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I'm happy and sad with September's update. The good news - Eldar have some new units and finecast cheaper Wraithguard are here. New Eldar conversion sets are here and I am waiting for new units to give us a much needed boost. The bad news - Marines have yet more units. I think that it is unfair so much attention is being put on Crons, SM and Orks and there are pretty much no new nid, eldar and IG models. I wanted to get your thoughts on this. Is the Warhammer 40k Universe biased to some armies?

Yup, especially when those armies make up 60% of your profit margin

Yeah. I think GW NEED to open their eyes and see Marines- Best weapons (well definitely not the worst) tough, strong good saves, good ws and bs, tanks vehicles and any kind of specialist unit. Eldar - squishy mushy, not the greatest weapons and not that great with assaults but Eldar are cheap!

Marines sell better than any other range GW has, which is why they get a disproportionate amount of attention. It might be a self-perpetuating cycle, but GW's not going to fix what isn't broken for them. There's nothing unfair about it, it's just business. Necrons are getting attention since they needed it for an incredibly long time, and Orks haven't gotten anything since the plastic Deff Dread and Killa Kan kits a few years back. All the Eldar "new" stuff is just old metal/plastic hybrid kits turned into Finecast upgrade kits. New Eldar stuff will happen, probably within a year or so.

SRM is correct, and it may not be good, but its buisness to them.
When something makes up a large % of your proffit, you will keep making things to keep them interesting.

If you use a unit and find its amazing, you would start to take more of them right?

Cheap WG are nice though, just a shame they still look as tacky as ever and now have holes in them too and droopy guns :(

But I suppose making marines good in the first place would have lead to them being clearly the best army which just makes people buy marines and not learn good tactics about playing the game. You need to be versatile to truly master the game though.

themaskedslayer wrote:
But I suppose making marines good in the first place would have lead to them being clearly the best army which just makes people buy marines and not learn good tactics about playing the game. You need to be versatile to truly master the game though.

You can learn great tactics playing as Marines. Just because they're easy to understand and fairly forgiving doesn't mean that using them makes you a bad player, or one who isn't versatile. They're also hardly the best army; vanilla Space Marines have been the middle of the road codex since 3rd edition and probably earlier.

They're "easier" to play, cheaper to start up, and have more variety than any other type of force (you can make an army built around pretty much playstyle you choose.) Of course they're the best selling models. It also doesn't hurt that if they want to update a codex, only a few models need to be released, instead of a whole line like with other factions.

The one thing that does suck though is that the vanilla SM codex appears to have no purpose now. Why play regular marines when you can play slightly cheaper, drastically better marines that have crazy abilities? Which is sad, because it makes the one space marine codex that should be adding variety to the game, and makes it almost extinct. It doesn't excel at anything either as far as I can tell, and that means that your average player will just pick the codex that fits what he's going towards over the vanilla one.

As for the model updates, aside from plastic stormtroopers, the hydra, and a few artillery variants, most of our main units have kits. We're pretty well off compared to other lines. Orks haven't gotten anything new besides the dakkajet as far as i'm aware, and i'm pretty sure eldar is one of the next ones in line after dark angels, alongside tau. Also, didn't nids get an awesome new tervigon kit?

One big reason I think people have missed so far is that making Marine parts is also fairly cheap, in the words all meanings. Low creative effort involved, easy to sell, pretty low cost production (fewer small parts that needs extra attention), and so on.
I've some of dakka's heavier names time and again explain that Marine production doesn't really take up so much time as people would think. It's sort of like pop music - there's going to be people buying it even if it's crap as long as it's marketed and labled right.