Bosskelot

Not updating the old core troops and focusing on useless giant monsters seems like the exact same issue that caused the old TK refresh to flop. You'd have thought GW would have learned from 9th ed 40k that you need to update the core troops of a faction first otherwise people aren't going to buy into it.

The success of a tabletop game and it's success as a Lore vehicle to sell novels are not interlinked. AOS by a lot of metrics is the 2nd most popular tabletop game around, but it is basically non-existent outside of that. A paucity of novels, absolutely barren lore discussion communities, dead wiki's, 0 man-talk-lore presence on youtube outside of 2+tough and even the fun meme-based communities that are supposedly named after the system like r/Sigmarxism talk more about 40k than AOS. This is the complete opposite of 30k which has probably done more to keep Black Library afloat over the last 20 years than anything else they publish, and takes up 70% of all lore discussion, youtube videos and memes online about 40k itself, and yet the last time I saw anybody playing 30k the game was a year and a half ago.

Again, it isn't a good thing to be finding these supposed limited boxes in the wild over 2 years later. Boxes like Dominion and Leviathan swallow up a HUGE amount of GW's production capacity, which has already been having a terrible time for the past 2 years, so if they they produce like 60% too many of them that's an absurd amount of plastic and cardboard that hasn't gone into keeping their other ranges in-stock. If we want to use new players as an excuse here, well I'd hazard a guess that more new players will be looking at 40k, so if 40k product ranges are getting hammered by needing to produce an AOS or Warcry or KT box that won't sell enough then that's objectively worse for new players. As I said before; there are countries that have had certain products out of stock for over a year now. That's how bad GW's logistics are struggling currently. Overproducing these big prestige boxes that either rot away on shelves or end up having to be sent back to Nottingham to be destroyed is not all that good for anyone outside of finding cheap extras if you're going some crazy skewlist of 100 ETB hobgrots or 120 ETB necron warriors or something.

The character system in 10th works horribly and is not something you want replicated. If AOS just had 9th's Look Out Sir rule it would be way better.

It all comes down to how GW decides to judge or spin numbers. In terms of sheer volume sold Dominion probably was the "best" launch to date. But they absolutely 100% overproduced it to an absurd degree. I remember the release time and talking to some LGS owners around me, and they were telling me that GW reps were really trying to push absurd numbers of the box onto them, solely because Indomitus had done so well and Paul Marketing at GW thought that ALL boxes would sell that well. This lead to them trying to get the biggest LGS to take on 200 boxes of the new BB. For comparisons sake, they sold 125 boxes of Indomitus. BB is not as big as 40k. Dominion was much the same, trying to get them to order 150-200 boxes of it and doing the usual "oh but remember Indomitus? And Age of Sigmar has been growing a lot in recent years..." spiel, completely ignoring actual reality in general but also locally; the owner had to say to them repeatedly that AOS just wasn't anywhere near the popularity of 40k locally and that he'd had 15 boxes of Soul Wars back in 2018 that he still had stock of 3 years later. It's a very common PR spin within the corporate world, especially within investor reports, to game the numbers to make the performance of something look a lot better than it actually is. Video game publishers love to bandy around numbers of accounts, or hours played over a specific time, or any other number of tricks, to make the performance of a product look really impressive. So you can have a game that only hit half of its expected revenue/player count/sales in a specific time, but if its a big enough game that's still enough players that you can pull out "[x] amount of hours played over release week" and it will be a big impressive number to hopefully fool investors and journalists. And it being overproduced and available for so long is also not some pro-consumer thing either. Every Dominion box that goes unsold and rots away on a shelf or has to get sent back to GW warehouses to be destroyed is potentially half a dozen other products that aren't being produced. Since 2020 we've had consistent issues with stock and availability of GW products, which is made worse when they do a big box game release that eats up all other production and exacerbates those issues even further. Look I love that you can buy multiple boxes of Dominion to get a bunch of extra Yndrasta's, good for you. But there are countries out there where people have not been able to buy Land Raiders, Fire Prisms or Battle Cows for OVER A YEAR. That's not an exaggeration either.

This is cropped art of the eventual 4th ed battletome and you can't convince me otherwise.

also really hoping the Ard Boyz have options other than spears

Very happy as an Ironjawz/Gitz player, although Trugg might end up going on a square base and being an Idol of Gork for my Oldhammer games. 😂 Do wonder if the current ard boyz/black orcs kit is going to keep being sold but for ToW instead.

If nids are the sunday preview for today it's wild to me that we haven't even seen the codex cover yet, or even have any details on the Marine model release. They are keeping things crazy close to their chest right now.

GW have been massively overproducing these types of boxes recently. You really shouldn't have any issues getting hold of one, especially as AOS is far from 40K's level of popularity.

Loving these Soulblight Vampires continuing to be an excellent source of Drukhari kitbash material. Hello new Archon.

Two main ones: - Get thee gone double turn. Can lead to one player having to sit through 2 turns of doing nothing (which for a game that already has a lot of downtime really isn't good) and it also leads to highly restrictive and boring listbuilding because if you do want to "play around" the "priority roll" then it massively constrains how your army is built. The fact that GW has had to bolt on so many band-aid fixes to this one mechanic to try and make it work should tell you that it doesn't work. - Any future GHB/mission packs should just be... missions, and maybe "secondaries" or whatever they might be. All this extra realm stuff with new battalions, enhancements and command abilities is just an extra layer of annoyance and complexity that the game doesn't benefit from. And I say this as someone who is no enemy of complexity.

Mostly this is down to all the different reaction or interruptive rules that can trigger, such as moving in an opponents turn.* A lot of it just massively slows the game down or just makes some units practically unable to be dealt with by certain armies because they just don't have the movement speed to close the distance and make that extra move useless. Putting Overwatch in the movement phase too has had disastrous knock-on effects for game smoothness too; if both players know what they're doing they know how good Overwatch is now, so every movement phase becomes a player moving a unit, stopping, and asking their opponent if they would like to Overwatch; the opponents might consider for a little bit and then either do it or not. Repeat this for all 10 movement phases, with some armies able to do it multiple times, and the time it takes to get through a game balloons out of control. And this isn't even getting into the balance concerns with it either: one of the reasons for most Aeldari infantry being useless as I descrbed above is also down to Overwatch. T3 1W infantry just get chewed up as soon as they want to move anywhere, so unless they're super cheap or can respawn endlessly their use in-game is basically very limited. There's other stuff too such as Fly movement now requiring diagonal moves if non-infantry flyers want to go over terrain; it sounds like a good idea conceptually, but not only does it make it more worthwhile to just go around most terrain features as most Fly models (thereby defeating most of the purpose of the keyword), if you're actually playing the game properly diagonally measuring and moving units like this is an absolute nightmare. The same applies to the Charge & Fight Phase changes; GW removed most of the "jank" surrounding fight phase movement which I guess some people would like (not me, I enjoyed that aspect of 9th's fight phase) but now the fight phase takes longer to play because of all the "Must" qualifiers put into the rules about distances. It turns the phases into these long drawn out slogs of having to measure out every individual model. Characters joining units has really only shown itself to "work" if you're an army like Space Marines; where the sheer amount of characters, who all wear the same armour and are the same size as the units they lead, means that for the most part there's always at least one good choice for a Leader to attach to, or a unit to have. Then you get to every other army and the system just breaks down. The nonsense of Tyranid characters becoming weaker by joining bodyguard units because mixed toughness isn't really a thing and Sisters and Aeldari having these restrictive bodyguard units which either just make certain character/bodyguards useless dead picks are the prime examples here. But there's also just the fact it's made big deathball units the meta again as if your characters often cannot benefit anything outside their own unit, you just put all of your eggs into one basket instead. Then if the bodyguard unit dies, you're left with a bunk character that often doesn't do anything else. The shift over to Tempest also makes games longer, as there is the requisite drawing of your cards, reading your objectives, looking at the board state to figure out if you can do them, thinking about it, and either continuing on with your turn, or discarding one and pulling another card out and repeating that process. This isn't a major thing on its own, but when both players are doing it over 5 turns then time quickly gets added onto the clock. And while I enjoyed Tempest in 9th, and enjoy Tactical Objs in 10th, they are definitely frustrating for a lot of people to play and do not "reward building balanced armies" or whatever nonsense people liked to say about them in 9th compared to the GT missions. If you don't have cheap highly mobile throwaway units you cannot play the mission pack well, just like Tempest. And so your only choice is to lean into pure lethality and table your opponents. Can't do that either? Well, have fun I guess? Not to mention the randomness makes it difficult for people to counterplay their opponents objective play which was a huge part of 9th. Now the best general play, even if you can play objs well, is just to table people by turn 3 because if they get better draws than you in the first 3 turns it can be incredibly difficult to actually make that comeback. Not to mention the inconsistency of which cards can be freely discarded on turn 1; somehow GW thinks Behind Enemy Lines and Seize Enemy Output are easily doable in the first turn despite like, maybe Aeldari and Marines being the only ones conceptually capable of doing it somewhat reliably. Also, requiring every unit to now have its own super special unique rules adds more bloat, burden of knowledge, imbalance and gotcha moments onto the game than stratagems ever did. A unit can't just be a fast moving skimmer with a heavy weapon on it anymore; it now needs some additional rule where it places a debuff on an enemy unit somehow EXCEPT if it's the same skimmer with slightly different weapons it now has a completely different rule entirely. Certain artillery units have absolutely punishing "Pinning" rules that can severely limit the movement of units; in 8th and 9th these were stratagems and so could only be used once except for the one exploit end of 8th where a Thunderfire Cannon could Tremor Shells 2 units at once and was considered wildly OP as a result. Now just take 3 Nightspinners or 3 Basilisks or 3 TFCs/2 Whirlwinds etc and just be hitting 3-5 units with these rules every single turn. *AOS players will immediately think of Redeploy here. Guess which mechanic, aside from the double turn, makes people bounce off of AOS the most? Yeah, it's Redeploy. Now Redeploy is everywhere in 40k.

I've played more 10th and my opinion of it has soured even more. Just lots of change for the sake of change. Even its most arguably positive changes aren't necessarily an improvement on 9th, they're just something different. And there's a wealth of rules that look good on a first read but quickly show themselves to be problems in terms of mechanics or just general game smoothness if you just play a handful of games with them. There is maybe the skeleton of a good edition in there. I once heard someone describe 10th as a bunch of stuff that is a conceptually good idea until it hits actual game mechanics and it falls apart. Them rushing it out to meet the 3 year deadline clearly did tremendous damage to it.

8th and 9th had codex releases for every faction. 9th had model releases for basically every faction (think only IK were left without one?), with pretty expansive releases and refreshes for a good number too.

Influencers who received the new epic 30k box are being asked to send the books back. So definitely some very bad print errors.

Just seems like a repeat of the Kruleboyz; an overwhelming amount of characters and/or monsters but the actual core of the faction is looking very barebones. Not that I'm too bothered by it; definitely not a fan of the new CoS stuff although I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes them look so off to me.

Apparently the delay for 30k epic is because of an embarrassing error printed in the rulebook so they've had to reprint. An embarrassing error in this case using a real world quote from a real world historical regime that might be a lil' bit yikes.

Yeah if the mechanic really is just everything can fight and there's no exact lining up corners to see who can/can't fight then I could legit see circular bases on movement trays being perfectly useable in the new system. That would actually be pretty massive.

The removal of the psychic phase in 40k has actually been really bad. It's made everything less interactive and given players and their opponents less agency in a lot of cases. This doesn't have to mean TOW will be the same, but there's already an instance of it not working in another GW game system currently so I'd be a little worried. Really not a fan of the whole wide frontages thing either. One of the things that killed old fantasy was the increasingly large rank bonus required to have functional units and how the actual regiment sets sold didn't give you useable units in that regard unless you bought 3 of them. Seems like it's just repeating the same mistakes and will have the same end results.

Really big fan of all the new nid stuff. Felt like the nid aesthetic had basically been stagnating for years and had locked itself into a highly restrictive and very narrow set of design archetypes, so it's nice to see what obvious new blood in the design studio has come up by deciding to branch out and obviously ignore a lot of pre-established "rules" about Tyranid aesthetics. And even then they still realized when things worked and didn't need to radically redesign basic gaunts or lictors, just bring them up to date. It's little things too like the design of the scything talons/legs on a lot of the models having more texture and shape to them rather than being these big perfectly curved shapes with ultra smooth sides. It's not just advances in plastic injection moulds; that's a conscious design choice and one which really adds to a lot of these models.

I don't have any firm info about it, but certainly hearing ex-studio or head office people speak about WHFB vs AOS there was a constant desire to do something new with the setting. A lot of the creatives at the time didn't like the faux-historical setting and wanted to do their own thing. More than anything else I think this was the actual driving force behind the move. People will bring up financials but literally everything GW was doing during this time period was tanking. Even 40k was doing poorly. We also have some evidence that 8th edition 40k was doing to be an AOS-style reset, and even though it didn't go that far it did move things forward and heralded a shift in how that game has been developed. Having had experience of management types in large corpo settings I would imagine going back to WHFB in any way shape or form looks like some kind of admission of failure or backtracking to them. I wouldn't be surprised if there are several forces at work within the company that want to get rid off all traces of the old game and the only reason we still have stuff like Skaven, or new Seraphon sculpts, is that the counter-forces were loud enough to keep them around. People act like big corporations are these hyper logical perfect business entities that are always doing the most hyper optimal moves; the reality is they're full of and run by absolute morons a lot of the time who have just consistently gotten lucky, or cornered a niche in the market and are operating on pure inertia, and the internal workings of said companies can be riven by drama, inter-office politics and giant egos. Whenever you see any big public management change in a large company, entertainment companies especially, you can almost always expect a load of in-dev projects being canned because the new boss wants to "put their mark on the company." Or whatever. Really wouldn't be surprised that whoever or however the main GW studio is being run really doesn't like that the specialist games team wants to try out WHFB again.

The rank bonus being made 5 was one of the things that started WHFB's decline. So I fully expect it to be the case in TOW.

I think it's funny that they announce 30k Epic and immediately show off models and rules for it, meanwhile TOW is going on like 4 years since announcement with, uh, 3 models shown off and 0 rules content. Really does feel like someone somewhere in GW wanted to do the project to keep eyes on the IP, but several other forces within the company are incredibly hostile towards it. My experience of GW employees during the early-mid 10's, during that time but also hearing them talk since then, is that the entire company was just looking for any excuse to get rid of Fantasy. This wasn't just some financial thing either this was a lot of the creatives wanting it gone and replaced by what would eventually become AOS.

Aspect Warriors are basically Aeldari Space Marines, so no. A Marine will be a good generalist, an Aspect Warrior specializes in one specific area to be the best in that respect. A Howling Banshee is a nightmarish combat threat and could blend through plenty of normal Marines with ease, so Marines should shoot her before she gets to them and in a shooting contest the Banshee isn't winning. On the flipside very few Astartes things are winning a shoot-out with a Dark Reaper, but they can beat them in combat, so that's what they should aim to do. Currently in 10th Howling Banshees lose combats to basic Marine line infantry, despite being specialized anti-elite combat shock troops. The one thing they are meant to be good at, is something they lose at. Narratively individual Aeldari forces number in the couple of dozens, just like individual Marine forces. They are equally as elite in-lore. And this is just Aspect Warriors. We have things like Incubi and Troupes and other similarly elite Marine-killing things becoming atrocious and chaff-like.