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I mean, the pose of the mage is fine. I could do without that helmet though.

It's like some failed Legend cosplay.

Yeah, a toned down version of that head dress would also have been fine but that really is too big.

Yeah, her helm makes her face seem wide and look like she's pouting. Would definitely headswap for something more serene looking or masked.

The hero characters are all floating about, the cavalry all look dynamic, fluid and pretty fantastic, I must say, and then we have the archers... as lovely as they are design and detail wise they look straight out of Warhammer Fantasy Battle of yore! Regimented and perfectly lined up for a formation... of square bases!?!
I suppose this fits the bill in portraying this army as well drilled and organised but after the new, more dynamic and savage looking Chaos Warriors I'd have thought we'd get to see those fancy compound, wizard bow things in a few different poses.

Cool army overall, I know I'll buckle to a Start Collecting or Christmas Battleforce set circa 2022! >.<

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention the new DoK warband for Underworlds. Looks like a (relatively) cheap way to get a Hag Queen without being a shrine.

I think archers look cooler when they are regimented.

 Irbis wrote:

 stonehorse wrote:
How can GW get High Elf inspired models so wrong?

Yes the sculpting quality is the high standard that we have come to expect from GW. However, the aesthetics are just... crap. A 3 string bow?

Yup, bows need to have one and only one string with more complex arrangements being forbidden and breaking all suspense of disbelief:

Less of the snark please...

The bow in the picture is one string that has a series of pullies that give the compound bow a lot more strength. The Aelf one is not the same, there is no pulley system, just 1 string hooked on to 4 points. I see where GW were going with the idea, just the resulting model doesn't work... now there may be some Mcguffin hand waving magical in game way to make it work. Which is fine, but that doesn't come across from looking at the model in isolation. Background fluff is separate from the model, as they (the model) can be used in any fantasy system.

It just looks to me like GW was trying to imply a medieval version of a compound bow.

I love when people cry about realism........ in age of sigmar.
How dare a bow have 3 separate strings!
No elf in their right mind could make that work.
That is of course, if elves were real too.

90% of the creations in warhammer aren’t actually close to realistic or functional and that’s just from a gear perspective.

It’s designed to look exaggerated and dynamic.
They can’t use normal bows as it’s a big part of their history, so they improvised to make them stand out.

If you want completely screwed dynamics, find a vehicle in 40k that could even function or do its job.

It’s a game though, much like a film, artistic license plays a big part in it.
It doesn’t need to have real work functionality or physics as it’s meant to be for show.

If you want pin point accuracy then try a historical game instead, you won’t get anything close to it here.

Jackal90 wrote:
I love when people cry about realism........ in age of sigmar.
How dare a bow have 3 separate strings!

The original argument was that 3 strings are "gak aesthetics" and not the lack of realism. In fact, it was the counter argument that appealed to realism (compound bow). So it's actually people justifying weird designs with realism in this case.

But its not three separate strings. Its three strings attaching to the top of the laminated(?) bow (3 layers), and one string attaching to the lower recurve. It just doesn't make sense.

Fortunately, it looks like the front two strings can be easily removed, and the hook bolts will just look like they're holding the top of the bow together. Easy peasy.

These are a ton nicer than the previous elf archers, though I wish they had stuck with a standard elvish longbow. Ah well. I do like the spearmen, and will likely pick some of the up. Who am I kidding, I'll get a little of everything for skirmish.

Actually it might be 3 strings. Just 3 strings with different upper connection points, but the same lower connection point.


Anyway its fancy and elfish and strange which fits AoS. It can go up with with pauldrons so huge you can't move your arms; spears that are too short (a LOT of spears are too short in wargames); tanks that are both too small and too big at once*; heroes and close combat in space


What's actually stranger is that they've got bowstrings at all. A lot of GW's archers don't have strings. Daughters of Khaine Melusai don't have strings at all on their bows and this holds true with several others scattered throughout the range.



*the classic IR Lemon Russ is both too small to actually hold everything inside it; whilst at the same time having much too big and tall a profile to be an effective modern/advanced/future war tank.

It's three strings, with three separate anchoring points up top and a single anchoring point at the bottom.

You can actually tell fairly easily from this shot:



I wouldn't be shocked if the strings are there to separate them from another build from the box.

Their bows also have three seperate upper limbs to match!
Any physicists around to explain how feasible this is?

 EnTyme wrote:
It just looks to me like GW was trying to imply a medieval version of a compound bow.

I see that and it screams 'magic item' to me. When something has a design that is clearly nonsensical materially that is generally the case. Many people do not want to put two and two together, for varied reasons, which will lead to some disliking it as a result. But that is how artistic appeal works.

Oh, I know. It's this way with pretty much every release. Regardless of which army gets previewed, one section of the community will nitpick it to death, one section will say it's the best design yet, and at least a couple will say it's the army that finally inspired them to get into AoS. The first group is just typically the loudest.

Who cares about the bow.. look at those ugly pdgy faces and stupid droopy helmets…

To clarify:
The animated armour guy and cav are huge hits for me stunning work.
The rest so far is a huge miss.. Its almost as if these were done by two separate design studios..

I fully agree. Armor ghost is amazing, and I really wish they went with that as one of the main themes. The massive peacock plumes and bits designed to snap in constructions (like said three thin bowstrings) are not cool.

It's really weird. Generally GW was good about updating the aesthetics to their new setting, but both the incredibly goofy bone trash collectors and these elves are more miss than hit to me.

I like the cavalry and melee infantry and could see the archers being good with some modification. That is the most important part of the range in my opinion.
The characters are very goofy and OTT and look impractical as gaming pieces. But I rarely buy GW characters because they are so over priced in any case.

 BertBert wrote:
Their bows also have three seperate upper limbs to match!
Any physicists around to explain how feasible this is?

Only 1 string will be sending energy to the arrow, while the other...to the bow's limb, which is similar to dry fire (firing without any arrow), and (probably) break the limbs. Or cause micro fraction.

Also pretty obvious that drawing 3 string at the same time require much more strenght than drawing just one. Unlike a compound bow, which some one try to bring up here, you don't draw all the strings on it. The string is on a pulley system that help the user reduce the drawing weight while still having a powerful shot.

Way to go researching ...horse motion and lance bucket. But bow design and proper mediterranean 3 fingers draw? Nah bruh.

Guess it can work if the bowstring is elastic (not sure if it's technically sensible even then, but at least there is a point - at present, the tension will be on the front string, with those behind it going limp when drawing the first backwards).

Even from an aesthetic point of view, I just don't see the point. A normally strung bow would not have upset anybody and few people would have strongly preferred the current design over it, while quite some people strongly dislike what they've made here. Guess it just had to be something original.


(Also, I hope to one day witness a discussion on realism in fantasy where nobody says "who cares about realism.. it's fantasy!". If you'd see a figure holding a sword by the blade end, or uses a spear backwards with the blunt wooden part towards the enemy, you'd rightfully say that looks silly if there is no in-universe logic to explain it. That's how fantasy works: suspension of disbelief for a limited number of factors, and everything else pertains to e.g. the same laws of physics as in our own world. After all, that's why they tend to use sharp metal weaponry, add flights to their arrows and make bows out of curved wood, rather than make an arrow out of a grass straw with a heavy golden weight at the back, shot from a stone bow.)

 Overread wrote:
What's actually stranger is that they've got bowstrings at all. A lot of GW's archers don't have strings. Daughters of Khaine Melusai don't have strings at all on their bows and this holds true with several others scattered throughout the range.

The harp of that one Slaanesh character has strings. It's possibly the latest thing, started with that model, that we will now be seeing more of.

Bowstrings are probably too mundane for GW's marketing team to be highlighted as "a brilliant example of what modern miniatures design technology can do".

 Geifer wrote:

 Overread wrote:
What's actually stranger is that they've got bowstrings at all. A lot of GW's archers don't have strings. Daughters of Khaine Melusai don't have strings at all on their bows and this holds true with several others scattered throughout the range.

The harp of that one Slaanesh character has strings. It's possibly the latest thing, started with that model, that we will now be seeing more of.

Bowstrings are probably too mundane for GW's marketing team to be highlighted as "a brilliant example of what modern miniatures design technology can do".

Or not, like this model for Necromunda which was just announced at GAMA alongside the Auralan Sentinels...

Possibly. Or Specialist Games models aren't designed by the same people that favor the same things. Or these models are too old to follow the same paradigm because bowstrings were still in the testing phase when these were designed. We'll see.

They model the string to show off their 200 iq triple limbs, triple string design. Without it no one would even understand what's going on with these bow with 3 limb stacked on top of each other.

 Irbis wrote:
Yup, bows need to have one and only one string with more complex arrangements being forbidden and breaking all suspense of disbelief:

Build a bow the way GW did and give it a shot. You'll see the problems quite quickly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Jackal90 wrote:
I love when people cry about realism........ in age of sigmar.
How dare a bow have 3 separate strings!
No elf in their right mind could make that work.
That is of course, if elves were real too.

90% of the creations in warhammer aren’t actually close to realistic or functional and that’s just from a gear perspective.

It’s designed to look exaggerated and dynamic.
They can’t use normal bows as it’s a big part of their history, so they improvised to make them stand out.

If you want completely screwed dynamics, find a vehicle in 40k that could even function or do its job.

It’s a game though, much like a film, artistic license plays a big part in it.
It doesn’t need to have real work functionality or physics as it’s meant to be for show.

If you want pin point accuracy then try a historical game instead, you won’t get anything close to it here.

That's a fair criticism. Most of the melee weapons are unfeasably big too, and the wielders would be cut to ribbons by people fighting with realisticlly-sized weapons in short order.

 Ghaz wrote:

 Geifer wrote:

 Overread wrote:
What's actually stranger is that they've got bowstrings at all. A lot of GW's archers don't have strings. Daughters of Khaine Melusai don't have strings at all on their bows and this holds true with several others scattered throughout the range.

The harp of that one Slaanesh character has strings. It's possibly the latest thing, started with that model, that we will now be seeing more of.

Bowstrings are probably too mundane for GW's marketing team to be highlighted as "a brilliant example of what modern miniatures design technology can do".

Or not, like this model for Necromunda which was just announced at GAMA alongside the Auralan Sentinels...

Spoiler:

Yeah, GW doesn't seem to understand bow strings.

Having three strings doesn't make the bow look cool or fantastical. It just looks dumb. It's worse than having multiple arrows on a string.
Big ass swords and guns aren't practical either, but at least they have a coolness factor behind them. If they wanted to make a bow look cool they did it wrong. They should have made them greatbows, like in the Dark Souls series.
No bow string looks cheap. I would assume that its due to manufacturing issues, but if you can have 2 useless strings on a model bow then you can make a bow with 1 string.

I can't believe someone is claiming shooting multiple arrows at once from a single bow isn't cool. That would make me actually like the archers.

pm713 wrote:
I can't believe someone is claiming shooting multiple arrows at once from a single bow isn't cool. That would make me actually like the archers.

No, it wouldn’t look cool. It would look ridiculous. Then again, looking ridiculous seems to be the look they’re going for with half the AoS range.

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
Guess it can work if the bowstring is elastic (not sure if it's technically sensible even then, but at least there is a point - at present, the tension will be on the front string, with those behind it going limp when drawing the first backwards).

Even from an aesthetic point of view, I just don't see the point. A normally strung bow would not have upset anybody and few people would have strongly preferred the current design over it, while quite some people strongly dislike what they've made here. Guess it just had to be something original.

I'd bet on it being part of the post-Chapterhous everything-must-be-unique design direction of GW. While I am not bothered by what they went with, a more normal bow design would have appealed to me more.

[(Also, I hope to one day witness a discussion on realism in fantasy where nobody says "who cares about realism.. it's fantasy!". If you'd see a figure holding a sword by the blade end, or uses a spear backwards with the blunt wooden part towards the enemy, you'd rightfully say that looks silly if there is no in-universe logic to explain it. That's how fantasy works: suspension of disbelief for a limited number of factors, and everything else pertains to e.g. the same laws of physics as in our own world. After all, that's why they tend to use sharp metal weaponry, add flights to their arrows and make bows out of curved wood, rather than make an arrow out of a grass straw with a heavy golden weight at the back, shot from a stone bow.)

All-or-nothing thinking at it's finest; the argument such people are making is 'because fantasy inherently involves some degree of improbability, any degree of probability is acceptable' which is in turn an extrapolation of the sentiment 'all improbable things are equally improbable.' At which point you realize they individual in question is not taking the discussion all that seriously and probably don't mean to come across as such. Rather, the implied statement is "this is a fantasy setting where realism will be bent to some degree and this falls within a reasonable range of that."

Long way of saying that sometimes it's just a matter of communication.