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Its always amusing that BOTH of GWs companies are constantly churning out Marine figures and apparently its still not enough ?

 Mr Morden wrote:
Its always amusing that BOTH of GWs companies are constantly churning out Marine figures and apparently its still not enough ?

well. on 40k marines we are at like 4 iterations of the basic riflemen? With all other slots being also covered?

Whilest horus heresy has quite significant core troop types missing. (recons, breachers, all melee orientated things?!?)

I would trade literally the entire Primaris range for plastic Mk2

I’m hoping we get the other Cerastus loadouts in plastic. But. Much as I normally loathe resin? I think I’d be OK if the other weapons are resin.

It’s the legs and body that really need the plastic. To stop it being a complete child born outside of wedlock to build.

Oh no.
You just made me realize something, Doc Grotsnik.
All the joints on the Questoris chassis plastic kit legs and feet are fixed..

Is the Knight Lancer about to become essentially monopose?

Possibly, possibly not. The Contemptor Kit is super posable, but has tabs to ensure even and idiot (HI!) can get a decent post with minimal worry.

Clip those off and you get serious options.

Cerastus could go either way, but I’d hope for the latter. Because it’s easier to clip away some tabs, than carefully saw through a more solid non-joint to free up the legs/

Think I saw somewhere that it has some range but I can't find it now. Regardless, chopping up and reposing it won't be that hard and the material upgrade is worth it for a loss of posing IMO. It might not do some of the more crazy poses as easily but the wallet hole will be smaller.

Nah, thats a fairly backward step - i've done four resin Cerastus and they were an absolute joy to assemble.
Like, i wish every kit i got from FW was as flawless as any of my Cerastus knights.

The leg position conversion on the Questoris is a bit of a pita - nothing i can't handle (done 6 so far) but i would not expect anyone but already competent modelers to handle a Questoris knight leg re-pose without pre-made replacement parts.
I admit mine aren't perfect but they're good enough.to not look particularly weird.

Not denying the FW Cerastus posing is good, what I am saying is that losing some of that posing for a superior material and a price drop is worth it. All the Cerastus currently sit at £225 and I think when I considered getting an Acheron some time ago it was still about £180. Considering the price difference between the current Heresy plastic kits and their original counterparts, I'll take less posing and a significantly reduced price.

Don't forget drop protection. Plastics tend to survive better than resin, more coming apart, less shattering.

'Significantly reduced price' huh?
I hope you get what you want, but i do not share your optimism.

Cody.d, please tell me you don't plan to drop your knights

I mean prior to the release of the plastic Spartan it was sitting at around £120. Its now £70 from GW and a little under £60 at my local FLGS.
The current Cerastus are, as noted previously £225. I'd say they'll at least drop to £150 considering the next biggest Knight is the Dominus chassis at £110 from GW. Is it cheap? God no but for a model that size I wouldn't expect it to be. Is it a significant price drop? Absolutely.

 SirDonlad wrote:
'Significantly reduced price' huh?
I hope you get what you want, but i do not share your optimism.

Cody.d, please tell me you don't plan to drop your knights

I've heard horror stories of resin baneblades being dropped down stairs. Thankfully I've only lost things like spears going snap.

cody.d. wrote:

 SirDonlad wrote:
'Significantly reduced price' huh?
I hope you get what you want, but i do not share your optimism.

Cody.d, please tell me you don't plan to drop your knights

I've heard horror stories of resin baneblades being dropped down stairs. Thankfully I've only lost things like spears going snap.

Spare a thought for the full-scale Warlord Titan owners!

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
How would a niche knight type, in an already niche faction be driven by the accountants though?

That is what confuses me about this, why not use the significant labour for the knight to make assault and breacher marines instead which would be an bigger Market and a not niche?

40k knights sell like hotcakes and accountants, utterly lacking any wider context of the games they sell, legitimately have absolutely no comprehension why a 30k knight will not?

I don't know what you all think accountants in retail businesses do, but as someone that spent a considerable amount of their career as an accountant in retail businesses in the UK (specifically in FP&A, which actually requires understanding the wider of the products and market), it isn't what various people here are suggesting.

These decisions are taken by buyers/merchandisers/marketing/product managers depending on the exact structure/naming convention of the business, usually to preset internal benchmarks on rate of return and profitability, which would have been decided at board/senior management level, with perhaps some guiding analysis from the finance team on the implications of setting it at different levels has for profitability, and authority levels agreed by the board for sign off required to deviate below those presets.

 Baragash wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
How would a niche knight type, in an already niche faction be driven by the accountants though?

That is what confuses me about this, why not use the significant labour for the knight to make assault and breacher marines instead which would be an bigger Market and a not niche?

40k knights sell like hotcakes and accountants, utterly lacking any wider context of the games they sell, legitimately have absolutely no comprehension why a 30k knight will not?

I don't know what you all think accountants in retail businesses do, but as someone that spent a considerable amount of their career as an accountant in retail businesses in the UK (specifically in FP&A, which actually requires understanding the wider of the products and market), it isn't what various people here are suggesting.

These decisions are taken by buyers/merchandisers/marketing/product managers depending on the exact structure/naming convention of the business, usually to preset internal benchmarks on rate of return and profitability, which would have been decided at board/senior management level, with perhaps some guiding analysis from the finance team on the implications of setting it at different levels has for profitability, and authority levels agreed by the board for sign off required to deviate below those presets.

It's more that nobody can come up with a good explanation of exactly why they decided to release another plastic knight when we actually ask for a whole bunch of other, simpler stuff.

At least someone from accounts realizing the companies sales need to look better in a certain quarter makes some degree of sense in the way it lacks any deeper understanding of what the players have been demanding/expecting for a literal decade now.

Why the Cerastus Knight Lancer over assault infantry?

1. They wanted to. This is best reason, but I can propose others.

2. Cerastus Knight Lancer is but a single kit. Needs just one person to stick it through the Rubicon Plasticarus. This may have been easier than normal thanks to the existing file for AT Cerastus Knight Lancers. Whilst not simply “stick that through the Resizograph”, it’s still better than going from scratch.

3. Assault Infantry? Well, first you start with the bodies. Then a jump pack. Than the weapons, for the basic kit teased. We’ve also seen promise of plastic melee weapons to come. Now all that could be a single sculptor still, but it could be multiple sculptors. In terms of production, you need to make lots and lots and lots of those, because they’re gonna sell. But being multiple SKU’s, that requires different production slots. The CKL? Single SKU, simplifying it somewhat.

4. CKL opens things up somewhat for the game as a whole. Someone with an existing Knight army can now Heresificate it quite nicely. Heresy players previously tempted but put off by price tag/big resin kits being less pleasant now have a bigger hook appealing to them.

5. GW know their market far better than we do, because they have data we simply don’t.

6. CKL is almost certainly, like the Rhino chassis, going to be a base kit. Going forward, you can do the others on as little as one Big Sprue. That’s a cheap outlay, for another *Insert Price When We Know It* in GW’s trousers.

I will argue that every step of the production process except injection machine time is utterly trivial for GW. Lone artists have no issue churning out multiple full unit kits per month on a 10$ patreon. And injection machine time, funnily, is the one that CLK eats up way more than an Assault Squad since it's a lot more different sprues to make one box.

The only two convincing arguments I've heard are

a) they are so out of touch they don't even know which units players actually need

b) someone very clever sneaked a big 40k seller into 30k budget to pad our numbers and get more funding for HH next financial season

Those aren’t convincing arguments at all.

As for production? They have finite casting resources. Even with every machine they own, running at peak efficiency across 24 hour shifts with minimal downtime for cleaning, maintenance what have you, it’s still finite.

And they’re not just producing for Horus Heresy, or something coming out for any game in the next few months.

AoS, 40K. Kill Team, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, Blood Bowl, Aeronautica, Underworlds, War Cry. All have production demands. And new stuff has to be cast up well in advance, so you can meet your release schedule as much as possible.

Every new release puts fresh pressure on that production schedule. Should anything sell in higher than expected numbers, you then need to find time to get another run done, and boxes for shelves printed in some cases.

Yes, that's literally what I said. And a Knight eats up more machine time, and more importantly, machine downtime because it's probably going to be somewhere upwards of 5 different tools that you have to swap out versus a single tool for an infantry unit.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Those aren’t convincing arguments at all.

As for production? They have finite casting resources. Even with every machine they own, running at peak efficiency across 24 hour shifts with minimal downtime for cleaning, maintenance what have you, it’s still finite.

And they’re not just producing for Horus Heresy, or something coming out for any game in the next few months.

AoS, 40K. Kill Team, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, Blood Bowl, Aeronautica, Underworlds, War Cry. All have production demands. And new stuff has to be cast up well in advance, so you can meet your release schedule as much as possible.

Every new release puts fresh pressure on that production schedule. Should anything sell in higher than expected numbers, you then need to find time to get another run done, and boxes for shelves printed in some cases.

The whole academic field of Operations Research and Supply Chain Management literally does nothing else than optimize machine usage, warehousing, distribution and so forth all day long. Because it turns out that these are really hard problems, even with modern computerized systems, and even for relatively small setups. GW has a pretty complex setup, as they have multiple product lines, international and regionally distinct supply chains for all sorts of component and raw materials, highly coupled material streams (need your boxes, your sprues and your booklets all at the assembly line etc.), classical transport problems and such for their sweet, sweet simultaneous worldwide launch, and on top of that financial vagaries like exchange rate risk and such. This is not your little mom&pop shop that can ignore 90% of that because they're churning out Patreon stuff on their garage full of printers, effectively paying themselves a sub-mandatory minimum wage and probably breaking all sorts of workplace safety laws which is only not a problem because they're not big enough that anyone whose job it is to care has them on their radar...

Anyway, as you said, without a lot of the data they're relying on we literally can't say what they're on about, but theories that 'the accountants' shift stuff like that around willy-nilly to 'sneak a 40k seller into 30k' or something like that are laughable, and ultimately rely on an idea about how corporate product planning works that's stuck somehwere between the early 50s and The Simpsons.

Tsagualsa wrote:
Anyway, as you said, without a lot of the data they're relying on we literally can't say what they're on about, but theories that 'the accountants' shift stuff like that around willy-nilly to 'sneak a 40k seller into 30k' or something like that are laughable, and ultimately rely on an idea about how corporate product planning works that's stuck somehwere between the early 50s and The Simpsons.

Except we know from first hand accounts like James Hewitt's that GW office politics work exactly like the caricature of dumb corpo management.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:
Anyway, as you said, without a lot of the data they're relying on we literally can't say what they're on about, but theories that 'the accountants' shift stuff like that around willy-nilly to 'sneak a 40k seller into 30k' or something like that are laughable, and ultimately rely on an idea about how corporate product planning works that's stuck somehwere between the early 50s and The Simpsons.

Except we know from first hand accounts like James Hewitt's that GW office politics work exactly like the caricature of dumb corpo management.

I fail to see how his experiences are relevant today:

I’ve worked for Games Workshop three times in my life. The first two of those were in retail. I was recruited to work at GW Maidstone in 2002, and after several shop moves, I left GW Reading in 2008 because I felt I was being repeatedly passed over for management training. I came back a year later as a trainee store manager, ran the Windsor and Kensington branches after completing my training, and left in 2011. In 2014 I was hired as a Rules Writer in the GW Publications studio; I transferred to Specialist Brands in 2016, and left to set up Needy Cat Games in 2017.

https://lagoon83.medium.com/working-at-games-workshop-the-nuanced-version-edda9ffb1237

No disrespect to him as a person, but his experience as a store clerk and manager is not relevant at all for product planning issues, and his two years as rules writer are probably neither. What remains is a stint at Specialist Brands (i.e. what commonly still gets called Forgeworld, and is a subsidiary to the main production line) of 1-2 years, at least 6 years ago.

He was hired to the studio at the tail end of the 'Kirby era', and in the meantime they have changed a lot of things, among them whole new facilities for production and the implementation of a new, modern ERP system (which is still ongoing and troubled, unfortunately not uncommon for these things as these are very complex systems) which is literally what you do when you want to move away from 'cartoon management'. His experiences are just severely outdated.

Company culture is not something that changes that fast tsagulsa.
Neither is memory something lost so quickly.

Tsagualsa wrote:

I fail to see how his experiences are relevant today:

How about that lady who quit over toxic office politics a year or two ago and GW got a hit piece on her published in the Guardian, that's definitely the reaction of a healthy management.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:

I fail to see how his experiences are relevant today:

How about that lady who quit over toxic office politics a year or two ago and GW got a hit piece on her published in the Guardian, that's definitely the reaction of a healthy management.

What?
Where?

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:

I fail to see how his experiences are relevant today:

How about that lady who quit over toxic office politics a year or two ago and GW got a hit piece on her published in the Guardian, that's definitely the reaction of a healthy management.

I am not aware of that at all, can you give me a link?

Here's the thread we had at the time https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/799950.page

Seems her Twitter has been deleted however

"Hit piece" might have been overdramatized but they seriously did somehow push a damage control article in the Guardian within days of her going public to the tone of "some ex employees are whinging but they are just giant doo doo heads, look we're paying out a bonus this year"

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Here's the thread we had at the time https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/799950.page

Seems her Twitter has been deleted however

"Hit piece" might have been overdramatized but they seriously did somehow push a damage control article in the Guardian within days of her going public to the tone of "some ex employees are whinging but they are just giant doo doo heads, look we're paying out a bonus this year"

Okay, so they did an article in the Guardian for damage control, with no evidence they paid for it is what it boils down to? I'm reading up on that thread, but it will take some time.

You can't even link the actual part of the thread that is supposedly relevant to your claim. Sounds even more unlikely, especially considering you've already backtracked.