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Agreed - the one gain is that Old World and AoS could fold one into the other fairly easily.

40K and 30K less so because basically you've got mirror-armies already present in both settings so you'd be doubling the optional model count.


That said it would take catastrophic drops in sales and sustained drops to likely get to GW doing that. GW could create the situation too; if they started swapping armies steadily every year from one game to the other people would pick up on that and that would likely in turn accelerate any drop.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Overread wrote:
The only thing that would possibly make GW change the End Times would be if Age of Sigmar's sales collapse whilst Old Worlds soar.

Yes.

Think about how quickly Warhammer was replaced by Age of Sigmar and there's your answer. GW will respond to consumer interest.

That said, 30k and 40k co-exist. Nothing that would stop this from continuing on for a few years.

That wasn't a quick decision at all. You're looking at a minimum of 4 years development time for new ranges and there were probably long and multiple discussions concerning ending it before any decision was made. I'm reckoning the decision was probably made at the start of eighth, if not even before that.

yes as overread says, I wasn't claiming they were a failure, just not succeeding in there original intention - being fantasy space marines as a product range and sales umbrella.


They are basically just another AoS faction, they don't dominate amongst the players, GW clearly doesn't think they can sell lots of them or they'd have a much larger model range and they don't take up a quarter of the army lists available in the game. If you include chaos marines in the count then armies that are based on space marine models have 11 army books/supplements and their own model ranges.

compare that to the single stormcast book and you can see that stormcast are just another AoS army, while GW does not treat marines as just another singular 40k army. If stormcasts had milk to squeeze, you best believe they'd have Storm Wolves, Blood Cast, Dark Storms, Storm Templars etc.

But they don't because they have none of the foundational design and natural development marines had, they were a cynical moneyman ploy to copy paste a popular product to sell a new one and it didn't work.



As for the speed at which WFB was replaced, in terms of miniatures I actually think the stormcast were designed to be in WFB as a way to boost sales, but that the setting itself was only nuked quickly. If it wasn't then their hamfisted ruleslite release of AoS looks even more ridiculous. If they had 4 years to develop the 1st ed of the new game and that's all they managed they are utter failures at game design.

AoS didn't get proper rules until 2018, EIGHT years after WFB's 8th ed rules were released. The general's handbook came out a year after they released the 1st ed rules, but it was a hack job to try and salvage a complete farce of a game.

Nothing about the nuking of WFB looked well thought out or planned over years at all.

Concerning SCE, you make it sound like it's a bad thing they're not a complete and disgusting dominant like marines are in 40k. The fact they've had a considerable range selection and resculpts of their entire first range dictates the want and the sales are there.

Comparing anything to marines is an utter nonsense as nothing will ever compare to them. Not even chaos marines who are the exact same thing, just with spikes.

Yeah Marines are an enigma that's basically impossible to reproduce. It's baffling that you can have a halfdozen Marine factions in 40K and ANOTHER half dozen in 30K and then multiple marks of armour on top of that - all being the same general concept

Heck GW are only just bringing 40K marines to a point where there's 1 army roster instead of 2 rosters of broadly the same model concepts (Marines and Primaris Marines)



Marines have a magic to them that I don't think can be recaptured and honestly I wouldn't want to see recaptured. Sure its easy money for GW; but at the same time it stifles creativity. Just compare the AoS line to 30K. 30K has loads of factions but most of the time you get more marines. AoS in contrast has a wild selection of vibrant factions

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Concerning SCE, you make it sound like it's a bad thing they're not a complete and disgusting dominant like marines are in 40k. The fact they've had a considerable range selection and resculpts of their entire first range dictates the want and the sales are there.

Comparing anything to marines is an utter nonsense as nothing will ever compare to them. Not even chaos marines who are the exact same thing, just with spikes.

No, I'm saying it was a bad thing for GW because that's exactly what they were trying to do. I hate the oversaturation of space marines. This discussion is entirely that stormcast were cynically designed to be an oversaturated marine equivalent and they failed at it.

They haven't failed at being just another AoS faction, but they've failed at the thing they were invented to do. GW keep trying to make fetch happen and it's not happening.

And their creation is tied up in the cynical design and purpose of AoS as a whole, they are the failed poster child of a game that failed to be in any meaningful way distinct from the game it replaced to the point that they have been super WFB conservative in design of all their factions for the last 5 years and ToW coming shows they didn't get the market saturation from AoS they wanted.

I don't agree. They know that marines are lightning in a bottle and will never recreate that. They'd be fools to think otherwise. In terms of the game and setting, it's a vastly good thing they are poster boys who don't completely dominate. Gives every other faction a chance to breathe. But they are still by far, the most played faction in the game. Sounds like a success to me.

I mean, no they haven't. The releases of the Idoneth with their massive wave monster, the up and coming mechanical bull, winged elves from DoK, if anything the designs have become even more outlandish in recent times.

I think there were a lot of foolish choices made around the very start of Age of Sigmar. It's very clear that the whole idea of Stormcast is that they would be like marines - instead of Chapters they had Chambers and early lore REALLY pushed hard on the idea that Sigmar was going to unleash more chambers of Stormcast and that the army would grow and grow and splinter into chamber sub-factions over time.

This, of course, didn't happen and since then we''ve seen GW pull back somewhat from that plan into a more "replace the models quickly" approach. Which is almost entirely driven by the fact that they HAVE to put Stormcast in the starter box by management mandate and as a result have new models for a good chunk of the army every 3 years.

That's a challenge when the whole army is new to start out with and there is nothing old to replace. If they'd chosen Chaos as the "must be core" choice they'd at least have had 4 god armies and one generic to flick between.

The other option that their marketing could lean on would be going from "Must include Stormcast" to "Must include Grand Alliance Order". Which would make a heck of a lot of sense considering its the Grand Alliance with the most indivdiual factions within it.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
I don't agree. They know that marines are lightning in a bottle and will never recreate that. They'd be fools to think otherwise. In terms of the game and setting, it's a vastly good thing they are poster boys who don't completely dominate. Gives every other faction a chance to breathe. But they are still by far, the most played faction in the game. Sounds like a success to me.

I mean, no they haven't. The releases of the Idoneth with their massive wave monster, the up and coming mechanical bull, winged elves from DoK, if anything the designs have become even more outlandish in recent times.

chaos dwarfs already have robot daemon constructs in WFB, a wave monster is a summoned elemental, also available in WFB and winged elves are just Harpies. The only reason you know they aren't harpies, is because some writing told you. The models are not outlandish for WFB at all.

 Hellebore wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
I don't agree. They know that marines are lightning in a bottle and will never recreate that. They'd be fools to think otherwise. In terms of the game and setting, it's a vastly good thing they are poster boys who don't completely dominate. Gives every other faction a chance to breathe. But they are still by far, the most played faction in the game. Sounds like a success to me.

I mean, no they haven't. The releases of the Idoneth with their massive wave monster, the up and coming mechanical bull, winged elves from DoK, if anything the designs have become even more outlandish in recent times.

chaos dwarfs already have robot daemon constructs in WFB, a wave monster is a summoned elemental, also available in WFB and winged elves are just Harpies. The only reason you know they aren't harpies, is because some writing told you. The models are not outlandish for WFB at all.

Fyreslayers, Kharadron Overlords, Ossiarch Bonereapers, and how they rewrote Flesh eater courts were all panned by the community as outlandish when they came out. None of those would fit in WFB.

 Jammer87 wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
I don't agree. They know that marines are lightning in a bottle and will never recreate that. They'd be fools to think otherwise. In terms of the game and setting, it's a vastly good thing they are poster boys who don't completely dominate. Gives every other faction a chance to breathe. But they are still by far, the most played faction in the game. Sounds like a success to me.

I mean, no they haven't. The releases of the Idoneth with their massive wave monster, the up and coming mechanical bull, winged elves from DoK, if anything the designs have become even more outlandish in recent times.

chaos dwarfs already have robot daemon constructs in WFB, a wave monster is a summoned elemental, also available in WFB and winged elves are just Harpies. The only reason you know they aren't harpies, is because some writing told you. The models are not outlandish for WFB at all.

Fyreslayers, Kharadron Overlords, Ossiarch Bonereapers, and how they rewrote Flesh eater courts were all panned by the community as outlandish when they came out. None of those would fit in WFB.

The writing was panned, not the models. That's the distinction that people keep ignoring. Fyreslayers are just slayers with interesting equipment, some with armour like the slayer king. The kharadron blimps already exist in WFB, jump packs don't. Otherwise the foot troops look like armoured submariners (which dwarfs have). Flesh eater courts are just ghouls and strigoi vampires. There's nothing about the models that says anything else.

Seriously, if GW can use the same models from WFB and call them duardin or aelves or ogors with 0 changes, the inverse is also true.

 Jammer87 wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
I don't agree. They know that marines are lightning in a bottle and will never recreate that. They'd be fools to think otherwise. In terms of the game and setting, it's a vastly good thing they are poster boys who don't completely dominate. Gives every other faction a chance to breathe. But they are still by far, the most played faction in the game. Sounds like a success to me.

I mean, no they haven't. The releases of the Idoneth with their massive wave monster, the up and coming mechanical bull, winged elves from DoK, if anything the designs have become even more outlandish in recent times.

chaos dwarfs already have robot daemon constructs in WFB, a wave monster is a summoned elemental, also available in WFB and winged elves are just Harpies. The only reason you know they aren't harpies, is because some writing told you. The models are not outlandish for WFB at all.

Fyreslayers, Kharadron Overlords, Ossiarch Bonereapers, and how they rewrote Flesh eater courts were all panned by the community as outlandish when they came out. None of those would fit in WFB.

Fyreslayers were panned mostly because "naked dwarves" whilst Slayers were already a thing in Old World.

Kharadrons are already touched on several times.

Ossiarchs were mostly panned on because that was still VERY fresh from the end of Old World and most of the hate came from those who wanted to see Tomb Kings back not another different skeleton force. It also didn't help that GW didn't seed this faction enough; they kind of teased it in a side game but so many "great powerful person/things" get released in books that never become models that no one really paid attention.

Flesheater Courts were panned mostly because their models didn't represent the lore - meanwhile they've gone on to be surprisingly VERY popular lore wise and the new models that lean into the design even more so.


Again a lot of the hate was coming from the fact that these new factions were appearing when
a) Existing factions in AoS needed new models and were running around with really old sculpts next to brand new Stormcast
b) Multiple factions being fragmented to being useless or removed entirely - lots of fresh pain.

IT's very hard to get excited about the new thing when having the new thing meant that armies and models that were decades old (quite literally armies people had grown up with) had been removed.


Take away that removal - take away all that pain of the end of Old World and accepting new factions becomes a case of a few people grumbling that "Oh the static lore that I grumble about being static is now advancing" and most accepting and a bunch jumping on the shiny new models.


It's similar to how every time a faction in 40K gets a new release there's a bunch of Dark Eldar players grumbling about not getting an update (and before that SoB players who were stlil running around with their first generation metal sculpts of the army). The AoS situatoin was just way more fresh and way more brutal.

And as I've said before, the ossiarchs are just specific tomb king units turned into an army.

Tomb kings have bone constructs in the form of giants, swarms, scorpions, phoenixes and ushabti. The ossiarchs are just a version of the ushabti.

There is nothing in AoS that isn't derived from previously existing WFB themes. They truly are not original at all. The originality is in the TEXT written about how Ossiarchs are created. Take the text away and you just have small ushabti units created by liches.

Heck Ossiarchs are just the evolution of the Morghast guards and the new Archon/Neferata model mounts.

Ossiarchs and the cow elves are just pretty ugly models, that's their problem. If they looked less ridiculous people wouldn't have argued.

Ossiarchs look awesome!! They just need more of a range ot show off things like more mechanical monstrocities and a full animal and full centaur pack

 Hellebore wrote:


As for the speed at which WFB was replaced, in terms of miniatures I actually think the stormcast were designed to be in WFB as a way to boost sales, but that the setting itself was only nuked quickly. If it wasn't then their hamfisted ruleslite release of AoS looks even more ridiculous. If they had 4 years to develop the 1st ed of the new game and that's all they managed they are utter failures at game design

It is known that the AoS team had written a full on ruleset in a full size hardback rulebook as they do for all their games for 1st ed. Management told them to shelve it at the last minute shortly before release and to release lite rules that would fit on a pamphlet instead. Some of the contents of that original rulebook eventually got repurposed into the first generals handbook.

 Hellebore wrote:
And as I've said before, the ossiarchs are just specific tomb king units turned into an army.

Tomb kings have bone constructs in the form of giants, swarms, scorpions, phoenixes and ushabti. The ossiarchs are just a version of the ushabti.

There is nothing in AoS that isn't derived from previously existing WFB themes. They truly are not original at all. The originality is in the TEXT written about how Ossiarchs are created. Take the text away and you just have small ushabti units created by liches.

Once again - Dukhari are just dark elves with guns. They are now a WHFB army.

Just because you can vomit out worthless reductivist slop on a web forum ad nauseam to try to "prove" your point, doesn't mean that theres any validity to your arguments.

Claiming my words are such also doesn't make them so.

You need counter arguments not ad hominems.

Your position would have every wfb model in AOS then not actually part of their faction because they can't just be reductively called duardin or ogors because those are entirely different things ad you cant just slap AOS on it and now a Lizardman is a seraphim - oh wait.