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I'm as salty about the mismanagement of the Kirby years as anyone, but you shouldn't throw out all the effort people put into AOS to correct that.

Eh, AoS has always been Shards of Alara. I'm not surprised at all to hear the next plan is Conflux.

If they blow up AoS I'm burning my Necrons

 LunarSol wrote:
Eh, AoS has always been Shards of Alara. I'm not surprised at all to hear the next plan is Conflux.

That implies that FTV: Exlied is coming soon...looking forward to seeing that Chaos Dwarf Juggernaut or the Chronicle Chaos Cannon...

But yes, despite my love of the Stormcast and Daughters of Khaine, finding players has been a struggle in my locale...

 flaherty wrote:
Were I GW, I'd lean that way. Kill the LOTR license. Have one product line that is fantasy-based and try to map it to some Earthly stakes.

As GW probably also realized when deciding to invest (a pretty tiny amount) into Middle-earth after a prolonged period of letting it gather dust, and when they brought back Warhammer Fantasy/The Old World, as well as Necromunda, and Blood Bowl, and other revisited and new smaller-scale games, there's money to be made from people who like those things, and no, those same people won't be shifting to 40k or AoS if you stopped producing the games they liked. They'd largely just stop being GW customers and find something to their liking elsewhere. Keeping those customers with pretty minimal investment seems worthwhile.(Plus, a handful of people playing the other games might start 40k or AoS while part of the GW ecosystem.)

Moreover, given the continued popularity of Middle-earth >70 years after the publication of LotR and >20 years after the movie trilogy, I do believe it would be foolish for GW to allow another miniature company to get the license, as that could suddenly attract major attention to a competitor.

Dudeface wrote:

 YodhrinsForge wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:

If AoS had been dying like WHFB did, then sure.

Are we still repeating this nonsense as fact? It grows with every cycle of retelling as well, first it was "not profitable enough for Kirby who thought everything that wasn't earning like Space Marines was worthless trash", then "undeperforming relative to 40K", and now we're at "it was totally dying and making no money at all GW were basically keeping it going as a charitable old folks home"

It wasn't doing well, all those versions say the same thing.

Well, no, they don't really. The original is based on the estimation of one person who had otherwise demonstrated some pretty questionable judgement. The second is simply the state literally every GW product ever made except 40K has always existed in. Only the most extreme/recent framing claims it was objectively doing badly to the point its end was actually merited.

I'll be honest even now old world seems, to me, to exist purely as a nod and thanks as lip service to people after a nostalgia hit.

Might seem that way to you, I find it to be annoyingly popular because I personally don't care for it but getting anyone around here to play 6th since it came out has been like pulling teeth from an Orc.

Sylvaneth this time with a Zerg Creep mechanic

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/ghkdf2i5/reclaim-nature-with-the-new-rules-in-battletome-sylvaneth/

Does this change of realms mean the background for our forthcoming Bac-Con event, which is set in a dimension that is juat a massive bacon sandwich, no longer canon?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
GW has done similar counter intelligence tricks before.

I remember some very accurate rumors about the IG codex (5th edition?) and orders. The rules were right but the names of each order was wrong.

So I would bet they showed them to a couple of people, each with sight differences, and waited to see which version got posted.

My biggest hesitance about against believing this sort of thing is who has the time & capacity in their job to set up 4D chess/intelligence agency type ops within their business to find who is 'leaking'? Is there some guy walking around with an eye patch whose job it is to track down leakers, also who has been stealing milk from the fridge?

 YodhrinsForge wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:

If AoS had been dying like WHFB did, then sure.

Are we still repeating this nonsense as fact? It grows with every cycle of retelling as well, first it was "not profitable enough for Kirby who thought everything that wasn't earning like Space Marines was worthless trash", then "undeperforming relative to 40K", and now we're at "it was totally dying and making no money at all GW were basically keeping it going as a charitable old folks home"

It is fact. It was not selling well. GW is far from perfect but doesn't make a habit of killing off golden geese. Do you think GW would have made such a massive gamble as ending WHFB and starting something totally new instead if it was going hunky dory? There's a reason Space Marines get fed so many endless releases. If you make the money you get the support.

 flaherty wrote:


Can you point me to one of these "quite a few" examples you seem to have in mind? A single meme on par with Krieg shovels?

You can start with the AoSlore reddit community, which has 10k members and is a pretty nice place.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AoSLore/

Personally I am happy there are no krieg shovels, that meme is atrocious. Long may it remain so.

But what the others said is correct about it just not being something you have exposed yourself to. AoS has its own things going on, and you just don't know them, which is okay, but that doesn't mean they don't happen.

I enjoyed AoS for what it was and played all of 2ed and 3ed with Khorne Bloodbound with Minotaurs and Ogres. But my home is ToW now. Even then I dont think is a good thing for AoS to try and become more old fantasy.

We have ToW for that, and they have done an abysmal job expanding ToW lore in this 2 years (We live in the Anarchy on the empire and have had 0 stuff done with such a great time for civil conflict between factions). Arcane Journals are corporate slop to sell the new miniatures with a couple exceptions.

But GW lacks any kind of narrative inclination nowadays. Their narrative content doesnt fell expansive. Back in the day you had campaings, suppleemnts, rules in White Dwarf like a gnoblar list that brought TONS of great lore. And then, because of those narrative driven campaings, they brought miniatures.

Now its clearly the inverse: They design the minis and then have some schmuk writte a pamphlet where the new hotness its very great much great to sell it.

People that enjoy AoS deserve AoS. They have supported it with money, playing the game. They shouldnt have to endure their game going backwards to some pseudo fantasy appeal when we have allready ToW (Especially because as a ToW player the idea of GW trying to merge back the two, or make them similar in setting, flavour and/or rules, its dreadfull)

Most memorable AoS moment for me was not when they initially created the thing with only a few pages rules with the idea of play as you want attitude. It moved from that. Most memorable moment was the creation of Sempiternals, as the name itself evoke "infinite duration" only to be discontinued a few editions later. That marked the setting more than fluff or maps or gaming shortcomings. That tells me GW does not really give a F about AoS.
I like the models, I collected some factions and can make up my own background versions, but sorry to say cant really go back.
Also unlike WFB the comic factor is gone, the Kruleboys are awful and everything looks way too serious, funny that I would expect WFB to be more historically inclined and less humorous than AoS but its actually not.

The idea of "end of times" even if only from a fluff perspective seems, well, an indicative something is not right with AoS from GW point of view.

I mean the rumors are for a soft reboot and a reorganising of things which is not even remotely close to the end times.

Overall that seems perfectly fine if they want to focus the lore more on fewer specific areas.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
I mean the rumors are for a soft reboot and a reorganising of things which is not even remotely close to the end times.

Overall that seems perfectly fine if they want to focus the lore more on fewer specific areas.

The internet cant help but blow things out of proportion for clicks, In practice its pretty much what they are doing, almost every story takes place in Aqshy, Ghyran or Ghur anyways they might as well be three continents on the same world.

It would explain the situation with Warcry, which is long overdue for a new edition and currently online-only.

Either way I lost interest just before the launch of 4th edition, and now collecting for MESBG instead.

 flaherty wrote:
Does anyone care about the AoS story setting? Are there 100 people alive who could give you the lore behind the Hammers of Sigmar and the Anvils of Heldenhammer? Without googling, can you think of an AoS quote that rivals the mutant/heretics/xenos litany or even little flavor texts like "Even in death, I still serve," or "Innocence proves nothing."

I really like the models, but GW would be right to scrap the setting entirely. Creating a "Battleworld" that is kinda-sorta the Old World map seems silly. If nothing else, it certainly makes the game more juvenile.

40K is so successful for two reasons:

1) The marine design is iconic in the way that Gundam mech's are. It's like they gave form to a Jungian archetype. But it's not just aesthetics, which is why the move to copy/paste them into AoS failed. 40K works because...

2) The setting feels real. The metaphysics are goofy, the real physics are ludicrous, but the world is steeped in real and recognizable history. You're replaying the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Voyages of Discovery, and American Manifest Destiny at a galactic scale. You see Puritan hats and WWI trench coats. Catholic iconography and army markings.

It's silly and pulpy, but the gravitas borrowed from all the symbols the world deploys provides stakes and lets players believe they are part of stories that matter. It gives them a permission structure to have a Rorke's Drift-inspired guard regiment that makes perfect sense.

AoS has none of this. How am I supposed to insert myself into a realm of life or fire or metal or death – all disembodied and accessible by portals? It's fine so far as it goes. You can make some fun terrain, but it leaves you with nothing at the end. No communion with myths that resonate in your culture.

At least the Old World was "Earth 300-1400AD-ish, but with monsters and magic." Were I GW, I'd lean that way. Kill the LOTR license. Have one product line that is fantasy-based and try to map it to some Earthly stakes.

Exactly this. Never could get into AOS cause the setting is too esoteric. There's pretty much nothing that grounds it to the real world. And im evidently not the only one. Cause as you said, pretty much nobody cares for AOS setting and lore, even among those that love the game

It sucks for the few persons that really were into the AOS setting, but this seem like a good decision for the future of the game . Though i must admit that its a bit weird to do such a thing not long after reintroducing WHFB, but GW moves in mysterious ways some times

I don't need grounding to the real world but I do need a setting to ground itself.

That's the issue with AoS - each author and each story is almost in a world of its own. You get the sense that there's no flow of geography nor time and that what little we do have of both is highly wibbly wobbly and because of the vastness of the setting also makes most things feel like they have no impact on the setting.


Personally I also feel like when they lost Josh Reynolds the books kind of lost focus and energy. Like it went to "just going by the numbers".
I think its all indicative of a setting built by managers rather than one crafted by one or a team of really die-hard fans eager to tell a story.


It also bleeds into other areas because all those amazing "heavy metal cover" style wildness of the setting makes fans start to ask questions about how it all "works" and there just aren't good answers to it all.
How do you farm when there's storms or rust; or when the land can change from a meadow to a mountain range and back again in a few days; how do you contend with an ever growing infinite population of the undead; or tackle liquid seas of quicksilver and other metals - which would render the land too hot to live in; the air toxic to breath and in general be really non conductive to most life.

By having multiple realms GW technically had to world build for them all but kind of didn't. So even for fans that get the setting and love it there's just no meat on the bones to sink into and really get the setting and craft your own stories within it.


If GW is going to soft-reset some things to really help build the setting; get more authors to write for them; get more unity between the authors - then honestly I'd be all for it. We might lose a bit of the insane wildness of the setting; but I think we'd gain in storytelling.






That said the BL team I think needs a budget boost. Old world has 1 novel that's new; AoS seems to get a few more but nothing big and many feel like false starts that go nowhere. We know they can do it because 40K and 30K are doing grand; but Fantasy just doesn't get the same attention (heck just look at the BL celebration each year - multiple new 40K and 40K novels - often one or nothing for AoS or a reprint)

I think some kind of grounding in the real-world (or in real life history) is important, cause it makes it much more easier to relate to/understand a setting. I dont have the time to read pages and pages of fiction, so having the different factions (at least, most of them) and the history/ politics being (caricaturally and loosely, granted) based on real life cultures/groups/empires/events made it much more easier to get a sense of the setting and the different factions.

WHFB was great in that sense, cause only by looking at the map and aesthetic of the factions, amd reading a few blurbs of text, youd have a pretty good idea of what the setting was all about. It would catch your interest and makes you want to learn more. AOS in contrast, is so esoteric that you have to put hours into making sense of it, and for most, its too big of a barrier to overcome

 YodhrinsForge wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

 YodhrinsForge wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:

If AoS had been dying like WHFB did, then sure.

Are we still repeating this nonsense as fact? It grows with every cycle of retelling as well, first it was "not profitable enough for Kirby who thought everything that wasn't earning like Space Marines was worthless trash", then "undeperforming relative to 40K", and now we're at "it was totally dying and making no money at all GW were basically keeping it going as a charitable old folks home"

It wasn't doing well, all those versions say the same thing.

Well, no, they don't really. The original is based on the estimation of one person who had otherwise demonstrated some pretty questionable judgement. The second is simply the state literally every GW product ever made except 40K has always existed in. Only the most extreme/recent framing claims it was objectively doing badly to the point its end was actually merited.

I'll be honest even now old world seems, to me, to exist purely as a nod and thanks as lip service to people after a nostalgia hit.

Might seem that way to you, I find it to be annoyingly popular because I personally don't care for it but getting anyone around here to play 6th since it came out has been like pulling teeth from an Orc.

The only sales data we as a community have for sure is that it wasn't even in the top 10 games independent stockists were selling, and some confirmation that internally it wasn't doing well sales wise. 8th was one of the most heavily supported editions with the most updates and a whole mechanic around large blocks of infantry to encourage model sales to long time players and it just didn't seem to solve the issue.

GW wasn't financially in a great place at the time either. Their lawsuit with Chapterhouse had been going on for years by that point, and they had shuttered all the specialist games to cut down on anything that wasn't making them enough money. We lost BFG, Mordheim, Epic, and Blood Bowl (though that one managed to come back to the table top three years later) before WFB, so from the externally it looked like the company was in some financial troubles at the time.

Locally we have four people counting myself interested in The Old World and honestly I find myself moving more towards it and Blood Bowl because as much as I like 40k it's becoming too expensive for my retail salary to keep up with. The way they keep shaving off the bits I like to make the game more balanced for tournament play over making tournament play it's own more restricted format is a whole extra thing that hasn't helped either.

Now I don't think AoS is dying. They might pull a big narrative shift like collapsing the realms into a singular realm but I don't think it's getting an End Times treatment. If anything they might have had to sit down and ask what they're doing with these super massive realms that are basically just empty space they don't use and decided narratively putting everyone in the same space would make conflict more organic and easier to do the "here's why X will fight A, B, C, and D".


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Astmeister wrote:
Sylvaneth this time with a Zerg Creep mechanic

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/ghkdf2i5/reclaim-nature-with-the-new-rules-in-battletome-sylvaneth/

A much better way to do the "nature taking over" thing than spamming trees. Though you can still do that as a core mechanic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NAVARRO wrote:
Also unlike WFB the comic factor is gone, the Kruleboys are awful and everything looks way too serious, funny that I would expect WFB to be more historically inclined and less humorous than AoS but its actually not.

Skaven and Gloomspite Gits are really the only two "funny" factions. Everyone else is doing their best to be super serious all the time which is fine I guess.

Honestly, I love the idea of Morky Orcs, but the rules team doesn't seem to know how to convey that well, or worse, is afraid to let them be as strong as such an idea should allow. That said, I wish they did short torsos and long legs, not long torsos with short legs, as the former would fit better for swamp living.

 Overread wrote:
I don't need grounding to the real world but I do need a setting to ground itself.

That's the issue with AoS - each author and each story is almost in a world of its own. You get the sense that there's no flow of geography nor time and that what little we do have of both is highly wibbly wobbly and because of the vastness of the setting also makes most things feel like they have no impact on the setting.


Personally I also feel like when they lost Josh Reynolds the books kind of lost focus and energy. Like it went to "just going by the numbers".
I think its all indicative of a setting built by managers rather than one crafted by one or a team of really die-hard fans eager to tell a story.


It also bleeds into other areas because all those amazing "heavy metal cover" style wildness of the setting makes fans start to ask questions about how it all "works" and there just aren't good answers to it all.
How do you farm when there's storms or rust; or when the land can change from a meadow to a mountain range and back again in a few days; how do you contend with an ever growing infinite population of the undead; or tackle liquid seas of quicksilver and other metals - which would render the land too hot to live in; the air toxic to breath and in general be really non conductive to most life.

By having multiple realms GW technically had to world build for them all but kind of didn't. So even for fans that get the setting and love it there's just no meat on the bones to sink into and really get the setting and craft your own stories within it.


If GW is going to soft-reset some things to really help build the setting; get more authors to write for them; get more unity between the authors - then honestly I'd be all for it. We might lose a bit of the insane wildness of the setting; but I think we'd gain in storytelling.






That said the BL team I think needs a budget boost. Old world has 1 novel that's new; AoS seems to get a few more but nothing big and many feel like false starts that go nowhere. We know they can do it because 40K and 30K are doing grand; but Fantasy just doesn't get the same attention (heck just look at the BL celebration each year - multiple new 40K and 40K novels - often one or nothing for AoS or a reprint)

Neglect for the setting has been a huge problem I think, this post was great for me in how I think about the setting. There wasn’t much to really discuss about the setting with players at all.
And I was thinking reading this, but I bet that management probably think this was really useful. Which is where I sort of think the setting feels like an idea dumping ground. The realms themselves are weirdly underused, the factions don’t tie into them particularly well. Or even why they need to interact or want to interact.
All things I think are actually fairly easy to work at, and I don’t think is that hard for people to understand.
I also think the actual factions feel unfinished, even after 4 editions, it still feels like we need some more expansion to some of them. With a few feeling like kinda bland on their own as well.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 YodhrinsForge wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:

If AoS had been dying like WHFB did, then sure.

Are we still repeating this nonsense as fact? It grows with every cycle of retelling as well, first it was "not profitable enough for Kirby who thought everything that wasn't earning like Space Marines was worthless trash", then "undeperforming relative to 40K", and now we're at "it was totally dying and making no money at all GW were basically keeping it going as a charitable old folks home"

It is fact. It was not selling well. GW is far from perfect but doesn't make a habit of killing off golden geese. Do you think GW would have made such a massive gamble as ending WHFB and starting something totally new instead if it was going hunky dory? There's a reason Space Marines get fed so many endless releases. If you make the money you get the support.

"It is fact", followed by assertion, supposition, and the genuinely comical notion that GW has never made a bafflingly silly and counterproductive decision. I'm sure one day someone making this claim will have actual evidence, but once again it isn't today.

The Honest Heresy guy does talk about 4th edition not selling as well as previous editions, just based on his evidence as events organiser.

I also agree (and thus has been the case for many, many years now, going back to interviews with Chambers & Priestley talking about 20 years ago) that GW is entirely commercially orientated. If something sells we get more of it and games in that direction. So AoS starting a 'soft reboot' would again fit in with this - they've identified the strengths (based on market research?! ), the rules and miniatures, weakness is the nebulous and confused background- lets do something about that.

It might be that they don't see as much licensed stuff being pitched for the AOS setting, and so they've identified the setting as a bit of a weak point of the game.

It has often been cited by people as a reason they can't get into it.

Shame for the people that liked the more planescapey setting of course.

 Apple fox wrote:

Neglect for the setting has been a huge problem I think, this post was great for me in how I think about the setting. There wasn’t much to really discuss about the setting with players at all.
And I was thinking reading this, but I bet that management probably think this was really useful. Which is where I sort of think the setting feels like an idea dumping ground. The realms themselves are weirdly underused, the factions don’t tie into them particularly well. Or even why they need to interact or want to interact.
All things I think are actually fairly easy to work at, and I don’t think is that hard for people to understand.
I also think the actual factions feel unfinished, even after 4 editions, it still feels like we need some more expansion to some of them. With a few feeling like kinda bland on their own as well.

True, having stormcast in the starter box each edition means they can only do one other army as a big update every 3 years; others are on life support sometimes. It doesn't help that the initial run up till 2.0 was a total mess and wasted the early years of AoS and that we've had a few rumblings of things since then like Beastmen leaving in one big go.


Lets not forget AoS at launch was a pure sandbox concept. Massive open realms that are ever expanding and almost infinite in size coupled with only 4 factions. Each faction being made of big armies that sell well and smaller themed ones that GW could throw out in a single release wave and then drop if the don't hit sales targets or expand if they did. With such a system being the backdrop for just collectors and painters the very open and wild nature of the Realms works perfectly as something to support a boutique model game.

And we all know that failed hard and 2.0 made it a proper wargame; but with all the trailing elements from that initial start.


I also do agree, factions have some casual connections to one single realm but even the its super casual. It's also something GW can't really explore; you can't make a group of Sylvaneth for every realm and doing one "squad" per realm would have all armies looking like a motley mess.


Now GW could keep it as-is if, I think, they got themselves a proper tight lore team/staffer who really holds the setting tightly together; if they output a load of original artwork depicting the realms clearly. Not those watercolour backdrop type scenes; but proper detailed ones that show farmers, serfs, cities, animals, livestock, farms, towns and so forth. Coupled to idepth background books. I think they'd also have more success slowing the narrative down to focusing on mortal characters and having a proper sense of time (DATES) so that, alongside more detailed aps, we can start to get a proper idea of how places, stories and events tie together.

Of course one problem with that is time and size; originally the realms were so vast travelling them would take generations to achieve so suddenly a city in one realm can't be invaded by a city from another and have impacts on a 3rd realm because you're talking 100s of years for that to all play out. Fine for the gods; sort of ok for Dwarves and Elves; humans you'd have whole generations missing. Which makes it really had to have any human characters who aren't magically touched to live longer.

If its true that its turning back into a planet then it just goes to show that the WFB IP was never the issue during the end times.

Most of aos is still sold off the back of wfb and several factions are either unchanged in design or still literally use wfb models.

People keep trying to roll all aspects of the game up into a single 'wfb wasnt successful' when its clear that only some aspects were.

The IP clearly has huge value, enough to keep total war going for a decade, enough to bring back tow and enough that aos is still just vampirically sucking on wfb ip even decade later. The chaos dwarfs are just updated turmakhan units. If the wfb ip was part of its failure they wouldnt have repackaged the miniature range for their new game.


All it says is that mismanagement and potentially rank and flank game design were just not generating an accessible game enviroment.


If they simply repackaged aos factions as wfb and ignored the end times and kept the skirmish game it wouldn't suddenly make the game unpopular.

Because the IP has never been the issue

IP is probably the least of the problems Old World had.

The only reason I think GW blew it up was, as I noted above, so that they could have an IP setting that was totally free from any constraints. Because they were just going to make and sell boutique models*. They basically wanted an MMO Sandbox like SecondLife or such and just let things be creative.

I will say that having zero restrictions has led AoS to have some of the best models GW has made. There's a flare of creativity that you just don't quite feel in 40K where they are limited to set factions with already strongly identified design language.


*because the management having a lack of actual customer interaction and feedback wound up thinking that was their core viable market

 LunarSol wrote:
Eh, AoS has always been Shards of Alara. I'm not surprised at all to hear the next plan is Conflux.

I kind of agree with this. It also feels a little like Marvel's Secret Wars to have some sort of battleworld made up of formerly disparate places. I think that could be really cool, especially if they use it as an opportunity to flesh out some of the areas and factions that have not seen as much development.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
If they blow up AoS I'm burning my Necrons

Okay, this legit made me laugh out loud. Well done.

Pacific wrote:The Honest Heresy guy does talk about 4th edition not selling as well as previous editions, just based on his evidence as events organiser.

I also agree (and thus has been the case for many, many years now, going back to interviews with Chambers & Priestley talking about 20 years ago) that GW is entirely commercially orientated. If something sells we get more of it and games in that direction. So AoS starting a 'soft reboot' would again fit in with this - they've identified the strengths (based on market research?! ), the rules and miniatures, weakness is the nebulous and confused background- lets do something about that.

In GW's push for "simplicity" they made the mistake of sanding off a fair bit of the things that gave factions flavor mechanically and made the least like army building rules the game has had to date. Even people who are fairly positive about AoS have had a lot of criticism for this edition so it's no surprise it's struggled more with the more casual AoS crowd.

Da Boss wrote:It might be that they don't see as much licensed stuff being pitched for the AOS setting, and so they've identified the setting as a bit of a weak point of the game.

It has often been cited by people as a reason they can't get into it.

Shame for the people that liked the more planescapey setting of course.

Yeah, the setting wasn't WFB's issue, it was more that the game was just very hard to get into, lacked things to sell to the long time players who built up a decent sized collection then stopped buying. Online at the time there was a real issue with snobbery as well with WFB groups vocally talking down to 40k players for playing the "dumb" game. So anyone who was interested and went online for more info would likely bounce off of the community there.

Basically the game lacked good onboarding options for new players, had a player base largely of older people who were happy to not buy things for years at a time, and online the community had a toxicity problem. None of those things make for a successful game. AoS has done better about dealing with those issues which is likely why they went for the reboot: they needed a clean break to drum up interest and shake up the status quo so they would actually sell stuff for the game.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Eh, AoS has always been Shards of Alara. I'm not surprised at all to hear the next plan is Conflux.

I kind of agree with this. It also feels a little like Marvel's Secret Wars to have some sort of battleworld made up of formerly disparate places. I think that could be really cool, especially if they use it as an opportunity to flesh out some of the areas and factions that have not seen as much development.

8 realms with 8 maps breaking down the larger geography and some key locations would have done a LOT for helping people find things to latch onto.

For example, I've been enamoured with Averland for ages just because there was something to latch onto. The yellow and black uniforms had a strong visual pop, and there history in setting was interesting (hunting Halflings like the British nobility hunted foxes for example). AoS barely even gives details about their key cities and then failed to take the lore of those cities as metropolitan places where everyone has to work together and instead kept writing rules that kept everyone segregated because they couldn't share rules across the various races.

Not to mention even some of the elements they've developed don't appear in the models. Eg one of the major points they've done with Cities of Sigmar was not just the united races (which they appear to have abandoned); but also steam punk.

In stories they have mechanical chariots, mechs and everything; whilst their tabletop army is honestly rocking with 1st generation black powder guns and a general "Empire from Old World" feel.

They don't feel steam punk at all.


There's this strange disconnect between the lore and the models. Probably because the Steam Punk city is just supposed to be one of many; but its the only one they've kind of fleshed out.


Again you just get this general feeling from the outside that there's no one really holding the strings for control and direction of the AoS lore and creativity. Or if there is there's plans within plans undone by managers and only half done and won't reall come together for another 3 editions worth as everything catches up with itself. Eg some idea that Cities start steam punk unified races and then diverges at some point; where the models are slightly ahead of the lore or something.

The newer cities stuff looks more clockpunk aesthetically and if the cogfort comes true it may be more clockpunk than steampunk which would be a nice niche since the KO already do a sort of steampunk thing.

Current Cities of Sigmar are more pioneer companies though, not well armed standing armies and garrisons. It’s those heading out into the wildnerness in an attempt to tame it and establish new colonies and cities.

Hence they’re relatively low tech. Makes for a simplified logistics issue, and more rugged reliable kit is the order of the day over things which, presumably, need specialist maintenance.