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I was looking over the models released for 30k and unless the Powers-That-Be go back to the DAoT era, they will eventually run out of Marine models for the Heresy.

Which, I assume, means that new factions will need to be introduced.
I feel that GW will keep Xenos separate and in 40k, so what could they add to the HH lineup?

All the different MKs of armor for every type of squad & character.
Unique kits for Legion specific units.
Every FW vehicle & kit that's either still in resin or oop with no plastic version.
The original RT era Dreadnoughts
Specific characters - currently known of or brand new

Campaign specific units
Terrain & fortifications

More Knights
More Mechanicum - who knows how many more weird thing the Mechanicum has.
More Solar Aux stuff - weather stuff just not made yet in HH scale or brand new stuff
Deamons & Deamon characters
Assorted xenos not already in 40k.
Plastic Titans of all classes + parts

This list should keep GW busy for the next decade or so.

That's absolutely correct - yet it's easy to imagine GW introducing a 'new' (genuinely new or retconned into the fluff) faction in the middle of all of that, because the splash of the new generates bigger sales than just plasticising existing units.

Militia/ Imperial army currently has a very small range that's only some tanks. They could expand that into anything. Website even calls out "warp cults" right now but I wouldn't know to what model that applies.
Currently they're in the lucky Position of not following no models no rules.

Not to worry. Western civilization will fall before GW makes every model for existing units.

It's not inconceivable that HH will become "Warhammer 30,000" if they ever exhaust the HH civil war aspects of the setting. That would bring a lot of new potential stuff to the table, and in time the 30K universe might become the TOW equivalent for 40K.. So you'd have Orks, Eldar, (unaligned) Chaos, Genestealers, Squats and whatnot.. Hrud?

Xenos?

No. After Ullanor, there were none with the numbers to seriously threaten The Imperium.

But there’s Cults and Militias which could stand with a serious fleshing out. Could do a basic “bog standard Imperial Army” kit (ideally in Rogue Trader era uniforms for me), then offer upgrade kits for specific Regiments and that.

HH hasn't even got fully demonic armies yet - so there's a LONG wait before we might even consider even seeing hide or hair of a Xenos.

Honestly I think our only chance of seeing Xenos would be if GW decided to do the Great Crusade round 1 before the Horus Heresy. When the Imperium was conquering worlds and wiping out most of the other Xenos they met.


Otherwise HH was mostly riding on the popularity of the books and Space Marines which is why its so heavily full of Marine VS Marine VS Marine forces ;P


Though we have got some Mechanicum appearing here and there; at the same time Sisters of Silence have 1 plastic kit and 1 resin kit.

Not sure what the point of 30k xenos would be

Who invests in a faction that is predetermined to be steamrollered into nothingness?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Not sure what the point of 30k xenos would be

Who buys an army that is predetermined to be steamrollered into nothingness?

Everyone who is buying into Old World right now?
Every single Historical Wargamer is basically playing with factions that fall/change or otherwise never appear again and that's after "only" a few hundred years.

Lets face it you don't have to have a billion years of potential futures to have a fun game with engaging lore.

You just need to focus the storytelling on the characters and on a smaller window of time so that there's loads of smaller and larger battles to have. If you covered a major battle every 1.5 years (standard 3 year release cycle and campaign books) you'd still only have 7 major conflicts/events in a 10 year period. 14 in a 20 year period. That's tiny; easily achievable without having to have thousands of years.

Yet for the Old World, all the original major races played a part, right up to the end.

Great Crusade? Not so much.

Orks got stomped into relative irrelevance on Ullanor. Indeed it’s entirely possible had the Heresy not occurred, they’d have become a manageable problem for the most part.

Eldar? REKT, by their own hand.

Tyranids? A problem for another Millenium.

Necrons? Back to 2nd Ed rare but super tough threat, such was the sporadic reawakening.

Kin? Possibly folded into the Imperium. After all, both have something to gain from the other, and a common ancestor.

 Overread wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Not sure what the point of 30k xenos would be

Who buys an army that is predetermined to be steamrollered into nothingness?

Everyone who is buying into Old World right now?
Every single Historical Wargamer is basically playing with factions that fall/change or otherwise never appear again and that's after "only" a few hundred years.

None of those factions become a nonfactor before the story begins.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Orks got stomped into relative irrelevance on Ullanor. Indeed it’s entirely possible had the Heresy not occurred, they’d have become a manageable problem for the most part.

Even within the Heresy series, it's been confirmed numerous times that engagements with Orks up to Isstvan are mop-ups of Ullanor.

The Scars take Chondax because it's one of the last "wild" places left in known space where they can hide from the Imperium at large and hunt their prey. The Orks that the Emperor's Children fight just before the Isstvan campaign are stragglers from Ullanor. The supposed threat of an Ork empire that required the Calth Muster is specifically noted by Guilliman to not actually be a real threat, but more a diplomatic mission between the Ultramarines and Word Bearers enacted by the Warmaster the soothe the bad blood between the two Legions.

The Emperor left the Crusade because there were no "threats" left. Everything was easily handled by the forces of the Imperium and the Imperial Webway needed his full attention.

The advent of the Heresy, the collapse of the Imperium's might, and the stagnancy that followed are what allowed the likes of the Orks to return.

I dont really get the argument, we are playing a game, not a story. Your faction getting rolled in the lore 100 years down the line doesnt stop you from being able to play them..

Personally, I hope GW intdoduces Great Crusade xenos - stuff like megarachnids and rangdans, as well as some of the bizarro human and post-human factions. Not so much interested in eldar or orks, though theres arguments to be made that generic eldar corsairs woukd better fit as a standalone faction in HH yhan in 40k, and I can see an argument being made that pre-Ullanor orks are stylistically and thematically distinct from the 40k era, as the thwacking they received was so severe that it imprinted on their cultural memory as well as the fact that it utterly destroyed whatever ork culture existed beforehand and forced a reset in ork society, etc

i'd rather we get more SoS units before they start making new factions. forget armies needing plastic, SoS needs models at all

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Not sure what the point of 30k xenos would be

Who buys an army that is predetermined to be steamrollered into nothingness?

Everyone who is buying into Old World right now?
Every single Historical Wargamer is basically playing with factions that fall/change or otherwise never appear again and that's after "only" a few hundred years.

None of those factions become a nonfactor before the story begins.

I mean that's like saying there's no point playing Ancient Romans because they don't feature at all in the story of World War 2.

The story of the Great Crusade doesn't begin in 40K, it is its own point in time.

And yes there'd be Xenos but no Necrons, Tyranids, Tau etc.... As I said it would likely look at major Xenos forces from that era. So races that we might have only had as minor lore mentions in historical archives up till now or even races that have never before been mentioned. Yes they get squashed by the Imperium* eventually. Yes their story comes to an end and they don't appear in 30K and 40K; that doesn't really matter. They don't have to appear in those games - in fact with GW's current internal game segregation it actually works out great for that.


The whole point of doing a game in that era is indeed to see the struggle of other factions; the conquest of the Imperium and to tell the war-stories from that era. Again you don't have to have thousands of years to tell a story; you don't even have to have hundreds you can tell loads of campaigns and major events in much smaller spans of time. So they don't have to worry about suddenly doing the "And then your race loses and you die and your models are burned and melted and never made again" because that window of the universe the game looks at never advances that far.


It's all basically academic though; its insanely unlikely that GW would try for another game set in the same universe around the Imperium or any faction honestly. GW has enough trouble keeping 40K and 30K going and starting 20K or whatever would water down things far too much (heck many of us would argue 30K is already doing just that but it kind of sort of manages to work)

*until they prove insanely popular and a small pocket of them survives into the 40K era and suddenly launches onto the Galactic scene like Tau, Necrons and Votaan.

Imperial Army.

Solar Aux are their own unique thing, and the militia list has always been a stop gap way of using a 40K imperial guard army in HH.

Image a dedicated 30k imperial army range, some proper blanche looking units. True cannon fodder infantry not super elite not quite marines. 8 wheeled cargo trucks that get shot up by bolters.
Basic humans that make space marines look like the terrifying gods of war that they are.

To do imperial army properly youd have to approach it the same way as Astra Militarum, with several ranges of distinct troops representing notable regements like the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, Lucifer Blacks, Regnault Thorns, etc.

The problem with the Imperial Army is that there's nowhere for them to sit between Solar Aux and Militia as they exist now.

There's very little actual Chaos in the game set during a civil war where one side has fallen to Chaos. So that's ripe for expansion.
Of course, Adeptus Titanicus never got Chaos titans, so...

We are nowhere near that, but once they milked the Intergalactic Civil war to the bone, it is not entirely impossible that they take the 30k setting in another direction.

Plug-in book happening in another galaxy, with an entirely different lore, and with Eldar, Orks, maybe Necrons bolted on.

I mean, in the far future, we could probably have a "the galaxy is destroyed, everyone moves to another galaxy" which would allow them to fuse every model range from 30k and 40k into a single "new" universe.

Yeah thats not going to happen.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'd rather we get more SoS units before they start making new factions. forget armies needing plastic, SoS needs models at all

That's already in the pipeline according to the HH 3.0 reveal stream (Talons Of The Emperor Liber releasing later, no doubt accompanied by a wave of new miniatures)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Whos to say GW couldn't backpedal out of the "most threats to the Imperium were wiped out" blurb. It could easily be said in hindsight that this was just Imperial propaganda, that "actually" major xenos forces still existed, they just stayed out of the limelight seeing the IoM was going crazy and starting to fight among itself..

And even that doesn't remove the possibility of HH moving to post-heresy times. Horus has just been slain, the big E has been confined to the Golden toilet.. there's still several millennia to uncover before we get anywhere near the 41st millennium. Loads of potential for great narrative events, like how the Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult takes over, all that juicy stuff..

They won't bring Xenos or even Imperial Army. I mean the latter is just covered by Imperialis Militia with the fitting Provenences of War and this list was always 'choose, build and convert whatever you want'. Same with Daemons as an own faction.

Apart from the resin to plastic transfer that should keep them busy for some years they'll have to deal with Dark Mechanicum, corrupted engines (and Legionaries), SoS, superspecialawesome new Marine stuff and characters.

We'll, it would be nice to have a small selection of Eldar and Orks, enough for allies or small armies in any of the Horus Heresy games, but GW seem really locked into a civil war setting where no one else is invited.

Almost like that's the core idea of the Horus Heresy, the greatest civil war the Imperium ever had.

Weird that GW might want to keep that aspect to the game. /s (in case it wasn't obvious)

 Gert wrote:
Almost like that's the core idea of the Horus Heresy, the greatest civil war the Imperium ever had.

Weird that GW might want to keep that aspect to the game. /s (in case it wasn't obvious)

Do you think it will branch out into the Siege of Terra and the Scouring?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:


Do you think it will branch out into the Siege of Terra and the Scouring?

I'd be interested in that, for sure. I'm not sure we'd see the Scouring, but the Siege of Terra is a reasonable expectation to me.

The Siege of Terra is a long long long way away.

As it stands, GW is going back to Isstvan so we may be looking at a reset for most of the campaigns.

For the Scouring? Unlikely and even then it would likely be the pre-Codex stage where the Loyalist burned the remaining Traitor homeworlds such as Colchis and Olympia, but even then I'd be very surprised.

What would the Scouring entail? More chaos taint + a bunch or random rebels?