Bosskelot

I played 7-wide Orc units using the new sizes and they were so unbelievably clunky to maneuverer around once terrain and other units came into the equation. The fact people think 20-30 wide units are going to be in any way useable just exposes them as being online-only mathhammerers.

So the magic reference cards went back in-stock on the GW store for about 15 minutes before they went out of stock again. 😂

Just in general Rank and Flank hits so much harder visually when seeing it on a table. Someone posted their purple High Elves on reddit a week or so ago and they really looked stunning. A Warhammer Fantasy army just looks so amazing when all its all painted up. Played my first 2 games on the weekend. We did two 1.5k back to back and did some minor list tweaking between them just to try more stuff out. My greenskins managed to stomp the chaos gitz both times (Black Orcs and Fanatics are probably too mean for beginner games which is something I'll have to keep in mind since I'll be doing intro games of TOW in future)

The issue with the Kruleboyz is not that they don't look good*, it's that they don't share any real design language with the rest of the army whatsoever. They really need to be their own separate faction. *Some of their stuff is weird, but it's more lore and visual design not really being on the same page. Apparently they're massive worshippers of Kragnos and then there's nothing about that reflected in their designs anywhere. Feels very much like something tacked on at the end with GW then retroactively trying to convince people that "oh this banner and these shields totally represent Kragnos."

But Blood Dragons could still cast. And there's also nothing in the Vampiric Gifts that really pushes towards a Blood Dragon playstyle.

There is an objective loss of flavour in the VC book but it still looks interesting. There's also the weird oversight of a Vampire being unable to cast while wearing armour which is a thing they've always been able to do. Otherwise I forsee every Vampire Lord wearing the Flayed Hauberk.

Cold One Knights with full plate are 2 points cheaper than dragon princes and have all of their attacks at S4 (remember, the mount exists and it has 2 attacks with armourbane). Not only are they deadlier in prolonged combat but the Knights themselves are hitting at S6 on the charge which is a much more important breakpoint than S5 on the charge. Not to mention Black Guard have Stubborn and Immune to Psychology compared to Fear (not super useful on a unit like PG) and Veteran.

Even if the CoS and BoC stuff is sold out because of TOW I doubt GW are going to treat that as being the case and will just see it as an unexplainable bump in AOS sales lol

The level of complexity in 3rd is very strange because, as I mentioned earlier, I am a person who plays lots of games and am currently ramping up to play lots of TOW which is an objectively more complicated ruleset than AOS. And yet despite playing AOS off and on for the past 6 or so years it still finds ways to trip me up and make it difficult to grasp and retain basic game concepts. I really don't know what exactly about the way the rules, 3rd's especially, have been written makes it this way but someone mentioned earlier that because of the simplifying of stats there then created this explosion in warscroll specific unique rules to try and differentiate units. I think this might get at the crux of the issue but I think there's also a general issue of simulation vs abstraction and I don't think AOS manages to do its abstraction very well. For as many rules as a game like TOW has, there is an inherent intuitiveness to it if you've ever watched, I dunno, Lord of the Rings, or read military history books of the pre-1914 era. Units, for the most part, act like you'd expect them to and even the weirder ones like Fanatics still retain a level of verisimilitude. This goes for the rules in all the individual armies and also the core rules themselves. Even if we were to take a very abstracted wargame like 40k 9th and 10th edition you can still see this at play. If a unit gets charged it can't shoot out of combat, unless it's a big vehicle because yeah of course a leman russ wouldn't care about being swarmed with grots of course it could still shoot things. That makes sense. And while infantry weapons can wound big targets they're not exactly ideal at it, so you need anti-tank, and those anti-tank weapons are conversely not ideal for shooting infantry etc etc. Now, 40k is still crazily abstracted and does not operate or simulate squad level combat at all in the slightest but there's enough there that it makes grasping basic concepts and mechanics relatively easy, up until you get to missions of course. Where AOS starts to break down is how too many things don't really operate how you'd really expect them to and then certain scrolls are being overloaded with bespoke rules that only serve to make them arbitrarily more complicated. You can just shoot out of combat in AOS, which is completely counterintuitive to how a person might expect to deal with ranged units. Flat to-wound rolls mess with your perception of how good certain units should be at dealing with others. Damage overspill creates the same problem. None of these are "balance" issues and they work within the confines of the game, but they're examples of mechanics that can feel jarring to experience. As for weird complexity on units, a regiment of Swordmasters in TOW may have a lot of rules, but they're actually all pretty straightforward and importantly the unit has 1A each with their Swords of Hoeth. Nice. Then we get to Vanari Bladelords who have 3 different weapon profiles, 2 of which are different styles of attack for their swords. Which would be fine but the actual rules for that strike vs sweep profile are absolutely insane. One doesn't follow the normal rules for attacking and wounding at all and the other is calculated off of how many models are in the target unit but does follow the rest of the rules for attacking and wounding and making saves. Why was this a decision made? Sweep vs strike attacks have existed in AOS and 40k for a while now; they're fundamentally a fine mechanic and work well; why was this unit chosen to have this psychotic weapon profile. What does it add? But you can start to extrapolate that general view off to many armies and units across the game. And when you combine that with weird unintuitive core rules, very abstract missions with "controlling" circles on the ground and Grand Strategies and Battle Tactics* that are removed from anything actually happening in the game and it starts to form this cognitive load that even an experienced toy soldier pusher-arounder like me starts to check out of. *This is not to say I dislike controlling objectives, or Grand Strats or Battle Tactics. But it's telling that I was able to play 8th, 9th and 10th 40K with their system of Primary and Secondaries with no issues and yet I struggle with Sigmar, because as abstracted and gameified as those mechanics are I didn't feel like I was fighting with the core rules.

There's definitely plenty of legitimate criticism you can level about how GW has handled TOW so far and stuff you wish they would change their minds on, but I'm sorry TOW has been an objectively successful launch. The hype and enthusiasm for this game is incredibly large. They sold out almost everywhere within an hour of preorders going up. Non-preorder stock in the local stores around here was all gone by the end of release day. My LGS has said that the amount of preorder requests they had was 2nd only to new 40k editions and completely obliterated past ones like HH, AOS, KT, Warcry etc. Speaking of my LGS, they created a Facebook group for organizing games of TOW down there; it's been up for a week and already has 100 members. This is a LOCAL group for a LOCAL gaming store. Saying "oh well they just didn't make lots of it so it wasn't that successful" well then I guess the Deathwing box is a giant flop because that's out of stock too. What actually makes this doubly impressive is that this release focused on the two most unpopular armies in the game and it still, obviously, smashed GW's sales forecasts. We haven't even gotten to the big hitters like Greenskins, High Elves and Chaos yet.

To be completely fair the 10th ed event was ticketed.

To go back to discussion about old models, I think a lot of people really misjudge the actual appeal about many of these kits. It's often not about nostalgia at all, but just simply; they're far more simple to build, and far easier to paint down to less details and more static poses leading to less of the model being "exposed" to a persons vision. You could paint 10 of the old chaos warriors in about half the time it takes to paint 10 of the newer ones, and that's not even much of a crazy detailed newer kit. Do you know how absolutely mindnumbing it is trying to paint a Lumineth army compared to a High Elf one? And that's even with the Lumineth requiring less models. Painting 20 wardens made me want to kill myself. Painting 10 dawnriders made me wish for catastrophic climate change to end our species. Gorgeous models but agony to paint. Discussion about models online is often very focused around and led by the instagram and youtube painter community who have zero issues with a model being piled down with detail and requiring 50 different paints; in fact they have a financial incentive for that to be the case because it means longer, more in-depth videos and more people wanting to watch tutorials on how to paint. The vast majority of people who actually buy and play with these models cannot paint well or have the time to spend ungodly amounts of hours to paint well. A simpler model that can be assembled and painted to a reasonable standard in a sensible timeframe? That is INCREDIBLY appealing. More static poses also just work well for TOW/WHFB. The sight of disciplined ranks of soliders all marching forward in unison is a very powerful visual. There's a reason Fantasy armies hit so much better than basically any 40k or AOS army when you look at them displayed and all arrayed up.

Games Workshop lol Even the two local GW stores only got half of their actual orders in. This is not LGS's overselling. Across the UK and Continental Europe everyone is reporting critically low actual allocations and a few of them have stated that word is from GW themselves is that it is, yet again, a problem with picking. Combine that with a company that for the past 12-15 years has been unable to understand its own product and doesn't get who is buying it and why, leading to insanely wrong numbers of product actually being produced and you get this shitshow of a launch. The amount of hype and excitement over the game is actually crazy and GW have just not only managed to completely misjudge that but seem to have also botched its distribution too.

Not very encouraging when my GW preorder is still listed as Processing on their site.

3rd ed is weird in that, for me, AOS has never been my primary game, just a supplemental one for my main ones (40k mainly, but LOTR and various squarehammer games) so it's always been a more casual experience compared to those. Except 3rd ed really hasn't been constructed with that in mind. It is very awkwardly complex is many areas and the GHB during 3rd has only added to that. The amount of gotchas and and very extreme rules changes across months make it very difficult to play as a secondary game. But I also don't want to say that should all be changed (mostly, I think a lot of the concepts in the GHB were straight up bad and confusing even for dedicated players). I'm coming at this from a 40k perspective where my fave edition of the game was 9th and 10th has just obliterated my enjoyment of the game entirely. I am in the process of selling some of my less dear/more secondary armies for the game because I will just never, ever want to play them for as long as 10th remains. The issue with that edition is that it is almost entirely trying to court new players and people who play one game every 2 months. And there's nothing wrong with appealing to those types of players, new ones especially, but it has destroyed the enjoyment for most of the more dedicated/serious players. In their efforts to make the game more accessible and simplified, they just destroyed the flavour and variety of the game, ironically in a very AOS fashion. In fact the worst part of 10th is that it is actively cribbing ideas from AOS... but to AOS's credit it at least does those ideas better or was designed with them in mind. Simplified loadouts, blank-nothingness characters that only do one thing and flattened points costs have always been a feature of AOS so if you approach the game as a new player they're fine and they mostly work; but porting those design elements over to 40k has been disastrous. So I would hope for AOS 4th they at least make it a smoother experience for new players, or people who play it as a secondary game, while not ruining the experience for the playerbase that likes some of the more complex rules. And in general I hope the AOS team had proper time to actually work on the new edition rather than having to rush it out of the door in 5 weeks.

Have you seen the prices for their plastic hero models? They're about the same.

The rules allow for characters joining units to be placed at the side of the unit instead of within it, so that might be the intent for it and things like the Slaan. It's very strange regardless as it certainly won't look as aesthetic.

With regards to base sizes I think it's inevitable that over time everyone will move over to the new base sizes either through rebasing or adapters. The rules are just fundamentally written with them in mind and the footprint of your army changing by 20% is too big of a factor. Yeah very few people will be fully rebased on release day and for the initial weeks where everyone is learning, re-learning, experimenting with the rules then there will be a lot of leeway given. But even the local super casual Old World players are ALL rebasing their armies and one of the local clubs is even offering a laser-cutting/3d printing service for new movement trays to encourage people to switch over.

Talk is from influencers that they are literally fully feature complete factions with just as much attention put into them as the "main" ones. From what Rob/Square Based said the decision to make some factions "Legends" and others not wasn't a developer decision, but management politics with main studio and the SDS having one of their usual slapfights. With a bunch of """unsupported""" factions having the most models currently available it sounds like the main studio won. (remember kids, companies do like money, but companies are also staffed by individuals who will make plenty of irrational and spiteful decisions to mess with other people or projects. This is corporate culture 101.) All the talk about saying they wouldn't support them and going on this magical journey with the current factions was absolutely said through gritted teeth. The developers behind this project clearly care a whole lot about it and probably worked on the assumption that every faction would be fully involved in some fashion.

Isn't there already an Avatar of the Rat God? Also the last thing I thought Skaven would need is more big centrepieces. But then AOS does love doing those.

They just generally do less damage and LOS is more restrictive. The consensus among the influencers playing the game is that taking a monster or a general on big monster isn't just going to lead to them getting sniped in turn 1 by a single cannon.

Yeah artillery now actually sounds fair and balanced, compared to the absolute nightmare it was in 8th. In general lethality seems very toned down; less attacks on elite units, less AP, AP being divorced from S means that any S buffs aren't doing double duty, no more step-up, magic much less silly etc.

Really interesting that GMG says the ruleset is like if 6th ed fantasy and MESBG had a baby.

The warcom articles can often be wildly inaccurate to how things are actually portrayed. I remember every Necron player being nervous and disheartened with how warcom preview articles were treating The Silent King in the run up to the Necron release in 9th. Talking about how he was this evil megalomaniac with delusions of godhood which... is like, not his character at all. And then we got the Codex and his lore was essentially not that in the slightest.

Perfectly stated really. Don't get me wrong there's lots of old models I do want to see come back and plenty which I think hold up well still, but the TK infantry and cavalry are most certainly not it.