Change is hard, who knew (or: how I feel about the new Cities of Sigmar book)

I’ve been struggling to figure out how I feel about the new Cities book, so I figured I’d blog about it and try to get my thoughts into some kind of order. At the point of starting to write it I don’t have a nice neat conclusion in mind so it might be a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we’ll see how it goes.

Point 1: change in AoS is good for the game

Before I get into the specific context of the new Cities of Sigmar battletome and range refresh, let me say that the pace of change is one of the things I like about Age of Sigmar. I like that the lore moves on in a reasonably meaningful way each edition, I like that Games Workshop are gradually replacing kits designed for the Old World with new more out there model ranges, and I like that the rules and the competitive meta evolve frequently. So regardless of my personal feelings about the new Cities stuff, I think that replacing the older Empire models is a good move by Games Workshop, and while I was very fond of the old Cities battletome it was feeling pretty out of date and in need of an update. The new Cities models look amazing and generally seem to have been received very positively by the AoS community. So I’m not trying to argue in this blog that the new Cities stuff is a bad thing.

Point 2: change can be hard!

Most people who have played any Games Workshop game system for any period of time have probably experienced some kind of unwelcome change, be it a nerf to a favourite army, rules changes you didn’t like, or withdrawal from sale of kits you told yourself you were going to buy one day. For myself, I’ve learned from experience that I don’t enjoy speculation about rules changes until the full picture’s available, because I end up stressing about how changes I don’t fully understand yet might impact my armies. So these days, I tend to largely avoid preview teaser articles and wait until man-reads-book day to learn about new rules. But the Cities range refresh is the first time there have been significant changes to the model range for an army I own since I got into AoS in 2017, so processing how I feel about it is a new experience for me.

My Tempest's Eye army

As someone who has two fully painted Cities armies, I’ve been mildly anxious about what a range refresh might mean ever since rumours of a human focused range refresh first starting circulating probably a couple of years ago now. In some respects having a long time to prepare for it has been a good thing: I’ve had an opportunity to get both of my Cities armies on the table this year to give them a runout prior to potential retirement, and I’ve had time to get my head round things a bit. If you’d asked me three months ago, I’d have said that I was fully resigned to my Tempest’s Eye old-Empire kits army being largely squatted, and that while I was holding out hope for my Living City Dispossessed army remaining playable it wouldn’t be the end of the world for me if it didn’t.

Point 3: it’s ok to feel sad or disappointed about changes to the game

I think sometimes there’s a lot of pressure to either come down fully on the side of ‘I hate this and it’s bad and I will make a clickbaity You Tube video about why it’s bad’ or ‘it’s important to be positive and the haters are wrong’. Over the last six months I’ve had a lot of very mixed emotions about the Cities changes, and I’m still not quite sure where I’m going to come out at the end of it all. I’ve enjoyed seeing all the new models being previewed, and most of the kits look fantastic. It’s very likely that I’ll do a new Cities army at some point and paint a bunch of them.

Regarding my own armies, it’s been an overall less positive experience. With my Tempest’s Eye I was very confident that most of the kits I have painted up (handgunners, pistoliers, shadow warriors, general on griffin) would be retired, and at one point I was considering rebasing the army so that I could play it in Old World once that comes out. As it turns out, enough stuff has survived or has obvious counts-as opportunities that I could probably continue to play the army in AoS if I wanted to, but I’m not sure I do want to – there’s so much potential to do cool things with the new kits that continuing to run the old stuff feels a bit boring. I don’t feel quite ready to make a decision about this yet, so I’ll probably leave the army sitting on the shelf for a year or so and then take stock of what I want to do. If Old World comes out and looks fun then maybe rebasing will be the way to go, if I decide I don’t want to do that then I could easily add some new kits to the army to give it a new lease of life in AoS. Or I could retire the army, stick it in a box in the loft, and paint a completely new Cities army that makes the most out of the new stuff. I’m hoping that at some point my brain will switch to seeing this as an exciting opportunity rather than a faintly anxiety provoking loose end I need to resolve, but we’re not there yet.

My ghost dwarves Living City army has had a lot of ups and downs. When GW released the list of units that wouldn’t be in the new Cities book, I was overjoyed, because everything in the army was staying. The army is made up of a bunch of Dispossessed, a steam tank, a celestial hurricanum and some Sylvaneth units, and all of those things remain playable in Living City. However, the more I’ve learned about the rules, the more it’s become clear it doesn’t work as an army anymore. The hurricanum is the centrepiece of the army: it’s a converted Black Coach which is probably my single favourite model I own. But with the new Cities rules, it no longer provides a buff to duardin units, so it doesn’t really play a useful role in the army any more. The Sylvaneth I have painted up for the army are a Spirit of Durthu and six Kurnoth Hunters, but now that coalition rules have gone and it’s only the allies rules that can be used to add Sylvaneth in, it won’t (unless I’ve missed something) be possible to run both of those units in the army at the same time any more, as I’d go over the allies points limit.

My Living City army

So while the army technically still exists, it’s no longer an army that I’d ever want to actually run – even in a narrative context, I know that I’ll have more fun if I run a list that can do stuff and has a shot at winning games, rather than just putting models on the table that won’t present any meaningful challenge to my opponent. I’ll admit that I’m pretty disappointed about this, I’d got my hopes up that the army was going to survive and remain useable, and I’m sad that that’s not the case. I’ll keep the army, because it’s one of the hobby projects I’m proudest of. But I haven’t played with it anything like as much as I’d have liked to, and I’m gutted that I probably won’t have that opportunity now.

Point 4: yeah, there’s really not a good conclusion to this blog

Where does these leave me? I guess taking a bit of time to process my feelings and decide whether I want to do with Cities stuff in future. I almost certainly will do a Cities project of some kind at some point in the next year or two, because I love the lore of Cities, and the new kits are amazing and I’d like to paint them. But the fact that I’m feeling a bit down about my existing armies is definitely putting me off getting any new Cities stuff right away. It’s also making it harder for me to get excited about the Dawnbringers books, because obviously Cities stuff is pretty central to the lore of the Dawnbringer crusades. But I want to fight that, because I absolutely loved the Broken Realms stuff at the end of AoS 2^nd edition, and I’d like to be able to get invested in Dawnbringers in a similar way.

At one point I had a plan to take a Tempest’s Eye army of some kind (either Cities or Stormcast) to a narrative event in October, and I’ve quickly abandoned that because it became clear that my brain had placed a ‘we are sad about this’ label on anything to do with Tempest’s Eye and trying to deal with that felt unnecessarily stressful when I have a lot of other armies that aren’t anxiety provoking. Instead I’m trying to focus on my new Seraphon project both so that I have something I’m excited about to take to the event, and because probably the best way to deal with feeling sad about an old army is to get motivated for a new hobby project.

Cheeky shot of these two aggradons I just finished painting on the day of writing this blog and am very happy with.

So I guess we’ll see how it goes! If there’s a message I want you to take away from this blog, it’s probably that it’s ok to acknowledge that you don’t like change sometimes, and it’s ok not to be super into the thing that everyone else is super hyped for. Hopefully at some point I’ll have a cool new narrative idea for a Cities project, and then I’ll feel less sad about my old armies going away (eight armies was probably too many armies anyway, right?)