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IF people are put off by the lack of availability of LI stuff, I hope GW dont do the 'well it shows there isnt enough interest' down the line and not expand and support the game.

VAYASEN wrote:
IF people are put off by the lack of availability of LI stuff, I hope GW dont do the 'well it shows there isnt enough interest' down the line and not expand and support the game.

All indications are that what's available is selling well. The only thing holding back more sales is the limited selection that's available. There's currently no reason for GW to be unhappy with how the game is selling.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/02/13/legions-imperialis-how-to-fight-battles-with-entire-armies-of-titans/

points costs uplift for Engine Killer weapons, in titan v tian games only, probably fair enough

anything smaller than a knight banned, presumably to stop marine heavy support units and similar dropping titans in one round..


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Eumerin wrote:

VAYASEN wrote:
IF people are put off by the lack of availability of LI stuff, I hope GW dont do the 'well it shows there isnt enough interest' down the line and not expand and support the game.

All indications are that what's available is selling well. The only thing holding back more sales is the limited selection that's available. There's currently no reason for GW to be unhappy with how the game is selling.

^^ this all GW can really go on is how much of what they produce is being sold (guessing a high percentage) and how often their sales reps report being bothered by independents asking when more is available

I believe all restock requests go through GWs Direct Trade Sales portal, which is basically an online store for retailers at wholesale trade rates. One would presume that this enables GW to log and track demand for specific products or SKUs, provided retailers are actually inputting demand into the system. IIRC in the past the system would indicate stock levels in some manner, my go-to store would only place orders for what was indicated to be in stock, otherwise GW would sit on the order, sometimes for months, until suddenly one day he would be billed for it when it became available again. This caused all sorts of obvious cash flow issues for him, as larger restock orders would slam his credit cards/bank accounts suddenly and without warning, and often time the restocks came in well after the customer who requested those items found them available elsewhere or lost interest in the item for whatever reason, etc.

You can of course bugger your rep about it as well, but properly your reps are really primarily there for your weekly new release orders and your annual account maintenance obligations, etc. They can assist you with restocks but from what I understand that really takes the form of them submitting a cart on your behalf via the direct trade sales portal, so it should still be getting registered somewhere in GW's ERP system (lol).

I quite like the idea that I can reuse my AT models for small games of Titandeath. Gives me some options.

Titandeath might end up being a really cool starting point for developing campaign games involving Titans. Within the LI framework, your Legio can end up facing flyers, tanks or infantry in addition to other Titans. It's like another, more fast paced flavour of AT, if you will.

 Pacific wrote:

 xttz wrote:
There's a pretty significant number of AT players that have assembled collections far too large to realistically play under normal AT rules. This is basically Apocalypse for them.

Thankyou - that is the first answer I have read on this topic that makes sense.

And I guess is genuinely useful at the moment for people who have that collection and can't buy stuff for Legions itself.

I do wonder if you'd want to play LI if your goal was a titan only game though. I appreciate AT is too complex, but I feel like LI is too far the other way. Even Epic 40k, the edition that gets lambasted for being overly simplified, has more depth in terms of how Titans play with the procedural damage, catastrophic and critical damage tables, and effectiveness based on how much damage has been taken.

for a pure titan v titan game, or titans & knights... reskin Battletech, or Alpha Strike and you probably get a much better game of it, with the ability to bring in a bit of infantry and vehicles/air support

I actually lamented that the Titan hit charts system from SM2 was not included in Legions, as I loved that part of the game and how it was incredible for adding cool narrative stories in games (titans with both arms blown off trying to carry on and stomp on stuff etc) .
But after playing some games I think it is so crunchy/long-winded in other areas, the last thing it needed is even more rules referencing and pauses in play - so perhaps the more simplified multi-wound system gun platform works a bit better?

When do Shops usually get their Release Lists?

 Pacific wrote:
I actually lamented that the Titan hit charts system from SM2 was not included in Legions, as I loved that part of the game and how it was incredible for adding cool narrative stories in games (titans with both arms blown off trying to carry on and stomp on stuff etc) .
But after playing some games I think it is so crunchy/long-winded in other areas, the last thing it needed is even more rules referencing and pauses in play - so perhaps the more simplified multi-wound system gun platform works a bit better?

I think the only thing noticeably lacking is what happens when titans die, I wasn't quite expecting the giant chart from AT but something more than every titan basically explodes the same regardless of scale.

RazorEdge wrote:
When do Shops usually get their Release Lists?

Sunday night or the Monday after the Next Week post goes up on WarCom. I don't know for sure when Euro Trade sends it out, but for as quick as Euro prices are confirmed they must be sending theirs out about the same time.

 Shadow Walker wrote:
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/02/13/legions-imperialis-how-to-fight-battles-with-entire-armies-of-titans/

Their all-Titan rules seem a bit kludge, like their trying to force the rules to do something for which they're not well suited.

I think I'd rather play a game of AT for that.

 schoon wrote:

 Shadow Walker wrote:
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/02/13/legions-imperialis-how-to-fight-battles-with-entire-armies-of-titans/

Their all-Titan rules seem a bit kludge, like their trying to force the rules to do something for which they're not well suited.

I think I'd rather play a game of AT for that.

At least the article itself is an acknowledgement that AT doesn't scale up well at all in terms of space and time requirements, where as titandeath will allow for a broader range of point levels and still hopefully be resolved in practical amount of time.


At least it shows an understanding of some of the stranger mechanics that needed altering for it to work stand-alone, like changing the methodology for attacking so the defender no longer decided the order of weapons fire.

I will say the silly "equation" for engine killer weapons give me titanicus ptsd, imagine just giving an updated list of weapons costs instead of throwing math problem at players. Also indicating only SOME weapons will cost more, which, I sorta think that's a bit weak, the only real task for titandeath was creating an economy around the weapons loadouts, they were free to do so too because the increased points costs wouldn't affect normal legions, just titandeath. That fact that they chose only to cost engine killer weapons, and even then, couldn't be bothered to just list the updated costs per titan, so I dunno it sorta seems like something players themselves could have come up with. But it does seem more practical than setting up dozens of titans for a two turn weekend long game a of titanicus.

Perhaps I’m dim or maybe GW’s messaging is poor, but will the Great Slaughter book have rules for drop pods and other forthcoming models? Or is that another book entirely?

 Fugazi wrote:
Perhaps I’m dim or maybe GW’s messaging is poor, but will the Great Slaughter book have rules for drop pods and other forthcoming models? Or is that another book entirely?

From the reveal article:

Drop Pod Assaults return in a new Formation, smashing powerful infantry detachments into the heart of battle with lethal Deathstorm Drop Pod batteries for support.

Since it has the Drop Pod formation rules inside it will also have the rules for the models

well thats a bit of a blow out, local shop, a shop which shifted 300+ boxes of Age of Darkness and I gather over 150 copies of Legions has been told its allocation for the expansion book

drum roll

2 copies

two, thats it, single digits, and low at that, thats yer lot

its like they don't actually want people to play this

Or they don't want you ordering from an independent FLGS.

Jaxmeister wrote:
Or they don't want you ordering from an independent FLGS.

perhaps, this does however mean I won't be ordering it

we have about a dozen locally who want to play it, about half that managed to get hold of enough to play it, three more have just the started and assorted bits from AT & LI but not enough to really use, and another three looking at dropping it as they can't get enough stuff to keep going

models can be found elsewhere, not all want to, which is fine, the inability to get the actual books is ridiculous

Old World is basically suffering the same, a few managed to get some, quite a few more didn't

leopard wrote:
well thats a bit of a blow out, local shop, a shop which shifted 300+ boxes of Age of Darkness and I gather over 150 copies of Legions has been told its allocation for the expansion book

drum roll

2 copies

two, thats it, single digits, and low at that, thats yer lot

its like they don't actually want people to play this

The hell are they playing at....

VAYASEN wrote:

leopard wrote:
well thats a bit of a blow out, local shop, a shop which shifted 300+ boxes of Age of Darkness and I gather over 150 copies of Legions has been told its allocation for the expansion book

drum roll

2 copies

two, thats it, single digits, and low at that, thats yer lot

its like they don't actually want people to play this

The hell are they playing at....

at a guess some serious underestimation and shenanigans. local bod reckons the release of the individual tanks is being held back to push sales of the starter set which seems easily available, plus limited availability of the expansion is because they have assumed many have multiple copies of the starter but will only by the expansion once and they got their guesses wrong

It might also be that stores which were understocked before, and thus generated a lot of complaints and negative marketing; are now being served with increased stock to compensate and appease those markets.

Ergo GW has not enough for everyone so they are juggling the stock around and different stores are getting different amounts to try and even it out somewhat.

And this is why the Kickstarter model of release is popular for established game companies.

 Flinty wrote:
And this is why the Kickstarter model of release is popular for established game companies.

can work well, though my former, now closed, local game shop hated them. by the time a game hit retail, if it ever did, most who wanted it had it

for the company I see a lot of benefit though, if they can sustain it

There is more benefit for the fans though. I agree it doesn’t help real game stores, but it at least gets enough kits out there to the people who are keen to get it. Watching the horrendous drip feed of GW product to people who are absolutely gagging for it is painful to watch.

At the same time a good many KS games hit with a big boom and then nothing after. The firm burned all their money on fullfilling the KS itself and thus have to either run another (which has a long lead time to work up toward); or they are back to their regular income levels and have to drip feed updates slowly.

Made harder by the fact that the most eager market is typically burned out. With a glut of stock they often can't justify/afford/budget for more for a while.


So you can get a huge boom and then a bust after which can so very easily kill things. Esp if local stores aren't picking up the game to advertise and get new customers in (because the local stores "don't like KS or KS games).

perfect for companies doing fire & forget games though

and actually for some games you don't want a constant drip.. drip... drip... of new stuff that gets shoehorned in to meet a marketing forecast

though I'd argue such has to be essentially self contained board game type stuff

GW are being.. overstretched? recently, they seem to be scatter gunning new games to see what sticks

I mean gork knows 40k has the space conceptually for a whole range of new stuff, its a big universe afterall, but they are now long past the point - especially when the genericisation of unit profiles now where its hard to bring anything new in, though its still the cash cow

it all comes over as a company struggling with what they are trying to do beyond short term financial returns

VAYASEN wrote:

leopard wrote:
well thats a bit of a blow out, local shop, a shop which shifted 300+ boxes of Age of Darkness and I gather over 150 copies of Legions has been told its allocation for the expansion book

drum roll

2 copies

two, thats it, single digits, and low at that, thats yer lot

its like they don't actually want people to play this

The hell are they playing at....

Telling stores info like this in advance, knowing they will publish it on social media or whatever.
Works great for GWs fomo marketing with no cost involved.

I think they are just struggling with success at a time when a LOT of other firms are in the very same boat. Unable to take full advantage of increased sales because shipping and manufacture have been messed around with insane rising costs everywhere and that's before you add literal armed pirates messing up the waters; wars and other things. Cost of living and the fact that a lot of big firms have driven up the prices for a lot of basic elements has no doubt hit GW too. Even with increased sales they are likely also having to spend vastly more to resolve and invest than they would have done just a few years ago.

Add to that issues with their warehousing system

our local was getting 1 book and 1 set of cards, its pretty much the only stockist in the area too.

now its getting zero.