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I really hate the stems for the Seraphim/Zephyrim that need to be glued to the model. Should be a ball joint that fits into a hole underneath the jump pack, so that you can take the model apart for transportation.

Models with a dynamic pose that have only one foot on the ground should either have a slotted base (if they're all like that -- thanks, wyches, you're doing it right) or be stepping on a rock, floor tile or piece of terrain that has a larger contact surface with the base. This applies double to larger or heavier models, like some of the Custodian Guards and the Blade Champion.

A Custodian Warden can have both a banner and a spear or axe, but a Custodian Guard or Allarus Custodian who takes the banner can only wield the misericordia (a Dmg 1 weapon). Why? No logical reason aside from the models being designed that way.

Bases should be made of the same plastic as the models so that plastic glue works better.

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-Guardsman- wrote:

Bases should be made of the same plastic as the models so that plastic glue works better.

What makes you think it's a different kind of plastic in the bases?

 Arschbombe wrote:

-Guardsman- wrote:

Bases should be made of the same plastic as the models so that plastic glue works better.

What makes you think it's a different kind of plastic in the bases?

Are you kidding? It's fairly obvious.

- The plastic of standard bases doesn't melt and resolidify as well under plastic glue as the plastic that the models are made of. You have to keep the model and base together longer to make them stick, compared to two different bits of the model. Even then, the base remains the part of the assembled model that is most likely to come off.
- The plastic of standard bases is brittle. Can hardly bend at all, but breaks easily.
- Standard bases don't come on sprues and don't show signs of ever having been on sprues, so clearly it's a different molding process.


I say "standard bases" because GW does produce some themed bases made of the kind of plastic I want, such as Boarding Action bases (see below), Necromunda bases and others. Why not make all bases out of this plastic, including blank ones? Does it just cost more? Fine, I'll pay more. It'll hardly make a difference in the overall cost of this hobby.

GW's bases used to be on sprues. The current bases are still injection moulded polystyrene, samr as everyone else's, just produced individually using a single injection port under the bottom of the base instead of being in a sprue.

Why doesn't the Death Guard Tallyman have a melee weapon? The Blue Scribes can attack with their quills, and the Spoilpox Scrivener used to be able to, so why can't the Tallyman?

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
Why doesn't the Death Guard Tallyman have a melee weapon? The Blue Scribes can attack with their quills, and the Spoilpox Scrivener used to be able to, so why can't the Tallyman?

Not sure what you mean here. He has a close combat weapon. It's not flashy, but it's probably better than you'd expect from a guy whose hands are busy holding an abacus and a clipboard. Heck, it's better than the blue scribes' quills given that it isn't S2. Do you mean that you just want it to have some quirky special rule instead of being a normal ccw?

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
Why doesn't the Death Guard Tallyman have a melee weapon? The Blue Scribes can attack with their quills, and the Spoilpox Scrivener used to be able to, so why can't the Tallyman?

Not sure what you mean here. He has a close combat weapon. It's not flashy, but it's probably better than you'd expect from a guy whose hands are busy holding an abacus and a clipboard. Heck, it's better than the blue scribes' quills given that it isn't S2. Do you mean that you just want it to have some quirky special rule instead of being a normal ccw?

Maybe they could keep the current melee profile, rename it to his pen, and give it the lethal hits ability, like he's using poison ink. It wouldn't be much, but sounds fun and fluffy.

-Guardsman- wrote:

Are you kidding? It's fairly obvious.

- The plastic of standard bases doesn't melt and resolidify as well under plastic glue as the plastic that the models are made of. You have to keep the model and base together longer to make them stick, compared to two different bits of the model. Even then, the base remains the part of the assembled model that is most likely to come off.

They melt the same for me. I use Tamiya plastic cement. I think any joint weakness comes from the surface texture of the bases and the length of the lever arm (height of the model) when force is applied to the joint.

- The plastic of standard bases is brittle. Can hardly bend at all, but breaks easily.

I haven't found the bases to be more breakable than the models.

- Standard bases don't come on sprues and don't show signs of ever having been on sprues, so clearly it's a different molding process.

Ad others have noted, 25mm bases used to come on little sprues of 4. Some used to have inject points on the top center. They may have modernized their molds, but they're all still injection molded polystyrene. And they still feel the same to me.

The difference is minimal, but bases can certainly be a little harder than model plastic, and I've also found them to sometimes not grab the glue quite as well.

That's not down to the type of plastic, though, as they're made from exactly the same High Impact Polystyrene as the miniatures, as far as I'm aware... . We've seen similar with coloured miniatures over the years, where coloured promotional miniatures felt different to their regular grey counterparts. Same plastic, but the type of colourant added to it changes its properties slightly.

Normally carbon black is used to add black to things. That will pretty much always make things more brittle.

The beveled bases in general...
the angle is too steep to easily pick up the figure by the base, so have to grab the figure (more wear and tear, although I've never really had any wear issues with my really old figures (30+ years))

and I have a hard time picking up a base without a fig... too beveled...lol

and it would be nice if the underside of bases had the size on it, too!

I'm trying to figure out why the shin armour on my "easy-fit" space marines is a separate piece on every single model.

Why the need to add complicated bits in monopose models?

One design thing that irks me is Abaddon. Fantastic model but there are a few bits here and there that make his armour look a bit worn out such as the tatty cape, broken trophy rack and exposed cables. Yes he's the bad guy, but I expect that he'd keep his armour and kit in top condition.

Rules-wise, the weirdest couple of things I can think of are:

- When Dark Eldar were re-released for 5th Edition, the index at the back of the book contained all the stats for the weapons, except one. The Shuriken Pistol, which could only be taken by Harlequins, said "see the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook", just really weird to have that there.

- Marines were redone for 5th Edition and contained the full armoury in the Codex. A Sergeant could take any combination of ranged and melee weapons, but for some reason there was a footnote saying a Sternguard Sergeant couldn't take a Thunder Hammer. No idea why, thematically you could have a Scout Sergeant awarded with a Thunder Hammer. He keeps it as a Devastator, as a Tactical, as an Assault, as a Vanguard, but the moment he's promoted to Sternguard he has to give it up. Was never explained by GW why that was the case.

 Valkyrie wrote:
One design thing that irks me is Abaddon. Fantastic model but there are a few bits here and there that make his armour look a bit worn out such as the tatty cape, broken trophy rack and exposed cables. Yes he's the bad guy, but I expect that he'd keep his armour and kit in top condition.



- When Dark Eldar were re-released for 5th Edition, the index at the back of the book contained all the stats for the weapons, except one. The Shuriken Pistol, which could only be taken by Harlequins, said "see the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook", just really weird to have that there.

.

Oh yeah GW definitely went through a phase of never repeating rules in books and asking you to reference another expensive book. Glad that's largely a thing of the past now?

 Valkyrie wrote:
One design thing that irks me is Abaddon. Fantastic model but there are a few bits here and there that make his armour look a bit worn out such as the tatty cape, broken trophy rack and exposed cables. Yes he's the bad guy, but I expect that he'd keep his armour and kit in top condition.

i see the model as him having gone through combat already. his armour might have been nice and shiny and everything was fixed up properly, but that was hours, maybe even days ago, and the attrition of battle has worn him down

 Valkyrie wrote:
- When Dark Eldar were re-released for 5th Edition, the index at the back of the book contained all the stats for the weapons, except one. The Shuriken Pistol, which could only be taken by Harlequins, said "see the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook", just really weird to have that there.

Harlequins had some other fun tidbits in 5th ed.

They had the same unit options as their Craftworld counterparts... except the Shadowseer and Death Jester could take a Kiss in Dark Eldar.
They could generate Pain Tokens; but they couldn't use them - they could share them with attached characters though...

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Snord wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Giving Primaris Heavy Stubbers that were usually associated with Guard, Autocannons that were associated with CSM and hover tanks that were usually a Xenos thing.

Agreed - this is where Primaris seemed 'off', rather than the design of their power armour. And putting Intercessors in Heresy-style units with no special or heavy weapons, thus making the iconic Tactical squad obsolete when it was both more effective and cooler looking. Or, for that matter, adding Desolation squads instead of just having Primaris Devastators.

"Marine Aspect Warriors". Yup! Totally against the OG Marine organizational paradigm.

Game wise it makes a lot of sense. In the sizes battles are now, it makes more sense to have squads with a dedicated role rather than generalists, and it is quicker to resolve attacks if the squad is uniformly armed. What I find bizarre, that GW has very heavily went against this in other armies, with "no doubling the same special weapon" thing, forcing skitarii, guard, kabalites etc to have stupid amount of different profiles in each squad, making resolving the shooting to be super tedious. If I were writing the rules I would endeavour to write the options so that for most units you could have reasonable loadout with no more than two different weapon profiles in the squad.

GW rules are not written from a single aspect.

Mixed up with them you've got a bunch of sometimes competing objectives and attitudes. Eg on the one hand you've got moves to simplify the rules; on the other to simply change and shake things up; then you've got things like "no models no rules" which seems to include GW wanting you to be able to "build one of every option" with every box you buy.

So suddenly upgrade parts cost nothing; suddenly units can take a full compliment of special weapons per box (not squad box); which leads to really odd situations where a unit can have more specialists than regular infantry/troops.
In Age of Sigmar it leads to squads taking musicians and banners everywhere in multiples.


At the same time its not even; ranged weapons have retained unique profiles but close combat has been dumbed down. Tyranid Warriors lost ALL their close combat variety; meanwhile in Age of sigmar there's a push to make unique weapons have the same profiles.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
It's so narratively satisfying that we never got any exploration of why Guilliman, who wrote the Codex Astartes, and established more generalist Marine squads, organised his secret super-Marines along the lines of specialised Legion units.
Forge the Narrative!

They actually do explain that though? The dark imperium novels and later books which focus on Cawl and Gulliman regularly bring up this topic.

First, Gulliman explained that he intended the codex as a handbook of best practices that you were supposed to follow unless you have good reason to not do so. The later part somehow got lost in time, and now most chapters following to the letter. He is literally more troubled by the Black Templars revering the emperor as a god than by them not following the codex, but all he does about is call Helbrecht a fool.

The second, and probably bigger part is that Cawl more or less does whatever the hell he wants and Gulliman is taking the pragmatic approach to this. He needs a ton of weapons and Cawl is providing them. Without Gullimans protection, Cawl would probably have been executed for heresy for most of his projects - and some of his more secret ones would get him executed despite that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
At the same time its not even; ranged weapons have retained unique profiles but close combat has been dumbed down. Tyranid Warriors lost ALL their close combat variety; meanwhile in Age of sigmar there's a push to make unique weapons have the same profiles.

Simplification really is extremely inconsistent. In the recent DG codex there is a whole double-sided page with pictures of models explaining all the weapons - but they still have the same weapon as "heavy blight weapon" on plague marines and as "flail of corruption" on blight lords.

I'm also currently re-introducing a tyranid veteran to 10th and the melee weapons in that codex really are a mess. Sometimes monsters get to chose between two weapons, sometimes both are combined into one attack profile, sometimes you get one weapon in addition to the other, but not if you trade it. And it's the same weapons on all of them.

On the subject of dice, those Ultramarines ones from a few years back were kind of annoying (I never had them as I don't play Smurfs, but a couple of my friends did), in that they had the Ultramarines symbol on the 1 instead of the 6. So it make it where seeing your symbol was a bad thing.

Also those Death Guard dice with the squishy parts. I never trusted them to roll fair and hated it if any of my opponents used them.

 Jidmah wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
At the same time its not even; ranged weapons have retained unique profiles but close combat has been dumbed down. Tyranid Warriors lost ALL their close combat variety; meanwhile in Age of sigmar there's a push to make unique weapons have the same profiles.

Simplification really is extremely inconsistent. In the recent DG codex there is a whole double-sided page with pictures of models explaining all the weapons - but they still have the same weapon as "heavy blight weapon" on plague marines and as "flail of corruption" on blight lords.

I'm also currently re-introducing a tyranid veteran to 10th and the melee weapons in that codex really are a mess. Sometimes monsters get to chose between two weapons, sometimes both are combined into one attack profile, sometimes you get one weapon in addition to the other, but not if you trade it. And it's the same weapons on all of them.

Yeah, like a lot of things GW does with their rules you can sometimes see a pattern and then it changes randomly; and by the time we hit half way through the edition you'll also see even more changes and shifts. It's all a symptom of a 3 year rules cycle where the system has no chance to actually settle down and mature because its all change almost as soon as we get the rules established.

With Warriors I CAN kind of see why GW did it so that they could open up more niches for close combat units. Tyranids used to have a LOT of "jack of all trades" models that basically did everything based on upgrades and weapon choices. Carnifex was the entire heavy support choice just as the warrior was every single middle-weight unit type.

The army has grown a LOT from the 3rd edition days and some of those niches are now occupied by specialist units. So some contraction of options isn't bad; esp if it creates a nice niche for the model to live in. It just feels really jarring with the warriors because they took away all the cool things they've been adding over the last couple of revisions of the kit and yet kept the same kit out. I was very much expecting a new warrior kit with wings (you know to go with that prime and its wings); but its never materialised (heck there's another weird choice - take away the generic prime that the warrior kit actually builds and replace it with a single pose, single weapon option prime kit that has wings who then leads a unit that hasn't got wings..)


But yeah this edition has felt like GW has been trying to simplify things a lot, which honestly I think is becoming less a case of making it easier for new people to get into the game and much more a case that its easier for GW to bash out codex faster and easier when they've insane deadlines now. Every book is on a 3 year cycle and some of them even faster if they come out late one edition and early the next. When you're cycling books that fast you don't want complicated models with loads of moving parts you want something dead simple; as few profiles and options as possible.

This random flailing around rules wise is what put the nail in the coffin for me with picking back up GW books. I'm absolutely sure there's great stuff in there, but the stuff that doesn't make sense will just itch at me and make me crazy. Too much money to be dropping on rules that seem to be designed under at least 3 different paradigms at a time. I do really wonder what it's like in the Studio now, I wonder if the designers are having a good time, how much freedom they have and how they feel about their jobs.

 Quixote wrote:
I'm trying to figure out why the shin armour on my "easy-fit" space marines is a separate piece on every single model.

Why the need to add complicated bits in monopose models?

Limitations of the mold vs. detail.

For HIPS plastic, you can’t have any undercuts. The molds need to pull away cleanly from the sprue, with zero spots where it would have to curve around the mini. Any detail needs to be facing the mold, you can’t mold detail on the side. Unless you break up the mini and have different parts at different angles. And if you want something like the distinct raised ridge of the primaris armor, with space behind it, it needs to be separate.

Resin and metal models use soft molds, rubber/silicone not metal. So you can have some undercuts. But the more you have and the deeper they are cause wear and tear on the molds, so they end up having to remake the molds from masters more frequently.

If you look at a mini on the sprue and wonder why they broke it up the way they did, the restrictions of the process are generally the answer. And GW has come a long way about craming more detail on the models. The trade off on this is you end up with more parts, and sometimes the minis are broken up in weird ways.

Honestly GW are very top of their game when it comes to cuts on models. All those strange angles and curves aren't just achieving cuts that let them model more angles and detail; but many times they are also using them to hide the joins once the model is assembled.

Sure there are still some joins on show but a good many that are on show are also now very easily cleaned off.

There's a good bit of skill and time that goes into those cuts that I think a lot of people don't appreciate.

Surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but the Rogal Dorn tank having a massive hole on the underside.

It's very odd how it's basically the only vehicle they've made in the past 30 years or so to not be 'complete'.

The fronts of the new sonic blasters are in two parts that have to be glued together before being able toe glued on the gun, but the front of the blastmaster for some reason is just one piece and can be attached more quickly.

Looks like someone's excel table for dice orders was off by one row. I think I know where the Death Guard dice colors went

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
The fronts of the new sonic blasters are in two parts that have to be glued together before being able toe glued on the gun, but the front of the blastmaster for some reason is just one piece and can be attached more quickly.

Shadow Queen Morathi's head was a whopping eleven separate components.

 BorderCountess wrote:

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
The fronts of the new sonic blasters are in two parts that have to be glued together before being able toe glued on the gun, but the front of the blastmaster for some reason is just one piece and can be attached more quickly.

Shadow Queen Morathi's head was a whopping eleven separate components.

How is that even possible?

I wonder how many components the new Knights are going to be?

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but the Rogal Dorn tank having a massive hole on the underside.

It's very odd how it's basically the only vehicle they've made in the past 30 years or so to not be 'complete'.

It's odd when looking at the finished model. But looking at the sprues, they're pretty packed. Including a part for that floor gap would have meant leaving off weapon options, or adding an entire additional sprue. It's a side effect of being a slightly larger than normal tank... leaving off a part that nobody is going to see is a more cost effective solution than tooling an additional sprue.

Internet rage about it aside, this one is actually a clever design choice.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
The fronts of the new sonic blasters are in two parts that have to be glued together before being able toe glued on the gun, but the front of the blastmaster for some reason is just one piece and can be attached more quickly.

Without having seen the sprues, I would guess that's down to the cabling on the sides of the sonic blaster.