Grimrock

I've got two problems with stormcast in every starter. The first is the forced redundancy it creates. Due to the convention the starter box always has all new miniatures (which can be resculpts of previous miniatures). In addition because it's a starter box it always has to include basic troopers. That means that at the very least GW needs to sculpt a new basic trooper for stormcast every edition, which is why we're now essentially on our 4th iteration of a liberator and why they're already throwing out models from last edition. GW seems either unwilling or perhaps incapable of acknowledging that this is an issue and so there is no sign of it stopping. This is awful for everyone, a waste of precious design resources and a waste of customer time and money. The second is purely personal but honestly I find stormcast unbearably boring. They're literally all the same guy with slightly different equipment. Dude with a shield and hammer. Dude with a spear and shield. Dude with a small crossbow and axe. Dude with a slightly larger crossbow and no axe. Marginally slightly larger dude with a hammer and shield. There's some minor variation when you get to the characters (dude with horn and dude with bow!) but even then it's not really significant until you get to the unique named ones. They're just so repetitive to model and paint. I really don't understand how anyone can get through a whole army of them without pulling their hair out. I tried once and I got like 10 models in before I couldn't take it any more. I have the same issues with space marines though and given how popular they are it's probably just me.

New commands look interesting, not a huge deviation but definitely a bunch of tweaks. I'm really liking the new Ability system, it looks like it's clearing up a lot of timing questions and making everything nice and neat. I could see it being too mechanical for some people, but personally that's a good thing. I'm picking up a bit of an anti combat bias in a number of the changes which is interesting. Redeploy no longer has the restriction for being near an enemy unit that moved within 9", so the counterplay of stopping outside of 9" and hoping for the long charge is gone. Also means that a unit that finished a nearby combat can't just sit still and make an easy charge to the next unit. It's also useful against deep striking units. The change to Forward to Victory needing to be spent before making the roll is a dramatic nerf to the command and combat armies in general. Now you'll have to pick that one single charge you absolutely have to make and spend the command point in advance. It's going to lead to a lot more failed charges and a lot of wasted CP when you make your one charge anyway. That tiny timing tweak will change this from one of the most commonly used commands to one of the least used ones. Magical Intervention could also be pretty crushing depending on what spells are out there. Any spell that manipulates movement could be absolutely devastating if used in your opponents turn. Normally you have to cast before moving meaning you're less likely to get in range, but if you can move in your turn and then cast the spell in your opponents turn you'll be able to ensure you can put the spell wherever you want it. Not only that but we don't know how unbinds work. It's possible you won't be able to unbind in your hero phase, so an enemy spell cast might be unblockable. Imagine your key hero just barely survives your opponents shooting phase only to be killed by an arcane bolt in your own hero phase making you lose your key command ability and unravelling your whole turn. Oof. Countercharge can be brutal as well, it'll be a lot harder to pick on weaker ranged units or lock them in combat if your opponent can just charge in their deathstar combat unit or super monster and kill you before you get to attack. All that together does seem like a pretty hard hit to any combat focused army. Of course that being said they're also getting a huge buff by having all combat ranges extended out to 3", so I'm hopeful it'll balance out in the end.

Why is it always extremes like this? Nobody wants lifelong support for minis or feel like they're owed it. If you want an example, Chaos Marauders and Marauder Horsemen are about to be replaced with new darkoath models and when the news dropped were people getting upset and threatening boycott? No, they were ecstatic to see the new sculpts. Those models came out right around the time I started the hobby in 2002 and they've had a great run, almost nobody is sad to see them go. Sacrosanct models that came out less than 6 years ago? That's not a great run. That's not a good run. That's barely a warmup jog. The worst part is people totally understand that the stormcast line is bloated and in dire need of consolidation, but this problem is entirely GW's fault. They're the ones that have been diligently bloating the line with release after unnecessary release to the point where it's entirely unmanageable. So they've made a mistake and the route they've chosen to fix their mistake is to punish their customers. Not only that, but they show no signs of learning from their mistake because, while punishing their customers for simply buying their products, they're continuing to bloat out the line with yet more releases. This is what's really hammering in the nail in for most people.

Well saying the bad news early doesn't change the fact that it's bad news. However I guarantee you this would be much worse if they waited for the release of the indexes. The one positive thing I can say for the news today is it was delivered much better than the stuff the 40k team pulled at the start of 10th. The bandage is ripped off, but at least there is a while to get some use out of your toys if one is still inclined to play. Obviously sucks for the people that bought kits last weekend, but at least nobody else is going to buy them for the next few months only to find they're not supported anymore.

Interesting thing to wake up to, that's for sure. Of course my condolences for the people that just lost their armies, I don't want to see the community shrink any more but I absolutely understand if it's time to move on from GW. Looking forward, I think people absolutely need to take a very careful and measured approach to buying miniatures. I thought we were past the mass culling but GW has yet again proven they'll cut even brand new product out from under you at any time, so best to beware. Obviously if you're just buying for the models to paint or the narrative or for use as proxies then go nuts, but if you expect rules to exist past a single edition then you might not want to take the risk. Stormcast players, I would absolutely avoid buying anything released before 3rd edition. Just because they haven't axed some models yet doesn't mean they're safe, they probably just have a limited amount of resources for resculpting. I would expect the remaining fatcast models like Dracoth riders to be gone by next edition. Also given the fact that GW seems committed to bloating the faction every 3 years with a new release box you might not want to jump on the thunderstrike bandwagon right away. Who knows if next edition or the one after has a new style that replaces everything thunderstrike? Ogor players, if I were you I would absolutely wait until their book is released in 4th edition before buying new models. If they don't get a major overhaul this edition I'm pretty confident they'll be axed in 5th, maybe 6th latest. They're no different from BoC, an old range with a couple token releases for the last few years. For people saying that they would be axed now if they were going to be axed remember people have been saying that about BoC since they got their first army book. GW might just be biding their time for 3 years until they've finished their initial releases for The Old World and are ready to expand east towards Cathay. It probably goes without saying, but I wouldn't touch anything from a specialist game with a 10 foot pole anymore. I'm really glad I put off buying any Warcry warbands specifically for use in AoS, and now there's no chance I will going forward unless it's purely for conversion purposes. I don't care if they're built specifically for a given sub faction like Legionnaires or even if they're core for another main faction like the Rotmire Creed, they're all at high risk to be put into legends within an edition.

I don't know. Given the way they talked about how much they like people having to make impactful choices with list building my impression was that the system is going to be much more restrictive if you're trying to optimize your list. Sure you can just do anything and have 15 drops, but if you want to get that choice for first or second turn you're going to have to make some very hard decisions. Having a lot of heroes that just open up everything doesn't really jive with that sort of ethos.

Yeah I'm sure that most of the basic battle line will be unlocked by multiple heroes, but it's the edge cases that worry me and I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the more esoteric units are much more limited. Plus there are units that are so thematically linked I could definitely see them getting locked together. Like Pusgoyle Blightlords and the Lord of Afflictions, maybe Flesh Hounds and Karanak, or Furies and Be'lakor. That being said I'm curious to see how the sub factions might interact with the new system. Maybe certain sub factions will allow certain units in all regiments regardless of the hero selection? For example a Knights of the Empty Throne equivalent with a cavalry focus could allow you to take Varanguard and Chaos Knights in any regiment regardless of the hero?

I do hope you're right, I'm cautiously optimistic about the new system but I am a little worried about the hero tax. It would be a really unfortunate situation if you had a favorite unit that was actually decent to use in the game, but it was locked behind a single hero that was absolute trash or just too expensive. Just as a random example, lets say that you absolutely love Varanguard armies and you've been playing knights of the empty throne with 18 of them this edition, but now the only way to get them in a regiment is to take Archaon. You're stuck in a situation where if you want to play your favourite models it a remotely competitive sense (ie. minimal drops with an apparently essential extra CP) you now need to go buy a massively expensive and complicated model and pay a huge point cost. Sure you could just put them in as auxiliaries, but then you're handicapping yourself when you get to the game and probably stand a good chance of getting double turned at some point. Hopefully these sorts of things won't be a problem, but it does feel like the system is custom designed to allow games workshop to 'encourage' people to go out and purchase specific hero models or to balance out problematic warscrolls by soft locking them behind an expensive and annoying hero tax. I do appreciate encouraging thematic armies, I just hope that GW is generous with what heroes allow what models in a regiment.

Holy moly now that would be one big book. With all the cultist units S2D has got to be the second biggest faction already and all the rest are already pretty big. Souping them together would be... catastrophic haha. I'm down for it though, put all my factions together so I only need to worry about one book update per edition. Sounds perfect.

I've been playing the game long enough that I'm in the resigned ambivalence towards the double turn. I know how to play around it to the extent that I don't usually just lose to one, but it can definitely still happen and I've definitely won off it far too often. The reason I voted against it however is the overall negative impact it generally tends to have on newer players. In our little bubble here you'll probably see a lot of people that like it, but outside the bubble the double turn is the most quoted rule I've seen for why people have no interest in the game. It's so completely unintuitive that people hear about it and just shut down completely. To people that have played I go you go games the thought of just going twice in a row with their whole army is frankly ridiculous in concept. Not just that but if a new person does give the game a chance it takes quite a while to learn how to be defensive and play around the double turn, which causes a ton of friction. They struggle with list building to account for it, either by taking a battle regiment to take advantage of it or bringing sufficient screening to counter it, or they struggle to anticipate how their opponent might play if they have a potential double. I've seen a lot of new players get frustrated off of getting tabled on a double and sometimes those players just don't come back. Basically the hobby needs new players to survive and grow, but I think the double turn has a net negative impact on that growth. It creates this awful hurdle for a lot of new players that just doesn't need to be there. If someone gets past it they can absolutely love the game, but it's too difficult for far too many.

Yeah, and I'd say that talk of engagement through the double is all echo chamber because there are a huge number of games that don't have a double turn and get along just fine with engagement. But like you said, no point in going back and forth. For the article I do like more consequences for taking the double turn, but I'm not sure if it's enough. If I get a good double what does it matter if I miss out on 2 points? And if I don't I just keep it in my back pocket and we keep playing standard activations. I just really hope their wording is accurate and you don't lose your tactic if your opponent forces you into a garbage double turn. That would be incredibly awful but based on the way they handled the CP this edition I'm not super confident they took it into account.

Yeah I couldn't help but roll my eyes at it. "By far, the number one answer to the last question is this: ‘not the double turn!’". Please. I don't know a single person in real life or a single YouTuber that would respond like that. The only people I know that actually stick up for it are on here, in real life it's resigned ambivalence at best with the majority disliking it in one way or another.

Yes I believe you're right, you will still have to measure per model but measuring itself doesn't really take much time. Just run a 3" template over your models and you're good to go. The thing that seems to take the most time now is trying to position to maximize who gets to fight. For example the weird staggering and super tight wrapping you need to do to get models with a 32mm base and a 1" reach to fight. A 3" bubble should be more than enough space to fit entire units even if they're 20 strong so all that fiddling for position should mostly be a thing of the past.

The nice thing is this shouldn't even be all that hard to do. Just the combat range change alone should save a huge amount of time measuring models and messing with positioning, and if they do actually drop battle tactics in favor of cards that'll be another 5-10 minutes per round saved on deliberating which tactic to take. The thing I'm really hoping for is an overall point reset that shrinks the size of the game a bit. Something like adding 15-25% to points across the board. Nothing too drastic so people don't feel the need to start playing 2500 points as the standard size, but enough to take some of the sting out of trying to build a full army for new players. Either that or have GW come out and officially say that the new standard game size is 1750 and then push it hard through the rules and official events.

Maybe we'll get lucky and GW will finally give us fully fleshed out terrain rules in 4th edition like 40k has had for what... 4 years now? Incorporate rules like breachable, more cover and line of sight blocking, better rules for vertical engagement, the whole nine yards. Then they can actually give us a good varied batch of terrain tailored to the new rules so even people that don't play the two launch factions will want to pick up the starter set. Eh, who am I kidding. We're stuck with stuff that gets in the way, stuff that sort of gets in the way, and stuff that really gets in the way. No point in hoping for anything different.