stratigo

And you can put it on a dragon

I am mildly amused but sympathetic to cubicle7 putting out a city guide only for GW to go a couple weeks later "lul Morathi conquered it and killed all the nonelves and renamed it"

Very little. The issue with no politics is that it really isn't. It's "don't talk about divergence from the status quo too much". The way you live right now, the money you make, the right you have are maintained by politics, it isn't the natural state of man. So questioning what GW has obligations to do, and what they SHOULD have the obligations to do is political. GW's obligations to its customers are enforced by political process, and any change to them whether increasing or decreasing those obligations, would be through political measures. Which is why it never will be on the back of the box. Albeit political forces aren't just in what is and is not legal, but in pressure between competing interests too. Companies have internal politics for example, sometimes enshrined in policy and sometimes not.

What is legal and what is moral for business strategies, transparency, or fairness are political considerations.

This is clearly intentional. They aren't going "oh boy, how could we predict that charging 60 dollars on top 40 dollars plus another 40 dollars, oh and 60 more dollars now, the first sixty doesn't count any more costs a lot of money?" GW is 100 percent aware of what they are doing.

Ha, 4 books. Oh the optimism. Check how many books they forced on psychic awakening. Some people only had a book for like 3 months before it was entirely invalidated. In the middle of a pandemic where they couldn't really use it anyways. GW's rules writing is pretty exploitative to its customers.

Also, if you're in the US, shipping is massively messed up right now. The post offices are kinda run ragged by the election and, uh, sabotage, and so any shipping involving post offices is super inconsistent right now.

I want to note, you can't really talk corporate pricing, value for cost, or what exactly your dollar (pound/euro/whathave you) should buy without being political. These are all political topics. The idea that your purchase should include some guarantor of rules or if you are only buying the tangible plastics is a political discussion.

KO have an extremely oppressive alpha strike build that contains most of the winning lists. The zilfin first turn drop with WLV is very strong, and it's unbeatable if it double turns someone first to second. It's still good without the oppressive zilfin list, but not quite as.

The ability to toss a WLV and the Zilfin first turn alpha.

GW hated how KO were being played a year ago, which was often blobs of arkanauts or riggers. GW's vision of KO is boats, and often lists would have maybe one boat. So they nerfed the army into the dumpster. The new book boosted the boats again, and a lot of their FAQ changes have been about boosting boats. Course the very best KO list is back to mostly one boat, which I am sure the rules writers are grumpy about.

Actually most of the not fine statues were put up because they were not fine and were a useful tool in reminding a downtrodden minority how the majority viewed them and their place in the world. The vast majority of those civil war generals were raised in opposition civil rights. The shouldn't be at street corners, campuses, and in front of government buildings. People remember why they were actually placed there and the equivocation of "but but history" is mostly nonsense. The morality that changed was "oh, maybe black people should have equal rights and not be abused". Sadly, for some, still a controversial statement. The problem being that the Imperium was never supposed to be the good guys. They were a satire on how fascist the original game writers thought thatcherite england was. So, uh, yeah, being problematically xenophobic was one of the ways to show the imperium was bad that people have started to take as good. Which is bad. Just like how statues that were raised to glorify slavers (the vast majority of confederate generals and politician statues) as a tool to scare black people was bad when they did it.

AoS is remarkably.... not balanced at all and I am not sure why people think it is. That said, as a KO player, this bums me out. Cause I know this will lead to a nerf that could put the army back into the dumpster. GW is rarely... uh... restrained in their balance decisions

I mean... capitalists tend to be greedy. It's the point. Make all the money by hook or crook, restrained only by law and even then you can spend some of your money to weaken those restraints or ignore them (which is when capitalism becomes bad for society).

Your characters are certainly a cut above WHFRPG, they're not so fragile and the game isn't so fraught. But it IS surprisingly deadly. Deadlier that I thought it would be going in. It doesn't take super much to reduce heroes to their wounds track, though the designers did put some breaks here so you can't go from full to dead in a swing. Once you lose all your toughness, you're about 3 more hits from actual death. This is slightly mitigated from the conceit that your money is also your source of healing, and healing is more readily available in AoS than WHF. But the game is certainly deadlier than DnD.

And then people take as few of them as they can get away with. :P.

Arkanauts. They went from hardcore butt kickers with a strong shooting component to.... objective sitters and screens. They don't really do anything else now. They're not the objectively worst unit by any measure, but as a KO player, it is a bit of a bummer.

I understand, but I also think a stance should be taken, officially, on the perpetuation of well known racist tropes.

You have a couple of anecdotes, of questionable sourcing. But... like... why is your mother trying to keep government benefits even with family help a problem? You'll have to unpack this one for me, because I don't see the issue. Why should she be beholden to you and your brother(s)? I dunno what the second anecdote is even supposed to indicate? I mean, I am going to assume you aren't pulling the reactionary view that black men are inherently violent (whether socially or biologically, this distinction is a trick). So what's the point? He's doing a bad thing. He should not do the bad thing. So black people as a whole don't deserve benefits or something? Black people AREN'T receiving wonderful welfare. They receive, in actual measurable reality, very LITTLE government support. But of course welfare is one dimension of funding black communities. Work programs, school funding, infrastructure, housing. But you seem to focus only on the welfare boogeyman. Which is, again, a racist trope invented by racists to justify oppressing black people. This isn't conjecture, this is a well researched phenomenon. Actual deliberate racists created this view of 'welfare queens', and because racism is insidious, it's perpetuated through the entire culture. There's no amount of hard work that's going to fix black communities. Black people already work quite hard, they just are usually relegated to jobs that do not pay much. There's no amount of hard work that's going to get someone stuck stocking shelves at a grocery store to the american dream. So you got to hit on the lucky handful that make it higher. But, like, no dude it isn't fair that schools in black communities are decaying edifices starved of money. How are you gonna get a good education without money to pay for books, pay for a computer, and the library was closed years ago? Maybe you can get the community to band together to help one kid out of thousands push past the blocks. But you can't do that for every kid. But why do you expect black people to just work harder than most white people enjoy? Why is this okay? Why are you so against the idea of giving black people the same hand up white people enjoy by benefit of being white? Do you think that getting welfare completely destroys a person's willingness to work?

Yeah, they're probably not. But you never know about the future. This isn't true. A handful misuse welfare. Statistically VERY FEW misuse welfare. The idea that welfare is regularly misused is a racist one perpetuated as a justification to NOT give black people any money at all. It distresses me that this is a trap you've fallen in to. You are literally parroting back talking points invented by racists right here. That black people simply couldn't handle being handed prosperity, they will misuse it. Black people must first change themselves somehow, in some way. But of course, no, there's nothing a black community can do, no action they can preform that would prove to the people who want to withhold welfare that black people are suddenly deserving of benefits.

There are plenty of obvious ways to help black communities. And none of them have to do with fixing the minds of all racists everywhere forever. Mostly it involves spending a scant fraction of the money on black people that we have, and continue to, spend on white people. In aid and benefits. I mean, can you imagine how much better it would be if the government just..... gave black people houses? Just handed them out? Cause that's what the US has done, multiple times, for white people. One of the core features of the recent protests was shifting funding from hard enforcement to community services for black communities. And, like, we can DO it. Things have gotten better than they were in the past. We, you, are not doomed to be stuck in the current morass. Lizardmen females is mostly a case or quirk of gendering pronouns honestly. Though if you want to bring dimorphism in, you could cheekily have female lizardmen be bigger and stronger than male If, in total freedom, designers only make dudes, white dudes for the good guys, then is that a problem? Of course the flip side is any time they do make a female model someone, perhaps you, will say "oh it's forced diversity". So the actual freedom isn't important, because no one is privy to the thoughts of designers, and few are privy to the process of models getting made, so any time a model comes out, it's always conjecture about why a model is made. Unless you think GW designers are just super jazzed to make endless amounts of space marines, I can tell you, it's likely a profit motive for all the space marine releases for example. And not, uh, creative freedom. Hollywood has always been divided. One of the biggest oscar bait films is, pretty much, the racism biopic. Especially if it boils racism down to the actions of individuals that are bads, and ignores the system, though we still get regular gems from this too. The other biggest oscar bait is, of course, the industry ****** film that's all about how cool the process of making movies is. But the context of this document is that the oscars is run by a collection of old white dudes. Several of whom are not even subtly racist. They tend to throw a bone at one black film at a time and then ignore every other film featuring black people. Under this document at least the low effort movies with minorities shoved in them will also have minorities among the crew and producers though. Representation come into play all the time already. That's the issue. That if the system isn't forced to change, it of course won't. The reason why there aren't many black people in career fields is not because there are no qualified black people for career fields. It's because of racism. The all white crews aren't all white (and the crews are, right now, mostly white) because white people are magically supremely skilled film makers. It's because racism. I mean, I'll urge you to listen to the late great Chadwick Boseman's oscar acceptance speech. The success of one or a handful of black people doesn't excuse the system from its efforts to reduce the majority of black people to a lower class status. And I mean, trying to avoid hurting racist white people's feelings (and people who lose their minds over the idea of more black people in the oscars are) is a losing proposition. You may as well say we shouldn't have elected Obama because a black president scared white people too much. The bootstrap comment was actually me paraphrasing MLK. It's something he said in the context of government aid for black communities. He was all for people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but that in black communities, many people don't even have boots. Metaphorically. But there's an even deeper context. You see, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is physically impossible. It doesn't matter how strong or agile you are, no amount of tugging on your bootstraps will lift you into the air. The term was first coined as a mocking impossibility for the poor to reach the heights of the wealthy in Britain without any aid. And the rich in Britain adopted the term and it has become this bizarre core tenet/fantasy of modern capitalism that the only true way to success is to be perfectly self made with no help whatsoever, eg pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But just as doing that remains physically impossible, no one has ever been perfectly self made. No one who has seen success did so without help, whether they were born into money, or because a generation ago the government gave them free housing, or they got a handout that kept them going in rough times. No one is perfectly atomized. The best way to help black communities is to start spending money on them. Providing things like housing, offering work programs, increasing school funding, and handing out welfare for those below the margin. And this would only be a scant percentage of the literal trillions (adjusted for inflation) this country has given white people through the years. You can't fix black communities without spending money on them.

We really shouldn't blind ourselves to an uncomfortable past because of modern progress when the results and legacy of that past are still with us. these models have gone no where, are still sold, and still form a core of representation in the game. The OP didn't include bretonnians and tomb kings, but is is willfully blinding yourself to try and ignore current model ranges just because they are old. They are still current The mix of opinions often comes from a pretty dark place though, and trying to treat all opinions as valid can fall into the paradox of tolerance, which is not a good thing and just cedes the ground to bad faith and hate. I suspect it's because.... dwarves can't be classically beautiful. The ideal female form as presented in the media just doesn't and can't fit the dwarf body type. GW has only recently, and only haltingly, made female models that don't fall into 1 of two catagories. Hollywood beautiful, or obviously comedic. And even then, a dwarf body type is more divergent from the hollywood ideal than anything GW has ever produced for a non comedic female model. I would like to note that kharadrons are, in large part, a spoof on ultra capitalism, specifically of the type typified by victorian magnates. And the victorians were one of history's most sexually regressive peoples. Remember, Black Library authors wanted to introduce female Custodes, and the GW bigwigs told them they could not. I mean women are often excluded, at times cruelly. In my local store, no ladies. Why? I suspect it's mostly to do with thirsty nerds swarming them when they come in. Or they come in on a particularly unlucky day and we have the local incel well into a rant about women in media in the corner. I highly doubt such This is also a SUPER contentious topic in history that has prompted innumerable debates that only ever gets worse when lay people weigh in with their "expertise" and "biotruths" But how much of a minority? It's hard to say when the idea of warrior women is so inherently contrary to a couple centuries of concerted propaganda that's only really been challenged for less than half. The thing about archaeology especially is that it is very easy to interpret things based on preconceptions you already have, shaped by centuries of social norms. Also the people of the past were deeply irrational. I mean, have you read what educated victorian men though about women's intelligence? They literally invented whole fake sciences to justify their views on race. This is not the act of rational men. This is the act of men wanting to couch their deeply held (very awful) beliefs in a veneer of rationality. And this very much still goes on today. So, let us say, that it stands to reason, logically, let us say, it stands to reason, no let us say, that I am always correct. So, going from that, then is stands to reason, logically, that it stands to reason, everything I argue is true. Biotruths by non biologists always lead us astray I mean, yikes man. Yiiiiiiikes. Yikes. Where black people live and the conditions they live in is not an accident or a mere quirk of history, but a result of literal centuries of concerted effort at all levels of governance and society. Through exclusion and expulsion and through deliberately targeted aid and benefits to white people. This is why historic amnesia is a mistake. You can't address the issue without rebalancing, in some comparatively small part, the deliberate imbalances of the past. It's a cruel thing to tell a man with no boots to pull himself up by his bootstraps. I mean, warhammer is not going to fix racism, no. Fixing racism will allow more black people, and other ethnicities, to enjoy the hobby though.

And when you do, game safely! Not everyone in our community is taking proper precautions when they game.

The size of "armies" in this game aren't really large enough to need the thematic grounding of a battleline. Battlelines are a balancing tool.

If you ask someone what their units do, and they don't tell you, they're a ******. If they're doing at a tournament, you should tell the TO there what an ****** that person is. Indeed I imagine a TO will give that person a talking to. I will, otherwise, demand they show their books and then, slowly, read every single entry. Telling people what your army can do when asked is level 1 courtesy. Knowing what units do doesn't tell you how they're going to be used, or how the support pieces are going to buff the other parts of the army. It robs nothing, at all, from the strategy of the game, it just prevents a cheap shot of "oh, you didn't know this unit could stack a couple buffs and triple their damage output. Gotchya!"