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I think we understand at this point there are many people in the world not interested in painting a lot of models and want them their skirmish low model count games.

And thats cool.

We dont need the world to be 100% low model count skirmish games though. There are already so many to choose from. Even AOS can be low model count, and then there is warcry.

 catbarf wrote:

I think there's a sweet spot to unit size, though. Like this:

To me that's a perfectly fine formation and reads as a 'regiment', but it's only 12 models on 25mm bases. In the days of 4-models-per-rank you'd commonly see units of 12-20 depending on their eliteness.

It will never happen under GW, but I really like ASOIAF's strict limits on unit size. You buy the box, that's your unit size (usually 12). No more, no less. Want another tray of them? Buy another box and run it as a separate unit.

I think it could happen. I also agree that the game is more fun when you have lots of smaller units. It gives you more decision making and it looks better on the table. You also feel like you accomplished something when you finish a unit. I'm currently painting a block of 30 eternal guard and I honestly find it tedious. On the other hand, doing a unit of 5 cav units feels so much better.

It's not like you are buying fewer models, you are just organizing them in a way which makes the game more interesting.

On another note, I hope that they don't make the magic system like 40k and AoS. They made mortal wounds and now they don't bother thinking of anything original for spells beyond that. The old system felt like it had a bit more variety.

 Egyptian Space Zombie wrote:
I think it could happen. I also agree that the game is more fun when you have lots of smaller units. It gives you more decision making and it looks better on the table. You also feel like you accomplished something when you finish a unit. I'm currently painting a block of 30 eternal guard and I honestly find it tedious. On the other hand, doing a unit of 5 cav units feels so much better.

It's not like you are buying fewer models, you are just organizing them in a way which makes the game more interesting.

On another note, I hope that they don't make the magic system like 40k and AoS. They made mortal wounds and now they don't bother thinking of anything original for spells beyond that. The old system felt like it had a bit more variety.

Definitely agreed on a larger number of smaller units being better, with perhaps a slightly larger regiment to hold the centre in armies who tactically suit it (Dwarfs, for example).

Makes for much more dynamic games with more move/countermove. A fantasy battle should be won in the movement phase, as that is the phase which is most in the control of the players.

The movement phase is exactly what I miss most about classic warhammer. Maneuver phase that mattered, not just getting to charge on turn 1 or teleport into combat without positioning.

There is nothing better than getting a beautifully placed flank with a Cavalry charge and r&f does it well.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Yeah your group and area will dictate your own experience for sure.

Our casual events always matched tournament standard though - and that wasn't anything I was after it was what the community expected (and some would get VERY cranky if you deviated form that standard).

Sounds like a terrible community

I find it interesting you say that given there was no standard size among my friends, I'd usually rock up with 1500pts, but have lists written up at 1000 and 750, some guys went for 1250 for some reason. So I tried to write my lists in such a way that I could get myself to those points values easily. Hell, back when Warhammer Skirmish was a thing I'd occasionally catch up with mates for sub-500pt battles.

But yeah, if people *only* play 2000+pts it would be a nightmare trying to get new players into the game.

"So, just buy a few hundred dollars of models, spend a few hundred hours painting them, then you can come back and play a game with us!"

One hope I have for NewHammer is they make the game scale well to smaller battles.

Thats how it is here, I only ever see people playing 2000pts basically. Theres a few grogs who will always play 3000 pts because they have large old collections of minis and want to use them, but other than that I basically never see people play anything other than 2k

 Strg Alt wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Thats not a "noob" issue, thats a "preference" issue. There are some people who prefer skirmish games, there are others who prefer massed battle games, there are others who like both equally, and sometimes people change (most of my old WHFB play group now only play skirmish game exclusively - despite having previously painted hundreds of minis for WHFB they will now turn their noses up at any game which requires them to paint more than a dozen minis. It happens).

Your problem wasn't "noobs" not wanting to paint tons of models, your problem was the people you were trying to market the game to weren't interested in playing a massed battle game.

Please send me your noobs who desperately want to play R&F once Covid is over. This must be a special breed indeed. Never seen such creatures in my environment.

I'll let you know if I'm ever visiting Germany

But I can sympathize with you as locally Im encountering fewer and fewer people who want to play mass battle games. Skirmish scale and small battle games have become really popular as of late and thats mostly what people are interested in. That being the case we did manage to start up a good sized community for Conquest which is a massed battle rank and file game. We've also started up a small but growing microhammer community (i.e. 6th/7th ed WHFB, but using 10mm scale 3d printed and metal/resin minis.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Strg Alt wrote:
Funnily one important aspect has so far been neglected in this discussion: Price.

How expensive are ten Witch Elves again? Oh, only 40 Euros?! That's quite a bargain when you consider that you need a lot of them to fill up your regiments. However lets really milk our customers this time. That will mean we are charging 60 Euros for five Witch Elves. As compensation we provide bigger tactical stones from which these damsels are jumping from. The message between the lines is that you need cojones the size of rocks to enter this new game...

Thats not fair, I *did* mention price being the issue previously.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:
The movement phase is exactly what I miss most about classic warhammer. Maneuver phase that mattered, not just getting to charge on turn 1 or teleport into combat without positioning.

You say that, but towards the end of the games lifetime my recollection of the typical game was basically a table with two armies lined up end-to-end with maybe 2 " in between units. How much maneuvering could you really do when your only real option was to move forward or backward because other units and terrain made it impossible to do anything else?

On a 6 or 8x4 table, we didn't have that issue. We also only played 2000 points.

 catbarf wrote:


I think there's a sweet spot to unit size, though. Like this:



To me that's a perfectly fine formation and reads as a 'regiment', but it's only 12 models on 25mm bases. In the days of 4-models-per-rank you'd commonly see units of 12-20 depending on their eliteness.

Then the frontage requirement became 5 and you started seeing 15 as the bare minimum, 20 more common, and often 5x5 blocks of 25. Then the deathball tactics promoted units of 30 or even 40.

Gameplay aside, from a purely aesthetic/collecting/painting perspective I feel I got more value out of two units of 5x4 than one giant unit of 8x5. Less of the unit is filler stuck in the middle, and functionally I have two units instead of one.

YMMV, but I never particularly felt like I needed enormous units to get that rank-and-flank feel. A standard unit size of 4x4 would be just fine with me.

I can't exalt your post enough. I wholeheartedly agree
This is precisely why I'm trying to get my Oldhammer friends to switch from 8th to 6th.

You can't include two characters in a 4x4 regiment with full command group. Therefore I propose five models to be the optimal unit front rank length.

In 6th though there weren't a lot of 12 man regiments running around. That was 5th.

6th edition the common size for infantry was 20 (5 x 4) and 24 (6 x 4). (at least thats how it was in tournaments)

There were people that ran them smaller but at least in the tournament world back then that was not common because those units needed the bodies to absorb damage and still be effective.

I'd also like them to stop the death star nonsense and stop being able to cram units full of characters. Conquest does a great job with that. You can only have one character in a unit.

 Strg Alt wrote:
You can't include two characters in a 4x4 regiment with full command group. Therefore I propose five models to be the optimal unit front rank length.

Sir. Who says your characters will even fit in a ranked unit?

Think of the swirls.

 KidCthulhu wrote:

 catbarf wrote:


I think there's a sweet spot to unit size, though. Like this:



To me that's a perfectly fine formation and reads as a 'regiment', but it's only 12 models on 25mm bases. In the days of 4-models-per-rank you'd commonly see units of 12-20 depending on their eliteness.

Then the frontage requirement became 5 and you started seeing 15 as the bare minimum, 20 more common, and often 5x5 blocks of 25. Then the deathball tactics promoted units of 30 or even 40.

Gameplay aside, from a purely aesthetic/collecting/painting perspective I feel I got more value out of two units of 5x4 than one giant unit of 8x5. Less of the unit is filler stuck in the middle, and functionally I have two units instead of one.

YMMV, but I never particularly felt like I needed enormous units to get that rank-and-flank feel. A standard unit size of 4x4 would be just fine with me.

I can't exalt your post enough. I wholeheartedly agree
This is precisely why I'm trying to get my Oldhammer friends to switch from 8th to 6th.

Yep, this is one of the main reasons 8th was so atrocious and why it's baffling to me that people tried to continue playing it or adapting it's core rules for new games.

8th games looked horrible on the table and were horrible to play.

 Arbitrator wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

I think there's a sweet spot to unit size, though. Like this:

To me that's a perfectly fine formation and reads as a 'regiment', but it's only 12 models on 25mm bases. In the days of 4-models-per-rank you'd commonly see units of 12-20 depending on their eliteness.

It will never happen under GW, but I really like ASOIAF's strict limits on unit size. You buy the box, that's your unit size (usually 12). No more, no less. Want another tray of them? Buy another box and run it as a separate unit.

I like how AoS 3.0 is doing it, where a box is a unit and you can run a certain number of "reinforced" doublesized units depending on game size. If GW could balance the rules to the box contents and the box contents to the rules, it would be amazing. Not so sure they can, but it would be amazing

 Strg Alt wrote:
I think some people here forgot what happened when GW killed WHFB. They not only removed the setting but insulted it's loyal player base.

What kind of insults? Players of legacy armies were burdened with silly special army rules in AoS. So when you wanted to benefit from them you had to behave like a fool. In addition to that the death of the Old World was accompanied by snide articles in White Dwarf and the local GW employee tried to sell AoS to new customers by spouting the official doctrine which sounded like this:

"The Old World was on the brink of destruction for so many years that it was ludicrous to stay. So it is good for AoS to step in and bring something new to the table."

Honestly, calling those rules 'insulting' is being more than a little over-sensitive. Sure, those rules were stupid, but they were clearly intended as nothing more than a bit of light-hearted fun. Some people loved them. A lot didn't... but from discussions at the time, most people just chose to ignore them rather than taking them as a personal insult.

2. GW is incapable to write good rules. You want evidence? Check out the needless reprints of rules in all those Necromunda source books. And the most recent rules fail is the handling of weapon ranges in the new Kill Team. Instead of printing Range of X inches like it is handled in each sane games company they printed something along the lines of 2 circles, triangles, squares and other geometric shapes. Total stupid gibberish! Who gave the green light for that? LMAO!

If well-written rules were a serious requirement for a miniature game to succeed, GW wouldn't have survived the '90s.

As much as people complain about their current publications, the juggernaut just keeps chugging along. So clearly there's a reasonable sized customer base out there who just want to play a game, and don't particularly care that the rules aren't perfect.

4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

They've already said it's going to be the same scale and using the same bases. They'll make money off vets the same way they always did. At the very least, they'll have new rulebooks to sell to people, and there will no doubt be hideously expensive 'collector's edition' boxes to sell out of in five minutes on release day.

If GW's rules and how they handled the introduction of AOS made WFB feel disrespected that's really GW's problem. It contributed to the botched launch in a real way. They really mishandled all that stuff back then.

auticus wrote:In 6th though there weren't a lot of 12 man regiments running around. That was 5th.

6th edition the common size for infantry was 20 (5 x 4) and 24 (6 x 4). (at least thats how it was in tournaments)

There were people that ran them smaller but at least in the tournament world back then that was not common because those units needed the bodies to absorb damage and still be effective.

I'd also like them to stop the death star nonsense and stop being able to cram units full of characters. Conquest does a great job with that. You can only have one character in a unit.

12 man Chaos Warrior units (usually back up by 20 man marauders admittedly) were fairly common where I was playing, at least among those not playing gimmicky lists like all Knight or all Chariot core, but yeah that was about it. 16-20 was much more common.

insaniak wrote:

4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

They've already said it's going to be the same scale and using the same bases. They'll make money off vets the same way they always did. At the very least, they'll have new rulebooks to sell to people, and there will no doubt be hideously expensive 'collector's edition' boxes to sell out of in five minutes on release day.

Imo Necromunda is probably the template here:

Initial get you by rules to cover the old factions and get people invested again, but then steadily release new things they didn’t have before with awesome new models and a bit of power creep to get people buying more.

And then of course the style and the scale don’t match up properly so before you know it you’ve got a whole new army…

 Strg Alt wrote:
I
4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

it seems a bit absurd to say it's "an outright lie" when a significant portion of several of AoS factions that are currently purchasable and usable are still made up of those same old WHFB miniatures even several years after the release of AoS.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
I
4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

it seems a bit absurd to say it's "an outright lie" when a significant portion of several of AoS factions that are currently purchasable and usable are still made up of those same old WHFB miniatures even several years after the release of AoS.

How is my Khemri army faring in AoS?

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
I
4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

it seems a bit absurd to say it's "an outright lie" when a significant portion of several of AoS factions that are currently purchasable and usable are still made up of those same old WHFB miniatures even several years after the release of AoS.

How is my Khemri army faring in AoS?

You do realise you're just supporting his comment right?
Mentlegen never said "all" he said "significant portion". So yes there ARE armies that were lost and models that were lost. It doesn't diminish the fact that a lot of current AoS armies are still using Old World models. Heck Seraphon and Skaven are huge forces and almost entirely Old World models.

 Strg Alt wrote:

How is my Khemri army faring in AoS?

What does that have to do with whether or not it will be usable in TOW?

You mean Skeletors army of grinning clowns? Ossidark Bonerippers?

I mean a good chunk of the Tomb Kings army would be usable through Soul Blight. The only units I'm really struggling with are Ushabti, Warsphinxes, and archers.

 Strg Alt wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
I
4. It's an outright marketing lie to claim that vets can play TOW with their old armies. If that was the case then GW would not make any money. No, they intend to screw the player base in some way or another. How do I know? Well, take a look how GW changed "Space Marine" (early Epic) when Epic arrived. It wasn't just an edition change but a vastly different game.

it seems a bit absurd to say it's "an outright lie" when a significant portion of several of AoS factions that are currently purchasable and usable are still made up of those same old WHFB miniatures even several years after the release of AoS.

How is my Khemri army faring in AoS?

What does that have to do with either what you said or what I said? You claimed it was a "lie" and they wouldn't want people to use old models...when a significant amount of AoS is currently made up of those very same old miniatures that were part of WHFB. If you wanted to start something like a Skaven or Lizardmen army using the old WHFB miniatures in preparation for TOW you could do so right now without too much difficulty, those old miniatures are still available officially.

Obviously not the case for all of it, but the point is "using old miniatures" does not necessarily mean "GW makes no money" like you imply.

And there's also the obvious part that a lot of those same WHFB miniatures are usable in AoS, so if you had something like a Skaven army already and wanted to start AoS...it's the exact same situation you're saying here makes this for TOW a "lie".

 Strg Alt wrote:
You can't include two characters in a 4x4 regiment with full command group. Therefore I propose five models to be the optimal unit front rank length.

I actually like 5 across because you have a command group with a soldier on either end.
If it's 4 across it's not even.

I really don't get the desire for smaller games and units.

8th was what armies should look like. Massive battles that lasted hours. It's what I always wanted Fantasy to be.

I would often play 18000 point battles with 3 huge armies on each side. Those were the best games of my life. It's what i've always wanted out of a game.

Theres so many small skirmish games out there, I want at least 1 where i can put down just massive amounts of stuff because thats how the game was intended to function.

To me 8th was the most cinematic and eventful game out there.

I really don't get the desire for smaller games and units.

Current modern game design is about two very important factors:

* speed of game. New games have a goal of their standard being playable in 60-90 minutes. This is what the majority of the playerbase wants in a lot of marketing (putting my gamedev hat on where I have actually participated in said surveys for marketing on game projects I have been a part of)

* ease of collecting - transportation. Players want to pack their army up in a little bag and carry it to the game store easily. They also largely dont want to dedicate whole rooms in their living space to wargaming.

The smaller the better. The smaller the size of units - theoretically the faster the game and the easier it is to transport/store. Also the less there is to paint as painting is to many people a huge chore that they hate.

I personally love bigger games but since 2010 or so getting people to want to play huge games has become more difficult by the passing year.

Besides, if it's the Old World, the appropriate army is Undead, not the weirdly cut up vampire counts and tomb kings.

chaos0xomega wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Yeah your group and area will dictate your own experience for sure.

Our casual events always matched tournament standard though - and that wasn't anything I was after it was what the community expected (and some would get VERY cranky if you deviated form that standard).

Sounds like a terrible community

I find it interesting you say that given there was no standard size among my friends, I'd usually rock up with 1500pts, but have lists written up at 1000 and 750, some guys went for 1250 for some reason. So I tried to write my lists in such a way that I could get myself to those points values easily. Hell, back when Warhammer Skirmish was a thing I'd occasionally catch up with mates for sub-500pt battles.

But yeah, if people *only* play 2000+pts it would be a nightmare trying to get new players into the game.

"So, just buy a few hundred dollars of models, spend a few hundred hours painting them, then you can come back and play a game with us!"

One hope I have for NewHammer is they make the game scale well to smaller battles.

Thats how it is here, I only ever see people playing 2000pts basically. Theres a few grogs who will always play 3000 pts because they have large old collections of minis and want to use them, but other than that I basically never see people play anything other than 2k

I'd be curious to see a survey of how prevalent it was to only play 2000+pt games. If my group was the odd one out then I think that explains why WHFB died, it was too much work to build an army big enough to find an opponent

If that was the case, GW really need to work on promoting the idea and the rules such that you don't need to always play large games, and that a battalion box is a viable starter force.

I thought Warhammer Skirmish was a great idea (that is, the rule set called "Skirmish", not playing with loose formations) because it let you play with as little as a few hundred points and meant a new player could start gaming almost immediately.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
I really don't get the desire for smaller games and units.

8th was what armies should look like. Massive battles that lasted hours. It's what I always wanted Fantasy to be.

I would often play 18000 point battles with 3 huge armies on each side. Those were the best games of my life. It's what i've always wanted out of a game.

Theres so many small skirmish games out there, I want at least 1 where i can put down just massive amounts of stuff because thats how the game was intended to function.

To me 8th was the most cinematic and eventful game out there.

The game needs to scale well to allow new people to join, and ya know, sometimes you just want to play a quickie rather than a massive battle.

It's not like small games mean it has to be loose formations, ASOIF works with a few regiments of 12 models (though admittedly I don't love the rules, I think the army sizes work okay).

Letting veterans come back and run their old armies by buying no new miniatures is a completely valid strategy. For one they are still buying the book, and more importantly they are members of the community that new players can learn from/play with. A large playerbase is the foundation of GWs market dominance because popularity feeds on itself.

Secondly, where are these mythical players who own a full army and just stop buying miniatures? Every wargamer I have ever met continues to purchase minis even if they stick to just one army in the first place (already a rarity). It is absurd to suggest that allowing veterans to play with their old miniatures will not generate sales. Heck, just look at how well resculpts of old units do. My flgs can't even get zombies or blood knights in stock and skeletons aren't far behind.