So the signs all point to GW shaking up fantasy, possibly including blowing up the whole dang world.

So... what went wrong? How did it go from being their number 1 game, to needing drastic measures to rescue?

Some thoughts:

1 - Too many redundant factions: splitting Chaos into 3, Undead into 2, Elfs into 3, Orks into O&G and Ogres... Just too many factions that are similar. We can disagree about which factions were redundant (I really like the Egpytian tomb kings as a concept and would love to have the Assyrian Chaos Dwarfs back) but 14 different factions each with their own kits and blisters? Too much for even GW's stores to support.

2 - Not enough diverse factions: GW could have developed other factions that were either culturaly diverse (Araby, Cathy, Yind, Nippon) or played differently (an all flying army, an all monster army). Instead each action was the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery.

3 - Neglecting the core: With a mature game and extablished factions new releases stressed large monsters or war machines and ignored basic infantry. Most players will buy one dragon, or tentacle rape monster or flying boat or whatever but will buy several infantry units. GW could have either replaced some aging models (High Elf infantry and chaos warriors for example) or introduced some new ones that players would buy in bulk.

4 - Rules bloat: another problem with 14 factions to differentiate, too many small random rules to track and balance.

5 - Losing the cutting edge - A lot of companies have yoinked GW's big shoulder pad and skull look, with WOW probably being the most prominent. What was once original is now old hat. It's not GW's fault and there ain't much that can be done but it's worth remembering.

Other thoughts?

Personally I find it was pricing, I love Warhammer as a hobby and I dabble in other tabletop games too but I have other hobbies that take precedent and GW are very close to completely pricing themselves out of reach for me, I'd sooner go head first and spend £300 on some 15mm WW2, Dropzone Commander, Infinity, Hordes, Malifaux and Mordheim than simply pony up for another Warhammer army.

I say that as a big fan of Warhammer and of Games Workshop model kits as well, It's my favourite tabletop game, warts 'n all.

Frankly a Warhammer Skirmish game would suit me down to the ground, I've got the Mordheim rules on a HDD somewhere too so I'm quite curious about this new start for fantasy as I've already got two rule sets (8th and Mordheim) so 9th will have to be quite special to be extracting cash from me, now!

In 6th and 7th editions I really quite enjoyed playing Warhammer Fantasy. I have a very large painted Orc and Goblin army and a similarly large and fully painted Dwarf army. I used to also have Beastmen and Lizardmen, and I have the guts of a WoC cavalry army.

When 8th came out, I bought the book, got kind of excited, played a game and...never played fantasy ever again.

It's not that the rules were terrible, they weren't, though I believe they had several critical flaws. It was that setting up the game was so damned time consuming with the model bloat of the new edition and then all I did was remove swathes of the little guys I'd spent minutes putting onto the movement tray as my opponent bombarded me with magic.

It wasn't worth the effort needed to set up the game to actually play the game, and most of the fun movement related tactics had been stripped out of the game. So I always intended getting back to it once I'd done up my armies and had a think about how to deal with the magic issue.

But then GW increased the prices on the rules, increased the prices on the sets, and I lost more interest. Time was I would buy the books for every force I was even vaguely interested in. As the 8th edition books were more blatant rehashes of old material than any other codex set I'd seen, and they were charging a premium for the rules, I just stopped. I could not justify the cost of keeping current when compared to the enjoyment I got out of the game. I didn't rage quit, I just sort of fell behind. And the prices kept going up, and the rules didn't get any better- in fact they tended to emphasize what I didn't like about the game with Storm of Magic and so on.

So now the Old World is ending, and I barely care. I haven't bought a single thing for End Times. I've just moved on.

Ignoring the pricing for the moment, because you know... GW, KK's third point pretty much sums up my views. Warhammer for me was about armies with the occasional monster as a centre piece. In recent years it just became about monsters with some infantry for them to tear apart.

On the topic of points 2 and 4, wot I just posted on another topic:

I'll say 'write better games'. Balanced, yes. Not shook up for the sake of repositioning flaws and reselling, yes. And also 'more appropriate'...
If you want a mass battle game, make a mass battle game focused on units and their footprints, on combined arms, on tactics, and maybe some more focus on command and control, too. (I bleedin' love C&C in mass battle games. Without it, IMO, it's like a fantasy novel without a map: so much more dull.) Don't make a mass battle game by swelling the model count of your original skirmish/warband game about individual models with individual attacks and individual saves, and so ridiculously dependent on how many individual models you have in the back rank of each unit, and on individual big flashy killy characters.
If you want to focus on the *deep breath* cinematic value of individual flashy powerful characters, make a skirmish game and don't force gamers to buy 100-200+ grunts and wound markers before they can experience it 'properly'. (Properly. Ha.)

I don't think 'the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery' is so much of a problem, or entirely accurate. Historical gaming has been constantly popular with variations on the 'same arrangement' with many, many more factions. ('monsters' being relegated to the occasional elephant in a few armies, and no wizards either) I think the differences there are that most historical mass battle games are as I said above: actually tailored for mass battles, with mechanics centred more around tactics and maneuvre rather than individual models, characters, and special rules. Also, for all that GW gamers rave about the lore and fluff and how the rules represent it, I think that most historical gamers might appreciate their 'fluff' more, and give it it's proper place - i.e. separate from the rules.
That's not to say that the different rulesets are entirely flavourless, and I've heard a couple of grognards complain that a certain set of rules doesn't represent a particular historical tactic or weapon properly (though one of these was that Warhammer Ancient Battles was useless for English Civil War hedgehogs and shotte sleeves and the like ) but overall historical games seem to take a much more elegant and simple, but deeper approach with general rules and mechanics, and let you get on with the fluff and excitement represented by the conflict you decide on (like I said, separate from, and possibly more important than, which rules you use!), the minis you choose to fight it, and how well you manipulate them on the tabletop with those deeper rules. As opposed to how well you can micromanage their weapon, magic item and autotriggered special rule loadout, and how many you can buy or afford. Some fantasy games also follow this reasoning, and seem to be more and more popular because of it.

One more thought, does anoyne have any insights into why GW spent a few years cranking out some lovely wizard towers?

I mean they were lovely, I almost bought the obervatory one just to build, but as far as I could tell they were almost useless in the game and sucked up a lot of resources.

And they KEPT DOING THEM!

Why not do a modular castle to replace the elderly 'mighty fortress' or a modeular wooden stockade which would work for other armies, or universal monsters like a generic dragon...

It just made no sense to me...

Because it's a thing for GW to produce and GW gamers to buy. That's the GW hobby after all, didn't you hear? Usefulness in some 'game' is not the point.

I wanted to reply to Vermis, in my experience, or should I say, speaking for myself, I've tried the historical rulesets (black powder, field of battle, piquet, half a dozen ACW, AWI, Napoleonic, Ancients, and even Kings of War, and the "footprint" approach to mass battle games left me cold. I can't put my finger on what it exactly is - I prefer the warhammer fantasy and warhammer ancients for my 28mm battles. I do like the other sets for their command and control (piquet, field of battle, battlegroup) where you don't know everything and can't always do everything.

Fantasy has always been mind numbingly complex. Take a unit like a giant or even a goblin fanatic and you end up with 2-3 pages of rules to use it in game, while warhammer ancients could do an elephant in half a page. Simpler, and cleaner.

Rules bloat in fantasy is just as bad as in 40k, everyone wants detail and complexity (crunch, chrome), and they all want their melta gun to do unique things when used by their faction. So, you end up with endless special rules, because a melta can't be fusion which can't be super heat gun.

Time was when Fantasy was the big kid on the block, and was primarily a european thing while 40k was played more in the US. Now its all 40k, all the time. GW, I think, did price themselves out of mass battle, when you compare to sub 80 cents per model historicals versus $3-4 each core model for plastics. My benchmark for expensive used to be Perry. Once I began seeing Perry models for much less than GW plastics, I knew GW was heading a bad way.

And KK, I don't get the terrain for fantasy either. I think it was the move toward buy everything for everything from us, rather than being about the hobby. And really, fantasy was always terrain lite, so why bother. Oh, and that venerable fortress is an absolute steal cost wise compared to newer castles...

Sorry for the ramble, I hope it made sense, and again, all in my opinion (speaking for myself)

 Flashman wrote:
Ignoring the pricing for the moment, because you know... GW, KK's third point pretty much sums up my views. Warhammer for me was about armies with the occasional monster as a centre piece. In recent years it just became about monsters with some infantry for them to tear apart.

That's kind of what it was like in the early days, first and second edition, and that's why I stopped playing.

Why bother to play a game in which whatever you do, the other guy pulls out some mega monster or "I win" magic card and basically negates every bit of tactics and luck you have managed to scrape together.

But in the modern game I think doubling the price of army books was a big mistake. It's the reason I stopped playing 40K. If I did play Fantasy I would have stopped for the same reason.

 Cruentus wrote:
I wanted to reply to Vermis, in my experience, or should I say, speaking for myself, I've tried the historical rulesets (black powder, field of battle, piquet, half a dozen ACW, AWI, Napoleonic, Ancients, and even Kings of War, and the "footprint" approach to mass battle games left me cold. I can't put my finger on what it exactly is - I prefer the warhammer fantasy and warhammer ancients for my 28mm battles.

Fair enough. For me it was the opposite: finally turned off by the minute crunch of WFB (what's better for a bunch of ogre bulls - ironfist or extra hand weapon? Ah... who cares?!) I started checking out historical games too. I joined a WAB-playing club just as they were gearing up for a dark ages (WAB shieldwall) tourney and I joined in. After all the faff of watching dozens of hirdmen and ceorls and things being gingerly shuffled and shuttled across the table; waiting for champions and berzerkers and things to resolve their extra or different attacks; picking models out of the back of units (and the usual fretting over whether you have 4 or 5 in the back rank) and spending altogether too much effort trying to rank them up again; and my own particular problems resolving attacks and casualties to and from mixed units of saxons thegns and ceorls, and ranking those up when you have to pluck dead guys out of the middle of units; and so on... I finally decided the problem wasn't the F in WFB, but the W.

This was the same club that moved from WAB ECW to Pike & Shotte, and those games along with Black Powder ACW and others, were just so much more fun to me. Even though I usually lost like a chump. (I still fondly remember when my Yankee field gun crew misunderstood their orders, picked up their piece, and ran at full movement towards the enemy lines)

That said, God of Battles is a ranked-block, individual-model, casualty-removal fantasy game that I wouldn't mind trying out sometime. The difference there is that the smaller possible game sizes in it are much, much smaller than WFB, currently. Currently as in, it almost seems to me what 3rd ed 'Oldhammer' is, except the mechanics are more streamlined than even big-battle Warhammer is. (it would be difficult not to be)

For me there were several reasons:

Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

Ever increasing large monsters - as mentioned above. I want the game to be about big armies, with a few monsters. And, in my opinion, a lot of the big monsters look like . That spider thing that the Orcs get, that Eagle With A Trailer Hitch that Elves get. That complete bit of gak that the Vampire Counts get, and the horrible things that have been tacked on to the Tomb Kings.

Sorry, but they look like crap.

And these are the things that bother me when I already own the miniatures. I do not need to spend the money to buy my units of Empire Halberdiers - I have had them for a decade and more.

That said, I could not stomach shelling out the shekels to buy the hardcover army books.

But for someone just getting into the game? They are like to die of sticker shock.

As much as I love Kings of War, I doubt that it is putting much of a dent in the sales for Warhammer - though it may be grabbing folks that already have Warhammer armies, but want to play with halfway decent rules.

The Auld Grump

I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

which in a way is bizarre as GW really doesn't seem to listen to the player base in most things,

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

which in a way is bizarre as GW really doesn't seem to listen to the player base in most things,

I disagree.

Strongly.

The problem kicks in when each of those bits of 'new stuff' have to be special snowflakes.

One of the reasons that I like Kings of War so much - the rules are much more universal, rather than finding three ways of having rules that mean the same thing.

If the rules were properly integrated then there would be no need to get rid of old units to make room for the new.

Though Warhammer has done a much better job of holding onto the old than Warhammer 40K has.

The last edition of Fantasy that I really liked was 6th.

The Auld Grump

Fracturing the armies was never really an issue. The issue was more prevalent in the way in which each army book was taken on, as a pet project by an author with limited playtesting and an inconsistent attitude to how each army was dealt with.

Then you have the issue of 'too many dice' (random charge distance, winds of magic, too many models etc), high price point due to the new balancing point of the rules (people want to push 3,000 to balance the new 50% lord/heroes) and general veteran attitude (that the price point isn't too high so who cares if we raise the price point at tournaments) which is pushing away newbloods.

Honestly the game is too bloated to take on GW's trademark inconsistencies and 'beardy-be-gone' attitude which seems to ignore a whole demographic of its customer-base. Nuking the rules base for a skirmish system could be a good start, but given their attitude towards rolling more dice regardless of how simple a rule should be, I don't hold out that much hope for the future of Fantasy. Then there's the lack of any real contribution by GW anymore into the community which means that the community bears the cost of keeping this hobby alive and in play.

It's just a sad state of affairs.

I started with 8th and ended with 8th. The model count is just way, way, way too high. And all those extra models are just wound counters. If I wanted to simulate something on that scale, it'd be better at 14mm or less. That scale of the game is just terrible and the costs associated with it are the first killer.

The second are the rules making dudespam a necessary evil. The rank bonuses and steadfast make combats boring slogs of nothing happening. The spells are then ramped up to 11 to combat the slower pace of combat.

It also has the same minutia problems like 40k where things like weapon skill, arguable more game impacting in a Fantasy setting, is still a hot mess with no real way to say a WS6 dude is fighting WS3 or a WS5 fighting a WS3, etc. It exists to aid in speed rolling, but that's a band-aid for the "too many dudes" issue.

Lastly, the secretive hush hush over upcoming 9th. I am so very glad I sold my Bretonnia now (save the valuable metal center pieces) as it seems like they're gonna be just an add-on for forces of man. For other people with Lizards... ew, if true.

Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun. Not sure which is worse now, 40k or Fantasy, but I dislike both games now after playing so many that don't use random mechanics.

I agree with the OP's list, and add my own:

1 - focusing on models and not rules. They were so obsessed with whether or not they could make 'big' models, they never stopped to ask if they should. I remember when the arachnarok came out, and it was a case of "we can build big models now so we will". A lot of what has been produced since then has revolved around that idea. But at its core, warhammer wasn't about collecting models for the sake of it, or centrepiece models for the sake of it, it was about playing a game. Which leads to:

2 - with the loss of focus on rules, the game has been slowly getting out of hand. As stated: rules bloat, special snowflake, reboots for the sake of reboots. The game (and rules) have taken the backseat to the models, which is unfortunate because it was the game that drove the models and not the other way around. GW started life supplying models for other peoples games, but if the games hadn't been good or popular the models would have been largely irrelevant.

3 - prices. GW wants to make a fortune selling cheap plastic toy soldiers. The problem is what they're selling isn't a 'premium' item, even though they try to hype that fact to their customers. Prices could be tolerated more if they came with good rules and balance, but they don't.

The end result is simple: people stop buying. To the point that they've lost the majority of their customer base (8% down from 33% down from god knows how high to start with.)

For me, the real question is: Why do they think this is only going to happen to fantasy and not 40k?

It was supposed to be a game of mass battles, not mass pricing.

I think one of the biggest problems is a comparitve lack of promotion. 40k is a game that everyone knows, more or less, even if you don't do table top you know about 40k. there are all sorts of memes etc about it on the internet. word of mouth sells 40k. WFB doesn't have that advantage. it's to most people "just another fantasy setting". what this means is people tend not to go looking to get into WFB, certinly not compared to people who might decide to get into 40k. so far no WFB based video game has acheived "huge hit" status. (not like say dawn of war or space marine, which have both sold well) thankfully this could be less of an issue if warhammer: total war does really well. oddly right now it's 40k that doesn't seem to have a "big A grade title" coming down the pike.
"j

I've played fantasy for going on 20 years, with a bit of a break at one point when MMORPG's got me for a few years. I think the higher costs of building an army is what hurt fantasy the most. The not having an intro game, which is what 9th could end up being a side by side game, who knows.

The large monsters isn't the problem, as you can build a monster free army, just as well as a monster laden force. due to cannons and spells, the first is likely better.

The bloat of rules is not that bad. Most are memorizable, except maybe tables such as the giant rules, but those haven't changed AFAIK in ages.

Model bloat is likely a issue, a wide range is problematic, ogres didn't need their own book, as they were part of empire, chaos and O&G however giving a WD of PDF file to make them an own force would have been acceptable. But if you wanted them to have something unique like ogre mountain cannon (Ironblaster) you needed to make a model unique. for IP reasons.

Promotion is lacking, I agree with the video game situation.

 Vermis wrote:


Fair enough. For me it was the opposite: finally turned off by the minute crunch of WFB (what's better for a bunch of ogre bulls - ironfist or extra hand weapon? Ah... who cares?!) I started checking out historical games too. I joined a WAB-playing club just as they were gearing up for a dark ages (WAB shieldwall) tourney and I joined in. After all the faff of watching dozens of hirdmen and ceorls and things being gingerly shuffled and shuttled across the table; waiting for champions and berzerkers and things to resolve their extra or different attacks; picking models out of the back of units (and the usual fretting over whether you have 4 or 5 in the back rank) and spending altogether too much effort trying to rank them up again; and my own particular problems resolving attacks and casualties to and from mixed units of saxons thegns and ceorls, and ranking those up when you have to pluck dead guys out of the middle of units; and so on... I finally decided the problem wasn't the F in WFB, but the W.

This was the same club that moved from WAB ECW to Pike & Shotte, and those games along with Black Powder ACW and others, were just so much more fun to me. Even though I usually lost like a chump. (I still fondly remember when my Yankee field gun crew misunderstood their orders, picked up their piece, and ran at full movement towards the enemy lines)

That said, God of Battles is a ranked-block, individual-model, casualty-removal fantasy game that I wouldn't mind trying out sometime. The difference there is that the smaller possible game sizes in it are much, much smaller than WFB, currently. Currently as in, it almost seems to me what 3rd ed 'Oldhammer' is, except the mechanics are more streamlined than even big-battle Warhammer is. (it would be difficult not to be)

Oh, yeah, I remember all of that now. I didn't mind that much, but my regular opponent has stated exactly what you just wrote - the fiddly, rank counting (counted before or after?), minute rules, etc., all cut into his satisfaction.

I guess that when I played, we never really paid much attention to things like steadfast, or hordes (never saw a single unit formed that way, and I played against O&G a lot), and in historicals it was fairly straightforward, small points battles (750-1000 points), so they went quicker. We also interspersed skirmish games and ambushes and such into the scenarios. I played a Successors WAB game at Adepticon, with hundreds of amazing models on both sides, and when played with a relaxed group who wanted to enjoy themselves, it went well and made me want to play more.

Although I can remember the protractor discussions about movement back in the 5th-ish days, where my opponents were so fiddly with movement arcs, positioning down to the mm, etc., that it put me off. Still played, just not against those guys (while realizing it was entirely appropriate according to the rules).

I've looked at the Foundry rules, but never pulled the trigger. There is also something about the GW fluff, etc., that makes proxies, counts as, or other "plays as" in another system not feel right for me.

Someday I'll play more, hopefully campaigns, but the fantasy folks are thin on the ground around me.

*edit for spelling and to add: I am amazed at the sheer size of the GW catalog when you look across all of the armies. Its a massive amount of miniatures, I wonder of they're just not able to keep production going on such a vast number of models, and have settled on making bigger kits for more margin.

The combination of the cost of the models and the required number to play the game at the level the rules function best.

This combined with no entry level experience redirected their customers to their competition. Which have thrived in the areas of the wargames niche that GW ceded to them willingly.

Oh, so, so, so many things:

Pricing: arguably the biggest offender, since it hit you THREE times. First, prices for models were ridiculous. Second, emphasis on huge units necessitated buying LOTS of ridiculously priced models. Third, Gigantic Monsters (offered up to combat huge units) were even more expensive. This was a huge problem, since it was bad by itself, and made two of the other problems so much worse.

Model Count: by rewriting the rules to reward huge units of infantry, GW damaged the game in many ways. It made playing prohibitively expensive. It made creating an army both expensive and hugely time consuming. It disconnected collecting from playing, since the person buying to paint and model needed 5-10 models, but the person creating a unit often wanted 30--but no one wants to assemble and paint 30 model of the same 5 sculpts. It reduced army diversity, since you were likely to field a smaller number of units, each of larger sizes. It discouraged the purchase of entire types of models, since they were so much less effective than huge blocks of infantry. It led to the development of 'mega-spells' which were devastating to small units.

Gigantic Models: In and of itself, this is not actually bad. In fact, I think it was badass. However, the prevalence of gigantic models, and their shoehorning into relatively small armies, led to a very poorly balanced game. While I think a game where the Skaven unleashed a towering abomination would be incredible, the fact that the skaven were rolling out massive monsters in every army (etc) made the games ridiculous. It disrupted both the design of the game, by focusing tactics on big individual models rather than small units, and it disrupted the setting. Why is anyone afraid of Chaos Warriors if all these giant Chaos beasties are roaming around? Who decides to invest time and effort into growing grapes when a 50" tall bull-man might roam into your area and kill everyone?

Army sameness: I know people are talking about rules bloat, and they aren't wrong, but hang with me here for a second. GW inserted the same types of units into every army. Orcs & Goblins had a big monster, then so did beastmen, then so did Empire. Daemons have monstrous cavalry, and so do Empire, and Ogres, etc. Elves have chariots, and now, so do Daemons, etc. With the extremely rare exception of the dwarves and Brets, GW stuck [box of models this size] into every army, without any thought to how it affected play, the background, or the feel of the army. Why is the Empire scared of Chaos monsters if they have Griffin Riders and barn size griffins? What distinguishes one army from another, when they all have the same types of units? Heck, I remember being disgusted by the changes in Ogre Kingdoms. I was SO excited to finally field an army of Ogres. A whole army, of OGRES! Then, of course, ogres got cavalry, and monstrous mounts, and cannons, etc. The actual OGRES of the army were not interesting any more.

Overwhelming magic: partly in response to the emphasis on huge units and big monsters, magic got dramatically buffed, and in a poorly thought out and unbalanced way. Not only was this damaging to game balance, it was extremely frustrating to the opponent. Why field a unit of, say, Ogres, if a single spell could easily wipe them off the board with one casting? It also was severely damaging to the fluff. If magic was this incredibly powerful, but astoundingly risky, how did wizards survive a single battle, much less develop their skills over years of study? Why were traditional military tactics ever developed, if amazing spells could shatter units in one go?

Maniac branding: Games Workshop has incredible economies of scale, which they could use to dominate the market for fantasy modeling, but their bull-headed insistence on a ham-handed, overwhelming 'Warhammer' look destroyed their ability to market to other hobbists. While having a distinctive look is an important sales driver, why in the world woudn't you make Fantasy buildings and monsters that anyone might buy for their game? Now, many different companies make nice, inexpensive (in some cases) fantasy buildings, terrain, and boards, but GW could have cornered and dominated this market if they had produced affordable, flexible options instead of SKULL PIT and GOTHIC stuff.

Disregarding Playstyle: the distinction between WFB and 40K was the emphasis on maneuvering and tactical positioning. Largely throwing that out the window meant that you lost audiences in two ways. People who wanted fantasy tactical battles moved to other games, and people who were happy with this less tactical style of play moved from Fantasy to 40K, where it was more fully realized and implemented.

Total Customer Disengagement: GW makes no effort to communicate anything to their fans other than what they should buy this week. They have eliminated all interaction with fans via social media, don't discuss plans or release sneak peeks, and have, UNDER OATH, derided and belittled the whole idea of market research. If people have NO IDEA what you are doing to the game, it makes it very difficult for them to decide to invest in a very large, very expensive, very complex game which requires a huge amount of time and money commitment. When other people tell you what their game is doing, for free, and it costs less, you experiment with them.

Fluff Violence The saddest thing for me to see is the irrevocable damage done to the Warhammer Fantasy world. I'm not just talking about the End Times, though they do exemplify the disregard or even hatred GW seems to show for their own background. Chaos Warriors and Chaos Knights were widely feared in the Old World, for their incredible strength, violence, and savagery. Now you have tons of huge monsters, as well as ogre-sized chaos warriors. Why were Chaos Warriors feared so much? Chaos Knights were a source of terror, but now, they struggle to disrupt a single block of infantry. The Empire depends on Wizards in war, but mistrusts them, but now has all sorts of magical contraptions that roll into the battle. I LOVED the distinct post-medieval, 'Renaissance' flavored setting of WFB. I loved the grim, gritty realism of their dark low fantasy. Now everything is big monsters, big magic, and big contraptions. It's not plausible that people should think and behave in any sort of way that resembles medieval/Renaissance Europe when the fabric of the entire world is so dramatically changed. In addition, you can advance the storyline, without tearing it apart. If I wrote a political thriller where South America and Africa were both destroyed by a giant meteor, Canada invaded America, Americans fled as refugees to Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece were destroyed by, oh, let's say anarchists, Russia was wiped out by a force from the Arctic, and Western Europe was fundamentally changed, while Britain sank, all in 10 years, people would call me a massive hack. If I also didn't mention anything at all about China, Japan, or India doing anything during this time, people would call me a racist or an even bigger, less talented hack. If the company doesn't care about the setting any longer, why should anyone else?.

So here's my take.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
So the signs all point to GW shaking up fantasy, possibly including blowing up the whole dang world.

So... what went wrong? How did it go from being their number 1 game, to needing drastic measures to rescue?

Some thoughts:

1 - Too many redundant factions: splitting Chaos into 3, Undead into 2, Elfs into 3, Orks into O&G and Ogres... Just too many factions that are similar. We can disagree about which factions were redundant (I really like the Egpytian tomb kings as a concept and would love to have the Assyrian Chaos Dwarfs back) but 14 different factions each with their own kits and blisters? Too much for even GW's stores to support.

1000 times yes. Chaos always should have had the malleability to mix and match Beastmen, Warriors, and Daemons. I just recently bought HOrdes of Chaos and Storm of Chaos, and those books are absolutely fascinating. Agree with the "we can split hairs over which ones are redundant", for instance i think spliting ogres was a good thing (as ogres became super unique - quasi-nomadic, almost Mongolian Khannite like, but culturually promiscuous mercenaries ravenous with hunger and fear-worshipping a comet ? Pretty interesting and neat... whereas TK as an egyptian theme is neat, but there's not enough to spread it from VC and vice versa. ).

14 factions. Fourteen! The bloat alone was gigantic.

2 - Not enough diverse factions: GW could have developed other factions that were either culturaly diverse (Araby, Cathy, Yind, Nippon) or played differently (an all flying army, an all monster army). Instead each action was the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery.

I sort of wish they had had the human nations band together a long time ago, and then you could do Araby / Cathay / Nippon elements without further bloating with more armies, but acknowledging that the forces of men had gotten their gak together in the fluff and made a concordia humanicus of sorts... then you can introduce those things (i mean, really... who isn't going to buy arabic fast cav or samurai foot troops for their empire?) as part of the continent spanning "empire of man", while keeping your army count down. Books are expensive, sure, but adding a couple pages to an army book that's already going to get reprinted per edition isn't.

3 - Neglecting the core: With a mature game and extablished factions new releases stressed large monsters or war machines and ignored basic infantry. Most players will buy one dragon, or tentacle rape monster or flying boat or whatever but will buy several infantry units. GW could have either replaced some aging models (High Elf infantry and chaos warriors for example) or introduced some new ones that players would buy in bulk.

I agree on the replacing aging models, though not relegating it to just core : and we saw that with high elves... while the core was by and large not replaced, the entirety of the foot soldier Special category was, and they were all really nice. I bought 30 all new phoenix guard and White Lions (despite almost never using white lions, personally), and i split a total of 4 islands of blood with a skaven friend. Still, the decision to reboot books but let tons of aging models just wither for some armies but redoing most for others (see also dark elves) was just weird. Inconsistency is rarely a good sign.

4 - Rules bloat: another problem with 14 factions to differentiate, too many small random rules to track and balance.

Nah. I disagree here. See Mark 1 Warmachine. It got so bad that the Infernals, who i used to belong to, would trip up over rules in private discussions. WHFB was a LONG way away from so many rules that it could be considered rules bloat. There are way more overly complex games out there. I will say this, though, WHFB loooooves itself some exception based design rules. Like, their core rules even have exceptions in them: I.e. Cannon balls bounce - Unless it hits a large target, then it doesn't go further ! That gets eye rollingly annoying as you go further and further into the development of a game, as nearly every friggin rule has an exception to it. Core rules should be inviolate as a standalone set of rules : the special rules at the model or faction level is where the exception based design should come in.

That said, WHFB's rules are not that extravgant or bloated. If you want to see rules bloat needless complexity for its own sake, see confrontation 3.5 with errata, or WM mk1 with errata, or hell even Mk1 Infinity.

5 - Losing the cutting edge - A lot of companies have yoinked GW's big shoulder pad and skull look, with WOW probably being the most prominent. What was once original is now old hat. It's not GW's fault and there ain't much that can be done but it's worth remembering.

I think a lot of companies have very successfully moved in on the once "only game in town". Warmachine is a very strong competitor. They have a brilliant marketing and release schedule / model. Brilliant. Kickstarter is making it easier and easier to get games off the ground. Competitors are making models that are much easier on the wallet.

I think a big thing too is every time GW burns people, it loses customers it almost never gets back. For a game that's been around, ... i think ? 25 years ? maybe more... that's a lot of time to burn people. Invalidating armies. Squatting stuff. etc etc. People don't forget that gak, no matter what GW's cult of corporation tells itself while figuring out inventive ways to pay its shareholders dividends (and note: I Love WHFB ! I want the game to thrive which means the company to thrive!).

Other thoughts?

The prices have just reached crazy town. 60 bucks for 10 witch elves ? Yes they are nice. Yes i friggin' bought them so i'm part of the problem. But goddamn it, even a dyed in the wool rabid elf player like me thought real long and hard before finally shelling over that money for them. I have 20. I am going to go Avatars of War or Kings of war for the remainder i want.



I actually think End Times is good for the game. It has created buzz (there are people interested in fantasy that never have been before at my local shop... and were poised to pick the game up until locals were like "HEY IT MIGHT ALL BE CHANGING / BEING INVALIDATED, SO DON'T!" which i can't blame them on. I think if they hadn't fethed with the nature of the game, or quashed rumors alluding to them fething with the nature of the game, and kept making smart decisions, and went back to making products that showed some love and passion in them (like Hordes of Chaos, Storm of Chaos, etc) rather than the very pretty to look at, but soulless books that have come out recently*... I think they might have turned the ship. But its probably too far gone now.



*I refer to Dwarves and Lizardmen. I think both of these new books are completely soulless. Dwarven rune strikes are bound spells now.... yeah ? really ? Sigmars Blood was even bland and flat compared to something like SoC, etc. from the late nineties early 2000's.






Note: I'm a few gin and tonics in after a long day, so if the above makes no sense, apologies. Looked good at time of writing,

TheAuldGrump wrote:
Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

TheKbob wrote:Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun.

I hear that. Every wargame has some element of chance, but I much prefer wargames that make you apply whatever skills you have to skew that chance in your favour. If I lose I'd rather it was because of my own idiocy, which might be improved, rather than the game's idiocy, which might be a bit more difficult to fix.

TheKbob wrote:I started with 8th and ended with 8th. The model count is just way, way, way too high. And all those extra models are just wound counters. If I wanted to simulate something on that scale, it'd be better at 14mm or less.

Ah Kbob, were you around at the time of Warmaster? Still some of the best 10mm minis ever made, IMO. I should stick up a plog for my couple of armies sitting around, half-painted.

(also, where are you getting 14mm minis...?)

OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

That's an occurrence I've noticed before, which seems pretty weird to me, and I'm not sure whether to blame GW or the players. It's like, "okay guys, here's the high elves and here's what's established about their armies and background. They have basic spearmen and archers. And hybrid spearmen/archers. And some elite swordsmen, and elite woodsmen. And elite temple guardians. And elite rangers. (And boy do HE get a few elite units) Oh, and you can stick your hero on a hippogriff or even a dragon!" Then a couple of editions later, "oh hey guys, high elves get a chariot pulled by weird mutant lions. Just to make them a bit more speshul, yeah?" Then "hey guys, you get a big 'ol fiery phoenix now. Don't ask us which orifice we pulled that out of. We'll just say it was the same one we pulled this other phoenix out of. Only this one's not all fire like a regular phoenix, it's all ice! Oooh. Kewl, huh?" Then "hey guys, d'you like this eagle pulling a stumpy rowboat? Whaddya mean, 'desperate'?"

It feels like Flanderization to me - losing focus of the original defined theme, and whatever subtleties and original quirks it might have had, in order to pile on the crazy and end up with a caricature of what it used to be. And folk lap up the gradual changes 'til it jumps the shark and the backlash begins.

And I guess it's rich, me lamenting the 'original theme' of the sixth edition high elves, but, well, still.

From 7th edition onwards, it became Greed: The Game.

Other posters have already covered the subject so I'd like to not write too much on it, but to me, the problem is that when you're designing a tabletop game you should always be clear on what you want: either a mass battle game, or a skirmish game. As its current iteration, WHFB is neither, falls right in the middle and that means it has the negative points from both, which make it one mess of a game: ridiculous model count (with each and every soldier being an independent entity with specific stats), special rules feast, too invasive and troublesome magic system, etc etc.

4th and 5th edition, in example, are far from being perfect rulesets but at least it was more a thing of "skirmishes with regiments". Throw in some needed fixes (i.e. limit the items characters may take, fly rules from 6th) and they become enjoyable and not too unbalanced (specially with 4th edition armybooks). 7th is mostly 6th on full Greed Mode. And 8th... it basically killed the game in my area.

Overall, in terms of popularity, imagination and model quality, I'd say 6th edition was the golden age. Some of the best fantasy minis GW has ever released date from that edition (dark elf metal range, daemonettes, teutogen guard... ah those were the days, the lovely metal days).

Cruentus: I can understand the thing about proxies, and sometimes I wouldn't mind rules tailor-made for certain models. I just guess it's my 'anything but Warhammer!' attitude that helps me make the leap!

Butcha: your army sameness point made me see Kid Kyoto's point #2 in a different way. In one way the 'infantry, cavalry, artillery' isn't quite like historical gaming, where different armies might have access to different types of those, and in different quantities. (in a crude and possibly inaccurate example, like a Macedonian pike phalanx vs. Indian elephants) Almost every faction in Warhammer really does follow what might be a stricter formula, especially with the fantastic stuff: everyone gets a giant monster, almost everyone gets a giant monster mount, everyone gets a big wacky machine that can't really be called artillery, etc.

I haven't played WFB in 5+ years, so I can't speak with any certainty to the current state, but what was killing WFB in my area back then was just the style of the game. Large blocks of troops that basically just shuffle forward because turning, well, took up your whole turn. It was a game stuck in a design philosophy from a time before many of the youngest players were even born.

I think the modern times, and more innovative games, caught up with it.

No longer is WHFB the high school star quarterback. Now, WHFB is just a bloated 50 year old who still wears his lettermen jacket when he is not working at the shoe store.

It seems like to me they are trying to turn back the clock for a chance to get with the times and trim some fat. I hope it works and they really have changed and not fall into old habits again.

WHFB 8th Edition simply is not newbie friendly. I started with 8th and Im so done with FBs. I was all in with my buy in and regret every penny spent. Im a 20 year 40k vet and Ill testify that WHFB is no where near the crossover game it could be.

Garbage. Ill never play it again or could ever recommend it to anybody.

One more thought...

Was reconning Storm of Chaos WHF's jump the shark moment?

After getting all kinds of fan involvement and promising all sorts of cool evolutions of the timeline...

GW dropped it like a sack of Skaven poo.

Of course they did the same thing with both Armageddon and Black Crusade but it wasn't quite as blatant.

The things that kill it for me:

At first glance the formations etc are very cool, but after doing a lot of reading and playing other games I find that Warhammer Fantasies concept of formations and formation fighting are not very believable. I prefer the smaller scale ancients games for formation fighting.

Magic is can be fun but the process is a pain. For me as a Lizardmen player I have a lot of magic potential. But generating spells, then magic and yadda yadda actually makes me hate that phase. I would rather each mage have a limit of spell dice a turn (factored by profile and gear etc) and can cast magic of certain groups provided he have the magic dice for it. It becomes a not very fun part of what could be a phase of cool strategy.

So many models. Wouldnt be a problem but since the formation fighting is bad, each model is actually needed. You cant have a fixed base formation like in other games I have played. Instead, annoyingly, your models fight to the death unless on the rare occasion they happen to flee the board. Its stupid and just makes you have rank after rank of models numbering in the 100s depending on the faction.

Another one that bothers me about most GW games is leaders and heroes are 99% of the time only good for their killing value. In real life we have leaders who roamed the battle fields giving orders and inspiring troops to do their jobs. In GW fantasy lands, leaders dont actually lead. They have minor buffs to leader ship, but they arent normally seen actually leading a army. This bothers me greatly. Especially when I hear that their old small scale games used to rely on commanders giving orders etc.

The boards are plain. Because of how formations work and you end up with HUGE blocks everywhere, the board has to be open and flat a lot of the time to allow these huge blocks to be placed.

I guess the scale is an issue too. I think lord of the rings has pretty good formation fighting for its scale. Of course if the game gets huge then there is a problem but I think fantasy could learn from that game.

I think its all just a bit wrong. Its hard to start and is nothing like formations found in history.

From my experience it started around '08 when they started repackaging all the 20 man boxs as 10 man boxes, then the subsequence price raises that then happened to thows boxes. Vet's stopped building new armies, and new players were getting priced out of starting the game.

Then when 8th ed hit, many vet's just couldn't afford to update their armies for the new system and army books. So they dropped the game altogether.


6th ed and the quick turn around of 7th ed 40k has started putting the same pressures onto the 40k player base that 8th did to fantasy.



I will say thow, that the newer big kits in fantesy and 40k have been a huge bone to getting new blood into thows games, and getting vets to start new armies. Being able to take a single big monster that takes up most of your armie's points so you have less models to paint and buy has been really appealing to alot of people.

If it wasn't for stuff like the imperial knights, i feel like 7th would of been a much bigger flop.


This is just from my own personal experiences.

Joyboozer wrote:
It was supposed to be a game of mass battles, not mass pricing.

This is pretty much it in a nutshell.

I haven't played the fantasy version since the First Edition.

Simply no one in the USA wanted to play it, and I wasn't about to lug 300lbs of miniatures back-and-forth to England every time I went.

And, when it was finally exposed to historical miniatures, and studied all of the "why's" that existed with massed battles, WFB (and WAB) just seemed to be far too abstracted, and seemed too much like skirmish games pretending to be massed battles.

And every time I would return to check on WFB, it seemed like they had ventured further and further from the "massed" part of the "battles."

I mean... Look at the most popular tournament historical ancient's rules for the 80's/90's/00's: WRG's Ancient's Rules (perhaps the most complex and detailed rules outside of ICE), and DBM/MM.

Those WRG rules are nothing now, in terms of complexity and number of rules (and pages of rules) compared to WFB.

And they even produced Fantasy Combat versions of those rules that can handle any monster or force put on the table for WFB.

This subject comes down to a combination of prejudice for both WFB players, and for the players of other rules sets, and no small amount of subjective preference.

Also, WFB left behind the Dark Ages/Medieval genre, and are really closer to the Renaissance than to Ancients/Dark Ages genres, which is what a lot of people think of with Fantasy.

GW does do a wonderful job of providing background for their world, to provide its own form of genre... So... Based upon that, it is going to find a continued following for a while yet.

But as many others have noted... It has left behind its "massed" portion.

MB

I liked the fact the GW's setting resembled a real Renaisance/Early Modern setting; it set them apart from the legions of WOW or Final Fantasy wannabe settings with giant 20 feet long swords and a half elf witch clerics doing back flips while shoot fireballs from their toes

I liked how they once focused more on the human struggle of the setting.

Now its just a game about putting giant overpriced monster models on a table....

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
One more thought...

Was reconning Storm of Chaos WHF's jump the shark moment?

After getting all kinds of fan involvement and promising all sorts of cool evolutions of the timeline...

GW dropped it like a sack of Skaven poo.

Of course they did the same thing with both Armageddon and Black Crusade but it wasn't quite as blatant.

I definitely think it was, and always will be, a thing to do and had a big part to play.

ATXMILEY wrote:
I liked the fact the GW's setting resembled a real Renaisance/Early Modern setting; it set them apart from the legions of WOW or Final Fantasy wannabe settings with giant 20 feet long swords and a half elf witch clerics doing back flips while shoot fireballs from their toes

I liked how they once focused more on the human struggle of the setting.

Now its just a game about putting giant overpriced monster models on a table....

I will admit it set them apart, and that it is an original that melds Moorcock and Tolkien genres.

But I think they have tried to be a little too creative, and it began to be a little too unrecognizable from 40K.

But.... I would lump GW's WFB, and WOW into the same genre, with FF being a very different thing (although post FF 9, they began to veer sharply in the direction of WOW in their worlds, and away from the previous hard-ish Sci-Fi that was FF 7 - 9).

But all three do use incredibly exaggerated motifs as a part of their design elements.

MB

It's just a price issue, something GW never understands.

The world and factions are fine, the rules and gameplay is better than 40k. However it's insanely expensive to play, and faced with fantasy and the more popular/unique 40k the general public will usually go for 40k.

.....And way too many skulls.

8th edition major changes and general homogenization, as well as unit bloat really killed Fantasy.

It used to be, back during the 6th or 7th ed. books, that not every army had access to monsters. Empire didn't, outside of Ogre mercenaries, and many armies simply didn't have access to things. Chaos didn't have cannons outside of the Hellcannon, High Elves only had access to Dragons and Griffons, without these new Phoenixes and Flying Chariots. Empire didn't have access to units like Demigryph Knights. Dwarves still don't have access to monsters, but armies such as Bretonnians seem so woefully lacking compared to the menagerie of options new books can take.

Power Creep is also another major factor. The biggest change I remember was the High Elf Army Book back in 2007. While Daemons of Chaos were probably the army everyone associates with cheese, always strikes first for an entire army seemed a radical departure from the rules most were familiar with. Now, an army needs 2-3 army wide special rules as well as individual special rules, all of which can vary greatly in power.

The changes 8th brought in are definitely a major issue with Fantasy. Magic was pretty broken initially, and the "test or die" spells can still wreak a ton of havoc. Spells like Purple Sun can destroy Ogres while Elves and Warriors of Chaos walk away unscathed.

Army size was probably the major killer, though. This hobby is expensive, no matter how you slice it, and with 40 being the new 20-25 I'm not surprised it drove many people away. The amount of time spent assembling, painting and working out the army on its own seems ludicrous if you're not sure you will like the game, much less have opponents you enjoy playing with.

Ultimately, I'm a bit sad to see Fantasy go this way. 40k, at least at the very core of it's lore, it still somewhat remotely similar to what it was. With this new change, and the removal of the Old World and a shift to an even grimmer and more dramatic tone, I don't necessarily know that Warhammer Fantasy is in my future.

I think the biggest problem for WHFB is the price of entry. You need a LOT of models on the table for a functional army at 2000 points. Some armies are given to hordes and with GW selling boxes of five for $30 that really prices most people out of the game entirely. The cynical, pure greed moves like what they did with the Orcs hammered a whole lot of nails in the coffin.

Warhammer fantasy-what went wrong?

Prices went nuts. GW always did have higher-than-everyone-else prices, but what they want now is just ridiculous. The game has been losing players because of this for a few years now, the paperboy can't afford it anymore, and there you have it.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
One more thought...

Was retconning Storm of Chaos WHF's jump the shark moment?

After getting all kinds of fan involvement and promising all sorts of cool evolutions of the timeline...

GW dropped it like a sack of Skaven poo.

Of course they did the same thing with both Armageddon and Black Crusade but it wasn't quite as blatant.

It may not have been the moment when the game jumped the shark - but it was certainly a prime example of why playtesting and balancing is important before releasing the product on an unsuspecting populace.

They were expecting Chaos to roll out and lay waste, and instead they got....

'Dude, you just stepped on a pile of chaos and squished it...'

Then they decide... Chaos lays waste anyway, 'cause... REASONS!!!1!

Got a bunch of people ticked off.

Sorry GW, you may have wanted the mighty tide of CHAOS, but what you got was creamed Khorne.

The fact that GW has admitted in the past, publicly, on the pages of White Dwarf, that they don't listen to playtesters... and admitted, in public, on their financial report, that they don't study the market....

I think that I have a good idea as to why Fantasy is failing.

The Auld Grump - who does not believe that the new edition will help.

*EDIT* A Rusty & Co. strip that sums up the problem with Storm of Chaos....

Not to sound too much like a grognard (although I certainly fit the bill), I've played WHFB literally since v1... I played regularly up through v6 and then slowly started to taper off. v7 (or was it v8, I forget) lost me... For lots of reasons, to be honest.

The only thing that'd keep me playing GW games is the network effect of good people to play against/with.

I guess, setting aside any of the issues with GW's recent policies and focusing on the rules, the primary issue I have with WHFB/40K is that the core of the current GW rules are, in essence, the exact same mechanics (UGO/IGO, move/shoot/assault, Roll to hit/wound/save on a d6, 2d6 LD test for morale) that Don Featherstone first laid out in his books on wargaming back in the '60's

But there's a great deal of creativity out there now. It's a lot like having some friends over for a boardgame night and then have someone suggest we play Monopoly when there's Takenoko, 7 Wonders, Catan, or any number of other great games out there that have a much better play experience. Sure Monopoly can be fun with the right group, but 99% of the time I'd rather play a *better* game with that same group!

The core GW rules, to me, feel a heck of a lot like playing Monopoly with a bunch of stuff "tacked on". But there's so many rules sets out there with, for want of a better term, more "modern" mechanics.

I absolutely love how Flames of War handles the levels of training of a unit (Green, Regular, Veterans) separate from their morale. Veteran units know the in's and out's of combat, and in FoW that's far better represented than just giving them a +1LD, an extra attack (perhaps), and better weapons options. Better still, you can create the (very historical) examples of Veteran units that just don't want to be fighting anymore...

I love how Malifaux has introduced a deck/hand management function in a miniatures game, but even more than that has created a VP system that leads to a much more interesting game than "line them up and try to kill the other side". Not to mention the ability to build a list after you know what you are trying to accomplish!

KoW has a clean system that takes "old" UGO/IGO and D6's and creates a new game that really can scale up in size without crashing in time-to-play. KoW, in particular, reminds me of how much of a breath of fresh air De Bellis Antiquitatus and De Bellis Multitudius were after years of the ever- increasingly creaking WRG Ancients rules... Not that DBA/DBM were the be-all and end-all for ancients but they *absolutely* saved ancients gaming with my old gaming group and we had some really, really fun campaigns using DBA that would not have been possible with a more cumbersome set of rules.

And there are, of course, a ton more options out there.

I'm normally a relative fan of random movement since players typically have too much control over their units, but v8 (yes?) just went too far with the random charges IMHO. I've seen far too many games turn solely on who rolls better for charge range...

I don't like the "evaporating" units as a mechanic anymore. Came around a lot on that. Used to think historicals with their wound markers were weird, but now I'm not at all a fan of the "movement tray with 6 models left on it" any more. It just ruins the aesthetic, not to mention not feeling at all "realistic" (and fully realizing that's something of a oxymoron) when you've read enough about ancient and medieval battles. Units just don't evaporate like that... And it leads to very silly late in game situations.

GW has never had a really workable magic system and Storm of Magic, for me, just proved it.

And the final nail in the coffin, for me, has been the trend towards "super models" (with super prices, natch) driving things. I have no interest in a game with Nagash on one side and some other super character on the other. but even before the current End Times stuff, that trend was well on its way and clear (albeit more on the 40K side).

<shrug>

Really, the last things GW had going for them in my mind are/were the models and the background. Well, that and the network effect, of course... From my perspective, I'm seeing a lot of slippage from GW on the models front vis a vis their competitors (and compared to what they'd been doing recently to boot!) And, at least wrt WHFB, they seem to be throwing the entire background out lock, stock, and barrel to create something new. So, in the end, that really puts GW (to my mind) almost completely in to the, "I'd play their games because the people I enjoy gaming with play their games" camp and nothing more.

Anyway, just rambling a bit with my crusty old grognard hat on... I'll stop now.

Valete,

JohnS

Another factor is competition from Kings of War.

The model range doesn't have the variety or quality of GW, but the rules are superior to 8th edition, and far better for large mass battle games with the abstraction of units as a single model in game terms. You can play a game twice the size in half the time.

People often just use their Warhammer armies to play KoW at this point, a trend that will continue if GW is planning to "squat" some of their armies.

10 years ago there wasn't really much in the way of popular competing rulesets and miniature lines, nowadays there is.

Also, AoW, Shieldwolf, WGF and various historical companies as competition on the miniatures side of things.

The overall feel of the fluff and story has become stale. It's almost become a parody of itself with the huge End Times characters. I am definitely nostalgic for the "way it was." There was a dark humor and irony in the previous edition's narrative.

At the end of the day, GW is the reason that Fantasy is a total failure.

Much the same, almost exactly to a T, they have used the business failure handbook to bloat themselves into a state of ignorance and believing their own hype to think that they are too big to fail.
Much the same as the banks, car companies, and other larger then economicly fiesable to continue, they have overextended themselves in every negative way possible that everyone else but them can set their watch by the obligatory price hike to now unacceptable proportions.
Retconning the game will be the last nail in the coffin.

No longer is it about gamers. It's all about the companies big wigs and their overpaid bank accounts on every one else's back.

They are too stupid to see what everyone else is eating GWs lunch over. Stupid business practices and near criminal levels of ineptitude.

I rather like the diversity of models added to the Armies. Allows for multiple themes and adds exciting new units to one's army. Otherwise, the lists tend to fall back into min/max's netlists.

I have to chime in on the competition front- I think I really agree with that. It could just be that my interest was waning anyway, but I switched to Hordes for a while as my main game. That was pretty much switching one tightly regulated property for another, albeit a better organised and written one.

But KoW made me get all my old Fantasy stuff out of the boxes and start making lists and so on again. All those free rules, a clean elegant ruleset, and easy enough to introduce new people to...

I still haven't gotten my plans off the ground, but once KoW planted the idea of using my stuff in other systems in my head, I pretty much only collect with multiple systems in mind. I think I will not be fooled into thinking I "have" to abide by the particular demands of whatever gaming company I am buying rules or models from again. I really can't fathom that I ever was.

We have seen a perfect storm for GW's core games, of a dramatic deterioration in the quality of the rules, an emphasis on new units instead of improving core ones model-wise, and the ever increasing prices. Fantasy has been the smaller of the two for quite some time now, coupled with the sheer weight of troops you need for an army and yeah, the entire thing became so unwieldy it's died a death.

GW have continued to push the outer barriers of their 'price elasticity' for a very long time. I think the elastic snapped.

I often use this metaphor, but Warhammer rapidly evolved into a Michael Bay movie, all flash and bang with no subtlety.

I can never find it, but I remember a 1000 point battle report in White Dwarf between Dwarfs and Bretonnians that had a fantastic narrative style. It was small scale, intimate with a relatively low model count and it pretty much guided my approach to Warhammer ever since.

Unfortunately, GW guided the game in the other direction and while you can of course do what you want with the rules, you can't always persuade your opponents into doing the same thing.

 snurl wrote:
Warhammer fantasy-what went wrong?

Prices went nuts.

The price certainly didn't help but that's probably not even half the real story as Fantasy has always been expensive, the cost of entry is idiotically high however. Personally I think that what really killed it off is the horrifically horrible mess that is 8th, a turgid and bloated ruleset if ever there was one. In addition to that the direction that the game has taken is a definite negative for me; Fantasy has always had elements of 'fantastic' fantasy but recently it has all been turned up to 11 much to the detriment to the fabric of the game itself (exactly the same thing has occurred with 40k).

If the rumours about the fluff massacre that 9th supposedly brings are accurate then Fantasy will almost certainly be doomed, well more doomed than it is now.

Yeah, at some point the line between "grim" or "mid range" fantasy shifted into crazy high fantasy. The Old World always had high fantasy elements, to be sure, but it was clear that those were weird. Wizards were powerful, but they were also feared and were always dablling with powers that could destroy them. Some armies were always more inherently magical (undead, daemones), but the focus was always on the poor bastards hacking each other in the scrum.

Look at the Empire. In 6th, they lost some of the goofier elements from 5th (war alter, war wagon, halfings, ogres), and were more or less a renaissance army, built around halbreds, handgunners, gothic cavalry, and a few artillery pieces. Sure, they had oddball stuff like pegasi and flaggellants and even the helblaster, but the army looked and played like a real world that was grappling with the insanity creeping into the world.

Now? You have knights riding wingless griffons flanking a magical war machine and popemobile. That's not grappling with insanity, that's taking it out for a nice seafood dinner.

 Flashman wrote:
I often use this metaphor, but Warhammer rapidly evolved into a Michael Bay movie, all flash and bang with no subtlety.

I can never find it, but I remember a 1000 point battle report in White Dwarf between Dwarfs and Bretonnians that had a fantastic narrative style. It was small scale, intimate with a relatively low model count and it pretty much guided my approach to Warhammer ever since.

Unfortunately, GW guided the game in the other direction and while you can of course do what you want with the rules, you can't always persuade your opponents into doing the same thing.

It was the battle of Grimdal's Tomb or something similar I believe (at least, I think that is what you refer to). The dwarves had to send a small party into the tomb to battle some skeletons and retrieve a warhammer whilst the main body of the force outside had to fend off the Bretonnians. It was an awesome report as I remember.

 filbert wrote:

 Flashman wrote:
I often use this metaphor, but Warhammer rapidly evolved into a Michael Bay movie, all flash and bang with no subtlety.

I can never find it, but I remember a 1000 point battle report in White Dwarf between Dwarfs and Bretonnians that had a fantastic narrative style. It was small scale, intimate with a relatively low model count and it pretty much guided my approach to Warhammer ever since.

Unfortunately, GW guided the game in the other direction and while you can of course do what you want with the rules, you can't always persuade your opponents into doing the same thing.

It was the battle of Grimdal's Tomb or something similar I believe (at least, I think that is what you refer to). The dwarves had to send a small party into the tomb to battle some skeletons and retrieve a warhammer whilst the main body of the force outside had to fend off the Bretonnians. It was an awesome report as I remember.

Spot on - that was the one. Found it now, time for a good read

http://s1205.photobucket.com/user/BrianBBergh/library/The%20Battle%20of%20Grimdals%20Tomb?sort=9&page=1

I'll sum it up in one word. COST.

The cost of entry into the Warhamer Game System is the single biggest factor in why I don't play anymore (or any GW Game). I sold all my Warhammer armies off, Tomb Kings and Skaven. I like doing big armies, I like doing unique armies that wrap around a background and are themed off it. Now, it's buy a big monster, same monster everyone has, and add a few grunts to it. For me to do a new Warhammer army to the standard and size I'd like, I'm probably dropping around £1000.

For that money, I could buy so much more from other games systems, which is what I've done. My last GW army was Orks 6 years ago and I spent around £1000 on it. Took me 3 years to complete it, and it's sat on a shelf ever since. No one in my local Games Club plays Warhamer or 40k anymore due to a) the cost, b) GW policy c) rules creep.

GW are no longer interested or encourage people to 'Hobby'. All they are interested in is how to make more £££ to satisfy the shareholders. This to me (and my games club) is not appealing and it's why we don't play or invest in Warhamer or 40k. It costs too much for what you get.

What drove me from Warhammer to 40k... circa 1996 or so... was that Warhammer was becoming Herohammer. We had our "generals" on Dragons, that cost half the points of our armies, and they smashed into each other. Sometimes, a warmachine or two would happen to get through the 3 saving throws that said character had [Black Amulet: Rebound a wound on a 4+. EVERY character had one.]

So I moved to 2nd edition 40k. A lascannon, on a grunt, could wipe out my opponent's general. Yes, he had to fail his Terminator Armour save [8- on 2d6] and maybe a 5+ invul... but I could easily kill him in one shot from my grunts. Sweet mother of the Emperor, every model meant something! It wasn't just 2 models smashing into each other in the middle of the board while everyone else waited to live or die based on the outcome of those two models.

...

...

...

A Knight you say? Trip-Tides? What's a Wraith Knight? How come half my army does nothing to them again? Why does Super Beast of Infinite destruction shrug off my Lascannon on a 3+? Why do I need to do 6HP to it? What use are these Lascannons if I can't kill you in 2 turns before you Stomp my army to death, even 1/4 games?

The scope has changed for these games. No matter how many 5 point Guardsmen you have, 70 Guardsmen are still going to get Stomped. Litteral words from the rules. Even 50 of them are going to get wiped before 5 Lascannons burn through half the HP of a Knight... just irritating.

-

 Flashman wrote:
I often use this metaphor, but Warhammer rapidly evolved into a Michael Bay movie, all flash and bang with no subtlety.

I can never find it, but I remember a 1000 point battle report in White Dwarf between Dwarfs and Bretonnians that had a fantastic narrative style. It was small scale, intimate with a relatively low model count and it pretty much guided my approach to Warhammer ever since.

Unfortunately, GW guided the game in the other direction and while you can of course do what you want with the rules, you can't always persuade your opponents into doing the same thing.

I don't think anyone here has put the problem in a frame that illustrates so clearly what the problem as, as comparing it to a Michael Bay movie.

That pretty much nailed it: all style, no substance.

MB

 Polonius wrote:
Yeah, at some point the line between "grim" or "mid range" fantasy shifted into crazy high fantasy. The Old World always had high fantasy elements, to be sure, but it was clear that those were weird. Wizards were powerful, but they were also feared and were always dablling with powers that could destroy them. Some armies were always more inherently magical (undead, daemones), but the focus was always on the poor bastards hacking each other in the scrum.

Look at the Empire. In 6th, they lost some of the goofier elements from 5th (war alter, war wagon, halfings, ogres), and were more or less a renaissance army, built around halbreds, handgunners, gothic cavalry, and a few artillery pieces. Sure, they had oddball stuff like pegasi and flaggellants and even the helblaster, but the army looked and played like a real world that was grappling with the insanity creeping into the world.

Now? You have knights riding wingless griffons flanking a magical war machine and popemobile. That's not grappling with insanity, that's taking it out for a nice seafood dinner.

I agree but many of their fans seem to want everything as stupid and over the top as possible. personally i hate it.

But is it dumb to cater to the fans that like that sort of thing?

 TheAuldGrump wrote:


Sorry GW, you may have wanted the mighty tide of CHAOS, but what you got was creamed Khorne.

The Auld Grump - who does not believe that the new edition will help.

Exalt +1

I think if GW wants to come full circle to a narrative driven game, you have to drop the pretense of massive battles, massive costs, and even random rules. A tight, well balanced game allows for things to play out versus someone having the one turn they roll bad for charges, have their dice pool fail them, and their wizard blow themselves up. So their army goes from a threat to sitting ducks.

Other games just don't let this happen. You create stories through scenarios, terrain, and army restrictions. Creating "narrative" through random this and random that just leads to frustration as the narrative gamers will dislike having a wizard learn a different spell every battle (or your warlord in 40k being mildly brain damaged and forgetting what he was good at) and competitive gamers absolutely want none of that. The games just become so much skewed into negating dice that it becomes Super Combo - Hammer. A game designed for this, like Warmachine, can handle that and thrive. The random schlock that is a GW ruleset implodes under such weight and makes for a bad time without severe hand waiving by one or both players.

I'd rather have a game outcome dictated by the tactics of the players with weighted averages of dice rolls as the final decision, not whatever reverse nonsense we have now.

 Harriticus wrote:
It's just a price issue, something GW never understands.

The world and factions are fine, the rules and gameplay is better than 40k.

If this were true, the game wouldn't have tanked hard. 8th is a bad edition, point blank.

As far as cost, I had 8 playable armies at one point, didn't really enjoy playing 8th that much so sold 6 of them. Now, I rarely play WFB becuase it's just not very good, so cost wasn't an issue. Other, more enjoyable, games were.

Back when I enjoyed playing Warhammer.
Each race/faction had a clear identity and play style.The rules were mainly historical with a cool fantasy veneer over the top.
(Ancients with some magic and mythical creatures to spice it up.)
So you could strongly identify with YOUR army.

Now is just weird and wacky nonsense that sounds cool,(to sell toy soldiers to kiddies,).But is vapid and chore to actually to play.

Most folks I know wanting massed fantasy battle game play K.o.W or A.o.A.(With their GW WHFB armies.)

What went wrong? GW plc stopped caring about game play , and focused on wallet raping the easiest to please*.
(*Collectors who just buy stuff because GW sell it.)

Lanrak wrote:
Back when I enjoyed playing Warhammer.
Each race/faction had a clear identity and play style.The rules were mainly historical with a cool fantasy veneer over the top.
(Ancients with some magic and mythical creatures to spice it up.)
So you could strongly identify with YOUR army.

Now is just weird and wacky nonsense that sounds cool,(to sell toy soldiers to kiddies,).But is vapid and chore to actually to play.

Most folks I know wanting massed fantasy battle game play K.o.W or A.o.A.(With their GW WHFB armies.)

Question: regarding identifying with your army; could it just be the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia speaking? You were probably a lot younger who you started playing I think. I'm sure there were folks back then saying exactly the same thing you are saying now (the game has devolved, now it's all about weird and wacky nonsense, selling toy soldiers to kids etc). Case in point: many 40k veterans said these exact same things when third ed. dropped. Those people who started with third (or rather, the few that remain...) are saying the same things now with the newer editions. I Doubt wfb is much different.

Who you are and what you want in a game changes as you get older. Could a lot of what we're seeing and commenting on in terms of a game's 'soul' (for want of a better word...) simply be related to this? in a nutshell, the game is, and always has been about weird and wacky nonsense, selling toys to kids etc), it's only with the benefit of a bit of age that we start to see things for what they are...

@Deadnight.
I am sure there is some nostalgia in there.
However, back in 3rd-4th ed WHFB, there was fewer better defined armies.And as these armies were more 'themed about a particular play style.'

And they tended to be stronger historical references to their play style.(I can remember talking to GW game devs back then, and how they saw the armies in terms of historical frameworks ,on which they hung the fantasy coolness on.(Holy Roman Empire, Huns and Vandals, Vikings and Norse,etc. )

Oh I totally agree gamers requirements change as they grow older/wiser.

Young people are great at soaking up data like a sponge.So games like top trumps where remembering all the data profiles off 100s of cards appeals to them.
They get better by remembering lots of data.

Older people generally want to make meaningful decisions in the games they play.So they play games like chess.They get better by working out how to make better in game decisions.

WHFB and 40k have always had heavy strategic loading , to appeal to younger gamers.

However, many meaningful in game tactical decisions have been replaced by 'randomness'.

As a war games rule set WHFB and 40k, are very poor.In terms of clarity brevity and intuitive play.

They are all style and very little substance.

I tend to think WHFB was going fine up until 8th. It might not have been as popular as 40k, but it didn't NEED to be as popular as 40k, it just needed to make more money than it cost to maintain and I reckon it probably did that fine.

8th edition buggered things up too much. It encourages stupidly large armies which puts off new players and many of the changes annoyed older players, so it lost out on both fronts.

The numbers point to WHFB actually being quite popular in Europe (according to figures given in another thread, apparently the USA is half the global sales of 40k, or was back in the CHS lawsuit numbers I think, but USA in itself is only 30% of the global market, so the most logical way to fill that gap is to assume WHFB is actually quite popular in Europe).

But overall I think 8th is to blame.

Lanrak wrote:
@Deadnight.
I am sure there is some nostalgia in there.
However, back in 3rd-4th ed WHFB, there was fewer better defined armies.And as these armies were more 'themed about a particular play style.'

And they tended to be stronger historical references to their play style.(I can remember talking to GW game devs back then, and how they saw the armies in terms of historical frameworks ,on which they hung the fantasy coolness on.(Holy Roman Empire, Huns and Vandals, Vikings and Norse,etc. )

Oh I totally agree gamers requirements change as they grow older/wiser.

Young people are great at soaking up data like a sponge.So games like top trumps where remembering all the data profiles off 100s of cards appeals to them.
They get better by remembering lots of data.

Older people generally want to make meaningful decisions in the games they play.So they play games like chess.They get better by working out how to make better in game decisions.

WHFB and 40k have always had heavy strategic loading , to appeal to younger gamers.

However, many meaningful in game tactical decisions have been replaced by 'randomness'.

As a war games rule set WHFB and 40k, are very poor.In terms of clarity brevity and intuitive play.

They are all style and very little substance.

You can still see some of these real world historical elements, I used to be awful at this game and a very helpful person pointed out to me I should try to look at my army and it's real world analogues, so back in 6th I based my dwarfs on Romans, fairly good armour and elite troops backed up by auxiliary units (back when dwarf handguns could move and fire) and it worked wonders and I got a lot better at the game by using this mindset.

These days... They just don't work that way, it's all gunline dwarfs to be competitive and my combat dwarfs are not able to March up the field and compete, sad.

Its funny people saying there are too many monsters

When in actual fact most monsters aren't seen as competitive thanks to overpowered cannons

A poor business choice to constantly make big monster kits and have them invalidated by S10 D6 wound cannons with laser accuracy

Funny that monsters are far more durable in 40K, you would think it would be the opposite way around. A 40K Greater Daemon can survive several hits of high tech weaponry, yet in WFB he can be squished by one primitive cannonball.

Chad Warden wrote:
Funny that monsters are far more durable in 40K, you would think it would be the opposite way around. A 40K Greater Daemon can survive several hits of high tech weaponry, yet in WFB he can be squished by one primitive cannonball.

To be fair, being hit by a "primitive" cannonball would give most people (and monsters) a bit of a headache. But you're right in that cannon fire is no where as accurate as the rules make it out to be.

Haven't bought anything for fantasy since 8th. Unflankable blocks did it. No army I was interested in building and painting could deal with them, so done. At one time I considered fantasy rules far superior to 40K, but still played mostly 40K because the modeling side (counts, conversions, terrain) was more fun. Nowadays I'm struggling to motivate it play 40K, let alone fantasy. Book price is a major issue - I'll play for models because they will entrain me while I work on them even if I don't play. But I had codexes/armybooks I played only once or twice before a new edition appeared, and when the price of the books doubled (or in the case of 40K with data sheets figured in, tripled), and my income didn't, that was pretty much it. I wonder if GW is assuming anyone who can't justify the cost of their books is just downloading them from the internet. If so, they miscalculated in my case and lost a lot of my business.

What?

To the original post here is my .02 -

Warhammer Fantasy suffers, because GW is GW. Meaning their biggest concern as a business is self preservation. Maintaining their IP while trying to please shareholders and make a profit. In a nut shell, these are the few issues I see them having that's had a tremendous effect on their games.

#1. Prices.... GW's prices have continued to go up causing their customer base to find alternative solutions. In 40k, there isn't much in the way of competition so gamers either pay GW's prices, or go to the black market and buy used items (eBay) or knock-offs (China). Fantasy on the other hand is a different animal. GW can't claim IP on a Dwarf or an Elf, so in addition to the alternate methods of eBay and China GW also has to compete with companies like Mantic and Avatars of War who make perfect substitue miniatures. If you compare the number of models needed to play WFB compared to other systems, getting the most bang for your buck is important when GW wants to charge you $40-$50 for 10 plastic models.

#2. Rules.... Usually it all comes down to costs and the changes in the rules are of no exception. The initial costs to play any GW game are expensive. When you consider $80 for a rulebook, $50 for an army book or codex, and another $500+ in models, paint, and accessories to build your army it adds up fast. The thing is once you've built your army, you're pretty much set and as long as you can find opponents to play, you can pretty much enjoy it forever. This is where GW scratches their head and trys to find a way to sell you more that you really don't need. Their solution is to turnover game editions. Now, if you go back a ways new editions were somewhat refreshing and welcoming to fix rules that were broken and improve upon the game. Today, GW pumps out new editions with the sole purpose of capturing sales to a market that otherwise wouldn't spend another dime. There's no intent to "Improve" on the game, only to pump in enough changes that force you to buy the new rules. The only motivation a player has to buy the new rules is because he/she believes that without migrating to them that they either won't find a game or won't be able to use a shiny new model. IMO- Most of the newer rules I see are over-bloated and so cumbersome to try and remember that they've began sacraficing the enjoyment of why you bothered to play in the first place.

#3 Balance and Competitive Play... Up until about 4-5 years ago, GW drove the tournament bus. They sponsored independent tournaments and they ran their own Grand Tournaments. While some complained about the type of gamers that competitive play created, the truth is that competition is healthy. Competition generates buzz, it generates markes sales, and competition establishes a meta level. When GW abandoned the bus they were driving and began publishing rules that offered very little in terms of balance, those that were riding on the bus lost interest and jumped off in the middle of nowhere.

In all fairness, I've drifted away from the hobby (Especially on the 40k side) for the last 2 years. I still enjoy Fantasy and I do like 8th edition, but the End Times books are putting a sour taste in my mouth about where the game is headed. I'm hopeful that if 9th edition turns out to be a bad egg that I can still find gamers willing to play older editions of the game to continue my enjoyment and entertainment.

The Auld Grump: Creamed khorne. Excellent.

Polonius wrote:Sure, they had oddball stuff like pegasi and flaggellants and even the helblaster

You mean the ribauldequin?

BeAfraid wrote:
I don't think anyone here has put the problem in a frame that illustrates so clearly what the problem as, as comparing it to a Michael Bay movie.

That pretty much nailed it: all style, no substance.

MB

Some of us might also compare it to a Peter Jackson film, for the same reasons.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lanrak wrote:

Young people are great at soaking up data like a sponge.So games like top trumps where remembering all the data profiles off 100s of cards appeals to them.
They get better by remembering lots of data.

Older people generally want to make meaningful decisions in the games they play.So they play games like chess.They get better by working out how to make better in game decisions.

WHFB and 40k have always had heavy strategic loading , to appeal to younger gamers.

However, many meaningful in game tactical decisions have been replaced by 'randomness'.

As a war games rule set WHFB and 40k, are very poor.In terms of clarity brevity and intuitive play.

They are all style and very little substance.

Oh yes. This is partly why I'm always pointing out other rules to WHFB vets. Most of them leave out the reams of special rules for more tactical general mechanics. A wee bit of a shakeup in wargaming expectations, a little paradigm shift (or paradigm nudge), but it can be so much more enjoyable. And quicker.

 Vermis wrote:
The Auld Grump: Creamed khorne. Excellent.

Polonius wrote:Sure, they had oddball stuff like pegasi and flaggellants and even the helblaster

You mean the ribauldequin?

BeAfraid wrote:
I don't think anyone here has put the problem in a frame that illustrates so clearly what the problem as, as comparing it to a Michael Bay movie.

That pretty much nailed it: all style, no substance.

MB

Some of us might also compare it to a Peter Jackson film, for the same reasons.

Like me, for instance.

I HATE! HATE! HATE! The Jackson films as long as they are referred to, even tangentially as "Tolkien."

They are great fantasy movies, if you like explosions in fantasy movies. They have some Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, and a Dragon... And even some other fantasy stuff.

But they are to Tolkien as are three guys in Black Robes handing out Beer and Pizza in an auditorium are to Communion in a Catholic Mass.

MB

Personally, I found the massive, oversized, armies that the game was pushing towards, plus the over priced kits, plus the new meta - gunlines and massive monsters - something that I can no longer afford to keep up with has seen me put my poor Skaven on hold until things improve. That and the fact that everyone plays 40K in my area.

£94.00 for an effective unit of Jezzails? GW, are you having a laugh?

 Vermis wrote:

Lanrak wrote:

Young people are great at soaking up data like a sponge.So games like top trumps where remembering all the data profiles off 100s of cards appeals to them.
They get better by remembering lots of data.

Older people generally want to make meaningful decisions in the games they play.So they play games like chess.They get better by working out how to make better in game decisions.

WHFB and 40k have always had heavy strategic loading , to appeal to younger gamers.

However, many meaningful in game tactical decisions have been replaced by 'randomness'.

As a war games rule set WHFB and 40k, are very poor.In terms of clarity brevity and intuitive play.

They are all style and very little substance.

Oh yes. This is partly why I'm always pointing out other rules to WHFB vets. Most of them leave out the reams of special rules for more tactical general mechanics. A wee bit of a shakeup in wargaming expectations, a little paradigm shift (or paradigm nudge), but it can be so much more enjoyable. And quicker.

Ditto.

But I tend to go even further than the typical individually based figures ranked up in masses that have little reflection to actual formations of troops that fought as melee troops, and recommend rules that tend to be element based, and which use definitive scales (the whole trope of "there is no scale" for either figure-man representation, or ground scale is a monumentally delusional fiction) that allow a better representation of an abstraction of the combats that occurred (and present more convenience in storage, shipping/transportation, and play for the miniatures themselves).

I tend to lean toward DBA, HotT, Fields of Glory (for which there are Fantasy Rules in existence, even if they remain unofficial - if more people adopted them, then Slytherine might just make them official), and Hoplon (a game that is similar to a mix of DBA/DBM and Field of Glory).

All of these rules sets have Middle-earth and Hyboria army lists completed, and most of them have more generic fantasy lists as well. The Middle-earth lists are very well researched, and conform to Tolkien's books, primarily, but there are some lists for the Movie Versions of the armies as well.

And DBA/HotT both have WHFB styled army lists as well, which allow people with existing WHFB armies to play with those armies.

In fact, HotT (Hoards of the Things) has a very simple points system that allows for a broad variation in the available model selection, and play that is VASTLY more enjoyable than WHFB.

But if people wish to stick to the individually based miniature, and spend the time required fiddling with all of those figures, then there is still Kings of War.

I have NEVER understood the desire to leave miniatures individually based, even as early as 1979, when I first encountered playing Fantasy Miniature Wargames in Dallas.

I would look at the historical gamers, who had figures based multiply, and look at how much incredibly faster it was to play than it was with our individually based figures (I even took a stopwatch to about 20 - 30 games of each - Historical or Fantasy miniatures - to see what the time difference was, and discovered that multiply based requires less than half the time, usually, to deal with moving and dealing with casualties. And this includes the use of sabots for movement of the individually based figures).

The point

GW, with WHFB has no innovation, and has stuck with simple changes to a system for the sake of changes, rather than innovations that actually improve the rules. And they have stuck to what is essentially a 19th century style of miniatures gaming without recourse to the style and substance of that era.

MB

For me, keeping them individually based is purely so that I can use them in skirmish or mass battle, as I wish. I am planning on sorting out group bases (probably with magnets) for mass battle in the next while, but I am interested in playing skirmish and mass battle, so it just makes sense to keep the basing singular for the most part.

When I get around to doing my Pike and Shotte stuff, that's a period I am less interested in skirmish for, so I will probably multibase.

1. The prices are just to high.
2. Does not appeal to the younger generations
3. Rules are bad and lack of balance in the game
4. No support in my local area need to travel to get a game in

Just to put this discussion in perspective, sales of WHFB peaked at the beginning of 6th and have been declining ever since. Even during the supposed "golden age" of WHFB, sales were dropping. Got this back in the summer of 2013 from the owner of my FLGS after he did a trip to Memphis and met with the top management of GW NA. His store does high 6 figure sales of GW product, so he was on very good terms with GW NA. The General's Compendium released during 6th was GW NA's attempt to improve sales. GW UK did not appreciate the "interference".

8th edition was GW UK's attempt to reverse the decline. The fact that after releasing 8th, they let the game languish for 18 months didn't help. Only releasing one army book and a supplement that emphasized the worst aspect of 8th during that time. No new material and no revised armies to address new imbalances made people lose interest.

Pricing for one.

8th, I found, is very balanced, but there are some areas in the rules that could use a little more addressing ( especially in magic).

I believe in a " If you build it, they will come" frame of mind. In regards to that, I believe GW failed. I believe GW put more focus on 40K than Fantasy. I've always found that Fantasy players will come out of the wood work and from long distances to get involved in anything Fantasy oriented. GW didn't cater to their player base. This could have been accomplished with more frequent attention on up to date FAQ, addressing out of date army books ( Skaven and Bretonian at this point), etc. I think what they did with Storm of Chaos was great.

I think what they're doing, with the story line, the excitement, the models, etc, with End Times is a HUGE and GREAT start. That may be the right track that they needed to get on. how drastically they change rules, armies, etc, for 9th is the only concern at this point. But if they had this type of attention just without 9th in mind for Fantasy players, then that alone would have been worth it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, as far as sales are concerned, I'd not be surprised if lowering product prices would help them even more. That's more players now starting another army, or expanding upon a current one.

 Da Boss wrote:
For me, keeping them individually based is purely so that I can use them in skirmish or mass battle, as I wish. I am planning on sorting out group bases (probably with magnets) for mass battle in the next while, but I am interested in playing skirmish and mass battle, so it just makes sense to keep the basing singular for the most part.

When I get around to doing my Pike and Shotte stuff, that's a period I am less interested in skirmish for, so I will probably multibase.

This is an issue that I sorta-kinda understand, but which I think ultimately is a socio-economic issue.

Namely, that some people can't afford to have two different sets of miniature, one for mass combat, and the other for Skirmish/RPG.

I totally get that.

But that doesn't express a preference, but a contingency (that all things being equal, the person would choose a set of rules that used element-basing, if they could afford to do so).

Yet I see people using this excuse who live in $500,000 houses, and buy a new BMW every year.

MB.

Da Butcha wrote:
Oh, so, so, so many things:

Pricing: arguably the biggest offender, since it hit you THREE times. First, prices for models were ridiculous. Second, emphasis on huge units necessitated buying LOTS of ridiculously priced models. Third, Gigantic Monsters (offered up to combat huge units) were even more expensive. This was a huge problem, since it was bad by itself, and made two of the other problems so much worse.

Model Count: by rewriting the rules to reward huge units of infantry, GW damaged the game in many ways. It made playing prohibitively expensive. It made creating an army both expensive and hugely time consuming. It disconnected collecting from playing, since the person buying to paint and model needed 5-10 models, but the person creating a unit often wanted 30--but no one wants to assemble and paint 30 model of the same 5 sculpts. It reduced army diversity, since you were likely to field a smaller number of units, each of larger sizes. It discouraged the purchase of entire types of models, since they were so much less effective than huge blocks of infantry. It led to the development of 'mega-spells' which were devastating to small units.

Gigantic Models: In and of itself, this is not actually bad. In fact, I think it was badass. However, the prevalence of gigantic models, and their shoehorning into relatively small armies, led to a very poorly balanced game. While I think a game where the Skaven unleashed a towering abomination would be incredible, the fact that the skaven were rolling out massive monsters in every army (etc) made the games ridiculous. It disrupted both the design of the game, by focusing tactics on big individual models rather than small units, and it disrupted the setting. Why is anyone afraid of Chaos Warriors if all these giant Chaos beasties are roaming around? Who decides to invest time and effort into growing grapes when a 50" tall bull-man might roam into your area and kill everyone?

Army sameness: I know people are talking about rules bloat, and they aren't wrong, but hang with me here for a second. GW inserted the same types of units into every army. Orcs & Goblins had a big monster, then so did beastmen, then so did Empire. Daemons have monstrous cavalry, and so do Empire, and Ogres, etc. Elves have chariots, and now, so do Daemons, etc. With the extremely rare exception of the dwarves and Brets, GW stuck [box of models this size] into every army, without any thought to how it affected play, the background, or the feel of the army. Why is the Empire scared of Chaos monsters if they have Griffin Riders and barn size griffins? What distinguishes one army from another, when they all have the same types of units? Heck, I remember being disgusted by the changes in Ogre Kingdoms. I was SO excited to finally field an army of Ogres. A whole army, of OGRES! Then, of course, ogres got cavalry, and monstrous mounts, and cannons, etc. The actual OGRES of the army were not interesting any more.

Overwhelming magic: partly in response to the emphasis on huge units and big monsters, magic got dramatically buffed, and in a poorly thought out and unbalanced way. Not only was this damaging to game balance, it was extremely frustrating to the opponent. Why field a unit of, say, Ogres, if a single spell could easily wipe them off the board with one casting? It also was severely damaging to the fluff. If magic was this incredibly powerful, but astoundingly risky, how did wizards survive a single battle, much less develop their skills over years of study? Why were traditional military tactics ever developed, if amazing spells could shatter units in one go?

Maniac branding: Games Workshop has incredible economies of scale, which they could use to dominate the market for fantasy modeling, but their bull-headed insistence on a ham-handed, overwhelming 'Warhammer' look destroyed their ability to market to other hobbists. While having a distinctive look is an important sales driver, why in the world woudn't you make Fantasy buildings and monsters that anyone might buy for their game? Now, many different companies make nice, inexpensive (in some cases) fantasy buildings, terrain, and boards, but GW could have cornered and dominated this market if they had produced affordable, flexible options instead of SKULL PIT and GOTHIC stuff.

Disregarding Playstyle: the distinction between WFB and 40K was the emphasis on maneuvering and tactical positioning. Largely throwing that out the window meant that you lost audiences in two ways. People who wanted fantasy tactical battles moved to other games, and people who were happy with this less tactical style of play moved from Fantasy to 40K, where it was more fully realized and implemented.

Total Customer Disengagement: GW makes no effort to communicate anything to their fans other than what they should buy this week. They have eliminated all interaction with fans via social media, don't discuss plans or release sneak peeks, and have, UNDER OATH, derided and belittled the whole idea of market research. If people have NO IDEA what you are doing to the game, it makes it very difficult for them to decide to invest in a very large, very expensive, very complex game which requires a huge amount of time and money commitment. When other people tell you what their game is doing, for free, and it costs less, you experiment with them.

Fluff Violence The saddest thing for me to see is the irrevocable damage done to the Warhammer Fantasy world. I'm not just talking about the End Times, though they do exemplify the disregard or even hatred GW seems to show for their own background. Chaos Warriors and Chaos Knights were widely feared in the Old World, for their incredible strength, violence, and savagery. Now you have tons of huge monsters, as well as ogre-sized chaos warriors. Why were Chaos Warriors feared so much? Chaos Knights were a source of terror, but now, they struggle to disrupt a single block of infantry. The Empire depends on Wizards in war, but mistrusts them, but now has all sorts of magical contraptions that roll into the battle. I LOVED the distinct post-medieval, 'Renaissance' flavored setting of WFB. I loved the grim, gritty realism of their dark low fantasy. Now everything is big monsters, big magic, and big contraptions. It's not plausible that people should think and behave in any sort of way that resembles medieval/Renaissance Europe when the fabric of the entire world is so dramatically changed. In addition, you can advance the storyline, without tearing it apart. If I wrote a political thriller where South America and Africa were both destroyed by a giant meteor, Canada invaded America, Americans fled as refugees to Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece were destroyed by, oh, let's say anarchists, Russia was wiped out by a force from the Arctic, and Western Europe was fundamentally changed, while Britain sank, all in 10 years, people would call me a massive hack. If I also didn't mention anything at all about China, Japan, or India doing anything during this time, people would call me a racist or an even bigger, less talented hack. If the company doesn't care about the setting any longer, why should anyone else?.

This, 1.000 times this.

8th edition is what went wrong with Fantasy and if 9th edition rumours are even remotely true, they will just put the final nails in the coffin.

Long ago, WHFB was doing fine.

But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.


That, and prices that put off new players, together with changes that put off old players.

 heartserenade wrote:
Long ago, WHFB was doing fine.

But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.


That, and prices that put off new players, together with changes that put off old players.

Maybe Aang will come save us?

MB

Im so glad I never moved past 3rd Edition...

BeAfraid wrote:

 heartserenade wrote:
Long ago, WHFB was doing fine.

But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.


That, and prices that put off new players, together with changes that put off old players.

Maybe Aang will come save us?

MB

But GW's Aang will be a 10ft tall warrior in fullplate with skulls engraved on it, wielding a rape sword and riding a skeleton Griffon with side mounted cannons.

A variety of issues. Price being the biggest one.

Poor rules affect veterans, who will go play something else.

Moving to niche locations means fewer new players and "walk-ins". As does a lack of feeder games.

And the key one. Prices affect everyone, from the vets that aren't willing to retool their armies again, while excluding new players and kids who will increasingly just go and buy an XBox or PlayStation instead. Which all of their friends are playing. Because "how much does this game cost to start?" is a real question.

I have yet to play a game of 8th ed. There's an awful lot of info to take in. Models are nice and all but I'd be more enthusiastic about playing it if the rules were easier to follow. Which is why I'm looking at KoW V1/V2

I played WHFB in 5th edition, which was the original version of "Herohammer" where you had one powerful character on a dragon or other beastie that ran around destroying everything.

What they did was they changed it to be more focused on troops, and like everything else they do they used it with a high price hike to get you to spend more, and engaged in similar nonsense to 40k with cutting the amount of figures in a box so you needed multiple boxes to get a single unit, which resulted in each unit being around a hundred bucks or more.

Couple that with what is generally a stagnant and uninteresting generic fantasy world, and there isn't much appeal. They move at a snail's pace. In Warmaster they had Araby as a faction, but never brought Araby to WHFB, or Cathay or whatever their version of China and Japan was. Even that is pretty much just nothing interesting.

Plus there's the fact that any good historical system can let you do similar to WHFB at a fraction of the cost.

Not in any particular order

1) Rules that were too vague and were created with the power gamer in mind (who were most likly lobbying for those types of changes). There are so many things in the current rules that make no sense and muck up play, sure they add flavor but when they cause conflicts or even arguements. Why have them? All the while other items that worked well were eliminated.

2) It wasn't too many armies: it was too many special rules inside those books that caused conflicts with universal special rules and game play.

3) Many books had magic items that broke the game or made unfair play for certian armies....which leads into the next point

4) 'I like my army why can't they make it equal to all the other armies' people like what they liked and all the sudden they are left with an army that just could not compete with GW's golden few armies....which leads to next

5) I can't afford another army and mine sucks why bother playing.

6) Monsterous infantry.............Broke PERIOD! Alas, I'm guilty of playing them but I only keep it to 8 max. Take 18 with a 'Sargent' 55 attacks with strengh 4-6 against while a standard infantry of equal size and frontage gets 32 and only has one extra rank bonus, strngth 3-5 if your lucky ......but not for long.

7) Cannons became laser beams and gained the finger of death rule. Warmachines in general became too powerful and lost all the thing that kept them in check. Rate of fire vs number of crew, high tendancy to go haywire and blow up, etc.

8) remember that awesome center piece model you bought......yeah the Prince on dragon....Orc on wyvern ect.....Gone and dead. warmachines along with other exotic monsters and a few other choice things, made it useless to field one. why dump points into something that doen't work not that they were very powerful in past editions but were able to survive and at least participate in the game.

9) Terrain rules and skirmish breakdown.

the list goes on and on


10) FORGING A NARRATIVE.....................biggest excuse to produce half assed rules and not care about a quality product

The increased number of models in the current edition has been a major problem in our local gaming group. New players became discouraged by the time and money investment required by a full army and dropped out. This was made worse by some dumb long term veterans who use their much larger collections to counter build against players who can barely field one army, let alone rotate units. The two new regulars who stayed both use Ogres, this army seems suffers less from this problem. Natural attrition means the game is played less and less, and that results in fewer players taking up WFB.

It may just be a local thing but we are also losing veterans to historical gaming. The high fantasy style direction seems to be a big turn off for them.

I got into WFB right as the Terrorgheist was released and got out about two months later. I really enjoyed the game. What turned me off was the need for huge blocks of things that aren't amazingly customisable Space Marines. The hobby aspect to WFB is, for me, a chore.

To me, Fantasy really only works well if you play certain armies, like my Night Goblins got a good boost, the giant spider is cool and not really out of place (it's a giant spider...)
There are things I wish for that are strange and will probably never happen (though Harlequins came back so I hope Slayers do too...)
I enjoy 8th ed more then I did 7th ed. 8th is annoyingly harmless, I don't hate it and I get pick up games every so often.
Curious about 9th, but also weary about it.

Did I see a forum for Kings of War?

Or any other game that could be a replacement for WHFB?

I am still amazed that people actually play the game.

I never made it even to Third Edition.

I used to like to just watch games, when players had pretty armies.

But given the abuse dishes out here, I am surprised that I don't see more discussion of other games.

Why is that?

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
Did I see a forum for Kings of War?

Or any other game that could be a replacement for WHFB?

I am still amazed that people actually play the game.

I never made it even to Third Edition.

I used to like to just watch games, when players had pretty armies.

But given the abuse dishes out here, I am surprised that I don't see more discussion of other games.

Why is that?

MB

Here you go:

http://manticforum.com/forum

It took me exactly 10 seconds to google it... And I thought that my google-fu was weak!

BeAfraid wrote:

But given the abuse dishes out here, I am surprised that I don't see more discussion of other games.

Why is that?

MB

Because it's a GW forum, and when you mention other games, people whinge.

Okay, that was hyperbole. There are Warmahordes and Mantic boards further down the forum, but when you have an entire company's repertoire (or even the guts of a genre, like historicals) shoved into one board while two individual GW games get 6-7 boards each... you can see how it's kinda skewed.

And heck, out of the GW-centric forums I've seen, this is the one most open to alternative games.

 Vermis wrote:

TheAuldGrump wrote:
Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

TheKbob wrote:Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun.

I hear that. Every wargame has some element of chance, but I much prefer wargames that make you apply whatever skills you have to skew that chance in your favour. If I lose I'd rather it was because of my own idiocy, which might be improved, rather than the game's idiocy, which might be a bit more difficult to fix.

While I absolutely agree that lately GW has taken the randomness too far, I think that the random factor can be great, when it comes into play because of player choice.

Randomness should not be put into anything and everything, but having a few units, or even an army that uses randomness can be a wonderfully entertaining thing when done with a little subtlety. The old Orks are a good example. There's a lord choice for empire that's another. Leitdorf, I think his name is, the crazy one. The thing is, a player has to choose to use the crazy bastard, and gains a risk/reward situation based on chance. But alternatively, he can choose to have a reliable army by using any other leader.

Having entire chunks of your army be hideously unreliable is a terrible design. Having a chart along the lines of on a 2-5 this baseline profile is used, on a one something bad happens, on a six something great happens, can be wonderful for something like an Ork force, whose weapons and such are... dodgy. But having every single choice be something completely different is absurd.

Deadawake1347 wrote:

 Vermis wrote:

TheAuldGrump wrote:
Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

TheKbob wrote:Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun.

I hear that. Every wargame has some element of chance, but I much prefer wargames that make you apply whatever skills you have to skew that chance in your favour. If I lose I'd rather it was because of my own idiocy, which might be improved, rather than the game's idiocy, which might be a bit more difficult to fix.

While I absolutely agree that lately GW has taken the randomness too far, I think that the random factor can be great, when it comes into play because of player choice.

Randomness should not be put into anything and everything, but having a few units, or even an army that uses randomness can be a wonderfully entertaining thing when done with a little subtlety. The old Orks are a good example. There's a lord choice for empire that's another. Leitdorf, I think his name is, the crazy one. The thing is, a player has to choose to use the crazy bastard, and gains a risk/reward situation based on chance. But alternatively, he can choose to have a reliable army by using any other leader.

Having entire chunks of your army be hideously unreliable is a terrible design. Having a chart along the lines of on a 2-5 this baseline profile is used, on a one something bad happens, on a six something great happens, can be wonderful for something like an Ork force, whose weapons and such are... dodgy. But having every single choice be something completely different is absurd.

Agreed- a Mad Mech or Warlock Engineer theme build being insane random is good. Your disciplined generals capabilities? Not good.

PhantomViper wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Did I see a forum for Kings of War?

Or any other game that could be a replacement for WHFB?

I am still amazed that people actually play the game.

I never made it even to Third Edition.

I used to like to just watch games, when players had pretty armies.

But given the abuse dishes out here, I am surprised that I don't see more discussion of other games.

Why is that?

MB

Here you go:

http://manticforum.com/forum

It took me exactly 10 seconds to google it... And I thought that my google-fu was weak!

Thanks...

And I didn't try to Google it, as I was posting from my iPad, which is having "issues" (if I leave a page for any reason it will re-load the page, killing my post).

But now I know! And knowing is half the battle (Go Joe!)

MB

I believe everyone here has been talking about symptoms rather than the real underlying problem.

The real problem is GW's current three game model.

GW used to update WFB and 40k as well a lots of other games (including board games!)- some successful, some not. As the company moved to only supporting three games (40k, WFB, and LoTR) a couple of things happened.

First, there was no other GW games for players to go to. The expectation used be that vets would collect multiple GW games. And since a lot of these games were skirmish or board games, this wasn't unreasonable. Without the number of in house alternatives, and in order to keep profitable, model counts required for games had to go up. New models for armies had to be added, and, when none were pre-existent in the fluff, created from whole cloth. Models packaged per box were reduced. Armies were "split" requiring players to make additional purchases to keep up to date.

All of these problems were exacerbated by the fact that there was no longer an "intro" game (like HeroQuest) to the GW world, decreasing the influx of new players. A smaller player base meant that there had to be a drive for each remaining player to spend more.

Second, since there was only three games, GW could not afford to take a risk on any of them. So rules changes had to be made incrementally (as they still are). Each edition suffered bloat from having to retain rules from prior editions. I think the GW dev team could have made the bold needed changes to WFB, but GW couldn't take such a risk to 1/3 of their product line. Alessio, Rick, and Jervis would all go on made great games for other companies (KoW, Black Powder, Bolt Action, Hail Caesar) but their time at GW seemed to be restricted to making tweaks rather than the big needed changes.

Somewhat paradoxically, after years of taking no risk on needed game updates, GW is now in the position of having to make even greater changes in order to keep WFB afloat.

Third, the rules deteriorated further as: a) GW changed from a company that made (lots of) games, to a company that focuses on producing models, and; b) the dev team lost the ability to use smaller games to R&D new ideas.

I don't agree with that theHandofGork, the issue is that the philosophy of the company has
changed, it is not about supporting the games or making a balanced game, everything is
sacrificed just to sell models (or anything) to make their profit margins.

Disclaimer: I don't mean this to be an attack on the guys that like 8th Edition. If you love 8th Edition, good for you! I'm legitimately happy that you have a game that you enjoy.

Thaaaat said: 8th Edition is what killed Warhammer Fantasy. 7th Edition had a pretty strong following, not 40k's level of following, but it was popular and played regularly. By deciding to turn everything on its head with 8th, instead of fixing what was wrong with 7th, Games Workshop seems to have alienated a huge section of its WHFB fanbase. Before 8th dropped, the FLGS had 5 to 8 games going during weekly Warhammer night. Within a month of 8th edition hitting, that number dropped to 1 or 2. The people that hung up their square bases weren't power gamers, either. They were your usual FLGS crowd, a mix of hobbyists lore-fans, and core gamers. The game went from having diversity, to being hordehammer. Maneuvering didn't mean as much, magic become even more powerful, and the game seemed to be a lot more bland than it had been.

To be fair, the people that stuck with 8th Edition did grow to enjoy it. People re-discovered maneuvering through use of chaff units, but it still isn't nearly as important as it was in 7th. The problem is that while a handful of players stuck with 8th, the majority of those that left at its inception have never returned, and have no interest in returning. Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition was a good example of a company throwing the baby out with the bath water, and in this case the baby was adopted by someone else (WarmaHordes, Malifaux, X-Wing...), and isn't coming back.

Again, if you love 8th, that's great. Unfortunately, what happened in my region has been observed by other players that I've talked to from around the US. For whatever reason, the dramatic changes in 8th were the straw that broke the camel's back. Now, instead of fixing the game to go with their excellent Fantasy setting, GW is rumored to be dropping that setting. It's kind of sad, really.

I don't think the WHFB factions were redundant at all.

Even the most similar factions had plenty of flavor that made them distinct. Wood Elves had a focus on shooting, skirmishing, and interacting with forests. High Elves were magic and elite line infantry focused. And Dark Elves were evil High Elves.

Chaos had a lot of distinction. Warriors are the faction of tough elite troops with good armor saves. Beastmen had fairly hard hitting but squishy troops. And Daemons are Daemons.


This is opposed to 40k's 50 shades of Space Marines plus supporting cast.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think the WHFB factions were redundant at all.

Even the most similar factions had plenty of flavor that made them distinct. Wood Elves had a focus on shooting, skirmishing, and interacting with forests. High Elves were magic and elite line infantry focused. And Dark Elves were evil High Elves.
......

Not too sure you're helping your case there.

Price - £140 for a horde of core. (you need hordes otherwise GTFO)

That horde is then killed by a wizard casting an uber spell

8th ed destroyed it. 6/7th could have been salvagable.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think the WHFB factions were redundant at all.

Even the most similar factions had plenty of flavor that made them distinct. Wood Elves had a focus on shooting, skirmishing, and interacting with forests. High Elves were magic and elite line infantry focused. And Dark Elves were evil High Elves.

Chaos had a lot of distinction. Warriors are the faction of tough elite troops with good armor saves. Beastmen had fairly hard hitting but squishy troops. And Daemons are Daemons.


This is opposed to 40k's 50 shades of Space Marines plus supporting cast.

It depends on how you look at it.

I bought tons of WFB minis but only for 40k conversions (or lately, shelf warming) I never really played it.

One reason is that all the armies were some combination of infantry/cavelry/artillery/monsters, which to me did not say high fantasy, it said historical armies with a fantasy venier. Even the Ogre Kingdom was still hoards of goblins with some bigger, fatter infantry behind them.

Now if there were whole armies of giants, or dragons, or whatever that would be different but the distinctions among the fantsy armies seemed subtle and not really that major.

Fluff-wise is there that great a difference between the green guys who want to kill and eat you, the brown guys who want to kill and eat you, the other, shorter, brown guys who want to kill and eat you and the big fat guys who want to kill and eat you? Yeah once you're into the game orcs are not the same as beastmen, who are different from skaven, who are different from Ogres but from the outside?

For a store owner things were even worse because - unlike 40k's Space Marine proliferation, where 6, or 7 or 8 armies shared vehicles and other kits - each fantasy army had several unique infantry, monster, cavalry and artilley kits.

A store owner could not just focus on how many dragons or giants he might sell, he had to drill down and anticipate how many High Elf Dragons vs Dark Elf Dragons, vs Vampire Count Dragons he will sell.

Now I think 40k is heading for trouble because of the proliferation of unique special snowflake kits. Now DA, SW and BA have their own terminator, tac squads and vehicles which a store has to stock and sell and if someone is looking for a Storm Raven but you only have Storm Wolfs then you lost a sale. But that's another story.


GW could have done more to keep inventories lean. The plastic giant kit for example was meant to be used by Empire, Chaos, Orcs etc. But then they quickly added a unique Beastman giant and other unique beasties. They could ahve done a single plastic dragon for the 3 elf factions, and made an undead dragon for both Vamps and Tomb Kings.

Don't get me wrong, the models we got were great, and very very tempting, but the proliferation made stokcing and marketing WHFB a major headache.

The only real problem as far as I can see it is the absolutely ridiculously massively huge cost for starting WHFB, which is even a lot greater than for starting 40k, which is already rather expensive. As it is now, no sensible kid can afford to get into it, unless he is filthy rich. At the moment, a very basic 1000pts Empire list:
-1 captain
-1 wizard
-40 halberdiers
-10 handgunners
-8 knights
-1 cannon
-5 outriders
costs a staggering £149.50 ($248 or €188), and that does not include rulebook, armybook and other required stuff. Also keep in mind that the Empire is one of the cheaper factions, most other factions need a lot more models to get the same points value. This is a price no kid is able or willing to pay to get into something new, not to mention what his parents are going to say about it. That is almost the price of a new console! And the worst thing is that even if you have a 1000pts army, it would not get you very far as most games are played at much higher point levels. It should therefore not be very surprising that Warhammer barely attracts any new players.
Either prices will have to come down or the game will have to be changed to be better playable with only a handful of miniatures. If nothing happens, I am afraid our hobby is slowly going to die out as old players leave and are not replaced by new ones. It also loses GW even more sales because people start using alternative and much, much cheaper models.
GW needs to lower either prices or model count, otherwise WHFB is as good as dead.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think the WHFB factions were redundant at all.

Even the most similar factions had plenty of flavor that made them distinct. Wood Elves had a focus on shooting, skirmishing, and interacting with forests. High Elves were magic and elite line infantry focused. And Dark Elves were evil High Elves.

Chaos had a lot of distinction. Warriors are the faction of tough elite troops with good armor saves. Beastmen had fairly hard hitting but squishy troops. And Daemons are Daemons.


This is opposed to 40k's 50 shades of Space Marines plus supporting cast.

It depends on how you look at it.

I bought tons of WFB minis but only for 40k conversions (or lately, shelf warming) I never really played it.

One reason is that all the armies were some combination of infantry/cavelry/artillery/monsters, which to me did not say high fantasy, it said historical armies with a fantasy venier. Even the Ogre Kingdom was still hoards of goblins with some bigger, fatter infantry behind them.

No self respecting Ogre player uses Gnoblars in units larger than 10, and only to screen leadbeltchers. Gnoblars are so bad its not even funny. They're too slow to screen the ogre army and too weak to actually hold in combat. They're zombies without being unbreakable basically, which means they can't do anything a unit like them usually is supposed to do.

One reason is that all the armies were some combination of infantry/cavelry/artillery/monsters, which to me did not say high fantasy, it said historical armies with a fantasy venier. Even the Ogre Kingdom was still hoards of goblins with some bigger, fatter infantry behind them.

Now if there were whole armies of giants, or dragons, or whatever that would be different but the distinctions among the fantsy armies seemed subtle and not really that major...

Now I think 40k is heading for trouble because of the proliferation of unique special snowflake kits

Umm...?

(On your first point, though: what would make an army of giants much different to even bigger infantry? And what makes 40K armies more than variants of elite heavy infantry, elite light infantry, soviet-style horde infantry, and so on?)

If nothing happens, I am afraid our hobby is slowly going to die out

Oh, don't worry. The hobby will probably be fine. The WFB wargame within the hobby might take a bit of a hit, though.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:


For a store owner things were even worse because - unlike 40k's Space Marine proliferation, where 6, or 7 or 8 armies shared vehicles and other kits - each fantasy army had several unique infantry, monster, cavalry and artilley kits.

I'm not sure how that is any better on the 40k side with the spamming of marginally different space marine units that do the same thing. As a theoretical store owner, I'd rather stock just a "space marine tactical squad" than have to stock a space marine tactical squad, a blood angel tactical squad, and a space wolf grey hunter squad to cover bog standard marine troops choices. Same thing goes for bikes... do we really need multiple bikes squads (two separate ravenwing ones (three if you've still got the the legacy version), the normal one, a scout bike squad? How about assault marines? Do we need vanguard vets, assault marines, and sky claws? While I think the space wolf sprues from 2008 are some of the best work that GW has ever done in plastics and value, if I were a store owner I'd have preferred stocking just a single box with multiple copies and then ordering much cheaper chapter specific accessory sprues as needed instead. One fully featured space wolf accessory sprue could replace a half dozen other SKUs. The same goes for DA, GK, and BA. You could probably cut the astartes product line in half by doing that and frankly not lose much as long as the sprues were well designed (like the Dark Angel one is). 40k is suffering from the same bloat if not more that fantasy is but the difference is that it seems to be more popular regardless so it doesn't affect the bottom line as much.

 warboss wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:


For a store owner things were even worse because - unlike 40k's Space Marine proliferation, where 6, or 7 or 8 armies shared vehicles and other kits - each fantasy army had several unique infantry, monster, cavalry and artilley kits.

I'm not sure how that is any better on the 40k side with the spamming of marginally different space marine units that do the same thing. As a theoretical store owner, I'd rather stock just a "space marine tactical squad" than have to stock a space marine tactical squad, a blood angel tactical squad, and a space wolf grey hunter squad to cover bog standard marine troops choices. Same thing goes for bikes... do we really need multiple bikes squads (two separate ravenwing ones (three if you've still got the the legacy version), the normal one, a scout bike squad? How about assault marines? Do we need vanguard vets, assault marines, and sky claws? While I think the space wolf sprues from 2008 are some of the best work that GW has ever done in plastics and value, if I were a store owner I'd have preferred stocking just a single box with multiple copies and then ordering much cheaper chapter specific accessory sprues as needed instead. One fully featured space wolf accessory sprue could replace a half dozen other SKUs. The same goes for DA, GK, and BA. You could probably cut the astartes product line in half by doing that and frankly not lose much as long as the sprues were well designed (like the Dark Angel one is). 40k is suffering from the same bloat if not more that fantasy is but the difference is that it seems to be more popular regardless so it doesn't affect the bottom line as much.

It is still not as bad as in Fantasy because all SM armies do use the same vehicles and largely the same infantry (with only 4-5 different kits). In WHFB every army has completely unique kits, thus requiring a lot more space on the shelves.

I realize that but in fantasy you don't have a half dozen armies that are basically the same thing like space marines on top of the ones like eldar/chaos that are doubled up... you just have some doubled and one triple. The space marines use similar vehicles but have twice as many factions under that umbrella to fill out the other stuff with. I'm just saying that there is plenty of bloat in both, not that there isn't any in fantasy.

Well that and KK made the point that 40k is becoming like Fantasy in this regard, and it's something that might bring about or accelerate its downfall as well.

 Accolade wrote:
Well that and KK made the point that 40k is becoming like Fantasy in this regard, and it's something that might bring about or accelerate its downfall as well.

40k is the "newer" title by several years and editions but the bloat there has been going on for a while as well (probably since early 5th edition IMO). I don't think it is becoming like fantasy per se but simply everything is becoming more bloated. The same is true both of the main two IP's owned by GW (WHFB and 40k) as well as the work done by their subsidiaries. Black Library and the HH series has become the poster child for literary fragmentation and bloat and Forgeworld is even starting to go that route (Istvaan did NOT need 3 books and let's not get started about the contemptor dreadnought of the month club). I think it is more accurate to say that fantasy is simply suffering from the same thing as everything else GW... not that things are becoming more like fantasy. In the end, it's semantics so I won't belabor the point further.