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Hey dudes

Years ago I used to be into Warhammer big time. I never played much but I LOVED the lore and adored the fantasy setting.

I have returned all these years later and I see AoS is the new format. To start with I was reading doom and gloom posts about how the game is garbage now. But these past few weeks the game seems to really be gathering pace

I saw on the AoS Facebook page, the Sylvaneth battletome highlight and I'm so excited that they are adding in more faction specific rules and the game really seems to be taking off.

What I'm wondering though - Is the game still transferring over from the old Warhammer? Like I see the old models for skeleton warriors, fell bats and high elves and I'm wondering are these going to be re-done and released as new factions?

Are the Sylvaneth the new wood elves? Will Beastmen return? And are skeletons and vampires seperate armies? I don't really understand the whole grand alliance thing. From what I gather you can run any units that are under a grand alliance together, but the Sylvaneth have arrived with rules that give them benefits when it's only Sylvaneth units in the army... Will other armies follow in the same way like do you think Skeletons will get there own specific faction rules and things?

Sorry for the bombardment of questions but there's a lot of buzz starting to form around this game and I love the direction it's heading!!

RoboDragon wrote:
Are the Sylvaneth the new wood elves? Will Beastmen return? And are skeletons and vampires seperate armies? I don't really understand the whole grand alliance thing. From what I gather you can run any units that are under a grand alliance together, but the Sylvaneth have arrived with rules that give them benefits when it's only Sylvaneth units in the army... Will other armies follow in the same way like do you think Skeletons will get there own specific faction rules and things?

Sylvaneth are the dryads, the elves were deemed not good enough and dumped lorewise basically; so they're still there but they're called wanderers now.
Beastmen are still around and in the chaos book.
Skeletons and vampires are kind of the same thing I think, they still work together but I think they use necromancers more. I'm not too familiar with the death alliance.
You can run any units at all together, however generally people have tried to run things that synergise with abilities and keywords (stuff like a bloodletter for example has khorne, daemon so you want stuff that affects things with the keyword khorne and/or daemon to work with it). The sylvaneth are getting something brand new with faction specific bonus like this because the general's handbook is coming out, the other armies will follow later.
Skeletons will get their own stuff like everyone else I think. Just they'll need to get around to it, unless they're in the handbook I haven't really looked into it that much yet.

They seem to be hinting at the fact that you'll get extra bonusses if you run only 1 sub-faction within your grand alliance.

So a "pure flesh eater courts" army will have extra benefits (like getting better units as battleline (ie troops) units. And ofcourse extra synergy if you do that, because of abilities and spells that only affect flesh eater court units.

Some subfaction armies however are not yet fleshed out enough to be really playable as stand alone armies.... But I'm sure that can happen over time.

As for the question: what "old models" are deemed good enough by GW and will not get redone later on... hard to tell. It can happen (Flesh eater courts and seraphon were good examples of that). But hey already scrapped some lines by makeing them no longer available (tomb kings are most noticable here).

If you are starting out, it's probably safer to pick a faction that was already released with it's own battletome if you are worried that they'll lack support later on.

Thanks for the replies!

Are lizardmen just illusions now? Not quite getting that one.. they are just made of star energy?

RoboDragon wrote:
Thanks for the replies!

Are lizardmen just illusions now? Not quite getting that one.. they are just made of star energy?

The slann are still alive.
When the Slann sees the need, he creates a 'daemon' from memory of whatever Lizardmen he needs.
Unlike other summoning though, he is summoning *specific* Lizardmen who once existed; best analogue I can think of is the star trek holodeck images of famous people. They are effectively a magical clone, and retain all their memories and experience of who they were.