[The Rumour Thread]

The delay between Dominion and the Tomes is actually less than Indomitus and the Codexes. It was a 3 month wait for those, whereas this is going to be 2 months.

What's making this feel longer is that GW are being far more tight-lipped about the direction of AOS than they were with 40k 9th. On Indomitus release day, they had their Codex show livestream that revealed basically everything remaining modelwise (I think?) but also showed off a ton of rules too. It also had sneak peeks of the new DG, Admech, Drukhari, Sisters and Ork models which gave people some idea as to what was coming next.

Not only did the Dominion livestream not reveal any rules, it didn't have any previews or sneak peeks for other upcoming AOS releases either. And the trickle of information since then has been slow and minor.

In September 2020 the Codexes were still a month out, but we still knew a lot of rules information and knew that after Marines and Necrons, we were getting BA/SW/DW supplements and Admech, DA, DG, Drukhari, Sisters and Orks at some point after those. What information do we have about AOS lmao

EDIT: and what makes this even worse is that one of the factions in the Dominion box set is basically unusable in-game currently.

[The Rumour Thread]

1 hour ago, Fyrenn said:

I agree...  i can't begrudge (too much) a company making a decision on a delay, there are a lot of reasons why that might happen.

I think just locally it feels that the buzz/hype is dying down with so many unknowns.  We know they're going to be doing rules articles prior to the release, I guess I just don't know why they can't throw one or two of those out now just to keep things moving.  I can't see how it would hurt, and it seems to me some people legitimately are in holding patterns while they wait for x:  rules for warclans, waaghs, next release, FAQ, and so on.  

It doesn't have to have lots of flashy images, just a couple paragraphs can continue to wet appetites' for what is coming.

 

 

The time between Indomitus and Codex release was even longer, but even then I feel like we had more information.

The Codex show Preview stream they did on Indom launch day showed off a load of rules for instance. The equivalent for AOS3 had.... nothing like that as far as I can recall?

[Warhammer - The Old World]

I still hope for support for round bases, just because I feel the game should take a page out of KoW's book and be about unit vs unit entities. There's no need for a game like WHFB to be on an individual base by base system.

This is sort of what I mean:
 

 

[Rumours on low Dominion sales - discussion]

GW sales reps have been incredibly pushy with indie retailers ever since Indomitus apparently. Really trying to make them order Indomitus levels of stock for every single box release, regardless of the game or the local scene.

At my local, he'd had the gw rep trying to justify 100+ boxes of Dominion because he'd sold 125 Indomitus boxes. The rep just didn't understand that despite AOS's growth, it's nowhere near 40k popularity in the slightest, especially locally.

He ended up ordering 30 only half of which have actually been sold with the rest now sitting on the shelf collecting dust.

[Rumours on low Dominion sales - discussion]

6 hours ago, Nos said:

And Dominion is actually the first GW boxed set to have two 1000+ plus armies, but again, that's not made clear, it's just an island of minis. 

Indomitus was two 1k armies.

Plus they were also legal armies to actually use in matched play, unlike the Kruleboy half of Dominion.

[Rumours on low Dominion sales - discussion]

On the flipside several different community surveys I've seen have put Gloomspite and Ironjawz as two of the most popular factions in the game.

And, like, people have this idea that Lumineth are popular but that's just because they had a big release and they get a lot of discussion because of their intensely crunchy rules that have a lot of controversial elements to them. There's little evidence any of this has translated into mass sales. It's not like Lumineth videos on youtube (lore/painting/battle reports) get uniquely higher numbers than usual, in fact a few channels I watch it's sometimes the opposite. Of the two LGS's near me, both still have stock of the LE army box and both managers have said the range isn't a massive mover despite the local area having an active AOS collector community.

It's obvious GW intend for Lumineth to be a significant sales presence and they have pushed them aggressively, but I'd say they've been out for long enough to get a rough idea that they've not taken over the game by any stretch. This is unlike something like Sisters of Battle where they were very vocal about the basic squad box becoming the single biggest seller of any of their products in 2019 (outselling all of the Marine stuff btw) and are now aggressively marketing them as being one of the new faces/postergirls of the game.

[Rumours on low Dominion sales - discussion]

Chikout said everything I would say really and in general people have been making lots of sensible points.

I think the the potentially lower expected sales of the box are indicative of the reception of AOS in general because of its somewhat weird design and faction choices. I have no doubt that if the Kruleboyz didn't have

a) such a silly name

and

b) such weird non-Warhammer designs

People might have been more enthusiastic about them.  A bunch of Brian Nelson Orc sculpts in there would've gotten people hyped; in fact just look at the new 40k Orks and how there's been a little bit of a mixed reaction to some of them precisely because it's clearly not Brian Nelson designing them. With the Kruleboyz not only do their heads and faces look strange, their proportions are weird to people too. But it's because AOS has this chip on its shoulder about trying to be "different" (for the sake of being different) you get lots of uneven aesthetic choices and designs that can miss the mark for a lot of people. Lumineth are the prime example of this.

Plus, the confused messaging and marketing around them is just leading to lots of uncertainty about their relation to Warclans, if Warclans is being re-done, the future of Bonesplitterz and Ironjawz etc etc. And added to this we have 0 idea what is coming in the future for them and how expansive (or not) their range is going to be. The Necron refresh for 9th was crystal clear in comparison and there were lots of sanctioned leaks and teaser trailers that added to the hype (we'd known the Silent King was making a return since WD's January 2020 issue for instance).

The Hobgrot issue is the ******-yellow skinned elephant in the room too. Again, this feels like AOS being up its own ****** and trying to be too clever for its own good. The launch box didn't need a full third of the models not being a part of the aesthetic theme or core rules of the army they're bundled with in the box, nor did they need to be a reference to a historically unpopular Warhammer Fantasy army that stopped being properly supported 21 years ago. Why are they there? I'm actually interested in Kruleboyz because I have Destruction armies and I've always been a Greenskin player since Fantasy and despite my above paragraphs I LIKE the Kruleboy models. But I don't like the Hobgrotz and worse still they're not even really a proper part of the faction! WHY ARE THEY THERE? So GW could sneak a reference in to a potentially upcoming army? To continue doing their confused move of trying to distance from WHFB while dredging up its corpse wherever possible to score cheap nostalgia points in the most shallow and cynical of ways?

I also think the reception to 3.0's rules and general direction has sucked a lot of hype out of its release. Don't get me wrong, I'm not passing absolute judgement on 3.0 and it's probably overall better to play than 2.0, but if you look at how GW has presented and marketed 3.0 compared to how they did with 9th you see a very big difference. 9th Edition was designed and marketed about trying to fix as many issues from 8th as possible. In fact the preview trailer for its rules changes was a laundry list of checkmarks that people had been asking for. And going through the rules and the codexes GW has basically tried to address and fix practically every complaint and flaw in 8th's systems. This hasn't been perfectly done, not at all, but it did lead to a lot of excitement for 9th pre-release and still leads to a lot of continuing interest in future releases. 40K feels like it has a coherent design and idea behind it, even if the execution is lacking and crucially it feels like the designers are receptive to what the playerbase talks about.

But 3.0? Half of the changes are attempts to fix stuff, and then the other half are changes for the sake of changes it feels like. A lot of longstanding complaints and bugbears people have with the games systems are literally unchanged. You could maybe be charitable and say this is GW trying to keep the game accessible and fast-paced to play, so stuff like shooting, terrain and battleshock sees 0 changes in order to keep that casual focus. But then the core rules are now 40+ pages and counting and we have an incredibly complex system of heroic actions and expanded command abilities while army building has jumped up in complexity too. So these decisions clearly cannot be about keeping the game simple. Instead it just feels like an insular studio team with 0 idea of how the game is played in the real world and making arbitrary changes based on... something? This is also coming off of the back of 4 battletome releases that have been all over the place in terms of design and even with this new edition incoming it really doesn't feel like the AOS team knows what it wants to be doing with the game. Which of course leads to less hype and less willingness to buy-in.

I mean just think about it; how can you have a load of confidence in a rules team that thinks the core shooting rules for AOS are perfectly fine and don't need any changes? This is without considering any of the units that break the system, I mean just the core shooting rules on their own. I've never seen a wargame with such loose, decision and consequence-free shooting mechanics.

Oh and, I'm sorry I have to mention it, I know a load of people who were waiting for a 3.0 announcement as an excuse to finally jump into the game and when the news came out that the double turn was staying it killed all of their enthusiasm. Yes, they've improved on it in 3.0, but its mere existence is enough to turn people off. It is what it is.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

Plus for many people the pace is still glacial, especially if they have no point of reference for the bad old days.

 

[The Rumour Thread]

1 hour ago, Clan's Cynic said:

More likely it's down to 40k/Marines being far more popular than AoS. According to ICv2's charts, Star Wars: Legion and Marvel Crisis Protocol actually overtook AoS in Q4 so it doesn't seem to be quite the juggernaut of it's sister game.

The queueing system didn't really stop the Gaunt's Ghosts LE from flying out of stock last week.

 

You only have to look at how LE versions of books sells between the two games.

Recent LE versions of battletomes and BR books often take around 1-2 weeks to go OOS. An LE 40K codex will go OOS on the day of its release, even for a less popular army like Drukhari.

[The Rumour Thread]

6 hours ago, Enoby said:

It just feels the rules writers don't have a clue what they're doing. Or if they do, they don't want to tell us why they do what they do. 

This is certainly something GW has definitely fallen behind on.

They want to do more regular updates for their games, like balance patches in videogames, but then they don't realise that in balance patches the developers will often have extensive commentary about why a change was made. Just look at updates for games made by Valve, Blizzard or Riot. In fact GW doesn't even do patch notes. It's up to the community to try and find out what even changed!

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

The scope of changes while also not really addressing the biggest issues with the core rules is.... very bizarre.

Of course there could be lots of unforeseen and subtle changes in how the game plays because of innocuous things, but yeah their direction for the game is kind of confusing honestly? Shooting is actively better, terrain is unchanged, battleshock is unchanged and some of the changes made to certain unit types probably won't amount to anything because of the previously mentioned things. Monsters/Behemoth's problems weren't that they lacked damage, it's that they died really quickly. And they will still die really quickly.

It really feels like GW is actively ignorant of how people played the game or just doesn't care about their concerns. 9th ed 40k core rules aren't perfect, but every single change made was made in an attempt to fix a perceived issue with 8th edition and from that perspective it's been wildly successful. With AOS 3.0, the game will certainly play differently in some areas, but it doesn't look like a lot of the core problems with the system have been solved or changed at all.

In fact when we got the leaked and full rules for 40K a lot of the worrying and gnashing of teeth died down... but with AOS 3.0 there's still a load of worrying and negativity.

[AoS3 - Kruleboyz Discussion]

I really hope they have some more actual units. Half the roster going from the leaks feels like different varieties of Killabosses on mounts.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

12 hours ago, Ganigumo said:

Yeah but is the problem the core rules or the broken battletomes?

It's clearly both.

You can lay the oppressive nature of shooting at the feet of battletomes all you want, but it is because the game's LOS, terrain and core shooting rules are so bad that this kind of stuff happens.

With the way the rules are currently written, the only way to balance shooting is to make every shooting unit actively bad or overpriced because they suffer no real drawbacks or limitations within the rules. But that's a horrible way to go about things because it reduces design space and variety in unit and faction design.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

55 minutes ago, feadair said:

I would not be too worried about Unleash Hell just yet. Its power depends on the overall context. In the new WH40k 9e the faction with the best overwatch abilities (Tau) is doing incredibly poorly. The main reason is the mission design. To win, you need to be able to capture and hold midfield objectives. This means that burly units that can charge in, eliminate the objective holder and thus capture it are extremely valuable. In other words, flipping an objective is a high priority. Shooty units can at best eliminate an objective holder one turn and then take it the next. They cannot do both at once.

The difference is, in 40K you cannot shoot into melee.

In AOS you can.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

How relevant are the monster buffs though?

All I've seen is ways to make monsters slightly more killy, when really their issue has been survivability. With shooting (seemingly) not being touched and in fact made better with Unleash Hell what's really stopping them from being yeeted off of the board very quickly?

Also depending on how missions are constructed they could also be made extra useless.

Also points changes could relegate them to irrelevancy.

Look at 40k 9th; pre-release GW went on about improvements to monsters and vehicles and people were looking at the previewed and leaked core rules and predicting a monster and vehicle meta. We're a year into 9th edition and outside of Drukhari Raiders that has not materialized. Massive point over-corrections because of severely overestimating those buffs, a mission design where vehicle usage doesn't win you many points, a rise in average lethality without a rise in survivability for vehicles/monsters and the introduction of the Core keyword have led to a 40k edition that discourages those unit types pretty heavily.

Not all of this might apply to AOS of course. But with changes to a game there are often so many unseen interactions and unintended outcomes that Monsters getting 4 unique "command" abilities could be the wettest ****** imaginable in terms of actual game impact.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

1 minute ago, Enoby said:

What realistic rules would people like to see to balance shooting, with the changes we can currently see in mind? 

Personally I'd have wanted to see more comprehensive terrain and LOS rules. Not that this solves some egregious units (hello LRL!) but it is something at least. The fact that in their hype video for the new rules terrain was mentioned nowhere is a little concerning honestly.

Compare it to the similar video that 9th edition 40k got which everybody reacted to really positively because it looked like a bunch of ideas focused around fixing issues with 8th edition. The video for 3.0 is like half fixing stuff from 2.0 and half stuff which doesn't seem to matter or is actively not fixing issues.

This obviously doesn't mean these fixes or improvements are not there of course, and the actual act of playing the game can often give a drastically different result and outcome than theorycrafting on paper, but it's slightly concerning that a lot of this pre-release hype is avoiding talking about what many people to consider to be the biggest core issues with the ruleset and how, or if, they're being addressed.

[AoS 3 New Rules Discussion]

All the dripfeed does is make people angry until someone leaks the full ruleset two weeks before release.

Happened with 40K lol

[What would you like for AoS 3]

The idea of counter command abilities is something I actually suggested either in this thread or another one as a way to deal with the problematic nature of the double turn, specifically how it increases downtime.

I'll be curious to see how it pans out but even then, it still feels like GW is wedded to their IGOUGO system too much and is putting increasing amounts of bandaids on it in order to fix what is fundamentally broken. Spending resources to do counter abilities that disrupt the normal flow of gameplay works great in LOTR.... but that's also because LOTR is alternating phases.

The lack of any information about terrain changes is also pretty concerning, but it wouldn't be the first time GW has underestimated or misunderstood how big of a deal the changes they make can be. Drukhari got hardly any rules previews in the run up to their release but they're currently the strongest army in 40k currently, with all the strongest rules interactions and units being stuff that had 0 marketing or hype behind it.

[Discussing the quality of rules in AoS]

GW have an incredibly insular studio culture that, even when it does do outside playtesting, is generally up its own ass and unwilling to listen to any other points of view. A comparison to Blizzard Entertainment of the mid-00's to late 10's is very apt; "if you aren't part of our system and don't do the things we do, you literally have 0 idea what you're talking about." There's a lot of discussion in the 40k community right now about this subject because a few of the youtuber batrep channels that playtested 9th edition have been pretty candid about some of their experiences and its highlighted how flawed GW's core design methodology and playtesting system really is.

Add to this a disconnect between what the designers are trying to achieve with a book and what players are looking for and a studio system that rewards people that can drink the corporate kool aid and show passion and enthusiasm for the IP over actual design skill, and issues like the new Sylvaneth model will keep happening.

[AoS3 - Kruleboyz Discussion]

AOS should be introducing more of its own characters, rather than trotting out the corpses of WHFB fan faves for nostalgia points, especially when these characters are entirely different to their original incarnations. Teclis and Tyrion got done dirty in this respect; they might as well have not even called them that to begin with because AOS T&T have nothing in common with their Fantasy counterparts. And then you've got decisions like not making any use of Thanquol who is one of the greatest WHFB characters they ever made and is practically non-existent in any events going on currently.

However GW are also writing themselves into a corner because the only important characters are increasingly becoming god-level beings which kind of kills any hype or interest around anyone not that. Plus many of the existing characters and Gods just are not interesting enough currently and this is especially apparent in the Greenskin named ones. Skragrot and Gordrakk just don't really hold a candle to old characters like Skarsnik, Azhag or Grom.

Hopefully this new destruction focus changes some of that a little, but Kragnos himself is still emblematic of the problem I mentioned above. He's automatically important because he's a god, but is anything about him actually that interesting? Especially when he had 0 build-up?

Part of it feels like an attempt to move Destruction away from being the Greenskin Grand Alliance by giving them a new figurehead that isn't that.... but then they make their brand new antagonist faction Greenskins too so idk.

Kruleboyz look cool though. Since I have Gloomspite and Ironjawz I'll obviously be picking them up too.

[How does everyone feel about the new AoS 3.0 release?]

I'll need to see more of what AOS3 actually entails before really deciding.

We know very little about it outside of vague statements and rumours. Some of those sound interesting and other sounds disheartening (double turn isn't going anywhere, boo!)

And even once they've announced all the changes and made a fancy trailer and Warcom article going through all additions, actual game experience can lead to very different results than previously held expectations. In the hype period for 9th edition 40K, people were saying the edition was going to become Vehicle and Monster spam for every army only for the actual reality of how the game plays to squash that notion completely.

I have no doubt that a few advertised changes to the rules, heralded by GW and the playerbase as being massive gamechangers end up being big wet farts in terms of actual impact. It is the nature of these things.

What IS a concern however, is whether or not AOS will have an actual design lead or some sort of unified vision for what it wants to be ruleswise. 9th edition 40k has been remarkably consistent so far in that all of the books released have been decent to good and have mostly done an okay job with feeling coherent and like they're part of the same game system with roughly the same goals. That's not to say they've been perfect and mistakes haven't been made, but even the Necron and Drukhari books feel like the same game, despite the large power differential between them. If we shift our gaze over to AOS however, HoS, DoK and LRL all feel like they've been made for 3 completely different editions with wildly different goals and visions. There is no consistency in AOS battletomes currently and it's a huge issue.

[The Rumour Thread]

2 hours ago, Aeryenn said:

I'm really surprised about the lack of excitement regarding Warhammer+. I thought that for Warhammer geeks like us it is like a Christmas gift we always wanted. And the animations look really good. 

I already pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime. I'm sure lots of people pay for Disney+ and Crunchyroll and whatever else on top of those.

Yet another streaming service is one too many at this point and is why a lot of them are slowly failing. We've reached peak saturation. With Warhammer+ specifically they look to have very little in the way of actual content and what the quality of content that will be there on release seems to be dubious at best. GW's IP's are good, but not good enough to make me pony up another £7 a month and sit through a couple of hours of potentially ****** animated shorts.

I watched all of Invincible on Amazon recently and rewatched all of Avatar The Last Airbender on Netflix. I highly doubt the Warhammer animated stuff will come anywhere close to the quality and execution of those, at least for the moment.

[The Cursed City situation]

9 hours ago, SirSalabean said:

I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned but I spoke to a couple people I know at GW and cursed city was cut as over the most recent lockdown in the UK we are only now exciting their UK print company went bust, the had big plans with them including cursed city and they had closed their China facility due to this. It’s not the best scenario but it’s one I can understand due to the unforeseen circumstances.

 

what I personally disagree with is the handling of the situation, all they needed to do was clearly explain the situation and apologise for the misinformation. What they did was sly and pushing comments under the rug didn’t help.

Thankfully I’m not interested in cursed city but I definitely feel for others. Hopefully this doesn’t happen again. 

The issue with this, and many of the other theories, is that CC was up for sale for like an hour at most before disappearing and all mention of it in social media posts started to be removed and past warcom articles started to be edited.

So, during that weeks period of pre-order basically everything that could go wrong in the continued production of CC did go wrong? 

That's not to say this all didn't happen, but my point is that if it did happen, it happened months or weeks in advance and so GW would have likely known the game wasn't going to be a long-term product. But they still continued to advertise it as such.

So putting the blame of things on tariffs or shipping issues or print companies going under either makes GW incompetent or actively malicious.

[The Rumour Thread]

A redesign of Stormcast is one of the best ideas they could have had since the current designs are a massive turn-off for lots of people. The Vindicators look great and what SCE should have looked like from the beginning.

[Soulblight Gravelords News, Rumours and Speculation]

The full reveal is a little underwhelming for me.

I have to echo the disappointment at the absurd amounts of named characters in the release schedule. A big part of Warhammer for me is the concept of "Your guys." Being able to create an army for yourself and fill it with your own lore and characters. I play Craftworld Ulthwe in 40k and so make heavy use of Eldrad, but my two main HQ's are an Autarch and her twin Farseer brother and I've created an entire backstory and ongoing narrative for the two of them over the past few years. Same with my Necron Phaeron and his entire royal court and its political intrigues. Same with my 3 Raiding Force leaders for my Drukhari. Sure, I'll use Drazhar in that army sometimes, but in none of these cases are special characters really a big part of the faction identity of even necessary for them to function. In AOS my gobbos of the Yellow Nose Tribe have an entire hierarchy and storyline going on, carried over from WHFB.

In all these cases there's enough given to you in order for you to make your own storylines while being able to dip into the named character pool every now and then. With Soulblight it really feels unbalanced in the other direction, especially as outside of a single Vampire Lord on foot and one on a Dragon you have no other options to represent an un-named Vampire character in your army which feels a little limiting. There's no way to represent an un-named "Feral" vampire either it seems. Radaukar or bust I guess.

Really though it's a further indication of how splitting up a lot of armies from WHFB has had mixed results and the extreme focus on special characters within AOS really kills a lot of my interest in it as a game and a setting. Soulblight are not the VC reboot people were hoping for, but that's because VC already lost half of their units to other factions. And that is not some insurmountable problem, but it would have been nice to see some more actual new units and new generic characters to flesh the faction out and make it feel more alive. So many AOS factions have the majority of their Warscroll entries just be characters which a lot of the time makes them feel less interesting and more simplistic than they otherwise might be.

I know a lot of people like the ongoing narrative of AOS, but I've always struggled to get into that sort of thing within a wargame setting. Not that I object to it or can't enjoy parts of it, but a setting is more important than a narrative to me mainly because in a setting-focused medium I can create my own stories, rather than being fed them.