Bundle an unpopular unit with a popular one. Allows you to get rid of old stock & probably increases overall sales of both the unpopular and the popular stuff. Plus it can tempt people to buy just a little bit extra. People who normally spend only 150 per year might be tempted in going for the 200 box. And the people that buy all the stuff seperatly throughout the year anyway probably will buy the box and continue buying their usual loads each month as well. After all, collectors will want to buy every model anyway. And probably have some back-ups for alternative variants. Or to kitbash, or whatever. With 100's of available models very few players are going to say "well I got everything I'l ever want now" and never return simply because they got a bundle with a discount. Most will just continuing buying more, but maybe now they switch to their secondary army for a little while. Anyways, bundles make a fairly significant profit in basicly any other market, why wouldn't it work here?
other markets have built in failure rates. technically you can still play this game with the models from 1990 in official tournaments as long as they are on the right base... that's serious permanency.
Models break And most players that are serious enough about the hobby to still be playing and collecting 2-3 decades later will probably be working on their 5th or 6th (or 7th, or 8th etc.) army by now. Even if they still return to the army they initially fell in love with. I reckon the amount of players who'l truly stick with only 1 army and actually manage to run out of stuff to buy are going to be far and few between.
Looks like no Seraphon box set this year, from rumours. Nighthaunt, Skaven Stormcast and gobblins. Skaven and Goblin!
lol! Death in AoS really lacks character imo. Death really appeals to me. But Nagash never did it for me. Heinrich Kemmler, and Dieter Helsnicth were very intriguing characters to me. I really loved the Soulwars box set. I really think GW got it right with Dark Imperium and Soulwars. I invested in both. But I have to admit, Stormcast and Nighthaunt do feel a bit flat. They look absolutely great though. The problem with Stormcast (sigmar) and Nighthaunt (Nagash) is they are to BIG. I always found the sideline characters more int resting. When I play any games, I really hate to use named characters. For me that personally, that really kills the vibe. I like to invent my own. I like the idea of playing as an insignificant general or captain somewhere. But I like it more when GW makes more stories about smaller characters. Nagash in WHFB was good because he wasn't the whole of death. In AoS I feel like all he is doing is constraining the death faction (imo of course).
Hilariously, a quote from Darius Hinks, the author of the newest Gotrek book: "When everything's big, nothing is. You can't have every threat be terrifying and every hero be fearless." That being said, I do think there is a ton of potential in the Stormcast; the internal struggles of identity and a fear of losing your humanity and becoming more a monster than those you were created to fight are compelling things to explore. They just need to do that more, and I think that they are moving towards that area. In the latest StormCast podcast interview, Darius Hinks touches on this sort of larger than life problem. It's a good listen. When 2.0 hit and they introduced the idea of undead that Nagash wasn't able to control, the idea about having contention between a domineering tyrant and a rebellious undermining faction seemed very interesting for the Death allegiance, but they quickly reigned that back in. I'd have to agree that lorewise, Death remains quite boring, despite their models being gorgeous.
Yes! Space Marines are really cool, but their lore makes no sense at all. There are only 1000 Ultramarine's but the imperium spans 1 million planets. Also for all the genetic engineering and growth vats + implants etc. On the table that was represented by + 1 to S T WS BS then an imperial guards man. Yea, they made gigantic error with the lore. But what is worst is when people try to defend that lore saying things like they are spec op's etc. Realistically there would need to be millions of Space Marines per world. Just on logistics alone. 200 Space Marines can't take over a whole planet. I just don't find the Stormcast lore appealing. I don't think it match's the models or the army play style. If every Stormcast is that powerful, and all that effort goes into make them. Each of them should be as powerful as Vampire Lord. Not just slightly better then a man with 2 wounds. What would have been much better, is if they just said the Stormcast came from some monastery somewhere, and then didn't even bother to explain any more about them after that. If there is a choice between no lore and crap lore, no lore is always better.
It lacks character, but is everpresent and getting a lot of attention for some reason. Which is rather annoying. Fortunatly there are other chapters of space marines. And yes, the space marines are a limited resource that can't be everywhere. Most imperial citizens will never see a space marine. Even most imperial guard will never see a space marine. They are only send to the most urgent of battlefields, and fortunatly not every single planet of those million is an active warzone. And most of those warzones are being handled by the imperial guard. If the space marines are present on even 1% of all imperial worlds it'd be a lot. They're probably present on less than 1 in a 1000 worlds. Which with most chapters covering multiple worlds as they rarely need to go out in full strength to a single world, means they don't actually need that many chapters. Meh, there are very few games where lore and gameplay match. If the lore did match you'd need to field thousands of models when playing say imperial guard. And 1 space marine would still wreck havoc on em. Cannonically they literally can. A group of 200 space marines can land on a planet and then wipe out the various enemy strongholds one by one with minimum losses. Now obviously to hold the planet they're going to need some help. After all, 200 guys can't be everywhere and constantly sniff out every new sign of rebellion. You need some grunts to go and control the population to prevent them from rising up again. But 200 space marines are more than enough to break open a fortification, kill those of importance inside and move on the the next fortification until they clear out the planet and the only thing left are a group of leaderless grunts, which a minor imperial guard force can then take their time wiping out. Simply put, you don't send the space marines to conquer a world, you send the space marines to break open the enemies fortification, wipe out the enemy leadership to cripple their resistance and then have the imperial guard clean up the mess and do the actual conquering while the space marines go off to their next mission. Again, that'd make the game essentially unplayable. Something like cities of sigmar would become unplayable as you'd need to field hunderds of models for even a fairly small scale game. Sadly lore and gameplay usualy just can't match if the lore is sufficiently fantastical. And SCE aren't the only ones that suffer from this. Kroak, Nagash, Alarielle also suffer from it greatly to name the most obvious victims.
Right so, this is what I mean about scale. Go out to a main road now, and in about 2-3 minutes you probably see 200 cars past by. A planet, would have thousands of important installations. Think of it like USA millitary bases. And tv stations etc etc. Even if you had 200 invincible men, who were perfect at doing things, and wasted 0 time. It would still take them a very long time to just travel to each of the locations. If you added all that time together it would be a lot of time. Then its impossible anyway, because who would bother to build a military installation and not prepare it against a lesser known threat "Space Marines". You can't divide up the tiny numbers of Space marines between the galaxy. Even if you add the chapters together, its still infinitesimal numbers of Space Marines. The lore becomes retarded with the Ultramarines when they fight the Tyranids and the Death Guard. Tyranids would spawn into millions or billions of organisms very quickly. it doesn't matter if each Space Marine was super elite, the numbers are just dumb. And then the Death Guard war on Ultramar as well. And the 1000 Ultramarines are not wiped out. Its just bad lore. But maybe its good, because it is so nonsensical.
They could make them like Beast Claw Raiders where you just field a few models. Obviously its not an easy job. They must know that describing them as being super powerful demi gods appeals to people. It probably works really well for marketing. Just to say tho, Space Marines have amazing lore in general. I think everything is good about them, except the numbers. A lot of 40k was established in the 80's. Where wars were won by taking over a main base. But today we have cellphones and portable communications devices. That's why Spec op's don't work anymore. And they would not work in W40k. No one would place all their important stuff in one place. They would spread it out everywhere and keep it all moving about. Like what happens today. That's why all modern wars are skirmishes, and no one can ever win them.
Meh, you field fewer marines than say imperial guard models. But yeah, 40K doesn't do a terrific job of conveying the scale you are supposed to be fighting on. There's a couple of differences though compared to the real world. Which allow them to get away with this. 1) protection in 40K is far far far superiour compared to our modern day protection relativly speaking. Both personal armour as well as fortification are far more effective. This allows for main bases to still exist. A 40K fortress can stand up to bombardement for decades. A modern day fort would be gone in a couple of hours. This allows for things like trench warfare to actually be viable in 40K. Similarly it allows for actual sieges and open field battles, unlike the modern day conflicts that are largely skirmishers. And this makes it far safer to have a centralized powerstructure as this is also far more efficient. 2) In 40K noone cares overly much about collateral damage. Unlike the real world, where we at least attempt to not bomb innocent civilians and to keep whatever we are trying to conquer fit for humans. In the modern world insurgents can attempt to hide. In 40K they'd just nuke the city the enemies are hiding in and call it a win. Hell, the imperium is willing to turn entire planets into irradiated wastelands to defeat their enemies. They'l just wait a couple of centuries before the place becomes fit for human life again to resettle it. 3) The scale of warfare in 40K is enourmous. When a war covers basicly the entire planet spreading out and moving around like modern conflicts tend to do no longer really be an option, after all where do you go if the entire planet is covered? 4) Most modern wars aren't wars of conquest against another power with a centralized powerstructure. They're fought against insurgent groups that refuse to cooperate. And an insurgent group doesn't really need a centralized powerstructure, it can easily exist as a virtual organisation on the internet as it doesn't really need to control anything. Al it needs to do is direct the various insurgents. Hence why it can easily spread out. Hell they don't even really need to have things like supply lines. However, the moment they do actually start to control territory, be it a small territory like one city, or a bigger territory like an entire country they need to set up a centralized powerstructure to police and control it and organize things logistically. At which point important stuff will be in one place as that's simply more efficient. In 40K nearly every war is a proper war of conquest against another centralized powerstructure. Dealing with insurgents is what you have the local PDF for and doesn't "count" as far as 40K is concerned
To my understanding this was exactly the problem with WHFB. Collectors pretty much stopped buying new stuff.
Really? That just seems weird. Was their a major content draught in WFHB? Cuz at the rate both 40K and AoS release stuff, and the size of both games. I can't really imagine anyone really reaching that point unless you're collecting for decades, or simply only care about 1 maybe 2 armies.
well yeah... at that rate running out isn't too complicated.. Especially if you don't like many armies.