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It looks like they may have been let down by GW, not getting their full allocation at launch day, some of the levels have gone up as well since I last looked, either they've had an increased allocation or some cancellations/bounced payments. Stock levels switched from pre-order to in store, now showing as:

Astra Militarum 17 stock on the way
Blood Queen 26 in stock
Genestealer 45 stock on the way (gone up by 7)
Overlords Skyfleet 9 in stock
Orks Kult of speed 36 in stock
Stromcast Eternals 79 stock on the way (gone up by 7)
Tau 9 in stock
Tzeentch Arcanites 17 stock on the way (gone up by 8)

The way some of them have dropped by 30 since yesterday I wonder if they only received about 70 of each set for launch while expecting 100 and none of the Stormcast.

Both my kharadon ones dispatched from Element last night, I noticed that the GSC one is the lighter green colour now which usually means "preorder and it'll turn up" . Last time Element messed up with me was the old Warmachine army boxes , when Privaterr did Europe out of most of the stock, so in general I think Element don't overpromise, they're just at the mercy of suppliers who do.

It may be similar to a few weeks ago when the GW warehouse even let their own stores down with Saturday's new releases not arriving until the Monday after. My local GW got their UPS delivery of new releases yesterday rather than the usual Thursday so maybe Element only got a part delivery of the new battleforces?

My Guard box arrived today, one absolutely jam packed box of plastic. Dissapointingly one of the cadian heads was loose in the box but intact as was the piece of a guardsmans hands holding a map which had snapped in half, luckily wasn't planning to use that and I have a couple of spares..

Looking through Leman Russ, command squad and Infantry Squad instructions have been updated to post codex, Chimera has old assembly instructions no datasheet, Sentinel instructions are post index-pre codex, Ogryn instructions are 7th edition. Exactly the right amount of bases, 1 guard vehicle and 1 infantry transfer sheet

I caved on an infantry box to go with my Genestealer Cult box to make a larger GSC force. First time I have purchased a 40k product in 20 years so now to work out if best to kept some / all of them as guards or convert to cultists.

Thinking of getting one of these sets for myself. Have some Blood Angels, Chaos-ish Guard, CSM, Orks, Aeldari soup and Genestealers (and a couple Nid Warriors) already, but not sure I want more Orks...even though this set has a bunch of stuff I don't have and could use. Guard would probably go towards boosting my Traitor Guard or maybe GSC (maybe a bit of both?). Tau were going to be my new army when I was getting back in early this year, I like the selection and have some Fire Warriors from the Kill Team box. Tzeentch daemons would work with my Chaos army probably. Stormcast could be converted to some nice Marines (and gonna get some bird-doggos for my DE Exodites as beasts anyway). Or I could knock out some Squat customs. Basically everything bar the skeleton set would be of use...any recommendations?

I cant make any recommendations as to what to buy but don't expect to see them in stock anywhere within a week.

 judgedoug wrote:
Ministomp got theirs in on Tuesday and have been shipping them. My GSC is apparently on the way to me ^_^

Too bad when I asked about preordering one on Black Friday they were only willing do to 15% off. My LGS was going to give me 30% off for one item for small business Saturday, it was between one of these and necromunda and I went with necromunda.

Just got my shipping notice from Element fortunately. Checking their stock levels however them seem to have dropped rather dramatically from the 70-80's down to the middle teens. Seem they didn't get quite as much as expected.

Element posted my Imperial Guard box today (ordered last Friday) but still waiting for them to post my GSC box (ordered within a minute of going on sale).

My local GW didn't get all the stock they were expecting either (including some pre-orders) but were told they would be coming

so either a production or delivery hicucup, with my guess being the former,

GW just seems to be running very close to the wire on balancing what they're planning to release to what they can actually supply at the moment so anytime a machine goes down for maintenance, boxes don't arrive exactly on time, too many staff are ill at once etc the stock they promised for next weekend just doesn't get finished on time

GSC on way from Element as well now.

A lot of the formulation of sets and why their exact contents are last minute is so that they can use up stock that's been sitting around. They will manufacture more to fill out the boxes but the aim is always to reduce stockpiles.

e.g. if they have 1500 sprues of model A lying around and 500 of model B they will manufacture another 1000 of model B, and bundle them together in to 1000 boxsets then afterwards their stock of A and B is both 500 units.

Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

Aeneades wrote:
GSC on way from Element as well now.

Glad to hear it! Mine too, and I didn't order until the 27th.

Yeah, no-one in modern industry keeps more than a week’s stock hanging around, not least because warehouse space costs money. Even assuming your projections are catastrophically wrong one week or two, it would be cheaper to grind ‘excess’ sprues back into pellets and feed them into the machines to make more of whatever was actually selling through.

They might have dispatched mine on Friday, but both are still awol after today. I've never had any new releases from element this late ever. I'm suspicious......

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

Several of the recent Christmas deal sets were actually shown to trade partners in April of this year to generate interest and gauge manufacturing numbers.

 judgedoug wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

Several of the recent Christmas deal sets were actually shown to trade partners in April of this year to generate interest and gauge manufacturing numbers.

Evidently ineffectively.

 Albino Squirrel wrote:

 judgedoug wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

Several of the recent Christmas deal sets were actually shown to trade partners in April of this year to generate interest and gauge manufacturing numbers.

Evidently ineffectively.

If trade partners don't respond with their estimates then, yes, it's entirely ineffective.

It seems like every online store in the USA and all of at least the statewide FLGS where I am have a surplus of Battleforces. At this rate, I am expecting deep discounts on them in a few months.

TBF a lot of UK retailers screwed themselves over by telling enquiries you couldn't pre-order them or that they would not be selling them online. Then having a surplus on release. The preorder week itself fell a week before payday for a ton of people. For 40K it seems they picked horde armies, they really needed 2 horde, 2 elite. If you don't fancy painting a ton of minis to make a bigger army then there is no point buying them.

Awareness also, they didn't put them in White Dwarf so unless you are online and visit warhammer community or 3rd party sizes, you didn't know about them. £100 is a lot to fork out unprepared at Christmas.

For AoS it's a weird selection, Death hasn't had a new army book, Overlords depend on you liking their style , Tzeentch is done as a horde box, Stormcast is themed and you better love gryph hounds. Plus no points values for the Warscroll , the Iverlords isn't even a legal army in matched if you use it all, lacking a battleline.

 Mr_Rose wrote:
Yeah, no-one in modern industry keeps more than a week’s stock hanging around, not least because warehouse space costs money. Even assuming your projections are catastrophically wrong one week or two, it would be cheaper to grind ‘excess’ sprues back into pellets and feed them into the machines to make more of whatever was actually selling through.

Umm wasn't plastic supposed to be NOT reusable which has been used as arqument why bits store wouldn't be workable anymore unlike when models were metal where you could just remelt the excess parts?

tneva82 wrote:

 Mr_Rose wrote:
Yeah, no-one in modern industry keeps more than a week’s stock hanging around, not least because warehouse space costs money. Even assuming your projections are catastrophically wrong one week or two, it would be cheaper to grind ‘excess’ sprues back into pellets and feed them into the machines to make more of whatever was actually selling through.

Umm wasn't plastic supposed to be NOT reusable which has been used as arqument why bits store wouldn't be workable anymore unlike when models were metal where you could just remelt the excess parts?

Polystyrene can be reused, it's just not as easy as metal models. Metal models you can literally just throw the model back in to your molten metal pool and turn it in to another model. You can't just shove a whole plastic model back in to an injection moulding machine, it has to be cut up or ground down in to pellets or flakes or beads or whatever the machine is designed to use. The plastic only becomes molten as the beads are passed through a heated injection barrel when it's injected in to the mould, there's no pool of molten plastic to throw bits in to for recycling.

Plastic is also cheaper than metal, so having lots of metal lying around is not only costing you on storage it also represents a large chunk of your capital sitting around doing nothing. That gives more motivation to throw metal models that aren't being used back in to the fire to create new models, saving you from having to buy new metal to make the new models.

Mr_Rose wrote:Yeah, no-one in modern industry keeps more than a week’s stock hanging around, not least because warehouse space costs money. Even assuming your projections are catastrophically wrong one week or two, it would be cheaper to grind ‘excess’ sprues back into pellets and feed them into the machines to make more of whatever was actually selling through.

Inquisitor Gideon wrote:Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

judgedoug wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Um no...these sets are decided on months in advance and with a theme attached. They need to be made ready to show to stockists in order to be able to sell them on. They don't have laying around stock, the sprues in these would be made to fill these boxes, not pulling apart other boxes and repackage them.

Several of the recent Christmas deal sets were actually shown to trade partners in April of this year to generate interest and gauge manufacturing numbers.

Generally thats how it works but GW works differently, they dont deal with annual sales of millions of each product, outside of new releases its generally its in the thousands and for a mature product sometimes hundreds, they have to stock more than a weeks stock because of limited and lengthy production process. The molds can only do a couple of thousand for plastic and a hundred or so for metal before they degrade and cost a large amount to make and the resin require constant supervision and adjustment during manufacturing and less than half produced are good enough to sell. When they decide to reprint a sprue they will produce as many as they can until the mold fails and while there might be production runs of popular models every few weeks others only see a run after a few months of being out of stock.

They assign a production code to each individual element the box, the rules and the sprue and they are packaged up to meet demand with the elements changing over time, occasionally old boxes are recalled to be repackaged as they have done recently progressivley recalling the 7th edition boxes with the intricate scrolling design to be reissued with the new plain design, they also repackaged the unsold talons of the emperor set updating the datasheets to 8th.

The battleforces sets they indeed notify the retailers around April of what amries they are intending but they are only provisional contents, they dont make the decision on the final contents till much later (around October) In my astra militarum box for example the Ogryns and Chimera were produced last year whereas the sentinel was produced in Summer and infantry were produced for the box itself.