 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me as always is my co-host for this week, it's Tyler. What's up buddy, how you doing? I am not sufficiently prepared and festive for this show. Gotta do better next year. I look as guard the entire house, could not find a Santa hat or whatever that beautiful thing on Tom said that I'm very jealous of that. I don't know what it did. Reindeer horns, thank you. They're diamond encrusted, you see that? Oh, glittery. Beautiful. Only the finest, only the finest for Tom, absolutely. We are, we're gonna, first of all, this is our I suppose Christmas show, it's only a couple days after, this is the one closest to Christmas, this is where we celebrate. And at the same time, we're also gonna talk about 2024 next year, it's right in between, so that magical week, one of my favorite weeks of the whole year, the week in between Christmas and New Year's, basically a week where no one expects anything of anyone else in the world. This is the appropriate thing, it's one of the best things about this part of the year. So, we're gonna go ahead and talk about next year. Konstantinos is not here, so I can be positive and cheery, which I'm very excited about. Yeah, yeah, only when he's around do you need to really get negative, yeah. So, we're gonna be talking about our 2024 predictions later on in the show, but of course first we start off the show as always with the news. All of you out there, by the way, who are watching welcome, I hope you had a wonderful holiday. If you celebrate, if you don't, I just hope you had a wonderful Monday. Either way, I hope it was great. What do we got for news? We got some preview images, sir. I released a little teaser video, bunch of silhouettes today, like you've got these images ready to go. I do. They're teed up. So, this is like one of two of Callus and Toll, who are both getting models. That's who this is. Yep, that is exactly what's happening here. Yeah, correct. That's what this is. You can see his little top nod and he has a sword like this and guns and stuff, and we'll see his partner later on. So, that's that one. Then we have a new Chaos Marauder horseman, which is exciting, because that is like a very old kit hiding out in the Chaos line. Potentially a Warcry kit, this Marauder horseman, I would say, but we'll see. Could you be one guy? Might not be a whole kit, because it might go with, sorry, but maybe not. Maybe it's just a brand new kit, because at the same time, we've got a little Lumineth person here, part of it. We have a Lumineth, and the Lumineth person is likely up against this person, which is a Night Haunt in a Warcry box, so probably because we had heard rumors of a Night Haunt versus Lumineth kit, and this guy's clearly Night Haunt, like the most very obvious image to anyone with eyeballs is this one. They'd have to really give me throwing us a left turn for this not to be Night Haunt, the general lack of links. It seems like a Karen Wraith update. Maybe. I mean, I would assume so. That model is so old and so, like, so boring. Like, it literally looks like about four other models. Yeah, sure. Sure. There's a lot of opportunities there to get that guy updated, and then finally, yes, his callus in total, the other one. Here you go. The other one. So there's the five images we got. And realistically, this is like the first two months of the year is what they're previewing here, basically. Like, a lot of this stuff will just see the figs themselves either in the next couple of weeks or at an LVO. Yeah. That's what we did last year. Like, last year, we had Serafond, like a bunch of Serafond reels in the same video. Yep. Nicholas R, sorry, Average Joe, I apologize. Average Joe said, where are all the Skaven? You're not going to see them yet, buddy, because that's for the middle of the year. And they're not going to start, basically, sprinkle some stuff in rumor engines. But, yeah, at Adepticon is when you'll see the fourth edition launch box, just like they announced the 40k one. And that's when you'll see all the Skaven fingers crossed, hope amongst hope. So at any rate, you wouldn't expect anything. Yes. Yes, exactly. Cross your claws. Who are callus and toll? Callus and toll are a pair of heroes who are sort of the balcony muppets of the mortal realms in that they sit around and sort of make fun of everybody else. But realistically, they are a pair of heroes, a witch hunter and his warrior buddy, who are featured in a couple AOS novels and show up as side characters in many other things. Other stories throughout the realms, they are two characters who have proven very, very popular as sort of POV characters on the nature of the mortal realms. They're the AOS Felix and Gotrek. Yeah, sort of. Yeah, absolutely. They operate out of Hammer Hall, mainly, but they get around, so. Yeah, they were in Excelsis in that one book that I read. The only AOS novel I've ever read, City of Secrets, I think, or something. It was actually quite delightful. Yeah, they were in Excelsis, I think, until they got ruined, and now they're in Hammer Hall right now. And yeah, like, they get around. I mean, they're, you know, mortal realms travelers. They're not, like, attached to anything in particular, so. But they're their city's people, basically. More order-a-vasey are coming, folks. So there you go. That's all of that stuff. I mean, it's all exciting. I'll, like, we're due a Warcry box set, so I assume that's what the Nighthawk versus LR, sorry, versus, yeah, LRLR. A Chaos Marauder kit, hopefully, maybe as part of, like, a Dawnbringers Book Five. We'll talk about hopes around that a little later on. Could be just anything that's causing that, though, at the same time. Would that be all chaos, or what do you, like, what do you think, some chaos in cities? Probably chaos in cities. I assume that's maybe also where Calisthenthole comes from. And that's what I was going to ask, yeah. Because they've been riven throughout. Yeah, they've been riven throughout Dawnbringers for, like, a while. We're getting predominantly death in this next set, right? Like, that's the next book. Yeah, yeah. It's, like, death. All of it. That's its thing. Yes. So, where is all that stuff, by the by? Hopefully, real soon, is when we're going to know. So, anyways. Nicholas R. said, darn, I was hoping we were going to get, uh, the thumbnail was a guncast mini. Look, I'd love Stormcast with guns, okay? Like, let's get into it. Give Stormcast tanks and heavy bolters. Let the, let the apotheosis complete. All right. Let's do this. Like, just give them mini guns. Everything's better with a mini gun. So, there you go. Uh, I disagree, Robert McMillan. I just, it would be cool if it's not that I wouldn't love to see him. But I think, I think we'll be operating in that space. But I really have my money unscathed. Strong bet. Anywho, although Stormcast, I agree completely. I think you're right there. I don't think we'll ever get a launchbox without Stormcast. It's just what it is. Yeah. Um, all right. Cool. What else we got? Old world release infos. I did not look into this. What do we got going on here? Oh my goodness gracious. We've got so much information. Launchbox is ahoy. Choo choo. That's not what, that's not what boats make. Okay, so returned to the world of legend. I'd really rather not, but let's do it anyways. I do like this different time setting, by the by. What I'm seeing in like the story and all that stuff is actually like, they're focusing a lot on like the border princess part of the world, which was always actually the most interesting part of the world to me. So I'm happy to see all of that. Um, um, I'm here for, I guess we're back to just sort of low key European pseudo racism. So that's going to be a good time. Um, but the, you know, we got the boxes. So there's two, two count them, two launch boxes. Okay. Um, now both contain the big book. We'll talk about the big book in a minute, but it's like a, do you want the good guy launchbox or the bad guy launchbox? And allegedly this is supposed to be around, uh, like 1250 points or something like that, like in that space. Who knows? I mean, you know, given that we've seen how things are built in this, it's going to be like fantasy. So like, it's not like a unit is some guaranteed number of points. Like units can vary wildly on how many points they cost, right? Like you could have a unit that's worth 80 points or 200 points, depending on, did you give them the additional weapon? Did you give them light armor, heavy armor, shields, a champion, a musician, a standard bearer, a magic standard? Does there, you know, like whatever, right? Just all sorts of crazy stuff. Okay. So like, you know, I don't, I don't know how many points are in any given thing or how you can really say that, right? But nonetheless, that's the basic concept. Uh, then we've got the details. Let's get them deets. So here is the Tomb Kings of Khemri edition. I love that the two retired factions, okay. Are the face of the old world? Are the face of the relaunch. Yeah. Tom, is this a it's morbid time situation? Okay. Let me explain. I mean, okay. For everybody else. Let me make sure everybody gets what I'm saying here. Morbius was always a stupid comic book character. Scott is wrong. Okay. He was always dumb. And not that the midnight suns weren't cool. I was 12 years old once too. I thought they were pretty awesome. All right. But uh, the Morbius movie came out. It was terrible. It flopped. It did nothing, right? Okay. And then there's this whole like meme culture that comes out around it of its morbid time and then he morbs all over the place and all of this, right? It becomes like this trending thing on social media, right? And then they're like, oh, people want to see the, the Morbius movie after all. And so they put back out, they put Morbius back out in theaters and it yet again did nothing. Okay. C.W. Kreiner said Morbius was the weakest part of the midnight suns. You're absolutely correct. That is, this man speaks truth. Obviously Morbius was the weakest part of the midnight suns. I mean, ghost writer rules. Okay. At any rate. So have they fallen for their own meme? That's the question I'm asking here. What do you think? No, I don't think so. I think that they are cognizant of the fact that there was a lot of blood and tears spilled around the cutting of these factions as we moved into AOS. That there were a lot of loud stands. I don't think it had anything to do with these two against each other as per the meme. But I think that it, I think that they were the natural to that launch, like that would launch together. That said, I, like it feels like a real miss. And what I mean by that is this. Of all the Tomb Kings models they could have put in that box. Yeah. Really? Really? Well, so this is like 93 models in this box, 40 warriors, 32 skeleton 32 archers, 16 horsemen, three chariots, and then new Tomb King on foot and big guy on dumb Crocodragon. Okay. And the obviously the new models are the Tomb King on foot and dumb Crocodragon. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so you've got 91 models that were released. I went back and looked this up. And when this game comes out, they will officially be celebrating their 20th anniversary. How about that? It's almost to the theoretically, it could be almost to the week. I mean, I don't, I don't know when this releases, right? I mean, they've said, they said, check back in the new year and like, we're gonna have a lot of information soon. So I'm just assuming this releases in January, right? Because they the way they were saying it at the end of the article is like wink, wink, nudge, nudge coming real soon. Right. So these guys will literally turn 20 years old, the same month this game releases, which I do find serendipitous, like to the, to the almost to the week. So I just like no Tomb Guard, no Sphinx or Necro Sphinx, no Stalkers or Ushabdi, like it just feels like such a mess. The most interesting Tomb Kings units there are out there. Yeah. And by the way, on the secondary market historically, those units that I just named were very, very expensive. Sure. These units that you see in this box were worthless on the secondary market. Sure. Like it just, it feels like such a mess. Sure. I dropped something on my desk. All right, Tyler, what's your take on this? You went like, let me ask this though, Tyler. This is a pretty good army profile. If you look at this thing, right? Like it's, like it's a lot of infantry and stuff like that. It's, it's a good silhouette for the army. Like this is a cool looking force admittedly. 100%. Yeah. I'm in, yeah, mode with, with all of this. I don't have a lot of personal interest in the old world. I'm curious to read the rules and be blown away by how complex of a game we play growing up compared to what we play now. And what we play now feels too nuts to me on the complexity side. Sure. Which is, which I find fascinating. Yeah, just so. But yeah, I mean, that's a fair point. I don't, yeah. I mean, I think the design of all this, the, the marketing, the branding looks well done. I heard some controversy over how people were upset that the book was not in red killer, which I found kind of funny. I don't know if that was just a meme going around or that was something real. I don't know. Is that a thing? I heard, I heard a few things about that from some friends early in the week. But yeah, don't, don't have any strong opinions on this. I'm very excited for our buddy Tristan though. Oh, indeed. It's a great day for Tristan. I mean, hopefully we, I would assume that they'll put back out all the other kits you mentioned, Tom. I would assume because I mean, what a terrible miss. Yeah, I hope. Like if it had, let's say that it had like, I don't know, some smaller units of infantry in this and that, like, that, that had been a number of those other units had been in this box. I probably would have bought this box just for bits, right? But because of, you know, for me wanting to do conversions and stuff like that. But what's in here? Not. Don't worry. When tiles come out, Vince, Tom and I, regardless of anything that we say right now, we're going to be all in. You guys will. When they release the high, I mean, I still have high elves. Like I don't know what they have to offer me because I still have like 10,000 points of piles in my, in my closet downstairs, which I'm probably offer. Here's an idea, Tom. New high elf models. Yeah, that absolutely love and you're going to buy them. They offer you new high elf models. You give them money. Then this is the deal accepted. The answer will be yes. All right. So here's the Bretonian side. So again, we've got a bunch of peasants, which we saw the army construction for Bretonia in an article as well. So we know that actually you do need peasants in the standard army. Like you have to have peasants, not just knights, which is a change. It used to be very frequent. You would, you would not always, plenty of people ran peasants, but you would see lots of lists that were peasant lists, would often be knights only. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I look, I'm going to straight up say, I do not hate the army composition rules that they shared in the article that we're on offer. I look like obviously we will do a full show dedicated to the old world when it actually releases. And when we can talk about it and like, I'm not going to lie. I don't hate the army composition rules. I really don't like percentages within additional number sliders on there. Right. Like potential number sliders like one plus. So you got to have at least one or zero to one or zero to two or something. Right. So it caps at one or two or then just any of these things go nuts. Right. So like, okay, that's actually quite a fine amount of control on, on those individual units. But here we've got 12 nights of the realm. You've got your peasants of two varying types. You get your three peggy peg nights. I was looking Tom, by the way, and I still have so many peg nights. I realized how many Pegasus nights I have on just like unbuilt. It is frightening. I have a lot, like a lot. Like too many. I'm just going to say it that way, Tom. Too many. Okay. More than more than 20. No, not more than 20. Thank God. Okay. I don't have more than 20 unbuilt. But and then this new, there's only one new model in this box, which is the Lord guy. So, okay. Yeah. It's so funny. I was at my local store and they had a metal treb in the like miscellaneous models area and I was like, look at that. There's a treb. How cute. I mean, these guys look good. I actually like this color scheme they're going for here. That sort of unified scheme because it's like, we're operating in a different time period where it's not, you know, sort of dukes from all over the realm, sending their, their knights along into one congealed force and sets the individual barons and dukedoms and stuff like that. I, I honestly legitimately think the army looks a lot better with a unified sort of color scheme. I just think it looks cool. I've always liked this red and black. Yeah, looks great. So I dig all the new models. All the new models are amazing to me. Like all the new plutonium models are really good, really good. I'm sad that they have to sit alongside these again ancient models. I did not look up the years on the knights of the realm and the peasants, but I believe they're about the same time period. Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised. I don't know. To me, the men and arms and the bowmen look pretty good. I was kind of surprised by that. Knights, at least based on the photos, look a little derpy, particularly obviously compared to the new guy. But yeah, the problem is with the knights, you have a really direct comparison between a brand new, crisp, clean, sharp, you know, modern sculpt and then the old, you know, one step advanced beyond battle masters plastics, uh, sculpt. And like that's rough, right? Yeah. Like if you, every one of those knights that's in that picture, Tyler, if you turn it up like this, there's nothing underneath on the front. It's just like a, it's like a kindle down there, just a smooth plane of just like where these two giant pieces fit together and don't have any, no detail, no shape, no nothing. It's just like, it's just nothing. You can't, yeah. Just like 90s, 90s technology. Yeah. So that's fun. Okay. Go ahead. I like this comment by Jamie Lang. I've got to scroll back up. I know we're getting lit. He was talking about basically how with, with composition here with the old world and fantasy, you are having to eat some veggies. Whereas with AOS, you can go straight to the ice cream, straight to the junk food. And that's, that's your entire plate. There you go. You want all sharks? You want to be? Sure. You want an army of that nonsense and turning up pile in? Here you go. You want an army? Yeah. Obviously. Do you think, do you think that there might be a chance that there could be cross pollination on, on unit compositions, like what we see in this for the new edition of AOS? We'll talk about it in, in the upcoming section when we're like, that feels like a great item for our main topic. All right, let's keep moving. This is the book. It's a big book, but they say 325 pages. I don't have the notes in front of me, but I think it's 325 pages. There's a lot. And they said 70 pages of fluff. And I'm like, holy crap, that is not enough because that leaves 255 pages unaccounted for of rules. That's too many pages of rules. This is not an RPG. That's a lot of rules. Okay. So yeah, it's a big book. I don't know how we're going to do a show about this whenever this happens, but we're going to try. I don't know how to explain or make a presentation out of 250 pages in a book. I can't do that. I can't do that. One thing that you need to do is just do an entire, like 20 slides on keywords. Yeah. On USRs. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Peter Harrison said, who are they marketing this game for? Purely long time player's question mark. It doesn't interest me at all as a two year player. My answer would be, I think it's, I'm not sure they could tell you who their persona really is, but if I had to answer the question, my answer would be they are targeting high complexity fantasy players, people who miss literally the old world and are everybody who played Total War. I don't think so. I really, this is not the game I would make if you, the existence of the thing does not equal targeting a market. Okay. That's not how product development works. Okay. If in Total War, the computer does like everything for you. Okay. If you're going to make a game to target video gamers, if you're trying to make a gateway game for video game players, this is the opposite of what you do. I mean, the dead opposite. I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just being serious. Like people who only play video games and aren't used to like labyrinthine, Byzantine, tabletop rules are not going to have fun coming in and learning about the nature of complicated movement, flank, wheel, blah, blah, blah rules. Okay. That's just not the game. All right. Like I could write a game meant to target Total War players. It wouldn't look anything like a 250 page rule book. It would look like AOS won. Yeah. But with rank and flank. That's it. No, I mean, I would have done, I still think that the original vision that Jervis had, which was a 12 page rule set, was the correct thing. Like he cut it from 12 to four by senior executive mandate. Okay. And then very quickly it went back to 12. And if I was trying to write a game to bring in video gamers, I would write a 12, like a Total War player specifically, I would write a 12 page rank and flank rule set. It can be done. There are lots of good really short rank and flank games out there. They exist. You don't need 250 pages for a rank and flank game. It's not required. Okay. So no, I think they're, I think they're persona. And it's like, whether they will this or not, like around the office, they might be saying, yeah, we're targeting Total War players. And if I was in their product management team, I would cry BS immediately. Okay, as someone who does a lot of discussion about like persona targeting and marketing and stuff like that in my normal life. So anyways, sorry, you got me off on a rant there, but at any rate, that I think that's really the target. Okay. So it's a big book. We'll see what we can do. That's cool. I mean, like, okay. This I don't hate. This is sort of the army books. Uh, and like, this is the army books. So you've got a good guy book and a bad guy book, and they form a little picture. Just fun. That's nice. I do really like the art. Like all the new art I've seen is actually really good. They went out and got some really nice artists. And by that, I mean, they have good people working in the specialist studio side of the house doing the digital art. So you've got a good guy book and a bad guy book. I like the throwback with the name ravening hordes. I see you. I see you trying to lure me back in by naming the bad guy book after the greatest supplement ever made in the history of warhammer fantasy. Okay. Um, and these are like what you need to play the game. This is your armies and your army lists and how you build them. Okay. Your special rules, all that kind of stuff. All right. And then you might think, great, okay, I got two books, maybe core book, this book, they did say all these things will be available in EPUB. So I assume they're not going the direction of AOS since they don't have an app. So you'll actually just be able to buy EPUB PDFs basically, which means these things will all be pirated in like five minutes after they're not to mention, they'll be like a Wahapedia world, whatever. Sure. Of course. Yeah. But then you have these arcane journals and how they explained to these were like softback supplements that give you like special characters and additional like support like unique magic items and special armies, which I'm not against if it's executed correctly. If I still have to carry around the normal book to completely and reference then like the core book and that book and this book to get my all of my rules together when I want to play one of those special armies, that's kind of crappy. If this book were to be like a replacement if I'm using this like if I'm let's say I'm using some special army out of here, like what did they mention? They mentioned like the mortuary cult or something from the Tomb Kings book. Okay. Which I assume is like the priest one. Yeah. So if when I'm playing that, I only need like this thing and the core thing, then fine. Cool. If it's just more if it's like all stacks on stacks, then we're right back in the same place. But I do love specialized armies because that's how you get back to not needing to necessarily have your your meat or vegetables or I don't know whatever the stupid thing is you got to eat your meat before you have your pudding or whatever dumb analogy for food we're going to use. The point is, is that like you could have special armies where it's like in this army, Dekras thinks is her core go crazy, you know, like whatever or something. Okay. So, yeah. Yes, that is true. Keith Rogers said Tomb Kings being armies of evil nostalgia ruined. They were neutral like ogres. Good day, sir. Yeah, we flattened it out. We flattened it out. It's just good and bad now got rid of that neutral concept, no more gray. Okay. So, Matt P, one would hope the whole faction is in the supplement. I think they said that's not the case in the article, but I guess we'll see. So there you go. That's all of that. And then finally, we had some new models for the tomb kings. We'll just look at them real quick here. Guy with a big scroll. Okay. Cool. Seems fine. No issue. New battle standard bear. Pretty ugly. Pretty awful. Do not like that stance at all. That's like a really rough stance. I don't like the flag. Yeah, I don't like anything about this. I don't like how thick that is. Look at how thick that is. He's all this piece hanging down here. Rough. Scream just caught up. Oh, yeah, that is a little weird. I like the first guy. This guy is a little weird. Yeah, first guy's fine. First guy's fine. He's not like amazing, but he's fine. This dude. No, no, that's real bad. And then tomb swarms. I also don't like these. I don't like the weird points and directions and stuff like that. Like I get it. They were trying to do the swirly, twirly, nimbly, bimbly thing, but it doesn't sell for me. Yeah. Assumingly, by the way, all three of these are resin models. Sure. Okay. Those are pretty funky looking. Yep. So there we go. I mean, we'll see. More for the old world whenever we get it. I think that's all our news. That was a long one. It was a long one, but we had much to talk about. All right. Let's go to some pick of the week, gentlemen, shall we? Tyler, what do you want to share with everybody? All right, two quick ones. So, Miss Cast, the gentleman over there got to drop the new episode today all about movement. Highly recommended. Lots of good Darren stories and from others. And then I watched one of my favorite TV shows now of the entire year on Netflix the other week. Thankfully, it's been renewed for a second season. Okay. Blue Eye Samurai. Yeah, sure. Sure. Have you seen this? I have. It's amazing. Okay. Good. All right. There's hope for you. Okay. Tom, have you seen it? I have not. Tom, I don't care what your opinion is of anime, you have to watch this. This show. It's really good. It's just phenomenal. Yeah. My wife and I are binge-watching Ted Lasso. The lasso. Okay. We'll have to Ted. Yeah. Give this a go. It's amazing. Yeah. It's so, if you liked, I mean, it's a female protagonist, revenge story. I said in Edo era Japan, eight episodes. It's, yeah, it's just phenomenal. I could say more about it, but yeah. Ben's got any thoughts on it? Blew me away. Yeah. I mean, I do a whole episode on sort of ancillary fantasy, you know, media, right, that shows that this kind of stuff can work. Like, how do we not have a Warhammer property? When you've got stuff like that going on and yet you can't get a Warhammer thing off the ground is truly shocking to me when you look at something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was great. The For Whom the Bell Tolls fight scene is a particular standout in my mind in the Castle Assault in episode, I'm going to say six probably. That's about right. Yeah. That was pretty great. Yeah. I liked all of it. I mean, I, Tom will tell you I am a huge, huge, huge super fan of the Edo period in Japan and have set many games there and know the period very well and have read books and watched documentaries and all sorts of stuff like that. I'm a big fan of that time period in Japan because I'm a nerd. So anyways, there you go. One of these years I'm going to go visit Japan, but specifically I want to go to Kyoto. I want to see the old, what's left of the palace and I want to head to the Seito Inland Sea, those kinds of things. That's the sort of stuff that I really want to see of which you get a good, you get like some good sort of reimaginations of those things as backgrounds in that show. Yeah. Yep. That's all I got. All right. Tom, what do you got for me? I'm going to sprupe something that I've mentioned before, but not in a couple months, but I'm going to start with a story. Oh boy. Okay. I'm ready. Settling everybody. Christmas was approaching and I was notified by my technology that there was somebody at my front door and it looked and the package had been dropped off and I went, well, that's curious. What do you mean a package? I'm not waiting on anything. All of the Christmas gifts are here. Everything has been wrapped. What is this mysterious package? Sure. And I go to my porch and there's a box and it has my name on it and then I see it's from Hatchet. Friends. What? Hatchet, which is the publishing company that does Stormringer and so I received my third month's Hatchet box. Let me just tell you, I have never been so excited for a product as I was for this binder. It's out of this world. I love it so much. It's ridiculous and I know it tells you how the planes work. Weird. We've been wanting to know that for years. Sure. I'll just say it again. I subscribe back in October when they first launched and I've never regretted it. Every time I get a package from them, I'm like, this is amazing. You know what's more amazing in February on my birthday? I'm going to get a crondis and I'm excited about that. Sure. That's coming. So I say all that to say, if you all haven't checked out the Stormringer subscription, it's a super interesting product. And if you're looking for models to paint, if you're looking to fill out some Armies Storm, it has Stormcast and it has Warclans as the primary, but I paid the three extra bucks a month to get the premium subscription. I'm going to get crondis. I'm going to get another mall crusher. I'm going to get like some more KO, which I don't need, but I'm excited about some more trolls, some Trogoths. It's going to be, it's fantastic. Like folks, if you seriously, if you haven't checked out the subscription, check it out. It's amazing. You sense a really good deal too, like in terms of it ends up being about 52% retail, I think 52 to 55% retail, something like that. Yeah. Now, like I don't need the GW paints, right? But I let my kids paint, so it's great. You know, it goes in their painting bucket. Sure. Yeah. It's like it's, it's a pretty good deal for what it is. And again, like I originally did it for the models, but the actual like magazine is like super interesting. There's like a lower section in every book and then there's like a how to paint for those that are like getting into the hobby, which is pretty sweet. Like it's a, it's way more in-depth tutorial than most GW has ever done. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So anyways, it's, it's a neat product. So for those, and you can still get the subscription. And again, I'm not, there's no, I'm not getting any kickback. The show's not getting any kickback for this. Yeah. Like it's, it's just because I simply love the product. Nice. Yeah. And there's a bunch of great, sure it ends up in the description. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a bunch of terrain that comes in, in some of the issues as well. Yep. Just real quick, a little while back, somebody had said Vince's Tomb Kings hate continues. Listen, listen, listen here. Okay. Who's, I remember who said it. Somebody said it. One, you're not wrong. And it's good for you to call me to the carpet on that one. Two, I love Tomb Kings. I have so many Tomb Kings. I have a huge Tomb King army. Okay. Huge. And it's because I love them so much that I expect such quality. And when I don't see it, I'm going to call it out. That's number one. So I should be more clear. It doesn't live up to my expectations of what this thing could be. Dumb Crocodragon just does not do it for me. I'm sorry. So there we go. But new Tomb King on foot, guys. Fine. He looks cool. Okay. For myself, my pick of the week, I'm going to direct everybody to the most recent episode of Tup, trapped under plastic. The link is down in the description. It's all about VinciCon. And the reason to get together we had here at the beginning of December with the boys when they came up and the projects and stuff that we worked on. So it's great. John kind of recounts it from his point of view. Some fun stuff that happened. So check it out. It's a good time. All right. With that, gentlemen, let's turn to some hobby time. All right. Tyler, how goes the planning for the new year? It's almost the new year. Yeah. Yeah, I've gotten sidetracked. I've been doing some terrain painting still. So working on my dry brushing. It's coming along. Yeah. It is good enough. It's actually better than good enough. I'm pretty excited about how it's coming together. So I'll have some photos at some point once I get some fully, fully finished. And let's see what else is going on. I've been playing a bunch of Soul Blight. Tom, you and I have apparently been on the Soul Blight train. I think you got some games in too. Yeah, I've swapped over. I'm over on the FEC train now. That's great. I realized that what I wanted to do with Soul Blight is not possible. And so I'm on the delusional course now. You had an interesting, yeah, we hadn't talked about it, but you had an interesting alpha list plan. Yeah, which is fine. I would rather be more reliable and FEC can do that. So. Oh yeah. So yeah, very nice. So Soul Blight's been a lot of fun. I did want to share, we're doing a lot of show and tell tonight. My fam surprised me with an amazing gift, feeding into my love of accessories. And so they got me, guys, this outstanding measurement set. You can see it here. Yeah, I've been looking at that one for a while. Yep. So apparently this is on Etsy, came from the UK, tabletop upgrades, something. Yeah, guys, this thing's amazing. Well, those are magnetized. Those are like magnetized. It's magnetized into there. Yeah, and they pop right out. It's a trade and all the measurement stuff pops right out. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, they're all acrylic. Yeah, I was looking at it. I was looking. Yeah. I got these underneath. Yeah, there's a little indention where you can just pop it out. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. That is super cool. So it's got a cover. Yeah. Anyway, had to show that. No, that's super neat. You should absolutely send me a link for that or something so I can post it down there after the show because that's super cool. I had no idea that even existed and that's awesome. What a neat product. I like the measuring that it has, this little storage holder thing too and they all, everything has a little spot. I like things that are well organized where everything has a spot. Absolutely. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, hit me with the link after the show. I'll drop it in. I'll drop in the show. That's everybody. All right, for me, I am as well painting some FEC. So I painted this little guy right here. Got my new Varvulf painted. He was actually super fun. This guy rules. He's not too complicated at all, but he's a very expressive model. Yeah, I love this guy. This dude just nailed it. There you go. See him a little better. There he is. So he's fine and he's good to go. All done with him. And then I'm also painting a bunch of these skeletons that came out in 2003. I just suddenly got the urge to paint a bunch of these skeletons. Yeah, these very old already existing skeletons that I absolutely already had in my collection. They're just existing skeletons that came out back then. Yeah. Just like you had your 18 or however many Pegasus Knights. Yeah. Just some old stock. I had a bunch of skeletons sitting around and thought to myself, I should paint a bunch of these. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. So all right. So that's been my hobby time. That literally went right up to the show. I was getting those guys finished. So like, basically, I clicked over here and was behind getting everything set up. All right. So with that, do I get to talk about my hobby time? Oh yeah, go. Sorry. I'm sorry. I apologize, Tom. Go ahead. I'm so sorry, Tom. You go right. Thanks, Vince. Well, you were you talked earlier and mentioned something about FEC and that got me confused because you interrupted Tyler's. I did. I just didn't talk about the hundreds of models I'm putting. Please go. So we want to hear about it. Yeah. So, you know, I'm building models. No paint. No paint is going on any models yet, but I'm building models and it's great. I love the FEC models. They're delightful and yeah, you're right, Vince. They are wonderfully beautiful models. Some of them are a pain to put together. None of the thing in the FEC box was really difficult, but like I was doing the Herald from like Jerrion's. Yeah. That Herald was the Mariscroll was the worst. Like it was if you've never put that together. My wife was like working on one and she's like, I can't do this. She's built hundreds of models at this point and she's like, I can't do this one. It doesn't work. Sure. Yeah. I like legitimately that there's a bunch of them that are strange. Like the new Vargolf, of course, is weird in how he goes together, but it's just weird. It's not actually hard. Like most of them, if you just literally go in order on the sprue, like find piece one, attach it to piece two, find piece three, attach it to that. Find piece four. Like they're mostly built now. So they literally go in order on the sprue. Right? Like part one and part two go together then with part three, then four, then five, then six, then seven, then you're done. Right? So you can, like some of them are a little weird in how they fit, but they're actually just very straightforward and it's like one goes two, goes three, goes four. Done. So yeah, I hear that. I feel that. All right. Very good. Excellent. Okay, now. Sorry, Tom. Now, with that being said, let's turn over to our main topic for tonight. Main topic time 2024 hopes and predictions. Okay. But before that, I'm going to surprise these guys. There's a little thing that I didn't warn them about, but we're going to do it now. We're going to put them on the spot. Here we go. Here we are. Here we are. Boop overview. Then the surprise. We're going to look forward to 2024 and make some educated guesses. We're going to divide our guesses gentlemen into three types. Everything has to be one of these three types. It's either a sure thing, 50-50 or Hopium. Okay? When you're making a guess, because this is the internet, there's no room for nuance. So either it's a sure thing or it's just guaranteed 50-50, which is what you say when you don't really know. And then Hopium, when it's just pure chance, you're just, you're tinfoil hat and you're shooting your shot out and you're pointing out into left field. Okay? Yep. All right. Sure thing, 50-50, Hopium. Those are the dividing lines. Okay. And then 2024 promises to be a very big year for fantasy-based warfare. I mean, really it will, because we're going to get like, we know the old world's coming and realistically, we know there's going to be an AOS 4.0. So this is our year folks. Like fantasy, this is the year of fantasy. I really hope we get some, I really hope we get some, this is the year where we could really see some exciting things. So, okay. Now, before we begin that, we're going to do a quick 2023 look back. And here's how we're going to do that. You're ready? We're each going to say the best thing and the worst thing in AOS 2023. So you have to pick a best thing in AOS 2023 and a worst thing in AOS 2023. Okay. We're going to stick to products here. Okay. So don't name like an event or something like that. That might very well be true, but we're going to talk about a product. What was the best product in your mind? What was the worst product in your mind? Okay. All right. Have you gotten your items gentlemen? Yep. Done. Okay. Tom, you were quick off the stick. Start us out. Do I start with best or worst? Whatever. You can do both. Just, you're both. Okay. Best, let's do worst. Worst, general handbooks. Okay. Okay. Best, war cry boxes. Okay. All right. You want to unpack that for me a little? Yeah. One, the fact that I have to say general handbooks plural, let's start there. Because it like again, we did this in the review of like the thank you or jenki. Like I gave a very full description for why I'm so frustrated with the general handbooks that dropped this year. It feels like they failed on most levels. There were some good scenarios, right? But other than that, it feels like a lot of the, that the general handbooks are just still way too heavy design wise. So that's why it's bad. Good. The war cry, like war cry, in my opinion, is at its best when it has been the big boxes of terrain and two army, like every single time. For me, like that's what, like it grips me every single box that released this year I purchased. Like I purchased very little models this year. But when I started purchasing, I went back and bought every single one of those terrain plus troop boxes. One, because the models were just the best. Like if you look in every single release, I don't know of almost a single model set that isn't better than it, than the most of the models in its actual model line. So for example, like if you look at Beast Flayers, look at Beast Flayers compared to how all of FEC was when that box dropped. It was the best models in that entire line. The same, I would argue, is true of the vampires, the foot vampires in the hunt, the blood hunt. The same with the claws of Karnak, just all the way down the line. The skinky chameleon skinks were better than all the rest of the, like I would argue any of the other models in that whole line came with little baby pterodactyls and a bunch of just beautiful sculpts of skinks. Just every, like almost at every point, what came out of those boxes, the fire slayers, the fire slayer models that came out of that box was simply better than all of the models in the fire slayer one. Like it just, it is greatness upon greatness that we're getting the war cry units. And actually, some of them are actually becoming competitive now. Some of them are actually good units. They're not just throw away forgettable, you know, forgettable war. Perfect. Tyler, you're best, you're worst. Yeah, I had a quick question on the, on that. Do you guys have any sense of whether there's a meaningful pattern or correlation between war cry releases as a hails of future refreshes or expansions or priority new battle tomes with a slight expansion or whatever? Like any, does it mean any real correlation? I think what happened is, is I think that the sculptors went wild. And when they walked through the design room, you know, when they walked through the sculpting room, they said that, that, that, that, that send into production and we're gonna, and we'll put it in work, honestly. And so then whenever the books get released, right, that stuff could just get slumped into the actual main product. Yeah. I think that that's what you're seeing. And actually as an aside, what I would actually maybe argue that we're seeing is we're seeing war cry as, as the venue of updating units with new units in AOS. And so rather than new books coming with like a foot hero in a new box, you're just getting like heroes with the book launches and then the units that would be in those book launches are getting pushed through war cry first and then into the new books. Yeah. Like your gorgers or whatever. Sure. Yep. Yep. Yep. Very interesting. New terrain units. Like that's true of both the, both the seraphon and the ogre armies. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Okay. So I've got a death themed best and worst. So worst, pre-fleshed accords, pre-fleshed accords death, OBR. I'm, I'm, I'm cheating a little bit because that's what I do on the show. Complete disaster. OBR, sole blight, those battle tomes, absolute hot mess, the both of them, when they came out to me, that was the worst of the year. That was like the culmination of one of the most jank years that we've had in the eight years of AOS's history with these battle tomes. They're in a better place now, thankfully. And then the best, I love this fleshed accords book as we just went over recently and the models, the box, that's great. Yeah. There's a couple of potential concerns, things, but they're easily addressed if needed as we discussed as well. So yeah, I think the fleshed accords battle tone is, is pretty amazing. Really excited for it. Tenacality, slaves was also incredible. That was more, that was like split and half, right? That was like 2022 and 2023. Yeah. Obviously, slaves was incredible. Okay. Best for me, easy. It's big pig and the iron jaws expansion, even though in the game, the model rules are underwhelming. I couldn't be more thrilled that we got the thing finally after so many years of wanting it. And we didn't just get one version of it, we got three versions of it, which is awesome. So like there's actually lots of different ways, lots of different reasons to engage with big pig and just the iron jaws small refresh and expansion in general was something much needed to a wonderful, beautiful, very AOS line. So, but big pig is the headliner there. If you made me pick an absolute best, I'd pick him without hesitation. It's just wonderful to see something that the entire community has wanted for so long. My community of iron jaws players, at least I'll say, actually get manifest and like, yes, hey, this thing is here, right? There it is. Cool. We got it. Ladies and gentlemen, we got them. And so that's easily the best for me. The worst, well, since you said Soul Blight, that's fine. I'll leave that to the side because I do think that was the worst of the year. I just think it was the most off kilter book, but I'll pick the one I wanted to pick in my heart anyways, since you already got it out there, which is the new Heed Knights of Slenesh book. The worst. And that was this year. Somehow that's true. It feels like we've labored under this Sisyphean stone for all of my life. I don't remember a time before it anymore. And I hate it. I hate it from top to bottom. It's the worst. It's, as far as like actual play experience goes, it's truly the worst time I've had all year. And nothing made me want to quit an army that I've loved for 20 years more than that book. I've never had a book be that divergent from anything I would like to do with the army than that book. It was so wildly off kilter. So there you go. That's my best and worst. So I guess for one of my armies, it was a great, it was the best of times. For a different one of my armies, it was the worst of times. Indeed. I've played against a full army of pigs about a month ago and yeah, can confirm they need to work on momentum. Sure. Just needs a little tweaking. Little tweaking. Yeah. Doesn't quite get there. Doesn't quite get there. That's all right. That's all right. Okay. I'm still glad we have the model because now that the model exists, the model exists. We can always get some new rules in the future and that's fine. Right. Okay. I almost feel the exact opposite about Slenesh, by the way, just on that. I'm like, man, I hate that they made so many dumb archery units because now we're going to be compelled to have dumb archery units be a focus in every book going forward. Right. So like sometimes it's a curse to get new models. Take them back. I don't want them. Okay. All right. Now let's turn our gaze forward and look into 2024, the year to come and let's talk about the major things we see going on. The very first slide, I've got it here. That's right. You remember this picture. You know this picture. You love this picture. It was the herald of what was to be a new age when we saw this picture of Lord Vandus Hammerhand and the prosecutors and the liberators when we were all like, what is this? I saw this for the first time sitting at Hoffbrough House in Kentucky, coming down to Tom's house to play a D&D marathon myself and a couple of people. We were there and I was looking at my phone. That was the last one. That was the last one that was at my house. Yeah, there you go. Almost a decade ago. And I saw this picture and I was like, whoa, the world is changing. Like this is something different. Okay. And you know, new editions have rolled on as they do every three years. We've seen this pattern in both things. We know it's what they're going to do. So we assume, so sure thing, right? Let's just put that prediction out there. Sure thing, we're going to get an AOS for this year, right? Because not because they care about three years, but because shareholder value says we're going to get a new edition. Okay. Have to appease Milton Friedman, Vince. Absolutely. Hey, thanks, AVS. I appreciate you dropping by to drop a like. Everyone else be cool like AVS and hit like or something like that. Okay. By the way, as we're going through this, I want to know your predictions as well. So let's just talk, we're going to just assume for this, this slide that the new edition is happening. Okay. So what are our predictions for AOS 4.0? That's what we're going to go for here. They've gotten so tight with the additions that now the game isn't predicting whether or not we get a new edition. The game is predicting what's in the new edition. Okay. I will start while you guys think. Okay. I am going to boldly put a flag down and say, sure thing, scaven in the launch box. There we go. I've planted the flag. We've been calling that for years, like the last 18 months. You can't say that. I've been living there for a while. I'm starting with one prediction, Tom. We're all, we can make multiple. Okay. I'm giving, this is me buying you guys time to think. I'm being nice. Sure. I'll, I'll one up you. I think it's going to be predominantly Eshin in the box. Okay. Okay. Right on. Right on. Good. Okay. What are you, what are you, what are you labeling that one? You calling that sure thing as well? Yeah. Okay. Because that's what sells. Ninja rats. Ninja rats. It's certainly, it certainly do sell. Yes. Okay. Very good. Baren Lloyd said for years dot, dot, dot 18 months. Yeah, exactly. No, it's, you're absolutely right. Okay. What else we got? What do we want to see? What do we say? What do we hope? What do we dream? What do we predict? It obviously we have reason to think that we're going to get some stormcast, some old stormcast models will get refreshed into Thunderstrike armor. We have the thing with realms of run, the RTS video game. We have Ionis and so on, right? So maybe on the flip side, some of those models might go away entirely, might go to legends, I wonder. Some of those original 2015, 20, yeah, 2015 stormcast models. Sure. Do you think we'll get Thunderstrike liberators? Yeah. Yeah. I just don't know that they're actually going to refresh everything. Like I wonder, so what made me think of this is my ongoing conspiracy around judicators at 200 points. And the travesty and the lack of love for these lowly judicators that don't do anything in the game with the bows. Yeah. The crossbows can do some work that I think they're going to get axed. And it's just anyway. Well, we have stormcast with bows, right? We got vigilors. We have vigilors. We got vigilors. Why do we need them? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have long strikes. You know, if you want crossbows. Yeah. So yeah, my precious judicators are just going to go bye-bye entirely. Okay. They're already dead vents. Let's just confirm it. Just kill it. Stop. He's already dead. Yeah. Okay. So we call the range. We redesign what remains into Thunderstrike armor. Is that the prediction? More or less. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so would this include keeping units but redesigning the kits so that they're like multi, like multi kits? So like I can imagine a world where like if they decide to keep liberators and judicators, they just move it so that they're the same core model with alternative build. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. That'd be nice. Yeah. That'd be interesting. Yeah. I mean, they already wore to some degree. Like I built all my judicators originally out of liberator bodies. Yeah. I just wore the legs. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. We got bankers and and predictors, you know, that's all. And we have castigators for Crossbow. We also have castigators for Crossbow. Right. Just so many. Just so many. God in heaven. There's too many duplicates in that range. Okay. Yeah. Culling definitely feels in order. So we're calling for a culling. Okay. Yeah. Trim that line down. Okay. Very good. Could the great fracturing happen? No. You know, like some? No. No. I just know there's no setup for it. No, like not a like splitting like a but I just wonder like we've seen kind of glimpses over the years of like certain models being like we've seen again we saw the chapters like this is a call out back in like second edition that I suggested going to third edition we might get the split right of like distinct army books for the the the various storm hosts or whatever. Like I just wonder what if they push certain product lines into certain like certain storm cast units into certain product like certain storm hosts or whatever. I don't think so and I'll tell you why because the money's not there. Okay. It's that simple. Like storm cast is a decently popular army. Okay. Generally has a good meta representation. One of the higher meta representations right but in the end it's just another army in the mix. Like it's high meta like at one point I think the highest it ever peaked in the history of AOS was about 12% of the meta some years back and second edition. Yeah. And now it's basically written for more or less years around the same place between five and six percent. You know if you hold a tournament no matter what the state of storm cast as far as its win rate or its performance the meta you will get a couple storm cast players showing up right especially if you live anywhere near Matthew Swinney for example. Sure. But we have so many storm cast players Missouri. Yeah. I would put us up as having the most in any ever some reason in any state in this country it's wild. But that percentage is nothing and I really cannot emphasize this enough. Nothing compared to space marine representation. Okay. Like space marines are the they're not they're like the plurality of armies in 40 K with a huge lead. Okay. They look like the they look like the Republican primary field right now basically and as far as like how how the percentages are stacked out. Okay. And it's because like storm cast are just like so indelibly 40 K and have sent and most 40 K players like have us have a space brains. You mean space brains are in doubt. You said storm. Yeah. Sorry. Space brains are indelibly 40 K. I apologize. And like they they just have like you know if you play 40 K you probably have a space marine army. I have a space marine army Tom. I have a fully painted space marine army. Okay. I played it like once in in the newest edition. Right. It's wild how many people own and collect space marines. Like they're they're an order of magnitude bigger. It's my point. So they can afford to split off and have other books and stuff like that. Like they have the market to support that storm cast just doesn't. It's just another army in the end. It may be the flagship faction of the game. It may go on like the logos and have a statue out front. But it does not have the the player base representation. That's it. What do we want to see mechanically? Like I mean a lot of people were saying the half inch of a half inch thing right or the Battle Brothers thing basically coming back and being in the rules. I assume we're going to see that just built in. Let me ask you the question. Will fourth edition finally be the death of the range on weapons or are we going to still keep a mixed profile? I think we all agree we'll probably see the fight in two ranks basically for lack of a better term. Okay. Are we going to see them still retain weapon ranges or will they just kill that completely? I think they'll probably keep it. I'm not even sure I would personally want them to get rid of it. I suspect it would improve the quality of the game. Like in my mind one of the principles here as we've long discussed is okay let's think about what can we cut to reduce time in this game. How can we get back to 230 with tournament games for example and just make this more accessible for casual players? So that would be on my list of things that could be cut right out the gate right out the gate. But what about the fire slayer hand axes? Are they table wide? What do you mean? We're not talking weapon range on on ranged weapons Tom. We're talking about melee range. Yeah. I real quick Tom I do love obviously I love the you know the gameplay nuance of ranges right it makes it's interesting you know screening and you can do various tricks and there's depth there that's intriguing right to the competitive players. It's just yeah anyway. So then let me ask this yeah let's say that we do kill let's say that we do kill weapon ranges yeah melee. Sure yeah how do you resolve is it um if you're within three inches you can attack? No it'd be the standard thing like it was it's like you either do it there's a couple different ways it could work but like here's a simple here's a simple potential you're within half an inch of an enemy or an inch of an enemy and then you're within a half an inch of somebody within a half an inch or an inch of an enemy that's it. So what you're proposing is all of the ability that stop piling become infinitely worse? Well first of all good um well no what I'm saying is I mean like I haven't talked about how much I'd love to make piling simpler and kill the crap out of that. No you're here you are mishearing me. When I say worse I'm not saying better for the game I'm saying worse for the game. Why? Because if if everything moves to a half inch weapon range that like any if you have any way to stop piling it restricts low. It could just be everybody's an inch or a half inch or somebody within an inch. That all that's fine that's all still worse than having a three inch range even when you can't pile and being able to attack with your primary like basically no one has a three inch range so what are we talking about other than single models? Well I'm talking about like monsters. I'm talking about like monster weapon ranges. Yeah okay so what? So monsters fight. Monsters are going to be in contact with the thing they're fighting. Not if they can't pile if they're within three inches and can't pile. They're like the concern here would be big boys right? Right. You're saying like what they get trapped somewhere stuck on something and can't actually pile in at your point? They get stuck on something. They get behind any any unit that's not their unit but three inches of an enemy. Like any unit that's like they can't reach over the top anymore at your point. They can't reach over the top anymore right or or abilities that shut down piling which they're it's not just one or two. There are one or two that are egregious but there are many in the map that are out there. Like legitimately I would love it if here's how I'd rank this. I don't think they'll get rid of weapon get rid of weapon ranges and let me tell you why. The sheer number of scrolls it would require them to update and reformat. Sure yeah that's it. The actual man hours. I literally think that's why it doesn't go away. Okay. Should it? Yeah probably and then by the way on those big monsters you just write back into them that they that they have a three inch threat range or something on the few big monsters you need to or you make it a function of the monster type right that monsters themselves have it or whatever. What I'm suggesting is is like I think it's a design trap because of all of not only the obvious primary consequences of a change like that but the secondary and tertiary it'll take it'll take 18 months to work that out in the system balance. I mean or Tom or they'll just do it. Right sure to work out the balance you mean like when coherency randomly changed and then a bunch of units became utter garbage they really put a lot of work into figuring out the balance of that didn't they? No they just changed it and then a bunch of units went in the bin. Right and that's then that's what I'm saying is that the whole meta like the whole thing like y'all suffer for 18 months until that works itself out. That's what I'm suggesting. I one I don't think it would be as big a deal as you're saying is my honest answer. I think in the vast majority of combats the vast majority of combats vast vast Duncan Idaho vast okay it just doesn't matter you go up your models go in and attack the monster the monster's fighting you back that's how it works right that's most people's experience with the game in angle shooting is where it ends up becoming a problem most of the time. Okay now that being said I really don't think they'll kill weapon range because as I said because of the cheer just man hours they'd have to put into it but I do think we'll get the rule of like I think it'll be weapon range or you fight within you fight within within the range and the weapons through the weapon range stays there as a backstop that's it yeah okay so to get out some of the ones that I mean we've hit before oh by the way what are we putting the weapon range change at I'm going to put it at 50 50 I'm saying it's a 50 50 yeah I think it's hope I think it's hope I cannot imagine them changing the weapon because of all the secondary there'd be lots on yeah there'd be like like from just from a balance standpoint and just because then if we do that you're talking about a ravening hordes entire product like update of everything in order to update all scrolls perfect next question you've just you trip to the next question do the books carry over or do we do we do we index at fourth edition this would be the time we've gone three editions yeah time to index every three editions you index this is the rules this is the rule I'm pretty sure we're gonna get indexed there's no way there's no way I discuss gentlemen I mean if 40k just got it and yeah eight nine tenth that was their third yes I might as I I say I I don't know if it's I mean who knows I worried that it's more likely to be a negative at least in the near term I mean but yeah I don't know I mean the t of the r is I think it's probably gonna happen do you know how many war scrolls are in the game it's a tough man I know no let me start again do you know how many war scrolls are in the stormcast book sure 79 uh yep close enough and how many and how many battle tomes do we have 24 I think 24 yeah yep they don't all have 79 scrolls I understand that but we have well over a thousand war scrolls yes I've said it's a major hurdle your point it would make life easier if they just bend the whole thing off and indexed it right like start from scratch I don't think so I think the amount of work that you're suggesting if they're going to index would be it's enormous and it would like I I think that they don't have the bandwidth when we see the problems that we see on like rollouts and stuff like that I don't think that they have the bandwidth to roll it out maybe one thing in your favorite one thing what would put me a foot in your camp is that I think it's fair to say 40k ninth edition had a lot more issues than a os third edition no doubt like right so just the conclusion being that we don't necessarily need to go in and get this thing and make substantial changes blah blah blah right right we need to remove some things streamline some things but yeah so that would certainly like that through that lens I could have a foot in your camp on that okay ultimately historically every three editions is when we went to indexes and sort of bend everything and started over right yeah I think what the real answer to that question is is not is is not really uh it can't be answering itself it's how much do they want to mess with the core rules of the game it's how much do they feel the need to do the every three edition shuffle that we've historically done in warhammer where every basically fourth edition was a was a massive change right and like basically every sort of 10 year period you you get this big change and that's when this one's two right um this will be like the nine year mark so we're we're there and so it's the question of do they feel it's worth it do they do they change enough of the core rules that they're like well we've none of the old books work so we've got to do it we're under the gun right or do they try to go no continue living edition we'll keep hopping this and keep going and and do the battle tome shuffle again right and we'll go fourth edition and we'll we'll release the 24 battle tomes all over again what i'll say is this if they are it depends the real question then is is how much of the core game is changing yeah that's what i'm saying like if they're willing to be been like battle tactics and stuff like that right if they're willing to have been all that moving into the new edition then i could see it happening i also don't think that they they're gonna do that like you could imagine lots of it it doesn't even necessarily need to be anything large you could imagine it just being death by a thousand cuts what i mean there is imagine that let's let me just walk you through a sequence here tom okay let's say the spell casting rules change in in some way maybe it's a minor way maybe it's not okay but maybe they they change in some way uh and then the spell casting tab briefcase i i don't know sure like okay that's sure that's probably bigger than what i was thinking but let's say yes okay sure um but you could you could also just have spells move into a more keyworded type thing where they have certain interactions or stuff like that right one of the great problems we've always had with spells is they they don't have a layer down they've the spells and warhammer have always been in aos at least sorry have been missing what uh dnd long ago figured out is that other typographies assist then when you need to create more rules later what i mean by that is dnd from the earliest periods had evocation versus abjuration versus illusion right and so you could create things and characters and and stuff like that that were good with that particular type of thing but not as good with other things right and when you're rolling a 2d6 magic system one of the big big big problems is that we're not dealing with a typography spells or spells or spells right other than endless spells which occupy their own spells that summon endless spells are there only the only thing that's different so like creating a typography where you could say this wizard has plus one to cast this type of spells would actually open up a new significant space because right now their only choice is plus one to cast and that's such a massive bonus right because then it goes out and applies to everything ever they ever print right they sometimes they've they can construe it tightly and say like everything in this lore that's really the most control they have right now right so anyways okay but they changed that a little heroic actions let's say they rewrite those they all heroic actions are different now they're smart you roll the dice first and they all work on a set dice roll and then have some bonus like we've proposed let's say they change battle tactics in some decently significant way but they're still around as a secondary objective right let's say they go in and rewrite the enhancements section completely because it's trash and nobody knows with how the heck to use it when they first start let's say they go in and change monsters rampages some let's say we have the battle brothers thing put automatically into combat okay whatever right you we could just describe our movement from second to third edition yeah it's my my point is you could get enough of those changes that now the old books get really weird and they do have to go an index it becomes necessary because not because we made any single huge change but because we made enough small ones and I guess what I would say is that everything that you just described was literally the move from second to third and potentially and if that and if that didn't constitute a need for a ravining hordes update right I don't know what like I like to me they would have to they would have to change core mechanics yeah okay to to really to really constitute a need I don't know man the reason I say is because like in second edition a lot of the stuff just worked whereas like it was just base books or and we didn't even have all the books whereas I mean we're still running on first books for god's aches for a while we were literally like are the only command abilities that were out there were the core command ability yeah yeah everybody did every turn whereas now they've integrated so much of this crap into everybody's individual books like everybody's third edition books has like unique heroic actions and monster spam pages and you know like my point is you could change less and have the impact be greater than what you're describing because that stuff didn't exist in second edition tomes or first edition tomes so when they suddenly introduced new stuff and piled it on top didn't matter because there was nothing there to change if you're going to trim back and not add then the books become weird sure that's the only point okay uh all right I'd say if you're if I'm gonna put a bet on it I'd honestly think it's I don't know man I'd probably go 50 50 I'd come down right in the middle I could see it being an index thing by the by I'm not even sure I'd hate it if books going forward we're like some amalgam of 40k and what we saw in the old world where it's like here's a good guy book here's a bad guy book or here's a here's a chaos book here's a destruction book here's a death book here's a uh destruction book whoever I forgot I don't know whatever it is I mean they did they did that when we moved in AOS where you basically had the four grand alliance times I understand and then but instead use what you learned in dawn bringers and armies of renown and print individual tomes but they just give specialized armies in some way they completely replace all right so some combination of like 40k and what they were talking about with the old world but anyways neither here nor there like the base conception exists in this in this single tone go ahead backing up backing up guys I'm a little unclear on where you two stand on the current states of the AOS core rules how too complicated but but mostly good okay and then tom uh I would say too complicated I'm more new hmm and why are you one in particular makes you more neutral I like I I truly I truly feel that battle tactics are a pox on all things that are fun about this like I think that the the way that battle tactics have been integrated into the larger competitive scene as well as the way that they have um been uh like not only the world that we live in not only are they now being introduced in books they're being added in uh updates like war scroll update stuff right in order to balance army factions and think about that like the competitive performance the way that they're fixing some armies is giving them easier battle tactics so that they can auto they can auto get tournament points yeah sure like to me like that is poison I agree like that is that is like and so that entire so inside baseball it does not materially change the experience of playing the army correct all of that just needs to be jettison straight out the window like all of that is death but but here's the deal I think you can get rid of all that and still keep maintain a very core very playable game there are events that do that and and so but I think the experience as it is now like scenarios don't matter what matters is can you get all five yeah hold on let me clarify something because it's being discussed in the comments yeah when I'm saying these grand alliance books what I don't mean like just everything soup that's not what I'm describing nor do I think they'll bring back grand alliance stuff other than in sort of a narrative capacity what I'm describing is more like what you saw with ravining hordes and forces of fantasy or whatever in the old world stuff where instead of putting out an individual battle tone for every army the addition launches and you get four books one for each grand alliance and in that book is the individual army rules for the standard version of that army okay the simplified standard version of that army you get a instruction book that has an iron jaws rules it has this is the iron jaw section you open to the iron jaw section it has iron jaws points iron jaws scrolls iron jaws abilities that allegiance abilities yeah and like a one page description of what this faction is and then you go change the page and you hit gloom fight gets and this is what the glooms fight gets are and it's the entire core of what it takes to play that army in the game um in 20 pages or 30 pages or whatever and you basically have an entire grand alliance in a single book for and then from that point on you don't update the core you only update like regimen to renown or armies of renown style updates correct you replace right so like here's the base here's the function you can stop here forever and be done yeah but then here we're going to publish this thing the the granditomi expandomatica okay of stormcast and in it it has armies of renown that basically you can say okay throw out you don't use those rules at all you only use what's in here armies of renown yeah bring your stuff i think they're gonna make a lot less money like i'd be very interested to see what the like the economics are because what it's what it says is you don't have 24 guaranteed releases set out just updating battle times that is lying through math you need to think that thought through again you need to step back and really think that through what you just said okay okay how many people buy all 24 books uh anybody a portion a small portion of the player base very small vanishingly small five percent five percent no way you don't think so freaking way no freaking way one in 20 players has all every buys every battle tone not even a chance no way nope the problem has always classically been when they make these individual battle tomes that they're selling that battle to them to four to five percent of the audience that's always been the problem this adds four but like everybody who you've already gotten the tank who loves that army is going to buy the thing anyways when you do your expansion book this gives you four more tomes that has a lot more popularity because you've crushed all of those percentages together so now if you play any of the death armies you buy this book and more people will buy four since it's only four and not 24 you lower the barrier to owning the rules to all armies when you make it four books and you've still got them in the tank for there you would sell more books in the way i'm describing not less yeah i'm not sure about that i mean i could math it out pretty easy it's not a hard business case like right now the the way these tomes are released is so singular okay bunch of people come and watch the show like all every time we do a battle tone review show it's always our most popular shows right because everybody wants to know right but most of those people aren't going to buy a book if you're not in the tank for that army you're just going to read it on wapedia or whatever why would you go buy the book for not your army unless you're like a tournament grinder and even then you probably just read it on wapedia like it is collectors that buy every book and that is a vanishingly small percentage book collectors in this case you start with four main books that you can charge a premium for i would add okay and every one of those four books you're gonna get you've now crunched together the percentage so at minimum all of your other players come together and they buy that so you've turned four percent into 20 percent or whatever okay but you also will get people upscaling because they'll be split across some of the books with their couple armies and so they'll buy more of them as time goes on and you release your supplementary expandopedias you'd actually like the people who were really in the tank for the army who right now would buy the battle tone will still go buy this thing too nothing changed but now you got them to buy two books for their one army not one before you were selling that person one book over the course the addition now you're selling them too it's that easy what i am describing would be a better experience for everyone and to make them more money that's it now i don't know if they'll have the the business savvy to actually make a product line that would work like this but hey who knows all right let's keep going what else new addition wise what else what else haven't we mentioned new addition i do think we will see a change to battle tactics i doubt they're going away yeah yeah tom i doubt they're going to go away which i mean personally i would like to see the system maintain a secondary system it needs to be better implemented than what we have currently what we've had isis i think it would be a better world to live in if we have our casual you know sort of the general audience version of the game without battle tactics as we've discussed a lot and then you have our annual ghp and that has an annual set of battle tactics and then you have maybe each battle plan with x number of battle tactics built in and that's it and then that's all that we use we don't have battle tom battle tactics i think that would be a better world more constrained you know and the options etc but yeah i have a hard time seeing that they're going to do away with battle tactics entirely yeah i don't know i think they could change it in 50 ways that would be better than than what it is i i agree with you i'd like to see more stuff baked into the battle plans um like there's there's 10 good ways you could do it that aren't that aren't like tom's describing and and frankly i agree with you to me i'd call it a i'd call it a sure thing we're gonna see some kind of change to it but that might be just me pushing it up over 50 50 out of pure hope so yeah this this probably not the time to do it but yeah i would be curious tom to talk more sometime about why i mean i'd actually never heard you quite go this far or at least i don't remember you going this far where you essentially are saying you think a secondary system is poison what i'm hearing is a secondary system is poisoned for the game is that what you're saying a universal secondary system is poison because it's what actually drives the performance not the primary system i would argue that i think the the better design is uh is individual secondaries per like per like you write a scenario and there are associated secondaries with that scenario yeah yeah um because like i because then like it yeah um yeah like just real quick here like the joe mcgill said the biggest change to secondary objectives has to be removing the necessity to score them in all five rounds or you lose right i think that's kind of what you're point we are one of the things you're pushing on there strongly tom right like you could imagine the system changing to be where like there's eight universals at the start of each game you pick three of them secretly and over the course of the game you have to accomplish all three of those right you could even to potentially do two in one round or something like that right but if you get your three get your three but you have five rounds to do the three of them they can be done simultaneously they can be done separately you can skip around that kind of thing it would loosen it but still allow it to be there those kinds of things you could imagine i'm not saying that's a perfect system i'm saying that is more of a move where it doesn't become like oops i dropped one i lose right yeah that's that's very good point yeah because i mean that the real meta right now is playing playing battle tactics and if you can play all your battle tactics you can reliably uh perform in the meta like you can reliably perform and win events like that's that's the law in the short of it like i hate when i begin dreaming up lists and then everybody's like well why haven't you included a surf unit or whatever you know like i'm thinking about fbc in order for your battle tactics and so at that point like battle tactics drive list composition yeah you're talking about how you can we can make lists full of whatever you want it's like yeah but those lists very easily become trash because they can't actually play the real game that's going on right because the real game is the battle tactic game not the warhammer game with scenarios that i thought we were correct yeah firstly would just take that one level higher you're playing the game to 28 yeah you're not playing the killing game necessarily there's a lot playing the game to 28 you're playing the game to 28 is i think is primary is still relevant but yeah but every single point matters particularly on against good players these games yeah like if you i was following the championships and so many of those games were like one point games and you're like yeah very very very tight right with the scoring system that we have so anyhow yeah uh what else uh terrain that's a big one we've emphasized a lot a real terrain system i have to believe come on fourth edition sure thing get it in there yeah it has to be i would also say my other sure thing for for new edition is um um uh we will see a better uh on ramp system for new players uh i hope so yeah the equivalent of the combat patrol over whatever in 40k like i there is no universe where they didn't look at what 40k did and go well we don't we have nothing to do here we're good they absolutely have to know that uh that they have a real problem right now with the addition and like actually getting new players in the game yeah like it's so clear sickness maxima says nope no real terrain system just a return of battle tome chaos dread hold yes the real champion we've all been waiting for okay man those things are gonna be worth money in the future they're gonna be so rare sure sure uh okay i think we've plumbed the new addition to to the bottom of this well um uh cj said will it be will it be vanguard or will they re rebox i don't know man probably vanguard type of thing vanguard but but you know who knows it that feels like what they've been aiming at for a while although that though they may still rebox some of them on top of that as they like want to rebalance things or whatever so all right we ready to keep going next one so i did uh oh i'm gonna left turn you all that's right you didn't think that we were gonna talk about this but we are the new old world that's right we're gonna do old world predictions you ready that's here we go folks you thought it wasn't gonna happen it is we talk about warhammer on this show of the fantasy variety so get into it uh so at now it's time for old world predictions lock in okay uh here's what i think here's i'll start while you guys formulate some opinions since i'm gonna be i want to be quiet this entire segment nope you must have opinions that is the requirement uh i think this is going to be one of the i like i think old world in general they are going to have an uphill climb and by that what i mean is they are releasing a very complicated game full of a lot of reconstituted very old models using potentially some rules that are very outdated in a world of other rank and flank systems that have continued to advance in the decade intervening right uh but it is very warhammer and nostalgia does sell products it sells launch boxes really well the question is does it make long-term players okay and i think that turns completely on one those like i think those whatever they called them arcane encyclopedia thingies uh how good those are and how much do they let you actually you know kind of build the army you want and play the the your version of the army you can imagine and stuff like that right is if they have alternate armies or blah blah blah whatever how much can you build the thing you want to build play the army you want to play because that was that that was the thing that is the thing that fantasy lacked that a os delivered was you had you were empowered to make your army your own right that was really hard in fantasy and so if those things deliver then that's a big deal and the other thing i'll say is it's going to be almost completely down to how good are the new models whatever the new models are for the other armies they come out with how good are those new models and how much does that encourage like beyond this britonian and tomb king stuff we've seen yeah you know do we actually get the delivery of remember when they were talking all about kiss 11 all that constantly haven't heard people one about that recently okay like do we get stuff that delivers on the promise of what was in total war or what the old world could have been or on these other things okay do we get kits that live up to that i think that's the big question for me in the old world right tom you got thoughts on this i'm okay if i'm if i'm the only one predicting by the way i think the success of it is going to be dependent upon accessible um old kits are for purchase okay um and i think that this is like this is not something like i think that they like i don't know how they've solved this problem but they're going to release a game where 90 percent of the models are not available unless and or very old or in this case they're very old even made of metal or resin right right yeah best case they're very old but like our like is the entire system going to revolve around a rotated rotating made to order system or because it's not going to be on demand they can't keep up like normal gw can't keep their normal main games product lines in stock sure let alone specialist games sure and so like i think in a very like in a very real sense they are maybe assuming that there's a lot of product out there that people can find armies to play this and i think that that is death like that is a death sentence to the success of old world like if you want old world to be successful the models you like you have to be able to go you know what i want to start a high elf army i need to go buy one well if you're going to go to ebay right now that doesn't exist sure not unless you're going to spend three thousand dollars and buy one of the two sky cutter chariots that are on ebay for $250 or whatever right like let alone any of the other product lines have been basically discontinued like some stuff is fairly evergreen from aos like they could pull that in but a lot of it isn't and a lot of it is just gone and so starting those armies are going to be difficult and so the question is this how accessible are old kits going to be okay because they're making an entire game based on models that you can't you don't actually like you can't get to build armies and as i was saying that's what i'm saying even if they're accessible let's say they're all released let's say they just run enough copies out of these old molds okay you've still got the problem that the that your that 90 percent of your kids and that's being generous are made of metal resin and 20 year old plastic right like that's not going to be a positive experience putting together the the fine cast burtonian trebuchet or whatever is not going to be a positive experience okay putting together like the metal bone giant or whatever remember that thing if that thing still exists in tomb kings it's not going to be a positive experience okay uh so like not only do all the kids have to be available even in the best case where they are they're still going against even their other games and their the other 10 percent of their units that are new flashy stuff that looks really cool yeah and you're relaunching a game that failed because of like in the market the market rejected this game you can be sad about the demise of the old world and that's fine i understand if people are emotionally attached to this thing but like the market did judge this thing a failure the icv2 reports towards the end where my fantasy fell off the chart for a couple reports that's insane that means it wasn't in the top five selling games in its category all right so its revenue was in the trash yeah and how much of this are you really going to sell the other problem with them not re sculpting everything tom with these old kits like you talk about the availability of old kits i'm not actually sure that's even the biggest hurdle my real problem is like we looked at those launch boxes earlier right yeah i could put that entire launch box sands new krokobos and on the table right now i have all that stuff i have it right now i don't need to buy a single model i still have them all square based same with the plutonians i have tons of knights ready to go i've got peasants i've got bowman i've got everything reliquaries and trebuchets and peg knights i've got the whole shooting match right what would make me go buy new stuff is making new models yeah yeah like like a kiss love army like a kiss love army but so much of this is going to at launch will just be old existing plastics that most of their target market the persona that they've targeted already already has yeah yeah it's funny um i want to kind of make my point like i hear that but i want to make my point very like poignant we just released an army book like a new book cities of sigmar a couple months ago right two months ago yep half half of that line is not available right now for gw sure you know what the irony is most of it is old world stuff sure all the dark elf stuff all the dwarf stuff um most of the stuff that you would actually expect for a game like this isn't even available and that's a current game yep that's a current line that they just launched and half of it half of the kits aren't available and came out in the book that are that are in the book let me say that like that's a problem sure so i think production capabilities will will likely hinder any growth this game might have so you know that's that's it's it's a challenge i'm i'm very interested to see where this goes over the course of the year my prediction is the initial launch boxes will sell very well okay because they won't make a ton of them and they'll basically sell out which will encourage the sort of like fomo attitude right but then how much do we get the releases to support it for the rest of the year how much do we have new kits how much actual of it do we see it being played that kind of thing right like is there going to be an old world tournament at adepticon i assume right probably yeah i think so how many people we can right i'm not saying i expect it to be the equivalent of a os year one of course that'd be insane 24 right i don't want to be higher than that i'd say at least 40 okay right how many people are showing up to these tournaments that kind of thing yeah 40 might be conservative but anyway yeah i just personally i don't have a lot of opinions on this guys yeah this is just kind of outside of my scope of knowledge and yeah i mean i have a lot of thoughts running through my head but they're a little ancillary like i'm thinking about 3d printing and getting into like like what what's another problem in a world of no you're absolutely right in a world of selling generic fantasy kits from 20 years ago into now into a market where 3d printing is so rife and easy like you know rob's doing his whole square-based podcast he just printed he just 3d printed out his whole fantasy army for all his right there's there's so many like i'm not buying old buying this i'm not buying your i am not buying your repackaged models from 20 years ago i'm just gonna 3d print my uh something that looks you know way better uh for pennies yeah yeah yeah so yeah because it's just generic concepts writ large all right um but yeah it'll be very interesting i don't know like blood bowl has been able to be successful but is the is blood bowl a reasonable analogy to this maybe not oh no way i mean yeah horse heresy would be the probably horse heresy has to be the one you compare it to yeah absolutely yeah like they can't accept blood bowl numbers on this right no but a horse heresy like they don't have as many like regimented events do they like it's more um it is more like lower based and it is more like narrative isn't it like that a community i i don't know that's my impression i'm not sure that's certainly my impression based upon locally and the players that i don't i don't know the the i don't know the horse heresy community i mean i'll say there's a pretty big event at um uh ad nova but i can't speak beyond that so okay i mean hey look interesting road ahead for the old world all right i'll take us out of this let's get back to aos now that i've now that i've left now that i've swerved you uh okay okay let's talk new battle tomes um we talked a little bit about this earlier uh i mean we're done with battle tomes now as well you can release in the new year you think you think oh you're saying you're not predicting that we're done with battle tomes like you're not taking a hard plan on i'm i'm saying yeah i'm not saying that i'm saying i'm making a factual statement factual statement we now have battle tomes for the 24 armies of aos i'm i'm just calling the fec went out even though like blah blah blah should release yada yada yada we all get it it's like this that's two t thing from last year in january we'll get the book itself and the other models but like the book is out it exists okay are we getting any additional battle tomes pre launch of fourth edition question number one question number two by the way i have a separate slide for ancillary tomes or ancillary books so we'll talk about those in a moment question number two is if no is it just all ancillary books from here on out have we gotten any confirmation about how many donbringer books there are we know there's five have we heard if there's six or have they given a final number we know there's four i don't think they've said the fifth one oh that's right that's right i was counting the we were we were we were estimating five because of how early they started okay five has been a number i've seen in past variations of this i can remember what my line portents was i know the only were all four whatever all of them were four prior yeah the 48 okay whatever the last 40k narrative was called they had five you know the abaddon and all yeah all of that stuff that was five i saw so okay probably five four or five i doubt we're going to get a faction battle tome there's always the possibility that we'll be surprised and we'll get a legitimate new faction release before fourth edition i would be pretty surprised by that but i mean that's possible there's no way there is no way yeah we will not get a pre fourth edition faction yeah i exactly i'd have to i'd almost call it a sure thing as well we're done with the fec book comes out and we're done with battle tomes until yeah 4.0 yep yep now you may get like some updates or whatever in the two like faction updates some new models of model updates or whatever in the in the two additional books that i think we're gonna get but i don't think that you're gonna get any new faction but yeah yeah that seems likely yeah so that then one question is with the fifth well seemingly we are the usher on is the yeah we'll be the fourth book and then he'll be he'll be doing regular four yeah and then fifth would maybe involve we'll talk about it a second hold on keep your powder dry on in celery books we're sticking to battle tomes here battle tomes only i battle tomes only i did not thought on battle tomes this year events so i was thinking about okay how many battle tomes did we get during a launch year and what i could remember was mostly three yeah normally during launch year we'll get three to four and then year two we get flooded yeah exactly it's like it's like yeah storm cast night haunt and then it was like i don't know fire slayers or something and then it was yes storm cast war clans and nergal and that was it with the launch of third edition in 2021 that's all we got right and then yeah exactly tom it was like 10 to 12 i'm not sure we can draw on the historical paradigm here though that's the issue well it depends like so for example in a world where they move to this new alternate like codex situation right where they release these grand alliance the whole army and one sure evergreen book i know yet another reason this would be good to do that by the by because it would mean you get all these books at launch right hypothetically and then what you would like seemingly have to do is or do like you would go you would move towards yearly narrative like yearly campaign like narrative arcs where five you know some number of books are released over a 12 month period that each of those books have some degree of story some degree of army of renown you know it would be the exactly the type of model book that we're seeing right basically on rotation for three years before you get a new addition i i think okay let's let's talk about the two paradigms here okay paradigm one is they keep the current system of battle tones yeah yeah right okay all right if they keep the current system of battle tones i don't think you can look back at the previous two launches as any predictor of what you would see here let me unpack that the launch into second edition was really them going okay uh but yeah i guess we know what we're doing with a os now because first edition wasn't wasn't all over the place mess right right right okay so they were so busy fixing the core system and trying to figure out what they wanted the rules the rules to be and introducing endless spells and nonsense and all of that right like it was they were still building the plane as it was flying through the air right and so that's why i i just they didn't even really have the concept of what a battle tone was in their head when they started planning second edition's launch right because we only got sylvaneth partway through first you know like for most of second we were relying on like freaking white dwarf updates and GHB expansions and other dumb crap yeah okay so then we moved to third the launch of third and there's no way their release schedule went how it was supposed to because remember that thing that happened for about two and a half years remember that now there was a slight disruption in the world they released the cat's movie and then a month later we all got never left our house again for two years basically right um like that's it was in the middle of pandemic and so they were incredibly disrupted in their schedule because of global shipping and everything else like their their own ability to output and all of that right so in my mind under the paradigm where they keep just doing like a battle tone per per army like we just keep on the current trajectory basically and say okay let's not rock the boat which by the way you've got to rock the boat you can't just do the same thing forever otherwise people just eventually lose interest you know there's no formula so solid that it just works forever i will say vince real quickly i'm just another data point is 40k 10th is on this paradigm right now yep they're gonna get four books this year the two launch and then two more adeptus mecanicus and necrons and that's it right so i don't yeah it is it is a data point yeah that's it that's a data point i could get behind but in my mind if they're gonna stick on the battle tone thing they should be aiming at like five six something like that and then realistically 12 to 14 the next year and then close it out in the second half of or in the first half of the year after so within the first two years you have all your tones that's got to be their goal internally i mean that's that's largely what we did this year such that you go moving into your third year you only have narrow books right like yes we've had like we had two updated tones but one is like that almost a full rewrite of it of the prior tone which would be cities so i mean in my mind it's like a situation where the the the problem that this continually presents is that it puts it on the battle tone treadmill and yes it does give them something to constantly talk about but again they could always you could do that with a sort of expandopedias like i talked about but let's assume that's paradigm one paradigm two is yeah they do go in different direction they index it out and then introduce something and in some ancillary way right then we go back on the battle tone grind again so let's take some big swings here post fourth okay let's assume we keep the same world our launch box we've all said is is is stormcast and scaven we all agree there's no need to argue about it it's 100 true don't worry about it i'm just as sure as thing asterisk it is not a sure thing but that's okay we're all hoping that would mean we get those two those two tones yeah yep who else gets the tones who else gets the year one tones who are your people in year one who are your golden children that get the first tones yeah uh so i'm gonna guess us i need to think about it uh warplanes mm okay sure yeah just be to actually like squat out the the um the savage or and and maybe night home okay um simply because like what we often see is that the the armies that were prior launch boxes from prior years end up being the early tomes of the next years because those are those are like when you're looking at a proportion of people who have models you're hitting a majority of the of like like the armies that most people have be from prior editions and then and to do both like warplanes and night haunt you would also hit both older books and books that have um that i hit all the grade aligns it's also important i think that they books they my particular guess is the books they release in the first year they have to be ones where they don't play it on any significant model expansions because they just don't have the production run to get it going because so much of the factory will be turned to producing whatever the launch boxes because they need to like you know the story about the the 10th edition launch box was that basically like for months the factory just ran that right or everything that that was like the primary thing taking up most of their capacity so assuming that it's a similar situation right so they'd want to stick to armies where they're not planning any kind of additional real release of any major kind and night haunt and uh warplanes are whatever they're stable do that they're both stable where they both have already they've they've had expansions they have plenty of models um you know iron gels already get just recently got their release so like neither of these really need anything else yeah like if you want your models redone you do not want your book coming in the first year is what i'm saying sure right but it needs real cleanup i mean obviously a lot of folks think bone splitters we got a lot of reasons to think bone splitters are going to get axed and yeah we had the ij supplement that needs to get incorporated into an actual battle tone and yeah so i i could easily see that as well maybe you get like one new unit or a new hero something the the usual little treatment for cruel boys that probably are sitting on more cruel boy model cruel boys models but i think we saw a war band of war cry or underworlds with a with a cruel boys unit so yeah i think that's a good guess okay all right rock on and let's assume four tomes is our is our sort of cap that's what we that would be the most we can historically predict i'll say that if we got four we'd be we'd be at the high end of historical averages as much as those data points as i said can actually be used as a to elaborate on so we could get a couple more bonus ones but that that would be sort of the thing and you know the problem is i i saw everybody in the chat throwing in their options by the way if you haven't hit like yet folks hit like do all those fun things appreciate it uh for our lengthy discussion here if we've said anything you like or not hit like anyways it's fine we appreciate it uh for this holiday show that's that's a you if you if you want to give us all a gift a like is certainly nice um but the the the the thing to me with it is it's everybody had their own things they put in there and probably has reasons why not just because it's the army they play i mean i'm sure some people just put the armies they play in there right but everybody probably had people probably had plenty of other reasons too idk because it feels like it needs it a lot or slanash because the book is terrible or uh you know whatever right pick your poison yeah you could you could go like tons of explanations and this and this is the problem with the battle tome treadmill right is that everybody wants their book right away because they all quote unquote need it and you're just on there forever so there you go uh all right so let's go oh yeah yeah i was i was gonna say this one guess i mean i could see something that got a notable update through the dombringers might be an early battle tome though like as we'll get into i'm thinking the fifth dombringers will be chaos related and slaves and corn and yes maybe maybe we might see a corn battle tome with with the updated models from the dombringers book five something like that um but yeah i think i think it's a very good point you made that you know it's going to be something that's not going to have a major expansion refresh whatever yep and and again this is why i would love the sort of ga book model plus expandopedias right and is because then everybody would start on equal footing everybody would have i mean yeah i mean like so one thing to do battle tome releases quote unquote you don't you don't do battle tome releases and it with expandopedia you're doing expandopedia releases right but so one of the challenges that i think with that is that you'll you'll no longer like books of lore dedicated to army if you do that so like there's no that's with the expandopedias have lore in them that's your major story stuff that's the huge thing you're doing in there i understand that like the the progressing the narrative but i'm talking about why the what the gore tide is and how is it different skull reverse and it's not because those don't exist in the main rules that's not a thing i mean we're not using sub factions in my model those aren't things anymore tom you're playing corn there is a corn army in the book and these are the rules to play corn i hear that but here's the challenge is that you have like named characters like corgis coal and stuff like that um that are like that are baked into the lore that are or like in stormcast you have you have storm hosts yeah and like certain storm hosts have identity with certain named characters like vandas or whoever else sure and like you you would just need to like write them out completely no why would you write them out completely because um unless you are like gw has leaned heavily into the design like ghettoization design regarding um named characters and wanting and pushing down this like world of sub factions i think that i think that we are like to suggest that we're going to move away from that completely seems like a far stretch to me i would imagine we still have sub factions um even if the sub factions are literally like a single ability like they've been being written in the last you know last handful battle i mean maybe i'm saying we don't need it it's extra weight we don't need if you if you go down my my model like i think we have sub factions as a fluke of history not because they're in any way required for the army like it is a it is it is an organically it is a thing that accidentally organically evolved i understand that but then how do you like because some factions are so tied into their sub faction identities so taken you mean some heroes are so tied into their so terrifying seraphon okay like the two sub factions are like the two identities of what those things are our lives aren't sub factions really you're saying that star born in uh coalescer not sub factions they are absolutely not the sub factions are coattles claw and so on those are the don't uh me those are sub factions tom coalesced and star born are not that there's some extra thing that they have okay it just is like i'm not pulling this out of nowhere here they don't appear on a page and have a little logo and say like here's star born here's your little rule that's not what they are and it's not how it works they are an extra thing that's that seraphon has and there's no reason that extra thing wouldn't still exist yeah i don't know i like maybe maybe like the the the sort of named hero problem or any of that like again if you want to simplify let's simplify okay like we could do this and actually make this an accessible game here's corn bam it's these 20 pages you want to play corn here it is this is all you ever need in this chaos book and then the corn expandopedia comes out and it either like corgis call is just in there and he's just he can be taken because he can just be taken in corn because there's no sub factions so who cares it doesn't matter that he's whatever he is he's just there he's just a thing you can take okay yeah i don't know when the expand apedia comes out you have the gore tide army of renown or whatever and corgis i don't remember corgis call is gore tide or whatever i think he is but he is he and he has like war scroll abilities that that only affect gore tide units yeah i understand that but obviously we're rewriting those things if we're doing the this model right and what i'm suggesting is is i think that that is way too heavy of a design i don't think gw would take that on on there like uh in there in the updating of an addition maybe i don't know man i don't think any of us sitting back in 1999 at the end of fifth edition thought that the world was going to look like what it did when six came out like maybe the turkey doesn't think it's going to get its head cut off until thanksgiving day and it's getting its head chopped off like i mean like there's no reason to believe that the past has to resemble the future or the sorry the future has to resemble the past with with what gw writes right so there you go um okay at any rate let's talk about new ancillary books tyler i'm starting with you on this one you've got to be quiet for a minute as tom and i argued in classic classic tom and ventz fashion uh okay uh new ancillary books ghb's narrative books other books we already talked about i agree they'll be a dawn bringers book five it's a clearly a five book arc we're not ending on on on the dead guy sure we gotta talk about what we think is going to be in there of course of course but here's what i want to know tyler yeah yeah with the coming of fourth we will get a new ghb yep what do you want to see in that ghb tyler what's your hopes for that let's start there we're gonna have one ghb for the year because they've they've committed to the yearly thing mm-hmm what should be in that book tyler like there to be a multiplayer system uh i think it would be really good for them to turn the ghb into a more expensive product that accounts right for a broader variety of of interest so multiplayer like a triumph and treachery some kind of system like that team format in general will be a huge thing i think to actually have a better fleshed out or just a real team tournament system yes reach brother amazing and oh gosh what else i think we i feel like wasn't too bad last time around i mean maybe there's too much ancillary stuff at the moment maybe you could streamline that a little bit i already mentioned the idea of a universal set of annual battle tactics and then yeah we have battle tactics that are associated with battle plans they really need to do a six month release of six more battle plans whether that's free or a digital purchase however they do it so that we end up with 18 battle plans for match play over the course of a year right 12 initially and six at the halfway mark i think that would be the event expansion in december or something exactly yeah the tournament yeah the tournament 100 so so and they could do uh you know narrative events or narrative scenarios narrative missions as part of that as well right teams uh triumph treachery etc so uh yeah a few things like i think it's in a pretty good place i'd be curious tom to hear you i'm trying to think back on like what have been some of your critiques i i think you're what i recall like your one of your main ones you felt that the ghb's have been too heavy-handed in how they've changed the environment how they changed the ecosystem it's like okay we're doing this wild swing for six months right and then we're doing another wild swing for the next six months something like that yeah um that they are the design the design is too heavy for the rest of the um like what i would what i would ultimately say is this i think the ghb needs to be super vanilla uh for the summer as we adapt to the new addition rules and so the the ghb needs to be a super light touch a pitch down the middle for scenarios um and uh and to let the system breathe you know especially if they're doing any wide sweeping changes before they begin before they begin to do some like heavy design any glimpse of heavy design hopefully we never go back to what it's been the last you know year or so so really moving away from this seasonal model where yeah this season it's calvary this season it's troops like completely move away from that yeah that makes a lot of sense to me as well that would be my hope yeah i cannot back that hard enough like tom you and i on this one are completely aligned i mean especially at the addition change first of all i've hated the heavy-handedness of all these ghbs where it's like entire swaths of units are like garbage amazing average amazing again it's just like uh stop just i want to play an army okay um and like in my mind number one is focus on the battle plans right like for the single player side of the thing by the way tyler again completely back and you totally agree with you completely have t and t in there have doubles stuff like that in there and team stuff somebody said in the comments the recent white dwarf uh recent white dwarfs have had like multiplayer scenarios in them or something first of all i didn't know that i love multiplayer scenarios oh cool uh and that's amazing it must be really sad to write for white dwarf knowing that no one reads what you write like boy if you're just like like you're just it's it's like the the psychology experiment words words out into the nothingness yeah exactly it's like the psychology experiment where they have people copy down stuff and then the then the researcher just takes the piece of paper you write folds it up and throws it in the trash but they'll pay you to keep writing it and people just won't do that very long right because it's incredibly psychologically defeating to watch someone just go like thanks trash thanks trash right that that's kind of what i think it is at this point to write for white dwarf um so the but but like for the for the focus one-on-one player part of it man do they need to focus on just generating 12 good battle plans yeah right like just give us 12 good interesting battle you know the the battle plans that you get on the like if you wanted to do like a summer ghb would be 12 good battle plans and then in the battle scroll update or whatever like halfway through the year revisiting like six old battle plans from a prior ghb updated with with a new twist or whatever right like that seems to be the right the right approach and so then you like you're regularly recycling old but then you know like that are tried and true right but with a different twist or a different angle and that could actually be achieved very easily if you went and you added secondary objectives and so the core mechanics of the battle plans say the same but the secondaries all change when they get reintroduced sure yep absolutely and yes i've got we got some people we've got some people standing up to defend white dwarf like i understand i'm being hyperbolic of course i know some people do still read it um but boy just has the readership on that dropped off like some people still buy dvds too but um you know the sales aren't what they once were that's all i'm saying um i i bought a new vehicle yesterday uh-huh because you're old got smashed because you were in a bad accident but you were okay thankfully yeah yeah i wasn't gonna mention that but yes so i bought a new vehicle yesterday and thanks i appreciate that and i was very i was very worried for you when you sent me that text and i was glad to hear you and everybody in the family was okay it's a very scary thing it is um but it's a new new-ish vehicle and it had a dvd player in it and i was like what is this like who added that on like when they originally built this vehicle that are like you know that i want i want technology from 30 years ago yeah yeah i get you i get you um all right so wow yeah sure um i mean so that's number one to me is the is the battle plan focus number two to me is i like yeah we if we're not taking the big swings let's say we're not like radically reinventing the meta with every ghb which i don't think we should be by the buy okay what do we actually do with it then like what is the season of events is it just the battle plans do we add any rules at all well it used to have sections for open and narrative play yeah sure and i don't think we necessarily need those those have other methods of getting out there maybe but like what if like what if we had something that leaned back into something like variant of the play right like multiplayer what if what if it is something like this narrative ish whether it be like some variants of like regimen or you know something like that some element of multiplayer play and some uh and then match play specific yeah yeah i'm with that i'm saying what's going in the match play section that's my question because we all agree it should be lighter but then what is it doing like i'm asking us to put meat on this so yeah i i might have a difference it's probably a difference between with the time like as far as being lighter yeah i would like that but i personally i still enjoy the all right here is your um special spells for this season right here is a special commendability like i don't mind that i think that can be done in a way that's interesting and and that will be characterized as lighter so yeah i fully agree with that i fully agree with that yeah yeah like i don't have a run with that at all we just don't need more horror for us for blizzards sure right like that's what yeah yeah an extra magic dice and whatever whatever whatever i played a game last weekend by the way yeah i played a game this last weekend and the first was it was turn three sorry round three before we got on turn round three before we got a primal magic dice because just nobody had the battalion and so it was just like roll fail roll fail roll fail roll fail roll fail roll fail roll fail statistically not that unlikely right it's certainly possible it's just flipping a coin and having it up heads four times in a row or whatever something eight times zero and uh i was like oh my god this is the best game of war i've played in forever it's funny sorry go ahead keep going yeah so we i don't know what that looks like exactly but yeah something that's a that's a lighter version of this i think like the yes i'm just thinking back to the original 2021 when i think that all this got started which was you know okay we're setting in ger we've got all these battle plans that are named for the setting of ger and but then we had some of these things that i remember were just was that was that 2021 i'm looking at yeah it's been third edition yeah yeah yeah and was that like what did we get exactly with that did did we get the crazy monster we got monster hunter monster the season of monsters right out of the gate that was that that was the initial that's what that was yeah yeah okay yeah so because it went like monsters bounty hunters glation champions magic crap because we should have only had three but we had four i think that's right yep yep yep i might be missing one in there but that sounds right no no you have it that's what it is yeah i think that's kind of it i mean i always on net you can't tell me that hasn't been negative no it's been bad no i'm saying i'm this is a tyler think about what i just said on net when i sum those up monster season right bad bounty hunter season bad glation champion average and like and like at best i'll give primal magic an average so like this so this is completely nets out negative yeah i it's like okay what's the what's the goal here like this if you're talking about for turn it just runs into the bait we've always had right like who are your audiences here if you're talking about tournament tournament players who go a quite a few tournaments or you know three let's say three tournaments in a year they may not mind this level of change right annual that's that's an entire year okay i can but for those who like a lot of friends we talked about before you know they're slow painters it takes them by the time they get an army painted it's already a new season right yeah exactly yeah and the so it does seem like there's this level of list changing um that is or yeah you're having to restructure a list to account for the ground shifting from under you too rapidly that's been going on like that seems to be at the heart of a lot of this right and that is slow down yes like how do you how do you slow that down while still having some variety some some seasoning literally maybe you know setting these season like i think we're going to go with the realm of shadow okay so we're going to get a ghb that's going to set the realm of shadow so how yeah how do we do that in a way that is sufficiently generic universal but it doesn't like wildly impact list sure i'll give i'll give you a couple options yeah would you like my couple options sure okay here's option number one option number one is you put in three simplified lightweight rules that are representative of the thing i will give you some examples let's assume we're going to the realm of shadow i don't know that's the case but let's just say we do okay in the match play section it says here are three optional rules you can utilize as a to or in your home games to represent play in the realm of shadows okay optional rule number one is like diminished sight okay any ranged attack that targets a target more than 18 inches away has negative one to hit okay and you miss a weapon attack yeah optional rule number two uh cloying shadows okay here is a new heroic action the hero can disappear into the shadows and teleport so it's a heroic action teleport that everybody can access yeah optional rule number three is uh ambush from darkness you can choose one unit or two units or something like that d three units i don't care whatever you get it at the start of the game and after they are set them up after they are set up remove them from the battlefield they may enter as an ambush unit but they must enter from a board edge be set up within six inches the board edge more than nine inches away from all enemies okay so yeah there's three simple rules that all feel like shadowy rules right they are all three listed as optional but the to but they're but they're simple enough that if the if a to goes we're gonna turn all these on right okay then they can then they're they're playing completely in the realm of shadow and they can use that and and that's still going to have an effect because it gives people new options it has some amount of weight right it's not crushing but it's but it's there like it's doing something right that doesn't wildly change entire sweeping units of what's good or bad because it's kind of broadly applicable pull any unit off teleport any hero right penalize extreme ranged weapons which aren't aren't that multitudinous anyways right like that is a over 18 inches whereas to's could just as easily go we're not using any of those we're just using the battle plans go nuts or you and your home game could go like because they've all been listed as three optional rules for your games you can just turn them all off just turn the light switch off and play the battle hmm that's a light touch and it puts the power back in the hands of the player while giving them structure and both a permission structure yeah both literal and figurative to then engage with the season in the way they're comfortable with yeah yeah it's interesting i can hear the voices of some tos in my head particularly myself uh where there's up there's desire out there for universal system of that is when i go to lvo when i go to nash con right i'm playing i'm playing the same game and i know you're not necessarily a fan of that that's not i in fact you're not that i'm not a fan is that i hate that like i hate hell well there will be some sub sub communities right within our that will reject that outright um and like what i mean by that is uh you know like folks like you're you're kind of your bcp like hyper competitive they want uniformity um and you're right Tyler like that like they're going to reject that that like piecemeal system outright that's fine they would have their uniformity because their uniformity would be the tos at big events get together and say we're just going to use all these we're going to use the season and all the big tournaments probably just use all of the rules that's just as uniform but the second we start catering everything in the game to an elite slice of tournament organizers and the big tournaments that they run the game gets materially worse for everybody that is just a fact okay yeah because those people a very small minority of the overall player base have a completely different set of needs i'm not saying those needs shouldn't be served because they should they are an important player base a high energy very important player base and the tos are heroes okay but they should not be the core of which around which the game is designed they should be the option that the game can tilt into and they're just gonna have to put up with the fact that they're the extreme minority right the game will still cater to them but the game isn't built around them it does well i mean while we're talking about it i do wonder if you guys have an opinion how likely is it that fourth edition is going to go further down this road of uniformity within the broader tournament environment let's say it's a good question a lot of i i suspect it is going to increase with fourth edition for a number of reasons i mean like i think there's already some of this being impacted by the golden ticket the world championships there's that's that's a longer i mean that's a show in itself that conversation but uh yeah anyway i would personally bet that it's likely going to increase it for better or worse the yeah i know i i i don't disagree the question is how heavy does that uniformity that's the question i'm just laughing because i i've heard that uh guys from people at vault wars is becoming more recognized this year and like which is cool and i'll i'll hear things and the way people talk about it just makes me laugh it's like vault wars is that crazy tournament that does weird things like highlighter and like okay that's crazy that's that's that's now what passes for crazy and weird right yeah that's nothing that's nothing yeah like uh anyway yeah yeah that's that's like an extra award that's nothing you're you're a step away from nothing there right and it'll be any offense to you like because no no exactly yeah no exactly yeah it's not yeah well i would say that this like it's a great soft incentive for people to take non-traditional right um but yeah that's not hard incentives right like hard incentives are prohibiting certain warscrolls or doing things like that yes um or i would even i would even say things like uh nashcon's two-list format is a hard insight yeah oh actually into the baked into the the structure of the event itself all right so we've talked to the ghb to death let's keep going here okay um what else is there anything else on any other books i think we'll get the fifth dawn bringers i think that'll be the lead into fourth i don't think we'll get any other narrative books in the year there you go yeah um okay they'll make up for that sorry go ahead tighter i'm gonna guess corn and you were yawning someone to jump in and interrupt you uh corn and i think it will we're gonna see corn we may get a new corgis coal model uh with him ascending which i think would be amazing and then hopefully a valkia uh what's the ugly ass model that we have right now these like silo something oh skilla yes silo i don't know yeah yes yeah get an update horrific model get an update to him get an update to valkia update i think you just been that model sorry just for sure and yeah that that's and then you'll get the dark oath riders the updated marauder kits i we'll see if dark oath savages are going to replace the foot rotters or do we actually get a an updated you know generic yeah sure it'd be great to just again bend them bend the more existing marauders often just call dark oath savages like those are marauders now there we go yeah uh fingers because they're like a million times better marauders my god right maybe an actual full-on like if we get enough of this dark oath stuff uh with this fifth dom ringers a full-on iron jaws style supplement i'd love to see that like a dark oath supplement for the slaves of darkness that'll come i think that'd be really cool be a great expandopedia army yeah sure just saying anyway yeah just uh just a few thoughts on that on what we're gonna see all right um my my pushback events is this if we go your new route of four core ravining hordes yep um and lean into these uh waha pd these expanded videos then um i think though that everything will be ancillary then from that point on um and what i mean by that is that we move into like yes okay let's say we get four core grand alliance books that define the the core faction from that point on i think we will move into one-year seasons with all lore books like i say lore books what i mean by that is this like well each year we would get a story you get trotted out over four to six books uh and each of those are your expandopedia with your regiment your armies around i don't know it's around or whatever launched with each book man that sounds amazing let's do that that sounds so much better than what we're doing right now like that sounds a million times better than the current model and then you would get three narrative arcs per season i'm sorry were you saying this was a pushback on my position or were you trying to reinforce the quality of my argument because if you're still manning me you're doing a great job no you just simply said there will be no ancillary and my pushback is is i think that if we have your four core in the world then everything is ancillary from okay okay i think that we would get we would get these narrative arcs each year for each game or like for each um with generalist handbook yes yes yes yes yes man that'd be amazing okay now i'm back on the page with you and boy you have described i want to go to there okay how are we still doing this dumb model of book releases from 1997 how have we not updated this but what i'll say is this if you do that model then some of these expandopedias would have like whenever a new army like hypothetically when malarians you know umbrion sure umbrion or whatever yeah drop like they would end up functionally being battletoam umbraneth in one of the expandopedias as the whole new army drops yeah yeah and then they'll get the only way you would do yeah whenever the next edition launches each of your four books they just fold themselves into the main book right and then what happens when you have like line renewal like cities of sigmar do basically one of the expandopedias end up basically being the updated battletoam for that thing like so it ends up staying in this weird space i'm with you i'm standing if they move to a different one yep i got you all right new models and model ranges okay let's close out this is the last main one i have and we have just another catch all uh okay new models and model ranges well we've already talked about everything at the beginning of the show that they spoiled or that they they said it's the little silhouettes of so callus and toll potentially night haunt and um and lumeneth war cry box uh new as we said potential marauder horseman that seems to be odds on what all those silhouettes are right um and if that's if we're not getting any and then you know book five the question is is that part of what the chaos people are from in which case that could open up hope for some additional chaos stuff it does seem like we're leading to a book five with a showdown with chaos in some way because we've got corgis call messing around we've got all this stuff happening in the background right so it does feel like we're kind of sneaking around that having those corn items in there so are we going to say this is the year we get a new to match the news storm cast do we get a new corgis call this year as well like does he does he technically come first i don't think he ascends to be a demon prince by the way i don't know that that's his goal i don't know that his goal is so lowly yeah i think he could have been a demon prince like 10 times over by now like he in the in the narrative he's really going for something like unique uh like he basically was like i'm gonna kill this continent this living continent as an offer to corn right um like he's trying to effectively chop down yig drissel as like an offering to corn like that's what he's on about right um interesting and so you know like that's big i i think if i was going to do a new corgis call i would want to see him ascend to sort of uh more like super mortal lord basically like like basically the same i think the same path archaeons done but just for corn right i don't know that he's he's trying to become a demon prince or something or a bloodthirster or lose his individuality i'm not sure that's his goal interesting i think he becomes a much bigger scarier mortal lord with like an awesome mount right yeah that could be a cool opportunity like a big dog yeah you joke you joke but no i would love it if he was riding a big dog like put him on a big three-headed like take karnak yeah blow karnak up right like big pig size yeah and put a new corgis call on top of it uh yeah okay time i want that that would work for my dog army yep so maybe we've been uh i was gonna make a karnak uh i've been seeing i feel like i've been seeing some nergal images and the admin calendar like maybe they've got a couple of old s models epidemias festas maybe they make an appearance in this fifth book i was kind of thinking about that oh sure yeah yeah like we kind of get a refresh of the various incendiary chaos heroes that was that's what you mean yeah yeah and yes as a couple people have pointed out yeah or i don't pronounce the name but yeah our ball the undefeated he was a guy back in warren fantasy in the old world who rode like a hellhound dog he was on a big dog but it was like a big dog for the time so it was actually like a joke it would have been smaller than than this model okay because it was just a tiny little thing uh yeah okay i could see that uh if we get new skaven and new stormcast we've you mentioned the calling and the thunder striking of stormcast yeah um is that is that like the extent or like what else would we want to chamber yeah does anybody want to or call it does anybody want to call a shot on a work right thing besides the potential lumineath night haunt thing yeah i think that after um after uh i'm gonna go big here um and suggest that the war cry box that we see isn't set in girth okay it's not no and that rather the lumineath um i mean this may this may be too big of a swing but it would be the lumineath verse night haunt would actually be set in um in ulgu okay being like light light vs shadows right like light vs ghosts in the darkness as the introduction to the new uh ulgu setting because i think that that's where we're headed i think with the new edition we're gonna move to ulgu as the primary realm and all the new war cry stuff will map to that just like it did with uh girth yeah okay because we talked about like a couple years ago guys where it's right we at least again that the historical pattern had been under walls unveils the new realm first yeah and then the edition launches and then war cry adapts that new realm yeah and so like then that's why i was saying that it may be too early for war cry to jump to ulgu but it would make sense to me for it to be um like light bringers you know or some form of yeah of haish and elves vs the shadows of the of death right like the darkness the ghosts that dwell in darkness yeah well that sets up your ashen rack hall too really easy right right right that's exactly right yeah yeah i mean that would be super cool i'm i'm down for that and you know this the scaven have always been big in ulgu um they're big there they're big in japan and uh you know so like i think that's fine i think it opened the door it would open the door to potentially a small uh additional lumeneth expansion but it could also it could do open the door to like a knight hawn expansion it could open a lot of things up yeah where you get the more like stealth focused versions of people who are messing around in ulgu um i don't think you'll see malarian or anything like his ombre neath in 2024 um but as i've said he's your he's your spring 2025 arm like in that first year in that first year normally as you're ending that first year going into the next big summer you always get an army drop in that april may time frame and my money is if we're in ulgu we'll get malaria yep and then the following year we're going to get teary it's terrian will then respond once malarian has shown us as a lumeneth expansion as an as lumeneth and like whatever the narrative arc is at the end of yeah that is that is exactly what's going to happen yeah yeah i mean the that looked like a ripper temple or what i would gather would be a ripper temple model the one that was previewed today and it almost looked like some kind of water dragon uh icon that i felt like at least that that's where my brain was going to in that in that photo yeah which you know which would would which would lean into the eastern influences that we've seen right yeah like that's that's a very common like that is an association with water mm-hmm yep 100 percent speaking of itaneth is overdue for an expansion again i uh 2024 would be my guess at some point adik getting expanded love to see a little more like you know love crafty in in and itaneth which could potentially tie in i mean might be stretching at this point really hammering i think they're a great candidate for a war cry expansion force yeah interesting i i want to see i want to see seahorse riders but we're not going to go that direction we will likely go the like squid like again dweller and darkness direction for itaneth like if i'm guessing they will go to more like the the horrors of the deep which is what we need with i think really with this army yeah like that's on under tabs right now yeah yes and especially if we're going to you that would make sense as well yeah yep like that yeah i i agree can i can i ask a question go for it can i make a big swing yeah that's what we want let's take some big swings do you all think we'll still see endless spells moving forward oh will they get jettisoned out mm yeah uh it's a great question uh hopeium they would be jettisoned i would call it 50 50 they survived i would i would love to see them rocket it out of the game and never returned yes i know you feel that way the reason why is that it's actually like if you go scroll the website most of them are out of stock they don't sure like they they cannot eat them yeah they cannot keep them in stock at all but they actually they are trying to sell them it's just they don't have them in stock they're they're still i mean i i don't know i don't know but like but like can you even get the original like malign importance or anything like that i didn't think malign sorcery is even available anymore let me look uh my sorcery uh online only yeah you can still buy it right but online only that does not right like um yeah i don't know like it just makes me wonder the trajectory of where we're going right like can you what about the other ones like the the the second the second by the way the real reason i think you did they would jettison them you want my real business answer not just because like what ben swans or stuff like that yeah i think they're bad for the game that's number one but that i don't think they would i don't think that's going to start me the way i think the actual problem is they're produced in china they're not made at the factory in the uk and that supply chain has gotten very fragile over the past two years three years and so like if they were going to make a decision to like if they were going to make a business decision to shore up supply chains right and and reduce risk jettison endless spells would be one way they could do that uh what was the other the other release of not malony tree but uh oh forbidden forbidden power yeah yeah forbidden power that was it which by the way as an aside how the letter can't like even in forbidden power yes there are those four endless spells but there used to be a terrain piece in there that is just disappeared into the ether sure sure yeah i was trying to think guys when was the last time we got an endless spell release tied to a faction it's been quite some time if if i recall uh like they have not been releasing these things maybe it was daughters of kane but that was now if it was daughter of kane it was that's been a long time it was some time ago yeah i'm looking through the battle times and i'm not seeing anything within the spells endless spell releases like i was yark no i mean they had they all in the first edition i was yark book uh yeah 2023 i'm not seeing anything that had endless spells which is might be right song yeah i one can hope i mean yeah like i just it doesn't feel like a thing that needs to be there by the way i wouldn't even care if they kept the army on the spells and just jettisoned the generics and it would just be kind of became like like that that that's fine that wouldn't solve the supply problem i'm talking about uh kyle nelson said why are those produced in china and how does vince know that i know that because that's what i do i'm here because i know things um but secondly uh the why are they produced there because they're cheaper lower quality models that they don't care about the casting on as much because endless spells have a much lower casting quality requirement than uh their actual models and so the same was true for most of the terrain that gets produced they that is to say they don't have as fine a detail requirements or things like that so they can just be kind of more easily mass produced in the factories that that china can pump those things out with um whereas with their mainline models the the actual casting and production requirements are like really really high like it's actually requires extremely expensive machines to manufacture the kinds of models the gw does most most people in the world just do not have machines capable of either doing the initial cast of them nor of producing the actual models it actually takes very expensive machines on both sides um and very very highly paid people to to do all of that work so whereas the terrain and and and less spells are like such simpler goofball models that it's like like look at the look at the burning head that's you know i mean come on now it's just not hard to make something like that it's play-doh yeah i highly doubt they're going to get rid of them personally i like them uh they yeah i like what they add to the game it's taking them forever it's taking them way too long to get them to a reasonable place we i think we finally have gotten there not all of them are great none of them are particularly out of bounds uh you know like gem into the spine the the ones that you see are generally fine uh pendulum is fine for the you know anyway i like what they do for list building what they do for gameplay but it it took forever to get them to the point that they're in now where they're at least in a decent place yeah i just wonder like it would just it just dawned on me like as i've looked at like adding new armies like when i go to buy an army i like i want to buy the ancillary thing for any reasons i want to buy that the endless spells and one of the things that i found is that like just locating endless spell kits is really difficult like it's like it's legitimately difficult and so it just raises questions when i think about like new players wanting to join the game and yeah when i think about the trajectory of where we're going like it just makes me wonder like are these things going the way of the dodo yeah it's a good question absolutely um hey cheng said gw is that high end i'm kind of surprised so are gw models reasonably priced that i have no answer to gw models are certainly um you know costly but there's a lot more factored into that price than the weight of the plastic right like there there's a lot going in i will tell you that uh that casting a model like they do okay uh like getting a new kit like they're going to make a new space brain kit is probably easily a like 50 000 at the low end 100 000 125 000 at the high end yeah i heard i've heard 75 to 100 ish yeah yeah it depends on the size of the kid and what's going on and how much complexity there is and what size sprue does it use right like is it using a tank sprue which is like the big one or is it using the half sprue right those all have different names or the quarter sprue okay each one of those has different cost bases to it but the the level of like the machine used to actually cast that thing out is is very very those those things are crazy expensive but then you also have to the entire process like i'm talking about from from what you're paying the artist to concept it out to when you the first models roll off so anyways it's you know it's an expensive process and so they they you know they cost out from there are they reasonably priced i mean i don't know man that's that's that's i is anything that under the current model of the world reasonably priced given their desire to deliver shareholder value that i can't justify but um i was gonna ask a question it is an expensive process yeah go ahead when what was the last army terrain piece that was introduced in the it was the last army terrain oh boy oh boy it's a long time ago oh no that's not no it was like five minutes ago uh sorry that's a total lie five minutes ago uh the moped the moped the moped as a variant yeah of the original uh yeah i forgot about that before that had been quite a while but yes the moped yeah but again that's more of a variant than it is an actual like new terrain addition sure yeah it had been some time beyond that yeah i'm not like technically we did get we did get the uh also in war cry you're alluding to war oh sure and also in war cry we got the variant seraphon um the realm shaper the other realm shaper yeah i suppose but that didn't actually have different rules the moped was like a legitimately different model like because it actually had completely different rules yep yep but again like when you're looking at actual new models right it's a super fascinating um like they just simply in the last three years they haven't really added almost any regarding yeah yeah agreed which i mean part of that might be just they're happy with the the the armies that have terrain versus the armies that don't because there's no need to add more right yep and part of that could be yeah it's a thing they don't want to invest they don't want to throw more money in that like they're already they don't want to have to have rely on china to produce any more stuff since again that's where the the army train comes from china right yeah so yeah okay i thought our question i had is to what degree are we're going to see a greater amount of narrative or thematic coherence in their releases especially in 2025 you know for fourth edition when you get into the guts of new releases expansions etc i feel like there's been very little thematic or narrative coherence with third editions releases uh you know like we've got cities of sigmar at the tail end of it even though the narrative was supposed to be about this donbringer yeah sure that city of sigmar right would have come out at the near the start of it uh yeah so i like i mean my answer is i think they will absolutely uh do such a thing like i think their goal is and has always been to better align the books to the larger narrative moves to everything and have that kind of progression and i think you see that happening now that they're sort of back on plan with donbringer's book four and fec and the alignment there and that kind of stuff so in my mind that's where they want to be they know that if they like tell a story and draw people in and like they've seen the power of lore no one should know no one knows better than than gw that lore can actually like move the needle on sales right i mean 40k is like that writ large yeah yeah so i think that's certainly in their minds that they want to align and drive toward that unified image these usually unified releases i actually think it's really hard to do and then then the pandemic happened and threw him way off instead like again somehow we're going to get nine years into this game before we actually have the real game which is crazy to say all right right but that's almost true i mean we should probably mention the two obvious ones that could use a refresh seemingly which would be so basic chaos and yeah at least in my mind ogres uh stand out this one i mean there's yeah some real old kits there any thoughts guys on we might see those i think ogres they'll just handle through continued like warcry and ancillary game releases because they can't most of what they need isn't huge like the beast riders are fine the main ogres are probably fine for a while still like yeah like gluttons and stuff um but the butcher is terrible the slaughter master is terrible those two models are i mean really really really bad yeah the yetis yeah exactly uh but but all that stuff could easily like that's a that's a new hero at a book release that's a war cry that's an underworlds model right like you get it the underworlds warband oh it's three yetis and uh and a hunter it's like oh well okay solved a bunch of problems there didn't we or whatever you know right yeah um so like you could imagine that kind of thing right yeah so and beast chaos i think we're very beast i think they have to get a complete line refresh i think it has to be and that's why i don't see it happening in 2024 does it need to be done yes will it happen in fourth in in 4.0 oh i'd give that a 50 50 at best could they kill one no no i don't think so no i would rate that as like a zero percent chance yeah no we've we've seen some model new models yeah these are such an such a part of this game um they have been for a long time they like have a pretty significant player base of people who like them and engage with them and importantly they have a lot of fans at gw there are a lot of beast beast beast of chaos players are going to say at gw so in general whenever a bunch of people in the headquarters actually play the army it doesn't go away like sorry but that's what it is right i mean look you know if you like beast of chaos the brittonians of aos yeah like they're just gonna hang out man and and yeah i mean there's also exactly there's there's as a beefy crunch just pointed out they'll they'll potentially get updated through old world as well because they actually will be one of the ones that probably remains pretty stable in both so yeah why not full crossover and ogres are the same as well like they could update ogres in uh in old world yeah do you guys think it's a lock that we're going to see that we're going to see old world updates that then translate to aos that port of aos sure i mean define what you mean there well so that is a box of models from packaged with the old world for the old world comes out right and it has a war scroll or war scrolls for aos no i do not think you'll see that like and that's it that's so wild to think that they wouldn't capitalize on that obvious synergy but no i don't think they want to muddy the waters or mix their games plus it's two rival studios these are effectively competitive operations within the same company now they're both competing for dollars they're not going to make models for the other games now do i think that they'll make new gore for or something okay or whatever pay i'm just i'm just saying that as an example right for the old world and then people who play aos where there is also a unit called gore right we'll go buy that kit to use those things yes yes that will happen right yeah just like you will see people put a zombie dragon on the table that looks like the tomb king's mommy dragon sure because the zombie dragon kit is not available right now from sure that's a good call talk about a kit that needs updated at least my opinion that that's i'll be trying to guys but yeah i mean but that's the point like it's like it goes back to what i had said like you can't buy these things from gw right now sure what are you going to do like how are you going to yeah um we we will see that i'd be shocked if we see cast or i mean like are we going to see cast orbs finally at some point in fourth edition no not no i don't i don't do i think i think it'd be like the tell end if we do i think it's here i don't i don't think the hordes of hashit are not popular like here's the reality i understand that i understand that uh like you're just not i i don't think that you see it short of something like a armies of renown judgment or situation right like you may you may see that you may see a box come out right that is a bunch of units all together that um that serve as a unit that can be imported into an army but here's the deal um that just does not like we have i'll say it this way we have reached a like a stasis point in a os with the armies as we have they got to be really careful about putting under armies they can't put out four armies in an addition or something like that it's crazy right right you're lucky to see one new full new army perdition and even with that you're going to begin to see some armies cycled out as new ones are brought in yep like they they they are going to need to very carefully control adding new new armies into the ecosystem right so when i say things like do you think beast of chaos could cycle out but what i'm also asking there is is with them adding malaria umbraneth or whatever like they will need to look at at cycling things out or cutting from their lines i think you can see you can put one or two more in and not break the system and so like just adding umbraneth probably fine expanding lrl with uterian that's because that's still just lrl is a bigger army now it's fine yep right yep but if you get up to like when when you cross the threshold of like if you're getting up towards 30 there's going to be a priority yep i wouldn't look then i was curious what 40k is rocking so at least based on the website armies of the perium that's you know zenos armies armies chaos that's all of that's 20 and then you've got the spaceman's category right which however the hell you want to think about that but yeah no that yeah that seems about right 30 yeah that starts to get scary like i could see us get an umbraneth i could see us get um an expansion to lrl as like another sub faction maybe i could see us with another uh destruction faction because they're still so like compared to the other grand alliances sure yeah right um but beyond that like i think we're about done and until you begin trimming or collapsing other uh other uh factions yeah some people have said they think umbraneth or or malaria's forces would just be part of doc and i know they could do they like they could do a combined where where that happens in general they've made it so like the gods have their own armies you don't generally have a singular book that has two different gods in it because this is epic fantasy and it's very top down and so like malaria is his own god with his own troops and so he'd have his own book all the different orcs are all still they're different orcs but they're all still under the same gork and morgue right yep and i mean i'm just that's traditionally been the way that they think about the game and so like now like i realized i said that while i at the same time i just said tirion and uh teclas having a unified book but my impression of them is it it is the exception because they're so tightly bound together they are as yes the twins so you get whereas twins yes where whereas at the same time i mean i understand malaria and uh morathe or their daughter yes our mother son mother son now i understand that they're also related um so they could i mean i i thought about i thought about them a student things but yeah i they they could do one large army the problem is it would have to change they wouldn't all be the daughters of king they would be something else right right they would be like the shadow kin or something like that yeah yeah like whatever they'd have to get a new name because like malaria and troops we have no reason to believe the uh that malaria and troops have any care about kane that's not their bag that's not what their world is they worship him he's a full fledged god right he was from the beginning um but yeah mother son and moria you ain't wrong sickness uh okay uh anyways so uh look there we go we'll we'll see i guess all right let's uh let's close this out any other final hopes and dreams to end this out for the year anything else for 2024 you want to see outside of just product ranges or whatever anything else you want to see we gotta we gotta quick quick go around here uh yeah so i would not be shocked if they update or if they tried to do a revamp of path to glory at a revamped updated narrative system for fourth edition launch uh where they release a standalone book with that new narrative system whatever it's called i suspect it may not be called path to glory going forward just kind of i still feel like there's some real work like that crusade equivalent from 40 guy you mean oh yeah yeah they did do that with yeah crusades exactly yeah they had a crusades yes more or less that's yep uh that that would be one thing uh somebody at marvel's when will fire slayers be squatted that's just rude i was actually so that was going to be one of somebody just uh took one of that was potentially going to be one of my um my big swings uh was if this is going to truly be a ravining ravining hordes is when you when you redraw faction lines and when you write like that's like that's when you do that thing um is when you're doing a big sweeping change like and if that's the case uh the two that that looked uh uh most tenuous to me would be fire slayers and be sick yeah like i hate to say that like fire slayers at this point could simply be a regimen of brown oh man yeah the i mean i'm i'm still full on hopium after seeing that vulcan whatever the the box the war cry box like i hope that they're sitting on a bunch of new fire slayer models and at some point in 2025 we're going to get a you know fire slayer's done right yeah i mean look as the known fire slayer hater on this show okay i would put that at a zero percent chance they're not going to kill their their new aos faction could it be combined in one big dwarf book yeah maybe like i don't know that's always there's always a chance you never know how they're going to think about that design right but are they getting rid of fire slayers no man i don't not for a minute do i think that's gonna happen i really don't and so like i just i sickness you knew what you were getting into when you made a 2000 point swift talk agent army if you didn't know you were you were writing the lightning on that one come on buddy that's a different story okay you were like i'm gonna play army mailmen full of these hyper specific units from the old world you knew what was happening there uh and arrested a wall file saying like no soup like dwarf soup yeah that's a good point but yeah i mean i just i don't think for a minute that uh that we're gonna see like fire slayers go that's that's crazy talk well i would like i what i says this it would not surprise me they go the route of savages and what i mean by that is that we simply like they don't get you know squatted they don't get fridged but they they just don't get touched like i could see that happening for them because they're just such a small representation sure they get updated in the book they have a line item but they as a line as an ip are dead i don't know man that's uh that's that's a probably not for me but we'll see what other hopes of dreams you have tom what do you got i'm still waiting for my new my new sub faction fire eaters yeah sure i mean i'll tell you right now we already know what my hopes and dreams are we've talked about like five times on the show it's just please give me the new scaven range i want just please can i have it now all right it's all i want uh we haven't said a whole lot about what like what more what do you think you're going to get so do you think it's going to be ush like thompson i think it's going to be a most line refresh with a lot of culling okay yeah like that is to say you'll get heavy action well the box would be heavy ashen but you'll get a launch at the same time like right like so it will be like what they did with necrons in ninth is what i'm saying okay so you'll cut a bunch of stuff and call it out of the line like a bunch of things will be called okay yeah weapon what's that weapon teams potentially i mean at the minimum some of them are going away right like the um what's his name the the doom grinder or whatever the warp grinder that guy's gone you know the little little i mean a little bicycle rider i love that guy i love the bicycle riders spikey guy too but like whatever you you get picked you know there's going to be like 10 to 12 kits that are retired just gone from the line okay you'll get mostly refreshed outside of the new plastics like the vermin lords will stay and be what they are the storm fiends will stay and be what they are and stuff like that potentially they'd keep the bell it would fit like i think when they redid the the necrons like the scythe the big yeah big croissant like the flying croissant stayed right okay but they did make a new pyramid i think um a new monolith or whatever um so i think it could be the same thing there it's like potentially the bell stays it's not like a horrible plastic kid it's not the bell the bell and and or sensor yeah exactly yeah because it's like a double kit and you know could you redesign it make it awesome yeah i mean if you could do amazing things or that do you have to redesign it no it's it's still plastic it's still serviceable right but like clan rat redesign storm vermin redesign plague monk redesign plague sensor bearer redesign all the mainline stuff rat ogre redesign most of the heroes that are still riding on ancient plastics so like or and or metals or fine casts like plague priests master molders because they're going to keep this the we have a new death master already so that guy's good to go he's locked in right uh because we got that update already but basically all of that stuff and so on and so forth new you know like and and by the way either like new gizelle or better kill gizelles fine make better new interesting artillery right like right kill the doom wheel i love the doom wheel okay uh but like kill the doom wheel and give me a new crazier bigger wilder weapon like it you know i'm saying like the doom wheels retired but now we have like the whizzer you know i'm just like and it's like four wheels all spinning around the whizzer you get it um the grinder yeah like the the point being is that you know give me spiritual sequels to those previous things that are there that are their new stuff but like all the core units will stay and just get redesigned that's what i would see for the range refresh okay interesting so yeah there you go an annihilation whirly gig thank you sickness maximus absolutely the annihilation whirly gig yes uh varnacks at witchscape and theme do we think they'll dig into first i agree it'll be eschen to go in the launch box like you were exactly i think you're absolutely right tom because it's like that just is an easy launch filling out filling a launch box with ninja rats is just like the coolest thing you can do to sell a box right and plus it's a very funny opponent for stormcast right you can picture the trailer them like lightning striking down and fighting some some uh some plan rats or whatever and then just like out of the shadows just like little little warp tip throwing stars little green throwing stars are coming out of the shadows and just like pinging and you're seeing like lighting blasts go up all right that kind of thing yeah easy yeah okay cool good stuff there you go all right well what are your hopes and dreams out there audience hey drop it down in the comments and if you haven't hit like yet please do so uh for this probably show that it was much longer than i thought it was going to be but we had a lot to talk about uh that's all right hey everybody this is our last show of 2023 so i just want to say thank you so much for everything you've done in the show this year liking subscribing watching the show those who buy the merch down below support us on patreon buy the books that uncle adam and i produce all that kind of stuff do check it out we really appreciate it uh everything's down there and uh so check those out hit those things make dings it's fun you'll be cool you will get at least some percentage cooler all your friends will think so and uh we certainly will think so uh but yes thank you very much tyler tom thank you both for everything this year absolute pleasure to close out 2023 with both of you an honor and a blessing and a pleasure as always i got we gotta go i gotta go back and add it up tom see who had the highest tally of appearances and you had a strong showing at the tell end of this year he did yeah i've had like nine in the last ten shows or something ridiculous you may you may have picked me seven in the last nine you got into the last minute there he brought it home all right yeah but thank you everybody we really appreciate it and uh as always we'll see you next wednesday