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I'm happy with many of the recent changes but if they really want to knock my socks off call me when they have a bits service again.

Crispy78 wrote:
Well I never... Just spotted on the new Warhammer 40,000 facebook page:

"FAQs eh?
All right, let’s knuckle down and do this.
What one (just one, there’s rather a lot of you guys…) rules question do you want answered or clarified? Jot it down in the comments and we’ll take them to the Game Designers on your behalf. We’ll even return with answers, we promise. It might take a week or two but a collated list of freshly approved FAQs will be yours post haste"

It has over 1k of questions in 4 hrs. Not sure how many are the same but they opened up Pandora box

 Sigvatr wrote:
AoS was way back in Kirby's times. Culling an existent game system and introducing a new one takes far longer than a year or two.

Then again, given the effort put into AoS...that might not be the case

I reckon GW could bash out AoS in as little as three months if desperate. They would have to drop all the usual 40K releases for a few months to do it.

To go back to the 40K FAQ requests, I lost interest in 40K when GW spooged all the Apocalyse etc. stuff into it and doubled the cost of books. I've got nothing to ask abotu 7th edition since I never bothered to read any of it. I don't agree the game needs to be replaced, for my taste they could take it back to the 5th edition setup and go on from there. Alternatively, I would be happy with an Age of Emporer for the simplification and cheap rules.

Interestingly, your personal anecdote in regards to 40k directly fits to the change we and other tournaments in Western Germany undertook. The tournaments my wife and I organize have all been scaled down back to 4th first and then 5th - and there's an enormous positive feedback. 7th is a terrible, terrible mess of convuluted rules, of thousands of little pieces thrown together, forcing players to spend hundreds of dollars to field a single army just for the rules (!), let alone the models. 40k 7th is completely inaccessible for beginners as they are immediately overwhelmed. 5th was the best edition for 40k, in our opinion, with a few little flaws that can be easily fixed (i.e. Transporter Spam) and then, you're good to go. Fast, action-packed matches without 50% of your playtime spent on looking up and remembering what feels 4 special rules for every single army in the game.

At this point, 40k receiving the AoS treatment makes little to no difference. Points no longer serve as a balance mechanism as every last bit of balance has been thrown overboard.

GW will never go back to 5th or anything similar, for once because they would never, ever admit mistakes, and also because they don't /want/ the game to be balanced. The sole reason for why GW started to initiate AoS was to reduce the effort spent on what takes most of your time: balance. With 40k now not having balance anyway, Ao40k is the way to go. Formations already exist and can be easily transitioned, the armies are there, the Skirmish level is there etc. It would be an easy transition.

Some armies will see culling, especially some Space Marines orders, but alas. Hopefully, after Tomb Kings, Necrons will also be deleted from 40k. Let them rest, they suffered enough.

 Chute82 wrote:

Crispy78 wrote:
Well I never... Just spotted on the new Warhammer 40,000 facebook page:

"FAQs eh?
All right, let’s knuckle down and do this.
What one (just one, there’s rather a lot of you guys…) rules question do you want answered or clarified? Jot it down in the comments and we’ll take them to the Game Designers on your behalf. We’ll even return with answers, we promise. It might take a week or two but a collated list of freshly approved FAQs will be yours post haste"

It has over 1k of questions in 4 hrs. Not sure how many are the same but they opened up Pandora box

GW can rebuild it, they can make it stronger, but they don't wanna spend a lot of money.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I lost interest in 40K when GW spooged all the Apocalyse etc. stuff into it and doubled the cost of books. I've got nothing to ask abotu 7th edition since I never bothered to read any of it. I don't agree the game needs to be replaced, for my taste they could take it back to the 5th edition setup and go on from there. Alternatively, I would be happy with an Age of Emporer for the simplification and cheap rules.

Aosing it would be going too far, all we really need back from 5th is being able to assault from reserves again, 6-7th if faq'd can work, it's just the army creation that needs overhall, that and 7th eds complete lack of terrain rules.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Interestingly, your personal anecdote in regards to 40k directly fits to the change we and other tournaments in Western Germany undertook. The tournaments my wife and I organize have all been scaled down back to 4th first and then 5th - and there's an enormous positive feedback. 7th is a terrible, terrible mess of convuluted rules, of thousands of little pieces thrown together, forcing players to spend hundreds of dollars to field a single army just for the rules (!), let alone the models. 40k 7th is completely inaccessible for beginners as they are immediately overwhelmed. 5th was the best edition for 40k, in our opinion, with a few little flaws that can be easily fixed (i.e. Transporter Spam) and then, you're good to go. Fast, action-packed matches without 50% of your playtime spent on looking up and remembering what feels 4 special rules for every single army in the game.

At this point, 40k receiving the AoS treatment makes little to no difference. Points no longer serve as a balance mechanism as every last bit of balance has been thrown overboard.

GW will never go back to 5th or anything similar, for once because they would never, ever admit mistakes, and also because they don't /want/ the game to be balanced. The sole reason for why GW started to initiate AoS was to reduce the effort spent on what takes most of your time: balance. With 40k now not having balance anyway, Ao40k is the way to go. Formations already exist and can be easily transitioned, the armies are there, the Skirmish level is there etc. It would be an easy transition.

Some armies will see culling, especially some Space Marines orders, but alas. Hopefully, after Tomb Kings, Necrons will also be deleted from 40k. Let them rest, they suffered enough.

I'll agree on 5th being the best but oddly for me I'll go ahead and be the optimist and hope and pray someone at gw can look at all the love and enjoyment and nostalgia forgeworld has won over with 30k and apply those lessons to saving 40k. It gives me hope that they can still save 40k by separating it from all the silly apoc crap and giving us the best attempt at 5th in 7th possible. Just indexing silly crap to point level being played can be done with a few key strokes and would and could do the game a lot of good, it would just give people who prefer 40k level point levels a more coherent game.

 Ghaz wrote:

Schmapdi wrote:
I feel like the new CEO has noticed that the building is one fire and has ordered the staff to stop filling all the fire extinguishers with gasoline. But no real progress has been made.

Businesses (especially those the size of GW) turn more like a cruise ship than a sports car. Any turn is going to take time to show its results.

I say, Captain Smith, isn't that an iceberg?

The Auld Grump

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

 Ghaz wrote:

Schmapdi wrote:
I feel like the new CEO has noticed that the building is one fire and has ordered the staff to stop filling all the fire extinguishers with gasoline. But no real progress has been made.

Businesses (especially those the size of GW) turn more like a cruise ship than a sports car. Any turn is going to take time to show its results.

I say, Captain Smith, isn't that an iceberg?

The Auld Grump

Ideally you stay out of the waters with the icebergs and keep a close eye out for strays. Sometimes however you don't see the iceberg until its too late and still strike it even after you've started to turn. GW has started to turn, but is it too late to keep from hitting that iceberg looming ahead?

GW are a veritable racing trimaran in comparison to a truly large business, they're big for wargaming, sure, but they're not that large, even simply in the wider toy and model sector, let alone for a business in general.

The issue wasn't so much "Iceberg" it was with acknowledging the iceberg existed, and the subsequent stubborn refusal to believe that the iceberg posed any threat.

Rountree is, effectively, simply turning the wheel with the iceberg somewhere still on the horizon.

I'd like this analogy better if it were with spaceships and space icebergs.

With GW having their plans laid out years in advance, it does make it harder for them to change course. Its hard to say how much stuff is still in the pipeline from Kirby's time that it was just too late for Rountree to have done anything about if he were so inclined.

And it is hard to see icebergs when you're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

This stuff takes can easily take years of pre-planning, AoS, no matter how you may judge it's quality, was absolutely not 'banged out' in 3 months.

I would place a fairly hefty bet that there is still a fairly significant amount of Kirby era projects in the pipeline to be dealt with.

Yeah, even if we assume that the new AoS minis were already in production as WHFB minis and just got rebased and rebadged, from what I've read around and about, you're looking at 6-9 months just to get books and boxes printed and distributed.

Whatever impresion you may get from the quality of the final product, AoS would have been in development for at least a year or more before we saw it.

 Ghaz wrote:
With GW having their plans laid out years in advance, it does make it harder for them to change course. Its hard to say how much stuff is still in the pipeline from Kirby's time that it was just too late for Rountree to have done anything about if he were so inclined.

And it is hard to see icebergs when you're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

Pretty much everyone with any first hand knowledge concurs that they're not working years in advance though. They'll have a road map, and obviously production has lead in times for various things, but they're just as capable of turning something out in a couple of months and dropping it into the schedule as they are producing something and sitting on it for several years.

Really? Both Sad Panda and Atia have said that they are working years in advance.

Yeah sorry but there is no way, Endtimes/AoS was a massive launch in packaging, artwork, stories, product development, logistics and multimedia. You don't just change one of your core products, address every race in the game with 100's and 100's of pages of rules, fiction and artwork in a few months. They may be able to knock out a small release in a few months, especially if they are just new models with no codex, of a smaller supplement dex, but something of that scale eclipses that kind of thing on every level. I guarantee you AoS was in the works minimum 2 years, if not more.

I'd say that even a year and a half is a very low estimate. GW did not just introduce a new game, they deleted their secondary gaming system and even they will have thought twice before doing so. Even after having made said decision, they still had to write all the rules, as bad and lacking as they are, think of models, plan their design, have them made etc. all while still trying to maintain their only remaining system that is what keeps them afloat. GW removed the most important and thus most time-consuming part of the game by no longer providing a balance mechanism, but still, there's a lot of work done by a smaller team. I'd go with 2 - 3 years of planning ahead, strongly leaning towards 3.

GW is starting to struggle now as the market changes. GW has been the only effective supporter for tabletop games for a long time, but now, with so many other companies out there, some of them growing stronger by the minute, GW is starting to lose their strong position. GW failed to adress their problems, i.e. the ridiculous pricing and poor writing in time, openly neglecting and rejecting large parts of their customer base (and continuing to do so), rather spending time and money on senseless trials. We're not talking End Times (heh) here, but GW will continue to lose its importance over the next few years and if they continue to openly ignore their problems, they will go down.

Let's also separate aos "the miniatures" from aos "the core rules". While it may take months to say print a book a or box, it seems like when the game is 4 pages of rules it couldn't have possibly taken too long. I can believe a lot of the logistics took a while but the core game resembles something scrawled on a napkin. Moving away from ranked combat is one thing but this whole models moving by the tail thing is a bit much.

AoS rules were designed with the sole purpose of cutting down cost. Removing balance from the game means removing the largest part of developing time other companies. The rules are poorly written and lacking, but still, it took time to come up with all the text, formatting it, designing it etc.

Last but not least, rules and models could only be released together so splitting doesn't make much sense.

 Sigvatr wrote:
The rules are poorly written and lacking, but still, it took time to come up with all the text, formatting it, designing it etc.

True, but we may have failed to consider other drastic cost cutting measures that have taken place at GW.

Yup, 100% with Sigvatr. Production of this scale is a weakest link endeavour, as in, you can only release as fast as the slowest part can be completed. The sheer amount of writing that went into Endtimes was staggering. Let's not forget Endtimes was absolutely done as a lead in to AoS, they were not mutually exclusive entities. So tack on End Times to AoS as a combined entity, tally up all the models, every bit of artwork, every book, every page, all the painting, the pictures, the design and production work, stocking, logistics... yeah. It was absolutely massive. Probably one of the biggest undertakings GW ever did, and as we said, 2 years would be a bare minimum, and 3 would be far, far more realistic and arguably still on the conservative side.

 MajorTom11 wrote:
Yeah sorry but there is no way, Endtimes/AoS was a massive launch in packaging, artwork, stories, product development, logistics and multimedia. You don't just change one of your core products, address every race in the game with 100's and 100's of pages of rules, fiction and artwork in a few months. They may be able to knock out a small release in a few months, especially if they are just new models with no codex, of a smaller supplement dex, but something of that scale eclipses that kind of thing on every level. I guarantee you AoS was in the works minimum 2 years, if not more.

That's just it, there's a huge distinction between a massive ground up overhaul of one of your two core product lines and, say, a Space Marine accessory sprue.

I'm not saying that there aren't things that require planning from a long way out, but it's equally folly to think that everything they produce is painstakingly plotted out years in advance.

I guess if one believes that nothing short of that sort of overhaul is needed to make 40K appealing again, I can see how one may then consider it could take years for it to take place. But then look at the time between 6th and 7th, I can't believe that was ever planned as it happened, and that 7th was a reaction to 6th's reception, rather than 6th was always expected to last a year and a bit (or however long it was.)

A complete revision, if that is indeed the intention, may take a little while, but don't assume for a second that GW are somehow powerless to react because everything is minutely planned out to 2018 with no room for manoeuvre, the changes will come, just smaller, more incremental and not all together.

 Azreal13 wrote:
But then look at the time between 6th and 7th, I can't believe that was ever planned as it happened, and that 7th was a reaction to 6th's reception, rather than 6th was always expected to last a year and a bit (or however long it was.)

I suspect that 7th ed was rushed out faster than originally planned due to 6th ed's reception, but I don't think it was written from the ground up in the time after 6th ed dropped... As messy as 7th ed is, getting the rules revised, getting books planned (and for all their faults, the current rulebooks are really nicely designed), printed, distributed worldwide... I don't believe there's any way that it would have been possible to get all of that done in the time between them noticing that everyone hated 6th edition and the 7th ed release.


I think it's more likely that 7th edition was what they were aiming for all along, but they went to it via 6th to lessen the extremity of the change - Ease us all into it, rather than repeat the 2nd/3rd ed changeover - but the response to 6th ed forced them to speed up the process rather than allowing things to get too out of hand.


That's just a guess... but it seems far more likely than that they wrote a whole new edition and got it out into stores within a year..

 Azreal13 wrote:

 MajorTom11 wrote:
Yeah sorry but there is no way, Endtimes/AoS was a massive launch in packaging, artwork, stories, product development, logistics and multimedia. You don't just change one of your core products, address every race in the game with 100's and 100's of pages of rules, fiction and artwork in a few months. They may be able to knock out a small release in a few months, especially if they are just new models with no codex, of a smaller supplement dex, but something of that scale eclipses that kind of thing on every level. I guarantee you AoS was in the works minimum 2 years, if not more.

That's just it, there's a huge distinction between a massive ground up overhaul of one of your two core product lines and, say, a Space Marine accessory sprue.

I'm not saying that there aren't things that require planning from a long way out, but it's equally folly to think that everything they produce is painstakingly plotted out years in advance.

I guess if one believes that nothing short of that sort of overhaul is needed to make 40K appealing again, I can see how one may then consider it could take years for it to take place. But then look at the time between 6th and 7th, I can't believe that was ever planned as it happened, and that 7th was a reaction to 6th's reception, rather than 6th was always expected to last a year and a bit (or however long it was.)

A complete revision, if that is indeed the intention, may take a little while, but don't assume for a second that GW are somehow powerless to react because everything is minutely planned out to 2018 with no room for manoeuvre, the changes will come, just smaller, more incremental and not all together.

That's pretty fair I would think. I am certainly not saying they can't get anything done in months. Aos is a different ballgame than say the last necron release though I guess is the point as you mention.

I've been playing GW since the mid-90s. These are good times.

They are going in the right direction, but the prices are just way out of my comfort zone, Betrayal at calth i bought, but price wise it is not in line with boardgame prices from other companies.
I have a space marine army, so i could fool my self in needing them, but the genestealer cult one, although the mini's are gorgeous, i could not justify the cost for some minis that i do not have an army of.

As i play a lot boardgames, and have some of the miniature ones, they usually have less miniatures but the rules are better implemented. (although zombicide has more mini's)

I am looking forward to Battlefleet Gothic re-release (they should have made a re-release as the new PC game comes out), but if the base boxs is near the 200$ mark then i am running for the life pods!

Right track? Have you seen those prices and games? No.

 Ghaz wrote:
With GW having their plans laid out years in advance, it does make it harder for them to change course. Its hard to say how much stuff is still in the pipeline from Kirby's time that it was just too late for Rountree to have done anything about if he were so inclined.

And it is hard to see icebergs when you're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

There are plans and there are plans and there are actual production capabilities.

No doubt GW have a plan going forwards three months, six months, a year and probably up to five years. BUt GW isn't building nuclear reactors or designing new antibiotics that have to pass a rigorous test protocol to be licensed. It designs and manufactures small plastic toys and writes and prints the books associated with them. GW owns all its design, art, layout, printing and manufacturing in house. It can change direction very quickly if it wants to.

Just because they are seemingly slightly less bad at the moment doesn't mean they actually are going to do any long term changes.

The main issues continue to fester (and I'll ignore the Old World blowing up):

- 40k is galloping towards AoSification,
- The prices. I mean... do we even have to point that out?
- Some of the new miniatures are... less than stellar, though of course, liking or disliking something is purely subjective.

 Crablezworth wrote:
Let's also separate aos "the miniatures" from aos "the core rules". While it may take months to say print a book a or box, it seems like when the game is 4 pages of rules it couldn't have possibly taken too long. I can believe a lot of the logistics took a while but the core game resembles something scrawled on a napkin. Moving away from ranked combat is one thing but this whole models moving by the tail thing is a bit much.

More like 400 pages of rules if you include all the warscrolls.

 Mymearan wrote:

 Crablezworth wrote:
Let's also separate aos "the miniatures" from aos "the core rules". While it may take months to say print a book a or box, it seems like when the game is 4 pages of rules it couldn't have possibly taken too long. I can believe a lot of the logistics took a while but the core game resembles something scrawled on a napkin. Moving away from ranked combat is one thing but this whole models moving by the tail thing is a bit much.

More like 400 pages of rules if you include all the warscrolls.

But are they to be included or not? One can't say "it's just 4 pages of rules - so easy to learn" for one thing and then quote over 400 pages for another.