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I was talking to some friends the other day about a different way to sell plastic soldiers. .Right now if you want to build an army of , lets say for this example , marines you buy two tac squads , one box of devastators and a chaplain . Right now you would buy 3 boxes that cost about $40 each and blister for $15 equaling $135 for 25 marines and a chaplain. My idea was to change the basic way you build an army to something along the lines of a box of 10 bodies for $20 .Since if the box only contains generic torsos and legs it should be able to be mass produced quit easily since its the same thing 10000 times and should be cheaper to make. Then have a second blister with 10 weapons .It can be 10 boltgun or 10 plasma or 10 mixed it doesnt matter blister of 10 guns for $10-15. So to make the same 25 marines you would buy three boxes for $60 two boltgun blisters and one mixed weapon blister for $30-45 and a chaplain for $15. Giving you a total of 30 marines and a chaplain for $105-120.

If you were to change to this format that would reduce production costs since the only thing in the box would be something generic and could be pumped out quickly.Same thing could be done with eldar aspects . Have a basic body with legs like the current guardians and have a Fire Dragon upgrade blister with meltas and special heads . There could also be accessory blisters with stuff like glyphs ,Iconography ,Purity seals or whatever else is race specific which could be used as trophies of your conquests or bling for your own models.
let me know what you think about this .

That sounds needlessly complicated. Especially to somebody new to the hobby, they probably won't want to buy a box just to bring it home and realize it's just full of torsos and no arms or weapons. GW products, like most products, depend on having attractive packaging that really draws the eye. What's more exciting - the current boxart of a squad of Marines looking awesome, or 10 torsos swaying in the breeze?

The idea of Eldar aspects having a generic body sprue that gets modified with a special sprue per aspect is a cool idea though. GW could do that just fine with the current setup though.

I don't see how a sprue of bodies is any easier to cast than a sprue of bodies and guns.

To get new people interested that is what starter boxes are for. Have a stater box with 30-50 bodies with different weapon options and hq with some really cool looking box art and bam you just hooked a kid. If you have 1 box with some cool box art next to 2 boxes of more men and 10 upgrade blisters it would make starting a new army easier or changing your current setup easier.

I see what you are saying:

A generic run of prints, that can be sold separately... The problem is GW will never do this. Just look at the devastator sprue. You can buy a box of tac marines for it, and use all of the special weapons. It makes more sense for GW to sell you the lock-stock basic tac marines with the rest of the gear, because they can charge you for the rest of the gear... as far as I can tell, Defiance Games (formerly of wargames factory) intend buidling their things to be as interchangeable as possible.

I would prefer seeing a limited time starter kit thing though, walk into a store when a certain theme is on, and buy a customised starter kit... 4 or 5 boxes/blisters at 20% discount, but you have to follow the Force Organization chart. This could easilly be "protected" by requiring the person to also set up a GW membership account or w/e with the necessary ID....

This kind of sounds like the old RT miniatures.

For the most part (at least regarding metal miniatures) you had a metal body, and then generic arm sprues that fitted almost all the metal models (look at the RT orcs for the best examples, there are only about 10 arms between the entire range).

I can see your idea working, and personally I kind of like the idea, but again you are going to have to offer starter boxes for beginners.
It would be quite useful, as you could offer conversion parts as additional boxes (e.g. if we took orks as an example, you could offer extra arms/heads on other sprues to complement the standard shoota/slugga arms, perhaps with a wider variety of choppas etc.

poda_t wrote:
I would prefer seeing a limited time starter kit thing though, walk into a store when a certain theme is on, and buy a customised starter kit... 4 or 5 boxes/blisters at 20% discount, but you have to follow the Force Organization chart. This could easilly be "protected" by requiring the person to also set up a GW membership account or w/e with the necessary ID....

They used to do this in mail order. The old OLD WDs would have deals in the back where you could save a decent chunk of money if you bought that army, typically the armies would be the ones that were in the battle report in that issue, but still there was a good discount available, not any more though

I like the idea in general but not to actually replace the way its done now. It would be nice to have the chance to buy things in this way as I think the veteran gamers would love it and would create lots of possibilites. As for new gamer though, gotta keep it simple and not scare them off with something like that.

I've been thinking about this as well, only slightly different.

Instead of packaging each sprue separately (which increases packaging costs to design the box art), reorganize the sprues to make them more uniform.

For example, the Chaos sprue includes some body parts (legs, torso) and a bunch of chaos-y bits. The SM sprue has the same problem.

However, if you had one generic "Space Marine" sprue and separate chaos/loyalist sprues (and separate DA/BA/BT/UM/GK sprues) GW could cut down on the number of sprues necessary.

This is essentially the idea that the Chaos/Loyalist Rhino variants use.

How is having a generic sprue, a chaos upgrade sprue and a loyalist upgrade sprue in any way better than having a full chaos sprue and a full loyalist sprue?

lord_blackfang wrote:How is having a generic sprue, a chaos upgrade sprue and a loyalist upgrade sprue in any way better than having a full chaos sprue and a full loyalist sprue?

If the average box of 10 marines takes 2 sprues, then it is better for GW to produce 3 unique sprues, 1 generic and 2 specialist, rather than 4 unique.

They can sell the box for the same price, but save money on mould design and development.

edit: in short, it's cheaper to produce 2 identical sprues than 2 unique sprues.