Bosskelot

The cards allow people to have a casual game and assign their wins or losses to bad draws, but the game is just as easily solvable as before. It's why you consistently see the same people winning events and its why I can basically score 37-40 secondary points in every single game, guaranteed, even when going tactical. And that's assuming you don't just go fixed where the game becomes easier to "solve" than before because now you're only having to worry about 2 easily scored secondaries rather than 3.

Huge amounts of errata's needed (to the point where the physical cards they printed out have more errors on them than the past 2 editions worth of codexes combined), tons of unintended but broken combos of power such as a plethora of high damage weapons with devastating wounds, needing the designer commentary to actually understand and use the Fly rules properly, plenty of core rules just not tested at all, tons of characters who join units and either give that unit a duplicate effect or give it a bonus that actively clashes with their weapons (tons of characters give their unit Lethal Hits, but the unit itself has Dev Wound weapons, which are two conflicting rules), bland and poorly thought out bonuses and abilities with armies like Votaan being able to get +4 to hit despite the modifiers to hit capping out at -1 or +1. I could go on. Here is the 40k balance dataslate The amount of gigantic core rules changes is actually kind of crazy for a game not even a year old, and the index/codex changes are pretty gargantuan too. While it is good GW is willing to make those sorts of changes it also shows just what a complete disasterzone 10th was on release.

Yeah that's a complete nothingburger of a video.

There's a balance to be struck with this kind of stuff. GW doesn't have unlimited production capacity, especially nowadays we have extreme issues with entire ranges struggling to be in stock anywhere and some countries have been unable to buy certain things for over a year. Producing 2x more Dominion than what was needed was a huge amount of plastic and cardboard gone into stuff that could have been allocated elsewhere. Great; you can buy 200,000 Yndrasta's off of Ebay but Lumineth players can't buy a battlecow and Australians haven't been able to buy a Land Raider in years. Not only that but all that excess stock has to be returned to get destroyed. It is hugely wasteful in an industry that is already massively wasteful and has a crazy carbon footprint. So yes it is catastrophic for buyers because it negatively effects every other product GW produces.

40k 10th isn't really built for comp players. It's very much meant to appeal to ultra-casual garagelords who play 1 game every 3 months, or super new players. That's what the system is built around.

You should be more worried as to what sorts of lessons GW has taken from Dominion. They catastrophically overproduced it last time, so will the suits now be pushing for a much smaller production run on what might end up being a much more popular box? Who knows, but I have faith in GW to make bad judgement calls on this sort of stuff because they've been doing it consistently for the past 10+ years.

He's not on a chariot. Just a giant two-headed wolf.

It's a mounted Goblin Warboss called Kiknik on a two-headed wolf called Chompa.

The other issue with adding more and more reactive moves to units to account for a double turn is that it also adds onto the total amount of activations being made which in turn adds onto how long the game takes to play. In an AA game your reaction to your opponent moving their stuff first is just that; it's you activating your units as a reaction to what they did. In 40k and AOS with their reactive rules you are doing a reactive move ON TOP OF your regular movement, or a reactive shooting attack on top of your regular shooting. This might be fine if such moves weren't so easily accessible and in some cases very spammable. But restricting them too much also goes against GW's ideal to have the other player on the receiving end of a double get more moves so they're not just sitting their for 40 minutes with their finger up their ass.

It's amazing how 40k can have armies that are purely melee with little to no actual shooting who can manage to solve these hurdles perfectly fine, and also has armies that can heal and rez and also function perfectly fine too.

Regarding USR's I can only hope they actually commit to them rather than the half-baked implementation in 40k currently. The potential removal of battle tactics for a 40k tempest style system would be interesting. Battle tactics, like faction secondaries in 9th, are an attempt to make a faction play like it should in-lore but they can often miss the mark and become wildly too difficult to balance or become very boring. Not that the Tactical Deck in 40k doesn't have it's fair share of "go to this corner and do an action and score 4 points" but it does at least have plenty of "Kill ___" and "take this objective off of your opponent."

The whole of AOS is hardly built around the double turn, sorry. You could remove it and the game would still function perfectly fine.

I do hope the new Stormcast take more inspiration from the Thunderstrike, rather than just being battered grizzled versions of the 1st Ed models. I actually like the thunderstrike aesthetic and proportions and think all of the SCE pre-that look like dogwater.

It's hard to say because a lot of Leviathan was.shown off at Warhammerfest, which isn't happening this year. I'm not sure when the next big con/event is happening before summer.

Yeah considering they both have representation in Underworlds it would be very strange for them to disappear. Especially as GW was selling a christmas box with 40 plague monks a little over a year ago.

There's a skaven leak going around that sounds a little disappointing. Apparently Plague Monks and Gutter Runners are disappearing.

Honestly leaks are good for hype. I'm still of the opinion that the absolute silence surrounding Dominion and further Kruleboyz releases was one of the contributing factors to that box not meeting expectations.

I mean the wargames atlantic skeletons are not exactly shining beacons of quality and building experience. Shoutouts to the spindly spears all having 4 connector points on the sprue and tiny little joins connecting the torsos to the arms.

Not really. You're getting 36 of them instead of 20 for one thing, and they actually have options in how you build them, unlike Deathrattle.

Looks awesome. Is that 2k? Seems like less!

It's a combination of their production capacity not really having grown to meet their new consumer base, and then them still being bad at accurately gauging demand and knowing how much of a product to actually make. That's always been a weakness of theirs but in days when they were generally selling much less to a much smaller audience they could generally bumble their way through it. When you have multiple examples of supposed "Limited" stock items languishing on shelves and not moving while entire markets have been unable to.buy basic units like Land Raiders and Fire Prisms for a year then that's not just about production capacity; that's about bad market research and bad prioritisation.

Played 4 games now. O&G have stomped every time. Blorcs and Fanatics definitely feel exceptionally strong. The absolute chaos from the last game:

HH, KT and Necromunda. Again; this is profitability not gross sales. All of those systems benefit from being these ancillary 40k things and are rife with kitbash material or actively encourage it within the systems themselves so all 4 essentially have this continuous feedback loop of sales and cross-compatibility. KT benefits from this a lot; you want the Corsair or Kasrkin kits? Those count as KT sales. Necromunda is super low maintenance too; I know it and MESBG were hard-carrying FW for a while because their releases for those games sold really well despite being very small ones logistically. This is also why for a long time it was Necromunda Mondays on Warcom; that game sells like crazy for how little investment (relatively) it gets. AOS gets basically almost as much attention as 40k does, have similar sized dev teams and departments, gets just as much floor space in stores devoted over to it etc, but it sells much less. It absolutely sells more total units of product more than something like Necro, but its costs are also far higher. Part of this is also because AOS itself doesn't require a lot of models; armies are generally pretty small so peoples collections stay small.

I'm sure there are loads of them who absolutely hate that the game seems to be successful (at this early stage at least). From working as a GW sales monkey from 2009-2010*, statements by former design people, studio workers, Alan Merrett etc, my perspective has always been that during the late 00's there was a deliberate and concerted effort to actively sabotage WHFB as much as possible from many people within the organization. Even at its lowest ebb, WHFB was never unprofitable (a direct statement from Alan Merrett and others), but it didn't make just enough, and the wider company was circling the drain at the same time, that it finally gave impetus to actually can the game. Merrett is definitely a nasty piece of work, but he was someone who had been actively trying to end WHFB since the 90's so if he says the game was still making money then I'm inclined to believe him on that. Like the whole AOS vs WHFB is a boring and played out discussion and ultimately meaningless and pointless, but it's very clear that GW wants AOS to succeed and will pour endless amounts into it regardless of its actual performance which is not something WHFB was ever really granted after a certain point in the 00's**. Even in modern times I've actually heard GW employees offer criticism of 40k; any hint of dissatisfaction about AOS gets you a VERY intense rebuttal and an employee fully immersed in The Company Culture ready to proselytise on that games behalf. Half of the weirdness of TOW's development and marketing over the past 4 years has probably been down to internal shitflinging within the company over some of the higher ups not wanting it to be a thing at all. *During my time, I saw other sales monkeys and managers across 3 different stores actively discourage people from getting into WHFB and point them towards 40k instead. **I've seen a few metrics and talked to people In The Know, who say AOS isn't even GW's 2nd or 3rd most profitable game and that the disparity between modern 40k's sales and AOS are basically the same as 40k and WHFB's were during the 2010's.

Still baffles the mind that the two least popular factions in WHFB are consistently sold-out. They've been bad at estimating demand for their products for 10 years now, but with the growth of their market, supply chain issues and lack of production capacity it is rapidly hitting a breaking point if they can't even keep stuff like this in stock. Meanwhile you've got the limited edition FEC box still on sale everywhere (element games has got a heaving shelf full of it that hasn't moved) while the actual full FEC release is up for preorder. We've had 2-3 years of limited run Marine boxes not coming anywhere close to selling out meanwhile most KT boxes have had laughably tiny runs and gone out of sale globally within 5 minutes of preorders opening. I don't think anything more needs to be said about Dominion either. They just do not understand their product, who is buying it, and why. and yet because they have a virtual monopoly on the TT wargaming sphere they still make money hand over fist. Hail the free market.