Agree… a lot of the latest GW sculpts dont do it for me. Too fancy.
Give me a 90s / 00s sculpt any day… potato head and all!
I joke a bit, but more detailed and complex is not always better. Even in art.
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I think for Kings of War, GW somewhat agrees with you… WHFB sculpts aren’t too complicated and while there are duplicate sculpts in a unit, as a unit they look fine.
For AOS and 40k and most other games, having more variety is a good thing. Mantic has given us a similar level of variety in newer units for Warpath/Deadzone/Firefight.
I think an area where GW does this better than usual is in their starter kit models which are often push fit and have fewer components.
For a mass battle game, I really don’t care too much about individual sculpts, but I would like maximum six pieces for the vast majority of models:
- Body
- Head
- Weapon
- Two Arms
- Shield
- Maybe something extra like a backpack/knife
(Bonus points for some models having a combined body/head, a single two arm piece, etc)
Second Edition 40K had the following instructions for building all of the miniatures in the box:
Warpath 1.0 had similarly simple models to assemble. Many of the Mantic PVC models have the right amount of components too.
I want somewhere between this and the typical Kings of War miniature has now for 99% of my army.
I want character models to have a bit more variety, but honestly not so much that they’re time consuming or unobvious to build.
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I love those 2nd edition models… and yeah current TOW is more my preferred style of GW model (both the revived older models and the new releases theyre dropping to fit in with them).
But to be clear, my objection to the more complex models is not actually build difficulty or fragility or whatever. I just really think a simpler design is a more readable, cleaner model on the tabletop that I’d rather look at.
I dont mind Mantic’s newer models, I don’t think anyone of them approach the fussiness of the kind of GW models I’m talking about… although, yes, its moreso characters and special units, monsters etc that are GW’s worst offenders.
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Just need to look at the new Cathay, while the Army picture looks good, but the infantry and cavalry looks to be terrible to rank up on the bases they come with and the large monsters horrible to transport.
A nice display army but not a gaming army, at least not as shown in the preview
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They don’t really sell to the gamers anymore. Most people buy stuff and don’t put it together. Some put it together but never paint or play with it. Some want to paint it all up for display.
Very few people actively playing it vs. buying the models.
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It’s not a simple one to answer.
Mantic’s plastics are affordable, but the resins are around standard industry price, and with a limited core of hard plastics, the overall cost to complete an army outside of the core units can be quite expensive.
But then, the company has one of the most accessible and easy routes into 3d printing and being able to use those minis officially, which dramatically drops the price of those expensive resin units if you have a 3d printer.
I’ve just printed out a goblin walker army for firefight for around £5 of PLA, 12 gruntbots, 2 stuntbots. retail price on those in resin is £320.
That’s not something you can do with GW, so the vault does make a huge difference, even without a resin printer I’m finding that a bambu mini with a 0.2 nozzle and the fat dragon games profile goes a long way.
Next up will be an FDM elemental army now that they’ve all been added to the vault, barring the earth elementals which might have been a traditional sculpt to start with.
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Fdm elementals are what I’m doing too for my daughter!
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Will you post some photos?
I’m curious about FDM printing for my Marauder Army.
This is what I’m doing for Armada. Currently painting my Salamanders fleet. Two of each tiny, medium and small ship plus a large and a XL ship. This is roughly a starter fleet and a complete fleet, totalling EUR 175, now for EUR 30 (prices of two vault packs for those who are subscibed) and a bit of resin.
I printed a few more guns (tip: the salamanders have separate cannons) for a shore encampment.
This makes the hobby very viable.
I even wrote a post about this: Kings of War Armada starter fleets – Vince on all things Kings of War
I’d love to see where others can pick up the ships for a similar price.
We may want a new topic for Vault vs. Retail pricing
Mass battle prices are mostly a problem because tournament gamers decide the general points level. Its easy to say Mantic have cheap models but when you need a bucket of them to play a stamdard game its still expensive. Skirmish games are popular because they use less models than a single horse does. It doesnt matter if you can get 40 gonlins for 30 quid when you need 200 of them. Youre still competing with these smaller games like warmachine, frostgrave etc. Even if their models are more expensive you need so few ite cheaper and easier to get done.
If we want kow to be seen as cheap we need to shrink from 2300 points and aim at closer to 1500 so people dont get overwhelmed with too much to do like we see now
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Kings of War and The Old World have similar model counts for games, plus KoW lets you use less models per unit base than The Old World.
The point here isn’t “Mantic is cheap” but more “Mantic is less expensive than Games Workshop”
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Tabletop gaming is an expensive or at least costly hobby. Especially mass battle games. If you decide to play a mass battle rank and flank game, you most likely want it to be a ‘mass’ battle game. To reduce the amount of models to make it more accessable is the wrong direction, I think. I like KoW because it’s a mass battle game. If I want skirmish, I play skirmish.
KoW scales down pretty good, especially with Ambush. I am a pure casual gamer and have so far played games of 500pt (Ambush) to 1700pt and all of them were fun! My friend is currently painting like a posessed and our next game will be 2300 - 2500pt. That was always our goal to play games like that. That is why we play mass battle games.
I think Mantic’s approach to make KoW more accessable by scaling down and alowing to grow up is quite good. Mantic’s prices were good and are currently ‘okay’. The Vault is a nice way to reduce the costs for a small minority of players, but in the end playing KoW or other mass battle games will never be ‘cheap’!
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Other factors are more important with 3d-printing atm. I got a cheap resin printer on ‘Kleinanzeigen’ (german craigslist) for 150€. Vault subscribtion and materials as running costs are pretty cheap. BUT!
If you want to print with a resin printer, you need a ventilated room outside the house where kids can not enter. The hassle of cleaning a printer, dispose resin correctly, ventilation and storing chemicals is much bigger than the initial and running costs.
I would say 3d-printing is cheap but not very accessable, at least with resin. And FDM printers lack quality for miniatures atm.
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That is why Ambush is a thing, and 750 to 1000 points work very well for the small game.
Yet army price and amount of models is something different here.
People happily pay 600€ for a 40k army with a 100 models skirmish game, but 200€ for a 200 model R&F army is seen as not cheap enough?
Also talking Warmachine, the game is similar priced as Kings of War, were the casual 75 points (equal to 2000 points Kings) are ~250€.
This is more about prejudice of R&F being expensive and skirmish being cheap rather than actual costs
In addition 2300 points for Events isn’t the norm for casual gaming as the local groups play happily with 1995 points.
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3D printing needs to be something as easy as 2D printing before it can be mainstream and not a hobby of its own.
I look forward to being able to pick the models from my Vault membership and send them to my local copy shop.
I’m not sure if this is the way to go,
Personally, I think 2,300 points is too large for tournaments (as it’s hard to get 3 games in a day), therefore, I advocate 1,995 points. I wouldn;t go below this, as I feel the game changes quite dramatically from 1,500 to 1,995 due to the increase in size. Where a 1,500 point elite army could be as small as 9-ish units, 1,995 points go from 12 or so, The difference does matter.
As for point costs, there are ways to build an army “on the cheap” and be very effective, even without a 3d printer. An Order of the Green Lady army built from (very afordable) perry plastics + reaper bones elementals can be built under EUR 100, I am sure. The game goes for an ogre army if you can find 36mm minis somewhere , which is the ideal size for ogres.
I think you can build an ogre army using 30-ish miniatures (my 750 points was only 12 models) so with a bit of creativity, you don’t need to shell out a fortune for an army.
Finally, there’s some 2nd hand armies on the market that are afordable as most gamers have more armies than they’d need.
Warmachine is curently over priced. Theyre charging crazy prices and offer no real cheap way to approach.
Dropping 300 points doesnt solve some of the problems that get in the way. Having to build that many models and then paint them is a major hurdle. 9 unit elite armies is still a big battle in tabletop terms. And theres an argument to be had that table space is limited so 28mm rnf should be kept to a smaller size so movement isnt just 2 lines smashing into each other. And if you want to do larger battles drop to 10 or even 6mm models to really rank up the scale and have movement be less hindered.
Historics have always been huge in size but fantasy ranks have balllooned since the 90s. Todays standard kow army size would have been 2 players back then. Ambush is closer to that original mass battle size but there needs to be a middle ground between 750 and 2,300. 2,300 as a large scale battle is nice but like with many games people keep scaling it up and companies obviously support it to sell more stuff. I personally like when you cant have all your toys and even multiples. Force selection is so much better when you have to pick what goes in and what doesnt instead of adding everything you want then filling the rest out. Especially in kow where you see so much spam ans intentional spam as well. You shouldn’t see elf armies spamming hordes like theyre goblins. Horde armies become so much less characterful when hordes are the defacto for every army instead of a army trait of the swarmy types.