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 Fenrir Kitsune wrote:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
It's sad to see all the people who hated 8th.

IMO 8th was the by far the best edition of the game.

All the reasons I love it were the reasons people didn't. It was huge and epic with tonnes of models.

It's sad that people only want small skirmish type games.

Errr, I play napoleonics 28mm with hundreds of models per side. WFB 8 was a football team in comparison and took longer to play!

When it comes to rank and file games, I'd hazard a guess and say most people like playing a big game with lots of models. The problem comes when you have to paint that huge number of models.

It'd be awesome to have a 10,000 model army. But the time it would take me and the money it would cost I could pretty much build myself a full scale working Spitfire

Da Boss: not all my gaming opportunities all fall into my lap, and I know something about how hard it can be to find a game or a venue. From being part of a group of vets cleared out of the local GW years ago, to LGSs closing down, to moving to kitchen table gaming, to waving new rulebooks and putting on demos, to having to make 100+ mile round trips, to making compromises on which games are played, I know something about it. Having gamers who like the same games is sometimes a happy accident; other times a little persuasion is needed; and sometimes you have to grin and bear it. (So... much... Malifaux...)

Some other people find it difficult to get a game in due to personal circumstances, like yourself, but most of the "oh noes - no support" responses I see seem to come from people who are terribly upset that they have less opportunity to buy another 4,000 points for their army; or that they might have to stick with one rulebook for more than four years; or that Schrödinger's 'new players' are more important than the gamers they might've hung around with for years; or some other vague paranoia drummed into them by GW that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy - everyone peering suspiciously at everyone else and thinking "I'm going to dump my army before they do!" - or so it seems. So yeah, I get a little incredulous. I think it'd be interesting to have a poll or something to see just what most WFB gamers expect from the concept of 'support', and the lack of it. Maybe it'd turn out I'm wrong... but I wonder.

On the topic of scale and army size: thinking about it, we play a lot more skirmish games and board games since our focus shifted from GW. I imagine it's partly due to the fact that when you've got a variety or a cycle of regular games, it helps if you don't have to buy too much for each one. And it goes the other way too - not being driven to buy another few thousand points for WFB frees you up to build that variety of skirmish crews, if you have the opportunity.

Similar thoughts about mass battles - the longer I've been away from WFB, the more I think that any mass battle over 15mm is a waste of time and space. (I'm not all the way there: it might not be a waste of money, with 1/72 and 28mm plastics, but still...) Buy a few big, characterful 28mms for 1:1 skirmishes; buy lots of cheaper, smaller scale minis for the mass-of-bodies spectacle. Peter Berry's got some entertaining thoughts on the general subject that explain it nicely. And if you thought I was snidey...

https://www.baccus6mm.com/includes/index/i_want_you/i_want_you_text.inc.php
https://www.baccus6mm.com/includes/news/28mmmyth.inc.php
https://www.baccus6mm.com/howtoguides/HOWTOPaint6mmfigures/

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Fenrir Kitsune wrote:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
It's sad to see all the people who hated 8th.

IMO 8th was the by far the best edition of the game.

All the reasons I love it were the reasons people didn't. It was huge and epic with tonnes of models.

It's sad that people only want small skirmish type games.

Errr, I play napoleonics 28mm with hundreds of models per side. WFB 8 was a football team in comparison and took longer to play!

When it comes to rank and file games, I'd hazard a guess and say most people like playing a big game with lots of models. The problem comes when you have to paint that huge number of models.

It'd be awesome to have a 10,000 model army. But the time it would take me and the money it would cost I could pretty much build myself a full scale working Spitfire

For WFB models in measly boxes of ten at GW prices, it's too much money, far too much. Perry plastics come 40 to a box for £20. Two of those and a command blister breaks into three units or one brigade. Same with cavalry - often 14 models to a box, so a full unit and two of those to a brigade.

Had GW priced along those lines, WFB big games would be more attractive.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Fenrir Kitsune wrote:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
It's sad to see all the people who hated 8th.

IMO 8th was the by far the best edition of the game.

All the reasons I love it were the reasons people didn't. It was huge and epic with tonnes of models.

It's sad that people only want small skirmish type games.

Errr, I play napoleonics 28mm with hundreds of models per side. WFB 8 was a football team in comparison and took longer to play!

When it comes to rank and file games, I'd hazard a guess and say most people like playing a big game with lots of models. The problem comes when you have to paint that huge number of models.

It'd be awesome to have a 10,000 model army. But the time it would take me and the money it would cost I could pretty much build myself a full scale working Spitfire

Clubs put on big model count games by combining armies from lots of members' individual collections. This is especially easy in very popular periods like Napoleonics.

It doesn't make sense to own a huge army for yourself. Too much time and cost in building it, and not much opportunity to deploy it. There is also a problem with scale and space. Physically you need a massive table to fit that many figures on it. If you do a hall game, you have the risk of people walking all over the pieces.

6mm armies are an option. I have a very large 6mm Russian Napoleonic army, with enough 60mm square brigade size bases to fight a battle like Borodino. However the visual appeal is different to 28mm.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Fenrir Kitsune wrote:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
It's sad to see all the people who hated 8th.

IMO 8th was the by far the best edition of the game.

All the reasons I love it were the reasons people didn't. It was huge and epic with tonnes of models.

It's sad that people only want small skirmish type games.

Errr, I play napoleonics 28mm with hundreds of models per side. WFB 8 was a football team in comparison and took longer to play!

When it comes to rank and file games, I'd hazard a guess and say most people like playing a big game with lots of models. The problem comes when you have to paint that huge number of models.

It'd be awesome to have a 10,000 model army. But the time it would take me and the money it would cost I could pretty much build myself a full scale working Spitfire

Clubs put on big model count games by combining armies from lots of members' individual collections. This is especially easy in very popular periods like Napoleonics.

It doesn't make sense to own a huge army for yourself. Too much time and cost in building it, and not much opportunity to deploy it. There is also a problem with scale and space. Physically you need a massive table to fit that many figures on it. If you do a hall game, you have the risk of people walking all over the pieces.

6mm armies are an option. I have a very large 6mm Russian Napoleonic army, with enough 60mm square brigade size bases to fight a battle like Borodino. However the visual appeal is different to 28mm.

15mm is the way to go for historicals. You can make a full ancient/medieval/napoleonic army for like 50 euro with the usual suspects (zvezda, victrix, etc.) and you can make out uniforms and such, but little more.

For fantasy it doesn't work just right. Ok, so those are high elves because they have a pointy hat, and those are, ehr, dwarves because they have axes, but then again they might be WoC.

Fantasy needs that kind of visual quality with bigger figs.

These guys are doing a 40.000 point per side battle. Fully painted, and you can follow their progress on their blog.

http://thegatesofkislev.blogspot.com.es/2016/01/la-batalla-battle.html

jouso wrote:
15mm is the way to go for historicals. You can make a full ancient/medieval/napoleonic army for like 50 euro with the usual suspects (zvezda, victrix, etc.) and you can make out uniforms and such, but little more.

For fantasy it doesn't work just right. Ok, so those are high elves because they have a pointy hat, and those are, ehr, dwarves because they have axes, but then again they might be WoC.

Fantasy needs that kind of visual quality with bigger figs.

These guys are doing a 40.000 point per side battle. Fully painted, and you can follow their progress on their blog.

http://thegatesofkislev.blogspot.com.es/2016/01/la-batalla-battle.html

I think 15mm is fine for Fantasy as long as the models are well made. I have WW2 Germans, British, US and Soviet troops in 15mm and they are all pretty distinctive even before you put paint on them.

Warmaster was 10mm and it was still possible to see the different unique units, though I'd prefer 15mm because the faces tend to look more real.

6mm to my eye is where they begin to lose their distinctiveness completely, so even though I did like Epic 40k I didn't really like the infantry at that scale.

I went with 28mm as I've got a tonne of terrain already made of it, covering multiple settings. No reason other than that.

jouso wrote:
For fantasy it doesn't work just right. Ok, so those are high elves because they have a pointy hat, and those are, ehr, dwarves because they have axes, but then again they might be WoC.

Fantasy needs that kind of visual quality with bigger figs.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Warmaster was 10mm and it was still possible to see the different unique units, though I'd prefer 15mm because the faces tend to look more real.

6mm to my eye is where they begin to lose their distinctiveness completely, so even though I did like Epic 40k I didn't really like the infantry at that scale.

With Ral Partha Europe' Demonworld, Khurasan, Splintered Light, Pendraken's new fantasy, Polar Fox Studio, Microworld etc, I don't know if 6-15mm fantasy has ever been as popular!

We just need a solid 10-15mm fantasy ruleset. Hail caesar as a framework can work pretty well.

auticus wrote:
We just need a solid 10-15mm fantasy ruleset. Hail caesar as a framework can work pretty well.

I always heard that Warmaster was a pretty decent rules set

Same engine.

auticus wrote:
We just need a solid 10-15mm fantasy ruleset. Hail caesar as a framework can work pretty well.

I think Pendraken's Warband rules is a pretty solid 10mm ruleset, although technically it's scale independent, like Hail Caesar.

I've been playing Kings of War, which I've kind of been losing interest in (probably because my League of Rhordia/Kingdoms of Men lists lose in the fantasy arms race with other factions), and I've been looking at the "Lord and Lands" ruleset, which I reviewed on my blog. It's been written for 6mm, mostly for Microworld's lines.

Warmaster was decent, Hail Caesar seems to be an evolution of Warmaster. Thats why I prefer it.

Kings of war could also work but to be honest, I can't really get into that game for a variety of reasons.

Hail Caesar framework would need the army lists created for the fantasy armies. There is a fan site with a fantasy alteration for Hail Caesar out there as well.

Try Hordes of the Things.

auticus wrote:
We just need a solid 10-15mm fantasy ruleset. Hail caesar as a framework can work pretty well.

I was wowed by Mayhem's unusual mechanics, and they turned out as interesting as I thought they were:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/679157.page

A little Warmaster, a little HOTT, a lot it's own thing. Figure and scale agnostic, but with measurements and things it's arguably better suited to 10-15mm. E.g. recommended base size for 10mm is 40mm square - which is handily two Warmaster bases pushed together - for 15mm is 50mm square, and for 28mm is 60mm square. Which gives you about nine infantry minis per unit... (Though if I ever bother with 28mm mass battles again, I'd go for 80mm square)

Second Infinite Array: I also have a copy of Lords and Lands here, which reads as pretty nifty, and I've been meaning to check out Warband. And you already know about Shadow Storm:

http://adyswargamesden.com/shadow-storm-aka-fantasy-hail-caesar-pdf/

And of course there should still be pdfs of Warmaster floating around. Most likely at the Specialist Arms forum.

My brother and I simply went back to 6th Edition. It had a ton of gaming material, a book for almost every army, Ravening Hordes lists for the two that didn't have books, and with a few exceptions was relatively still balanced. Add in the Power and Dispel Dice rules and the Insane Courage rule from 7th, and it's damn near perfect.


I'm also fortunate enough to have a forum available specifically for playing games in newer settings than Oldhammer:

www.classichammer.com

I also have a local shop that will let me host Classichammer nights since GW gaming is already pretty much dead.

I'm just using Kings of War rules and 15mm figures, with the aesthetics and fluff behind my battles being 100% in the Old World. I am only using figures that keep the old-school Warhammer "look".

And 15mm is perfectly good for fantasy. Many companies have tons of detail, and it's perfectly easy to tell Dark Elves, High Elves, and Wood Elves all apart, even moreso the different races. Definitely not "blobs".

Like for example, some Orcs and Goblins with a troll:



An empire knight:



Dark Elves:

I liked eighth edition a lot, but there were things I did dislike about it. For me the cost was more of a hinderence than a problem. For the most part I had enough miniatures from previous editions, and when I built my orc army I was able to pickup a lot of miniatures from ebay.

But for most people it was just a huge mountain to climb to get to the point where you could actually play in the standard pickup battles at the store.

And then actually *painting* all those miniatures took even longer. In most other wargames I play I try to get my army at least table ready, but I eventually gave up on my orcs and just slowly kept working them while trying to get games in when I could.

Aegis I think has the right idea, 8th edition might have made a lot more sense in 15mm.

The cost and time was always a stumbling block for me, too. Especially as I was painting armies for 40k already, though the cost back in the late 90's was not as bad as later years.

15mm is a fun way for me to love the setting, but with more accessible armies (especially as there is really no groups in my area, so to play with friends, I have to provide both armies).

As long as I can love the setting, it's not dead for me. I'm having an awesome time finding 15mm figs to match Warhammer units and then using them with Kings of War profiles.

 argonak wrote:
I liked eighth edition a lot, but there were things I did dislike about it. For me the cost was more of a hinderence than a problem. For the most part I had enough miniatures from previous editions, and when I built my orc army I was able to pickup a lot of miniatures from ebay.

But for most people it was just a huge mountain to climb to get to the point where you could actually play in the standard pickup battles at the store.

And then actually *painting* all those miniatures took even longer. In most other wargames I play I try to get my army at least table ready, but I eventually gave up on my orcs and just slowly kept working them while trying to get games in when I could.

Aegis I think has the right idea, 8th edition might have made a lot more sense in 15mm.

Agreed, WFB in 7/8th grew too big and was too expensive (time and money) for new players to get into and that eventually killed the game. 15mm would have been fine (though you miss out on some of the detail, especially on some of the 2000's models such as DoW and Brets). I heard people used Warmaster to play a version of travel WFB too.

The alternative would be to go back to 4th/5th/early 6th sized armies but with less of the overpowering herohammer options. The unit sizes then were considerably more realistic and on par with what 40k armies are today (40k armies then were much more skirmish based, similar to how Beyond the Gates of Antares is now).

However I don't think Warhammer is dead, if anything Total War Warhammer has shown that isn't the case. GW have left the door open for someone to take on the mantle of fantasy ranked battles. I don't think the current offerings quite have the same flavour as Warhammer, but then I'm more a casual player and I liked some of the wackiness in WFB which I think both KoW and 9th have moved away from to make a balanced game. I don't mind slight imbalances making armies unique as long as they weren't overpowering (O&G Animosity for example), but also providing a interesting ruleset (which is my personal gripe with AoS as a game).

In time I think something will come along that replaces Warhammer in all it's glory but we may just have to wait a few years.

I think a couple of things GW did really hurt Fantasy,

1) Reboxing, not too long ago you could pick up boxes of 20 Orc boyz for example, they then switched to 10 and charged nearly the same amount making the same unit twice as expensive in £££

2) Hoard rule, this one is the biggest killer in my view. It give massive units an advantage and awards people who spend lots of £££ on the above boxes to get a big unit.

If they had not bothered with the hoard rule people wouldn't feel the need to spend £100 on one unit and instead would run multiple smaller units making it cheaper to get into.

As a house rule we ignore the Hoard rule and all run the units as they come from the box (the exception is the boxes of 10 like wildwood rangers where we use 20 dudes) and for the most part it is perfectly balanced, cheap to get into (Just purchased a new 1800pts dark elf starter army for my wife for £109)

Is it dead? Not in my area, at our club every Friday night there has been at least 1 - 2 games of 8th edition going on with half a dozen people still arranging games. In the same token we have 2 AoS players who have played 2 games at the club since it came out with 1 other person taken it up.

Had GW not been giant dicks they would have supplied both round and square bases in the AoS boxes to allow people to play both systems still what erks me even more is that GW still sell square bases separately!!!

hobojebus wrote:
Unsupported games get stale you're never getting new rules or units, you're never going to get fixes for broken stuff.

What's more you can't attract new players if they can't easily buy their own stuff it's offputting.

So while the rules still exist stagnation leads to entropy and after a few years your not playing anymore.

Have you not seen the Ninth Age work? It's very well supported.

jouso wrote:
These guys are doing a 40.000 point per side battle. Fully painted, and you can follow their progress on their blog.

http://thegatesofkislev.blogspot.com.es/2016/01/la-batalla-battle.html

Wow, these guys are insane! I love this blog. It really motivates me to work on my own armies.

We all jumped to 9th AGE it is well done and they balanced it very well its not WFB 8th edition with different names they made a good game. It and KoW took over a lot of LGS's and AoS is dead at most of the stores I have been too down here in tampa there are less than 10 that play and most of the time you only see maybe 4 playing and not very often.

Not at all.