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DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
I’d leave them dead...

That's an odd way of reintroducing something.

If you bring them back they have to
A) Feel like squats
B) play different than current armies
So what were the feeling of squats?
They were split in clans that were very different
1. The bikers
2. The infantry
3. Massive repurposed vehicles.

1 is a problem, the dev's have often mentioned how ridiculous they were, hell angel in space doesn't feel right for a mining culture either. Imho they have to be ditched.
2. The squat infantry made no bleeping sense, this is a culture of miners and metal worker with really advanced tech. Why the hell are they using flak vest and lasgun? So need redesign: they should use heavy armor made for mining in dangerous environments. And one of the demiurg idea is great, they lost so much population that they use heavily automation. So few heavily armored infantry or engineer like characters with lots and lots of automated defense point.
3. Is where they were unique. They should have a rule that they can include a superheavy in any core detachment.
Should have a smaller version of the leviathan and its variants (colossus, cyclops). Baneblade sized dirigeable would work too.
With gyro to drop their few vital infantry to capture objectives.

It would play as several pocket fortresses of automated defenses across most of the battle fields to defend objectives placed and a mobile fortress and gyro trying to go where the automated defenses are going to be overwhelmed.

By having the automated defenses dropped in turn 0 both in and outside your deployment zone would be very different from standard gunline and require a LOT of planning.

I like the direction for the army Mantic went with Forgefathers.

For lore, I'd have them backwards engineer the Eldar's Webway and retreated to their own pocket dimension for a while. The appearance of the Chaos maelstrom has caused issues with their tethers to this universe, and have now returned to re-establish a presence again in this galaxy and unscrew what the humans have obviously effed up. They're no longer buddy-buddy with the imperium, and can ally with any faction - except maybe poor old 'Nids (who can't ally with anyone!).

If I absolutely, 100% had to actually bring Squats in?

I wouldn't bring them into main 40k. Necromunda is as good as it realistically can be bringing them in.

I wouldint

This is because the History of the Necrons article is the first time GW has admitted that Squats used to exist in 25 years isn't it.

the_scotsman wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
I'd have to consider their tabletop role before lore. What role would they have on the table. Melee? Obviously not. Resilience has always been the theme for Dwarves, so I would build around that. High reliance on gravity based weaponry. Mole mortars, termite transports, etc. Their strength vs opponents would be ways to slow them down (like tremor shells but not as obnoxious), including melee (reduce enemy attacks, strike last etc). They themselves would be slow moving on foot, but possessing high T and good saves. Armoured suits that are close ranged firepower and melee focused, almost like golems.

The problem is, they're imperium.

What role is not filled in an imperium army between the profiles for

Guardsmen
Scions
Sisters
Marines
Primaris marines
Terminators
Ogryns
Gravis
Centurions
Custodes

"No, I'm stuffed"

"But zir, eet ees only a wafer-thin faction!"

If they come in as a Tau ally, instantly, instantly you know what role they fill that a normal tau army does not have. Every complaint that everyone has ever fielded vs Tau can be resolved (especially if they have some psykers)

yeah, no, lol. As others have said, make them anti-Imperium. There is so much lore you could explore (cool little rhyme) about how they were left for dead by the Imperium, banished, etc. i mean, the have basically been banished by GW, it would be perfect. have them absolutely despise the Imperium, but not be chaotic either. They could be more like a Xenos race.

The Newman wrote:This is because the History of the Necrons article is the first time GW has admitted that Squats used to exist in 25 years isn't it.

nope, last page of the 8th rulebook mentions them

I mean, they were mentioned elsewhere too before that.
And Necromunda literally brought them back as two models at the moment.

Nomadic mercenary survivors living off their stronghold spaceships bearing a grudge against the Imperium for abandoning them in their hour of need when their homeworlds were attacked by the Tyranids. A few mining enclaves mostly on inhospitable worlds.

Game-wise, some funky artillery and slow moving but heavily armored infantry. Additional damage resistance abilities, maybe in auras representing shields, with things like lowering S and D of incoming attacks, giving cover, FNP saves, etc... Strategems again boosting resilience in various ways. Weaponry short to medium ranged and melee, except for the artillery. Artillery type attacks can have funky additional effects like messing with the enemy's ranged to-hit rolls, slowing them down, destroying cover, or doing additional damage to enemies in cover (so as to force them out of cover). Can also have cutting beams like the BFG Demiurg or the old Squats Cyclops, so like a laser with exploding dice against a single target.

 FragTheCommissar wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
that fething stupid bit about the 'Nids attacking their Homeworlds, as that has never made sense

What about it exactly does not make sense?
Even if it was an off-the-top response/idea. What about it would be illogical or unreasonable?

The squat home worlds were completely barren, no atmosphere, no biome, no nothing. The squats were also not a huge population. So we are expected to believe that the Tyranids successfully munched their way through barren rocks without starving themselves? The squats were the worst faction to sick the Tyranids on.


As to the OP, I reinvented the squats 15 years ago, do id just go with that. They were a high tech force, like a cross between guard and tau, treating exo suits more like battle suits than terminator armour. But slower.

Dwarfs using cool heavy mech suits was a nice image.

However, they've created an opportunity with the background to go a bit different.


I think they could hybridise then with genestealer cults. Squats are virtually blanks and the control of the cult didn't work. So they were able to push the Tyranids out due to lack of biomass and resistance to the hive Mind.

This results in the tech of the squats with an army that's now truly alien with tyranid DNA running though them. But not mutant, it equilibrated quickly as the squats have a tough metabolism. So some hardened armour plates in their skin, different skin pigmentation but nothing else.

They're now considered xenos and can no longer be part of the imperium. But they carry advanced weapons from before the age of strife. I think volkite rifles forward standard infantry and works from there.

Maybe their berserker units are the few mutants that appear - random mutations that activate at any time so any squat can turn into one. The curse they must live with as a result of their survival and one of the reasons they hate the imperium for abandoning them.

Living ancestors are super powerful as they now have hive Mind genes so psychic powers greater. But run the risk of attracting the hive minds attention and either spontaneously mutating or suffering burn out as the hive Mind attacks the intruder.

So there you go:

Tyranid genes now in their genomes permanently
Hi tech exo suits, grav (gyrocopters are grav)
Volkites
Berserker mutant units
Hate everyone
Living ancestors now waking weapons if mass destruction that can go nuts or explode

Alternatively maybe the Squats were eaten by the Tyranids because they were the little scraps of biomass available among the masses of barren worlds the Tyranid fleets were traversing? The Squat worlds might have been the oasis or pitstop in the middle of the desert. Not great but better than starving.

Iracundus wrote:
Alternatively maybe the Squats were eaten by the Tyranids because they were the little scraps of biomass available among the masses of barren worlds the Tyranid fleets were traversing? The Squat worlds might have been the oasis or pitstop in the middle of the desert. Not great but better than starving.

You can estimate the amount of biomass pretty easily based on squat populations and it wouldn't have been much
If you compared the total.biomass of earth to that of humanity, we make up a tiny percentage, miniscule.

So it wouldn't have been an oasis but rather the last drops of water in the canteen of a dying man.

It's not really an argument to say that systems of nothing but barren planets are going to be terrible vs an array of maiden worlds. Add to this that the squats built their homeworlds like fortress worlds as the cost of getting such crappy biomass would have been astronomical.

So there would be no reason for them to continue pushing into the homeworlds when they realised how bad they were, or they would have starved in the attempt.

For a conceptual space the one that comes to mind as not being completely covered by others is one that uses biotech but in less of a body-horror/augmentation/xeonomorph sort of way.

Like, they grow a genetically engineered trees to make armor. Turtley/Snaily things are turned into tanks, anti-grav skywhales.
They're piloted still though - it's not like something they unleash or they're simply riding critters or strapping a platform to the back of an elephant. It's been engineered so there's like a place to fit in a cockpit.

For rules I'd see them as not being super tough, or having high saves but they'd have extra wounds. Maybe in conjunction with an army wide healing rule.
Their long range weapons wouldn't be particularly special - cannons, lasers, missiles. But they'd have some weirder biological short range guns like electric-eel discharge, sticky stuff who knows.

Necromunda gang

 Hellebore wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
Alternatively maybe the Squats were eaten by the Tyranids because they were the little scraps of biomass available among the masses of barren worlds the Tyranid fleets were traversing? The Squat worlds might have been the oasis or pitstop in the middle of the desert. Not great but better than starving.

You can estimate the amount of biomass pretty easily based on squat populations and it wouldn't have been much
If you compared the total.biomass of earth to that of humanity, we make up a tiny percentage, miniscule.

So it wouldn't have been an oasis but rather the last drops of water in the canteen of a dying man.

It's not really an argument to say that systems of nothing but barren planets are going to be terrible vs an array of maiden worlds. Add to this that the squats built their homeworlds like fortress worlds as the cost of getting such crappy biomass would have been astronomical.

So there would be no reason for them to continue pushing into the homeworlds when they realised how bad they were, or they would have starved in the attempt.

I'm willing to bet that despite the barren descriptions, there would still be at the very least a mild presence of foliage and animal life, probably more frequently in some parts of the planet than others.

Additionally, we are talking about more than one planet as you say.
Surely not every Squat planet could be a carbon copy of itself.

Finally, whos to say that Squats didn't taste particularly delicious?
Sometimes the small candy bars taste better than the big ones.

I haven't ever read on the origins of the Squats. I don't know anything about their planetary background aside from what I hear by word of mouth.. but I am willing to bet that whatever lore is available can and will be reasonably stretched, as is much of the fluff in 40K.

And I still think it would be pretty wicked if Squats went underwater on a massive ocean planet to avoid further attack by the Tyranid fleets.

 FragTheCommissar wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
Alternatively maybe the Squats were eaten by the Tyranids because they were the little scraps of biomass available among the masses of barren worlds the Tyranid fleets were traversing? The Squat worlds might have been the oasis or pitstop in the middle of the desert. Not great but better than starving.

You can estimate the amount of biomass pretty easily based on squat populations and it wouldn't have been much
If you compared the total.biomass of earth to that of humanity, we make up a tiny percentage, miniscule.

So it wouldn't have been an oasis but rather the last drops of water in the canteen of a dying man.

It's not really an argument to say that systems of nothing but barren planets are going to be terrible vs an array of maiden worlds. Add to this that the squats built their homeworlds like fortress worlds as the cost of getting such crappy biomass would have been astronomical.

So there would be no reason for them to continue pushing into the homeworlds when they realised how bad they were, or they would have starved in the attempt.

I'm willing to bet that despite the barren descriptions, there would still be at the very least a mild presence of foliage and animal life, probably more frequently in some parts of the planet than others.

Additionally, we are talking about more than one planet as you say.
Surely not every Squat planet could be a carbon copy of itself.

Finally, whos to say that Squats didn't taste particularly delicious?
Sometimes the small candy bars taste better than the big ones.

I haven't ever read on the origins of the Squats. I don't know anything about their planetary background aside from what I hear by word of mouth.. but I am willing to bet that whatever lore is available can and will be reasonably stretched, as is much of the fluff in 40K.

And I still think it would be pretty wicked if Squats went underwater on a massive ocean planet to avoid further attack by the Tyranid fleets.

The homeworlds are described without exception as being dead balls of rock without atmosphere. The squats lived in pressurised tunnels and grew nutrients to eat. The closest thing to an ocean was massive dust seas, or rust.


As for stretching the background to fit, well that's true the other way around as well. They can easily stretch it so they survived intact, that the Tyranids didn't attack, where killed, starved or the imperium just lost contact and presumed them all dead.

There are a million ways to bring them back if changing the background is in the table

How would I do it?

You need to shoehorn them into the setting from a narrative perspective. There starts to be so many different armies it can be a bit hard to do.

They would need a visual esthetich. I would imagine a lot of wild hair or braided hair depending on the model. With a lot of colours. Besides that, it would need some sort of dorection. Digging tools have been taken by GSC. Armoured warriors are SM. Heavy Metal looking machines are very orky, so not that. Perhaps do a visual esthetic of hot rod cars. High end heavy metal 80s. The sort of high end model the mad max villail could afford. (As opposed to scrap builds like orks.) Imagine big engines sticking out of the hood.

They would need to carve out their own piece of rules that make them unique. I do not know what design space that is left. Many times dwarfes are very slow. I feel this is a trap as it takes options away from you once the game starts (see necrons.) If you do a gunline, how is it different then other gunlines? I would think focusing on good transports and elite units would be great. Have great equipment, but very short range. Sort of that sweetspot that the SW are in.

Let Wargames Atlantic make them first for $35 per box.

https://wargamesatlantic.com/blogs/news/einherjar-move-to-tooling

I'd roll them into AM almost like a regiment. Bikers could take the place rough riders had. A new squat tank maybe too? Not too inspired.

OMG I had no idea Wargames Atlantic is doing a space-dwarf box! Dang it. I'm going to end up getting a few of those boxes. Their stuff is just too dang good.

Also: keep them ideas coming folks! I'm hearing some really cool thoughts that I never would have come up with. Some of my faves so far have been the underwater aesthetic, the idea of lots of fortifications, the "board control" idea, and the bio-tech angle.

Primarisquats?
Resquates?
Nusquats?



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 privateer4hire wrote:
Let Wargames Atlantic make them first for $35 per box.

https://wargamesatlantic.com/blogs/news/einherjar-move-to-tooling

Wow. Those are some killer minis! And at that price...
Yup. GW will have to do something really special to beat this company in value that is certain.

Tbh the AOS Kharadron Overlords look almost like something out of 40k already. I love those. They look tough and techy. I'd want squats to be like them with a few steampunk style vehicles with seriously oversized bore guns.

Those floaty metal balloons are awesome. I'd also envision them as a society with "squats of iron" - like, truly sentient automatons that kind of resemble the squats themselves which live among them and are treated like real people.

Also space slayers. Gotta have space slayers.

I'd love to see the squats make a comeback. I even spent a week or so writing up a fandex for them based on the Kharadron Overlords.

I'd like to see them come back as a transport-vehicle-based army. Like having each of the overlords vessels have a high transport capacity with mounted guns that can be fired by passengers (like the chimera's lasguns). I think I had the HQ's all designed around buffing, repairing, or somehow modifying the vehicles.

Of course, the hearthguard made an appearance, essentially midget terminators. And the balloon-slash-assault troops from the Kharadron Overlords were assault troops that could assault from any of the vessels.

So, yeah. Vehicle-centric, technology based, primarily. With a bit of very tightly focused psychic power. Some uncommon melee tricks, but not really overpowered in melee. Using the Kharadron Overlords models mostly, but borrowing some from the old squats line. That's how I would bring them back.

EDIT: I agree with Doctor Boom and Morkphoiz. I just realized I'm repeating a lot of what they said.

EDIT2: I just found the Squats Fandex I wrote. I had them go with a lot of short-ranged, low-strength, high volume firepower, on the principle that they usually do their fighting in tunnels where you don't need to be able to shoot 300m, just around the next bend, but you absolutely, positively need that thing to die when you shoot it.

Lets see, special rules... They get +1 to their save in all area terrain (even if it's not ruins or doesn't provide LOS-blocking) and can't be overwatched by enemy units in RUINS (because they get in via tunnels instead of charging through the front doors like Space Marines).
Due to all the years of fighting and being abandoned by the Eldar, fighting hopeless battles against the Orks and all that, their leadership cannot be modified. They have a very stoic outlook on things. (not a huge deal in 8th edition, but I figured it might lead to some interesting edge cases)

Some of the cool stuff was infantry models on vehicles could act like Tau drones and absorb incoming shots ("Death Before Disassembly!"). Or they could be assigned to repair the vehicle instead of shooting ("Cunning Gadgetry"). Also, when reduced to 0 wounds, the vehicles explode on a 6, but on a 1 a model being transported could be sacrificed to bring the vehicle back up to 1 wound (I called that rule "Crisis Averted!").

But to reflect their plodding nature, the squats move characteristic was only 4", and the vehicles can't advance (well, they can, but they take D3 mortal wounds if they do). I called that rule "Ah Cannae Push Her Any Faster, Cap'n!"

I had a lot of fun writing up the rules.

Well they managed to make Dwarves non gunline in AoS. This would be a harder trap not to fall into in a shooting game as well as the fact that most of the design space is taken up in 40k at this point.

It'd be an incredibly interesting project to work on all round!

I would have them return as a mercenary race, as many others have suggested. I wouldn't tie them directly to the T'au, but I would allow them to ally with mostly anyone except GSC and nids - which they would have an utter hatred of - and the imperium - also hated, and they don't need any more soup!

from what I've read about squats (alas, they predate my participation in the game) they had 3 playstyles - infantry, bikes, and artillery.

I would repurpose this divide into heavyish horde, mobility and defending.

So Infantry-wise, I would be looking at them having slow, high-tech equipment. heavy guns for their basic infantry, maybe with pistols as a backup. 4+ saves as a minimum. heavy mining-automata to fill the CC gaps.
The long range gunline is filled by tau, and the mid-range gunline is filled by marines. short range gunline doesn't work so well, really, so they will need transports - open topped ones - and short range, powerful guns.

Mobility wise, I would include fairly liberal transport sizes (they are only small, they could have 2 floors in a transport!), mining machines to deepstrike in, and a variety of cool bikes, copters and fast, tough small-squad units.

Defensive wise, I would give them vehicles which can change into fortifications. seriously, heavily armoured vehicles with little to no offense, which can instead not move for the turn, become a fortress, and everyone inside can shoot. deployable fortifications. Also heavy artillery, probably a set of fortifications unique to the squats (perhaps a set of 2-4 little bunkers, which a unit can spend their movement phase transferring from one to another via tunnels - and reinforcements can deploy from - mitigating their slow movement, presumably 4"!)

I would be very interested in squats (or demiurg) being introduced, provided that they weren't just "short marines" or "short guard" or some other equally bland approach.


one strong contender in my mind is a sort of anti-tau. we have chaos vs imperium, orks vs tyranids, so demiurg vs tau. not in a "they are trying to destroy the tau" sense, but a "the tau stand for the greater good, the demiurg stand for revenge and survival". The Demiurg would be able to include a variety of new races who all have a vendetta against the rest of the galaxy, lost their home worlds to specific races, and banded together lest the galaxy eat them alive. so you end up with a selfish but not evil band of misfits and renegades, not corrupted by chaos and not out to conquer the galaxy, but looking to put the hurt on the rest of the galaxy in petty revenge for their own losses.

It would allow for a set of mercenary-type units in with the squats to give variety and bring these interesting units into the game without adding entire armies. Specific units can include caveats like "may not be included in an army which contains IMPERIUM units", or "TAU units", etc, so you can bring a big variety in a mono-squat build, or a restricted variety for soup.

The ones which dislike a faction would have to fulfill a similar roles to the faction they dislike - the ones who hate tau would need to have decent ranged firepower, the ones who hate marines would have to have good saves and toughness, the ones who hate orks would need to be somewhat horde-y.

rbstr wrote:
For a conceptual space the one that comes to mind as not being completely covered by others is one that uses biotech but in less of a body-horror/augmentation/xeonomorph sort of way.

Like, they grow a genetically engineered trees to make armor. Turtley/Snaily things are turned into tanks, anti-grav skywhales.
They're piloted still though - it's not like something they unleash or they're simply riding critters or strapping a platform to the back of an elephant. It's been engineered so there's like a place to fit in a cockpit.

For rules I'd see them as not being super tough, or having high saves but they'd have extra wounds. Maybe in conjunction with an army wide healing rule.
Their long range weapons wouldn't be particularly special - cannons, lasers, missiles. But they'd have some weirder biological short range guns like electric-eel discharge, sticky stuff who knows.

It's a cool sounding idea, but not for squats. That sounds about as unlike space dwarfs as you could get. Now, for an exodite army...

I’d like to see all the cliches dropped and something new presented. Not cyber punks, space miners, steampunks.

For me they should be mega angry for being left to be nids fodder. They have discovered, or were secretly in possession of, some pre heresy tech that they have leveraged to their advantage. Maybe the squats are small in number but command armies of men of iron. Or they ride megarachnids into battle haha

I got a morbid one for you!

The technologically advanced Squats find a series of offline Men of Iron installations, and reactivate them - BUT! They tamper with their programming, installing an enmity to all sentient species outside of the Squats, who are now basically the only mutual species to work with the Men of Iron. This makes the Squats the only race to really develop and field Artificial Intelligence (Abominable Intelligence) as their army. Squats would be the Men of Iron HQ equivalents, providing an intellect outside of machine efficiency - this means that the subterfuge and underhanded tactics which worked aeons ago won't work nearly quite so well now.

M41 845 (100 years after the loss of the Squat Homeworlds), the Squats and the Men of Iron make their reappearance on the fringes of the Gothic sector. They quickly carve up the both the Imperial and Chaos fleets, and leave the remainder scrambling to regroup. Several star systems go silent, as well as gravity field shifts as some stars are snuffed out. During this time, the Squats seed the Men of Iron on countless worlds - even a single automaton sent on a far travelling Rogue Trader, is capable of building and installing a Men of Iron installation in the mantle of a planet.

M41 898 (153 years after the loss of the Squat Homeworlds), the Squats and Men of Iron have finally established an area of space within the Gothic sector, where all contact is lost.

M41 944 (199 years after the loss of the Squat Homeworlds), the Men of Iron begin a systematic cleanse of neighboring star systems. Unlike the Necrons who destroy all life, and the Tyranids who devour all life, the Men of Iron utilize mass nuclear ionization, and EMPs to bring planetary populations to their knees - sterility and the complete deactivation of any technology (defences, infrastructure, etc), the populace is then rounded up and forced into mass concentration camp style ships, where they are used as slave labor.

M41 979 (235 years after the loss of the Squat Homeworlds), an Inquisitorial venture into Squat space (along with company level Adeptus Astartes support from 2 chapters), results in not a single survivor. The rest of those chapters make a foray into the area, and suffer supreme losses, they reveal the existence of the Men of Iron to the galaxy as a whole.

M41 (999 (254 years after the loss of the Squat Homeworlds), a new Squat offensive is brewing...

The Squats would comprise Command and Auxiliary units - the Men of Iron would provide the bulk of their forces.

Squats:
HQ - with some form of armywide buff - maybe a doctrine switch capable unit, that changes the Men of Iron from doctrine A to doctrine B mid battle
Elite - a Lite version of the HQ, maybe rather than changing the doctrine, they can enhance doctrines

Men of Iron:
Troops - Low accuracy and movement 5+ (range/CC), 5", high toughness, saves and squad size, as well as medium ranged Assault 1 weapons. Such as Assault 1 18" S5 AP-1; T5, 3+ Sv, 5-15 models in a unit, immune to morale.
Elites - Stronger versions of the Troops; T6, 2+ save, 4+ to hit, 6" movement, Weapons are Assault 2, same profile, +1Str/AP.
Fast Attack - Small AI spider walkers with lots of sharp stabby claws - fast, average in CC, low T.
Heavy Support - large slow bipedal walkers - lots of wounds, T9, long range fire support options, very long range flame attacks, etc.

Doctrines:
These are activated at the start of the turn, before the Movement Phase.

Basic Protocols: Base stats.
Assault Protocols: +1" Movement, +1 to CC hit, +1 to A in CC (not on charge), -1 to ranged hit, -6" to weapon range, -1 Ld aura 6"
Support Protocols: -1" Movement, +1 to ranged hit, +9" to weapon range, -1 to CC hit, 1 attack maximum per model in CC, attack last in CC.

Maybe make squats a slave race of the necron, fully translated in to automatons, but looking like those steam punk dwarfs from AoS. This way there would three things achived. Lore progress , intreducing a new army and giving necrons someone to ally with.

Could be realy interesting lore wise too. Maybe squats were given an offer by the necrons and "saved", but the saving ment under going a change like the necron themselfs went through. Maybe there small pockets of fleshy squats still wondering the empire, ever distrusted as their brethern turn to the xeno side.

There would be the whole ad mecha angle, even the now less robotic necron would have a second to ponder their hate of all living things, maybe some overlords would decide that they want more race to under go the same process and serv the necron goals.