Chewing-on-Wargame-Scenery-Review: WH40K7E

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Post by Chamomile »

I've been reading through 7e myself today. I don't really know the rules well enough to review them, so I can't really review the thing the way Koumei can, but I can say that there's a paragraph that is clearly (though not explicitly) referencing Big Ben as ancient lost technology that the Machine Cult has broken while trying in vain to reverse engineer. Big Ben. A giant clock. This is how far the Imperium's technological knowledge has degraded. People can't wrap their heads around 19th century clockwork even when given a working example to study.
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Post by Laertes »

Did they fly to this clock in their plasma-engined spacecraft that they can build and repair? Did they walk around it with their power armour and mechadendrites, peering at it with bionic senses, only to conclude that "this shit be whack, boss, we have no idea. It's got all springs and gears and stuff like crazy"? If so, that's actually pretty hilarious in a good way.

<Londoner>
It's not called Big Ben. Big Ben is the name of the hour bell rung by the clock, named after a popular heavyweight boxer of the time. The clock itself has no name, and the tower is simply called the Palace of Westminster Clock Tower.
</Londoner>
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Post by Koumei »

Brief update: the new black seems to be "minidexes". Which can be taken as their own thing or simply allied to very obvious choices or whatever. So there are a couple of "specific Chaos Legion, with specific named HQ choice" and stuff.

Also, they released 7E codices for Space Wolves and Grey Knights, and they must have spent at least three minutes on them.

Ward Knights:
  • No more Inquisitors/Assassins - they're in the Inquisition minidex
  • No more weird grenades (rad/psychotroke), they're for Inquisitors
  • Warlord Traits table
  • Special "half your Derp Strike forces can 'port in on turn 1 and re-roll scatter" formation, Elite is 1-4, Troops is 1-4 or something, Heavy is 0-2
  • Removes any special character who lacks a model
  • Cheaper Personal Teleporter for Dreadknight
  • Psilencers are shit (but are ranged Force weapons), Psycannons now use the Salvo rules
  • More formalised rules for Nemesis Force Weapons
  • HQ choices are changed a little bit with their statlines and available gear
  • Psycannon Bolts can no longer be taken, so nobody will ever want Dreadnoughts or Aircraft ever again, everything is ruined forever
  • Psyker stuff all changed to be relevant to this edition
  • A table of special relics HQ choices can take
Yes, it's actually just an edition update with some stuff whited out

Wolf of the Wolf Wolf:
  • Doesn't have a mini? Doesn't exist
  • Long Fangs are not as totally awesome as before
  • No you will not be taking an army that consists of seven dudes
  • Thunderwolves are awesome
  • Warlord Traits table
  • Updated Psyker rules
  • Relics for HQs to take
  • Wolf Wolf Aircraft with Frost Weapons
Again, it's an update. But they scribbled in some notes about aircraft and called it a day. The Frost rules aren't bad mind you.
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Post by OgreBattle »

You left out the new dreadnought special character the space wolves get. His name is Murderfang, his special rule is Murderous lust, and his murderclaws are made of unmeltable space ice.

Image
Last edited by OgreBattle on Mon Aug 25, 2014 2:20 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Voss »

Yes, it's actually just an edition update with some stuff whited out
And weirdly, zero models. Which from the company that proclaims they are a miniatures company and not a rules company is fucking bizarre (especially since people use that an excuse for why the rules are shit).


Of other relevance, their annual report surfaced a while ago, and it contained this little gem (among others) from the CEO:
Kirby wrote:"We do no demographic research, we have no focus groups, we do not ask the market what it wants."
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthrea ... -available
Enjoy the bonus crazy thread, which also has links to the documents.
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Post by Koumei »

That thread makes me so happy. It's good to see GW profits slowing, the customer base slowing, their own mismanagement and shitty practices hurting them. One day they will bleed out and lie broken before their competition.

Or be bought-out by a video game company and used to churn out RTS games Dota clones.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

"We do no demographic research, we have no focus groups, we do not ask the market what it wants."
http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-c ... e-2014.pdf
If your measure of 'good' is the current financial year's numbers, you may not agree. But if your measure is the long-term survivability of a great cash generating business that still has a lot of potential growth, then you will agree.
One day 3-D printers will be affordable (agreed), they are now, they will be able to produce fantastic detail (the affordable ones
won't) and they will do it faster than one miniature per day (no, they won't, look it up). So we may get to the time when someone
can make a poorly detailed miniature at home and have enough for an army in less than a year. That pre-supposes that 3-D
scanning technology will be affordable and good enough (don't bet the mortgage on that one) and that everyone will be happy to
have nothing but copies of old miniatures.
:wtf: This Kirby guy is out of his mind. To be fair, that second quote is taken out of context. If you take him at his word, what he's saying is that while they had lower sales this year they were able to drastically reduce operating costs. Which is an acceptable enough excuse, but then he has to derail it with the crazy-ass quotes I sandwiched that one with.
On the first of January next year I will be stepping down as CEO of Games Workshop. I intend staying on as non-executive Chairman
(if the board will have me), so those of you who want to see an end to these preambles (rhymes with rambles), don't get your
hopes up just yet.
I have never bought any GW products and I don't intend to, but after that last spate of craziness? Thank fucking God.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Aug 25, 2014 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Also:
Crazy-Ass Wanker Kirby a.k.a. CAWK wrote:We have, this last year,
spent an indecent amount of your money trying to stop someone stealing our ideas and images. It is a very difficult thing to do
when it is done through a legal system designed to prevent people stealing hogs from one another. Our experience has probably
been typical of most – far too much money spent on far too little gain. The argument is that we have to do this or we will, bit by bit,
lose everything that we hold dear, everything that keeps the business going. Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous
deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky. But is it true?
Anyone know what this dude is talking about? Why does GW have such a hard-on for, as I can see from the linked thread, Chapterhouse?

This preamble is making me lawl my ass off. This is one of the most hilarious things I've ever read and I know practically nothing about GW.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Aug 25, 2014 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Laertes »

For those not aware, Games Workshop lost a really, really big intellectual property lawsuit against a company called Chapterhouse in 2013. The judges ruled that Chapterhouse was allowed to continue making and selling replica 40k stuff and GW couldn't stop them.

Kirby is attempting to spin this as "huh, we don't care, we make better 40k stuff than they do so it doesn't matter that we've lost our captive market."
Last edited by Laertes on Mon Aug 25, 2014 4:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by zeruslord »

One day 3-D printers will be affordable (agreed), they are now, they will be able to produce fantastic detail (the affordable ones
won't) and they will do it faster than one miniature per day (no, they won't, look it up). So we may get to the time when someone
can make a poorly detailed miniature at home and have enough for an army in less than a year. That pre-supposes that 3-D
scanning technology will be affordable and good enough (don't bet the mortgage on that one) and that everyone will be happy to
have nothing but copies of old miniatures.
One day 3-D printers will be affordable (compared to an army of GW minis), they are now (if you're willing to pour time and energy into a hobby OH WAIT YOU'RE A WARGAMER), they will be able to produce detail about as good as GW's plastics (some already can), and they will do it faster than one miniature per day (already the case). So we're pretty close to the point where somebody who is both a wargamer and a 3D printing hobbyist can make a decent miniature at home and have enough for a Grey Knights army in less than a month. That pre-supposes that 3-D scanning will be done by some guy somewhere (see also: software piracy) and that everyone will be happy to have nothing but copies of all of GW's miniatures ever, plus whatever else people design.

Honestly, the hard parts will be getting to the point where you don't have to be a 3D printer hobbyist to keep an affordable one running and it's acceptable to bring printed clones or printed unofficial models to the dominant wargame. The first is going to happen slowly, driven by artists who want objects, not another hobby. The second needs enough scans of official minis modified for printing, models that look 40k enough to escape scrutiny, or a change to a rules-driven rather than minis-driven game.

On a side note, in a steady-state 3d printers for everyone world, vehicles may still make sense as kits; casting doesn't get much more expensive as the model gets bigger, where 3d-printed stuff gets way slower. The main hull of a tank or dreadnought is a big box with some doodads on it, and if it came without weapons and decoration, you could print exactly the eagles, bolters, and purity seals you want - take advantage of the strengths of both technologies, and there's still some money in it for GW.
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Post by Laertes »

The thing is, that if all this was was a miniatures business, Kirby would be 100% right. Games Workshop makes fantastically good miniatures. Nobody out there can seriously compete with them either in terms of sculpture or in terms of manufacturing. If this was just about making toy soldiers with big shoulder pads, then the standard business orthodoxy says to welcome the competition into the business. Let them use the same symbols. In fact, let them make clones of old GW models and use those. The more companies there are making Warhammer stuff, the more customers there will be buying Warhammer stuff, and the more people GW can sell to. This is why FedEx doesn't care about other overnight delivery companies and Starbucks doesn't care about other coffee shops: the presence of competition increases the size of the market, and if you can beat the competition's product then you'll gain more customers from the larger market than you'll lose from the competition's sales. If GW had faith in their product - and they should - then they would welcome this. So if it was just about the miniatures business, I'd be agreeing with Kirby.

However, it's not just about the miniatures business. Games Workshop's IP is probably more valuable than their entire manufacturing and retailing branch at this point. Think about the Blood Bowl video game, and how poorly it would have done had it simply been called "elves and dwarves play American Football." The GW IP is gold, and they're making masses of money licensing it out for games and books and everything else. It's why they're as scared as they are of anyone else using it. It's why for years they've been as litigious as they have. It's why now that someone else is using it, Kirby has to go off on long tangents to reassure skittish investors that this isn't game over for them.

So I disagree with Kirby, but I understand why he's saying what he's saying. He's lying because he has to. He's trying to calm people because their worst fear has come true.
Last edited by Laertes on Mon Aug 25, 2014 5:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Chewing-on-Wargame-Scenery-Review: WH40K7E

Post by Whipstitch »

Koumei wrote: G. Put it in (sorry, forgot it's not a dating sim)
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Post by Stahlseele »

i read somewhere that gulliman is actually healing in his time tomb, is that actually true?
and if so, does that mean 8th edition is wolftime?
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Post by Voss »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Anyone know what this dude is talking about? Why does GW have such a hard-on for, as I can see from the linked thread, Chapterhouse?
The short version is that once upon a time GW include stuff in the army books that didn't have models yet. And this was fine, because (formerly) they actively supported conversions and Do It Yourself stuff.

Then a bunch of small garage companies came along (Chapterhouse being one of many) and started filling in the units without models. And basically GW felt that this hurt their sales when they finally did put models out. [This... is pretty much unverifiable since, as Kirby says, they don't do market research & etc, so I seriously don't grasp how they could find out one way or the other]. So as a result they don't do that anymore at all, launched the big lawsuit thing (which backfired since someone stepped up to represent Chapterhouse for free, or at least for outside donations; when GW expected them just to acquiesce to the cease and desist out of lack of funds).

More recently, the new army books have not only not had unreleased units without models, but they've also yanked out stuff that had no GW version, especially if there was a Chapterhouse version (Like the tyranid mycetic spore). Just bloop, gone, erased from the universe.

Chapterhouse was also doing a bits service (shoulder pads, weapons and the like) for various things. Now notably a lot of other companies do this too. But Chapterhouse was dumb, and specifically said 'for GW models' rather than a more generic 'for 28mm sci-fi models' which a lot of other little companies still do (Kromlech, Puppet Wars, a couple others I forget). The bits market really took off after GW shut down their own bits service, because... um... they didn't want money or something. [Actually the reason is they figured they could make more money by forcing people to buy yet more boxes of the same kit for the one of a kind weapon options in each. Likely that helped the exodus away from GW]
Last edited by Voss on Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by name_here »

Stahlseele wrote:i read somewhere that gulliman is actually healing in his time tomb, is that actually true?
and if so, does that mean 8th edition is wolftime?
That's been a rumor mentioned since at least third edition and probably earlier.

Also, wolves are Leman Russ. He's wandering around the Eye Of Terror with the 13th company, kicking ass and taking names.
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, the case covered a vast number of different products, and a few things like the "for GW models" shoulderpads were ruled in favour of GW, but the vast majority came down against GW, "feel free to sell these, enjoy any publicity from the court case". With fans, as one, declaring GW to be a massive pile of dicks (as already evidenced by the "YOU CAN'T CALL A NOVEL 'SPACE MARINE' BECAUSE WE INVENTED AND OWN ALL SPACE MARINES" incident).

Also it helped to set the groundwork for people to know what they can get away with if they decide to get in on it too.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Good. GW needs a slap in the face with a gigantic tuna. Seriously, this company is crazy. I had no idea you Warhams were putting up with that nonsense.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Voss »

Many aren't. The trickle is getting larger.

7th 40k was the last straw for me. It's almost exactly 6th edition but with its much needed errata, a terribly flawed approach to the psychic phase, which was deliberately abandoned for being to fucked to exist, and terrible scenario cards, which reward winning big by winning bigger.

Speaking of the fantasy side of the game, they're now selling a setting rewrite book for $80. The return of nagash and incidentally everyone can summon undead, because... Skeleton kits weren't selling enough or something.
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Post by brized »

All the investors need to see is this video.
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Post by Koumei »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I had no idea you Warhams were putting up with that nonsense.
Mostly, they're not. I mean, as I said before, it's a long time since I've been a warham, I just like watching them fail. And apparently a whole lot of other people are in the same boat, and more and more people have been leaving the hobby without even an equal influx of new blood.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Yeah, GW products virtually always force a save vs. sticker shock so many potential buyers quickly change their tune from "This looks cool" to "Holy shit, someone talk me out of this," which kinda sucks for GW given that even their loyal customers talk shit about them on the regular.
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Post by Username17 »

Laertes wrote:The thing is, that if all this was was a miniatures business, Kirby would be 100% right. Games Workshop makes fantastically good miniatures. Nobody out there can seriously compete with them either in terms of sculpture or in terms of manufacturing.
This is pretty importantly not true. Reaper makes much better looking character models than Games Workshop, and Privateer makes better looking squads of dudes with ridiculous shoulder pads.

There are reasons I don't play the games of either of those companies, but it sure as fuck isn't because the miniatures don't look as good as GW standards.

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Post by Koumei »

That's true, particularly in recent years, but GW has the upper hand (in the Western markets) when it comes to big things: dragons, mecha, biglargemcfuckenhuge tanks and weird flying churches or cauldrons with twirling flame-and-smoke towers that have demons sitting on them.

Now if you look at a global market because you're in a world where you're able to order things from other continents and convert currencies, Japan actually takes a massive shit all over GW by having far cheaper kits with more parts and complexity, and even after you assemble and paint them, they still have moving parts so can adjust their poses.

But the wargaming competition hasn't come up with stuff to compare with:
This

Or this

Or this

Or this

That's the best they have going for them though, and I don't think "four Baneblades on each side with minimal infantry" really works. If PP get their act together with their bigger GIANT ROBOTS (and make the rules actually support loading up on them), then they won't even have that.
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Post by Laertes »

I am told - although I don't know it as a fact - that GW is many years ahead of the competition in manufacturing and design technology terms. This means that the marginal cost to them of making an individual toy soldier is lower, but more importantly the overhead cost of designing a new toy soldier and then mass producing thousands of it is lower. If this is true then they don't need a monopoly. They'd win a fair fight and everyone knows it.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

I will second that Reaper has amazing sculpts. Even large ones. I've participated in both of their kickstarters, and even their plastics are good (of course, they're based on their metal sculpts).
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