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So the signs all point to GW shaking up fantasy, possibly including blowing up the whole dang world.

So... what went wrong? How did it go from being their number 1 game, to needing drastic measures to rescue?

Some thoughts:

1 - Too many redundant factions: splitting Chaos into 3, Undead into 2, Elfs into 3, Orks into O&G and Ogres... Just too many factions that are similar. We can disagree about which factions were redundant (I really like the Egpytian tomb kings as a concept and would love to have the Assyrian Chaos Dwarfs back) but 14 different factions each with their own kits and blisters? Too much for even GW's stores to support.

2 - Not enough diverse factions: GW could have developed other factions that were either culturaly diverse (Araby, Cathy, Yind, Nippon) or played differently (an all flying army, an all monster army). Instead each action was the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery.

3 - Neglecting the core: With a mature game and extablished factions new releases stressed large monsters or war machines and ignored basic infantry. Most players will buy one dragon, or tentacle rape monster or flying boat or whatever but will buy several infantry units. GW could have either replaced some aging models (High Elf infantry and chaos warriors for example) or introduced some new ones that players would buy in bulk.

4 - Rules bloat: another problem with 14 factions to differentiate, too many small random rules to track and balance.

5 - Losing the cutting edge - A lot of companies have yoinked GW's big shoulder pad and skull look, with WOW probably being the most prominent. What was once original is now old hat. It's not GW's fault and there ain't much that can be done but it's worth remembering.

Other thoughts?

Personally I find it was pricing, I love Warhammer as a hobby and I dabble in other tabletop games too but I have other hobbies that take precedent and GW are very close to completely pricing themselves out of reach for me, I'd sooner go head first and spend £300 on some 15mm WW2, Dropzone Commander, Infinity, Hordes, Malifaux and Mordheim than simply pony up for another Warhammer army.

I say that as a big fan of Warhammer and of Games Workshop model kits as well, It's my favourite tabletop game, warts 'n all.

Frankly a Warhammer Skirmish game would suit me down to the ground, I've got the Mordheim rules on a HDD somewhere too so I'm quite curious about this new start for fantasy as I've already got two rule sets (8th and Mordheim) so 9th will have to be quite special to be extracting cash from me, now!

In 6th and 7th editions I really quite enjoyed playing Warhammer Fantasy. I have a very large painted Orc and Goblin army and a similarly large and fully painted Dwarf army. I used to also have Beastmen and Lizardmen, and I have the guts of a WoC cavalry army.

When 8th came out, I bought the book, got kind of excited, played a game and...never played fantasy ever again.

It's not that the rules were terrible, they weren't, though I believe they had several critical flaws. It was that setting up the game was so damned time consuming with the model bloat of the new edition and then all I did was remove swathes of the little guys I'd spent minutes putting onto the movement tray as my opponent bombarded me with magic.

It wasn't worth the effort needed to set up the game to actually play the game, and most of the fun movement related tactics had been stripped out of the game. So I always intended getting back to it once I'd done up my armies and had a think about how to deal with the magic issue.

But then GW increased the prices on the rules, increased the prices on the sets, and I lost more interest. Time was I would buy the books for every force I was even vaguely interested in. As the 8th edition books were more blatant rehashes of old material than any other codex set I'd seen, and they were charging a premium for the rules, I just stopped. I could not justify the cost of keeping current when compared to the enjoyment I got out of the game. I didn't rage quit, I just sort of fell behind. And the prices kept going up, and the rules didn't get any better- in fact they tended to emphasize what I didn't like about the game with Storm of Magic and so on.

So now the Old World is ending, and I barely care. I haven't bought a single thing for End Times. I've just moved on.

Ignoring the pricing for the moment, because you know... GW, KK's third point pretty much sums up my views. Warhammer for me was about armies with the occasional monster as a centre piece. In recent years it just became about monsters with some infantry for them to tear apart.

On the topic of points 2 and 4, wot I just posted on another topic:

I'll say 'write better games'. Balanced, yes. Not shook up for the sake of repositioning flaws and reselling, yes. And also 'more appropriate'...
If you want a mass battle game, make a mass battle game focused on units and their footprints, on combined arms, on tactics, and maybe some more focus on command and control, too. (I bleedin' love C&C in mass battle games. Without it, IMO, it's like a fantasy novel without a map: so much more dull.) Don't make a mass battle game by swelling the model count of your original skirmish/warband game about individual models with individual attacks and individual saves, and so ridiculously dependent on how many individual models you have in the back rank of each unit, and on individual big flashy killy characters.
If you want to focus on the *deep breath* cinematic value of individual flashy powerful characters, make a skirmish game and don't force gamers to buy 100-200+ grunts and wound markers before they can experience it 'properly'. (Properly. Ha.)

I don't think 'the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery' is so much of a problem, or entirely accurate. Historical gaming has been constantly popular with variations on the 'same arrangement' with many, many more factions. ('monsters' being relegated to the occasional elephant in a few armies, and no wizards either) I think the differences there are that most historical mass battle games are as I said above: actually tailored for mass battles, with mechanics centred more around tactics and maneuvre rather than individual models, characters, and special rules. Also, for all that GW gamers rave about the lore and fluff and how the rules represent it, I think that most historical gamers might appreciate their 'fluff' more, and give it it's proper place - i.e. separate from the rules.
That's not to say that the different rulesets are entirely flavourless, and I've heard a couple of grognards complain that a certain set of rules doesn't represent a particular historical tactic or weapon properly (though one of these was that Warhammer Ancient Battles was useless for English Civil War hedgehogs and shotte sleeves and the like ) but overall historical games seem to take a much more elegant and simple, but deeper approach with general rules and mechanics, and let you get on with the fluff and excitement represented by the conflict you decide on (like I said, separate from, and possibly more important than, which rules you use!), the minis you choose to fight it, and how well you manipulate them on the tabletop with those deeper rules. As opposed to how well you can micromanage their weapon, magic item and autotriggered special rule loadout, and how many you can buy or afford. Some fantasy games also follow this reasoning, and seem to be more and more popular because of it.

One more thought, does anoyne have any insights into why GW spent a few years cranking out some lovely wizard towers?

I mean they were lovely, I almost bought the obervatory one just to build, but as far as I could tell they were almost useless in the game and sucked up a lot of resources.

And they KEPT DOING THEM!

Why not do a modular castle to replace the elderly 'mighty fortress' or a modeular wooden stockade which would work for other armies, or universal monsters like a generic dragon...

It just made no sense to me...

Because it's a thing for GW to produce and GW gamers to buy. That's the GW hobby after all, didn't you hear? Usefulness in some 'game' is not the point.

I wanted to reply to Vermis, in my experience, or should I say, speaking for myself, I've tried the historical rulesets (black powder, field of battle, piquet, half a dozen ACW, AWI, Napoleonic, Ancients, and even Kings of War, and the "footprint" approach to mass battle games left me cold. I can't put my finger on what it exactly is - I prefer the warhammer fantasy and warhammer ancients for my 28mm battles. I do like the other sets for their command and control (piquet, field of battle, battlegroup) where you don't know everything and can't always do everything.

Fantasy has always been mind numbingly complex. Take a unit like a giant or even a goblin fanatic and you end up with 2-3 pages of rules to use it in game, while warhammer ancients could do an elephant in half a page. Simpler, and cleaner.

Rules bloat in fantasy is just as bad as in 40k, everyone wants detail and complexity (crunch, chrome), and they all want their melta gun to do unique things when used by their faction. So, you end up with endless special rules, because a melta can't be fusion which can't be super heat gun.

Time was when Fantasy was the big kid on the block, and was primarily a european thing while 40k was played more in the US. Now its all 40k, all the time. GW, I think, did price themselves out of mass battle, when you compare to sub 80 cents per model historicals versus $3-4 each core model for plastics. My benchmark for expensive used to be Perry. Once I began seeing Perry models for much less than GW plastics, I knew GW was heading a bad way.

And KK, I don't get the terrain for fantasy either. I think it was the move toward buy everything for everything from us, rather than being about the hobby. And really, fantasy was always terrain lite, so why bother. Oh, and that venerable fortress is an absolute steal cost wise compared to newer castles...

Sorry for the ramble, I hope it made sense, and again, all in my opinion (speaking for myself)

 Flashman wrote:
Ignoring the pricing for the moment, because you know... GW, KK's third point pretty much sums up my views. Warhammer for me was about armies with the occasional monster as a centre piece. In recent years it just became about monsters with some infantry for them to tear apart.

That's kind of what it was like in the early days, first and second edition, and that's why I stopped playing.

Why bother to play a game in which whatever you do, the other guy pulls out some mega monster or "I win" magic card and basically negates every bit of tactics and luck you have managed to scrape together.

But in the modern game I think doubling the price of army books was a big mistake. It's the reason I stopped playing 40K. If I did play Fantasy I would have stopped for the same reason.

 Cruentus wrote:
I wanted to reply to Vermis, in my experience, or should I say, speaking for myself, I've tried the historical rulesets (black powder, field of battle, piquet, half a dozen ACW, AWI, Napoleonic, Ancients, and even Kings of War, and the "footprint" approach to mass battle games left me cold. I can't put my finger on what it exactly is - I prefer the warhammer fantasy and warhammer ancients for my 28mm battles.

Fair enough. For me it was the opposite: finally turned off by the minute crunch of WFB (what's better for a bunch of ogre bulls - ironfist or extra hand weapon? Ah... who cares?!) I started checking out historical games too. I joined a WAB-playing club just as they were gearing up for a dark ages (WAB shieldwall) tourney and I joined in. After all the faff of watching dozens of hirdmen and ceorls and things being gingerly shuffled and shuttled across the table; waiting for champions and berzerkers and things to resolve their extra or different attacks; picking models out of the back of units (and the usual fretting over whether you have 4 or 5 in the back rank) and spending altogether too much effort trying to rank them up again; and my own particular problems resolving attacks and casualties to and from mixed units of saxons thegns and ceorls, and ranking those up when you have to pluck dead guys out of the middle of units; and so on... I finally decided the problem wasn't the F in WFB, but the W.

This was the same club that moved from WAB ECW to Pike & Shotte, and those games along with Black Powder ACW and others, were just so much more fun to me. Even though I usually lost like a chump. (I still fondly remember when my Yankee field gun crew misunderstood their orders, picked up their piece, and ran at full movement towards the enemy lines)

That said, God of Battles is a ranked-block, individual-model, casualty-removal fantasy game that I wouldn't mind trying out sometime. The difference there is that the smaller possible game sizes in it are much, much smaller than WFB, currently. Currently as in, it almost seems to me what 3rd ed 'Oldhammer' is, except the mechanics are more streamlined than even big-battle Warhammer is. (it would be difficult not to be)

For me there were several reasons:

Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

Ever increasing large monsters - as mentioned above. I want the game to be about big armies, with a few monsters. And, in my opinion, a lot of the big monsters look like . That spider thing that the Orcs get, that Eagle With A Trailer Hitch that Elves get. That complete bit of gak that the Vampire Counts get, and the horrible things that have been tacked on to the Tomb Kings.

Sorry, but they look like crap.

And these are the things that bother me when I already own the miniatures. I do not need to spend the money to buy my units of Empire Halberdiers - I have had them for a decade and more.

That said, I could not stomach shelling out the shekels to buy the hardcover army books.

But for someone just getting into the game? They are like to die of sticker shock.

As much as I love Kings of War, I doubt that it is putting much of a dent in the sales for Warhammer - though it may be grabbing folks that already have Warhammer armies, but want to play with halfway decent rules.

The Auld Grump

I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

which in a way is bizarre as GW really doesn't seem to listen to the player base in most things,

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

which in a way is bizarre as GW really doesn't seem to listen to the player base in most things,

I disagree.

Strongly.

The problem kicks in when each of those bits of 'new stuff' have to be special snowflakes.

One of the reasons that I like Kings of War so much - the rules are much more universal, rather than finding three ways of having rules that mean the same thing.

If the rules were properly integrated then there would be no need to get rid of old units to make room for the new.

Though Warhammer has done a much better job of holding onto the old than Warhammer 40K has.

The last edition of Fantasy that I really liked was 6th.

The Auld Grump

Fracturing the armies was never really an issue. The issue was more prevalent in the way in which each army book was taken on, as a pet project by an author with limited playtesting and an inconsistent attitude to how each army was dealt with.

Then you have the issue of 'too many dice' (random charge distance, winds of magic, too many models etc), high price point due to the new balancing point of the rules (people want to push 3,000 to balance the new 50% lord/heroes) and general veteran attitude (that the price point isn't too high so who cares if we raise the price point at tournaments) which is pushing away newbloods.

Honestly the game is too bloated to take on GW's trademark inconsistencies and 'beardy-be-gone' attitude which seems to ignore a whole demographic of its customer-base. Nuking the rules base for a skirmish system could be a good start, but given their attitude towards rolling more dice regardless of how simple a rule should be, I don't hold out that much hope for the future of Fantasy. Then there's the lack of any real contribution by GW anymore into the community which means that the community bears the cost of keeping this hobby alive and in play.

It's just a sad state of affairs.

I started with 8th and ended with 8th. The model count is just way, way, way too high. And all those extra models are just wound counters. If I wanted to simulate something on that scale, it'd be better at 14mm or less. That scale of the game is just terrible and the costs associated with it are the first killer.

The second are the rules making dudespam a necessary evil. The rank bonuses and steadfast make combats boring slogs of nothing happening. The spells are then ramped up to 11 to combat the slower pace of combat.

It also has the same minutia problems like 40k where things like weapon skill, arguable more game impacting in a Fantasy setting, is still a hot mess with no real way to say a WS6 dude is fighting WS3 or a WS5 fighting a WS3, etc. It exists to aid in speed rolling, but that's a band-aid for the "too many dudes" issue.

Lastly, the secretive hush hush over upcoming 9th. I am so very glad I sold my Bretonnia now (save the valuable metal center pieces) as it seems like they're gonna be just an add-on for forces of man. For other people with Lizards... ew, if true.

Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun. Not sure which is worse now, 40k or Fantasy, but I dislike both games now after playing so many that don't use random mechanics.

I agree with the OP's list, and add my own:

1 - focusing on models and not rules. They were so obsessed with whether or not they could make 'big' models, they never stopped to ask if they should. I remember when the arachnarok came out, and it was a case of "we can build big models now so we will". A lot of what has been produced since then has revolved around that idea. But at its core, warhammer wasn't about collecting models for the sake of it, or centrepiece models for the sake of it, it was about playing a game. Which leads to:

2 - with the loss of focus on rules, the game has been slowly getting out of hand. As stated: rules bloat, special snowflake, reboots for the sake of reboots. The game (and rules) have taken the backseat to the models, which is unfortunate because it was the game that drove the models and not the other way around. GW started life supplying models for other peoples games, but if the games hadn't been good or popular the models would have been largely irrelevant.

3 - prices. GW wants to make a fortune selling cheap plastic toy soldiers. The problem is what they're selling isn't a 'premium' item, even though they try to hype that fact to their customers. Prices could be tolerated more if they came with good rules and balance, but they don't.

The end result is simple: people stop buying. To the point that they've lost the majority of their customer base (8% down from 33% down from god knows how high to start with.)

For me, the real question is: Why do they think this is only going to happen to fantasy and not 40k?

It was supposed to be a game of mass battles, not mass pricing.

I think one of the biggest problems is a comparitve lack of promotion. 40k is a game that everyone knows, more or less, even if you don't do table top you know about 40k. there are all sorts of memes etc about it on the internet. word of mouth sells 40k. WFB doesn't have that advantage. it's to most people "just another fantasy setting". what this means is people tend not to go looking to get into WFB, certinly not compared to people who might decide to get into 40k. so far no WFB based video game has acheived "huge hit" status. (not like say dawn of war or space marine, which have both sold well) thankfully this could be less of an issue if warhammer: total war does really well. oddly right now it's 40k that doesn't seem to have a "big A grade title" coming down the pike.
"j

I've played fantasy for going on 20 years, with a bit of a break at one point when MMORPG's got me for a few years. I think the higher costs of building an army is what hurt fantasy the most. The not having an intro game, which is what 9th could end up being a side by side game, who knows.

The large monsters isn't the problem, as you can build a monster free army, just as well as a monster laden force. due to cannons and spells, the first is likely better.

The bloat of rules is not that bad. Most are memorizable, except maybe tables such as the giant rules, but those haven't changed AFAIK in ages.

Model bloat is likely a issue, a wide range is problematic, ogres didn't need their own book, as they were part of empire, chaos and O&G however giving a WD of PDF file to make them an own force would have been acceptable. But if you wanted them to have something unique like ogre mountain cannon (Ironblaster) you needed to make a model unique. for IP reasons.

Promotion is lacking, I agree with the video game situation.

 Vermis wrote:


Fair enough. For me it was the opposite: finally turned off by the minute crunch of WFB (what's better for a bunch of ogre bulls - ironfist or extra hand weapon? Ah... who cares?!) I started checking out historical games too. I joined a WAB-playing club just as they were gearing up for a dark ages (WAB shieldwall) tourney and I joined in. After all the faff of watching dozens of hirdmen and ceorls and things being gingerly shuffled and shuttled across the table; waiting for champions and berzerkers and things to resolve their extra or different attacks; picking models out of the back of units (and the usual fretting over whether you have 4 or 5 in the back rank) and spending altogether too much effort trying to rank them up again; and my own particular problems resolving attacks and casualties to and from mixed units of saxons thegns and ceorls, and ranking those up when you have to pluck dead guys out of the middle of units; and so on... I finally decided the problem wasn't the F in WFB, but the W.

This was the same club that moved from WAB ECW to Pike & Shotte, and those games along with Black Powder ACW and others, were just so much more fun to me. Even though I usually lost like a chump. (I still fondly remember when my Yankee field gun crew misunderstood their orders, picked up their piece, and ran at full movement towards the enemy lines)

That said, God of Battles is a ranked-block, individual-model, casualty-removal fantasy game that I wouldn't mind trying out sometime. The difference there is that the smaller possible game sizes in it are much, much smaller than WFB, currently. Currently as in, it almost seems to me what 3rd ed 'Oldhammer' is, except the mechanics are more streamlined than even big-battle Warhammer is. (it would be difficult not to be)

Oh, yeah, I remember all of that now. I didn't mind that much, but my regular opponent has stated exactly what you just wrote - the fiddly, rank counting (counted before or after?), minute rules, etc., all cut into his satisfaction.

I guess that when I played, we never really paid much attention to things like steadfast, or hordes (never saw a single unit formed that way, and I played against O&G a lot), and in historicals it was fairly straightforward, small points battles (750-1000 points), so they went quicker. We also interspersed skirmish games and ambushes and such into the scenarios. I played a Successors WAB game at Adepticon, with hundreds of amazing models on both sides, and when played with a relaxed group who wanted to enjoy themselves, it went well and made me want to play more.

Although I can remember the protractor discussions about movement back in the 5th-ish days, where my opponents were so fiddly with movement arcs, positioning down to the mm, etc., that it put me off. Still played, just not against those guys (while realizing it was entirely appropriate according to the rules).

I've looked at the Foundry rules, but never pulled the trigger. There is also something about the GW fluff, etc., that makes proxies, counts as, or other "plays as" in another system not feel right for me.

Someday I'll play more, hopefully campaigns, but the fantasy folks are thin on the ground around me.

*edit for spelling and to add: I am amazed at the sheer size of the GW catalog when you look across all of the armies. Its a massive amount of miniatures, I wonder of they're just not able to keep production going on such a vast number of models, and have settled on making bigger kits for more margin.

The combination of the cost of the models and the required number to play the game at the level the rules function best.

This combined with no entry level experience redirected their customers to their competition. Which have thrived in the areas of the wargames niche that GW ceded to them willingly.

Oh, so, so, so many things:

Pricing: arguably the biggest offender, since it hit you THREE times. First, prices for models were ridiculous. Second, emphasis on huge units necessitated buying LOTS of ridiculously priced models. Third, Gigantic Monsters (offered up to combat huge units) were even more expensive. This was a huge problem, since it was bad by itself, and made two of the other problems so much worse.

Model Count: by rewriting the rules to reward huge units of infantry, GW damaged the game in many ways. It made playing prohibitively expensive. It made creating an army both expensive and hugely time consuming. It disconnected collecting from playing, since the person buying to paint and model needed 5-10 models, but the person creating a unit often wanted 30--but no one wants to assemble and paint 30 model of the same 5 sculpts. It reduced army diversity, since you were likely to field a smaller number of units, each of larger sizes. It discouraged the purchase of entire types of models, since they were so much less effective than huge blocks of infantry. It led to the development of 'mega-spells' which were devastating to small units.

Gigantic Models: In and of itself, this is not actually bad. In fact, I think it was badass. However, the prevalence of gigantic models, and their shoehorning into relatively small armies, led to a very poorly balanced game. While I think a game where the Skaven unleashed a towering abomination would be incredible, the fact that the skaven were rolling out massive monsters in every army (etc) made the games ridiculous. It disrupted both the design of the game, by focusing tactics on big individual models rather than small units, and it disrupted the setting. Why is anyone afraid of Chaos Warriors if all these giant Chaos beasties are roaming around? Who decides to invest time and effort into growing grapes when a 50" tall bull-man might roam into your area and kill everyone?

Army sameness: I know people are talking about rules bloat, and they aren't wrong, but hang with me here for a second. GW inserted the same types of units into every army. Orcs & Goblins had a big monster, then so did beastmen, then so did Empire. Daemons have monstrous cavalry, and so do Empire, and Ogres, etc. Elves have chariots, and now, so do Daemons, etc. With the extremely rare exception of the dwarves and Brets, GW stuck [box of models this size] into every army, without any thought to how it affected play, the background, or the feel of the army. Why is the Empire scared of Chaos monsters if they have Griffin Riders and barn size griffins? What distinguishes one army from another, when they all have the same types of units? Heck, I remember being disgusted by the changes in Ogre Kingdoms. I was SO excited to finally field an army of Ogres. A whole army, of OGRES! Then, of course, ogres got cavalry, and monstrous mounts, and cannons, etc. The actual OGRES of the army were not interesting any more.

Overwhelming magic: partly in response to the emphasis on huge units and big monsters, magic got dramatically buffed, and in a poorly thought out and unbalanced way. Not only was this damaging to game balance, it was extremely frustrating to the opponent. Why field a unit of, say, Ogres, if a single spell could easily wipe them off the board with one casting? It also was severely damaging to the fluff. If magic was this incredibly powerful, but astoundingly risky, how did wizards survive a single battle, much less develop their skills over years of study? Why were traditional military tactics ever developed, if amazing spells could shatter units in one go?

Maniac branding: Games Workshop has incredible economies of scale, which they could use to dominate the market for fantasy modeling, but their bull-headed insistence on a ham-handed, overwhelming 'Warhammer' look destroyed their ability to market to other hobbists. While having a distinctive look is an important sales driver, why in the world woudn't you make Fantasy buildings and monsters that anyone might buy for their game? Now, many different companies make nice, inexpensive (in some cases) fantasy buildings, terrain, and boards, but GW could have cornered and dominated this market if they had produced affordable, flexible options instead of SKULL PIT and GOTHIC stuff.

Disregarding Playstyle: the distinction between WFB and 40K was the emphasis on maneuvering and tactical positioning. Largely throwing that out the window meant that you lost audiences in two ways. People who wanted fantasy tactical battles moved to other games, and people who were happy with this less tactical style of play moved from Fantasy to 40K, where it was more fully realized and implemented.

Total Customer Disengagement: GW makes no effort to communicate anything to their fans other than what they should buy this week. They have eliminated all interaction with fans via social media, don't discuss plans or release sneak peeks, and have, UNDER OATH, derided and belittled the whole idea of market research. If people have NO IDEA what you are doing to the game, it makes it very difficult for them to decide to invest in a very large, very expensive, very complex game which requires a huge amount of time and money commitment. When other people tell you what their game is doing, for free, and it costs less, you experiment with them.

Fluff Violence The saddest thing for me to see is the irrevocable damage done to the Warhammer Fantasy world. I'm not just talking about the End Times, though they do exemplify the disregard or even hatred GW seems to show for their own background. Chaos Warriors and Chaos Knights were widely feared in the Old World, for their incredible strength, violence, and savagery. Now you have tons of huge monsters, as well as ogre-sized chaos warriors. Why were Chaos Warriors feared so much? Chaos Knights were a source of terror, but now, they struggle to disrupt a single block of infantry. The Empire depends on Wizards in war, but mistrusts them, but now has all sorts of magical contraptions that roll into the battle. I LOVED the distinct post-medieval, 'Renaissance' flavored setting of WFB. I loved the grim, gritty realism of their dark low fantasy. Now everything is big monsters, big magic, and big contraptions. It's not plausible that people should think and behave in any sort of way that resembles medieval/Renaissance Europe when the fabric of the entire world is so dramatically changed. In addition, you can advance the storyline, without tearing it apart. If I wrote a political thriller where South America and Africa were both destroyed by a giant meteor, Canada invaded America, Americans fled as refugees to Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece were destroyed by, oh, let's say anarchists, Russia was wiped out by a force from the Arctic, and Western Europe was fundamentally changed, while Britain sank, all in 10 years, people would call me a massive hack. If I also didn't mention anything at all about China, Japan, or India doing anything during this time, people would call me a racist or an even bigger, less talented hack. If the company doesn't care about the setting any longer, why should anyone else?.

So here's my take.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
So the signs all point to GW shaking up fantasy, possibly including blowing up the whole dang world.

So... what went wrong? How did it go from being their number 1 game, to needing drastic measures to rescue?

Some thoughts:

1 - Too many redundant factions: splitting Chaos into 3, Undead into 2, Elfs into 3, Orks into O&G and Ogres... Just too many factions that are similar. We can disagree about which factions were redundant (I really like the Egpytian tomb kings as a concept and would love to have the Assyrian Chaos Dwarfs back) but 14 different factions each with their own kits and blisters? Too much for even GW's stores to support.

1000 times yes. Chaos always should have had the malleability to mix and match Beastmen, Warriors, and Daemons. I just recently bought HOrdes of Chaos and Storm of Chaos, and those books are absolutely fascinating. Agree with the "we can split hairs over which ones are redundant", for instance i think spliting ogres was a good thing (as ogres became super unique - quasi-nomadic, almost Mongolian Khannite like, but culturually promiscuous mercenaries ravenous with hunger and fear-worshipping a comet ? Pretty interesting and neat... whereas TK as an egyptian theme is neat, but there's not enough to spread it from VC and vice versa. ).

14 factions. Fourteen! The bloat alone was gigantic.

2 - Not enough diverse factions: GW could have developed other factions that were either culturaly diverse (Araby, Cathy, Yind, Nippon) or played differently (an all flying army, an all monster army). Instead each action was the same arrangement of infantry, monsters, cavalry and artillery.

I sort of wish they had had the human nations band together a long time ago, and then you could do Araby / Cathay / Nippon elements without further bloating with more armies, but acknowledging that the forces of men had gotten their gak together in the fluff and made a concordia humanicus of sorts... then you can introduce those things (i mean, really... who isn't going to buy arabic fast cav or samurai foot troops for their empire?) as part of the continent spanning "empire of man", while keeping your army count down. Books are expensive, sure, but adding a couple pages to an army book that's already going to get reprinted per edition isn't.

3 - Neglecting the core: With a mature game and extablished factions new releases stressed large monsters or war machines and ignored basic infantry. Most players will buy one dragon, or tentacle rape monster or flying boat or whatever but will buy several infantry units. GW could have either replaced some aging models (High Elf infantry and chaos warriors for example) or introduced some new ones that players would buy in bulk.

I agree on the replacing aging models, though not relegating it to just core : and we saw that with high elves... while the core was by and large not replaced, the entirety of the foot soldier Special category was, and they were all really nice. I bought 30 all new phoenix guard and White Lions (despite almost never using white lions, personally), and i split a total of 4 islands of blood with a skaven friend. Still, the decision to reboot books but let tons of aging models just wither for some armies but redoing most for others (see also dark elves) was just weird. Inconsistency is rarely a good sign.

4 - Rules bloat: another problem with 14 factions to differentiate, too many small random rules to track and balance.

Nah. I disagree here. See Mark 1 Warmachine. It got so bad that the Infernals, who i used to belong to, would trip up over rules in private discussions. WHFB was a LONG way away from so many rules that it could be considered rules bloat. There are way more overly complex games out there. I will say this, though, WHFB loooooves itself some exception based design rules. Like, their core rules even have exceptions in them: I.e. Cannon balls bounce - Unless it hits a large target, then it doesn't go further ! That gets eye rollingly annoying as you go further and further into the development of a game, as nearly every friggin rule has an exception to it. Core rules should be inviolate as a standalone set of rules : the special rules at the model or faction level is where the exception based design should come in.

That said, WHFB's rules are not that extravgant or bloated. If you want to see rules bloat needless complexity for its own sake, see confrontation 3.5 with errata, or WM mk1 with errata, or hell even Mk1 Infinity.

5 - Losing the cutting edge - A lot of companies have yoinked GW's big shoulder pad and skull look, with WOW probably being the most prominent. What was once original is now old hat. It's not GW's fault and there ain't much that can be done but it's worth remembering.

I think a lot of companies have very successfully moved in on the once "only game in town". Warmachine is a very strong competitor. They have a brilliant marketing and release schedule / model. Brilliant. Kickstarter is making it easier and easier to get games off the ground. Competitors are making models that are much easier on the wallet.

I think a big thing too is every time GW burns people, it loses customers it almost never gets back. For a game that's been around, ... i think ? 25 years ? maybe more... that's a lot of time to burn people. Invalidating armies. Squatting stuff. etc etc. People don't forget that gak, no matter what GW's cult of corporation tells itself while figuring out inventive ways to pay its shareholders dividends (and note: I Love WHFB ! I want the game to thrive which means the company to thrive!).

Other thoughts?

The prices have just reached crazy town. 60 bucks for 10 witch elves ? Yes they are nice. Yes i friggin' bought them so i'm part of the problem. But goddamn it, even a dyed in the wool rabid elf player like me thought real long and hard before finally shelling over that money for them. I have 20. I am going to go Avatars of War or Kings of war for the remainder i want.



I actually think End Times is good for the game. It has created buzz (there are people interested in fantasy that never have been before at my local shop... and were poised to pick the game up until locals were like "HEY IT MIGHT ALL BE CHANGING / BEING INVALIDATED, SO DON'T!" which i can't blame them on. I think if they hadn't fethed with the nature of the game, or quashed rumors alluding to them fething with the nature of the game, and kept making smart decisions, and went back to making products that showed some love and passion in them (like Hordes of Chaos, Storm of Chaos, etc) rather than the very pretty to look at, but soulless books that have come out recently*... I think they might have turned the ship. But its probably too far gone now.



*I refer to Dwarves and Lizardmen. I think both of these new books are completely soulless. Dwarven rune strikes are bound spells now.... yeah ? really ? Sigmars Blood was even bland and flat compared to something like SoC, etc. from the late nineties early 2000's.






Note: I'm a few gin and tonics in after a long day, so if the above makes no sense, apologies. Looked good at time of writing,

TheAuldGrump wrote:
Ever increasing randomness - random chance favors the novice, since there is always the chance that careful strategy falls apart when your Knights Panther 'charge' six inches....

TheKbob wrote:Edit: "Random" is the worst game mechanic possible and is the least fun.

I hear that. Every wargame has some element of chance, but I much prefer wargames that make you apply whatever skills you have to skew that chance in your favour. If I lose I'd rather it was because of my own idiocy, which might be improved, rather than the game's idiocy, which might be a bit more difficult to fix.

TheKbob wrote:I started with 8th and ended with 8th. The model count is just way, way, way too high. And all those extra models are just wound counters. If I wanted to simulate something on that scale, it'd be better at 14mm or less.

Ah Kbob, were you around at the time of Warmaster? Still some of the best 10mm minis ever made, IMO. I should stick up a plog for my couple of armies sitting around, half-painted.

(also, where are you getting 14mm minis...?)

OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:I'll add another one

the players (in general). Players who want more and more new stuff but who react badly whenever units/races/etc are removed from the game

which is at least in part responsible for rules bloat (new units have to have a special Sctick or at best a new combination of existing special rules)

That's an occurrence I've noticed before, which seems pretty weird to me, and I'm not sure whether to blame GW or the players. It's like, "okay guys, here's the high elves and here's what's established about their armies and background. They have basic spearmen and archers. And hybrid spearmen/archers. And some elite swordsmen, and elite woodsmen. And elite temple guardians. And elite rangers. (And boy do HE get a few elite units) Oh, and you can stick your hero on a hippogriff or even a dragon!" Then a couple of editions later, "oh hey guys, high elves get a chariot pulled by weird mutant lions. Just to make them a bit more speshul, yeah?" Then "hey guys, you get a big 'ol fiery phoenix now. Don't ask us which orifice we pulled that out of. We'll just say it was the same one we pulled this other phoenix out of. Only this one's not all fire like a regular phoenix, it's all ice! Oooh. Kewl, huh?" Then "hey guys, d'you like this eagle pulling a stumpy rowboat? Whaddya mean, 'desperate'?"

It feels like Flanderization to me - losing focus of the original defined theme, and whatever subtleties and original quirks it might have had, in order to pile on the crazy and end up with a caricature of what it used to be. And folk lap up the gradual changes 'til it jumps the shark and the backlash begins.

And I guess it's rich, me lamenting the 'original theme' of the sixth edition high elves, but, well, still.

From 7th edition onwards, it became Greed: The Game.

Other posters have already covered the subject so I'd like to not write too much on it, but to me, the problem is that when you're designing a tabletop game you should always be clear on what you want: either a mass battle game, or a skirmish game. As its current iteration, WHFB is neither, falls right in the middle and that means it has the negative points from both, which make it one mess of a game: ridiculous model count (with each and every soldier being an independent entity with specific stats), special rules feast, too invasive and troublesome magic system, etc etc.

4th and 5th edition, in example, are far from being perfect rulesets but at least it was more a thing of "skirmishes with regiments". Throw in some needed fixes (i.e. limit the items characters may take, fly rules from 6th) and they become enjoyable and not too unbalanced (specially with 4th edition armybooks). 7th is mostly 6th on full Greed Mode. And 8th... it basically killed the game in my area.

Overall, in terms of popularity, imagination and model quality, I'd say 6th edition was the golden age. Some of the best fantasy minis GW has ever released date from that edition (dark elf metal range, daemonettes, teutogen guard... ah those were the days, the lovely metal days).

Cruentus: I can understand the thing about proxies, and sometimes I wouldn't mind rules tailor-made for certain models. I just guess it's my 'anything but Warhammer!' attitude that helps me make the leap!

Butcha: your army sameness point made me see Kid Kyoto's point #2 in a different way. In one way the 'infantry, cavalry, artillery' isn't quite like historical gaming, where different armies might have access to different types of those, and in different quantities. (in a crude and possibly inaccurate example, like a Macedonian pike phalanx vs. Indian elephants) Almost every faction in Warhammer really does follow what might be a stricter formula, especially with the fantastic stuff: everyone gets a giant monster, almost everyone gets a giant monster mount, everyone gets a big wacky machine that can't really be called artillery, etc.

I haven't played WFB in 5+ years, so I can't speak with any certainty to the current state, but what was killing WFB in my area back then was just the style of the game. Large blocks of troops that basically just shuffle forward because turning, well, took up your whole turn. It was a game stuck in a design philosophy from a time before many of the youngest players were even born.

I think the modern times, and more innovative games, caught up with it.

No longer is WHFB the high school star quarterback. Now, WHFB is just a bloated 50 year old who still wears his lettermen jacket when he is not working at the shoe store.

It seems like to me they are trying to turn back the clock for a chance to get with the times and trim some fat. I hope it works and they really have changed and not fall into old habits again.

WHFB 8th Edition simply is not newbie friendly. I started with 8th and Im so done with FBs. I was all in with my buy in and regret every penny spent. Im a 20 year 40k vet and Ill testify that WHFB is no where near the crossover game it could be.

Garbage. Ill never play it again or could ever recommend it to anybody.

One more thought...

Was reconning Storm of Chaos WHF's jump the shark moment?

After getting all kinds of fan involvement and promising all sorts of cool evolutions of the timeline...

GW dropped it like a sack of Skaven poo.

Of course they did the same thing with both Armageddon and Black Crusade but it wasn't quite as blatant.