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I think that Heroic Fantasy works as well as any other for describing Warhammer, from 4th edition on, at least. Heroes have a major impact on the game.

Through 3rd... probably closer to Low Fantasy - where the Empire is mostly under the control of squabbling Elector Counts, and the Emperor is a weak willed figurehead.

I guess that I can see Kings of War as either High or Low fantasy - depending on the players. Heroes are not as much of a game changer, especially with the new 2nd edition rules.

The Auld Grump - and suddenly I have an urge to play the old TSR Battlesystem....

I agree it's open to a lot of interpretation and opinion; but personally, what TV tropes describes as high and low fantasy, sounds to me how this article defines epic fantasy and sword & sorcery, respectively. Although the article also gets somewhat confused between setting, theme, and scale, in places. I think it's perfectly possible to have a handful of low-down antiheroes doing their own thing in a high fantasy setting, and so on.
It suggests to me that there's a heck of a venn diagram in fantasy fiction. Or even better, something like DnD's basic alignment system (High Epic, High Heroic, High S&S, etc.); though probably a bit more convoluted, assuming it's possible at all.

I was just writing the Introduction to the Fantasy Version of a Historical Set of rules.

And while doing so, was looking at the various Fantasy sets published since the 1970s, and the divide between Fantasy and Historical miniatures.

In the 1970s, the distinction arose between Fantasy Miniatures, and Historical due to Role Playing Games, which focused upon individuals, contrasted to the historical gamers who focused upon Units of men as the agent or actor in the game.

And that the Divide tended to grow through the 1980s, despite the introduction of games like Warhammer Fantasy Battles, or Heritage's abysmal Warlord (Anyone who is curious, Warlord's rules used to be less than one page in length). Chainmail and a few other games did try to make a difference (such as the AD&D Fantasy Battles System, but they largely languished compared to other, later systems.

But, overall, Historical Miniatures players (and rules designers, dominated by ONE author, who largely still dominates that genre) saw Fantasy miniatures games as infantile, and childish, not worthy of serious consideration, while Fantasy Miniatures Players tended to reject Historical Gaming as snobbish and elitist (because that one rules author WAS/IS Snobbish and Elitist, going out of his way to write opaque and convoluted rules, which are now have an eponymous word to refer to any rules writing that is unnecessarily complicated and opaque).

This led to the FEW attempts by Historical Rules Writers to produce Fantasy Sets to be shallow, and lacking in any real detail, or seeming understanding of the Fantasy Worlds involved.

The rules created (such as WRG's first attempt at "Fantasy Rules" as an addendum in the back of 3000BC - 1250AD, 5th Edition, or their later Hoards of the Things treat all fantasy types as being monolithic entities: all dwarves are identical, all elves are identical, all Goblins/Orcs are identical, etc.).

All real flavor was "abstracted away."

Conversely, the Fantasy writers tripped all over themselves to add back in this flavor, but their overall ignorance of WHY certain things were done in Historical Miniatures Games, or the ignorance of History in general, led to games that only minimally represented actual warfare of this type (WHFB and Warmaster being the most notorious instances of this). The former's focus upon individual characters, and individually mounted miniatures led to an over-emphasis upon the behavior of individuals, while paying lip-service to units (which behaved nothing at all like the accounts we find in history), while the latter moved the focus too far back toward units, while removing any differentiation between the units (not all units in armies occupy the same space on the ground). This is important, because it is an aspect of Fantasy Miniature's overall failure to produce a game that accurately incorporated the historical behavior of the different types of troops: the refusal to set a ground and time scale causes aberrations at all levels of play.

Some newer game designers are attempting to confront these issues. Kings of War TRIES to address them, but still suffers from being overly attached to WHFB.

Madan Mitra also made a valiant attempt to create a Fantasy System out of DBM (a larger scale historical rules set that had less "abstraction" - i.e. More detail) with his creation of De Bellis Fantasticus (DBF) in the mid-1990s, but ultimately, even this did not include enough detail.

FINALLY, though, we are seeing Historical Rules Systems that DO contain enough detail to make a decent set of Mass Combat Fantasy rules. And, I am not talking about the Skirmish level stuff, like Hail Caesar, or SAGA. I am talking about games like L'Art de la Guerre (itself a rip-off of a Greek Historical set of rules by the name of Hoplon), which place an emphasis upon the actions of the unit, yet leave open the opportunity for heroic, individual actions, AND contain enough granular detail for the troops to be able to apply the rules, without modification to the majority of all Fantasy Troop types we typically see in Fantasy Worlds. Some modification of these rules will be required to include ALL Fantasy Troop Types, but the work required is minimal.

We are, in other words, finally seeing enough overlap between Historical Miniatures Gamers, and Fantasy Miniatures Gamers to see the development of a set of rules for Fantasy that recognizes that just because it is "fantasy" doesn't mean you can just make everything up (rules for the various fantasy worlds do exist, this is what gives them the internal consistency which makes them attractive), and that just because a set of rules is "Historical" does not mean that it is elitist or snobbish to recognize their applicability to Fantasy Worlds.

I would love to see another division between these two worlds fall:

Basing standards.

Games Workshop went out of their way (I actually had a conversation with Bryan Ansell about this in 1985, about why they were pushing for bases on their miniatures that did not conform to the traditional basing standards for existing games: he said that he wanted to drive a wedge between them, to force the adoption of Citadel's miniatures for a game over other's miniatures) to establish basing standards that deviate from all other existing standards (Warmaster ALMOST being an exception).

With the increased size of 28mm/30mm miniatures, many in the Historical Miniatures community are tiring of the WRG standard for that scale (which forces either a change in miniature frontage, or a change in the standards of miniatures per frontage on a base).

If a game was to come along that established a more common standard, between both Historical and Fantasy miniatures, I think that would be a win.

MB