The LAF Games Workshop Discussion Thread

[HerbertTarkel]

At some stage on this thread I recall someone positing that some markets consider the number of parts-per-kit a metric of value (I can't remember the example market they used, perhaps something like Gundam?); such that a 18 part single 28mm figure is better 'value' than a 5 part 28mm figure at the same price. And that this fitted into the 'boutique' market image GW were working toward a few years ago.

If they are aiming for that as a metric, check that box 

[Belligerentparrot]

Is it just me, or have the most recent kits had lower "individual parts" count? I don't mean the total amount of gubbins on the sprue, I just mean the number of parts you need to glue together to make a little dude.

That Van Saar box from a couple of years ago was rage-inducing, with separate head and neck bits, and separate upper and lower arm and weapon bits. I haven't noticed anything that bad recently, maybe they learned their lesson there?

Most recent stuff like the Kasrkin seem to be back to complete arms with weapons attached, and heads with necks attached.

[pixelgeek]

Is it just me, or have the most recent kits had lower "individual parts" count?

The Age of Sigmar minis come in 4-6 parts but it is frequently a tortuous topology puzzle to figure out how they fit together. Like LeMarchand's Box which suddenly opens when you absently fiddle with it but defies all attempts when you actively work on it.

[beefcake]

I still have a soft spot for these multiparts... 
Orc

If someone buys that ancient kit, they're doing it solely out of nostalgia when heaps of alternatives exist.  Heck there are vest selections of Mordheim-designed STL's which are modular kits now which mimic the original design perfectly.

Or they don't know any better. My brother has finally ventured out into other games like frostgrave and he loves it. He doesn't buy the minis though but was still stuck in GW games.

You shouldn't really need an instruction manual to put together rank and file troops.

[westwaller]

You shouldn't really need an instruction manual to put together rank and file troops.

I agree - someone should probably tell Victrix this! 

I guess that is a consequence of better looking models though?!
I think for me GW these days is very much about enjoying what I do like and ignoring what I don't, mini wise and fluff wise.
 The young teenager inside me still misses searching through the racks of blister packs of whole miniatures for cool looking Orks or Space Marines though 
I do wonder how long it will be before the GW monster eats its bloated self though, especially as increasingly there are a lot of simpler cheaper proxies for some of their miniatures out there.

[Mammoth miniatures]

I agree - someone should probably tell Victrix this! 

I guess that is a consequence of better looking models though?!
I think for me GW these days is very much about enjoying what I do like and ignoring what I don't, mini wise and fluff wise.
 The young teenager inside me still misses searching through the racks of blister packs of whole miniatures for cool looking Orks or Space Marines though 
I do wonder how long it will be before the GW monster eats its bloated self though, especially as increasingly there are a lot of simpler cheaper proxies for some of their miniatures out there.

I've been building alot of victrix stuff lately and they are afaic the best plastic figures around. They strike a happy medium between customisability and a strong distinct figure. The way victrix do plastics is kind of an alternate universe GW where they kept the customisation of parts whilst still leaning into the strong poses and dynamic sculpts.

[zemjw]

That Van Saar box from a couple of years ago was rage-inducing, with separate head and neck bits, and separate upper and lower arm and weapon bits. I haven't noticed anything that bad recently, maybe they learned their lesson there?

The nadir/zenith (depending on your opinion) for me was with the Necromunda Ironhead Squat Prospectors box. There's a figure holding a hammer in his left hand, with his right fist clenched. The fist arm was composed of three parts: the arm to the wrist, the four fingers and a separate thumb. I created many new swear words as I was trying to fit that thumb in place

[Mammoth miniatures]

The nadir/zenith (depending on your opinion) for me was with the Necromunda Ironhead Squat Prospectors box. There's a figure holding a hammer in his left hand, with his right fist clenched. The fist arm was composed of three parts: the arm to the wrist, the four fingers and a separate thumb. I created many new swear words as I was trying to fit that thumb in place

Sounds like they were using the same system malifaux miniatures used. They clearly used some sort of layout system for tooling that worked to eliminate all undercutting by creating more and more parts - so you had hands with separate fingers and weapons in three parts.

It's an issue that comes from switching to an entirely digital workflow for a physical product - you need sculptors who understand the limits of reality when it comes to casting, otherwise you get kits that are in theory amazing but in practice an absolute nightmare.

[boneio]

Most of the Frostgrave kits are exactly that...simple, modular... Fireforge is simply brilliant.  Wargames Atlantic is pretty damn good, and Victrix is superb.  Gripping Beast does some solid kits as well.

Solid agree...

If someone buys that ancient kit, they're doing it solely out of nostalgia when heaps of alternatives exist.  Heck there are vest selections of Mordheim-designed STL's which are modular kits now which mimic the original design perfectly.

Mild disagree! GW has an aesthetic consistency that only a handful of STLs get close to, and I don't think even the glorious aforementioned plastics you listed are on par with GW's old or new sculpts (with some clonking great exceptions, GW's body of work contains some right horrors  ) insofar as getting that 'look' goes.

They all have their place, the modern non-GW plastics are what most people are likely to use for games outside the GW sphere whereas not too long ago it was GW or metals only... but there's nothing like the 'obviously Warhammer' artistic direction that GW manages. I find non-GW figures in GW games really jarring, they don't fit... but the reverse is true for me as well, GW figures in non-GW games usually feel wrong.

Ironically, that probably just shows I've fallen for their master plan 
I think it's already been discussed on this thread that GW sees 'their' hobby as being very distinct from the wider wargaming world.
It's hard to say how true that is - their sales figures aren't exactly in disagreement with the idea when compared to the entire rest of the market.
All the 'engaged' hobbyists i.e. those posting on forums, instagram, etc are well aware that wargaming is a broad church; but what percentage of the total active GW market do those really engaged people make up? I suspect it's surprisingly small, from occasional chats I've had with punters at wargame shows.

[westwaller]

I've been building alot of victrix stuff lately and they are afaic the best plastic figures around. They strike a happy medium between customisability and a strong distinct figure.

Yep in the main, I agree. Although the ability to only put some heads/arms on particular bodies gets tricky when you don't want too many near identical looking miniatures. But that's me just being picky really. For me, the more time I have to spend building miniatures the less time I have to paint and or play though. I really love building, but for me the Perrys WOTR kit for example was a tad more enjoyable to build than Victrix Normans.
However this is the GW thread so I won't derail the topic further. 🙂

[Sturgkh]

Is it just me, or have the most recent kits had lower "individual parts" count? I don't mean the total amount of gubbins on the sprue, I just mean the number of parts you need to glue together to make a little dude.

That Van Saar box from a couple of years ago was rage-inducing, with separate head and neck bits, and separate upper and lower arm and weapon bits. I haven't noticed anything that bad recently, maybe they learned their lesson there?

Most recent stuff like the Kasrkin seem to be back to complete arms with weapons attached, and heads with necks attached.

My personal suspicion / assumption is that GW has been trying to lower the assembly requirements for their miniatures. They've been using a variety of methods, such as "plug and play" models that don't technically even require glue to assemble, using very strategic ways to break up kits into parts to minimize or hide mold lines and seams, and moving to a model (no pun intended) where individual models basically go together one way with maybe 1 or 2 alternate builds unique to that model. The Inquisitorial Agents kit for Kill Team, or the Chaos Cultists for 40k, are good examples of this - there's alternate parts for each model, but these extra bits only fit their intended model and aren't compatible "as is" with any other model in the kit.

I think between the time sink of assembly and the up-front $ investment if you don't already own a bunch of tools and paints, the way GW configures new kits (as well as using color plastics, especially for starter kits) feels like an attempt to make their miniatures as easy (cheap) to get onto the table as possible.

It sacrifices the classic cross-compatibility a lot of their kits have had over the years, but reducing the amount of seam-scraping and gluing probably makes the hobby less daunting or cost prohibitive to a fair number of potential customers.

[Sturgkh]

A convenient line can be drawn at either the 1991 buy out or 94 floatation of GW.  Personally I’d pick 1991, after that it’s downhill into plastic tat with fewer and fewer exceptions each year.

My sense has always been the divide is more or less edition-based as it sorta refers to how the minis were sold/used:

"Oldhammer"" - anything up to and including WHFB 3rd Edition and Rogue Trader (IE 40k 1st Edition), when minis were originally sold for RPG or random cool factor and began to loosely be geared towards army-gaming with them using the early editions of the Warhammer system

"Middlehammer" - essentially the 90s, including 4th and 5th edition WHFB and 2nd edition 40k, when the rules were still somewhat complicated with a fair amount of randomness and a tendency towards 'hero hammer' and overpowered magic/psychic powers, and most of the core minis were still metal albeit with more and more plastics, and for 40k more and more vehicles after the initial Rhino/Pred/Raider of RT and the Imperial Guard vehicles of 2nd.

Traditionally, 6th Ed WHFB and 3rd Edition 40k (and later) were not considered part of Middlehammer, but modern Warhammer as you didn't have the codex/armybook invalidating rewrites of the core rules between 3rd and 7th edition 40k or 6th-7th/8th? edition WHFB as you had between prior editions.

Obviously, with the passage of time and people confusing these labels as being relative time periods and not more edition-based labels, 'Oldhammer' seems to now mean WHFB 1-5 / 40k 1-2 and Middlehammer to mean WHFB 6-7/8 and 40k 3-6/7, with Modernhammer being AoS and 40k 8+.

Anyways, regarding buying old 'retro' GW kits over third party mimics, the one thing I've seen about 3rd party minis - especially 3d print ones - is the excessive amount of detail on them. Beyond the very specific aesthetic GW has, the main appeal for me (and I suspect other old senile gamers) is that the "metal era" GW minis (for lack of a better term, and including the plastics of that era) were just simpler in detail. I get liking detailed minis, but it adds to the complexity of painting them.

As such, I'd personally prefer buying an actual GW kit from that era instead of a 3rd party (or even using an AoS kit). I love painting, and modern paints are such much technically better and varied than what we had back in the day, but the mental / time investment of having to tackle squads of modern kits can be sorta off-putting to some of us.

[jon_1066]

My sense has always been the divide is more or less edition-based as it sorta refers to how the minis were sold/used:

"Oldhammer"" - anything up to and including WHFB 3rd Edition and Rogue Trader (IE 40k 1st Edition), when minis were originally sold for RPG or random cool factor and began to loosely be geared towards army-gaming with them using the early editions of the Warhammer system

...

We are splitting hairs here a little since WHFB 4th was released in '92 and WH40K 2nd in '93 so smack in the middle of the two dates.  You can definitely see a shift in GW from the management buyout.  It became much more professional and corporate with the accountants running things rather than the creatives in order to float the company.  That shift from Oldhammer was obviously not a single point but a gradual change in emphasis.  Putting a hard line in is obviously difficult because WH40K 2nd edition obviously used a lot of stuff released during Rogue Trader.  Likewise with WHFB 4th.

[Storm Wolf]

Oops I touched a nerve with the sprue comment then 

Maybe I wasn't clear it was the fact that no attempt has been made with the sprue layouts to keep bits from each model close to each other for ease of assembly.

Like old GW kits, Airfix et. all managed to do.

Left leg half on sprue 1 and right leg on sprue 2 etc, etc, is just not good planning

A triumph of computer over common sense 

[McMordain]

Oops I touched a nerve with the sprue comment then 

Maybe I wasn't clear it was the fact that no attempt has been made with the sprue layouts to keep bits from each model close to each other for ease of assembly.

Like old GW kits, Airfix et. all managed to do.

Left leg half on sprue 1 and right leg on sprue 2 etc, etc, is just not good planning

A triumph of computer over common sense 

I think they changed that. I'm pretty sure the last couple of GW models I have built (Cities of Sigmar and Adepta Sororitas figures) had the parts close together on the sprues. Only the extra options, or parts that are interchangeable (like heads or shields) tend to be placed somewhere else.