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 really hope not.

Look i might be a minority here but i prefer to play fun narrative games wirh my friends over tournaments and that has been my preference for over 30 years.

Does it sucks that some armies were left out? Absolutely! Does it at least seem that GW has a plan with this game? Certainly.

I would prefer to have 9 or 10 mostly well-balanced and fun armies with great rules over about 20 of which some are wildly more or less powerful. I've seen that happen many times before and don't have many fun memories of it.
I played tournaments during 7th edition and I still have nightmares about dark elves and demons.

I also think that around 10 armies for now are manageable to update well every edition; those poor Bretonnia players went neigh on 20 years without any updates.

Let GW do their thing for now; the game is but a year old. It's the most fun I've had with Warhammer in a long time and the rules are, i think, for the most part in a great place.

I'm sure that in the future they'll rotate at least some legacy armies back into the game. That wait sucks for people who only play a legacy army, but they have been pretty upfront with that from the very beginning. Patience is key I think. Just let it play out.

 Hellebore wrote:

The biggest issue will be how they decide to sell the armies if they do. Lizardmen units are identical to AoS, so do they move the AoS to TOW and make whole new lizardmen, run the same line in two boxes or what?

What's the question? They do exactly what they did with the other factions. Sell pre-2015 kits in ToW and post-2015 kits in AoS.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

The biggest issue will be how they decide to sell the armies if they do. Lizardmen units are identical to AoS, so do they move the AoS to TOW and make whole new lizardmen, run the same line in two boxes or what?

What's the question? They do exactly what they did with the other factions. Sell pre-2015 kits in ToW and post-2015 kits in AoS.

It would be the only example I can see where they would try to sell two identical units in two different games with 'how badly they're sculpted ' the delineating factor. I doubt they would consider it worth the investment when people can just buy the existing AOS models to make a tow army. You can't do that with the other factions, but skaven and Lizardman you can.

 Hellebore wrote:

It would be the only example I can see where they would try to sell two identical units in two different games with 'how badly they're sculpted ' the delineating factor. I doubt they would consider it worth the investment when people can just buy the existing AOS models to make a tow army. You can't do that with the other factions, but skaven and Lizardman you can.

They sell both old and new sculpts for all sorts of units already. 100% you would get old plastic Saurus, resin Slann, etc reissued for ToW.

JWh85 wrote:
I really hope not.

Look i might be a minority here but i prefer to play fun narrative games wirh my friends over tournaments and that has been my preference for over 30 years.

Does it sucks that some armies were left out? Absolutely! Does it at least seem that GW has a plan with this game? Certainly.

I would prefer to have 9 or 10 mostly well-balanced and fun armies with great rules over about 20 of which some are wildly more or less powerful. I've seen that happen many times before and don't have many fun memories of it.
I played tournaments during 7th edition and I still have nightmares about dark elves and demons.

I also think that around 10 armies for now are manageable to update well every edition; those poor Bretonnia players went neigh on 20 years without any updates.

Let GW do their thing for now; the game is but a year old. It's the most fun I've had with Warhammer in a long time and the rules are, i think, for the most part in a great place.

I'm sure that in the future they'll rotate at least some legacy armies back into the game. That wait sucks for people who only play a legacy army, but they have been pretty upfront with that from the very beginning. Patience is key I think. Just let it play out.

A tight ruleset doesn't preclude you from playing narratively. A narrative ruleset almost always precludes casual or competitive play. Just saying.


Also, you mention balanced lists as a narrative boon? That's EXACTLY what casual and competitive players want. They want every army to have an even shot of winning.


You used 7th as an example of skewed tourney play. Why didn't you use 6th? Because with a few manageable exceptions they had the entire game balanced and dialed in. WITH 17 factions, if memory serves. It's doable, and having a healthy tourney scene doesn't impact narrative play.

chaos0xomega wrote:



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Vorian wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:


They launched HH 2.0 without a significant chunk of their then-current active players being able to play it. Some were not able to play it for almost a year post release. Given that WHFB was dead for a decade - yes they 100% could have launched TOW without old WHFB having rules for their armies, there was no obligation to provide rules for folks who hadnt played the game in almost a decade.

You're suggesting that they should have not provided army lists for old armies and launched with 2 armies, only and have 5 or 6 armies after a year?

And the reason to do this is so current legacy armies would just be unplayable instead?

And you've decided that is a solution that would please the legacy players and the wider old world player base?

OK then.

I think i was pretty clear saying that releasing barebones index pdf lists for all 16 factions on day 1 with a vague statement that some of the factions might not be updated in the future was the way to go if they intended to possiblly incorporate legacy factions into the game. Likewise that if there was a chance of legacy factions being included then just doing a slow launch w 2 factions on release day and the remaining factions every few months until you got to a decision point would make more sense than making explicit statements on day 0 that you were excluding those factions entirely and then later pulling suppport from the biggest competitive event on the planet over their decision to allow thisr factions.

Ah, in effect making everything a legacy army until they announce one by one that they have been un-legacied.

I'm sure that would have resulted in far fewer complaints and not wild speculation and endless frustration about who would and who wouldn't get a list.

I think it's pretty obvious having all the rules and army lists day 0 and full clarity on what the next 2 years or so was going to look like was going to be preferred by the vast majority of players.

Even legacy players have had two years not sitting there hoping for a release that was not going to come. I can't imagine anyone would think the false hope would have been preferable to knowing.

Hellebore wrote:HH marines are pretty much not useable in 40k now that they've removed virtually all normal marine units. You can use Counts As for sure, but in terms of models, a HH tac marine isn't a 40k intercessor. So there's distinct model lines. Which will get even more distinct as primaris marines eventually remove all normal marines.

You can use the CSM codex - there you have non- Primaris Marines with mostly the same weapons.

Hellebore wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

The biggest issue will be how they decide to sell the armies if they do. Lizardmen units are identical to AoS, so do they move the AoS to TOW and make whole new lizardmen, run the same line in two boxes or what?

What's the question? They do exactly what they did with the other factions. Sell pre-2015 kits in ToW and post-2015 kits in AoS.

It would be the only example I can see where they would try to sell two identical units in two different games with 'how badly they're sculpted ' the delineating factor. I doubt they would consider it worth the investment when people can just buy the existing AOS models to make a tow army. You can't do that with the other factions, but skaven and Lizardman you can.

You can do that with Chaos Warriors and Vampire Counts too. It's just you have to convert them to fit in a regiment - same with the new Saurus warriors. Sooner or later they'll replace the old regiment boxes with skirmish game miniatures.

They already brought back OOP kits for units that have updated sculpts in AoS. They're not re-squatting them and telling you to buy AoS versions.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
To be fair GW brought back Old World in the first place after destroying it for AoS. That signifies that they do in fact change their minds sometimes.

To my knowledge they never said they wouldnt bring back WHFB, and internally duscussions about a WHFB reboot basically started immediately, it was always intended but was contingent on the success of AoS and TWW and the form it would take was unclear until some years later.

 Hellebore wrote:


My cynicism says GW wants the IP power of those TOW armies in AoS, but I do hope the pressure created by LVOs using Legends actually has an effect.

For the time being, 4 of those 7 factions are amongst the most popular in AoS (VC -> FEC and SBGL (Nighthaunt has supposedly waned), Lizardmen -> Seraphon, Skaven -> Skaven, Ogre Kingdoms -> Ogor Mawtribes) and their inclusion in AoS is seen as a selling point that draws interest to the game and strengthens the identity of the entire brand and IP. For as long as AoS remains a bigger moneymaker than TOW (and it is bigger, by a lot - though I hear TOW is trending bigly in growth and if sustained will be bigger than HH in the near future), management isnt going to jeopardize that by dilutung the brand back into TOW.

GWs goal is very much to develop that type of following with factions in TOW, thats supposedly why Brets and TK were first out of the gate, as they developed cult followings after the collapse of WHFB and were aeeing morw demand than they ever did before that, also why Cathay and Kislev are being targeted for inclusion in TOW as the fan response to them in TWW3 was overwhelmingly positive (and for a time Kislev was the most played faction across all three games by a very large margin in N America, S America, Europe, Africa (Cathay was Asia, Empire in Oceania).

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

It would be the only example I can see where they would try to sell two identical units in two different games with 'how badly they're sculpted ' the delineating factor. I doubt they would consider it worth the investment when people can just buy the existing AOS models to make a tow army. You can't do that with the other factions, but skaven and Lizardman you can.

They sell both old and new sculpts for all sorts of units already. 100% you would get old plastic Saurus, resin Slann, etc reissued for ToW.

Only for chaos warriors, and some goblins units, and thats a temporary thing.

Vorian wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Vorian wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:


They launched HH 2.0 without a significant chunk of their then-current active players being able to play it. Some were not able to play it for almost a year post release. Given that WHFB was dead for a decade - yes they 100% could have launched TOW without old WHFB having rules for their armies, there was no obligation to provide rules for folks who hadnt played the game in almost a decade.

You're suggesting that they should have not provided army lists for old armies and launched with 2 armies, only and have 5 or 6 armies after a year?

And the reason to do this is so current legacy armies would just be unplayable instead?

And you've decided that is a solution that would please the legacy players and the wider old world player base?

OK then.

I think i was pretty clear saying that releasing barebones index pdf lists for all 16 factions on day 1 with a vague statement that some of the factions might not be updated in the future was the way to go if they intended to possiblly incorporate legacy factions into the game. Likewise that if there was a chance of legacy factions being included then just doing a slow launch w 2 factions on release day and the remaining factions every few months until you got to a decision point would make more sense than making explicit statements on day 0 that you were excluding those factions entirely and then later pulling suppport from the biggest competitive event on the planet over their decision to allow thisr factions.

Ah, in effect making everything a legacy army until they announce one by one that they have been un-legacied.

I'm sure that would have resulted in far fewer complaints and not wild speculation and endless frustration about who would and who wouldn't get a list.

I think it's pretty obvious having all the rules and army lists day 0 and full clarity on what the next 2 years or so was going to look like was going to be preferred by the vast majority of players.

Irs no different than what players in 40k, AoS, and HH experience every edition. Ask Deathwatch players about having theur armies squatred and then unsquatred, or daemon players not knowing if theyre getting their own standalone codex or are gettibg folded into other armies (or for that matter Harlequins players, etc).

If the community behind GWs number 1 seller can put up with it, what makes TOW players so special?

Besides that, legacy status with a clear statement of nonsupport was not an obstacle for thousands of people to go out and start new legacy armies under the assumption GW would reverse course, I cant imagibe what I proposed leading to a different or worse outcome.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
To be fair GW brought back Old World in the first place after destroying it for AoS. That signifies that they do in fact change their minds sometimes.

To my knowledge they never said they wouldnt bring back WHFB, and internally duscussions about a WHFB reboot basically started immediately, it was always intended but was contingent on the success of AoS and TWW and the form it would take was unclear until some years later.

That sounds like an insane stretch of the imagination. Perhaps some staff wanted OW to come back, but honestly once AoS was out it was out and there was never any hint that removed armies were coming back or that Old World would come back. In fact so little hint that when they first teased it happening no one believed them and we even had "will it really be square bases" discussions because the second image GW ever showed for it was a square base


True they did never say they'd never bring it back; but to jump from that to "AoS then Old World was always the game plan" sounds kinda crazy

Yeah, I really suspect that the only reason why they considered bringing back the OW is because they saw in interest in the Total War games and went "oh gak, we could have been getting a cut of that".
Hence why the first armies they showed concept art for was Kislev and mentioned Cathay, because that was concurrent with the release of TWWH3.
I would not be surprised if they brought out Vampire Coast at some point, because that's a TWWH2 faction.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, I really suspect that the only reason why they considered bringing back the OW is because they saw in interest in the Total War games and went "oh gak, we could have been getting a cut of that".
Hence why the first armies they showed concept art for was Kislev and mentioned Cathay, because that was concurrent with the release of TWWH3.
I would not be surprised if they brought out Vampire Coast at some point, because that's a TWWH2 faction.

Actually it might not even be TW games because that's a related but separate market. I suspect it was more seeing things like 9th age, Kings of War and a bunch of other games all basically doing what Bloodbowl and others were doing. Keeping a GW game alive and generating decent income that GW could have in the model market.

TW Warhammer doing well is a marketing boon, but I suspect staff pressure; people asking; prices of 2nd hand models on ebay; 3rd parties basically copying the game and so forth all had a greater impact on GW going "Yeah actually we CAN make money on this and it won't hurt our AoS sales"

I feel like the chief job of Specialist Games nowadays is to keep grognards in the GW ecosystem. Might not even have a financial goal beyond maybe breaking even, the important part is to stop us from shopping elsewhere.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I feel like the chief job of Specialist Games nowadays is to keep grognards in the GW ecosystem. Might not even have a financial goal beyond maybe breaking even, the important part is to stop us from shopping elsewhere.

In a sense probably yes - but also probably because the 3rd party market often goes with easy wins and its MUCH easier to launch a game that's basically something a the mammoth mult-million £ market leader did and then abandoned. You have an instant captive market right on your doorstep and if you can get a solid product into that space a lot of your growth is already done for you. MUCH faster than starting your own game from the ground up where it might take years to just grow a viable decent following.

So yeah I suspect a part of it is GW learning to not leave money on the table and help grow their own competition in the market. Why compete with yourself basically when you can otherwise put the game back into production and make profits on your own.


I think the big change is that GW stopped requiring top-return-on-investment requirements from other investments. Or at least lowered the target thresholds to values that are more sane for the market (and not based on what Marines sell for). Having a top-end management team that also takes user-feedback and such into account is also likely part of it. The Kirby era was famous for him saying that he knew what we customers wanted and that he didn't need customer feedback. Meanwhile Modern GW I think is listening to that feedback and responding to it (where it makes financial sense).

I think that's why we've seen a huge change in direction on a lot of products. Plus GW are rolling in cash right now - its not like the 90s where Epic 40K not selling well enough got it killed off in 6 months; today GW can likely afford a loss-product for a time whilst they grow it.

 Overread wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, I really suspect that the only reason why they considered bringing back the OW is because they saw in interest in the Total War games and went "oh gak, we could have been getting a cut of that".
Hence why the first armies they showed concept art for was Kislev and mentioned Cathay, because that was concurrent with the release of TWWH3.
I would not be surprised if they brought out Vampire Coast at some point, because that's a TWWH2 faction.

Actually it might not even be TW games because that's a related but separate market. I suspect it was more seeing things like 9th age, Kings of War and a bunch of other games all basically doing what Bloodbowl and others were doing. Keeping a GW game alive and generating decent income that GW could have in the model market.

TW Warhammer doing well is a marketing boon, but I suspect staff pressure; people asking; prices of 2nd hand models on ebay; 3rd parties basically copying the game and so forth all had a greater impact on GW going "Yeah actually we CAN make money on this and it won't hurt our AoS sales"

I might confuse things or misremember, but I seem to recall reading at the time, that the Bretonnia expansion for TW was an unexpected big success that got some eyebrows raised. I dont think you can explain that with "a separate market" from the dissapointed Bretonnia players that fairly recent saw their army squatted.

 Overread wrote:


I think that's why we've seen a huge change in direction on a lot of products. Plus GW are rolling in cash right now - its not like the 90s where Epic 40K not selling well enough got it killed off in 6 months; today GW can likely afford a loss-product for a time whilst they grow it.

They are also in a unique position right now with things like old world and especially Epic (Legions)They only have to break even, or close too it . Legions models are just shrikifications of HH models. If legions fails as a game, the models are just getting rolled out into HH (and potentially get modified into later 40k kits if needed) later on as bigger models. They just need to recoup some money on the legion moulds. The sculpt/design has paid for itself twice over.

Old world models can be rolled over into AoS if the old world flops & vice versa. If they were to ditch AoS, they can just shoehorn all (or most of) the new skaven, lizards, Daughters of Khaine models etc back in to the old worlds lines. As much as people say GW clearly want a divide in the product lines, they know full well people are using kits from all the different games and its just money to them. If they really cared about the product divide we'd have the old metal squigs back already!

Not many other companies can roll out products with a built in fail safe like that. Even riskier sculpts for things like Necromunda & kill team are probably more common these days as they can roll them back into 40k as 'units' to recoup costs (similar to how warcry boxes become AoS 'units' in army books).

For all of GWs faults, I think taking risks with more 'unique' model sets is one thing they are doing quite well with right now.

 Fayric wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, I really suspect that the only reason why they considered bringing back the OW is because they saw in interest in the Total War games and went "oh gak, we could have been getting a cut of that".
Hence why the first armies they showed concept art for was Kislev and mentioned Cathay, because that was concurrent with the release of TWWH3.
I would not be surprised if they brought out Vampire Coast at some point, because that's a TWWH2 faction.

Actually it might not even be TW games because that's a related but separate market. I suspect it was more seeing things like 9th age, Kings of War and a bunch of other games all basically doing what Bloodbowl and others were doing. Keeping a GW game alive and generating decent income that GW could have in the model market.

TW Warhammer doing well is a marketing boon, but I suspect staff pressure; people asking; prices of 2nd hand models on ebay; 3rd parties basically copying the game and so forth all had a greater impact on GW going "Yeah actually we CAN make money on this and it won't hurt our AoS sales"

I might confuse things or misremember, but I seem to recall reading at the time, that the Bretonnia expansion for TW was an unexpected big success that got some eyebrows raised. I dont think you can explain that with "a separate market" from the dissapointed Bretonnia players that fairly recent saw their army squatted.

The thing is they are separate markets. Yes they are related but the vast number of players who are not already GW players; who are video game gamers are not going to covert to tabletop gamers.
They might get the odd box in the same way that the Lord of the Rings films generated loads of "one box wonder" customers that never converted to gamers.

It's not that there's no impact, just that you'd be a fool to build a major revival of a game based purely off good sales in a totally different market. Again TW Warhammer doing well can be because of Warhammer - it could also be that its the first high budget fantasy RTS game in about 10-20 years (ergo since Warcraft 3)

so, we have seen them bring back limited forgeworld only releases
What are the odds that something like Tumakhans horde or Chaos dwarves come out

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
so, we have seen them bring back limited forgeworld only releases
What are the odds that something like Tumakhans horde or Chaos dwarves come out

Doubtful (imo).

They have already said they wont bring back the mammoth. They are not bringing back Daemons, so I doubt we would see things like Tamurkhans model return. We might see some other odds n ends like the empire conversion kits. There is a possibility that the landship might show up on a MTO seeing as it got a mention in the recent journal, but it could just bit a titbit for those that already owned the model (as a throw away line rather than a real entry in the rules).

Chaos dwarves would probably come back as a 'new' army rather than in resin, but the rumours have been that they will be a returning force for AoS for a long time now so I'd not hold my breath we'd see them in the old world again. (I'd like to see them back, I have a huge army off them waiting for an excuse to be painted)

Forgive my lack of knowledge but Horus heresy new releases have been a mix of plastic and resin right? So stands to reason any new armies for Old World will be the same right?

Only the Marine Consuls have been resin thus far.

Anything re-released is in plastic. Glorious, lovely, practical plastic.

 nathan2004 wrote:
Forgive my lack of knowledge but Horus heresy new releases have been a mix of plastic and resin right? So stands to reason any new armies for Old World will be the same right?

The more appropriate comparison is Middle-Earth, which the release structure is far more similar too. I.e, you'll get the vast majority in resin and handful of important pieces in plastic.

Any game under the Specialist Game studio can have resin models - they tend to focus them on characters and really big things.

New models for the OW armies thus far have had resin characters in all of them.


It's hard to say if GW will continue that policy or not or if they'll look to move the game toward fully plastic for the new armies. That they've updated armies with new resin models right now suggests that resin is going to be part of the future for Old World at least for the foreseeable future.

Rando question to see if this is happening to anyone else: Can any of you not see the interactive map on www.theoldworld.com? I don't see it at all.

 Scottywan82 wrote:
Rando question to see if this is happening to anyone else: Can any of you not see the interactive map on www.theoldworld.com? I don't see it at all.

Not presently. They could have needed to do a bug fix or something after the recent update.

Yeah, its been removed, i assume because it wasnt supposed to show us something.

I know this is the eternal moan, but OUCH on the pricetag for Frydaal. She costs half as much as an Arvus Lighter

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
I know this is the eternal moan, but OUCH on the pricetag for Frydaal. She costs half as much as an Arvus Lighter

Weird. In UK£, she's two-thirds of the price of an Arvus lighter. Is she more expensive in the UK than Aus, or is the Arvus more expensive in Aus than the UK?

 Shakalooloo wrote:

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
I know this is the eternal moan, but OUCH on the pricetag for Frydaal. She costs half as much as an Arvus Lighter

Weird. In UK£, she's two-thirds of the price of an Arvus lighter. Is she more expensive in the UK than Aus, or is the Arvus more expensive in Aus than the UK?

Frydaal is $71 AUD

Arvus Lighter is $135 AUD

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I'm just saying i find the idea of Legacy armies kind of BS. In the case of skaven it's more because GW put skaven as the posterboys for the new bad guys of the current AoS edition. I mean even if the skaven are in the middle of a civil war the empire is in a very bad civil war too. Doesn't mean some of the various skaven clans aren't still doing things since there are so many clans and so many skaven. If nothing else Dwarfs are still aware of skaven as a threat and fight them in the Under-Way. The skaven's biggest enemies (greenskins, lizardmen and dwarfs) know skaven are a threat and they won't just forget they exist due to frequent interactions (greenskins probably would forget tho actually). It's a business decision from GW and nothing else.

The one thing nobody seems to talk about (or if they do, I missed it), is that for all the talk of the Empire civil war and early rumours that TOW would just be a HH-style Empire v Empire game and starter box at launch, a Skaven civil war actually sounds like an interesting setting for a game! It would have been the perfect moment to revamp the range to much the same extent as the new AoS edition did, updating a bunch of units from ancient metals to new plastics, and maybe introducing some new ones befitting the chosen focal clans. Much as I like Skaven, I am happy that the game has a bigger scope than that, though I imagine it could have been moderately successful as a starting point. While I think it is a loss not to have Skaven, Lizardmen, etc. in TOW, I am mostly happy that they are maintained and updated in AoS - they're some of my favourite factions, and at this stage I have more interest in gaming the Warhammer Fantasy world with other rulesets than TOW anyway, so the availability of nice minis is the main thing.