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 Overread wrote:

 pancakeonions wrote:
Because I just played Vanguard, and it's far, far better. I don't play at clubs, I just play socially with friends, and with so many rule sets out there, who has time for subpar rules?

I can never work out if Kings of War miniatures are just years behind GW in terms of the style that they've gone for; or the painter that they've chosen or both. A lot of their core stuff certainly has a very retro feel to its design. I think my issue is that whilst I love the concepts for their armies the models have never really "wowed" me. Granted it could be their paintwork and that I'm seeing photos not real miniatures.

Some of their newer stuff is looking better and the Vanguard stuff is starting to look a little more advanced in terms of design.

Haha, you're right! The funny thing about my comment is that I play Vanguard... With WHFB models! I have a few Mantic models, and the newer ones are quite nice, but in general I much prefer pre-AoS GW models. Unfortunately, GW has increased the size of many of their more recent figures, and made some so ornate as to be hard to play with (e.g., fragile, hard to transport), so I haven't gotten into their newer stuff. Some of it is quite nice, to be sure, but too big. The other day, I battled against an all Reaper Bones goblin warband, and they looked great!

Aye, KoW is very proxy friendly. I use whatever minis I want when planning my forces (I have not actually got many games in) and most of them are GW.
Dwarves: GW Dwarves with some Mantic, Reaper Earth Elementals
Elves: GW and Privateer Press Elves, with some GW LOTR as "Half Elves"
Ratkin: GW Skaven obviously
Varangaur: GW Chaos plus Frostgrave Barbarians
Salamanders: GW Lizardmen, Reaper Lizardmen
Kingdoms of Men: GW Rohan, Historicals from various sources
Ogres: Privateer Trollbloods
The Herd: GW Beastmen, Dungeons and Dragons Werewolves, LOTR Direwolves, Frostgrave Gnolls
Trident Realms: GW Mer Elves, PP Bog Trogs and Frogmen, Descent Giant Crabs and GW River Trolls.
Undead: Mantic Undead and a lot of GW stuff for knights and characters, and a Reaper Zombie Dragon
Hordes of the Abyss: GW Demons

The big advantage to me is using whatever miniatures I think are the coolest.
That said, I still want to play AoS, I just plan on making my minis dual use.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Unlike 40k, you don't need Battletomes to play AoS. All the warscrolls are available for free, either on GW's website or through the app. The Battletomes have abilities and mods you can use to customize your army, but they aren't required.

Are the abilities and mods free? Or do you pay points for them? If they are free then yes they pretty much are required or you are screwed when opponent has extra abilities for free.

tneva82 wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Unlike 40k, you don't need Battletomes to play AoS. All the warscrolls are available for free, either on GW's website or through the app. The Battletomes have abilities and mods you can use to customize your army, but they aren't required.

Are the abilities and mods free? Or do you pay points for them? If they are free then yes they pretty much are required or you are screwed when opponent has extra abilities for free.

The faction abilities are generally highly desirable to needed for an army to really work. You can certainly run an army without them, but you are taking a big loss of potential. Plus if your army has mages you can't take any spells except realm spells (and that's only if you and your opponent are playing with the realm rules).

Also many factions have unique features; eg Daughters of Khaine have a selection of prayers and if you take a prayer from their list you get to pray twice per priestess not just once - so that's a huge shift in potential.


Of course if an army has no battletome they can still function, but often those forces have a significant disadvantage and are often taken either as allies or in a "grand alliance army" thus at least getting access to Grand Aliance abilities (though these are somewhat out of date now as they were released way back in the early days).


So yes you can run a faction without, but you'll be more likely to lose and be missing out on key features of the faction. It's one major reason many hope for a big year of Battletomes so that moreof the fringe armies can get on the table and be played. Right now if you look at any rankings for tournament events and general "what are people playing" there's a vast bias toward factions with battletomes.

My high elves were dissected into oblivion and have lost all cohesion and flavor. Maybe they will recoup at some point, maybe not.

Not complaining, as I had the pleasure of enjoying them for 25+ years of Fantasy editions.

Been unable to play really cause 40k has dominated my store and I recently decided I didn't wanna interact with one of the sigmar players for various non-gaming reasons, but my other sigmar opponents have been busy with holiday stuff.

Also my other projects that I want to use in game have been pushed back due to missing parts, or lack of wanting to do it at that time.

 Elhazard wrote:
My high elves were dissected into oblivion and have lost all cohesion and flavor. Maybe they will recoup at some point, maybe not.

Not complaining, as I had the pleasure of enjoying them for 25+ years of Fantasy editions.

You can still play with them but you would have to use Grand Alliance: Order which would allow you to use everything elf, minus some units that may have been removed.

My battleforces for Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin arrives today. I'll be honest, I've always hated elves. I mean, I really think they are the dumbest fantasy race and there's never ever been anything even remotely interesting about them (even if they make cookies). If you told me a few years ago that I'd buy an elf faction (much less two, with maybe the Sylvaneth one day), I would've punched you for being a dirty liar. Age of Sigmar has accomplished the impossible. It made elves not suck.

 Sqorgar wrote:
My battleforces for Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin arrives today. I'll be honest, I've always hated elves. I mean, I really think they are the dumbest fantasy race and there's never ever been anything even remotely interesting about them (even if they make cookies). If you told me a few years ago that I'd buy an elf faction (much less two, with maybe the Sylvaneth one day), I would've punched you for being a dirty liar. Age of Sigmar has accomplished the impossible. It made elves not suck.

I’d say that in terms of model range, the elves have some of the worse baggage left over from fantasy and the early 1.0 era of the game. Broken up into way too many factions, with too few minis in each, and lots of minis discontinued as well. OK, most factions got hit with this, but it just feels like the elves got it particularly badly.

Makes me wonder sometimes what the game would be like if it started from a completely clean slate...that’s a thread I’ve been interested in starting.

I really hope some of the Aelves get merged; if just to make a sane number of armies that GW can keep updated! I'd hate to see a dozen Aelf armies all around Daughters of Khaine size with none of them getting updated models and features for decades because there's just too many of them.

I've no problem if this means that GW has to release new lore changes so that the subfactions have to ally together.

To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.

 Overread wrote:
I really hope some of the Aelves get merged; if just to make a sane number of armies that GW can keep updated! I'd hate to see a dozen Aelf armies all around Daughters of Khaine size with none of them getting updated models and features for decades because there's just too many of them.

I've no problem if this means that GW has to release new lore changes so that the subfactions have to ally together.

You know its going to happen. 12 books, three units in each.

At least GW will post how “amazing” the new books are on fecebook.

 Charistoph wrote:
To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.

Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.

There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.

To put dark elves with chaos would require a fundamental rewrite of their AOS lore. They hate chaos. The problem is that everyone mistakes "order" for "good guys".

 AegisGrimm wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.

Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.

There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.

Yes--that's what Dark Elves were. At least until the End Times.

Now? Now they're something different. Scourge Privateers are monster-hunting pirates who ply the Realms looking for things to sell and tame. Shadowblades are Sigmar's dirty little secret, rooting out cults within the Free Cities and killing the members in very public ways.

The other two haven't been fluffed out too much, aside from the Darkling Covens using magical control over their thralls and the Order Serpentis having nasty beasties.

auticus wrote:To put dark elves with chaos would require a fundamental rewrite of their AOS lore. They hate chaos. The problem is that everyone mistakes "order" for "good guys".

Well, that's why I said that they should have done it back when they were rewriting all the factions. It still can be done now, and I'll get to that after the jump.

AegisGrimm wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.

Yeah, even though they technically don't fit with Destruction, it's still a helluva lot better than being part of Order. Nothing about the Dark Elf mindset would let them work at all with any of the other factions within Order. They are twisted, treacherous, torture-loving reavers without what most civilized people would call a conscience. Sure, they had their own ties to Chaos, but they are better served as a faction that would happily make war on all the others, just like all other Destruction factions.

There is no way that Sigmar and the ancient heroes of the Elves that are now gods would ever call them allies. Many people thought the Fyreslayers should have been in Destruction, but Dark Elves are way worse.

Destruction can mean many things. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning had Dark Elves allying with both the Greenskins and Tzeentch. The motives being to destroy what they could not posses, and conquer the rest. They were just more organized than Chas and the Greenskins in producing that destruction.

Too which, getting it in to the modern era basically redoing what happened before. Certain significants in the culture that produces units very much like the Dark Elves become disenfranchised by the current Realm structure and get infected with that whole, "I'm gonna wreck it because I didn't build it," attitude. Heck, the Ogres don't really want to wreck everything, they just want to eat everything, but that leads to a whole lot of destruction. It's not Greenskin level or type of mayhem, but they both can apply to being a Destruction type offaction. But with the Dark Elves, that would assume that those significants didn't find allying with Chaos to be more tempting over all.

The Grand Alliances present a concept of alliances that are not as clear as many think. Grand Alliance Order has no connection to be being good and is more a loose alliance of factions who on the one hand build civilizations - ergo they found settlements, improve their lot, fortify and trade - and who hate and oppose Chaos.

Now lets not forget Destruction and Death also fought against Chaos and originally all 3 Grand Alliances stood united with Sigmar against the Chaos. However Nagash broke away from the Alliance due to his arguments with Sigmar over Stormcast and his right to the souls of the Dead. Meanwhile Destructions patron god broke them away because of the gulf between the peoples; the destruction forces being more clan based and akin to nomadic lifestyles and clan wars and the like. Basically they werent' founding cities and trading they were raiding and if the real world shows us anything its that sedentary societies and nomadic societies can have huge problems living alongside when it comes to land ownership. Your standard civilized people would roll into an area and continually expand and build walls and fences and claim land and resources; whilst your nomad is might roam over that area of land but once every few decades for resources they need.


Dark Aelves wouldn't fit into Destruction nor Death nor Chaos, although the way the story is a few twists here and there and they could have fallen to Chaos. However that's quite a fundamental leap to make both in lore and in terms of model design and aesthetics. AoS is married to the Old World and you can see this in how internal alliances are formed within the Grand Alliances. How the High and Dark Aelves in particular are in alliance blocks of their own and don't cross over (unless you're building a grand alliance order army).


I think they do belong in Order just as Idoneth do and the Slaan and the Dwarves. The difference is that you've got Covens with mind control; Murder Worshippers; soul stealers; assassins; pirates on the high seas and the high skies. Heck Fyreslayers are almost like a destruction faction with their great wanderings at the start of the AoS lore and their wild fighting styles.

Going back to the old staple of D&D alignments, Order = Law, with no qualifications on good vs evil.

So you can get Lawful Good (Stormcast Eternals), Lawful Neutral (Seraphon?) and Lawful Evil (Dark Elves) all within the banner of Order. Yeah, it does feel a little incongruous for those factions to ally with eachother though...

And yet in WWII the Allied forces allied with the Russians despite knowing that the Soviet state was almost just as evil in its ways as the Nazi regime. Plus come the end of the war the Allies were looking to form alliances with the broken Nazi forces in preparation for a big Soviet push.

War forces alliances that you might not otherwise take up. Stormcast and Free Peoples might well not naturally ally with the Daughters of Khaine, however when you've only just retaken your lands from the twisted madness of Chaos and are still waging war on them, having a whole race of Aelves who can dance into battle and gleefully and willingly throw themselves at Chaos forces then you might well want to favour them.

Sure they've got those creepy temples and some men who go in never come out; and they do also run a lot of those blackmarket fighting rings. However you can rest easy that they at least don't organise gryph hound fights!

 Charistoph wrote:
To be honest, I thought putting the Dark Elves in to Order was a mistake. Since one is already rewriting lore anyway, they could have made them in to Chaos Elves or matched them up with Destruction.

Another mistake in a looooooong string of mistakes when it comes to AOHS lore.

You spend an awful lot of energy bashing a game you don't even play.

I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"

I'm not going to repeat many of the points raised by others even though for a lot of them they're why I do not play AoS, but I think the main one is that there just isn't a main draw for the game and GW themselves don't really seem to be trying that hard.

Essentially, my issue is that the "new" stuff outside of Stormcast is basically taking one or two units from the old army books and expanding them out into their own individual armies yet none of these new armies have much growth or potential for expansion and they're all mostly comprised of like, 5-6 different units on average. They're also not especially interesting or have much going on in terms of their visuals or themes. Oh look, it's tree people or naked ginger dwarves or half-snake ladies. No offense to the people who like these factions but quite honestly they're really boring, uninspired or just lacking in variety. Even some of the more potentially interesting ones to me like the Overlords or the Ironjawz still suffer from a lack of variety. I always loved greenskins but Ironjawz are just Black Orcs with some added Black Orc Boar Boyz. And GW are trying to push and sell this as an entirely independent standalone army? There's nothing to it so why should I be interested or want to invest in them?

If you look at 40k they've done a way better job of introducing new factions to the game in terms of being unique or offering something fresh, but also in the amount of effort they put into them. 3rd ed Necrons were low on unit variety, but they still had more than like, Ironjawz and Daughters of Khaine combined. And this was like 16 years ago! And they massively added to the lore and background of the setting in a pretty major way! A more brutal comparison is Ad Mech which are considered to need a model expansion, but they still have way WAY more stuff than many of the "new" AoS armies and Ad Mech on the whole are far more visually cool and interesting and unique than these AoS armies too.

Now recently GW do seem to have actually been putting some sort of effort into one of their supposedly flagship game systems since Nighthaunt and Idoneth are a lot more interesting and seem to have actual content to them so maybe the paradigm has shifted and the previous "new" stuff was a holdover from when Kirby was still there and because of the time it takes to develop models and books and the like, the new GW couldn't change it much and had to roll with it. If future AoS stuff has ACTUAL effort put into it like the Idoneth and Nighthaunt then I might be interested in the future, but for now it just seems like the main creative team doesn't really know what it's doing.

I've just commented in another thread about how I loved the aesthetic of the last 3 armies to be released so it might be apt to comment in this thread too. The main reasons I don't play is I don't understand the new setting with all these realms and there are less players in my local meta to play with. Also the standard time/money constraints.

The new grots are looking pretty thematicly strong to me.

 Bosskelot wrote:
I'm not going to repeat many of the points raised by others even though for a lot of them they're why I do not play AoS, but I think the main one is that there just isn't a main draw for the game and GW themselves don't really seem to be trying that hard.

Essentially, my issue is that the "new" stuff outside of Stormcast is basically taking one or two units from the old army books and expanding them out into their own individual armies yet none of these new armies have much growth or potential for expansion and they're all mostly comprised of like, 5-6 different units on average. They're also not especially interesting or have much going on in terms of their visuals or themes. Oh look, it's tree people or naked ginger dwarves or half-snake ladies. No offense to the people who like these factions but quite honestly they're really boring, uninspired or just lacking in variety. Even some of the more potentially interesting ones to me like the Overlords or the Ironjawz still suffer from a lack of variety. I always loved greenskins but Ironjawz are just Black Orcs with some added Black Orc Boar Boyz. And GW are trying to push and sell this as an entirely independent standalone army? There's nothing to it so why should I be interested or want to invest in them?

If you look at 40k they've done a way better job of introducing new factions to the game in terms of being unique or offering something fresh, but also in the amount of effort they put into them. 3rd ed Necrons were low on unit variety, but they still had more than like, Ironjawz and Daughters of Khaine combined. And this was like 16 years ago! And they massively added to the lore and background of the setting in a pretty major way! A more brutal comparison is Ad Mech which are considered to need a model expansion, but they still have way WAY more stuff than many of the "new" AoS armies and Ad Mech on the whole are far more visually cool and interesting and unique than these AoS armies too.

Now recently GW do seem to have actually been putting some sort of effort into one of their supposedly flagship game systems since Nighthaunt and Idoneth are a lot more interesting and seem to have actual content to them so maybe the paradigm has shifted and the previous "new" stuff was a holdover from when Kirby was still there and because of the time it takes to develop models and books and the like, the new GW couldn't change it much and had to roll with it. If future AoS stuff has ACTUAL effort put into it like the Idoneth and Nighthaunt then I might be interested in the future, but for now it just seems like the main creative team doesn't really know what it's doing.

Hmm I personally like AOS because all the armies are different, more than half the armies in 40k are power armour and let's not forget all the primaris Lieutenants. Anyway I tend to avoid this topic, but I find the AOS far from uninspired.

Just my perspective.

Carnith wrote:
I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"

Well... considering that WHFB and AOS are two completely different games that appeal to two completely demographics for two completely different reasons, I think that it NOT being WHFB is a valid reason for why they are not playing AoS because it not being WHFB *is* bad to such a person in terms of where they'd spend their game time.

I find that not only valid but useful because it lets anyone from a design capacity understand and see where it could be meshed.

Bosskelot - check out the new Grots being previewed today - of which is only part of the new sculpts being released for that force!



An Actual Englishman a reasonable bit of the early books and lore was a bit confused. I think the writers got AoS dropped on them as much as anyone and a lot of the early BL books focus more on battles and Sigmar making his big return to the realms. I think since then there's been an expansion in the lore that goes further.
Eg Pestliens, whilst being battle focused, gets you really into Skaven and Seraphon in two big ways and you get a fantastic flavour of the extreme high fantasy nature in the city that they are fighting through.

Inferno Issue 1 the first story is set at the end of the Mythic and start of the Chaos age and starts to flesh out some of the fall of peoples to the hoards of Chaos. It also strongly hints at a human faction yet again - there's loads of humans in the Lore so I think that we will see at least one if not two AoS Human led armies released in time.

The Novellas really go the extra mile; being longer than a short story so having room to go into a bit more depth; yet not as heavy to take on as a novel and the new novel pre-release in digital by GW this last day or two has apparently got some really fantastic Chaos and world lore in it. I think that the latter material is really coming together after the rocky start that AoS had.

Auctius yes that is a very true point, but its also true that its rather impossible for anyone to help people into AoS if they a want Warhammer Fantasy and not AoS to start with. There's barriers to entry and then there's an iron clad wall with spikes on it.
One is surmountable and the other is darn near impenetrable unless they open the gates

Carnith wrote:
I really wish this thread wasn't a "this is why I hate Sigmar" and more of a "What reasons have kept you (a person who likes to play sigmar) from playing". I get that the latter was the real question, but it has devolved into a "this game isn't WHFB and that's BAD and does things I don't like"

So this was supposed to be a therapy/support thread rather than actual discourse? Understood.

 Overread wrote:
Bosskelot - check out the new Grots being previewed today - of which is only part of the new sculpts being released for that force!

I'll be interested to see what the other new models are, but this is still indicative of the issue I already raised; it's taking already existing units from an already existing army and splitting them off and trying to make them an independent army. Back when I played WHFB I had a huge greenskin army with plenty of Night Goblins, but I have no interest in a standalone Night Goblin book because it just means less variety and even with the new setting I don't think they're an idea that can carry itself on its own.

And the new models they've shown off are just redesigns, some of which look worse than some very old models (love those old metal fanatics) so I'm honestly not too hyped to see what else they have in store because it doesn't really bode well. Even the new character looks like a joke compared to Skarsnik and Gobbla.

 Just Tony wrote:
So this was supposed to be a therapy/support thread rather than actual discourse? Understood.

 Overread wrote:
The intention of this thread is not to air grievances or hates of AoS, but rather to be a spot where people can be encouraged to ask questions that give them pause in starting AoS. This might be understanding the lore a bit better; or the way the grand alliances work or which armies are good to take or how to use endless spells etc....


So use it as an opportunity to ask questions and find answers so that you can get into the Age of Sigmar fantasy game

Literally the OP.