The MUP and Counter Charge interviews were enjoyable, although they treaded quite a bit of the same ground. I haven’t listened to the Direct Misfire one yet.
At this stage, now, I’m starting to wonder more banal things like… What factions will be in the big starter box set? Because presumably there will be one.
The new faction and… Trident Realms again? Hmm.
Well the mystery faction, TR, Salamanders and Halflings are looking like being in the first lore/background book.
Plastic placoderms look like they are coming (so might get rolled out with v4 starter set), while Salamanders have a number of gaps in their roster which might get some love?
Salamanders are being said to get a full STL release with that book (guess it was easier to add the plastic model base as STL over closing the gap with plastics)
And the new Faction being obviously plastic with new Placoderms and Depth Horrors being confirmed to be plastic as well so guess those end up in the V4 starter box
Did we get confirmation on plastic depth horrors? That would be something!
That’s what Ronnie said at Clash
I’ve been waiting for plastic placos ever since we got Eckter’s beautiful sculpt 
If new faction is the threat from the East (which sounds very likely) then Salamanders make sense lore-wise.
The Xirkalli Empire have been pushing the Salamanders West, apparently.
We have art of the TR fighting their ships.
I have no idea how this involves the halflings though.
They’re out West, where Morgoth is coming from, so Halfings vs new Undead would make more sense.
Might be an invasion on more than two fronts
So any opinions on how Dwarves are going to work with all units seemingly stealing their rules? I wonder if Ronnie insisted on speed 7 dwarves.
Invasion on more than one front is almost certain, given the answer I got to a question on a FB post.
Or more likely Def 7 dwarfs? 
Me gusta a lot!
I’ll just say that the previously mentioned 40 testers for 20 armies with this level of army list reassortment and merging is not entirely encouraging. Thank you very much though to the testers who have put in their evenings and weekends. I think it will take a few months after release to work out the army list issues, but I’m sure it will happen over time. Formulas are great starting points, but testing is really necessary to come up with a good final cost for internal and external balance. The system itself is in principle better than what we had, but we’ll need to see what people can do with it and a lot depends on which units were put in which categories and where their stats and points ended up. I wish they’d included just one revised example army in this blog so we could see how it might work in practice. As with the previous blogs it does raise questions because we don’t yet have an army to actually look over.
Same, I kept hoping I’d scroll down to an example … Maybe that’ll sneak out on FB like other additional commentary we’ve gotten (or it’s coming on Oct 3rd).
Overall, the KOW battalion has a lot more freedom than I expected. I assumed we’d get something like the Epic Warpath system, which we did, but those battalions are far more constrained compared to the KOW one. Which is good!
I do think a lot is going to depend on what ends up being Core, as that’s now the listbuilding gate. But this is an extremely familiar problem for anybody who played Warhammer of either flavor, and if you really hate your Core troops, I’m sure you can min/max your way past them to some extent … tho you’re still stuck with 2-6+ regs of things you don’t really have a choice but take 
The number by itself isn’t important in my opinion
10 testers who know what they are doing (doesn’t necessarily need to be good players but good at pointing out errors and giving feedback) and have access to the full rules (and not just testing a selection) can do a lot more than a 100 who just report back “shooting is too strong and dwarfs need to be removed”
If this works out or not remains to be seen, but as long as some proper testing was done (and if it is true that they tested over the past year you would have 2 weekends per army) the worst things should be gone
I don’t love the idea of “tiers” of Army lists even if it’s hard to imagine doing 20+ extensive lists all at once. Various GW games that had only the hint of a list unless you bought the new releases have left a bad taste. For instance, having more command orders is an obvious advantage even if Mantic is better at resisting power creep than GW.
Also not having artifacts scale in cost is going to limit where they get used.
Mantic is saying they are going to do some list previews with the various podcasts. It’s good to hear there will be some list previews. Even just knowing for one list which units ended up in core, auxiliary, support, specialist would be helpful to figure out how this might work. I’m sure there is confidence in the lists, I just hope there’s also a commitment to follow-up after release with adjustments if necessary once this hits the wider community and feedback starts pouring in.
Someone should tell Matt Gilbert that allies should be allowed as an optional rule (disabled by default) because garage gamers want to use the Companion App as well.
Just create another list with the things you want to use as allies. If you want also just ignore the validation if you want to build lists outside the battalion structure. You make up the rules with what you want to play with in your own games!