Stormcast Eternals Codex

[Rodney Liuzzo]

Asanyone who plays GW games knows, Fantasy has been earning GW far less than 40k and sales had been falling. I think it is about 15% of total revenue. GW handled it very badly. They tried to hype it up in the stupidest way possible, with the End of Times, an epic battle against chaos that threatened to destroy the whole world. They introduced huge, expensive models to appeal to the hard core players and alienate everyone else.

The new rules remove the need for points cost and codexes, instead having warscrolls for each unit that can be downloaded for free. It is intended to make it easier for a beginner to play, without having a properly developed army. It is now a game in which you just bring whatever mismatched models you have and throw them together into an army. Generic fantasy war gaming at its most generic.

With such a dramatic change in rules and very little play testing, even GW have admitted that there will be lots of flaws in the rules. Is it worth playing? Perhaps, if you are a beginner, and that is the plan. GW wants to lure children to fantasy, by making it easy to get into.

That is what I wrote two weeks ago. Since then I have had a better chance to evaluate the rules, the stats and the game balance. I have seen how other peoples games have gone and thought about why GW did this.

There are also a bunch of silly extra rules connected to certain figures, to give you bonuses for talking to your models or your imaginary horse, grumbling in a dwarvish manner, having the biggest mustache and granting random sexual favours to your opponent. (I kid you not)

According to GW, these rules were deliberately silly and are intended as a final farewell to some of the old armies. At present these are the same models, but GW plans to change the look of some of these races and phase out the old models.

For years GWs strategy has been to produce stupid looking, but very detailed models and charge an arm and a leg for them. Or to add a whole new range of models and skew the rules, so that an army must have them to win (flyers).

I am not surprised that they have been losing fans to other games.

What Age of Sigmar most lacks is game balance. The only nod towards game balance is a sudden death rule if you have 50% fewer figures, but this makes very little concession to the power of the figures. 20 Chaos warriors are far more powerful than 30 goblins, but would still get the Sudden death advantage. Alternately, you could put 1,000 chaos warriors against the goblins. Sure, the goblins would only need to kill one unit to win, but how could they kill a unit 1000 strong? What about 20 heroes on dragons against 30 goblins?

AoS is probably also intended as a way to get power gamers to buy some of the stupidly overpriced ruler models (who would otherwise pay 35 for one figure when you can get a whole unit for 20) and the stupidly expensive End of Times garbage. (60+ each). The only game balance seems to come from model count or total hit point count. To use Bretonnians as an example, A paladin has 5 HP and is a hero. A mounted paladin is the same, as is a paladin on a pegasus or a lord on a pegasus, and the damsel and the fey enchantress and the green knight etc. Buying the models, you can get two damsels for less than one fey enchantress, but the Fey Enchantress is far more powerful, yet is regarded as equal in game balance terms.

There is only war, as the forces of the Immortal God Emperor (Sigmar) battles across the cosmos (9 planes) against the forces of chaos, aided by his elite space marines (stormcast eternals). The new models seem to pretty much look and function like Blood Angel space marines, the wings being like the jump packs. Each group of the Sigmarines, or Stormcast belongs to one of eight Stormhosts. Each Stormhost is analogous to a 40K chapter of Space Marines.The game might be a simple battle system, but if I wanted to play 40K, I would. The new models are also more expensive than most of the old fantasy models.

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