Bosskelot

Spearhead will at the very least not be telling beginners to build their units in specific ways which then become useless/bad in the "main" game because AOS has very simplistic loadouts for the most part. However it looks like it's still going to have the same issue where a beginner is basically learning different rules from what eventually is the actual game.

They also stated that Combat Patrol was exquisitely balanced and it most certainly isn't.

That news dampens my potential desire to get the launch box. If they're potentially putting less models in it in favour of the mat and terrain but still charging £150 then I'll probably sit the release out. But hey it could be different. This is where GW's dripfeed marketing doesn't really help them as I don't think I'm alone in my thoughts about hype for the launch box being lowered by this news so continuing to sit on it and be cagey with the information seems a little bit counterintuitive for them.

Continuing on with the added seasonal rules is a massive turn-off for me. Thought it was one of the worst aspects of 3rd. As above GHBs just being mission packs would be fine.

It's wild that Valkia still doesn't have an updated model.

Beastmen are still one of the strongest armies in the game and the Hagtree Fetish shaman is still extremely good.

Yeah GW released an entire range of middle eastern/specifically Persian inspired models based around them being hedonistic pleasure seeking degenerates and no-one cared despite western literature having a long history of portraying that area of the world in such terms. Babylonian Dwarfs (a dead culture it must be noted) aren't going to upset anyone.

It's also very telling that the moment TOW comes out instantly the BoC stuff starts selling more and seeing the same lack of stock as a lot of other ranges.

Beastmen got a 7th ed army book and a giant release wave. Most of what you see in the army currently is from that 2010 release.

It really depends on how GW sees them or how actually profitable they are. Underworlds has always seemed like it did very well and didn't seem like a crazy expensive to produce system (maybe it is; idk what the RoI is on cards and the like) but these giant big limited edition prestige boxes for Warcry have always seemed very strange. Doubly so when hearing back from my LGS contacts about how aggressively GW has tried to push them in the past; basically trying to get these places to order almost the same amount as Indomitus or Dominion for whatever seasonal Warcry box is coming out. It gets even weirder when Kill Team gets very few allocations. It's almost like that very first Warcry release in 2019 was such a surprise success they overcommitted to it and thought those sorts of numbers would keep on going up and up.

4 editions in and we're still doing 6's to hit cause mortals. Joy. 🙄

Going from the store implies it disappears completely, not just being repackaged for TOW

The KF/Character on Griffon model is in the TOW rulebook so I'm doubtful it's going anywhere.

It costs £82.50 to get 30 old Ork Boyz currently and those are from the same era as the Orcs. Tomb Guard and Black Guard are from about the same time period as each other. One costs 47.50 for 20. The other costs 70. That Tomb Guard price is also cheaper than when they first released (£25 for 10)

TOW has been charging its plastic at a discount. With beastmen being in TOW they'll literally be cheaper than in AOS.

At 2k you could have 2 units of savage boyz and 2 of savage boar boyz. Which is limiting but also considering the size of armies in the game that's honestly going to be most/the core of a 2k list so it's not too bad.

Removing any sort of morale system also runs the risk of the game either becoming far too grindy and lacking in dynamism if lethality is too low, or the game becoming too lethal so entire units get wiped out in single activations because that's the only way to avoid the eternal grind. The Necron mirror match in current 40k has this problem, where the army isn't lethal enough to overcome its own tankiness, and battleshock is a worthless mechanic so by turn 5 very little has actually died and it's difficult to really feel as if anything of consequence has happened.

I think if you just putty in those mouths and file them down so it's flat the helmets are improved massively. Why they decided SCE should look even more like Handsome Squidward I don't know.

I'm kind of impressed that they managed to make the Stormcast helmet design even worse. I guess they wanted more of a divergence from the original model which is fair, but that face ain't it.

It's definitely an interesting conundrum any game faces because yeah I agree with you on the priority roll feedback they got at events being true, but of course people who are going to a 2-day AOS event are already the ones super hyper invested in it*, so the real question is how many people is the double turn alienating from getting deeper into the game or entering at all. But that's always the difficulty with this type of thing; do you just keep appealing to the same core audience, or do you try and make big changes to grow the audience? But by taking that risk, you might alienate the dedicated core audience and also not really do a good enough job of capturing new people either. I can tell you for a fact that everytime I ask people why they haven't gotten into AOS despite showing interest, or they tried it initially and stopped, it is always ALWAYS the double turn. At the end of the day it sort of depends what is the overall feedback they get about AOS and what their goals are for 4th. 40k had a player survey done on it halfway through the ed, but 3rd never got that, so all the designers ever speak to it seems are hardcore event players and seemingly have little to no feedback from the wider playerbase. They definitely pulled out a little bit of that "simplified not simple" phrasing for the announcement so there is at least a concern of new player attraction and retention *AOS is a very weird community too in that it's hyper-defensive about any criticism of the game. A lot of this is obviously an ingrained reaction to old fantasy players, or total war fans, trashing on the game for years, but it is what it is. TGA is actually pretty unique in it's one of the few AOS communities online where you can actually criticise the game and not be personally attacked over it or have any aggression thrown your way. If people disagree, they actually do it politely and try and have a discussion about it.

Oh it's not even that, sure it can add its own type of tactical depth, it's people making wild statements about other games that don't have the double turn mechanic. Someone said that 40k, and by extension any pure IGOUGO game, is solved in turn 1 and you just have to execute your plan is pure delusion. It speaks as someone who literally only plays Age of Sigmar.

You know some of the statements being made by ardent double turn defenders really read like the people making them have never played any game aside from Sigmar.

How is this any better than an online errata?

If anything they'll be cheaper in TOW. The trend in that game is to sell giant regiment sets at a discount. Just compare Tomb Guard in TOW to Black Guard in AOS.

They're changes after just 6 months of release and many of them like towering and dev wounds significantly change how the game plays. The dev wound change itself is a bigger core rules change than anything in 9th and has still basically lead to a lot of abilities being semi-broken now.