Finally

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Jimmy
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Finally

#1 Post by Jimmy »

Finally got around to getting the book and having a game.

http://www.thatsnomoon.info/blog/age-of-sigmar

Cheers

:)
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Re: Finally

#2 Post by RE.Lee »

Good read, nice to hear the book fixes a lot of the problem with AoS. I'm considering using those rules for some sort of skirmish game. I doubt it would speed up any game with 200+ Skaven models in it, but for a dungeon-crawl style game (Assassin and 6 Gutter Runners infiltrate the Tower of Hoeth or something) it might work quite well. The new background still sucks though - no Tomb Kings to speak of...
cheers, Lee

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Re: Finally

#3 Post by Prince of Spires »

Thanks for the post
Last week I walked into a Games Workshop store which is something I've avoided for the better part of a decade.  After copping the normal bullshit and over energetic people that work there that you'd love to punch in the mouth I asked some questions to which I already knew the answers for.
This is very recognizable. Always happens to me as well. They somehow always appear as if GW is the best thing since sliced bread. :)
 The staff member claimed that Age of Sigmar was outselling Fantasy by far which is an indicator that in fact it really is doing well or rather that's the text book response from any sales person.
Heard this as well. And noticed your discussion with Swordmaster. I decided to do a bit of digging. GW doesn't release any numbers on subsystems. So there is always some guesswork involved in interpreting them. But GW does release financial results. And though you can doctor those a bit as well, in general they don't lie. AoS was release July 2015, the GW financial year conveniently runs from June 1st to May 31st. So, the annual reports show a year of AoS and a year before AoS.
2015 (so before AoS): revenue £ 119,132,000
2016 (1 year AoS): revenue £ 118,069,000

In other words, looking over a whole year, AoS is not contributing to growth as yet. They do note:
We learnt some valuable lessons during the year on how to deliver product system changes on this scale and as we released more of the range in the second half of the year, we finished the year with sales of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar at a higher rate than Warhammer has enjoyed for several years.
So during the second half of the year, AoS was outperforming WH. At least according to this one sentence.

Of course, the most interesting number is if AoS is bringing in fresh players or if these are simply 40K players migrating to AoS to try it a bit. And this number is not to be found, though GW probably has some insight into this. Time will tell if GW can return to growth or not.

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Re: Finally

#4 Post by Jimmy »

Thanks Gents.

@RE - In regards to the 'problems' I honestly had a single game of AoS when it first dropped and didn't play again simply because it was so different and felt unfinished. The addition of the General's Handbook seems to complete it in my opinion.

Background is something I haven't put any energy into for AoS and to be honest I'm not bothering with. As long as I can field my Tomb Kings and they have documentation to represent them then I'll be a happy chappy.

@Rod - I guess in another 12 months will be the real indicator if in fact it is working as they predicted.

I recorded a podcast today with a long time warhammer buddy about our thoughts on the game we had the day before and would love to get some feedback on it if anyone is keen for a listen.

http://www.thatsnomoon.info/podcast/episode-3
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Re: Finally

#5 Post by SpellArcher »

Glad you've rediscovered your mojo Jimmy!

:)

On the financial success of AoS, I honestly don't know what to believe. Here's a thread putting the anti case:

http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic ... 3&t=134671

It's certainly flourishing as a tournament game in Britain, though so are other systems as this forum shows:

http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=13
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Re: Finally

#6 Post by Teledor »

SpellArcher wrote:Glad you've rediscovered your mojo Jimmy!

:)

On the financial success of AoS, I honestly don't know what to believe. Here's a thread putting the anti case:

http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic ... 3&t=134671
Some very interesting figures in that thread. The fact that royalty revenue is boosting their bottom line so much is really masking the overall health of their core business. Not that I am rooting for AoS to fail, but man it cannot be doing too hot. Really seems like they did very little in market research or anything a proper business would do before such a momentous shift in direction like AoS.
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Re: Finally

#7 Post by draxynnic »

To be perfectly honest, I’m inclined to think that anyone who seriously believed that AoS as released would pick up the sales within the year was kidding themselves. They both literally and figuratively demolished what they’d built and have been building up from scratch, which with even the best planning will usually result in short-term losses as you reorient yourself. And the AoS release, to be frank, feels like it was rushed out the door. There are signs that there are deeper plans running behind the scenes, but even now a casual glance at AoS still looks like an excuse to drop less successful models and promote overpriced new ones.

(The pricing is, IMO, a mistake on their part. The Sigmarines are clearly an attempt to translate the ‘cheap to collect and easy to learn’ aspect of Space Marines into the fantasy setting, but when a single infantry model can cost you more than a whole squad of Marines did fifteen years ago, they fail hard on the ‘cheap to collect’ side of things… even when you take inflation into account. Granted, the miniatures themselves are high-quality if you like the style, but they’re hardly entry-level prices even with the smaller number of miniatures needed to jump in.)

There is the possibility that AoS will become something great in the long run. We have to remember that 40K and Fantasy both started from fairly basic beginnings, and what we had before the End Times was the result of decades of development. However, it does seem that GW might have been better off running the two in parallel for a bit (treating AoS a bit like the LOTR game, except with their own IP and largely the same models as WHF) and only dropping WHF once AoS was in a position where it could work well for larger battles and had reasonable balance (balancing by number of models was obviously silly (here’s my 16 dragons versus your 17 goblins! And hey, because I have less models, I get to invoke Sudden Death!) and balancing by wounds has clear issues).

That said, the main thing they really needed was robust skirmish rules that work for all armies. I think the biggest problem with WHF versus WH40K is that WH40K rules still largely work with relatively small games, while WHF rules, particularly in the later editions, increasingly pushed you to larger units which meant larger army sizes if you wanted to have a decent set of units on the board. This means that WH40K is suitable for small games (because people haven’t collected, assembled, and painted the minis needed for a larger game, or just because they don’t have the time) while WHF, particularly in 8E, was not.
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Re: Finally

#8 Post by Prince of Spires »

What probably matters most in this is not the numbers but the trend. Which is hard to say anything about from the numbers (other then that the overall numbers have been in decline for years). But if the trend is that they are seeing more and more people start AoS then that's a positive, especially if the WH numbers had been declining. In general it's easier to continue a trend then to reverse it.

Of course, it's more complicated then that. After all, even if the AoS trend is positive but those are customers coming from 40k then it doesn't actually add to the GW audience. Given that income available for hobbies tends to be fixed GW needs new customers and not customers to move from system A to B.

From a company perspective, the main issue I have with how GW handled AoS is that they completely threw away their unfair advantage. Their advantage wasn't the IP (which was nice and rich, but nothing extraordinary), the quality of the game (which was average) or the quality of the miniatures and the completeness of the range. No, the one advantage GW had over all the other companies was the big and loyal player base.

Fantasy wargaming was GW / WH and WH was fantasy wargaming. People who started in the hobby started at GW. They had the most players, most tournaments, most loyal fans, biggest online presence. And somehow, someone decided it was a good idea to throw all that away and start from scratch. And now they're in a situation where they have to actually compete with other companies and game systems.

In the end, it could be a good thing for the hobby. Usually, consumers benefit from real competition between companies as they push each other to become better. For GW though, I'm not so certain. It's a brave new world out there and I'm not sure they know what it takes to survive in it.

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Re: Finally

#9 Post by draxynnic »

Agreed. The whole thing reminds me of WOTC going to 4th edition D&D, in fact.

D&D has always been essentially the Warhammer of roleplaying games (or perhaps saying that WH has been the D&D of non-historical miniature wargaming might be more accurate), being the first game that most people think of, the starting point for the hobby for many, and generally having been what people stick with even if they do try out other systems. In both cases, they’ve started out being more concerned over the hobby than the bottom line and became more corporate over time. 4E was then designed on a similar line of thought to AoS: the old game was stale and complicated, and they needed to spice it up while making it easier for new players to get into.

From the perspective of getting new players into the hobby, it worked: I know a few people have come into the hobby through 4E that possibly wouldn’t have through 3.5. However, from a business perspective, it flopped: the greater number of established players didn’t like it and either stayed with 3.5 or went to other systems, and ironically, some of those other systems (such as Pathfinder) were developed by former partners of WOTC that felt they were hard done by in the way WOTC handled their 4E licensing and decided to go their own way. Now, instead of dominating the market, D&D is just another competitor.

So I guess it’s not all that surprising that WHF made their equivalent of a D&D4E. It’s even at about the same point in its lifespan: D&D started in 1974 and had 4E thirty-four years later in 2008, while WHF started in 1983 and turned to AoS thirty-two years later in 2015. The surprising thing, if anything, is that GW doesn’t appear to have looked at D&D’s experience and considered whether they’re going down the same path.

In the case of Warhammer though, I could see them deciding that the older players were less important. Said older players could be expected to already have most of the miniatures they need, so picking up new players is possibly more important for future revenue than it is for an RPG that can keep selling modules and rulebook expansions. (On that matter, the ‘target audience’ being in the teens may be a question of catching them young rather than really expecting them to be the majority of their revenue). Furthermore, if WHF was already faltering while WH40K is doing well, they may have figured they had less to lose and they might as well rip off the proverbial bandaid now. However, I’m seeing the same things happen as happened with D&D 4E: they’ve lost a lot of goodwill among their existing player base, causing their formerly loyal customers to go elsewhere, including to systems based on the abandoned game. Meanwhile, for the newer players, those expensive miniatures are competing with games like X-Wing… which also has expensive miniatures, but X-Wing is designed to be played with three or four miniatures a side, while AoS, while not as big in scale as WHF, is still intended to be played with units rather than individual models (unless they’re large models and/or characters), and therefore has a higher barrier to entry. Furthermore, as people have noted, GW has been really bad at keeping up with technology and at being in touch with their customers: I remember them having hobby articles, previews, stories, and lore online around 2000 or so, but as the internet has developed they seem to have backed away if anything such that their online presence now is basically a glorified catalogue (and the printed magazines nowadays aren’t much better).

Now, from a business perspective, people continuing to play under 8E or 9A rules may not have been a bad thing for GW – after all, someone playing 9A is still likely to be using GW miniatures, at least until and unless some other company comes in to supply miniatures (and it’s unlikely that a competing miniature company would be willing to step that closely to GW’s IP, although it has happened before…). However, this is where I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot by pulling so many of the more generic miniatures. I understand wanting to protect their IP, but I think a lot of companies overvalue the value of IP for IP’s sake: instead of being in a position of competing with other companies for those generic miniatures, what they’ve effectively done is ceded the field entirely. This can mean less people using GW miniatures in other games, and people playing games like 9A or even AoS compendium armies (unless in a GW-run tournament) being in a position of buying their miniatures from another company simply because the GW miniatures for a particular unit are no longer available (except secondhand, but GW doesn’t get a cut there either). Given that trademarks expire if they’re not used, and registered designs (if relevant) also expire in time, it’s entirely possible that other companies will be legally able to supply replacements for the pulled models in a few years if GW doesn’t supply them themselves, as long as the replacements aren’t close enough to trigger copyright.
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Re: Finally

#10 Post by Duranthalis »

The comparison to D&D4E is pretty much spot on (though, I might venture to say that my group started backing away from D&D with the advent of the D20 system). Sadly, both companies decided to take everything that was established and try and reboot it, rather than build on it.

In addition to that, the raising on the price per unit (or price per model) for AoS may also contribute to the lower numbers. I was excited to see new Sylvaneth models but then I balked at the price on some of them- I couldn't justify paying $60 for one model (Drycha ... especially considering the change in scale and base size making the new model unusable under the WHF rules despite how much I love the model). It's entirely possible that people are looking at the prices and walking away. I know that I personally have purchased some of the WE models they were discontinuing, the new branchwych model, and some paints. Other than that, GW has not gotten my money since AoS hit.

That said, I haven't gotten out of gaming, modeling, or painting. Where has my disposable income earmarked for hobbies gone? I've spent over $400 this year on Flames of War. Bought another expansion for Zombicide. Have gotten more X-Wing ships. Tonight I seriously debated buying Malifaux figures if for no other reason than to have some pretty cool models to paint (Neverborn and Resurrectionists seem pretty nifty). Point is, that's money that I used to spend pretty much exclusively for GW models that is now being spent on other companies because GW doesn't offer the same attraction it once did.

I wish GW the best in their new venture. I hope they manage to fulfill the needs of the people who are attracted to their products. I hope that they can stay competitive with the other companies out there that are more in tune with their target audience through social media. I would hate to see GW go away, whether that feeling stems from nostalgia or a fear that, should a gaming titan fall, the rest of the gaming industry would suffer.
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Re: Finally

#11 Post by Prince of Spires »

I pretty much agree with Durenthalis (although I'm not a D&D player, so I have no experience there...).

I can't justify to myself spending $130,- on a single WH model (the new everqueen on beetle thing). It's gotten to the point where it's too expensive for me. Which makes me wonder about how it's generally received. I have the feeling that in general I'm more willing to dish out money then most people on a lovely miniature. Or at least that I have enough disposable income to do so. Those kinds of prices for me means I'm out. Fortunately (I guess) I don't actually like the model, so I don't really care either way.

I do wish GW all the best. I don't think miniature gaming is a zero sum game, in the sense that one company has to lose for another to win. Rather, the healthier the community is the more people will pick up the hobby and the more companies will benefit. Also, everyone benefits from having strong competition. Competition drives you to improve your standard, lower your prices, improve the game / rules and in general find some way to be better then your competition. Which is probably what went wrong for GW. They effectively had (have?) a monopoly on fantasy wargaming. Which made them more and more inward focused, made them able to keep raising prices, ignore the rules side and so on. Having strong competition could fix that, if they wake up on time that is.

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Re: Finally

#12 Post by draxynnic »

It's $225 in Australia - no, exchange rates and shipping do not justify the extra hundred. Here, they pretty much find an excuse to raise the prices whatever's happening. If the Australian dollar is high, then the cost of raw materials is high so prices go up! If the Australian dollar is low, the exchange rate is unfavourable to prices go up! Never mind that the Australian dollar usually slides with the cost of the raw materials, so if the Australian dollar is low, that should mean that the price of materials is also low...

That said, I don't really begrudge them high prices for the big setpiece model. I haven't seen the new Alarielle miniature to scale, but Forge World stuff was already pretty pricey, so it's probably not actually a massive escalation if it is Forge World scale and quality. It's the prices of the basic stuff that you'd be building your rank and file from. The cheapest model I've been able to find that was made for AoS (rather than a rebased legacy model) is over $9. Which is a little bit insane when we're talking about basic troops, even basic troops for high quality, low numbers armies like Stormcast and Chaos Warriors. They're highly detailed minis with a lot of customisation options (read: making you buy plastic you're not going to use), and they probably justify the price on that basis (apart from the fact that 'customisation options' means 'making you buy plastic you're not going to use'), but they need to continue making affordable minis that someone just getting into the hobby can get together and use.

I hope they succeed too - if nothing else, I think there is potential in what they're doing with AoS, and I'd like to see where it goes out of curiosity if nothing else. But to do that I think they're going to need to get their head into the sunlight, smell the roses, and realise that they're out of touch and steadily pricing themselves out of the market.
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Re: Finally

#13 Post by Prince of Spires »

The cheapest model prices are not that different here in Europe either. It's about €5 per model (roughly AUS$ 7.40 if the interweb informs me correctly...). A decent sized army with a few spares (to have some choices) can then quickly become expensive.

How big is a standard AoS game in term of number of models? For a WH game you can easily end up with 70-100 models on the table even for an elite army like HE. And it only "gets worse" when you start playing horde armies where you can have that number in just 2 or 3 units. At a minimum of €5,- a model that means at least a €350 investment before you can really start playing a game...

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Re: Finally

#14 Post by draxynnic »

I'm not sure what a typical game would be, but it is still a game about units rather than individuals (unless the individuals are heroes). I'd probably expect that you could get a reasonable game with about four units and a character... you could probably put that together using High Elf miniatures for about $200-$300 AU, depending on what you chose.

The cheapest way to get started - particularly if you're going Sigmarine - looks to be the Starter Set, which has decent starting armies for Stormcast and Chaos for $200AU. That looks to be really heavily subsidised, or like Isle of Blood they're using special sprues that are cheaper to make: if you bought them separately, you'd be looking at over $300 for the Stormcast side alone.

(The bundles really seem to be the way to go if you want any value for money at all - the Seraphon bundle, for instance, is $140, when the Carnosaur and Cold One Riders combined would cost you $155 if you bought them separately and the bundle has twelve regular Saurus thrown in on top. It's when you want to go outside the bundles that it gets ridiculous. So I guess that's their strategy: hook people on the bundles, then charge through the nose if you want anything outside a bundle.)
Last edited by draxynnic on Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Finally

#15 Post by Grenic »

For me I'm at a crossroads with miniature gaming in general.

I've tried 9th Edition and while it has certain benefits, its apparent God like attitude toward the ETC is just off putting. Not to mention the balance issues the HbE book has.

This means AoS is is back on the table. Have they addressed the summoning rules?

The final road is to just fold my tent and spend my gaming money on my other interests.
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Re: Finally

#16 Post by Jimmy »

The summoning rules have been addressed in the matched play section of the General's Handbook. Basically you must pay points from your total to cover units you plan on summoning into the game.
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Re: Finally

#17 Post by Grenic »

Sounds promising.

Does it make it possible for army list that does not have any summoning play on an even footing with one that does?
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Re: Finally

#18 Post by Jimmy »

Unfortunately I've only two games under my belt in matched play and neither had summoning units so I'm not equipped to answer. From my very limited experience however the points seem to be balanced fairly well so with that in mind I would imagine the answer to your question would a certain yes. In fact I would go as far to say running a summoning type of list comes with quite a risk, if you lose your wizards then you've lost all those points invested into summoned troops if you haven't used them yet which could potentially landslide you into defeat.
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Re: Finally

#19 Post by draxynnic »

That's my gut feeling as well: summoning in matched play looks like it's a bit like deep striking in 40K. On the one hand, when the unit arrives, you can place it where you like. On the other hand, you may not be able to get it when you need it. AoS summoning gives the player more agency on when it arrives and there isn't the chance of losing the unit altogether to a Deep Strike mishap - on the other hand, it takes a spell from one of your wizards, and if you run out of wizards that can summon before you run out of units to be summoned...
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Re: Finally

#20 Post by jamierk »

Don't forget that summoning can do things like take you over your behemoth allowance, or summon units outside your allegiance. Small bonuses but still worth noting.
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