Noserenda

Yeah i dont think its unusual to have mixed feelings about AoS still afters its abysmal launch. I think most folks are moving past outright hatred though, at least if they are paying attention, the future feels a lot more interesting and bright for AoS than 40k which feels like its disappearing up its own backside somewhat

Can confirm the two keenest AoS players in our group havent talked about it since the Heresy leak, the hope of a not janky rules-set for that is much bigger, though our group was formerly very Heresy focused for years so that might be expected. That said, this and last weeks games nights got rainchecked by possible covid so we havent had a good natter about the whole thing yet

There was a point a (long) while back where Marines outsold all of Warhammer and recently they have also been the Powergamers choice army which means even more, plus the Indomnitus Primaris were the watershed for a lot of hobbit marine stans to buy into Primaris and the Necrons were an awesome range revamp, its very much a perfect storm i think? In contrast the Kruleboyz are verrrry marmite and different to existing Orcs and the Stormcast, despite steadily improving over the years still summon up some complicated feelings as the posterboys and entire focus of AoS during its extremely turbulent birth, hell, they are conceptually right up my alley these days and making/painting them still feels bad.

I think its worth mentioning that the places Grungi goes in the last story are all related to the ones in the previous 5 stories too, several of the characters are direct ancestors too

I mean... No offence but thats nonsense. Its a minimal amount of effort to produce epubs and the like given how the books are designed these days and then you save a whole load of logistics moving dead trees around only for some of them to sit around gathering dust forever. They stopped making epubs for 40k, offering no viable alternative and people just went back to pirate PDFs instead, which were delayed for basically no time whatsoever by some guy with a scanner popping them up online. Its exactly like streaming and the like, if you offer a convenient legal option, even if it costs money, people will take it. If you make it awkward or too pricy, or just remove the option entirely (smoooooth work GW) then people will pirate. Just to be clear piracy bad, i would rather give GW money, but Paper codexes are awkward, take up space and have other problems, their current app model is awkward, not usable on PC's and missing over half the content. On the topic of the day, the sub is pretty mediocre until it comes to the Assassin which is 80% of the reason to sub right there

Yup the White Dwarf stories are pretty good, well, except the one where some wizard keeps calling Gotrek a Fyreslayer, racial slurs arent cool I suspect it means a new White Dwarf model as their God figure, Grungi definitely seems more like a "behind the scenes" figure for now.

I suspect we will see another preview event on the actual release day of Dominion like they did with 40k and announce the army books plus a bunch more minis and a path to glory expansion etc at that time.

It might be worth waiting for the full picture before declaring doom folks, theres still like 2 weeks before release to get commentary and FAQs out that sorts all this out. Some really weird choices though ive gotta admit...

Ive glanced through it, looks exactly the same as the other recent ones. But Giants cant ride a beasty (booooooo!)

PLus i dont think a GW three year plan has ever gone off perfectly for a myriad of reasons

Dug out some of the eternal Stormcast backlog to get a few more painted before i remember i hate them again Its really hard to get invested in "new army, new edition" after how wildly invested i got into buying (And stripping and rebuilding) Dwarfs for "Warhammer 9th" unfortunately. Low key traumatised probably, ho hum!

I put a lengthy post about it up recently-ish, possibly in this thread, but they dont write rules to drive sales, because rules dont really drive sales, well, at least powerful or bad rules dont, (i suspect troops/battleline taxes do) the majority of sales just going to models folk like or other reasons, the super competitive "buy a new army after every FAQ" is a tiny tiny minority despite their loudness.

Oh Damn, that Judicator and Chariot just sold me

Stormcast a lot nicer than i anticipated, not sold on the Orcs, well, except the grots. Particularly the Stab Grot of course. Good to see Chaos Dwarf hints too, probably for AoS 4 ofc

Ooof Stormcast going full rubber lance there lol

Im not sure thats true with Age of Darkness, given the almost immediate power creep the system experienced. Well, at least im pretty certain it was ll worked out to some degree initially but then things got tweaked or changed along the way which pretty much undid that work effectively, though having Alan as a showrunner at least had the advantage of keeping the vision largely consistent (after the book 2/3 power bump) which is usually the problem with the main GW studios, either due to feedback or staff changes.

Dwarf soup could be interesting, i mean as long as you can leave factions out without hobbling yourself, no self respecting Dwarf would be seen dead associating with *spit* Fyreslayers after all

Yeah Warmaster was a great set of rules for wargames, just not for warhammer which is why it flopped i think and Battle of Five armies was awesome but produced purely for licencing reasons apparently so GW never had much investment in it. I think if it is produced in a 28ishmm scale it is going to be designed to cross over with AoS, regardless of what Old World itself ends up being, it would just be too much of a gamble otherwise. I dont think smaller scales are inherently easier to 3d print either tbh, a friend got a 3d printer last week and has already made 2kg of Imperial fists (Mostly Heavy Intercessors and Gravis characters) for 40k that look pretty great so the scanners or artists are already out there. I think FWs main problem is recasters, if they try to do a resin focused mass battle game its the recasters that will cut into their profits, so either way they are going to have issues. Personally id rather they embraced 3d printing sooner rather than later, plenty of companies seem to be springing up selling STLs and the like and they can still sell minis to luddites like me I mean they are already using 3d printing to make masters and the like so most of the work is already done.

We've been over it already earlier in the thread but tbh, given how much support for Warhammer is coming from the computer games crowd these days, a smaller scale absolutely makes sense given the majority of the time in Total war games you are looking at the battlefield super zoomed out

It was around 2002 for Lizardmen, i distinctly recall the brand new Saurus being the fist minis i built for the store army while working at GW

Yeah if Cursed city was limited GW would have told us, making more copies is considerably more straightforward then reworking it to include expansions or whatever. So i guess we will see another wave asap.

Id agree with Runebrush, its a staged intro to the hobby for complete newbies so the early issues especially arent much use to experienced hobbyists.

I should mention the belief at GW is that Rules dont notably affect sales. That may have shifted a bit with more community engagement , especially since the enormous growth of the last few years all kinds of conventional wisdom/demographics may have changed but i doubt they have much tbh. Competitive gamers are noisy out of proportion online because they tend to be the customers wanting to talk about things a lot more and hone their forces but a huge majority of buyers pick things for looks or other inscrutable reasons. I mean from personal experience (As useless as anecdotal evidence is ) when i worked in a GW store our most regular customer came in 3-4 times a week to buy some models he liked the look of, painted them up and then came back for more, no interest in the games or background at all despite our best efforts, he just liked painting figures. When i ran my own store one of our best customers is just on a mission to apparently build a full Imperial Guard army given the amount they bought, but also had no interest in gaming or apparently rules as they still buy odd random legends or rules-less Guard stuff ive made over the years and sell on to buy more plastic crack

And you can often (but not always) just field them as a regular battle scroll if needed.

The assumption is afaik that people will field those models because they like them rather than for the rules, they are also often a minefield for weird interactions with odd composition or weapon choices as well as,as others have said, the potential for them to be tricky or expensive to get down the line. It just makes sense to make them a little underpowered/inefficient.