I would certainly hope the complexity is in the warscrolls, because there isn't really enough meat on the core rules for me to sink my teeth into. I'm worried about the points thing, the lack of any mention of them, and some rumors saying there just aren't any, has me thinking that GW has washed their hands of balancing sides altogether and just left it to the players, in which case I really won't be able to play this game at all. There'd just be no point.
Otherwise, overall the game really just doesn't feel like it has the sort of tactical and interactive elements to it that made
WHFB so cool. No careful maneuvering to turn flanks or draw your enemy into a bad position. No carefully judging how many dice to use on spells in an attempt to bait out dispel dice before the spell you really want to cast. None of that.
I don't hate everything about it. For a skirmish game, I like how they handle being locked in combat. But if they're doing something so extreme and new, it's frustrating that they kept some of warhammer's most dated and annoying gameplay elements, such as three separate rolls to resolve all (well, most) attacks, and i-go, u-go turns that have one player standing around doing relatively little while they wait for their opponent to do most everything, rather than a LotR style interleaved turn.
If there is a points system, and if the battlescrolls do bring in some interesting depth and complexity in the way they interact, then I could see myself enjoying this as an alternative to low points games, a replacement for warhammer skirmish basically, but it really wouldn't replace warhammer fantasy for me. Yet I doubt I'll be able to find many players for the latter going forward. I'm really hoping KoW 2nd edition is a more interesting and effective game than the first, now that they're trying to sell a game for GW's models, and not just models for GW's game.
As for the names, I think it's more a matter of
our monsters are different and
Phantasy spelling than of copyright issues. Plenty of fantasy books/games/what have you write about Wamphyrs instead of Vampires, Dh'raq'ons instead of Dragons and so forth. It's a dumb trope, but a common one, and doesn't require any sort of wacky intellectual property malarky to explain it. GW knows that players can continue buying elf models from other companies even if they're called 'aelfs' in
AoS. Heck, 'aelf' isn't even a copy-rightable or trade-markable name.
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