Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
long-ass nips Diane
Dec 13, 2010

Breathe.

People are talking about War of the RIng a lot in this thread but everyone in Austin stopped playing it because it was broken as gently caress and not very fun, GW should've just made a good game instead.

Or stuck with the other Lord of the Rings game that's a lot better.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Mukip
Jan 27, 2011

by Reene

KuangMkV posted:

So, serious question. How many of you cool kids want to try WARMACHINE or HORDES for the first time?

I don't. I want to play a game of ranked fantasy mass battles of the sort that GW just threw in the trash. Warmachine seems like it involves broadly everything that I dislike about Age of Sigmar: Skirmish, circular bases, small scale, loving pauldrons, a "continuing story". I piss on your Warmachine! I will look into Kings of War.

Apollodorus
Feb 13, 2010

TEST YOUR MIGHT
:patriot:

KuangMkV posted:

So, serious question. How many of you cool kids want to try WARMACHINE or HORDES for the first time?

I do, but I also want to play the game of massed fantasy battles and ranked regiments that made me play Fantasy instead of 40k when I first started 15 years ago.

That's why I haven't sold my Empire fantasy minis, because there has to be a game out there (KoW, or Hail Caesar) that will allow me to rank up my halberdiers and slam them into other ranks of infantry, and shoot muskets at fools from a distance.

Dr. Red Ranger
Nov 9, 2011

Nap Ghost
To be fair to Warmachine, with the exception of PAULDRONS on some unfortunate models, all the similarities it has to AoS is because AoS bastardized its mechanics without any of the positioning, magic resources, and tactical options that make it work. The advancing story lines really only exist to give you new versions of old characters without eclipsing or obsoleting them. As a 40k refugee I appreciate the things they get right.

kommisar
Jan 2, 2007

All of this is so fascinating. I played fantasy heavily during 6th edition and for a lot of reasons it's my favorite time period of gaming. Everyone pretty much exclusively plays Warmahordes near me now, which is great and I enjoy, but the nostalgia of ranked combat fantasy gaming is always calling my name.

I can't believe that all of that has been poo poo on so thoroughly and with such malice. That people are defending this is even more insane.

Fascinating.

Crowsbeak
Oct 9, 2012

by Azathoth
Lipstick Apathy

Leperflesh posted:

It would be a first. If you look at where major movements of the stock have occurred in the past, they're always based on either the overall market moving bigtime, or on new information from the semi-annual reports. When GW surprised the market with a cut in its dividend, that dumped the stock huge. When they announced sales figures for their new line of paints were fantastic, the stock leapt upwards.

When they announced changes in products? Release a new boxed set, like space hulk or something? It makes no impact whatsoever. A few nerds sell a few hundred shares, but major movements of LON:GAW happen on volumes of 100k+ shares. Over the last three years their average daily volume has been around 58k shares. Against that, trades of a few hundred shares at a time are nothing but background noise. If every gamer nerd dumps their stocks Monday, the stock might go down a half of a percent. But it also might move as much as two percent entirely due to the market as a whole being up or down. So if the stock drops a percent or two on Monday, it'll be indistinguishable from normal daily movements of the stock.

41 Institutional investors hold 71% of the company between them. None of those institutional investors are likely to be paying attention to what the internet has to say about a single new product from a company that honestly is not very important to most of them. Games Workshop is a small-cap company among thousands of small-cap companies. The funds that hold them do so mostly as a diversifying factor against other companies in and out of the sector and industry (Sector: Cyclical Consumer Goods & Services; Industry: Toys & Juvenile Products - NEC) and because they pay a regular dividend and have no debt.

"Stockholders" always has to be understood in the context of who actually matters in the stock market. There are hobbyist investors who buy shares in the companies they feel loyalty to; most of them are unsophisticated investors and whether or not they make money on their investments in the long run is almost entirely due to chance. The investors who have the most information and who are first in line when it comes to buying or selling are the big guys who rarely consider trades of less than a hundred thousand dollars at a time, and when one of them makes a move, it's a desk trader whose actions have got to be justifiable to management. And that means based on fundamental or technical indicators, not internet rumors.

How well did the sales of End Times go? Could that impact their financials?

Broken Loose
Dec 25, 2002

PROGRAM
A > - - -
LR > > - -
LL > - - -
WarmaHordes is really nothing like Fantasy. Kings of War is the appropriate analogue, given that WM/H is a (very good) open movement skirmish and combo game that is very gamey in the poo poo you can do and how you can do it. KoW is the infantry-block ranks and flanking Napoleonic countercharge wargame that people played WHFB for.

El Estrago Bonito
Dec 17, 2010

Scout Finch Bitch
I would recommend Osprey's Of Gods and Mortals, because it's 15 bucks and if you own a WHFB army you'll be able to knock together a counts-as list for it quite easily (because Osprey don't give a gently caress what army list you use).

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Crowsbeak posted:

How well did the sales of End Times go? Could that impact their financials?

We don't know, but yes. We'll see the next report this month; the CEO's commentary might mention how well End Times went, but the standard report format only breaks down numbers by region, channel (direct sales vs. retailers), and major product groupings (think: models vs. licensed products). If GW doesn't volunteer that information, we'll have to infer it from the numbers, which will be difficult because 40k 7th edition was released during the same period.

My guess is that numbers will be down a little on a year-over-year basis, and that the CEO will blame this partially on currency valuation changes, partly on ongoing costs from restructuring, and partly on soft sales in a still-recovering British economy.

e. It's worth mentioning that GW's numbers have never broken down sales between 40k and Fantasy. When people claim that fantasy is only 8% of GW's profits or revenues or whatever, they're basing this on a combination of speculation, and a report someone did back in 2010 that was itself based on some comments by a GW expert witness in a court case that wasn't centrally about GW's sales.

In other words it's totally unreliable hearsay. We absolutely do not know how much money is made or lost on any specific Games Workshop product or product line, with the possible exception of its paint line (because GW spent a lot of time talking about how great paint sales were back in 2012).

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jul 5, 2015

builds character
Jan 16, 2008

Keep at it.

Crowsbeak posted:

How well did the sales of End Times go? Could that impact their financials?

What leperflesh said just above, but also what he said here is going to be extraordinarily difficult to move away from.


leperflesh posted:

The funds that hold them do so mostly as a diversifying factor against other companies in and out of the sector and industry (Sector: Cyclical Consumer Goods & Services; Industry: Toys & Juvenile Products - NEC) and because they pay a regular dividend and have no debt.

Crowsbeak
Oct 9, 2012

by Azathoth
Lipstick Apathy

Leperflesh posted:

We don't know, but yes. We'll see the next report this month; the CEO's commentary might mention how well End Times went, but the standard report format only breaks down numbers by region, channel (direct sales vs. retailers), and major product groupings (think: models vs. licensed products). If GW doesn't volunteer that information, we'll have to infer it from the numbers, which will be difficult because 40k 7th edition was released during the same period.

My guess is that numbers will be down a little on a year-over-year basis, and that the CEO will blame this partially on currency valuation changes, partly on ongoing costs from restructuring, and partly on soft sales in a still-recovering British economy.

Yeah but the world ecconomy isn't anywhere near suffering the problems it had in 2008. Oil Prices are still down, so production should be down, the parts of the world in stagnation are not where GW operates generally, and the rest of the industry is doing better. Of course I assume most other companies in their industry are not listed, and its not like GW is hemorrhaging money or anything.

El Estrago Bonito
Dec 17, 2010

Scout Finch Bitch
Also it will be interesting how things fare in the face of X-Wing. The only time GW really got competition this steep was in the heyday of Mage Knight and Heroclix (which is still the best selling minis game ever) and back then they (or someone else, but the rumor is it was GW) pulled some strings and got HC/MK classified in all the industry sales charts and distribution channels as a TCG (so it doesn't count as a miniatures game). X-Wing is however an actual minis game and there is really no way around it and also it can actually dent their sales pretty significantly (since it's burning TTG sales charts to the ground right now). I'm sure they'll have some justification for it if they have one at all but it's interesting to see GW going into a market where they aren't the unsinkable juggernaut.

However I wonder if we'll see a massive price slash. Back in the day this is how GW put down every game that competed with them until Warmachine. They slashed their prices to the absolute bone and offered insane deals like the old space marine and land raider sets. It put down Target, the only real company to ever go toe to toe with GW in their genre (European comic book inspired space marine warfare in the future) and so I'm a little surprised they've held so long to the "jewel like objects cannot be cheap" rock since the one surefire way to bring back people would be to cut prices.

Squifferific
Oct 17, 2004
Proud user of machines that go "Ping!"

BlackIronHeart posted:

Owen, the Chaos player, made his own video about AoS and he apparently doesn't feel a need to keep it PG-13. The game volume overpowers him in the beginning but he turns it down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYoNhQevx08

This man sounds so sad :(

I'm wondering what this game would look like if you automated all the dice rolling. It will probably just vanish.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

El Estrago Bonito posted:

Also it will be interesting how things fare in the face of X-Wing. The only time GW really got competition this steep was in the heyday of Mage Knight and Heroclix (which is still the best selling minis game ever) and back then they (or someone else, but the rumor is it was GW) pulled some strings and got HC/MK classified in all the industry sales charts and distribution channels as a TCG (so it doesn't count as a miniatures game). X-Wing is however an actual minis game and there is really no way around it and also it can actually dent their sales pretty significantly (since it's burning TTG sales charts to the ground right now). I'm sure they'll have some justification for it if they have one at all but it's interesting to see GW going into a market where they aren't the unsinkable juggernaut.

However I wonder if we'll see a massive price slash. Back in the day this is how GW put down every game that competed with them until Warmachine. They slashed their prices to the absolute bone and offered insane deals like the old space marine and land raider sets. It put down Target, the only real company to ever go toe to toe with GW in their genre (European comic book inspired space marine warfare in the future) and so I'm a little surprised they've held so long to the "jewel like objects cannot be cheap" rock since the one surefire way to bring back people would be to cut prices.

There's what, 34 miniatures in the AoS box? That's like $7.35 a model. Even if they cut that price in half it'd be insanely overpriced.

enrious
Jan 22, 2015

theironjef posted:

There's what, 34 miniatures in the AoS box? That's like $7.35 a model. Even if they cut that price in half it'd be insanely overpriced.

47 minis for $125 USD retail, or $2.65 USD per mini.

edit: Or $5.31 NZD for our poor fellows on GW's naughty list.
vvv

enrious fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jul 5, 2015

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

enrious posted:

47 minis for $125 USD retail, or $2.65 USD per mini.

Oh man I was way misinformed. I must have been looking at an aussie forum or something.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Crowsbeak posted:

Of course I assume most other companies in their industry are not listed, and its not like GW is hemorrhaging money or anything.

Basically this. GW is, as far as I know, the only publicly-traded company exclusively engaged in trad games. Hasbro is public, and owns Wizards of the Coast, but Hasbro doesn't break down WotC's financials the way GW breaks its financials down, and despite the wild success of Wizards' premier product, Magic the Gathering, on the scale of Hasbro's total business, WotC is small potatoes.

GW is remarkable in that it has zero debt. Actually it's stupid for having zero debt, but that's another big post I put in the GW death thread. It's also stupid for paying a dividend, yet another big post, but both of these factors make the stock reasonably attractive to institutional investors.

If GW's sales decline significantly, that doesn't push it into bankruptcy; it only forces the company to cut in order to stay profitable. It can close stores, it can close factories and offshore production, it can cut product lines. GW can follow a similar trajectory as Palladium, if it makes a series of decisions that fail to recover growth, but until/unless it starts borrowing money it can't pay back, the company won't close.

It could become a target for acquisition, eventually. GW's IP is, in theory, pretty valuable. There are not a lot of companies that might consider buying them. Hasbro, maybe.

enrious
Jan 22, 2015

theironjef posted:

Oh man I was way misinformed. I must have been looking at an aussie forum or something.

It was NZ, I edited the post.

But for $2.65 ($2.12 on Ebay)...and I can proxy them for Basilea in KoW or as some sort of fantasy Roman analogue in RPG games...and then there's the Sigmarine figures too...

I will be strong.

BlackIronHeart
Aug 2, 2004

PROCEED
If they made this with Nurgle instead of Khorne and knocked $50 off the price tag, I'd be jumping on it. But alas...

fnordcircle
Jul 7, 2004

PTUI
I played AoS today.

The good:

It plays quickly.
I enjoy putting whatever I feel like onto the table (more on this in a second)
Being able to take Chaos stuff with my Skaven was fun.
It's a decent change of pace from the more strategy and synergy-intensive games I play, specifically my favorite game of all Warmachine. I'm ok with the idea that AoS occupies a different gaming space than Warmahordes, I can enjoy both for different reasons.
I got to use all these pretty models that I've only been able to use once before because Fantasy is dead everywhere I've ever gamed going back to the early 90s.

The bad:

Balance.
Rolling to see who goes first every round.
Overpowered units/abilities. Daemon princes summoning daemons is stupid. Things that auto hit and do 2d3/1d6 mortal wounds are stupid.

The bad was very bad. There's also a really interesting interplay between the issues with balance and with rolling to see who goes first every round. It meant that, because in each of my games the person who went 2nd in round one happened to roll highest for round 2 it makes it impossible to tell if our lists were balanced against each other. Bottom of turn 1 is your first time when you've got a good chance to get into melee and for things to be in range for magic, etc. So I charged in, took out his best model and then got to do it all over again without him getting a chance to do his magic, shooting, etc.

So how do I tell if my list was balanced when I get to shoot twice and blast with magic twice and I get to choose first melee twice? I don't like losing when it's obvious that I've got the inferior list and I don't like winning when it's obvious I've got the superior list but going 2 turns in a row skews my ability to tell what is balanced against what.

All in all, I was surprised how much I did enjoy the game the issues notwithstanding. Maybe it's because I went in with such low expectations and since it was a learning experience the balance issues weren't as big of a deal as they will be later on. I want to like this game but I think it is going to take a community effort to assign point values for the game to have any chance of surviving. Primarily because I'm pretty sure a good chunk of the people who poo poo on supposed WAAC players are really just sore losers in disguise and that most of us want to go into a game hoping that victory isn't determined solely by list composition which is the way things feel right now.

BlackIronHeart
Aug 2, 2004

PROCEED
How many times did you manage to not look your opponent in the eye or ride an imaginary horse?

Business Gorillas
Mar 11, 2009

:harambe:



BlackIronHeart posted:

If they made this with Nurgle instead of Khorne and knocked $50 off the price tag, I'd be jumping on it. But alas...



If they're gonna charge GW prices for a case they should at least cut it off the sprue for you

KuangMkV
Jan 25, 2003

Apollodorus posted:

I do, but I also want to play the game of massed fantasy battles and ranked regiments that made me play Fantasy instead of 40k when I first started 15 years ago.

That's why I haven't sold my Empire fantasy minis, because there has to be a game out there (KoW, or Hail Caesar) that will allow me to rank up my halberdiers and slam them into other ranks of infantry, and shoot muskets at fools from a distance.

PM me your mailing address. :)

lovestick
Feb 11, 2006

~30303030303~


I played 3 games today of roll 3+ then 4+ Age of Sigmar today and can give a little rundown. All three games were played with good friends and we tried to play the rules as written.

Game 1 - Starter Set

This was probably the funnest game because the forces were pretty well balanced and the new chaos minis look pretty darn good. My opponent was a good sport and the unit specific rules were well written and flavorful. A lot of the problems we experienced with the game in the later matches weren't present because of the limitations of the starter set contents. The strategy of the game was basically push units at each other then roll a 3+ then 4+ over and over again.

Game 2 - Wood Elves vs Tomb Kings

This was a 'big' game that we played with about 5 or 6 units for each army. We noticed that some of the units that you can chose are absolutely garbage and others are way too strong. We tried really hard to come up with a balanced force to play against each other but in the end it didn't really work out. The strategy of the game was basically push units at each other then roll a 3+ then 4+ over and over again. The shooting rules we found to be complete garbage. The game would have been funner if some missions were provided and we both found ways to abuse the sudden death rules and decided against using them because it would have made the game even less interesting.

Game 3 - Three way battle!

I busted out some nurgle dudes for the last game, where three of us tried a multiplayer game. The strategy of the game was basically push units at each other then roll a 3+ then 4+ over and over again. The rules were easy to adapt to have more than 2 players. This was the third different army I played that day and it felt almost exactly the same as the previous two. We attempted to balance our forces by taking 3 units each with similar numbers of wounds and it didn't really work. After we got to around turn 5 and decided to call it because there was nothing to do but push models at each other and roll the same numbers over and over again. I chose not to use the sudden death rules again because I could have just picked endure for my GUO, or the TK player could have picked seize ground and could have 'won' the game but that didn't seem fun or interesting.



Overall it can be kind of a fun game but you just do the same thing over and over no matter the army or win condition. When, or rather if, we play this again we'll try to come up with some scenarios to play and a better way to balance the army lists. If you play 40k khorne demonkin or want to convert some sigmarines then I would say pick up some of the models on ebay otherwise you can give the new boxed set a pass. The biggest highlight was I played with some really cool friends and that made the game tolerable and scheduled a game of bolt action and infinity the next time we get together.

Shadoer
Aug 31, 2011


Zoe Quinn is one of many women targeted by the Gamergate harassment campaign.

Support a feminist today!


After going through the rules, and playing a few games... I have to say my biggest gripe with it isn't the lack of balancing mechanics, or the way warscrolls were done, or the simplification of the rules, it's that the game is just rolling dice.

There's no more flanks, no more rears, charge distances are ridiculously random, and the only real decision you have to make is which one of your units is going to attack the other first... and even then, it doesn't even matter much.

The only strategic depth the game has seems to be
- You want to have range fire units protected since they can fire into close combat
- You want a Slann/Chaos Wizard/or Undead Priest constantly summoning units in a corner of the map
- You want to have units get behind their melee units in order to try and kill the range units behind enemy lines and disrupt their summoning.

And that's what I see as the dominant strategy in the game. As every faction except "Destruction" has access to summoning units, the key is to have your melee guys protect your range units and have a few "summoners" in the back to bring on reinforcements.

That's it, that's the most strategic depth I can find in this game. And that's really really sad.

Lord Twisted
Apr 3, 2010

In the Emperor's name, let none survive.
TBF 40K combat can be summed up as "push units together and roll 4+ 4+" etc but the melee has a lot more depth in the form of toughness v strength v saves v ap, and delivery systems, overwatch, cover, difficult terrain, positioning, challenges...

Mukip
Jan 27, 2011

by Reene
I wonder what Creative Assembly makes of all this given that they are making Total War: Warhammer (which I assume will be pre-End Times). They got sold a dog even worse than I did. It's interesting that GW decided to poo poo the bed before Total Warhammer was even released instead of trying to use it as a launchpad. When CA releases that game people will be playing with Karl Franz and Empire Halberdiers while Games Workshop is pushing Sigmarine Hammerhammerers.

Mukip fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Jul 5, 2015

Business Gorillas
Mar 11, 2009

:harambe:



Mukip posted:

I wonder what Creative Assembly makes of all this given that they are making Total War: Warhammer (which I assume will be pre-End Times). They got sold a dog even worse than I did. It's interesting that GW decided to poo poo the bed before Total Warhammer was even released instead of trying to use it as a launchpad. When CA releases that game people will be playing with Karl Franz and Empire Halberdiers while Games Workshop is pushing Sigmarine Hammerhammerers.

i imagine that they're pretty pissed now but in the end i don't think it'll matter. i don't think there's gonna be a demographic of "wow, i really like age of sigmar, but this total war warhammer game doesn't really do it for me"

edit: in the end, it'll be GW that loses. think about what the response will be when someone plays the game and they say "wow, i really like this warhammer game, i wonder how my favorite faction does in the actual game. let me look on the internet and see what they think," followed by a dozen posts about how they shouldn't play AoS because its hot garbage

Triple-Kan
Dec 29, 2008
I'm just catching up on this nonsense and it's heartbreaking. Can someone fill me in on what The End Times was, and why it's leading up to this weird Warhammer land where there's 7 different zones and Empire Space Marines? The whole thing looks like a really bad intro to 40K instead of it's own game.

Gravy Train Robber
Sep 15, 2007

by zen death robot
I remember a guy in a GW shop turning his nose up at me in 2007 when I came in to look at models and mentioned how much I loved Dawn of War and was thinking about getting into it. Remember that we're talking about a company who views videogames as a forgettable fad.

Shadoer
Aug 31, 2011


Zoe Quinn is one of many women targeted by the Gamergate harassment campaign.

Support a feminist today!


Mukip posted:

I wonder what Creative Assembly makes of all this given that they are making Total War: Warhammer (which I assume will be pre-End Times). They got sold a dog even worse than I did. It's interesting that GW decided to poo poo the bed before Total Warhammer was even released instead of trying to use it as a launchpad. When CA releases that game people will be playing with Karl Franz and Empire Halberdiers while Games Workshop is pushing Sigmarine Hammerhammerers.

Yeah it's like they forgot the lesson of Dawn of War where 40k got a huge boost of popularity from it. A bunch of PC gamers went "this game is awesome... wait, I can buy miniatures for it?!" and then GW modified the game to be more like Dawn of War. It's like they completely forgot that entire lesson.

Skellybones
May 31, 2011




Fun Shoe

Triple-Kan posted:

I'm just catching up on this nonsense and it's heartbreaking. Can someone fill me in on what The End Times was, and why it's leading up to this weird Warhammer land where there's 7 different zones and Empire Space Marines? The whole thing looks like a really bad intro to 40K instead of it's own game.

End Times was Chaos winning their campaign to wreck everything while Nagash came back from the dead and tried to take over, all the elves had a big war and the Skaven blew up the moon. Everyone died and the Lizardmen flew away in their spaceships.

Now Age of Sigmor is some kind of weird future thing where the ghosts of all the heroes are fighting each other or something.

dishwasherlove
Nov 26, 2007

The ultimate fusion of man and machine.

Unsurprisingly the WFB fanbase aren't ready to give up on it yet:

quote:

Small update

Work on "the ninth age" (suggestions for better name?) is ongoing as we speak. Basically it will be an updated version of 8th warhammer. Pretty much like how 7th edition was an updated version of 6th.

Personally I believe the best chance of saving the type warhammer we love is community driven rulebook and armybooks. If done right, such project could give us precisely what we have always wished for GW to be (writing competitive game, balance updates, writers that are in touch with the community etc).

It such project is to have any chance of success, we need a large player base, thus we want to maximise the number of people transiting to this. We therefore strive to create a version of warhammer that is close enough to 8th for people to still see it as warhammer and be able to pick it up and try it out without too much rules reading beforehand. But we still want to add some new stuff, both to create something to get people exited about trying it out, but also for improving the game.

So,
1. Rewriting rules for broken parts of the game, keeping the parts that works and changing the parts that do not
2. Small updates to rules with minor issues
3. New lores (keep some spells, around 30-40% new spells for each lore, updates to attributes, casting values etc where needed)
4. New magic items (both common and race specific, again keep some, add some new stuff)
5. New points costs for very strong/weak units (maybe rules changes in a few cases)
6. Possibly add new unit entries to match new models released for AoS.

Eventually we want to have an international committee, with representation from various communities, for deciding on all updates, rules changes, maybe even create new armybooks. Creating such committee would take time however (especially with most community representatives preparing for ETC at the moment), and releasing this soon seem important if we are to not lose to many players. On top of this, larger groups tend to work slower, so again creating a committee at this time is not optimal. We therefore intend to get the ball rolling and ASAP publish an alpha-version including points 1-5 (probably only points changes to the most imbalanced units in this version). Goal is to get this out before ETC (beginning of August), with a few sneak-peak pre-releases of some stuff during the next few weeks to get some hype going and show that works being done. If alpha-version is received well, we can then start to gather a committee and with this create a beta version based on feedback on the alpha version.

Can't be any worse than what GW has done. The bar has been set very low.

http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=129642&start=90

BULBASAUR
Apr 6, 2009




Soiled Meat

Mukip posted:

I wonder what Creative Assembly makes of all this given that they are making Total War: Warhammer (which I assume will be pre-End Times). They got sold a dog even worse than I did. It's interesting that GW decided to poo poo the bed before Total Warhammer was even released instead of trying to use it as a launchpad. When CA releases that game people will be playing with Karl Franz and Empire Halberdiers while Games Workshop is pushing Sigmarine Hammerhammerers.

Are you kidding? They got a gold mine. If they are the only way to experience the old warhammer fantasy, guess which game everyone will buy every few years.

Mukip
Jan 27, 2011

by Reene
Some people are suggesting that we should be grateful because at least GW gave us the End Times as a send-off to Warhammer, but when you understand that much of the nonsensical, stupid and generally unsatisfying events were about setting up AoS then it's not really a proper ending to the setting based on the original material, but an awkward attempt to retcon everything in a disingenuous manner that I now think displays appalling contempt for the fans of the setting. I like the Nagash book and thought it could be something cool and then took a look at the others books with mounting concern and horror. This whole debacle is worse than I ever could have imagined

BULBASAUR posted:

Are you kidding? They got a gold mine. If they are the only way to experience the old warhammer fantasy, guess which game everyone will buy every few years.

Yeah I think you're right, actually. Still, it must be weird for somebody in either GW or CA because they've committed to spending several years producing expansions for Total Warhammer to include more races and lands on that planet that GW blew up and replaced all the names with. People will play the game and maybe look into Dark Elves and Naggaroth online to see what this Warhammer game is all about, only to find that they are now Aelfs in the Realm of Trademark Nounverb and Naggaroth has been obliterated and all that other weird stuff in Khaine which they'll read in some wiki. People will be scratching their heads about all this for years to come.

Mukip fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Jul 5, 2015

Shadoer
Aug 31, 2011


Zoe Quinn is one of many women targeted by the Gamergate harassment campaign.

Support a feminist today!


What the gently caress was the End Times? Everyone thought it was a way of easing people in a new edition and a bunch of the rules from it would be in 9th, but it turns out that was too logical a move for GW. It wasn't a way to update fantasy enough so you could play that instead of Age of Sigmar as all the books have been now pulled. It wasn't to tell a transition story to the "Age of Sigmar" either because, really, why was it necessary. All the old heroes and villains are back anyways and Stormcast eternals could have fit into the existing universe.

I can only assume that "The End Times" was the previous CEO's plan to resurrect Warhammer Fantasy and use it as "9th Edition". Then the new CEO decided to dump that plan and implement "The Age of Sigmar" and released all of the "End Times" stuff early and rushed just to recoup money. Cause really, the first two books of "The End Times" had a lot of thought put into them... "Khaine" not so much and the last two were just vomited out as if they only had a few weeks to finish them and intended something much longer.

And really, "Age of Sigmar" really feels slapped together. It's like the new CEO gave them 6 months to put it together, with the edicts that the rules had to be short, no barriers to prevent people from buying models, and have space marines. They then took some Chaos Warriors that were probably meant for "The End Times" release and then really did grab a future "Blood Angel" army, scrapped off the futuristic bits, and rebrandeded them as "Storm Cast Eternals". As for rules, this seems like what they could get done fast enough to meet some ridiculous deadline.

ijyt
Apr 10, 2012

I wish the rules were better, because this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted a wood elves army, a khorne demons army, a beastmen army, a deathrattler army - but not at the cost of needing all those boxes for the massive rank and file. AoS would have let me build up a couple of small warbands (like Infinity), but nope.

Business Gorillas
Mar 11, 2009

:harambe:



ijyt posted:

AoS would have let me build up a couple of small warbands (like Infinity), but nope.

if only there was a GW game that was a skirmish game that pitted small (<20 models) warbands against each other

edit: if there's anyone around the Cleveland area that wants to play this magical game, let me know :swoon:

Shadoer
Aug 31, 2011


Zoe Quinn is one of many women targeted by the Gamergate harassment campaign.

Support a feminist today!


ijyt posted:

I wish the rules were better, because this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted a wood elves army, a khorne demons army, a beastmen army, a deathrattler army - but not at the cost of needing all those boxes for the massive rank and file. AoS would have let me build up a couple of small warbands (like Infinity), but nope.

Oh in some ways this was a great idea of GW, just executed incredibly poorly.

The Warscrolls are fluffy as heck and it's really great they gave long neglected armies like Bretonnia a real update. A bunch of rules in it like the new Skaven "Advance through treachery" are strokes of genius and it looks like someone on this team actually cared.

Just they then didn't take one of the numerous ways they could have balanced the game.

They could have given point scores, they could have had a rule of "each side has an equal number of units" and then had strict sizes of the Units (Elf units of 10, Skaven Units of 30, ect), they could have had a sort of slot system where you could only take so many war machines or infantry, or something. But no, they just left that flying in the wind.

Edit:

Business Gorillas posted:

if only there was a GW game that was a skirmish game that pitted small (<20 models) warbands against each other

edit: if there's anyone around the Cleveland area that wants to play this magical game, let me know :swoon:

Mordheim, the most beloved game GW ever produced that they have steadfast refused to support in any way.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Oasx
Oct 11, 2006

Freshly Squeezed

Shadeoses posted:

End Times was Chaos winning their campaign to wreck everything while Nagash came back from the dead and tried to take over, all the elves had a big war and the Skaven blew up the moon. Everyone died and the Lizardmen flew away in their spaceships.

Is there a more detailed explanation of the story? I can't quite tell if people are kidding about the whole Lizardmen thing.

  • Locked thread