The Gaming Den

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.

I have advocated hijacking the WHF minis line for over a decade. Kings of War was an idea that got me very excited, but the execution's been very disappointing.

Anyway, I think when you wrote your own fluff as part of the hijacking process, you'd want to do it so that most any army could ally with most any other with some simple justification. Basically, declare that strategic considerations frequently outweighed political antipathy. High Elves and Dark Elves persistently work together to defend joint elvish interests outside the interelf warzone. There are independent vampires who'll work for anyone who provides blood in quantity. The same Empire general sequentially allies with orcs, chaos, and ratmen (against the others), depending on which is least/most likely to conquer his province this season.

Just have each army list also come with a section describing what an 'allied force' looks like and let people use 'em.

If any of your races cannot ally with any of your other races, you have fucked up. People need to be able to play the game with the models that they own.

But the "ally" concept really doesn't do what it needs to do. Allies in the sense of WH40K's "extra detachment" or King's of War's "25% of your points" is about letting players transition from playing one army to playing another. You have a functional Undead Army and then you can start collecting Lizardmen and field a hybrid army before the Lizard army is finished. That's fine. It's an incentive for people who have an army to keep buying miniatures. Obviously, a miniatures company is going to be very interested in solving that problem, and the allies rules do that to some extent.

But it's not a lot of help for children who are interested in starting the game. People who don't do a very dedicated buying program wholly divorced from what is going to happen with children who get allowances are simply not going to have 75% of their stuff be any one thing. When people first flirt with the hobby, their collections are going to be eclectic. A unit of knights, some goblin archers, a manticore, some elvish spearmen, and a mummified wizard. Or whatever.

Whatever lore or rules or whatever you come up with, the basic reality is that tabletop wargaming isn't like computer gaming in a very important way: putting together an army of all one thing isn't easier for a new player, it's harder. Minis get purchased and painted because of enthusiasm, not because you clicked the recruit button a few more times. The more goblins have to be finished before moving on to buying and painting some elves, the less likely a 12 year old is going to be able to assemble an army before giving up in frustration.

Now, Mantic doesn't really need to care about this problem at this point in their life cycle. Right now there are plenty of spurned Warhammer Fantasy players who already have armies that they can win over to create new customers. All they have to do is to convince Elf players that they want to have one more regiment of Stormwind Cavalry and sell them a box for thirty bucks (or whatever). They don't have a pressing need to sell playable armies to 12 year olds because there are enough olds out there with High Elf armies to sell as many Stormwind Cavalry boxes as they can cast the minis for. But if they stay in business long enough or get big enough, it will become a big problem.

The barriers to entry to this hobby are very high. Older Warhammer players quit and die, and the player base is dwindling. I'm sure Mantic would be fucking ecstatic to get a third of the old Warhammer Fantasy player base coming over to them for now. But it's pretty hard to see how the hobby as a whole can stay alive and not wither away if there aren't real gateways for younger generations. Age of Sigmar's "put whatever the fuck you want on the table" thing is actually a positive step towards companies facing reality. Of course, we're talking one step forward and ten steps back and then jumping off a cliff into a shark infested sea. Because holy balls, units don't have points costs and the game literally gives you in-game bonuses for mustache size. But having the default assumed playstyle be "and then you have a weird and random assortment of minis to put on the table" is a bare nod to the reality of the world we live in.

TL;DR: Single race armies need to be treated like a decadent option for advanced players with huge collections because that is what they are.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: TL;DR: Single race armies need to be treated like a decadent option for advanced players with huge collections because that is what they are.

-Username17

QFT. Speaking as someone with a collection of literally 1000+ (mostly random and eclectic) miniatures, putting together even 100 of them into something that looks like a coherent army would be a challenge. Especially if you mandated some sort regiment formation.

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

Actual WWII that actually happened had the British and the French working together. Who historically hated each other but recognised Germany as a greater threat to both of them.

Or the British and the Americans working together. Who historically didn't want to help each other in the fucking slightest due to events involving tea, but recognised Germany as a greater threat to both of them.

Or the Americans and the Soviet Union working together. You can tell how much they liked each other because as soon as the War was over they pointed their guns at each other and had a very long, tense stand-off and had some minis battles (the minis in this case being "other countries"). But all that happened after they had dealt with the bigger threat of Germany.

If you can get those kinds of alliances happening in the real world (never mind the arguments from a bunch of people who play a minis game based on it but aren't even old enough that their grandparents suffered through banana rations and bomb shelters), then I can't see anything stopping Vampire Counts and High Elves working together. Or whatever.

It sounds like the missing part of the business plan is a skirmish-scale game to serve as both a low-investment entry point and to accommodate more eclectic collections. That's cool, I've had a ball with the Warhammer Skirmish rules and the Mordheim variants.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:It sounds like the missing part of the business plan is a skirmish-scale game to serve as both a low-investment entry point and to accommodate more eclectic collections. That's cool, I've had a ball with the Warhammer Skirmish rules and the Mordheim variants.

That's an important part of the business plan. Certainly, if you can't play some kind of game when you have 20 models, it's hard to imagine sticking with the hobby long enough to have 150 models. But the real missing part of the business plan really is "multi-racial factions." Games Workshop actually was pretty much there in the fucking 80s, and has been gradually making it harder and harder to play their fucking game since Ravening Hordes in 1987. There was a brief period of moving in the right direction with the original pan-racial Chaos in 1989, but by 1992 it was all bullshit about racial army codices and shit. Is it any wonder that Warhammer Fantasy has been steadily losing out since the 90s?

The reality is that the Racial Army List is completely backwards to the way people actually collect miniatures when they aren't bending over backwards to play Warhammer. People normally get minis one box or blister pack at a time, and paint them as inspiration takes hold. The first games that are played with the models are RPGs and skirmish games. Heroes and monsters get finished first, and blocks of spearmen are literally the last thing.

Warhammer, and Kings of War, and all those games says that the big block of spearmen is your "core units," the basic building block of your army that you have to have before you can start fucking around with the elites. This is totally backwards. Small and eclectic groups of elites and monsters is the kind of thing that a small miniatures collection can actual make. Only dedicated and decadent players with huge miniatures collections can actually field 50 models in a regiment with identical weaponry.

Small end armies should be filled with irregulars, monsters, and warriors of various races. The kind of thing you'd get by rolling on the old D&D recruitment tables for advancing to name level as a Ranger. Formations of troops with similar weapons and livery should be for bigger armies.


Armies for beginning players look like this.

And not like this:



You have to be a seriously dedicated collector who has put a lot of time and money and patience into the game with a very clear idea of what you want to do before a square of High Elf Spearmen is a thing you could possibly put on the table. Making that the barrier to entry for the game is fucking insane.

-Username17

It's not just that, but a huge barrier to entry to me has been the sheer volume of work to make the army look even a fraction as good as the promotional artwork; and the highly probable scrubs associated with that.

Realistically, this would be my army...

Probably $80 and 12 hours of labour

Ultimately, it's the whole cost angle, both time and money. I'm expected to shell out hundreds of dollars for the 'privilege' of a part-time job painting my army? It'd be a literal year before they thought about looking as nice as what you see in books or what the established players' look like. Meanwhile, I spent a literal fraction of the cost and got myself Heroscape.


This is $50 only because it's been out of print for five years, I bought it for $20

How much trouble would you get into if you were to 3D scan and print such stuff?

when people start out the way you describe they usually play at home with a handfull of friends, getting half the rules wrong and having fun anyway, and don't care about "proper" army composition in any way. i know i started that way.

it's only once you decide the hobby is for you and worth the effort, time and money, when you expand the group of people you play with (gaming stores, clubs, tournaments), that these issues become relevant. in many years of tabletop wargaming i have met very few people who actually wanted to continue to play that way once they reach that point. they are out there, i give you that, but they are a minority. and noone is stopping those players from buying whatever they like and play in any way they like. the mini-producers certainly won't mind. like i quoted from the kow-rulebook. "don't mix good and evil.. unless you want to." that's the attitude every producer should have, cause it covers all kinds of players.

i do agree that army composition should be as flexible and open as possible, but personally i prefer to have this flexibility within the framework of single race armies. what companies needs to do is provide reasonable prices beginner boxes.

considering what virgil said, prepainted minis are also they way to go for beginners. just look at x-wing!

One of the innovations that really made Games Workshop's success was the collectible aspect of it - like with Magic, the ability to customize your army and point-whore and "Damn, that looks cool" your forces is very attractive for several market demographics. But the blisterpack/regiment boxed set (and the increasing complex ruleset) also means there's a substantial investment barrier to play...something that GW has traditionally struggled with.

Although they did try.

shlominus wrote:when people start out the way you describe they usually play at home with a handfull of friends, getting half the rules wrong and having fun anyway, and don't care about "proper" army composition in any way. i know i started that way.

it's only once you decide the hobby is for you and worth the effort, time and money, when you expand the group of people you play with (gaming stores, clubs, tournaments), that these issues become relevant. in many years of tabletop wargaming i have met very few people who actually wanted to continue to play that way once they reach that point.

Yes shlominus, tautologically the only people who are able to actually play Warhammer are those willing to put in the time and energy and money required to build Warhammer armies. Sorry to be blunt, but: No fucking shit!

The point is that Warhammer requires people to invest time and energy and money in a way that is in no ways synergistic with collecting models for other purposes. People who collect models for RPGs or "because they look col" or pretty much any reason other than "to field a playable Warhammer army" end up with collections that are very diverse. If those people can't play Warhammer even at low points values, the player base is always going to be terribly small.

Warhammer's "field a giant pile of clanrats or GTFO" concept is inherently exclusionary. It's a huge barrier to entry. It's a barrier to entry so high that before Games Workshop set fire to the entirety of Fantasy Battles, they literally sold more Space Marines than all of Fantasy Battle materials combined. Not 40K as a whole, just Space Marines. Because Space Marine armies require comparatively little investment (as there are less figures and the figures are easier to paint). Which is probably why the bean counters at GW decided that it would be a good idea to torch their entire game line and make something with Sigmarines. But the big issue is still that the entire concept of asking people to make the jump from whatever the hell is in their miniatures collection to having 120+ models of the same race where most of them have one of only a couple of multiply repeated weapon layouts.

Investing in the giant goblin spear column is an end-stage Fantasy Miniatures addiction thing to do. Putting that as the first thing you have to do before you can field an army is doing things 100% backwards. People should want to invest in the giant regiment of goblin spearmen because it is awesome and will make their army better. Not because it's a literal requirement to play the game at all.

-Username17

Stahlseele wrote:How much trouble would you get into if you were to 3D scan and print such stuff?

That depends dramatically on context. If it's being done entirely in-house with your own scanner and printer and your friend's borrowed figs, then you're essentially untouchable. You're also spending more money or time, because a printer that can match a 40K miniature in detail is not cheap yet, and it's still unpainted.

GW undoubtedly has a generic C&D form letter to send to any place that hosts scans of their models. Big guns would undoubtedly be brought to bear if you opened up access to your printer/scanner operation to the public for a fraction of GW's prices.

you won't get any disagreement about the huge entry barrier to tabletop wargaming from me. i have enjoyed this hobby for some time and am well aware of it.

i also agree that companies should offer something to those that collect the way you describe and want to make the jump to bigger games.

what you seem to ignore is the fact that the people that are attracted to games like warhammer enjoy giant goblin regiments and don't see them as obstacles to their enjoyment. it's not the "endstage", it's what attracts people to play "this" kind of game over another in the first place. there are plenty of skirmish games around that people can happily play with their small collection of minis.

people that play warhammer want regiments, cause that's what warhammer is about. (or, you know... was) they want row upon row of imperial soldiers, skaven, or undead. thats the "warhammer" appeal. you seem to be confusing people that want to play a tabletop wargame with people who have a couple of minis from playing rpgs and want to do something else with those. yes, the player base could be increased by doing what you suggest. let me predict a small sideeffect: the players that enjoy the games the way they are played now would be pissed cause they'd have to play against hodgepodge armies of whateverthefuck minis their opponent has a lot.

which players of 40k play mixed race armies the most? beginners? casuals? nope. tournament players, cause they can provide special, sometimes very powerful options. the casual gamer usually sticks to a single race army cause they like the look or fluff.

your solution would only appeal to a small segment of potential wargamers. the ones that want to mix the experience of playing with whatever models they have with larger scale battles. in my experience, those players are a tiny minority.

i can only repeat myself. cheap starter boxes and prepainted minis are the way to go, if you want to lower the barrier and increase the player base. can totally unrestricted armybuilding help? probably, but there might be a reason very few systems work that way. (no, frank, the reason is not that everyone but you is an idiot.)

There has been a lot of discussion on the topic of warhammer fantasy entry barrier and the general consensus is not the lack of allies, or lack of prepainted minies you can buy, but two things:

1) The rules themselves make the game very unbalanced for any games of 1000 points and lower. Games of 1000 to 2000 points can also be moderately unbalanced as well. The last (8th) edition was designed for 2500 point battles, and that shows itself. 40K on the other hand does much better at low point levels, mostly due to the fact that you win games in 40K by claiming objectives instead of killing dudes.

2) Ready to play, cheap boxed sets that are balanced against each other for every army. GW started something like that, but a little too late IMO.

shlominus wrote:what you seem to ignore is the fact that the people that are attracted to games like warhammer enjoy giant goblin regiments and don't see them as obstacles to their enjoyment. it's not the "endstage", it's what attracts people to play "this" kind of game over another in the first place. there are plenty of skirmish games around that people can happily play with their small collection of minis.

You are totally wrong here. The "endstage" and the "main attraction" are frequently the same thing. As the case is here.

Everyone likes the idea of having a swarm of clanrats or a green tide or an unstoppable phallanx of high elves or whatever the fuck. But that is financially out of the question for most hobbyists. And requires way too much patience and dedication of time for a child.

The reality is that while 12 year olds look at a table with regiment after regiment of painted elves or orcs or whatever and a gleam comes in their eye - there's no way they are going to actually be able to assemble one of those. What they are actually going to do is get an allowance every week and they are going to buy a little of this and a little of that. If you can't fucking play the game with a hodge podge of stuff from different races, those people are never going to play your fucking game!

By all means, there should be real advantages for armies at high point totals to be racially themed and have big squads of regimented spearmen and shit. That's what the game should look like when people put competitive high end armies on the table. Because people who invested a lot into the game in terms of time and money can actually field an army of all Dwarves or an army of all Beastmen or whatever. But people who have much smaller collections also have much more eclectic collections, so smaller armies should be a diverse pile of things from different races.

It's actually a rather trivial game design problem. Consider: If the higher tier hero bonuses apply to everything on the table in-faction, then battles with high enough point totals to justify taking the higher tier heroes would also justify single-faction army lists. So for example, you might have three levels of Necromancer, that have the ability to boost undead units, and the bigger Necromancers affected undead units in larger areas, then at low point values it could make sense to run a single Necromancer with a few Ghouls along side whatever the fuck else you were bringing, while at high point values it would make sense for all your cavalry to be Blood Knights and all your archers to be Skeleton Archers and shit because you were going to take the Lich Lord expensive Necromancer and you might as well get your points' worth.

But games like Warhammer haven't even tried to solve that problem, because they've been marketing themselves solely to players who can make the enormous upfront investment to put together a themed army before they play a single game for a quarter of a century. Which is retarded, and why they've been on a downward trajectory the entire fucking time.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: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.



-Username17

More than anything I want some kind of Tomb Kings+Lizardmen combined army. Not necessarily because of the units. I think I just might have some kind of weird pyramid fetish.

Ghremdal wrote: 2) Ready to play, cheap boxed sets that are balanced against each other for every army. GW started something like that, but a little too late IMO.

IIRC, they already had this in the 80's. As a kid with not much pocket money, the only way I was able to get into WFB was because there was a box set of plastic skeletons from GW, something like 30 skeletons with sprues for choosing hand weapons, shields, and bows. Box also came with like 5 mounted skeletons and a chariot, that box set rocked...for something like $25? That did for rank-and-file, then for heroes I could use my random D&D minis for vampires/liches/etc.

This was also the only way I was able to play 40K - the plastic space marine box set (mk6, "beakies") had like 10 marines for like $20 or so, with sprues for assault/devastator/tactical squad weapons. My friend chose Harlequins, because there was a box set for $20, not as many minis but the models were worth more points so it evened out.

So my view is they already had started down the road of "ready to play, relatively cheap box sets", but then they got (more) greedy and stopped making them.

Koumei wrote:

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

Actual WWII that actually happened had the British and the French working together. Who historically hated each other but recognised Germany as a greater threat to both of them.

Or the British and the Americans working together. Who historically didn't want to help each other in the fucking slightest due to events involving tea, but recognised Germany as a greater threat to both of them.

Or the Americans and the Soviet Union working together. You can tell how much they liked each other because as soon as the War was over they pointed their guns at each other and had a very long, tense stand-off and had some minis battles (the minis in this case being "other countries"). But all that happened after they had dealt with the bigger threat of Germany.

If you can get those kinds of alliances happening in the real world (never mind the arguments from a bunch of people who play a minis game based on it but aren't even old enough that their grandparents suffered through banana rations and bomb shelters), then I can't see anything stopping Vampire Counts and High Elves working together. Or whatever.

You don't even need to go that back in history, just check recent newspapers.

In Lybia the USA, who had been all friendly with Gadhafi for the last decades, suddenly decided to support the rebels. And as soon as Gadhafi was dead, the rebels burned down the USA embassy along with its ambassador as thanks.

A few years ago ISIS was one of the glorious rebel groups receiving weapons and support from the west, now they're being bombed.

The situation in Syria right now is a complete clusterfuck with everybody forming and breaking alliances at every moment.

Heck, the USA and Russia are even allying agaist the same target again! Kinda.

@koumei&maglag:

i guess i should have explained what i meant. i wasn't talking about alliances in war (or politics), i was talking about (a vocal faction of) historical wargamers. a large number of them are pretty anal about this sort of things. if you bring a force made up of germans and italians you'd better be fighting some battle were these armies in that setup actually fought alongside each other.

you can't just move one of the armies a few kilometers south... nonono!

british and american troops? sure, but then we'll have to fight at hill#254, #253 didn't have any americans. and the british better be scotsmen!

Oh right, they want to model it on specific battles that actually happened. So everyone has to bring the exact correct army for the specific terrain set-up because the table is made to look like [Place] and that means it has to be the battle fought on [Date] between [People] and [People].

I forgot that GW players are somehow not actually the biggest assholes in tabletop gaming.

Also holy shit AH, I thought nobody else knew of that game. I had that when I were a lass some 20+ years ago, just a handful of years after HeroQuest.

phlapjackage wrote:So my view is they already had started down the road of "ready to play, relatively cheap box sets", but then they got (more) greedy and stopped making them.

i don't think they ever stopped making these, it's just that the prices went nuts!

This is pretty much the number of models I'd want a miniatures game to start at:

Having 3-5 guys armed the same way would be the closest to hordes and regiments it gets.

Well, most people want the game to scale up to regiments, because they are awesome. Seriously:





The problem of course is that your 30th model isn't going to be your 24th Dark Elf Hoplite, and your 42nd model is not going to be your 36th Stormvermin. Regiments have a place on the battlefield, but only if that battlefield has hundreds of models on it.

The issue is that regiments and single-race armies are things that players can put together if they have been collecting miniatures for years. The Ravening Hordes rules in 1987 were written for players who had been playing since 1983 and collecting since 1978. And five years later they really locked it down with 4th edition. Warhammer Fantasy pulled the drawbridge up and locked out all the teenagers and scrubs in 1992. Is it any surprise that the game died and was canceled in 2015? For fuck's sake, the teenagers who started in the hobby in 1st edition are literally in their fifties now, and they've set up elitist and exclusionary rules to keep new blood from joining their games for an entire generation.

You don't let people play your game with the minis they actually own for an entire generation, and a generation later your game is dead. Are you fucking surprised? I am not surprised.

If you want your game to survive, you need to have games that people can play and reasons to get further involved with the hobby. There needs to be a reason and a means to transition between a small collection and a medium collection. And reason and means to transition between a medium collection and a large collection. Warhammer provided those for the first generation of players. The first rules let you bring whatever the fuck you had. They only locked those doors and said "Mr. Suitcase or GTFO" after the first generation had already had years to develop their collections. The second generation of players got some side games like Necromunda and Mordheim, but there was no game they could play when they owned 40-80 models. Which is fucking insanity. And the third generation saw GW simply set fire to the place for the insurance money and walk away.

But yes, there should be a point total where the players want to put down big formations. It looks cool and it's a thing that bigger armies actually do. Also, it's a money making proposition because if the 100 model army has two 24 model phallanxes in it and the 60 model army has zero, then you're going to have to collect more than 40 models to transition from a 60 model army to a 100 model army.

-Username17

shlominus wrote:@koumei&maglag:

i guess i should have explained what i meant. i wasn't talking about alliances in war (or politics), i was talking about (a vocal faction of) historical wargamers. a large number of them are pretty anal about this sort of things. if you bring a force made up of germans and italians you'd better be fighting some battle were these armies in that setup actually fought alongside each other.

you can't just move one of the armies a few kilometers south... nonono!

british and american troops? sure, but then we'll have to fight at hill#254, #253 didn't have any americans. and the british better be scotsmen!

Yes but many, if not the majority of WW2 minis scenarios are quite frankly based on fanfiction - very often written by the SS or their fanboys. Real historians for instance have found that the US Army only faced the Tiger I tanks three times in France and Germany; but if you base it off published "historical" scenarios every other German tank the Americans will face is a Tiger.

It's gotten to the point that serious historians have started dismissing WW2 minis games as part of the "Wermacht Porn" or "Wehraboo" sub-culture.

WW2 minis isn't really about historical realism anymore as it is about reliving hollywood historical fantasies.

Zinegata wrote:

shlominus wrote:@koumei&maglag:

i guess i should have explained what i meant. i wasn't talking about alliances in war (or politics), i was talking about (a vocal faction of) historical wargamers. a large number of them are pretty anal about this sort of things. if you bring a force made up of germans and italians you'd better be fighting some battle were these armies in that setup actually fought alongside each other.

you can't just move one of the armies a few kilometers south... nonono!

british and american troops? sure, but then we'll have to fight at hill#254, #253 didn't have any americans. and the british better be scotsmen!

Yes but many, if not the majority of WW2 minis scenarios are quite frankly based on fanfiction - very often written by the SS or their fanboys.

It's gotten to the point that serious historians have started dismissing WW2 minis games as part of the "Wermacht Porn" or "Wehraboo" sub-culture.

WW2 minis isn't really about historical realism anymore as it is about reliving hollywood historical fantasies.

i don't think your generalisation is very accurate.