@ian_williams: If you are looking at getting back into miniatures wargaming, there has been an explosion of new, well designed games that are all cheaper to get into than Warhammer.
If you specifically want to play rank and file fantasy you should look at playing Kings of War. It plays how you always wished warhammer fantasy played, without ever realizing its what you wanted. The game has massively toned down magic making wins and losses decided by movement and not the randomness of magic. Its main innovation is that the games units are all on set "bases". A troop, regiment and horde are all the same base size across all armies in the game. Meaning you can play with cardboard cut into the proper shapes, since models are no longer used for tracking wounds, and line of sight is abstracted. This is also means you dont need to buy 40 pikemen to make a horde of pikemen. You can beautifully model say 20 pikemen on a horde size base and save a lot of money/time. Because all of your models(or lack of if you play cardboard wargaming) are pre attached to the unit size the game is faster to set up and play. You no longer have to spend 30 minutes meticulously arranging your spearmen into an array only to have them all fall down the second you start to move them.
Other fantastic wargames that have risen to popularity in the wake of Age of Sigmar: Malifaux(Western/Gothic horror inspired skirmish game), Infinity(Sci Fi skirmish game with a light anime aesthetic, gorgeous models), Dropzone Commander (10mm scale battle game. Very similar to warhammer 40k Epic), X wing(Star wars dog fighting game, models are pre built/painted, very fun and pretty), Guild Ball(Victorian inspired skirmish game centered around playing football. From the guys who are doing the Dark Souls Board Game), Frostgrave (Fantasy skirmish game with campaign advancements), and the list goes on and on. There are a lot of really good games out there that are all cheaper and funner than anything Games Workshop has made in the last decade.
Yeah, I never really left! I've played or own a lot of those. Frostgrave, in particular, is something very near and dear to my heart. Amazing game and a worthy successor to Mordheim. We're amped about the upcoming expansion about the sewers and tunnels beneath the city.
The one thing replacements never work for with me is Fantasy Battle. It's not to say KoW is a bad game or anything. WFB just has this very specific matching of rules to background the other rank and fight games I've played quite have for me. It may be because I got into the Warhammer RPG at about the same time, but I can put up with a lot of balance issues in home play (tourney play is different) if I'm getting that rules to fiction synergy WFB usually gives me.
I went to the gamesworkshop website and immediately found a specific total war section under the age of sigmar part of the site.. not as hard as this article made it out to believe. But great article none the less.
It's kind of weird. On the launcher, there's a flashing banner which says "buy the miniatures here". Click it, head to the GW website. 9 miniatures, total, of old school variety, listed as Total War miniatures. And you can certainly go sifting through the site and find the extant old minis, albeit mostly on round bases. But all of that requires a certain level of familiarity with how things are now. It's not exactly what I'd call hard, but it's also not precisely as simple as head over, fill your cart with straightforward purchases due to new names, reorganizations, etc. Now, what they're doing in individual GW stores, I can't say. I'm curious if someone came in and asked for a dwarf army what they would be pointed to at a brick and mortar, though.
EDIT: This is what I get for reading from the bottom up. Someone above pointed out that it's there but it's also not quite as straightforward as having it all out in the open, and certainly it's not married to the style of game presented in TW at all.
I'm getting ready to fire up 6th edition with my old crew soon, though, so Total War's gotten me back in. God help me, I'm back in.
What had you settle on 6th? My friends and I are going to "stop the clock" on WHFB and just continue playing our armies ignoring Age of Sigmar but haven't picked a ruleset to use. We looked at Kings of War but it's just not quite the same so we leaning 8th because of all the magical items you can use to mix stuff up.
That's where we left off our serious playing, so our armies won't need to be adjusted much, if at all. Also, after poking around, that seems to be the consensus for best edition. "Best" is a moving target, and most of the editions have something to recommend them (except 4th and 5th... no Herohammer for me, thanks), so I don't know that you can go too wrong so long as you pick one and really nail down the rules for that edition, only.
Really liked this article, and glad to get some perspective on GW from the UK perspective.
I'm American, just to be totally clear! But my mother is an ex-pat who married an Englishman after my parents' divorce. My introduction to GW was when she'd send over issues of White Dwarf because she knew my brother and I played D&D as kids. So I got in early, at around age 12 or so (so like 88-89, around there), though even when the prices were sane it was a little too much for a kid to afford. So we got the rules and made little squares, meticulously measuring before cutting so these hundreds of little squares of paper matched the listed base sizes in the Warhammer rules.
When I did go visit my mother overseas, we practically lived at the local GW store. And there was always a local GW store.
I love Total War and all but saying it's the biggest when Dawn of War 3 has been announced seems like a stretch unless I misunderstood and we're not counting 40k.
Well, I tried to hedge a bit there. I wrote that it's one of GW's greatest video game triumphs, only possibly the greatest. So we'll see! But you're very right that DoW3 is liable to be a big, big deal.
I've always had an odd fascination with reading old D&D material, even though I've never played it. It almost serves as a way to further familiarize myself with the tropes of the genre so I could, theoretically, have greater respect for those who turn the tropes on their heads. I'm thinking about expanding that to Warhammer/40K now. Seems interesting.
There was this great article in maybe the Guardian a few years ago about reading roleplaying game books for pleasure, like you would a novel, and how it frees your imagination to wander in the unfilled spaces which gaming books must allow by design. It was interesting.
That also reminds me that it's probably worth giving special mention to Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. It died in the face of the behemoth that is WoW but still was a major push in terms of exposing more people to the Warhammer Fantasy setting. While my impression it was more of an EA investment than a GW investment I think it's worth remembering in the history of relatively recent Warhammer Fantasy games.
I adored WAR. I really did. It fell off mid-game because the events and PvP relied on a critical mass of players which was just never going to be sustainable, but it's still the best early game in a MMO I've ever played. So much fun.
There needs to be (there probably already is) a support-group for people who had the realization one day of how much they've spent on miniatures. 3, 7500+ point armies. 2 at 7500+, and 1 at 11000-ish points. And then another, half-painted at about 2000. And these aren't Armageddon-scale models.
I look back on how many miniatures I have, on how extensive my collection is and then I understand why I don't have nice things.
I've got way too many. I can get back in now without financial pressure because I've got full armies, so that's liberating. But in a weird way, the replacement of Warhammer with Age of Sigmar has been liberating, too. There's no pressure to get in on the new releases for WFB, to rework your armies, to adhere to whatever tournament meta is going on in your home games. I mentioned my old crew and I are going in on 6th with some occasional 3rd and it's awesomely free of all that extra "stuff" which historically comes from GW's marketing and tournament teams, even if it's just ambient noise.
Aside from a few choice titles like BG and Neverwinter, did D&D really thrive in video game space? I would not really feel confident in stating that.
Re: D&D. I'd definitely offer that D&D did far better in terms of classics than just those series. There was the entire Gold Box era, Planescape and Icewind Dale, the action arcade games from back in the day. Your point on the developers being talented is well-taken, but that loops us back around to the floodgates question: it always felt like TSR (and then WOTC) were careful about who they licensed to, while GW takes a somewhat scattershot approach to things.
Early games workshop was so metal that they reached out to offer to do the art for Bolt Thrower's first album
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They went from being influenced by to influencing metal in a pretty short space of time
Oh, hell yes. And it was more than just this. Games Workshop had a small, very short-lived record label. I remember they flogged a band called D-Rok like crazy for about three White Dwarf issues. It was a big deal because the guitarist was in The March Violets.
The story about me getting really excited for Warhammer Fantasy Battle again before going to the website because I forgot Age of Sigmar exists now is 100% true, by the way. I highly doubt I'm going to be the only one. It's a really strange situation. That's also my giant (Malcolm Weatherbottom III) and my messy stack of games (older Games Workshop nerds are free to gawk at that copy of Dark Future).
One thing I didn't get in there, because it's a little too inside baseball and felt clunky in the context of the piece, is that Games Workshop found themselves in an odd spot with 8th edition. Their prices were so high at that time, Warhammer had dwindled to (I think) 15% of 40K's sales, but 8th was really into big units. So you had this strange dynamic where the last edition of the game was probably the most expensive on both a per unit and per miniature basis. It's maddening.
I'm getting ready to fire up 6th edition with my old crew soon, though, so Total War's gotten me back in. God help me, I'm back in.
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