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 SolarCross wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Except for the past 30 years 40k hasn't been trying to fit superheavies in to your average game, that's a more recent phenomenon.

Personally I think with the size of games 40k tries to play (with tank squadrons, large monsters, walkers, etc), 15mm scale would be perfect. 6mm the models just become counters, which some people like but I don't think has wide appeal. 15mm the models are still clear enough to put some effort in to making individuals look nice, but also if you want to paint stuff quickly a basecoat and a wash goes a long way on 15mm models.

Of course for painting display models, 28mm (and larger) is great, but part of the problem with 40k is not knowing what it wants to be and that's driven a lot of people away in recent years.

I agree, even a drop to 15mm would make big games much more practical and affordable.
A 15mm mini is half the height, quarter the footprint and an eighth the volume. Which loosely implies minis being an 1/8th cost. Leman Russ for a £5? yes please!

Dropzone Commander is on a 10mm scale and even the infantry looks nice enough.

Not sure the point of this is. Professionally done. One of the reasons why I quit Dropzone Commander is because I suck at painting 40K. It's even worse with Dropzone Commander. Easy to show pics when a professional does it, but if I showed you my infantry it would look horrible. There is a reason why infantry is mostly one colour maybe two from normal painters. They are just way too hard to do.

As for price. WWWHHHHAAAAAAAA. HHHAAAAA HA! $80 for a bar of soap? That is what a hover craft looks like before being painted. DzC is not cheap. It's almost as expensive as 40K. Again only reason it seems cheaper is because you need less minis. But seeing some of the prices, yeah they are quite expensive. Another reason why I quit. I just didn't want to pay $80 for a bar of soap. So I went back to 40K. At least I am paying more, and I don't have to squint when I paint so much.

Great set of rules though, I will give you that, but to paint that small and be happy with it, and the prices. Yeah, no thank you.

 SolarCross wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
That's faulty logic.

Dropping scale may mean a drop in material costs, but they're a tiny part of the cost, really really tiny.

There may be a small drop in production costs due to less time to actually sculpt a smaller model with less detail and less complex sprue design, but the reality is the drop won't be anything near enough to realise prices like you're suggesting.

Given the costs of packaging, logistics and the overhead of the retail chain would be almost completely unaffected, I'd be surprised if GW would/could sell a 15mm Russ for less than £25.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Actually, probably closer £15-20, I'd got the Russ at £40 currently in my head, and they're £31.

No your logic is wrong. Design costs (which you incorrectly call production costs) would be the same as for a 28mm russ, but those costs are tiny, tiny, tiny on large production runs. Large production runs are hardly a thing in wargaming but if there was any company that gets close to that it would be GW. All other costs are fairly proportional because a 28mm leman russ package would hold 8 15mm russes not 1 (Derp).

For a point of reference Dropzone Commander sells 10mm main battle tanks (in resin) in packs of 3 for £11.

Spoiler:

Just found this 15mm APC (in resin).. £6 each.

[/img]

You're right, I was referring to design costs, but GW don't distinguish between the two in their reporting so I've got in the habit of doing likewise when discussing their practices.

Either way, I stand by my point. The costs aren't proportional, they don't suddenly cut in half because what you're making is smaller, or do you think the landlords will all accept a lower rent in the shops or the staff will take a wage cut?

Your examples are not equivalent, neither company is subject to the cost obligations that GW are, and while I've long held that GW has painted itself into a corner cost wise, it is a fact and other companies do not have that burden to carry and that at least partially reflects in the final selling price.

Also, both your examples are resin, a production method which disperses much of its cost over the life of the production run, meaning, correctly priced, the model makes profit from sale 1, GW would almost certainly use plastic which carries a much heavier up front investment, GW have shown themselves to be deeply risk averse, so they're not going to risk not shifting the volume at a lower price over the lifetime of the product, they know that the vast percentage of their money is made in a short time after release and in order to be profitable they need that investment back.

There's also the issue that if we're doing 40K at half scale, why are people going to suddenly buy more stuff? If they buy twice as much and play games twice the size, then it hasn't solved anything gameplay wise, it's just changed the shape of the problem. Or, if we're talking £5 Russes vs £30 Russes people need to be buying six times the volume of models to preserve their revenue. So if people carry on buying armies that still look like 40K armies, but with models half the size, GW's revenue goes down the toilet.

Perhaps the demand would be there to increase the player base and the spend per head to make a success of the whole thing, but as CEO of GW, I know I wouldn't be willing to risk hundreds/thousands of people's livelihoods on that gamble.

I'm not saying GW couldn't make a 15mm version of a Leman Russ and sell it for the figures that you're proposing, I'm saying they wouldn't because it would kill the company.

hobojebus wrote:
GW don't set high prices because it costs them alot, they set them because their sales are abysmal and they have to keep profits up any means necessary.

The fact that GW's prices have always been at the upper end of the market, even when their sales were fantastic, suggests otherwise.

Past history suggests that GW sets their prices high for no reason other than because they can. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Epic would be any more affordable now than it was last time it was available.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SolarCross wrote:

Dropzone Commander is on a 10mm scale and even the infantry looks nice enough.

They really don't. And they look worse with an average paintjob.


For my money, anything smaller than 25mm is really only suitable for games that focus predominantly on vehicles or giant creatures, because human-sized models at those scales are featureless blobs. If you want to play infantry engagements like that, you're better off not spending all that money on miniatures and going for a game that uses tokens for units instead.

 Azreal13 wrote:

I'm not saying GW couldn't make a 15mm version of a Leman Russ and sell it for the figures that you're proposing, I'm saying they wouldn't because it would kill the company.

Well I wouldn't put it past GW to price a 15mm Russ way over what another company would charge, because brand recognition is something to be exploited. I doubt it would kill them though to price it nearer to what another company would charge (around £5), because it would be a product that would appeal to different kind of gamer who is at present not being offered anything by GW. I'd say there are gamers for whom hobbying is a necessary/unnecessary evil and then there are hobbyists for whom gaming is a nice optional extra. GW basically caters only to the latter group at present. X-Wing is very much eating up the former group. I guess FoW also.

The hobbyists might not be into sensibly scaled game assets because they are too small for freckle painting but gamers would potentially eat up tank battalions that don't cost a second mortgage and actually fit on a standard gaming table.

Judging by the size of the computer game market vs the tabletop wargame market, it might even be that out there as yet untapped by GW there are actually more wallets amenable to manageable sized game assets than there are wallets predisposed towards big model kits.

 SolarCross wrote:
...because it would be a product that would appeal to different kind of gamer who is at present not being offered anything by GW.

Has there been anything about GW's behaviour in recent years that would lead you to believe that they have even the slightest interest in catering to 'different' gamers to their current audience?

The hobbyists might not be into sensibly scaled game assets because they are too small for freckle painting but gamers would potentially eat up tank battalions that don't cost a second mortgage and actually fit on a standard gaming table.

Seriously, dude, what is the obsession with freckles?


The appeal of 28mm minis isn't just for 'hobbyists' (by which I'm assuming from the context that you mean 'modelers', as opposed to 'gamers'). People like 28mm because it's nicer visually. A 28mm human has more detail than a 10mm human, which makes it easier to tell different units apart and allows for more variation.

We've been playing fairly successfully with 28mm miniatures without the need to hire out a football field for some time now. I'm a little puzzled as to why you would think that finding space to play is suddenly such a gigantic issue.

 insaniak wrote:

For my money, anything smaller than 25mm is really only suitable for games that focus predominantly on vehicles or giant creatures, because human-sized models at those scales are featureless blobs. If you want to play infantry engagements like that, you're better off not spending all that money on miniatures and going for a game that uses tokens for units instead.

At 6mm they are featureless blobs, at 15mm they are quite okay. Point of fact, 15mm is the standard scale for infantry predominant gaming outside of GW willy wonka land. Ancient & medieval historicals for example.





But you are a hobbyist, i guess. Everything is a trade off. 28mm tanks are stupid beyond belief on a 6' by 4' table, simply stupid, it should never happen, unless painting tanks is more important than gaming with them, then I guess the stupidity of putting a 28mm tank on a 6' x 4' is quite okay as long as it looks good.

I will use my Trump card: Get a better job.

Problem solved!

But honestly, if I can buy 90$CAD games every month I can't really complain to 50$+ CAD GW miniature or whatever. Heck I'm hard-pressed to find any miniature hobby that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for what you get.

 SolarCross wrote:
28mm tanks are stupid beyond belief on a 6' by 4' table, simply stupid, it should never happen, unless painting tanks is more important than gaming with them, then I guess the stupidity of putting a 28mm tank on a 6' x 4' is quite okay as long as it looks good.

If painting tanks is more important than gaming with them, then going for a smaller scale game so that you get more of them would surely be more of a thing... The smaller scale in that case is [i]better[i] for the modeler...


I'm not sure what's so stupid about the table size, though. Enemy units aren't always a mile apart... 40K represents close range firefights, either as a small skirmish or as a part of a larger overall battle.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SolarCross wrote:
Point of fact, 15mm is the standard scale for infantry predominant gaming outside of GW willy wonka land.

Indeed. And painted by the average gamer, they're featureless blobs. Particularly once you're looking at them from 3 feet away.

Showing studio paint jobs is great, but doesn't reflect what generally winds up on the table... unless you're looking at a game where both participants are 'hobbyists'.

 insaniak wrote:

If painting tanks is more important than gaming with them, then going for a smaller scale game so that you get more of them would surely be more of a thing... The smaller scale in that case is better for the modeler...

I'm not sure what's so stupid about the table size, though. Enemy units aren't always a mile apart... 40K represents close range firefights, either as a small skirmish or as a part of a larger overall battle.

lol, at 28mm scale a 6' by 4' table is equivalent to a football pitch... a football pitch. Even a squad vs squad is cramped at that scale (assuming they armed with something rangier than a football), throw in artillery pieces, main battle tanks and jump jets and things get super stupid fast. Do you realise that the Basilisk self-propelled artillery has a game range of 240" which is 12 feet? Scaled up that is only equivalent to the range of an English longbow! Bolters with a range of 24" scale up to a water-pistol range of 48m. 19th century breach loading rifles have a firing range of 400m, nearly 10x that of the space age bolter.



oversized models not fitting on the table? Problem solved!

The game's an abstraction, not a simulation.

If you start to question the realism and accuracy of the concepts in play, you're going to find the whole thing implodes in short order.

Now, the game isn't working right now, but that is neither inherently or exclusively to do with the scale, and if you halved or even quartered the scale of the models, there would still be wild inaccuracies between on table performance and fluff descriptions.

 Azreal13 wrote:
The game's an abstraction, not a simulation.

If you start to question the realism and accuracy of the concepts in play, you're going to find the whole thing implodes in short order.

Now, the game isn't working right now, but that is neither inherently or exclusively to do with the scale, and if you halved or even quartered the scale of the models, there would still be wild inaccuracies between on table performance and fluff descriptions.

A wargame is a bit of both, abstraction and simulation, a game like chess is pure abstraction. Nonetheless you are right that an element of abstraction is needed to make a wargame work on any scale, however the bigger the scale the sillier it gets. The battlefield gets far too crowded at 28mm scale, it looks daft and impedes manoeuvre, you can't play a sizable game without going broke paying £30 per tank and running out of space to place them.

I am totally fine with artistic types paying £30 for a oversized tank, putting it on a table and pretending that they are a wargamer, they can buy 28mm model kits and play 7th ed.

I would however prefer to pay £30 for squadron of 6 tanks and play a real wargame. GW did epic before they could do it again. At 6mm you could have even imperator titans on the table. At 15mm you can have nice looking infantry alongside the smaller titans and superheavies and it wouldn't be too silly or expensive. You don't have to buy or play on a rational scale you can still buy the oversized stuff. So what's the problem?

What do you consider a sizeable game?

 SolarCross wrote:
you can't play a sizable game without going broke paying £30 per tank and running out of space to place them.

And yet, people have been doing this successfully since the early '90s.

Which would seem to suggest that it's not the massive problem that you're trying to make it out to be.

pm713 wrote:
What do you consider a sizeable game?

The battle for Stalingrad.

3 million infantry
30,000 artillery
1500 tanks
1500 aircraft

 SolarCross wrote:

lol, at 28mm scale a 6' by 4' table is equivalent to a football pitch

It's possible that a part of the problem you're having is that you're trying to look at 40k as a scale representation of a battle.

It's not. It's a wargame using 28mm-ish miniatures as gaming tokens.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SolarCross wrote:

pm713 wrote:
What do you consider a sizeable game?

The battle for Stalingrad.

3 million infantry
30,000 artillery
1500 tanks
1500 aircraft

Then yes, 40k is possibly not the game for you.

But then, for that sort of scale, neither is Epic. But at that point, you might as well complain that, say, Blloodbowl is just as bad for not accurately representing the story of game you want to play.

 Azreal13 wrote:
The game's an abstraction, not a simulation.

If you start to question the realism and accuracy of the concepts in play, you're going to find the whole thing implodes in short order.

Now, the game isn't working right now, but that is neither inherently or exclusively to do with the scale, and if you halved or even quartered the scale of the models, there would still be wild inaccuracies between on table performance and fluff descriptions.

There's abstraction, and then there's a game that looks stupid because a tank that is 9" long and a walker that is 9" tall are deploying 24" away from each other

I'm all for abstraction, my understanding is most WW2 tank battles occured at 700-1000 yards, that's just an impractical scale to reproduce in a game even at 6mm scale.

But 40k whizzes past abstraction and hits the wall of absurdity. One of the many things that put me off 40k was one day walking in to a store and seeing a game that looked less like a wargame and more like a couple of babies in slapping range of each other

 SolarCross wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
The game's an abstraction, not a simulation.

If you start to question the realism and accuracy of the concepts in play, you're going to find the whole thing implodes in short order.

Now, the game isn't working right now, but that is neither inherently or exclusively to do with the scale, and if you halved or even quartered the scale of the models, there would still be wild inaccuracies between on table performance and fluff descriptions.

A wargame is a bit of both, abstraction and simulation, a game like chess is pure abstraction. Nonetheless you are right that an element of abstraction is needed to make a wargame work on any scale, however the bigger the scale the sillier it gets. The battlefield gets far too crowded at 28mm scale, it looks daft and impedes manoeuvre, you can't play a sizable game without going broke paying £30 per tank and running out of space to place them.

I am totally fine with artistic types paying £30 for a oversized tank, putting it on a table and pretending that they are a wargamer, they can buy 28mm model kits and play 7th ed.

I would however prefer to pay £30 for squadron of 6 tanks and play a real wargame. GW did epic before they could do it again. At 6mm you could have even imperator titans on the table. At 15mm you can have nice looking infantry alongside the smaller titans and superheavies and it wouldn't be too silly or expensive. You don't have to buy or play on a rational scale you can still buy the oversized stuff. So what's the problem?

That's a pretty bad attitude you're showing towards people that you don't seem "real" wargamers.

Especially as you're posting under your company name and it appears 70+% of your listings are for the GW stuff that all those pretend wargamers are buying.

Isn't it intrinsically contradictory to advocate the use of a smaller scale in Epic to allow the use of Imperator Titans, with weapons that have a range probably only limited by the curvature of the planet, making the necessary abstraction to make them playable exactly the same as that you've criticized 30mm scale units for having, as well as claiming 15mm would allow for oversized stuff like Warhounds, which would probably still be IK sized at 15mm and still possess weaponry that in "reality" is still completely over the top for the scale of the engagement that a 40K game seeks to portray?

 SolarCross wrote:

lol, at 28mm scale a 6' by 4' table is equivalent to a football pitch... a football pitch. Even a squad vs squad is cramped at that scale (assuming they armed with something rangier than a football), throw in artillery pieces, main battle tanks and jump jets and things get super stupid fast. Do you realise that the Basilisk self-propelled artillery has a game range of 240" which is 12 feet? Scaled up that is only equivalent to the range of an English longbow! Bolters with a range of 24" scale up to a water-pistol range of 48m. 19th century breach loading rifles have a firing range of 400m, nearly 10x that of the space age bolter.

oversized models not fitting on the table? Problem solved!

I'm pretty sure ranges in 40k are meant to represent accurate range before environmental factors come into play, alongside possible factors of the weapon itself being a difficulty. The DV booklet says this too (can't quote verbatim as currently it's not with me) - it was something like "the Cultists fire at the Tactical Squad which is 18" away. The Cultist's Autoguns and Heavy Stubber can all hit, however the Champion's Shotgun cannot - we can assume that he curses as his shot falls short of its target"

Also from your previous post - when was 15mm scale the standard in wargaming? If it was/is, it hasn't exactly got much traction in many non-historical universes that I know.

We should also consider that games like Infinity and X Wing exist, where you can pay upwards of £10 (or more like 50 US cents given current inflation atm) for a single model. Such a game may only need a few models on both sides to play, but it still puts a dent in most people's wallets.

Personally I'm pretty happy to pay for the quality of some of these things, especially GW's models. Love GW or hate them, I have not found a single company out there that does better and more amazing casts than they do.

G.A

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
There's abstraction, and then there's a game that looks stupid because a tank that is 9" long and a walker that is 9" tall are deploying 24" away from each other

I'm all for abstraction, my understanding is most WW2 tank battles occured at 700-1000 yards, that's just an impractical scale to reproduce in a game even at 6mm scale.

But 40k whizzes past abstraction and hits the wall of absurdity. One of the many things that put me off 40k was one day walking in to a store and seeing a game that looked less like a wargame and more like a couple of babies in slapping range of each other

The thing is, a game that features both ranged and melee combat needs to either have everything close together, or allow for incredibly rapid movement.


Once you accept that 40K is essentially a fantasy game in a space opera setting, the short distances are less of an issue.

 insaniak wrote:
The thing is, a game that features both ranged and melee combat needs to either have everything close together, or allow for incredibly rapid movement.

Once you accept that 40K is essentially a fantasy game in a space opera setting, the short distances are less of an issue.

In sci-fi you have plenty of tricks for getting in close: force fields, invisibility, teleportation, air drops, improbably protective armour, APC's including flying ones.. I don't see that as an issue for 15mm scale or less scale. You can still do plenty of handwavium to make melee relevant.

I'm not getting why you object to other people playing a version of 40k on a more rational scale?

I would just like to point out that Warlord Games, who make 28mm scale figures to a far higher standard that GW's OMG GRIBBLY CARTOON look can charge:

-£24 for a 25 to 30 man box set with all the optionial upgrades and extra ones included
-£28 for the above 30 men with many metal upgrade parts thrown in
-£6 to £8 for weapon teams that come in blisters of up to three different ones
-£13 to £20 for a full artillery piece, some which come with a tow thrown in as well
-£18 for a plastic tank kit that includes the parts to make up to five/six different variants
-£25 for a hand cast resin and white metal piece

Compared to GW's £18 to £22 for five to ten outdated plastic kits that needed replacing half a decade ago.
Just saying.

 SolarCross wrote:

I'm not getting why you object to other people playing a version of 40k on a more rational scale?

Because a "more rational" scale takes away the detail on the miniatures that lure many of us into the hobby in the first place

G.A

 General Annoyance wrote:

Because a "more rational" scale takes away the detail on the miniatures that lure many of us into the hobby in the first place

G.A

So don't play it, keep buying 28mm scale. I am assuming GW could do epic alongside 28mm. Do you object to that?

 SolarCross wrote:
I'm not getting why you object to other people playing a version of 40k on a more rational scale?

I'm not getting why you insist on posting obvious straw man arguments. Nobody is objecting to other people playing a smaller-scale version of 40k, we're objecting to your attitude that the smaller-scale version would be indisputably superior and we all need to play Epic.

 Peregrine wrote:

I'm not getting why you insist on posting obvious straw man arguments. Nobody is objecting to other people playing a smaller-scale version of 40k, we're objecting to your attitude that the smaller-scale version would be indisputably superior and we all need to play Epic.

Ok well that is alright then.

 SolarCross wrote:

 General Annoyance wrote:

Because a "more rational" scale takes away the detail on the miniatures that lure many of us into the hobby in the first place

G.A

So don't play it, keep buying 28mm scale. I am assuming GW could do epic alongside 28mm. Do you object to that?

I don't play 40k anymore actually; I think the game is a broken mess that doesn't always reward both player's time investment.

GW have ditched a lot of their specialist games, including games on a smaller scale like BFG and Epic. Perhaps this is due to lack of sales/desirability. I for one would not mind collecting BFG, but I felt like the Epic models lacked any meaningful detail outside of the Titan models.

G.A

 General Annoyance wrote:

 SolarCross wrote:

 General Annoyance wrote:

Because a "more rational" scale takes away the detail on the miniatures that lure many of us into the hobby in the first place

G.A

So don't play it, keep buying 28mm scale. I am assuming GW could do epic alongside 28mm. Do you object to that?

I don't play 40k anymore actually; I think the game is a broken mess that doesn't always reward both player's time investment.

GW have ditched a lot of their specialist games, including games on a smaller scale like BFG and Epic. Perhaps this is due to lack of sales/desirability. I for one would not mind collecting BFG, but I felt like the Epic models lacked any meaningful detail outside of the Titan models.

G.A

Aren't they bringing those back?

 SolarCross wrote:

 General Annoyance wrote:

Because a "more rational" scale takes away the detail on the miniatures that lure many of us into the hobby in the first place

G.A

So don't play it, keep buying 28mm scale. I am assuming GW could do epic alongside 28mm. Do you object to that?

Hang on, are you advocating for Epic, or a smaller scaled 40K now?

Because I'm pretty sure you originally started advocating for 15mm 40K.

pm713 wrote:

Aren't they bringing those back?

If you believe the rumours, then yes. I don't like to assume until definitive proof is found, and preferably in the form of an official announcement instead of a leak.

Either way, they don't exist currently, suggesting that they were not desirable before; I didn't see many people up in arms when BFG and Necromunda vanished from their website.

Plus we have to consider GW's push in recent months on board games - seems like they have a board game craze right now

G.A

They're bringing them back, that's official.

We've already seen provisional sculpts for Blod Bowl, and we're getting Adeptus Titanicus first, with expansions for other unit types down the line.

That's all either photographically confirmed or directly from designers in the studio.