Thoughts on SW: Legions?

Colorcrayons wrote:

Mr. White wrote:

Not Sure wrote: I'm so far outside this section of the hobby that my opinions don't really matter, but to me it seems like there's something ti the point way upthread (Barnes?) that said "GW is a model company who also prints rules"

The original source on this was the former head of GW (Kirby) who was ousted a few years ago.

It's actually Jervis Johnson in white dwarf prior to Kirby taking the reigns. Kirby just regurgitated it in stock reports.

Thanks. I had always attributed the line to Kirby. So that famous line was from Jervis, but I'm sure it wasn't Jervis who made the actual call be a 'minis company first'. That had to be Kirby....right?

Agreed. I know the Marines we're rescaled to "truscale" in new 40k, but otherwise the scaling has been consistent for more than 25 years.

The scaling has been overall consistent since 2nd Ed. Overall being the qualifying statement.

@mr. White
I think when citadel was enveloped by gw was really the time they were mainly a minis company. They may have just not fully admitted it even to themselves at that point, since they did produce a large catalogue of games by that point still. Yet they outsourced their minis to even Milton Bradley for heroquest, so I honestly believe citadel's absorption to be the true turning point.

Da Bid Dabid wrote:

edulis wrote: Although I agree that GW makes awesome models, and they do a great job of making their games interconnected, the whole thought that GW models from years ago are usable today is BS.

I started playing 40k again this year and I think my models from 3rd edition that I purchased around 18 years ago not only are perfectly in scale and usable, but actually look better than the current line.

What's more, and to Micheal's recoup expenses point, these older oop warhammer models go for $$$ in the aftermarket. There's an oldhammer demand. Not just from Oldhammer players, but from current players looking for some historic touches or alternate sculpts/units to their current forces.

Most non-GW minis lines...when they go oop...the models are dirt cheap. How many did Sag buy for $50?

Yeah, if anyone knows of anyone selling Valhallans let me know!

GW scale creep is definitely a thing, many of the old models look tiny compared to new ones. I'm surprised you guys don't feel that way.




That 1E Terminator is smaller than many regular Marines from 7th ed.

MB- Acknowledged. I realize there's an atmospheric difference, but I tend to look at Arkham from the perspective of the monsters. If you're still using shoggoths, then you're still using Lovecraft. The fact that you're now using shotguns to remove the shoggoths instead of dying from fright at seeing one is a change in attitude more than setting.

As for the scale thing, I think there may be economic factors at work here, more than organizational ineptitude. Board game prices have been increasing at a remarkable rate in the past 20 years, often because the components in question have become ever higher in quality. But in games like Imperial Assault or, say, Star Trek: Ascendancy, which I've just acquired a copy of, there are questions of quantity, as well. If you want to do a galaxy-spanning game like Ascendancy, you can't use the scale of X-Wing. Games would simply take up too much space and would be unwieldy. This has often been a criticism of WHFB, in that you can't play it on a card table, so you often need more space than the average American apartment has or you have to go to a game store that actually has space (rarer than you'd think.) But if you want to have a mass combat game, such that Luke and Han can gun down two dozen Stormtroopers in the same engagement like in Imperial Assault, you need to be able to fit those two dozen Stormtroopers on the average table (i.e. not one of the required size for WHFB.) That's what most people consider a "board game" vs a "minis game"; a difference which has frequently been clouded in recent years. So, the different scale may have been an accessibility thing.

But it may also have been a cost thing. Minis ain't cheap, for either producer or consumer, as many of us know. I can buy four boxes of Clanrats for the same price as TI4. Four boxes of Clanrats won't even approach the actual cost of a functional army of even 1000 points. But a lot of the cost in those Clanrats is the detail of the models (and GW's ridiculous prices, but let's try to stay focused here.) Imperial Assault costs $100 for the base game. I'm betting that that price point is set in a window that's similar to what CP was talking about on BGG a few years back about Descent. The cost of doing the game with 32mm minis would likely have priced it out of the reach of a lot of gamers who aren't GW players, aren't modelers, and aren't hobbyists. They just wanted to play mass combat in the Star Wars universe.

Minis gamers, OTOH, are generally willing to pay more for smaller segments of their game because they know that they're buying something to not just push around the table and roll dice with, but to paint and convert and generally make their stuff visually stand out. IA is not that game. IA is not a "minis" game, so to speak. It's a board game with miniatures. I'm willing to bet that they produced them at the smaller scale to keep the price in a range that people would still endure, but at which they could also make money (especially considering that it's a licensed property and we don't know how their agreement is set up; they might be sharing revenue on a per unit basis.) Furthermore, development cycles take time. This is the same discussion I had with Ben Brode a couple years ago when they released an abominable card for Priest in Hearthstone and I asked him: "Priest is already awful. Why would you do that?" Well, it's because it had been in the pipeline for a while and once they saw how bad the class was performing, they didn't have time to change it. That's a VIDEO game producer saying they couldn't alter their production schedule. A PHYSICAL game producer would have far more difficulty. FFG decided to get into the minis business with X-Wing, They decided to go full-bore into GW's territory with Runewars, which ended their business arrangement. Imperial Assault was already fully developed and produced by that time. When X-Wing topped their sales charts, they probably decided that since Runewars was moving forward, they might as well ride the Star Wars wave. But you can't do a "minis game" with models as small as those that IA required and expect that regular modeler types will get in. (Only weird people like me and Von Tush (long absent from these parts) play 10mm shit like Epic.) So they had to go to what is considered the typical scale of 32mm.

Most companies, especially successful ones like FFG, don't do stuff like screw their customers on a regular basis by making their games non-compatible. One only has to look at their willingness to provide rules and cards for the same heroes in Runebound, Dungeonquest, Descent, and Runewars (the board game, not minis game) to realize that.

Jackwraith, you bring up a good point regarding the cost. While the cost of entry is a lot higher for FFG products, at least at the most basic level, that has no relation to how much cost overall well be sunk in the game. FFG's model could very well assume that a player will plunk down $100 for a base game if everything else is a little more affordable.

I don't know if it actually IS more affordable, since my minis investment is very limited. Still it is worth thinking about.

charlest wrote: GW scale creep is definitely a thing, many of the old models look tiny compared to new ones. I'm surprised you guys don't feel that way.

That 1E Terminator is smaller than many regular Marines from 7th ed.

When compared to rogue trader era, sure. Hell, even models created during that same era had massive scaling issues among themselves at times.

But many of those comparisons you have provided are frankly laughable, and the sort of bullshit I see fox news using to support their bias.

Like the comparison of a shitty chaos plebe and a gorechosen dude who is recognized as a mutated giant in fluff and realized in sculpt.

I stand by my assertion that scaling has been 'overall' consistent since 2nd Ed 40k days.

Changing scales on dead then revived games like bloodbowl, is inconsequential since scale matters not one iota for gameplay, unlike 40k.

Pull out your a-game, Charles. You can do better than that, to prove a point when playing devil's advocate.

The problem is it's difficult finding pics.

I wish I still had my Necromunda original plastic Goliaths on hand and I'd snap a pic myself - the new ones are ridiculously huge and I'd feel embarassed as hell combining them. Same with the Orlocks. I pretty much have to buy the new ones so it doesn't look ridiculous.

I'm not seeing how he's being deceptive. The space marine back to back, the terminator comparison, and the Necromunda lady?

It helps since I've seen it with my own eyes.

It'd be foolish to argue there is not scale creep, there is across the entire industry not just GW. But there is a higher chance of a model bought for 40k today to fit right into the same game 10 years from now than most other companies (and likely the game will be chugging right along with its UGOIGO archaic turn structure).

The blood bowl comparison is a little unfair because the minis from each edition are designed to match the board from each edition. Same thing going on with the grid style Necro? I don't know there...

There is indeed scale creep if standard is 32mm, as I erroneously wrote up in my last post. Standard for GW is 28mm. Not sure if it still is, but that's what it was since the 90s.

Yeah, I dunno...showing a space marine from 1988 vs 2015 is a bit of a stretch. That's almost a 30yr jump! I think my AoS models will probably at least still be in-scale 10-20 years from now. 30+? I have no idea... but I'll be 73!

I think the FFG offense here is that IA is a recent game. To not even attempt to capture or consider those players with Legion was a questionable call.

For sure, the switcheroo on Star Wars mini scales sucks big-time and is not really excusable. It has the additional issue of requiring even more space for those enormous vehicles.

It's painful from store owner perspective also. 2 different SKUs for particularly similar minis from the same company.

Or people accidentally getting IA minis before their SWL version is released.