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I'd probably be a lot more thrilled about the return to square bases if I hadn't already rebased my WHFB stuff to round bases for AoS. Here's hoping the rules can support round bases on movement trays.

This looks like All The Good Stuff to me.

The problem with 8th Edition Megaunits could often be less to do with cost and more to do with boredom. If you had a similar model count in 7th edition it would be split across 3/4 units, which might be different troop types or at least painted to look distinctive. Who wants to paint 80 identical goblins?

Thats why I held off rebasing all of my stuff. Even though I took flak for having square bases in my AOS campaigns.

However I can't imagine that movement trays wont be allowed to facilitate the round bases.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Graphite wrote:
This looks like All The Good Stuff to me.

The problem with 8th Edition Megaunits could often be less to do with cost and more to do with boredom. If you had a similar model count in 7th edition it would be split across 3/4 units, which might be different troop types or at least painted to look distinctive. Who wants to paint 80 identical goblins?

Precisely. In 6th/7th my army sizes were roughly the same in model count as they were in 8th.

The big difference was instead of 6-8 units in 2000 points you had 2-4 units in 8th, and one of them was your big daddy blob deathstar belly smacking the opponent's big daddy blob deathstar in the middle of the table while both of you were shaking those magic six dice hoping to "six dice for the win" and get your uber-doom-erase-75%-of-your-opponent's-army-in-one-go spell off first with double six irresistable force.

The simple two houserules of "flanking removes steadfast" and "double 1s are miscast" stopped both of those things... but those were houserules and of course we know how a lot of people feel about houserules.

The only part that interests me is the lore. I’ll happily buy some new WHFB novels by CL Werner or Chris Wraight. The Old World was a fun setting for stories.

As for the minis, nope. They were too expensive when the Goldswords dropped in plastic, and have apparently only risen in price per mini since then. I might have been tempted by Kislev or Cathay minis, but the very thought of $35 for a single human mini or $50 for 5-10 mooks hits me like ice water.

There are too many affordable alternatives of decent-or-better quality for me to buy if the novels give me the modeling itch:
WGA is making Empire proxies with their Conquistadors.
Last Sword’s elves and lizardmen are great.
Mantic’s ratmen are good enough for Skaven to my eye.
For dwarfs, Oathmark, Mantic and Avatars of War have decent minis, but Reaper Bones are the closest lookalikes to GW, and still cheaper per axe-dwarf.
Orcs are well represented in plastic and resin across many, many ranges.
Tomb Kings are well covered by TTCombat’s new range.
Fireforge has Bretonnia down.
Chaos is well covered by lots of ranges. The Heartbreaker oldhammer resins are priced competitively with current GW plastics, and loaded with “character”.

So many affordable alternatives are out there that I suspect many TOW customers will start shopping around once they see the prices.

Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

GW will happily sell them new models.

I'm one of those people who couldn't get into AoS when it replaced wfb, so this game appeals to me, depending on how GW rolls it out.

What I'm still sort of surprised about was that they didn't rush this project to make the most of the current popularity of the warhammer total war game. They're launching the third and last game of the series this year and the old world is still seemingly a ways off.

There are tons of facebook groups with fantasy players still playing the game, same with Mordheim. Of course there's going to be a player base. There's also plenty of new people who want a chance at a fantasy game.

By the set up, the way they've been discussing "skirmish" style sounds to me like they're going around 5th - 6th edition style fantasy which to me was the peak. Its not "skirmish" in the way people are making out. Its still 2000 point games, it's just the unit sizes were smaller. It's not like Border Patrol 500 point games, although I'm sure that will be a similar starting point.

The way I see it, Warhammer : TOW came about after that survey they did asking people to submit their thoughts about warhammer a few years back. A lot of people talked about the demise of fantasy battles and hoping for a return.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I expect this is definitely the case. It's probably not a coincidence TOW was uncharacteristically announced out of nowhere the same time KoW 3e was being released - all the talk dried up from that and into "I guess I'll use KoW until the OFFICIAL GAMES HECKIN WORKSHOP rank and file game is released!"

Just leaning in to +1 the reminder that GW first blurted out some stuff about The Old World about two rounds of internal meetings after KOW 3E released and was proving a financial success. I'm genuinely impressed that the Dub has decided to reinvest in WHFB in a serious way and keep it distinct from AOS, especially as AOS has finally hit its stride as a Real Game, but then again KOW and A Song of Ice and Fire (and the success of Total War) have shown that GW was foolish to declare the rank n flank mass battle game dead however many years back.

Personally? I'll just be sad to see the KOW community lose some of its players, because it will, the draw of the Dub is too strong to keep everyone. Then again, I like to think some of the converts will stay around thanks to the strength of the rules and the freedom of the hobby (or at least the cheapness, GW is getting really tough to justify buying new at the army level, I imagine even more so in 2024 when TOW arrives in whatever form it takes). Nuking the Old World allowed me to look back on 20 years of playing WHFB, and what I realized was how stupid and riddled with NPEs a lot of it was.

Total Warhammer II was released 4 years ago. It just got it's final update, and that's because TW III drops this year.

TWIII will still be getting DLC, expansions etc. for about half a decade AT LEAST. TOW being will come out right in the middle of that.

 catbarf wrote:
I'd probably be a lot more thrilled about the return to square bases if I hadn't already rebased my WHFB stuff to round bases for AoS. Here's hoping the rules can support round bases on movement trays.

I would have bet money that GW would lift the round-models-in-square-units trays from ASOIAF, but repeatedly talking about square bases suggests otherwise. If they lifted set unit sizes from KOW they could support both square bases in trays and round bases in other trays, but I don't think the WHFB vets waiting for WTOW want that, as a complaint against KOW is that you don't remove casualties and get to enjoy Ye Old Cloude of Dead Modells like back in the day

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

I know for someone that may not care about rank and file that it may appear that there is no interest for this, especially one immersed deeply in the AOS side of things, but I'm part of several huge social media groups full of people interested in this very thing.

Also reminder that for a few years that very question was asked daily about AOS.

I didn't realize the medieval fantasy game D&D was such a failure in the US. XD

Anyway, I think hopefully if the game is based off of 5th or 6th for the most part it should be fine as a game to play. Community wise you'll get plenty of folk like me that were to young to fully play before it was murdered but grew into with help of Total Warhammer. Things like Trove and Ebay were used to get proxies and rule books.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

Well theres me

I have decades of collecting, reading and enjoying Warhamemr and now AOS as well. If I like the models /books I will buy them.

As well Total War - Cubicle 7 is doing a really good job with continuing to delve into the Warhammer World (and AOS) - combining someof the oldest lore with new and interesting elements. They also seem (like CA) to be working hand in glove with GW - the Age of Sigmar books had a lot of that examined the lead up of the recent Broken Realms campaign - especially with regards to Anvilguard.

 jojo_monkey_boy wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

GW will happily sell them new models.

I'm one of those people who couldn't get into AoS when it replaced wfb, so this game appeals to me, depending on how GW rolls it out.

What I'm still sort of surprised about was that they didn't rush this project to make the most of the current popularity of the warhammer total war game. They're launching the third and last game of the series this year and the old world is still seemingly a ways off.

I wouldn't put it past GW to intentionally time it to come out right alongside KoW 4th

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.

Looks like the Compendium Rumor is true?

I'm not worried about Kings of War, it was doing perfectly well before AoS and will do perfectly well after TOW releases.

People seem to forget that it was doing great for 5 years prior to AoS and view it as a reactionary system, it just happened to be in the right place at the right time, finishing up a KS delivery exactly at the point of WHFB getting nuked.

Mantic will probably sell more minis, since they'll once again be in the position of people buying them as proxies for a mainstream GW game without even having to change the bases.

I already have some round-based KoW Undead that I use for frostgrave, wouldn't be much of a stretch for me to make a soulblight army for AoS at less than half the usual price, when TOW releases, I'll give it a try but none of the minis need to be from GW, I was done with the price rises 10 years ago and the more recent aggressive FOMO marketing keeps me away despite having more disposable income these days.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

You underestimate the ability of people who set models on fire and swore off GW as the whore of babylon to come crawling back at the slightest shake of those square-based hips of her.

GW got me with 2nd ed AoS, where it looked like they're turning a new leaf over, I won't be fooled again- they never change, at best they take a sabbatical from their usual practices.

Glad they put some rumors in the ground and made some flat declarations of intent about old models and rule set (even if a blend of 3rd to 8th sounds like a meaningless non-answer to me).

Now... who's going to be scouring calendars to see what month and year matches the calendar shown in the picture? (30 days, starts on a Tuesday)

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

You'd be surprised. When they binned WFB everyone in my playing group ignored the new AoS because it didn't really qualify as an actual, serious game at that point. When AoS started to mature and we actually began playing it people tended to go for the shiny new model ranges (I suspect that might be rather common - I rarely see AoS armies with large numbers of WFB era models in them). As a result a significant number of people in my group still have old WFB armies stashed away under beds or in boxes. Enough to create a sustainable player base for the game on release. When you couple excitement over a "new" GW game with an instant, viable population of players it is easy to see hobbyists who weren't around for WFB taking the plunge to invest. In that respect I think the decision to make the game back compatible with old WFB models is an extremely good one for kickstarting TOW.

In the article they said they were looking at taking inspiration from 3rd edition through to 8th. I do hope they'll go back to the unit/army sizes common in those earlier editions to make the game more attractive to buy into and collect, both in monetary and painting terms.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The only part that interests me is the lore. I’ll happily buy some new WHFB novels by CL Werner or Chris Wraight. The Old World was a fun setting for stories.

As for the minis, nope. They were too expensive when the Goldswords dropped in plastic, and have apparently only risen in price per mini since then. I might have been tempted by Kislev or Cathay minis, but the very thought of $35 for a single human mini or $50 for 5-10 mooks hits me like ice water.

There are too many affordable alternatives of decent-or-better quality for me to buy if the novels give me the modeling itch:
WGA is making Empire proxies with their Conquistadors.
Last Sword’s elves and lizardmen are great.
Mantic’s ratmen are good enough for Skaven to my eye.
For dwarfs, Oathmark, Mantic and Avatars of War have decent minis, but Reaper Bones are the closest lookalikes to GW, and still cheaper per axe-dwarf.
Orcs are well represented in plastic and resin across many, many ranges.
Tomb Kings are well covered by TTCombat’s new range.
Fireforge has Bretonnia down.
Chaos is well covered by lots of ranges. The Heartbreaker oldhammer resins are priced competitively with current GW plastics, and loaded with “character”.

So many affordable alternatives are out there that I suspect many TOW customers will start shopping around once they see the prices.

This was basically the main reason I hypothesized the possibility of 10/15mm scale minis, and the main reason I'm still expecting GW to find a way to feth people over/why I think the bit about "its the same scale its always been and we want you to use your old armies" is a load of steaming bs.

There are so many *not* GW options out there with incredbile minis at much better pricepoints than anything GW curently offers, much more than there was 10 years ago when such things were already becoming an issue (which many believe contributed to GW axing the game). What has changed that makes GW feel any different? The hardcore grogs are dead-set on using their old existing minis, i.e. no new miniatures sales. Those with a chip on their shoulder are vowing to play the game without using a single new GW mini as "punishment" for their misdeeds, i.e. only using third party minis. I'll certainly buy GW minis myself if they make any that tickle my fancy, but I also already have gigabytes of STLs with which I could make my own armies with if I find that preferable, as well as the CAD skills to sculpt my own ranges if the inspiration so strikes me.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Really what is the playerbase here? I can't imagine there being a lot of grognards left who haven't either rebased their army or set it on fire.

As it happens, I found about 2000 points (out of something like 15-20k points) of Ogre Kingdoms that I didn't rebase yet over the weekend I think fewer rebased/shitcanned their armies then you realize though, but many of those don't seem to be too intent on buying new minis for those armies, especially if they can bring them back to the table as-is.

I didn't realize the medieval fantasy game D&D was such a failure in the US. XD

It actually grew faster in the UK and EU in the early days (thats literally how GW got its start) and remained a small and at times obscure community in the US for some time. Which isn't to say that it was a failure here, just that it didn't really take off here (in part because of Satanic Panic nonsense, but also heavy social stigma associated with it until recently) until much later. Even then, growth in the US didn't really kick in bigly until 5e launched (and actually was almost written off as a failed product line by Hasbro/WotC with 4e). While 4e mainly struggled because of mechanical issues, thematically it was also the last hurrah of the traditional eurocentric fantasy thing in the setting. With 5e WotC injected a lot of Magic: The Gathering style modern mythic fantasy elements into the game/settings. In this manner 5e is in many ways reminiscent of AoS, except WotC managed to better incorporate the multiplanar and mythic aspects into it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (although they did advance timelines in some of the campaign settings, pretty much all the campaign settings were retconned in some way at a minimum). You can even see this just by comparing the artwork between 4e and 5e - 4e exudes traditional nostalgic high fantasy vibes in its artwork, whereas 5e is a bit more "gonzo" by comparison. Look at the 4e and 5e covers for eberron side by side, for example - theres a big difference in the interpretation of the warforged there. Compare the Mordenkainens books, 4es cover is traditional fantasy shop, 5e is doctor strange. Compare the Monster Manuals - 4e has a rather traditional looking fantasy beastie on the cover - its a demon lord but its got a traditional devilish thing going on for it, looks like it could be a khornate bloothirster. Its got the horns, tail, wings, nothing wholly unexpected or eye-catching really. Then 5e had a friggin Beholder in a thunderstorm.

Its actually interesting that both D&D and Warhammer went through thee sales slumps and rebranding around the same time, makes you wonder if they were somehow related or if there was a deeper impetus behind it.

People seem to forget that it was doing great for 5 years prior to AoS and view it as a reactionary system, it just happened to be in the right place at the right time, finishing up a KS delivery exactly at the point of WHFB getting nuked.

Arguably it was the reason WHFB was nuked in the first place - I remember when they released their plastic skellies or zombies kits or whatever it was in the early days. One of the local undead players went out and bought 200 of the damned things to bulk out his vampire counts. Sometime later they released their plastic dwarves and one of the guys on the fence went out and built a 5000 point army that was 80% mantic minis, only using GW minis for some of the more obscure and special stuff.

Mantic will probably sell more minis, since they'll once again be in the position of people buying them as proxies for a mainstream GW game without even having to change the bases.

Yep.

Oh boy am I glad we can end those daft arguments about whether TOW will be 10mm.

Yea no Chaos, I think that is bull.

 Londinium wrote:
Oh boy am I glad we can end those daft arguments about whether TOW will be 10mm.

That tbh is the biggest thing I took from this, damn those were tedious, and they were everywhere.




As to me, this news is great, I dropped out of WHFB not long before AOS and I've tried to get into AOS twice, and to be fair there is nothing against the game, but if I am going to set up a skirmish game in the 40K/AoS style, 9 times out of ten its going to be 40K because in a similar format I prefer the pew pew of 40K. The reason I always liked WHFB because it played so differently, so I will be getting on board when Old World turns up, and I'm in the spot were I don't have lots of AoS models to fret over (just Warcry and Quest these days) so will be able to get involved with no baggage.

Also happy to wait for as long as its takes to come out.

chaos0xomega wrote:

It actually grew faster in the UK and EU in the early days (thats literally how GW got its start) and remained a small and at times obscure community in the US for some time. Which isn't to say that it was a failure here, just that it didn't really take off here (in part because of Satanic Panic nonsense, but also heavy social stigma associated with it until recently) until much later. Even then, growth in the US didn't really kick in bigly until 5e launched (and actually was almost written off as a failed product line by Hasbro/WotC with 4e). While 4e mainly struggled because of mechanical issues, thematically it was also the last hurrah of the traditional eurocentric fantasy thing in the setting. With 5e WotC injected a lot of Magic: The Gathering style modern mythic fantasy elements into the game/settings. In this manner 5e is in many ways reminiscent of AoS, except WotC managed to better incorporate the multiplanar and mythic aspects into it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (although they did advance timelines in some of the campaign settings, pretty much all the campaign settings were retconned in some way at a minimum). You can even see this just by comparing the artwork between 4e and 5e - 4e exudes traditional nostalgic high fantasy vibes in its artwork, whereas 5e is a bit more "gonzo" by comparison. Look at the 4e and 5e covers for eberron side by side, for example - theres a big difference in the interpretation of the warforged there. Compare the Mordenkainens books, 4es cover is traditional fantasy shop, 5e is doctor strange. Compare the Monster Manuals - 4e has a rather traditional looking fantasy beastie on the cover - its a demon lord but its got a traditional devilish thing going on for it, looks like it could be a khornate bloothirster. Its got the horns, tail, wings, nothing wholly unexpected or eye-catching really. Then 5e had a friggin Beholder in a thunderstorm.

Your theories don't sound very credible tbh.

Can you think of a "gonzo," "mythic" (or whatever other ultimately-insufficient genre label we can use) fantasy setting that was popular in the US before the 5E/AoS years? Y'know, to confirm that the tastes of the US market actually reflected the preferences you're claiming they did? Is MtG the best you got? Because nobody plays MtG for the setting/characters.

Do you have numbers for NA being WHFB's weakeast market by a large margin? I'd like to know how large the margin is. I'd like to see the interview quotations you remember from the former designers so that I'm not trusting a third-hand interpretation of the measure of the word "large."

Has D&D not recently grown in Europe at the same rate it's grown in the US? Y'know, given the supposed preferences of each region?

Who was playing the best-selling Total War and Vermintide series? Europeans?

I think there's a much simpler explanation than the one you're working with: The US doesn't have strict fantasy subgenre tastes -- rather, it didn't have any widely popular sword-and-sorcery fantasy, until two more-or-less "generational" events -- the LotR movies and Game of Thrones -- brought that genre to the mainstream.

For the gonzo part, American cartoons and comic books have been gonzo for a long time, and hold sway over at least one generation’s sensibilities.

This must be a different gonzo than what I'm thinking of

I'm pretty sure they'll be selling official Games Workshop branded movement trays at 3x the normal price so you can use your round based models with the new system. I wouldn't worry too much about that angle, not even GW is going to think it's a good idea to create some system that requires you to rip your models off their bases every time you want to switch them between AOS and Old World.

They could pretty easily make it base size agnostic while still retaining individual casualty removal.

I mean I don't believe for a second that they WILL do that, but they could.

GW already switched base shape on fantasy players before, i don’t see why people think they wouldn’t do it again.

Luke82 wrote:
GW already switched base shape on fantasy players before, i don’t see why people think they wouldn’t do it again.

They've done it so many times! Can you believe the 3rd edition core rulebook had pictures of hexagonal slottas? Which they wanted you to use, Sigmar forbid, alongside your squares and even rounds! And then they took all of that away from us, and made us use squares, until we needed to use rounds, and now we'll be back to squares but WHERE ARE THE HEXAGONS!?