Yeah that part of the article is mainly about the GHB. I think it is relevant though, as it explicitly mentions the mercenary system in the paragraph about narrative play.
Honestly, I think GW only supported them at the beginning of AoS to keep players attached to the hobby. "I know we're rebooting fantasy, but you can still play your Empire, Dwarfs, Dark Elves, etc..." I think GW will gradually phase out those armies to focus on their newer armies. But, you're right that GW does seem to be bringing back several WHFB armies, so who knows?
I think so. Allies can only be taken from a (in most cases) short list and from the same Grand Alliance. If I understand the mercenary system (the bits we know) it sounds like it works across Grand Alliances but probably has other restrictions.
I feel like if they do revamp them they will make them less generic fantasy armies and more unique to the age of sigmar.
It would be nice to represent the majority of the AOS citizenship. To use a 40k comparison, we have Space Marines but no Imperial Guard. That's where a lot of the interesting background comes from, in my humble opinion.
I'd love a free-cities battletome with all the generic fantasy races and it could be a great avenue to explore the commoners of the Mortal Realms. That said I can wait on that if they just give us an updated Seraphon battletome.
To bring this back to seraphon.... I've been thinking that the scale rumour engine pic could from a seraphon underworlds model. As season 3 is coming up there isn't many factions that don't have a warband. I think you may see us in season 3
Hopefully we'll see some more at the end of the month, I'm always interested in the underworlds warbands they are cool little sets I havn't dipped into yet.
I hope so too. I think that would be an easy way to give us a few new models and add some quick new mechanics into our army (b/c the Shadespire warbands usually have some "unique" thing they do when used in regular AoS). Or they could be used as proxies for heroes. Plus, it might get me back to Shadespire
it might be decently usefull and worth the prize. But I just hate using phones/tablets for basicly anything. And a subscription based models means its gone once you stop paying (or if GW dissappears altogether) At least the actual books i can still use 20 years later no matter what happenend in the meantime. Also have there been more pictures of the terrain yet? So far all Ive seen is a sigmarine temple and a bunch of broken sigmarine statues and pillars and such. Is there any more?
I mostly agree with your statement, however if your lazy, like me, or have awful handwriting (like me), you will probably have a laptop or tablet, meaning that you can just use the warscrolls from there, and it is pretty convenient. In all honesty a digital battletome is always worse than the paper one, but it does mean a lot less weight to carry around.
The digital one would be easier to search in, but although I use the app for warscrolls a lot, I also prefer the regular old paper book for home use. What I do though: I take pictures of a few pages with my phone so I can have the bataillon warscrolls, allegiance abilities, artefacts and spells with me at all times, to create lists and look them up without having the paper book with me. Edit I just wish they would give everyone who buys the paper some kind of code to use and get the digital version for free (including updates, and not only errata). That would be nice.
For the sake of my own spine and convenience I tend to go for digital editions, but there is something lovely and irreplaceable about flittering through a nice chunky physical rulebook. This, for the love of god this, what we are really paying for with rulebooks is the work, not the actual value of the physical rulebook item (which probably totals to a few pounds at the very most). A combined physical + digital purchase seems intuitive.
My girlfriend made custom war scrolls for me. Including updated errata and such. That already gets you a long way (and is nicer to play with than either book or tablet). I'd love that, though I wouldn't even want a proper app. Just a collection of PDF's of the war scrolls with up to date text according to all the errata and what not would already be brilliant. If I want to I can just print and laminate them myself. Plus, if I desperately want to I can put them on my laptop or tablet anyway. It might be a bit more messy than an official app, but it's not like you're ever going to be using more than a handful of war scrolls at any given time anyway, so it's not like you're going to be searching for unexpected units frequently (assuming your opponent is nice and bring his own stuff ) Though if nothing else I'd at least want a desktop version of the app. Even if it just mocks being run on a phone in the background. At least then I can actually make a nice full screen and compare stuff instead of staring at the tiny phone screens that barely fit an entire warscroll.