Thing is, if all mounted Bretonnian army isn't a feasible / competitive army, then its not balanced.
Well, the bretbois are one thing. There's also great enthusiasm about a medieval style infantry+cavalry army, which the T9A KoE does very well.
But the bretbois are/were not the only ones to complain. And 'my army is weak' or 'I don't recognize my favorite troops in T9A' are not the only sources of complaints. Actually, the most fearsome thing is that people will simply stop complaining, stop giving their ideas, and just wait and see what comes out. Already there are thousands of T9A forum members who were active at an earlier point, but have now practically stopped visiting the forums. Some of them quite active at the time. This is normal for forums, and it's hard to say if it's an alarming trend or not, regarding the longevity of the whole project.
Where do you think its heading Zyg?
Uh, I don't know, really. Personally, I think there are two important things emerging atm.
1) The new army books should be balanced around the core strengths and core weaknesses of the armies. I read this as hc balancing. The rules team and army book teams have been quite good at it, so I have faith that this leads into an even better balanced game, with visibly different playstyles for all the different armies. But it will also change the armies, and we've seen how adverse to change the crowd is. The new 9th Scroll sheds some light on how the rules teams will approach this.
2) It's been almost two years now, with huge initial interest, great progress with the 0.1-1.1 editions, the 'big IP change' in the project direction in late 2016, total change of time schedules in 2016/17 (some might say vaporware), and now the decision to freeze the 1.3.4 until August-September. So it's been uphills and downhills all the time, and the number of members on the forum has grown from mere hundreds to over 11.000.
But this all seems to level now. My hunch is that it is only now that we are beginning to see the level and nature of the real, long-time community support. And it's of course thinner than in the early days, when things were new, proceeding at a mad speed, and the dividing line between the designers and the community was very fluid. The project is becoming more professional, the product more a product than a community brainstorm.
So, my only relevant prognosis is that we will see. T9A is living very interesting times at the very moment. Maybe after the 2.0 and the ETC (can't remember which is promised to come first), we'll all be in the clear as to what T9A wants to be, and will be.
But clearly, T9A remains to be the hot thing in the fantasy battles genre this year too.
-Z
