Bosskelot

Definitely not a fan of the new CoS stuff. Something about most of it just looks really off. The armour and weapon designs plus the poses just look awkward. On the other hand Tahlia looks incredible.

Having played a bunch of 10th Ed games now I should hope that AOS4 takes as little from them as possible. The core rules alone are plagued with issues and a substantial step down from 9th, and this isn't even getting into the mess that is the Indexes. A lot of this can't be fixed either as it seems to be core central design intention rather than mistake. A good example of this is the "chaff-fication" of many units, where anything that isn't a Marine or above has been made substantially worse and seen huge points drops as a result. It leads to 8th Ed problems again with Aspect Warriors being worse than generic Marines in the areas they're meant to specialise in, but still being "good for their points" because they're so cheap. But that seems to fly in complete opposition to the Aeldari identity of a relatively small elite force. There are so many bizarre choices in design in 10th, the consistent reintroducing issues that were problems in 8th or early 9th and fixed is one of the biggest ones in general

It's always gonna be a careful balancing act between standardizing a lot of stuff for ease of play vs having more unique things in order to bring out the flavour of each unit/army. For all its issues WHFB was actually a pretty simple rules system, helped along by how much standardization and usage of USR's there were. Everyone would know what the base statlines of a human, elf, dwarf or orc were, and how these would change when being mounted, including any equipment they had and what it would do as things like Light Armour, Halberds, Spears, Shields etc were all universal. Of course this can lead to blandness, or tricky situations where for design or balance reasons it would actually be sensible to really change some of the core statline for a unit in order to help differentiate it or balance it in some ways. (like how a lot of elite units get +1 W over their normal counterparts in AOS) Of course the designers can go completely overboard sometimes, the Stormdrake Guard being the best example here. Half of the abilities don't need to be on that warscroll and then on top of that most of them could be handled much better as weapon USR's as you're seeing with 40k 10th. Of course 10th looks like its having its own potential problems already in that by making declarative statements about how many rules an army will have and having datasheets being physically limited to a set size, GW has removed all ability to expand their system. I know players of a few armies who liked their mechanics in 9th and who are really bummed at how their army now has 1 singular faction rule. Not only that you now have certain units which would actually benefit and be fine with being more complicated than others, but will have to lose a whole load of rules and mechanics in order to fit on those tiny rectangular cards.

Again, /tg/'s reputation for accurate leaks is basically 0% Which is funny because 4chan is completely anonymous, it'd be so easy to accurately leak stuff on there, but nobody does.

All they've said is that the pdf factions won't be part of the narrative and won't be getting new models, at least initially. Considering a lot of the pdf factions are stuff which is still mostly being sold through AOS I fail to see where a lot (I do get some of it) of the doomposting is coming from.

Having 0 rules for models in AOS will be super weird since that describes the ranges of more than half of the factions mentioned in both the narrative stuff and the pdf ones. Skaven rules without clanrats? Yeah, okay.

Personally I find the concerns that the pdf factions may end of being Legends'd really absurd. Things get put in Legends when the models stop being made and sold. Have a look at all of the AOS factions in those pdf armies and tell me their entire model ranges are going to stop being sold. Go on.

Yeah the entire 00's as a period was incredibly inconsistent model quality wise. You could really tell GW had gained the capabilities to make models a little more three dimensional than the very static 2D posed stuff of the 90's, but a lot of the designers were obviously struggling to keep up and multipart plastic kits varied wildly in quality. For every great Juan Diaz sculpt you had some real stinkers like a lot of the Lizardmen stuff of the time or the atrocious Chaos Ogres.

The main issue is that their messaging and general presentation for TOW is just so messy and obtuse. Like, all that Q&A stuff should be in an official video or warcom article.

Resin is perfectly fine (preferred in a few cases tbh) and specifically FW resin has massively improved in recent years. Hell you can't even say it costs too much in comparison because GW plastic characters are costing more than FW ones now.

Seeing old WHFB factions get the modern GW trailer and preview treatment will continue to be weird lol

Dawnbringers are definitely not for me, I guess. Funny that they showed off an old Empire knight for comparison and I still thought it looked cooler than the Cavaliers lol Really underwhelming preview regardless. Harbringer and Maw-Grunta look amazing at least. Not sure that AOS3 needs to be pivoting into its end of edition campaign when its not even 2 years old yet but hey alright and I'm sure FEC players are loving having to wait until potentially 2024 for their book while a bunch of campaign books and FOMO boxes take priority.

To be fair Valrak barely has a passing interest in 40k. Hearing him talk about anything non-Marine is just pure cringe because he is completely ignorant of it.

Their painting videos aren't even showing up in my youtube subscriptions anymore.

Yeah I've been using the new troll and squig models on squares for years now, with base adapters if I ever want to actually play gloomspite in AoS.

What is the new wolf rider kit like in terms of options? Can you construct them without shields or only bows?

Having a huge part of Dominion taken up by Hobgrotz probably wasn't the best idea either. But then it's not like Kruleboyz had lots of other units to fill that space. Also, GW overproducing stuff is still actually an issue for hobbyists as they don't have infinite production capacity and warehouse space. You can praise the market being flooded with cheap Dominion sculpts which nobody actually bought all you want, but all that production time and materials is stuff not being allocated to already existing products that were, and still are, consistently struggling to stay in-stock. Great there are 200k extra Yndrasta's in the wild for hobbyists. Those same hobbyists struggled for a year to actually get a hold of like, Fire Prisms because GW couldn't produce them fast enough to meet actual demand.

The GW of that time period was very different to the one now. They had a tiny roster of active games and were haemorrhaging money. Even 40k was doing poorly and close to being End Times'd itself.

Yeah this might put the rumours of the Bret v TK starter set to bed. I think GW really should be more transparent as to what this project is even meant to be although I do think they're in an unenviable position. Devoting a huge amount of budget and production capacity to overhauling a load of old ranges for a product that doesn't even exist anymore/yet is highly risky, but at the same time they run the risk of not really drawing people back in to the game without the promise of new models. On top of that if they're going to be selling these old ranges at the new modern prices then it's going to be an even harder sell. Back when 7th ed was coming out I was going to make an Empire army, until the new kits came out as boxes of 10 for the same price as the old boxes of 20. Of course nowadays I have plenty of disposable income and could happily spend unwise amounts on stupid plastic toy soldiers if I want because my other outgoings are minimal. But not everyone is in my situation. Not only that but the death of WHFB really did open up a lot of peoples eyes to other games and other miniature ranges to get their fix; the one thing that keeps people coming back to GW is model quality and if you're just getting the old Knight models again except this time for 50% more than they used to be then uhhhhhh...?

This was basically confirmed as a Marine immediately. It's the exact same design as a former FW upgrade kit.

Empire would still be accurate as like Marines of the HH they will just be palette swaps.

Toughness does not make the game complex.

When it comes to hordes and unit sizes 7th was the edition that really started the decline and loss of popularity of the game, as the rank bonus was changed from 4 wide to 5 wide. This immediately overnight invalidated and made worse a load of regiment sets that previously were 16 models, so you could have a 4x4 unit and have one that was fully functional and able to gain full rank bonus; suddenly in 7th it now was lacking 4 models for that juicy +3 rank bonus. Now sure, in 6th people would often take bigger units and go 20 minimum anyway, but it gave people an easy way to just get regiments onto the table as a jumping off point. Also around this same time the new Empire state troops came out... as a unit of 10 rather than the old unit of 20. That certainly didn't bode well for how the game would continue to be handled going forward.

The friction between low fantasy vs high fantasy was already an existing thing within WHFB long before it ended. You had a giant explosion of player numbers during 6th during a time when the game was very about mass battles rank and flank and reasonably on the low fantasy side of things rather than super crazy fantastical stuff. One of the contributing factors to the games decline was, in the rare times it was actually updated, GW kept on doing these giant crazy monster centrepiece models and weird stuff like flying bird chariots. Not only did a large portion of the playerbase not really find these appealing, but they were bunk in-game too. Elf players wanted spearman and cavalry and cool new elite units, not flying chariots. It's why the reception to Cathay has been so mixed and why some of the Kislev stuff hasn't really resonated with people.

That above criticism of space marine reveals could be equally levelled at Stormcast though? This is the first major marine release since templars 2 years ago, and even then they only got like 4 kits. Meanwhile 9th has had giant refreshes and massive updates for Necrons, Craftworlds, Guard, Sisters, Orks, Chaos Knights, Chaos Marines and even slipped in a new army with Votaan. With the upcoming Nid refresh too there's increasingly very little 90's/early 2000's plastic left in the game too. I know AOS players have got a major chip on their shoulder about their game but I think a lot of the times people just really do need to actually pay some attention to what happens in other systems and their ranges. The 3rd edition releases so far have been absolutely pathetic and at least half of the factions are languishing with increasingly outdated ranges that are aging terribly, or with new ranges that are embarrassingly half-baked and in desperate need of expansion. Thank god for the Seraphon update because jesus they needed it and it also looks fantastic.