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Dead here. Oddly enough WFB, which was not dead before AoS, died too. No one is buying WFB stuff.

Hanging on by the skin of it's teeth?

Wednesday night Fantasy / AOS has been taken over by MTG and Pathfinder night at the FLGS.

The store owner is frantically painting up stuff trying to get people playing but it is not moving much.

Who am I kidding, I have not laid eyes on a game being played yet.

We shall see, the rules seem OK enough but the local fantasy players have pretty much rage-quit to a man.

My friends who do have fantasy armies have moved on to KOW with barely a backward glance.

Not unexpected that it's doing poorly when they have only released Stormcast and Khorne.

This is my fear and I have enjoyed the games I've played but the releases have been a bit meh for me so far.
The summer was obviously dedicated to AoS, however 40k is now starting to ramp up again, if rumours hold it will be:
Tau this month
Chaos at xmas
Nids/IG new year

So where are the other AoS factions fitting in? Leaving aside release schedules GW only has a limited production capacity with moulds etc so if 40k is taking us up to xmas will there only be very small AoS releases for other factions, none at all, 2016 midyear?

What can Lizardmen expect, High Elves, Dwarves? Im quite confused and a bit worried on where GW plan on taking AoS overall.

Our club, the 'hardcore' of WFB players are sticking with WFB for now, and still trying to figure out where to go from there.
AoS is pulling interest from WFB, 40k, WMH and other systems; it's 2nd to 40k and averages same number of games as WFB over the weeks.
How much of this is going to be long-term and how much is just initial excitement I don't know, but I've seen intro games being played 3 weeks in a row and the 'new' folks are playing again next week.


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 Ratius wrote:

What can Lizardmen expect, High Elves, Dwarves? Im quite confused and a bit worried on where GW plan on taking AoS overall.

Literal answer, nothing. There won't be new releases for these races, as they're world-that-was.
On the other hand, Seraphon, Aelf and Duardin will have new releases. Just don't know what or when.
Although I think the fyreslayers will appear first just because they're the only faction we've seen any artwork from and their background mentions have been a little more frequent.

^Seraphon have had artwork too. :-)

Yeah I think Fyreslayers will come first. Possibly a harlequins-esque release I.e 1-2 units and 1-2 characters

There's a lot of "I don't know" going on about the fluff and future releases of AOS. That's not a good business plan.

 MWHistorian wrote:
There's a lot of "I don't know" going on about the fluff and future releases of AOS. That's not a good business plan.

Yeah, I think the fact that people simply have no idea what's going to happen to the older armies, and if it's worthwhile to invest in them... I think that's not helping.

Do we have ANY idea if Empire armies will be useful at all or with the lack of an actual 'empire' are all humans now chaos worshipers or refugees in Sigmaheim?

 jonolikespie wrote:
Do we have ANY idea if Empire armies will be useful at all or with the lack of an actual 'empire' are all humans now chaos worshipers or refugees in Sigmaheim?

They are all tooled up in Azyrheim and there is no Empire, sadly. The only Empire models that have been pictured are those in the cult of sigmar (warrior priests etc), so we can guess that humans will have a future army of their own but it will likely be very focused on religion.

I'm still going to be adding to my Empire army in the meantime though. I play mine as swashbuckling mercenaries and smugglers. The thing is with AoS, because there are no rules on army composition other than "you need the warscrolls", there will hopefully never be a point where my army is no longer playable because those compendium warscrolls will always be there. (Well, until AoS dramatically changes the rules and renders all warscrolls incompatible. But that shouldn't be for a good while).

Because of this freedom, I have actually found myself collecting 4 armies since AoS began. Free Peoples, Duardin, Death and Moonclan Grots :-)

We're building up steam with more and more interest. I think it has taken people watching games to see how much fun AoS is and turn them on to it.

Personally I have relented and started a savage orruk force after I saw a beautiful army at my local GW

It started off strong at my local store, already being about 50/50 between WHFB and 40K. That only lasted about a month, and the usual Thursday night games are 100% 40K now. It's a shame.

I really want for it to succeed, but after the hype of gaming cenvention with focus on WFB 8th and 40K there has been very little talk about AoS. I backed The Others: 7 Sins tho

As funny and snarky as that is it, it also shows a very local pattern on where interest and money and flows.

Some people tried it at first, I think the store cleared out of all the initial release stuff.

After a couple of games however, those who were interested seemed to have dropped it, and none of the more recent stuff has been selling at all.

Basically, July hit, and by the end of august pretty much all interest had dried up. It's been dead since then.

My local store JUST started stocking Age of Sigmar this week (mostly historicals up until now)

I guess that means there was a community demand for it? Will update in a month, when they either stop stocking or there is a thriving community

Locally, the community wrought "9th age" is more popular than AoS and even Kings of War is more popular.

That said, most of the local WHFB players have moved onto sword and spear historicals.

such a shame I believe it has died out in the local area

So I got curious and jumped on Facebook. I wanted to see if there was a local group for AoS discussions and how active it was.

I tried 'Age of Sigmar <city>'
And found nothing.
I tried 'Age of Sigmar <state>'
And found nothing.
I tried 'Age of Sigmar <Austraila>'
And found nothing.

Searching the last term I got no groups or clubs but I did get a couple of posts from mid September from the Buy Swap Trade Australia group. That was about it.

We still have an AOS league in San Diego at AT Ease Games that meets on Sundays at 11am. I think what is making it hard to get into AOS is that GW does not know how to make a release schedule. Why go months with no Fantasy releases (as in what was happening with the End Times where 2-3 months passed before another book was released), then go for 3 months straight with nothing but AOS, and in particular mostly two factions (with a nod to Clan Pestilence and Sylvaneth factions), and then totally drop the baby they just birthed to go for 3 months straight (or more) with nothing but 40K? What happened to alternating release months? More people would be interested in AOS if it had something for their army. There are something like 14 armies for WFB. Why should any except Stormcast and Bloodbound want to play AOS? There is a flaw in the AOS get-you-by warscrolls for the other armies. Before the release of AOS there was a lot of talk about the new armies being better than the old ones. This is true because of the mini-bosses that they have. If you look at the warscrolls for the old factions, many suffer from a problem of not having mini-bosses. A mini -boss is a hero that is not a commander. You can only use one commander's ability in the hero phase. So if you buy multiple commander's, the excess abilities can't be used. But with Bloodbound and Stormcast there are a bunch of heroes that are not commanders. They can use all of their abilities in the hero phase to achieve a level of synergy that is not found in the get-you-by warscrolls. I played against my friend's Skaven. I kept beating him and he was getting frustrated. Then he pointed out that the vast majority of his heroes were commanders. He couldn't stack abilities. I showed him the Clan Pestilence list, he played me with that force and wrecked me. The difference, Plague Priest mini-bosses!

Any idea when gw's new financials are due? I want to see the results of this grand experiment. I bet they spin off losses as start up expenses for THE new, hot game right noe.

 Orock wrote:
Any idea when gw's new financials are due? I want to see the results of this grand experiment. I bet they spin off losses as start up expenses for THE new, hot game right noe.

You won't see the results until 2-3 years from now when the dust has settled. That's when we'll see if this game is sustainable in the long run. The sales figures are probably pretty low atm because of a few factors

- Free rules, so no need to buy anything, which is unprecedented and thus the effect on initial sales is also likely to be unprecedented
- At this early stage, the people who know about the game are most likely to be old Fantasy players, aka people who are pissed off as feth and are leaving in droves. When that mass exodus and drama is over and those people have stepped out of the conversation is right about when new people will start to notice the game, or not. And that's when it's future will be decided.
- Only two factions released so far

I think the release shedule theory is dead on. The other factions are supposed to be getting repackaged, but right now we have 2 full factions and 2 partially released factions.

I want to see the repackaged Lizards, I want ot see the repackaged Elves.

That and I really want more Pestilence.

Chromedog, what historical rules are your WHFB players migrating to? I am a former WAB competition player and see many similarities between those rules and the demise of WHFB 8th. But I must say I am thoroughly enjoying painting up Bloodreavers for a big AoS Khorne force.

Local club has 35-50 players per meeting, depending on tournaments - and it's usually a mix of:

WHFB, KoW, Sword&Spear, Some Hail Caesar, 40k, Blood Bowl, epic and infinity. Haven't seen a single game of AoS ever.

 Mymearan wrote:

- At this early stage, the people who know about the game are most likely to be old Fantasy players, aka people who are pissed off as feth and are leaving in droves. When that mass exodus and drama is over and those people have stepped out of the conversation is right about when new people will start to notice the game, or not. And that's when it's future will be decided.

I get what you're saying here but it just struck me as odd. Despite everything GW are still the biggest name in the hobby right now, and it looks like they put a lot of effort into AoS. Surely if any other company were handling it and had GWs resources there would not be a miniature Wargamer on the planet who hadn't seen AoS. You need a lot of exposure for a release like this, otherwise no communities form initially and later when people look at it they wont be able to join if they want to as it'll not be played in their area.

Maybe you should go start the AoS group in your local area then, Jonolikespie!

Once you've got a group together you could buy all the models going cheap on Buy Swap Trade together so you all have armies to play with.

Win win for you in my books!

Daston wrote:
Our club still plays 8th or moved to KoW. People are however using the chaos dudes for 40k and 8th

OGM DONT MENTION KOW ON AOS THRED! WE DON"T COME TO YOUR THRED AND WHINE!!!
STOP BEING A USELESS WHINY BABBY AND LIKE WHAT I LIKE!!!!!

Good job keeping in character with your shrieking traitor sentinel pilot title, Boggy Man.

 Bottle wrote:
Maybe you should go start the AoS group in your local area then, Jonolikespie!

Once you've got a group together you could buy all the models going cheap on Buy Swap Trade together so you all have armies to play with.

Win win for you in my books!

Assuming for a moment I was interested in playing, I am genuinely unsure how I could build a group. Locally Infinity has a few excited players and we have a facebook group to coordinate but it's hard roping new people away from X wing and Warmahordes. It gets even harder when half the local communities are very tourney driven.

At the two local game stores AoS is laughed at for being tactically shallow and, well, immature I guess. No one really has any respect for GW anymore, even the people that are still die hard 40k fans (what few of those there).

I know one of the store owners would be happy to move some stock and supports anything people are interested in but his regulars are typically much older than the GW target audience, being the kind of shop that forgoes Magic in favour of historical model kits and hobby supplies. He actually has a shelf of the GW airbrush paints that you can not find on the shelf in a GW store because he sells airbrushes, he can move that stock while they can't. So while he'd like to support AoS if people showed an interest, the old timer fantasy fans moved to KoW and he is supporting that instead (though only minimally, most people are playing something Star Wars, Warmahordes or historicals like Bolt Action and Flames of War).

The other local store is a chain shop that is all about the Magic, but when they do branch into miniature games it is always competitive. Mostly Warmahordes played as ranked leagues and tourneys, not the kind of people you could pull into AoS no matter how hard you try. They did recently get in a GW shelf for their store and AoS stock when some 40k refugees arrived at the store after the local club went bust, but I know one of the most fanboyish ones now is shouting praises to Warmahordes from the rooftops so I don't actually know how well 40k is going there. What I do know is no one is buying AoS from them when they don't offer a discount. Seriously, I've come to expect at least a 10% discount just because Australian RRP is absurd.

That only leaves the local GW store itself. Not the worst of places, when it opened it had a terrible manager and while the current guy is not as good as the last he is far from the worst. He is however an avid 40k tourney player and most of the community already established there are 40kers who field fully grey armies and talk tourney lists. I know of 1 guy there who was huge into 8th ed warhammer who I could probably track down, he was excited for AoS when it came out and may very well still be interested. Given the amount of table space in a one man GW store though it would be an uphill battle just to get AoS on the one table just by virtue of us being outnumbered by regular 40kers.

Sadly that is how badly AoS is doing around here, the older gamers clearly prefer tighter, more balanced rulesets and the younger crowd (those in their late teens and early twenties) seem to be big into the 40k tourney circuit. AoS really has nothing to offer either group unless there were already enough demand for AoS that people could set up comped tourneys.

No. 40k reigns supreme still.

Was a little interest for AoS, but no one plays it as I can see. Saw some boys playing their first 8th edition match ever, on sunday. Has to be sort of symptomathic.

GWs unreliability counts towards them I think. They are the kind of dirtbag that introduces an open-ended game, and then doesnt care to support it, and even closes down factions and units. The whole dogs of war debacle hurt a lot of players in my area, where they spent lots of money trying to build big mercenary companies, just to have their rules removed from the game later. Just one example.

If GW released one of their great stand-alone-games like gorka morka, mordheim, necromunda etc, I think this would see much more play. Space Hulk seems wildly popular among those who have it, but that came out in a limited edition, so no one I know has it. Sigh.