infinite_array wrote: Just wanted to duck in here and mention that the new Gotrek audiobook/drama is basically an ongoing conversation between a WHFB veteran and an Age of Sigmar player.
Gotrek, looking at Age of Sigmar thing: What nonesense is this?!
AoS character accompanying Gotrek: That is *insert AoS name of person/place/thing*, which has-
Gotrek: *Brian Blessed Noises* The Old World was better!
infinite_array wrote: Just wanted to duck in here and mention that the new Gotrek audiobook/drama is basically an ongoing conversation between a WHFB veteran and an Age of Sigmar player.
Gotrek, looking at Age of Sigmar thing: What nonesense is this?!
AoS character accompanying Gotrek: That is *insert AoS name of person/place/thing*, which has-
Gotrek: *Brian Blessed Noises* The Old World was better!
I really like that.
I'm going to have to listen to that myself.
For me - I liked the old world a lot, and I dislike what I know of the new one - some of the retooling of the factions seems really dumb to me too (Zepplin dwarves and underwater elves for instance).
I find the new mix of factions confusing too.
Finally playing Total Warhammer (which is totes awesome btw) has really made me miss the old world again :( It was big blocks of infantry squaring off that really drew me to Warhammer over 40k in the first place.
Schmapdi wrote: For me - I liked the old world a lot, and I dislike what I know of the new one - some of the retooling of the factions seems really dumb to me too (Zepplin dwarves and underwater elves for instance).
But the old world had loads of zepplin flying dwarves in the artwork and such. It just never really made it tableside besides the odd gyrocopter because GW couldn't make zepplins out of metal that were economical/not weight a tonne. Even the ones that we have now in plastic are small zepplins
Yeah, Dwarves had airships. I don't think they were that common though. The dwarves also use ironclad ships and dreadnoughts when everyone else uses wooden ships. Or Turtles in the case of lizardmen.
Overlords aren't actually that far off from WHFB Dwarfs in terms of tech, but much like everything in AoS they are exaggerated. My only real problem with them is that they went from Nordic themed to Victorian Steampunk themed. And I don't like steampunk. Its over done and poorly done.
That and the new plastic casting focus means that GW can actually give us models of them without having to remake warmaster (I think there was an airship in warmaster, if not it would have been the ideal place we'd have seen one eventually).
And yes you remind me that they did have air ships in Man O War
Barak Varr, the Dwarven Sea Port in the Border Princes, and its fleet of smoke belching ironclad warships, one of which was featured in Dreadfleet, with an airship as it's scout.
Classic art that shows a trio of airships. I think there's also several that featured in Golden Demon over the years
Man, I wish that Steamhammer tank was released back then.
Its goofy as hell, but it looks fun and I can totally imagine some insane dwarven engineer to build something like that.
Schmapdi wrote: For me - I liked the old world a lot, and I dislike what I know of the new one - some of the retooling of the factions seems really dumb to me too (Zepplin dwarves and underwater elves for instance).
But the old world had loads of zepplin flying dwarves in the artwork and such. It just never really made it tableside besides the odd gyrocopter because GW couldn't make zepplins out of metal that were economical/not weight a tonne. Even the ones that we have now in plastic are small zepplins
A big difference for me is that old Dwarf airships were made with lighter than air gases rather than magic metal in the sky that may or may not be divine.
What is it about the bigger and more fantastical setting that turns people off? You can get more mileage out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the old world. But was it not limited in overall scope? Just one planet, mirroring the real world, realistic climate for the most part. With most of the factions stuck to one area (Lizardmen in Lustria, Wood Elves in Athel Loren, Ogres in the east etc.). I don’t mean to rub salt in any wounds. I just think AoS is more, unshackled.
Largely relatability. Its hard to relate to the world that is as high epic fantasy. (I like the setting of AOS, I'm just speaking from what I hear a lot)
I think part of the Disconnect is that the Old World had years of lore built up around it. The size isn't so much the issue, the issue is that we went from something almost as deep as Lord of the Rings into something as fresh as Harry Potter book 1.
So people feel less connected than before because its basically a new world and there's huge amounts of it that are not set in stone.
Ontop of that one could envision most of the Old World fairly readily because it was built upon a huge number of standard fantasy tropes. Basically if you grew up on Lord of the Rings and most western based fantasy you could easily envision large swathes of the Old World without the lore being there.
AoS is fully fantastical realms and its going to take longer and require more lore and material to give that same impression. Some areas like the plains where the Dark Oath fight are easy; whilst regions like the Realm of Metal or Shadow are far more mystical and defies peoples ability to even envision the local flora and fauna without GW producing more stories, maps and artwork depicting it.
The setting is far more varied and that is good, but it needs far more lore building to establish itself. The Empire of old most people could envision with a few leading comments. "Medieval peoples with muskets and steam tanks, not many. There that's most of the lore you need to settle yourself and the wooden buildings, castles, pubs, pigs, farms, fields etc... casually populate themselves very quickly.
Right now we've not really got that, esp since GW chose to invade most of the world with Chaos so most of what is there is twisted, decrepit and decaying in warped ways.
I fully understand why people feel this disconnect, but at the same time GW is releasing new Novellas and new stories and I hope will release more artwork as well to help put more flesh on the bones. They've already taken some steps with some casual maps in the rule book, however I feel that htey need more (I think GW is being cautious with maps and such as I think they want to keep the realms open to addition without adding new realms, so I don't think they want to write themselves into a corner now and either have to tip their hand and reveal future content on maps or deny themselves the opportunity to just add new s tuff
Future War Cultist wrote: What is it about the bigger and more fantastical setting that turns people off? You can get more mileage out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the old world. But was it not limited in overall scope? Just one planet, mirroring the real world, realistic climate for the most part. With most of the factions stuck to one area (Lizardmen in Lustria, Wood Elves in Athel Loren, Ogres in the east etc.). I don’t mean to rub salt in any wounds. I just think AoS is more, unshackled.
That's part of the problem. AOS is so huge and GW did an awful job of explaining how things worked so it feels far less important. If a province of the Empire or Dwarf Karak fell then it mattered, it was significant. In AOS it's not. A province falls? So what there's so much more left. You took a stronghold from Nagash? Big whoop he has many more.
A big factor I often see go unmentioned is that the base of fluff AoS has now was nearly nonexistent at launch. Aside from the basics of what the realms were, what the four grand alliances were, and a few extra Stormcast snippets there was little to nothing. The campaign books expanded the world very little beyond offering characterization of very specific regions/characters/factions, ditto for the battletomes. On top of that the Stormcast were presented as 'generic awesome mary sue good guys' up front and to find the depth required reading said books which were expensive with little in the way of practical content beyond battalions.
Future War Cultist wrote: What is it about the bigger and more fantastical setting that turns people off? You can get more mileage out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the old world. But was it not limited in overall scope? Just one planet, mirroring the real world, realistic climate for the most part. With most of the factions stuck to one area (Lizardmen in Lustria, Wood Elves in Athel Loren, Ogres in the east etc.). I don’t mean to rub salt in any wounds. I just think AoS is more, unshackled.
That's part of the problem. AOS is so huge and GW did an awful job of explaining how things worked so it feels far less important. If a province of the Empire or Dwarf Karak fell then it mattered, it was significant. In AOS it's not. A province falls? So what there's so much more left. You took a stronghold from Nagash? Big whoop he has many more.
I think its more that currently the lore has a lot of battles and fights, but because those locations being fought over are all new to us they don't feel important. Furthermore a good number are chaos fortifications and thus being torn down is kind of essential currently to leave room for new factions to flourish.
I do think GW could have helped themselves and set the game in the first age when everything was new and establishing itself and all the factions were building up and improving themselves and learning new things about the world. Sadly choices were made in AoS's past that voided that option, we've skipped the prologue and the film and we are in the sequel so there's a bit of catching up. That said reading the new novella's that came out today I think GW is going to make fantastic strides in that direction. AoS needs time, more so it needs time under new GW management to flourish. Give it 10 years and then I think we can fairly compare it to the Old World.
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NinthMusketeer wrote: A big factor I often see go unmentioned is that the base of fluff AoS has now was nearly nonexistent at launch. Aside from the basics of what the realms were, what the four grand alliances were, and a few extra Stormcast snippets there was little to nothing. The campaign books expanded the world very little beyond offering characterization of very specific regions/characters/factions, ditto for the battletomes. On top of that the Stormcast were presented as 'generic awesome mary sue good guys' up front and to find the depth required reading said books which were expensive with little in the way of practical content beyond battalions.
Agreed, AoS had a horrible start, its 2.0 has really, I feel, been its turning point and you can see that in the new material coming out from Black Library; in the Rulebook and the Battletomes coming out and in the way GW is marketing it. AoS is almost like a phoenix in that its been burned and reborn and its doing very well for it. One hopes that now GW has gotten over the big 40K Codex release (for the most part); AoS can get at least year of full focused attention to really come into its own.
It really cant be overstated how botched the transition was. Describing it as finding yourself several films/seasons into a series is very apt.
It has steadily improved under the new direction so I am hopeful for the future. I'd like to see them be as aggressive as they are in 40k in reigning in outlier balance failures though. Seem to hang around longer in AoS.
There just aren't enough people playing it near me to bother with it at the moment.
I mean even a game as obscure as Darklands gets more games in my local club. Although I would like to see the release of the Fimir models teased by Forge World a while back.
Eldarain wrote: It really cant be overstated how botched the transition was. Describing it as finding yourself several films/seasons into a series is very apt.
It has steadily improved under the new direction so I am hopeful for the future. I'd like to see them be as aggressive as they are in 40k in reigning in outlier balance failures though. Seem to hang around longer in AoS.
It's improved leaps and bounds since it's first release. I would have never played it then. 2nd edition did a lot to pull me in. I am honestly quite impressed how much the game has grown.
In regards to balance, I'm going to say it's quite the opposite, AoS is actually much more balanced than 40k. If anything 40k needs to reign in some of it's more serious issues before I really consider heading back into tourny play.
I agree with that when comparing game to game it just seemed to me that while better balanced across the board AoS hobby killer builds linger longer (the Flyer spam/Assassin spam/rule of 3 crackdown in 40k being an example of the quicker action I referenced)
Eldarain wrote: It really cant be overstated how botched the transition was. Describing it as finding yourself several films/seasons into a series is very apt.
It has steadily improved under the new direction so I am hopeful for the future. I'd like to see them be as aggressive as they are in 40k in reigning in outlier balance failures though. Seem to hang around longer in AoS.
I think one big balance difference that AoS got right is that whilst there is an allies system its curtailed as such to basically prevent "soup abuse" far more so than 40K. Even Stormcast, who can ally in anything in Grand Alliance Order, cannot build a supreme "soup" army of min-maxing (in fact at present for all their favour in models, the Stormcast are actually ranked on the underpowered end of the scale- or at least have yet to have anyone take major positions regularly at tournaments).
AoS rules feel like they are aiming for more balance, what needs to be more aggressively done is not so much controlling the balance at this stage, but get Battletomes out and clean up the army listings. I'd love for a year like 40K has had and by 2019 Christmas be able to see most armies at least with a Battletome - might not mean new models, but at least their future secured and some of the split up armies are recombined into functional forces. I think that would go a very long way to improving its popularity with both previous fans (many armies are still without Battletomes and sitting on shelves) and also in getting new people into the game as they have far more freedom to choose what they want.
A year of AoS would be fantastic. I really hope that’s what they’re planning, now that 40k is covered. And I think the BoC book is the first example of a way to bring scattered factions back together again. I could easily see the Freeguild, Devoted Of Sigmar, Colligate Arcane, Ironweld Arsenal and even Maneaters being grouped together under one book, now that units no longer need to be restricted to one book (e.g, Tzaangors) or even one GA.
But as a big big fan of the game, I’ll be the first to admit that the games launch was terribly botched. No points, no structure, little background, do silly things to get bonuses...we’re lucky it survived that. And now it’s grown into my own personal favourite game.
Future War Cultist wrote: A year of AoS would be fantastic. I really hope that’s what they’re planning, now that 40k is covered. And I think the BoC book is the first example of a way to bring scattered factions back together again. I could easily see the Freeguild, Devoted Of Sigmar, Colligate Arcane, Ironweld Arsenal and even Maneaters being grouped together under one book, now that units no longer need to be restricted to one book (e.g, Tzaangors) or even one GA.
But as a big big fan of the game, I’ll be the first to admit that the games launch was terribly botched. No points, no structure, little background, do silly things to get bonuses...we’re lucky it survived that. And now it’s grown into my own personal favourite game.
40k isn't covered though.
They still need to release something for GSC, Sisters of Silence and Custodes, a 40k Slaanesh release to tie into the new Slaanesh range, Vigilus and whatever they are planning for Black Fortress. There is still a lot of stuff to cover.
Honestly I don't think anyone (save possibly Kirby?) can say that the launch of AoS was anything but a total mess. That said I think that the old plan for AoS was just totally different. I think their plan was to fully embrace the attitude of "people just buy cool models" in marketing.
Hence why rules were optional and armies were fractured into tiny sub-armies; which I think was a means to allow GW to introduce new armies and retire old models without having the same backlash in marketing that retiring full proper armies has. They also dropped TombKings quite randomly and I figure that we'd have seen them steadily drop more armies as they rotated stock around. It would have made AoS a very light lore and basically rolling series of releases focusing purely on short term profits from launch events.
It's honestly no surprise to many that its launch was a mes, but considering that Kirby was famous for not allowing/doing proper market research nor communicating with the player base its easy to see how a closed box management team (focused purely on the shareholders meeting and profits in the short term) could arrive that that idea.
New Management has totally different focuses and the new AoS is a totally different beast, though still lumbering along with some of the baggage of its launch mess. A year of releases, even if there's hardly a single new model and its all Battletomes cleaning up armies and giving others a secure future - would totally increase the popularity and player base significantly. I really hope its GW's plan, I really hope we can see armies fleshed out and others recombined ilke the Beasts of Chaos were.
Overread wrote: Hence why rules were optional and armies were fractured into tiny sub-armies; which I think was a means to allow GW to introduce new armies and retire old models without having the same backlash in marketing that retiring full proper armies has. They also dropped TombKings quite randomly and I figure that we'd have seen them steadily drop more armies as they rotated stock around. It would have made AoS a very light lore and basically rolling series of releases focusing purely on short term profits from launch events.
Incidentally that was the rumour well before release of AOS.
Overread wrote: Hence why rules were optional and armies were fractured into tiny sub-armies; which I think was a means to allow GW to introduce new armies and retire old models without having the same backlash in marketing that retiring full proper armies has. They also dropped TombKings quite randomly and I figure that we'd have seen them steadily drop more armies as they rotated stock around. It would have made AoS a very light lore and basically rolling series of releases focusing purely on short term profits from launch events.
Incidentally that was the rumour well before release of AOS.
I don't recall anyone fully believed it to be true until it happened though. It was just such an insane idea to the market and showed how big a disconnect the management had with its actual customers. Heck I still hold out hope that GW of today brings the Tomb Kings back into the game as I'm sure they've still got the moulds for the models (unless their range retirement ran alongside most of the moulds wearing out at the same time). Even if they revamp them with new sculpts a return for the army would be a huge thing for GW to do for the fantasy range and I think it would get more old-guard looking at AoS once more with fresh interest.
Overread wrote: Hence why rules were optional and armies were fractured into tiny sub-armies; which I think was a means to allow GW to introduce new armies and retire old models without having the same backlash in marketing that retiring full proper armies has. They also dropped TombKings quite randomly and I figure that we'd have seen them steadily drop more armies as they rotated stock around. It would have made AoS a very light lore and basically rolling series of releases focusing purely on short term profits from launch events.
Incidentally that was the rumour well before release of AOS.
I don't recall anyone fully believed it to be true until it happened though. It was just such an insane idea to the market and showed how big a disconnect the management had with its actual customers. Heck I still hold out hope that GW of today brings the Tomb Kings back into the game as I'm sure they've still got the moulds for the models (unless their range retirement ran alongside most of the moulds wearing out at the same time). Even if they revamp them with new sculpts a return for the army would be a huge thing for GW to do for the fantasy range and I think it would get more old-guard looking at AoS once more with fresh interest.
Yeah well nobody really believed much of anything about AOS rumours before it got released. Even after release people were convinced there was full rulebook coming soon.
But point being it might really have been the plan. Certainly fits what did happen. Sure looked going that way until Roundtree swung things around a bit
Oh there was a 'rulebook' but it was like the campaign books only more bland, a few snippets of relevant background lore, and re-hashed content from the starter set.
It was primarily an expensive fluff book with a handful of missions. However when the four pages of rules dropped, most people thought that was a joke because up until then... no large scale wargame only had four pages of very generic rules.
I also cannot stand the look/lore/overall aesthetic of the sigmarines. Not to mention they just keep releasing them over and over......almost like they are Primaris Lieutenants. I don't care for the setting, just confusing and every time that I've tried to read into it, I get bored and do something else. Plus, unless they do something more with elves, I'll leave it well alone.
I just play in a corner where the Old World still exists. Weird new armies show up sometimes because of the rifts left from the End Times nearly tearing the world apart.
I just played a game of 6th with my Beastmen against my brother using my High Elves. It reminded me of why I have no interest in playing AOS. As long as I have ANY opponents for Classichammer, I have no motivation to play the current game.
bullyboy wrote: I also cannot stand the look/lore/overall aesthetic of the sigmarines. Not to mention they just keep releasing them over and over......almost like they are Primaris Lieutenants. I don't care for the setting, just confusing and every time that I've tried to read into it, I get bored and do something else. Plus, unless they do something more with elves, I'll leave it well alone.
Just out of curiosity. which part of the stormcasts' lore? And at least they get something more interesting than primaris lieutanants in terms of variety (YMMV of course).
Just Tony wrote: I just played a game of 6th with my Beastmen against my brother using my High Elves. It reminded me of why I have no interest in playing AOS. As long as I have ANY opponents for Classichammer, I have no motivation to play the current game.
While there is no interest where I am in previous editions, our kings of war group has grown to about twelve players now. All of my issues with AOS are non existent in that game. Multiple viable builds per army. Games last 90-120 minutes as opposed to 4-5 hours, largely because movement is a lot easier (you just move a movement tray instead of fiddling with around one hundred individual models). No alpha striking "tactics" and no ability to ram your alpha units into the enemy in turn 1, so movement and positioning is key as opposed to combo synergy and listbuilding. No double turn ending the game because you got lucky and rolled a double turn up. Even squash matches seem rarer (they happen still but its definitely not as common). Games dont seem lost after deployment because you brought the wrong list. And of course, all of the factions have rules so there is none of this drip feed of everything so that only the armies with tomes are viable.
We conclude our aos campaign in a couple weeks with a siege. The campaign has been fun but the next aos outing will likely be next fall, giving a years rest from the system, and we will be sticking with path to glory to keep the games smaller and more manageable.
I was very excited for Conquest but they still have not released that game yet.
I like path to glory. I'd actually really like a more kill team style game for AOS that takes path to glory and puts some more detail into a warband. 10-12 models or so, each one with skill ups.
Thats where I think AOS / the universe would truly shine.
Yeah. The problem here locally is no one will play unofficial rulesets. If they made it official - absolutely. Right now that just leaves KOW Vanguard rules which is exactly what I am talking about.
Eldarain wrote: I just play in a corner where the Old World still exists. Weird new armies show up sometimes because of the rifts left from the End Times nearly tearing the world apart.
My armies/events take place in a literal piece of the Old World that survived due to the magic of plot.
Eldarain wrote: I just play in a corner where the Old World still exists. Weird new armies show up sometimes because of the rifts left from the End Times nearly tearing the world apart.
That is great. I am glad to see someone who loves the Old World still keep it.
Since Age of Sigmar doesn't really make any sense to me like how a human becomes a god, I just think that the Old World never did go POOF and it's still there, we are just in Sigmars imagination. Either he got hit in the head, got knocked out, or is just dreaming and this is all his imagination. I am not saying this is true, just how I like to think about it trying to get back into Age of Sigmar.
I actually played a demo/small game of AoS over the weekend at a mates. The game was fun but it confirmed to me what I suspected about the game. It is a beer and pretzels game with lovely models. But that is ok. I can see why many would find the game enjoyable if that is what you’re looking for in a tapbletop game. Unfortunately for me, with my main games being WM/H, Malifaux (and a tiny bit of 54mm Inq!!!) it was like trying to draw a detailed picture using finger painting. I want more depth and precision in my games.
But I can see that it has potential to be a bigger game. I really think that if they had kept the old world setting but in a ruined “after the near apocalypse” state they would have had more initial success. They could have kept the familiar factions in a reduced state, added new subfaction etc and moved the lore on.
The main thing that prevents me from playing at the moment is deeply disliking the background for the Lizardmen and not enjoying summoning as a game mechanic at all. I would probably play in a no-summon environment I think, or one where summoning was limited. I will ignore the background because I think it is very poor overall.
I also hate the naming scheme because I hate bs. I bought the very lovely Ogre Mage from Warhammer Quest for my D&D game and it is fantastic. But the name? "Ogroid Thaumathurge" Gimme a break GW. It is an Ogre Mage. If they want to have copyrightable names they should at least try to get them to sound a wee bit less idiotic.
I'm trying to figure out what army best fits Squats, I mean, Kharadon Overlords. I am thinking maybe Ad Mech but I'm not sure what the airships can be. As soon as I figure it out i'll at least be playing AoS models.
Overread wrote: The intention of this thread is not to air grievances or hates of AoS, but rather to be a spot where people can be encouraged to ask questions that give them pause in starting AoS. This might be understanding the lore a bit better; or the way the grand alliances work or which armies are good to take or how to use endless spells etc....
So use it as an opportunity to ask questions and find answers so that you can get into the Age of Sigmar fantasy game
Sooo in keeping with the opening post the solution you're after is for the denizens of this forum and thread to change the entire premise and structure of AoS for you?
Also I honestly can't help but think that you're trolling for attention when you start stating that the "models are garbage". Not that I expect everyone to love the models, but if you hate the entire model line (which let us not forget is significantly still Fantasy line models) then it says you've no interest in Warhammer Fantasy and no interest in AoS, which means you're just here to sow discord
Or the poster meant the new models rolled out specifically for AOS since its release.
You're being purposefully obtuse to what the poster meant because of your appreciation for the game, and take every disparate opinion as a different level of personal attack depending on the... intensity with which the poster dislikes AOS.
A game that plays nothing like what it replaced, dictated divisive changes in the money maker game for GW, and doesn't "do it" for several gamers is going to be remarked upon whether you like it or not, and it won't be positive most of the time.
Last night I went to the game store to price a brick of dice, and walked back to see what gaming was going on. I saw a small game of AOS with someone trying their best to get a newbie in. He remarked that it was vastly unpopular in the area, and it took effort to find opponents. That remark right there tells me all I need to know. People aren't playing AOS simply because they don't like it. Why? That's a debate. Whether they're "wrong" for not liking it because you DO like it? That isn't even up for debate, and it never should be.
I like to think that I generally don't take criticism of AoS as a personal attack and am generally open with some of the issues it has and that GW still hasn't resolved.
I might be a tiny bit more sensitive in this thread if only because of the fact that too many only use the title of the thread as a means to air their displeasure of the game, which is why I quoted my opening post in the thread. Perhaps I was a little too provocative with the title; but I do think it merits reminding that the intent was to help people into the game through barriers and their own lack of understanding rather than being a focus for general dislike from people who have no interest in wanting to play the game at all.
Overread wrote:I like to think that I generally don't take criticism of AoS as a personal attack and am generally open with some of the issues it has and that GW still hasn't resolved.
I might be a tiny bit more sensitive in this thread if only because of the fact that too many only use the title of the thread as a means to air their displeasure of the game, which is why I quoted my opening post in the thread. Perhaps I was a little too provocative with the title; but I do think it merits reminding that the intent was to help people into the game through barriers and their own lack of understanding rather than being a focus for general dislike from people who have no interest in wanting to play the game at all.
Then, to be quite blunt, you weren't inviting any sort of discussion. The purpose of this thread was to convert the non-players who weren't vehemently against it. Help me help you want to play AOS would have been a better title in that respect. When making a street team/shill/recruitment thread, you need to be clear, ESPECIALLY with a game as divisive as AOS.
auticus wrote: Not as much as it was a couple of years ago but yes to a lot of communities (from what I gather, mainly in the states), AOS is still a filthy word.
A pity. I've been away for a while, and the entire time I've been gone, I don't think I've seen any AoS hate anywhere. I though AoS 2.0 was rather well received, actually. I guess I had just assumed people moved on, but forgot that people like to hold grudges long past their sell by date.
Just Tony wrote: When making a street team/shill/recruitment thread, you need to be clear, ESPECIALLY with a game as divisive as AOS.
Is AoS still divisive?
auticus wrote:Not as much as it was a couple of years ago but yes to a lot of communities (from what I gather, mainly in the states), AOS is still a filthy word.
WAS.
Nowadays I think people just either play it or ignore it. The vocal outcry has died down but at the same time you don't see the swell of players (at least in my region of the US) that we're led to believe exists. The main thing is that people who choose not to play have reasons that may be something other than "I need handheld through it", which seems to have apparently been the intent of this thread.
I think if you ask "Why are you not playing AoS?" then "I think it is gak" has to be a valid answer.
I think the game looks better rules wise than it did when it started. They seem to be hammering the backstory into something a little bit more cohesive. The improved rules are more important to me, because I find the background generally uninspiring and odious, particularly the naming of units and weapons (I hate that everything has to have a super special name, like nothing is ever just a javelin or a sword, it has to be a Celestite Strike Spear or a Cold Steel Runeblade. And the naming of monsters and units is pretty asinine, even by GW standards).
The models are hit and miss. Some of the new models are absolutely awesome, others to me are over designed and suffer from really bad scale creep due to the change to the bigger bases, which annoys me becasue 25mm has been the standard for this kind of gaming for decades. It seems a pointlessly petty and controlling move to try to keep people from using their models in other systems easily. The naming schemes and scrapping of lines likewise seem more driven by a certain view of IP than a desire to make a good game or a compelling world.
That said, there is some really creative stuff coming out of the game. The Deepkin are very cool, and GW predictably pulled off an undersea empire with more panache than any other company. The new spectral army is very cool too, and a good army for new players to learn. A lot of the new demonic stuff is awesome, Tzeentch is getting more love than it has in years.
So it is a mixed bag for me. I am going to give the game a try if only because I think it will be easy to get a pick up game, but I am not happy with all aspects and some of them have been a particular barrier for entry for me.
Actually, the biggest is probably that I am confused about what books I need to buy and what is needed for a standard game, which is a problem with all GW games these days as far as I can see. There seem to be two different big rule books and then I also need a battle tome and then also to be up to date on the FAQs and stuff. Given other companies can put army lists and core rules in one book this seems excessive.
Da Boss wrote: I think if you ask "Why are you not playing AoS?" then "I think it is gak" has to be a valid answer.
I'm not sure it is a valid one. A valid answer would why you think it is gak. "I don't wanna" is hardly the beginning of a productive discussion.
The models are hit and miss. Some of the new models are absolutely awesome, others to me are over designed and suffer from really bad scale creep due to the change to the bigger bases, which annoys me becasue 25mm has been the standard for this kind of gaming for decades.
25mm hasn't been the standard for miniature games in years. I don't think there's a major miniature game out there under 28mm, with many of them being 32mm these days. That's not an AoS problem.
Actually, the biggest is probably that I am confused about what books I need to buy and what is needed for a standard game, which is a problem with all GW games these days as far as I can see. There seem to be two different big rule books and then I also need a battle tome and then also to be up to date on the FAQs and stuff. Given other companies can put army lists and core rules in one book this seems excessive.
Unlike 40k, you don't need Battletomes to play AoS. All the warscrolls are available for free, either on GW's website or through the app. The Battletomes have abilities and mods you can use to customize your army, but they aren't required.
You don't need the big rulebook either. The actual rules are like 18 pages and also free on the website. The rulebook has some things you might want (matched play scenarios, updated rules for older armies, allegiance abilities), but how useful that stuff is might depend on what army you decide to play and whether you also have the GHB or not. Someone else will have to go into detail on this as I haven't really delved into 2.0 too much yet.
The General's Handbook is not technically required either, but it is the location of the unit points, so if you want to have a 2000 pt game, for example, you'll need the GHB for that. The points are not given away for free unlike most everything else. There's also additional matched play scenarios.
Malign Sorcery has the rules for endless spells. Again, optional, but probably something worth picking up. I don't have it myself.
Anyway, if you want to try out the game, you really just need models as all the required rules are provided for free. If you want to play the game competitively, you'll want the GHB and Battletome for your army, possibly the big rulebook and malign sorcery.
25mm is the standard for bases, is what I meant. 1 inch, it has always been a popular standard because it is useful for all sorts of games. The move to 32mm bases for normal infantry I find obnoxious.
I really appreciate you clarifying the books. Thank you. I still think it is offputting that there are so many and it is kind of ambiguous which ones you "need" to play, you know what I mean? Like I want to play with points, so I need to get the GHB. I did not know that was where the points were, and assumed they were in the battletome. Since I do not care for the background, I am happy to avoid the battletomes and just buy the generals handbook.
What you get in Battletomes is more than points you get:
Army Allegiance Abilities and battle traites - unique army wide bonuses that apply to the army.
Faction specific relics and equipment for leaders.
Spell Lores for Wizards from the faction. In AoS wizards can only use spells from the army allegiance that you're a part of and only if the wizard is a direct unit from that group (ergo its not allied). Allied wizards can only use the spells on their warscroll and (if you choose to use it) any realm spell lores.
Faction specific Battalions - formations of units that have a bonus or ability.
Any other additional rules or equipment that the army has. For example Daughters of Khaine get their Prayer table.
So a Battletome has a general complete list of bonuses and abilities which are important for the faction. Generals Handbook has "some" of these for armies that don't yet have a Battletome, but does not cover them all.
I fully agree that at present AoS is messy when it comes to armies that don't yet have a Battletome. The shining hope is that after 2018 being a heavy 40K year, we can cross our fingers that 2019 turns into a heavy AoS year and GW have resources to repeat what they've done to clean things up and make it more obvious what is needed for each group and what each groups role and intention is.
Also the Warscroll Builder on the GW community website is pretty good. It has points and other basic stats listed so you can use that to build an army from. So points are free on there, whilst warscrolls are on the unit tabs in the store. It's more about the lores and abilities that bind an army together where you need a specific book.
Baring in mind some of the earlier books (such as the Grand Alliance books) are a bit out of date now. AoS 2.0 is really akin to a 1.0 release with the earlier stuff being closer to a beta.
Considering how messy GW scheduling is, expect about 2/3 get a Battletome or update before the next major GHB update. That's one of the two biggest issues with the GW production system. I think only 6th Edition saw all the armies addressed, with one of the books being split in 7th.
Da Boss wrote: Like I want to play with points, so I need to get the GHB. I did not know that was where the points were, and assumed they were in the battletome.
The newer battletomes include points but are quickly outdated, as the GHB is updated yearly while the battletomes are not. It gives them an opportunity to rebalance the game as needed. Like comparing the Daughters of Khaine battletome (came first) to the GHB'18, the points for the individual units are the same, but the battalion point values have increased.
I still run into the problems of no one really to play it with. GW has few people who play it (mostly its 40k, but with the small size of the tables been seeing more kill team and such) I have 2 buddies I have dragged kicking and screaming into it, but that is successful only because C7 is supposed to be making an AoSRPG, and my buds love some C7 and rpg much more than tabletop. A couple are plotting to RP as Stormcast if they are allowable and so have bought some of those models to go for a char concept.
It might be that this is why GW is pushing Skirmish forward "early " In my view. I'd have thought they'd wait for more battletomes to be out, but perhaps they want skirmish out there sooner to tempt more people into AoS the same way killteam does for 40K
Overread wrote: It might be that this is why GW is pushing Skirmish forward "early " In my view. I'd have thought they'd wait for more battletomes to be out, but perhaps they want skirmish out there sooner to tempt more people into AoS the same way killteam does for 40K
While even with 2nd edition, AoS as a mass game has little appeal to me, but I LOVE the original skirmish and would equally like to see it expanded on. The game lends itself to be a better mordheim than mordheim and campaigns in hammerhal are a blast.
Da Boss wrote: And the naming of monsters and units is pretty asinine, even by GW standards
Ripperdactyls were named during WHFB though, so AoS at least does not hold the top spot yet.
Random tangent: for funsies I went through the list of Nighthaunt units and separated them into their component nouns/adjectives!
Banshee
Banshees
Black
Blade
Blade
Cairn
Chain
Chain
Coach
Dread
Dread
Executioner
Ghast
Ghasts
Gheist
Glaive
Grim
Guardian
Harridans
Harrow
Hex
Horde
Hosts
Knight
Lord
Myrmourn
Rasp
Reapers
Revenants
Scythe
Shrouds
Souls
Spirit
Spirit
Stalkers
Tomb
Torment
Wraith
Wraith
Wraiths
Remember thst the 'popularity' of AoS is recorded by the huge increase in sales, not visible fan base.
People are not playing AoS in great numbers, what they are doing is buying AoS miniatures which is attributed to AoS.
It should really be attributed to four factors.
1. AoS, because despite what i say above it isn't a dead system.
2. A general renaissance in sales post Kirby, mostly linked to more client sensitive pricing policies..
3. A rush of panic buying of deleted or soon tom be deleted items. hough this phase is now over.
4. Continuing popularity of legacy gaming via Oldhammer, 9th Age or Kings of War.
I don't think AoS is even popular at GW. After 2.0 came out, there's been six months of basically nothing. Old battletomes weren't updated. Factions haven't gotten their endless spells or warscroll cards. I think a faction or two doesn't even have a wizard yet. New better lore, then it just stops. We got Beasts of Chaos, and I can't remember if there was anything else. From what I can tell, AoS's biggest success is Shadespire, and that's convincing probably about 0% of people to try out AoS.
Meanwhile, we got a ton of stuff for Kill Team, all but wiping AoS from memory, and 40k has had a constant barrage of codices and releases. I don't even play 40k, but I've bought some of them.
I really love AoS's design style. When they release a new army, they almost universally knock it out of the park. Sylvaneth, Deepkin, DoK, Kharadron, Nighthaunts, Ironjawz - just some really, really amazing models. I really think AoS has what it takes to be as popular as 40k, it just doesn't get the same level of support, and without that support, it doesn't get the same mindshare.
I don't think AoS's future is in 2,000 pt matched play. It has a lot of strengths, but I don't think matched play is one of them. The people who seem to be the happiest with AoS all say they play skirmish or Path to Glory. MongooseMatt, the biggest AoS fan ever, stopped caring about the game when the game dropped the narrative elements in favor of matched play. Same with me. I think, as a community, we should probably focus on a different way to play AoS such that it isn't just 40k-lite.
It's been doing pretty good here locally in the Phoenix, AZ, metropolis. There are regular game nights at the GW and several of the local stores, and they even run tournaments on a regular basis. Maybe not as much as Steamroller or 40K, but I see more on that than I have for those not the Big 3.
I think its more that GW were focused on finishing 40K rather than shifting all focus onto AoS. Also AoS wasn't forgotten about for that period of time, it just wasn't the primary focus of GW. Perhaps a mistake, but I think rolling out 2.0 was a solid move and the game did need it.
What it now needs is for 40K to take a step back and let AoS march forward, whcih should happen considering that GW has now released most of the Codex for 40K (they've actually been really slow these last few months as Specialist games and AoS have taken a bit more focus - Cultists and Space Wolves lagged quite a bit after the earlier part of the year).
GW need someone in charge of ...I dunno, what would you call it, the new player experience?
Since I started running D&D in my school, some of the kids have gotten really interested in fantasy miniatures. They want to start AoS but they are pretty intimidated by the sheer amount of crap out there. They should get rid of this idea of charging for rules entirely and put everything up for free, or alternatively, update points and so on for everything at once in one centralised place.
At the moment the SC boxes give a great starting point in terms of model purchases. The game is also easy to get into in terms of model count required. It is a shame that the disorganised approach to rules releases is a stumbling block, because everything else is in place.
I might try and teach them the game (sneaky way for me to learn the game as well ) so this advice is useful because I want to spare their parents any extra spend. I tried getting the kids into KoW but they just prefer the look of AoS.
Charging for rules isn't the problem and having lots of FAQ documents isn't either. A beginner just needs a clear set of directions.
To Play X army you get Core Rules and X Battletome and play.
To get started that really is all you need for AoS. The complicating factor is that not every army has its own Battletome and its not always clear where an armies rules actually are. Even Generals Handbook doesn't cover them all.
Once a person is through the initial battles and getting into the game they can expand with Malign Sorcery; with the FAQ documents and the Generals Handbook updates. Most lf that latter lot is either answering common questions or updating minor elements of the printed core rules to better balance the game.
I don't think GW will ever go free because things like the Big Rulebook and the Battletomes are more than just game rules. They are artwork, lore, painting, guides, showcase - they are a huge smattering of everything. And lets face it it works really well; most people have a good grasp of the basic lore of the world they play in and the faction they play as. GW has built a lot of lore around their titles and it really helps with immersion. It really helps to tie people into their armies for more than just pretty models and statistical rules. It feeds the creative ideas when modelling and painting.
You only have to look at the wealth of conversions, home stories; army tales and stuff that you get with 40K and Fantasy and AoS that you just don't tend to see from a lot of other franchises where the lore is often far more simplistic.
I think charging for it when it is so disorganised compounds the problem. The game is much better set up than it used to be for people to get into, in terms of price, required model count and force building rules. But it seems they have to drop the ball somewhere and that seems to be organisation of the rules. It is a shame, but the GW design studio has always been unashamedly unprofessional.
Agreed and its really odd that GW lets this confusion continue when they could resolve it a single A4 page or less of details of the basic future of AoS. As they've already got long term plans they could already say that "XYZ" factions will be combined in the future etc.. whilst factions J and L will be small alliance focused forces etc..
I figure the only reason they don't is to prevent any 3rd party jumping the gun. If GW said Scourge Privateers were going to be their own full army then you can bet the 3rd parties would start mining the lore and cranking out units based on the lore of the game as alternate sculpts before GW ever got off the ground. Whilst a vibrant market of alternative parts and models is good for gamers in general; it has its downsides in how it has altered GW's behaviour and attitude.
Then again at least GW isn't like old Spartan Games - brimming with ideas and sharing concepts way before they are viable products or event past testing phases .
Lets face it. The vast vast majority of people expect matched play and points.
I cannot count the number of times new players have given the :wtf: face when they try to understand what non-matched play is, because its so anti anything in modern game design, and want to turn directly to the points.
They expect that to be the core game and belong to the core game rulebook.
To play the game ideally you should need: the core rulebook. the battletome that your army belongs to. If you are "souping" then all of the battletomes that your army belongs to.
The generals handbook which has point updates.
Thats it.
The core rules should be in the core rulebook. The battletomes being what they are today is fine. The GHB being what it is is also fine.
Whats not fine are the rules being shotgunned across multiple sources.
That is neither new player friendly nor veteran friendly. It is rather a giant pain in the ...
Whether or not AOS is a great mass battle game is largely in the eye of the beholder. I think for a game that focuses on individual model movement (40k... AOS) that the less models on the table the better.
Which is why I'm drawn more towards Killteam and a "skirmish" version of AOS over a full 2000 pt game. The tedium of moving 80-150 individual models, or watching my opponent do so (twice in a row when they get double turn) is something that I think needs reviewed.
It's definitely something that the "Warhammer Community" site should be addressing. Even a link to it from their main page would be helpful.
Now, they do have a "get started" page as well as kits to get you rolling. It doesn't do a good job on explaining what else you need, though. And as someone has mentioned, we're in the second GHB, and there are many "armies" which have not been left to the sands of Khemri or lost to the Green Lady, which have yet to receive a proper Battletome.
To continue the point further, some armies have models from mixed groups, such as Death's tomes, and are very crazily mixed up in theme in the Order group, which makes it difficult to track down without a Battletome. Their sale site is an absolute mess if you are looking at Order with 22 groups of armies when compared to Death's 8 or Destruction's 12 (and most of those are mixed company).
And then you have the old grognards who still have Khemri or Green Lady's forces who still play them, and potentially get another player interested in them, only to find out they are completely 2nd hand now.
I have never seen what GW defines as Open Play being used in AoS, or any wargame, ever. But even if I had the idea of giving rules to play without rules is silly. Narrative, on the other hand, I have seen plenty of. Not nearly as much as Matched Play and YMMV depending on the group but it is a not-insignificant part of play.
Charistoph wrote: It's definitely something that the "Warhammer Community" site should be addressing. Even a link to it from their main page would be helpful.
Now, they do have a "get started" page as well as kits to get you rolling. It doesn't do a good job on explaining what else you need, though. And as someone has mentioned, we're in the second GHB, and there are many "armies" which have not been left to the sands of Khemri or lost to the Green Lady, which have yet to receive a proper Battletome.
To continue the point further, some armies have models from mixed groups, such as Death's tomes, and are very crazily mixed up in theme in the Order group, which makes it difficult to track down without a Battletome. Their sale site is an absolute mess if you are looking at Order with 22 groups of armies when compared to Death's 8 or Destruction's 12 (and most of those are mixed company).
And then you have the old grognards who still have Khemri or Green Lady's forces who still play them, and potentially get another player interested in them, only to find out they are completely 2nd hand now.
I think it was a mistake to break up the factions so much. But the Beasts Of Chaos book shows how you can get around this. I'm pretty sure Order and Destruction could get something similar.
I've been interested in AoS for a while, but while most of the newly released minis are very nice they don't scratch my particular itch...an Empire style army. I REALLY liked oldhammer Empire and something similar to it might draw me into AoS. Though I guess it's possible no such army will be forthcoming.
I think cleaning up the factions and giving everything a battletome would go a long way toward making the game more accessible to new players and old. If I had any input in GW's business strategy, this would be my first suggestion.
auticus wrote: I've not seen a narrative game that had no points yet.
Path to Glory?
As for the three ways to play - Open Play has a bunch of random scenarios without a lot of overhead, or cool scenarios that break the game in some way (sky scenarios), where balance is up to the players and the points don't matter. Narrative play has stuff you do between matches (like upgrading units, doing that siege minigame, campaigns) where the game can be intentionally unbalanced and that's okay. And matched play is a (supposedly) balanced match between armies, with the better general being the victor.
I think it is relatively simple to get into AoS, but it is difficult to know how to continue from there. There are three levels of starter set. From there, big rulebook, GHB. If you want to continue with Stormcast or Nighthaunt, their battletomes are available and up to date. But if you don't want Stormcast or Nighthaunt, it gets a little challenging. I think everything that has a Start Collecting has a battletome, but they aren't all up to date.
I don't think Path to Glory is trying use its structure to balance the game, necessarily, but instead to give a progression system in which to give players guidance on what to buy/build next. PtG creates very unbalanced games, but that's okay because it was never trying to. If people min-max those choices, they may ultimately be ruining their own experience because PtG isn't about min-maxing. But min-maxers will be min-maxers.... what can you do, right?
Panzerkanzler wrote:I've been interested in AoS for a while, but while most of the newly released minis are very nice they don't scratch my particular itch...an Empire style army. I REALLY liked oldhammer Empire and something similar to it might draw me into AoS. Though I guess it's possible no such army will be forthcoming.
I wouldn't dismiss the possibility so readily. They are still officially being sold on their site unlike the Khemri and Bretonnians. They are just split up between the Free Peoples, Devoted of Sigmar, Ironweld Arsenal, and Collegiate Arcane. You can even run them all together, for the most part, if I remember things properly.
But the Empire and the Elves point out the army issues most glaringly in the transition from FB to AoS in that they are so spread out. Realistically, it makes some sense to split up the Wood Elf book between the tree spirits and the elves, but there was no reason to split up the most of the rest of the armies like this, especially if you're designing the game to allow a freeform army build to be in place as it is.
Truthfully, I expect them to introduce a Battletome that will be remarkably close to the old Empire book, much how the Beastmen book is remarkably close to a combination of the old Beasts of Chaos and 7th Ed Beastmen books. It's more a question of "when" rather than "if" for me. If there is a lot of differentiation it will be focusing more on how mixed the old Empire was, such as how Nuln was its own thing, so that it would be a mix of Free Peoples and Ironweld, and then another Battletome which focuses more on the Devoted of Sigmar mixed with the Free Peoples, and so on.
EnTyme wrote:I think cleaning up the factions and giving everything a battletome would go a long way toward making the game more accessible to new players and old. If I had any input in GW's business strategy, this would be my first suggestion.
Specifically to AoS, maybe. My first suggestion would be to split up their systems so they aren't concentrating so much at one time on one of their systems. Their biggest issue is that it leaves massive holes in their systems for years on end. With their current Warscroll/Datasheet setup it shouldn't really be hard to have development going on both 40K and AoS at the same time so edition changes can be caught up rather quickly, and then add eDocs for new model kits later one, and one can alternate releases rather reliably.
Of course, that depends on internal company structure being sufficient to the task. If they only can have enough developers to work on one project at a time, that would be one reason for their lop-sided release schedules.
Sqorgar wrote: I don't think Path to Glory is trying use its structure to balance the game, necessarily, but instead to give a progression system in which to give players guidance on what to buy/build next. PtG creates very unbalanced games, but that's okay because it was never trying to. If people min-max those choices, they may ultimately be ruining their own experience because PtG isn't about min-maxing. But min-maxers will be min-maxers.... what can you do, right?
Agreed. Narrative play has never meant no structure or balance mechanism at all, it just means the mechanism is loose and tied to the narrative feel over having an equal balance of power.
To that end I feel like certain open play elements, like sky battles, are far more suited to narrative play.
Overread wrote: It might be that this is why GW is pushing Skirmish forward "early " In my view. I'd have thought they'd wait for more battletomes to be out, but perhaps they want skirmish out there sooner to tempt more people into AoS the same way killteam does for 40K
While even with 2nd edition, AoS as a mass game has little appeal to me, but I LOVE the original skirmish and would equally like to see it expanded on. The game lends itself to be a better mordheim than mordheim and campaigns in hammerhal are a blast.
This x100
AoS is a great game at skirmish size. Loses most of its charm when playing at tournament point levels.
Orlanth wrote: Remember thst the 'popularity' of AoS is recorded by the huge increase in sales, not visible fan base.
People are not playing AoS in great numbers, what they are doing is buying AoS miniatures which is attributed to AoS.
Respectfully, I’d say thats demonstrably false. One example is looking at Adepticon attendance. AoS first Adepticon Championship tourney: About 40 folks. Second year, double that. This year, it more than doubled yet again at 184, with waitlist. A separate Team tourney is filled to capacity at 152, with waitlist. I may be wrong, but I believe these events sold out within hours of open registration. AoS Youngbloods Tournament is the only AoS (pure AoS, not WH:Underworlds, which are also strong) event not sold out, currently at half capacity.
Kings of War has one event currently at full capacity as I type this, and their biggest and most prominent event(from what I gather, correct me if I’m wrong. It sounds prominient lol ) Clash of Kings 2019 North America Championship is capped at 48, with remaining capacity at present.
9th Ages “Adepticon-adjacent” tourney titled Cornerhammer has 14 signups as I type this.
I can’t find any Oldhammer events as I peruse the Adepticon events list. Do they still happen at Adepticon?
All of those events could reach capacity before registration closes, and that would be awesome for the wargaming community, but just look at the numbers disparity and speed at which the events are selling. The hype and ardour to play seems to be vastly in AoS’s favor.
Granted this is only one example, but I think its pretty telling and counters your premise of “People are not playing AoS in great numbers”. If that is true, then they are playing the other games you list at #4 in even fewer numbers.
Orlanth wrote: It should really be attributed to four factors.
I think your premise is mistaken and this list is incredibly suspect, but I do think its missing a 5th factor: Collectors + Painters. Don’t discount the fact that some great looking mini’s, barring personal taste, have been released for AoS. A painter could hate AoS, but still appreciate the kits coming out and buy it up.
Orlanth wrote: 1. AoS, because despite what i say above it isn't a dead system.
And judging from the numbers above, its probably the healthiest system. For instance, imagine the shitstorm if the Kings of War and AoS numbers for Adepticon listed above were flipped. AoS would be hailed by every hater and troll as an epic flop, I’d wager.
Orlanth wrote: 2. A general renaissance in sales post Kirby, mostly linked to more client sensitive pricing policies..
I’d factor in increased community interaction, post Kirby more than pricing. Sure GW made some great discounted battleforces and a good bulk of the rules are free, but its still on average head and shoulders above any of their competitors in terms of money needed to buy in. That hasn’t really changed. GWs attitude toward its fans is certainly a paradigm shift, and I think that counts for more than pricing.
Orlanth wrote: 3. A rush of panic buying of deleted or soon tom be deleted items. hough this phase is now over.
I think this was/is vastly overstated. Most of the stuff cut, barring Tombkings were and still are in abundance secondhand as well as having cheaper alternatives from other companies.
Orlanth wrote: 4. Continuing popularity of legacy gaming via Oldhammer, 9th Age or Kings of War.
Like above, I think I think this is overstated, as well as less and less true as time passes. Not to say that those games aren’t popular in their own fashion, but that they are somehow fueling AoS’s sales growth seems suspect. Once again, use the Adepticon numbers as a barometer.
What I mean is, as AoS has gotten and gets more and more distinct from its predecessor, the contribution of those three games systems has/will decline. For example, who is bringing their Kharadron Overlords to a 6th Edition WHFB or 9th or KoW game? Do any of those systems support the newer releases? And even when those new releases can be backwards/cross compatible, the models scale/footprint is different, look at the new black coach for example.
I always looked at the “AoS is only selling because of X game” with a wary eye. It usually came from the mouths of people who couldn’t countenance AoS being successful. There is also really no way to prove it as well, so its a bunk statement meant to promote ones preferred non-AoSWHFB successor, while backhandedly downplaying the growth of AoS.
A few months ago, I was also of the opinion that AoS wasn't really being played. This mainly derived from my initial views of the launch. Which, to be fair, was pretty awful to say the least.
When I actually started looking into it, I found the exact opposite. AoS was actually quite popular, filling up on game nights in a pretty large store. They recently just started an escalation league and it far exceeded expected signups with about 40 people joining.
This is of course all anecdotal, but I think a lot of people are probably in the same situation I have, and not really looked into where and the times it's being played. Instead, they are remembering it's initial release and not realizing how much it's really grown.
Sasori wrote: When I actually started looking into it, I found the exact opposite. AoS was actually quite popular, filling up on game nights in a pretty large store.
Maybe the AoS players were so tired of getting gak on by 40k players that the intentionally moved their games to a different night to avoid them...
I've been out of AoS too long (I've still been buying the models to paint, but haven't been playing), but from what I can tell, AoS players seem to be fairly happy with the game (outside of the double turns) and with their community, but they seem to be somewhat wary of proselytizing anymore.
Got into AoS when it game out...really enjoyed for awhile. Then bettter spells, points costs, command traits....liked it even more.
But the only "tactics" to the game are the type of minutia listbuilding garbage that I hate. If I had local players to play narrative games with, I'd get back in....but I hate the competitive scene so much I wanna puke.
But 40K and AoS rules systems are nearly the same now! There's certainly far less difference than there used to be back when rank and file was a big change in movement and combat resolution.
Sasori wrote: I think Nels hit the nail on the head.
A few months ago, I was also of the opinion that AoS wasn't really being played. This mainly derived from my initial views of the launch. Which, to be fair, was pretty awful to say the least.
When I actually started looking into it, I found the exact opposite. AoS was actually quite popular, filling up on game nights in a pretty large store. They recently just started an escalation league and it far exceeded expected signups with about 40 people joining.
This is of course all anecdotal, but I think a lot of people are probably in the same situation I have, and not really looked into where and the times it's being played. Instead, they are remembering it's initial release and not realizing how much it's really grown.
IT is definately a regional thing, I have had folks point out events I was trying to get going as evidence of the game being alive and well and telling me "see, here is a group you can play with". But I have noticed that games are popular based more on geography than anything else., goes back to "one man's trash is anothers treasure" around here, guildball and infinity (I dont like either) can clear tables even from magic.
AoS is slowly picking up where I live, but I see a very clear distinction between new players and old WHFB players. Many WHFB players are still very salty over the entire thing and outright refuse to try AoS out. However, we are getting newer players in and they are excited about the entire system.
Eventually the older generation will just phase out and a new one that doesn't have the same nostalgia for WHFB will be building up the community. At best there are a few WHFB who are just core gamers(they'll play anything as long as it is fun) who will occasionally bring out their old units for a game or two and they seem to be having fun with the new system.
I'm playing AoS, but infrequently. I have a Nurgle daemons army that I use in both AoS and as part of a daemons army in 40k.
The reason I'm not playing more AoS, beyond the local player count favoring 40K is that few of the armies really appeal to me.
I like the Fyreslayers in concept, but the models are expensive and the army is reliant on numbers. The army also lacks variety and seems to have been shelved by GW in with a lack of new models and rules. If the army got one more new unit and a new battletome, maybe some endless spells, I would probably start them. And before anyone starts 'but Fyreslayers don't use magic' there are definitely moments where Fyreslayers use magic-like rituals and abilities in the black library stories. I could see that making a functional conversion over to AoS.
If I could field a full daemons of chaos army in AoS like I can in 40K without resorting to the significantly weaker Grand Alliance: Chaos Alliegence abilities and artifacts, I would.
So it's not so much that I don't want to play AoS.
Warhammer and 40k were never truly alive at my local store and even the large store 50 minutes away doesn't garner much AoS activity. I'll be honest and say that I've become rather lazy and don't want to spend the time driving down there to potentially (maybe) find a game. Miniature gaming, besides 40k really seems to be on life support where I am at.
I suspect it comes down to a lot of different factors, but I don't have time or money to buy and paint two armies to evangelize the game. The game isn't good enough to me yet to warrant that as the background still feels really soulless to me even though I've read all the books. Perhaps if my daughter, coming in April, ever has an interest then I'll dip a toe back in, but my hobby time and money has really turned to D&D and board games these days.
I asked at the local GW store if there was anyone playing locally and he said there was maybe a pair of guys playing infrequently and I would have to try and arrange it online. I might see if he has time to show me the ropes when I have my stuff sorted.
Meanwhile, SE of the famous Las Vegas in the less-scorching-now-that-we-are-in-December Valley of the Sun, they have regular game days at several of the local game stores, and a pretty regular tournament schedule. While I don't play, I keep up on the Facebook group where such announcements are made. It's not quite as prevalent as Warmachine, 40K, or X-Wing, but I see more on it than I do most other systems.
I like the Fyreslayers in concept, but the models are expensive and the army is reliant on numbers.
Daughters of Khain also suffer the same with very expensive basic troops. It's because GW took models that were elite choices in large armies and made them core troop choices for new armies. The result is that we have a model that has changed its market focus without changing its price. It's honestly an anomaly and its odd that GW hasn't moved to change this as it clearly holds those armies back.
The original price of those models was high because GW never expected you to buy more than a couple of boxes of them. They were a small part of bigger armies designed to be thrown down on their own and used as an elite choice. Now that they are troops GW should safely lower the price on them as gamers are expected to purchase more individual boxes. Or if they don't want to reprice they should release a new boxed set with them in and give that a new price.
Daughters of Khaine is weird in that the Witch Aelves are expensive as hell and a number of their hero models are only found in the Bloodwrack Shrine, which is direct only. They don't have a Start Collecting and the Blood Coven box went out of print the moment it launched.
I suspect that they'll get their Start Collecting in January (and it'll basically be the Blood Coven box), but right now, they are in a weird place as far as major parts of their army are concerned.
They have a Christmas bundle, at least. Fyreslayers have a Start Collecting which comes with 10 vulkites, but you really need at least 60 to be viable and they are $60/10 on their own.
Daughters do have one bonus in that (esp if you use magnets) the Blood cauldron kit basically has all their leaders in it barring Morathi. So for less than you'd get separately, you get almost their entire roster - and they are all viable and valuable choices.
The Blood Coven set went out of print, but there was quite a lot of it in the distribution network. 3rd parties were still getting stock of it quite a long while after it went out of print although I think its now gone. Though yes the new army boxed set easily replaces it.
One bonus both Daughter and Fyreslayers have is that because their ranges are so small in variety of models, they are actually all pretty much worth buying and using. There's no chaff in those armies. It's also really nice to see GW making functional working armies with very small model counts. Though more would be nice to see!
Personally I'm hoping the DoK embrace things like the old Dark Aelf beast trainer and introduce more fantastic monsters into the army.
Overread wrote: Daughters do have one bonus in that (esp if you use magnets) the Blood cauldron kit basically has all their leaders in it barring Morathi. So for less than you'd get separately, you get almost their entire roster - and they are all viable and valuable choices.
The Blood Coven set went out of print, but there was quite a lot of it in the distribution network. 3rd parties were still getting stock of it quite a long while after it went out of print although I think its now gone. Though yes the new army boxed set easily replaces it.
One bonus both Daughter and Fyreslayers have is that because their ranges are so small in variety of models, they are actually all pretty much worth buying and using. There's no chaff in those armies. It's also really nice to see GW making functional working armies with very small model counts. Though more would be nice to see!
Personally I'm hoping the DoK embrace things like the old Dark Aelf beast trainer and introduce more fantastic monsters into the army.
DoK also have quite a few metal Witch Aelves available second hand. I am currently running a 20 Aelf squad of Metal Witches. Sure, the plastic looks better, but the nostalgia look of the old ones is a bit charming. Plus they are not as greedy for space(ie. very simple poses) so storing them is less of a hassle.
I also agree that it would be nice to see some of the dark elf line move more to DoK. Like the War Hydra, sorceress, and sorceress on the black dragon. I was actually surprised that the Sorceress didn't make the cut as she kinda has the Witch Aelf asthetic for the most part. It would have been an easy way for them to add an HQ that doesn't come in a box with ton of other bits. Hell, if they had added Sorceress to DoK they could easily have released a Start Collecting without relying on the Bloodwrack shrine.
AoS interests me. I had a small mix of Orcs, Vampires, and a ton of High Elves back in the 6th/7th days. I’ve since sold the elves and orcs. I loved Black Orcs, dwarfs, and everything involving wood elves. I find the new system intimidating. I don’t know how armies are formed, how the game is played, I find the new factions a bit kooky, and I fear the game seems like 40j allies where “grand alliance order” is like Imperium with access to a plethora of builds and broken combos while something like orcs might struggle to be relevant. Obviously I haven’t had a deep dive into it to figure it out but that’s what has me cautious to dip my toes in.
Bremon wrote: AoS interests me. I had a small mix of Orcs, Vampires, and a ton of High Elves back in the 6th/7th days. I’ve since sold the elves and orcs. I loved Black Orcs, dwarfs, and everything involving wood elves. I find the new system intimidating. I don’t know how armies are formed, how the game is played, I find the new factions a bit kooky, and I fear the game seems like 40j allies where “grand alliance order” is like Imperium with access to a plethora of builds and broken combos while something like orcs might struggle to be relevant. Obviously I haven’t had a deep dive into it to figure it out but that’s what has me cautious to dip my toes in.
Grand Alliances work on several levels.
First you have the grand alliance in the lore. This is a loosely allied group of factions who have the same general agenda even if they dont' actually get along. For example Order are only allied because they all hate and loath chaos and generally build settlements and civilizations. Destruction hate Chaos too, but they are more your nomadic and warrior peoples who are not going to found great settlements or build noble houses and such. Death are, well, pretty much undead and allied to Nagash in some form and Chaos is, well Chaos.
In the game each Grand Alliance has distinct armies with a battletome (or rules in the Generals Handbook) can be fielded as its own army. An army has not just units, but traits, army wide abilities, spell lores (for faction wizards to pick from), battalions (like formations - groups of units that get a bonus though the battalion itself comes with a cost in points too).
Each army can also take a limited number of allied units which cannot be more than 1/4 in points and model count (the warscroll builder on the GW website helps with the maths on this). For example at 2K points you can only take 400 points worth of allies. These allies are further limited as each army (with a battletome) has a strict limited pool of armies it can draw from in the Grand Alliance.
For example Daughters of Khaine can draw allies from basically the entire pool of factions based on the old Dark Elves army (so Scourge Privateers, Shadowblades, etc...) and the new Idoneth Deepkin. They can also take Stormcast Eternals who are the only Order army who can take allies from every other Order force.
So as you can see whilst you can have allies there are limits on what you can and cannot take within the army. Furthermore the point and unit count limits mean that you can't overwhelm your army with another force so it keeps its original army flavour and feel.
Now there ARE ways to take whatever you want, you can take an army that is a Grand Alliance army which lets you pick from whatever you want. But you lose out on the army wide traits and abilities. Furthermore wizards can only take spells from the spell lore in their army Battletome, which means allied wizard can't take any spells that are not on their warscroll (because you're not using their battletome to form your army around)
Chaos also has some tricks for taking more allied forces within a Chaos force, but there are limits there too (I'm not as familiar with them though).
SO Basically yes there are allies, yes you can get messy. But there are limits and in general pure armies with a few allies are the most well rounded and powerful. The "soup" isn't isn't really here like it is with Warhammer.
Thank you very much for that info Overread, that actually has me more interested in AoS. Soup, CP generation and stratagems running rampant are putting a serious damper on my enjoyment of 40k these days. I’ll have to dig further under the surface of AoS, I’m still a sucker for fantasy settings. I was pretty irate with GW for blowing up the Old World even though I was on a long hiatus from their games at that time. 17 years ago I was a big big fan of Tyrion and Teclis lol.
Right now Aelves are in a little bit of a mess faction wise.
After they captured Slaanesh and sealed him within a prison they started to harvest the souls trapped within his belly. Teclis took his allocation of souls and tried to forge new bodies for them and made the Idoneth Deepkin. But their souls are damaged and withered and they must act like soul-vampires sucking the souls from others to survive. They live within the deep seas and when they come to land to war they bring with them magic that lets the wind of magic flow like water so that their sharks, eels and great beasts of the deep can rise to war with them upon land.
Morathi has taken the title of Oracle of Khaine and stolen his heart (the only part thus found of the old god). She syphons the energy he would get from worship to herself (as she got eaten by Slaanesh but escaped on her own - so unlike the other great Aelves that survived she didn't get to become a god). He Daughters of Khaine are women focused and shadowy - a powerful glass cannon style army that dances over the battlefield to strike with blades.
Wood elves got split too as their treekin allies basically gave up on the Aelves and are now their own thing. The Treekin have their own faction and power whilst the old Aleves that once fought by their side are now allies at best; although the Aelve half hasnt' yet had any battletome.
There's also talk that Tyrion has made Angelic Aelves with his allocation of souls and that Malarion has made demonic/draconic style ones (in appearance only they are not chaos born). Though as yet neither of those forces have arisen.
The other Aelf forces are a bit hit and miss in terms of if we know if they will continue on their own or not. Darkling Covens has their own page in the Generals Handbook with faction abilities and the like and they've a fair decent core to an army. Others we just have no idea on what will happen to them.
AoS also has battalions like formations for 40K, but they are not the be-all and end-all. They are nice to have but can be quite expensive to take (and that's even with minimum forces allocated to the batallion and not bumping up units to larger squads). So they are a choice to make, but not the prime focus.
I would say that the structural choices of AoS are generally very good, where it lets itself down is the number of factions that have battletomes at this stage. Whilst its been out for longer than 8th edition 40L, AoS has had to wrestle with its early days when the focus was far different to what it is now; that and the last year was a very heavy 40K period. Many are hoping that 2019 is going to be the year of AoS and that it will get a similar treatment to what 40K had this year - with a lot of Battletomes rolling out.
Many are also hoping that a handful of the most early tomes also get updated as they are not in keeping withthe changes and maturing of the rules of AoS
1) release the books for everything that has not had a book yet. Its well past tiime.
2) after this, begin going through and solving all of the false choices in the game and broaden the bell curve of power, both internally and externally.
Externally, the balance is broader than it has been in fantasy other than the 2000-2003 days, but there are still some really bad stinkers.
Internally, most factions have an obvious path to play, and if you're lucky you get 2 or even 3 paths to play, but if you don't follow that path, the math of the game will hammer you if you're up against someone opting to take the obvious path to play.
Last things like summoning need checked. I understand people love their free things, but there are a couple outliers that wreck the game if someone is playing on their obvious path to play with summoning.
Of interest: if they'll begin opening the game up to more "soup" (right now its not as efficient or as optimal as it is in 40k so its not seen as much).
When you have a strong element of soup its hard to build weakness into an army without having an ally then solve that weakness. Soup also dilutes army identity, which is a shame as its often a specific army that gets people into the game rather than a visual mish-mash of factions.
Personally I think as the game matures and GW introduces more features and questions into the game structure we might see soup increase and then degrease based on army variety. Eg lets say they add a siege mode where you need siege gear. Right now the options are limited and if you're in order you're going to have to bring Stormcast Ballista.
However if GW then turns around and gives other factions/alliance blocks artilery and siege gear then the soup for Stormcast should reduce.
Because I just played Vanguard, and it's far, far better. I don't play at clubs, I just play socially with friends, and with so many rule sets out there, who has time for subpar rules?
pancakeonions wrote: Because I just played Vanguard, and it's far, far better. I don't play at clubs, I just play socially with friends, and with so many rule sets out there, who has time for subpar rules?
I can never work out if Kings of War miniatures are just years behind GW in terms of the style that they've gone for; or the painter that they've chosen or both. A lot of their core stuff certainly has a very retro feel to its design. I think my issue is that whilst I love the concepts for their armies the models have never really "wowed" me. Granted it could be their paintwork and that I'm seeing photos not real miniatures.
Some of their newer stuff is looking better and the Vanguard stuff is starting to look a little more advanced in terms of design.
pancakeonions wrote: Because I just played Vanguard, and it's far, far better. I don't play at clubs, I just play socially with friends, and with so many rule sets out there, who has time for subpar rules?
I can never work out if Kings of War miniatures are just years behind GW in terms of the style that they've gone for; or the painter that they've chosen or both. A lot of their core stuff certainly has a very retro feel to its design. I think my issue is that whilst I love the concepts for their armies the models have never really "wowed" me. Granted it could be their paintwork and that I'm seeing photos not real miniatures.
Some of their newer stuff is looking better and the Vanguard stuff is starting to look a little more advanced in terms of design.
Haha, you're right! The funny thing about my comment is that I play Vanguard... With WHFB models! I have a few Mantic models, and the newer ones are quite nice, but in general I much prefer pre-AoSGW models. Unfortunately, GW has increased the size of many of their more recent figures, and made some so ornate as to be hard to play with (e.g., fragile, hard to transport), so I haven't gotten into their newer stuff. Some of it is quite nice, to be sure, but too big. The other day, I battled against an all Reaper Bones goblin warband, and they looked great!
Aye, KoW is very proxy friendly. I use whatever minis I want when planning my forces (I have not actually got many games in) and most of them are GW.
Dwarves: GW Dwarves with some Mantic, Reaper Earth Elementals
Elves: GW and Privateer Press Elves, with some GWLOTR as "Half Elves"
Ratkin: GW Skaven obviously
Varangaur: GW Chaos plus Frostgrave Barbarians
Salamanders: GW Lizardmen, Reaper Lizardmen
Kingdoms of Men: GW Rohan, Historicals from various sources
Ogres: Privateer Trollbloods
The Herd: GW Beastmen, Dungeons and Dragons Werewolves, LOTR Direwolves, Frostgrave Gnolls
Trident Realms: GW Mer Elves, PP Bog Trogs and Frogmen, Descent Giant Crabs and GW River Trolls.
Undead: Mantic Undead and a lot of GW stuff for knights and characters, and a Reaper Zombie Dragon
Hordes of the Abyss: GW Demons
The big advantage to me is using whatever miniatures I think are the coolest.
That said, I still want to play AoS, I just plan on making my minis dual use.
Sqorgar wrote: Unlike 40k, you don't need Battletomes to play AoS. All the warscrolls are available for free, either on GW's website or through the app. The Battletomes have abilities and mods you can use to customize your army, but they aren't required.
Are the abilities and mods free? Or do you pay points for them? If they are free then yes they pretty much are required or you are screwed when opponent has extra abilities for free.
Sqorgar wrote: Unlike 40k, you don't need Battletomes to play AoS. All the warscrolls are available for free, either on GW's website or through the app. The Battletomes have abilities and mods you can use to customize your army, but they aren't required.
Are the abilities and mods free? Or do you pay points for them? If they are free then yes they pretty much are required or you are screwed when opponent has extra abilities for free.
The faction abilities are generally highly desirable to needed for an army to really work. You can certainly run an army without them, but you are taking a big loss of potential. Plus if your army has mages you can't take any spells except realm spells (and that's only if you and your opponent are playing with the realm rules).
Also many factions have unique features; eg Daughters of Khaine have a selection of prayers and if you take a prayer from their list you get to pray twice per priestess not just once - so that's a huge shift in potential.
Of course if an army has no battletome they can still function, but often those forces have a significant disadvantage and are often taken either as allies or in a "grand alliance army" thus at least getting access to Grand Aliance abilities (though these are somewhat out of date now as they were released way back in the early days).
So yes you can run a faction without, but you'll be more likely to lose and be missing out on key features of the faction. It's one major reason many hope for a big year of Battletomes so that moreof the fringe armies can get on the table and be played. Right now if you look at any rankings for tournament events and general "what are people playing" there's a vast bias toward factions with battletomes.
Been unable to play really cause 40k has dominated my store and I recently decided I didn't wanna interact with one of the sigmar players for various non-gaming reasons, but my other sigmar opponents have been busy with holiday stuff.
Also my other projects that I want to use in game have been pushed back due to missing parts, or lack of wanting to do it at that time.
Elhazard wrote: My high elves were dissected into oblivion and have lost all cohesion and flavor. Maybe they will recoup at some point, maybe not.
Not complaining, as I had the pleasure of enjoying them for 25+ years of Fantasy editions.
You can still play with them but you would have to use Grand Alliance: Order which would allow you to use everything elf, minus some units that may have been removed.
My battleforces for Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin arrives today. I'll be honest, I've always hated elves. I mean, I really think they are the dumbest fantasy race and there's never ever been anything even remotely interesting about them (even if they make cookies). If you told me a few years ago that I'd buy an elf faction (much less two, with maybe the Sylvaneth one day), I would've punched you for being a dirty liar. Age of Sigmar has accomplished the impossible. It made elves not suck.
Sqorgar wrote: My battleforces for Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin arrives today. I'll be honest, I've always hated elves. I mean, I really think they are the dumbest fantasy race and there's never ever been anything even remotely interesting about them (even if they make cookies). If you told me a few years ago that I'd buy an elf faction (much less two, with maybe the Sylvaneth one day), I would've punched you for being a dirty liar. Age of Sigmar has accomplished the impossible. It made elves not suck.
I’d say that in terms of model range, the elves have some of the worse baggage left over from fantasy and the early 1.0 era of the game. Broken up into way too many factions, with too few minis in each, and lots of minis discontinued as well. OK, most factions got hit with this, but it just feels like the elves got it particularly badly.
Makes me wonder sometimes what the game would be like if it started from a completely clean slate...that’s a thread I’ve been interested in starting.
I really hope some of the Aelves get merged; if just to make a sane number of armies that GW can keep updated! I'd hate to see a dozen Aelf armies all around Daughters of Khaine size with none of them getting updated models and features for decades because there's just too many of them.
I've no problem if this means that GW has to release new lore changes so that the subfactions have to ally together.
To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.
Overread wrote: I really hope some of the Aelves get merged; if just to make a sane number of armies that GW can keep updated! I'd hate to see a dozen Aelf armies all around Daughters of Khaine size with none of them getting updated models and features for decades because there's just too many of them.
I've no problem if this means that GW has to release new lore changes so that the subfactions have to ally together.
You know its going to happen. 12 books, three units in each.
At least GW will post how “amazing” the new books are on fecebook.
Charistoph wrote: To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.
Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.
There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.
To put dark elves with chaos would require a fundamental rewrite of their AOS lore. They hate chaos. The problem is that everyone mistakes "order" for "good guys".
Charistoph wrote: To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.
Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.
There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.
Yes--that's what Dark Elves were. At least until the End Times.
Now? Now they're something different. Scourge Privateers are monster-hunting pirates who ply the Realms looking for things to sell and tame. Shadowblades are Sigmar's dirty little secret, rooting out cults within the Free Cities and killing the members in very public ways.
The other two haven't been fluffed out too much, aside from the Darkling Covens using magical control over their thralls and the Order Serpentis having nasty beasties.
auticus wrote:To put dark elves with chaos would require a fundamental rewrite of their AOS lore. They hate chaos. The problem is that everyone mistakes "order" for "good guys".
Well, that's why I said that they should have done it back when they were rewriting all the factions. It still can be done now, and I'll get to that after the jump.
AegisGrimm wrote:
Charistoph wrote: To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.
Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.
There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.
Destruction can mean many things. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning had Dark Elves allying with both the Greenskins and Tzeentch. The motives being to destroy what they could not posses, and conquer the rest. They were just more organized than Chas and the Greenskins in producing that destruction.
Too which, getting it in to the modern era basically redoing what happened before. Certain significants in the culture that produces units very much like the Dark Elves become disenfranchised by the current Realm structure and get infected with that whole, "I'm gonna wreck it because I didn't build it," attitude. Heck, the Ogres don't really want to wreck everything, they just want to eat everything, but that leads to a whole lot of destruction. It's not Greenskin level or type of mayhem, but they both can apply to being a Destruction type offaction. But with the Dark Elves, that would assume that those significants didn't find allying with Chaos to be more tempting over all.
The Grand Alliances present a concept of alliances that are not as clear as many think. Grand Alliance Order has no connection to be being good and is more a loose alliance of factions who on the one hand build civilizations - ergo they found settlements, improve their lot, fortify and trade - and who hate and oppose Chaos.
Now lets not forget Destruction and Death also fought against Chaos and originally all 3 Grand Alliances stood united with Sigmar against the Chaos. However Nagash broke away from the Alliance due to his arguments with Sigmar over Stormcast and his right to the souls of the Dead. Meanwhile Destructions patron god broke them away because of the gulf between the peoples; the destruction forces being more clan based and akin to nomadic lifestyles and clan wars and the like. Basically they werent' founding cities and trading they were raiding and if the real world shows us anything its that sedentary societies and nomadic societies can have huge problems living alongside when it comes to land ownership. Your standard civilized people would roll into an area and continually expand and build walls and fences and claim land and resources; whilst your nomad is might roam over that area of land but once every few decades for resources they need.
Dark Aelves wouldn't fit into Destruction nor Death nor Chaos, although the way the story is a few twists here and there and they could have fallen to Chaos. However that's quite a fundamental leap to make both in lore and in terms of model design and aesthetics. AoS is married to the Old World and you can see this in how internal alliances are formed within the Grand Alliances. How the High and Dark Aelves in particular are in alliance blocks of their own and don't cross over (unless you're building a grand alliance order army).
I think they do belong in Order just as Idoneth do and the Slaan and the Dwarves. The difference is that you've got Covens with mind control; Murder Worshippers; soul stealers; assassins; pirates on the high seas and the high skies. Heck Fyreslayers are almost like a destruction faction with their great wanderings at the start of the AoS lore and their wild fighting styles.
Going back to the old staple of D&D alignments, Order = Law, with no qualifications on good vs evil.
So you can get Lawful Good (Stormcast Eternals), Lawful Neutral (Seraphon?) and Lawful Evil (Dark Elves) all within the banner of Order. Yeah, it does feel a little incongruous for those factions to ally with eachother though...
And yet in WWII the Allied forces allied with the Russians despite knowing that the Soviet state was almost just as evil in its ways as the Nazi regime. Plus come the end of the war the Allies were looking to form alliances with the broken Nazi forces in preparation for a big Soviet push.
War forces alliances that you might not otherwise take up. Stormcast and Free Peoples might well not naturally ally with the Daughters of Khaine, however when you've only just retaken your lands from the twisted madness of Chaos and are still waging war on them, having a whole race of Aelves who can dance into battle and gleefully and willingly throw themselves at Chaos forces then you might well want to favour them.
Sure they've got those creepy temples and some men who go in never come out; and they do also run a lot of those blackmarket fighting rings. However you can rest easy that they at least don't organise gryph hound fights!
Charistoph wrote: To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.
Another mistake in a looooooong string of mistakes when it comes to AOHS lore.
I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"
I'm not going to repeat many of the points raised by others even though for a lot of them they're why I do not play AoS, but I think the main one is that there just isn't a main draw for the game and GW themselves don't really seem to be trying that hard.
Essentially, my issue is that the "new" stuff outside of Stormcast is basically taking one or two units from the old army books and expanding them out into their own individual armies yet none of these new armies have much growth or potential for expansion and they're all mostly comprised of like, 5-6 different units on average. They're also not especially interesting or have much going on in terms of their visuals or themes. Oh look, it's tree people or naked ginger dwarves or half-snake ladies. No offense to the people who like these factions but quite honestly they're really boring, uninspired or just lacking in variety. Even some of the more potentially interesting ones to me like the Overlords or the Ironjawz still suffer from a lack of variety. I always loved greenskins but Ironjawz are just Black Orcs with some added Black Orc Boar Boyz. And GW are trying to push and sell this as an entirely independent standalone army? There's nothing to it so why should I be interested or want to invest in them?
If you look at 40k they've done a way better job of introducing new factions to the game in terms of being unique or offering something fresh, but also in the amount of effort they put into them. 3rd ed Necrons were low on unit variety, but they still had more than like, Ironjawz and Daughters of Khaine combined. And this was like 16 years ago! And they massively added to the lore and background of the setting in a pretty major way! A more brutal comparison is Ad Mech which are considered to need a model expansion, but they still have way WAY more stuff than many of the "new" AoS armies and Ad Mech on the whole are far more visually cool and interesting and unique than these AoS armies too.
Now recently GW do seem to have actually been putting some sort of effort into one of their supposedly flagship game systems since Nighthaunt and Idoneth are a lot more interesting and seem to have actual content to them so maybe the paradigm has shifted and the previous "new" stuff was a holdover from when Kirby was still there and because of the time it takes to develop models and books and the like, the new GW couldn't change it much and had to roll with it. If future AoS stuff has ACTUAL effort put into it like the Idoneth and Nighthaunt then I might be interested in the future, but for now it just seems like the main creative team doesn't really know what it's doing.
I've just commented in another thread about how I loved the aesthetic of the last 3 armies to be released so it might be apt to comment in this thread too. The main reasons I don't play is I don't understand the new setting with all these realms and there are less players in my local meta to play with. Also the standard time/money constraints.
Bosskelot wrote: I'm not going to repeat many of the points raised by others even though for a lot of them they're why I do not play AoS, but I think the main one is that there just isn't a main draw for the game and GW themselves don't really seem to be trying that hard.
Essentially, my issue is that the "new" stuff outside of Stormcast is basically taking one or two units from the old army books and expanding them out into their own individual armies yet none of these new armies have much growth or potential for expansion and they're all mostly comprised of like, 5-6 different units on average. They're also not especially interesting or have much going on in terms of their visuals or themes. Oh look, it's tree people or naked ginger dwarves or half-snake ladies. No offense to the people who like these factions but quite honestly they're really boring, uninspired or just lacking in variety. Even some of the more potentially interesting ones to me like the Overlords or the Ironjawz still suffer from a lack of variety. I always loved greenskins but Ironjawz are just Black Orcs with some added Black Orc Boar Boyz. And GW are trying to push and sell this as an entirely independent standalone army? There's nothing to it so why should I be interested or want to invest in them?
If you look at 40k they've done a way better job of introducing new factions to the game in terms of being unique or offering something fresh, but also in the amount of effort they put into them. 3rd ed Necrons were low on unit variety, but they still had more than like, Ironjawz and Daughters of Khaine combined. And this was like 16 years ago! And they massively added to the lore and background of the setting in a pretty major way! A more brutal comparison is Ad Mech which are considered to need a model expansion, but they still have way WAY more stuff than many of the "new" AoS armies and Ad Mech on the whole are far more visually cool and interesting and unique than these AoS armies too.
Now recently GW do seem to have actually been putting some sort of effort into one of their supposedly flagship game systems since Nighthaunt and Idoneth are a lot more interesting and seem to have actual content to them so maybe the paradigm has shifted and the previous "new" stuff was a holdover from when Kirby was still there and because of the time it takes to develop models and books and the like, the new GW couldn't change it much and had to roll with it. If future AoS stuff has ACTUAL effort put into it like the Idoneth and Nighthaunt then I might be interested in the future, but for now it just seems like the main creative team doesn't really know what it's doing.
Hmm I personally like AOS because all the armies are different, more than half the armies in 40k are power armour and let's not forget all the primaris Lieutenants. Anyway I tend to avoid this topic, but I find the AOS far from uninspired.
Carnith wrote: I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"
Well... considering that WHFB and AOS are two completely different games that appeal to two completely demographics for two completely different reasons, I think that it NOT being WHFB is a valid reason for why they are not playing AoS because it not being WHFB *is* bad to such a person in terms of where they'd spend their game time.
I find that not only valid but useful because it lets anyone from a design capacity understand and see where it could be meshed.
Bosskelot - check out the new Grots being previewed today - of which is only part of the new sculpts being released for that force!
An Actual Englishman a reasonable bit of the early books and lore was a bit confused. I think the writers got AoS dropped on them as much as anyone and a lot of the early BL books focus more on battles and Sigmar making his big return to the realms. I think since then there's been an expansion in the lore that goes further.
Eg Pestliens, whilst being battle focused, gets you really into Skaven and Seraphon in two big ways and you get a fantastic flavour of the extreme high fantasy nature in the city that they are fighting through.
Inferno Issue 1 the first story is set at the end of the Mythic and start of the Chaos age and starts to flesh out some of the fall of peoples to the hoards of Chaos. It also strongly hints at a human faction yet again - there's loads of humans in the Lore so I think that we will see at least one if not two AoS Human led armies released in time.
The Novellas really go the extra mile; being longer than a short story so having room to go into a bit more depth; yet not as heavy to take on as a novel and the new novel pre-release in digital by GW this last day or two has apparently got some really fantastic Chaos and world lore in it. I think that the latter material is really coming together after the rocky start that AoS had.
Auctius yes that is a very true point, but its also true that its rather impossible for anyone to help people into AoS if they a want Warhammer Fantasy and not AoS to start with. There's barriers to entry and then there's an iron clad wall with spikes on it.
One is surmountable and the other is darn near impenetrable unless they open the gates
Carnith wrote: I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"
So this was supposed to be a therapy/support thread rather than actual discourse? Understood.
Overread wrote: Bosskelot - check out the new Grots being previewed today - of which is only part of the new sculpts being released for that force!
I'll be interested to see what the other new models are, but this is still indicative of the issue I already raised; it's taking already existing units from an already existing army and splitting them off and trying to make them an independent army. Back when I played WHFB I had a huge greenskin army with plenty of Night Goblins, but I have no interest in a standalone Night Goblin book because it just means less variety and even with the new setting I don't think they're an idea that can carry itself on its own.
And the new models they've shown off are just redesigns, some of which look worse than some very old models (love those old metal fanatics) so I'm honestly not too hyped to see what else they have in store because it doesn't really bode well. Even the new character looks like a joke compared to Skarsnik and Gobbla.
Just Tony wrote: So this was supposed to be a therapy/support thread rather than actual discourse? Understood.
Overread wrote: The intention of this thread is not to air grievances or hates of AoS, but rather to be a spot where people can be encouraged to ask questions that give them pause in starting AoS. This might be understanding the lore a bit better; or the way the grand alliances work or which armies are good to take or how to use endless spells etc....
So use it as an opportunity to ask questions and find answers so that you can get into the Age of Sigmar fantasy game
An Actual Englishman wrote: I've just commented in another thread about how I loved the aesthetic of the last 3 armies to be released so it might be apt to comment in this thread too. The main reasons I don't play is I don't understand the new setting with all these realms and there are less players in my local meta to play with. Also the standard time/money constraints.
Not hugely relevant - but this is basically my position.
AoS continues to be a bit chicken and egg.
Had a big goblin army in WHFB and I am certainly tempted by the new grots. I'll almost certainly buy one unit just to paint - but not sure about going beyond that.
(And, this is just noobishness, I continue to be kind of unclear on how building an army works in AoS - with points, battleline units, spells, batallions etc. So its hard to visualise compared with say 40k.)
AoS was basically the testing ground for 40k 8E. A lot of the rules that were changed originated in some for in AoS. Think of AoS points as Power Level in 40k. You don't pay for individual gear options, just for the model (or models). Battleline are your Troops choices. You have to include at least a certain number of Heroes and Battleline depending one the points limit of the game (just like HQs and Troops in 40k). There is also a maximum number of Heroes and Behemoths your army can include base on that points limit.
Had a big goblin army in WHFB and I am certainly tempted by the new grots. I'll almost certainly buy one unit just to paint - but not sure about going beyond that.
(And, this is just noobishness, I continue to be kind of unclear on how building an army works in AoS - with points, battleline units, spells, batallions etc. So its hard to visualise compared with say 40k.)
The way you make an AoS army is actually a lot more straight forward compared to current 40k with their detachments imo. Units can have a role in the army (some don't, some do). There's:
Leader: you have to have 1 to be your general, but you can't have too many
Battleline (read: troops): you have to have a minimum of battle line units. Some units are battleline for certain specific factions (for instance: grimghast reapers are only battleline if you are fielding a nighthaunt army).
Behemoth (read: monsters): can't have too many of those
Artillery: can't have too many of those either.
Without any role: take those as you see fit, as long as you have your minimum of 1 hero and enough battleline units.
Oh, and a max of 20% of your army can be allied units, but those can never count towards minima, only towards maxima....
You just choose your points limit and the limitations (or minimums for battleline) are dependant on how big your game is.
I like the simplicity of the AoS army composition. You can make "soup" armies, but those tend to be weaker and not have a lot of extra rules... That's in stark contrast to current 40k where you want to soup it up as much as possible to make your army stronger than a mono-codex force.
Had a big goblin army in WHFB and I am certainly tempted by the new grots. I'll almost certainly buy one unit just to paint - but not sure about going beyond that.
(And, this is just noobishness, I continue to be kind of unclear on how building an army works in AoS - with points, battleline units, spells, batallions etc. So its hard to visualise compared with say 40k.)
It defaults to 2K points, but if you click on the points value (upper right corner) you can change the points for the match.
This will update it with the limits for artillery, behemoths, leaders and the minimum requirement for Battleline Troops.
So you can use that to aid you in building a list up for a basic army.
It also updates the allies limit where you are limited on the number of allies both in point value and unit count. So building a "soup" army is very restricted unless you build a Grand Alliance Army - which are a bit out of date with AoS 2.0. Suffice to say pure armies tend to have the edge, but there's good room to bring choice allies along without breaking the game; its honestly a very well rounded allies system that works really well without being too complex.
Note the Grots are likely not going to be updated until they officially launch with their new Battletome. Plus in the Battletome itself you will also have battalions. These are groups of units that are bought as a block and which have minimum requirements to form up. Once you've got them you get a Command point (used to pay for command abilities in battle) and also a special ability for those units; this might be a single ability over them all or one getting a boon. Note that Battalions do cost points to use in addition to the price for the units, which helps keep them from being "too" good. In fact you can build many viable armies without any battalions and even at 2K you might only take one if you include one (varies from army to army a bit).
Honestly building armies is quite simple and its easier if you have a Battletome and thus all the relevant faction information to get your head around it. If you're into Grots then at the very least the Battletome might give you some idea how to get started plus there's lore and background on the faction. In addition don't forget Januaries White Dwarf has AoS Skirmish updates in it, we don't yet know what form this will take, but it will be well worth checking up on it. Skirmish getting a revamp* and some attention would give you one avenue to get into the world of AoS and get some games with only a handful of models.
Plus the specialist game Shadspire has some unique models and a Grot warband for it so that's another avenue of cheap entry into the game even if you don't want to go further into a full AoS army.
*From what I can gather of preview opinions the WD is going to refine what is already out there whilst there's a strong chance of a bigger refresh of Skirmish to come later. Which would make sense as GW is likely going to market Skirmish just like they market Killteam for 40K. AoS just needs more core factions with battletomes before its really a sensible time to push a big new version of Skirmish at large.
I don't play AoS (even though I like it) simply because the scene around my area is nearly nonexistant, and the closest store where people might play is more than a half hour away (and only carries about half the ranges of either GW main game range), which doesn't work well with a full workday that takes me in the other direction meaning that I wouldn't even be able to START a game on a weekday until 6pm or later at that store.
The only way I can play games is by getting a buddy, my wife or my dad to game with me, and only if I paint both forces involved and own all the rules material being used.
So right now I am getting my AoS fix with skirmish games that let me collect several varied warbands with the same effort a single AoS army would require. And while more generic in feel, using the fantasy rules from One Page Rules as a free and easily-taught ruleset, where I don't have to buy a ton of Battletomes to have 4-6 races worth of warbands, and lets me at least play games set in the Mortal Realms (or in the old World, lately) in spirit, if not in actual rules.
Though I am thinking of getting into AoS by way of Skirmish, which still lets me use all my varied warbands in my home games but with actual AoS rules material.
That is a great statement. The two games are two different styles and not saying that AoS is bad but just not your cup of tea.
I am an old timer that started WHFB at 3rd edition and was very excited with the end times... AoS was a kick in the gut but I gave it a try.. as did a number of my buddies.
My empire verses Undead, Nurgle Chaos, Ork and Goblin.. We played a number of games of it but didn't care for it..
Once the general handbook came out we revisited the game but the style of game play wasn't what we cared for..
Not much on the new background either.. I have picked up a few random figures to paint but nothing like my army collecting of the past.
Just with Warmachine.. I used to enjoy the game but it has changed so much that I no longer care for it.. nothing against people that still play it.. just not for me anymore.
Played 40k on and off for about eighteen years - love the lore and stuff and collected books and miniatures and everything basically my whole adult life.
Now I picked 40k at the age of ten instead of fantasy because...laser guns are cooler than swords? I dunno - something as deep and thoughtful as that. As time went on I kept seeing warhammer models I liked and I dipped into the range for my 40k ork army regularly but never quite took the plunge. I think the amount of models needed to start a new system, the lore that I didn’t know at all and the fact all the kids at school, and later fellas at my various gaming clubs were more 40k focussed meant that I never did.
Fantasy also always seemed like the more “grown up” game when I was growing up. A lot of us kids played 40k but some of our parents and teachers played fantasy.
Now everything changed when AOS came out. There basically was sod all in the way of lore so I could kind of start at the beginning and learn as it grew. Also the nature of the game meant that things seemed to have switched - the fantasy game was the simpler “entry level drug” aimed at kids, noobs and the casual gamer (I put myself in the causal gamer camp...I’m too old to be a noob but to noobish to be anything else haha) and 40k was the more complex rule set.
Now due to working hours increased and a little one on the way I need my hobby to be a little more “pick up and play”. Also I want a game that lends itself to smaller as well as larger battles. What spare cash I have, I want to spend on toys and not rulebooks/army books. Also I can now buy the fantasy models I always liked the look of!
So AOS v2 has actually came at a perfect time for me. I’m about half way into my slaves to darkness army now!
For me honestly its the story and setting, i just cant get into it. I personally find norse mythology rip of to be a very boring setting. I liked the old world because events mattered and things were tangible and within the realm of conception. Like for example, if thribes of Norsca started to head down south, i could picture in my mind what that meant, vs now where they just come from some endless faceless plane of existence to do stuff.
Much of the newer and latter stuff is far superior. I'd say the short story in Inferno Issue 1; the new Novella series of books and Pestilens are all really great reads of AoS lore.
The Realm War stuff is good, but because so much of it focuses around key battles as Sigmar retakes the Realm Gates, they tend to be heavy on action but light on character and world building beyond establishing the setting.
I feel as if the authors working for BL are more comfortable and settled with the lore now than when they started out with AoS and whilst there's still no real time-line established (I figure that will come within time outside of major events that we get where there is a clear time line); It's far more solid now.
Because T9A is the steady tournament fantasy game around here, and well rooted in my circles of friends. AoS is however growing healthily , with a tournament footprint of its own, so it's just a matter of time before AoS gets a spin as well.
Background-wise it's classic historically based fantasy all the way for me. Lotr, WHFB, T9A, but any rules would do, and I'd never be picky about what armies I'd meet.
EnTyme wrote: Out of curiosity, when was the last time you looked at the lore, Backspace?
I try to keep up on it and i know they are back tracking on a lot of their cosmic fantasy stuff, which im really happy with. Don misunderstand me, imo its getting better, its just i hate fantasies that have various "Realms" and planes of existence. That again is the biggest draw back for me, because right now there is not enough established for me to really care about when chaos takes x or so and so concourses Y Does that make any sense?
I was building a Norse army for 3rd edition out of White Dwarf 107 very slowly as my part-time jobs allowed back in high school. It was a combined army of humans and dwarves with lots of berserkers, troll slayers, giant slayers and a large unit of werewolves. Then a few years pass and the editions change and suddenly everything in Norsca is given over to Chaos and the Norse line of minis is shut down.
My goal before I die is to finish the human portion of that 3rd edition WFB army, even if it is all Foundry minis at the end. That's why I'm not playing AoS. I'm still working on my 3rd edition units!
For me, AOS just lacks the tactical aspect that 40k has. Don't get me wrong, the models are much better and the game is much easier to get into, but I feel the ceiling is just too low.
Sumilidon wrote: For me, AOS just lacks the tactical aspect that 40k has. Don't get me wrong, the models are much better and the game is much easier to get into, but I feel the ceiling is just too low.
Which seems odd to me considering that both games basically have the same rules system now. I think about the only big difference is that 40K has more models on the table and a few more options such as superheavies and dedicated air units (AoS has a few of those but they are not their own "thing" quite like they are in 40K).
Otherwise many of the terrain and core mechanics are very similar to each other now.
I'd probably call it a wash. 40k has way more devastating shooting and the strategem system leads to vicious alpha beta trades early in games.
AoS is way more melee centric and units move crazy fast. Combine that with almost card game like combo stacking bleeds a lot of the potential complexity out.
Having said that the move to "unmodified" and "wholly within"
Could be massive for AoS as there is a lot of depth in little finesse moves during movement, pile ins that could really shine if the "3 card combo of doom" elements keep getting reigned in.
Bosskelot wrote: Does AoS still have those rules where units can shoot into and out combat with basically no penalty and things like damage spilling over?
Yeah. You can fire into combat with no penalty. You can breathe fire onto a combat and only hurt your opponent. You can drop a bomb into combat and only hurt your opponent.
Yes damage spills over. Wounds carry into the unit as a whole.
The one change they made was a missile unit in combat cannot fire out of combat anymore.
I'm only going to invest in AoS in anything more than Skirmish level when they change such dumb rules as those involving shooting into melee, as well as offering actual functional terrain rules. And, no, I don't mean battletomes for their proprietary terrain kits where moving past a signpost gives you a benefit- I mean actual terrain rules, like rough terrain, treacherous terrain, areas of forest providing cover as well as blocking line of sight, and the like. It's something any half-brain can easily house-rule, but most communities scoff at anything that's "non-official". Garrison rules are only a halfway measure.
right now to someone without tons of knowledge of the game like me (a relative newbie) is seems like AoS games involve terrain that is simply visual variations on buildings and walls.
I just don't understand the game design in a game where a Gyrobomber can pass over a seething combat of Dwarves and Goblins and have their bombs only kill goblins, even if I am being benefited by that as a Dwarf player. It just seems lazy and weird. But I guess that's something you get as a result of a game where all templates are removed from game design, because it's too complicated otherwise.
The latest version of the game threw a bone to people like us by allowing normal forests to prevent shooting through it. It caused a minor uproar but that has since died down.
As it stands I wouldn't expect any more but it was a minor compromise into a wargame with actual terrain rules, though from reading twitters from the designers and listening to what they say at talks at conventions, they are not writing rules for a game that emulates a battlefield so much as they are writing an abstract game that is built on the backbone of collectible card games only with models and dice added for functionality (focusing on combo synergies and removing positioning and maneuver influence, which is where we see armies able to cross the table in one turn to engage, or armies like stormcast that can teleport most of their army wherever they like)
Numerous polls and numerous discussions have led to the conclusion that the AOS fan base is not interested in complexity. Indeed the simpler the game and the more abstract its rules, the better. Things like terrain rules and more complicated issues like maneuver are the opposite of what would be liked by the target audience.
Though every year things change a little. So who knows where we will be this time next year.
Sumilidon wrote: For me, AOS just lacks the tactical aspect that 40k has. Don't get me wrong, the models are much better and the game is much easier to get into, but I feel the ceiling is just too low.
Which seems odd to me considering that both games basically have the same rules system now. I think about the only big difference is that 40K has more models on the table and a few more options such as superheavies and dedicated air units (AoS has a few of those but they are not their own "thing" quite like they are in 40K).
Otherwise many of the terrain and core mechanics are very similar to each other now.
The main reason I feel 40k is more tactical is specifically because shooting and objectives are more prevalent. Almost all the AOS games I play or watch on Youtube turn into the same type of thing, 2 turns of movement, the rest of the game dedicated to resolving ongoing combats. With 40k however, the game is a lot more fluid, with more units, more viability in falling back (due to shooting) and ultimately more movement due to chasing down maelstrom objectives.
This is not saying I dislike AOS, it's more to say that I quickly get bored of it and find it as a nice short-term break from 40k
With 40k however, the game is a lot more fluid, with more units, more viability in falling back (due to shooting) and ultimately more movement due to chasing down maelstrom objectives.
This is not saying I dislike AOS, it's more to say that I quickly get bored of it and find it as a nice short-term break from 40k
The games are very similar but it seems that the fantasy community always was a little less open towards scenarios and different victory conditions
40k had the same problems until Maelstrom Cards became a thing while it made the game more dynamic it also gained the "victory by lucky cards draw" aspect
AoS also has something similar but somehow most games you see are the standard deployment and victory by killing more units than you opponent we have seen for 20 years now with the same problems.
Rulewise I would say that 40k has the better Core rules while AoS has the better faction rules but the differences are in details (shooting Alpha Strike VS no Maelstrom Card Deck) and if someone likes the current 40k he can also enjoy AoS
With 40k however, the game is a lot more fluid, with more units, more viability in falling back (due to shooting) and ultimately more movement due to chasing down maelstrom objectives.
This is not saying I dislike AOS, it's more to say that I quickly get bored of it and find it as a nice short-term break from 40k
The games are very similar but it seems that the fantasy community always was a little less open towards scenarios and different victory conditions 40k had the same problems until Maelstrom Cards became a thing while it made the game more dynamic it also gained the "victory by lucky cards draw" aspect
AoS also has something similar but somehow most games you see are the standard deployment and victory by killing more units than you opponent we have seen for 20 years now with the same problems.
Rulewise I would say that 40k has the better Core rules while AoS has the better faction rules but the differences are in details (shooting Alpha Strike VS no Maelstrom Card Deck) and if someone likes the current 40k he can also enjoy AoS
That is not my experience at all. Maybe 7th caused that to happen, but in 5th and 6th people were always vying for something other than Pitched Battle. Essentially living between three cities during the tail end of 5th all the way to the early days of 7th, it was never difficult to get oddball games. Hell, we were still doing Albion scenarios all the way into 7th.
Just Tony wrote: Maybe 7th caused that to happen, but in 5th and 6th people were always vying for something other than Pitched Battle. Essentially living between three cities during the tail end of 5th all the way to the early days of 7th, it was never difficult to get oddball games. Hell, we were still doing Albion scenarios all the way into 7th.
It started here with 6th as Pitched Battles with the 20:0 system (total killed points /100 = tournament points, wiping out the opponent = 20:0) became tournament standard and somewhere mid 6th everyone refused to play something else than this
The irony here is that the 20:0 system was developed because the killing everything lacked for tournaments and something more detailed than win/draw/los was needed, and now people still use it here for tournaments trying to get the 40k Maelstrom and AoS Victory Points system to translate somehow into this instead of just adopt the new system that has scenario/victory points and don't need an artificial translation of killed units into those
From 6th thru 7th for a solid 8 years I could never get my area to move beyond pitched battle. It was always about matching tournament standard always and pitched battle was the defacto only used scenario.
I ran a lot of leagues in those days and anytime i tried introducing a scenario into whfb 6th or 7th I received 10x of hell for it.
auticus wrote: From 6th thru 7th for a solid 8 years I could never get my area to move beyond pitched battle. It was always about matching tournament standard always and pitched battle was the defacto only used scenario.
I ran a lot of leagues in those days and anytime i tried introducing a scenario into whfb 6th or 7th I received 10x of hell for it.
My local meta wasn't too dissimilar. However, my LGS would often change up the tournament scene by being wacky with the army organization permits. There was always the standard 1850 game, but there was often a 1000 point game where the required number of units was changed from Troops to Elites, Fast, or Heavy. We even had one where it was a team game at 2000 points, but instead of 4 armies of 2000 points or 4 armies of 1000 points, a pair would share the 2000 points, and they would split it up as they chose between them. This helped to break up the Steamroller-only mentality that has infected the WMH meta.
We ran mostly Pitched but a little bit of scenario play on the sides, and those scenarios were always more memorable than Pitched Battles because they come with a story baked in.
auticus wrote: From 6th thru 7th for a solid 8 years I could never get my area to move beyond pitched battle. It was always about matching tournament standard always and pitched battle was the defacto only used scenario.
One of the things I liked the most about 8th is that it defaulted to scenario play.
Once everyone got rid of watchtower it was even better.
Yeah around where I lived everyone only ever played the standard pitched battle. During my time with 6th and 7th I think I can count on one hand the number of times a different scenario was played.
Oddly it was an issue 40k had too; everyone only wanted to do a pitched battle in that game too despite the actual rulebooks not containing missions like that. It was a mission in the competitive scene which even casual players adopted because, I assume, it required very little tactical thought or depth. It just turned the game into a pure dicerolling thing where all you had to do was either sit and shoot or run and chop and you didn't have to do pesky things like hold objectives or control table quarters. For someone who loved the missions of 40k it pretty much turned me off the game completely during that period.
This is the reason why 5th is still my favourite edition of 40k as the tournament scene (and therefore everyone else) herelly got heavy into those victory by scenario were 6th feelt like a step back
I think as well it was a function of the "listbuilding phase" in that people built lists assuming Pitched Battle, not Rearguard or something wacky like that, and they felt they could be disadvantaged if they played another mission. Probably not even much of a conscious thought. That is why a meta where "rolling for mission" is standard is a godsend, because it means people have to take into account all of the missions when list building. This makes it much harder to make a "power list" because you have to be able to deal with more situations.
Its exactly that people built their list assuming pitched battle and did not like the idea of not knowing what scenario they were listbuilding against (because they coudln't min/max if they didn't know what they were min/maxing against)
I don't know if its purely a min/max thing though.
I think its more that in a pitched battle or known scenario situation a player who has some experience, knows what kind of threats are going to be present as well as what kind of demands are going to be on the board. Even more so when playing at the local club where you've an idea of terrain types and density etc..
Therefore they know the conditions which in turn gives them a framework around which they can base their army.
Now give them random or unknown situations and its harder for them to build an army because they've no real idea where to begin the process. Partly this is a limitation on points based armies without a force organisation chart or similar structure that ensures a "core" is already established. Another part is lack of experience in a variety of situations on the part of the players.
Essentially the more freedom you give people to choose what they want the more some can get paralysed by a lack of ability to choose. This can result in very poor choices which can in turn make people gravitate toward games that reward them in a certain way.
GW could actually address this if they released scripted narration battles more often. Giving players more guidelines on what to take to create certain types of narrated battle.
Of course there will be those who won't want to try new things or who only want straight destructive battles etc...
I consider that min/max. To me optimizing my list based on a set list of conditions I know won't change is min/maxing. Min/maxing is another word for optimiizing which is also another word for competitive listbuilding. They all mean the same thing.
If I know pitched battle is the only scenario I will play I will build a certain way, and in my experience pitch a fit if someone wants to play a different scenario because my army build will no longer be optimal unless iits pitched battle.
If I am playing multiple scenarios then I can't optimize my list properly because I don't know what the conditions are going to be fully. I can only miin/max against what my meta typically brings, but if I roll a scenario that disadvantages my min/maxing, then I have "screwed myself over".
WHile I personally love multiple scenario types because it does hamper listbuilding min/maxing, it was exactly this mindset that was screamed very loudly in my community and on many forums for a great many years.
To this day using a broad number of scenarios is still crapped on because it "screws listbuilding over". In my area in both 40k and aos the same scenarios are used (whatever is tournament standard).
To be fair, though, some scenarios did require that the Attacker and Defender have different points/composition. The Sheer Heroism/Seven Knights scenario comes to mind immediately. My brother and I recently played a game using the Rearguard scenario for 6th, and that required the Defender to have half the points of the Attacker. Now that's easily solvable by either bringing 9 lists to every PUG or to make a list on the spot, but for some odd reason people aren't keen on spontaneous listbuilding.
Just Tony wrote: for some odd reason people aren't keen on spontaneous listbuilding.
I think its largely a byproduct of the fact that its hard to carry ones entire collection in a single case now. Granted magnetic trays have made big inroads in helping; but not everyone uses them. With some armies and compositions you can carry your 2K force and a few changes, but to carry most of ones army is a trickier affair.
So its not just that some hate the idea of writing a list on the spot in 10 mins; but that they just haven't actually got much to change in the army they've brought, outside of things like upgrades.
The other aspect is people build and bring the army they want to play. Before they've even gotten to the club their hope and intention is to use the army they brought.
I loved Rearguard. And I had no problem making a list out of what I had with me, to me it made sense that a rearguard would be a desperate, cobbled together force. That scenario was all about dying heroically to give others a chance, so I was all in for it. Dwarven rearguard vs. Bretonians. Ouch.
That said, it was basically me and two other guys who liked that sort of thing, most everyone else wanted pitched battle. And pitched battle can be a fun game too. Just never as memorable as the scenarios.
But if your environment is like mine, a lot of your community mostly only played tournaments or leagues that emulated tournaments and even their casual games had to be tournament practice games using tournament scenarios.
I remember a nuts game of 40K where about 6 of us got around a single battle table and put a few hundred points of models down (I think 200 or thereabouts). We then had one turn "grace" with no attacking allowed but could move into position.
The alliances that were formed and broken; the back stabbing; the pain; the minifights and grudge matches that appeared in that small game were a lot of fun. Sure it was totally unbalanced; sure it wound up a couple of separate fights that then fell into each other and sure it wasn't fair or balanced in the perfect sense.
But everyone went into it knowing that it was just a bit of fun and because it was split multiple ways you still had that "I want to win" but without it being as strict a competition (esp since the guy next to you - who totally promised they wouldn't attack - did attack you!)
I think its largely a byproduct of the fact that its hard to carry ones entire collection in a single case now. Granted magnetic trays have made big inroads in helping; but not everyone uses them. With some armies and compositions you can carry your 2K force and a few changes, but to carry most of ones army is a trickier affair.
This is the biggest problem. I currently have a fixed 2k Khorne List I can easily fit in a Battlefoam 720 box and it is super nice to just take that bag containing everything. I would hate to have to drag my two 1520s just so I can list build on the spot. Easy when you are playing an elite army, but if you have dozens uppon dozens of models with large behemoths mixed in it all becomes rather cumbersome.
I think its largely a byproduct of the fact that its hard to carry ones entire collection in a single case now. Granted magnetic trays have made big inroads in helping; but not everyone uses them. With some armies and compositions you can carry your 2K force and a few changes, but to carry most of ones army is a trickier affair.
This is the biggest problem. I currently have a fixed 2k Khorne List I can easily fit in a Battlefoam 720 box and it is super nice to just take that bag containing everything. I would hate to have to drag my two 1520s just so I can list build on the spot. Easy when you are playing an elite army, but if you have dozens uppon dozens of models with large behemoths mixed in it all becomes rather cumbersome.
Are you using the manga racks or just the foam? I recently switched to the Manga Racks and I found I can fit a TON more models, and they tend to break a lot less often than when I was pulling them out of the foam. I know this is kind of what Overread is saying, but I just switched a few months ago myself and picked up a few more trays on the BF black Friday sale. It really does make a huge difference.
I haven't started AoS because I'm still not completely finished with any of my three 40k armies. My Necrons are the closest to being done, about 6 more units to go which I am currently making progress on. My Eldar and Slaanesh armies are assembled and magneted but barely painted. Still a lot of progress to be made.
However, I really want to start a Seraphon army. Not because they're good (it seems from reading the forums that they are), but because the models look amazing to me. What I would like to do if I ever pull the trigger on starting my Seraphon army is take a one unit at a time approach. Buy a unit, build it, paint it, be done with it. That would avoid the situation I'm in now, but I suppose many warhammer players have said the exact same thing, only to end up with $500 worth of Seraphon the next day.
So if I were to take a one unit at a time approach, what Seraphon unit would I not regret having when I finally start playin? Skinks? Warriors? Knights? I should probably start with the equivalent to troops in 40k if such a thing exists in AoS.
And as long as I'm asking questions, what is a good army to make decent beardy list with? Aside from Seraphom I find Sylvaneth and Beastmen models appealing. The only army find really unappealing is the Stormcast Eternals.
Currently nighthaunt and daughters of khaine are the broken OP lists. Seraphon and stormcast are definitely up there in power. Sylvaneth and beastmen are above the middling line. They can be high powered and can definitely trash any non-book army, though are about even keel with most current gen books barring nighthaunt and daughters of khaine.
Some of the biggest contenders you see near the top frequently:
Daughters of Khaine
Idoneth Deepkin
Grand Host of Nagash
Legion of Sacrament.
Nighthaunt are mid tier at best. Stormcasts only consistent competitive build is the Gav bomb, which (like the Vanguard Wing before it) artificially holds up the book and will likely be nerfed into the ground.
The main issue is the new high fantasy aesthetic just isn't for me. The mix of the new art and models just doesn't give me a sense of a struggle of good vs. evil, especially when the good guys just respawn if they die and can't remember what they had for lunch. It doesn't feel grim, dark, or gritty, the things that lifted the highly derivative Old World from plagiarism into iconic status.
I also don't quite see the point in removing square bases and ranks when so many players end up using movement trays for their 2x30 Plague Bearers anyway. And even with less models, the removal of square bases made it play similar to 40k as well, and 40k is, imho, a better game with a much better narrative and deeper background. Furthermore, neither AoS or 40k has particularly good rulesets. WFB had a grand narrative and an established background. AoS, while it's getting better, doesn't have a fraction of that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate. I'd love to play some Caledorian Dragon-riding survivors, but almost zero of the new models appeal to my low fantasy preferences. I recognise the models are great, they just aren't for me.
I think part of the lack of the Grand narrative for AoS is that GW make the world so grand and huge that the narrative got lost in it. I think the lack of a fixed time line has also harmed things because whilst the big story events clearly play out one after the other; its harder to place the short stories in the "grand scheme of things".
There is also the fact that the lack of a big fixed timeline and map system (we only got some maps in 2.0) means that its hard to even track who owns what and if a certain city being lost really is a huge deal or its just one of a million cities contended over.
I think the good VS Evil struggle comes out a lot more when you're not dealing with Stormcast. I also think that, given time, the way they've setup the alliances will be interesting. Order has factions such as the Daughters of Khaine - violent women who worship the god of murder; Pirates who pillage, raid and take slaves (mostly of other order factions); deep sea aleves who raid to harvest souls of the living like soul vampires etc...
I think there's been a big aim by GW to try and shift away from just purist good vs evil into forced alliances of convenience and also into making the water a bit muddier.
Stormcast are tricky and I don't think it helps that much of their early stories were heavily focused on mulitple battles with very little down time or character building going on. I think that hurt their ability to create heroes readers cared about - plus the rebirthing mechanic = whilst its not perfect - does take some of the gravity out of fights. I fully hope that events after the Necro Quake and other gods and things moving around might see changes to Stormcast. Seeing them stripped or crippled from rebirth; forced to rely on other sources of recruitment etc... would be great to experiment with (and I'm sure has to happen otherwise Sigmar, with reforging, has an endless army that will only ever get bigger as he takes more souls of the faithful into his armies as they die upon the battlefields)
Overread wrote: I think part of the lack of the Grand narrative for AoS is that GW make the world so grand and huge that the narrative got lost in it. I think the lack of a fixed time line has also harmed things because whilst the big story events clearly play out one after the other; its harder to place the short stories in the "grand scheme of things".
There is also the fact that the lack of a big fixed timeline and map system (we only got some maps in 2.0) means that its hard to even track who owns what and if a certain city being lost really is a huge deal or its just one of a million cities contended over.
I think the good VS Evil struggle comes out a lot more when you're not dealing with Stormcast. I also think that, given time, the way they've setup the alliances will be interesting. Order has factions such as the Daughters of Khaine - violent women who worship the god of murder; Pirates who pillage, raid and take slaves (mostly of other order factions); deep sea aleves who raid to harvest souls of the living like soul vampires etc...
I think there's been a big aim by GW to try and shift away from just purist good vs evil into forced alliances of convenience and also into making the water a bit muddier.
Stormcast are tricky and I don't think it helps that much of their early stories were heavily focused on mulitple battles with very little down time or character building going on. I think that hurt their ability to create heroes readers cared about - plus the rebirthing mechanic = whilst its not perfect - does take some of the gravity out of fights. I fully hope that events after the Necro Quake and other gods and things moving around might see changes to Stormcast. Seeing them stripped or crippled from rebirth; forced to rely on other sources of recruitment etc... would be great to experiment with (and I'm sure has to happen otherwise Sigmar, with reforging, has an endless army that will only ever get bigger as he takes more souls of the faithful into his armies as they die upon the battlefields)
Good vs. evil isn't that intrinsic, but something heroic is maybe what I should've written. When everything is amazing, nothing is.
With regards to the Stormcast specifically, for me the major issue is the aesthetic. They are clad in high fantasy plate that wouldn't be amiss in World of Warcraft. This is in extremely stark contrast to the people of the Empire or Bretonnia. Sure, you had Grail Knights and Knights Panther etc, in addition to silly things like the Steam Tank, but it had an aesthetic that was much more realistic than the Stormcast's look.
Just to re-iterate, I don't think it's an objectively bad look, it just doesn't appeal to me.
Personally the only thing I really want from stormcast are the awesome mounts they get - annoyingly the SC models themselves are so large and broad that its near impossible to convert their mounts for use by many other races. That is unless you're going to go nuts shaving off all the saddle and harness parts moulded onto the model and strip it back to a wild beast and add your own smaller saddle setup.
Lore wise I think the new novellas really pushed forward the idea of individual heroes within the setting really well. AoS does lack some show-heroes for many armies, but I think that given time the lore will evolve some. PlusI think there will be a big shift when we see GW add a couple of human factions to the game.
Ultimately I think AoS is not designed with low-fantasy players in mind, originally it was most likely to differentiate themselves from other similar low-fantasy games who were in competition, but now they have Lord of the Rings to fill that slot.
Aye the old world fantasy sort of walked the line between low and high with more a leaning to low. I think that was partly its original inspiration being Lord of the Rings and also the fact that rank and file and metal and the sculpting of the times were better geared toward more foot warriors and archers and fewer big monsters and mounts.
Fast Forward and AoS is very much high fantasy and is using all the advantages of modern materials and sculpting and casting to push the limits with a lot more monsters and beasties and such.
I well agree if you want low fantasy then AoS is certainly not really the ideal pairing.
Eldarsif wrote: Ultimately I think AoS is not designed with low-fantasy players in mind, originally it was most likely to differentiate themselves from other similar low-fantasy games who were in competition, but now they have Lord of the Rings to fill that slot.
Overread wrote: Aye the old world fantasy sort of walked the line between low and high with more a leaning to low. I think that was partly its original inspiration being Lord of the Rings and also the fact that rank and file and metal and the sculpting of the times were better geared toward more foot warriors and archers and fewer big monsters and mounts.
Fast Forward and AoS is very much high fantasy and is using all the advantages of modern materials and sculpting and casting to push the limits with a lot more monsters and beasties and such.
I well agree if you want low fantasy then AoS is certainly not really the ideal pairing.
Aye to both. I think GW also did a smart move, in retrospect, in moving to high fantasy, as it has a bigger appeal, with me being a casualty. If they re-release Mordheim, I'll play that (unless it's full of Stormcast), but for now my eyes are on Frostgrave, Erehwon, and Oathmark, and possibly Hail Caesar. The Kings of War-aesthetic doesn't appeal to me either, tbh.
Kings of War have a huge "retro" feel to so many of their designs. They feel like if they'd started in the 80s they'd have been ok, but in todays world their sculpts just don't stand up well compared to others.
That and their paint style also feels retro so even on some of the cooler looking stuff it still looks wrong to my eye.
Some of their newer models are looking much improved, but I think that they've just got a style that doesn't appeal to me either.
It wouldn't surprise me if we see GW push movement trays into LotR games. It would be one big way to preserve the classic rank and file fantasy with another game system.
The thing with KOW is you can use whatever models you want. I love my GW models and continue to use them. Mantic models are coming up in quality (the new titan giant is pretty awesome).
I don't think GW is going to rank and flank in LOTR.
LOTR is kind of strange in that its the same scale and presence as AOS (skirmish, focused on heroes) with different mechanics that accomplish a similar result.
The main diff in LOTR is that the models are more "normal" and tolkien fantasy vs high fantasy of AOS.
I would be head over heels in love if they brought LOTR with some rank and flank or made it a game about maneuver and positioning.
Currently only KOW really feeds that in regards to professional companies with a presence and not fan made (hail caesar does as well but is historical and the fantasy plug in is fan made so repels people that don't want to touch fan systems)
Conquest coming out in June has a lot of peoples' attention in that it is also rank and flank and Alessio wrote that as well (the author of Kings of War, and one of the designers of WHFB 6th edition)
Go and ask the GBHL on Facebook about it. You'll get lots of info there. And it's not really unsupported in that sense. It got a core book and expansion and both are cheap and easy enough to find. The models are the same, so you've already got those for all intents and purposes.
LotR has had a cult following for some time with GW/FW acknowledging that recently with the release of new books and box set. Hell, even I am tempted to start a force or two with the new box. I am excited to see how this will develop in the coming year.
Perhaps I am a bit of a naysayer(and I apologize for that), but it feels like the rank and file are a dying breed except for some smaller games. I do wonder if it is because those games tend to require a larger investment than the other games. As much as I found WHFB fascinating(and had a few models) it was still something I never broke into due to how much I felt I needed to invest into it and I get the same feeling with Kings of War and similar products.
I think the issue is that rank and file requires more investment up front to get to a "decent" standard of game that looks good. That or you take a hit on miniature quality or rely on an china factory to pump out stuff cheap.
I personally think Warmaster (or AoS in the same scale) should come back. I just feel that scale of game is far better for showing massive rank and file armies whilst keeping the price down. I also feel that the way terrain appears at that scale just works better for rank and file. 35mm always looks a bit boring on the board for rank and file because of how you've got to have room to wheel and turn armies. That wasn't an issue 20 years ago, but today we are spoilt for terrain and it does make a table more interesting.
Overread wrote: I think the issue is that rank and file requires more investment up front to get to a "decent" standard of game that looks good. That or you take a hit on miniature quality or rely on an china factory to pump out stuff cheap.
I personally think Warmaster (or AoS in the same scale) should come back. I just feel that scale of game is far better for showing massive rank and file armies whilst keeping the price down. I also feel that the way terrain appears at that scale just works better for rank and file. 35mm always looks a bit boring on the board for rank and file because of how you've got to have room to wheel and turn armies. That wasn't an issue 20 years ago, but today we are spoilt for terrain and it does make a table more interesting.
I wouldn't mind Warmaster coming back. Space Marine(later known as Epic 40k) is what brought me into this hobby and I would love to see both fantasy and 40k versions of it coming back.
If they DO bring Warmaster back, then it needs something that WFB or AOS doesn't bring. That was part of the charm in Epic, the scale and certain units that were only available for that game BECAUSE of the scale. Warmaster didn't have that.
AoS has loads of "god beasts" and mythic monsters that are far too big to put on a 35mm tabletop game. Plus terrain features plus you can do things like sieges "properly" without beggering yourself on a castle wall in resin/plastic/foam and having to use a van to get it to the game club/shop.
So I think there's loads that AoS can bring to a Warmaster scale game along with the representation of rank and file. The biggest risk would be trying the more dynamic poses that GW is doing in such small sizes. They'd have to redesign many units to a simpler appearance - you would not be having rank and file khinerai standing on their 1 10th of a mm thick tails
Rank and Flank has been dying for a while for a few reasons.
1) you need a lot of "boring weak core tax"
2) because you need a lot of "boring weak core tax" you have to both assemble and paint that. People like low model count. In 5th edition WHFB (late 90s) that was the name of the game: hero hammer and tiny model count armies. 6th ed brought back troops which was great but also caused a lot of people to leave because of "weak core tax" and a lack of desire to buy, collect, assemble, and paint a lot of models when they were happy with the game that let them take 20 or so models and call it a day (my chaos WHFBGT army in the 90s was 11 models for reference)
3) games that rely on movement and positioning fell out of favor long ago for games that instead rely on listbuilding and combo synergies. This started in the late 90s with magic the gathering and started picking ups team when games like warmachine came out in the early 2000s focused on synergies.
Movement and positioning for a lot of people is either more difficult to master than they like or "boring".
Sources: having worked on the team of a few games (mostly in video game industry) there was a lot of research into what the customer wanted most, and over the years those polls created a deep trend that crystalized roughly 2009 or 2010 and has not abated since (if anything the combo / deckbuilding paradigm for games like AOS has only gotten deeper)
I strongly believe the reason why Warmaster has not been heard from is simply that that type of game would not make GW much if any money, despite there being a target audience that would love it.
I feel that target audience (of which I am a part) is just too small for a company like GW to feel its worthwhile.
I think the Titanicus game for 40k is them dipping their toe into tiny scale EPIC to gauge the interest. The interest does not seem very overwhelmingly positive to me.
Didn't AT sell out nearly all of its stock of its starting core box at launch despite it being the most expensive box that GW has ever made, by far. I'd say even if the interest in it isn't as big as 40K or other games, its certainly within, if not exceeding GW's estimated sales rates.
Warmaster might have more luck if GW launched it alongside Creative Arts launching Age of Sigmar Total War.
auticus wrote: Rank and Flank has been dying for a while for a few reasons.
1) you need a lot of "boring weak core tax"
2) because you need a lot of "boring weak core tax" you have to both assemble and paint that. People like low model count. In 5th edition WHFB (late 90s) that was the name of the game: hero hammer and tiny model count armies. 6th ed brought back troops which was great but also caused a lot of people to leave because of "weak core tax" and a lack of desire to buy, collect, assemble, and paint a lot of models when they were happy with the game that let them take 20 or so models and call it a day (my chaos WHFBGT army in the 90s was 11 models for reference)
3) games that rely on movement and positioning fell out of favor long ago for games that instead rely on listbuilding and combo synergies. This started in the late 90s with magic the gathering and started picking ups team when games like warmachine came out in the early 2000s focused on synergies.
Movement and positioning for a lot of people is either more difficult to master than they like or "boring".
Sources: having worked on the team of a few games (mostly in video game industry) there was a lot of research into what the customer wanted most, and over the years those polls created a deep trend that crystalized roughly 2009 or 2010 and has not abated since (if anything the combo / deckbuilding paradigm for games like AOS has only gotten deeper)
I strongly believe the reason why Warmaster has not been heard from is simply that that type of game would not make GW much if any money, despite there being a target audience that would love it.
I feel that target audience (of which I am a part) is just too small for a company like GW to feel its worthwhile.
I think the Titanicus game for 40k is them dipping their toe into tiny scale EPIC to gauge the interest. The interest does not seem very overwhelmingly positive to me.
In regards to point #3. How well is warmachine doing?
I would be head over heels in love if they brought LOTR with some rank and flank or made it a game about maneuver and positioning.
Already done.
In early 2009, Games Workshop also released an expansion to the original game called War of the Ring which, according to the company, allows players to emulate the large battles included in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by streamlining the game system.[2] This expansion differs from the main game in several ways. Firstly, War of the Ring uses a larger number of models but the models are placed on movement trays with two cavalry models or eight infantry models on each. This allows for much easier and quicker movement of large numbers of models at once. These are called "companies". Larger creatures such as Ents and Trolls are treated as separate models and do not use movement trays. Combat within the game is also treated differently. In the original game players both roll dice to determine who wins the fight and then the victor rolls to see how much damage is done. In War of the Ring only dice to determine damage are rolled. Also, in War of the Ring, heroes are treated more like upgrades for their company rather than individual models, as they are in the original game.
War of the ring is a game that is not officially supported and thus deemed "dead" by the community at large.
While it technically exists, it is not a supported game, and thus to many and most people I know or interact with - is not a viable option.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
In regards to point #3. How well is warmachine doing?
Warmachine was doing super great until they did other things to implode their game.
That doesn't change that combo building deckbuilding list synergy games are by and large the dominant lifeform in game design and the marketplace and that currently there are only two known rank and file games. One is historical. The other is Kings of War. Combined their community is a fraction of what AOS is as a whole (or if thats false then there is a massive number of players with no online presence and they actively avoid events)
I don't think they are free. However... they just released their new edition and the rules are just in one rulebook. The army lists for LOTR are in another book. The army liists for all of the Hobbit era are in a third book.
auticus wrote: War of the ring is a game that is not officially supported and thus deemed "dead" by the community at large.
While it technically exists, it is not a supported game, and thus to many and most people I know or interact with - is not a viable option.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
In regards to point #3. How well is warmachine doing?
Warmachine was doing super great until they did other things to implode their game.
That doesn't change that combo building deckbuilding list synergy games are by and large the dominant lifeform in game design and the marketplace and that currently there are only two known rank and file games. One is historical. The other is Kings of War. Combined their community is a fraction of what AOS is as a whole (or if thats false then there is a massive number of players with no online presence and they actively avoid events)
What did warmachine do?
Also in regards to being “dominant” , the battle arena fad has totally “dominated” the game space recently. Does that mean that evey game that uses the battle arena paradigm is automatically considered “good”?
I don't play warmachine as combo games don't interest me, so I can't answer that with any confidence.
However, dominant in this case means that it is what the vast majority of players are playing.
No it doesn't mean its good. A lot of people on these forums will even say they don't play AOS or 40k because they feel the games are good. They play them because they know that their monetary investment wont be wasted and that they can always find games.
Combo synergy games tipped around 2009 to be dominant so we're looking at a solid 10 years now of almost nothing but these types of games being produced because thats what sells right now.
I'm still having a hard time giving a damn about the AoS setting, even after reading two of the Realmwars novels. Everything is just too over the top, like Stormcast spending 8 days marching, and then 4 straight days climbing up a solidified waterfall of molten silver just to have several full-scale battles at the top, back-to-back.
The fantastical one-upsmanship of each story and set-piece of the Realms just keeps me from getting comfortable. I would have been far happier if the Old World had been remade into something easier to relate to than godbeasts-as-suns, etc.
auticus wrote: War of the ring is a game that is not officially supported and thus deemed "dead" by the community at large.
While it technically exists, it is not a supported game, and thus to many and most people I know or interact with - is not a viable option.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
In regards to point #3. How well is warmachine doing?
Warmachine was doing super great until they did other things to implode their game.
That doesn't change that combo building deckbuilding list synergy games are by and large the dominant lifeform in game design and the marketplace and that currently there are only two known rank and file games. One is historical. The other is Kings of War. Combined their community is a fraction of what AOS is as a whole (or if thats false then there is a massive number of players with no online presence and they actively avoid events)
What did warmachine do?
Also in regards to being “dominant” , the battle arena fad has totally “dominated” the game space recently. Does that mean that evey game that uses the battle arena paradigm is automatically considered “good”?
The writers of Warmachine had an idea about what their game was supposed to be/how it was supposed to work that didn't really line up with the playerbase's, so they ran through an edition change without taking enough feedback that violently disassembled most of the power models from Mk.II and annoyed most of the players.
Then they discovered that Warmachine has this reputation as a hardcore munchkin's wombo-combo game where you run at each other and whoever's card-combo goes off better wins, which is making it hard for them to attract new players.
Then they decided it'd be a great idea to pull their game from distributors and force retailers to deal with them directly, which a lot of small retailers have apparently responded to by dropping the game.
And on top of all that the MTG judge lawsuit led to them pulling the Press Ganger volunteer community organizer program, which left a massive hole in both marketing and event organization.
A grand confluence of things that mean that while the game may have improved in the transition from Mk.II to Mk.III (particularly because of the reintroduction of the community playtesting/feedback platform) the community has largely disintegrated.
AegisGrimm wrote: I'm still having a hard time giving a damn about the AoS setting, even after reading two of the Realmwars novels. Everything is just too over the top, like Stormcast spending 8 days marching, and then 4 straight days climbing up a solidified waterfall of molten silver just to have several full-scale battles at the top, back-to-back.
The fantastical one-upsmanship of each story and set-piece of the Realms just keeps me from getting comfortable. I would have been far happier if the Old World had been remade into something easier to relate to than godbeasts-as-suns, etc.
Fanboy from day one and even I agree with your Realmgate Wars assesment, but...
The Realmgate Wars fell flat for many reasons, some of which you list and I think they’ve largely course corrected. I believe “City of Secrets” was the response to that negative feedback and I look at that novel and its continuing series as a new start of Age of Sigmar in terms of how they presented the lore.
Also, if you are up for it, definitely checkout Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid. 3/4ths set in just one “normal” city, with Stormcast, Collegiate Arcane, Dwarven Death God(not Nagash) worshipping Dispossesed, Ironweld Arsenal and various Freeguild with different dispositions and cultures (one of the regiments or an officer in the regiment worship Sotek of all things) :
Spoiler:
“Still coming,’ her second-in-command, Chutehk, said. He tapped the leather hilt of the obsidian knife thrust through his belt. He was Chamonian, like Morguin, but from the southern jungles, rather than the highlands around Vindicarum.
‘And we’ll be here to meet them,’ Morguin said, flatly. ‘And stop playing with that bloody knife. There’s no hearts to be cut here, you serpent-worshipping bastard.’ She paused and glanced at him. ‘No offence.’
‘Great Sotek forgives you your blasphemy,’ Chutehk said, idly. ‘And he wouldn’t take their hearts anyway – rotten all the way through.’ He smiled, displaying teeth capped with turquoise. ‘He prefers the hearts of heroes.’
‘I already told you, I’m not interested.’
‘It is a high honour, dame.’
‘Then you do it,’ Morguin snarled.
Chutehk sighed. ‘I would, but I am not a hero. Merely a second-in-command. Ah well.’ He laughed. ‘However shall I live with myself?”
Its brutal street by street, building by building cityfighting, and a far cry from the over the top Realmgate Wars battles. Its also very much diverse cast of characters(many of them female) , furthering it even more from Realmgate Wars stories which were Stormcast Sausagefests. I think its been a very concious decision to tone down alot of initial craziness, as well as giving non SCE their time in the sun.
There is still some off the wall stuff in “Spear of Shadows”, but even that novel is mostly focused on the interactions and tribulations of the various parties searching for the Eight Lamentations. The setting has some stuff that would never work in WHFB, but its never distracting in the Eight Lamentations series, like it was in RGWs.
I agree the Realmgate novels have their problems; the other issue being that because they are so heavily focused on the combat the characters get little room to be, well, characters.
Personally I found Pestilens book a great read and did a battle setup that wasn't all about Sigmar really well. Then the new Novellas have really opened up about other factions and settings and fleshed things out well. I think the writers were almost as lost with AoS as the gamers early on but I think they've caught up now and have a better grasp on the settings and peoples outside of Stormcast.
The only thing lacking from the lore now I feel is a stronger sense of geography of the realms and timelines. 2.0 has brought some maps with it for some realms and the major events do string together. I hope that at some point GW starts up a proper "time" period possibly a few hundred years after the Realmgate Wars - so that the world has settled after the big push against Chaos and we can focus on peoples and places and see the worlds play out their stories.
I think the other big trick missed was the lack of big stories of the mythic and chaos era. GW skipped two whole eras of the world and gave us one after the fall of many civilizations. That said there are several of those stories right in the first volume of the new Inferno.
Even though I don't play I have nothing against the setting apart from initial shock. The literature is on par with late whfb efforts, i.e a mixed bag. I like that there are more audio books now so I can listen while painting. And besides being up down in quality my largest issue is that sometimes the prefix obsession when it comes to weapons and armour grates on my nerves. Thats one thing whfb had going for it, an axe was an axe not a "starfalldestroyeraxe" or whatever. For some reason it feels like a tacky commercial and not in funny over the top way
I was looking into the game a bit more and something that I noticed disappointed me. It is obvious that Stormcast are the "main" faction and all other factions exist only as foils to them. They are obviously intended as the Space Marines of AoS in all respects, and I think that that is unhealthy for the game (not GWs bottom line, which I do not care about). I stopped playing 40K because of this and it puts me off playing AoS if I know my faction will always be second rate foils to the poster boys.
Actually right now besides their model count, Stormcast are doing fairly poorly for a modern and poster-child army. Balance wise and in the competitive scene they are not ranking as high as many other armies. I think GW has taken great pains to avoid Stormcast being overpowered and too easy to play to avoid having them dominate in the same way that Marines do in 40K.
I think they realise that a poster army works well for giving a central story for their casual marketing focus; but that they mustn't bleed too much power in to the army otherwise it dominates too heavily and they can end up with one army pulling the rest along. Makes good sales, but isn't actaully healthy for the company.
The only thing stormcast really have going for them at present is a really well fleshed out army for a brand new force. Many people are hoping that this year SC shift back a gear and dont' get any new models or only a hero or two - even within SC there's not a huge amount of room for many more infantry style models before they are tripping over each other in what they offer on the tabletop.
I really fundamentally disagree, I think Space Marines are not generally the most overpowered army in 40K, they tend to be middle of the road and playable but they do not tend to be the top. The way they dominate is not through gameplay power, it is through:
1. Always being in the starters.
2. Having the most extensive model selection and plastic range.
3. Always getting a new army book update promptly with each edition.
4. Always featuring in promotional materials, and always having fiction told from their POV.
5. Being the central "badasses" in the fiction.
So I think that you talking about army power is misunderstanding my point, and my issue with the idea of a poster army at all. Fantasy never had much of a "poster" army, it had a few ones that were more favoured (Empire, Orcs and Goblins, High Elves, and Chaos) but generally the game was much more diverse and interesting due to not having one faction be designed as the "main" faction. When I play against space marines in 40K I feel like a bit part in their heroic story rather than part of an equal story. I think Stormcast are in some ways even more extreme than this due to the nature of AoS factions - they are massively overdeveloped in terms of options and new releases compared to other factions which have been splintered into irrelevance or released with a very shallow model variety compared to the Stormcast.
Maybe they will fix this but I spent years hoping GW would fix the dominance of Space Marine armies to no avail so I think it just part of their business model and obviously works well for them.
Stormcast may not be winning every GT but in the casual scene / non tournament pickup scene they are most definitely on easy mode and are frustrating to play against. Additionally the part about them being front and center to everything is very accurate, and while I learned to deal with that from 40k, it is something that generates some people's dislike and they don't get involved because of it.
WHereas WHFB did not have any space marine race that was front and center over everything.
I will interject here to note that I gave AoS an honest try, including buying a Stormcast army, and the degree to which Stormcast are easy-mode is a major reason why I'm not still playing. AoS feels like it's gotten past "we can determine who's won by reading the army lists" and into "we can determine who's won by reading the name of both army books" territory, at least for pick-up play.
Reason I never bought into AOS or WHFB (yet) is because the 40K universe is enough for me, and by being in the distant future it becomes something special and not too derivative of Tolkein's middle earth. Somehow 40K feels fantasy enough...the human imperium is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquistion, Witchfinder Generals and Roman empire. The Eldar as obviously the elves and the Necrons are the undead. The large chaos demons are probably Balrogs...
By leaving it with 40K its easier to explore other franchises for serious fantasy with games such as Frostgrave and of course the D&D games such as Castle Ravenloft. And then there is GW's own Middle Earth game.
My brother aquired a copy of the older ROTK rule book and we've been kicking around the idea of some monster/adventure themed games. The Shelob mission seems good fun!
That said, I wouldn't mind getting Storm Strike. Just like 40K's First Strike, there is a lot of value in that box! Who knows...
Stormcast are pretty easy-mode until one gets to top end competitive where their lack of finesse hurts them rather than helps. Like ogors the army is easy to play well but has tactical limits in capability; the main strength is being good in a straight-up fight but at the high end the combos push the specific builds used above that. Retributors are essentially the Stormcast meta in a nutshell.
That said the sacrosanct stuff is undercosted by a fair margin and does decently.
That said the sacrosanct stuff is undercosted by a fair margin and does decently.
This is actually what turned me away again from AoS GW just did not learned from mistakes in the past and just making the shiny new models straight up better than the old one leading to an army with a lot of units but most of them doing the same but better instead of giving the player some options
TBF they also have a long history of releasing new models that suck. They just tend not to get noticed because, well, they aren't played. For example, the new SC special characters and scythe banshees are sub par while glaivewraiths are downright terrible. Kharadron had issues when they came out and are among the worst battletomes now despite being entirely new. Everything new for Nurgle isn't as strong as blightkings, etc.
It does show that GW is unlikely mis-balancing intentionally, but rather is just poor at doing so. Unfortunately that makes the situation even worse, not better. Being beaten by new shiny stuff is irritating, buying new shiny stuff and discovering it can't beat anything is even worse.
Thats the rub. Some of those new stormcast were so obviously undercost that it took about 5 seconds to glance over the abilities, note the points, and realize how criminal they were point costed.
If thats not intentional then thats gross incompetence.
It does show that GW is unlikely mis-balancing intentionally, but rather is just poor at doing so
This is the one thing, GW is just bad at game design but people still play their games (as they are in a position were people play just because it is the game played and not because it is good, making it hard to fail)
Releasing the Errata book not at the end of the year but with the new edition and making it before last minute changes to the rules were made was also a mistake.
This is what I mean by "they never learn" as this is nothing new
NinthMusketeer wrote: TBF they also have a long history of releasing new models that suck. They just tend not to get noticed because, well, they aren't played
But it is for the same reason
The Designers just have limited idead what the models role on the battlefield is and therefore releasing models with similar roles makes it impossible to balance as one will always be better than the other (or they become identical)
It is just a slap in the face when it gets really obvious even without looking at the point costs (and you get units that are so bad you won't take them even for 1 point per model whole others are so good that a 10-15 point increase won't change it)
I thought they had overcome this issue by releasing only small factions with less different units so that all of them are an option and at least the internal balance for the battletome works and than we got the new SCE stuff.
Sad thing is, at the moment I think that AoS is (rulewise) better than 40k and in a much nicer spot as there are no legacy items GW to care about while designing their stuff (unless for 40k were they could not just replace existing Marines by Primaris and so there will always be one being better than the other as they have the same roles on the battlefield)
Overread wrote: Actually right now besides their model count, Stormcast are doing fairly poorly for a modern and poster-child army. Balance wise and in the competitive scene they are not ranking as high as many other armies. I think GW has taken great pains to avoid Stormcast being overpowered and too easy to play to avoid having them dominate in the same way that Marines do in 40K.
Uhhhh Marines in 40k are one of the weakest armies in the game currently
Overread wrote: Actually right now besides their model count, Stormcast are doing fairly poorly for a modern and poster-child army. Balance wise and in the competitive scene they are not ranking as high as many other armies. I think GW has taken great pains to avoid Stormcast being overpowered and too easy to play to avoid having them dominate in the same way that Marines do in 40K.
Uhhhh Marines in 40k are one of the weakest armies in the game currently
I thought they made up for it by going "soup" though?
At least that is one area AoS has got right I think. Whilst there are Grand Alliances and ally systems, the way Battletomes are setup it favours taking more pure armies. I prefer that greatly because its those pure armies that have a visual style that they share and a lore and artwork which all draws you into them. I like a system that has allies as an option, but hasn't made it mandatory to remain competitive (even if you're not playing tournaments the balance filters down to the casual and if making a strong army required a huge soup then you either accept to have a continual uphill struggle or have to adapt)
I think one of the problems GW has is that they sometimes approach content with new models first. This tends to put a lot of weight and models onto certain factions whereas other factions suffer without anything new.
This usually means that with each addition to the largest force the new addition risks overlapping or negating existing units instead of actually expanding the force and a part of me fears Stormcast is in that territory now. Same thing with Space Marines.
If the model creation was a bit more even we might have gotten a few more Sylvaneth figures, perhaps some new Fyreslayers, and so on that probably would have been better for the game in the long run.
My impression is that GW has brought their model design team a bit more in line. I think with Kirby there was a lot of "they make what they want" going around which in the extreme kind of led to divisions like FW where they were almost producing stuff for just one or two model lines. Lets face it as ignored as fantasy is the FW offering for FW is pitifully small.
So I think it was partly the way they approached design and one would hope they are slowly changing that approach. Plus AoS had a very rocky start and changed its whole focus several times. It wouldn't surprise me if small armies was the original intention - letting GW add new factions really easily, but also retire old ones by removing only a couple of moulds from the system (and likely along the way using the Grand Alliance system to promote soup rather than stand alone armies).
I do agree that Fyreslayers need more models; heck you can basically buy the whole army bar one or two characters, by just getting Start Collecting boxes. I'd say since Idoneth we've seen bigger and more varied armies in general - either from fresh releases or from combined up forces. It actually leaves Daughters of Khaine in an odd place as one of the newer 2.0 factions with still quite a small range of models.
Yep DoK work really well as they are, but I too wish there were a few more models in the range. It's almost as if there's a deliberate gap in the range to make room for either blending with another Dark Elf old faction or to make way for a second wave of new models.
There's loads of potential for what to add to the range and I'd hope its strong selling and position in the meta means that GW might well pay some attention to them and bolster the army variety a little.
AoS does have the advantage of not having to deal with Super-Heavy models. While there are the Super Daemon models of Forgeworld, nothing really gets played at that size.
Flying also has always been in the game as well, and they never had Vehicles operating as a completely separate system like 40K had for decades, so the introduction of Flyers never has been a problem for the Fantasy side of Warhammer.
Well....5th ed WHFB had "flying high" as a mechanic where you couldn't touch the flyer and then they could land anywhere on the table. But that ended iin sep 2000 with 6th ediition.
Overread wrote: Yep DoK work really well as they are, but I too wish there were a few more models in the range. It's almost as if there's a deliberate gap in the range to make room for either blending with another Dark Elf old faction or to make way for a second wave of new models.
I thought for sure the Executioners would be in the DoK roster, given their previous ties to the Khainite cults in Dark Elf culture. And the Assassin.
Overread wrote: Actually right now besides their model count, Stormcast are doing fairly poorly for a modern and poster-child army. Balance wise and in the competitive scene they are not ranking as high as many other armies. I think GW has taken great pains to avoid Stormcast being overpowered and too easy to play to avoid having them dominate in the same way that Marines do in 40K.
Uhhhh Marines in 40k are one of the weakest armies in the game currently
I thought they made up for it by going "soup" though?
At least that is one area AoS has got right I think. Whilst there are Grand Alliances and ally systems, the way Battletomes are setup it favours taking more pure armies. I prefer that greatly because its those pure armies that have a visual style that they share and a lore and artwork which all draws you into them. I like a system that has allies as an option, but hasn't made it mandatory to remain competitive (even if you're not playing tournaments the balance filters down to the casual and if making a strong army required a huge soup then you either accept to have a continual uphill struggle or have to adapt)
Space Marines are trash and aren't included in the Imperial soup armies. Blood Angels used to have a single model (maybe 2 sometimes), but that's gone.
Oh yeah, that's another thing I don't like about the rules. I'd love to take 3 Elf Lords on Dragons, but that ain't happening. And even if my parents hadn't chucked my 3000 points of 90s High Elves when I was at uni, I wouldn't be able to field them together.
Not playing - tried it when it came out and didn't think much of the rules. Gave it a fair shake and it came up wanting.
Background - nigh incomprehensible. Sorry!
That was a few years ago. Looks like the games in a better place now, theres some interesting stuff been released. Read a couple of the battletomes - two were okay, one was utter toilet. Fairly standard GW Hit/Miss rate then.
Some interesting stuff going on, but we shall see how it fares. I'm not sure whether to go in or not - it'd be narrative play for me, all the way.
Oh yeah, that's another thing I don't like about the rules. I'd love to take 3 Elf Lords on Dragons, but that ain't happening. And even if my parents hadn't chucked my 3000 points of 90s High Elves when I was at uni, I wouldn't be able to field them together.
Actually you can.
High Elves dragons in Order Draconis are at 340 points so you can take 3 - it costs just over 1K points so that's quite a lot in the leaders pool, but you can certainly do it. You can even do it for Dark Aelves too.
The only limits are that both Order Draconis and Serpentis are very small armies so you're basically stuck with dragons and cavalry as your core army and then can ally in around 400 points worth of allies (assuming a 2K game). Both are very likely to get addressed as GW updates the game armies (personally I'd wager we see armies like that rolled into a single force much like theyv'e done with Beasts of Chaos and Goblins).
auticus wrote: Yeah the concept of an "army" is largely gone. They recognized tiny model count is desirable and cater to that.
As long as we ignore Goblins, Stormcast, Beasts of Chaos Small forces was the original focus of AoS; now however they are clearly reversing that design choice. There's even people wondering if they'll update Skaven the same way as they have Goblins - putting all the Clans into a single book and then having then either able to go all together in a single skaven force; or have clan groups that you can focus on - rather than having 4 or 5 separate skaven clan books.
Goblins - you can take a small army of all trolls.
Stormcast - most of the storm cast armies I see are small model count affairs. Certainly not the army counts of old. THey are 40 models or in that ballpark.
Beasts of Chaos - can't answer to this as this army lasted three weeks in my meta before disappearing.
When I say small armies or concept of an army I am talking the size of the force not the unit entry count in their book.
Poster was talking about an "army" consisting of 3 dragons and some stuff to go with it, ala 5th edition days when armies were 15-20 models.
Model count.
6th - 8th was focused on "armies". AOS is more back down to the D&D party or warband level again.
Ahh yes you are right AoS has stepped back to smaller numbers of models on the table I agree. It makes full sense too as the game was a big relaunch and a "new" game as such to many. It makes full sense that the army size would drop.
I fully expect that given 5-10 years we will steadily see things shift. Either the points values will go down or the army sizes will go up. Either way we will see GW push for larger armies because people will have bigger and bigger collections of models to use and thus will have more reason to push GW for bigger engagements and more chance to bring more models
Plus just like with 40K; GW can introduce new rules systems and model types that increases the type variety and thus the demands on players to bring more variety of units to tackle more situations.
It's not super extreme in AoS's case as it could have been, but yes you can do smaller armies now. I fully expect that to steadily change through time.
Or army structure/ruleset is altered to encourage groups of models as opposed to powerful single models. It would be a delicate balance for the Stormcast, though. Ogres were often on a tightrope walk in 7th, if I remember right.
Looking at the title of the thread and then looking at the new Gloomspite Gitz release. I don't know, man I might start a small little AoS force. I'd say a drawback is that none of my friends play AoS, they're all 40k players and while I probably would be able to drag one or two down with me I think I'm the fastest (or rather most consistent) painter in the bunch. Playing a game where you don't know the system all that well with a complete stranger can be fun, it's also a bit daunting sometimes.
How viable is a grot-throng looking? The getting grots back with the shrine seems strong and buffing them with snufflers seems like a good idea too but I'm not familiar with the game and am just guessing from how that would work in 40k roughly. I haven't played fantasy since 2003. The battalions in AoS seem a bit strange but I think I sort of get how they work..
But could something like this be a decent place to work towards?
I haven't really calculated where that'd all end up pointswise but I love the idea of massed grots and the rest of the units are just too cool to forgoe.
Because AoS killed any will I have to sink time into the New fantasy setting released for us by GW. But however I do realize that many welcome the changes it brougth when it was released, and even as much as the end of the old world aggrevated me some of the AoS models look half decent.
Oh yeah, that's another thing I don't like about the rules. I'd love to take 3 Elf Lords on Dragons, but that ain't happening. And even if my parents hadn't chucked my 3000 points of 90s High Elves when I was at uni, I wouldn't be able to field them together.
Actually you can.
High Elves dragons in Order Draconis are at 340 points so you can take 3 - it costs just over 1K points so that's quite a lot in the leaders pool, but you can certainly do it. You can even do it for Dark Aelves too.
The only limits are that both Order Draconis and Serpentis are very small armies so you're basically stuck with dragons and cavalry as your core army and then can ally in around 400 points worth of allies (assuming a 2K game). Both are very likely to get addressed as GW updates the game armies (personally I'd wager we see armies like that rolled into a single force much like theyv'e done with Beasts of Chaos and Goblins).
auticus wrote: Goblins - you can take a small army of all trolls.
Stormcast - most of the storm cast armies I see are small model count affairs. Certainly not the army counts of old. THey are 40 models or in that ballpark.
Beasts of Chaos - can't answer to this as this army lasted three weeks in my meta before disappearing.
When I say small armies or concept of an army I am talking the size of the force not the unit entry count in their book.
Poster was talking about an "army" consisting of 3 dragons and some stuff to go with it, ala 5th edition days when armies were 15-20 models.
Model count.
6th - 8th was focused on "armies". AOS is more back down to the D&D party or warband level again.
I think it is more that they added flexibility to how large you want to go. You can take Greenskinz and go big or you can go Ironjawz and go elite. With DoK you can go mass Witch Aelves, but you can also go smaller with a lot of melusai. With Blades of Khorne you can go mass bloodreavers or you can go Blood Warriors/Bloodletters with Bloodthirsters.
This flexibility gives the game something WHFB never had and that is scalability of investment. By being able to start smaller it becomes somewhat easier to build a larger army.
AegisGrimm wrote: I still think how AoS approaches terrain is truly abysmal, especially in the case of Skirmish where terrain is much more a part of the game.
To be fair terrain in both 40K and AoS needs a bit overhaul. I think its an area that GW rules writers are leaving slack because it adds pages to the rules that they want to keep short. I also half think that their rules design team has been playing wargames against each other so long that some of the terrain rules are not written, but they play with them because its just logical to them so it goes without saying.
It would kind of explain oddities such as how forests/woods work with regard to line of sight and ranged attacks and the like (where, I will point out, most think AoS is ahead of 40K in terms of representation).
I also think that they've got this idea kicking around to make all terrain tehmselves and then attach a warscroll to each specific terrain feature. So instead of generic building and wood rules they've got lots of little sub-rules for "Old wood" "Warped wood" etc... Though it seems they can't decide on if they want to do this or not; so we sort of get half and half with neither fully fleshed out.
I don't think it has to do with them wanting to keep it short. At all. I think it has to do with a lot of people hate terrain interfering in their games and past versions of whfb and 40k it was not uncommon to see people playing on planet bowling ball (a monikor for a table that has little to no terrain on it) intentionally, or pushing all the terrain onto the edges of the table where it can't interfere with their game.
When woods blocking line of sight returned with aos 2.0 if you recall there was quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth about it not being "fair".
Battlefield management has always been a thing you had to do in tabletop battle games. That is until 40k 8th and AOS arrived.
I think they intentionally said "a lot of players find terrain to not be "fun" so we're going to omit it". I base that on many comments that have been made by their design team either before they were designers and were posting on these and other forums, or other commentary they have said in interviews and on their twitter feed.
I think Old fantasy had more issues with terrain because of the way units moved; you had to be lighter on terrain so that units could have space to wheel and turn in formation; AoS strips that out entirely.
As for forests I think the main issue there is still the seraphon and their ability to summon terrain to the table.
I am not a fan of the mechanic where opponent team can pop down terrain in general.
On another note I would love for GW to release "terrain maps" for their matches. Basically approved maps that have certain terrain at certain points. Could work both for Narrative and Matched Play. Narrative maps for storytelling and Matched maps that are balanced in a certain way. I think Flames of War has specific maps people play on for example.
Overread wrote: I think Old fantasy had more issues with terrain because of the way units moved; you had to be lighter on terrain so that units could have space to wheel and turn in formation; AoS strips that out entirely.
As for forests I think the main issue there is still the seraphon and their ability to summon terrain to the table.
As for forests I think the main issue there is still the seraphon and their ability to summon terrain to the table.
That was part of it but the majority of the anger was more along the lines of shooting is all completely dead now that we have terrain that always blocks line of sight, so its not fair.
The sylvaneth being able to summon terrain just added to that outrage.
I think Old fantasy had more issues with terrain because of the way units moved; you had to be lighter on terrain so that units could have space to wheel and turn in formation; AoS strips that out entirely.
People were howling about terrain needing to die in a fire in 40k as well where you didn't have formations or ranked up units, and everything has always been skirmish formation in 40k.
People in general didn't like terrain impacting their game hardly at all and did their best to keep it out of the game or minimal until GW made rules that made it largely inconsequential.
I don't recall a lot of people complaining about the amount of terrain in 40K, except for not using enough of it. Some of the rules here and there were a little wonky, and how cover interacted with them, but that was pretty much it.
I heard it personally, or read about it almost daily. There was always someone complaining that melee armies were screwed and that terrain should not have much of an impact so that melee armies could not be as screwed.
Conversely, good terrain allows for melee armies to not be screwed. Oddly enough, it was up to the players to really define what the terrain is and what it does.
That was probably because in older editions of 40k you had things like difficult terrain tests and needing to remove the models closest to the unit firing which would often be the ones you most wanted to actually get into combat.
Now the removal of all that and the introduction of true LoS creates a different problem entirely.
The Chaos Warriors are actually my favorite older plastic kit. Unlike a lot of other models, they still work with a more static rank and file pose. I always thought it gave the impression of a deliberate, unyielding, unstoppable death march.
EnTyme wrote: The Chaos Warriors are actually my favorite older plastic kit. Unlike a lot of other models, they still work with a more static rank and file pose. I always thought it gave the impression of a deliberate, unyielding, unstoppable death march.
Those Warriors of Chaos, in their nice, straight, orderly lines.
Chaos used to mean CHAOS, not evil and cruel. That is actually why I never bothered playing any Warhmmer after 4th edition, and probably the reason I've never picked up AoS; the emphasis of evil over Chaos for the ruinous powers.
Just because Chaos was a certain way in D&D doesn't mean it should be that way in Warhammer. If you think about it, Chaos isn't inherently evil. It's amoral.
Just Tony wrote: Just because Chaos was a certain way in D&D doesn't mean it should be that way in Warhammer. If you think about it, Chaos isn't inherently evil. It's amoral.
It used to be chaotic. It used to be more fun! Now it’s just evil chaps with spikes, so it is what it is. I preferred the older chaos too - 4th book is a classic
Just Tony wrote: Just because Chaos was a certain way in D&D doesn't mean it should be that way in Warhammer. If you think about it, Chaos isn't inherently evil. It's amoral.
I don't even mean Chaos in the DND context. I mean Chaos in the Realm of Chaos - Slaves to Darkness context. When it was about madness, and insanity and mutation and weirdness, not just killing.
Terrain (should) be an easy thing to have rules for in a game, it's just that Rules Lawyers tear it apart and require an idiotic amount of clarifications. Two level-headed players should not have any trouble with a very short summation of the terrain that is most likely to be on the table.
For instance, this is the entire set of terrain generalizations for a free indie skirmish game that I am clarifying up/ inventing my own additions for some home games of mine:
Spoiler:
Terrain
Line of Sight: If you can draw a straight line from the shortest distance between an attacker's base to the target's without it passing through any solid obstacle or building, across another unit’s base, or between any members of another unit which has more than one model, then it has a clear line of sight.
The following list covers most types of commonly found terrain on a battlefield. Many terrain items can be made of two or more types, agreed upon by the players before the start of the battle.
-Cover(forests, ruins, fences, farm fields, etc.): Any unit shooting across or into an area of cover terrain, while their target has most of their models within or behind that cover receive -1 to their shooting rolls, unless the shooting unit is within 1” of that piece of terrain.
-Difficult Terrain(woods, brush, mud, shallow rivers, etc.): Units moving through difficult terrain cannot move more than 6” at a time, even when Rushing or Charging. (*note: in this game, that means units are restricted to basic movement lengths)
-Dangerous Terrain (quicksand, deadly vegetation, deep rivers, etc.): Roll one die for every model that moves across dangerous terrain or begins their activation inside of it. On a roll of 1 the model takes one wound, regardless of its Defense value.
-Dense Terrain: (thick forests, overgrown ruins, etc.): Some areas of terrain are so thick that units with the majority of their models completely inside will gain cover from shooting attacks that originate from outside of the same terrain area. Line of sight is also blocked when drawn from one side of an area of dense terrain to another, if neither unit is already inside of this terrain.
-Elevations(rooftops, hills, etc.): Drawing line of sight to or from units that are in Elevated positions ignores models which are deemed to be on a lower elevation. An Elevation of more than 2” high with a sheer edge requires a ladder, ramp, or stairs for models to climb on top of it.
-Bottomless Terrain(deep crevasses, lava pools, etc.): Any model may attempt to leap across an Impassable terrain element during their movement, but if they fail (see: Jumping), or are pushed or fall off the edge (see below) they are immediately Knocked Out, rather than Stunned.
Is it full of holes exploitable by rules lawyers? Sure, absolutely. But two people wanting to have a good time can find it perfectly serviceable. With just a couple more paragraphs, rules can be added for Jumping across and Falling off of Elevations, as well as jumping down onto other units as a form of attack.
Garrisoning and basic cover rules in AoS is along the right track, but not even close to good enough, unless you are just pushing models around a flat plane and rolling dice.
As a Sylvaneth player I feel like people are as scared of the wyldwoods as they are because they aren't as aware of the restrictions they have. The need to keep a mimimum distance from other models on placement means you need to place them quickly before people run up the fields and I have had cases where the terrain was spaced just right to leave these huge tracts of land the forests couldn't fit into without being too close to something else.
PiñaColada wrote: Looking at the title of the thread and then looking at the new Gloomspite Gitz release. I don't know, man I might start a small little AoS force. I'd say a drawback is that none of my friends play AoS, they're all 40k players and while I probably would be able to drag one or two down with me I think I'm the fastest (or rather most consistent) painter in the bunch. Playing a game where you don't know the system all that well with a complete stranger can be fun, it's also a bit daunting sometimes.
How viable is a grot-throng looking? The getting grots back with the shrine seems strong and buffing them with snufflers seems like a good idea too but I'm not familiar with the game and am just guessing from how that would work in 40k roughly. I haven't played fantasy since 2003. The battalions in AoS seem a bit strange but I think I sort of get how they work..
But could something like this be a decent place to work towards?
I haven't really calculated where that'd all end up pointswise but I love the idea of massed grots and the rest of the units are just too cool to forgoe.
I'm not really much of a pro, and I'm only just starting to get back into Sigmar because of the Grot release too, but that collection looks pretty good actually. Lots of bodies, some good buffing units, and fanatics look hilariously awesome if they can roll well. The army on the board would also look ace.
auticus wrote: People were howling about terrain needing to die in a fire in 40k as well where you didn't have formations or ranked up units, and everything has always been skirmish formation in 40k.
People in general didn't like terrain impacting their game hardly at all and did their best to keep it out of the game or minimal until GW made rules that made it largely inconsequential.
On the flipside the 8th 40k resulted in terrain being so ESSENTIAL that I have never in my life fought in such a big amount of terrain. One could say even it now has bigger impact than ever before here but style is different. Rather than degrading say shooting it now blocks it completely as these huge solid walls appear around making it very hard to draw LOS to enemy. End result is my ork LOOTAS(with their heavy weapons) are one of my most mobile units in my army as they are being magick'ed around just to get LOS!
Cover has died in flames. Big LOS blocking walls have come in.
EnTyme wrote: The Chaos Warriors are actually my favorite older plastic kit. Unlike a lot of other models, they still work with a more static rank and file pose. I always thought it gave the impression of a deliberate, unyielding, unstoppable death march.
Those Warriors of Chaos, in their nice, straight, orderly lines.
Chaos used to mean CHAOS, not evil and cruel. That is actually why I never bothered playing any Warhmmer after 4th edition, and probably the reason I've never picked up AoS; the emphasis of evil over Chaos for the ruinous powers.
Do you have another solution how to position the models in a regiment? I would like to hear it.
I couldn't get my head around GW destroying the Old World. Even from a business standpoint I thought it madness. Like D&D killing the Forgotten Realms or Battletech the Inner Sphere. An act of vandalism.
I'm a veteran - gaming since the early Eighties. Table-top, hex and counter, RPGs - love them all. I tried AoS.
I think think the battle was already lost in the very early stages for me. The vandalism. Then the 'humour'. The change in aesthetic from classic fantasy to super hero fantasy. Rank and file to skirmish - at the very least I'd need another large scale fantasy combat system to use thirty years of armies.
But I was interested to see if the game system was decent. It wasn't. At launch it was probably one of the worst systems I have ever played through. I ain't just including professional commercial releases in that either. Things seemed to be improving rules wise and I'm glad people are enjoying it. But at launch it was a absolute mess. Remember on forums when people thought it was a joke? Others were saying these were just quick start rules and GW would be releasing the full rules soon. A mess from every standpoint.
So why the love? KoW.
I'm simply loving it. Fast and furious, tactically deep, multi-basing with dioramas, manoeuvre - counter manoeuvre. Games going to the wire most times. The new version of WFB I really wanted.
Two or three games a sitting rather than two-thirds of a game a sitting. Making playing out campaigns or linked scenario battles much easier.
Balance is decent. We play with the Clash of King updates as the company keeps thing tidy with these updates. We are a close group though so we don't try to break games. So maybe others will have a different opinion in this area. Balance was always an issue in WFB but again not trying to break the game and actively working to fix such issues as they arise helps. But in this regard KoW is certainly less stressful.
I hope those that play AoS enjoy it for many years. It didn't really stand a chance with me. Lost me at the beginning with the actual mechanics being the coup de grâce. Even saying that I might still have went to KoW over WFB if I'd given it a try a few years before the launch of AoS. AoS enabled my group and I to overcome our in-errata in testing and enjoying different systems over WFB. The Old World was to fantasy table-top what D&D is to fantasy RPGs. It's simple presence controlled that market through history and scale. I think that was a mad thing to throw away.
I’ve tried twice to get into AoS. I bought both starter sets, built the minis, read the books then rapidly lost interest both times. There’s a number of reasons, but they all fall into the camp of either issues I have with the background or issues I have with the game.
Stormcast. I find them very disappointing. I remember there was a brief period when AoS was first released, when we didn’t know what Staormcast actually were. The possibilities felt exciting and intriguing. Were they golems, animated statues, maybe empty suits of armour animated by spirits? Perhaps they were celestial beings, angelic hosts of Sigmar with visages too terrible or awe inspiring for mortals to look upon? Turns out the reality was far more dull. They’re basically space marines but worse, because any tension or tragedy in their deaths is instantly dispelled by the lore in which they just keep coming back to life. So, the poster boys and girls of the game are the most boring thing in the game. I do like their minis, until they take off their helmets to remind me how boring they are under those cool helmets.
The background in general just doesn’t work for me. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Planescape, the old D&D campaign setting (my favourite one too). Planescape had the same sense of anything goes, anything could potentially exist in the various planes of existence, but AoS fails where Planescape succeeded.
When Planescape launched it initially focused on the places where ordinary people lived. It created a very real sense of being a living, breathing setting where people went about their lives. AoS has utterly failed at this. When everything is dialled up to eleven, it stops feeling “real”. Despite GW repeatly trying to tell us that there are cities and towns in the mortal realms where ordinary people go about their lives, when it comes to the game, the miniatures etc they’re just not there. The ordinary humans are just leftovers from WHFB.
I feel like AoS is a non-setting. Whereas Planescape managed to tie its wildly disparate elements together with a thick veneer of Planescape style (in the art, the writing, as well as the lore) AoS still feels like a mishmash of cool ideas without any uniting theme. The mortal realms just feel like an excuse to give the miniature designers free reign, but free reign is not a coherent setting.
The game itself is too gamey for my tastes. I’ve seen articles on AoS tactics which advocate arranging your units into massively spread out W or H shapes to restrict the enemy’s movements. This is the exact opposite of what any general would do in reality. Any war game in which the best way to win is to not behave the way real armies behaved, is failing as a wargame.
I don’t hate AoS. Like I said, I’ve dumped money on two starter sets and genuinely tried to like it. I love some of the miniatures. I just can’t get excited about it because every time I try to dive into it, it feels hollow and disappointing.
MonkeyBallistic wrote: I’ve tried twice to get into AoS. I bought both starter sets, built the minis, read the books then rapidly lost interest both times. There’s a number of reasons, but they all fall into the camp of either issues I have with the background or issues I have with the game.
Stormcast. I find them very disappointing. I remember there was a brief period when AoS was first released, when we didn’t know what Staormcast actually were. The possibilities felt exciting and intriguing. Were they golems, animated statues, maybe empty suits of armour animated by spirits? Perhaps they were celestial beings, angelic hosts of Sigmar with visages too terrible or awe inspiring for mortals to look upon? Turns out the reality was far more dull. They’re basically space marines but worse, because any tension or tragedy in their deaths is instantly dispelled by the lore in which they just keep coming back to life. So, the poster boys and girls of the game are the most boring thing in the game. I do like their minis, until they take off their helmets to remind me how boring they are under those cool helmets.
The background in general just doesn’t work for me. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Planescape, the old D&D campaign setting (my favourite one too). Planescape had the same sense of anything goes, anything could potentially exist in the various planes of existence, but AoS fails where Planescape succeeded.
When Planescape launched it initially focused on the places where ordinary people lived. It created a very real sense of being a living, breathing setting where people went about their lives. AoS has utterly failed at this. When everything is dialled up to eleven, it stops feeling “real”. Despite GW repeatly trying to tell us that there are cities and towns in the mortal realms where ordinary people go about their lives, when it comes to the game, the miniatures etc they’re just not there. The ordinary humans are just leftovers from WHFB.
I feel like AoS is a non-setting. Whereas Planescape managed to tie its wildly disparate elements together with a thick veneer of Planescape style (in the art, the writing, as well as the lore) AoS still feels like a mishmash of cool ideas without any uniting theme. The mortal realms just feel like an excuse to give the miniature designers free reign, but free reign is not a coherent setting.
The game itself is too gamey for my tastes. I’ve seen articles on AoS tactics which advocate arranging your units into massively spread out W or H shapes to restrict the enemy’s movements. This is the exact opposite of what any general would do in reality. Any war game in which the best way to win is to not behave the way real armies behaved, is failing as a wargame.
I don’t hate AoS. Like I said, I’ve dumped money on two starter sets and genuinely tried to like it. I love some of the miniatures. I just can’t get excited about it because every time I try to dive into it, it feels hollow and disappointing.
I think that when C7 comes out finally with the AoSRPG a lot of that fluff issue will be much better resolved. they are a great game company. They will do it justice. ONE of my big fluff complaints is not so much the lack of it, but the shotgunned out disjointed mess of it. There is plenty of it and some of it I find really damn good, some of it I think it basically trash,.though that is likely due to my preference in authors, to me Josh Reynolds is the 2nd coming of Tolkein so I love everything he has put out. Hammerhal for warhammer quest made a good impression on me whereas shadespire, not so much. It feels like Shadespire tried to hard to be Mordheim and isnt, whereas Hammerhal just tried to be Hammerhal and is very interesting as a city.
Bad mechanics I just think are more par for the course with GW, the only game I thought they did a good job with is the LOTR series.
Bad mechanics I just think are more par for the course with GW, the only game I thought they did a good job with is the LOTR series.
Epic 1st and 2nd were good rule-sets for the scale they depicted.
RT was a beautiful little sandbox for exploring the early 40K universe. People forget about the customisation it allowed to players to invent whatever the wanted in the new universe.
Warhammer Historical Wargames also had some good stuff.
thekingofkings wrote: ...Bad mechanics I just think are more par for the course with GW, the only game I thought they did a good job with is the LOTR series.
The impression I get from GW is that they have a bunch of little competing sub-teams that either can't or won't coordinate what they're doing, so they end up with a weird emergent meta based on bad interactions that the design team never really bothered to consider. 30k is way, way more functional than 7e 40k despite using the same books simply because there was a lot more central control over the play environment, which is also one of the things LotR does that most GW games don't.
AoS feels like it's gone the opposite direction and thrown any attempt to control the play environment to the wolves in favour of writing every single army book like it's for a different game from every single other army book.
In terms of miniatures, Age of Sigmar seems to be head and shoulders above 40k.
In terms of gameplay... well, I'd say they're actually pretty close at this point.
What it really comes down to for me is the story. I just don't see anything interesting or engaging going on there.
I've actually thought about this before. The entire purpose of Age of Sigmar is to provide as wide and open a canvas to the writers and game developers as possible so that they can craft something engaging out of it, but for the life of me I just haven't seen anything. I know there are a lot of books out there but at the same time the 40k books are almost treated like the Star Wars books were under George Lucas. Except where those books weren't considered canon, last I asked an official representative of GW the books are neither canon nor non-canon, they just don't commit themselves either way.
Having said all that, I have actually read the 2 short stories of Age of Sigmar that were included in that free Black Library sampler book that they gave out in 2017, as well as most of the shorts from Malign Portents. They were all surprisingly engaging, but lacked something that I just can't quite put my finger on. Maybe I just need more information, but then again I've absorbed so much already and still feel like I'm spinning my wheels in the mud when it actually comes to me actually wanting to go out of my way to engage with it either in fiction or game.
I think the biggest drawback for the lore is the lack of structure and placement. The world that was had very fine details and over time it also refined the now iconic characters.
It's going to take time to refine and create a more recognizable history of the AoS world.
Currently, I'm excited about the light elves - Tyrion and Teclis successful rebirth of the ancient elven souls. It feels as if there's a great potential in the theme.
MonkeyBallistic wrote: Stormcast. I find them very disappointing. I remember there was a brief period when AoS was first released, when we didn’t know what Staormcast actually were. The possibilities felt exciting and intriguing. Were they golems, animated statues, maybe empty suits of armour animated by spirits? Perhaps they were celestial beings, angelic hosts of Sigmar with visages too terrible or awe inspiring for mortals to look upon? Turns out the reality was far more dull. They’re basically space marines but worse, because any tension or tragedy in their deaths is instantly dispelled by the lore in which they just keep coming back to life. So, the poster boys and girls of the game are the most boring thing in the game. I do like their minis, until they take off their helmets to remind me how boring they are under those cool helmets.
Also this. When I first heard of Stormcast I had this image in my head of the angels and demons of diablo, duking it out in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
You know what, now that I think of it I pretty much expected Age of Sigmar to be Diablo. Not that copying someone else would have been a very wise move, either.
Still, it doesn't take much to come up with an idea better than what they had. Space Marines in Fantasy with infinite lives.
Having said all that, I have actually read the 2 short stories of Age of Sigmar that were included in that free Black Library sampler book that they gave out in 2017, as well as most of the shorts from Malign Portents. They were all surprisingly engaging, but lacked something that I just can't quite put my finger on. Maybe I just need more information, but then again I've absorbed so much already and still feel like I'm spinning my wheels in the mud when it actually comes to me actually wanting to go out of my way to engage with it either in fiction or game.
What do you guys find so exciting about it?
Try the Skaven Pestilens book (get it in the omnibus 1 edition because you also get the Sylvanath and Fyrslayers books too) and the new Novella stories like Warqueen and Heart of Winter (to name but two). They are great reads and I think go further to establishing the lore. I think one mistake was that a lot of the early Realmgate novels were very much focused on key battles and as such didn't have the same room nor time to establish a world because they were getting stuck into a fight.
Another issue is that GW sort of skipped the whole building and mythic age of the Realms and jumped to after all that had built and fallen and been corrupted by a 1000 years of Chaos incursions. What you have in the Mortal Realms now is essentially a period after the Realmgate Wars where its as if the Chaos Wastes of the Old World were swept back. Old cities rebuilt upon; old secrets long since forgotten; old battles long since gone etc....
Some of the new Novellas feel as if they are at least 100 years or more after the Realmgate events and my impression is that the lore should start to settle and slow down and start to establish places and timelines and connecting events between books. I would also recommend checking out Inferno 1 and 2 and (when it comes) 3 and soforth. The stories are much shorter, but again they feel like they are developing into a world and peoples.
I also hope GW pumps out some more artwork - not just a scene of loads of warriors, but scenes of the realms. My impression from the books I've read is that looking into the Realms is like looking at Album covers from earlier Metal era - you've got a world of hot metal with creatures that have natural valves and pistons within them - you've got a land soaked in greenery and life; you've got a realm that's a blasted wasteland - you've got vast leviathan sized wyrms that walk over huge landscapes. Wyrms so fast that people have built a city atop their back; the buildings towering up against slow swaying thick "hair" like tendrils.
I think the newer Lore and books are getting better, the writers and setting is more "solid" and firm and I think developing itself. Whilst GW has resources I think that the management attitude toward the launch of AoS was casual in the extreme and that's reflected in the earlier lore and rules and mostly everything except model quailty. So there's been a lag-time for many other things to play catch up as the management and focus has changed dramatically.
It seems to me that a lot of AoS is more management driven than creative driven. I do not detect a huge amount of enthusiasm from the design studio about the setting.
It should feel vast and crazy, but the lack of reference and focus on all these godlike personae like Sigmar, Nagash and Morthai makes it feel weirdly small and cramped to me.
I usually do not read any secondary fiction for game worlds and expect to be able to get the information from my factions rulebook, but I got the Seraphon one and found it pretty bare, and what was there (Seraphon being memories of the space frogs) pretty unsatisfying.
Da Boss wrote: It seems to me that a lot of AoS is more management driven than creative driven. I do not detect a huge amount of enthusiasm from the design studio about the setting.
It should feel vast and crazy, but the lack of reference and focus on all these godlike personae like Sigmar, Nagash and Morthai makes it feel weirdly small and cramped to me.
I usually do not read any secondary fiction for game worlds and expect to be able to get the information from my factions rulebook, but I got the Seraphon one and found it pretty bare, and what was there (Seraphon being memories of the space frogs) pretty unsatisfying.
I think this comes from its history and the Kirby era. AoS was a tightly kept secret - heck we didn't even really get huge rumours on it and even teams like the FW team were left totally surprised by it (from what I recall reading). So yeah I think a lot of the creative side to very muted by GW's management desire to keep a tight lid on the release before it happened. Plus I think early on the intent was to have a much more fuzzy world setting. I strongly believe the original intention was to have a game system that was more collector edition models. With smaller armies overall for most factions - letting GW retire whole factions in one go and introduce others at the same time. So having an infinite realm network with fuzzy lore and timelines fits that really well. I think that's why we saw so many armies fractured in to so so many subfactions that were all rather small.
Having it all fuzzy and infinite means no more pesky players and fans screaming for updates to their favourite army that hasn't been selling well for 10 years (even though part of that might well be GW not releasing anything for them over those 10 years). Instead you drop the army - those models become legacy/collectors and you introduce the new snazzy army in their wake. Because you're embracing the "we are a boutique model company" mindset and abandoning the "Lore" entirely
Since then management has changed- the Iron Wall has fallen and the attitude has shifted. AoS has a lag-time reaction to that but I think we are starting to see it approaching its golden age. Ergo a period where the lore is coming together; where the armies are getting cleaned up and functional and where there's a general air of future and direction to it. 2.0 was a big turning point - the lore got a bit firmer; maps appeared and we've now also got an RPG setting coming and I think that is giong to bolster the lore a fair bit. RPG games NEED a fixed timeframe and lore aspect to let people use them so I can see that starting to shore things up.
) so this advice is useful because I want to spare their parents any extra spend. I tried getting the kids into 
