Age of Sigmar Rumor Roundup

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

New models? Not bad. I'm liking the new Stormcasts. That paint scheme just makes them look horrendous...

I'm personally waiting to see what the new Lizardmen/Seraphon models are gonna look like. I kinda like the little bits of fluff I've heard on them, and am eager to see how well they fit with the old Lizardmen stuff. I always wanted to play Lizardmen, just never got around to collecting them.

I can't match them to anything in the starter set contents, so I guess they must be something more to come (?)

Personally I think the Stormcasts would look cooler if paintschemes were more elemental in nature - like if the armour was made out of fire or ice. I kinda like the idea of them as burning elemental angels, a bit more God's Wrath

[Erik Setzer]

The models looked nice up close, other than the Helbrute-style thing, though my main complaint with that is the skulls peeking out from inside its skin looking silly, and I can cover that with green stuff.

But the game? Nope. Just a big ol' bag of NOPE.

MAYBE with people I would literally trust my life to, but that's it.

It's not just from looking at the simple rules and the lack of points and the weird stuff in the warscrolls. I saw some people decide to play a multiplayer match of AoS today. First off, they decided, "Let's make it fair, five Warscrolls for everyone." Right. I won't do a full run down, but they were clearly not balanced, and kudos to the kid who took like thirty Ogres in a unit as a single warscroll.

Then they started just going nuts with the rules. I pretty much lost it on these last two:

"There's no rule that says a 1 is an auto-fail, so if I boost my to-hit rolls to a 1+, I auto-hit all the time!"

Well, technically, there's no rule about 1 being auto-fail or anything... but that should be common sense, right?

"Measure all attacks from the point of the weapon, i.e. a big monster's scorpion tail would measure range from that part of the model."

Um, no, that's not how the rule is meant to work. You use the weapon's range, yes, but the rules say all measurements come from any point of the model. Their interpretation, which multiple people at the table tried to back up, means that if you charged the Stormcast basic guys into combat with their shield facing the enemy (which just looks cool), then they could never attack in melee, as their hammer is more than 1" from the enemy model.

Add in the shenanigans with the rules for units, and the way people were interpreting summoned units to mean you have to have a unit you're going to summon as part of your starting force, and more besides, and it was soul-crushing. Some of the people playing weren't bad people, but that game brought out the darkest side of them, and I knew that I could never play it against them, because it would devolved into a horrible mess due to lack of structure or clear rules. (Funny how they were eager to claim 1+ is auto-succeed, and you measure range from weapons, but that the idea of being able to fire into and out of "combat" was just insane.)

I think watching people play the game actually turned off multiple people in the store. One person told me that even the manager basically gave up on the game after seeing it being played.

As a beer and pretzels thing with close friends who you can trust and discuss it with, okay, not horrible, though still feels like something aimed at ten-year-olds with the joke rules. (And seriously, I'm an Ork player who misses some of the fun old Ork stuff, but this is way too much.)

As a game you can play pick-up games with? Nope. Awful.

And it's even sadder that the people I'd trust to play the game with are all turned off on it anyway... so all the work I did putting together models during the week was pointless.

I get a bad feeling now that AoS will end up killing off the fantasy side of Warhammer, unless they release AoS 2nd Edition within a year and expand the rules and replace all the warscrolls. Especially with Mantic pushing hard to grab all the disheartened players.

[Austin Becht]

I can't match them to anything in the starter set contents, so I guess they must be something more to come (?)

Personally I think the Stormcasts would look cooler if paintschemes were more elemental in nature - like if the armour was made out of fire or ice. I kinda like the idea of them as burning elemental angels, a bit more God's Wrath

Yeah...my thoughts on their "Age of Sigmar" release schedule is this:

Week 1: Starter Box (obviously...).
Week 2: Terrain (this has been confirmed...).
Week 3: Additional units for Starter Box forces, possibly pouring into Week 4.

Anything after that is up to conjecture. Its been rumored hat we are going to see one or two months of non-stop "Age of Sigmar," so I'd expect that we'd see some of the core stuff come out, maybe starting out with a few units for each alliance (some for Orcer, ie. the Stormcast Eternals; some for Chaos, ie the Khorne warhost; some for Destruction, such as new Orcs; and some for Death, with some new undead units to fit the general theme of a combined undead force.) This would offer a good starting point for the game, alongisde all the existing Warhammer Fantasy stuff, and give their customers a general idea of what to expect from the game, and its miniatures, moving forward. Then I think we'll see snipit releases here and there, with campaigns pitting two or more races/alliances against each other, and a few weeks of releases based upon such races/alliances. I would also hedge to bet we'll see some Tzeentch stuff down the road when Tzeentch Daemonkin comes out, as has been heavily rumored. Would seam a pity if they don't piggyback of the Tzeentch hype there to release some stuff for Tzeentch in "Age of Sigmar." I mean they kinda did that with ET: Archeon into Khorne Daemonkin, or was it the other way around...? GW is releasing so many things so fast its hard to keep up...

I think the only race we might not see many releases for is Daemons; with the exception of updated models, there's no need for a to change their aesthetic. They might add new units down the line, but that's a far stretch when they could be filling out their slew of new armies.

And again, I'll state this is only my opinion. I'm in no way rumormongering, just stating what I think will happen.

As for my Sigmarites, I'm thinking of a more lightning-themed color scheme, to bring out that sort of theme of them. So whites, blues, and golds.

[Tomgar]

As a beer and pretzels thing with close friends who you can trust and discuss it with, okay, not horrible, though still feels like something aimed at ten-year-olds with the joke rules. (And seriously, I'm an Ork player who misses some of the fun old Ork stuff, but this is way too much.)

The really egregious thing about these "joke" rules is how forced it all seems. It's like they're desperately going "this is fun, see! Look how fun and random this all is! Guys? FUN!"

I already have fun when I play wargames, I don't need some lol randumb, Pewdiepie-esque nonsense codified into the actual mechanics as if I'm incapable of having fun otherwise. Hell, being told to ride an imaginary horse for bonuses is more likely to piss me off and make me feel embarrassed than make me feel some forced, fake sense of joviality. It's the mechanical equivalent of your uncle Dave who describes himself as "a bit of character" because he occasionally does cringeworthy BS like put his shoe on his head to show everyone how zany and wild (!!!) he is. It needs to get in the sea and bloody drown.

[Lexington]

Depends on the value of the old customer base vs. the value of the new, doesn't it?

A smart business in GW's position should know that it's not an either/or proposition, and they sure don't purposefully make it such .

New customers, once you have them hooked, can be much more valuable in their first few months than two or three existing customers will be for the rest of their lives. Thing is, though, you have to fight for those new customers. They have to be identified, brought to market and sold to - and at a success rate that's not exactly high. Selling to new customers, especially in a hobby market with a high cost of entry (yes, Warhammer is now theoretically less expensive than it used to be - it's still very costly), and for a company that loudly and proudly does zero marketing, is extremely difficult. People don't just materialize in GW stores, ready to put down a huge wad of cash for what, really, seems like not a lot of material in return. In fact, I'd bet the percentage of customers who walk into a GW store "cold" and walk out with a starter set makes up one of, if not the smallest percentage of GW's entry-level customer base. What, then, is almost certainly the largest?

People whose friends play.

Cast them as toxic, tantrum-throwing villains if you like (not hard, if you're looking at Warseer), but existing customers are GW's best marketing. To new eyes, they're just Steve, who plays that model game and won't shut up about it. Or Bill, down at the games store, who has that really well-painted army. Or, hell, they might be, D6haXXor, some faceless guy on a forum dedicated to this "Warhammer" thing you've been hearing about. They're your point of first contact with Warhammer, and they'll have a huge impact on your decision to buy that starter set or not. If these guys all feel shafted by GW's new direction - and insulted by the dumb rules given to their armies - they're going to let you know about it, and you'll come away thinking this "Age of Sigmar" stuff is just nonsense for morons. Or, even worse for GW, you won't hear about it at all. Either they're talking about GW's competitors, or they're investing their energy into video games, paintball, semi-professional chainsaw arts, etc. That potential new customer base takes their money and goes elsewhere with it.

That's the network effect, and it's a huge part of how gaming grows and spreads across new customers. In the same way, every player who quits Warhammer in disgust is one less opponent for the people who still play, which could well lead to them leaving, and so on and so on until individual communities crumble away into nothing. That's already happening, but it's still inadvisable for GW to completely disregard (and more or less insult) their existing player base - all they're doing is giving business, and the business of the people these disgruntled customers bring into the hobby, to companies like Privateer and Corvus Belli.

The really egregious thing about these "joke" rules is how forced it all seems. It's like they're desperately going "this is fun, see! Look how fun and random this all is! Guys? FUN!"

Yeah, this has been my observation, too. Funny rules can be great in small doses (people still talk about jamming as many Orks as they could into a 2nd Edition Battlewagon), but they work best when they give a little character to the experience or to a single army. Tossing them in at every turn like they have feels like...well...

[Wargamer]

Found this on the web. Dunno if it its old news to some:
[url]http://youtu.be/mFCKQ60yFis[/url]
@5:10 or so

[Tomgar]

Honestly man, for all that you quip about the folks at Warseer throwing tantrums over this, they're the only ones who seem to be feeling as pissed off as me. I'm actually shocked at how aggressively positive most people are about this game. As in, voicing your misgivings is likely to get you dogpiled and insulted multiple times. I'm glad at least the Warseer crowd are showing me that I'm not alone in utterly friggin' hating this game.

[Spider-pope]

Found this on the web. Dunno if it its old news to some:
[url]http://youtu.be/mFCKQ60yFis[/url]
@5:10 or so

The terrain is pretty nice, but it's made out of the same crappy plastic that the giant plasma cannon thing was, so i would expect warping.

[Trojan66]

Has anyone noticed the price of the new spray paint for your sigmarite marines ?
It's £17 v £11.75 normal sprays.
Hope that's not a sign of things to come

[Houghten]

I think it's just because gold.

We got three new paint pots, too, and the two gold ones are £3.50 but the flesh one is £2.55. Also Corax White spray came out a couple of weeks ago and it's £10.40.

- - - Updated - - -

The terrain is pretty nice, but it's made out of the same crappy plastic that the giant plasma cannon thing was, so i would expect warping.

Are you sure? It's on an actual sprue instead of in bags...