Bosskelot

If anything I'm coming round to the idea of TK v Brets being a good choice for starter set factions, precisely because they sold poorly initially. This means that very few people actually have armies of them. If they were to do Empire v Greenskins, or High Elves v Greenskins/Skaven/whatever... well the issue is all the old WHFB players already have those armies. There's less incentive for them to buy into a box like that. And look, if people still exist who are into WHFB they have already moved on to playing other systems with their collections. They already play T9A, KoW or 6th/7th/8th still. They don't really need a return of WHFB from a rules perspective outside of maybe re-uniting the disparate playerbase; what they are interested in is new and ongoing model support. TOW wants to capture a new playerbase sure, but it also needs the veterans on board and supportive too and if they can do that by getting those older players to be buying GW again then surely they'll go in that direction. Remember the issue with Tomb Kings is that they had their refreshed range come out at a time when WHFB, and indeed most of GW's sales, were just cratering. This was fully into the bad era of Kirby with horrible business decisions, ****** rules, little effort put into capturing and retaining players, very little model support for things outside of space marines (remember 40k during this time wasn't doing well either) and the LOTR bubble had properly burst which had thrown all of their finances into chaos. There really is nothing inherently bad about TK as a faction; they certainly have a lot more inherent strengths than their spiritual successors the Ossiarchs, but they came out with amazing new models for them which were all completely useless in-game and the core model range of the faction already looked really outdated and bad even though at that point it was maybe only like 10 years old. That's why it didn't sell. As for Brets they literally had their 6th edition release in like 2002 or 2003 and then that was it. They didn't even get army books in 7th and 8th. This can't be blamed on sales either as for a long period of time the GW design studio was basically directionless and made what it wanted to make; nobody there really had any desire to keep working on or updating Bretonnians past the early 00's.

Just to be clear most of these influencers barely play the game if at all. Valrak literally admitted recently he doesn't play 40k so his opinions on the state of the game can't really be given a ton of weight. I think there's a consistent issue across AOS and 40K right now where they've had a large influx of new fans who in many cases have spent loads of money on model collections and then found out they don't actually enjoy the games, or they just don't like tabletop wargaming period. So despite having like, 3-5 games under their belts they suddenly become experts in how the games should be changed. It's about simplification, but even then things like OPR exist and are free; they can move over to those systems and play them at any time, and yet they don't. Because even those systems are too much for them, because fundamentally they just cannot get into wargaming. It isn't really something they'll ever enjoy and yet they'll complain endlessly that games should bend over to accommodate them when really no changes could ever actually make them sit down and read and memorize the rules. Because that's what the issue is. Not to say both AOS and 40K are flawless, far from it, and there are plenty of improvements that could be made to both. Sigmar should've yeeted the double turn, fixed its shooting mechanics and introduced proper terrain rules in 3rd; 40K could legit use some parsing down of stratagems and doctrine-style army rules to simplify the game. But that's the thing; you do all these things and these same people will still not play the games, they'll still have complaints about how they're too complicated.

Also they're a horde army that is actually kind of difficult to paint. Lots of fiddly metallic parts and two-toned exposed areas that are both fur and skin. Comparing that to painting Night Goblins and people will go towards Night Goblins in the majority of cases. Also doesn't help that the original multipart plastic clanrats looked dated even when they came out. That was a very awkward time as GW was still in the early days of doing multipart plastic kits; some like the original Empire state troops and Orc Boyz nailed it (Perry Twins and Brian Nelson taking big W's for that), but then you had the original Chaos Warrior kit from end of 5th ed and said Clanrats which looked uhhhh not great, even for the late 90's/early 2000's. Of course modern clanrats look a lot better but they also came out at a time when WHFB as a whole was basically collapsing.

/tg/ has basically never been correct about any leaks.

I do definitely agree with this. Even the colour scheme of the wolf riders makes them more reminiscent of the EM Kruleboyz.

I mean to be completely fair Gitz already have a really solid and fairly recent model range. Out of all the armies in AOS currently they would've been one of the last ones I thought "needed" a big second wave of models.

Yeah it also doesn't give a very clear idea of how consistent the popularity of a game is. AOD may have had a good launch but it's currently difficult to gauge if ongoing sales of its product ranges are selling well or not.

They aren't selling because everyone already has the models and they lock you into a specific chapter as part of the savings of the box are taken up by chapter locked characters and upgrade sprues. Once actually new models come out people will buy those. Regardless that's an especially funny thing to say comparing the releases of 9th edition to 3.0. Ask Skaven, Fyreslayers, Ironjawz, Idoneth players how they feel about the last year and the supposed superiority in AOS releases compared to 40k.

The Marine battleforces recently are because they're trying to shift unsold stock. Notice how they're still not selling either. A lot of big 3rd party retailers haven't even gotten the 4 new Marine battleforces because the RG and IF ones aren't selling.

It's also very clearly an upgrade sprue for the existing Kabalite Warrior kit as the legs match 1:1. Thee trend for KT boxes is one entirely new set of minis combined with an existing one with a set of upgrades.

That's exceptionally funny because the RG and IF forces are still on sale absolutely everywhere. My LGS was only allocated 2 of each of the christmas boxes, they still still have both of their RG/IF boxes sitting on the shelf.

The strength of it is that mechanically it's basically the same as the regular matched play rules, with primary and secondary objectives and similar army construction rules, but the secondaries are all randomly drawn each turn from the card deck. This removes a huge overhead and pregame angst from more casual players and makes them feel less like they can lose in listbuilding because they picked an army that would struggle to do most secondaries. Now, ToW really doesn't actually solve that problem, and you can still very easily metagame it to make a ToW-specific strong list, but the perception of that being the case is more important for players. The randomness of it helps to take mental strain off of them, either from a decision making standpoint, or a player skill standpoint.

I think all these posts saying a "casual" mission pack wouldn't catch on are missing that Tempest of War for 40k, widely regarded as being the "casual" mission pack compared to the GT stuff, has been a wild success and is probably the actual default way to play the game for the majority of people now.

Yeah both AOS and 40K are following this seasonal model but 40k is currently doing it better. The Chapter Approved are just mission packs and really the most they do to mess with army construction and core rules is halving the starting amount of command points. It's still fundamentally the same game of 40k as if playing Crusade, Core book missions or Tempest of War. The AOS system is just so weirdly bloated and complex and just ghettoizes the playerbase. With rumours of 10th ed on the horizon I really hope the 40k team isn't being tempted to implement something similar. There's plenty of other fine ideas to crib from AOS, please do not take one of the worst ones.

So a lot of the more generic codex marine chapters aren't actually very popular at all. You can see this most recently with the RG and IF boxes still being on sale. GW's done this huge push in recent years to make the codex chapters more of a thing but it isn't something based on already existing popularity. SW, BA and DA do have absolutely huge fanbases but that's because they've had dedicated codex and model support for close to 30 years now.

Yeah trying to make people avoid the double turn discussion because it is somehow off-topic but then allowing a load of posts about horus bloody heresy is peak ridiculousness. Not really. 8th died for multitude of reasons, many of which started in 7th and sort of compounded upon each other over time. GW of that time period was also a very different company to what it is now and there's been a lot of evidence and statements by former employees that 40k was originally planned to have an AOS-style reset itself before the new management that came in during 2015 saw how badly AOS 1.0 did and (wisely) put that idea into the bin. Although some of the contributing factors to 8th's demise were a lack of regular releases, with many armies languishing with outdated stuff or even without proper updated rules, for years at a time, and also bad releases that added stuff to armies that they either didn't want or need, or were actively bad in the rules system of the game. Tomb Kings are like the ur-example of this; gorgeous new monster sculpts (all pretty bad in the 8th edition ruleset) and yet all of their core infantry were still the ancient (even for that time) outdated plastics that really hadn't aged well. I think there's definitely echoes of that in AOS 3 currently, with far too many armies languishing with ancient sculpts or half-finished rosters, meanwhile they get yet another plastic hero on foot to go along with the 12 others in their book. However, to stay history is going to repeat itself is just panicmongering and GW nowadays have a much better handle on how to do releases and support their games properly; it's just a lot of this stuff takes time. It does however sting for AOS when 40k has had a crazy edition where almost every other army has had extensive model refreshes and expansions that have focused on bringing ranges into the 21st century properly, yet Skaven are still having to buy individual poison wind globadiers from 1994 for £12, and Ironjawz haven't actually had any model release since like 2016.

Yep, the double turn is a weight around the games neck and is actively stymying its growth in many respects. I have seen plenty of people either steer clear of Sigmar because of it, or dip their toes in for a while only to leave the game fairly quickly later because of it. And no, you cannot just chalk this up to 40k players being scared of a different turn order than they're used to; this includes LOTR players and other players of systems that have actually good functioning priority rolls. You'd think with all the band-aid fixes they've tried to apply to the game that the GW designers would wake up and realize it isn't working, but I've always had the impression that the mechanic is someone's darling and they're reluctant to let it go.

Just because a new edition comes in summer, it doesn't mean other systems get left alone. In fact the usual play recently has been to release a new edition, and then do the actual full model releases for that edition a few months down the line. Part of this could be down to covid and supply chain issues, but, uh, those aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Looking at it historically you had AOS3 last summer, but you also had Sisters and the Beast Snaggas box in the same quarter too. Covid messed 2020 but even then the Lumineth set launched in the same time period as Indomitus. If we go back to AOS2 you had Imperial Knights getting their big release the same month as Soul Wars.

Don't forget Orks and Sisters in that too. As for reveals I like that there's finally some good replacements for my ancient wolf riders. Those new ones are going straight onto squares for my oldhammer/KoW/T9A greenskin army.

40k on paper is highly lethal, but there are several things the game does to offset this. Not only are there plenty of absolute bricks in terms of survivability, but the terrain rules help to ensure not every weapon can be brought to bear on every enemy unit whenever a player wants. In fact in a lot of 40k games turns 1 and 2 are filled with skirmishing and often very few casualties as both armies jockey into position in order to have their big turns on 3 onwards. Trading units efficiently and sensibly is a core part of competitive 40k and getting consistent scoring off of that; not of doing a giant alpha strike and winning the game immediately. There are armies that lean more towards that style of play, and bad match-ups where one faction might be more vulnerable to an alpha strike from a certain other faction, but they're either rarer or they're sort of skew lists focused around gimmicks and so end up being seen less. Generally the mission design deprioritizes killing too as lists usually have a significant portion of their points dedicated to objective holders and action-do'ers, who themselves might often not be the main sources of damage in an army. Even scary psykers might just be in a list to be doing psychic secondaries and scoring points, not to be doing mass amounts of mortal wounds. Grand strategies and battle tactics do lean towards the 40k style of mission design conceptually, but in reality lists are still just the same as they've ever been in AOS; spam the most efficient damage-dealers and kill your opponent. Those efficient damage-dealers can be your battleline too so you truly can just take nothing but them and be totally fine. This also leads into another divergence in the two systems with damage allocation and wound rolls where, again, AOS deprioritizes variety in unit/weapon types as damage overspill and flat wound rolls encourage finding the most mathematically universal damage dealers. A good example of what I mean is looking at pre-nerf pre-tome Sentinels, whom the Lumineth player could just spam, alongside Big T, and basically table people while not really doing a whole lot. Imperial Guard in 40k are actually very similar in a way; their shooting even pre-codex is frightening after being buffed lots in dataslates.... but being a very static gunline army in 40k is not a good way to play it. Guard are still in the mid-30's despite their terrifying shooting because that terrifying shooting does not directly lead into winning games. I do sometimes wonder if a combination of generally high points costs and no real restrictions on unit spam incentivise AOS to play like this. I'm sure if rule of 3 was removed back out of 40k we'd go back to the bad old days of early 8th again and the game would immediately get a lot more miserable. And 40k is able to have back and forth early game trading/skirmishing battles because most armies have access to cheap throwaway units.

A lot of what I'm hearing in this thread is that AOS really does need its own Tempest of War.

Honestly most of your reasons could apply to lots of different game systems, GW especially, so if other GW games seem to be doing fine in your local area maybe the reasons are more systemic and down to AOS specifically and also the local AOS scene. Games are basically kept alive by their communities and it sounds like you've got a pretty bad one for AOS. Trying to find regular AOS games in my local scene is like trying to find hens teeth; a lot of the locals have just decided to do a single monthly meet up where they all just.... play each other like they always do, and often with a very competitive bent. It's exceptionally hard for newer players to break into that group or find games on the reg. This is in stark contrast to games like 40K, LOTR, Saga, Gaslands, Blood Bowl and others which have regular organised weekly meet ups and gaming nights, and where 40k especially has people always looking for a game on most days, not just the club organised ones. Guess which systems are thriving down here right now. So yeah, a bad local scene and very AOS specific game issues are probably why your scene is struggling.

Highly tempted by that Sylvaneth box. The Skaven one too for Oldhammer/T9A/KoW.

Bretts and Tomb Kings being the starter armies just sounds like a total meme. There were definitely unfair reasons placed on them to be the most unpopular armies in the game back in the day, but even if GW runs itself a lot more sensibly now it just seems like a suicidal idea to have those two factions be the face of this new game system. The only way I see it is if GW truly wants to distance TOW and AOS from each other to a pretty radical degree.

I mean that's more a problem with the Necron codex; they haven't been a faction known for good AP on basic weapons since like the days of 5th-7th, 8th onwards they've just been completely pathetic in that respect. Where GW fell short in the design of the Necron codex is making them a melee army (because they actually get great ap and damage profiles on their melee weapons) but then still trying to present them as a shooting army in marketing. I will agree with you that AOC is a bad "fix" for a perceived problem, but ever since AOC was introduced I've actually tabled Marine armies, which is not something I was ever doing with Necron armies previously. Turns out buffing the anti-Marine combat units does wonders for flipping the match-up on its head from where it was in early 9th.