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40K is like Democracy..... the worst system in the world.... except for all the others.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Agree to disagree I suppose. I can't help but feel like managing a product has something to do with the design of that product.

Design is not Game Design. You don't need to know a gak about balancing and game mechanics to design a product. Try to do that with game design. The product is awesome the game is aweful. If you don't understand me, you might never played a non GW game for longer, I suppose.

I see that very often with GW-ONLY fanatics. Don't criticize the god emperor and his holy system.

All I try to say is that GW stands in its own way. They could be so much greater if they would change something about their methods, because there are major flaws. "Perfect balancing is impossible!" that is an ideology very typical for GW-Fanatics... and it's clearly wrong.

I let you have your opinion, of course... but it's wrong.

I suppose we'll see. Next Tuesday I'm planning on launching my Titanomachina game on Kickstarter. While I've played quite a bit of Warhammer it's mainly informed by my experiences with indie games like Tactical Assault's Combat Cards and Pulp Alley, and boardgames like Santorini and Carcassonne. It's fantastically well balanced, and I'm hoping it takes off.

Lord Royal wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
Agree to disagree I suppose. I can't help but feel like managing a product has something to do with the design of that product.

Design is not Game Design. You don't need to know a gak about balancing and game mechanics to design a product. Try to do that with game design. The product is awesome the game is aweful. If you don't understand me, you might never played a non GW game for longer, I suppose.

I see that very often with GW-ONLY fanatics. Don't criticize the god emperor and his holy system.

All I try to say is that GW stands in its own way. They could be so much greater if they would change something about their methods, because there are major flaws. "Perfect balancing is impossible!" that is an ideology very typical for GW-Fanatics... and it's clearly wrong.

I let you have your opinion, of course... but it's wrong.

You can only balance so much, too. Monopoly is only so popular because it's been around for so long, and it's only balanced at the start. Kind of the point of the game, anyways. Only the banks win with the way it's designed.

There are games that have near to perfect balancing even in Tabletop Miniature Games. They have just much more testing than GW. Balancing is a thing that you can figure out by doing many many playtests. GWs semi balancing is so unbalanced because they don't do many tests. I can remember a statement by Tom Kirby: "We are Games Workshop. We don't do market research, we don't need to talk to our community and we don't do playtests as we are a miniatures producer not a game developer."
For Tzeentch's Sake that's a thing of the past. But Kirby (I'm sure his face was inspiration for some artworks of Horus) did quite some damage to the game... Note that there's a difference between the game and the product. The product is good but the game tends to be broken.

And that mentioned arguement of the non-existence of perfect balancing often comes if I state that GWs balancing is broken af and that it's their and only their fault.

Lord Royal wrote:
There are games that have near to perfect balancing even in Tabletop Miniature Games.

I'm genuinely curious what these are?

 Easy E wrote:

Lord Royal wrote:
There are games that have near to perfect balancing even in Tabletop Miniature Games.

I'm genuinely curious what these are?

Dark Age for example... here's why:
the point cost balancing of the models is pretty good, but the VP system makes it near to perfect. Before every game you have to pick your 12 card mission card deck out of 30 unique missions (15 missions with kill components and 15 that don't involve killing), that you can fit onto your warband. Every model can win you a game by giving every model a secondary purpose. This way there are no unwinnable matchups no matter what your list looks like. Dark Age is definetely worth a look, as the rules are completely free.

Too sad that CoolMiniOrNot apparantly killed it. There's no official announcement though. All models seem to be OOP, but the rules like the balancing were gourmet... never played a better designed miniature game. And I'm really sad that it won't be supported anymore, but Dark Age was a good example for how important intense playtesting is.
Further they patched every model at least once a year and were tightly connected to their community.

For all that CMON were doing right with Dark Age, they produce a lot of stuff and it's possible Dark Age wasn't profitable enough. Were any of the models ever produced in plastic?

Nope. Restic though.
But does CMON has any games with plastic minis?
They're doing one-and-done games I think that's the reason why they took it out of their catalogue. Kings of War seems to be killed, too.
It seems more that CMON kills everything that isn't a boxed game to minimize their effort. Wargames are generally less profitable in comparison.

if useing dice to generate rolls, you probably want to consider D12 's at minimum for granuality in rules/ profiles - it can give you a wider spread of results and the dice also roll quite well.

alternatively a similar setup to gloomhaven also seems to work very nicely.

Lord Royal wrote:
Nope. Restic though.
But does CMON has any games with plastic minis?
They're doing one-and-done games I think that's the reason why they took it out of their catalogue. Kings of War seems to be killed, too.
It seems more that CMON kills everything that isn't a boxed game to minimize their effort. Wargames are generally less profitable in comparison.

That makes sense. Boardgames are much more accessible and profitable than miniature wargames, and there's a huge choke-point between boutique resin and mass-market plastic. Monsterpocalypse suprised me by making the monsters in resin; presumably because you get one per box.

Plastic is very expensive to produce actually. A sprue mould for plastic is around 50-60k$ as it isn't just a mould and more a little machine. Resin moulds are made of silicone but have to be replaced after a few hundred castings. That's why you only see high detail plastic minis in wildly popular games (there are exceptions though). Resin is the more expensive material but the moulds cost almost nothing in comparison.

Depends on the plastic, I suppose. What do you suppose it cost, per copy, to produce the plastics in the game Dwar7s Winter?

Mhm... idk but it looks very much like a restic unicast. it's definetely not a high detail cast.

And nope it doesn't depend on the plastic. It's the casting method that is expensive (or not). GWs plastic minis are casted through vacuum casting (don't know the actual english word for it). You know those cylinders in the sprue's frame? For each of those cylinders a vacuum tube is attached to the mould and those are the expensive part in a high detail vacuum mould, I suppose. But I never did a cast myself... just read and heard about it by insiders... so I really can't give detailed information about casting prices.

They're vinyl models (vinyl-100, essentially credit/bank card material). I've been quoted ~$8,000USD to have molds cut for a similar product. They're not going to compare to GW models, but they stack up pretty well against Super Dungeon Explore and more board-game oriented products.

 Nurglitch wrote:
They're vinyl models (vinyl-100, essentially credit/bank card material). I've been quoted ~$8,000USD to have molds cut for a similar product. They're not going to compare to GW models, but they stack up pretty well against Super Dungeon Explore and more board-game oriented products.

Sure, but I wrote about high detailed models. Moulds for less detailed models are cheaper, of course. And Unicasts (One model = one piece) are generally cheaper in comparison to multi part models. As a rule of thumb you can say: The more parts a model has and the more details you want to have, the more money you have to pay for the mould. And Resin is cheaper for a small release while plastic is more profitable for a big one. I don't know much about vynil though, as it's rarely used on high detailed models (at least as far as I know). As I said, I'm no expert. I just heard some things from insiders.

Lord Royal wrote:
Mhm... idk but it looks very much like a restic unicast. it's definetely not a high detail cast.

And nope it doesn't depend on the plastic. It's the casting method that is expensive (or not). GWs plastic minis are casted through vacuum casting (don't know the actual english word for it). You know those cylinders in the sprue's frame? For each of those cylinders a vacuum tube is attached to the mould and those are the expensive part in a high detail vacuum mould, I suppose. But I never did a cast myself... just read and heard about it by insiders... so I really can't give detailed information about casting prices.

Sorry, but this is all kinds of wrong, and not at all how those models are produced.

GW uses plastic injection to produce their plastic kits. This works by having a steel mold clamped between hydraulic plates, then melted plastic forced into the mold via pressure (created by a screw actually pushing the molten plastic into the mold). If you look at the sprues you will see injection points as well as other pegs, which are used as push-points for popping out the sprue from the mold.

Also, molds themselves do not run 50-60k, more in the range of 8-15k. A given plastic injection machine does run 60k and up (and up, some of the really fancy ones used by Bandai (and, I think GW have adopted some of these too) are well over 100k), but you don't need a separate machine for every sprue, just a different mold.

Price per sprue is "pennies" typically, but there is definitely significant investment up front in the mold costs, plus there's labor and machine time to consider (after all, a given machine can only do copies of one mold at a time, and they usually do those in runs of several thousand sprues at a given timeslot).

Resin casting (such as Finecast, Forgeworld, other minis companies) do use a vacuum chamber, but this is more of a way to remove air bubbles from resin which has been poured into molds, then placed in the vacuum chamber to pull out air bubbles. But a completely different process than plastic injection.

(Also, FWIW, the PVC "restics" that are used by CMON and some others are also injection, but they can use aluminum rather than steel molds because the PVC does not require as high a temperature and has a less viscous (thus, more flowable) liquid state, so also doesn't require presses with as much hydraulic pressure. Not sure on the price per sprue, but likely still very low. The lower initial investment point is why many smaller companies go with the restic/PVC over High Impact Polystyrene (GW and classic model cars, planes).

In terms of driving down costs, apparently Master Unit Dies are replacing aluminium moulds. It's one of the things I heard while shopping around for a casting company: https://www.dme.net/node/486

More to the point, when designing wargames you need to think about what you're going to sell and why. There's plenty of chit-based wargames out there being sold as boardgames, for example, and it's quite a niche. Likewise so-called 'block-games,' a type of wargame where players use blocks to conceal information from each other, have some brisk trade beyond what I personally would have expected. Hammer of the Scots, for example. I'm pretty sure these sorts of games skew towards the game-play end of the wargaming 'games vs widgets' spectrum. Warhammer would be the extreme end of the widgets spectrum as plenty of people that don't play the game buy the models to build and paint them. I don't think anyone is buying a board game just to own the chits...

That said, X-Wing is an interesting example of miniatures and chits, but between the property (Star Wars), the publisher (Fantasy Flight Games), and the business model (models packed with chits and cards) they seem to have hit a spot where they have so much fiddly stuff in the game that they can actually sell.

Something different and back to the topic...

If you managed the basics and continue with faction design, you should have a core mechanic in mind. Ask yourself the question: How do those dudes fight/win the game? Imagine some mechanic(s) that promises fun and interesting gameplay, that fit the fluff of your faction... or go the other way around, create some freaky mechanic have some games and then put a fitting fluff ontop. If you get creative you can give every faction a very different feeling. When your factions grow you can add more mechanics and units with different playstyles, of course. But try to keep different playstyles inside a single faction supporting each other. This way you can make the listbuilding easier and get closer towards a "take whatever you like" solution.

Don't you know this problem: "I love model XY, but its rules just don't work with the rest of my army."
This is how you avoid that.

Adding another 2 cents:

Have the option to pick secret objectives. It's a simple mechanic that forces opponent's to change/evolve their tactics during a game. That gives you more variety in gameplay terms and avoids your game from getting boring. It also adds an element of suspense and surprise. Generally having restricted information that is not visable for every player (ie. hand cards, concealed minis and the like) always give some spice into your game soup.