I have some questions about the Squats

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**Korinov**

Nevelon wrote:
Nobody in the studio to champion them

I've come to believe this is - sadly - the ultimate main reason.

**Kid_Kyoto**

On the humor/comic relief point I have to disagree.

Yeah they were saddled with a terribad name but it was the orks not the squats who had the comic relief role. Orks were the ones with the random 'kustom' tables for their vehicles and weapons.

Even Chaos with their random 'silly walk' mutations had more of a comic relief role.

Barring the name, there was noting really funny about Squats.

Darn... now I want to write a Squat codex...

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Oh and on Sisters, I hear they're coming real soon, they just need to figure how to do the undercuts for their sleeves.

And I hear they have veils!

**insaniak**

Backspacehacker wrote:

Squats were the comic relief, they were akin to the silliness of Skaven.

No idea where you got that from, but there was nothing particularly silly about them.

The 'official' word from the studio was as has been said - they couldn't find a direction for them that they felt did them justice, and so they quietly did away with them.

Reading between the lines, I would agree with the assessment that nobody in the studio cared enough to put any real effort into it.

It's hard to argue that they weren't 'grimdark' enough for a setting that now includes Space Santa.

**Kid_Kyoto**

insaniak wrote:

It's hard to argue that they weren't 'grimdark' enough for a setting that now includes Space Santa.

To say nothing of the Ultramarines.

They're super marines, and they are blue! They are Ultramarines!

A whole product line built around a really dumb pun.

**Sidstyler**

The Squats kinda live on in the Demiurg, though, which are pretty much just space dwarves. I always thought it would be cool if GW brought them into 40k as a Tau auxiliary, but I guess that's not gonna happen.

**Haravikk**

Sidstyler wrote:
The Squats kinda live on in the Demiurg, though, which are pretty much just space dwarves. I always thought it would be cool if GW brought them into 40k as a Tau auxiliary, but I guess that's not gonna happen.

Introducing a space dwarf xenos race is the exact opposite of what GW wants; which is to turn regular 40k into titans vs flyers.

I always kind of liked Squats, and felt they could easily have been re-imagined or turned into a mercenary force to make them more compatible with the direction of 40k, but alas, it was not to be. They've kind of achieved this weird niche quality thanks to be a near mythical faction that some people remember, but many don't remember much details about (myself included).

**EnTyme**

Kid_Kyoto wrote:

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Oh and on Sisters, I hear they're coming real soon, they just need to figure how to do the undercuts for their sleeves.

And I hear they have veils!

People have been saying this for years. I have a source with some connection inside GW (so a friend of a friend of a guy who once bought a '73 Yugo from a guy . . .) who says they actually have the plastic Sisters done and boxed, but the marketing department doesn't think there is a market for them. Personally, I hope they do get a rerelease at some point as they have some of my favorite fluff in the universe (one of my favorite characters from running Dark Heresy campaigns back in the day was a Sister Repentia), and I would start an army so fast, it'd make my wallet catch fire, but I'm not currently holding my breath.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:
insaniak wrote:

It's hard to argue that they weren't 'grimdark' enough for a setting that now includes Space Santa.

To say nothing of the Ultramarines.

They're super marines, and they are blue! They are Ultramarines!

A whole product line built around a really dumb pun.

While I don't doubt that that is partially true, Ultramarine is a color, friend.

**Haravikk**

EnTyme wrote:
People have been saying this for years. I have a source with some connection inside GW (so a friend of a friend of a guy who once bought a '73 Yugo from a guy . . .) who says they actually have the plastic Sisters done and boxed, but the marketing department doesn't think there is a market for them. Personally, I hope they do get a rerelease at some point as they have some of my favorite fluff in the universe (one of my favorite characters from running Dark Heresy campaigns back in the day was a Sister Repentia), and I would start an army so fast, it'd make my wallet catch fire, but I'm not currently holding my breath.

I heard the previous CEO (Kirby?) was pretty hostile towards the Sisters as an army, so they never really got a chance to be scheduled for release. Even assuming the new CEO is super pro-Sisters it could still be a minimum of 18 months before pre-planned releases are all out to give the Sisters a chance to finally come out, possibly longer if they decided more kits are needed to make up an adequate release.

So I'd have my doubts about all the soon-sayers, though obviously I'd love to believe it, but I think realistically it's still not going to be this year, especially with so much still to do to flesh out Age of Sigmar (its momentum seems okay, but that's going to be in part due to all the last-chance-to-buy folks buying up stuff they always wanted to add to their army but didn't think would be discontinued, AoS still needs more factions to be able to stand on its new kits alone).

**Kid_Kyoto**

EnTyme wrote:
Kid_Kyoto wrote:

To say nothing of the Ultramarines.

They're super marines, and they are blue! They are Ultramarines!

A whole product line built around a really dumb pun.

While I don't doubt that that is partially true, Ultramarine is a color, friend.

Yes...

It's a shade of blue...

That's...

The...

Pun...

**Azreal13**

EnTyme wrote:
Kid_Kyoto wrote:

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Oh and on Sisters, I hear they're coming real soon, they just need to figure how to do the undercuts for their sleeves.

And I hear they have veils!

People have been saying this for years. I have a source with some connection inside GW (so a friend of a friend of a guy who once bought a '73 Yugo from a guy . . .) who says they actually have the plastic Sisters done and boxed, but the marketing department doesn't think there is a market for them. Personally, I hope they do get a rerelease at some point as they have some of my favorite fluff in the universe (one of my favorite characters from running Dark Heresy campaigns back in the day was a Sister Repentia), and I would start an army so fast, it'd make my wallet catch fire, but I'm not currently holding my breath.

Really? They've manufactured product (not just designed it, or have it ready to go, but actually cast and boxed it) and then decided "nah, we've spent the cash, but better let it rot in a corner than actually see if it sells?"

That's blatant nonsense. Nobody is going to dispute that they have models designed years before they're released sometimes, but to actually produce them at retail volumes and then decide they won't sell? Not even GW is that dumb.

**Furyou Miko**

Especially since storing unsold stock costs money.

I'll believe completed sculpts. I'll believe masters. But if there were moulds cast, let alone boxes of ready product, they would be on the shelves.

**JamesY**

Yeah that's balls. They make mock up sprues during the design process to check how well components go together, and see how the models look, but that isn't the same as tooling a mould for mass production.

**Veteran Sergeant**

I'm sure some people do, but they are an army with no rules, and no other game system really comes close to a sci-fi skirmish game like Kings of War for fantasy. So anyone that still has squats probably don't do much with them but sigh a lot.

Eh, they have lasguns and flak armor. They make perfectly suitable Imperial Guard troopers. As a Citadel model and perfectly WYSIWYG, they're still legal.

Some of the models are hard to find a use for like Trikes or Exo-Armor, but in general there's really no reason the majority of somebody's Squat collection couldn't be wedged into an IGuard army fairly seamlessly.

I would actually say they were never that popular, as the line was never really fully fleshed out and/or explored.

Actually, the Squat model range was almost twice as large as the Sisters of Battle model range has ever gotten. Granted, the Sisters aren't a great example as they've been Model-Squatted for over a decade now, but it's more an indication that model range had very little to do with the Squats' demise. Squats had about as broad of a representation in miniatures as the Imperial Army/Guard did at the time, and a lot of things that have just gone on to be generic "Imperium" things like Thudd Guns and Mole Mortars began life as Squat concepts.

Squats just sort of fell victim to not having a very well-defined role in the game, nor in the background. They were basically a different kind of Imperial Guard. They used the same transports and tanks, the same armor, and the same weapons. The only significant differences came in their Trikes and the Exo-Armor. 2nd Edition also still had a Movement Characteristic, which meant that Squats were fairly slow-moving too, 25% slower than regular human models.

They certainly weren't "too silly" for 40K though. I mean, this is a game where everything is over the top. It's entirely possible that nobody in the design team could ever come up with a way to move the Squats into the 2nd Edition lore. 2nd Edition is essentially when the game transitioned to "Modern 40K" . It introduced all of the Imperial Guard's tanks, redefined the Rhinos and Land Raiders as Space Marine things, made IGuard heavy weapons to 2-man teams, etc. The IGuard got a massive overhaul in 2nd Edition. The Squats would have needed one too, in order to be a viable army again. It's possible that the design team just never could figure out what that overhaul would look like.

So they just kept making new metal IGuard lines, heh.

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Kid_Kyoto wrote:
insaniak wrote:

It's hard to argue that they weren't 'grimdark' enough for a setting that now includes Space Santa.

To say nothing of the Ultramarines.

They're super marines, and they are blue! They are Ultramarines!

A whole product line built around a really dumb pun.

I mean, bad puns and derivations are 40K in a nutshell.

Sanguinius, Sanguine-ius, is the primarch of the Blood Angels... and has angel wings, and the Blood Angels have fangs because vampires and blood.

Ultramarines being named after a blue palette color is among the most serious aspects of 40K that emerged from Rogue Trader.

**Kid_Kyoto**

Veteran Sergeant wrote:

Eh, they have lasguns and flak armor. They make perfectly suitable Imperial Guard troopers. As a Citadel model and perfectly WYSIWYG, they're still legal.

Some of the models are hard to find a use for like Trikes or Exo-Armor,

You mean Squat Sentinels and Ogryn?

Yeah, Squats needed more diversity but in RT days even Harliquens could take Land Raiders so that's hardly a deal breaker.

I think one thing that happened is when you start start stripping away the fantasy elements, do they need to have beards? Do they need axes? Do they have to be short and fat? And you look at their core, the hard as nails shooty army you can see a path that leads to them being the Tau.

The last time I thought about doing Squats using starter set Dwarves they were going to count as Tau with Dwarf slayers/beserkers as Kroot.

**Oggthrok**

I've had this theory about Squats for awhile...

We know that they were a sci-fi version of dwarfs, and that no one in the studio could think of anything to do with them. Or did they?

Imagine they sat down and looked at what was unique to the Squats compared to the Imperial Guard. What made them unique?

1. "Thunderers" that all used heavy bolters, throwing lots of Str 5 shots.

2. They had terminator-like "Exo-suits" used by an elite group

3. They understood technology, without the Ad-mech mysticism

4. They had a real grudge with the Orks, who they had tried to trade with but had inevitably been betrayed, implying Squats were willing to trade with anyone, even Orks.

So, they took all of these ideas, and said "Scrap the entire look and theme of this army, just go with shorter-than human aliens, who's infantry have heavy-bolter strength guns, and exo-suits, who try to trade and negotiate with other races."

And someone said "Well, what would we call them? No one likes that Squat name."

And they said, "Eh, just reverse it. Tauqs. We'll call them Tauqs."

Eventually, they dropped the qs from the end of the name. And that's how the squats traded in their bears for blue skin and forehead nostrils.

And now you know, the rest of the story.

**gravitywell**

I think the original thread is dead, but it's been reposted over the years...

http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?40899-The-Demiurg

Originally Posted by Jervis johnson
I know I shouldn't get drawn on this... but... can't... resist

Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.

First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantaties that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.

No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats - what *were* we thinking?!?!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realised what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regreted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.

Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by.

Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendancy to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.

In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based on the Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...

I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with exisiting army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules..." Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.

Best regards,

Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic

I would love to see someone at GW pick up and run with the Demiurg as a reboot of the dwarf archetype... maybe one day. They are allies with the Tau and build lots of robots. I dunno... maybe a mostly robot army with a couple of Demiurg controlling them. Might be some unique mechanics in there somewhere. I think ultimately it would take an artist to be inspired enough to breath some life into it.

Armorcast and Inquisitor magazine put out a good codex in 2nd edition that I liked using for my models:

http://wargamedork.blogspot.ca/2014/03/operation-game-collection-warhammer-40k_17.html

I personally loved the exo-armor and exo-armor trikes... could you imagine terminators on bikes now?

**MacPhail**

I think their best fit is with the Inquisition. I actually started scratchbuilding a Squat army with an AdMech theme, thinking the Masters of Mars would have been most likely to enlist the scattered spacefaring tinkerers, but GW went a different direction. I considered a counts-as IG army, but the walker and cavalry rules aren't quite there. Marines would be the best fit now, with a variety of bike army build options, lots of tough vets, heavy armor infantry, and big guns... but I lost my taste for it after converting a half-dozen models. I should post those up somewhere. But to my point, I'd love to see GW give some new life to Squats, Ratlings, Ogryns, Beastmen, Penal Battalions, Mercenaries, and all the other forgotten goodies in a grab-bag Inquisition list (which it already is, to a degree). Leave it to the long arm of Imperial law to put the freaks to good use.

**cuda1179**

I think that since there all ready exists a dwarf-like archetype with the Demiurge, that they should just run with them as the new squats. One reason I'd want this is because it would fit in well as a Tau Merc unit.

In a previous thread I came up with (at least in my opinion) some pretty decent ideas on how to make a new squat-like race different from everyone else while still holding some kind of parallel to the squats of old.

This included a heavy vehicle (mining machine) that had the option of taking infantry as crew (kind of a squad transport in reverse). I also wouldn't mind seeing some kind of Demiurge Dreadnought with an Ion Cannon (as the Demiurge gave that technology to the Tau).

Also, how sweet would it be to have a Lord of War choice be something like a super-heavy colossus or land train looking vehicle?

**JamesY**

MacPhail wrote:
I think their best fit is with the Inquisition.

**Huron black heart**

Back in the day my one friend who also played these games used an Epic Squat (contradiction in terms lol) army and I used Orks or Marines. They had some great looking units and were pretty formidable.
I never played them in 40k but saw the models in Games Workshop. As a kid however I was always more drawn to the Marines which I think is still the usual route into the hobby for kids.
Lore wise I always thought their old empire was destroyed by the nids and they became what is now the Rattling snipers.
If they did bring them back I wouldn't complain, always room for more variety, even if they were to be a slightly comedic addition..

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Oh and 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' may account for all the nostalgic love for the Squats

**OgreChubbs**

Didnt they tyranids eat them up as snacks?

**Backfire**

OgreChubbs wrote:
Didnt they tyranids eat them up as snacks?

That was once canon, then it was retconned they never existed at all. However there has been tiny hints about them here and there (4th edition Ork codex, 5th edition Tyranid codex and so on) and in 7th edition BRB it is explicitly mentioned that they do exist and are not extinct.

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Sidstyler wrote:
The Squats kinda live on in the Demiurg, though, which are pretty much just space dwarves. I always thought it would be cool if GW brought them into 40k as a Tau auxiliary, but I guess that's not gonna happen.

They did, though only in BFG:

It is probably bit hard to envision how 'space dwarves' would fit to how Tau are supposed to fight on the ground. And GW seems to have no interest to develope Tau auxiliares anyway.

**cuda1179**

I wish GW would revisit the idea of Tau Auxiliaries though. The Vespid are horrible at the moment, but they have the potential to be great. In the Fluff it states that the female Vespid are substantially larger than the males (that we see on the battlefield).

Personally I'd like to see a female vespid unit, another Kroot unit, and a unit of Demiurge.