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Its not that 8th required a million models. The model count for 8th was nearly the same for my armies as 7th or 6th. It was that ONE UNIT contained nearly 75% or so of the total model count in 8th because of the steadfast rule. Whereas the 6th and 7th ed armies had a ton of MSU units but still overall the model count for the whole army was nearly the same for a lot of people.

8th edition's biggest changes were:
* steadfast (if you had more models in your unit than your opponent in a battle, it counted as stubborn) I liked the rule at first... until the players began abusing it and basically you made massive death star blob unit that contained almost all of your models in one unit. (my first time seeing this was actually skaven and it was twin units of skaven slaves at 200 models a piece for each unit) - but then you had high elves dancing around with an 80 model strong white lions or swordmaster unit with all their wizards smashed into it with banner of the world dragon making them immune to magic (they had a 2+ ward save vs any magic) and things like that. And flanking didn't matter, so people would literally just shove these massive units forward and not care. The only thing that mattered was if you had more models than your opponent in the battles. Oh you flanked me? Thats horrible... (sarcasm voice) except I'm stubborn on a 10 and 99 times out of 100 there's a BSB somewhere letting me reroll.

* random charge distance instead of fixed charge distance. I actually liked this because I got tired of 7th edition's "dance" where the two battle lines shuffled around each other until someone made a mistake and got within charge range.

* magic - the six-dice-for-the-win was introduced in 8th and they also brought back the massive nuke spells on top of that. The result of double six was always irresistable force and a weak turd of a miscast (the miscast table was very benign unless you rolled a 2-4 on 2d6 so no one cared about it and chucked those six dice at their daddy spells hoping for the double six to show up).

7th edition at the tournament level was "cavalry hammer" where everyone fielded armies of all MSU cav (unless you were dwarfs because you had none) and each side looked like a checkerboard of a bunch of small cav units, while 8th edition was cram all of your wizards into one mega blob death star and go belly smack it in the middle of the table until one side failed a break check and ran and ended the game (or six diced Irresistable force the kill spell that wiped out most of the enemy in one go and ended the game)

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Eldarain wrote:
Biggest changes 7th-8th were fixed distance going to random charge distances and the introduction of Steadfast (unit with most ranks takes break tests on unmod LD)

This moved the focus from Cav/Monster to ranked units. As the edition evolved Monstrous Infantry/Cav became viable through sheer murder power. Magic was altered but as it was powerful across both editions in different ways I'd rank that as less of a change as the above.

That doesn't sound that bad... what am I missing?

It wasn't. Auticus described some of the issues of the first half of the edition well. Once the bulk of the books were out there were more varied strats and the 6 dice spells (especially some army specific ones) worked decently as a hard counter to the 50+ blocks.

8th being the polar opposite of the current release schedule was awful though. It was something insane like 9+ months from the edition launching and the first army book releasing. This gave a pretty bad first impression as the entire game was using books from a very different edition for an extended period.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Eldarain wrote:
Biggest changes 7th-8th were fixed distance going to random charge distances and the introduction of Steadfast (unit with most ranks takes break tests on unmod LD)

This moved the focus from Cav/Monster to ranked units. As the edition evolved Monstrous Infantry/Cav became viable through sheer murder power. Magic was altered but as it was powerful across both editions in different ways I'd rank that as less of a change as the above.

That doesn't sound that bad... what am I missing?

It's hard to describe without really getting into the dynamics of the game, suffice it to say multiple layers of different factors added up. Steadfast was a big part; units got a massive benefit for having more ranks than an opponent. The horde rule was also a notable factor, where a third rank of models could make supporting attacks if the unit was 10-wide. This essentially meant an effective size of 40+ to utilize, as at less than 30 models one would not be getting the full benefit.

Magic played a part; almost everyone gained access to spells that would delete a third to half a unit with a single cast (no, not an exaggeration), so units needed to be big enough that they had the models to benefit from the above two rules after getting hit by such a spell.

Many units that were previously elite MSU style, metal models where players were not expected to run more than 15 in a unit, became plastic and less points. Combined with the above, something like a 40-man unit of elite infantry was a good way to go. The problem? Those models were $50-$60 for ten. On the other hand, monetarily cheaper basic infantry generally found a unit size of 50+ desirable.

The end result was building an army often meant spending hundreds of dollars buying multiples of the same kit to fill out a single unit. That was a both a sticker shock up front and a drag to actually do, to say nothing of armies that could or even needed to run multiple such units.

Ok that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation.

I also heard that Ward's Daemon Codex also kinda broke things with Daemon Summoning?

It absolutely ruined 7th. 7th WHFB might have been the most egregious edition for books that torpedoed an entire era. I feel like Vampires/Dark Elves and Daemons were the three that really sank it.

Funnily enough no one where I was played any of those so I quite enjoyed 7th only hearing the tales of woe years later.

The 7th edition dark elves and daemon (edit: and vampires--knew I forgot one) books were both broken but it was just standard run-of-the-mill broken. Abilities too strong, point costs too low, etc. Summoning as a mechanic wasn't a thing back then.

There have been multiple points of time and armies where daemon summoning in AoS has been broken though.

 Mr_Rose wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:
I'd look to Blood Bowl for the look of new fantasy models rather than AoS.

Why? Apart from being sports teams, they’re also deliberately tongue-in-cheek (especially the star players) and slightly cartoonish.

I’d say look to TWW3 for the look of future WFB models.

That might be the case for Cathay and perhaps Kislev's newer models because we haven't seen the miniatures for them before. The total war computer models right now don't look that much like their tabletop counterparts. How they are realised in total war is not the same as the miniatures.

Whereas Blood Bowl is still tabletop Warhammer fantasy even though it's an alternative timeline. Obviously ignore the fact that they're sports teams, look more at the design styles. Particularly the teams that came out with the updated game, the imperial nobles and the black orcs. It's not a given obviously, but if you want to see testers for new fantasy, that's where to start. I think what we will see is a bit of blending. Where they will give most of the "classic" range a similar look to what it was, perhaps newer models for new armies like Cathay will have a touch more of the AoS vein to them.

Which is fine, because that's how Warhammer has always been. The "Old World" armies looked quite different to them what do come from that there "New World".

I'm particularly interested to see what will happen to the Dwarf minis, considering what happened to those poor sods.

Although I wasn't in Warhammer at the time, looking back and talking with a few folk, one thing that happened with 7th and 8th editions was the "screw you" effect. Where you used to be getting 16 - 20 figures in a box and then that ended up being 5 - 10 and yet you ended up paying more money. And as pointed out, although the army sizes didn't change too much, that made it feel like it was much more difficult to get started, particularly with horde armies. Of course for people who had been playing Fantasy for a while, they've amassed a collection and it's only a few new models to buy on releases, fine. But it turned away new players and older players didn't buy as much, meaning less money for GW.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Eldarain wrote:
Biggest changes 7th-8th were fixed distance going to random charge distances and the introduction of Steadfast (unit with most ranks takes break tests on unmod LD)

This moved the focus from Cav/Monster to ranked units. As the edition evolved Monstrous Infantry/Cav became viable through sheer murder power. Magic was altered but as it was powerful across both editions in different ways I'd rank that as less of a change as the above.

That doesn't sound that bad... what am I missing?

There's a lot I have issue with regarding random charge length, and all those rules the poster brought up were brought about to compensate for the garbage increase in lethality of units during 7th. The problem was, however, that each new book was written to fully exploit those rule changes.

7th killed my momentum with WFB, 8th motivated me to sell 8 of the 12 armies we had. I would have sold 10 but my brother advised me to hold on to two of them so we could just go back to 6th. The new rules are going to have to lean a LOT more toward 6th than 8th if they want me buying in for anything more than chasing down bases and kits I need.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Olthannon wrote:

 Mr_Rose wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:
I'd look to Blood Bowl for the look of new fantasy models rather than AoS.

Why? Apart from being sports teams, they’re also deliberately tongue-in-cheek (especially the star players) and slightly cartoonish.

I’d say look to TWW3 for the look of future WFB models.

That might be the case for Cathay and perhaps Kislev's newer models because we haven't seen the miniatures for them before. The total war computer models right now don't look that much like their tabletop counterparts. How they are realised in total war is not the same as the miniatures.

Whereas Blood Bowl is still tabletop Warhammer fantasy even though it's an alternative timeline. Obviously ignore the fact that they're sports teams, look more at the design styles. Particularly the teams that came out with the updated game, the imperial nobles and the black orcs. It's not a given obviously, but if you want to see testers for new fantasy, that's where to start. I think what we will see is a bit of blending. Where they will give most of the "classic" range a similar look to what it was, perhaps newer models for new armies like Cathay will have a touch more of the AoS vein to them.

Which is fine, because that's how Warhammer has always been. The "Old World" armies looked quite different to them what do come from that there "New World".

I'm particularly interested to see what will happen to the Dwarf minis, considering what happened to those poor sods.

Although I wasn't in Warhammer at the time, looking back and talking with a few folk, one thing that happened with 7th and 8th editions was the "screw you" effect. Where you used to be getting 16 - 20 figures in a box and then that ended up being 5 - 10 and yet you ended up paying more money. And as pointed out, although the army sizes didn't change too much, that made it feel like it was much more difficult to get started, particularly with horde armies. Of course for people who had been playing Fantasy for a while, they've amassed a collection and it's only a few new models to buy on releases, fine. But it turned away new players and older players didn't buy as much, meaning less money for GW.

I once again need to reiterate that people don't just get 1 army unless you price them out of multiples. Solid battalions like they used to have with 2 foot regiments, a cav unit, and a war machine/monster/whatever would be a real gateway to get people in. Add on regiments from there, but having what is essentially a playable skirmish force in one box will do more for WTOW than anything will right now.

I would like my fantasy to be about the infantry with supporting cavalry and monsters and elite (With the exceptions of armies like bretonnia, dwarfs, etc...)

The horde rules were way too good for infantry units, but in previous editions infantry was too weak vs cavalry.

I believe a middle ground could be achieved. A good thing they should do is to put cap in the maximun number of miniatures a unit can have like a Swordmaster of Hoett unit could be 5-20 miniatures or something like that, as in 40k.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Ok that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation.
I also heard that Ward's Daemon Codex also kinda broke things with Daemon Summoning?

Summoning was never a problem, but the Daemon Codex was just on a different level, like place the army on the table and do nothing the whole game but rolling dice when you get charged or to resolve magic and you still win against 1/2 of the other armies (and we tried exactly that)

But I also have to say that I really don't know anybody who played the original 7th Edi from GW without a community FAQ/Comp as the Edition was broken by default right from the beginning and GW did not wanted to fix even minor mistakes
as an example, Beastmen moved in Skirmish Order and had the special rule to rank up in close combat to get the regular bonus for fighting like R&F formations.
and for not giving them a too big advantage the ranked exactly 4 wide by the rules to limit the possible attacks

with 7th, minimum width was increased to 5 models but the rule was kept the same and the only answer we got via FAQ from GW was, "we don't make any mistakes, this works is it should be"

so if Old World is based on 7th, it might be that the new rules are very different from what people remember 7th Edition was, not only because of different comb systems to keep the books in line, but also because of different community FAQ/Erratas around to resolve rulebook mistakes

 Galas wrote:
I would like my fantasy to be about the infantry with supporting cavalry and monsters and elite (With the exceptions of armies like bretonnia, dwarfs, etc...)

The horde rules were way too good for infantry units, but in previous editions infantry was too weak vs cavalry.

I believe a middle ground could be achieved. A good thing they should do is to put cap in the maximun number of miniatures a unit can have like a Swordmaster of Hoett unit could be 5-20 miniatures or something like that, as in 40k.

I used the houserules where spears basically had the pike rules from 5th and 6th. If cav charged spear units head on the spear units fought first with +1 S. Gave a decent counter to cav, enough where someone deciding to go all cav would be putting some risk on the table. The thing with that ruleset is... if you charge ... you go first. It gave a huge advantage to charging (which is why so many people switched to all cavalry armies since you had the speed and if you didn't have the speed you had to be able to handle being charged, something a lot of armies' infantry just couldn't do very well).

While charging first means attacking first, its really hard to balance out cavalry other than to make them cost more in points (which was something GW didn't want to do and led to what we had)

 Just Tony wrote:


Solid battalions like they used to have with 2 foot regiments, a cav unit, and a war machine/monster/whatever would be a real gateway to get people in. Add on regiments from there, but having what is essentially a playable skirmish force in one box will do more for WTOW than anything will right now.

I'm thinking that's exactly how they'll do it. Plus an army v army starter box. Army size and rules will be similar to 6th edition I would guess, plus some new rules and some stuff from other editions as they mentioned in one of the articles.

 Olthannon wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:


Solid battalions like they used to have with 2 foot regiments, a cav unit, and a war machine/monster/whatever would be a real gateway to get people in. Add on regiments from there, but having what is essentially a playable skirmish force in one box will do more for WTOW than anything will right now.

I'm thinking that's exactly how they'll do it. Plus an army v army starter box. Army size and rules will be similar to 6th edition I would guess, plus some new rules and some stuff from other editions as they mentioned in one of the articles.

I would weep tears of joy if it happened like that...

I know that this is sort of by the by, but Duncan Rhodes has cracked out his Bretonnians and is currently reconfiguring them for use in TOW (returning them to square basing). I know he's still in touch with folk and friends at GW; maybe he knows something is pending on the horizon... a man can dream, a man can dream.

I think that all the old armies will have some kind of rules, a la legacy rules for aos. Don't think they'll all be supported though

as by the rumours, Index books for all old armies from 8th Edition (whatever that means) and new army books follow after

 streetsamurai wrote:
I think that all the old armies will have some kind of rules, a la legacy rules for aos. Don't think they'll all be supported though

"We want people to be able to use their old armies if they wish, or to start new ones, or to add new miniatures to old armies – whatever they want." ... is what they at least wrote on WarCom

Is no one going to comment on the last part of that rumour set, which is the most absurd part of it?

Those Kislev and Cathay previews are misinterpreted by some people. They do
serve more like an advice for Total War and should show how both Games
are "interlocked" based on the same Artworks and as part of World Building
for the TT Game. Also they will show that the new WHFB Game will be not
focused on the territories of the Empire as in the past. Those faction will
come for The Old World but not from the very beginning.

That alone makes the whole thing very hard to believe regardless of the rule side of things.

I would say this is the only part that makes the whole rumour plausible

I mean they are designing those factions from the ground up whereas chaos, empire, etc have all been around a while. Makes sense to me.

 nathan2004 wrote:
I mean they are designing those factions from the ground up whereas chaos, empire, etc have all been around a while. Makes sense to me.

For one of the first teases of their new hyped project that's a beloved return to a classic setting (beyond showing us icons on the map), they show us two effectively new factions that have no actual relevance to the tabletop miniature releases for a long time - one of which is entirely unexpected and not 'needed' - that they made primarily for the TW:W3 video game as "advice" to "interlock" the settings before showing anything that will actually be involved with the miniatures side? Just how does that make any sense?

The Total War Warhammer Computer games were planned as a Trilogy from the Beginning and long before they at GW had the idea for WoT (TW:W firstly announcement was 2014?) . I guess those Artworks exist much longer than those WoT previews imply.

RazorEdge wrote:
The Total War Warhammer Computer games were planned as a Trilogy from the Beginning and long before they at GW had the idea for WoT (TW:W firstly announcement was 2014?) . I guess those Artworks exist much longer than those WoT previews imply.

They were made for The Old World, though. They've said that themselves.

they have said those were made for both

and they also said that those were made for 8th Edition army books to have a base for the Total War game as this is based on 8th

so if they design TOW from ground up with 7th as base and throw in some converted 8th Edi army that never saw play before, even GW knows that this won't end up well

of course we can believe that they are going to kill the system right of with the first 2 army books just because we saw some teaser for Total War

Independent of any BoLS clickbait I could see Cathay being a faction that is only meant to be put into production down the line. It has been noted many times how disjointed GW acted during the release of Total Warhammer, ending Fantasy before its release and not doing any tie ins to cash in on its commercial success. I could see GW figuring that since Cathay is shown for Total Warhammer anyway, they might as well use the opportunity to throw out an article or two with some artwork to remind people The Old World exists and it's totally going to have all that neat stuff people loved about the video games. It's an easy way to fill their quota of half a preview per year for the game.

It would be funny not to see Kislev, though. With how the maps they introduced the project with have been Empire and Empire adjacent so far you'd think a goal for launch and post-launch was to give the game more variety than just dudes with feathers and puffy sleeves. Kislev fits that pretty well as it is to be a fully developed faction. It also allows GW to sell new models that don't have many legacy equivalents in circulation. Seems somewhat farfetched to have Kislev wait a long time for its release.

Don't forget GW of the age when TW Warhammer went live was under Kirby during the whole "we don't need consumer feedback" era of thinking and when almost all sales and investment options were compared to marine investment and returns - which meant they came up short.

GW today seems far more broadly aware that they can't just milk marines and that by doing so they actually created competing markets for themselves that 3rd parties were taking up and "poaching" customers away. They are also much more aware of consumer feedback and how important it is that it filters up the company to the top end. Sure it doesn't mean they do everything the consumers want, but I think they are more open to feedback and aware of it - and considering that since they've adopted even some basic change,s their profits went through the roof and they've hit their max production output time and time again - I think there's enough financial reward for them to continue these more positive business practices.

 Overread wrote:
Don't forget GW of the age when TW Warhammer went live was under Kirby during the whole "we don't need consumer feedback" era of thinking and when almost all sales and investment options were compared to marine investment and returns - which meant they came up short.

GW today seems far more broadly aware that they can't just milk marines and that by doing so they actually created competing markets for themselves that 3rd parties were taking up and "poaching" customers away. They are also much more aware of consumer feedback and how important it is that it filters up the company to the top end. Sure it doesn't mean they do everything the consumers want, but I think they are more open to feedback and aware of it - and considering that since they've adopted even some basic change,s their profits went through the roof and they've hit their max production output time and time again - I think there's enough financial reward for them to continue these more positive business practices.

...really.
I haven't particularly noitced, they seem to be milking Marines harder than ever, and whenever they take into account customer feedback they seem to apply it with a cruel, Monkey Paw-esque twist.
"New Ork boyz? Sure! Monopose and without enough weapons for any loadout."
"New Firstborn models? Sure! Completly out of scale with all of your existing ones!"

At the same time we have multiple specialist games that are no longer one-shot-wonder boxed sets. Necromunda, AT and AN are all stand alone games and of them Necromunda is basically expanding to be supported in much the same way as a "core" game. With fleshed out faction books and more.

The only hiccup we've really had there was Cursed City which was a huge mess and honestly shocking that GW didn't give at least SOME message as to things going wrong compared to Blackstone Fortress.

There's no shortage of dumb stuff to dislike, but GW has also made or brought back a lot of stuff in recent years that under Kirby would have been unthinkable. Got to take the good with the bad.

And then relentlessly complain about the bad because why wouldn't you?

Id be surprised if cathay is one of the faction released at day 1. Hopefully we get at least 4. Kislev and empire seems like a given, and if guess we get at least one flavor of elves, plus an evil faction (probably chaos)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Geifer wrote:
There's no shortage of dumb stuff to dislike, but GW has also made or brought back a lot of stuff in recent years that under Kirby would have been unthinkable. Got to take the good with the bad.

I think the roundtree era shows how incredibly incompetent kirby was. He's.not doing an incredible job imo, yet, he seems like god gift to gamers (and investors) compared to the totally inept kirby