The LAF Games Workshop Discussion Thread

[Lost Egg]

Some of those new cadian heads aren't too bad and if this is the sort of update they missed out on then it's probably a good thing.

[Belligerentparrot]

Yeah I quite like the Cadian heads too. The female ones are better than the male, I think.

Nice to see GW going for a more understated approach to female minis on the Cadian and Outcast sprues. Not a boob-plate or exposed midriff anywhere.

That new Ork box's limited options seems very... unOrky!

[Lost Egg]

Ahh I've not seen the male heads, I just grabbed the female ones off eBay for a conversion.

The limited options in the Boyz box ie even more odd now GW have released details of the new Guardian box: 11 minis (inc. a weapon platform with at least 3 options shown, inc. a new one), the 10 guardians can be defenders with shuriken catapults or storm guardians with pistols and CCWs. So why increase the guardian options but decrease the ork ones? Especially as there are only 3 shootas in the boyz box so you'd need 3 boxes to build a unit of 10 shootas inc. a Nob...though no shoota for him. Weird.

[Storm Wolf]

Agreed the options are pretty limited aren't they?

My other moan about the modern plastic kits is they are way too fiddly, hard to kitbash and only allow one or two options (generally) on how thay are made-up.

I much prefer the older kits as they were much less hidebound in how they could be made-up and they are much, much easier to kitbash

Glen

[Lost Egg]

Definitely. Plus, reducing the options in the kits seems to play into the hands of 3rd party manufacturers and 3D sculpting / printing.

[Elbows]

Yeah, but what you don't want to see is stuff like they've done with Plague Marines.  Their codex entry was limited to the weapons precisely included in the starter box from 8th edition.  They may have changed it since then, but they're rapidly moving toward "You can take what these models have, nothing more".  You see it with all the modern Space Marine Primaris models.

The Primaris lieutenants or captains are strictly limited to what models exist with wargear.  Until an official model gets a chainsword, or power fist...it's not an option.  So, I wouldn't be surprised to see GW go further in that direction.

They came out a few years ago in some online stream and had said that they thought it was "confusing" for gamers when options were included in the codex that weren't in the model kit, etc.  So...yeah...

[Lost Egg]

Yeah that's where I suspect they are going with it but still it seems mad. For a long time the flexability of GWs kits has been the biggest draw for me but that is rapidly diminishing with the new style kits, they just leave me cold no matter how cool the basic model looks.

I haven't the space or the time to get into 3D sculpting and printing but I have found myself going back to some of the older kits.

[Diablo Jon]

You can still kit bash with the newer stuff but it's bloody hard work now for anything bar head swaps. The worst are the monopose characters who always have half a body attached to an arm or a head so that doing a head swap requires presicion surgery and a lot of filler.

 I guess it's partly down to the multi facet way of GW "Hobby" in that plenty of people just want to play the game competitively are happy with as little construction, of minis, as possible to get them on the table. On the other hand the inq28 and the 40K modellers and painters  crowd would much rather have multiple piece kits with interchangeable bits for maximum kit bash potential.

It's not just a GW thing either plenty of people are divided over historical plastic kits and weather they want cheap quick assembly miniatures or multiple part model kits for maximum variety.

[Vanvlak]

It's practically a circle: back when GW made metal miniatures in one piece you had to chop them up to covert them.
Multi-part metals were a little bit better, and multi-part plastics more so.
Then came the current design philosophy (whether driven by market ideas, the design software used or efficient mould design I do not know) which is driving conversion towards assembly of the model and cutting it up again, just as we used to do with metal miniatures in one piece. Getting towards a full circle.

[Storm Wolf]

An ever decreasing circle, just like the oozlum bird

https://vovatia.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/the-secret-of-the-oozlum/

As referenced by Sydney James

[Vanvlak]

An ever decreasing circle, just like the oozlum bird

https://vovatia.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/the-secret-of-the-oozlum/

As referenced by Sydney James

And this place again proves to be a fount of knowledge! 

[Storm Wolf]

And this place again proves to be a fount of knowledge! 

  you know it!

[Belligerentparrot]

Diablo Jon - wonderfully put.

For myself, I don't mind the "hard work", and to be honest I don't find it much of a bother - you do need to think  a little bit about how things are going to fit together, but for me that is part of the fun. I cut up a couple of metal Confrontation gangers the other day, and that was definitely the unfun kind of hard work.

I thought GW has hit on a pretty good balance to be honest (for the most part - whoever designed the Van Saars  needs a stern talking-to). If you want a big army, you can get it good to go relatively quickly. If on the other hand you're into skirmish gaming with lots of conversions, almost all the kits scale extremely well together and you get much more dynamic poses than you ever could sticking Cadian torsos onto Free Company legs.

John Blanche's stuff is a nice example: he's always been exceptionally creative and good at conversions, but his stuff went up several levels once he could make use of the recent kits (cultists and ad mech especially).

[nozza_uk]

Circling back to Necromunda Outcasts gang, the GW website shows this as sold out online. Was it ever in stock?
Looking at other online GW stockists, they all show it as 'awaiting stock'. Did anyone manage to get a set?

[Belligerentparrot]

It has been available on and off. The original run sold out pretty quick, then it was available again, now it isn't again... I've been told the pandemic has had a significant impact at GW - they aren't churning things out as you'd usually expect them to.

The set is ace - great for conversions and all sorts of things.