Shearl

That makes two of us! I have twenty something of the forge world Fimir and a few other, now discontinued monsters. I'd love to see the direction GW would take with Fimir.

My local GW store and local gaming store have a pretty friendly relationship. Often when the independent store doesn't have something in stock they direct customers to GW, and when people ask about playing specialist games at the GW store they direct them to the independent store.

Cool sculpts, frankly I don't care if they're for an army or collection I have or not. I'm hoping to see some more undead stuff for AoS and a better look at the Necromunda redemptionists. I try to avoid disappointment over there previews by just hoping to see some nice new sculpts.

I don't mind playing a mirror match here and there, but if my gaming group was comprised of only a few people I would most likely pick a force no one else is playing. When I decided to pick a Necromunda gang I asked my flg which gangs people are playing the least, and picked one of them (naturally I did this right before covid so my poor Delaques haven't seen use).

I'd love the addition of a insect race in AoS (ideally for destruction), I just hope they're not too similar to Tyranids. Basically I'd prefer they don't have a hivemind like element, I'd rather they be individuals with a actual culture. Who knows maybe plot advancements might result in Beastgrave awakening and as a result the silent people are let loose upon the realms. Will it happen? Who knows, but I love that AoS allows for the creative space that its a possibility.

Everyone's talking about unaligned daemons, I just hope Bel'akor finds some decent new marauder sculpts and brings them along with him.

I'm not sure the Warcry boxes are really comparable to the new combat patrol boxes. Combat patrol boxes contain enough units for play a 500pt game of 40k, the warcry boxes are for warcry and not really a legal AoS force on their own. If AoS were to get an equivalent type of box it would enough to play a small game of AoS with just its contents. Plus the combat patrol boxes are more expensive than a start collecting.

Even before the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns I didn't find myself playing very consistently, but one thing that always stuck out to me as weird is the rule surrounding first turn initiative. I feel like rolling for first turn might be a better system, as the focus on minimizing drops along with artifacts has put battalions in a odd spot. I'd rather a battalion be thematic and provide subsequent buffs or abilities rather than being intrinsically tied to other elements of the game. Also as many others have said it would be nice for monsters to get some kind of change. I wanna put some big cool models on the table and better rules would help incentivize that. Lastly, I'd love for alternative activations to be included, but I realize there is no chance at all of this happening any time soon.

I wonder if it will be the Grave Keeper and some of the generic enemies that accompanies it. So maybe we'll get a look of the Grave Keeper and some zombies or something.

I think its entirely possible to have an ogor within the group and still be order. In the old world ogres were well known as mercenaries and hired muscle. If I had to guess I think it'll be an hired ogor in the same vein as the one in Mordheim. Plus there's a chaos ogor in Warcry, why not an order ogor in this?

I can remember veteran players complaining that their local GW stores always prioritized new customers (often younger folks) over the more established players. Its interesting to see the shift in opinions online that GW's marketing revolves around either focusing entirely on kids eager to spend their parents money at the expense of existing players vs the idea that GW seemingly doesn't care about new players and instead seeks to further milk existing players. Obviously those making these claims are hardly the same groups of people. Ultimately GW is a business and they seek to make a profit there they can, and that is definitely from both new players starting armies as well as existing players adding to their collections. Whether it is good or not, with GW there is often a "feast or famine" situation. Either your range languishes between releases (the poor dwarfs) or you find yourself inundated with releases for your desired faction. And while I don't have an Lumineth army, I can easily say I'd be happy to see my army getting a second release. I like having options and often don't feel the need to buy every new thing for an army I collect. Plus because there's no roadmaps we don't know if this is the last Lumineth release for several years.

Maybe I'm just an optimist (or just naive) but I imagine that the reason 40k got point changes and AoS didn't is more a matter of the newness of 9th edition rather than GW not liking AoS or something. A lot of 40k points and status are currently in a state of flux at the moment and if they hadn't gotten a new edition a few months ago I doubt they'd get point changes either. The rhetoric that GW is intentionally ignoring AoS or doesn't care about the game reminds me of the kind of silly claims that Cities of Sigmar took so long to come out after being revealed because they were embarrassed or didn't like the battletome. I just wish GW would be more transparent about things like this. I feel like some of these bad feelings could have been avoided if they simply explained why 40k is getting changes AoS isn't. Just like I wish they had put out an article about the discontinuing of the Forge World chaos dwarf line just to give the owners of the army a heads up, rather than many waking up to the unpleasant news. I think there's a line between transparency while still keeping enough secret for generating hype, I think GW still needs to find out where that line is.

This isn't my work, but further shows how a different scheme can really change the feel of the sculpt.

I genuinely enjoy that your comments like this get more likes than the actual rumors do. You better start posing pictures of your gargants somewhere on this forum, the people demand it!

As someone involved in both AoS and 40k (even the much maligned space marines) I would hardly say that AoS is being neglected. Despite the global pandemic GW has been releasing a lot of new and exciting stuff for AoS, including the Lumineth, Gargants, Slaanesh, Warcry, and more. I think the other big thing to keep in mind that a lot of the AoS releases are new concepts while the bulk of 40k releases are either updates or expansions of existing things. AoS players can wonder about ideas like "I wonder what the new army will be?" while for 40k its more a matter of "I wonder when Eldar will get updated". In that sense some of the excitement in AoS stems from the fact you don't know what's coming next, while in 40k its more a matter of getting excited about how the things you already love are getting updated. Maybe I'm just a fanboy/shill but frankly I think right now is a great time to be a fan of both 40k and AoS. And as a final point about the state of the Stormcast battletome, I don't want to sound callous but its kind of the nature of the beast. Books are rarely all created equal and often get lost behind as newer ones are released (its especially felt when the book is early in the edition). In both AoS and 40k there's armies that need some attention, but this cycle is kinda the way its always been.

While I can't add much to the discussion regarding plastic injection molding other than reiterating that they're rather hardy and expensive, I can chime in briefly on silicon molds used for casting resin. Both in my own small scale experiments casting with silicon molds and with resin miniatures from Forge World, the silicon is prone to tearing after repeated use. This is further hastened as a result of resin producing heat as it cures (this is part of the reason some recommend using dental plaster in some casting applications). On several occasions I've been assembling a Forge World miniature when I've noticed a stray bit of turquoise silicon stuck into one of the nooks or crannies, signifying that any future miniatures coming out of that mold will simply be missing detail there. But the flip side here is that while silicon molds last much shorter than plastic injection molds, they are far cheaper to replace.

If I had to guess the main reveals are going to be the new Slaanesh mortals we haven't gotten a decent look at. And then maybe a teaser trailer for an undead themed Warhammer Quest, which ideally will eventually lead into a undead release (in the vein of the Tzeentch stuff in Silver tower).

I think it’s important to note that Forgeworld had another strength besides making large boutique models, but they could make things that GW couldn’t justify spending resources on. The extreme price of plastic injection molds means GW won’t want to release a product that won’t sell well enough to justify the price of production. Forgeworld’s resin and silicon molds are cheaper to produce (while more prone to damage and wearing out) which allows them to produce characters, monsters, and conversion kits what they don’t need to sell as high a volume of. As others have said I believe the reason for Forgeworld’s AoS line to currently be on life-support is simply a result of neglect from rules writers and marketing. They produced a range of beautiful monsters, yet made it very difficult to include them in armies and when you did their rules were often pretty lackluster. I can’t help but wonder if the fear of people claiming FW was too over powered resulted in them course correcting too far in the opposite direction. It’s a shame because I own probably too much FW resin, and just recently I’ve had my 20 something fimir warriors, 2 nobles, basilisk, magma dragon, and Tamurkhan relegated to legends. I will say that when I purchased them I knew they weren’t great game wise and that it would be more of a passion project. I have hope that one day FW will figure out what it’s doing with AoS.

I’m not sure what your point is. I believe what @UnholyRevenant getting at is that it’s interesting to see that they hide little references to things that they later build upon, not that they’re putting obvious clues stating that they’re coming out with. The notion that the throw away lines occasionally become big things that we didn’t see coming. And the fun is that the lore blurbs we overlooked actually did foretell something grand that we had no way of seeing. This is not predicting the future, but us going back and noticing the hidden breadcrumb trail which leads there.

Definitely. I love a lot of the new angles some armies have taken, but I would really like some new zombie sculpts. I think its very possible to balance radically new ideas for some armies, while others essentially receive an updated model range sticking to their current style.

I just finished reading Warcry: Catacombs Blood of the Everchosen by Richard Strachan and want wanted to see if anyone else had any thoughts on it. I picked it up primarily because Warcry is the game I play the most lately, and I wanted to get a better look at the Scions of the Flame. The novel follows characters from the Scions of the Flame, Untamed Beasts, Splintered Fangs, Stormcasts, and the various denizens of the Eightpoints. The chaos characters fall pretty widely upon the scale of evilness, while some are definitely cruel zealots others seem far more reasonable and you even get a decent look at the poor people who are just trying to survive by working the land and avoiding trouble. The book also highlights that visions and prophecies are what may happen rather than what will happen, the main example being that the main characters of each warband have received visions showing different outcomes regarding the same event. Ultimately it falls to the strength of each to attempt to make their visions come true. Without getting into spoilers here, the plot could potentially have dramatic impacts upon the whole of AoS’s lore. Yet at the same time we don’t really know what is true and what isn’t, and I think that’s another point the book is trying to make. When chaos and prophecies are involved its neigh impossible to tell what is truth and what is fiction. This book could easily be setting the stage for much larger narrative changes or the events of the book might never get mentioned again. I feel the author managed to balance the action and more narrative elements well. Some of the combat sections did a good job of representing the dynamic combat of Warcry, especially the fighters making use of scaling and leaping from terrain. As is typical with Black Library books occasionally I felt the author turned to the thesaurus more often than needed, but the sometimes obtuse flowery language seems to be a stylistic choice in Warhammer novels (I’m not sure I’ve read a BL novel that didn’t include “anathema” or “cacophony” at least once). Is it high art? No but it was fun and helped further flesh out the Eightpoints and the diversity of chaos worshippers.

What do you mean? He included Fimir 😉

I saw on another site that the latest white dwarf references the “Tomb of Champions 2020” in the section containing Bugmansson’s Warcry rules. I know there was some speculation that the upcoming grand alliance books would take the place of this year’s tomb of champions, but it seems we’ll be getting both.

One of the new warrior sculpts has a dagger as well, it's not as ornate as this one though.