Sception

I mostly use citadel just because I that's the gaming store I most commonly frequent, but I do also use other brands for various things - vallejo metal colors for grey metalids, greenstuff world metal pigments + vallejo metal medium for yellow metals, handful of individual vallejo model color, P3, or army painter speed paints for particular colors here and there, occasional artist inks (usually just white for zenithal undercoats), I recently picked up some oil paints to experiment with oil washes in future projects, etc. I play around with whatever really, but use citadel more than the rest combined, but again mostly just due to the convenience of happening to be at a warhammer store, and because hobby stores tend to have the fully line of GW stuff. the other stuff I use I typically have to get online even when I go to indie stores, because they never maintain a full range like they do for the GW stuff.

In the same handful of posts this "rumor" says TOW is "underperforming against projections" and selling so far above those same expectations that they're bringing back more old factions. It can't even maintain consistency with itself, let alone with reality. It's bologna. A bunch of baseless speculation - if any of it does happen it will be by coincidence only. Ignore it.

I'm just hoping the carrion finally make it across the Atlantic. 😛

Yeah, looking back at wiki lore, Mourngul's are starvation revenants associated with frozen mountaintops and tundra wastelands. Unless someone can think of a particular reason they belong with vampire pirates other than the TWW2 devs saying 'here's an undead unit we haven't used yet', I'm much more inclined to put them elsewhere, probably with the strigoi, as their starvation & cannibalism associations to me line up better with ghouls than anything else. I would say that opens up room for something else on the vampire pirate side, but even without mournguls they already have several units, so maybe not.

maybe have a 'horrors of the deep' entry with three different sizes/profiles, like high elves have their sun, moon, & star dragons? & then you could have three different base sizes as well, maybe even 0-1 of the small size as special, maybe add a howda option w/ crew & character mount to the biggest? maybe that's going too far / trying too much. EDIT: Maybe we do that instead of the Mourngul, and shunt that off to another AoI? Wasn't the Mourngul originally some sort of ghostly spirit of consumption spawned of people who died of starvation - the same situation that leads to cannibalism out of desperation & thus in warhammer world creates ghouls? seems like reason enough to put the Mourngul in a ghoul court AoI, even if its never had any explit lore connection to the strigoi. Ot certainly looks pretty ghoulish.

I mean, what I would have liked to have seen is a scattering of non-humans throughout the mostly human units. Like maybe one of the five cavalry models is an elf, or in a unit of 10 hand gunners there's seven humans, two dwarfs, and a half elf, or maybe one of the cannon crew is a dwarf, etc etc. But again, while it's not my preference, I'm fine enough with the new CoS line as is.

really? That's AoS canon? There are half aelves, and half ogors? See that's a cool concept. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see in game and on the table, even if it's rare enough to be reserved for named characters.

I liked CoS as a mixed fantasy race faction simply because you /never/ see that anywhere else. Every other fantasy game and series and whatever always has the dwarves off in dwarf society, elves in elf society, humans in human society, orcs in orc society. Where they're mixed, it's always one subjugating another and mostly segregated regardless (see elves in dragon age). Sometimes the dwarves/elves/whatever have novel and interesting societies, usually it's the expected cliches. Either way though, you'll have a mix of fantasy races in the protagonist lineup or player party, but in the world everything stays separate. Cities in AoS was a very rare exception, with modern Azyrite society born from refugees of all the realms fleeing chaos, collectively turning to sigmar to protect them as their own gods fell to Archaon or were driven into hiding. What kind of society does that produce? How do people live and work together when their neighbors might have lifetimes far shorter or many times longer than their own? Are all the captains and guild leaders elves out of seniority alone? Or are retirement ages mandatory, with humans living out their last days with their family while dwarves are obligated to take up a second or third career and elves a seventh or eighth? How common are cross-species relationships, do they increase or strain social cohesion, and do they ever produce offspring? I mean, even if not naturally, there are gods are right there, physically present in Azyr, theoretically you can go to their house, knock on their door, and petition for a miraculous exception. Speaking of, Sigmar and Grungni are there, but do the former followers of other gods regret their abandoned faiths, or resent the gods that failed or abandoned them? We know the humans, elves, and dwarves, but are there other, rarer, stranger folk who are also part of Azyrite society? halflings, gnomes, greenskins, faries, sylvaneth? undead, even? Did no vampires or wights escape to Azyr and, with Nagash's apparent demise, pledge themselves to Sigmar? We know Sigmar's stolen the souls of some undead to forge them into stormcast, were none freely offered? And if there are any Sigmarite undead in Azyr, how have things changed for them in the modern age with Nagash back, but now as Sigmar's enemy? I'm not saying these kinds of stories are ~more~ interesting than those you could tell with just humans in azyr, just dwarves in their sky cities, just treelves in their forests. But they are different stories, and ones you just don't get in most settings. I'll live with overwhelmingly or entirely human cities of sigmar, I don't think it'll ruin the game or setting or anything, I don't think it reflects a negative worldview by the creators or whatever. Heck, I don't even play the faction. But I liked what the previous version did for the game and the setting, and even with fantastic new models I can't help but feel the new version is a bit dull by comparison.

Ok, so looking at the Total Warhammer Vampirates unit selection, and ignoring the subfaction-specific stuff, there are several units that translate over from the grand army fairly directly vampire admiral -> vampire count vampire captain -> vampire thrall fell bats -> fell bats scurvy dogs -> dire wolves zombie deck hands -> zombies syreens -> banshees* terrorgheist -> terrorgheist *yes syreens are a unit in Total Warhammer, while banshees are a character in Old World, but these are basically the same thing lore wise and I think it's fine to just say the AoI can take banshees and have done. Maybe compromise with a looser restriction on them than the grand army list? There are also some basic vampire counts units that /aren't/ included in the Total Warhammer vampirates army, but that I think maybe should be available to the army of infamy? These include: bat swarms: with access to medium bats (fell bats) and big bats (terrorgheists), I don't see why vampire pirates would also have plenty of little bats roosting under the deck or amid the rigging. one could imagine a swarm of them blotting out the sun before a vampire pirate crew raids some harbor or attacks a vulnerable vessel at sea. regular skeletons - do they absolutely have to be /zombie/ pirates? some people like skeletons more, I'd rather stay open to that, though I'm open to arguments against. spirit hosts - vampirates aren't without ghostly options, with both syreens and mournguls. I don't see why they wouldn't have the most basic ghostly unit. And again, ghost pirates are also an iconic thing. That leaves the following total warhammer units to consider as potential new units: Gunnery Wight: this is a light armored zombie hero with blackpowder weapons, so regular wight lords & kings don't really translate here. Mourngul Haunter: maybe we keep Mournguls, maybe not, but even if we do I don't think they need a hero version Depth Guard: infantry blood knights. In TW they have two hand weapons or halberds, though in terms of available models and conversions we might want to allow sword & board or great weapon as well, and also might want to come up with a more generic name since we're likely to want to use the same unit again in future projects, eg blood dragon AoI. zombie pirate gunnery mob: too different from regular zombies to port over, we basically need at least one generic undead pirate unit able to wield muskets or something. In game they've got a bunch of ranged weapon options, but I don't want to go overboard on shooting stuff given the base army's complete lack of it, especially since timeline wise blackpowder weapons aren't super common or advanced right now. deck gunners: a zombie pirate with a heavy machine gun, this is the kind of advanced blackpowder weapon that I think we can safely avoid by saying it wouldn't be around yet, at least not in heavy use. deck droppers: fell bats carrying around zombies with handguns or cartoon blackpowder bombs. A neat and funny idea, but potentially awkward conversion. I'm inclined to leave them out on the principle of not adding /too/ much shooting/blackpowder animated hulks: zombie ogres, a classic conversion, I'm inclined to add these. Mournguls: I'm not sure of the justification for attaching these to vampire pirates specifically? But they're there in the game, and there was an official model for them, which hasn't been supported by the core vamp counts factions, so it might be nice to throw these in just so that people who have the old model have somewhere to use it. rotting prometheans/leviathans - giant undead crabs. Cool, but I want there to be easy first party conversion options for all the new units, and there isn't one for this. Unless we re-magined it as a more generic 'any sort of giant undead sea monster' sort of thing, such that people could use like the dark elf Kharibdyss? necrofex colossus: a giant walking shipwreck with a skeleton of torn timbers and muscles of drowned crewman corpses lashed together. An absolutely amazing monster, iconic to the faction, and it kills me to say it but once again I don't think there's an easy enough conversion from mostly first party parts. If we make 'rotting leviathan' a generic undead sea beast concept, maybe these could fit in there, for those willing and able to scratch build them? bloated corpse: exploding zombie giant/big ogre. cool and gross, but I think monsters are kind of over-covered already, and kind of overlaps with the animated hulks cannonade: well, yeah, they're pirates, they should have a cannon mortar: I don't see the harm in mortars as an alternative to cannons? queen bess: a super strong giant cannon. As much as a signature huge cannon is on brand for a pirate faction, and as cool as conversions based on the chaos helcannon or ogre ironblaster would be, I'm inclined to say no here? on the same not wanting to add /too/ much shooting & not wanting to go overboard on blackpowder reasoning. I am open to being argued otherwise though. As important as what gets added are the units dropped. Armies of Infamy are supposed to be relatively narrow themed lists, after all, far more focused in their unit selection than the grand army lists they are drawn from. Here's the grand army stuff I'm inclined to say vampire pirates just don't get: wights: (apart from the 'gunnary wight' above, which is a different sort of thing). No wight kings, No wight lords, no grave guard, no black knights. Wights are raised from their earthen barrows, and while perhaps not magically bound to them the way vampires are to their coffins, they're still creatures of the land rarely found at sea. ghouls: No ghoul kings, no crypt ghouls, no crypt horrors, no varghulf, no vargheists (which the grand army associates with ghouls). while most undead hunger for the living, ghouls alone will starve if they don't feed that hunger. Trapped on a ship for months at sea ghouls would eat the provisions, then the crew, then each other. Plus Ushoran's progeny are subject to terrible sea-sickness, everybody knows that. cavalry/chariots. No black knights, no blood knights, no hexwraiths, no corpse carts, no black coaches. You can take horses on boats, but they don't like it - not even the undead ones. Any vampire worth their salt who lives and fights at sea will tell you it isn't worth the bother. And transporting a chariot by sea is just awkward. Maybe we make an exception for character mounts? Or maybe not? Cairne Wraiths: I don't know, we like banshees here. I can't have fun fluff reasons for everything. necromancers. no master necromancer, no necromantic acolytes. Seawater and rocking waves wreak havoc on fragile paper tomes of arcane lore and careful alchemical mixtures. Yes, that means no level 4 spellcasters for this Army of Infamy, the strongest available spellcaster would be a lv3 vamp count. It wouldn't be the first AoI with no lv4s - Settra's Royal Host is limited to lv2. It also pretty much guarantees that this homebrew AoI won't be outperforming first party content - legacy or otherwise - on tables that allow it. Tentative composition then looks like: Characters (some percentage) 1+ Vampire (must be the general) 0-1 Vampire Count per 1000 points Any number of Vampire Thralls, Drowned Quartermaster (gunnery wight)*, and Banshees note: 1 vampire thrall or drowned quartermaster may be the battle standard bearer for +25 points Core (some percentage) 1+ Drowned Pirate Crew (light armor with options for pistols, handguns, or paired hand weapons)* Any number of Skeleton Warriors, Zombies, Bat Swams, and Dire wolves Special (some percentage) 0-1 unit of Spirit Hosts per banshee Any number of Fell Bats, Drowned Pirate Ogres* 0-2 units per 1000 points chosen from: Drowned Pirate Cannon*, Drowned Pirate Mortar* (basic cannon or mortar but with low BS undead crew) Rare (some percentage) 0-1 Terrorgheist or Mourngul* per 1000 points, Any number of Blood Knight Infantry* Allies: most Armies of Infamy don't get allies, but I feel like Vampire Pirates should Vampire Counts Grand Army Dark Elves Grand Army (or corsair-specific army of infamy, if we link up with a dark elf homebrew project working on one) *new unit, rules to be worked out, name subject to change For the drowned quartermaster, pirated crew, etc, I I know 'Zombie Pirates' is the most firmly established, but I kind of want to leave it open to the player whether to represent/convert them as skeletons, zombies, or ghosts. Maybe fluff them as the drowned crews of sunken ships revived at first as zombies, but if they last long enough the flesh sloughs off without any change in their abilities, and under the light of morslieb they take on the ghostly countenance of the people they once were? Just leaving them as open as possible for hobbying & the most options possible for 3rd party models. That leaves out a lot of fairly cool and iconic vampire coast units - the colossus, the crabs, the deck droppers, etc. It also already has /6/ new units, not counting any special characters, which is a lot for an Army of Infamy, arguably too much already. IMO if we wanted to add more than this, in particular if we wanted to add things like the necrofex colossus, then what we'd be looking at at that point is an entire separate homebrew faction, not an Army of Infamy for an existing one. But maybe trade the Mourngul for a 'rotted leviathan', which could be any big undead sea beast, maybe including the mournghul? The problem there is base size - mournghul wants to be on a 50mm square, would be awkward on a 60x100, and positively drowning on a 100x150. kharibdyss wants to be on a 60x100, won't fit on a 50x50, and would look weird on a 100x150, most of the necrofex colossus conversions I've seen seem like they'd want to be on a 100x60, legs splayed wide knight titan style. most conversions & 3rd party stuff I've seen for giant crab style rotting leviathan look like they wouldn't fit on anything less than a 100 x 150.

So far I've mostly been using 5x5 for skeletons & zombies, 6x4 for tomb/grave guard - but I'm switching those to 7x3 or 8x3, 5x1 for blood knights (though I could see 6x1 or even 7x1 being good for them), 3x1 (or 4x1 with hero) for light chariots & necroknights. 40mm monstrous infantry (ushabti or crypt horrors) I haven't really nailed down, waffling from 3 to 5 wide, 1 or 2 deep. 10 wide melee infantry sounds good but gets too unwieldy, too difficult to wheel around terrain or to fit into a battle line with supporting units, too easy for the enemy to multi-charge, which defeats the point of having so many attacking models by splitting their output between multiple enemy units. If you have some particularly nasty buff it can still be worthwhile, but otherwise even 8 wide is honestly a bit much imo. In terms of units changing formation mid battle - drilled is good in principle, as are other units that let you redress ranks like the sea guard gimmick, but due to the physical realities of movement trays vs. loose models & such I prefer to avoid it altogether and just deploy units in the formation I mean to keep them in for the entire battle. Unless there's an easy way to manage things with multiple smaller trays - like 20 seaguard on 2 5x1 bases that can be put next to each other for 10 wide shooting then shifed to front and back for 5 wide combat.

I think part of the point of divorcing the subfaction layer of rules from the actual subfactions in the lore is specifically so they don't need to come up with a different special rules for every different specific city, society, and army in the lore. Four - the number nighthaunt have, honestly seems about right. OBR have 6 and that's been way too many, I can hardly imagine the dozen or so cities working out at all well. Honestly, mechanically, it seems like a good move, although there are some factions whose overall faction identity is hugely tied to their specific suite of subfaction rules - Soulblight is one, cities sadly is probably also one. Cases where subfaction is tied not just to a couple special rules but also to unit selection. Neferata and Mannfred for instance shouldn't be fieldable together without at least some amount of friction. .... I've seen a couple posts assuming every faction will get four faction battle traits. I don't think this is a safe assumption - the article doesn't say that, and even looking at stormcast, 2 of their faction abilities together would have been a single battle trait in 2nd or 3rd, you really can't count 'the ability that lets you put units in reserve during deployment' and 'the ability that lets you then deploy those units during the game' as separate abilities, so if stormcast are illustrative of any general trend I'd say ~three~ abilities per faction is more likely, though I doubt there's a general trend at all. One ability per subfaction though seems very likely, ignoring split abilities like celestial realm/scions of the storm. That's how most of the recent faction books have handled subfactions.

we're supposed to get the faction/subfaction preview today, right? Fingers crossed for a death faction. In particular I'd love to see how OBR have been re-imagined in light of the 'nobody gets extra command points' concept.

color choices could have been better, yeah, but the abilities also say what phases they're used in (if they're limited to particular phases) and have symbols representing those phases, so they're more clear than they were in the past even for those who can't see color at all.

Does anyone happen to have first hand experience with both the dark elf incubi and blood knight models sufficient to say whether the upper torsos of blood knights could fit on the lower torsos of incubi to make for infantry blood knights? I fear the knights would be just too big to fit. I'm trying to figure out a decent first party conversion for infantry blood knights, a unit that would be relevant for both Vampire Pirates (depth guard) and Blood Dragons, maybe other AoIs as well. There are readily available 3rd party alternatives, and in theory that's good enough so it's not make or break. But just as a personal preference I'd like there to be 1st party counts-as or conversion options for any new units that don't require sculpting skills.

I kind of wish 'all out defense' had been -1 to be hit instead of +1 to save. It would have had pleasing symmetry with all out attack, & more importantly imo save stacking is a bit excessive in 3e and I would have preferred to see some of the save buffs removed. Oh, well.

I have mixed feeling on the whole 'different weapons have the same profiles' thing. On the one hand, as an OBR player who likes the look of spears, it's nice to be able to build my units to my aesthetic preference without worrying about making them worse for no reason. On the other hand, a unit with two big hammers vs. a big hammer and a big shield kind of feel like they should play differently on the table. Like the former /should/ be a hammer unit (if you'll pardon the pun), while the latter should be an anvil. Plus it then gets confusing when dual hammers are the same as hammer and shield, but hammer and shield is a completely different unit with completely different rules from exactly the same models except armed with a spear and shield. If anything the hammer & shield and spear & shield units should be the same, while the dual hammers unit should be something else, no? Why are Liberators and Vindicators different units at all, when unnecessary warscroll bloat has already forced the devs into one embarrassing and premature cull of stormcast units? Why not take the opportunity of 4e's total warscroll refresh to consolidate units like this? It's just weird when GW devs are saying "different weapons alone aren't enough to warrant separate profiles on the same warscroll" out one side of their mouth, while out the other side of their mouth they're saying "different weapons alone are enough to warrant separate warscrolls entirely".

I don't disagree, but in general the best chaff to screen this way with would also have been the best chaff to just sacrificially charge into the problem shooty unit before charging with your hammer anyway (furies, fell bats, etc). Granted, this now works to distract multiple shooty units at a time, but still, there ~was~ counter-play to the old unleash hell, it's just a bit easier to do now. On the other hand, in matches where both sides have shooting units, you now get to covering fire before the opponent can reduce your shooting unit with their own on their turn. There's give & take.

You're absolutely right. For some reason I thought power through was end of the charge phase, not end of the turn. My mistake.

A unit can still only use one command per phase

I mean, they did have a big civil war about it first, and only really stopped that because 1) the leader of the resistance went crazy and 2) the end of the world got in the way. The way it was left, if team anti-chaos had stopped the apocalypse the high elves would probably have gone back to civil warring about it. also did the flames say he was good, or just the legitimate heir? because he honestly was the latter, and the real villain was hereditary monarchy as a political system in the first place. but that's enough trying to defend a bad book. Yeah, end times khaine was a huge disappointment, as both a narrative and as a game supplement, and after nagash and glotkin had been such spectacular successes. real shame.

sacrosanct no (they aren't part of the current stormcast spearhead, nor the previous vanguard iirc, and while I expect a new spearhead for stormcast out of the 4e starter box stuff that won't include them either), beastmen yes (they have a vanguard box, and they're supposedly getting supported like any other faction for the first year of 4e), and bonesplitters no (while they're also getting that year of support, they aren't a faction unto themselves and aren't included in any current orruk vanguard or spearhead boxes - honestly we might not even get spearhead support for ironjaws for the same reason).

I think we can be confident that we've seen the end of entire faction culls, at least for 4th edition. We might see individual units culled when their battletomes release, eg losing oldhammer kits from cities of Sigmar, and I suppose souping together or splitting apart factions is still possible. But if they were going to drop Ogres or Fyreslayers outright in 4e they'd have already made that decision, and they'd be announcing it now along with the bonesplitters and fyreslayers in order to get the pain over with at once. They had to know the move would hurt confidence in the game pretty badly, and if they somehow didn't know it then they do now. It'll take time to build that back, and if they undermine it during the healing process they might never get it back. Kind of surprised at the lack of another preview article today. They kind of need to keep a constant drumbeat of positive news going to get people past the disappointment, and there's plenty more to cover.

Sigmar & Nagash kiss & make up, stormcast & bonereapers souped

We're seeing a lot of movement on those charts just from more events being added. targeted balance adjustments seem premature until the data gets more consistent. People are still getting armies together, let alone figuring out how to make best use of them.

Yeah, I think we can rule this out. It's a neat idea, and I like that it's a thing in AoS at least, but with how ethereal works in the Old World it would just be too obnoxious.