Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I think what kept the tomb kings from having a lot of attension was:

a) They where sooooo old for so long. The last codex was great, but the old codex was terrible as power creep sett in. I played a 1000 point game vs empire, and 2 mortar shots later I had no armie. After the new codex came they where great, but their player base was long gone.

b) If you wanted to do undead armies, vampire counts where very powerfull. Power players where drawn there. This again ment less tournament resoults for TK and fever people jumped on the band waggon. (Yes I know there was a spamm T10 list.)

c) Why oh why where they the only army that could not march? This negative trait was very not apealing to most.

d) Why could you not shoot when people charged you? For an army with a subtheme of ranged attacks with very special rules for shooting, they where very bad at it. Having actual playable bowmenn would have helped the army a lot.

A lot of these can be fixed if they re-do tomb kings. Perhaps they could split the army in two with one focused on constructs.

Also, and I have said this before, some of those models where very good, among the best in the game IMHO.

Snake riders, sand stalkers, both sphinxes, the iconic casket, tomb guarfdians and tomb king kings where great all of them.

I still think that if their rules weren't total garbage in the power level department that they'd still be here today because people would have played them more.

Pretty much. It's what drives everything. I've been around for enough "You know I really like that maligned hideous model" right after they get a nice rules bump to know that. Even the "Narrative" players I've known just craft a story around the best stuff.

People like strong powerful units. It's probably why you experienced pushback on your system. People want broken stuff to club their friends over the head with. It's an odd environment to be in for so many years. We all complain about whatever is the most broken but all happily fill our lists with the best stuff available to us.

It has been particularly interesting to watch IG players in 40k adjust to suddenly being in the traditional Eldar player position this edition.

Eumerin wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Never mind that the AoS God of Death IS Khemri... Just keep walking, nothing to see here.

So Nagash hasn't eating him yet?

Nagash IS Khemri in origin. He's the cause of the Vampires as well as the wakening of the Khemri dead.

I think the word that you're looking for is "Khemrian". Khemri is the place. Khemrian is the adjective used to describe someone or something from there.

I don't recall reading that, but then I never did get any of the 8th Edition books due to finances.

auticus wrote:I still think that if their rules weren't total garbage in the power level department that they'd still be here today because people would have played them more.

Pretty much. When you take:

Niiai wrote:c) Why oh why where they the only army that could not march? This negative trait was very not apealing to most.

d) Why could you not shoot when people charged you? For an army with a subtheme of ranged attacks with very special rules for shooting, they where very bad at it. Having actual playable bowmenn would have helped the army a lot.

And tack on the high dependence on a Wizard to keep your army on the table, and only offer the standard Undead theme of Unbreakable and the bonus of shooting like 40K, there is little in a rules capacity to desire to play the army. All that is left is the overall theme, which is actually one of my favorites of old Warhammer along with Beastmen, Wood Elves, Bretonnians, and Beastmen (man am I a sucker for the look good/play bad armies).

I think simply allowing Tomb Kings to march would be enough to fix them in every edition they were played in. They'd still be markedly different than the VC, and they'd be viable without being broken.

 Just Tony wrote:
I think simply allowing Tomb Kings to march would be enough to fix them in every edition they were played in. They'd still be markedly different than the VC, and they'd be viable without being broken.

Even something like "Tomb Kings models within the Ld bubble of the army general or Hierophant may march" would have been sufficient.

I think it was a plan all along and the copyright issue didn't help the wheels from coming off the wagon... Once an army got to a certain point in sales
they will replace it with a new army and keep it around until it does the same. just to keep the momentum up.
Plus the sales for warhammer wasn't there when AoS was rolled out. So I think that just amplified the problem
Queen Khalida Nefarata is one of my all time favorite miniatures and was building a small force around her when the ax fell
at least I can use her in other games.

There are other armies that are currently dying like "empire" (refuse to call them free people) with almost no support they were once the strongest
army and heavily played. I guess GW thought they where to generic and may pull away from Sigmarines title being the only human army..

With no new releases and no battle tome for it since the new edition .. just shows the interest level of GW with any army

I acrually had a lott of luck playing TK. It was not a bad army.

My army list tended to be one of two categorirs: a big mage round with a lvl 4 mage and a lvl 2 mage. The worn powerstone that gave 2 ektra dice, and the khemri scroll that gave a virtual 4 dice, and a casket. Go off turn 2 or 3 and try to get as much out of it a possible.

The other was a fighty list with an assortment of chavalery and monsters.

Both worked fine.

On the marching: usually the casked made maguc dice you could use on marching. It was a real tax.

Besides that it was an army where the sum of the models where better then them induvidually. Great play experience.

Even the tomb guardians (same points as grave guardians but worse stats) where the king of winning second round of combat. Very funn.

In 8th they had one of the first army books - it was a good release with some excellent models but what was a neatly balanced book at the time became overshadowed by the Ogre/Daemon/WoC lists.

People forget how barren 8th was for the first 18 months - that will also have contributed to the failing of the TK release. Things really kicked into gear after about 2 years with the Ogre release.

TK were never popular, for whatever reason. I'd wager a part of it is that they were just 'Egyptian' skeletons. They lived in the shadow of VC thematically, rules-wise and models-wise. 8th edition did nothing to aid this, except to give a new (and high quality) emphasis of the core themes. Necropolis knights and the sphinxes really gave it some great imagery and reinforced its uniqueness. But they were weighed down by the core skeletons, plus the new Tomb Guard models were obscenely expensive for hw many were required for even a modest unit (that was pretty weak).

8th always had a problem with accessibility, but TK were about as impenetrable as you could be. Awful core models that were MANDATORY and no easy way to get a usable army. I don't think they even had a 7th ed army book. They'd been left to rot for a long time but were never given the full overhaul they needed.

There's real potential in the theme and the models for an independent death faction. Bring back the sphinxes, TG and the Necropolis knights and you have the core of something real. FEC barely have more kits than that and they have a full army.

 Eldarain wrote:
Pretty much. It's what drives everything. I've been around for enough "You know I really like that maligned hideous model" right after they get a nice rules bump to know that. Even the "Narrative" players I've known just craft a story around the best stuff.

People like strong powerful units. It's probably why you experienced pushback on your system. People want broken stuff to club their friends over the head with. It's an odd environment to be in for so many years. We all complain about whatever is the most broken but all happily fill our lists with the best stuff available to us.

It has been particularly interesting to watch IG players in 40k adjust to suddenly being in the traditional Eldar player position this edition.

I think you are for the most part exactly correct. A lot of the pushback I got was simply it was too balanced and list building didnt' matter as much.

But I notice its not as prevalent in other games. I think if you want listbuilding to be dominant, that that is definitely a legit commercialized playstyle, and you can't have both balance, and listbuilding be dominant at the same time.

 Charistoph wrote:

And tack on the high dependence on a Wizard to keep your army on the table

Initially, this matched them up with the other Undead. The other undead required that the necromancer be alive in order to keep the army from disintegrating automatically. I still remember when one of my opponents made the mistake of putting his Necromancer Army General in the front rank of his army, and then got charged by a DE warrior block that had an assassin hidden in it. You can guess what happened next.

But then "Undead" got changed to "Vampire Counts", and people running that faction now took a monster in (undead) human form as their army general, which made it extremely difficult to take out the army's leader, which made it much more difficult to trigger the "everyone fades away" undead trait. And meanwhile, the Tomb Kings kept on soldiering on with their own rules based on the older undead concept.

 Charistoph wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Never mind that the AoS God of Death IS Khemri... Just keep walking, nothing to see here.

So Nagash hasn't eating him yet?

Nagash IS Khemri in origin. He's the cause of the Vampires as well as the wakening of the Khemri dead.

I thought Neferata was the cause of the vampires since she stole his notes and tried to make an immortality potion with it. I mean, it was his notes, but vampirisim wasn't his fault.

Eumerin wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

And tack on the high dependence on a Wizard to keep your army on the table

Initially, this matched them up with the other Undead. The other undead required that the necromancer be alive in order to keep the army from disintegrating automatically. I still remember when one of my opponents made the mistake of putting his Necromancer Army General in the front rank of his army, and then got charged by a DE warrior block that had an assassin hidden in it. You can guess what happened next.

But then "Undead" got changed to "Vampire Counts", and people running that faction now took a monster in (undead) human form as their army general, which made it extremely difficult to take out the army's leader, which made it much more difficult to trigger the "everyone fades away" undead trait. And meanwhile, the Tomb Kings kept on soldiering on with their own rules based on the older undead concept.

Yeah, in 6th, Vampires still required a Necromancer, even if it was a less-of-a-combat-monster Necrarch. 7th then turned over the role to Vampires in general. 8th made it even easier on the Vampire army, while Tomb Kings were stuck in that same requirement. If they even made it so that crumbling required the loss of all the Kings, Princes, and Priests it would have been easier to play them.

ClockworkZion wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Never mind that the AoS God of Death IS Khemri... Just keep walking, nothing to see here.

So Nagash hasn't eating him yet?

Nagash IS Khemri in origin. He's the cause of the Vampires as well as the wakening of the Khemri dead.

I thought Neferata was the cause of the vampires since she stole his notes and tried to make an immortality potion with it. I mean, it was his notes, but vampirisim wasn't his fault.

I guess it depends on which version you're reading. I remember from the 6th and 7th books that Nagash was exiled and he went to Lamia and kept is undead research there which lead to him creating the Vampires as the next step to immortality. The Khemrians then marched on Lamia to destroy it because of Nagash. Now, I didn't read any of the 8th Ed fluff, so that may have changed by then.

The rules that your army dies when one model disapears is very bad design.

Thematic, yes. A good balanced rule, no.

That rule was from an era where wargaming was more thematic and storytelling vs competitive sport like it is today.

That type of rule has no place in a competitive sport version of the game.

auticus wrote:
That rule was from an era where wargaming was more thematic and storytelling vs competitive sport like it is today.

That type of rule has no place in a competitive sport version of the game.

That might be worth considering if GW ever actually makes Warhammer in to a competitive sport game...

The player base today treats wargaming like a competitive sport compared with the people twenty years ago where rules like the undead general dying kill your army existed.

If it is not a good rule now, was it a good rule then? Was there ever a time when that was a gios rule?

 Niiai wrote:
If it is not a good rule now, was it a good rule then? Was there ever a time when that was a gios rule?

It depends on how easy it is to target that single model. In the instance that I described above, my opponent made a foolish mistake. He put his necromancer in the front rank of one of his units, where the necromancer could be targeted. Even if I hadn't been running Dark Elves, who played the ever popular "Which unit is my assassin hiding in?" game, he still could have been targeted and killed with a little bit of luck on my part. It would have been a lot safer to stick him in one of the deeper ranks of the unit. That would partially limit his abilities, but it would keep the army safe.

On the other hand, weapons like cannons, that (depending on the edition) allowed you to target your opponent's characters, always made this sort of thing a bit dicey. The 6th edition Dark Elves didn't have anything like that. And frankly, I don't think that any of the weapons should have had that ability. Without that ability to single out a specific model, it's not an issue. In that case, the necromancer becomes a goal worth trying to work toward, but you still have to outplay your opponent in order to pull it off as it generally requires you to wipe out most of the unit that the character is hiding inside of.

An unbreakable army that causes Fear has a weakness?


Yeah, I'm a fan of the rule. Undead had enough perks that a massive minus like that wasn't that much of a detriment.

 Just Tony wrote:
An unbreakable army that causes Fear has a weakness?

Yeah, I'm a fan of the rule. Undead had enough perks that a massive minus like that wasn't that much of a detriment.

A lot depends on the age, but yeah, that was the point. I did forget the Fear factor in that earlier estimation. Part of the issue is that the more you progress in edition, both in rules and in army books, Fear became less effective than when the mummies were made in to their own army, yet, only the Tomb Kings were given such a massive weakness when compared to their Vampire cousins who were able to minimize the issue. More units were made Unbreakable or gained Fearless either natively, another rule, or other artifice as the armies progressed from 6th's launch.

And then there were the Daemons...

auticus wrote:
The player base today treats wargaming like a competitive sport compared with the people twenty years ago where rules like the undead general dying kill your army existed.

What the player base considered it and considers it is immaterial to how it is considered when it is produced. Warhammer has never been designed to be a competitive game. It's getting a little better over the last bit, but their adjustment period has always been at a slow pace compared to other games designed to be competitive.

 Niiai wrote:
If it is not a good rule now, was it a good rule then? Was there ever a time when that was a gios rule?

Because all the other armies had their own version of this rule; all their units would have to take a panic test when the general died. This would often result in panicking units running through units that passed their own panic tests, causing a fresh round of panic tests.

It always struck me as rather unfair that the panic on general death rule got removed but the undead armies retained their equivalent.

 Charistoph wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
An unbreakable army that causes Fear has a weakness?

Yeah, I'm a fan of the rule. Undead had enough perks that a massive minus like that wasn't that much of a detriment.

A lot depends on the age, but yeah, that was the point. I did forget the Fear factor in that earlier estimation. Part of the issue is that the more you progress in edition, both in rules and in army books, Fear became less effective than when the mummies were made in to their own army, yet, only the Tomb Kings were given such a massive weakness when compared to their Vampire cousins who were able to minimize the issue. More units were made Unbreakable or gained Fearless either natively, another rule, or other artifice as the armies progressed from 6th's launch.

And then there were the Daemons...

Yeah, now you're starting to reference 7th Ed, and those army books are LEGENDARY in their imbalance.

Also, how could VC nullify crumble? It still applied to them and there were no modifiers.


Point still stands, though: given what Undead armies were capable of, their crumble rule was not only fair and balanced, but justified. Daemons should have had a similar rule, honestly.

In 8th (not sure about earlier editions), Vampire Counts could have another wizard with the Lore of Vampires step up on their next turn to stop their army from crumbling.

Tomb Kings couldn't. Once your (infinitely more squishy than a vampire) Heirophant died, you were doomed to crumble to dust forever.

All the more reason I'm glad I went back to 6th.

I only played the last edition of fantasy. It sounds like the rules where quite crappy beforehand if the non undead armies died when you killed the leader as well.

As for the TK vs Vampire discussion it probably did not help that the vampires had a very unbalanced armybook in the vampires favour. If you wanted to play undeas, why pick the clear weak choise? This comes back to GW poor lack of balance. That, to their credit, they are trying very hard to course correct in 8th edition 40K. Not just individuals within the company, but the company as a whole.

I would like to point out thag when the wood elves came out several of them could pinpoint snipe characters. No more hierophant come turn 1 or 2 in that match up.

Fixing 'small' things in gamr balance like that and marching would make them viable. Just rebox the old models make some new basic troops and they could be a funn rennegade/independent faction to oppose Nagash in the AoS setting.

The way the rules worked was if your general died, each unit would have to take a leadership test or "panic", and fall back at least some distance. They could attempt to rally each turn and reform, so it was not the end of the world. It was a good rule, because it gave people an alternate lever to push to win. You had to actually kill the general to trigger it, and this was pretty hard to do if the general was in a regiment (they got special rules to avoid cannonballs and the like, and also had usually a magical defense) and if you put your general on a monster or ran them around on their own this was just part of the risk calculus.

Undead were immune to panic, so instead they crumbled slowly each turn, to represent the downside of losing the general. It was a bit harsher than panic tests, but ultimately it was balanced around this in points.

6th and 7th editions were (to my mind) far better in terms of game balance and as tournament games than 8th edition, though the latter half of 7th edition was marred by very poor army book design by incompetent games designers.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
In 8th (not sure about earlier editions), Vampire Counts could have another wizard with the Lore of Vampires step up on their next turn to stop their army from crumbling.

Tomb Kings couldn't. Once your (infinitely more squishy than a vampire) Heirophant died, you were doomed to crumble to dust forever.

In the earlier editions, the old world undead (including the early vampire counts) couldn't stop the army-wide crumble. However, units that were led by their own hero or lord, as well as particularly powerful units, had a chance to stop it from happening on a turn by turn basis.

What the player base considered it and considers it is immaterial to how it is considered when it is produced.

I disagree solely on the context of what we are discussing. That being "that rule is so awful it never should have been".

Because 20 years ago few had a problem with that rule.

Today... people would and do hate the idea. Largely because today the game is played as a competitive sporting event, and a weakness of that magnitude, regardless of how narratively it makes sense, would be seen as a weak competiitive option, and thus shunned and avoided.

Which moulds the thought process of game designers.

Twenty years ago the rules team has it in there because they feel its narrative and fun and the playerbase is largely ok wiith iit.

Today it would never see the light of day... because the designers are also for the most part all tournament players and understand that todays player base is largely about tournaments and that rule has no place.

For the record I played undead and vampire counts extremely competitive in the 90s and early 2000s. I attended all the GTs I could go to in a year with them (the equivalent of hitting Adepticon, LVO, the Masters etc yearly) and even with the undead crumble rule, I did extraordinarily well, even banking 5th place (out of 80 players) and several top 10 placings. So to this day I personally don't think the undead crumble rule is bad or that big a deal. Especially with all the other strengths that that army had at the time.

If you wanted to play undeas, why pick the clear weak choise? This comes back to GW poor lack of balance.

Exactly right, which is why I feel the Tomb Kings did not sell. Why would you ever choose tomb kings when vampires were just exponentially better? If TK had had good rules in 8th, I am confident they never would have been "axed" out of AOS. They would have been renamed certainly to IP protected terms, but they'd have sold and not been removed due to just sitting on shelves. Rules sell the armies. Weak rules guarantee that armies will largely not sell. Strong rules will guarantee armies move fast regardless of their aesthetic being good or bad.

And that's a pattern we've seen over and over with GW. Remember when Dark Elves were hardly selling due to having missed out at least one whole edition of rules (and thus at one stage being two editions behind). Hardly anyone used them as they were already a delicate and higher skill to use army; then with two editions of out of date rules they were so far behind that they were broken and not fun.

Given updated rules they leapt back into popularity.


I think that whole attitude is broken at GW now, they've smashed it with 8th edition 40K and I think they are on their way to smashing it for AoS, AoS is just taking longer because it was honestly in quite a mess to start with.