hoonked

I doubt GW is going to sell the LotR license. The thing is, it's a license that is expected to increase in value over the next few years, so GW may want to keep it. You have to consider that, right now, the highest budget TV series ever made is being dedicated to LotR and is expected to be released soon. Also, after Christopher's death, the LotR license has become more accessible to multiple productions, so nobody should be surprised if we see MANY more products of any kind dedicated to LotR in the next few years.

Interesting. Basically Aos just became a formations game! This also influences units on 25mm bases in a weird way: they can still make one long line, but there can be no space within the bases.

If you want basic infantry, the "dark elves" have a fair bit of draconic symbols. Mostly decals for the basic darkling coven infantry, but also scaled cloaks for black ark corsairs. Also, irondrakes have a LOT of draconic symbols, their weapons are shaped like dragon mouths and their banner also has some dragons on it.

I mean, in most games it will be hard to hit more than one unit when dropping. The thing is, their AOE range is 10", but they have to drop 9" from enemies, that means that you're going to hit just one inch of enemy lines... which is not a lot and if the opponent puts on any screen you are not going to hit anything interesting. (And even then, you have 1/3 chance of not doing anything) And the other thing: once these guys drop, you still have to charge 9". Sure, they reroll their charges, but other than that, stormcasts currently have only one good charge buff (Gavriel - a named hero). I mean, these guys are strong and have a fancy 2+ save, but I don't think they are THAT broken.

Ok so... do we have any information about the price? Because I love all of it, but considering the amount of new minis and the recent GW prices, I fear I would have to be a millionaire to be able to afford it 😂 Ok so, serious question: do we know how "limited edition" will the box be?

It is already clear that we are different persons with different preferences, but I would like to point out that I have a different idea about what a "game" should be. To be fair it might just be because of linguistic differences, given that English is not my native language. While checking Merriam-Webster dictionary, the first definition of "game" is "a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other" and only the third definition is "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement". Meanwhile, in the Treccani dictionary -an Italian dictionary, because I'm Italian- the first definition of "gioco"(game) is "Any freely chosen activity to which children or adults, individually or in groups, devote themselves with no other immediate purpose than recreation and entertainment, developing and exercising at the same time physical, manual and intellectual abilities." Italian also has another word, "partita", to mean "a single match", but more often than not in English you tend to use "game" even when speaking about single matches. I'm sorry for this rather long clarification, but basically what I want to say is that a game in my mind is in no way something done only to see who is the most skilled and it's not something done with the sole purpose of winning. To be fair, I personally find competitive Warhammer fairly dull. To me, playing Aos is something that I do for the overall "experience". I like seeing models battle on the table, I like the flavour of it all and I would prefer to play a sub-par list if it means having nice looking models on the table. I do also care about the rules of course; I do find some strategies more fun than others and the playstyle of an army is something I consider when deciding which army to build - but again - I care about how "appealing" a playstyle is to me, but I will not consider it's efficacy when deciding which army to build. And to be honest I mostly play with people that are on the same page as mine. Warhammer to me is primarily about the hobby, the narration, the flavour, the aesthetics and not really about the competition.

In all honesty, it simply seems to me that different users of tga have extremely different expectations of what an Aos game should be. I don't want a game of Aos to be a cutthroat "contest of skill", if I were looking for a game to seriously compete in I'd honestly prefer better balanced games than the ones GW makes. And if I were looking for an extremely competitive game, I'd prefer a game where models were cheaper and could be painted/assembled in less time so that I could playtest multiple armies. To be completely honest I don't care at all about the competitive play aspect of Aos, which is also why I prefer to play casually and I don't participate in tournaments. When I approach an Aos game, I do so primarily to have a lightweight fun. The "feeling" of fun is the crucial part for me, because as far as I'm concerned my hobby has to be fun first and foremost. And given that: yes, I don't like being tabled just because the deployment wasn't perfect. I want my models to stick around a bit, I want the game to last more turns and at the end of the game I want to feel like my models actually did something, even if I lost.

I don't feel like GW is actually following the Chinese market that much. That said, Creative Assembly(the total war developers) DEFINETELY are. They have two games that are being developed for the Chinese market ( Elysium and Battles: warhammer) and most of their articles/news/faqs are available in English and in Simplified/Traditional Chinese. At the same time total war Three Kingdoms has probably been produced to appeal to the Chinese market. I wouldn't be surprised if it was CA to push GW to make Cathay happen. That said, I like the chinese aesthetics, so it's good news to me 👍

I voted "as little as possible", I like seeing models on the table, I like big battles and it's disheartenening to be tabled on turn 1-2. But I do agree that this is a time consuming game, indeed, ideally I would like the design of the game to allow for shorter games without adding too much lethality. Lethality is already a fairly big issue in regards to balance and game satisfaction (being tabled by shooting+magic anyone?) and I would wish GW to try to find new ways to shorten games without adding more of it (but I do understand it's easier said than done).

To be fair the casting is fairly cheap and as far as I know it should be reasonably easy to make new casts of pre-existing molds. The expensive cost is the mold, so if the mold has not paid itself it's ok to use it to make new castings for a new board game. I'm not saying GW did that, they are not exactly transparent about their sales, but economically it could make sense.

As mentioned in this thread , wayland might have sorted out European shipping with no extra VAT (you will just pay your country VAT and not the UK one): EU Shipping Information - Wayland Games. That said, there might still be some custom processing charges, and there is also a kinda vague " If you are ordering something that was manufactured outside of the EU or UK, duties may apply. " without any mention of when the duties will actually be applied. To be honest I still have to try ordering from the UK after brexit and I would suggest to wait a bit before doing so, UK-EU trade is still kinda of a mess at the moment. That said, if you want to try ordering anyway, make sure that the shop you're buying from knows how to avoid the double-VAT.

Yeah, this is really kinda unfortunate as an EU customer. Wayland and it's free European shipping were great for getting miniatures and hobby supplies at a cheap price.

To be fair I think GW is slowly moving back to the whole Stormcast thing, probably the sales haven't been to exceptional. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the future the "typical" Order army becomes Cities of Sigmar + Stormcasts: it's pretty clear that cities is selling more than they expected, given that they are often out of stock and there's a lot of activity on Facebook/Tga/etc... surrounding the army. And in Broken realms not only did they add new rules for cities, but they also made possible to play cities in Stormcast armies. At this point I wouldn't be to surprised if they use the Exelcis plot to expand the cities of sigmar line. But probably this is just wishful thinking, because I personally think that cities+stormcast seem the perfect math for the archetypal order army.