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7th edition Daemons sold me Warmachine. I never stopped playing but I did stop buying. Basically model price doubled and went beyond what I felt was a reasonable price point. At that point I purchased most of my models second hand and on ebay or used third party models. This massively decreased sales but didn't decrease players. I wanted to buy a new Empire army and didn't purely on price. The other thing that happened was that the old world was less trademarkable and so that caused GW to leave generic fantasy for AOS .

By "traditional historical wargaming" I mean "you have a 12x6 table in a dedicated game room with fully modeled terrain and thousands of painted miniatures." I do not have that set up myself, but I mooch off of about half a dozen people who do. My own historical miniature collection is much more modest -- an 18mm Napoleonic Bavarian army, a 15mm Early Byzantine Army, a 25mm German paratrooper platoon. *That* kind of historical gaming is, and always has been, a cheaper investment than Warhammer, because it is limited to only the miniatures. The "traditional historical wargaming" spread with its vast array of miniatures, terrain, and tablespace is much more of a luxury.

As for people being discouraged from playing WHFB by the cost I'm not disputing that it happened, but I do question the logic of it. The cost of WHFB 8th simply was not greater than AOS or 40K, and plenty of people play those games today. Plenty of people (rightly) complain about the cost of those games, but the high cost isn't killing them off. There must have been a change in perception over the past decade about the relative cost or value of the games.

don't think the issue was the cost as such, but the cost of entry.

40k is playable with a few squads of models, a couple of characters and maybe a tank - and you can start with less than 20 models and critically still have a decent game

for WHFB you typically needed quite a bit more before the game worked, yes you could drop magic (as that really didn't scale down), agree no silly characters and play it smaller - but you still were typically going to need a few more boxes of models before you could get going

and when 8th brought in "hordes" you ended up with battles that looked impressive but when the alternative to painting maybe 100+ models to start off was painting 20 - or even just buying and assembling far less I think that was the problem

saw very few new players in 8th, existing players don't buy enough models, I suspect 7th was failing and 8th was a gasp to get existing players buying more

the fact the blew it all up and started again tends to suggest that whatever we think of the game as a game, it wasn't profitable enough

basically the barrier to entry compared to other games just got too high, could be the best set or rules in the world but was just too much to get into as a new player

what 8th needed was a skirmish system, using the same models, on the same bases, alongside it - so you could get a playable game with a box of troops and a character (maybe the leader from the box) so you had a way to get a game quickly and then work up

Appearance of scale had a lot to do with it as well. I honestly think that people were discouraged sitting down to paint 50 models in one sitting as opposed to 10 models per sitting. That's why you have the smaller unit armies tend to pop up faster than anything else. You get more sense of accomplishment when you knock out 10 dudes and think you've knocked down your pile of shame that much more. Even if you wind up with the same total models overall, what size of slice you choose to cut off effects perception.




EDIT: Talk to Text put skill instead of scale.

Tyel wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Whilest the later is true, the problem was due to balance you were intenciviced to actually buy some units to have a decent working army, the type of army that actually is fun to play because it doesn't just fold. Even if you weren't full on comp, you still required for many armies such a big block of elites or similar expensive models.

In the german sphere we called f.e. Zweihänder Goldhänder due to price, because how else than them being made out of best GW gold would justify their absurd price for points. And an Imperium army kinda required a big block of them as a center atleast 50 at that. And it wasn't an exception.

So if you wanted to build a competent (not competitve but not memey list) things still got expensive fast, which lead with the often high points for "normal" matches to WHFB being a significantly more expensive game than 40k.

New prospective Empire players being told they should start with say 4 boxes of Halberdiers to have one unit was unsurprisingly not attractive - and an outright crazy proposition versus "here's a box of tactical marines, have fun."

I feel its worth saying that you can play 8th with smaller units - but once your meta has people running 50 Grave Guard/White Lions, 100 Skaven Slaves etc, it felt like you had to join them to have a chance.

Which I think is an often unmentioned reason why lots of people bounced off 8th edition. A reasonable number of people had Cavalry-focused armies that were tailored to 6th and 7th edition. They weren't "collections" put together by semi-randomly buying this unit and that unit. When it became clear this sort of force was much worse in 8th, and it was clear you'd need to buy "50 Great-weapon infantry" to compete, the reaction from several was just "nah, this edition sucks, I'm out".

This was coupled with GW's glacial release cycle and complete indifference to imbalance. Its not like late 7th was an especially healthy time - with Daemons, VC and Dark Elves. Admittedly this wasn't anything new, but I think it just wasn't credible by the 2010s. Things like Warmahordes and X-Wing ripped through communities which could do something new rather than hope GW might give them a new army book in 5-10 years time.

Add to that, for even inexpensive armies, like the ogres or Chaos warriors, when you are told you require x ammount of chosen (gw only) or Ironguts (also gw only mailorder) at the time, .... yeah.. no.

Hell, half the time we couldn't even locally get chaos knights.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Saber wrote:
By "traditional historical wargaming" I mean "you have a 12x6 table in a dedicated game room with fully modeled terrain and thousands of painted miniatures." I do not have that set up myself, but I mooch off of about half a dozen people who do. My own historical miniature collection is much more modest -- an 18mm Napoleonic Bavarian army, a 15mm Early Byzantine Army, a 25mm German paratrooper platoon. *That* kind of historical gaming is, and always has been, a cheaper investment than Warhammer, because it is limited to only the miniatures. The "traditional historical wargaming" spread with its vast array of miniatures, terrain, and tablespace is much more of a luxury.

As for people being discouraged from playing WHFB by the cost I'm not disputing that it happened, but I do question the logic of it. The cost of WHFB 8th simply was not greater than AOS or 40K, and plenty of people play those games today. Plenty of people (rightly) complain about the cost of those games, but the high cost isn't killing them off. There must have been a change in perception over the past decade about the relative cost or value of the games.

Ironically, if i were now to start an empire army, i have quite a few decent alternatives compared to GW that would make it far more palpable to afford such an army and at 32 mm that is.

In hindsight it's very odd they never bothered to bring in a WFB skirmish game/system to lure new players into the lore etc.

They did it with AoS of course but they also did OTHER things in the name of business with that too.

They had Mordheim, Regiments of Renown *and* Skirmish (which weirdly wasn't actually a skirmish game as we'd know it)

As someone who only ever played in 8th, I've never heard of those latter two and the former is completely it's own thing as opposed to WFB-armies-but-skirmish, isn't it?

Warhammer had its skirmish games the same way as 40k had Kill Team by that time, either rules in the back of the core book or a booklet/WD article but not as stand alone game like Warcry

Mortheim was supposed to be that but this did not really work as that game was very different and while Warhammer needed large armies, Mortheim needed a lot of terrain

But, Skirmish as entry level to R&F does not really work well anyway
either because the "heroes" of the Skirmish are not special any more in R&F or the small warband needs to split up on different units
(or the Skirmish is seen as boring, if there are just the 20 same soldiers with 1 hero rather than the 10 individual guys)

hence to lure new players into the lore/setting a smaller version of the main game is needed rather than a side game with a very different focus

Its probably indicative of the problems of 8th - but there's an obvious contradiction between "WHFB needed large armies" and "People had to sink 1000 points into a unit of 50~ great weapon guys and 3+ characters".

Going to be the boring voice, but there was nothing really wrong with say 1k points 8th edition. Take 3~ units of infantry with a cap of around 200 points per unit. Add some ranged units/min-sized units of cav and maybe a cheaper warmachines/monster. (So no 225-250~ point rare choices that will be functionally unkillable at this scale.) Play the game, have a few laughs, try and avoid getting beer and pretzels on the board.

But clearly that isn't how the game was played competitively/seriously. Which in turn fed into this idea that this isn't how the game "should be" played. GW meanwhile did absolute nothing (via rules changes) to indicate how the game "should" be played. Turning up with the above garagehammer-style army and being stomped wasn't much fun.

Admittedly, I'm not sure it was much fun in earlier editions either - but there GW had competition now. So people left. The same sort of situation would do much to kill Warmachine 4~ years later.

one big problem was that the large and expensive to buy centerpiece models could only be used with larger points

hence marketing told them to buy that models and than they realised they have spend lots of money that cannot be used at 1000 or even 2000 points

 kodos wrote:
one big problem was that the large and expensive to buy centerpiece models could only be used with larger points

hence marketing told them to buy that models and than they realised they have spend lots of money that cannot be used at 1000 or even 2000 points

I'm not sure that's a solvable problem (unless you go back to seriously oldhammer and have a GM). If you're just buying a few models to try the hobby out you want a big, cool monster, most probably. But then with the number of points you can put on the table the monster is going to seriously unbalance the game. Not necessarily in your favour, of course; perhaps your opponent has a cannon and some slayers.

antia wrote:

 kodos wrote:
one big problem was that the large and expensive to buy centerpiece models could only be used with larger points

hence marketing told them to buy that models and than they realised they have spend lots of money that cannot be used at 1000 or even 2000 points

I'm not sure that's a solvable problem (unless you go back to seriously oldhammer and have a GM). If you're just buying a few models to try the hobby out you want a big, cool monster, most probably. But then with the number of points you can put on the table the monster is going to seriously unbalance the game. Not necessarily in your favour, of course; perhaps your opponent has a cannon and some slayers.

have to say laser guided cannons were also something of a turnoff to the game for me as well as it happens

 RustyNumber wrote:
As someone who only ever played in 8th, I've never heard of those latter two and the former is completely it's own thing as opposed to WFB-armies-but-skirmish, isn't it?

The latter two were things that came about during 8th edition. But GW also had less of an online presence at that time, I suppose. They were both available as free PDFs on their website - they weren't books to buy.

Did it have any sort of marketing push or at least acknowledgement from GW? Never heard anyone ever mentioning them until now.

Did PDFs created by, released by, and hosted by GW have any acknowledgement from GW? Adepticon ran an event of 'Regiments of Renown' at least once, it's pretty much word-for-word what GW released as far as I can tell (brief look)
https://www.adepticon.org/14rules/2014wfbrort.pdf


Here's the official GW packet for Regiment of Renown
https://warhammerlegacy.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/whfb-beta-regiments-of-renown-0-1.pdf

and here is the packet for Skirmish
https://warhammerlegacy.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/whfb-beta-skirmish-0-1.pdf

although, the host has added labels for "beta 0.1", I don't know if they added anything else but they, again, appear to match what I've got.

I found them when GW posted them online, I thought it was previous to Warhammer Community, but I'm not sure where they posted stuff prior to Warhammer Community being a thing. I remember them having a blog of some sort where they would post stuff like that and like, snow and ice rules for WHFB and MESBG.

There were also a couple of Chaos-themed warband mini-games like Path to Glory that were given away free with WD.

 RustyNumber wrote:
In hindsight it's very odd they never bothered to bring in a WFB skirmish game/system to lure new players into the lore etc.

They did it with AoS of course but they also did OTHER things in the name of business with that too.

Well during 6th they had a supplement called Skirmish, which was played with either few loose models scenarios or with 100 to 200 point games.

They also had Warbands supplement, which in all honesty is a supplement, which made Path to Glory available for all factions.

There was also Vanguard Clash for 8th edition, which was an 500 to 750 points game and was digitaly published by Black Library.

I hadn't heard of Vanguard Clash! I looked it up...

Light Infantry is defined as infantry with no better than a 5+ save...

5+ save is literally heavy armor...

Did defenses creep so high in 8th edition that heavy armor is considered "light"? Maybe that's why people stopped!

 Rihgu wrote:
I hadn't heard of Vanguard Clash! I looked it up...

Light Infantry is defined as infantry with no better than a 5+ save...

5+ save is literally heavy armor...

Did defenses creep so high in 8th edition that heavy armor is considered "light"? Maybe that's why people stopped!

Chaos, Full Plate and Gromril armor is save of 4 +.

But yeah heavy armor is a 5+ save. But you could achieve 5+ by having light armor + shield againts shooting and see the error here, because Vanguard Clash doesnt specify that the save is againts shooting or melee.

Here is a table how saving throw is calculated:

https://8th.whfb.app/shooting/shields

 herjan1987 wrote:

 Rihgu wrote:
I hadn't heard of Vanguard Clash! I looked it up...

Light Infantry is defined as infantry with no better than a 5+ save...

5+ save is literally heavy armor...

Did defenses creep so high in 8th edition that heavy armor is considered "light"? Maybe that's why people stopped!

Chaos, Full Plate and Gromril armor is save of 4 +.

But yeah heavy armor is a 5+ save. But you could achieve 5+ by having light armor + shield againts shooting and see the error here, because Vanguard Clash doesnt specify that the save is againts shooting or melee.

Here is a table how saving throw is calculated:

https://8th.whfb.app/shooting/shields

I would certainly consider infantry with light armour and a shield 'heavy infantry'. If they're that well equipped they're intended to actually take some hits!

light armour was 6+, Shield is +1, heavy armour is 5+, plate/special armour is 4+, horse is +1, armoured horse is +2
model with Shield on armoured horse = 1+ save

this has been the case since 4th/5th edition

"historical" problem here, mounted soldiers used plate armour so that they don't need a shield and have both hands to fight
and non armoured horses were actually a downside hence knight on foot exists

while shields really depended on the region and time
for example the buckler was a early modern times english thing
same time but on the continent big round shield were used to protect against musket fire at close range

 kodos wrote:


"historical" problem here, mounted soldiers used plate armour so that they don't need a shield and have both hands to fight
and non armoured horses were actually a downside hence knight on foot exists

There are historical artworks depicting armoured cavalry with shields and unarmoured/v. lightly armoured horses, e.g. this one from the 15th century: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Agincourt,_St._Alban%27s_Chronicle_by_Thomas_Walsingham.jpg
So even if it's a romanticised fiction that cavalry used to use shields with plate-mail, it's a very longstanding one.

Re. unarmoured horses, I agree that it's silly that they increase your armour save. +1T would have been logical, but obviously much more powerful. I'm going even further off-topic here, but if the new edition follows 40k's current to-wound rules that might be a viable approach.

antia wrote:

Re. unarmoured horses, I agree that it's silly that they increase your armour save. +1T would have been logical, but obviously much more powerful. I'm going even further off-topic here, but if the new edition follows 40k's current to-wound rules that might be a viable approach.

When I started looking into Warhammer I thought it was quite odd that when revived 1 wound cavalry with life magic, you only got 1 model back, after every 2 wounds you managed to healed.
In my opinion it would have been better, if cavalry got 2 wounds instead of plus armor saves or higher thoughness.

this is now going very off-topic
but yes, there were but different regions and different times

Agincourt as is very famous for English and French, it is a special place in history but it was also not the time were full plate armour was used by everyone
and not only the equipment was different in different region but it was used different as well
as an example, the polish Husaria had shields, but not for close combat on horse

shields in combination of heavy armour was not common after mid 14th century as it gave not enough additional protection to make it worth over the additional weight and limited movement

for jousting tournaments, this is a different story but there we would also go into different weapons that were "sports only" (different classification in different languages, English very much a lance is used by cavalry only, but you have heavy, light and jousting lance while in German, it is Speer, Spieß und Lanze, depending on how "heavy" it is so the jousting lance was there named a jousting spear while heavy infantry used lances)


for Warhammer:
horse should give +1 Wounds
horse armour +1 armour
shields either additional protection against ranged combat or no bonus at all and armour just being dedicated to the unit itself
as in state troops with sword, and state troops with halberds both having the same armour despite one having shields

 herjan1987 wrote:

antia wrote:

Re. unarmoured horses, I agree that it's silly that they increase your armour save. +1T would have been logical, but obviously much more powerful. I'm going even further off-topic here, but if the new edition follows 40k's current to-wound rules that might be a viable approach.

When I started looking into Warhammer I thought it was quite odd that when revived 1 wound cavalry with life magic, you only got 1 model back, after every 2 wounds you managed to healed.
In my opinion it would have been better, if cavalry got 2 wounds instead of plus armor saves or higher thoughness.

It's not like you need to do twice as much damage to kill a man on a horse, though. One arrow in the eye (his or his horse's) would still take him out. I was thinking Toughness would be good because it takes a more powerful hit to do lethal damage to a horse, at least with a blow to the torso.
Was taking two wounds of healing for cavalry an 8th edition thing? I don't remember it, but I've mostly played 7th. It does sound annoying that it's not symmetrical with the damage required to kill them.

antia wrote:

 herjan1987 wrote:

antia wrote:

Re. unarmoured horses, I agree that it's silly that they increase your armour save. +1T would have been logical, but obviously much more powerful. I'm going even further off-topic here, but if the new edition follows 40k's current to-wound rules that might be a viable approach.

When I started looking into Warhammer I thought it was quite odd that when revived 1 wound cavalry with life magic, you only got 1 model back, after every 2 wounds you managed to healed.
In my opinion it would have been better, if cavalry got 2 wounds instead of plus armor saves or higher thoughness.

It's not like you need to do twice as much damage to kill a man on a horse, though. One arrow in the eye (his or his horse's) would still take him out. I was thinking Toughness would be good because it takes a more powerful hit to do lethal damage to a horse, at least with a blow to the torso.
Was taking two wounds of healing for cavalry an 8th edition thing? I don't remember it, but I've mostly played 7th. It does sound annoying that it's not symmetrical with the damage required to kill them.

Just in case I looked it up and yeah, if you use Regrowht on regular cavalry you need to heal 2 wounds to get back a model.

https://www.thediceabide.com/blog/2012/05/winds-of-magic-lore-of-life

2 wound 25*50 mm cavalry would not just made Bretonnian knight armies and other regular cavalry units more viable, but it also would have made a better counter for the infantry blocks. Of course on the price that the a regular horse doesnt give +1 armor saves, not talking barding, that is other case enterily. Making the overall game more fun in my book.
And just to hammer my point where it belongs: horses also had attacks, so why didn't they recieved a wound is beyond imagination.

 kodos wrote:
light armour was 6+, Shield is +1, heavy armour is 5+, plate/special armour is 4+, horse is +1, armoured horse is +2
model with Shield on armoured horse = 1+ save

this has been the case since 4th/5th edition

"historical" problem here, mounted soldiers used plate armour so that they don't need a shield and have both hands to fight
and non armoured horses were actually a downside hence knight on foot exists

while shields really depended on the region and time
for example the buckler was a early modern times english thing
same time but on the continent big round shield were used to protect against musket fire at close range

Interesting, I did wonder why the historical 28mm armoured mounted knights I have don't have shields!

I'm all for having "realistically sensible" stuff translated to game rules... but at the same time this is a game where a trebuchet is fielded as a field battle weapon. And I don't say that lightly, I *hate* it when people justify a game in a fictional setting having unrealistic rules/interpretations of real world concepts by saying "iT hAs FiRe BrEaThInG dRaGoNs AnD tHeY'rE nOt AcCuRaTe ArE tHeY"

I wonder if they could work in the "realism" of projectiles losing lethality with range? That's a fairly major inaccuracy in the game, it'd probably make more sense to lose a point of S instead of accuracy with long range fire.

 Rihgu wrote:
Light Infantry is defined as infantry with no better than a 5+ save...

5+ save is literally heavy armor...

Did defenses creep so high in 8th edition that heavy armor is considered "light"? Maybe that's why people stopped!

The thread has moved on - but it was the other way round (although this applied to earlier editions).
S4 means -1 armour save. S5 means -2 etc.

S5 or S6 was the standard you'd want on any "Hammer Unit" (i.e. one that was meant to do any damage). So a 5+ save was typically reduced to nothing. Even 1+ or 2+ save cavalry would die fairly instantly when reduced to a 4+.

8th was meant to stop the tyranny of Cavalry, so I'm not really surprised they didn't get 2 wounds. A proper rebalancing could have made it work - but this would require something like a living ruleset. Not "here's some rules, see you in half a decade."

Tyel wrote:
8th was meant to stop the tyranny of Cavalry, so I'm not really surprised they didn't get 2 wounds. A proper rebalancing could have made it work - but this would require something like a living ruleset. Not "here's some rules, see you in half a decade."

One of the flaws with WHFB was that (at least in 5th) the scale was variable but essentially one model = one actual warrior.

If you abstract that a little bit, the system makes more sense. Armor saves don't necessarily reflect real-world probabilities but rather relative endurance. Consider that cavalry units typically had remounts available, so if horses were killed in the initial onset, it might be possible to regroup and bring those forward. Again, GW's system really sped up the pace of combat, which was typically quite slow.

I quit when 7th came out and so I have no first-hand experience of what 8th brought to the table, but I do know that a big part of the success of 6th was that it brought the 5th ed. system to its full potential. The core rules of 5th were fairly intuitive and presented interesting (and reasonably realistic) tactical options. However, the dominating power of magic and characters really undercut the point of fielding colorful, fluffy, ranked armies.

This was fixed in 6th by toning down magic, limiting characters, and tweaking the core rules to make outnumbering a factor in combat resolution. The cost of entry remained low, particularly for people who wanted agile, skirmishing armies (the dreaded MSU option), but these were far from invincible.

(One weakness of WHFB - which I remedied in Conqueror - was the inability of infantry to form a square or "turtle up" when its flanks were turned. Against ranked infantry in a hedgehog, MSU cavalry would have been largely ineffective.)

As far as I could see, all 7th promised with higher model counts to achieve the same tactical effect (ranks would go from a minimum of four models to five). It appears 8th decided to build upon this concept, further increasing the cost of playing, which people understandably didn't like.