Ok, so Games Workshop is pulling ALL of it's tricks out of the bag. Annoying but the sheer novelty of the game and some of the changes I like.
I'll start with the rules. I like them. I like that shooting was reduced in efficiency with the warband system and the penalties to move and fire. Removing volley fire I'm still not sold, but don't mind it all that much.
I like the heroic moves. Heroic Strike, in particular, makes the game a much more fluid experience. Not everything is set at the start any more, your heroes can try to take out that troll, even with lower fight values now. Heroic march is very nice too. I was not sold on the new heroic shooting action but I like it. The increased accuracy is very nice for shooting into melee and at important things like banners.
I LOVE the new monster rules. Some might find them overwhelming, and they are certainly game changing. But in the end they brought monsters back to a game from which they had vanished.
On the downside, I still find cavalry lackluster and still see too much emphasis on bodies over quality. But those are personal preferences.
But what REALLY ticks me of is GW's shameless BUY THE COOL NEW MODELS NOW gimmick. Almost ALL of the new models are underpriced for what they do. The new Orc hunters in particular leap at me, but so does the Elven cavalry with their ridiculous equipment and immunity to bow limit. The new goblins and their chittering hordes rule also SIGNIFICANTLY more efficient than your average goblin. The only ones I took no exception to were the dwarves... funnily enough...

The heroes are pretty much the same. They come with some serious price tags, but what they do is insane compared to the old edition rules. What bothers me the most is the change of aesthetic in the new edition. Unless I field a pure War of the 5 Armies evil army I will probably never buy any of the new evil models as none of the new models share the same feel with the old models. Good guys are exempt from this as they continue sharing the same aesthetic.

So to sum it up. I appreciate the new rules, would have spend the money on the new book just for those. But the models, rules and points costs of the new game are an absolute powercreep over the old edition. Coupled with the ABSOLUTE certainty that G.W. will not revise it's previous books anytime soon (read: ever) I see this expansion as a rules clean up, and little more. But it did succeed at that (the rules cleanup and refreshing).

While I agree with most of your points on the new rules I do take exception to a few.


Well that's PJ's decisions really, but honestly how much aesthetic or 'feel' do Isengard Uruks, Moria Goblins, Mordor Orcs, Easterlings and Harad have with each other. Not much really, so why the beef with the new things being as different from them as they are from each other? I don't like the Hunter Orcs, not because they're 'different' but because they look like they crawled out of a bad '80s Sci-fi where the bad guys all wear massive shoulder pads, random strapping and have bare torsos (like T-shirts have been forgotten in the future).


Nonsense. They're F2 and D3. No access to armour or shields, no banners or drums, no bows. You can get up to 5 more a turn until the (incredibly weak and immobile) scribe is inevitably killed. Want to protect the scribe? With what, F2/D3 goblins....oooh scary. Break point is now worked out on the number of models killed, not the number left on the table, so the scribe's reinforcements won't stop you breaking.


This is not WHFB or 40K. We're just over a week into the new edition of SBG and it's far too early to start moaning about powercreep.

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How can you complain about the elves when they're 22 pts? Compare them to SKoDA, for 3 pts more, they gain a point of fight, elf bows and woodland creature. But they also lose an armored horse and VERY powerful special rule. They're more than fair. Is Bolg extremely powerful? YES, but he's also 175 pts and his special rules forn't kick in til he starts killing stuff. And as mentioned, the new goblins lose armor, but gain the ability to support other models with the same rule, for the same base price as the old goblins. The only thing that I see as powercreep is that the new heros are getting a lot of new abilities, but even then they aren't game changing.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
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So...you have a different reason for not liking a model, and that's more valid somehow? Your opinion is certainly valid, whether or not I agree with your take on the Orcs (I do, in fact), I just find it odd that you would express such disdain for someone else's reasons.

I simply don't like the aesthetic of the new goblins, they don't come close to what I imagined when reading the Hobbit, whereas for the most part, the LotR movies (and the models derived from them) were a lot closer. Just a personal preference.



I don't know, Orc Hunters are on par with Reavers (trading Str for Fight), and are cheaper. What's not power-creep about that? Not sure about elf knights though, I think they're okay. Depending on the situation, I'd rather have a Son of Eorl in combat, having 2 attacks when you lose priority is huge. I'd much rather have seen elf knights at 25 points with 2A.

I suspect, with a lot of painting and conversion that you could come up with some effective looking northern Orcish armies, maybe themed around Mount Gundabad. The Gundabad forces get mauled during the Battle of the Five Armies - but their numbers would likely slowly increase in the lead up to the War of the Ring.

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I don't think they're game changing either. Bolg's F7 is less of a big deal with Heroic Strike. Someone with a lot of might (Boromir) or free might (Aragorn) can take him down before he buffs up. I like the mechanic of him getting more powerful as he kills things, it adds a new dimension to games involving him and there's a little sub-plot to the story of those games.
Thorin's company have some nifty rules, but the have mostly low D values and so will the buffs from Bombur, Ori and Oin, who are all D4 and need to be within 3" of another model (and the danger area) to do anything. Are any of them point-for-point better than Gimli or Floi? I'm not so sure.
Now that Gollum has a new profile all evil armies can take him as an ally and do ringbearer shenannigans if they wish, as can good armies with a choice of Frodo, Bilbo or Isildur (who has the potential to be utter filth with The Ring).


'Disdain' is a bit of a harsh word. I can disagree without thinking someone's opinion is worthless. I didn't agree that they should have some connection with evil characters already existing in LoTR because those have no common design cues either. Why would orcs in the north of the misty mountains look like those from mordor? Gondor and Rohan are right next door and they look completely different.

The hunter orcs may look good on paper, but one stat line is not indicative of powercreep by itself. In the context of the rest of the statlines and rules for new models this is a far more balanced release than a new 40K codex usually is.

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Orcs from the Misty Mountains (actually Dol Guldor for Azog's lot in the fil'm) would look different from Mordor Orcs because they would have 'evolved' differently over the 1000 years or so to their different surroundings.

I agrre mostly with what others have said btw.

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"I am the Flying Spagetti Monster. Thou shall have no other monsters before me"
-FSM.

Well, I hate to always go back to the same argument but Orcs should NOT be better fighters than the best of the Dunedain and on par with the greatest Elf warrior of the Third Age. Going by the books, it just doesn't make sense. At ALL.

Perhaps not so much the Hunter Orcs (though they remind me of Uruk-hai more than regular Orcs, to the point where I'm considering converting them into Feral Uruks) but the new Goblins don't even look like the same species as the old ones. Out of their armour, Men of Rohan and Gondor look the same.

Reavers are, to my knowledge, extensively fielded in numbers at tournaments. They've been proven to be effective minis, at 2/3 the cost of any other 2A warrior. Hunter Orcs have a very comparable profile and are cheaper still. While it may be theoretical because Hunter Orcs themselves haven't seen extensive use yet, we have plenty of data on how similar models perform.

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Gondor: 2339pts
Rohan: 1318pts
Dwarves: 2482pts
Elves: 1091pts
Mordor: 2305pts
Isengard: 1762pts
Moria: 1463pts
Evil Men: 381pts

A couple of millennia is far too short a time to evolve in any meaningful way. Their clothing, weapons and armour should be the only thing distinguishing them. Just like Men.

EDIT: It makes little sense why Orcs in more northerly areas would wear LESS clothing than their southern cousins. Surely, they feel the cold?

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Gondor: 2339pts
Rohan: 1318pts
Dwarves: 2482pts
Elves: 1091pts
Mordor: 2305pts
Isengard: 1762pts
Moria: 1463pts
Evil Men: 381pts

Hmm: what about "why the beef", "nonsense", "ooh scary", and "moaning"? These are modes of expression used to dismiss and belittle, they don't really serve any other purpose...you can disagree quite easily without them.

I agree on the point about clothing, i find that a little weird - I think it assumed that they evolved to be coldproof or something but I don't get it.

In amagical world, I'm pretty sure goblins/orcs cna evolve fsater than human into morlocks/eloi.

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"I am the Flying Spagetti Monster. Thou shall have no other monsters before me"
-FSM.

This bugs me to no end as well, but I've managed to put it aside and have almost given up worrying about it. We'll never see Numenor, Gondor, Rohan, and Elves the way they were meant to be balanced out with the rest.

Apologies if I sounded snarky.

I don't mind the look of the new goblins from the stills and clips I've seen from the film and I think it's acceptable for them to be very different to the Moria goblins, but the sculpts do seem to have rather large heads though. I'm reserving final judgement until I've painted them.

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I wouldn't say evolved (first of all because Tolkien was not an evolutionist and secondly because, to the best of our knowledge, orcs spawn and aren't born) so much as mutated. The reason why Mordor orcs look one way would be the way they spawned, ie they watched over in Mordor and in Isengard (explaining why all the Uruk-hai look identical) whereas in Goblin Town, they just spawn randomly without any help, so they get substantially more flaws than other orcs.

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I don't know if "evolved" is the right term. But there's certainly a lot of, uhhh, breeding differences, shall we say.

The Goblin Town orcs are vile little runts who've been interbreeding for centuries deep away from the sunlight. The Mordor Orcs have been bred for war, a type of war at least. The Morannon Orcs are those bred specifically by the Witch King for the War of the Ring. The Uruk-hai are probably/possibly part of the same process. The Moria Orcs are small runtish creatures of the mountains, Orcs left alone by and large, by the dark powers and their grander schemes.

(in the real world, humans sort of do this, but over much longer time frames - there are tribes in Siberia, vaguely related to the Inuit of northern Canada, who have adapted a very different body type to deal with the extreme cold and lack of sunlight in winter. It's sort of an evolutionary process, but its far quicker in how it happens, largely because humans actively adapt to situations)

In my own personal canon, there's another tribe of Orcs, descended from Morgoth's original host, dwelling somewhere in the north, grey skinned and fur clad and "adapted" to the cold.

(Also, Tolkien was Catholic, so either was an evolutionist or didn't have much of an opinion on the matter. He did retcon a lot of Middle-earth details towards the end of his life to keep up with then-current thinking on geology, but apparently it all changed too fast and too messily to be worthwhile)

Edit: Orcs do not spawn. Orcs are born. A mommy orc and a daddy orc pray really hard to Morgoth and a dark fell stork brings the baby orc... but yeah, Orcs are a corruption of humans or elves depending on which explanation Tolkien favoured at any given time, so they do indeed breed "naturally"

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Had to LOL at that image

That's only according to Tolkien's later writings that he never finished. While he never said so explicitly early on, I always got the feeling that they spawned, similar to the movie showing the Uruks of Isengard being spawned.

Also, the orcs of Moria were sent there specifically by Sauron (or were at least controlled by some of his Uruk-hai) to serve the Balrog

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

You're not complaining how orcs and moria goblins look different. In Tolkien's world orcs and goblins were used for the same thing. just think that the goblins/orcs of goblin-town are just a different variation of orc just like mordor uruk-hai/moria goblins/mordor orcs/morannon orcs/orc trackers are all different.

Of the above listed examples, only Uruk-hai are actually a different "species", the others are just variant breeds, like dogs.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.