Quote from: CRKrueger;8409864 pages of rules.
No point costs, army lists for anything.
A gauge to measure when you are in melee reach is $33



It's an elaborate rickroll.

I don't mind a lack of army lists or point costs, but damn if the pricing isn't insane. I hear rumors that they are going to be pushing more scenario based gaming with books of scenarios and victory conditions. Personally I'm cool with that because for me wargaming has always been a blurred line with roleplaying, however I feel like it is a serious misunderstanding of the player bases expectations if that's the direction they take it.

Seems like they would be better off to make this a skirmish level game that could serve as an entry to the big battles game if you decide your interested later.

Still, a $40 die shaker.  So it's not all bad... oh wait :eek:

I recommend Mordheim. Still the best game GW ever made.

Quote from: danbuter;841143I recommend Mordheim. Still the best game GW ever made.

Seconded, if you want a skirmish-level game.

For a large scale battle with large units and appropriate tactics, I recommend Warhammer Ancients 1st edition, which was basically a cleaned-up version of the 3rd edition rules.

Quote from: danbuter;841143I recommend Mordheim. Still the best game GW ever made.

Hell yeah!

I also love Necromunda. That's great fun too!

Quote from: TristramEvans;841173Seconded, if you want a skirmish-level game.

For a large scale battle with large units and appropriate tactics, I recommend Warhammer Ancients 1st edition, which was basically a cleaned-up version of the 3rd edition rules.

I was wondering when you'd show up in this thread. I'm curious to hear your opinion of this move by GW.

Quote from: SpinachcatI also love Necromunda. That's great fun too!

Three cheers for Necromunda! Played it extensively over the Xmas break and it was a blast. I wish that miniature line was still around.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;841235I was wondering when you'd show up in this thread. I'm curious to hear your opinion of this move by GW.

lol, have a lot of opinions on it, will take a long post/rant to go into it. Way too tired from work the last few days to go into it.

So first off, everyone knew fantasy was struggling. It was doing well enough for a small game company that was in it for love of the hobby, but for the large corporation that GW has become, it was lagging behind 40K. So fans expected a change. Even before the End Times there was talk about fantasy being reduced in focus, some of the less popular armies being phased out, etc.

When End Times hit, it was a deep breath of fresh air for a game that had grown a bit stagnant since 6th edition. 8th had been designed specifically to push large units, so the barrier for entry to the game had reached well into the range of $500, even the starter set for the edition being little more than a few extra models to help a person start towards buying models for a playable army. The hardcore playerbase existed, but it wasnt expanding, and as most players already had their armies, new sales were pretty low. The supplements for 8th had not been great overall, even stuff like Storm of Magic, that was a wildly unbalanced attempt to push players to buy big monster models. And then there was the Failcast distaster...

Meanwhile skirmish-level games like WarmaHordes had taken a big bite out of GW's hobby. It was clear to the fans that what fantasy lacked was an entry-level product to get new players interested in the game. The role that Mordheim and Heroquest had played in years past. Not to mention that sometimes players simply didnt want to play or didnt have the time for large 200+ model games, but 8th was designed with a baseline of 2k points, with anything under 1500 points seriously restricted. Kings of War offered a streamlined game that played much faster and combined with a better price point had established itself as worthy competition.

So, the point is, we all knew fantasy needed to change to survive. They couldn't, like they'd done with 7th and 8th, just put out a slight rules revision in fancy new packaging, arbitrarily jack up the prices again, and continue on.

None of us seriously expected End Times to be the end of Warhammer Fantasy though, despite the name. Storm of Chaos had teased the same sort of apocalyptic final battle, and it had ended with an orc sucker-punching Archaon, and Chaos whimpering back to the North to lick its wounds, while the Warhammer world was utterly unchanged. Certainly, we expected there to at least be lasting changes this time: Beastmen absorbed back into Chaos, the Lizardmen and Bretonnia gone, the elves absorbed into one army, etc. All of it made some sort of sense from the perspective of reducing the armies.

But blowing up the world? Didnt see that coming.

The Warhammer world had a very distinct identity, something pretty rare in fantasy gaming. What drew me to the game way back in the 80s was this darkly comic, Germanic renaissance setting, a precursor to Discworld (literally; Pratchett had been hired to write Warhammer novels, and then that fell through, and shortly after Discworld was introduced...), and far from the English pseudo-Tolkien fantasy that dominated. Warhmmer had gotten more generic as time went on , however, squatting off or squaring out their more unique elements.

Where once we had Bowie-inspired punk elves, Fomhoire-ish cyclopean Fimirs hiding in bogs and fens, mysterious turtle-centaur wizards enclaved deep in the forest, Aztec space frogs with lobotomied pygmy slaves and Amazon warrior women living deep in the jungles, we now had a set of armies that it was easy for Mantic to rip off, because it had become so by-the-numbers. Bretonnia started as a darkly-comic fantasy version of medieval France where the nobles played a game of high knightly romance while the commoners lived in poverty and filth, gathered into groups of "Villains, Vagabonds, and Rapscallions" when pressed into military service, to a full on Arthurian pastiche, wiped squeaky clean of any social commentary. Most of what was unique about Warhammer's orcs had long since been co-opted by World of Warcraft and its many competitors.  From the standpoint of GW's increasing concerns with fervently guarding its IP, Warhammer Fantasy simply wasnt copyright-friendly enough anymore.

All of that could easily have been dealt with. The basics were there and turning back the clock to accentuate what was unique about Warhammer wouldn't have been hard at all.

But instead they decided to go with a gimmick.

As a longtime comicbook fan, I'd seen this hackneyed approach dozens of times before. Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Death of Superman. Heroes Reborn. Zero Hour. "One More Day". The New 52.

And this time, GW through out the bath with the bathwater. Warhammer Fantasy is over. 8th was the last edition of the game that started it all. Age of Sigmar is not a new edition, its not a revision, its a completely new game that simply makes use of some of the old ideas.

So with all of that said, let me give my thoughts on this new game...

Barely any fluff has been released yet on AoS, so icant really speak as to what I think of the new setting(s), other than what little I have seen has been pretty yawn-inducing. 9 worlds/realms, each named after one of the Winds of Magic, stargates...er, sorry..."Realmgates" connecting them all. One Realm for the elves (now "Aelfs", because GW seems to think that using the old English form of the word will be easier to copyright?), one realm for the orcs, goblins and orgres (renamed...something stupid), one realm for the dwarves ("Steamhead Duardins", lol, I feel bad for the Dwarf players on that one), etc. These seem to be fantasy-fantasy worlds so far, with no hint of the Renaissance-era culture of the Empire. I'm relatively certain we're in MMORPG territory now.

The Sigmarines are what they are. It makes sense for GW to ape the success of Space Marines in 40K. I don't begrudge them that. Its not an army that holds any appeal for me, but the models arent horrible looking, for fantasy-superheroes.

So on to the system itself, since thats all that really matters. I'm a veteran RPG player, I can twist any game system to any setting I choose, so the Age of Sigmar fluff is ultimately all dross; something to bitch about, but of little consequence.

Let me start with saying I was pleasantly shocked that GW released the rules for free online. I never would have anticipated that in a million years. And then all the Battlescrolls as well? Ignoring the content, this was an amazing thing, and at the very least GW should be given kudos for that. Its not that many other companies dont do the same - in fact, most fantasy wargame companies these days, from Mantic to Tor - its that its frankly so out of character for modern GW. It makes me wonder how much of this is based on internal changes of the company with the firing of the last CEO, Mr. "We don't do market research and we're proud!", to the new CEO.

And thats not the only thing. For the first time since 6th edition GW is going to have a presence at gaming conventions and tournaments.

At the very least, I see all those as hugely positive steps.

HOWever, and here's where the giant "BUT" comes in...people should be aware that GW is also in the process of taking the final steps to kill off any independent retailers stocking their stuff. For anyone who doesnt know about that, well, that would take a whole nother very long series of posts to explain, but suffice to say, expect to see more and more "limited edition GW website only" releases of stuff, and less and less incentives for your LGS to stock any GW, except maybe copies of the starter box. Pretty soon, the only place to buy any GW miniatres will be from GW stores and the GW online catalogue (I refuse to call it a website anymore, as its now got even less content than the revised White "lets get people to pay us for our product advertisements" Dwarf).

But this is all still just ranting preamble....what about the game itself?

4 pages of rules. And you know what? They're OK.

Nothing really surprising, nothing shockingly bad, nothing incredibly good. Obviously to make it fit four pages, they sacrificed clarity in a few important cases, but I imagine that affects people who play in tournaments against win-at-all-cost R.A.W. opponents and/or against nosebreathers who hang out at the gaming store more than those of us who play casually with friends.

The toHit and toWound rolls are no longer modified by the target's attributes, which makes me wonder why bother having 2 rolls at all? Be faster with one player rolls to hit, the other player rolls to save. I like that magic has been de-emphasized. I never liked it when magic dominated the games. The reward-risk of rolling winds of magic with chances of getting sucked into the abyss or exploding are gone, though, and I will miss that a bit. To dispel, you have to place yourself in a vulnerable position, which means largely wizards will probably be sitting off on their lonesomes on either side of the board, occasionally picking off D3 infantry models a turn.

Shooting is a bloody free-for-all now. You can shoot into combat. You can shoot while you're in melee combat. You can shoot another unit while your in melee with someone else. Its basically just an extra round of attacks. I expect this, of anything, to get revised/errated first.

No Initiative doesnt bother me much. Dont know what I think of rolling each turn to see which player goes first. Means any player that goes second has a 50/50 chance of getting two turns in a row. Much prefer the systems that use a roll to activate units during a turn to represent Fog of War an the breakdown of leadership in large-scale combats.

Much to-do was had over the round bases. I never really cared that much either way. At some point I expect we'll see movement trays akin to War of the Ring to make round bases square for unit formations. In the meantime, you can use square or circle bases for the game and its not that big a deal.

But that does bring me to the lack of units/formations and flanking, etc rules. I completely expect to see these in a later supplement. But as it stands right now, they're sorely missed. Warhammer Fantasy had a niche as the game to play when you wanted a large battle between fantasy armies. Skirmish games are a dime a dozen, and I played Warhammer because I liked the feeling of a general leading a big army to war. Its not that having the option to play skirmish-level games wasnt highly desirable, as I mentioned before, but as an established player who has already sank a few grand into a few decent-sized armies, I want to be able to use those. So I'm still waiting for the game to catch up with me in that regard.

But I havent talked about the BIG ISSUES yet, have I? The new War Scrolls and...points. Points, points, points. I need some coffee, so this is going to take one more post...

The no points thing is insane. Baffling.

I've heard the excuses...

"well, it was hardly balanced before and it had points"
"a good opponent will play fair and you can see across a table if forces are generally comparable"
"Sudden Death rules compensate for this"

BULLSHIT.

That's a fucking bullshit taco, smothered in shit, with some shit sauce on top.

As it stands, there is no basis provided for creating an army. "Take whatever you want" is just frustrating and needlessly obscure. What am I supposed to sit down and work out with my opponent everything we both are taking before a game? What if I show up with 10 heroes and 2 units and he brought 1 hero and 10 units? How many skavenslaves equal a dragon? or an elf?

No, the only thing that's "balanced" is the two forces that come prepackaged in the AoS boxed set. Because that is Age of Sigmar. And other releases will be balanced around those. And GW will sell books full of Warscrolls that depict specific engagements with specific troop types, and those will be balanced. Because AoS is not a game about list-building, or using your own, outdated models, or any sort of customization.

You know, the reason I loved Oldhammer moreso than the later editions, even though they were more streamlined and in some cases just provided a better tactical gaming experience (6th), is because in 3rd edition and before, you made your own armies. You made your own characters, you calculated your own point costs, the entire system of balancing was laid bare for you to do what you wanted with it. Want to make a new Skaven clan Skryre war machine that looks like a tank crossed with a drill? Sure, here's how you calculate its value...The system was a wonderful toolbox for you to create the army and characters you wanted.

The dumbing-down of 4th edition stripped that away. GW went after a younger audience, and to keep them from getting confused, GW decided to take all those decisions away from players. "Here's your army list. These are the troops you can take. And, look, here's some official "Special Characters", because you ont need to worry about making your own characters any more. What do you think this is, some kind of RPG?"

But still, you could take those army books, and make your own lists, customize the generic characters with magic items and scavenge pile armourments, give characters mounts or run them on foot, make them wizards or optimize them for combat. There was some level of creativity involved. You put some effort into making your army list your own.

That aspect of the game doesnt exist in AoS. You pick your battlescrolls, which tell you what weapons and armour your troops have, what they can do, and thats it. Want a dwarf with a gold sigil sword that strikes like a mongoose and a flying carpet to ride on? Too bad. Not an option anymore. You take your battleaxe and chainmail and you like it, goddamn it. A custom-modelled Skaven warlord on a Rat Ogre Bonebreaker mount wielding weeping blades in both claws and one in his tail? Sorry, no can do.

That's an element of another game system. A dead game. Age of Sigmar is for an audience who wants to put even less creativity and thought into an army than that.

And as for the battlescrolls themselves? The free ones they released for all the old armies?

Well, it was very nice of GW to give a send-off to the old fans. To try and make them feel included and not just forgotten about. To provide a patch for people to actually do something with AoS while waiting for GW to release their gaming products for the new game.

Thats said...

somebody was taking the fucking piss.

Quote from: TristramEvans;841252its that its frankly so out of character for modern GW. It makes me wonder how much of this is based on internal changes of the company with the firing of the last CEO, Mr. "We don't do market research and we're proud!", to the new CEO.

The last CEO was certainly not fired.  He's still on the board as Chairman and is just semiretired.  Furthermore, the current CEO was the former one's right hand man.  He was both the chief operating officer and chief financial officer during the tenure of the previous CEO.  As well the current CEO has been with the company since 1998.

There's no big cultural change happening at GW.  The reason the rules are free is to get people with existing WHFB collections to keep playing and hopefully buy the new rulebook.  GW has made it a pretty standard practice going back to the nineties to release free army lists whenever an edition change was sufficiently different to merit it.  For example, 5th edition WHFB was not that different from 4th so it did not come with a free update, but 6th was add they made a " Ravening Hordes" booklet and PDF available for free.  7th was not that different and did not.

This isn't GW turning over a new leaf or something.  It's business as usually from the exact same people.  Once a few factions for Age Of Sigmar are developed and have army books you can buy expect to see the warscrolls vanish without comment just like the hundreds of other free articles and painting guides that used to be on their website.

The $74 rulebook is 264 pages long.  Giving away a 4 page document is hardly giving away "the rules" for free.  Given some of the leaked pictures of scenario pages and what's been said about the new rulebook, there's going to be so much more actual rules content in there as well.  Warscrolls for the actual Age of Sigmar factions, for a starter.  And one of their reps at a recent trade show has stated that there will be no joke entries in the actual product like there is in the free stuff.  The scenarios will also be very specific models focused.  While the four pages do outline the core mechanics, I think we're going to see tons of for money rules contnet that will contain the actual procedures of play for the full game.  And they are going to likely be more like the rules content in the game box and less like the free PDFs.  With scenarios focusing on selling the latest releases and super powered warscrolls sold just like 40k supplemental rules dataslates.  It's quite likely that if you want to see what "warscrolls" are likely going to be about going forward, look at what they are already doing with their 40k equivalent called "dataslates."

Quote from: TristramEvans;841260The no points thing is insane. Baffling.

Points exist, but they only hand that page of the rules out to store managers.

AH HAHAHAHAHA Games Workshop are a bunch of out of touch sleazy fuckers: 57.99 CAD for an ebook edition of the rules.

I sincerely hope that GW finally crashes and burns.

While Privateer Press must be wanking so hard they're in danger of breaking it off, I am excited about two aspects of Age of Sigmar.

1) Sigmarines!!

2) Player silliness in the gameplay. I thought the interactive elements on the warscrolls would be great fun.

I've played lots of Fantasy, but FOR ME it became utterly blah compared to 40k a long time ago. I might actually play Age of Sigmar because I think there's some value in a more casual Warhammer - of course, that depends on what we learn when the core book hits the shelves.

Quote from: TristramEvans;841249Where once we had Bowie-inspired punk elves, Fomhoire-ish cyclopean Fimirs hiding in bogs and fens, mysterious turtle-centaur wizards enclaved deep in the forest, Aztec space frogs with lobotomied pygmy slaves and Amazon warrior women living deep in the jungles, we now had a set of armies that it was easy for Mantic to rip off, because it had become so by-the-numbers.

Damn.

You nailed it.

Quote from: TristramEvans;841260That's a fucking bullshit taco, smothered in shit, with some shit sauce on top.

GW has been serving that delicious meal to fans for decades.

Quote from: TristramEvans;841260Age of Sigmar is for an audience who wants to put even less creativity and thought into an army than that.

You are probably right. Trying to make it more like a casual boardgame.

Quote from: NathanIW;841271And one of their reps at a recent trade show has stated that there will be no joke entries in the actual product like there is in the free stuff.

That would utterly suck. That's the one aspect that's got me interested in FLGS play.

I can't help but think that the silly rules are in direct response to the flying monkey ritual in Fantacide by Rick Priestly, Alessio Calvatore, and Andy Chambers.

Oook Oook Oook indeed.