Not a video-game question, but does anyone on this board play Games Workshop games? If so, what’s the current state of the hobby?
I haven’t played in over five years, but I used to play 40k (Imperial Guard) fairly regularly, and have been toying with (zing!) the idea of getting back into it.
The current state? Not much different from five years ago. The rules have been updated to edition five but it’s mainly incremental changes. You’d need a new copy of the rules, a new army codex for your guard, and probably you’d need to redo your army list.
I revisit the hobby now and then too. The main thing that keeps me away every time is how damn expensive it is. Seeing that I’d need to drop almost $100 just to get the updated rules makes me weep.
I haven’t played in a while, but I try to keep up on major changes. Looks like the Guard is getting a new codex around May of this year, along with a bunch of new models. You might want to hold off on any new acquisitions until then.
I used to play a lot of 40k and really would like to get back into it but I haven’t played in over 10 years so I have no idea if my minis would still be applicable. I have old Dreadnaughts and tanks tha I believe have been replaced.
Well, you most likely don’t have to replace any models if you don’t want to. If it’s been ten years then there’s probably a unit or two that disappeared from the codex but as a whole you should be fine. You need the new rules to play but it doesn’t matter how old your tanks are, they still represent the same kind of unit in the rulebook.
Even in GW stores the only rule is that you can’t use non-GW models. As long as they made it, no matter how long ago, they’ll let you use it.
My wife and I both play 40k and fantasy. I see the hobby is going strong with increasing amounts of large events nationwide. Local club health will vary, naturally, from area to area, but the michigan hobby is as strong as ever. Your guard are getting a nice boost from their new codex in may. Everything will be getting quite a bit cheaper, though the army sorely needs it to compete with the drastic cost decreases that orks got. Also, guard really doesn’t work well with one of the three main 5th edition missions, with most army builds, but they can be very strong in the other two easily. If you haven’t played in 5 years I’m guessing you last played 3rd edition and you’ll find that rules have been shaken up quite a lot since then.
IG have a new codex coming out, so i’d wait to buy anything new beyond the main rulebook, and like has been said previously your old models will work fine. The really really old dreadnaughts for the spacemarines maybe out of date though, and if your army was Squats or has Squats…well, they got removed from the universe.
5ed is pretty streamlined, which keeps the game moving pretty quickly. 1v1s with two people who have the rules down will take less than an hour to complete even at the 1750 pt level. It still has its warts however, like the self-generated cover save shenanigans. There are some ok forums out there for learning the ropes and dealing with oddball rules issues. DakkaDakka does an ok job, if a little overboard with their FAQ–at something like 70 pages.
GW in general is a bit of a fail, there stock has been declining pretty steadily, though i don’t think they are going to go out of business. They also are pretty clumsy with rules, if you thought the balance patches in DoW were slow, my poor DaemonHunter codex hasn’t been updated for over five years! It can make for some frustrating unbalanced games with odd rules questions. But… I’m still playing it and i have fun, though if i could find more AT-43 players in the SoCal area i’d be tempted to swap to that.
I’ll see your Daemon Hunters and raise you a Dark Eldar codex. It was released in 1998 for 3d edition and is still a valid, if partially broken rule set. It got some fixes patched in two years later but those were fairly minor. And for all I know it won’t be redone this edition either.
It is known that GW is working on a new Dark Eldar codex, but I imagine the massive number of new models they’d need is slowing it down. Speaking of old codex, the oldest codex of them all, the Space Wolves, is rumored to be coming out towards the end of the year. Interestingly, since the current codex relies so heavily on the Space Marine codex, it has actually aged pretty well.
I play mainly Fantasy, though there have been rumblings recently in my game club of people wanting to try 40k more. Which is good, because I probably have around 200 unassembled space marines to work on :D
Like others said, the “state of the hobby” is too dependent on your local situation, GW itself is getting a lot better I think (others disagree) especially on the sculpting front, some of the new orks are amazing.
The way I found to motivate myself to paint was to join online communities and do some painting contests and blogs and so on.
I’m totally painting a Skaven army.
I think someone stole my Ratling gun at new years drunken party. The cads!
KG
State of the game? Well, if you’re playing IG then you probably want to wait for the new codex to hit. With the way the scenarios currently play, the IG are almost guaranteed to lose the Kill Point scenario (you get 1 point for each unit you kill and IG typically have more than twice as many units as anyone else).
Yeah, one thing i should mention is that GW sculpts and models have improved, both in price(yay plastics) and in detail level.
Its just that their design dept still has their head up their arses as far as balancing, and rebalancing things.
I think that’s their business model. Every time they rebalance they force older players to buy new shit (like, say, if you played Alpha legion in 4th edition)
Yes, but its better than having models with poor sales because the rules on them are terrible, and frustrated players only to run to ebay shortly after because they faced an opponent who used some loopy rules and build exploits to trounce his boxed set army.
If older plays actually did buy new stuff every time they rebalanced, you’d think they’d rebalance stuff more often. =)
So, after pulling my army out of storage and playing a test game at my local store, I bought the new rulebook and have been working on digesting it and getting up to speed.
I’m happy with how many of the 5th Edition changes seem to be designed to streamline the rules and speed up the game. That said, I still think the rules involve too much randomness. I am sad to see that difficult terrain movement is still dependent on random dice rolls, and even sadder to see that running works the same way.
As some people in this thread warned, kill points are terrible for my army. Actually, they seem to break a lot of things, and lead to strange balancing decisions. (For example: since Rhinos can be a liability in KP missions they’re to 35 points, which seems way too cheap in objective-based missions.) I don’t understand why GW dumped Victory Points, which seemed a lot fairer.
i would just like for them to re-release warhammer quest and spacehulk
my own preferences are towards the specialist games, since they’re cheaper and easier for me to manage at the squad level
Any game involving D6’s heavily is going to have a good deal of randomness, best you can do is mitigate it by having alot of redundancy so that the averages will win out at the end of the day.
And yes, Kill points are stupid broken and whoever decided to implement them as is should be slapped upside the head. If you look around online you’ll find lots of better alternatives to the system, some pretty simple. (Example1: each team gets six points to nominate amongst there army, if they don’t have six units, they have to double up on a unit. You get a kill point for each of those units you wipeout/run off the board)
VPs have the drawback of letting someone put all there eggs in one basket, the giant TH+SS termie combo with their 2+/3+ saves is now badass for VP, or abaddon and his overpowered, overpriced lameness, while KPs and objectives let you ignore things your army isn’t equipped to deal with and concentrate on outmaneuvering your opponent.
Yeah, I used to love spacehulk. Certainly my favorite tabletop game of my geekdom youth. Pretty sure I have a really well used copy buried in a closet somwhere, mabye I should get some new terminator miniatures and try to reseruct it.