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 Hellebore wrote:
Gw misleads its customers in the name of profit and then creates a horrible gaming environment of marines fighting marines whose players all wonder why there aren't non marine armies to fight.

Because there are 2 tiers of gw customer, imperial and non imperial..except they don't tell people that and don't admit it. So they get a keen kid who wants Orks and then sinks their money into a faction that gw doesn't care about. So they get tired of it and either quit entirely or move to marines where they actually feel appreciated and can get gold plated service.

Until gw either admits to its customers this truth, or actively shifts their internal biases to give equal time to all factions, the disfunction will continue.

You know, I think Custodes ,Deathwatch and Grey Knights players would love their factions to be as ignored as Orks, when it comes to model support.

 a_typical_hero wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Gw misleads its customers in the name of profit and then creates a horrible gaming environment of marines fighting marines whose players all wonder why there aren't non marine armies to fight.

Because there are 2 tiers of gw customer, imperial and non imperial..except they don't tell people that and don't admit it. So they get a keen kid who wants Orks and then sinks their money into a faction that gw doesn't care about. So they get tired of it and either quit entirely or move to marines where they actually feel appreciated and can get gold plated service.

Until gw either admits to its customers this truth, or actively shifts their internal biases to give equal time to all factions, the disfunction will continue.

You know, I think Custodes ,Deathwatch and Grey Knights players would love their factions to be as ignored as Orks, when it comes to model support.

Given half the grey knight and deathwatch units are just rebadged space marine vehicles they already do.

I'm not particularly sad about it when you can cut those 3 armies and the imperium still has 9 codexes or codex supplements with their own models, which is more than a third of all codexes. With those 3 is FIFTY PERCENT.

So all you've done is complain that the Joneses are poor too because they only have 10 cars instead of 50. It's like posh spice claiming her family is working class....

 a_typical_hero wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Gw misleads its customers in the name of profit and then creates a horrible gaming environment of marines fighting marines whose players all wonder why there aren't non marine armies to fight.

Because there are 2 tiers of gw customer, imperial and non imperial..except they don't tell people that and don't admit it. So they get a keen kid who wants Orks and then sinks their money into a faction that gw doesn't care about. So they get tired of it and either quit entirely or move to marines where they actually feel appreciated and can get gold plated service.

Until gw either admits to its customers this truth, or actively shifts their internal biases to give equal time to all factions, the disfunction will continue.

You know, I think Custodes ,Deathwatch and Grey Knights players would love their factions to be as ignored as Orks, when it comes to model support.

How about the Orks get a Freebooters, Feral Orks and Speed Freaks codex?

A codex and individual models for every clan?

"Oh no, Paladin Space Marines, Special Forces Space Marines and Bodyguard Space Marines don't get treated better than a mainstay Xenos faction that's been in the game since day one!"

I've changed my mind. Make the marines S5 T5 and give them 5 shots a dude instead of 4. Let's just really go for it.

 Hellebore wrote:
Given half the grey knight and deathwatch units are just rebadged space marine vehicles they already do.

I'm not particularly sad about it when you can cut those 3 armies and the imperium still has 9 codexes or codex supplements with their own models, which is more than a third of all codexes. With those 3 is FIFTY PERCENT.

So all you've done is complain that the Joneses are poor too because they only have 10 cars instead of 50. It's like posh spice claiming her family is working class....

You are moving goal posts and your bias against everything Marine (and to an extension Imperium) is showing in every post, regardless of topic. There is as much consolidation for Custodes and GKnights in being part of the Imperium mega faction as for Dark Eldar to be part of Aeldari. Why do you complain? Eldar got a big wave of models over the last couple years, just play with them.

 Da Boss wrote:
How about the Orks get a Freebooters, Feral Orks and Speed Freaks codex?

A codex and individual models for every clan?

Why would I have a problem with Orks getting more models? This is not a zero-sum-game.

Why would I have a problem with Orks getting more models? This is not a zero-sum-game.

Tbf, it kind of is given that GW can only produce and ship so many models at a time.

As someone who thinks marines get too much support, I don't really have anything against GK or custodes getting a bit more support. It's not like SW, BA, and DA where a bunch of their units are just extra special versions of vanilla units.

As cool as death company are, part of me can't help but look at them and think that they're basically a glorified head swap. GK units tend to be a bit more fundamentally different even when they do vaguely line up with a vanilla marine unit.

And while I still think custodes should just have been one or two imperial agent options instead of a whole faction, they are similarly fundamentally different in terms of model appearance and capabilities than vanilla marines.

Love Death Watch, but their units just aren't that special. Especially now that you're not building whacky kill team combos like bike marines mixed with jump pack marines mixed with termies or whatever. (And also, I think a serious case could be made that when they operate on the scale of a 2k army, the things that make them different like kill teams stop working as well both mechanically and in terms of fluff and they essentially become a vanilla marine army.)

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Tbf, it kind of is given that GW can only produce and ship so many models at a time.

On a technical level, yes. But instead of making more Dark Eldar, or Custodes, or GK or whatever else, we have:
- Stormcast Eternals getting a refresh for a 2 year old starter set.
- Horus Heresy.
- The Old World.
- Lord of the Rings.
- Warcry.
- Necromunda.
- Blood Bowl.
- Adeptus Titanicus.
- Legions Imperialis.
- Aeronautica Imperialis.
- Underworlds.
- A couple of boardgames.
- A couple of new factions.

Did any of that reduce the perceived amount of 40k Space Marine releases? The issue is not "GW does not have the manufacturing capacity to flesh out Custodes more or refresh the Grey Knight range or give Dark Eldar something apart from reducing their codex with each iteration.". GW simply doesn't care enough for these ranges.

From my POV Grey Knights and Deathwatch are literally just Space Marines. Like I don't see them as a separate thing at all. Same for Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves and Black Templars. Chaos Space Marines? Also just space marines.

And Custodes are so close in concept to Space Marines that I pretty much consider them the same thing as well.

 Da Boss wrote:
From my POV Grey Knights and Deathwatch are literally just Space Marines. Like I don't see them as a separate thing at all. Same for Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves and Black Templars. Chaos Space Marines? Also just space marines.

And Custodes are so close in concept to Space Marines that I pretty much consider them the same thing as well.

To me, it kind of comes down to how much overlap there is between units, playstyle, etc. Historically, a faction like Blood Angels has basically just been vanilla marines plus a handful of extra units, many of which are basically just "extra special" versions of vanilla units. Or which didn't really warrant being locked to that chapter. Death Company and Sang Guard are kind of just vanguard vets. Librarian Dreadnaughts should have been in the vanilla book. Baal predators being exclusive to BA (but also somehow available to their successors) always felt like more of an artificial thing made to try and justify BA being their own book. Etc. Space wolves were very similar, and no being able to take a second special weapon instead of a heavy weapon doesn't make grey hunters dramatically different from tactical marines.

Grey Knights don't fit that pattern. They have some vehicles in common, but the fact that all their infantry units were packing psychic powers, force weapons instead of combat knives or chainswords, and storm bolters in place of bolters or bolt pistols meant that they were simply easier to stat out and price completely separately from vanilla marines. You can't really say that a GK battle line power armor squad is basically a tac squad the way you can say grey hunters are basically tacticals with some arbitrary tweaks.

Death Watch are kind of weird. In some editions, the whole Kill Team thing meant that they were extremely different from vanilla marines (despite being able to more or less use the same models). However, those rules were always kind of wonky in the context of a full-sized game of 40k. Too fiddly. Too wonky to make sense of a squad that contained both a terminator and a biker. So the main mechanic that differentiated them from vanilla marines *did* differentiate them, but it was also kind of clunky and probably needed to be rethought. Nowadays, the kill team thing has been significantly downplayed by keeping model combinations locked into broad categories that don't run into the terminator + biker weirdness. But as a result, they're kind of just vanilla marines with access to special ammo and a couple unusual weapon options. And I'd make the argument that an entire Death Watch fortress deploying as an army probably organizes things much closer to a conventional vanilla marine army rather than doing wonky kill team mixed unit tactics.

So I could definitely see Death Watch basically being reduced down to a detachment in the vanilla marines codex, and it would probably work, but there are ways to handle DW that are more complicated and change units more fundamentally that require a different approach.

Conceptually, custodes are just marine-ier marines with better stats and fewer gun options. Which makes them kind of boring as an army concept (to me; obviously you're welcome to like what you like). But mechanically, "better stats and fewer gun options," is hard to represent if you're stuck using the same datasheets as vanilla marines.

So like, if you're going to make custodes a faction, they make more sense having their own book rather than using the marine book. I'd just argue that they probably shouldn't have been their own full faction. They'd have worked pretty well as imperial agents I think. Instead of having a giant pile of dead golden mooks every battle, you treat them as a rare, special little force of guys. One character capable of buffing anything imperial with the sheer, awesome rareness of his presence. And you can then make the handful of dudes he brought with him as body guards into an absolutely brutal unit that opponents are scared of every game and who noticably have better stats than all the marines or sisters or guardsmen around them. (And speaking as a harlequin player, the clowns kind of have a similar issue.)

Grey Knights and Deathwatch should be squads available for Imperial armies through an Inquisition book at most, but I'd be fine with them being just squads in the Marine book. Same deal for all snowflake chapters - represented by options in the Marine book. And yeah sure allow mix and matching for more interesting homebrew chapters - that's all these special chapters started out as anyway.

Custodes shouldn't exist as a faction but if you must do them for special scenarios or the Heresy and Great Crusade eras then they could easily be special terminators.

Toughness or T 5 and Strength or S 5 would be a significant upgrade of the power of Space Marines.

This may make them closer to their established background or fluff.

But it may also make them harder to defeat with existing armies.

There are both pros and cons to consider.

 UR-025 wrote:
Toughness or T 5 and Strength or S 5 would be a significant upgrade of the power of Space Marines.

This may make them closer to their established background or fluff.

But it may also make them harder to defeat with existing armies.

There are both pros and cons to consider.

Think of it in relative terms.

Who should be tougher? (Ignoring armor and wound count.)
A Marine, or an Ork?
A Marine, or a Plaguebearer?

Who should be stronger?
A Marine, or a Bloodletter?
A Marine, or Tyranid Warrior?

Who's gun should be stronger?
A Marine, or a Necron Warrior?
A Marine, or a Hearthkyn?

Marines are already significantly past the human baseline.
When dealing with a Lasgun, it takes 3 hits to kill a human in Flak Armor. It takes 18 to kill a Marine-they are six times as durable.

 a_typical_hero wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Given half the grey knight and deathwatch units are just rebadged space marine vehicles they already do.

I'm not particularly sad about it when you can cut those 3 armies and the imperium still has 9 codexes or codex supplements with their own models, which is more than a third of all codexes. With those 3 is FIFTY PERCENT.

So all you've done is complain that the Joneses are poor too because they only have 10 cars instead of 50. It's like posh spice claiming her family is working class....

You are moving goal posts and your bias against everything Marine (and to an extension Imperium) is showing in every post, regardless of topic. There is as much consolidation for Custodes and GKnights in being part of the Imperium mega faction as for Dark Eldar to be part of Aeldari. Why do you complain? Eldar got a big wave of models over the last couple years, just play with them.

 Da Boss wrote:
How about the Orks get a Freebooters, Feral Orks and Speed Freaks codex?

A codex and individual models for every clan?

Why would I have a problem with Orks getting more models? This is not a zero-sum-game.

I haven't moved a single goal post. The way GW has decided to break up factions is arbitrary. The imperium is a faction, blood angels are not. They even made the imperial agents codex just to cover this. For me to have moved goal posts you would need to be claiming that GWs faction divisions are accurate and true and therefore the loss of grey knights is bad. Except they absolutely aren't. A chapter has 1000 troops in it, there are more men in the HQ of a full guard regiment. That's like letting the prisoners run the jail. If GW then said you know we can't really represent the ultramarines with one codex, we need one for each of their companies, you'd be all 'well that absolutely has to happen and now those are super important factions'.

The imperium is a faction and marines are a tiny pinpoint of their spear. and GW spends far too much time one them.


If GW was over producing orks I'd be vociferously complaining about that. Your mistake is assuming that because I am disparaging of GW's over support of marines I hate marines. That's a not all fish are sharks fallacy. The biggest armies I have are marines and I've had a space wolf army since their first codex in the early 90s, I have almost a whole company of salamanders I started with codex armageddon back when no one liked them because they were I3, before it was cool to like them :p. Being critical of how GW treats them and being biased against them are two separate things.

 Da Boss wrote:
Chaos Space Marines? Also just space marines.

I don't disagree Marines get way too much stuff, but if this is your standard, are you telling Dark Eldar players they should be happy since regular Eldar players get so many releases lately?

(They are basically equivalents in the same way).

There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

 Da Boss wrote:
There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

Model support is only there since about 9th edition, though. Before.that, Craftworlds had the oldest models in the game and DE only lost models since 5th Edition.

I'd say Orks and Tau are actually the favoured Xenos factions concerning Model support, they got something nice in basically every edition.

And regardless of which Xenos has the best support, I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim they get too much.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

Model support is only there since about 9th edition, though. Before.that, Craftworlds had the oldest models in the game and DE only lost models since 5th Edition.

I'd say Orks and Tau are actually the favoured Xenos factions concerning Model support, they got something nice in basically every edition.

Do Harlequins not count?

You could make a decent argument for them not counting, no, since GW has been fairly often presenting them as their own faction in recent years.

Most recently they have been folded back into the Craftworlds codex, but if someone got into the faction while it was independent, it's hard to blame them for viewing the faction as such.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

Model support is only there since about 9th edition, though. Before.that, Craftworlds had the oldest models in the game and DE only lost models since 5th Edition.

I'd say Orks and Tau are actually the favoured Xenos factions concerning Model support, they got something nice in basically every edition.

I think Craftworlds still are a contender for oldest model in the game with the Falcon. It's a model that has aged remarkably well in terms of design, but its sprue is truly archaic on a technical level, the detail soft as dough in places.

At least, oldest significant kit. There's some really old single characters left here and there (like Ezekiel) but they feel more niche than a main tank.

I like to use this site to check out mini drops over the years for factions:

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Portal:Miniatures

All non-marine factions have had editions where all they got was a character and a codex. Or not even that in the old days where you were not even guaranteed a book every edition. Which could also hit marine subfactions, like the Black Templar.

Orks look like they have a lot of novelty release to boost their numbers, with things like holiday minis and the goff rocker. But also decent drops in 9th and 7th. And they were the stars of 5th. Looks like they like odd numbers. Good luck in 11th!

Da Boss wrote:There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

Da Boss wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
There are three factions of Eldar vs at my count fourteen marine factions in the game. So I don't think it's quite as bad. But Eldar certainly are the favourite xenos faction and always have been. They've pretty consistently had strong rules, often had supplemental codices to give them different rules and get far more model support for their species as a whole than any other xenos faction.

Model support is only there since about 9th edition, though. Before.that, Craftworlds had the oldest models in the game and DE only lost models since 5th Edition.

I'd say Orks and Tau are actually the favoured Xenos factions concerning Model support, they got something nice in basically every edition.

Do Harlequins not count?

What I'd say is that eldar and tau are the only other 'protagonist' factions that aren't just bad guys. They are able to be empathised with by customers so you can cosplay as one a lot easier than an ork or a necron. Because they have human adjacent societies. which could make them more popular.

However, because of that they never get a spotlight because they can't displace the imperium as the protagonist, and they aren't convincing enough to be an antagonist. So even if the orks aren't as liked as eldar, they get more attention because they get dragged along by space marines to be their punching bag. Orks, nids, chaos and necrons are the only antagonists that will ever appear in starter sets, meaning they get attention simply for that.

As a species is a fraught argument, because you're now including all of chaos, votann and the genestealer cults in the human species faction. so how many codexes is that? The only non human related factions are, aeldari, drukhari, orks, necrons, tyranids and tau. that means that currently there are 20 codexes and supplements that reference humanity specifically. That's more than 2/3rds of all miniature lines dedicated to humans.


At least the harlequins have the precedent of an army list older than almost any other faction - including craftworlders. They've got more justification for a codex that 90% of the codexes that currently exist, because they're older than 90% of those armies (I don't think most of them existed in 1988 when the harlequin army list first came out).

To be honest, I sort DO consider Genestealer Cults, Votann, all of Chaos except Daemons as well as all the Imperials superhuman or not as "human" factions. You could do a fairly diverse wargame that included zero Xenos (and they do, it's called Horus Heresy!) easily.

I'm not angry that Eldar have three factions btw. It's cool. I just wish they put similar effort in across the board - though my preference would be for bigger codices that include all options rather than lots and lots of supplements.

 Da Boss wrote:
To be honest, I sort DO consider Genestealer Cults, Votann, all of Chaos except Daemons as well as all the Imperials superhuman or not as "human" factions. You could do a fairly diverse wargame that included zero Xenos (and they do, it's called Horus Heresy!) easily.

I'm not angry that Eldar have three factions btw. It's cool. I just wish they put similar effort in across the board - though my preference would be for bigger codices that include all options rather than lots and lots of supplements.

Well, how are Dwarfs, guys with tentacles and guys with 3-4 arms humans, but skinny guys with pointy ears you hardly ever see because of helmets are not?

 Da Boss wrote:
To be honest, I sort DO consider Genestealer Cults, Votann, all of Chaos except Daemons as well as all the Imperials superhuman or not as "human" factions. You could do a fairly diverse wargame that included zero Xenos (and they do, it's called Horus Heresy!) easily.

I'm not angry that Eldar have three factions btw. It's cool. I just wish they put similar effort in across the board - though my preference would be for bigger codices that include all options rather than lots and lots of supplements.

Parity is all I really care about. But that means ALL the imperium in one book.

Imperium
Chaos
Orks
Eldar
Dark eldar
Tyranids
Votann
Tau

Are the super factions that exist as separate entities. Dark Eldar are about as separate from craftworlds as chaos marines are from the imperium. There's as many examples of chaos fighting alongside guard against a rkrhr enemy as there are craftworlds and DE fighting side by side. The DE spirit stones as trophies so the idea that they're just two parts of the same society is really not true.

That or every species/society faction has a core book and the rest are supplements.

Either everyone gets supplements or no one does. And marines aren't a faction so at most would be their own supplement covering all chapters rather than a faction.

There are less ravenwing than there are commanders in a guard regiment..the idea that they are so special they need their own rules is artificial