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Another big step for AoS will be the transition from the old models to the new ones.

That's been quite the complaint that with AoS as a new game it should have all new factions that are a break from the old aesthetic.

Now this obviously is a double edged sword because it would leave the old fanbase without any access to the models they've grown use to and would feel alienated further than the current stock just getting round bases.

However, pushing out all new factions like the future fey Sylvaneths would really help players get a better feel for the new setting and dispell doubts that AoS is just making sells on the older stock instead of on the new models.

Agreed a 100% on this. The fact that the new settings is supposed to be thousand of years after the old world, and yet that most factions still look identical, is something that really makes me unable to get into AOS. Most redesign have been good so far (except for the fyrslyer. Concept is cool, but execution is atrocious), so I'm pretty excited to see what will come later on.

Davor wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
here's GW's problem they are set up for mass production but price their stuff as if it's a boutique item.

GW doesn't mass produce anymore. With all their "limited editions" GW just through out their answer of a lot of their products being expensive is paying for molds. So if they can only sell 1000 minis and never again, I guess molds don't cost as much as GW claims. GW have been releasing a lot of "limited" minis as of late. Also if GW was doing mass production, a lot of their minis would not be "selling out". GW makes artificial hype by on purpose not making as much as they could so they can be "sold out".

The vast majority of what GW makes is still mass produced. They release a few kits each month that are intended to stay on shelves long term.

Things like their board games where they only make a limited amount, the amount is probably what they can make from a single mould.

I don't think they do too many "1000 only" miniatures? They had a couple of limited Space Marines and I think that was about it? Either way, when you only intend to make 1000, my understanding is you can make a cheaper mould knowing it won't last as long.

privateer4hire wrote:
Even some of the staunchest detractors went from:
"AoS sucks! GW jammed us over! They're so unhoopy! I'll burn my models..."
to
"Points? Tell me more about how I can use my shelved minis in this new format."

Mathhammer, here we come again. ARGH! There goes play what you want and what you want. Net lists, here we come.

Baron Klatz wrote:
...... dispell doubts that AoS is just making sells on the older stock instead of on the new models.

This got me thinking. I am sure the 30% AoS sales is doing is older stock. Are people really buying that many Sigmarines and Chaos guys to be making 30% of all of GW sales? No I don't think so. What is it, 50% of 40K sales is what, Space Marines? Going by AoS was 10% of sales last year that would mean 40K is what 70% of GW sales and the rest we say are brushes, glue and what not? So that is what 35% of all GW sales is Space Marines? You telling me Sigmarines, Chaos, and the new Dwarves are selling about the same as Space Marines? No AoS in my opinion is not doing that well. It's the older stock that is being sold. Time will tell if my opinion is correct or not.

More importantly they are "mass produced" in that they are produced using injection moulded PVC - designed and optimized for mass production. They presumably also produce several thousand of any given mini.

limited run / boutique tend to have a fixed number and are usually in the hundreds, using some sort of hand-casting method in resin or metal. Where you might only be able to cast a few dozen an hour, rather than a few dozen a minute.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Davor wrote:

This got me thinking. I am sure the 30% AoS sales is doing is older stock. Are people really buying that many Sigmarines and Chaos guys to be making 30% of all of GW sales?

I think this figure only floated after Warhammer Quest went up for order to LGS, which came with huge bulk incentives (Some discount for every 10). So it's entirely possible that most of this 30% is actually trade orders for Warhammer Quest. That and the "Last chance to buy" makes me skeptical that of the 30% figure meaning anything. As already said, anything for Fantasy will be counted as AoS.

 thekingofkings wrote:

hobojebus wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
It is played around here every now and then. I myself am slowly warming up to it. Despite my hate for GW killing the WHFB setting (and getting rid of some of the stuff I had wanted to buy) I am now seriously considering getting into AoS. I just really need my sword&sorcery fix, and LotR alone isn't cutting it for some reason. I am now looking at either AoS or Darklands, but both have their share of problems... Though choices. I guess I just have to see and wait how everything develops before jumping in.

Have you had a look at:

Frostgrave
Songs of Blades and Heroes
Of Gods and Mortals
Hordes of the Things
Dragon Rampant
Kings of War

I just got frostgrave the other day I'm reading through it, I'm looking forward to playing it once I'm confident on the rules.

Would love to hear more about it after you get through reading it, likely in its own thread area. I was wondering if it is a good successor to mordheim. thanks.

Personally i don't think it is as good as Mordheim. Way too streamlined and simple for me

I was thinking of it as an alternative to AoS, really.

If you want a more detailed, in-depth fantasy skirmish game, a set of streamlined RPG rules like Savage Worlds may be worth looking at.

 streetsamurai wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:

hobojebus wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
It is played around here every now and then. I myself am slowly warming up to it. Despite my hate for GW killing the WHFB setting (and getting rid of some of the stuff I had wanted to buy) I am now seriously considering getting into AoS. I just really need my sword&sorcery fix, and LotR alone isn't cutting it for some reason. I am now looking at either AoS or Darklands, but both have their share of problems... Though choices. I guess I just have to see and wait how everything develops before jumping in.

Have you had a look at:

Frostgrave
Songs of Blades and Heroes
Of Gods and Mortals
Hordes of the Things
Dragon Rampant
Kings of War

I just got frostgrave the other day I'm reading through it, I'm looking forward to playing it once I'm confident on the rules.

Would love to hear more about it after you get through reading it, likely in its own thread area. I was wondering if it is a good successor to mordheim. thanks.

Personally i don't think it is as good as Mordheim. Way too streamlined and simple for me

That's not a bad thing in games look at x-wing, 40k is a mess because it's a sluggish bloated mess that takes three or more hours to play at 2k.

AoS is a mess because all those weapons and shields have different properties.

Most people I know enjoy Frostgrave BECAUSE it is simple. The concept that a game can only be good if it is complex doesn't fly with everyone. I may have agreed twenty years ago, but twenty years ago I enjoyed the aspect of the game that was "rules mastery" which meant if I memorized the complex rule system I had an advantage over others that wouldn't.

Today I don't have time for all that anymore. I prefer simpler games that don't have a lot of rules. Something that has never happened with AOS that has happened with every other GW game I have ever played is that I cannot remember a single rules argument in almost a year now.

40k is irritating because every game I spend a good 20-30 minutes total looking stuff up because the rules are atrocious.

As for AOS having different properties for shields etc, I don't mind that at all. One of my main complaints about Kings of War is how bland and generic everything is. Having models do different things appeals to me.

I treat it like I do discrete mathematics. Everything has its own set of properties and I only have to know the properties that I chose to take with me to game.

One way I do this is by simply printing out each unit card and laminating it. Then I have every unit I'm using right in front of me.

Back when I still played 40k we almost never went a week without a rules argument, we can go months without checking anything for x-wing.

Simple doesn't mean shallow, it of course doesn't automatically mean good either.

As for AoS weapons I just miss knowing at a glance what a model was armed with, I used to see a halberd and know exactly what it did.

40k isn't just complicated, it's a convoluted mess of poorly written and ambiguous rules. You can have complexity without taking much extra time to play a game by having well written rules and good reference sheets. 40k has neither, often a situation will have you flicking through a book, to find a rule, which will tell you to flick to another part of the book or possibly even a different book, then you find the rule you want and it's ambiguously written and can be interpreted multiple ways, often causing you to read larger slabs of rules and debate with your opponent to try and come to a conclusion.

You can have complicated rules as long as they don't give you the run around when questions come up and you have good reference sheets so questions don't come up frequently in the first place.

AoS, it seems GW thought "complication is bad, let's go simple!" while ignoring that it's the BADLY written rules people dislike, not the complex ones. It went too far the other way. Putting the rules on 4 pages? Really, would anyone have cared if it was written on 10-15 pages but with a little more depth, clarity and less corner cutting?

I don't think the game even needs 4 pages. A lot of the space currently is pretty much wasted in setup/triumph stuff. I'm a big fan of the short rulebook and I would not want 10-15 pages for the base rules. The problem GW has is poor ability to write. Even on the four pages, they wasted space and made ambiguous wording. The rules could be 2 pages and unambiguous. The strength of AoS is the simplicity of the base rules. It doesn't need more pages, but it does need more technical-minded writers.

4 pages of rules? What a joke. I believe Age of Sigmar has more rules than 40K. So how is AoS less complex than 40K?

Oh wait, I know. A lot of people need Mathhammer when they play so they can show how superior they are with man dollies.

coldgaming wrote:
I don't think the game even needs 4 pages. A lot of the space currently is pretty much wasted in setup/triumph stuff. I'm a big fan of the short rulebook and I would not want 10-15 pages for the base rules. The problem GW has is poor ability to write. Even on the four pages, they wasted space and made ambiguous wording. The rules could be 2 pages and unambiguous. The strength of AoS is the simplicity of the base rules. It doesn't need more pages, but it does need more technical-minded writers.

Yes I agree with you in both that I love the 4-page rules but feel like the triumph table and victory conditions are two of the clunkier areas, but I do see why GW included them for the ease of having lines in the campaign books that read "replace the triumph table/victory conditions with the following..."

So after giving it some more thought I don't think I would want to take them out completely because I think it's good to have a baseline there that the campaign books supersede. At the same time, they are some of the rules that caused the biggest uproar when AoS was first released. Perhaps disclaimers above each explaining their purpose would make them better. "The Triumph Table is a quick method to run a campaign with friends and link a series of battles" - "The Sudden Death Victory Conditions provide a loose framework for game objectives" or something along those lines.

don,t agree with you. I like it when a game have some kind of unique mechanism. Frostgrave pretty much only consist on who rolls higher on a dice. I can see why some like it for its simplicity, but me, I find it a bit boring. Same thing for AOS.

I much prefer a game like helldorado, where there was all kind of cool thing to do. Different strokes for different folks

Davor wrote:
4 pages of rules? What a joke. I believe Age of Sigmar has more rules than 40K. So how is AoS less complex than 40K?

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested 40k does a good job with its rules.

Oh wait, I know. A lot of people need Mathhammer when they play so they can show how superior they are with man dollies.

I'm not really following your logic progression. Do you mean because AoS has no balancing mechanics there's no point doing math?

A lot of mathhammer in 40k just comes down the the god-awful balance. It's usually just used to figure out which weapon or unit is "best", when if the game was balanced there shouldn't be a "best". In a balanced world, you'd just decide "oh I want the choppy unit, so I'll take those guys, and I want some anti-infantry so I'll take that gun, and then a bit of anti-tank so I'll take that gun". But the balance is so crap mathhammer steps in and tells you, wait, that choppy unit is likely to get gunned down long before it ever gets to chopping, that anti-infantry gun is a waste of points, and that anti-tank gun only has a 25% chance of taking off a hull point so is actually not as good as a completely different anti-tank option. If you don't do the mathhammer beforehand, you'll be wondering why the army you spent hundreds of hours painting keeps getting wiped off the table

The thing that most of the special rules are in the warscrolls makes the game much more easy to learn, even if there are in fact lots of special rules existing. It's like Twilight struggle, which at least used to be the no1 game in the Boardgamegeek, the rules are fairly simple and easy to learn because most of the content is in the cards, you don't have to waste time reading them all through before you get to play and while you play the rules are easily on hand on cards without needing to skim through a few hundred pages thick manual.

This is the thing why 40k is so hard to play, as you have to skim through all the different books for the rules, even when the core rules are in fact more simple than AoS.
The same design philosophy has been used in the Infinity and I can say that especially infinity (2nd edition) was exhausting game to get hold of. Luckily it's a very good game. It seems to be a Spanish thing as the batman miniature game has similar system of listing every skill in the book even when all of the units have their cards. It always takes almost 3rd of the playing time to find out what everything does.

Davor wrote:
4 pages of rules? What a joke. I believe Age of Sigmar has more rules than 40K. So how is AoS less complex than 40K?

It's been a long while since I looked at 40k, but that followed the same philosophy as AoS the last time I looked - namely every unit had its own set of rules, some would refer back to some generic rule, but many were specific to the unit. If you wanted to know the rules for all the units (even if the rules were generic abilities) you still needed all the codices to know all the rules for all the units.

However, just like 40k, AoS does not require that you know all the rules for all the units. It only requires that you know the rules for the units you are playing with. If we have a dozen unit types one the table then you only need to know the rules for those units, be it 40k or AoS. Then with 40k you need to understand the rules for the game itself, which is however many pages nowadays, and for AoS the 4 pages of rules. Any given game of AoS is going to be way less complex than 40k.

In AoS all of a unit's rules are found on its war scroll, while in 40K you have to refer to various different pages of the codex and the main rulebook.

The next difference is that 40K has a awful lot more little rules, such as weapon types (Assault, Rapid Fire, Template, etc.) that aren't found in AoS.

With regards to rules, many of AoS' ones are of different nature to 40k's ones. Where a 40k unit would have re-rolls to hit, ignores cove rules or always wounds on 4+, AoS units have rules like: halve the enemy's movement value, roll consecutive successes to wipe out a unit, various buffs etc. They are more akin to 40k's psychic powers as effects go thus are more difficult to remember during a battle (atleast for me in any case). Imagine an army of psykers (marginalized case) and how every turn you try to hold the spells you cast in your mind and base your decisions upon them. AoS is somewhat similar to that.