Chikout

It would have the opposite effect on me though. Right now I'm not sold on the Kruleboyz and the Stormcast lack a centrepiece that I love. If I see some cool new units for both sides, I'm much more likely to buy Dominion as a starter for those armies. On the 40k side the photo of the upcoming Necron range leaked early and it absolutely increased everyone's hype for Indomitus.

The core book has more than 200 pages of lore and a bunch of path to glory stuff. If you don't care about either of those, just buy the ghb.

You only have to look at the sales numbers. GW's sales increased by 30% this year. If you are projecting production based on sales which were stablish for the last 2 years then you are going to be 30% short. On top of that Cursed City had a massive amount of hype behind it leading up to launch with almost universal praise for the minis. Then you have the fact that a soloable quest game is ideal for these isolated times and you have a recipe for surprising success.

Someone sitting on a throne?

It's worth pointing out that some of the soul wars points changed when the battletome came out. Also we might see price changes on all 25mil units. It also will just take a small change to make them playable. They could well be a Hobgrotz hero that buffs them or a subfaction they're good in, or an expanded selection of allegiance abilities.

Almost certainly one box with 5 vindictors, 10 Hobgrotz or gutrippas and one hero for each faction for £32.50. A bigger box with 10 Hobgrotz and 10 gutrippas, 5 vindictors, 3 preators and whichever heroes aren't in the other box for £65. A third box with exactly the same contents plus some scenery for £105 The Stormcast big sprue has Yndrasta, 3 annihilators and the vexillor. The Kruleboyz big sprue has the big monster the murknob and the boltboyz. These will be sold individually at a very high price. This is pretty easy to guess by looking at the sprue breakdowns and comparing to the 40k starter boxes.

That's still a big if. They haven't mentioned the app at all which is actually somewhat encouraging. On the rumour front I really hope we get a hint of the next releases for Stormcast and Kruleboyz before pre-orders go up. It would help me decide whether I'm going to fully commit to one of these factions.

I live in Japan. It's virtually impossible to find space for a 6 by 4 table in most houses. Most people don't have garages or even gardens. You could probably say the same for anyone who lives in a big city and isn't extremely rich. A game that is designed to be playable on a dining table is a change that may cause short term pain for some people but is far better in the long term. As for the points changes I think as AoS has gone along there has been a definite decrease in points and increase in army size. If the points do all go up it will be a much needed reset which will make the game more affordable, less time consuming to paint, and hopefully faster to play.

I'm pretty firmly in favour of all the changes except coherency. Numbered rules with side bars- good change as it's easier to learn the game. Smaller unit sizes. Good change which should make the combat phase more interesting. A variety of sometimes powerful abilities that can be used at various stages of the game. Adds more strategic decisions. A general that makes the most of these will do well and we may see more games won on skill rather than list (of course a good list will still be very important) Predatory endless spells that move twice. A good change that should bring them into the game. Core battalions. A good change that should (hopefully) improve balance and will give almost every army a chance for one or two drops if they want. This means more roll offs for first turn. 8 pieces of terrain for 2000 points baked right into the core rules. Good but I hope that they can all block line of sight. Priest changes. A good change that offers some counter play. Coherency. Doesn't seem to prevent long chains and limits the effectiveness of a lot of units. I really hope there's more to come on this one.

The commander is the commander of the battalion. It can be any kind of battlefield leader. The sub commander can be a leader with a wounds characteristic of 10 or less. You can have Mannfred as commander and Belladama in the battle regiment, but if you chose Belladama as the battle regiment commander you now can't also include Mannfred. Regarding old battalions. Ben Johnson said in an earlier video that they would be part of the new path to glory. I would be surprised if they were also in match play though they have not yet confirmed they are not.

There is counterplay though. Anything with 6 inch pile in can ignore it. Flying chaff is great. Fly some chainrasps, or fellbats, or 5 squig hoppers over the screen. The shooting player has to decide if they want to waste a command point on clearing the chaff. If they dont spend it, they can't use it against another unit as the chaffe unit will be too close. It's certainly going to have an impact sometimes but its not unbeatable. Also we are getting L-shaped scenery and we still haven't seen the new scenery rules yet.

For me a big problem with the old battalions is that many of them aren't interesting. If you make six different things with six different abilities, competitive players will always choose the most powerful one. So you always saw Fyreslayer players using lords of the lodge which meant that every army would have the exact same 4 units at its core. The new battalions aren't super exciting but they are flexible. In a Soulblight army there are something like 50 ways of creating the command battalion. Presumably they will also be pointed.

In a way FEC are the perfect army. They have small things, medium sized things and big things. You can build a fairly decent army around each or mix them up. The army is one of the cheapest to buy and one of the easiest to paint.

If we think about what armies need updates, there's two ways of thinking about. Some armies lack options, some armies have outdated or resin sculpts. No army falls into both camps. In terms of lacking options the Fyreslayers clearly win that one. I don't think any other army is really in dire straits in that regard. There's an argument for Ironjawz and Bonesplittas but unfortunately I'm not sure Gw sees it that way. Idk just need a rebalance to make Namarti and Lotann worthwhile. In terms of old sculpts Seraphon, Skaven, Mawtribes and Fec are top of the pile. They are all popular armies. It wouldn't surprise me if they all got attention. As for new stuff, Malerion and Tyrion are clearly still missing and need to be brought into the fiction at least. A human faction is missing. Devoted of Sigmar/ Dawnbreakers would absolutely fit the bill. Throw in the new chaos dwarves band you have almost three years of releases.

I think it will probably just be about the Great Gnashtoof.

It should encourage more list variety. It will decrease the power of some of these command abilities. Imagine the three units of 20 skaven example. With multiple units the unleash hell will deal with 20 skaven but that frees the other two units to charge without risk. With more smaller units the combat phase should be more dynamic with the back and forth between players happening more often. Smaller units will be easier to manoeuvre if we get more terrain in 3rd edition.

Just listening to honest Wargamer. He is saying that a unit can only receive one command per phase and you can only use each command ability once per phase. So that's something at least.

I hope today's model preview isn't just the scenery. I'm rather on the fence about the box set. Some more info about what's coming next would really help me decide what to do.

There are abilities shown so far that give +1 save, -1 shooting, a 6+ ward save and an ability to put models back into units. These will help against shooting.

There's lots of ways you could limit these abilities to make them impactful. These are rules that could be layered onto the core rules for matched play. Something like 'each unit may only receive one command ability per battle round'. Then if you use Morathi's command ability on some bloodstalkers you can't use unleash hell on them in the same turn. The fear is that gw won't do any of those things but they do have experience with the rules of one.

GW is not doing well enough. They just had by far their best year ever. This year should have been a massive kick in the teeth to the company as in their two biggest markets people couldn't even go round their friends house to play a game let alone enter a tournament. The only reason I can think of for GW's success this year is that the games aren't actually that important. I remember back in the 90s gw had 9 or 10 designers and 9 or 10 rules writers. Now they have 9 or 10 writers spread across more game systems and more than 30 designers so it's pretty easy to see where their priorities lie and it seems to have paid off. As for the restaurant analogy if you've been playing gw games for more than a couple of years, you've definitely been going back to that restaurant. The only game gw have ever designed from the ground up to be balanced is Underworlds. Now I personally would love to see a more balanced game. I am worried about the problems unleash hell might cause, but so far I've seen several good things, a couple of debatle things and one worrying thing. Finally we have Smorgan (I think) of listlab fame. Here is a player who plays hundreds of games a year and, unlike all of us, has read all the rules. As a regular Honest Guest he's not exactly a gw shill but he seems pretty happy with the rules.

This is just the latest stage in the eternal battle. I think that the majority of staff at GW don't want to make a competitive game. As far as I'm aware the only member of the AoS studio who self identifies as competitive is Ben Johnson. When GW makes a product the order of priority is minis>lore>art>theme>abilities>regular stats>points>balance. Do you feel like an arrogant elitist when you win with Lumineth- job done! Gw is like a chef who opens a pasta restaurant and is very proud of the pasta they make. Unfortunately all the customers really want ramen. So the chef grudgingly says "Ok. I'll make you some ramen but it's still going to taste an awful lot like pasta." Now it's perfectly valid to complain about this scenario but I think that's the way it is.

Presumably that's what the ghb is for and we haven't seen a single page of it yet.

I understand the concern but there is a thing that bothers me about all the rules news. When people see expensive new minis, there's always a flurry of comments about how people will change this or that aspect of the mini or kitbash it with another extremely expensive mini. People come with lore and original colour schemes and dozens of other unique and creative changes. When people see a rule that is potentially game breaking, everyone is like "I'll use that rule that no-one likes but I won't be happy about it", even though it just rules on page that can be changed for free. If you think a rule is broken don't use it. If you're a TO ban it from your event. If you're having a pick up game with a stranger, have a little friendly chat before the game. If you're running a tournament level Lumineth list against someone playing their first game with Sylvaneth try not using some of their stronger abilities. If you play a newbie and wipe the table with them, that's your fault and not the game's. If I played tennis against Federer and he played his best. I wouldn't win a single point. Does that mean tennis is a broken game? I'd like to think he'd lob a few soft balls at me so we could have an enjoyable game. When I was a kid playing chess against my dad, he always took four of his pieces off the board at the start and we had a lot of fun games because if it. Gw themselves have said many times that they view their rules not as a definitive gospel but as a toolkit which can be used in any way players see fit. This is probably a fight against human nature that I'm not going to win, but I think AoS is a cooperative game where the two players try to create a situation where a tense and exciting game is possible. If it turns out that unleash hell is broken I would be tempted to introduce a house rule that a unit that uses it can't shoot in the next shooting phase. On top of all that be aware of the nature of GW marketing. I would be extremely surprised if the marketing team consulted the rules team about what to include in the previews. They almost always focus on destructive abilities and almost never focus on limitations. We don't know anything about limitations on command abilities or second rank fighting or other ways to apply ward saves which we already seen a priest can do. In the rules as we've seen them it's possible to make a unit +1 save -1 to hit and with a 6+ ward save. We don't know anything about scenery rules yet. But ultimately if you don't think gw is making a good ruleset then just adapt it to fit your needs. It's your game.

Exciting times!