Warlord Games 'Aesthetic' Change?

[carlos marighela]

I remember one person once asking for Romanians (or was it Norwegians?) and being directed towards Norwegians (or was it Romanians?) as decent proxies. I wonder how many of the other relatively minor Allied/Axis nations could be represented in plastic with sprue options to give national variety? I doubt that, for example, the Romanians on their own would justify a full set of plastics, but if you could represent half a dozen nationalities from a single box, surely that would be a good seller? I confess I don't know enough about the various uniforms to know if it was viable or not.

The trouble with generic is that you would need so many options it wouldn't really be economic. For Romanians there's no need. There are now five companies making or about to make Romanians and four of them are far better than anything Warlord will ever produce. Hungarians are very distinctive.

I was left pondering why there are no early- mid war Germans in greatcoats.* So little love for Norway or the winter of 1941/42. I suspect Gorgon ill probably rectify this before too long.


* Save for the various static sentry figures out there.

[westwaller]

I reckon Warlord ought to redo their terrible British and US Army plastic sets first. They have improved their stuff considerably since these kits first came out, and IMHO they could do with a reboot.

[Kommando_J]

Just had an increasingly angry back and forth with the warlord mail...they may have lost a customer.

Have been checking on the order I made on 30th of June...which was held until operation gigant was released(no date given) and seeing that the order was marked has 'unfulfilled' decided to chance my arm and see if the address could be changed (I am out of the country for a minor emergency) to my great surprise they get back straight away...to tell me my parcel had been posted out days ago...at this stage I have fund that warlords mail has become uncommunicative and slow (something they promised would change once GoAT was released ).

As part of the(otherwise civil/polite) reply I received possibly the most passive-aggressive paragraph in my life and am now considering cancelling the order and choosing a different main supplier.

Also post has gotten worse in that I am charge £5.00 for a bunch of minis stuffed badly into a small blister which is then set adrift in a sea of brown paper inside an unecessarily large cardboard box.

All in all lads...i'm pissed off

[N.C.S.E]

That's a real shame.

I might grumble all I like about Warlord Games, but their service, particularly when it comes to mispacks, has been pretty good whenever I've used it. I'll have to be more careful in future...

[Kommando_J]

I agree, when it comes to mispacks/mistakes they will send out an immediate replacement but they've became damn slow and I have seen that repeated by other, especially when it comes to queries/email.

As I said before I wish they'd stop this relentless expansion and just concentrate on the core products for a bit, I don't really care for a ww2 plane game that most people are buying for the limited edition bolt action minis , i've seen that tried before and I recall it flopped then too.

[JamesValentine]

god those are awful miniatures. they must of been sculpted by a blind man with both eyes torn out.
almost as bad as the obvious racist metal Japanese who were just incredibly obviously stereotypical.
thankfully I do like the range of WWII plastics and still have no idea why people moan about so many of the range (yet when you ask they quickly change the subject and skirt around, so I assume these people are just morons)

I never ever ever order from Warlord. last time I did I forgot I actually ordered anything from them until it arrived a couple of months later...and I no longer really wanted it.
their customer service is also frightful and they get far too defensive if you dare criticize anything in even a rational polite way.
very poor company with no focus on any singular range. leaving everything feeling diluted and weak.

but thankfully plenty of places either stock or can order the stuff into stock. so I never have to touch them.

[Jabba]

Depends what you ask them for or how you ask I suppose. Dealings I've had with them have been prompt and fruitful.

Tony.

[Chico]

Speaking of Orders showing as 'unfulfilled' my last 2 are still showing as that yet I have both many weeks ago.

While bad custumor support is never a good thing and there should never be an excuse for it I do feel Warlord Support is rather good when I've needed it.

What I do wish Warlord would do though is stop making so many ''Minor'' game systems, while I did play Project Z and Terminator Gensys the lack of game support made me stop playing them quite early in buying them which was a shame. If they were as supported as a main system (Bolt Action, Gates, K'47 ect) then with reg releases/FAQ's/Articles I may still be playing them now.

[Bon_Vivant]

"I was left pondering why there are no early- mid war Germans in greatcoats.* So little love for Norway or the winter of 1941/42."

Don't you know.....None of them had coats at all.   

[Kommando_J]

While I didnt want to name names of ranges...yes, the Japanese are horrid little caricatures and the German separate head stuff looks no better, the plastics are improving and perfect for filling out the bulk of an army (in fact a potential project for next year is warlord plastics and TAG Japanese metals).

As for my latest order? I kinda have lost interest...wit the sealion range being so spread out, a lot of my initial enthusiasm has dimmed waiting for rulebooks and minis to actually arrive, and while its not kosher to say...I could have very easily just waited to download operation gigant from a torrent...but I wanted to support it...which I now regret.

Chico, I agree, I didn't like the games and the plastics were very basic but the lack of support confirmed things for me...they gave away the rules for free and I haven't once bothered with them(no interest).

Project z is dead and genisys was too expensive on initial release...there was also no support and I recall a month or so ago they were trying to practically give away starter sets, the same will happen here, id bet solid money nce the bonus bolt action fight aces incentive is removed,...sales will drop out.

I get that Stallard and chums run things and thus decide what gets made but these days GW is starting to look like the company that listens(when i can cleary recall the reverse as early as last year).

[nic-e]

I just bought into Test of honour. I like the rules but have a feeling it may not see much in the way of update after this year.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that warlord want to be games workshop from the early 2000's.By that i mean that they want to have a wide range of games, a big license that draws in players and a nice big period of growth.The issue is that they're making the same mistakes GW made.

 They tried licenses that should have worked out well but didn't really know what to do with them,and they weren't really ready to put in the ground work like GW did when it got the LoTR license. terminator and doctor who aren't the lord of the rings but come on, it shouldn't be hard to sell people plastic terminator models.

They tried having specialist games but did so by buying other ranges but again didn't bother to build these into anything, Instead just sort of lazily floated some games out into the market to die on the shelf.(Day z never moved after it's release.Test of honour likewise sadly.I had to give our last two terminator boxes away because they were just moving from shelf to shelf.)

I think warlord cling too closely to the GW model of doing things , putting out releases with little in the way of external promotion and hoping their community will develop its own hype.(Even GW have realised that this is a bad way to do things now) The issue is that while they may be the next biggest company after GW, GW is a freakishly big thing given what it does.We all know warlord exist but people not actively into their games or ranges have no reason to check what they're doing and as such aren't going to be exposed to their games, where GW are so omnipresent that you can't really avoid seeing something about them on a forum or a blog somewhere.


And if you think ordering as a customer try ordering from them as a retailer...dear god, Getting one roman Scorpio put into a delivery took 2 months.

As to the sculpting quality, The massive variation seems to be less present in Antares and i wonder if that comes from their desire to make it into their 40k killer.Antares seems to be the golden child for them,with new plastic kits and releases fairly consistently. Perhaps their desire to be the next GW means they resent their historical focus and want to put more attention into their fantasy to try and court a different market ?

[Kommando_J]

They can try all they want, the botched the first antares kickstarter and by the time they got things up and running with enough decent plastic kits...GW had turned it around completely and was stronger than ever almost.

The doctor who range...how did they fuck that up!? Seriously, do it in 28mm and they could have done all sorts of cross-promotional stuff with their historic ranges...instead they go for 32mm statuettes and plastic kits that don't fit with any other range.

They can try all they want, the sci fi market is mostly GW's and the fantasy market is pretty much dominated by GW and osprey.

Just imagine if they dropped antares and they put all that effort to a historical range...the ecw release could have been fantastic, sealion could have been the summer event, instead we get a confused melange of ww2, samurai, and GoA scenery(the collaboration with sarissa has been fruitful) at the very start of the campaign.

[Arlequín]

Reading between the lines and probably getting it wrong, my impression is that GoA is a vanity project, a "screw you!" to a former employer and so gets quite focused attention from one of the Warlords in particular; it will be a success come hell or high water (and possibly even at the expense of profit).

BA on the other hand is their bread and butter, which with the policy of buying out competing ranges (Bolt Action in the first place, BEF Miniatures, the FoA vehicle range etc.) and mass-marketing, means they don't have to be that particular about what they throw out. The plus here is that they do collaborate with other companies and their competitors are influenced too; the result is more choice for the discerning gamer and generally the bulk of the 'Must be Warlord' crowd are quite satisfied with what they get. No losers there really that I can see.

Ultimately it is a company run by wargamers, so that's never going to stay on track with any one single project for any length of time. That it has amongst its number former employers of GW from the turn of the Millenium, might account for the impression that history does indeed repeat itself.

   

[Lowtardog]

Not sure they bought out the opposition to remove competition, from what I remember previous owners decided it wasn`t for them and Warlord had the cash. Their first purchase being Bolt Action who already had the rules to start with however I do think they have a good model and as long as it brings in more gamers, produces ranges, kit etc that I might use for other systems, games I have no issue at all with them I can take or leave it. For Antares it scratches an itch that 40k hasn`t for many moons since the early 1990s so all kudos to them

If you look at licenses go no further than Mongoose, now their is a "rise and fall" with miniature wargaming to avoid as a model

[Arlequín]

Perhaps, but then the BEF Miniatures line never appeared in the Bolt Action range, they brought out their own instead. The original BA ranges also disappeared over time, quite quickly in the case of the Italians. Opinions may vary, but I think the old Paul Hicks BA sculpts were far better than their replacements. As the Warlord figures vary considerably across the range 'incompatibility' can't have been an issue surely?