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As a competitive underworlds player, I'd happily pay $40 for each warband if I was playing. However, as underworlds and events in general are not happening in my area due to covid, I won't be picking up anyway warband until I'm able to play again.

With the releases spread over a few months, $40 a month to keep to up to date with my favourite game is very manageable. If you're trying to catch up and get them all in one go, that can hurt.

 frankelee wrote:
I feel like I've heard every possible iteration of the "is this a miniatures game/is this is a miniature or token" debate on this site alone, not to mention every other tabletop forum. And people often come to exact opposite conclusions using the exact same evidence. I don't know that there's much to the debate. It is semantics.

The more important question is, are the contents worth the price, all included? $40 for four models and two packs worth of cards is definitely pushing it. I don't really agree with the idea that just needing to purchase one thing (like one Necromunda gang) means that you should pay a high price for it, though that definitely has leeched into the community as a reasonable idea. I've had people tell me some miniature games with terrible price-per-mini were still excellent value because you only needed to invest $250 or so to have a full army, and be able to play. But if I ask those people if they'd like to buy my old set of gently-used dominoes for $250 and get literally everything they'll ever need to play they no longer seem to believe their own argument.

I think over-paying for one thing is much easier than over-paying for four or five things though. And so it does feel like GW is playing dangerously with the game's future.

It's not an idea that has leeched into the community, it's an acceptance that in addition to the raw price of plastic and manufacturing sprues there's a cost associated with development of a new SKU.

If it costs $2 to make a certain model in materials and time, but cost $20,000 to develop it and set up the machine to manufacture it but the rules of the game mean you're expecting to sell 20,000 units, you can sell them for maybe $6 each making 100% profit. If the rules of the game are such that you're unlikely to sell more than 5,000 units to the same number of players and you still want to make 100% profit on them, you need to sell them for (20000/5000+2)*2 = $12.

If your player base is buying whole armies, then sometimes the numerous models can subsidise the rarer models, and if you need to buy multiple boxes for the cards even if you don't necessarily want the models, then you increase the number of people likely to buy a single box and thus can lower the price. Likewise if you have a very large range of games, maybe one game can subsidise another another.

I consider WHU warbands a steal, even with the undeniably predatory sales tactic of packing cards that clearly work best with warband A in the box with warband B (a tactic popularized by the massively successful X-wing, so...) Each box is a brand new faction, and that means a new gameplay experince. I'd consider that worth the money even if they were out of scale for AoS, but obviously you usually also get one or more hero models for that and at that point the rest of the box is "free" compared to a clampack hero.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

It's not an idea that has leeched into the community, it's an acceptance that in addition to the raw price of plastic and manufacturing sprues there's a cost associated with development of a new SKU.

If it costs $2 to make a certain model in materials and time, but cost $20,000 to develop it and set up the machine to manufacture it but the rules of the game mean you're expecting to sell 20,000 units, you can sell them for maybe $6 each making 100% profit. If the rules of the game are such that you're unlikely to sell more than 5,000 units to the same number of players and you still want to make 100% profit on them, you need to sell them for (20000/5000+2)*2 = $12.

If your player base is buying whole armies, then sometimes the numerous models can subsidise the rarer models, and if you need to buy multiple boxes for the cards even if you don't necessarily want the models, then you increase the number of people likely to buy a single box and thus can lower the price. Likewise if you have a very large range of games, maybe one game can subsidise another another.

Sure, my comment is made with an understanding that all sorts of caveats may apply, I didn't go into them because it was already a long comment. But I feel my point still more than stands. The HIPS plastic that goes into make the two mini sprues that go into this box is literally not even going to be 5 cents. That expense is so negligible it doesn't factor in, it's really the overall factory/b2b shipping costs (as the smaller share of expenses) and the overhead of your company, both in developing the product and just existing (the bigger share of the expenses). So if you're not buying much to play the game, your value will go down because overhead expenses are still there, upping the price disproportionately. That, like all reasonable things, can be taken WAAAAAY too far, and it's that way too far nature that I'm referring to leeching into the community.

Now of course they can charge what they want for it, and people can pay what they want for it, but within the discussion of reasonable costs, and within the discussion of not running a game into the ground, there are some limits before you're over-costing things. But people just use that concept of limited requirements to declare carte blanche on pricing, that value is basically out the window, and as we see from domino set sellers around the world, even they have a very tenuous belief in that principle when they aren't stanning for a company they love online. I think it's incumbent on companies to control costs and maintain reasonable value on their games. Which includes eliminating unnecessary overhead. All that's on them. And objectively poor value for a product is still fair game to point out, even in those circumstances, even accounting for the fact that such products can be expected to be more toward the poor-value side of things.

This prompted me to look up domino set prices.

JWBS wrote:
This prompted me to look up domino set prices.

An under rated classic available for as low as $10-15.

Even without GW running the game into the ground through sheer greed, does it have much of a future anyways?
Past season 4 there just doesn't seem to be much more they can do, unless they start releasing revamped older teams.

Easily. We've already seen examples of the same faction getting different warbands. It would be absurdly easy to do more warbands from the same races with different playstyles.

There’s still no Ossiarch band to round out the undead yet. Nor a proper DnD adventure band (y’know; fighter ranger wizard rogue) from the Free Cities. Or they could take from the background races that don’t have books (the kurnothi hunt sets precedent) so grot sky-pirates, the other half of the Lumineth, not-Morathi dark elves, some mad Disposessed artificer and his best golems, that sort of thing.

 aku-chan wrote:
Even without GW running the game into the ground through sheer greed, does it have much of a future anyways?
Past season 4 there just doesn't seem to be much more they can do, unless they start releasing revamped older teams.

Game has a lot going for it. Each expansion also intorduces new mechanics which shakes things up too. Magic, hunter/quarry, primacy, hunger. It's really exciting to see what will come next and how each warband plays.

 Mr_Rose wrote:
There’s still no Ossiarch band to round out the undead yet. Nor a proper DnD adventure band (y’know; fighter ranger wizard rogue) from the Free Cities. Or they could take from the background races that don’t have books (the kurnothi hunt sets precedent) so grot sky-pirates, the other half of the Lumineth, not-Morathi dark elves, some mad Disposessed artificer and his best golems, that sort of thing.

Ossiarch is coming this year.

Indeed Ossiarch are May, and Idoneth June.
Possibly the last two battletomes to get one.
(Ignoring free cities as that’s a tricky one depending whether it’s a warband or several warbands.)

 aku-chan wrote:
Even without GW running the game into the ground through sheer greed, does it have much of a future anyways?
Past season 4 there just doesn't seem to be much more they can do, unless they start releasing revamped older teams.

We already have 4 Stormcast warbands, 2 Orruks (maybe 3, not sure if the savage orruks count as different or not), 2 Khorne and 2 Nighthaunt, so they can release different warbands from the same factions.
And then we have warbands like the Rippa’s Snarlfangs that dont have a faction i believe (I might be wrong about this).

For me WU seems like a good place for GW to test new factions for future releases in AOS, although maybe that cannot work with the time they need to develop a new faction.




Edit: Forgot 1 Stormcast warband

They could also do Soulbound Binding warbands, and there they can use whatever they want to, so...

Danny76 wrote:
Indeed Ossiarch are May, and Idoneth June.
Possibly the last two battletomes to get one.
(Ignoring free cities as that’s a tricky one depending whether it’s a warband or several warbands.)

I knew about the Idoneth but forgot the bone bros.

They could also start introducing other issues WRT Shadespire and the Katophrane Curse to the broader Worlds by bringing back some of the Lost. Imagine what happens when one of the breaches happens somewhere in Shyish and starts drawing the already-dead into the resurrection loop? Be a good excuse to bring back the Tomb Kings aesthetic. But mostly because I want a Brettonnian warband; mounted Knight, mounted Lady, two or three Men At Arms on foot, all very confused.

Lore wise and model wise it can go on forever. Rules design space is limited in such a tightly designed game, but so far they've managed to expand it (Cylces, Quarry...) without it feeling weird to me. One thing that's starting to overlap a lot is Inspire conditions.

Yeah, they need someone that inspires on achieving a certain number of objectives, or glory points (because you can get those in other ways), which is a space they don’t seem to have explored much.

Got Orcs?

Geeze GW are terrible at painting muscles. I'll guess those muscles aren't actually made from narrow chasms and sharp edges and it's just an artefact of a terrible paint job.

I understand keeping paint schemes simple rather than having them like they're painted by the gods, but wowser GW need to improve how they paint muscles on their display models.

YES YES YES YES!

Oh god, GW please release an updated Savage Orruk kit. The current kit isn't bad, but they have so much potential. Make the archers a separate kit, make some new shamans (looks like the team has one, hopefully with a Wurzarg mask), etc!

Edit: Weird that he doesn't have toe nails/claws. Some orruks do, but I guess not these ones (or maybe they fell out, like what happens with marathon runners)

That's uh...a thing.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Geeze GW are terrible at painting muscles. I'll guess those muscles aren't actually made from narrow chasms and sharp edges

No they are. Savage orcs are from that era when GW decided that sharp edges on organic tissue is going to be their new art style.

 GaroRobe wrote:
YES YES YES YES!

Oh god, GW please release an updated Savage Orruk kit. The current kit isn't bad, but they have so much potential. Make the archers a separate kit, make some new shamans, etc!

Yeah doubt that's gonna happen. This is just an Underworlds warband, I don't see them updating the Savage Orc kits any time soon.they're decent quality kits that let you build archers, spear/shield, dual hand weapons or hand weapon / shield. Overall it's a pretty good kit.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 GaroRobe wrote:
YES YES YES YES!

Oh god, GW please release an updated Savage Orruk kit. The current kit isn't bad, but they have so much potential. Make the archers a separate kit, make some new shamans, etc!

Yeah doubt that's gonna happen. This is just an Underworlds warband, I don't see them updating the Savage Orc kits any time soon.they're decent quality kits that let you build archers, spear/shield, dual hand weapons or hand weapon / shield. Overall it's a pretty good kit.

Yeah, the kit itself isn't terrible, but I'm a sucker for "new" models. If anything, the crypt ghouls need the update more (but even their underworld team doesn't fill me with much hope)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Got Orcs?

Amazing!

 lord_blackfang wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Geeze GW are terrible at painting muscles. I'll guess those muscles aren't actually made from narrow chasms and sharp edges

No they are. Savage orcs are from that era when GW decided that sharp edges on organic tissue is going to be their new art style.

I have some of those Savage Orcs, they are not nearly as bad as the paint job makes them look. Maybe the muscles are a bit over-defined, but the paint job turns it up to 11. If you do a google image search you'll find the same models painted by people other than GW and they look a lot better.

GW just decided to almost "blackline" the crevices as if it were power armour and edge highlight the muscles when no such edge exists (or is much too soft to warrant an edge highlight).

If they got someone to paint the muscles with proper blending using glazes, it'd probably represent the underlying model a lot better.

At least three confirmed models:
*Toofdagga (pictured above)
*Hedkrakka (Leader and possibly the shaman)
*Dakko Sharpstick (spear probably)

I'm guessing the warband will be four models total, like the 'ardboyz ironjaw group was.

Also, I just looked at the existing savage orruk range. Every one has claws on their feet. Why doesn't he?

What's with the nailless frog feet?

On the muscle thing, its the result of how the GW painting method works
Base, wash, layer highlight. These models are meant to look like something resonably acheivable, not a masterclass.

I think the nails are clawing into the floor by the look of it?

Wolverine claws and an "X" on the forehead , I hope they name him L-Orc-gan