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I was putting together 3 zoanthropes last night and as I got to the end of the sprues, I realised I could actually make a 4th if GW had included one more tail/base piece (ok a few of its back spore vents would be missing but hardly a deal breaker ).
It reminded me of the Space Wolf 10 man box set which had enough parts to make two full extra guys but didnt have 2 leg pieces i.e. a potential 12 models in the box.

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue) and market on the box something like "assembles 3 zoanthropes" *insert big bright sticker on bottom of box* "and a fourth free!".

It would:
garner lots of good will
ship more boxes when people see a deal/saving
likely cost next to nothing more
be a good marketing piece

Obviously they cant do things like two full land raiders in a box but for basic level troops would one extra tail/base piece have broken the bank?

/frustrated Ratius

 Ratius wrote:
Why...?

Because some guy with a spreadsheet did a cost benefit analysis and decided that the

likely cost next to nothing more

outweighed the

garner lots of good will
ship more boxes when people see a deal/saving
be a good marketing piece

 Ratius wrote:
I was putting together 3 zoanthropes last night and as I got to the end of the sprues, I realised I could actually make a 4th if GW had included one more tail/base piece (ok a few of its back spore vents would be missing but hardly a deal breaker ).
It reminded me of the Space Wolf 10 man box set which had enough parts to make two full extra guys but didnt have 2 leg pieces i.e. a potential 12 models in the box.

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue) and market on the box something like "assembles 3 zoanthropes" *insert big bright sticker on bottom of box* "and a fourth free!".

It would:
garner lots of good will
ship more boxes when people see a deal/saving
likely cost next to nothing more
be a good marketing piece

Well, as they'd have to print an extra spru for each box, then separate off the 4th tail.....
How do you figure that'd end up costing them "next to nothing more"?
And what do you purpose they do with all the other stuff from the now tailless spru?

Hmmm?

I said this

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue)

They just need to make/print a single extra piece from a mould - not a whole sprue no?

Because they can make more money if they force you to buy a whole extra kit.

If the did the extra tail, why not just include three more so you could build the Zoanthropes AND the Venomthropes instead of either/or?

Actually, I've run into the same problem with the Tau Firewarrior set - you get two extra legs, heads & arms, but lack the torsos. For me, it was easy enough with a little bit of green stuff to make the extra torsos and have two extra models (per box). Shouldn't be hard to greenstuff or cast a one-use mold to make the extra tail bit for personal use.

GW has always done this, there's useally a peice they use as a "limiter" that prevents you from it's useally legs (as with Marines) regarding Marines BTW devestators come with a kneeling pair of legs so if you make use of those you can often get another old marine or two. (I've use that to make captains etc in the past)

 Ratius wrote:
Hmmm?

I said this

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue)

They just need to make/print a single extra piece from a mould - not a whole sprue no?

That's not how it works, you can't do a part print from a mould. They'd either need to print the whole sprue and cut out the bit needed, which would involve manpower, waste of the rest of the sprue and so on; or creating a new mould for the extra bit, which would be far too expensive to be worth doing - you might just as well redesign the whole kit at that point.

 Ratius wrote:
They just need to make/print a single extra piece from a mould - not a whole sprue no?

I thought sprues were how the moulds were actually printed?

So they won't have a mould for individual SM legs - just a mould for the entire sprue that includes those legs.

At least, that's how I thought it worked. If I'm mistaken I'm happy to be corrected.

Ah righto, I wasnt aware they had to print the whole sprue to get the one extra piece. That would explain it to some degree.
Still a bit of bummer though, so close to getting another model *shakes fist at sky*

They don't 'print' the sprue. The sprues are injection moulded.

But yes, there's not way to just cast one section of the mould unless the mould was specifically designed that way from the start.


They could have included that one extra piece when the sprue was originally designed, but short of making a whole new sprue and corresponding new mould, the only way to get that extra part in there would be for them to cast it in resin, which would cost more to produce than the entire plastic sprue.

Because it's a box of 3 and not a box of 4, maybe ?

I mean, one thing they could do would be to make additional sprues and reopen their bitz shop.

 vipoid wrote:
I mean, one thing they could do would be to make additional sprues and reopen their bitz shop.

Eh the bitz era is long gone for GW. It worked back when most of their stock was metal and their production chain allowed them to easily fish a part out of the casting box and send it off to a customer and profit. Today everything is plastic cast and even finecast is a sprue based casting. There's a tiny bit of metal left in Skaven and a few other forces but its the exception rather than the norm for their production workflow. Thing is with plastics they can't just cast a part, they have to cast the whole thing, cut out the specific part and pack it up and send it off; leaving them holding an otherwise worthless sprue that they've got to dispose of.

So it generates more work, loses them product (remember whilst its small the volume GW produces in would make quite a significant amount of waste product very quickly so scale becomes quite a considerable waste).

It's also not worth it for them to cast individual parts as the moulds are insanely expensive.



It's something we've lost as GW has gone from metal to plastic. Even if you look at 3rd party companies doing their own parts its, again, often in resin and metals that they work with. Take a look at Forgeworld or Puppets War https://puppetswar.eu/models-and-bits-47.html - again all those optional parts are resin rather than plastics.

Personally I'd welcome FW expanding their alternative part and sculpt options, but it seems at present that GW isn't quite sure what to do with FW in general.

 Ratius wrote:
I was putting together 3 zoanthropes last night and as I got to the end of the sprues, I realised I could actually make a 4th if GW had included one more tail/base piece (ok a few of its back spore vents would be missing but hardly a deal breaker ).
It reminded me of the Space Wolf 10 man box set which had enough parts to make two full extra guys but didnt have 2 leg pieces i.e. a potential 12 models in the box.

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue) and market on the box something like "assembles 3 zoanthropes" *insert big bright sticker on bottom of box* "and a fourth free!".

It would:
garner lots of good will
ship more boxes when people see a deal/saving
likely cost next to nothing more
be a good marketing piece

Obviously they cant do things like two full land raiders in a box but for basic level troops would one extra tail/base piece have broken the bank?

/frustrated Ratius

you realize right while they might say buy 3, build 4th for free they would make it 33% more expensive?

GW isn't in it for making it cheap for you. They want you to buy more kits, not less.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ratius wrote:
Hmmm?

I said this

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue)

They just need to make/print a single extra piece from a mould - not a whole sprue no?

Plastic is cast in whole sprues. If they cut up pieces from sprue it means:

a) somebody has to cast sprue
b) somebody has to clip pieces and put in box
c) rest of the sprue is wasted.

It's why they don't have bits store like they used to have when metal was king. Metal stuff was made on smaller casts so one had less extra pieces and extra pieces could be just melted for reuse. Plastic? Not so easy.

That's also reason why they don't send you parts if you get sprue with few parts damaged. They send you frigging entire sprue. It's more cost efficient for them than cast sprue, cut pieces and throw rest away.

Nothing I know of is as crazy as the GSC Acolyte box. 18 heads, 15 sets (yes, left and right) of arms and ... 5 bodies.

As for the why.
A sprue is a certain size, the bits needed to make the models take up a certain space and then there is spare room. No point leaving it empty so they get filled with extra bonus bits. Because the plastic itself costs next to nothing and the cost of the mould is going to be the same regardless.

So either there is room for bits that make up part of an extra model, but not enough room for another model. Or GW wants you to buy an extra box.

 Overread wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
I mean, one thing they could do would be to make additional sprues and reopen their bitz shop.

Eh the bitz era is long gone for GW. It worked back when most of their stock was metal and their production chain allowed them to easily fish a part out of the casting box and send it off to a customer and profit. Today everything is plastic cast and even finecast is a sprue based casting. There's a tiny bit of metal left in Skaven and a few other forces but its the exception rather than the norm for their production workflow. Thing is with plastics they can't just cast a part, they have to cast the whole thing, cut out the specific part and pack it up and send it off; leaving them holding an otherwise worthless sprue that they've got to dispose of.

I'm afraid I don't understand this reasoning.

Why does clipping off a part from a sprue necessitate throwing the rest of the sprue away? What exactly stops them from selling the other parts from that sprue individually as well?

There is usually way too few models per box in general whan dealing with gw kits. Veterans remember the day orks and guardsmen etc came in boxes of 20. A box of 5 aspect warriors cost basicly the same in shelves space, storage, manufacture, transport for gw, but the idea that players will buy 4 of those boxes rather than one more price worthy is faulty. I think gw strategy here is bad.

 Ordana wrote:
Nothing I know of is as crazy as the GSC Acolyte box. 18 heads, 15 sets (yes, left and right) of arms and ... 5 bodies.

As for the why.
A sprue is a certain size, the bits needed to make the models take up a certain space and then there is spare room. No point leaving it empty so they get filled with extra bonus bits. Because the plastic itself costs next to nothing and the cost of the mould is going to be the same regardless.

So either there is room for bits that make up part of an extra model, but not enough room for another model. Or GW wants you to buy an extra box.

And as absurd as that all sounds, if you want a particular load out for 5 metamorphs you'll need anywhere between 2 and 5 boxes total. Which kinda works out over all when you're building that many more acolytes. Though it has been handy for screwing around trying random modeling ideas, I have so many spare bits between these and neophytes I can try all kinds of crap.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vipoid wrote:

I'm afraid I don't understand this reasoning.

Why does clipping off a part from a sprue necessitate throwing the rest of the sprue away? What exactly stops them from selling the other parts from that sprue individually as well?

Go ask bits sites, some times I can find what I'm after for dirt cheap because people shopping for bits are only after whatever's popular in the meta at the moment. Rest of the kit can sit and rot. Not to mention then having to track quality of cuts off sprues and warehousing spare bits. I've got bins of crap it takes me a few minutes to identify and I've only got one army.

 vipoid wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
I mean, one thing they could do would be to make additional sprues and reopen their bitz shop.

Eh the bitz era is long gone for GW. It worked back when most of their stock was metal and their production chain allowed them to easily fish a part out of the casting box and send it off to a customer and profit. Today everything is plastic cast and even finecast is a sprue based casting. There's a tiny bit of metal left in Skaven and a few other forces but its the exception rather than the norm for their production workflow. Thing is with plastics they can't just cast a part, they have to cast the whole thing, cut out the specific part and pack it up and send it off; leaving them holding an otherwise worthless sprue that they've got to dispose of.

I'm afraid I don't understand this reasoning.

Why does clipping off a part from a sprue necessitate throwing the rest of the sprue away? What exactly stops them from selling the other parts from that sprue individually as well?

Volume. GW produces a lot of models, to part loads of kits they'd have to have a lot of storage and sorting to make it practical. Furthermore most kits have bits that are popular and the rest that are not. They would fast reach a point where they'd have ample mountains of bits that are never bought whilst still having to cast whole sprues for the few that do sell. At which point they are either storing an ever growing backlog of plastic or throwing the plastic away. It's just not a practical consideration for GW's current scale of business and the materials they work with.

As noted above its already more efficient and cheaper for GW to simply send out a whole new kit when replacing misscast parts; than it is to send out only the replacement part itself. The staff isn't even going to the warehouse; they just place an order in your name and to your address and make it a zero charge. It then just passes through their system like a regular purchase.

 Overread wrote:
Furthermore most kits have bits that are popular and the rest that are not. They would fast reach a point where they'd have ample mountains of bits that are never bought whilst still having to cast whole sprues for the few that do sell. At which point they are either storing an ever growing backlog of plastic or throwing the plastic away.

There's a phrase for this.

It's called Market Research.

See, most companies have strange ideas like producing more stuff that people actually want to buy and less stuff that they don't want to buy.

You can get a box of oyumaru and a roll of kneadatite (Green Stuff) off that there Amazon that they have now for $50 (CAD). You can use the oyumaru to make a two-part mould to make copies of bitz with the GS fairly easily, allowing you to 'stretch' the kit a bit.

Then you just put the oyumaru back in some hot water and you can reshape it for the next bit.

So, for example, if you make copies of the Daemon Prince legs and back of the torso, you can very easily get three DPs from one box.

 Ratius wrote:
Hmmm?

I said this

Why dont GW just throw in these extra bits (even loose in the box i.e. off sprue)

They just need to make/print a single extra piece from a mould - not a whole sprue no?

That's not how it works. Any new piece would be a new sprue, and it's not the sprue that's expensive, it's the die that the sprue comes out of.

 vipoid wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Furthermore most kits have bits that are popular and the rest that are not. They would fast reach a point where they'd have ample mountains of bits that are never bought whilst still having to cast whole sprues for the few that do sell. At which point they are either storing an ever growing backlog of plastic or throwing the plastic away.

There's a phrase for this.

It's called Market Research.

See, most companies have strange ideas like producing more stuff that people actually want to buy and less stuff that they don't want to buy.

Yes but then GW has to make a whole new cast (or build it into the same sprue cast to have spares). And that would have to be done either with months of lag-time after the product goes on sale to find out what the market wants in bits or as a guess before the product went into production.

Either way don't forget that for a standard sprue GW's moulds cost in the region of somewhere like £100,000 each. That's BIG money to spend on an optional bits supply service. And as noted if they guessed and put it on the same mould as the core model then they could easily end up with mountains of spare parts that they didn't aticipate demand for correctly whilst also having demand for parts that they can't cast up on their own.


In the end its just not financially viable enough for GW to consider. Even their space marine upgrade packs come under production and profit fire every so often and that's one of their biggest selling lines.

I think it's naive to think that GW doesn't deliberately under-supply certain bitz.

Having a unit that can take two Plasma Guns ship with a Plasma Gun and a Flamer, for example, is a naked gambit to get you to buy two boxes.

Personally, I'd rather pay $10 more and have an additional sprue that allows the unit to be equipped with any of the options available to it.

 Ratius wrote:
Ah righto, I wasnt aware they had to print the whole sprue to get the one extra piece. That would explain it to some degree.
Still a bit of bummer though, so close to getting another model *shakes fist at sky*

Do you have a little bit of greenstuff to make a tail?

 Excommunicatus wrote:
I think it's naive to think that GW doesn't deliberately under-supply certain bitz.

Having a unit that can take two Plasma Guns ship with a Plasma Gun and a Flamer, for example, is a naked gambit to get you to buy two boxes.

Personally, I'd rather pay $10 more and have an additional sprue that allows the unit to be equipped with any of the options available to it.

GW used to offer weapon packs (and still has Plasma Guns & Meltaguns, for example) but by all accounts they didn't sell well.

It's because they have a deal with Kromlech where you can get your additional legs

beast_gts wrote:

 Excommunicatus wrote:
I think it's naive to think that GW doesn't deliberately under-supply certain bitz.

Having a unit that can take two Plasma Guns ship with a Plasma Gun and a Flamer, for example, is a naked gambit to get you to buy two boxes.

Personally, I'd rather pay $10 more and have an additional sprue that allows the unit to be equipped with any of the options available to it.

GW used to offer weapon packs (and still has Plasma Guns & Meltaguns, for example) but by all accounts they didn't sell well.

While that specific example was a bad call on my part, the wider point still stands.

I cannot think of a single box that gives you all the weapons/equipment that the unit it makes can take.

I guess they could also just start restricting what options a unit has. You could argue they have started to do this, in fact. Still, the new CSM boxes, for example, don't contain all the options. Not even close.

Not even basic stuff like ten BP+CCW Mahreens.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
I cannot think of a single box that gives you all the weapons/equipment that the unit it makes can take.

Redemptor Dreads
Invictor Warsuit
Centurions (twice actually, the box builds every option in two different squads)
Taros Terminators
Cataphracii Terminators
Both Repulsor kits
Ironclad Dreadnaughts
All the Rhino-based tanks
Attack bikes
Hellblasters
Assault Marines
Land Raider Crusader/Redemptor box
Inceptors
Aggressors
Eliminators
Intercessors (before the Serg option expansion at any rate)
Custodian Wardens build every option for a squad -or- builds two characters and an extra dude.
Custodian Guard, same as the Warden box
Dawn Eagles, every squad option -or- a character and two extra dudes
Contemptor Dreadnaught

Oh, and if you ignore the index options regular Dreadnaughts as well.

You could argue Primaris Librarians, Chaplains, and Apothocaries and Phobos Captains and Librarians. They do have every available option on the sprue, but I don't think it should count since "every available option" is exactly one layout.

If they went back to selling bits, i would expect you would be paying quite a lot for each bit. And the best value would be random bits bags anyway. So kinda ends up with may as well just buy the boxes with bits you want anyway.

You could also get a 3d Printer and start doing your own legs and bits that are a little more unique