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Nope. In BFG, the models are meaningless. All you really need are flight stands, because the ships are only as big as the diameter of the rod (about 3/16"). Everything measures to/from the rods.

And even then, the rods are grossly oversized by at least an order of magnitude.

Space is VAST. Ships are miniscule.


Really, if you've ever looked at true scale naval battles, or even tank battles, this would be readily apparent.

 EVIL INC wrote:
To be honest, the models for BFG were a bit overpriced even more so than their other models. However, it also looked like that would be one of the easiest games to proxy. Would only be a matter of finding shadow footprints of the ships to make artistist 2 dimensional representations of the out of plastic or cardboard and start playing. Has anyone done this? If so, I might give it a shot.

Current home of BFG online is the Specialist Games forum: http://www.forum.specialist-arms.com/index.php

I have seen 2d cut outs, but I'm not sure where. Asking in the Specialist Games BFG forum will get you the 2D cut outs you need.

T

I really don't understand why these games haven't made a come back into GW's catalogue.

Very cool settings that could take up the slack of people getting sick of the vastly growing armies and regular changes.

With the amount of kits available now, and all the conversions (coupled with the popularity of Inq28) shows that even without the kits it's possible to play these and create even more interesting forces.

If GW had a bits service they'd be golden.

 Medium of Death wrote:
I really don't understand why these games haven't made a come back into GW's catalogue.

Very cool settings that could take up the slack of people getting sick of the vastly growing armies and regular changes.

With the amount of kits available now, and all the conversions (coupled with the popularity of Inq28) shows that even without the kits it's possible to play these and create even more interesting forces.

If GW had a bits service they'd be golden.

Video game companies have jumped on the casual market bandwagon: angry birds, clash of clans, peggle, etc. I would think Mordheim and Necromunda would be great casual miniature markets to get people hooked or just involved.

 TheSilo wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:
I really don't understand why these games haven't made a come back into GW's catalogue.

Very cool settings that could take up the slack of people getting sick of the vastly growing armies and regular changes.

With the amount of kits available now, and all the conversions (coupled with the popularity of Inq28) shows that even without the kits it's possible to play these and create even more interesting forces.

If GW had a bits service they'd be golden.

Video game companies have jumped on the casual market bandwagon: angry birds, clash of clans, peggle, etc. I would think Mordheim and Necromunda would be great casual miniature markets to get people hooked or just involved.

But that ignores the key issue that GW wants you to buy WHFB/40k (and everything that comes out) and not Mordheim or Necromunda. Even if people would get hooked, there would be people who would play let's say Necromunda but look at 40k and say it's too many figures/too expensive/they don't want larger battles (basically the opposite of the common "Why I like 40k" type of comments), and that means lost sales to GW.

underfire wargaming wrote:

 Vermis wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The greatest shame is that if these games had stayed current, and they even <gasp> made more of them they would have no competition in the Wargames industry.

I hope you don't mind me saying so, but I don't count that as the greatest shame, or much of a shame at all.

I agree with Vermis 100%!, best thing to happen in decades for wargaming!.

It's the best thing to happen to wargaming in decades if you consider games to be completely interchangable replacements for one another. Not so fantastic if you were a fan of those specific games and would much rather have seen them get years of development and support than be replaced by a bunch of stuff you're not interested in.

I was annoyed when they stopped supporting these as most of us were but they needed revamped and GW weren't prepared to take the risk.

I think they will be released again but as a computer game.

GW abandoned Mordheim, Necromunda, Inquistor, Battle Fleet Gothic, Gorka Morka, and Epic 40,000 because they couldn't sell enough miniatures to justify continued investments on a meaningful level. The inability to justify those games comes from GW's attempt to minimize overhead. GW could only give the games the support of one or two designers who had to do everything;a comparable to the overhead that goes into a codex but beyond the initial releases of those games they tended not to sell a volume even close to a codex release. For any one of those games to have been as successful, enough for GW, every person playing a respective game would had to have bought nearly every faction or gotten that many more people to buy into the game.

 aka_mythos wrote:
GW abandoned Mordheim, Necromunda, Inquistor, Battle Fleet Gothic, Gorka Morka, and Epic 40,000 because they couldn't sell enough miniatures to justify continued investments on a meaningful level. The inability to justify those games comes from GW's attempt to minimize overhead. GW could only give the games the support of one or two designers who had to do everything;a comparable to the overhead that goes into a codex but beyond the initial releases of those games they tended not to sell a volume even close to a codex release. For any one of those games to have been as successful, enough for GW, every person playing a respective game would had to have bought nearly every faction or gotten that many more people to buy into the game.

I think its more along the lines that while the games were 'successful' (they made a profit), GW felt they could make MORE profit by investing the same effort in to their main lines (really, LOTR). It happens all the time, businesses sell off or close down their less profitable arms even if they are making money.

Other companies manage to produce competitors to GW's specialist games with far *more* studio overhead - GW has publishing, designing and production experience and an existing IP to draw upon whereas companies like Spartan had to discover all of this for themselves and invent the entire settings of all of their games.

 Yodhrin wrote:

It's the best thing to happen to wargaming in decades if you consider games to be completely interchangable replacements for one another. Not so fantastic if you were a fan of those specific games and would much rather have seen them get years of development and support than be replaced by a bunch of stuff you're not interested in.

I still smart a bit that GW dropped SGs, especially Epic: Armageddon, but considering the kind of 'support' they've been giving 40K, WFB, and arguably LotR since then ('support' spelled B U Y B U Y B U Y) I can also see it as a mercy.

And y'know what? I've still got the E:A book on my shelf. I can see it right now. It didn't magically disintegrate when GW snipped the SG section off their webstore. I think the guys at TacComm have been doing a decent job with NetE:A; there are more and more proxies that I'm pretty satisfied with, and even prefer to GW's original designs; and there's a nearby club where Epic is seeing a resurgence in popularity.

And if Epic has shrunk some from the public view, well, there's those new competitors with plenty of interesting stuff to soften the blow.

Sucks to get fewer SG games in, but to be honest I can't lie awake at night for every gamer moping over an old game. I was never overly impressed with the potential for pickup games in Timbuctoo or outer Mongolia, and not too wowed by the attitude that a game can only be played (or is only worth playing) if GW drops everything in your lap. (and keeps dropping random crap, for a considerable fee) Never mind if you already have the rules and more than enough minis. I can only worry about my own local clubs and groups, whether they suddenly develop gaming monomania, and how I might do something to get round it and get my fave games noticed.

BFG, Gorkamorka, necromunda, Mordheim, Inquisitor, Epic....how I miss that age of GW, I think some of my most enjoyable games were in those off shoots..I think I laughed more playing gorkamorka than all of my other Gw related experiences combined.

I do miss them.

Vermis wrote:[
And y'know what? I've still got the E:A book on my shelf. I can see it right now. It didn't magically disintegrate when GW snipped the SG section off their webstore...

...Sucks to get fewer SG games in, but to be honest I can't lie awake at night for every gamer moping over an old game. I was never overly impressed with the potential for pickup games in Timbuctoo or outer Mongolia, and not too wowed by the attitude that a game can only be played (or is only worth playing) if GW drops everything in your lap. (and keeps dropping random crap, for a considerable fee) Never mind if you already have the rules and more than enough minis. I can only worry about my own local clubs and groups, whether they suddenly develop gaming monomania, and how I might do something to get round it and get my fave games noticed.

Good points.
Playing SG games just takes a bit of effort on the part of the players. Really it doesn't take any more effort than most historical games where you have to do everything yourself: select the era, choose rules, find and paint appropriate minis (often both sides), build terrain, write or find scenarios, etc. Historical guys have been doing this for ages. It's us Sci/fi and Fantasy folks who have tended to get complacent and expect one company to give us the rules, fluff and minis all on one platter.

Luckily my club has no such attitude. We've been playing our choice of rules (often in our own setting: http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/p/galactic-frontier-homebrew-sci-fi.html ) with miniatures of our choice for years now.

Of course it does make it a bit ironic that we're planning a periodic Necromunda campaign, to begin in April, but it does drive home my earlier point. GW has already given us enough rules, scenarios, and lists of characters to keep a Necromunda campaign going for years. Surely we can take up the challenge of finding and painting figs (though most of us have necro figs already) and playing a campaign without having the direct support of GW corporate?

The Specialist games lasted a much longer time than any game has a right to expect, but they're not coming back. The tools are there to be used. Don't wait for GW to come back and pick them up. Pick them up yourself and get to work!

 EVIL INC wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
You could do standees / counters today, with no loss in playability. It just wouldn't be as visual.

A group of players COULD do that. However, if my group of players were to play a different group who used the actual models or their own set of "counters" there could be differences in "model" footprint or size and distances ranges.....
This is why a set release of "official" ones with the game would negate that issue and re-introduce the game itself. Not to mention, if done correctly, official countes and such would likely look much nicer than these buttons and that cardboard cutout. of course, making GW a boatload of money would also help the company out and the extra profits could be re-invested into further production, research , playtesting.....(we could hope lol)

If you cannot get the models anymore maybe this is an option?

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Nope. In BFG, the models are meaningless. All you really need are flight stands, because the ships are only as big as the diameter of the rod (about 3/16"). Everything measures to/from the rods.

And even then, the rods are grossly oversized by at least an order of magnitude.

Space is VAST. Ships are miniscule.


Really, if you've ever looked at true scale naval battles, or even tank battles, this would be readily apparent.

Having studied warfare through the ages, I am readily aware of this. You might not have noticed it though but wargaming does not always take exact scale into account. Exact scale and distances and so forth are arbitrary in many of today's games. GW as well as any others.
I did not know it measured fom the rod though. I just like to have an official standard where it is the same for everyone. Of course wanting it to be a win win for everyone including GW along with us players is a plus. It is only a suggestion of common sense where everyone would win.
A note on the use of the flat 2 dimensional representations though. You would not have the stem undrneath. A hole in the top that rods could be inserted into would then allow us to measure from the stem still.

Jehan-reznor- an exalt on the link. Too bad they dont have all of the options for all of the fleets. If they did, would be worth making multiple copies of each fleet to have spares on hand for outside players coming in or playing with strangers.

Trasvi wrote:

 aka_mythos wrote:
GW abandoned Mordheim, Necromunda, Inquistor, Battle Fleet Gothic, Gorka Morka, and Epic 40,000 because they couldn't sell enough miniatures to justify continued investments on a meaningful level. The inability to justify those games comes from GW's attempt to minimize overhead. GW could only give the games the support of one or two designers who had to do everything;a comparable to the overhead that goes into a codex but beyond the initial releases of those games they tended not to sell a volume even close to a codex release. For any one of those games to have been as successful, enough for GW, every person playing a respective game would had to have bought nearly every faction or gotten that many more people to buy into the game.

I think its more along the lines that while the games were 'successful' (they made a profit), GW felt they could make MORE profit by investing the same effort in to their main lines (really, LOTR). It happens all the time, businesses sell off or close down their less profitable arms even if they are making money.

Other companies manage to produce competitors to GW's specialist games with far *more* studio overhead - GW has publishing, designing and production experience and an existing IP to draw upon whereas companies like Spartan had to discover all of this for themselves and invent the entire settings of all of their games.

I agree they were successful, thats why I said "For any one of those games to be as successful" as a codex release.

I think we agree that it all shows GW's short sightedness when you consider how many of the big non-GW games this year draw clear parallels to these specialist games or in the least attempt to fill the same niches.

 Vermis wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

It's the best thing to happen to wargaming in decades if you consider games to be completely interchangable replacements for one another. Not so fantastic if you were a fan of those specific games and would much rather have seen them get years of development and support than be replaced by a bunch of stuff you're not interested in.

I still smart a bit that GW dropped SGs, especially Epic: Armageddon, but considering the kind of 'support' they've been giving 40K, WFB, and arguably LotR since then ('support' spelled B U Y B U Y B U Y) I can also see it as a mercy.

And y'know what? I've still got the E:A book on my shelf. I can see it right now. It didn't magically disintegrate when GW snipped the SG section off their webstore. I think the guys at TacComm have been doing a decent job with NetE:A; there are more and more proxies that I'm pretty satisfied with, and even prefer to GW's original designs; and there's a nearby club where Epic is seeing a resurgence in popularity.

And if Epic has shrunk some from the public view, well, there's those new competitors with plenty of interesting stuff to soften the blow.

Sucks to get fewer SG games in, but to be honest I can't lie awake at night for every gamer moping over an old game. I was never overly impressed with the potential for pickup games in Timbuctoo or outer Mongolia, and not too wowed by the attitude that a game can only be played (or is only worth playing) if GW drops everything in your lap. (and keeps dropping random crap, for a considerable fee) Never mind if you already have the rules and more than enough minis. I can only worry about my own local clubs and groups, whether they suddenly develop gaming monomania, and how I might do something to get round it and get my fave games noticed.

Can you make even one post on this subject without casting yourself as some kind of superior being zen-floating above the lesser mortals who are so silly as to "like" a particular thing? For the record, I didn't take all my SG stuff out into the back garden and burn it in an oil drum when GW stopped caring about them, I continue to play and enjoy them, modify them, and collect models to use with them(even, shock-horror, non GW models), but despite all the problems I have with GW I still think it's a shame that we likely won't get to see what modern versions of the SG's, in plastic even, could have looked like.

And as for "monomania"; I don't get why this is so difficult to grasp when it specifically comes to tabletop games. If a person likes certain bands within a genre but not others, or a specific videogame but not another game with superficially similar mechanics, it gets put down to personal taste, but say you like a particular game or group of games because of the specific confluence of mechanics, scale, aesthetics, and background which it represents and are uninterested in other games which lack that confluence and, well, that must mean you're some kind of bizarro obsessive with a stunted imagination.

Short answer. They were not making as much money for the company as they wanted.

 Yodhrin wrote:

underfire wargaming wrote:

 Vermis wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The greatest shame is that if these games had stayed current, and they even <gasp> made more of them they would have no competition in the Wargames industry.

I hope you don't mind me saying so, but I don't count that as the greatest shame, or much of a shame at all.

I agree with Vermis 100%!, best thing to happen in decades for wargaming!.

It's the best thing to happen to wargaming in decades if you consider games to be completely interchangable replacements for one another. Not so fantastic if you were a fan of those specific games and would much rather have seen them get years of development and support than be replaced by a bunch of stuff you're not interested in.

It is in our view the best thing too happen as it allows more openings in the market place for companies such as ourselves to enter the market and look at such ideas and say how can we do things better and different? and go ahead and create our own unique product and have a growing diversity in these styles of games, not everyone would want to play such styles of games in one setting and style which would be the case otherwise.

Of course their different games on their own, but such as GW is ran by men who do not care for their customers they shut down the range. Well that is for your view but many are very happy to see diversity come into the market place and this will overall grow the market and perhaps one day a company will produce the game setting you would most enjoy. You do however have fan made and supported rule sets ( the two names escape me at the moment) and they (unlike what GW puts out) from what I have heard are very balanced and enjoyable, so they have not been supported by GW but their are still rules very much of that setting that are being played and supported right now ( perhaps not in miniatures but theirs so many options now adays that you can find almost anything your looking for).

All in all it is still a great thing for the market place because now other companies stand a chance in producing these types of games without having to fight uphill against a company that would dominate that market place. I see nothing wrong in growth of wargaming instead of it being stuck and stagnant.

I do think GW tried an expansive new small game with the zone mortalis releases. But it felt half hearted and rather exclusive. They want something more than a static board game that can generate sufficient sales to warrant the effort. I can see their point even if I don't like it. I still think they offer GWs best hope of moving more deeply into video games.

I also think that they may have started with a false premise - that if Specialist Games were not available then customers would buy into the larger games.

Instead competitors are jumping in, and giving folks that the smaller games that they want - taking over a niche that GW has abandoned.

I still prefer Mordheim to any of the currently available alternatives - but Deadzone is doing a fine job of filling the smoking boots left behind by Necromunda. (If only the campaign wasn't being run on a work night....)

The Auld Grump

Eilif wrote:Playing SG games just takes a bit of effort on the part of the players. Really it doesn't take any more effort than most historical games where you have to do everything yourself: select the era, choose rules, find and paint appropriate minis (often both sides), build terrain, write or find scenarios, etc. Historical guys have been doing this for ages. It's us Sci/fi and Fantasy folks who have tended to get complacent and expect one company to give us the rules, fluff and minis all on one platter.

The Specialist games lasted a much longer time than any game has a right to expect, but they're not coming back. The tools are there to be used. Don't wait for GW to come back and pick them up. Pick them up yourself and get to work!

Que Eff Tee.

underfire wargaming wrote:It is in our view the best thing too happen as it allows more openings in the market place for companies such as ourselves to enter the market and look at such ideas and say how can we do things better and different? and go ahead and create our own unique product and have a growing diversity in these styles of games, not everyone would want to play such styles of games in one setting and style which would be the case otherwise.

This too. Heck, I know of at least four wee companies that sprang up to cater for 6mm sci-fi, with their own background and sometimes rules, but also providing proxies for Epic.

All in all it is still a great thing for the market place because now other companies stand a chance in producing these types of games without having to fight uphill against a company that would dominate that market place. I see nothing wrong in growth of wargaming instead of it being stuck and stagnant.

If it's not too hyperbolic, I see the reality of this topic and the potential of the 'what if GW went bankrupt?' topic like something out of the Dune series:

 Vermis wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:

Just a point - Malifaux book 3 is in beta, and has a campaign system.

And Malifaux book 2 was released... how many months ago?

I feel like GW's legacy isn't just freeing up gaming categories and niches, but encouraging the new guys who take up the space to act like them, in ways, too.

If you're implying book 3 (and book 2) is a new edition of the game you'd be wrong there.

Well.

It's still a bunch of overpriced badly-balanced money-grubbing anyway.