Aginor

To me it looks like some sort of engine. There is a V-shape that could be cylinders, and at the bottom there is something that looks like a hand crank with a gear connected to a toothed belt, which is connected to the bigger gear. The middle of the big gear is where the crankshaft should be. I guess it is 40k, although there is a small chance that it might be some cogfort part or something similar.

I play Deathmarch in a Grand Host list. Not super competitive but OK. I like to use Cogs to make them even faster and charge in with Black Knights. As for artefacts... yeah none of them are too great. I often use the Lantern to debuff enemies a bit, and give the timeglass to my General because that way he can at least do something without going into combat. Sometimes it does a few wounds on a squishy hero. A list can look roughly like this: Allegiance: Grand Host of Nagash Leaders Wight King with Baleful Tomb Blade (120) - General - Trait: Lord of Nagashizzar - Artefact: Grave-sand Timeglass Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon (440) - Vampiric Sword & Shield & Chalice - Artefact: Balefire Lantern Necromancer (130) Battleline 40 x Skeleton Warriors (280) - Ancient Spears 10 x Skeleton Warriors (80) - Ancient Blades 10 x Skeleton Warriors (80) - Ancient Blades 10 x Grave Guard (140) - Great Wight Blades Units 10 x Black Knights (240) 2 x Morghast Harbingers (210) - Spirit Halberds Battalions Deathmarch (160) Endless Spells / Terrain / CPs Chronomantic Cogs (80) Soulsnare Shackles (40) Total: 2000 / 2000 Extra Command Points: 1 Allies: 0 / 400 Wounds: 126

Here is a picture of my fighting platform. It would use the Stegadon's "sunfire throwers" attack. But you could easily just give it some rocks to throw down or a kettle with boiling oil or so. This is the static EotG. It needs a wizard or priest hero to man it. And here are some fortifications: And here is a shot from one of the games we played. (First edition AoS, hence the Skink Chief on the platform). The Seraphon are defending their improvised defense post. (And I just noticed that I was still playing on the bare table, seems I didn't have my Kraken mat yet). The Ironjawz (not pictured. Mixed force with a Maw-Krusha, some Ardboyz and Gore-Gruntas IIRC) ended up breaking through, destroying two terrain pieces IIRC. It was fun.

Hey y'all! I've mentioned once or twice that I have made up a few rules for sieges to use in AoS battles with my buddy, because we were disappointed by the siege rules in the GHB. A few users were interested in how we do that. So here they are. They are very basic though, and I am aware that they are horribly unbalanced because they basically undo some powerful abilities some armies have. I'd be interested in making them better and perhaps produce some siege system for everyone to use. Terrain pieces like walls, watchtowers or anything else that blocks movement is a fortification. Fortifications have hit points. So they can be destroyed, but not by everything. Since we don't have weapon types in AoS we just did the following: - 20 hit points (can depend on size. We gave small walls less hit points and big fortifications could have more) - 3+ save - 4+ save against mortal wounds - immune to rend - optional: reduces damage per attack to 1 - optional: halves non-artillery ranged damage, rounding down (so most archers would do zero damage) Any unit with the keyword "artillery" or "monster" can damage walls with its normal attacks, including rend. To prevent units of some armies (like my Seraphon) from teleporting behind the walls the idea was to let proper walls count as models of the defender. The defender places his fortifications before the normal setup. I had point prices prepared for the walls but they weren't really balanced so I won't post them. The goal was to balance the attacker's army so they would need an army that is around 50%-100% bigger than the defending army. We played a 1500 points attacking Ironjawz army vs. a 1000 points Seraphon army and the IJs barely won. I was defending with a wall made of five terrain pieces. Another idea was battering rams. The attacker can either bring a ram or declare a monster of his army to be a ram (like a Bastiladon for example). My idea was to let it do heavy damage to walls. Armed fortifications like defense towers would work with the watch tower warscroll but have fixed weapons (I built a weapon platform with the weapons of a Stegadon and a small terrain piece that would act as a static engine of the gods for example , I'll post a few pics soon) that could be used whenever a unit was garrisoning them. I had no good ideas for tunneling/starving yet. Ok, that's it for now. Sadly I lost my papers but that should be most of the rules. I'll add more if I remember them again.

Not at all. I'll make a thread about them soon. I am sure they are not very balanced but maybe they can serve as a basis for a discussion about siege rules.

Yeah I remember being a bit disappointed by those rules, they basically were just an additional phase before the game started and that's it. My buddy and I then made our own system, also very basic but more fun for us.

Over at Lustria Online we came to the same conclusion. Seraphon not ruled out yet!

Just taking a moment here to appreciate that - if the StD Battletome is released this year, which I assume - GW released a full dozen Battletomes for Age of Sigmar within one year. (And the year isn't over. There could be one more or so) If I see that correctly that's twice the average since AoS release in 2015 (before 2019 the average was 6 per year, with a maximum of 8 in 2016). As far as I can see that number of "army book" releases for any Warhammer product was surpassed only once, by Codex releases for 40k in 2018 (13 releases). Side note: the total number of GW major book releases per year seems to have reached 20 or so, which includes things like General's Handbooks and boxed games. In years with more AoS releases there are fewer 40k releases and vice versa. This year was an AoS year, with only 5 major releases for 40k and 13 for AoS. (The number for AoS includes the GHB. The rest are board games and the like).

The yellow space marine boss also solves a picture.

My initial thought was Aelves, too. But might as well be some weird Necromunda gang or something.

Hmmm not sure about the Ogors and New Death. Ogors might be just a battle box and no tome (yet), didn't we have something like that before? And the new Death, yeah it might be this year. I just didn't include them because we don't really know anything about them. The others are confirmed to be Battletomes. Either way: GW is really producing quite some books this year! 2019 is a new record for AoS releases. Edit: As for the Tomes released shortly before 2.0, like LoN, IDK, DOK and Nurgle : I think they are fine. Back then GW said that they designed them with 2.0 already in mind, didn't they?

IIRC GW released 8 or 9 Battletomes in 2016, that was the maximum so far. This year there are 9 if I am not mistaken (counting Orruks, CoS and Sylvaneth already), I admit I'd be kinda surprised if there were more than two additional ones. It would be a pleasant surprise though, especially if something scaly is involved.

I would be happy to use all those rules more often, and thus encourage building more versatile lists that can cope with all of them. But unfortunately the game is not balanced to do that. And that's especially true for tournaments IMHO. In a story campaign that I run for/with my buddy I sometimes say stuff like "your scouts say there will be a lot of obstacles on the battlefield" and thus enable him to build his list for that. But that's where the second problem comes into play: "one trick pony" armies. If you play Kharadron Overlords then some realm rules (those good against shooting) outright kill your list. You don't even have to play, you know you will lose. Something that slows down armies will kill Ironjawz as they will be shot to pieces. Realm rules working against magic will be really bad for Teentch but the Kharadron player will only laugh. As Seraphon I have it good. I can mitigate those effects using summoning, I also have good unit variety to choose from. SCE will also be fine because they have a huge choice of units and even their shooty stuff isn't _that_ bad in melee. But many armies will struggle with some of those rules. And that means that a roll for the battlefield's attributes might decide the match. Which isn't exactly fun gameplay. And even if the realm rules are known beforehand: some armies will not be able to compete. Those players have to pick another army, allies (which is almost the same), or just don't go to the tournament. Of course there are ways to mitigate those problems. But they won't work for every army either.

I think 24 or so is a good number, mainly for product life cycle and production time reasons: If they renew their rules with new editions every 3-4 years or so, they will need to put Battletome releases of most factions into that timeframe. So if they release two BTs every three months, that is 8 books a year. Thus all factions would have a new book every three years. They will do other releases as well so they might not make it in three years for everyone. That's where rules updates in the GHB come into play (like for Seraphon, still playable with the Battletome from 2015. Well, mostly) If the rules in the new edition don't drastically change they can maintain a faction playable with those small updates, so they might only have to release 6 Battletomes a year. So yeah that is what I think. They make ~8-9 books a year for AoS, of which 6-7 can be Battletomes. If they want to renew their game every four years they can sustain ~24 major factions. Edit: If I didn't count wrong we have 32 Battletomes since AoS release, making it 6.4 per year on average. Sounds like it could fit my above theory.

I am torn about the Seraphon changes. Some are cool. Our most overpriced stuff like Saurus Warriors, Knights, Guards, Troglodon, Stegadon, Kroak, Starseer, Chameleon Skinks and Kroxigor all got a bit cheaper. But for example for Guards or the Starseer I still think they are probably not worth it, they need warscroll changes. The Razordons got an expected increase, same for the EotG. Not severe IMO. The Skinks point increase hurts a bit more. Overall I am a bit disappointed because I think Saurus armies are still not worth it. But who knows, probably GW surprises us with some more changes that make them more worthwhile.