Warhammer 40k: Primaris Space Barbies

[Thaluikhain]

So of course GW does a zillion sphech merines spin-offs because they will sell.

Second that. Also, they have the advantage that there's a thousand (nominally) chapters, and most are undescribed. Loads of players make up their own (or take one that's almost totally undefined). Of course, you can do that with hundreds of Codex chapters identical but for their names and colour schemes.

Imperial factions are going to be popular because they are (mostly) human, which most players and most history is about. Sure, you can do your Ancient Egypt in space aliens, but if you want to do almost any other time period you need to do Marines or Guard or something. Each of the IG regiments GW sold models for was based on a real military at some point in history.

Now, making them all different is difficult, though actually producing models for them shouldn't be. Middenheim mercenaries were human mercenaries that also used the "hairy heads" sprue bits, and that was 20 years ago. Take standard kits and choose an upgrade kit.

As for allies, way back when "up to 25% of your points can be from a list of allies" was a thing, and to make it fair, evil armies could take other evil armies as allies, even if there wasn't much fluff connection. Not perfect, but better.

[Username17]

Making a competitor to 40K is extremely difficult because the barriers to entry are immense. Games Workshop spent about eighty million dollars on its own stuff last year. And while it turned a profit on that, it means that the barrier to entry to be a serious competitor to Games Workshop is probably measured in the tens of millions of dollars of capitalization. Without the backing of a major game company like Mattel, it just genuinely doesn't matter how good a set of ideas or sculpts or game system you have.

The cost of starting a game from the player side is also very high. Painting miniatures, buying miniatures, learning a ruleset. These are all large demands on resources of money and time. And it's no surprise that by far the most popular faction in 40K is coincidentally the one that is: the least models to collect, the easiest to paint, and the easiest to reorganize into different force organizations or change to being a different subfaction.

Games Workshop notes that a super majority of their models are sold to people who don't actually have armies and don't play the games. This is because the barrier to entry for the game is simply way too high. And if you were serious about competing with 40K you'd need to have a viable skirmish game that used many less troops that people could jump in and play. Like Necromunda, but have the models meaningfully contribute towards fielding larger forces.

Making a better set of rules than 40K is trivial. Even after eight editions, the ruleset for 40K is "pretty bad." Making a better set of fluff than 40K is also trivial. 40K fluff was embarrassing and stupid in the 80s and hasn't matured or aged especially well. Making models that are competitive with 40K models is individually of only moderate difficulty as most competent sculptors can make character models that are of comparable aesthetic quality - but creating a range that is remotely as deep as Games Workshop's would take tens of millions of dollars and a large artist pool working for years.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I figure it's only a matter of time Bandai feels like entering the 28mm wargames market

[jt]

I don't think the barriers to entry are that high at all. Yes, making a game with as much accumulated stuff as 40k is a massive undertaking, but being as big as 40k is not a requirement for entry to the market.

You can start with a skirmish game with a couple factions, good rules, and its own model line. This is something a couple people could do with Kickstarter money. If it's good enough, you'll make enough money to produce more model lines. If you make enough of those, you can link a bunch together into bigger factions for a larger scale wargame.

This imposes constraints on your design, but mostly ones that make a better product. A tiny game that nobody has heard of has to sell two-faction starter boxes so people can find opponents, but once you've done the work of fitting a game into that price point you'll always have a lower barrier to entry. Building up from skirmish scale similarly lets people buy your product a bit at a time without jumping straight to a few hundred dollars on a plastic army for a game they might not even like.

The X-Wing miniatures game did all of this stuff right and has successfully bootstrapped itself up to something much larger. And yes, they certainly benefited from the Star Wars licensing, but it's not like every Star Wars product is successful. And Fantasy Flight isn't two guys in their garage, but they're not Hasbro or Bandai or something.

[Iduno]

The key to toppling 40k is to make your stuff compatible with 40k minis. If people can use their existing 40k armies to play your game, they may well give it a shot, and if they like it, they might start playing that more and 40k less.

Something like Battletech where proxying your army is perfectly fine.

Old models? Great. Cardboard pieces with pictures on them? It looks janky, but you do you. A different mech, but they look "close enough" and you tell people "This is X, not Y"? Sure. Models from Robotech games? Whatever.

Then you print nicer-looking models, or bundle them with maps or scenarios so the people you've gotten in at the low-end eventually buy a bunch of plastic/metal toys at a high price.

If your war game needs "Space Warriors brand Shooty-Guys, but we won't complain if you have something else laying around that looks close" you can get people to use GW models for now, until you have enough people buying into your thing.


And agreed with jt that a good starter box is important. I'm not buying pieces for a new game, but if you've got enough for both of us, I'll try it.

[Thaluikhain]

And it's no surprise that by far the most popular faction in 40K is coincidentally the one that is: the least models to collect, the easiest to paint, and the easiest to reorganize into different force organizations or change to being a different subfaction.

I'd also add that they tended to have good rules for allying. When the Witch-Hunters Codex came out, you could add a couple of squads of sisters to your marine (or IG) force, when you bought more you could add a couple of squads of marines or IG to your sisters force and eventually have a pure sisters army. With, say, nids, you need a whole army before you've got anything.

On a related note, in fluff (sometimes in rules) almost every army has the option of taking standard humans. IG soldiers, stealer cultists, chaos cultists, necron cultists, ork diggas, tau empire soldiers, various human servants of the Imperium. I'd like to see the ability to take basic human troops in every army. So if you move from one army to another, you've got models you can still use. Probably want some upgrades and special weapons that are army specific, but most squad members should work for each army. Leave the human with the chaos banner behind, take the rest of the squad and add a sergeant with a genestealer head.

And if you were serious about competing with 40K you'd need to have a viable skirmish game that used many less troops that people could jump in and play. Like Necromunda, but have the models meaningfully contribute towards fielding larger forces.

Been thinking of that, but how easy is it to have rules that work well for Necromunda scale and for 40k scale? Wouldn't you end up with it being rules-lite for the first or too complicated for the second? I'd say the former is more desirable, though I'd also think being rules-lite for the big scale would help get more people in.

[Username17]

Been thinking of that, but how easy is it to have rules that work well for Necromunda scale and for 40k scale? Wouldn't you end up with it being rules-lite for the first or too complicated for the second?

The basic key would be unit activation. That is to say that while physically moving figures takes time, there's no especial reason for the declarations of the action of a squad to be appreciably different if it's two guys or twenty two guys. The number of units in an army doesn't have to be appreciably different in a Necromunda gang and a 40K army. Eight gang members versus an HQ, 3 Troops, 2 Heavy Support, and a Fast Attack.

Where GW really shits the bed is in the transition between units of "one soldier" and "units of ten soldiers." There aren't intermediate scales where Guardsmen come in squads of 3 or 4. That's ridiculous and also completely unnecessary. You could just have tanks and stuff become "unlocked" when you had a certain number of squads filled to a requisite number. The transition between a twelve model army and a seventy model army could be smooth, and the fact that it isn't is why so many people abandon Warhammer armies when they are half done.

-Username17

[jt]

It's a tall order, but if you could make a tactical skirmish game that can produce an interesting conflict between an eight-person infantry squad and one extremely complicated BattleTech style mecha, you could make the transition to larger scales even smoother.

[deaddmwalking]

It's been a long time since I played Warhammer 40k, but I recall rolling dice for each little man in a squad. With Space Marines you could split a squad into two 5-man teams, so there's really no reason NOT to allow a per miniature price and throw them all into the squad whether that's 4, 5, or 6 models.

It isn't for BALANCE reasons; if they cared about balance, they wouldn't have Space Wolves.

[maglag]

I figure it's only a matter of time Bandai feels like entering the 28mm wargames market

I actually saw an article where they were trying to do Gundam build Divers closer to reality, aka online matches where your unit stats are based on a scan of your gunplas.

Still the gundam universe has plenty of potential for tabletop wargaming, there's not only the giant robots but plenty of other units. Plenty of fanmade rules around.

The cost of starting a game from the player side is also very high. Painting miniatures, buying miniatures, learning a ruleset. These are all large demands on resources of money and time. And it's no surprise that by far the most popular faction in 40K is coincidentally the one that is: the least models to collect, the easiest to paint, and the easiest to reorganize into different force organizations or change to being a different subfaction.

No, because you just described Chaos Marines, but loyalist scum are far more popular.

Chaos needs to deploy less models because the special chaos marines are always more expensive, ditto for their HQs.

Chaos is also far easier to paint because you could literally just drop three buckets of different inks over chaos minis and it would count as fluffy painting because warp corruption and poor maintenance. You could just randomly cut and glue your minis and wave it away as mutations too, while loyalist scum need to worry about having the right number of limbs/heads at the right angles and whatnot.

But loyalist scum are presented as the "good" guys and the beztest of the bezt that mow down chaos marines like they were flies in 99% of their fluff engagements so yeah GW really hit it with spech merine fluff. It's pretty much the ultimate male power fantasy, spech merines have the best gear and are the smartest and bravest and kick everybody else's asses (at least until you find the clause where they're all eununchs which many spech merines players pretend it's not there).

And now they doubled down in that with the primaris merines, which are even better sphech merines.