Illumini wrote: Bretonnia makes more sense as a more baroque country than medieval anyway. The super medieval "no shooting" stuff was not interesting or realistic. They should have some gunpowder weaponry when they are surrounded by other cultures using firearms for hundreds of years.
Not really. The only reason the Empire has guns is because they learned how to make and use them from the Dwarfs. There aren't as many Dwarf Holds in the Grey Mountains, and those that are there were only there for only a relatively short time before the Bretonni came. There are also less expatriate Dwarfs, as there are in the Empire.
The chivalry thing is also a pretense for keeping weapons that can pierce the armor of Knights out of the hands of the peasantry. This ties into the general state of Bretonnian society; there is no real middle class and no real industry. Firearms are thus prohibitively expensive. Crossbows are similarly illegal. As such, the "infantry revolution" that occurred in historical feudal Europe never happened in Bretonnia.
Which makes it a wonder why they'll still around
The answer is magic. Grail Knights are superhumans in fluff, capable of fighting entire armies on their lonesome.
Bretonnia is relatively sheltered. Some orcs, some undead, some beastmen, maybe a Norscan/DE raid - none of those things are a serious existential threat.
Bretonnia is relatively sheltered. Some orcs, some undead, some beastmen, maybe a Norscan/DE raid - none of those things are a serious existential threat.
More than anything, WHFB was never really supposed to be a realistic setting, lol.
Bretonnia gave you one thing and Empire another, no need to mix them just because in the real world guns would have replaced archers.
I'm talking more the absolute Flanderized levels of it. Commoners vs. royalty is one thing, but the absolute destitution shown in the 6th Ed. book runs contrary to the ideals that the Code of Chivalry expouses.
I really liked that about the 6th ed book because of the fact it resembled the utter hypocrisy that was Chivalric Code, both real life and fantasy.They're ideals that literally no human can actually follow because they're human. Hell, Bretonnia is basically Arthurian fan fiction and all but one of the Knights of the Round Table failed to live up to the code fully in the end.
I think that's not true. There are people all the time who live up to their moral codes despite being human or societal pressures. It's silly to hold a nihilistic standard to an army in this game solely based on that presumption. It is more because there can't be a "good" guy in either system. Everyone MUST be as barbaric and evil as Chaos.
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Illumini wrote: Bretonnia makes more sense as a more baroque country than medieval anyway. The super medieval "no shooting" stuff was not interesting or realistic. They should have some gunpowder weaponry when they are surrounded by other cultures using firearms for hundreds of years.
Any time I see someone use the word "interesting" in discussions like this I go gloss-eyed. It's no different than the people lauding the concept of corrupt Autobots that are every bit as bad if not worse than the Decepticons. Everyone set to amoral bastard is far less interesting than the thought of someone holding their moral/ethical/piety ground against all odds. It's why Superman and Captain America are such great characters but edgelord tryhards find them "dull", "boring", or "not interesting".
I'm talking more the absolute Flanderized levels of it. Commoners vs. royalty is one thing, but the absolute destitution shown in the 6th Ed. book runs contrary to the ideals that the Code of Chivalry expouses.
I really liked that about the 6th ed book because of the fact it resembled the utter hypocrisy that was Chivalric Code, both real life and fantasy.They're ideals that literally no human can actually follow because they're human. Hell, Bretonnia is basically Arthurian fan fiction and all but one of the Knights of the Round Table failed to live up to the code fully in the end.
I think that's not true. There are people all the time who live up to their moral codes despite being human or societal pressures. It's silly to hold a nihilistic standard to an army in this game solely based on that presumption. It is more because there can't be a "good" guy in either system. Everyone MUST be as barbaric and evil as Chaos.
That's not a nihilistic standard, look up medieval historians talking about Chivalric Code. It was an impossible to obtain ideal that was flouted by the royal courts even as they lauded the people trying to maintain the code.
As for there not being a "good" guy in either system, that's patently untrue. The 40K studio workers have stated time and again that the Space Wolves are viewed in the studio as the actual good guys and heroes of the setting.
Albino Squirrel wrote: The Space Wolves? Evidently the guys in the studio now don't understand the setting very well if the Space Wolves are the good guys.
I think that was simply very thinly-veiled sarcasm
Albino Squirrel wrote: The Space Wolves? Evidently the guys in the studio now don't understand the setting very well if the Space Wolves are the good guys.
Just Tony wrote: Any time I see someone use the word "interesting" in discussions like this I go gloss-eyed. It's no different than the people lauding the concept of corrupt Autobots that are every bit as bad if not worse than the Decepticons. Everyone set to amoral bastard is far less interesting than the thought of someone holding their moral/ethical/piety ground against all odds. It's why Superman and Captain America are such great characters but edgelord tryhards find them "dull", "boring", or "not interesting".
A lot of people find Superman and Captain America boring and not interesting because of stupid writing. A character that was really good and that powerful and wanted to do common good wouldn't bother with punching shoplifters, they would go directly for ultra-rich and corrupt parts of the government. Funnily enough, Superman being amoral bastard is the only way to reconcile why he punches someone who stole bread to feed his starving kids, not ultra rich donkey-cave who put this man (and 500 others) out of work because they dared to ask for a raise to their starving wages.
Platuan4th wrote: As for there not being a "good" guy in either system, that's patently untrue. The 40K studio workers have stated time and again that the Space Wolves are viewed in the studio as the actual good guys and heroes of the setting.
Which is hilariously stupid because SW are barbarian donkey-caves who rank among top 10 chapters most harmful to the Imperium, and that's even without considering the harm they did by demolishing Librarius project with their idiotic hypocrisy (ensuring loyalists had nothing to counter Horus and co) and kicking one of the most loyal primarchs to Chaos side...
Platuan4th wrote: As for there not being a "good" guy in either system, that's patently untrue. The 40K studio workers have stated time and again that the Space Wolves are viewed in the studio as the actual good guys and heroes of the setting.
Which is hilariously stupid because SW are barbarian donkey-caves who rank among top 10 chapters most harmful to the Imperium, and that's even without considering the harm they did by demolishing Librarius project with their idiotic hypocrisy (ensuring loyalists had nothing to counter Horus and co) and kicking one of the most loyal primarchs to Chaos side...
Platuan4th wrote: As for there not being a "good" guy in either system, that's patently untrue. The 40K studio workers have stated time and again that the Space Wolves are viewed in the studio as the actual good guys and heroes of the setting.
Which is hilariously stupid because SW are barbarian donkey-caves who rank among top 10 chapters most harmful to the Imperium, and that's even without considering the harm they did by demolishing Librarius project with their idiotic hypocrisy (ensuring loyalists had nothing to counter Horus and co) and kicking one of the most loyal primarchs to Chaos side...
Which NOT a thing the studio did, that was something the Black Library writers for Heresy came up with. The studio constantly has the Space Wolves confronting other parts of the Imperium, especially the Inquisition, for immoral stuff like wiping out the entirety of Armageddon's population after the First War for Armageddon. Jervis Johnson himself held them up for several editions as THE paragons of justice in the setting well before Ward's "spiritual liege" stuff. There's a massive dichotomy between how the studio writes them and how the heresy writers try to plunge them into being just as terrible as everyone else. It's literally the very thing Just Tony is complaining about.
Is very easy to see how GW writters are biased in favour of Space Wolves because most Space Wolves fans are just as biased.
People complains about ultramarines but space wolves are just as bad. Thats why I like dark angels, at least they are a bunch of hypocrites but nobody tries to negate it.
For good space marines, I'll always prefeer my salamanders. GW doesn't writtes that much about them, and thats keeps them pure.
Bretonnia is relatively sheltered. Some orcs, some undead, some beastmen, maybe a Norscan/DE raid - none of those things are a serious existential threat.
More than anything, WHFB was never really supposed to be a realistic setting, lol.
Bretonnia gave you one thing and Empire another, no need to mix them just because in the real world guns would have replaced archers.
Exactly. When a fantasy setting comes out theres always the "why is nobody using guns when this X faction allready mass produces them?". One can make some reasons for why not everybody uses guns. We all know in the real world theres no excuse, the moment your opponent has guns and you don't, or you make everything possible to have them too or you are screwed. But thats a completely different setting than most people want to enjoy.
If I want a barbaric orc with a axe fighting a line of dwarfs with guns I can shut off my brain and imagine it to be a reasonable fight scenario and that an ork can survive a couple of gun shots even when I know one is enough to kill an elephant.
Galas wrote: Is very easy to see how GW writters are biased in favour of Space Wolves because most Space Wolves fans are just as biased.
As someone who isn't a Space Wolves fan(DA AND Sons player), it's even easier when the head of the studio at the time says multiple times in White Dwarf: "The Space Wolves are the only good guys in the setting."
As good as super soldiers of a genocidal and xenophobic empire that they support even if sometimes they go agaisnt some of the more radical elements if it affects them personally can be, yeah.
I mean, for Warcraft Writters Sylvannas is morally gray. For everyone else shes a clear villain. Some times a writter can't see past his own mental image and loses the whole picture because it doesnt matter that you as the writter know all the reasons for why a character or group does that, everyone is justified and the good guy of his own story.
Bretonnia is relatively sheltered. Some orcs, some undead, some beastmen, maybe a Norscan/DE raid - none of those things are a serious existential threat.
More than anything, WHFB was never really supposed to be a realistic setting, lol.
Bretonnia gave you one thing and Empire another, no need to mix them just because in the real world guns would have replaced archers.
Exactly. When a fantasy setting comes out theres always the "why is nobody using guns when this X faction allready mass produces them?". One can make some reasons for why not everybody uses guns. We all know in the real world theres no excuse, the moment your opponent has guns and you don't, or you make everything possible to have them too or you are screwed. But thats a completely different setting than most people want to enjoy.
If I want a barbaric orc with a axe fighting a line of dwarfs with guns I can shut off my brain and imagine it to be a reasonable fight scenario and that an ork can survive a couple of gun shots even when I know one is enough to kill an elephant.
To be fair to more primitive weapons, there was a transition period with guns even in the real world. Technology moves so fast these days that we sometimes forget how slow it used to move. I'm not an expert in the field at all, but my understanding was that early guns were inaccurate, short ranged, slow to fire, in some cases could still be stopped by good quality armour and in the early days part of the transition to guns had more to do with training than battlefield ability (easier to train someone to use a gun than a bow, sword, etc). I believe in Asia there was a period of many hundreds of years where bows were still used after firearms were introduced, in spite of bows being quite difficult and time consuming to manufacture.
But yeah, either way, the point in WHFB was more about having a couple of different flavours of humans to play with rather than anything to do with historical factors or realism.
There are plenty of grey areas and people in Warhammer which is another reason I like.
There are also a few completely evil people - can anyone think of anything good about Belakor or Archeon - plus the Skaven - a race of horrible, self serving, back stabbing creatures that (thus Far) have escaped the seeming need for so called evil races in many fantasy and sci-fi races to have "the exception good guy" which becomes the norm.
I love Skaven they are such great bad guys and fun to read about.
Bretonnia is relatively sheltered. Some orcs, some undead, some beastmen, maybe a Norscan/DE raid - none of those things are a serious existential threat.
More than anything, WHFB was never really supposed to be a realistic setting, lol.
Bretonnia gave you one thing and Empire another, no need to mix them just because in the real world guns would have replaced archers.
Part of the Stillmania-ing of the Warhammer setting. For the first half of WFB 4th ed. they had Bill King punching up their fluff and those early army books are a masterclass in how to create background for a game world that everyone working in tabletop games should study. Combined with the WFRP rulebook and the first half of The Enemy Within campaign, they had a fantasy world ready to compete with Lord of the Rings. Then for whatever reason they decided they wanted all their background to be straight hack work, and Bretonnians become a Monty Python sketch.
Magical ice sled towed by bears, filled with handgunners.
Large Ice-Leopard
Kislev Handgunners
......
We know.
We've been arguing about them non-stop for the past 3 or so pages.
Unless I've missed something, you've been talking about a new trailer that was released only a few hours ago for the past few days? This isn't the same as the gameplay reveal trailer posted a few pages back. These are more new units, not the cannon-sled and ice bear already discussed.
Galas wrote: I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.
And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?
The Leopard at least indicates that the flanderization that was talked about a few pages back isn't quite the case, they haven't gone "Kislev is just bears and Ice" and made everything new involve one of the two (or a combination).
The sled does look better when the ice doesn't move/change, albeit It would have been far better if it was just a flat slab like the concept art.
Galas wrote: I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.
And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?
In game terms, it is a single entity unit. Which heroes are as well, but they have a bit more going on. This is roughly equivalent to something like an ancient salamander.
AllSeeingSkink wrote:Bretonnia gave you one thing and Empire another, no need to mix them just because in the real world guns would have replaced archers.
Galas wrote:Exactly. When a fantasy setting comes out theres always the "why is nobody using guns when this X faction allready mass produces them?". One can make some reasons for why not everybody uses guns. We all know in the real world theres no excuse, the moment your opponent has guns and you don't, or you make everything possible to have them too or you are screwed.
AllSeeingSkink wrote:To be fair to more primitive weapons, there was a transition period with guns even in the real world. Technology moves so fast these days that we sometimes forget how slow it used to move.
Guns coexisted with bows in European use for several hundred years. Italian arquebusiers were decisive at Cerignola in 1503, while the Royalist English were fielding longbowmen as late as 1642.
It's really not that big a stretch to have the feudal peasantry wielding bows while their Germanic cousins next door have guns, especially since...
AllSeeingSkink wrote:I'm not an expert in the field at all, but my understanding was that early guns were inaccurate, short ranged, slow to fire, in some cases could still be stopped by good quality armour and in the early days part of the transition to guns had more to do with training than battlefield ability (easier to train someone to use a gun than a bow, sword, etc). I believe in Asia there was a period of many hundreds of years where bows were still used after firearms were introduced, in spite of bows being quite difficult and time consuming to manufacture.
...contrary to pop history, firearms rapidly became more effective than bows, but were expensive, logistically complicated, and required extensive training to use effectively. Meanwhile bows were comparatively cheap, and peasants already accustomed to using them for hunting and sport had requisite training. I've got a big ol' rant on the subject here.
Basically bows were primarily employed by peasants drafted into militia levies, while the cost and training requirements of guns and crossbows limited their use to professional mercenaries and subsequently standing armies. So it's quite fitting that Bretonnia would use bows, and the Empire would use guns, and these could coexist indefinitely thanks to Bretonnia's social structure. It's not as anachronistic as it seems.
I agree exactly. The Empire would have to spend MUCH more capital and support resources to field an army equipped like they prefer, while Bretonnians can just call up a peasant levy and have them use their hunting tools.
AllSeeingSkink wrote:I'm not an expert in the field at all, but my understanding was that early guns were inaccurate, short ranged, slow to fire, in some cases could still be stopped by good quality armour and in the early days part of the transition to guns had more to do with training than battlefield ability (easier to train someone to use a gun than a bow, sword, etc). I believe in Asia there was a period of many hundreds of years where bows were still used after firearms were introduced, in spite of bows being quite difficult and time consuming to manufacture.
...contrary to pop history, firearms rapidly became more effective than bows, but were expensive, logistically complicated, and required extensive training to use effectively. Meanwhile bows were comparatively cheap, and peasants already accustomed to using them for hunting and sport had requisite training. I've got a big ol' rant on the subject here.
Basically bows were primarily employed by peasants drafted into militia levies, while the cost and training requirements of guns and crossbows limited their use to professional mercenaries and subsequently standing armies. So it's quite fitting that Bretonnia would use bows, and the Empire would use guns, and these could coexist indefinitely thanks to Bretonnia's social structure. It's not as anachronistic as it seems.
So I was half right saying it had to do with training? Because the fact you could train a soldier to use one was a step up over bow where you had to draft peasants who had a lifetime of experience.
Also when I said "difficult and time consuming to manufacture" I was talking specifically about the Asian bows, where from my understanding they mostly used composite bows which I understand are harder to make than the self bows popular in western Europe.. Though I guess it depends on what infrastructure is already available, making a bow requires ageing the wood, shaping it, joining bits together when adhesives were far less reliable than they are today... but if you already have many craftsmen who can do that I guess they'll be cheap.
My very vague understanding was that bows remained a viable weapon against guns for about a 100 years in Europe, but several hundred years in Asia.
Galas wrote: I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.
And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?
The Leopard at least indicates that the flanderization that was talked about a few pages back isn't quite the case, they haven't gone "Kislev is just bears and Ice" and made everything new involve one of the two (or a combination).
The sled does look better when the ice doesn't move/change, albeit It would have been far better if it was just a flat slab like the concept art.
The "snow" leopard is quite a bit on the nose, though...
Galas wrote: I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.
And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?
The Leopard at least indicates that the flanderization that was talked about a few pages back isn't quite the case, they haven't gone "Kislev is just bears and Ice" and made everything new involve one of the two (or a combination).
The sled does look better when the ice doesn't move/change, albeit It would have been far better if it was just a flat slab like the concept art.
The "snow" leopard is quite a bit on the nose, though...
I mentioned in the thread in the video games section, but I reckon the the snow cat thingo is either a companion for Elsa, or something Elsa transforms into, as the cat is wearing the same jewellery as she is wearing.
AegisGrimm wrote: I agree exactly. The Empire would have to spend MUCH more capital and support resources to field an army equipped like they prefer, while Bretonnians can just call up a peasant levy and have them use their hunting tools.
Do we even know if they have hunting rights? In a lot of europe that was heavily limited for non-nobility!
AllSeeingSkink wrote:So I was half right saying it had to do with training? Because the fact you could train a soldier to use one was a step up over bow where you had to draft peasants who had a lifetime of experience.
Not really. Peasants used bows in the first place because they weren't particularly difficult to learn. Not something you'd master in a week, but massed archery was considerably simpler than the 20+ drill movements needed to operate a firearm, while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with your comrades, while holding a match lit at both ends, while everyone is carrying loose powder.
The 'lifetime of experience' thing is specifically in regards to English longbows, and it wasn't about experience, but the physical development involved in regularly drawing a 150lb bow. The kinds of bows more commonly used in Europe didn't have such requirements. If you had to draft a levy in a hurry, bows were significantly easier to train on, and the peasants were more likely to already have prior experience to draw from.
As far as expense, a composite bow (wood, horn, sinew, and animal glue to bind it) didn't require metalworking, which was a big hurdle for medieval societies. An arquebus required the skills of three different professionals- a woodworker to make the stock (a non-negligible task, since these guns had substantial recoil and a bad stock would split), a gunsmith to fashion the barrel (requiring both consistent metallurgy and precision tooling to cut the bore), and a clockmaker to fashion the action, plus significant time for fitting and finishing. The Chinese military manual Jixiao Xinshu, written in 1560, stated that one barrel per month was the optimal rate of production for a full-time gunsmith. Bows, while requiring skilled artisans to be effective and potentially long drying times for the wood, used readily-available wood and animal products and could be assembled with significantly less labor.
Bows remained a viable weapon in the Middle East and Asia for longer than in Europe mostly on account of doctrine- early firearms were poorly suited to use from horseback (though that changed in the late 1500s with the development of wheellocks), and the Turks, Arabs, and Mongols all emphasized horseback archery as a core military asset. In China and Japan, firearms started to replace composite bows much sooner. In particular in Japan, the Tanegashima design introduced in 1543 quickly became the preferred ranged arm, but the economics of manufacturing guns precluded fully equipping an army with them for the remainder of the Sengoku period, so they were supplemented with bows.
The erroneous idea that bows were displaced because guns were cheaper and anyone could use one is the fault of Victorian scholars, who clung to the English longbow as a symbol of old military traditions in the face of industrialization. And they wrote a lot of utter tripe that continues to color modern views of the Middle Ages and Renaissance on a variety of subjects.
Anyways, one of the things I enjoyed about the Old World was that it wasn't straight medieval fantasy and had that Renaissance style in the Empire. I'm not sure if the setting of TOW is late enough for the Empire to have those Renaissance elements, but if not, I'll be interested to see what there is instead. If the Empire is roughly equivalent to its WHFB incarnation, then that'll make a fun foil for the less technologically advanced Kislevites and Bretonnians.
You really reckon bows would have been easier to train on? I feel like even the most complicated of guns could be taught relatively quickly (not to an expert level of course, but enough to be a danger to the enemy).
I used to do archery, it takes a good while to get proficient enough to hit something at more than a few yards, especially if you're using an unsighted non-compound bow let alone an old style longbow. I started on a modern recurve bow, but there was a kid who started at the same time on a basic longbow and he was lucky if he hit the target at all, and on the longer shots at our club I remember his arrow literally bouncing off at times (target heads obviously). Even on the recurve bow, after many hundreds of arrows practice I was happy to hit the scoring area of the target on those same long range shots and my arrows would barely penetrate the targets (while the guys with much more practice, release aids, sights and compound bows would whine if they missed the bullseye, lol). I think even a thick piece of leather would have stopped those arrows, let alone proper armour.
I'm thinking that the training he's referring to is the actual tactics used, notably "volley firing". I'd say that part would actually be fairly easy to teach--everyone points up and lets loose when a signal is given.
Anyways, one of the devs from TWW3 posted this up:
Spoiler:
Is it a name with any significance to those who've followed Kislev lore?
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I used to do archery, it takes a good while to get proficient enough to hit something at more than a few yards, especially if you're using an unsighted non-compound bow let alone an old style longbow. I started on a modern recurve bow, but there was a kid who started at the same time on a basic longbow and he was lucky if he hit the target at all, and on the longer shots at our club I remember his arrow literally bouncing off at times (target heads obviously).
That kid would be considered fit for the battlefield. Remember that we're talking military use; there are no point targets. If you can hit a formation of 500 men from a distance of 75yds at least some of the time, congratulations, you are a professional archer. If you can hit a man-sized target at all, you're an expert.
Early firearms are complicated pieces of machinery with significant training burden. For starters, you are carrying a segment of lit match. This must be kept lit at both ends in case one is extinguished, and it may be necessary to re-light. One end is secured to the gun, while the other is free- and you must take care to ensure the free end doesn't contact lit powder. You are carrying a flask of loose powder, which must be precisely measured to avoid catastrophic failure (ie blowing yourself up). Maybe you have a brace of apostles to facilitate faster loading, but only a limited number. You must load a measure of powder, insert a bullet and wadding, and tamp it down- in that order, or it will render the weapon non-functional. Tamped thoroughly, else your weapon will explode. You must replace the ramrod, then use your priming powder (a separate flask- don't mix them up!) to prime the weapon. If necessary you must blow on the match to ensure it is lit, or adjust its placement as it burns up. All of this gets harder in dense formation.
Plus it's more than just using the gun. Plunging fire is not a thing with firearms, so a significant amount of training goes into rank/file maneuver to facilitate rapid fire. You also need to know your weapon well enough to be able to cast ammunition for your gun's caliber and measure powder effectively, plus maintain the delicate lockwork that enables the weapon to fire, and clean thoroughly to prevent carbon residue from caking up and rendering it non-functional. You need to know how to handle a round that fails to fire (particularly in battle), perform repairs and preventative maintenance on a high-stress weapon in an era where standardization of parts is not a thing, and relight a match that gets blown out or extinguished by rain. And, of course, you need the dexterity to juggle the gun, the rest, the match, the ramrod, and the multiple components of your ammunition, while people are trying to kill you, and where a mistake can be catastrophic.
Firearms (and crossbows, for that matter) only came into common use as the weaponry of professional mercenaries (or a military middle class, as in the Japanese ashigaru) who had the financial backing to afford their weapons and the training to use them effectively and maintain them. For the continental powers of the 1500s, it was much easier to hire these mercenaries than to try to turn peasants into effective crossbowmen or arquebusiers. Even in the English army, crossbowmen were better-paid than longbowmen, as it was seen as a more difficult and professional vocation.
Don't take this as me arguing it's easy to shoot a bow- bows, crossbows, and arquebuses all took a long time to reach mastery, and experts were highly valued. I've done archery as well, and my accuracy is nothing to brag about. But the training requirement just to get projectiles on target was lowest for bows. With poorly-trained levies, it was volume of fire that mattered more than anything else.
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Kanluwen wrote: Is it a name with any significance to those who've followed Kislev lore?
Iirc, it was really the adoption of the "new style army"(read: a full time standing army) that pushed gun usage to the fore specifically because they had the time to train everyone to a standard.
catbarf wrote: Bows, while requiring skilled artisans to be effective and potentially long drying times for the wood, used readily-available wood and animal products and could be assembled with significantly less labor.
Uh, no. A bow from yew tree needs a hundred year old specimen to produce good bows. And even that might produce just a handful of bows, because you need perfect wood for it, no blemishes, knots, cracks, etc. Even relatively small armies of England alone annihilated what yew supply there was in northwestern Europe and nearly rendered yews extinct, and that was in much more forested Europe than it is now, before most forests were clearcut to fuel industrial revolution.
You can make bow from other wood, sure, but it's not going to be as good. That's also why Asians bothered with their composite, glued bows, despite them being less durable and prone to ungluing and falling apart from moisture - the supply of good bow wood was far too small to satisfy demand and they had to make do with substitutes. Ditto with Europeans having to try hard improving metallurgy for a century to make all steel crossbow arms - lack of good wood. It was never 'readily' available.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: You really reckon bows would have been easier to train on? I feel like even the most complicated of guns could be taught relatively quickly (not to an expert level of course, but enough to be a danger to the enemy).
I find the claims of bows being cheap and/or easy to teach extremely suspect, seeing two first European semi-professional infantry armies, the Hussites and Black Army of Hungary, both in 1400s, ditched bows and used mix of crossbowmen and handgunners. You don't abandon something that works to arm huge (relatively) forces if alternative has any upsides at all.
Platuan4th wrote:Iirc, it was really the adoption of the "new style army"(read: a full time standing army) that pushed gun usage to the fore specifically because they had the time to train everyone to a standard.
Mercenaries were first and accounted for most firearm use from the 1400s to mid-1500s, but yes, the Spanish of the mid-1500s, Dutch reformed army of the late-1500s, and the other countries that followed suit in the early 1600s, all made heavy use of firearms.
Irbis wrote:Uh, no. A bow from yew tree needs a hundred year old specimen to produce good bows. And even that might produce just a handful of bows, because you need perfect wood for it, no blemishes, knots, cracks, etc. Even relatively small armies of England alone annihilated what yew supply there was in northwestern Europe and nearly rendered yews extinct, and that was in much more forested Europe than it is now, before most forests were clearcut to fuel industrial revolution.
You can make bow from other wood, sure, but it's not going to be as good. That's also why Asians bothered with their composite, glued bows, despite them being less durable and prone to ungluing and falling apart from moisture - the supply of good bow wood was far too small to satisfy demand and they had to make do with substitutes. Ditto with Europeans having to try hard improving metallurgy for a century to make all steel crossbow arms - lack of good wood. It was never 'readily' available.
I'm afraid I don't see your point. It is simultaneously true that bows required specific high-quality wood to be maximally effective, and that such wood was usually readily available in Europe, and alternatives used when it was not. By the time suitable yew became largely unavailable (early 1700s) bows were already gone from military use. Like you said, bows on the Continent (less so in English use) were often made of wood other than yew- and while it wasn't as good, they did it anyways.
I have not read any accounts that suggest that development of crossbows or firearms was due to an inability to make bows. So what's the argument here?
Irbis wrote:I find the claims of bows being cheap and/or easy to teach extremely suspect, seeing two first European semi-professional infantry armies, the Hussites and Black Army of Hungary, both in 1400s, ditched bows and used mix of crossbowmen and handgunners. You don't abandon something that works to arm huge (relatively) forces if alternative has any upsides at all.
Semi-professional armies with both the financial backing and professional standards for training needed to make use of more effective weapons did so. I'm not sure why you would take that as evidence that bows were more difficult to use; the trend across all of Europe was that as forces became more professional and better-trained, they phased out bows in favor of crossbows and firearms, and assorted polearms in favor of pikes.
As I mentioned earlier, in even the English army- where longbows were well regarded and in great supply- Genoese crossbowmen were regularly hired and commanded significantly greater pay than bowmen. Pay records from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance do not bear out the notion that a crossbowman was easier to produce, as their pay reflected professional experience comparable to engineers or artillerists.
While I see the logic of what catbarf is trying to argue, a lot of it is based on some heavy misconceptions and I don't know any historians (especially military historians, of which I know a few - several of whom have a concentration in this time period) who would agree with him.
Early firearms are regarded to have revolutionized warfare - and society itself - precisely because they are so easy to use. Any illiterate malnourished peasant with two eyes and two arms could be trained to use one proficiently in a very short amount of time (a few hours for basic use, a few days for basic proficiency, and a couple months for "well-practiced") - and the second eye was sometimes optional! Bows, on the other hand, required years of training from a young age and significant amounts of strength and coordination to operate with any degree of proficiency or accuracy - armies in the middle ages were able to muster large formations of archers because they were in widespread use as a hunting tool and there was an established skill base for them. And yes, accuracy mattered. The whole "no point targets" thing was true in the ancients era of massed phalanxes of hoplites and roman centuries, etc. but in the Middle Ages archers were prized precisely because they were accurate and were able to pick out specific lightly armored targets within mass formations that would otherwise not have been accessible to the first few ranks of melee combatants. Archers in the Middle Ages were primarily skirmishers and flankers - not static blocks raining death from afar. They had to be both mobile and accurate by necessity.
His take on whats involved with a firearm is more true of later muskets than they are early handcannons and arquebuses. A Hand cannon was a tube on a stick, you dump some low grade powder down a hole with a projectile (rocks or debris, sometimes cast metal balls), push it in with a ramrod, and set it off with a light (which could be a match, a burning stick, or anything else that burns). Misfires were common, but of less concern because of the low grade powder used. Arquebuses were more advanced, but still relatively simple to use and operate and with minimal risks due to the low grade powders used in early firearms. The lockwork in early arquebuses was relatively robust compared to the later flintlock, wheellock, etc. mechanisms that arose - hardly delicate. The development of volley fire formations made mass adoption simple - not more difficult - as it enabled rhythmic operation of the weapon and probably also involved some "herd mentality" type mental mechanism which made training and operation easier to understand. It was also advantageous to do it this way because there was very little actual "aiming" involved in the use of an arquebus, thus mass formations were more likely to cause damage.- Ironically this brought back the "no point target" paradigm that archery had otherwise evolved beyond. Ammunition casting was likewise fairly simple, armies employed smiths to assist with it, but again even peasants could be trained to manufacture ball ammunition, it didn't take much skill and was a relatively simple process. In any case, peasant lives were cheap - if they blew a hand off or got injured, oh well - his replacement could be trained quickly and at little cost. If the arquebus wasn't cheap to produce or quick to train, it would not have become the dominant weapon of warfare as quickly as it did - put the starving but plentiful dregs of society on a level playing field with the wealthiest and most skilled knight bedecked in plate armor and with decades of experience in horsemanship.
Crossbows likewise required significantly less training and experience to use than a bow or a longbow did, they were however expensive to manufacture and maintain (much moreso than an Arquebus), and still required a good bit of strength which is part of the reason they never saw as widespread adoption as firearms. The reason crossbowmen were better paid than longbowmen was nothing to do with skill, but because each crossbowman (in the typical mercenary companies and military formations of the time) also needed to pay a team of assistants (typically two - one to hold the pavise, the other to ready a second crossbow in order to maintain a steady rate of fire), whereas a longbowman only had to pay himself. As such on an individual basis, longbowmen made more, whereas the crossbowman had to pay out a portion of his wages to each assistant. While many crossbowmen tended to be of better stock than the peasantry, there were still plenty of peasants equipped with crossbows, either because a wealthy lord paid for them to be so equipped in service of his forces or because a mercenary company had a wealthy benefactor that would hire and equipment peasant recruits and take profits off of their fees - this was more typical than you seem to realize. Hell, there were entire peasant rebellions that were enabled by their ability to access crossbows (and also firearms), such as that of the Picards/Taborites during the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. Peasants took to crossbows and firearms precisely because they were easy to use and didn't require much training/skill or strength compared to bows or swords, etc.
This ease of use and mass adoption is what resulted in the collapse of the feudal system, the weakening/extinction of the military aristocrcy, and the failures of their castles and fortifications.
they one thing people forget about it that trained soldieres or veterans were not pound to a nation/country or lord by anything as modern day citizenship did not exist
so if you owned a crossbow and were able to handle it, you just went were the fighting was and fought for anyone that could pay
and when the fighting was done, no one was paying any more hence you walked away to work for someone else
every professional soldier by that time was a mercenary (the word soldier comes from Sold, German for Payment for fighting), even some knights made their living by being payed to fight for whoever needed them (in Poland-Lithuania everyone who could afford himself a warhorse could become a noble knight)
the situation in England was unique up to a point on the situation of peasant and whom they fought for
in central Europe, the ownership of the land you lived could change several times within your lifetime (worst case the people kept fighting for the old lord because they liked him more or just did not bother to go to war for the new one on the other side of the country)
hence why standing armies during wartimes became a thing as those were loyal to the one who payed them
(just keep paying them during peacetime instead of dismissing them and hire a new a new one was not a thing until much later)
Chaos0xomega, I recommend Eduard Wagner's book on Thirty Years War military equipment and tactics, as it gives a good breakdown of the development of firearms and infantry tactics over the 1500s- you are greatly downplaying the complexity of both the technology and training.
Robert Hardy's Longbow: A Social and Military History also directly contradicts the notion that crossbowmen were only better-paid so as to account for assistants, or that bowmen were primarily used as skirmishers (Agincourt and Crecy being two prime examples to the contrary).
I don't want to derail this thread further as we're getting away from The Old World, but if anyone wants to discuss it more I'd be happy to participate in a new thread and provide more sources.
In any case- I would throw out that the stylistic differences between the Slavic-inspired Kislevites, the Renaissance Germanic Empire, and the Arthurian Bretonnians make for some fun cultural distinctions for a fantasy setting, irrespective of their differences in technology.
I'd welcome a thread going deeper into the advance of weapons around the shift from bows to guns. However I think any such thread HAS to draw boundaries for itself. It's near impossible to have a thread on the topic when you're talking about the world advance in general terms; because its always going to have hang ups at different time periods and different nations causing any generalist statement to be rendered wrong just by shifting the target nation/time period.
I think you've got to break it down - country by country - time period by time period and look at it in detail. Overall summary statements are only good if you understand the underlaying concepts
Not to jump into any controversy here, but the reason firearms supplanted bows was because they are massively more deadly. An English longbow, as unfun as it would be to get shot by one, can't reliably injure an armored man, let alone kill him. Also, we see the claim it took a lifetime to use a bow bandied about on the internet a lot, it's a myth, and it'll remain a myth no matter how long people on the internet choose to believe it. Archery buffs say they can teach somebody to basic competence within two months, I brlieve them, and I live in the American midwest where bow season is still a thing and people still shoot bows. They don't practice with it constantly. I know the English longbow is literally magic, but no, it still works just like other bows, so no it didn't take years of extra training. Just a huge back and right bicep.
If your historical sources are telling you otherwise, well you gotta remember a lot of them are guys sitting in libraries who don't know much about guns or bows, and you should find some better historians to read.
I wish Bretonnia could be redeveloped as a Renaissance setting in a world completely different from our own and therefore open to lots of differences. Knights who eschew ranged weapons are still totally reasonable, and the development of weaponry and tactics would be very different for them. Unlike your typical 16th century soldier an orc may not go down when shot quite as quickly, or stupid goblin masses may not break or slow when heavily peppered with bullets or arrows simply because they're a different, somewhat dumber species with a very different psychology. Not to mention how crappy firearms might be against skeletons. All this would necessitate different battlefield tactics and developments, and also a different view of ones human neighbors given the world is full of non-human things ready to put the human race out of existence.
Bretonnia doesn't have to be THAT dumbed down and out of step with the rest of the setting. The fluff writing for it has seemed bored with itself since 5th edition's hard turn to simplistic and silly.
Listen, you're not arguing with me - you're arguing with historical evidence. Compulsory bow training in Henry III's England started at age 7 and archers weren't considered militarily proficient until the age of 15. That was actually basically law in medieval England, at least for a time. If it was so easy there would not be so much emphasis placed on learning it.
Its also kinda grossly inaccurate to base your understanding of what was involved in training an archer to be proficient for war in the medieval era by basing it off of modern day competition archery and hunting - for one things the average arrow in the medieval era was something like 3-5 times heavier than the arrows typically used today (from what I understand longbow arrows were somewhat heavier). Similarly, modern archery occurs at significantly shorter ranges (most deer taken with a bow and arrow today are taken within 30 yards, despite the fact that modern bows could theoretically shoot much farther) and with significantly lower draw weights compared to medieval combat archery. Modern compound bows are significantly easier to use and much easier to aim than medieval war bows, and have a lot of design features intended to enable their ease of use.
Modern bows have arrow rests, medieval war bows didn't.
Modern bows have sights, medieval bows didn't.
Modern bows have let-off mechanisms, medieval bows didn't.
etc. etc. etc.
Modern day bows and archery have little to do with medieval war bows, with all their pulleys, d-loops, let-off mechanisms, etc. they have more in common with a crossbow than a warbow(and even then they still don't have all that much in common with medieval arbalests).
As for crossbowmen pay, every source I have ever seen has indicated the pay was due to the maintenance/operating cost of the crossbows (note plural) needed by a sole crossbowmen to operate. I have also seen several sources indicate that the crossbowman had to pay out wages to his assistants, heres a link to one:
"Such troops often wore substantial body armour and normally operated in close co-operation with the pavesari shield or mantlet-bearers, whose role was to protect them from other archers or cavalry as they spanned and loaded their weapons. A crossbowman and a shield-bearer were in fact often paid as a team, though the man with the crossbow got more than half of the money. (Nicolle 2012: 30)"
The reference there, in case you're curious, is French Armies of the Hundred Years War by David Nicolle
Now, is it possible that the crossbowman still made more than the longbowman, even after accounting for the fact that he dished out some percentage of his pay to one or more assistants? I suppose so - I don't have any data about actual relative pay rates, I just know that there are reasons that crossbowmen received more coin that have nothing to do with crossbows requiring more training and skill to use than a bow.
in Poland-Lithuania everyone who could afford himself a warhorse could become a noble knight
Can you please cite source? That's...definitely not meshing with anything I've ever heard or read.
referring to the "nobiles pauperes" (powerless nobles), which came to be because Lithuania came up with the idea of creating a standing army with a fighting nobility but not having enough of them in the first place so called man to arms, and those gained nobility after the battles
Individuals that were ennobled usually joined one of the exiting families and used their Coat of Arms and were more just people living on the land of a Magnate/Baron than owning anything of their own (except for their armour and horse)
this was changed in 1641 as from that point only the Sjem could grant nobility
for source, several but I must dig them out (all about medieval/early modern times warfare/history)
Time to take the historical tangent elsewhere please, I am enjoying reading it as much as anyone but this is the News and Rumours thread for The Old War game.
The really simple explanation for Bretonnia is that it's a Flanderization of everything Arthurian legend. So no guns, and few crossbows. Lots of rich guys in armor on pretty barded horses, who are more than likely out of their league in open war, but make up for it in bluster (and the extreme work of those who ARE actual badasses).
AegisGrimm wrote: The really simple explanation for Bretonnia is that it's a Flanderization of everything Arthurian legend. So no guns, and few crossbows. Lots of rich guys in armor on pretty barded horses, who are more than likely out of their league in open war, but make up for it in bluster (and the extreme work of those who ARE actual badasses).
Yeah, it's magic and courage that has allowed Bretonnia to punch above its weight.
They do seem a little different from the original models, a bit more elaborate, but seems like quite a nice update to them.
I approve! Not that it matters much, lol. Plus I'm pretty biased so there's that.
I wonder if the Kislev focus in the digital game will be accompanied by a rebirth on the tabletop...
We already know Kislev is being made into a faction for the Tabletop The Old World project, though? The new units and designs and such have been made for that Tabletop Kislev faction, they're not something done for the video game primarily, that's the reason it's being discussed in this thread.
Hey, at least the actual GW model will be easy to modify - just stick some wheel on it and call it a day.
I kinda like the bears here more than on the artillery piece. Once you get past the idea that bears have been domesticated, having them pull the chariot is kinda reasonable, for a given value of the word.
Individually the two main elements of it fit Kislev and don't seem out of place, yet the context here is quite odd.
Bears a huge part of Kislev society and feature prominently in their culture, so seeing them on the Battlefield shouldn't be a surprise and it makes sense to have units of Bears and special bear riders and such...but used to pull a basic sled doesn't seem of enough importance.
The Ice magic is another relatively big part of Kislev society, with the Ice Witches and all that....but enchanting a basic wooden sled is just baffling.
It's like they've taken something special and then wasted it on something common and cheap.
Mentlegen324 wrote: Individually the two main elements of it fit Kislev and don't seem out of place, yet the context here is quite odd.
Bears a huge part of Kislev society and feature prominently in their culture, so seeing them on the Battlefield shouldn't be a surprise and it makes sense to have units of Bears and special bear riders and such...but used to pull a basic sled doesn't seem of enough importance.
The Ice magic is another relatively big part of Kislev society, with the Ice Witches and all that....but enchanting a basic wooden sled is just baffling.
It's like they've taken something special and then wasted it on something common and cheap.
Mentlegen324 wrote: Individually the two main elements of it fit Kislev and don't seem out of place, yet the context here is quite odd.
Bears a huge part of Kislev society and feature prominently in their culture, so seeing them on the Battlefield shouldn't be a surprise and it makes sense to have units of Bears and special bear riders and such...but used to pull a basic sled doesn't seem of enough importance.
The Ice magic is another relatively big part of Kislev society, with the Ice Witches and all that....but enchanting a basic wooden sled is just baffling.
It's like they've taken something special and then wasted it on something common and cheap.
Well, if you think of it as a 'basic wooden sled' instead of a 'fething powerful cannon,' maybe. But one of those is slightly more accurate to what's going on.
Mentlegen324 wrote: Individually the two main elements of it fit Kislev and don't seem out of place, yet the context here is quite odd.
Bears a huge part of Kislev society and feature prominently in their culture, so seeing them on the Battlefield shouldn't be a surprise and it makes sense to have units of Bears and special bear riders and such...but used to pull a basic sled doesn't seem of enough importance.
The Ice magic is another relatively big part of Kislev society, with the Ice Witches and all that....but enchanting a basic wooden sled is just baffling.
It's like they've taken something special and then wasted it on something common and cheap.
Well, if you think of it as a 'basic wooden sled' instead of a 'fething powerful cannon,' maybe. But one of those is slightly more accurate to what's going on.
I'm not talking about the canon sled that has Little Grom on it, though. This is a basic wooden sled with hide armour and a few guys standing inside.
Voss wrote: Ah. Looking at the video, no, I wouldn't call that a basic wooden sled either. And not just because a 'basic wouldn't sled' wouldn't fit 'a few guys.'
4 seconds in, that's a quite basic wooden frame with some hide and shields roughly strapped onto it. The one at 10 seconds is a more elaborate, ornate, heavily armoured version, but what I meant is that neither of them are really something on the level of being something you'd expect to have a magical ice-sled towed by bears. It's like if the Empire War Wagon was towed by demigrpyhs and had a steam-powered air cushion to levitate it rather than wheels, while still little more than a wooden box with some armour for pikemen to stand in - the locomotion method and the level of importance/specialty suggested by those is then heavily undermined by them being attached to something that's effectively just a basic common item. Those aspects feel overdone because the sled part of it doesn't meet that same standard as the rest of it.
I've been a fan of Kislev for a long time and still have some miniatures stored away for a WHFB project that never came together. I like everything I'm seeing. Seems like a nice mix of the traditional units/looks and more ice magic as a unifying theme for the army.
I'm hardly someone who complains about high magic, but in this context it...idk, it doesn't work. I think war wagons are such an iconic look that turning them into ice-sleds just makes them less imposing if anything. This feels like a way to cheap out on 3d animations and models instead of artistic decision.
Cronch wrote: I'm hardly someone who complains about high magic, but in this context it...idk, it doesn't work. I think war wagons are such an iconic look that turning them into ice-sleds just makes them less imposing if anything. This feels like a way to cheap out on 3d animations and models instead of artistic decision.
They were designed for both, and Idk, I have a feeling it's a lot more TOW following TW:W3 than the other way round. One of them is a proven successful product.
Cronch wrote: They were designed for both, and Idk, I have a feeling it's a lot more TOW following TW:W3 than the other way round. One of them is a proven successful product.
They've outright said the new units and such seen for Kislev were designed for TOW project and then used in TW:W3.
Cronch wrote: They were designed for both, and Idk, I have a feeling it's a lot more TOW following TW:W3 than the other way round. One of them is a proven successful product.
They've outright said the new units and such seen for Kislev were designed for TOW project and then used in TW:W3.
Which doesn't preclude the fact that TWW1, 2, and/or 3 may have inspired the direction of TOW (and by extension the Kislev designs) in the first place.
Cronch wrote: They were designed for both, and Idk, I have a feeling it's a lot more TOW following TW:W3 than the other way round. One of them is a proven successful product.
They've outright said the new units and such seen for Kislev were designed for TOW project and then used in TW:W3.
Which doesn't preclude the fact that TWW1, 2, and/or 3 may have inspired the direction of TOW (and by extension the Kislev designs) in the first place.
I don't see why TW:W3 would have had any affect on the updated aesthetics of Kislev. The idea that they'd design these entirely new units in a way that'll be better for the video game that'll be based on them rather than doing what they think is best for the tabletop time primarily sounds a bit strange.
Tear off the ice, slap some wheels and horses to it, and it will be probably be a great looking Kislev war wagon.
I really like the design of the basic infantry and cavalry, but I fear that size creep will make it hard to blend them into my middlehammer kislev army.
Now, if they don't have the weird ice-cushion when they're on battlefields which are actually covered in snow those would look cool. The glowey magic ice cushion though. Eugh.
They've outright said the new units and such seen for Kislev were designed for TOW project and then used in TW:W3.
And luckily GW never lies.
Just why would they lie about designing Kislev units for TOW project?
I'm not sure why there is such controversy about this. Bears, sled and ice cushion being the same with a choice of a fighting platform or cannon is classic GW dual kit design.
I dont see the problem with the ice. I mean wheels? In deep snow? Be prepared to not be able to move anywhere.
Perhaps its the Canadian in me but that would be hella dumb. A nice flat base that can rest ontop of snow and not sink is is superior in every respect.
As for the bears, Kislev worship Ursun, a bear god. So your not really domesticating anything. They just come when summoned by a priest of Ursun. Similar to how Wolves are related to Ulric and how they can be summoned in by their priests. (which is already been established in the lore with the Cult of Ulric.)
I mean kislevites usin bears as both mounts and animals for war is no different than orks and goblins using boars and wolves, both real life animals that weren't used in those context because they are wild ones.
But I agree the sleed would look better as just a sleed.
Includes more concept art of various units. Presumably those concepts are all done for TOW, as the bear shown is an edited version of the concept we saw for TOW. The Ice guard ended up quite a bit different from their previous concept too.
It doesn't look like this will be the low fantasy rank and flank focused game that I hoped it would be tbh. In a way it's good for my wallet!
I don't understand their marketing either;
- They show the fantastic older models which I would expect anyone with a fondness for Warhammer Fantasy has dreamed about collecting at one time or another
- Then they cut a promo burying the older models and anyone who likes them.
- Then they show a magic ice slay or bear cart and insist that this is what the people really want XD
Kroem wrote: It doesn't look like this will be the low fantasy rank and flank focused game that I hoped it would be tbh. In a way it's good for my wallet!
I don't understand their marketing either;
- They show the fantastic older models which I would expect anyone with a fondness for Warhammer Fantasy has dreamed about collecting at one time or another
- Then they cut a promo burying the older models and anyone who likes them.
- Then they show a magic ice slay or bear cart and insist that this is what the people really want XD
What they've shown so far is still Warhammer Fantasy, Kislev has always had magic and bears as a big part of their culture to a larger extent than similar things are in the Empire
What do you mean with the promo burying the older models though?
Mentlegen324 wrote: What they've shown so far is still Warhammer Fantasy, Kislev has always had magic and bears as a big part of their culture to a larger extent than similar things are in the Empire
This discussion keeps being dredged up, but I think some of what people are reacting to are the gulf between older warhammer and newer warhammer (I'd argue post-6th edition, culminating in 8th edition), which ultimately arrived at a world where the empire had magical lasers and robot horses. It was the kitschification of the game, because everything was special and crazy, nothing was anymore.
Kislev having bears and ice as part of their culture is one thing, but taking an Oprah level of "you get a bear, you get a bear, EVERYONE GETS A BEAR!" undermines the setting. If they had left it with bear cavalry being the ultimate expression of bear-ness, it would be special. I could even accept the elemntal ice bear as having a place. However taking a cannon on a sled, which is already a unique idea, and then having the sled pulled by bears and sliding on magic ice, is pretty much the definition of kitsch.
It's background design to sell toys to 12 year olds.
Which warhammers has been since 5th edition at least. Its only goal, in fact, has always been to sell plastic and pewter toys to people, often kids. TOW is by all accounts looking to be aimed at the TW:WH customers that GW hopes will be attracted to the same aesthetic than it's aimed at the much smaller number of old fans that stuck around.
You're probably right about GW's intentions, but if that is their method, people can still criticise it as tacky.
Youtuber Logan Paul makes more money than I do being human-garbage. Does that mean his way of operating is "good" or "right" and that we should aspire to his methods?
jojo_monkey_boy wrote: You're probably right about GW's intentions, but if that is their method, people can still criticise it as tacky.
Youtuber Logan Paul makes more money than I do being human-garbage. Does that mean his way of operating is "good" or "right" and that we should aspire to his methods?
I mean sure, but it's purely stylistic choice. Having bears on bears bearing bears is not more tacky than having lizards ride lizards which has been part of old warhammer since forever. They're going for more TW:WH style, you want more specifically 6th edition-only style.
jojo_monkey_boy wrote: You're probably right about GW's intentions, but if that is their method, people can still criticise it as tacky.
Youtuber Logan Paul makes more money than I do being human-garbage. Does that mean his way of operating is "good" or "right" and that we should aspire to his methods?
The moment you say is background designed to sell to 12 years old you are basically insulting anybody that likes it because older was better and for more mature people.
Giant chaos dragons and heavy metal album-like background and knights fighting trolls was peak mature hobby time oh yeah.
I would put here C.S Lewis quote but I'm too lazy for that.
Mentlegen324 wrote: What they've shown so far is still Warhammer Fantasy, Kislev has always had magic and bears as a big part of their culture to a larger extent than similar things are in the Empire
This discussion keeps being dredged up, but I think some of what people are reacting to are the gulf between older warhammer and newer warhammer (I'd argue post-6th edition, culminating in 8th edition), which ultimately arrived at a world where the empire had magical lasers and robot horses. It was the kitschification of the game, because everything was special and crazy, nothing was anymore.
Kislev having bears and ice as part of their culture is one thing, but taking an Oprah level of "you get a bear, you get a bear, EVERYONE GETS A BEAR!" undermines the setting. If they had left it with bear cavalry being the ultimate expression of bear-ness, it would be special. I could even accept the elemntal ice bear as having a place. However taking a cannon on a sled, which is already a unique idea, and then having the sled pulled by bears and sliding on magic ice, is pretty much the definition of kitsch.
It's background design to sell toys to 12 year olds.
TLDR; things should be boring or it's not as l337 pwnzors as it was in the 90s. Yunno, back when the models ACTUALLY looked like little kids toys. I mean, who could look at the old Nagash model and possibly think anyhing BUT 'yes, this is clearly designed by mature, sophisticated adults for mature, sophisticated adults.'
Get off your high horse. WHFB was over the top and stupid then, just like it is now. Pretending it was ever 'serious business TM' is lying to yourself.
Thinking back to third edition with Orcs riding irate pigs, mesoamerican toad people in jaguar skins and warrior priests being carried by lobotomized slaves because if their feet touched the ground they lost magic power, high elves riding dragons as a unit(not just heroes!), undead riding vultures.
Not to mention that wizards could summon illusory towns that would hide say, a unit of 5 high elf dragonkin until the enemy got in charging range. Or summon an elemental with 10s across their entire stat-line!
But yes, it's the bear-ice-cannon that does puts it over the top.
People confuse the gritty low-magic RPG with the epic extremely high magic wargame. Kislev's most elite cavalry being bear riders is extremely in line with what WHFB has been since its inception; GW even sold a bear-riding Kislev character for a time.
Giant Ice Bear breaking the setting? Tell that to the gigantic daemon literally MADE OF MAGIC that it's duelling.
jojo_monkey_boy wrote: You're probably right about GW's intentions, but if that is their method, people can still criticise it as tacky.
Youtuber Logan Paul makes more money than I do being human-garbage. Does that mean his way of operating is "good" or "right" and that we should aspire to his methods?
The moment you say is background designed to sell to 12 years old you are basically insulting anybody that likes it because older was better and for more mature people.
Giant chaos dragons and heavy metal album-like background and knights fighting trolls was peak mature hobby time oh yeah.
I would put here C.S Lewis quote but I'm too lazy for that.
It's a very late-teenager criticism to make, I agree. That's the main demographic for wanting to distance themselves from childhood. Unfortunately some people take a bit of extra time to get past that, somewhat ashamed to admit I know that from experience.
Rihgu wrote: Thinking back to third edition with Orcs riding irate pigs, mesoamerican toad people in jaguar skins and warrior priests being carried by lobotomized slaves because if their feet touched the ground they lost magic power, high elves riding dragons as a unit(not just heroes!), undead riding vultures.
Not to mention that wizards could summon illusory towns that would hide say, a unit of 5 high elf dragonkin until the enemy got in charging range. Or summon an elemental with 10s across their entire stat-line!
But yes, it's the bear-ice-cannon that does puts it over the top.
You don't understand that only 6th edition murder hobbo grimdark turn to 11 bretonnian designed by Donatien Alphonse François is proper warhammer fantasy.
But I won't keep beating this dead horse, specially because 6th edition is my favourite flavour of warhammer but I'm so tired of people taking crap in everything else because theres no true kislevitemen.
I think the disconnect is always that the RPG and also the tabletop often appeared fairly low magic. Plus a lot of the sculpts in the past were more modest in terms of bling and style and how magical they were. A bear or such was mostly just a bear, now its a bigger bear with big shiny armour and other things.
It's like the old vs new greater demons - they were both greater demons, but the new outshine the old. Just like the old outshone the first generation ones that came way before.
Perhaps one difference is that Old World had high magic battles and wars, but was also fully capable of a group of orks and humans bashing each other with swords. It could do low magic pretty often and indeed a lot of the time magical elements were more things like a Rune Blade - ergo its enchanted but its not firing lighting and glowing and stuff.
In the end even all the fantastical stuff in AoS could easily have appeared in Old World. If the Dwarven Smith Guild had abandoned its dogma of restraining Dwarven technology they would have easily arrived at the Khadoran level very quickly. And just like with most technologies, once it was out there humans could have captured, stolen and found remains enough to adapt into their own arms race with the dwarves. Perhaps something like a cog-fort would have taken longer to arrive at, but its all potentially possible.
I mean, yes, warhammer fantasy RPG where one of your career pats was literally imperial prostitute or imperial pimp it was very low fantasy. But as a Ogre Kingdom fan and player, a faction that nearly became exting because a dragon emperor summoned a meteorite and then destroyed a civilization of giants in sky-castles on top of mountains, I have always been kite sceptic about old-world Empire poorporn adicts.
"Your ogres are crap! The good ogres were the humans with mental problems! that were the best ones!" Bah.
I guarantee most people have never heard of whatever low fantasy RPG your'e talking about it, including me.
I'd say the majority of people who don't like the direction this is going were fans primarily during 6th edition. And yes, we all know Lizardmen and magic existed.
Demons are horrifying monsters from the warp, hardly comparable to the Santa Claus magic ice sled pulled by bears...
NinthMusketeer wrote: People confuse the gritty low-magic RPG with the epic extremely high magic wargame. Kislev's most elite cavalry being bear riders is extremely in line with what WHFB has been since its inception; GW even sold a bear-riding Kislev character for a time.
Giant Ice Bear breaking the setting? Tell that to the gigantic daemon literally MADE OF MAGIC that it's duelling.
I think the key difference is that the human factions are generally depicted as a lot more grounded. People don't have an issue with Daemons being over the top, same with Lizardmen and even the various flavours of Elves, but the stark contrast of Empire/Bretonnia/Kislev in most peoples minds has always been much more grounded. Sure, you got stuff like the mechanical horse and the Pegasus, but those were the exception, not the norm. I think just about everybody expected some sort of bear cavalry unit, but as has been said, them to be the absolute top tier rare unit rather than the faction being the Fantasy equivalents of Space Wolves Wolf Guard with Wolf Claws riding Wolves for the Wolf Time. Instead just about every Tom, Dick and Harry who isn't a chaff pleb seems to be getting one. That the Gryphon Legion are remarkable BECAUSE they're riding common garden horses says a lot.
Difference is, those things were in background only, not the models on the table and even the big magic was "normal" in the game
The game itself looked more like a semi-historical game with magic rather than the big fantasy we saw later in 8th when finally the stuff from the background made it into the game
and this is the problem here, while those things can exist in the background, people don't want it with their 6th edition flair on the table, and the more likely those units get models in the game, the less likely is a 6th edition reboot and rather 8th or AoS like game
Is the same reason why greater demons never really become bigger, they were always the same size in the background, they just didnt had the technology back them to make them bigger.
Exactly - a Greater Demon in the stories was huge and monstrous and oozing magic - on the tabletop it was honestly very small in comparison. GW just didn't have the tech to do huge things and the few that they did do were only in Forgeworld resin - so far more limited (esp in the past) in when they appeared on the tables.
The only time we saw some of it was in Man O War which is a really really old game now and something most never really encountered.
So yep they saw the art in the books, but on tabletop it was fairly low magic. Even though a lot of the big epic stuff was in the setting and was in the art and the lore; it just wasn't on the tabletop.
And heck near the End Times we got a TASTE of it - we got eagles pulling chariots and huge phoenix and FW sized greater demons
well they could make models bigger, but by that time the knew people were not willing to pay the price for such a large centerpiece/display model just for gaming
this was the time were the Steamtank was the most expensive single model in the game with ~40€, and the bigger upgraded one was 60-70€ and seen as already too much by some
a Greater Demon in 6th Edi for 110€, although a large plastic model, just would not have sold for gaming
I think the older WHFB models looked great. There are no doubt a ton of amazing sculpts in AOS, but to say that the modern sculpts are "cooler" than the older ones is untrue imo. If anything, imo, the older models are a more confident and pleasant because they're a bit more clever and self-effacing. It makes a joke on the absurd fun of playing a game!
I think a lot of the modern sculpts are bit too try-hard, which makes them open to mockery and teasing. This is a tabletop strategy game after all, the cosplay of it all is open to ridicule quite easily so its better to lean into the fun, rather than insisting "my Khorne Daemon is so scary!! GRRR!!!"
GW has consistently done a great job with skaven and orks for example, getting the balance of spooky and silly. Irony and wit are hard to write, let alone "sculpt". And when people talk about the "character" of old models - they're speaking to the cleverness. Definitely some sculpts have gotten way better as GW returned to them...but you have to take it on a model by model basis. There are some really (imo) timeless WHFB minis and if anyone thinks theirs are too goofy and out of style, ill happily take them off your hands!!
NinthMusketeer wrote: People confuse the gritty low-magic RPG with the epic extremely high magic wargame.
That's because most people didn't play 1st ed WHFRP campaigns long enough to get to higher levels where Bolter toting Chaos Lords were a possible common enemy. Seriously, dig out the original book and look at the Chaos Relics and other high level enemy gear/rewards. WHFRP was only "gritty low-magic" at the average levels or if your GM made it so, the system handled high fantasy just fine.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: I imagine the game itself only looked grounded because well, GW couldn't sculpt as they do now with AoS.
I think this is a very important point. Much of the 'magic' was about in-game effects that were invisible on the tabletop. Now you have levitating models surrounded by swirls of power and such. It may be a more magical visual expression, but the conception (powerful wizards smiting stuff) hasn't really changed.
Having said that though, blinged out character models riding impossible monsters go way, way back. In some editions said mounted characters were dominant forces on the tabletop, so the gameplay didn't scream 'low fantasy, ranks and flanks' either. But of course, one COULD play grounded WHFB if one chose, so it's probably best to say the game has been different things to different people as opposed to this one single thing.
Also worth remembering that in the early days of WFB and WFRP - conversions were how many larger entities and technology were represented.
Even in 6th Edition they also had official army lists for such things as Dinosaur armies in Warhammer Chronicles (2004) and Dogs of War enabling armies to field Dragon Lords, Ogres, Maneating Dark Elves and so much more.
Warhammer has always been a world you can explore the mundane, the fantastic and everything in between.
I don't know about the rest of you but I'm really confused about this new take on the Old World. Yes, still early days, no solid information yet and all that. Still...
Where is this game going to fit in the current line-up? From what is known right now I don't see how the models are going to be any different from what is being released for AOS. Square bases sure, but two fantasy model lines with very similar themes and styles? How is that going to work? Cross compatibility maybe? All the minis get rules for both AOS and TOW?
Ohman wrote: I don't know about the rest of you but I'm really confused about this new take on the Old World. Yes, still early days, no solid information yet and all that. Still...
Where is this game going to fit in the current line-up? From what is known right now I don't see how the models are going to be any different from what is being released for AOS. Square bases sure, but two fantasy model lines with very similar themes and styles? How is that going to work? Cross compatibility maybe? All the minis get rules for both AOS and TOW?
I really rustled some jimmies, eh? You guys can keep your enlightened maturity if it means I have to like models that look like they were designed by hasbro. I'll stay an edge lord with good taste, thank you!
I think the key difference is that the human factions are generally depicted as a lot more grounded. People don't have an issue with Daemons being over the top, same with Lizardmen and even the various flavours of Elves, but the stark contrast of Empire/Bretonnia/Kislev in most peoples minds has always been much more grounded. Sure, you got stuff like the mechanical horse and the Pegasus, but those were the exception, not the norm. I think just about everybody expected some sort of bear cavalry unit, but as has been said, them to be the absolute top tier rare unit rather than the faction being the Fantasy equivalents of Space Wolves Wolf Guard with Wolf Claws riding Wolves for the Wolf Time. Instead just about every Tom, Dick and Harry who isn't a chaff pleb seems to be getting one. That the Gryphon Legion are remarkable BECAUSE they're riding common garden horses says a lot.
Ohman wrote: I don't know about the rest of you but I'm really confused about this new take on the Old World. Yes, still early days, no solid information yet and all that. Still...
Where is this game going to fit in the current line-up? From what is known right now I don't see how the models are going to be any different from what is being released for AOS. Square bases sure, but two fantasy model lines with very similar themes and styles? How is that going to work? Cross compatibility maybe? All the minis get rules for both AOS and TOW?
I've been under the assumption for a while now that the "Old World" is just a marketing gimmick to lure in old players (and take some of the steam away from rank&flank competitors)
All the models from the Old World will probably get rolled over into Cities of Sigmar for AoS eventually. Kislev might as well be an AoS army if they copy the video game design.
It seems the obvious way to do it. I wonder if they would consider making Ossiarchs, Stormcast etc playable with the Old World rules too? Basicially having one giant range of fantasy minis, all playable with both rule sets.
Original announcement was in Nov 2019 and said "this is a long way off. Years. More than two. Like three or more." So they should be about halfway done if nothing unforseen has happend. It would be really fun if they told us something about what kind of game they are planning to release and when!
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Goose LeChance wrote: I've been under the assumption for a while now that the "Old World" is just a marketing gimmick to lure in old players (and take some of the steam away from rank&flank competitors)
All the models from the Old World will probably get rolled over into Cities of Sigmar for AoS eventually. Kislev might as well be an AoS army if they copy the video game design.
I HOPE it's a lot more than just a marketing ploy but they usually don't announce games three years before release and I don't know why they did it this time.
I could see there being some overlap (much like 30k/40k), but I have to assume that at some point an actual AoS "Normal" Human Army will come out and the old WFB refugee models will be retired. It might even stay as the CoS book, just with models that fit the setting better.
As for the seemingly endless high vs. low fantasy setting, are the people in the low camp only and specifically talking about the Empire? Because I remember pegasus air forces in 6th, and having 75% of your army either riding a mythical beast or just being a wizard doesn't really scream "grounded" to me. Sure, you could also run peasant blocks backed up by lances of knights of the realm, but that wasn't the only way to do it.
Heck, Kislev had a bear in their Mordheim warband and that was one of the lowest, scrabbliest, dirtiest games GW ever produced. When your whole force is half a dozen starving mercs who could only dream of one day living to see a suit of light armor in person, having ready access to trained war-bears must mean that they're relatively common.
Pegasus Knights were limited to 0-1, unless you were using a Lord on Royal Pegasus, and chances are that meant you were playing against some WAAC tournament player. They were a huge point of contention even back then.
Secondly no one has a problem with magic itself, or fantastical beasts.
I don't see much complaining about a single bear or bear cavalry unit. It's more about the excessive Godzilla bear and Santa sled, also all the ice magic/ice weapons.
Personally, I was really hoping they would take a lot more influence from 6th edition (Tolkien, Historicals), or Dark Souls for a pop culture reference, and a whole lot less World of Warcraft.
NinthMusketeer wrote: People confuse the gritty low-magic RPG with the epic extremely high magic wargame. Kislev's most elite cavalry being bear riders is extremely in line with what WHFB has been since its inception; GW even sold a bear-riding Kislev character for a time.
Giant Ice Bear breaking the setting? Tell that to the gigantic daemon literally MADE OF MAGIC that it's duelling.
I think the key difference is that the human factions are generally depicted as a lot more grounded. People don't have an issue with Daemons being over the top, same with Lizardmen and even the various flavours of Elves, but the stark contrast of Empire/Bretonnia/Kislev in most peoples minds has always been much more grounded. Sure, you got stuff like the mechanical horse and the Pegasus, but those were the exception, not the norm. I think just about everybody expected some sort of bear cavalry unit, but as has been said, them to be the absolute top tier rare unit rather than the faction being the Fantasy equivalents of Space Wolves Wolf Guard with Wolf Claws riding Wolves for the Wolf Time. Instead just about every Tom, Dick and Harry who isn't a chaff pleb seems to be getting one. That the Gryphon Legion are remarkable BECAUSE they're riding common garden horses says a lot.
See that is mischaracterizing the Kislev roster they've shown. The overwhelming majority is regular human stuff. When we narrow things down to just the rare choices and special characters things are quite different.
The Empire has a giant magical laser beam of multiple magnifying glasses and a giant rotating celestial model summing lightning storms. But then people say 8th edition doesn't count.
So we can hop over to Norsca and ride a Mumak-sized Chaos Mammoth with an immense maw at the end of its trunk. But Chaos humans don't count.
So let's go to Brettonia with its pegasai, griffins, and ascended fae humans. Or back to the Empire with its literal tanks running on steam power.
Most of the WHFB human armies were regular humans. Most of the Kislev roster is too. It is entirely, perfectly in line with the design themes WHFB has always had.
Adding cowpatties works, but the models need to come with dismayed or anguished faces as they ponder the exigencies of their brief, disease-ridden lives.
streetsamurai wrote: Really hope I'm wrong, but i fear more and more that the old world will end up to be vaporware or a really limited release (boardgame like).
I'm 100% ready for the first starter set to sell out within 5 minutes and never come back.
streetsamurai wrote: Really hope I'm wrong, but i fear more and more that the old world will end up to be vaporware or a really limited release (boardgame like).
Well, let's hope not. In the last 18 months they have given us the following:
1. Square Bases.
2. Sneak peaks of a nice map they're working on.
3. Concept art that is supposedly made for Total War III and TOW.
That is not a whole lot but GW usually never reveal new products more than a few months before release so maybe that's why we still don't know anything? I'm also a bit confused over why they would announce a new game three years before release and than tell us nothing about it for a year and a half (and maybe even longer).
Might have been a better plan to tease it like a year before release and then be able to post regular updates during that year.
Goose LeChance wrote: I guarantee most people have never heard of whatever low fantasy RPG your'e talking about it, including me.
I'd say the majority of people who don't like the direction this is going were fans primarily during 6th edition. And yes, we all know Lizardmen and magic existed.
Demons are horrifying monsters from the warp, hardly comparable to the Santa Claus magic ice sled pulled by bears...
Kislev had a Bear God who took the form of the bear - who also represented the Land of Kislev itself which they believed would take form and defend itself - , bears were an integral part of their society, had guys riding bears, had Ice Witches, the Ice Court, an Ice Queen in an Ice Palace....but now the Ice Bear representing the Land of Kislev, a Sled covered in Ice, and bears being used as something other than mounts is going in a different direction?
Man O war back in 1993 had Dwarf submarines and Ironclads and balloons. Chaos Dwarfs had giant rocket artillery and mortars. The Empire had a ship that was a single giant floating cannon as well as a mortar version. There were Griffon and Pegasus riders. I don't really see where the supposed change between fantasy styles happened and things suddenly became less low-fantasy, The Empire had Steam Tanks for a long time too.
Goose LeChance wrote: Kislev might as well be an AoS army if they copy the video game design.
It's been confirmed by both sides that the "video game design" of the new TWW3 armies are being based on the designs GW is doing for Old World. So it's actually that the video game is copying the miniatures designs.
Mentlegen324 wrote: What they've shown so far is still Warhammer Fantasy, Kislev has always had magic and bears as a big part of their culture to a larger extent than similar things are in the Empire
This discussion keeps being dredged up, but I think some of what people are reacting to are the gulf between older warhammer and newer warhammer (I'd argue post-6th edition, culminating in 8th edition), which ultimately arrived at a world where the empire had magical lasers and robot horses. It was the kitschification of the game, because everything was special and crazy, nothing was anymore.
Kislev having bears and ice as part of their culture is one thing, but taking an Oprah level of "you get a bear, you get a bear, EVERYONE GETS A BEAR!" undermines the setting. If they had left it with bear cavalry being the ultimate expression of bear-ness, it would be special. I could even accept the elemntal ice bear as having a place. However taking a cannon on a sled, which is already a unique idea, and then having the sled pulled by bears and sliding on magic ice, is pretty much the definition of kitsch.
It's background design to sell toys to 12 year olds.
Sorry, but over the top magic and technology has always been part of Warhammer. In the Vengeance of the Lichemaster scenario for WHFB 2nd ed and WHRPG there were cyborgs and robots. One of the first WHF stories I read was about a Khorne warrior who was wielding a laser pistol. In the original Shadows Over Boffenhagen RPG, the party can screw up and cause Tzeentch to manifest in the town. The whole concept of the Skaven is of an over the top technological society from the beginning. In the game you could open demonic portals and spew armies of demons at your opponent.
To complain about the silliness and over the top nature of the this stuff is to forget that this game was created by a bunch of college kids high/drunk on multiple legal and illegal substances in the 80s.
Goose LeChance wrote: Pegasus Knights were limited to 0-1, unless you were using a Lord on Royal Pegasus, and chances are that meant you were playing against some WAAC tournament player. They were a huge point of contention even back then.
Secondly no one has a problem with magic itself, or fantastical beasts.
I don't see much complaining about a single bear or bear cavalry unit. It's more about the excessive Godzilla bear and Santa sled, also all the ice magic/ice weapons.
Personally, I was really hoping they would take a lot more influence from 6th edition (Tolkien, Historicals), or Dark Souls for a pop culture reference, and a whole lot less World of Warcraft.
As I said, the pegasus air force was a valid army from 6th edition, the very one you say was "grounded". Yes, you had to take a lord on another pegasus to run the list, but how does adding more mythical beasts make it less of an issue? Surely a pegasus is much more high fantasy than a bear, so an army made up of 75% pegasi must be less grounded than an army with a handful of bears in it. Even if the bear cav is the equivalent of the old special (and I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're "rare", as that would give you a nice progression of cav), that means you'll cap out at the same proportion, but with normal old bears that we train today.
Again, no one's saying you can't have low magic lists or run games about rat catchers struggling to survive in the gutters. We're just pointing out that including the high fantasy stuff that's always been there isn't somehow ignoring the lore or "wrong". Mordheim and it's weird artistic direction are some of my favorite bits of the old world, but that's not the entirety of the setting. I don't personally like the ice sled (it seems like a waste of magic - unless Kislev has a lot of naturally occurring, self replenishing magical ice deposits somewhere), but that's just my opinion.
It seems the obvious way to do it. I wonder if they would consider making Ossiarchs, Stormcast etc playable with the Old World rules too? Basicially having one giant range of fantasy minis, all playable with both rule sets.
Original announcement was in Nov 2019 and said "this is a long way off. Years. More than two. Like three or more." So they should be about halfway done if nothing unforseen has happend. It would be really fun if they told us something about what kind of game they are planning to release and when!
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Goose LeChance wrote: I've been under the assumption for a while now that the "Old World" is just a marketing gimmick to lure in old players (and take some of the steam away from rank&flank competitors)
All the models from the Old World will probably get rolled over into Cities of Sigmar for AoS eventually. Kislev might as well be an AoS army if they copy the video game design.
I HOPE it's a lot more than just a marketing ploy but they usually don't announce games three years before release and I don't know why they did it this time.
They did it at this time solely to knock the steam out of Kings Of War releasing 3rd Edition.
We need to face facts that GW has several playable editions of this game that could be rereleased with some balance edits at the drop of a hat if they were THAT worried about keeping their Fantasy fanbase. They're going to try to make bank on a severely overpriced short sell and that's the last we'll see of it. I'm done being optimistic about this...
streetsamurai wrote: Really hope I'm wrong, but i fear more and more that the old world will end up to be vaporware or a really limited release (boardgame like).
Well, let's hope not. In the last 18 months they have given us the following:
1. Square Bases.
2. Sneak peaks of a nice map they're working on.
3. Concept art that is supposedly made for Total War III and TOW.
That is not a whole lot but GW usually never reveal new products more than a few months before release so maybe that's why we still don't know anything? I'm also a bit confused over why they would announce a new game three years before release and than tell us nothing about it for a year and a half (and maybe even longer).
Might have been a better plan to tease it like a year before release and then be able to post regular updates during that year.
My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
The only other game they've teased years in advance is a new Battlefleet Gothic (Battlefleet Heresy I think?) and that may have been a response to Drop Fleet Commander. But they never even showed art for that.
Just Tony wrote:They did it at this time solely to knock the steam out of Kings Of War releasing 3rd Edition.
Kid_Kyoto wrote:My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
Certainly possible even if it is unlike GW to show such insecurity about their own brand appeal. I don't have a better explanation myself.
streetsamurai wrote: Really hope I'm wrong, but i fear more and more that the old world will end up to be vaporware or a really limited release (boardgame like).
Well, let's hope not. In the last 18 months they have given us the following:
1. Square Bases.
2. Sneak peaks of a nice map they're working on.
3. Concept art that is supposedly made for Total War III and TOW.
That is not a whole lot but GW usually never reveal new products more than a few months before release so maybe that's why we still don't know anything? I'm also a bit confused over why they would announce a new game three years before release and than tell us nothing about it for a year and a half (and maybe even longer).
Might have been a better plan to tease it like a year before release and then be able to post regular updates during that year.
My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
The only other game they've teased years in advance is a new Battlefleet Gothic (Battlefleet Heresy I think?) and that may have been a response to Drop Fleet Commander. But they never even showed art for that.
Another thing I can think of is that GW considered the Battle Sister marketing that ended around the same time Old World was announced such a success that they wanted a follow up series. It's not a theory without flaws, but there are appreciable similarities between Sisters getting a plastic range overhaul after so long and the return of a nuked setting. As it stand now about half of the development time of Old World has been spent not telling us anything of substance about a project that we'd really like to have as much substantial information about as quickly as possible, which is a mirror of what happened to Sisters. It'll be interesting to see if the Old World articles pick up soon akin to the Battle Sister bulletin and start actually showing off models in reasonable intervals.
As for Ohman's last line, they're able to post regular updates. They just don't do it. Probably because they are afraid of posting something that later gets changed and held against them as a false promise. Based on that I agree that they should have held back until they're confident that what they have to show is set in stone. With that said, I think they still could have had an article a month showing a sketch or artwork or CAD model (or even just parts of that) of a faction they know will be in the game on release. Can't be hard to get together a dozen and a half of those things without really committing to anything.
Mentlegen324 wrote: What they've shown so far is still Warhammer Fantasy, Kislev has always had magic and bears as a big part of their culture to a larger extent than similar things are in the Empire
This discussion keeps being dredged up, but I think some of what people are reacting to are the gulf between older warhammer and newer warhammer (I'd argue post-6th edition, culminating in 8th edition), which ultimately arrived at a world where the empire had magical lasers and robot horses. It was the kitschification of the game, because everything was special and crazy, nothing was anymore.
Kislev having bears and ice as part of their culture is one thing, but taking an Oprah level of "you get a bear, you get a bear, EVERYONE GETS A BEAR!" undermines the setting. If they had left it with bear cavalry being the ultimate expression of bear-ness, it would be special. I could even accept the elemntal ice bear as having a place. However taking a cannon on a sled, which is already a unique idea, and then having the sled pulled by bears and sliding on magic ice, is pretty much the definition of kitsch.
It's background design to sell toys to 12 year olds.
Sorry, but over the top magic and technology has always been part of Warhammer. In the Vengeance of the Lichemaster scenario for WHFB 2nd ed and WHRPG there were cyborgs and robots. One of the first WHF stories I read was about a Khorne warrior who was wielding a laser pistol. In the original Shadows Over Boffenhagen RPG, the party can screw up and cause Tzeentch to manifest in the town. The whole concept of the Skaven is of an over the top technological society from the beginning. In the game you could open demonic portals and spew armies of demons at your opponent.
To complain about the silliness and over the top nature of the this stuff is to forget that this game was created by a bunch of college kids high/drunk on multiple legal and illegal substances in the 80s.
While I don't really agree with the complaints about them supposedly changing myselfs, I expect what some might say in response to this is specifically relating to Empire/Bretonnia/Kislev stuff - It sounds like they have the impression that those places/factions specifically were relatively low-fantasy until they suddenly changed with things like the Clockwork horse and this new Kislev ice bear, while for some strange reason the older Steam Tank, Pegasus and Griffons don't count (I guess because they were a very small part?) so was there anything else they had in the older lore that was just as non-grounded as those later additions?
I've not seen anything overly worrying with what they've shown so far. The complaints seem like somewhat missing that these sorts of things have always been there. Cathay for example was talked about back in 1992 (2nd edition) and supposedly had such things as turtle ships, eternally sharp swords, very elaborate fantasy dragon-themed armour (very much so), terracotta automatons, ogres, lightning unicorns, magical warrior monks, monkey warriors, living stone dogs used as mounts (which had miniatures even) and crow men, and had magic as a much bigger part of their culture than the Empire had. It's not like the sled and bear now mean Kislev went from hardly any ice magic and bears to suddenly bears and ice magic everywhere, or the Empire with its luminark and clockwork horse went from just a normal human civilization to suddenly having fantasy technology all over the place - Kislev always had a heavy focus on ice Magic and bears, and the Empire had it's strange fantasy contraptions before those, they were just some additions to that.
For Kislev and the Empire Magical/fantasy elements like that were always part of the setting and factions, I don't see what's meant to have changed.
I don't see much complaining about a single bear or bear cavalry unit. It's more about the excessive Godzilla bear and Santa sled, also all the ice magic/ice weapons.
Personally, I was really hoping they would take a lot more influence from 6th edition (Tolkien, Historicals), or Dark Souls for a pop culture reference, and a whole lot less World of Warcraft.
The Ice Magic and Ice weapons is from 6th edition, as it has been a part of Kislev since at least the WHFBRPG second edition, released in 2004.
Personally, I was really hoping they would take a lot more influence from 6th edition (Tolkien, Historicals), or Dark Souls for a pop culture reference, and a whole lot less World of Warcraft.
Warcraft was directly lifted from WFB! It was originally planned to be a MMORPG based in the Warhammer world,
I think it's something like the change that happened in D&D.
I always thought of the D&D worlds as the middle ages (OK the Hollywood take on them were everyone had straight teeth and bathed at least once a month whether they needed it or not) + the occasional demi human or monster outside the borders of civilization.
Now D&D worlds look like the Star Wars cantina with turtle folk and rabbit people in the inn and flying ships everywhere.
The Olde Worlde of Warhammere was even more mundane than D&D. Your typical peasant might see actual magic, one in his life and tell everyone about it forever. But now it too looks more like an anime or video game where there's magic on every street corner. And I think that's what's being lost.
Personally, I was really hoping they would take a lot more influence from 6th edition (Tolkien, Historicals), or Dark Souls for a pop culture reference, and a whole lot less World of Warcraft.
Warcraft was directly lifted from WFB! It was originally planned to be a MMORPG based in the Warhammer world,
Not quite - from what I recall Warcraft 1 was a joint project but for some reason GW decided to pull out. Blizzard had developed enough of the game by then that they didn't want to throw it away, so they changed the story, adjusted the lore and visuals and made Warcraft 1.
Since then the two firms have swapped ideas back and forth; Blizzard copied GW in doing a sci-fi version of the game; GW copied hydralisks etc.... Little things jump back and forth. Of course Bliz went on to make World of Warcraft which has had a huge effect on fantasy.
I also agree that over the last 20 years or so the fantasy scene has changed at large. It's gone from settings where magic is super rare and special (no matter if its earth shattering or just cantraps) into something that's sort of supposed to be rare, but is common enough that every adventuring party has several mages etc... Also as time has passed there's been an increase in content. DnD has far more races and characters than ever and, of course, people want to play them. So what started out as a rare species is now common enough that they can be roleplayed without every tavern they walk into suddenly going nuts because they aren't human etc....
It's been a steady change over time so you tend to notice it more when you step back and start comparing to the past.
I'd also say some of the quest and story writing has got a bit silly - in the bid to always have things be big and epic it tends to end up "Day 1 I'm a farmer" "Day 3 I just saved the kingdom" "Day 5 I just saved the entire world and all existence and god and also I got a good grade at wizarding school today!"
The constant upping of the gravity of the situation tends to end up hitting silly and losing a bit of a touch with its own setting.
Ohman wrote: Original announcement was in Nov 2019 and said "this is a long way off. Years. More than two. Like three or more." So they should be about halfway done if nothing unforseen has happend. It would be really fun if they told us something about what kind of game they are planning to release and when!
Good job that nothing unforeseenhas happened since November 2019 then.
Patriarch wrote: Good job that nothing unforeseenhas happened since November 2019 then.
Well yes, something big did happen, you are correct. I'm guessing it will have had an impact on things. I'm not sure to what degree though. The Old World appears to be in the development stage and I don't think there were any plans to start producing books, minis or anything this year. I think there is a good chance that the project is still on track, more or less.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: The Olde Worlde of Warhammere was even more mundane than D&D. Your typical peasant might see actual magic, one in his life and tell everyone about it forever. But now it too looks more like an anime or video game where there's magic on every street corner. And I think that's what's being lost.
No its just YOUR Old World was like that - but that was never the Total setting - just a element of it - once again the great thing about Warhammer was you could set it low key fighitng a few rats in a sewer or ride Dragons with High Elf lords against Daemons - or everything between.
Look at the covers of all the WFRP rulebooks from 1st ed - similar scene invcluding heroes including a fireball slinging wizard fighting monsters. Look at all the covers of all the Warhammer books from the very beginning especially Fantasy Battle and all spin off games.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: (OK the Hollywood take on them were everyone had straight teeth and bathed at least once a month whether they needed it or not)
just that is was at least once a week and better daily
this thing about not bathing at all was much later and had to do with linen became popular, which was easier to clean so people could appear "clean" without a daily bath (and as clean cloths, as well as expensive makeup became a sign of social status etiquette and medical manuals advised people to only wash the parts of the body that were visible to the public as the appearance was more important than hygiene) and with 17th century bathing was out of fashion
Kid_Kyoto wrote: The only other game they've teased years in advance is a new Battlefleet Gothic (Battlefleet Heresy I think?) and that may have been a response to Drop Fleet Commander. But they never even showed art for that.
Adeptus Titanicus.
Seems clear enough that the preview "rules" for the main GW studio don't apply in the same way for SG. As I know you know (but others may not), GW used to preview new army books/codexes and their associated miniatures well in advance of release.
Thinking about it, a less cynical reason for revealing early may have been simple exuberance.
I imagine people in the studio liked the Olde Worlde even more than we did and were even more crushed to see it go. I'd further imagine they were told the word Olde Worlde would never cross their lips again.
So once the ban was lifted I imagine they were jumping to share the good news.
Thinking about it this is probably more likely than a fear of Oathmark or 9th Age.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: I think it's something like the change that happened in D&D.
I always thought of the D&D worlds as the middle ages (OK the Hollywood take on them were everyone had straight teeth and bathed at least once a month whether they needed it or not) + the occasional demi human or monster outside the borders of civilization.
Now D&D worlds look like the Star Wars cantina with turtle folk and rabbit people in the inn and flying ships everywhere.
The Olde Worlde of Warhammere was even more mundane than D&D. Your typical peasant might see actual magic, one in his life and tell everyone about it forever. But now it too looks more like an anime or video game where there's magic on every street corner. And I think that's what's being lost.
I just point back to the Lichemaster RPG adventure. That was a low level introductory adventure for WHFRP and one of the tasks for the party was to get the robot working. The RPG was a akin to an anime series where the ordinary and mundane protagonist gets thrown into a crazy fantastical world. In the Doomstone campaign you end up on a dwarf airship. Yes you may start out as a dirty rat catcher, but full blown fantasy and technology elements are presented to players right away.
Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
I may be wrong, but that's literally the case in Star Wars, right? Luke was a farmer, and I always had the impression he had never even been to Mos Eisley, which is a wretched hive of scum and villainy... and filled with gnishgnaks, garoos, wizzlfubs, and all other sorts of strange alien beings basically down the block from him. Oh and also the starport!
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Bilbo and Frodo had seen a wizard, though, and wizards are much rarer than elves in Middle Earth, so it's kind of a matter of perspective.
I think armies are supposed to have all the big magic/fantastical stuff. The baseline mundane life is for the farmers, who don't feature much in the battle games.
silent25 wrote: I just point back to the Lichemaster RPG adventure. That was a low level introductory adventure for WHFRP and one of the tasks for the party was to get the robot working.
You keep referring back to this example and it seems to form the bedrock of your argument, so I actually wasted 20 minutes of my morning looking up the exact reference in the book in question.
It does not in any way refer to the entity as a robot. In fact, it is quite explicitly referred to as a magical construct:
"This chamber is bare, save for what appears to be a statue of a man, made of solid (but rather rusty) iron and standing around seven feet tall. Characters with Magical Sense skill will feel that the thing is magical in some way, although there is no obvious means of making it do anything.
They aren't everywhere, they are a small minority of options and they are the rare ones to boot. I am surprised so many people are implying that bears are common in the new Kislev roster when that is so untrue.
To summarize, the units are:
-regular humans
-regular humans
-demiwizards with magic gear
-regular humans
-regular humans
-horse cavalry
-horse cavalry
-horse cavalry
-bear cavalry
-horse cavalry
-bear chariot (beariot)
-heavy beariot
-chaos warhounds but they are order warcats
-elemental bear
-bear artillery
On top of that regular human infantry/cavalry are repeatedly referred to as being the mainstay of Kislev forces.
silent25 wrote: I just point back to the Lichemaster RPG adventure. That was a low level introductory adventure for WHFRP and one of the tasks for the party was to get the robot working.
You keep referring back to this example and it seems to form the bedrock of your argument, so I actually wasted 20 minutes of my morning looking up the exact reference in the book in question.
It does not in any way refer to the entity as a robot. In fact, it is quite explicitly referred to as a magical construct:
"This chamber is bare, save for what appears to be a statue of a man, made of solid (but rather rusty) iron and standing around seven feet tall. Characters with Magical Sense skill will feel that the thing is magical in some way, although there is no obvious means of making it do anything.
This is one of de Muscadet's magical creations."
It being a magical construct instead of a robot doesn't undermine his point though...?
NinthMusketeer wrote: It being a magical construct instead of a robot doesn't undermine his point though...?
I would say it does.
In a universe where magic is a thing but not very common, a golem found in the basement of a wizard is much more of a reasonable idea than human engineers who can barely work gun powder weaponry creating functional mechanical horses.
No one is saying there shouldn't be fantastical things in WFB. The argument I've been making is that the fantastical needs to be kept on rails so as to keep it fantastical.
Speaking of technology, didn't the Empire only have a total of like, less than ten Steam tanks in it's entirety, and nobody could build the bloody things? I'm pretty sure Steam Tanks only became a thing humans could manufacture, like, at all, only in Age of Sigmar.
NinthMusketeer wrote: It being a magical construct instead of a robot doesn't undermine his point though...?
I would say it does.
In a universe where magic is a thing but not very common, a golem found in the basement of a wizard is much more of a reasonable idea than human engineers who can barely work gun powder weaponry creating functional mechanical horses.
No one is saying there shouldn't be fantastical things in WFB. The argument I've been making is that the fantastical needs to be kept on rails so as to keep it fantastical.
Furthermore, if the human factions are mundane that makes the non-human factions all the more interesting. The aesthetic of daemons, forest spirits, and undead is stronger if they're facing ordinary humans (maybe with a monster) than if they're facing an army of griffons and crazy mechanical contraptions. Likewise, if the most of the army of Khemri, for example, is skeletons with different mounts and weapons it makes the mummies and animated statues stand out more.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Thinking about it, a less cynical reason for revealing early may have been simple exuberance.
I imagine people in the studio liked the Olde Worlde even more than we did and were even more crushed to see it go. I'd further imagine they were told the word Olde Worlde would never cross their lips again.
So once the ban was lifted I imagine they were jumping to share the good news.
I've seen that happen. Jervis did a seminar in the evening between two days of GT in Maryland in the long, long ago. He was supposed to just talk about the new HE army book at the time, but slipped on something about Gorkamorka. He said something like 'I'm really not supposed to talk about this,' but people pressed him, and he just shrugged and started gushing. It was kind of hilarious and charming, because his enthusiasm for the project just spilled over.
Patriarch wrote: Good job that nothing unforeseenhas happened since November 2019 then.
Well yes, something big did happen, you are correct. I'm guessing it will have had an impact on things. I'm not sure to what degree though. The Old World appears to be in the development stage and I don't think there were any plans to start producing books, minis or anything this year. I think there is a good chance that the project is still on track, more or less.
If COVID affected GW anything like it did Kickstarter than they'll soon be telling us they're actually further away from finishing the game than when they started.
As to the "magical" nature of Warhammer, the whole discussion reminds me of why good authors can make millions of dollars... it's obvious understanding the fine nuance of these things and being able to ride that line is something most people simply cannot do. It takes some real talent. Warhammer's level of fantasy, verisimilitude, grittiness and so on is just as it is, and at its best achieved an ambrosiac mixture for the imagination. You can't describe it by saying it was "High Fantasy" or "Low Fantasy" or citing a single instance from some book's cover art, or the events in a WFRP scenario (not the least of which because those events invariably were for all intents and purposes meant to be wild, one-in-a-million stories) and do anything close to an adequate job summing it up, or really even roughly describing it. It was a complex alchemy and longtime fans know it when they see it, and know when it's off the rails too. With some allowance for differing tastes.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Thinking about it, a less cynical reason for revealing early may have been simple exuberance.
I imagine people in the studio liked the Olde Worlde even more than we did and were even more crushed to see it go. I'd further imagine they were told the word Olde Worlde would never cross their lips again.
So once the ban was lifted I imagine they were jumping to share the good news.
I've seen that happen. Jervis did a seminar in the evening between two days of GT in Maryland in the long, long ago. He was supposed to just talk about the new HE army book at the time, but slipped on something about Gorkamorka. He said something like 'I'm really not supposed to talk about this,' but people pressed him, and he just shrugged and started gushing. It was kind of hilarious and charming, because his enthusiasm for the project just spilled over.
Yeah, I remember chit-chatting with him about Cathay. He told me (in a somewhat conspiratorial manner) that the current idea at the studio was that it wouldn't be another human army. Whether that eventually morphed into Ogre Kingdoms or was a different idea that never materialized, I have no idea. Even if the Old World still existed, there'd probably be a lot of sensitivities around Cathay. But yeah, the designers are human beings and get excited about things they're working on.
frankelee wrote: As to the "magical" nature of Warhammer, the whole discussion reminds me of why good authors can make millions of dollars... it's obvious understanding the fine nuance of these things and being able to ride that line is something most people simply cannot do. It takes some real talent. Warhammer's level of fantasy, verisimilitude, grittiness and so on is just as it is, and at its best achieved an ambrosiac mixture for the imagination. You can't describe it by saying it was "High Fantasy" or "Low Fantasy" or citing a single instance from some book's cover art, or the events in a WFRP scenario (not the least of which because those events invariably were for all intents and purposes meant to be wild, one-in-a-million stories) and do anything close to an adequate job summing it up, or really even roughly describing it. It was a complex alchemy and longtime fans know it when they see it, and know when it's off the rails too. With some allowance for differing tastes.
I think part of the reason Kislev doesn't 'feel right' to some folks is that they're seeing individual concept sketches and not armies on the tabletop. Not ranks of Kossars flanked by Winged Lancers and Gryphon Legion alongside a bear sled and a unit of ice archers. If one cherry-picked the most fantastic Empire elements absent ranks of halberdiers, etc. then Empire would look pretty crazy also.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world..
Because they live in a backwater /hicksville not a great city
So sure Farmer Heinz may not have seen a Elf, a Dragon or a Elemental Bear in the village of Knowherestadt of the Empire but good chance have seen Beastmen and Goblins and if he travelled to Nuln, Altdorf or Middenheim he will have seen much more - indeed from the very start of Warhammer, Middenheim has had a major magical festival with a flying wizard display team etc etc.
Anyone who actually knows the lore for Kislev will recognise that the Elemental Bear is very much in keeping.
And honestly, the wargame was always much more "fantastical" than the RPG (which isn't surprising, modern day walmart greeter will also likely never get within 10ft of an F-35, and yet they exist and if you're a fighter pilot, you're likely to see them all the time), and we, the players, tend to have our games be those once-in-a-lifetime scenarios instead of 50 Empire swordsmen clashing with 30 zombies somewhere near Sylvania.
As a general rule, with some exceptions, wargamers want to see Tigers and Panthers going against the IS2s and KV2s on the table, not the half-frozen Heer soldiers with horse-drawn artillery being turned to paste by a swarm of identical T-34s. Or to put it Old World terms, Reiksguard Greatswords and Helblasters, the high-tech, cutting-edge wonders of Nuln going against demons and elves riding giant raptors, even if 99% of Imperial military would never fight with anything more advanced than a crossbow (handguns were being adopted by the Empire as regular weapon at the time of Karl Franz, with Nuln being renown for fielding larger numbers of them vs other provinces after all)
To put it simply- in the Warhammer world, there were more wizards than engineers. the Empire wasn't the norm, it was the outlier in how low-magic it was. Flying was more common than having powered land vehicle.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
Kid_Kyoto wrote: I think it's something like the change that happened in D&D.
I always thought of the D&D worlds as the middle ages (OK the Hollywood take on them were everyone had straight teeth and bathed at least once a month whether they needed it or not) + the occasional demi human or monster outside the borders of civilization.
Now D&D worlds look like the Star Wars cantina with turtle folk and rabbit people in the inn and flying ships everywhere.
The Olde Worlde of Warhammere was even more mundane than D&D. Your typical peasant might see actual magic, one in his life and tell everyone about it forever. But now it too looks more like an anime or video game where there's magic on every street corner. And I think that's what's being lost.
I just point back to the Lichemaster RPG adventure. That was a low level introductory adventure for WHFRP and one of the tasks for the party was to get the robot working. The RPG was a akin to an anime series where the ordinary and mundane protagonist gets thrown into a crazy fantastical world. In the Doomstone campaign you end up on a dwarf airship. Yes you may start out as a dirty rat catcher, but full blown fantasy and technology elements are presented to players right away.
The Lichemaster is a bit different, but the case of the Doomstones campaign is interesting on account of it being written as a regular D&D campaign that was later on slightly reworked to kinda sorta fit into WFRP. It is also more or less univerlassy bashed as being not very good nor very Warhammer-y.
There's a few issues with the whole fantastic ideas and increased 'unique' playable species.
1. How often they turn up is on the Story teller of a given world, and running into a few bunny girl fighters in an adventurer tavern doesn't make them common.
2. Even if said BGFs are common, it just means they aren't the fantastic part of the fantastic journey.
A real world look at these though. By the late 1880/90s most large American cities had a Chinatown neighborhood. Chinese Americans were part of the American culture by that point.
How many people, those in those cities, were likely to actually encounter one of these people? For a good long part of US history, communities, even inside a larger urban area could be very insular. You *might* see a Chinese American walking down the street every now and then, but the odds are you wouldn't stop to talk to them.
Then remember, until the mid 1930's, most of the US population was rural. With most Chinese Americans living in cities, how many farmboys would ever actually meet one?
This now brings up fiction. We know Chinese Americans were part of society. But they were still mysterious to most Americans that entire subsections of fiction were about the goings on of their lives and neighborhoods. Places of mystery (even as the real life was just mundane with accents), where all types of adventure lurked, and mystical and magical things abounded.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
Not quite... there were 12 originally created, 8 still remain 500 years later - its unclear why there are no more built given that more advanced tech (mechanical animals) has been created since by the Humand and Dwarf engineers of the Empire, Marienburg also commissioned some slightly odd versions from Nuln.
Dwarfs had plenty of tech including Airships, Flamethrower cannons, A steam powered sentry gun
And then there is the Skaven with warp powered trains, ships....
Elves ride Dragons - you can even hire one as a mercenary.....
Chaos can even be given tech as reward for service.
Now again would Farmer Heinz have seen any of these - probably not but he also might have depending on where he lives in the Empire - also remember that an entire Province is ruled by the Undead.
Mmmpi wrote: There's a few issues with the whole fantastic ideas and increased 'unique' playable species.
1. How often they turn up is on the Story teller of a given world, and running into a few bunny girl fighters in an adventurer tavern doesn't make them common.
2. Even if said BGFs are common, it just means they aren't the fantastic part of the fantastic journey.
A real world look at these though. By the late 1880/90s most large American cities had a Chinatown neighborhood. Chinese Americans were part of the American culture by that point.
How many people, those in those cities, were likely to actually encounter one of these people? For a good long part of US history, communities, even inside a larger urban area could be very insular. You *might* see a Chinese American walking down the street every now and then, but the odds are you wouldn't stop to talk to them.
Then remember, until the mid 1930's, most of the US population was rural. With most Chinese Americans living in cities, how many farmboys would ever actually meet one?
This now brings up fiction. We know Chinese Americans were part of society. But they were still mysterious to most Americans that entire subsections of fiction were about the goings on of their lives and neighborhoods. Places of mystery (even as the real life was just mundane with accents), where all types of adventure lurked, and mystical and magical things abounded.
The problem is you assume that the Empire/America in this example is the norm. It's very much the exception to a globe full of wizards, lizards, dinosaurs, demons and tiger-people. Franz the kraut-herder is the exotic non-magical creature of fables, not the elven wizard riding a dragon.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
And the bear artillery reads the same way, but again people are applying a double standard.
Mr Morden wrote: Not quite... there were 12 originally created, 8 still remain 500 years later - its unclear why there are no more built given that more advanced tech (mechanical animals) has been created since by the Humand and Dwarf engineers of the Empire, Marienburg also commissioned some slightly odd versions from Nuln.
Dwarfs had plenty of tech including Airships, Flamethrower cannons, A steam powered sentry gun
And then there is the Skaven with warp powered trains, ships....
Elves ride Dragons - you can even hire one as a mercenary.....
Chaos can even be given tech as reward for service.
Now again would Farmer Heinz have seen any of these - probably not but he also might have depending on where he lives in the Empire - also remember that an entire Province is ruled by the Undead.
Technology and magical creatures...feh. I want to hear more about Farmer Heinz's abscess and head lice.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
And the bear artillery reads the same way, but again people are applying a double standard.
The limited number of steam tanks was always stupid. “Lost technology” was a 40k thing that felt very out of place in a universe where guns and steam/clockwork automata were becoming ever more common.
NinthMusketeer wrote: They aren't everywhere, they are a small minority of options and they are the rare ones to boot.
Your list has fifteen entries, and five of them are bears.
As far as I'm concerned, that's a lot of bears, and that's before the mounts are accounted for.
A third of the army being fantastical is in line with other human rosters, so again this just makes Kislev more of the same. Empire was riding around on griffins and mechanical horses while Brettonia had pegasai, so Kislev is LESS fantastical in that regard.
I don't even disagree with the concept in theory--GW moving towards a more fantastical setting with TOW makes sense and is a legitimate creative choice just as much as the feelings of people who don't like that choice. But the evidence just isn't there. This isn't like 8th Empire verses previous books, or Storm of Magic, or Monstrous Arcanum.
Even the entire premise is that the Kislev roster is more fantastical than pre-8th edition. At the most extreme it is halting a trend towards increased craziness that existed in 8th.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The limited number of steam tanks was always stupid. “Lost technology” was a 40k thing that felt very out of place in a universe where guns and steam/clockwork automata were becoming ever more common.
Well those folks in Marianburg did figure out how to make some very fancy land ships.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Thinking about it, a less cynical reason for revealing early may have been simple exuberance.
I imagine people in the studio liked the Olde Worlde even more than we did and were even more crushed to see it go. I'd further imagine they were told the word Olde Worlde would never cross their lips again.
So once the ban was lifted I imagine they were jumping to share the good news.
Thinking about it this is probably more likely than a fear of Oathmark or 9th Age.
Also, remember that a lot of these people live in the same town. They go to the same pub. They've been friends for years.
Warlord bloke : We're releasing a new version of KoW GW bloke with an NDA : <Bites tongue> Oh really?
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
And the bear artillery reads the same way, but again people are applying a double standard.
So it's 12 special cannons pulled by an animal that can be tamed/trained that's a big part of Kislev society (which is not a new addition) imbued with mage from the Ice Witches who are also a big part of Kislev Society (also not new lore). I don't see any sort of drastic change there.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yes but that's because it's a story and supposed to have cool things happen. The heroes journey and all that.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf before they started their journey.
Luke was on a farm hanging out with his buddies on the weekend and never been off world.
But if there's elves and dwarves and dragonkin and catfolk all drinking at the inn and the airship station is down the block then there's no hero's journey, you're already in a world of wonder.
If an WHFB army has A pegasus and A wizard that's one thing. When there's steam tanks and griffon knights and ice bears everywhere there's no baseline mundane life to move on from.
Bilbo and Frodo had never seen an elf because Hobbits purposefully kept out of the dealings of the rest of the world and preferred to stay in the Shire. Luke had never been off world because he was a relatively poor moisture farmer and had reason to leave nor anywhere to go - he had to stay to help Owen and Beru. They were both backwater places with characters who didn't venture anywhere, the experience of WHFB peasant is still going to be that sort of low-level fantasy where it's mundane most of the time - things like the clockwork horse, Kislev Ice Bear etc are not going to be common things that no one is bothered about having seen.
The old lore still had these sorts of things. There's been Griffon and pegasus riders alongside giant oversized nonsensical canons the size of a ship since Man O War, Steam tanks have been part of the Empire for a long, long time as well as various other Imperial Engineer school creations. Dwarfs had all their various contraptions. Cathay had terracotta automatons, stone dog mounts, crow men, lightning unicorns and monkey men. Kislev had the Ice Magic weapons, Ice Palace, Ice Witches everywhere, a bear god who took the form of a bear with the land of Kislev being a bear and them making uses of Bears as mounts and such. I really don't get how things are meant to be different now.
I mean, the Empire had like 8 Steam tanks in total, and the technology to make them was long forgotten, so they could never make more...
And the bear artillery reads the same way, but again people are applying a double standard.
So it's 12 special cannons pulled by an animal that can be tamed/trained that's a big part of Kislev society (which is not a new addition) imbued with mage from the Ice Witches who are also a big part of Kislev Society (also not new lore). I don't see any sort of drastic change there.
We will also see, if they are on ice or sleds, because the GW concept art is more traditionalist:
Background wise, in my head, I'm very much a goblins-stabbing-peasants-in-the-mud guy for the Old World. I collected an Orc army that was very much based on rank and file. Minimal magic items.
But I did tend to bring along a Level 25 Savage Orc Shamen because it used up a LOT of points.
And I added Goblin Suicide Hangliders at the first opportunity.
Hmm.
This may not be as rank and file on the table as it is in my head.
Let's see what spells that Shamen had access to. I'm sure it won't be that flashy.
"Open Demonic Portal. At the end of each of the casters turns, 6D6 lesser demons and 1 greater demon are unleashed. They will always charge the nearest non demonic troops of either side as soon as they get the opportunity"
Oooooh-kay. Maybe that's a bit of an anomaly.
"Summon Skeleton Horde"
Right. Yeah.
"Vorpal Hurricane of Chaos - D6 2" vortices which move randomly and destroy everything they touch"
Still.
Bears sound completely weird and random things to turn up on the table.
Well, maybe for a filthy orc player like yourself, but good and proper Human wizards from the Empire could bind a monstrous host with, can you believe it? 12. I'll repeat that - TWELVE! Bears!
Guess how many bears a Kislevite mercenary contingent could take? None. Tsk tsk.
NinthMusketeer wrote: A third of the army being fantastical is in line with other human rosters, so again this just makes Kislev more of the same. Empire was riding around on griffins and mechanical horses while Brettonia had pegasai, so Kislev is LESS fantastical in that regard.
I'm not really trying to argue what WFB was or should be. I'm simply expressing my disappointment with the one tone nature of Kislev's flavouring.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The limited number of steam tanks was always stupid. “Lost technology” was a 40k thing that felt very out of place in a universe where guns and steam/clockwork automata were becoming ever more common.
Lost tech makes a lot of sense though. It's an age where there is no repository of all knowledge and if an inventor dies and didn't have highly trained apprentices or written records (that were clearly put together); or they all die together (fire, war etc...); then even if there's a living example of their work, it can still be hard to recreate it. Small differences in things like the metal formula used for casting the steam boiler which lets it build up enough pressure to provide enough force to move the tank; whilst not being too heavy to bog it down - would be one example of how a small bit of missing information could stall the production of more. Or mean that newer ones perform worse than the originals. Which when they are already a huge financial investment, might make them unsuitable for general production for war when they've other weapons and means to invest in which work.
Dwarves did have the tech (and way more) but in Old World were fully in their "we are a dying race, we aren't letting those lesser races like humans and those upstart elves get a hold of our secrets". So they could well withhold the key info even during wars ect
NinthMusketeer wrote: A third of the army being fantastical is in line with other human rosters, so again this just makes Kislev more of the same. Empire was riding around on griffins and mechanical horses while Brettonia had pegasai, so Kislev is LESS fantastical in that regard.
I'm not really trying to argue what WFB was or should be. I'm simply expressing my disappointment with the one tone nature of Kislev's flavouring.
NinthMusketeer wrote: A third of the army being fantastical is in line with other human rosters, so again this just makes Kislev more of the same. Empire was riding around on griffins and mechanical horses while Brettonia had pegasai, so Kislev is LESS fantastical in that regard.
I'm not really trying to argue what WFB was or should be. I'm simply expressing my disappointment with the one tone nature of Kislev's flavouring.
That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The limited number of steam tanks was always stupid. “Lost technology” was a 40k thing that felt very out of place in a universe where guns and steam/clockwork automata were becoming ever more common.
Lost tech makes a lot of sense though. It's an age where there is no repository of all knowledge and if an inventor dies and didn't have highly trained apprentices or written records (that were clearly put together); or they all die together (fire, war etc...); then even if there's a living example of their work, it can still be hard to recreate it. Small differences in things like the metal formula used for casting the steam boiler which lets it build up enough pressure to provide enough force to move the tank; whilst not being too heavy to bog it down - would be one example of how a small bit of missing information could stall the production of more. Or mean that newer ones perform worse than the originals. Which when they are already a huge financial investment, might make them unsuitable for general production for war when they've other weapons and means to invest in which work.
Dwarves did have the tech (and way more) but in Old World were fully in their "we are a dying race, we aren't letting those lesser races like humans and those upstart elves get a hold of our secrets". So they could well withhold the key info even during wars ect
I tend to think that some steam tanks got made, and then the mechanical brains of the project (a dwarf renegade) was bumped off by other dwarves for sharing secrets with a lesser race, and as yo say once they're gone, no more steam tanks
NinthMusketeer wrote: A third of the army being fantastical is in line with other human rosters, so again this just makes Kislev more of the same. Empire was riding around on griffins and mechanical horses while Brettonia had pegasai, so Kislev is LESS fantastical in that regard.
I'm not really trying to argue what WFB was or should be. I'm simply expressing my disappointment with the one tone nature of Kislev's flavouring.
What's the one tone?
Bears. Ice. Ice Bears. Bear Ice.
But why do you think that's vastly different from their previous depiction? I've not read the original stuff so the information I have is from the WHFB wiki, but they've had all that sort of thing to what seems like a large extent since at least second edition of the RPG all the way back in 2004. Ice Witches and the Frozen court, the Ice Queen in an Ice Palace, using magical Ice Weapons, the land of Kislev represented by a Bear (as Kislev was thought of a a "spirit" itself) with a religion involving worshiping bears with a God of bears who took the form of a bear, and bears being held in high regard in Kislev society with rules on how they should be used, to the point the bear religion was just part of Kislev culture overall, and the use of Bears as mounts. All that has been there for close to 2 decades now, the difference is now we have the spirit of the land of Kislev made manifest by a magic ice Bear, a Sled that's coated in a layer of magic ice, and bears being used to pull things rather than just mounts. There isn't really anything there that's not in-line with that previous lore.
Kislev has always been Bears and Ice. Just now we're actually seeing that represented.
NinthMusketeer wrote: That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
Most of the new stuff is ice, bears, or ice bears, though. I like the confluence of Slavic influence in the form of Polish lancers or Cossack infantry, but those are all holdovers from the WHFB days. The new stuff is pretty one-note.
OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote: I tend to think that some steam tanks got made, and then the mechanical brains of the project (a dwarf renegade) was bumped off by other dwarves for sharing secrets with a lesser race, and as yo say once they're gone, no more steam tanks
WHFB canon was that all the Steam Tanks were made by a single 'mad scientist' inventor, and once he died the Empire struggled to keep the remainder working, let alone build new ones.
NinthMusketeer wrote: That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
Most of the new stuff is ice, bears, or ice bears, though. I like the confluence of Slavic influence in the form of Polish lancers or Cossack infantry, but those are all holdovers from the WHFB days. The new stuff is pretty one-note.
OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote: I tend to think that some steam tanks got made, and then the mechanical brains of the project (a dwarf renegade) was bumped off by other dwarves for sharing secrets with a lesser race, and as yo say once they're gone, no more steam tanks
WHFB canon was that all the Steam Tanks were made by a single 'mad scientist' inventor, and once he died the Empire struggled to keep the remainder working, let alone build new ones.
Which is fine - except that they can also make mechanical animals and other more advanced tech.
Now there is also some recent lore in WFRP4 that Leonardo did receive some assistance from the Dwarfs or obtained some info and they are keen that this is not repeated.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The limited number of steam tanks was always stupid. “Lost technology” was a 40k thing that felt very out of place in a universe where guns and steam/clockwork automata were becoming ever more common.
Lost tech makes a lot of sense though. It's an age where there is no repository of all knowledge and if an inventor dies and didn't have highly trained apprentices or written records (that were clearly put together); or they all die together (fire, war etc...); then even if there's a living example of their work, it can still be hard to recreate it. Small differences in things like the metal formula used for casting the steam boiler which lets it build up enough pressure to provide enough force to move the tank; whilst not being too heavy to bog it down - would be one example of how a small bit of missing information could stall the production of more. Or mean that newer ones perform worse than the originals. Which when they are already a huge financial investment, might make them unsuitable for general production for war when they've other weapons and means to invest in which work.
Dwarves did have the tech (and way more) but in Old World were fully in their "we are a dying race, we aren't letting those lesser races like humans and those upstart elves get a hold of our secrets". So they could well withhold the key info even during wars ect
I tend to think that some steam tanks got made, and then the mechanical brains of the project (a dwarf renegade) was bumped off by other dwarves for sharing secrets with a lesser race, and as yo say once they're gone, no more steam tanks
I don't actually know the lore behind it. I do know that in one of the Gotrek and Felix stories Nuln gets attacked and the Steam Tank factory (well the university its being made in) ends up with a huge freaking hole in it and several steam tanks totally destroyed as a result.
NinthMusketeer wrote: That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
Most of the new stuff is ice, bears, or ice bears, though. I like the confluence of Slavic influence in the form of Polish lancers or Cossack infantry, but those are all holdovers from the WHFB days. The new stuff is pretty one note.
So not only were you BSing us with the 'one note' you are shifting the goal posts to cover it and STILL missing the mark since there are new units which are neither ice nor bear themed. That is some serious bad-faith discussion right there.
Kislevs uses bears for playing football. Khorne has no one but two units of cavalry riding daemonic cyborg-rhinos.
They are bears. Fething bears. You can see Putin riding one in our world. Not pegasi, hypogryph, demigryph, white lions, dragons, hydras, wholly mammoths, wholly rhinos, ice-age based mountain monsters, undead or spectral nightmares, skeletal snakes or giant zombie vultures. They are just bears. Like orks with boars or goblin with wolves.
I think most people problem with complaints about this is not that we are negating people feelings towards a change in style or directive but just the fact that change doest not exist, and even worse when it is used as a excuse to say "old better new bad".
The only change between this roster and bretonnia 6th roster is the giant ice bear because back then they didn't had that technology.
And I have complained about space wolves flanderisation. But with kislev I really believe they have keep some restraining.
Kislev has always been russians, polish, ices and bears. You have all of that, and the most elite cavalry unit of the faction are NOT the bear riders BUT the normal winged lanced gryphon legion. And then you even have other snow animals in the form of snow panther.
Thats more variety than High Elves with their white lion-pelt wearing axemen with white lion chariots and dragon knights with archmages in dragons and lords in dragons and lords in eagles and eagle chariots.
I don't disagree with you entirely but I stopped playing WHFB long before AoS. Rules, balance, lore, pricing, model count, model design. Everything was going in a different direction.
I still wince when I see the Empire Mecha-Horse or the Dark Elf Chariot with one wheel. Like the Kangaroos or triple bow strings from Lumineth, I have to ask why? just why?
High Elves went from a beautifully designed army and turned into a zoo exhibit, so I'm not going to defend anything post-6th edition.
Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
Goose LeChance wrote: I don't disagree with you entirely but I stopped playing WHFB long before AoS. Rules, balance, lore, pricing, model count, model design. Everything was going in a different direction.
I still wince when I see the Empire Mecha-Horse or the Dark Elf Chariot with one wheel. Like the Kangaroos or triple bow strings from Lumineth, I have to ask why? just why?
High Elves went from a beautifully designed army and turned into a zoo exhibit, so I'm not going to defend anything post-6th edition.
Yeah 6th just made everything too gritty. Give me things like giant castles on top of sea serpents that the Dark Elves used to kill others with.
I think it depends what point you mean "old and early". Also don't forget people might look back fondly at the designs and have hoped that the more modern sculpts would have retained the same design ethos and approach.
Of course sometimes its muddy because, as noted several times in this thread, the old armies had things that were missing which were 100% there in the lore and art, but which just were impossible/impractical at the time with the budgets, sculpting skill and materials that GW had to work with at the time.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
CAD is to model design what CGI is to movies.
In the right hands, a powerful tool.
In the wrong hands... well... Transformers and Teclis.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
CAD is to model design what CGI is to movies.
In the right hands, a powerful tool.
In the wrong hands... well... Transformers and Teclis.
I'd say the current Teclis and early Warhammer models that were all as wide as they were tall, the only pose they could do is a T-pose with gigantic, extremly thick weapons held out straight by their sides, and all looked like various kinds of shaved primates are equally bad, just in the exact opposite way.
How about elves riding giant jurassic park lizards, or putting them into chariots? How's that not too high fantasy/flanderizing? They have horses, and yet two out of 3 mounted units in Dark Elf army, even in 6th ed, were mounted on lizards. And lizards are much dumber and harder to train than bears.
I really can understand why for most people is different for Kislev. Because Kislev are humans. Technically, they are "good humans" so different from chaos humans.
In Warhammer everyone had magical stuff and fantasic stuff because they were fantasy races. Humans were in the "peak warhammer period" so 5th-6th basically three historical factions, france, holy roman empire, and poland-lituanian mixed with russia. You had Pegasi and Gryphons and Wizards but that was it.
But that was, and is, a minimal portion of the whole warhammer fantasy universe and only in a comparatively short spawn of time of two editions and 2-4 factions. Compared with basically all the other factions of warhammer fantasy during all the rest of the game existence.
I mean WHFB Araby was literally a historical army ported over from when GW did historical miniatures but in warmaster it was expanded with giant Djinns and flying carpet archers, etc, etc...
I really can understand why for most people is different for Kislev. Because Kislev are humans. Technically, they are "good humans" so different from chaos humans.
In Warhammer everyone had magical stuff and fantasic stuff because they were fantasy races. Humans were in the "peak warhammer period" so 5th-6th basically three historical factions, france, holy roman empire, and poland-lituanian mixed with russia. You had Pegasi and Gryphons and Wizards but that was it.
But that was, and is, a minimal portion of the whole warhammer fantasy universe and only in a comparatively short spawn of time of two editions and 2-4 factions. Compared with basically all the other factions of warhammer fantasy during all the rest of the game existence.
I mean WHFB Araby was literally a historical army ported over from when GW did historical miniatures but in warmaster it was expanded with giant Djinns and flying carpet archers, etc, etc...
This is the impression I get too, that because they're "human" factions they're going to be quite grounded and relatively low-fantasy...but as mentioned in multiple posts now, Kislev has always been about Ice Magic and Bears to a large extent, Cathay and Araby had magic stuff allover the place, the Empire had strange technological oddities for a long time, and things like Griffon Riders and Pegasus riders were there since the 90s at least, and then there's the stuff like castle boats and dragons used as ships, Dwarf submarines and Airships and ironclads etc. Those fantasy elements have been there for a long time, the difference now is they're able to create models and are properly representing this lore elements that weren't on the tabletop before. The ice sleds and bears aren't a sudden addition that's changed what Kislev is or a flanderization, they're in-line with how Kislev has been for years.
I really can understand why for most people is different for Kislev. Because Kislev are humans. Technically, they are "good humans" so different from chaos humans.
In Warhammer everyone had magical stuff and fantasic stuff because they were fantasy races. Humans were in the "peak warhammer period" so 5th-6th basically three historical factions, france, holy roman empire, and poland-lituanian mixed with russia. You had Pegasi and Gryphons and Wizards but that was it.
But that was, and is, a minimal portion of the whole warhammer fantasy universe and only in a comparatively short spawn of time of two editions and 2-4 factions. Compared with basically all the other factions of warhammer fantasy during all the rest of the game existence.
I mean WHFB Araby was literally a historical army ported over from when GW did historical miniatures but in warmaster it was expanded with giant Djinns and flying carpet archers, etc, etc...
This is the impression I get too, that because they're "human" factions they're going to be quite grounded and relatively low-fantasy...but as mentioned in multiple posts now, Kislev has always been about Ice Magic and Bears to a large extent, Cathay and Araby had magic stuff allover the place, the Empire had strange technological oddities for a long time, and things like Griffon Riders and Pegasus riders were there since the 90s at least, and then there's the stuff like castle boats and dragons used as ships, Dwarf submarines and Airships and ironclads etc. Those fantasy elements have been there for a long time, the difference now is they're able to create models and are properly representing this lore elements that weren't on the tabletop before. The ice sleds and bears aren't a sudden addition that's changed what Kislev is or a flanderization, they're in-line with how Kislev has been for years.
It's a bit like in modern times taking a look into a very old rural village in Asia and imagining that is how this era should look like.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
Virtually anything sculpted by the Perrys is marvelous. The metal models have a depth and visual heft to them that can't be matched in plastic.
That's not to say that plastic is worse -- it's almost the better medium for large models, for example. However, I do prefer some metal models to their plastic counterparts.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
Virtually anything sculpted by the Perrys is marvelous. The metal models have a depth and visual heft to them that can't be matched in plastic.
That's not to say that plastic is worse -- it's almost the better medium for large models, for example. However, I do prefer some metal models to their plastic counterparts.
Not that they're as old as the early edition models, but I think its universally agreed upon that the Juan Diaz metal Pink Horrors are so much better than the current plastic kit. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way when comparing the old daemonettes to the plastic ones. Some metal models just have so much character to them, its crazy. And some are better off forgotten
NinthMusketeer wrote: It being a magical construct instead of a robot doesn't undermine his point though...?
I would say it does.
In a universe where magic is a thing but not very common, a golem found in the basement of a wizard is much more of a reasonable idea than human engineers who can barely work gun powder weaponry creating functional mechanical horses.
No one is saying there shouldn't be fantastical things in WFB. The argument I've been making is that the fantastical needs to be kept on rails so as to keep it fantastical.
Can you say the fantastical is being kept on rails where the the robot was a Dalek (second row from bottom, second from left)?
Spoiler:
And the leader of the Abbey was lead by a priest with a mechanical hand, eye and plates bolted on?
Spoiler:
And they are being assaulted by flamethrower welding ratmen?
I keep pointing back to the Lichemaster scenario because unlike Bloodbath at Orc's Drift or McDeath, GW has never brushed it under the carpet. Kemmler and Krell were introduced in that campaign and remained part of the WHFB universe and were always brought back each edition. The two predate most the major named characters of Warhammer that exist today. I recall the Battle of La Maisontaal being redone a couple times in White Dwarf in later editions. The scenario was created by Rick Priestley and that he put cyborgs and robots in his missions shows you his mindset for the WHFB game in the beginning.
That we're seeing fantastical units being shown off for Kislev does not stray out of the boundaries of original game. Does a giant elemental bear differ from when armies could take earth, water, fire, wind, death, or life elementals?
The Lichemaster is a bit different, but the case of the Doomstones campaign is interesting on account of it being written as a regular D&D campaign that was later on slightly reworked to kinda sorta fit into WFRP. It is also more or less univerlassy bashed as being not very good nor very Warhammer-y.
I'll admit I never played the Doomstones campaign because friends who played it lamented it was never finished before they shut down the game. Just remember them talking about the fourth book finishing with them being stuck on a dwarf airship.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
Virtually anything sculpted by the Perrys is marvelous. The metal models have a depth and visual heft to them that can't be matched in plastic.
That's not to say that plastic is worse -- it's almost the better medium for large models, for example. However, I do prefer some metal models to their plastic counterparts.
Not that they're as old as the early edition models, but I think its universally agreed upon that the Juan Diaz metal Pink Horrors are so much better than the current plastic kit. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way when comparing the old daemonettes to the plastic ones. Some metal models just have so much character to them, its crazy. And some are better off forgotten
I believe the original comment would be referring to, in this instance, the horror & daemonette models before those. Those were... models.
Mmmpi wrote: There's a few issues with the whole fantastic ideas and increased 'unique' playable species.
1. How often they turn up is on the Story teller of a given world, and running into a few bunny girl fighters in an adventurer tavern doesn't make them common.
2. Even if said BGFs are common, it just means they aren't the fantastic part of the fantastic journey.
A real world look at these though. By the late 1880/90s most large American cities had a Chinatown neighborhood. Chinese Americans were part of the American culture by that point.
How many people, those in those cities, were likely to actually encounter one of these people? For a good long part of US history, communities, even inside a larger urban area could be very insular. You *might* see a Chinese American walking down the street every now and then, but the odds are you wouldn't stop to talk to them.
Then remember, until the mid 1930's, most of the US population was rural. With most Chinese Americans living in cities, how many farmboys would ever actually meet one?
This now brings up fiction. We know Chinese Americans were part of society. But they were still mysterious to most Americans that entire subsections of fiction were about the goings on of their lives and neighborhoods. Places of mystery (even as the real life was just mundane with accents), where all types of adventure lurked, and mystical and magical things abounded.
The problem is you assume that the Empire/America in this example is the norm. It's very much the exception to a globe full of wizards, lizards, dinosaurs, demons and tiger-people. Franz the kraut-herder is the exotic non-magical creature of fables, not the elven wizard riding a dragon.
I'm not assuming America is the norm. You can see the same thing throughout history for longer than writing has existed. I just used an example that I felt should be familiar to most readers here. I could easily have talked about merchants quarters in Sumar, Jewish Quarters in hundreds of cities across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and so on.
Sorry didn't mean to start an argument! I'm not disputing that WFB had lots of fantastical, high fantasy elements, a lot of which has found a comfortable home in AoS.
However, this is a reboot and they have the opportunity to re-focus on the low fantasy elements. When I think about what was cool about WFB, it was the human stories, horror elements and the grimy, claustrophobic, superstitious world. That was why I said that for me they have focused on the wrong things here!
NinthMusketeer wrote: That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
Most of the new stuff is ice, bears, or ice bears, though. I like the confluence of Slavic influence in the form of Polish lancers or Cossack infantry, but those are all holdovers from the WHFB days. The new stuff is pretty one note.
So not only were you BSing us with the 'one note' you are shifting the goal posts to cover it and STILL missing the mark since there are new units which are neither ice nor bear themed. That is some serious bad-faith discussion right there.
I'm not the person who originally used the phrase 'one-note', nor is the other person you attacked, so this stuff about bad-faith goalpost-shifting is ridiculous. Take a chill pill and pay some attention to who you're replying to.
Galas wrote:Kislev has always been russians, polish, ices and bears.
Have they? Because that's what seems a little off to me- Kislev was an amalgamation of Slavic influences first and foremost, with minimal focus on ice or bears. You had ice wizards as their magic lore, and a single special character riding a bear, but that was it. Magic ice sleds pulled by bears is where it starts to feel like flanderization to me, or at least really playing up the high fantasy elements.
It's like if Empire comes back and most of their new units are robot or tank themed. Yes, they had those, but they were one-off things that represented the flavor of the faction, not dominating elements of the army roster.
Galas wrote:Kislev has always been russians, polish, ices and bears.
Have they? Because that's what seems a little off to me- Kislev was an amalgamation of Slavic influences first and foremost, with minimal focus on ice or bears. You had ice wizards as their magic lore, and a single special character riding a bear, but that was it. Magic ice sleds pulled by bears is where it starts to feel like flanderization to me, or at least really playing up the high fantasy elements.
It's like if Empire comes back and most of their new units are robot or tank themed. Yes, they had those, but they were one-off things that represented the flavor of the faction, not dominating elements of the army roster.
The miniatures / Army roster was limited in terms of bears and ice, with the Ice Queen and the occasional bear rider.
The Kislev lore however was full of bears and Ice. with the Ice queen, Frozen Court, Ice Palace, Ice Witches, the spirit of Kislev being a bear with their religion involving bears and a God of Bears who took the form of a bear, to the point that religion and Kislev culture were together, with their society having an overall heavy emphasis on bears. That's how things that been since at least second edition of the RPG, back in 2004.
So this is in line with how Kislev was within the setting. There is no flanderization going on here, just Kislev now being shown as it was.
It probably doesn't help that most of Kislev's lore came from the RPG books rather then the Army books since they didn't get an army book line like most others. So people didn't really get to read all of it out all that often.
Again, all the so-called 'low fantasy' Kislev units are still around and figure to be the bulk of Kislev armies. A Kislev army *on the tabletop* almost certainly won't be 'all bears and ice, all the time', just as Empire wasn't 'all crazy contraptions, all the time'.
Obviously with how rarely we’re drip fed news for this there isn’t a lot else to discuss, but this thread really is just the same argument repeated every few weeks huh.
ImAGeek wrote: Obviously with how rarely we’re drip fed news for this there isn’t a lot else to discuss, but this thread really is just the same argument repeated every few weeks huh.
Usually because someone new to the topic posts their disappointment after looking at the updates and then the defenders come in saying "nuh-uh you imagined it all"
gorgon wrote: If what you see isn't your thing, then why keep commenting? When I lose interest in something, I move on.
We aren't really seeing anything. That's really the problem with Old World marketing in my opinion. We're not just discussing things of which we have only partial knowledge, we're discussing things of which we have almost no knowledge at all.
How can you honestly say you're interested/not interested in whatever this game is going to be if GW refuses to tell us what they intend for it to be? It's why flavor and scale discussion gets endlessly rehashed. People know what they want out of it and for now even if they see things that may hint at things going in a direction they dislike, and sees them argue against those things or in favor of their own wishes, there is no substantial information to tell what the game is going to end up like. There's no basis for buying in or walking away at this time. Just potential, and contention on key points that we have no official information about.
Kroem wrote: Sorry didn't mean to start an argument!
I'm not disputing that WFB had lots of fantastical, high fantasy elements, a lot of which has found a comfortable home in AoS.
However, this is a reboot and they have the opportunity to re-focus on the low fantasy elements.
When I think about what was cool about WFB, it was the human stories, horror elements and the grimy, claustrophobic, superstitious world.
That was why I said that for me they have focused on the wrong things here!
We, again, circle back to the issue that for some people, the entirety of Warhammer was the Empire. And not even the empire, the underclass of the empire. It's ignoring the whole rich, fantastical, magical tapestry of the Old World for the perspective of Franz the Heinz in Nowheresburg that died of hiccups achieving nothing. Which...doesn't make for interesting narrative or wargame.
ZebioLizard2 wrote: It probably doesn't help that most of Kislev's lore came from the RPG books rather then the Army books since they didn't get an army book line like most others. So people didn't really get to read all of it out all that often.
Honestly, the Kislev I mostly remember comes from the RPG, particularly from Something is Rotten in Kislev. No bears, no ice queens, nothing of the sort. But it was a simpler time I guess.
ZebioLizard2 wrote: It probably doesn't help that most of Kislev's lore came from the RPG books rather then the Army books since they didn't get an army book line like most others. So people didn't really get to read all of it out all that often.
Honestly, the Kislev I mostly remember comes from the RPG, particularly from Something is Rotten in Kislev. No bears, no ice queens, nothing of the sort. But it was a simpler time I guess.
Looks at Something is Rotten: Father Bear is a powerful spirit creature associated with the 30ft tall Leshy or Lord of the Forest spirit. There is also the Brotherhood of the Bear, ranger-templars.
The adventure includes a entire town full of zombies, powerful necromancers, hugely powerful nature spirits (more outlandish than the Elemental Bear) and a 5000 year old Elf who does not have or need stats - not sure it was that simple a time
The Tzarina, the Ice Queen arrives (as the most powerful Ice Witch) in 4th Ed WFB and Ice Witches are explored fully in 1st Ed WFRP in Realms of Sorcery - later expanded in 2nd ed Realm of the Ice Queen.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
This is on my mind aswell. There is going to be an enormous mini-overlap between AOS and TOW. The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Will they re-box everything and make everything usuable with both games? One mini-range, two rule systems?
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
This is on my mind aswell. There is going to be an enormous mini-overlap between AOS and TOW. The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Will they re-box everything and make everything usuable with both games? One mini-range, two rule systems?
I mean there's also quite a few factions that simply never existed in Fantasy - Kharadron, Idoneth, Lumineth, Nightgaunt, Ossiriarchs, and most blatantly, Stormcasts.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Oof too true.
It's not like they were gonna sculpt a whole new High Elf range right? You might see Lumineth and some other AoS armies crossover but more likely this Old World will be temporary and the 3 factions will be put into AoS once they're done milking it.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
This is on my mind aswell. There is going to be an enormous mini-overlap between AOS and TOW. The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Will they re-box everything and make everything usuable with both games? One mini-range, two rule systems?
I mean there's also quite a few factions that simply never existed in Fantasy - Kharadron, Idoneth, Lumineth, Nightgaunt, Ossiriarchs, and most blatantly, Stormcasts.
For sure, they don't fit with the Old World. But if we separate game world and game rules? Stormcasts on squares for rank-and-file games, Bretonnians on rounds for skirmish games. I mean the rules doesn't have to be tied to the setting.
I don't know anything about this ofcourse but I'm very curious about what GW have planned or already put in to motion. The ranges WILL overlap whether GW intend for this or not. I wonder how they plan to handle it, imbrace it or try to build a wall between the games.
It's not like they were gonna sculpt a whole new High Elf range right? You might see Lumineth and some other AoS armies crossover but more likely this Old World will be temporary and the 3 factions will be put into AoS once they're done milking it.
Well, we don't know. But yeah, Skaven, Chaos, Night Goblins, Ogre Kingdoms, Vampire Counts Lizardmen etc are already there. People are going to use them.
Mr Morden wrote: The Tzarina, the Ice Queen arrives (as the most powerful Ice Witch) in 4th Ed WFB and Ice Witches are explored fully in 1st Ed WFRP in Realms of Sorcery - later expanded in 2nd ed Realm of the Ice Queen.
It's true that RoS came in 1st edition, but it's also kind of deceptive, in the sense that it came long, long after WFRP got discontinued by GW and it got re-released by Hogshead Publishing (SiRiK got published on 1988, RoS in 2001), which, as has been the case with anything licensed, has to toe the line of whatever was already there in WFB, and by then the Ice Queen/Witches had long been established in WFB. Same thing with dwarves not having actual wizards and the like, unlike the original 1st edition.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Oof too true.
It's not like they were gonna sculpt a whole new High Elf range right? You might see Lumineth and some other AoS armies crossover but more likely this Old World will be temporary and the 3 factions will be put into AoS once they're done milking it.
Just why would you think that? A project they know people really, really want, that returns to the old setting again with them having revamped and expanded classic armies, that even sets things in an earlier unseen time period, all the while being said to be akin to the Horus Heresy series...and you think i'll be something the don't bother to put any actual effort in so will just re-use AoS armies and treat it like a temporary project? I don't get it at all.
They're making a whole new Kislev range. Why would they not do the same to other armies?
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Oof too true.
It's not like they were gonna sculpt a whole new High Elf range right? You might see Lumineth and some other AoS armies crossover but more likely this Old World will be temporary and the 3 factions will be put into AoS once they're done milking it.
Just why would you think that? A project they know people really, really want, that returns to the old setting again with them having revamped and expanded classic armies, that even sets things in an earlier unseen time period, all the while being said to be akin to the Horus Heresy series...and you think i'll be something the don't bother to put any actual effort in so will just re-use AoS armies and treat it like a temporary project? I don't get it at all.
They're making a whole new Kislev range. Why would they not do the same to other armies?
Because if it goes in the direction it appears to be there will be a lot of crossover with AoS, it's going be redundant. Fantasy has never had the popularity of WH40k so the pool of players to pull from is smaller too, now they split that smaller player base between two games that are nearly identical. What's the hook? Can square bases(or movement trays) alone attract enough of a player base long term? I expect the bare minimum of support for this game from GW. The final purpose of a new Kislev army would be to put them in AoS when they are done with this side project.
Horus Heresy has the advantage of catering to the most popular army in the most popular game.
Automatically Appended Next Post: It would be incredibly ironic however, if the Old World suddenly entered a new boom period, as the AoS and 40K players flocked to it, so they can play on square bases. The very thing they hated.
Mentlegen324 wrote: Just why would you think that? A project they know people really, really want, that returns to the old setting again with them having revamped and expanded classic armies, that even sets things in an earlier unseen time period, all the while being said to be akin to the Horus Heresy series...and you think i'll be something the don't bother to put any actual effort in so will just re-use AoS armies and treat it like a temporary project? I don't get it at all.
They're making a whole new Kislev range. Why would they not do the same to other armies?
You asked Goose but I would like to chime in as well. We don't know for sure that they're making a whole new Kislev Range or anything else about the game. It would be a massive undertaking to revamp even a modest portion of the old range, and large parts of the old range, like Skaven, are still there in AOS-packaging. It's not unthinkable that GW have planned to rely heavily on re-releases of older kits to support the game.
Other plans are of course also possible.
We really need some more info from GW about the game to revitalize the debate, the disscussion have kind of run it's course by now.
NinthMusketeer wrote: That's very clearly two, and only encompasses a minority of units. So it cannot be the one tone you were referring to. With all due respect please let us know the actual "one tone" you are speaking of instead of beating around the bush.
Most of the new stuff is ice, bears, or ice bears, though. I like the confluence of Slavic influence in the form of Polish lancers or Cossack infantry, but those are all holdovers from the WHFB days. The new stuff is pretty one note.
So not only were you BSing us with the 'one note' you are shifting the goal posts to cover it and STILL missing the mark since there are new units which are neither ice nor bear themed. That is some serious bad-faith discussion right there.
I'm not the person who originally used the phrase 'one-note', nor is the other person you attacked, so this stuff about bad-faith goalpost-shifting is ridiculous. Take a chill pill and pay some attention to who you're replying to.
Galas wrote:Kislev has always been russians, polish, ices and bears.
Have they? Because that's what seems a little off to me- Kislev was an amalgamation of Slavic influences first and foremost, with minimal focus on ice or bears. You had ice wizards as their magic lore, and a single special character riding a bear, but that was it. Magic ice sleds pulled by bears is where it starts to feel like flanderization to me, or at least really playing up the high fantasy elements.
It's like if Empire comes back and most of their new units are robot or tank themed. Yes, they had those, but they were one-off things that represented the flavor of the faction, not dominating elements of the army roster.
I will try phrasing it as clearly as I can, though this is going to seem more blunt than I mean it.
"The new stuff is pretty one note." This statement is objectively false. It is not supported by the reality.
As to the larger concept of this being a trend towards a higher-fantasy setting, that is also false. The evidence does not support that viewpoint. The concept of WHFB as a gritty low fantasy setting is not grounded in reality, even when adding the qualifiers of pre-8th, human-only, non-Chaos, western regions only. There is no 'defense' GW but simply stating what is true and calling out what is not.
If someone does not like the Kislev roster that is fine. What people have a problem with is individuals who create a false narrative. What irks me personally is when such individuals are called on it and try to deflect by moving the goalposts or ad hominem instead of just admitting that their memory of the setting is not representative.
in the US/America, Europe was a very different field were 40k only got the monumentum with being the better cheaper game later on (starting with the cheap 5th Edi 40k Box and before that if you wanted to play Events/Tournaments, Fantasy was the only option in many regions)
it really depends on what market GW is looking at the moment and were they want to expand
TOW, if using old WHFB rules, won't have much overlap with the playerbase in Europe, and casting a new Elve range in classic 28mm on 20mm Bases will sell no matter the price while just going to pack 25 or 30mm square bases to put the 32mm AoS models on them for TOW won't do it for a lot of people
of course, having things compatible so that players who start one game might also play the other and buy into it, is a thing, but you don't see that in 30k/40k here either and there are not many people play both
while it is no problem to get all the AoS factions into TOW, there are enough empty spots on the map for all those factions to "have been there since ever but was just not discovered", you won't attract many of the old players while at the same time splitting new players between TOW and AoS For the same reason, having all the Necromunda models getting Kill Team rules was never done, although you can use the models in KT if you want
30k and 40K did originally share a rule set though and that, for some people, was part of 30k’s appeal. Even if you didn’t have a local 30k scene, you could collect a 30k army and play it in 40K games.
in terms of cross copatability Wierdly we still don't have the Vampire Coast in AOS - given that its such a good fit....so its difficult to understand what GW are thinking
Mr Morden wrote: in terms of cross copatability Wierdly we still don't have the Vampire Coast in AOS - given that its such a good fit....so its difficult to understand what GW are thinking
Perhaps they have to consider all the other stuff people want, arange it in a timeline and use resources to develope various ranges, and on their tea-breaks update and merge(purge?) all the "old" pre-2020 stuff they dont really care for anymore.
And the hour they announce Vampire Coast, we would find some new semi nostalgic theme we really want.
Galas wrote: Yeah, at least in Spain fantasy was the bigger Game of the two for décades until the end times.
Can confirm. WFB outsold 40k until the bitter end. Let's just say that the End Times and AoS were not very well received by the stores, on account of many, particularly FLGS, losing a significant part of their revenues due to it.
The Lumineth release signalled the end of any High Elf return. Same for the Vampire Counts, all the models are huge and there's no way they're gonna release new Elves or VC in a slightly different scale, with similar themes and units.
Galas wrote: Yeah, at least in Spain fantasy was the bigger Game of the two for décades until the end times.
Can confirm. WFB outsold 40k until the bitter end. Let's just say that the End Times and AoS were not very well received by the stores, on account of many, particularly FLGS, losing a significant part of their revenues due to it.
Considering we know paints outsold the entire WHFB range, we can safely say Europe is a tiny market compared to the US and UK then.
Beauty of Warhammer settings is that they can be interpreted and adopted in different ways. Miniatures, background and rules are just a starting point, what we decide to do with them is the endgame.
I don't care if my Skeleton warriors are called Deathrattlers or that my Elves have extra vowels in their names. It doesn't make one tiny bit of difference while they collect dust in the glass cabinet. Same with Kislev. If I think game designers have put too much emphasis on ice, ice, baby (or bears) that doesn't mean that I have to.
I grew up with Old World but I have started to enjoy Mortal Realms too. Realms of Magic open so many options for theming your army and if there are any bits in the background I don't like, I can simply ignore them.
I am genuinely excited to go back to Old World one day and I can't wait to see what GW and FW come up with. I just don't know what to expect. What I would love to see, what I think would be realistic and what we have seen so far have very little in common
Galas wrote: Yeah, at least in Spain fantasy was the bigger Game of the two for décades until the end times.
Can confirm. WFB outsold 40k until the bitter end. Let's just say that the End Times and AoS were not very well received by the stores, on account of many, particularly FLGS, losing a significant part of their revenues due to it.
Considering we know paints outsold the entire WHFB range, we can safely say Europe is a tiny market compared to the US and UK then.
Comparable to the UK alone (although before the end of WFB it was bigger than the UK market). Back in the day the US market was on par with UK, now it is bigger than any of them.
By way of example, take a look at 2010's and 2011's results:
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Oof too true.
It's not like they were gonna sculpt a whole new High Elf range right? You might see Lumineth and some other AoS armies crossover but more likely this Old World will be temporary and the 3 factions will be put into AoS once they're done milking it.
Just why would you think that? A project they know people really, really want, that returns to the old setting again with them having revamped and expanded classic armies, that even sets things in an earlier unseen time period, all the while being said to be akin to the Horus Heresy series...and you think i'll be something the don't bother to put any actual effort in so will just re-use AoS armies and treat it like a temporary project? I don't get it at all.
They're making a whole new Kislev range. Why would they not do the same to other armies?
Because if it goes in the direction it appears to be there will be a lot of crossover with AoS, it's going be redundant. Fantasy has never had the popularity of WH40k so the pool of players to pull from is smaller too, now they split that smaller player base between two games that are nearly identical. What's the hook? Can square bases(or movement trays) alone attract enough of a player base long term? I expect the bare minimum of support for this game from GW. The final purpose of a new Kislev army would be to put them in AoS when they are done with this side project.
Horus Heresy has the advantage of catering to the most popular army in the most popular game.
Automatically Appended Next Post: It would be incredibly ironic however, if the Old World suddenly entered a new boom period, as the AoS and 40K players flocked to it, so they can play on square bases. The very thing they hated.
The appeal is the return to the setting itself and what that will bring, that's what they've been hyping the whole project itself on up until now - they haven't been using the miniatures or game itself to get interest, but so far just the idea of seeing that classic WHF once more. The same could be said about the Horus Heresy - sure, it's Space Marines and they're the most popular army, but there's still redundancy and a focus on a specific subset of the playerbase, and it's been mostly handled by Forgeworld. If that's done well-enough to last for years and is still getting miniatures, with the novel series also going on for well over a decade, then I don't see why a return to the WHF setting and doing so in a way that explores new aspects of it would just be some temporary effortless side-project that they're really doing to merge those new units with AoS later.
People want more of WHF as shown by the popularity TW:W and similar games, and they evidently know that. Doing what you suggest would not be a good look at all, especially considering what happened with the setting in the first place.
Galas wrote: Yeah, at least in Spain fantasy was the bigger Game of the two for décades until the end times.
Can confirm. WFB outsold 40k until the bitter end. Let's just say that the End Times and AoS were not very well received by the stores, on account of many, particularly FLGS, losing a significant part of their revenues due to it.
Considering we know paints outsold the entire WHFB range, we can safely say Europe is a tiny market compared to the US and UK then.
A relatively cheap product that pretty much everyone needs, appealing to those into in WHF and 40K and their other products rather than a specific game, as well as potentially those outside the hobby...I don't see why it's meant to be surprising that paints sold better?
Galas wrote: Yeah, at least in Spain fantasy was the bigger Game of the two for décades until the end times.
Can confirm. WFB outsold 40k until the bitter end. Let's just say that the End Times and AoS were not very well received by the stores, on account of many, particularly FLGS, losing a significant part of their revenues due to it.
Considering we know paints outsold the entire WHFB range, we can safely say Europe is a tiny market compared to the US and UK then.
Comparable to the UK alone (although before the end of WFB it was bigger than the UK market). Back in the day the US market was on par with UK, now it is bigger than any of them.
By way of example, take a look at 2010's and 2011's results:
As you can see there (page 3), Continental Europe's revenue was higher than either UK's or USA's by themselves.
So with Fantasy being bigger than 40k in 2nd largest market it still was unprofitable to keep going with the line? Something doesn't add up here and I doubt it's GW's penny-counting ability.
Cronch wrote: So with Fantasy being bigger than 40k in 2nd largest market it still was unprofitable to keep going with the line? Something doesn't add up here and I doubt it's GW's penny-counting ability.
"Bigger" and "profitable enough for their wants/needs" are not the same thing. 40k was still bigger in the other two big markets, after all, and "bigger" doesn't mean "40k didn't sell at all" either.
WFB was underperforming according to what GW wanted out of it. That doesn't mean it wasn't profitable. Same as when they closed Black Industries wholesale the day after Dark Heresy got released and sold the whole of the first print before even going to stores, only to license it out. Simply put, they thought that the same amount of effort/investments would earn them more benefits using them otherwise.
I don't think it was unprofitable. I just think it wasn't AS profitable as other things, so they torpedoed it to focus on those other things.
Anyway, AoS is here to stay, and while the background it building up the miniature line still has some blanks. Like normal humans, who are in the Cities of Sigmar. Normal Aelves, who are still a thing. Wanderers or something? Normal Duardin, who are Dispossessed?
Anyway, such gaps in a model range would be very easily filled by... stuff from ToW. Since that's what they fundamentally are.
I think we're much more likely to get model use going the other way - from ToW into AoS - than from AoS back to ToW. Similar to how old plastic armour mark Marines can fold very neatly into a 40k army.
Yeah many people forgets that corporations dont work as people.
Stuff IS not Closed because they are taking a loss. But if you can spend 100 million and return 150 or 100 and return 300 the choice IS clear.
Other examples are Blizzard with Heroes of the Storm. It wasnt that It was making them no money but After Hearthstone they expected the dame explosión on the moba genre anddidnt get It.
But in their honor Ill say they tried a second push with 2.0 before putting It in Life support
So with Fantasy being bigger than 40k in 2nd largest market it still was unprofitable to keep going with the line? Something doesn't add up here and I doubt it's GW's penny-counting ability.
Why do you doubt GW's penny counting ability? Corporations often set ridiculously ludicrous sales targets for their products.
For instance, EA wanted Dead Space 3 to sell 5 million copies or else they'd kill the franchise. Dead Space 2 shipped 2 million units, Dead Space shipped ~1 million. In what world was 5 million a realistic target for a third person survival horror game in 2013, especially when the previous two games in the series didn't approach anywhere near those sales figures? For reference, the Resident Evil 2 remake managed 5.8 million sales over its first year and that had much better reception amongst fans and critics than Dead Space 3 did, and came out in 2019 when the market for video games was much larger than it was in 2013.
"ego Driven chairman wants something removed and push for insane and unrealistic quotas to justify its removal" is more popular people give credit for and It applies to all kind of products
The only way I think you could say WHFB was a loss is that *maybe* the floor space it occupied in stores did not match its sales. Since GW has its own stores, if you say half the cost for those stores is being consumed by the space WHFB is taking up in the store, then it was maybe making a loss.
The WHFB range was huge, and keeping the whole game stocked must have been expensive. I think the GW strategy of releasing new stuff like mad men is only sustainable for a certain game for a certain amount of time as the range just gets too big to manage.
But even comparing WHFB to 40k, a huuuuuge chunk of 40k is just Space Marine sales, if you did WHFB vs 40k minus Space Marines maybe WHFB was on par, but it had no single dominating faction that damned near everyone collected. It was actually one of the things I heard people say positive about WHFB, their range of opponents was more varied than the Space Marine vs Space Marine battles that were so common in 40k.
I think even wthin GW they realise that marine dominance is a double edged sword. It's great in sales, but at the same time can have issues in terms of resource allocation within the company. Plus you can't just chase the numbers, if you do there's a risk that you release so much marine stuff that he other lines suffer - increasing your dependence on a single product line and customer base.
Plus at some point there's a tip where the marine customers stop buying; when they feel like their armies are bloated and when the local clubs have nothing but other marine players and grumpy ignored xenos players and the other games are dead.
I feel like this was a bit of what was happening under Kirby. That they were following the money but not balancing it against consumer feedback. You can see how they started to try and make Stormcast into Marines in all but name; you can see the desire to double the marine line by releasing primaris as a separate army instead of what they'd normally do and simply replace the sculpts with updated models (as they've done many times before).
I think GW now has balanced itself a bit; they've taken on board a lot more consumer feedback and impressions and I think are keen to focus on diversification of their portfolio. To take on projects that might not give as much return on investment as "more marines" but which do return on investment in a healthy manner and which importantly, leave them more robust and diverse for the future.
Graphite wrote: I don't think it was unprofitable. I just think it wasn't AS profitable as other things, so they torpedoed it to focus on those other things.
Anyway, AoS is here to stay, and while the background it building up the miniature line still has some blanks. Like normal humans, who are in the Cities of Sigmar. Normal Aelves, who are still a thing. Wanderers or something? Normal Duardin, who are Dispossessed?
Anyway, such gaps in a model range would be very easily filled by... stuff from ToW. Since that's what they fundamentally are.
I think we're much more likely to get model use going the other way - from ToW into AoS - than from AoS back to ToW. Similar to how old plastic armour mark Marines can fold very neatly into a 40k army.
I sincerely hope this won't be the case. I'm no big aos fan, but i think it would cheapen the setting if they use armies that were developed for tow in it (and vice versa).
One of the big appeals of WHFB for me, too. And GW has done a remarkable job with having SCE as poster boys while also not having them take over the setting. Funny thing is I like marines, but there are just so many of them and it dims the appeal because I have enough desire to just see something different. WHFB never had that issue.
I do wonder if there were any sort of stats available estimating army popularity for WHFB. Obviously Beastmen were on top, but who was second?
Mr Morden wrote: in terms of cross copatability Wierdly we still don't have the Vampire Coast in AOS - given that its such a good fit....so its difficult to understand what GW are thinking
Perhaps they have to consider all the other stuff people want, arange it in a timeline and use resources to develope various ranges, and on their tea-breaks update and merge(purge?) all the "old" pre-2020 stuff they dont really care for anymore.
And the hour they announce Vampire Coast, we would find some new semi nostalgic theme we really want.
Not sure - we know they are working closely with Total War on the new game and Vampire Coast was a huge additional to the lore of the world that would also fit beautifully in to the AOS world.
I've heard a few times that high elves was the most popular army. I would guess empire, orcs, chaos warriors and skaven would also rank near the top, but that's only based on my personal experience
I doubt Bretonnians or Khemri were that populary as some People suggest. Look who few Support they got in the last Years of WHFB, inspecial the Bretonnians. Also there were few Armies of them Online.
Chaos, Empire, Orks & Goblins, High Elves - those were realy poular Faction.
Overread wrote: I feel like this was a bit of what was happening under Kirby. That they were following the money but not balancing it against consumer feedback. You can see how they started to try and make Stormcast into Marines in all but name; you can see the desire to double the marine line by releasing primaris as a separate army instead of what they'd normally do and simply replace the sculpts with updated models (as they've done many times before).
Sigh. You let idiotic 'squatted' FUD get to you. If Primaris were supposed to be replacement, we wouldn't see Aggressors. We would see Primaris Terminators. We would see Intercessors with special guns. Reivers with jump packs and actual melee weapons. Primaris veterans. The two lines are so different FUDders might as well postulate ork nobs or custodes were ""replacement"".
I think GW now has balanced itself a bit; they've taken on board a lot more consumer feedback and impressions
By deleting beloved SC boxes and army vs army ones?
I am not sure where GW would find such customers but now that I had seen idiots calling even worst Combat Patrol junk a bArGaIn and GeNiUs IdEa I guess they would find some if they tried hard enough
A Town Called Malus wrote: For instance, EA wanted Dead Space 3 to sell 5 million copies or else they'd kill the franchise. Dead Space 2 shipped 2 million units, Dead Space shipped ~1 million. In what world was 5 million a realistic target for a third person survival horror game in 2013, especially when the previous two games in the series didn't approach anywhere near those sales figures? For reference, the Resident Evil 2 remake managed 5.8 million sales over its first year and that had much better reception amongst fans and critics than Dead Space 3 did, and came out in 2019 when the market for video games was much larger than it was in 2013.
You didn't get the memo? Capitalism = infinite exponential growth. No, it doesn't matter resources or customer base are finite. You need to double sales year by year, or by definition you are a failure (and in some countries, legally, too, because not maximizing returns for your shareholders by any means possible not matter how shortsighted can be a crime). If sanity or common sense ever figured into it we wouldn't see runaway environmental destruction, worker exploitation and oppression increasing year by year to squeeze profit money if not from sales, then from your staff, accelerating global warming, growing wealth imbalance, and other such slight problems cropping up constantly
Cronch wrote: So with Fantasy being bigger than 40k in 2nd largest market it still was unprofitable to keep going with the line? Something doesn't add up here and I doubt it's GW's penny-counting ability.
we don't know why GW killed it in the first place, being unprofitable as something we heard, but we never got any proof of it or any real answer what exactly was unprofitable
looking at Lord of the Rings, if Warhammer Fantasy made a loss, with much more players around and the more expensive models, how could they afford to keep that game were they had to pay licence fees for the IP
yet Warhammer was facing the problems that it was more niche, as Skirmish game that can be started small, is very different than a game were models need to be cheap to achieve the same
for an AoS unit of 5 models than can be maximum 15 models, selling a box of 5 for 40€ is doable, but having a unit with minimum size of 20 and selling boxes with models of 10 for 40€ is a problem
as some said before, what AoS got could have been done with Warhammer as well, it was just that GW did not wanted to do it, for whatever reason, and thought they are better off with something new
BlackoCatto wrote: Be in mind armies like Brets were kind of screwed of over rules and content, with Tomb Kings being really okay.
Furthermore it isn't about sales to an extent, it's about studio interest.
I think marketing and sales lead everything. Presumably those factions didn't sell all that well or didn't warrant further investment.
I also think Arthurean knights weren't original enough to get ported into the messy trademark-able fantasy melting pot that is age of sigmar. Though I suppose we could still see Halve-Aelvan PureFyre Chilvalnauts or something absurd like that.
I see we're back to the discussion about peoples (mis)perceptions about the nature of the setting/game and debating why people have odd views about what WHFB is and isn't.
Gregor Samsa wrote: I think the older WHFB models looked great. There are no doubt a ton of amazing sculpts in AOS, but to say that the modern sculpts are "cooler" than the older ones is untrue imo. If anything, imo, the older models are a more confident and pleasant because they're a bit more clever and self-effacing. It makes a joke on the absurd fun of playing a game!
I think a lot of the modern sculpts are bit too try-hard, which makes them open to mockery and teasing. This is a tabletop strategy game after all, the cosplay of it all is open to ridicule quite easily so its better to lean into the fun, rather than insisting "my Khorne Daemon is so scary!! GRRR!!!"
GW has consistently done a great job with skaven and orks for example, getting the balance of spooky and silly. Irony and wit are hard to write, let alone "sculpt". And when people talk about the "character" of old models - they're speaking to the cleverness. Definitely some sculpts have gotten way better as GW returned to them...but you have to take it on a model by model basis. There are some really (imo) timeless WHFB minis and if anyone thinks theirs are too goofy and out of style, ill happily take them off your hands!!
Thats a lot of words spent on trying to excuse poor sculpting. You're never going to convince me that this is "confident", or "pleasant", or "clever", or "self-effacing", or "witty", or "ironic" or any of the other asinine adjectives you've tried to apply to them.
Oldhammer minis are none of the things you've ascribed to them. Gary Morley and Trish Carden/Morrison didn't sit down and say "I'm going to sculpt this miniature with awful malformed proportions and silly details because it'll be so cleverly ironic and witty while being pleasantly self-effacing", they sculpted them that way because that was what was within their ability and skillset to sculpt and within games workshops technological capability to reproduce. It was, in the most literal understanding of the phrase, the state of the art in the industry.
I'll stay an edge lord with awful taste, thank you!
Ohman wrote: I don't know about the rest of you but I'm really confused about this new take on the Old World. Yes, still early days, no solid information yet and all that. Still...
Where is this game going to fit in the current line-up? From what is known right now I don't see how the models are going to be any different from what is being released for AOS. Square bases sure, but two fantasy model lines with very similar themes and styles? How is that going to work? Cross compatibility maybe? All the minis get rules for both AOS and TOW?
I've been under the assumption for a while now that the "Old World" is just a marketing gimmick to lure in old players (and take some of the steam away from rank&flank competitors)
All the models from the Old World will probably get rolled over into Cities of Sigmar for AoS eventually. Kislev might as well be an AoS army if they copy the video game design.
It seems the obvious way to do it. I wonder if they would consider making Ossiarchs, Stormcast etc playable with the Old World rules too? Basicially having one giant range of fantasy minis, all playable with both rule sets.
Trimarius wrote: I could see there being some overlap (much like 30k/40k), but I have to assume that at some point an actual AoS "Normal" Human Army will come out and the old WFB refugee models will be retired. It might even stay as the CoS book, just with models that fit the setting better.
NinthMusketeer wrote: I think they are going to have a lot of the old world kits do double duty for AoS. Just like how much of the 30k stuff has rules in 40k.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Meanwhile I'm just wondering if we'll be able to use redone Fantasy units like the Blood Knights or Direwolves.
This is on my mind aswell. There is going to be an enormous mini-overlap between AOS and TOW. The majority of the AOS range is more or less a perfect fit with the Old World.
Will they re-box everything and make everything usuable with both games? One mini-range, two rule systems?
Theres very little crossover between 30K and 40k. 30K Marines can be used for 40k - as miniatures using 40k rules, but not as the units they are intended to represent in 30k. The ability to port 40k marines back into 30k is somewhat limited (wrong weapon loadouts, etc. in 40k marine units, lots of things that exist in 40k that don't in 30k, etc) unless you have a lot of marines and recombine miniatures across squads to try to make it work. The Custodes range is very flexible between both games, but the 30k Solar Auxilia and Mechanicum are largely isolated from the Guard/Mechanicum of the 40k era and vice versa. Beyond that, officially speaking there is no other crossover between games - while fans were at one point able to play 40k armies against 30k armies, Forgeworld attempted to discourage that practice and was adamant that they would not provide rules or faq/errata, etc. for players to do so (and in fact never provided any official means for it, which became a moot point anyway once 40k evolved passed the HH ruleset).
I would not expect to see Ossiarchs, Stormcast, etc. in The Old World. Daemons seem like the universal faction so I would be surprised *not* to see them show up in TOW. I could see Skaven and Slaves to Darkness/Chaos mortals (or at least a selection of the range) back-ported into TOW, as well as Cities of Sigmar to some exent (provided they don't get renamed Dawnbringer Crusades and have most of the legacy kits replaced by new AoS-ified kits). I don't think anything will be brought into AoS from TOW though (though I'm sure you'll be able to use TOW Daemons and Skaven/Chaos stuff in AOS, and human/elf/dwarf stuff might be usable in Dawnbringer Crusades/Cities of Sigmar). The key in all this though is, Daemons notwithstanding, I wouldn't expect you to be able to collect an army for one and be able to use it as-is for the other. i.e. your CoS/Dawnbringer Crusade army in AoS isn't just going to magically work in TOW - you will be able to use some of the *units* in your CoS army in your TOW empire army or whatever, but you will need to buy some TOW specific stuff that won't have an AoS analogue in order to make it work. And also square bases.
My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
I'm forever going to play whack-a-mole with this. Kings of War 3rd ed. was released about 6 weeks prior to the Old World being announced, and was announced about 8 months prior. Pretty sure Oathmark didn't even exist yet at the time. 9th Age is a bunch of sad nerds playing WHFB wondering why GW would forsake them as they push their 100% non-GW army that they've had since 6th edition across the table. A lot of the people playing these games are bitter and toxic grogs who have sworn off GW forever after the End Times and aren't coming back anyway.
GW isn't knocking the steam out of anything or scaring off anyone announcing a game that by their own admission was still 3-5 years away from release. GW is basically Thanos going "I don't even know who you are" when it comes to the existence of these games.
Another thing I can think of is that GW considered the Battle Sister marketing that ended around the same time Old World was announced such a success that they wanted a follow up series. It's not a theory without flaws, but there are appreciable similarities between Sisters getting a plastic range overhaul after so long and the return of a nuked setting. As it stand now about half of the development time of Old World has been spent not telling us anything of substance about a project that we'd really like to have as much substantial information about as quickly as possible, which is a mirror of what happened to Sisters. It'll be interesting to see if the Old World articles pick up soon akin to the Battle Sister bulletin and start actually showing off models in reasonable intervals.
As I've pointed out in the past, the bi-weekly Sisters Bulletin ended ~2 weeks prior to the announcement of The Old World (and IIRC the Sisters box set released either the week before or the week after the announcement), which means TOW was more or less announced on schedule to continue that marketing trend and keep peoples attention captive.
As for Ohman's last line, they're able to post regular updates. They just don't do it. Probably because they are afraid of posting something that later gets changed and held against them as a false promise. Based on that I agree that they should have held back until they're confident that what they have to show is set in stone. With that said, I think they still could have had an article a month showing a sketch or artwork or CAD model (or even just parts of that) of a faction they know will be in the game on release. Can't be hard to get together a dozen and a half of those things without really committing to anything.
Taking the verbiage of the announcement to heart, I suspect the real issue is that they had only just started preliminary work on the game and literally had done little else than give it a name at the time the announcement was made. The early stages of a project like this are generally highly conceptual (not just in terms of artwork and aesthetics but rules design, etc.) - stuff that GW probably doesn't want to discuss because its highly subject to change and establishes false expectations. What they have shown is stuff that seems to have been far enough along in development that they weren't expecting it to change.
Mentlegen324 wrote: Cathay for example was talked about back in 1992 (2nd edition) and supposedly had such things as turtle ships
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
HOW DARE YOU! THOSE MINIATURES ARE CONFIDENT AND PLEASANT SELF-EFFACING SCULPTS MADE TO BE WITTY AND IRONIC, AND ARE ALL THE MORE CLEVER FOR IT!
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
CAD is to model design what CGI is to movies.
In the right hands, a powerful tool.
In the wrong hands... well... Transformers and Teclis.
The same can be said about Clay and Green Stuff, in the wrong hands you get the original Nagash mini or any of the other weird and wacky oldhammer sculpts that some people seem to fawn over.
Wha-Mu-077 wrote: Sometimes i wonder how can anyone look at the old, early edition Warhammer Fantasy models and say they're "beautifully designed" with a straight face. They're all so blatantly held back by the technology and sculpting and budget of their time i find it hard to take them remotely seriously.
Virtually anything sculpted by the Perrys is marvelous. The metal models have a depth and visual heft to them that can't be matched in plastic.
That's not to say that plastic is worse -- it's almost the better medium for large models, for example. However, I do prefer some metal models to their plastic counterparts.
Not that they're as old as the early edition models, but I think its universally agreed upon that the Juan Diaz metal Pink Horrors are so much better than the current plastic kit. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way when comparing the old daemonettes to the plastic ones. Some metal models just have so much character to them, its crazy. And some are better off forgotten
I'll give you the pink horrors, I think they are more accurate to the lore of what they are supposed to represent than the current sculpts which are too well defined. I prefer the plastic daemonettes head and shoulders above the old metal ones though - the metal minis were the biggest PITA to put together and had little in the way of actual detail.
My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
I'm forever going to play whack-a-mole with this. Kings of War 3rd ed. was released about 6 weeks prior to the Old World being announced, and was announced about 8 months prior. Pretty sure Oathmark didn't even exist yet at the time. 9th Age is a bunch of sad nerds playing WHFB wondering why GW would forsake them as they push their 100% non-GW army that they've had since 6th edition across the table. A lot of the people playing these games are bitter and toxic grogs who have sworn off GW forever after the End Times and aren't coming back anyway.
GW isn't knocking the steam out of anything or scaring off anyone announcing a game that by their own admission was still 3-5 years away from release. GW is basically Thanos going "I don't even know who you are" when it comes to the existence of these games.
Overall 3rd edition was released earlier, however the TOW announcement came during the preorder period and just over a week before the actual release of Uncharted Empires, a KOW expansion book that contains army lists for armies that, at the time, Mantic really didn't have ranges for, or at least full ranges in some cases. These armies existed to port existing WHFB armies to KoW, initially. You're not really going to be able to convince me the timing was pure coincidence, that GW just decided that was the time to announce a project 3 years out with no info, and not just GW trying to say "wait a few years and you can use our models in our game again!"
chaos0xomega wrote: I see we're back to the discussion about peoples (mis)perceptions about the nature of the setting/game and debating why people have odd views about what WHFB is and isn't.
Technically we've already moved on to why GW ended the old setting and which of its factions were popular.
chaos0xomega wrote: Taking the verbiage of the announcement to heart, I suspect the real issue is that they had only just started preliminary work on the game and literally had done little else than give it a name at the time the announcement was made. The early stages of a project like this are generally highly conceptual (not just in terms of artwork and aesthetics but rules design, etc.) - stuff that GW probably doesn't want to discuss because its highly subject to change and establishes false expectations. What they have shown is stuff that seems to have been far enough along in development that they weren't expecting it to change.
I can appreciate how much in flux a project can be in early development, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that there is absolutely nothing that could have been posted in a preview article. It's the old setting that's existed for three decades. You'll know which faction you definitely want to see released early in the new game's life, and whipping up concept art for these factions and some non-committal text to fill six monthly articles until a basic roadmap for the project stands can't be that hard.
It's not about handing out hard, unchangeable details at a time when they simply don't exist. Just an early and continuous marketing presence to get some use out of the uncharacteristically early announcement.
chaos0xomega wrote: I'll give you the pink horrors, I think they are more accurate to the lore of what they are supposed to represent than the current sculpts which are too well defined. I prefer the plastic daemonettes head and shoulders above the old metal ones though - the metal minis were the biggest PITA to put together and had little in the way of actual detail.
They have boobs and motion over the plastic models. What more could you ask for?
Oldhammer minis are none of the things you've ascribed to them. Gary Morley and Trish Carden/Morrison didn't sit down and say "I'm going to sculpt this miniature with awful malformed proportions and silly details because it'll be so cleverly ironic and witty while being pleasantly self-effacing"
well, the story I heard about some of the models was that they wanted to make something different than GW asked for, something that would fit their impression of the fluff better, so it was sculpted so badly that it should be rejected and re-done but to their shock they made it straight to production without any complain
Oldhammer minis are none of the things you've ascribed to them. Gary Morley and Trish Carden/Morrison didn't sit down and say "I'm going to sculpt this miniature with awful malformed proportions and silly details because it'll be so cleverly ironic and witty while being pleasantly self-effacing"
well, the story I heard about some of the models was that they wanted to make something different than GW asked for, something that would fit their impression of the fluff better, so it was sculpted so badly that it should be rejected and re-done but to their shock they made it straight to production without any complain
I wonder if that's just an urban legend made to justify just how crap they looked, because people couldn't believe it.
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Show me a good one, then.
I always loved the Diaz Daemonettes - got lots of them. Same with the lahmian ladies
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Show me a good one, then.
I always loved the Diaz Daemonettes - got lots of them. Same with the lahmian ladies
Look at their faces. Look at how thick everything is, how little detail is on everything, how the poses are all clumsy attempts at action poses held back by the fact they have to be a single lump.
Oldhammer minis are none of the things you've ascribed to them. Gary Morley and Trish Carden/Morrison didn't sit down and say "I'm going to sculpt this miniature with awful malformed proportions and silly details because it'll be so cleverly ironic and witty while being pleasantly self-effacing"
well, the story I heard about some of the models was that they wanted to make something different than GW asked for, something that would fit their impression of the fluff better, so it was sculpted so badly that it should be rejected and re-done but to their shock they made it straight to production without any complain
The Nagash story from the sculptor was that he sculpted a different head closer to the art, but someone at the company wanted a skull head instead. So he quickly threw together a big ugly skull thinking it would never be approved...until it was. Original head here:
Spoiler:
Still isn't a great sculpt even for the era, but it comes down a level on the goofiness scale at least.
My pet theory is it was to scare off Kings of War, 9th Age, Oathmark and any other game thinking of claiming the Rank and File audience.
I'm forever going to play whack-a-mole with this. Kings of War 3rd ed. was released about 6 weeks prior to the Old World being announced, and was announced about 8 months prior. Pretty sure Oathmark didn't even exist yet at the time. 9th Age is a bunch of sad nerds playing WHFB wondering why GW would forsake them as they push their 100% non-GW army that they've had since 6th edition across the table. A lot of the people playing these games are bitter and toxic grogs who have sworn off GW forever after the End Times and aren't coming back anyway.
GW isn't knocking the steam out of anything or scaring off anyone announcing a game that by their own admission was still 3-5 years away from release. GW is basically Thanos going "I don't even know who you are" when it comes to the existence of these games.
Overall 3rd edition was released earlier, however the TOW announcement came during the preorder period and just over a week before the actual release of Uncharted Empires, a KOW expansion book that contains army lists for armies that, at the time, Mantic really didn't have ranges for, or at least full ranges in some cases. These armies existed to port existing WHFB armies to KoW, initially. You're not really going to be able to convince me the timing was pure coincidence, that GW just decided that was the time to announce a project 3 years out with no info, and not just GW trying to say "wait a few years and you can use our models in our game again!"
This is like arguing that someone announced a game to suck the wind out of GWs sales because it coincided with GW releasing a new codex. The "these armies exist to port WHFB armies" bit is pointless, that boat sailed a decade prior with the release of Kings of War 1st edition, at this point a lot of the people playing those armies are and have been using third party non-GW miniatures (many of which are based off of old WHFB minis).
BlackoCatto wrote: Be in mind armies like Brets were kind of screwed of over rules and content, with Tomb Kings being really okay.
Furthermore it isn't about sales to an extent, it's about studio interest.
I think marketing and sales lead everything. Presumably those factions didn't sell all that well or didn't warrant further investment.
I also think Arthurean knights weren't original enough to get ported into the messy trademark-able fantasy melting pot that is age of sigmar. Though I suppose we could still see Halve-Aelvan PureFyre Chilvalnauts or something absurd like that.
As stated by elements of GW themselves, it is about studio interest.
chaos0xomega wrote: This is like arguing that someone announced a game to suck the wind out of GWs sales because it coincided with GW releasing a new codex. The "these armies exist to port WHFB armies" bit is pointless, that boat sailed a decade prior with the release of Kings of War 1st edition, at this point a lot of the people playing those armies are and have been using third party non-GW miniatures (many of which are based off of old WHFB minis).
might be in the US, in central Europe, Uncharted Empires of 2nd Edi were a real big thing to have nearly 1:1 copies for GW model armies and for the same reason we had big rage when Mantic made changes to go away from legacy model support (as some 1:1 copies were merged with other units) which leaded to a direct answer from Ronnie that there is no point in Mantic supporting 20 year old GW models and they are still useable with the different unit entry
the use of legecy warhammer models is strong here and the message of "don't buy into Kings of War because a game with square bases is coming from GW" was very clear here
and there is no real other reason to post a empty base during the release of the "GW armies book" from Mantic and go silent for months after
PS: and yes, 3rd party model releases are often timed with the release of a new Codex to get sales off it, this is nothing special
BlackoCatto wrote: Be in mind armies like Brets were kind of screwed of over rules and content, with Tomb Kings being really okay.
Furthermore it isn't about sales to an extent, it's about studio interest.
I also think Arthurean knights weren't original enough to get ported into the messy trademark-able fantasy melting pot that is age of sigmar. Though I suppose we could still see Halve-Aelvan PureFyre Chilvalnauts or something absurd like that.
That isn't how trademarks work. Trademarks apply to names, logos etc and copyright does not cover design styles or theming, only the actual miniatures themselves. . A while back several people said something similar and thoguht they'd probably redesign armies entirely for this project to make them more "unique" so they could "protect" them, but as we've now seen the (supposedly) full Kislev roster and the concept art, there is no indication of any overhauls to make them more "original" going on.
Oldhammer minis are none of the things you've ascribed to them. Gary Morley and Trish Carden/Morrison didn't sit down and say "I'm going to sculpt this miniature with awful malformed proportions and silly details because it'll be so cleverly ironic and witty while being pleasantly self-effacing"
well, the story I heard about some of the models was that they wanted to make something different than GW asked for, something that would fit their impression of the fluff better, so it was sculpted so badly that it should be rejected and re-done but to their shock they made it straight to production without any complain
That's some Pee Wee Herman "I meant to do that" retconning lol.
I'm wondering if this too could be concept art done for TOW. The style and format is similar to that of the Kislev concepts posted recently, and we know the Kislev units were designed for TOW first and at least one of the concepts shown there (the bear) was first used to tease stuff coming with TOW.
Might not be for TOW after all but it would be a bit odd if it was a case of the Kislev roster blog post for some reason includes 1 piece of concept art we know was for TOW and then the rest isn't as well.
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Show me a good one, then.
Metal Phoenix Guard > Plastic Phoenix Guard > Anything in Lumineth
Oldhammer miniatures are really a mixed bag, some of them were crap, but a lot of them were quite good, it also depends what era you're considering, I think some good models came out of the 90's, haven't seen too much that I liked earlier than that though. It's easy to point to a model and say "Old Warhammer models were terrible!" but likewise it's not hard to find some real gems.
Show me a good one, then.
Obviously it depends somewhat on personal taste, but I reckon by the mid 90's the Perry's were doing some good work, most of the metal Bretonnian range from that era I think is great, the Grail Knight Hero, Bret Sorceress on foot, Bertrand and his Brigands, the Green Knight, those are still some of my favourite models. Brian Nelson did my favourite Orc Shaman model in the mid 90's.
It's a matter of taste, but I actually like a lot of the metal Lizardmen from the mid 90's also, you didn't see a lot of them because they had tons of the terrible plastics in the boxed set, so everyone just used the plastics. Some of the metal from the various Elf ranges I thought was good.
In 40k, the Valhallans, actually most of the metal Imperial Guard stuff was pretty good. We joke about how old some of the Eldar range is, but much of that old Eldar range actually looks pretty good. A lot of the metal Space Marine character stuff I thought looked pretty good also, though the wide legged stance was popular, so it depends how much you care about that.
Warhammer Quest had some nice models, as did Necromunda.
I'm not some crazy person who's going to stand here and say the entire range was great, I reckon more than half of it was pretty bad, but by the same token putting up a picture of Nagash and crying "Oldhammer sucks!" it's just disingenuous, everyone knows that model was terrible even by the standards back then.
Certainly if you like a cleaner aesthetic, rather than the "leaping off a tactical rock surrounded by swirly gak with so much detail you can't see what's going on" aesthetic, there were some good options back then, but obviously not the whole range and certainly not the plastics.
I'm wondering if this too could be concept art done for TOW. The style and format is similar to that of the Kislev concepts posted recently, and we know the Kislev units were designed for TOW first and at least one of the concepts shown there (the bear) was first used to tease stuff coming with TOW.
Might not be for TOW after all but it would be a bit odd if it was a case of the Kislev roster blog post for some reason includes 1 piece of concept art we know was for TOW and then the rest isn't as well.
These concepts are all of existing units, and in plastic to boots (bar the maneaters)
As it is still relevant to the current title of the thread, the entire Perry metal Bretonnian range was better than the plastics for 6th Ed, especially the bowmen / men-at-arms.
The 6th ed knight box was an improvement over the plastic knights from 5th, but scale creep was massive and made them incompatible. And I wouldn't say they were better than the metal knights errant, or metal questing knights (that still had lances)
In fact the Green Knight is still one if my favourite models. I have a metal one in storage somewhere I need to dig out. I will give 6th Ed Louen and Morgiana le Fay a nod over the 5th Ed ones. Though they are all still metal, or were originally.
Keep in mind that until about 4 or 5 years ago, we didn't really have "Monopose plastics". All the good, dynamic, well composed plastic miniatures recently? Monopose.
And people have complained like FURY. "These suck, how am I meant to make each of My Doodz look different"
Multipart plastics are NOT dynamic, unless you as the modeller are really good at posing. Every Ork Boy or Cadian is fundamentally identical, except for changing the angle of the limbs and torso by a couple of degrees.
And that's fine! It's good for rank and file.
But if you want models with character, a sense of movement and dynamism, GW's plastic miniatures only just caught up with what they used to do in metal. And yes, now that they're working with a light material that allows very thin parts and they've cracked chopping up the CAD files in such a way that you can get recessed details and undercuts that the old rubber moulds allowed metals to do, lots of then are utterly beautiful. And they can be a right pain to glue together in order to achieve that.
But the idea that "Old models sucked, newer ones are better 'cos they're newer" is just flat out wrong.
