Warhammer Fantasy rebooted with space marines

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Shady314
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Post by Shady314 »

That's shit stupid enough to come straight out of a hidden camera tv show.

These poor bastards think they're going to be playing a competitive tabletop minis wargame. What they don't know is we've made some "alterations" to the rulebook. Let's see what happens when the rules require them to do some... unusual things.
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Post by Night Goat »

They have to be pulling a Springtime for Hitler with this. It's the only explanation.
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Post by souran »

Red_Rob wrote:Warhammer has never been as big a money spinner for GW as 40K. GW has a history of ditching everything but the absolute biggest selling lines regardless of fan interest (see Blood Bowl, Battlefleet Gothic, Warmaster and all their other Specialist Games lines). It was only a matter of time before they decided to axe Warhammer and try to make it into another 40K. The timing seems strange seeing as they just announced Total Warhammer which seems like it will be using the old background. Way to alienate fans and waste a potentially huge cross marketing campaign!

GW has been creatively bankrupt for a long time now. They've definitely fallen a long way from their 90's position of dominance where having a branded games store was the best way to muscle out the competition. What with the LOTR license debacle and their rabid attempts to screw fans over causing an internet shitstorm they haven't weathered the 2000's very well at all.

I predict this will flop within a year and GW will strip down to ALL 40K, FINAL DESTINATION. It's the way they've been heading for a while.

Lets start with getting one thing straight: Warhammer fantasy was the bread winner for GW for more than half of their publishing life. Its only since the 3rd edition of 40K that it became the bigger of the two lines. Its true that right now 40k is their most valuable property, but its not like fantasy was not bigger than their next two competitors combined.

However, anybody who thinks that the 4E or NWOD launches were shitshows has not even seen the the gigantic explosion of hate filled bile comming out about Age of Sigmar. EVERYBODY hates it and 40K players who know about it are now terrified of their game geting the AoS treatment.

When I first heard they where shifting to round bases and a skirimish game I was a little disappointed, but then I remembered that when rick priestly wanted to make good wargames he made warmaster and epic 40k. Regular 40K is basically just a badly done squadleader in space, and reducing the model count in fantasy would probably help.

However, having read the rules (double turns, no balance, your units don't actually interact in a meaningful way), read the warscrolls (act like a jackass for victory! or don't because acting like a jackass is to WAAC/Beardy?), and seen multiple games run on youtube this thing is a dumpster fire. The best thing about it is how badly the community is reacting. Its like a plane crash that caused a train crash that caused a bus crash and then when the fire trucks showed up they slammed head on into each other as well. You just can't look away.
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Post by OgreBattle »

The most positive response I've heard is from Blood Angels players looking forward to all the conversion bits they'll be getting in plastic.

---

Age of Sigmar is oddly shaping up to be a tabletop approximation of Warcraft 3. Ranged attacks can be used by models in close combat and you can fire into melee without penalty. I'm imagining an army now of as many repeater bolt throwers* as will fit on the table with a wall of whatever large armored units Elves can deploy bubble wrapping them.


*Repeaters fire 12 times if they have two crew members within 1" of them. They hit about as hard as a chaos warrior. Due to the model count rules fielding repeater bolt throwers instead of a dozen archers means you get the benefits of a sudden death rule to your advantage.

Rules for existing armies here:
http://www.games-workshop.com/en-NZ/age ... ompendiums

List of Rules WTFery here:
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthrea ... -AoS-rules

Has such gems as mentioning that everyone can move, shoot, charge into melee at all times so models with a good ranged attack will be throwing double the amount of attacks.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Mon Jul 06, 2015 9:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by maglag »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:
maglag wrote: -Speech merines inside speech merines-Wait, they already did that as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_2nM1GEllg

Skip to 1:20 if you want.
I must sincerly thank you for having me introduced to that hilarious series, had a lot of great laughs.
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Post by tussock »

WFB 8th had ...

Chaos Beast (four flavours)
Chaos Demon (four lines)
Dark Elf
High Elf
Wood Elf
Dwarf
Greenskins (three to five lines)
Ogres
German Human
French Human
Italian Human (and others, suitable for any army)
Chaos Humans / evil-Norse (four flavours)
Vampire (five flavours, including more Humans)
Dead Egyptians
Rats (five flavours)
Lizardmen


Plus fans still wanting to play the old Amazon, Chaos Dwarf, China, Japan, good-Norse, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Halfling, and probably more army lists that hadn't been supported for very many years.

The thing is, if you wanted to win, you either played rot-flavoured Chaos Demons, or the cheap line of Rats. The old hero units that used to win everything back in the beardy days couldn't hack it, the other armies were mostly so much junk (depending on nerf-cycles, somewhat). People bitched and moaned about how those two armies were dominant so much ...



... that GW actually wrote a series of novels where the rot-flavoured Chaos Demons joined up with the cheap line of Rats, killed all the old heroes, and destroyed everyone else's armies forever, the end.

You know how Monte Cook, he came out of the closet there with his "I don't write rules for assholes" thing, that's what this is. It's the biggest middle finger GW can imagine up to wave at their fanbase in a gigantic "you know what, fuck you, we don't even need you as customers, cost wise, your whiny bullshit about rules balance doesn't add up to profit for us. Seriously, horsy-dance-to-win is the rule now, cry us a river."
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Post by Red_Rob »

A lot of the new "rules" can be understood by realising that the primary goal was for there never, ever to be a reason for a player not to buy a model they like the look of. Points costs and balance meant some units weren't worth buying - so no points, use everything you have every time, screw balance. Force organisation charts mean Lizardmen players don't want to buy Tomb Kings - so anything can work with anything now, fiction be damned. I don't even know if you can blame the designers, the instruction here from the top was obviously to remove any barrier to any player ever being able to impulse buy the latest thing they like the look of.

The inane childish play acting is simply Rules-Lite casual gaming taken to the Nth degree. Less Beer'n'Pretzels, more Absinthe'n'Mescaline I guess. You only have to head over to TheRPGSite to see there are people that see broken, unclear rules as a good thing to be promoted. GW has been railing against rules-savvy players as a way to avoid having to write clear and balanced rules for a while now and I guess this is their test case to see if they can get away with just overtly ignoring that segment of the fanbase.

Ultimately the logic behind these changes appears to be refocusing from a balanced tactical game you could play and buy models for, to something to do with whatever GW models you feel like buying at the time. The distinction is pretty fine, but the philosophy of "miniatures first, balance, gameplay and everthing else a distant second" has infected the entire design. It has twisted it until the game is now wearing the remains of WHFB like a skin suit. On the surface some things seem to be the same, but underneath is something entirely different and more sinister. This is GW nakedly attempting to reduce their game to just a miniature delivery system once and for all.
Last edited by Red_Rob on Thu Jul 09, 2015 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by souran »

Red_Rob is exactly right.

To put it simply, GW has decided that their "Hobby" is "purchasing game workshop miniatures." It isn't about playing a wargame of any level anymore, it isn't about collecting an "army" and pitting it against anything else.

It will really be interesting to see if "give GW money" can retain a "playerbase." They are both aided by, and totally ignorant of, the power of inertia in wargamming. There are multiple miniatures wargames I think are better constructed than 40K. There are numerous games that have better fluff. There are games that are better at depeciting combined arms combat. However, if I go to any FLGS I can probably find somebody to play a reasonable sized game of 40K, and as I live in a major metropoletian area I can find people to play fantasy as well. However, I cannot even be sure to find players for even other popular games like warmahordes, flames of war, or maliflux.

I don't think that it was a terrible idea to try and do a "skirmish" fantasy game. But what they did was terribad. What the fuck is it with the the past 8-10 years. It seems really groggy to say "all the new stuff is shit" but seriously, none of the new stuff is selling well, so "its all shit" seems to stick.
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Post by Koumei »

Actually, Red Rob isn't particularly correct. There have been a few revelations. As revelations, this is the new Errata for the Bible, so you should definitely paste it over the relevant sections of that book.

Revelations Chapter 1: [1]we're going to stop producing models for lines X, Y and Z. Especially Z, fuck that guy. [2]Also a few specific units and heroes can get fucked I guess. Look, everyone just buy our new models okay? [3]But if you totally are going to keep using the old shit, here are the new rules for it which are so fucking stupid you will only use them for casual games with your mates. [4]We're pretty sure nobody will end up using old models in tournaments or in stores, making it look more like a drug lab than a gaming store.

Revelations Chapter 2: [1]so apparently other companies have been using data-cards and such, included in the boxes, for like a hundred years. I guess we could start doing that, but that means standardising what's in the unit and all that. [2]Hey while we're at it, especially with that "all rules are free" push, why not make this stuff really easy to figure out? [3]Okay, so the value of any given unit equals its Wounds. And any particular mission will say each player is allowed 1-2 Hero Units, all of equal value going by our ability to figure values out, and that 1-2 is the same number for both players, not each obviously choosing 2. [4]And then each player is allowed some other number, like 3-4 of unit cards, each with no more than X Wounds. So it might be Battle of Knob Creek, with 1 Hero each, and 3 units of up to 16 Wounds each. [5]Bamf, no more calculating Points values and then slotting them into slots or seeing how they fill a pie chart.

Revelations Chapter 3: [1]and then they revealed their bell-ends to the audience.
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Post by Koumei »

You guys are in for a real treat. What I'm about to type is not just the satirical, tongue-in-cheek thing where we make shit up and talk about Wulfurius Wulfgar Wolfwolf von Wolfenstein of the Space Wolves. What follows is in their exact own words.

"Threx Skullbrand is the Bloodsecrator of the Goretide and carries Khorne's Portal of Skulls. Threx's hair is bound tight in the spinal column of an unfortunate foe. Threx's axe has no less (sic) than four serrated blades."
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Post by Prak »

It was all just silly over-the-top-ness until the axe.

That's just batshit stupid.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Koumei wrote: "Threx Skullbrand is the Bloodsecrator of the Goretide and carries Khorne's Portal of Skulls.
Sanguinator was too high brow I guess
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Post by Red_Rob »

At this point the shark is just a vanishing dot beneath the airborne carcass of AoS. He ties his hair with a spinal column? Does he wear a knuckle-bone friendship bracelet too? I know Warhammer has always been a little 2EDGY4U but now they are just taking the piss.

Hey, at least the lead designer of Age of Sigmar did an interview explaining the design choices.
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Post by maglag »

Sigmar's POV:

Image
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Post by nockermensch »

Koumei wrote:Threx's axe has no less (sic) than four serrated blades."
He should work for Gillette.
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Post by Zaranthan »

The new powersword model looks cool:

Image
Last edited by Zaranthan on Tue Jul 21, 2015 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

So I got a chance to look at the Age of Sigmar models down at the local gaming hole in the wall. And all I can say is wow. These are terrible. They look like this:
Image
And they want about $50 for a box of five. These guys cost ten dollars a model and they look like something from the Steel movie with Shaquille O'Neal. They are so fucking goofy looking that I was at first unsure that I wasn't looking at melty scrap or some sort of unfinished greenstuff mods.

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Post by DrPraetor »

FrankTrollman wrote:These are terrible... And they want about $50 for a box of five. These guys cost ten dollars a model and they look like something from the Steel movie with Shaquille O'Neal. They are so fucking goofy looking that I was at first unsure that I wasn't looking at melty scrap or some sort of unfinished greenstuff mods.
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As volume goes down, they lose economy of scale and have to cut costs on design & production in order to keep going?

Care to update your tabletop-gaming death spiral post to the economics of Games Workshop?
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Post by Username17 »

GamesWorkshop is a weird case. People have been predicting their demise for decades because they are a bunch of chucklefucks. But the reality is that it's really hard to make complete miniatures lines and GW is deeply entrenched in Europe. They are losing ground, but there's a lot of ground to lose.

They can't be threatened by some company of upstarts putting out a rulebook that puts theirs to shame. That's been done. That's been done a dozen times. Games Workshop is sitting on 35 years of molds for troops for a dozen kinds of aliens and tank kits and what have you. As the process of transforming sculptures to casts to miniature sets becomes cheaper and faster, it will become easier for prospective challengers to put out miniatures lines complete enough to be real competition for GW - but we aren't there yet. Frankly, I think it needs a lot more capitalization than upstart companies tend to have. It's not enough to have a good set of rules and a couple of talented sculptors. You need to unveil over a hundred models at the beginning just to get people to read your rules.

But anyway, that GW is on a downward trajectory is not news to anyone, and hasn't been for ten years. The last time an edition of 40K really breathed new life into the game was in 1998. Everything since then has been a flailing cash grab. And in the last decade, it's been a lot more flailing than cash grabbing.

That GW wants your money and is extremely pushy about getting it is not a novel observation. Rules like WYSIWYG and "only official Games Workshop™ models allowed" rules exist for no conceivable purpose other than to petulantly demand that you pay them a tithe for every model and every unit upgrade in your army. The thing that surprises people is that Games Workshop actually aren't super geniuses with exhaustive market simulations making cruel and calculated decisions to pry every last dollar, pound, and euro out of your wallet. In fact, Games Workshop doesn't do market research at all. Not even focus grouping people in the UK, let alone market surveys of other cultures. When I first heard that the head of GW admitted that, I thought it was a fucking joke, but there it is.

The major decisions made by GW are not driven by market forces for the most part. Yes, they eventually made Cadians in plastic when they noticed that the Cadians were the most popular Guard type in North America, but it also took them four years to even notice that Cadians sold better in the US than the other flavors of Guard. It's so obvious that they should be asking players what units they want models of for their armies and then get those models sculpted so they can start charging people money to have them, that people just sort of assume they are doing that. But they aren't. And they never have been. The only market data that moves anything is when they go back into their warehouse and notice that they have a bunch of backstock of one thing and have run low on something else. But that could as easily be an issue of bad production run estimates rather than any effective measurement of demand.

Games Workshop thrashes around. It's what it does. And for the most part, their go-to means of scaring up some cash is to make new armies and new editions that redistribute what kinds of models people are going to want. Because they sell the most models when people suddenly want to buy a whole new army or replace half of their army with new units that by WYSIWYG rules have to be new models that they bought from GW. But obviously, that kind of thing is self-limited and we can see from the drastic foot-shooting failure that is Age of Sigmar that GW felt that they were reaching the end of that cycle's viability.

The problem here is that a Warhammer army costs the better part of a thousand dollars. That's not something that Games Workshop feels is a problem for them, but it is a problem for getting people to buy new armies with the lure of bright shiny objects. The harsh reality is that there are only so many armies that can exist before a new one being available doesn't make you more likely to buy an extra one. Every new army is less likely to be more appealing to any hypothetical consumer than any previous army than the one before it was. And I think we're pretty close to that asymptote. Supposedly, WH40K has 8 races and 16 armies right now (not counting various flavors of Marine, of which there are like 8), although I am damned if I can tell you what they all are. I'm pretty sure that's why we ended up with Tau - they felt that new armies had to be more radical departures if they were going to get any takers.

Now I would say that what they should do, rather obviously, is to divide up the galaxy into between 2 and 6 alliances like it was World War II and let people take detachments from various constituent races and armies in those alliances. So like, some of the flavors of Marine would be in the same alliance as the Eldar, and then you'd introduce new Eldar shit and maybe Marine players would buy it because they wouldn't have to buy an entire 60 model army with three vehicle kits just to field the new shit that caught their magpie attention.

And they've tried that sort of thing a couple of times. There have been a few Imperial Auxiliaries codices. And Fantasy Battle fucked around with Dogs of War for a while. But it's never been a thing that has gone very far. Throughout it all they keep reaching for the short term cash infusion of trying to get people to buy all new armies. It's clearly wearing thin. I mean, when researching this rant I discovered that there is a hard back "Codex: Militarum Tempestus" which is a 72 page hard back book dedicated to fielding an entire army of specifically Imperial Guard Storm Troopers (word on the street is that it has the weird faux-Latin name because Games Workshop lost a court case attempting to bully people over intellectual property and needed to make more defensible copyrights). That is ridiculous, and obviously not going to fly.

So really, I see the death spiral of GW as being one of the company doing desperate and stupid things while their underlying business model is flawed and based on repeatedly doing drastic things that can only be repeated successfully a limited number of times. I think Age of Sigmar is pretty much the end of Warhammer Fantasy, and that it's 50/50 whether they'll be able to find a way to successfully reboot the franchise after the sheer enormity of this failure settles in on people. 40K has a bit more life in it, but possibly only a bit. D6 edition was already basically GW running on (and huffing) fumes, and there's no evidence that 7th edition has really fixed anything.

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Post by maglag »

GW has kinda already been doing the "let people take detachments from various constituent races and armies in those alliances". It's literally called the "allies" rules, except there's different tiers of trust,"battle bros", "allies of convenience", "we have a bigger common enemy right now but we still don't trust you" and "nopenopenope", where lower levels of friendship result in higher penalties. It's also a clusterfuck table with little rhyme or reason , in particular since even the different spech morons flavor has differents best friends scratch that all imperial forces are best friends forever now and think the same of everybody else.

Anyway, an ally detachment only needs to be an HQ and troop choice. So if you have an Eldar army, but would like to try some Tau, you can totally just buy/model/paint some firewarriors and a commander gundam and they'll be able to fight along your aspect warriors and eldar tanks. With a bit of modelling you don't even need the commander gundam, just improvise the Fireblade HQ that's basically a pimped firewarrior.

Eldar have been allying with Dark eldar for the recent years in 40K tournaments everywhere, chaos merines+daemons is also pretty popular.

Also for pratical purposes, GW 40K tournaments are quite forgiving with WYISWYG as long as you make it clear what is what. For example, a lot of people have custom spech merines custom color schemes, and they can use whatever spech moron codex they want for their dollies rules as long as they make it clear which one it is before the rounds start.
Last edited by maglag on Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Here's the current allies matrix. Armies of the Imperium is space marines+inquisition+imperial guard

Image

The main "we are battle brothers" groups are...

Chaos
-Daemons
-Marines
-Mutants, traitor guard, and other puny guys

The Imperium
-Marines
-Inquisition
-IG
-Sisters, Grey Knights, and so on. Oh yeah they have that Titan army too

Eldar
-Dark
-Craftworld
-Harlequin
-Corsair

The Tau, Necrons, Orks get a hodge podge of "allies of convenience", and Tyranids are all alone... if I were to revise the chart I'd have...

-Orks are allies of convenience to everyone and desparate for some imperials
-Necrons are allies of convenience to everyone except Eldar
-Tau are allies of convenience to everyone except Chaos
-Tyranids... for the sake of gameplay over fluff be desparate allies with everyone and convenience possibly with guardsmen that represent a genestealer cult or something.
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Post by maglag »

Also what the different levels of friendship imply:

-Battle bros means that you can ride in each other's transports and share buffs and shit.

-Allies of convenience means that you can't share transports/buffs but otherwise fight side by side no problem.

-Desparate allies need to make checks if too close to each other or they may lose their actions for the turn, no problem if you're, say, taking an ally mobile unit to strike behind enemy lines away from your own stuff.

-Come the Apocalypse means they can't fight together at all must deploy away from each other, thanks for the correction Koumei.
Last edited by maglag on Tue Jan 05, 2016 6:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Koumei »

These days Come the Apocalypse merely means "As above, but you have to deploy away from each other".
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Post by Username17 »

So I've looked up a bunch of battle reports from Age of Sigmar. The positive reviews are basically "We house ruled most of the game and had a pretty good time playing Calvinball." The fact that the base rules give you the same number of Clan Rats as Storm Vermin is so glaringly obvious as a problem that I haven't seen one positive review that didn't start with some kind of house rule and gentleman's agreement to force both players to bring mixed and rebalanced armies. The rules are simply so bad that I can't find one person on the internet actually playing by them.

Now one thing I will say is that I don't grieve the loss of the Warhammer Fantasy world. It was a bad fantasy world; filled with dumb cliches, stupid puns, and embarrassing racism. The lore moved forward at a snail's pace and big events were almost universally retarded. The end of the world and the replacement with Sigmarines is very dumb, but only barely noticeable as such compared to the horse shit and garbage that was already there. Warhammer Fantasy art was at its best when it looked like album covers for psychedelic metal albums from 1978. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't really read Heavy Metal for the in-depth world building.

Warhammer started as a miniatures line that made models for use in Dungeons & Dragons or RuneQuest. Only later on did they decide that they should make a game that people could play with the models alone. It's pretty much the opposite development track as the original D&D. Where D&D started with a mass battle game and gradually grew into an RPG based on the individual characters from the battles - Warhammer started life as game aids for the RPG, only morphing into a mass battles game when they noticed that they already had enough fantasy miniatures to do that.

And that, I think, is where companies trying to fight GW keep running into a wall. Games Workshop didn't release their mass battles game until there were already enough models that you could play it. People keep trying to release games where the mini line is incomplete, which is horse shit. You'll note that GW's practice of leaving units like Spores and Wave Serpents in codices but not actually modeled for ten years at a time ended up biting them in the ass and they fucking lost the copyright lawsuit to stop 3rd party people from poaching their units and selling models for the unsculpted pieces. But even beyond the danger of losing the IP, people just aren't thrilled with waiting a few years or possibly forever before their army will be possible to finish. It's what killed Chronopia (one of the many "better than WHF" games to come out during the 90s) and a host of similar games. It seems obvious that your game has to be playable on release, with additional models being produced along with additional content for the armies being released later on. Like the Warmahordes model (not that Privateer Press does not have its own problems).

The two main strategies to get around this hurdle are basically Reaper Warlord and Mantic Kings of War. Reaper Miniatures has been making awesome minis for two decades and have a veritable shit tonne of models to draw upon. They made Warlord, but it's not actually very good and in any case is only a Mordheim scale sort of thing, so whatever. But they could roll out a set of rules that would actually let you field a real army of Kobolds, and they'd have the Kobold minis lined up to make that happen.
Image
Like this, but with like an actual army and rules for such.
The Mantic solution is to make a game which allows you to use Games Workshop models for all the units they haven't made versions of yet, with promises to make more models of their own to fill in gaps. So the "Ratkin" army has zero Mantic models that you can use, but you play it entirely with Skaven models from Games Workshop (and you can use all the Skaven models as some unit or another of Ratkin). They promise that some day they will make Ratkin of their own and sell those models to you for money, but in the meantime you can get playing with models that you can get.

As a means of taking over the GW position, I think Mantic's is more likely to be successful. Also, they are actually doing it while Reaper merely has the potential to do theirs (Warlord just isn't a mass battles game). People can take 100% of their Warhammer model investment and go play Kings of War. Of course, I don't think it can lead to the kind of market dominance that Games Workshop used to enjoy. If Kings of War ever gets big enough, 3rd party miniatures companies absolutely can just make dwarf models that are playable as Kings of War Ironguard (or whatever).

But just as it was a mistake for Games Workshop to have a shit tonne of different armies that couldn't use the same models, it is a mistake for Mantic to make a bunch of armies that can't use each others' models. Right now, Mantic is chasing after the demographic of "Angry lizardmen and Tomb Kings players who want to use their armies and play games and feel abandoned by Games Workshop because they have been abandoned by Games Workshop." And let's be honest: that demographic is big enough for Mantic to get themselves a lot of growth.

In the long run, you kinda need to get the demographic of people who got some Orcs, Elves, and Undead to use in D&D games and then got a Hydra because they thought it looked cool and now want to buy some more minis and fill it out into an army. With thirty years of Warhammer Fantasy history getting shat upon and thrown out by Games Workshop, there are a lot of potential players that can be scooped up right now. But the future belongs to new gamers. And forcing people to collect models of only one race to get an army together does not line up with new gamer purchasing habits.

There really should be like only 3 or 4 empires or alliances or whatever, and all the different groups should be fieldable in that. Like how nobody gets upset when a WW2 player brings an army with German and Italian troops or an army with British and American troops.

-Username17
shlominus
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Post by shlominus »

FrankTrollman wrote:There really should be like only 3 or 4 empires or alliances or whatever, and all the different groups should be fieldable in that. Like how nobody gets upset when a WW2 player brings an army with German and Italian troops or an army with British and American troops.

-Username17
the allies system in kow is simple and elegant, like the rest of the design.

maxed at 25% of the whole army, you can take any other unit of the same alignment or neutral ones. these units then unlock other choices, just like regular units. and as usual, they are pretty loose in the rulebook, explicitly stating that you can play with different armies mixed if you like. "please don't mix evil and good armies, unless you want to." :)

as for ww2-games... you obviously don't know historical tabletopgamers very well. :rofl:
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