To be fair, the only way to get a firstborn chapter ancient and apothecary without going to Forge World is to buy a command squad.
I agree, the prices of GW products getting more and more insane. The Lumineth models are the worst I think, 10 next-gen High Elf Spearmen for £36.50 is just nuts!
If you want to be picky about it, the whole thing started with the Baneblade. Allowing those into normal games of 40K started a shift towards the 'bigger is better' mentality that seems to be kind of inherent to the modern 8th/9th edition game. ...also I notice that the Imperium seems to get the shiniest ones. Once again, this is a category where Orks kind of get screwed. The Killtank isn't bad, and at the points cost isn't horribly overpowered for what you're paying, nor it is impossible for a normal non-LoW-themed army to take it down. Personally, I'm waiting for them to grab more of the Epic stuff and make new kits. We still need that gigantic Tzeentch-themed war altar thing, the Doomcannon for Khorne, a proper Gargant for the Orks, and so forth. Oh - and perhaps a rule that restricts their use to 3000 point or larger games...
If we truly wanted to make sense lore wise I don't see why the swarm lord can't be considered to be a LoW
One has to raise the question as to what makes something a "Lord of War". Historically for the tabletop game, that's largely consisted of gigantic war machines and their equivalents. However, Horus Heresy gives us another interpretation in conjunction with the previous one: characters so powerful that they're in a league of their own (chiefly in reference to the primarchs, who not only can go toe-to-toe with other Lords of War on equal footing but are also obligated to be the army's warlord without exception if included). This is distinctly separate from the kind of command structure that would be seen in large-scale battles - sure, a Chapter Master or Lord-Castellan is extremely unlikely to show up in small-scale skirmishes, realistically speaking, but that rarity alone doesn't mark them out to be Lords of War.
On a related note about tyranids, yesterday i saw a fresh new BatRep, a narrative battle with 4000 pts of Nids vs 3000 pts of Blood Angels, with Nids going first and around 1/3 of the BA in reserve. BA won. If you have to bring an optimized list, hoping to find a casual army and then maybe the game will be vaguely balanced, we have a problem.
Certainly in 7th Edition Imotekh the Stormlord and the old Ghazghkull Thraka were both Lords of War choices, and the Swarmlord is bigger and more powerful than either of those. I don’t know if the same convention has been applied to 8th or if it has been fixed so that only truly massive stuff has this rule applied to it. If the latter is the case the Swarmlord would be too small to count as one.
Was that MWGs devastation of baal? I felt so bad for the nids player during that shooting phase turn 1
5 days to 21 days shipping so let's roll the dice on this Bamf I fully expect him to be as big as gulliman like the lore suggests
I'd be ok with no change in size... epically large isn't the only requirement, and it would be nice to have something slightly different for our own Niche LoW
Incoming mini-apocalypse game (narrative battle)! 2v2, 5000 vs 5000 Chaos Knights + Daemons of Khorne / Black legion vs Ultramarines + Sisters of Battle
I will surely post pics of the game with an explanation of how the turns went, but i don't think i will do a proper BatRep.