Chikout

Oh look. New stuff for Slaanesh. edit . Damn you Michu!!!

An ordered advent calendar would be rather boring. Hunting for the next day and the finding the double doors on the 24th is a big part of the fun. To get back on topic we already have more than 30 unsolved rumour engines. Another 24 seems excessive. I hope it's not just 24 pictures of the same mini. Here's hoping we see a boat load of releases next year to make up for the time we missed in 2020.

The preview show is a least partially nurgle unfortunately. My least favourite faction for either system. Still seeing the Slaanesh mortals should be interesting. Really hoping for something wacky like shadow Aelves or Vampirates. Also looking forward to seeing what the other battleforces are.

The thing on it’s back looks like a cuckoo clock. I must admit, as a silhouette it doesn’t do anything for me. It doesn’t look particularly menacing. I’m sure it will look better when we get the full picture. My personal hope is for a death themed warhammer quest.

My guess is that they are operating at less than 100% capacity. They are making up for this reduction in sales volume by increasing prices. I had hoped that this strategy would prove to be a mistake but if the number of Mega gargants I've seen on twitter is anything to go by people are willing to pay whatever gw charges. At £100 I would have bought the box but now I'll wait for the warbands to come out individually. I am very curious to see if underworlds gets a similar price bump. It has been a product that is aimed at a wider audience.

I just saw another person say that it will be €150 and the starter boxes will be €42.50. That's still too expensive. It has 12 fewer minis than the previous box. Anything more than the same price as the first box is too much.

Thanks gw. Every time I'm tempted to buy something new, the prices encourage to finish painting my backlog.

They really need to start releasing some of the blood bowl stuff. They have more previewed but unreleased minis than any other system. They still haven't released the treeman they previewed back in April let alone any of the stuff from the new season.

Another preview hint. The owl is definitely Lumineth then and not Kurnothi😞

There are a few things to think about when considering gw's release strategy. 1- they have looong term goals. Gw wants aos to be a going concern for the next 50 plus years. In order to maintain interest over time they have a slower release rate of new armies than we would like. Currently they tend to do one all new army and 3 or 4 updated armies each year. This year the Lumineth are all new and the gargants are an update. We may yet see updated Slaanesh and daughters this year, but that is still rather slow. With 24 books currently out that's a new update every 6 or so years. 2- gw relies on known big sellers. Gw has survived as long as it has largely thanks to the popularity of the space marines. There was a time when the tactical squad was selling better than the whole fantasy range. This means that gw returns to the well of space marines more than any other army. This has carried over to aos to a limited extent. We can reasonably expect a new range of stormcast minis every two to three years. Unfortunately this knocks back everything else in the queue. 3- gw's production and storage capacity is a major bottleneck. Every kit that gw adds to the kit is something that needs to be manufactured, stored in warehouses and manufactured again when stock runs out. This is why battleboxes have such limited runs and don't usually get reprinted. What gw wants is a limited number of kits that can be produced sold and cleared off warehouse shelves quickly to make way for the next product while giving a guaranteed return on gw's investment. There was an interview with Adam Troke when he was in charge of lotr where he said he had to negotiate for warehouse space so that gw would let them rerelease some old minis. All this is going to say that gw is physically incapable of producing new minis at the rate that many fans would want. Books avoid a lot of these problems. They are printed in China and are available digitally which reduces the amount of physical copies that need to be produced. (This does make gw's decision to abandon digital codexes in 40k rather strange) This has led to gw producing a huge number of books in recent years but a relatively small number of minis in comparison. Unfortunately the lack of writing staff, just 8 or so rules writers compared to over 30 miniature designers in the main studio, has led to books feeling rushed. 4- the future Gw has been working on addressing some of these problems. They have been building new factory facilities and new warehouses in both the UK and America. Potentially this could result in an increased rate of miniature releases. Unfortunately what with one thing or another we probably wont see those improvements for a while.

The problem is that gw sells these things globally. Here in Japan we haven't had inflation for the last 20 years, so a price increase hurts us more, and that's in a country were gw stuff is already incredibly expensive. Archaon costs more than a switch lite and the new gargants will be even worse.

I must admit I was a bit worried about the price of the new kit. Something the size of Archaon with a huge number of optional bits was always going to be pricey. It’s a shame to see that fear come true. Any way you cut it, £120 is a lot of money especially since I got a rulebook and 51 minis for £95 just a couple of years ago.

They will probably do the easy to build 40k kits alongside Pariah. I would expect Sons of Behemat the week after, followed by the new codexes.

I thought the general consensus was that a hag with a wound shrug would be pretty useful. I've also heard a lot of people singing the praises of the untamed beasts with their pregame move. If the khainites get some movement shenanigans, which their shadow aesthetics suggests they might, they could be useable.

DoK are getting a new unit with the warcry warband. Between the box set, warcry and underworlds DoK are getting three units this year. With the rules updates that are presumably coming that's not a bad little update.

What a fantastic preview. The warcry starter, the underworlds starter, the seraphon, the two new heroes and the new book series all look absolutely amazing. It's going to be an expensive year.

No. Its just the paperback release of the second one. It is a bit disappointing that we have so few AOS novels recently. With Josh leaving it's left a bit of a vacuum. It is encouraging, though, to see new writers like Dale Lucas working on AOS books. I hope we can uncover a few more new AOS writers in the near future.

Regarding new releases. Gw was closed for two months, but new 40k jumped the queue and was only a month late. The Stormcast and nighthaunt battletomes were released in August so the 40k codexes in October is back to being two months behind schedule. It looks like gw is going to take the 9 weeks between now and October to release the other models they previewed during the lock down. So that means underworlds, 2 Warcry warbands, Escher Necromunda, bloodbowl treeman and snotlings, Eomer for Lotr, Lumineth and of course Sons of Behemat. They will probably also release the easy to build 40k models in this window. The Lumineth novel goes on preorder September 5th so that looks like the date for the battletome. That means we could see a new AOS preview in October.

Yeah it's definitely a lack of supply, which is caused by a combination of the kits selling well and the production being limited. The factory is still not operating at full capacity.

One of things I enjoy most about AoS is the space it gives the imagination. It allows the player space to create their own stories within the wider framework of the setting. A good example is the corner of the setting that Nick Horth describes in his novels. Within his corner of the setting events have consequence, deaths of characters matter and the fall of a city would be a massive calamity. AOS lets any player do that against the back drop created by gw. In the old world the only way to create a campaign with serious stakes was to play what if scenarios. If Altdorf actually fell it would kill the setting, which is actually what happened. As for contradictions, when I was at school I studied two documents describing a battle in 8th century England. The two 'historical' documents had different sides winning. I actually like that some parts of the setting are left open to interpretation. The fact that the myth of Katakros the undeafeted had little to do with reality made that part of the lore more interesting to me. He was essentially retconnning his own defeats into victories. Overall I love that AOS is still growing. The fact that we can keep finding mythic figures like Katakros is one of the things that keeps me invested.

The trouble is that we know from an original flyer that 40k is launching a month late. Since gw was closed for 2 months it means 40k jumped the queue by a month, It has probably pulled the marine and Necron releases along with it, so anything that was originally intended to arrive before 40k now has to wait until 9th edition, the new marines and the new necrons have come out. It means we are going to have a long wait for those AOS releases.

After aos2 gw released the Stormcast and Nighthaunt battletome on the same week, and then gradually released their models alongside specialist games stuff over the next few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same again. There have been some pretty widespread rumours that the rest of the Lumineth are coming in September. The million dollar question is whether the sons of Behemat manage to squeeze into August or of they have to wait until the end of September. My money is on the latter. I think we will see the remaining underworlds warbands and the scions of the flame in August, Lumineth in September, Sons on pre order at the end of September and new warcry in October. I am quite curious when we will next see an AOS preview. It has now been a full 3 months since the last AoS preview and there isn't one on the horizon. I think gw delayed the AOS faq on purpose in order to give us something to look forward to because it's going to be 40k centric for a while.

Yup, this is it.

Nobody knows how much of something gw sells except gw. Any numbers you do see are probably just guess work. All we do know is that in the 3 years that dark imperium was on the market gw did about £650 million of business not counting royalties. 35,000 copies of dark imperium would be about 0.5% of that which is maybe a little lower than you would expect from their flagship product but they do sell thousands of products now so its not impossible.

It’s 8.30pm on release Saturday and still no reviews on YouTube. What’s going on?