beastclaw Raiders, where 3 of them could conceivably build your whole list. But newer boxes seem to be built deliberately to become less good in multiples. The Stormcast Spearhead has Yndrasta, a unique character where having multiple of her is useless. The Cities Spearhead had the Cavalier-Marshall, of which you (at the moment) don't want multiple, and the Cannon in it. I think the plan is probably to spread player's investments wide with Spearheads instead, using them to make it easy to start multiple armies, but also making it so that to have a "good" 2000 point army, you still need to buy mostly single kits.

The idea that Abraxia being released prevents a Valkia update is pretty funny to me. I don't know a lot about Khorne fluff, but I would hope that Valkia has more going on than just "devil woman with spear". But even if not, Khorne seemingly has an endless variety of "muscle dude with axe", so I think GA: Chaos can afford to double up on the concept.

Would certainly have been nice to have a big Cities vs FEC box in the middle of the edition to go with the developing narrative (even though these factions only manifested near the end of the edition). Or, to be honest, it would have been nice to have that Beasts of Chaos/Incarnate narrative actually go somewhere. Could have been Morghurites vs. Lumineth or whatever.

I think it does. Seems to me that the limiting factor for drops is number of heroes, not necessarily unit unlocks. Going one hero seems nearly impossible, and two seems like a commitment. Even current 1 drop lists run 3 heroes. And people frequently still find it worthwhile to go 2 drops for an extra big monster-hero. So there is some pressure at the low end even if you can allow a wide variety of troops.

Disagree. The Wildercorps for example can currently easily be battleline, and even though there is no Wildercorps hero I expect them to stay easy to take. A lot of Warcry units are just regular AoS units functionally. Underworlds warbands can get deleted for all I care, but they have a perfect setup in this system of just being a self-contained regiment.

I think you have inside info here, but honestly even in a vacuum I would have expected the system to be less restrictive than the current battleline unlocking mechanics, which already let you run nearly anything you want.

No units are locked behind any hero. You can run any unit without a corresponding hero if you just take on a drop. High drop lists already win events, I think we will see the same next edition.

The system seems pretty good to me so far. I like that there are no hard force organization limits, but you are still incentivized to build fluff friendly. I honestly expect my own lists to change very little from this, since I often build hero+unit power pairs, anyway. I also think going high drops will be better and more common in this system, since 1 drop seems nearly impossible and 2 drop seems very restrictive. Getting priority and getting that command point do come apart, by the way. You get the command point by running lots of heroes and unlocking regiments. You get priority for running few drops overall. You could easily have a match up of one guy with 3 drops in 3 regiments and another guy with 5 drops in 5, and the command point and priority would go to different players. It's really just spam lists that suffer from the worst of both worlds. Which is good, because I personally like that spam lists exist, they just should not be the best thing.

That's one of those examples where I will firmly place myself into the camp of "it turns out I don't actually care about this", because of my personal history. When I started AoS, I built a bunch of skeleton warriors, which have the option of swords or spears. Which I did a bunch of maths about and came to the conclusion that small units should take swords and big units should take spears. Then I though about it some more and figured out that for small units it doesn't actually matter because they do no damage. And for big units, an extra rank of models fighting from spears was almost exactly the same as +1 to hit from the swords, effectively. So that did not matter either. Later I was building Mortek Guard and for those guys, swords were actually just the right choice. And that kind of sucked, too, because spears looked cooler. And then along the line, I played a bunch of games with people and because of rules updates, they ran some guys they built with hand weapons as guys with spears. And I noticed how little that affected me at all, because they did all the attacking dice math anyway. And then the new Deathrattle Skeletons came out with a build option of swords or spears, but no rules difference between the two, and I just though that was smart because that way you can actually just build what looks cooler. So that's where I am living right now. I hope that for warscrolls where the choice between weapon profiles is actually meaningful (like 'Ardboyz), they just make two different warscrolls with separate point costs. And for others, I am totally fine with the choice being cosmetic.

It always feels to me like this kind of thing would be more exciting for established players, but given that we are talking about starter sets here, I am not sure that's the most relevant perspective.

It's weird in the context of Skaven, but not especially weird in the game as a whole. Most armies don't get a dedicated monster buffing foot hero.

I'm probably the more excited about this Stormcast release than any of the previous ones. I think the new art direction is rad. Stormcast have been getting cooler with every release, IMO.