Bosskelot
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Posts posted by Bosskelot
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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...?
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14 minutes ago, Nezzhil said:
And this.
This was basically confirmed as a Marine immediately. It's the exact same design as a former FW upgrade kit.
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Empire would still be accurate as like Marines of the HH they will just be palette swaps.
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3 hours ago, Chikout said:
The exact opposite of this. It surprises me that many comments are asking for the game to become more complex. The old world is coming back. It will have strength toughness and a conventional turn order. AoS 3 has been good but it's already creeping towards unnecessary complexity. They need to remove grand strategies and any battle tactics that aren't counterable. I do like the concepts behind battleshock, USRs and objective control. They would all work within the existing framework of AoS.
As for spell abilities. Within the current rules you can have spells that buff or debuff: moves, charges, attacks,hits, wounds, damage, saves, wards, command abilities, other spells, objective control, move sequence and fight sequence. That's 26 abilities. Then you have focused damage, Aoe damage, teleports etc. GW relies too much on mortal wounds, but they could easily be more imaginative without changing the core rules at all.
The core tennant of removing bloat and making the game experience smoother is something I'm all for. Let the old world have all the crunchy rules. As a big warcry fan, I love that I can internalise all the rules and focus on my strategy and tactics instead.
Toughness does not make the game complex.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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47 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:
Yeah we'll see if their Total war popularity transfers to real sales... I can say that if this is the launch matchup for TOW I'm out for sure. There were valid reasons why neither army could keep enough interest when WHF was around. I could see TK being the simpler army to paint for new players, but Bretonnia certainly isn't. And gameplay wise I don't remember either army being very starter friendly, ESPECIALLY if Line-of-sight and charging angles are coming back.
That automatic 5+ ward really confused me until I remembered y'all have no real answer for shooting and magic. hopefully the new changes help!!
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.
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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.
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13 hours ago, Clan's Cynic said:
I think something to keep in mind with Skaven is that a lot of the online fanfare for them has been relatively recent.
While Skaven have always been an iconic Warhammer faction, I never remember them being especially popular in the tabletop - not underplayed, but hardly 'up there' with Warriors of Chaos and High Elves - which is likely why they've had such limited updates over the years, but also weren't taken out to pasture like Bretonnians and Tomb Kings.
They were always one of those "I'd love a Skaven collection... BUT" armies, where people admired them from a distance but shirked away due to the cost. Horde armies are expensive in an expensive hobby, and we know what GW is like about marketing - if they weren't seeing sales figures for Skaven, they weren't going to put much effort into updating them. It's only recently they've had their finger on the pulse about anything other than raw sales data.
It certainly wasn't until Warhammer: Total War II that the internet's fascination with them really exploded in my view and that was only five or so years ago - coincidentally not much younger than Age of Sigmar.
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.-
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/tg/ has basically never been correct about any leaks.
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19 minutes ago, Gitzdee said:
This is true, but i just dont understand why they would release a unit for a "new" subfaction without anything that goes along with it.
And the armies that really needed an update got the hero + tome treatment.
To me it feels like the Snarlfang Riders belonged to Kruleboyz at some point in time and got shoved into the Gitz tome. Just like some other kits that feel like it should have been a cursed city expansion.
I do definitely agree with this. Even the colour scheme of the wolf riders makes them more reminiscent of the EM Kruleboyz.
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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.
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10 hours ago, Chikout said:
This whole breakdown is based on some pretty dodgy assumptions. Before 2015 gw sales used to be pretty consistent with new edition years giving a bump on sales before settling down again the following year. It made it possible to guage the impact and success of each new edition. This has changed recently. 2018-2019 was the first year every that sales in the year after a 40k launch beat the launch year. In fact gw has had record 6 month period every six months between 2016 and now. This continued growth makes it extremely difficult to guage the impact of particular ranges without direct data from GW.
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.
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On 1/9/2023 at 6:38 PM, CommissarRotke said:
with the loud whispers of the 2022 marine boxes not selling well, I wonder how even more saturation is going to work out... at this point I just feel bad for 40k. I know we have various things to complain about with AOS but diversity of armies and model design has never been one...
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.-
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1 hour ago, Captaniser said:
13 battleforces for 40k now, not even 1 is a xenos box.
And if the rumors are to be believed about the future of 40k, then it starting to look more and more like Horus Heresy 2.0 more than anything.
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.
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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.
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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.
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13 hours ago, CommissarRotke said:
Good to know, hopefully AOS will get the same treatment with whatever is after Thondia? This actually looks like what we've been talking about wanting to see TBQH...
- A deck of 66 cards for setting up an matched play game in a matter of minutes
- 40 secondary missions, plus a new Core Stratagem to help turn the tides in your favour
- Includes tokens and an instruction leaflet to explain how the cards work
Like this is what I'd personally love to have as AOS expansions, especially the last line on the webstore "You will need a copy of the Warhammer 40,000 Core Book" and *only* the corebook 😍
edit: AND IT'S LESS EXPENSIVE THAN A GHB/CAMPAIGN BOOK. The future is now apparently
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.
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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.
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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.-
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8 hours ago, novakai said:
TBF I wouldn’t be surprise if the subset Marine player base of Blood Angels, Space wolves, Dark Angels, Ultramarines, and maybe even Imperial Fist are larger then any one army in AoS and probably even triple in size of some armies.
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.
9 hours ago, Wraith said:Anyway, getting back on track, AoS needs to be careful to avoid becoming to complex and too competitive. Isn’t that what killed 8th edition?
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.-
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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.
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The Rumour Thread
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
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.