when you were talking skeletons I was thinking about was Mierce, best skeletons on the market. while your at it their wraiths are amazing and Warren need look no further than mierce for his Vikings too. definitely malifaux for the dogs, they’re zombie dogs but they’re the nicest out there and there are more than the ones you showed.
all about quality over quantity for me. a display cabinet with stunning characterful sculpts, beautifully based amongst themed terrain is so much sexier than a discordant mass of cheap miniatures you’ve blasted through. you’re a good enough painter to go that route @lloyd mate, glad you’ve seen the light.
the beauty of fantasy is that they are always relevant. like you said @lloyd, age of sigmar through rune wars and frostgrave. it’s the same with RPGs, much easier to work towards with fantasy over sci fi. sci fi tends to be more setting specific with regards to aliens, style and tech.
my sci fi is system specific were as fantasy for me gives me the ability to world build safe in the knowledge that they remain relevant to future fantasy games and settings. sci fi skeletons? not for me. keep them in fantasy were they belong. one step too far in my opinion. you can still have a wide range of flexibility in your undead without trapping yourself completely while giving yourself the opportunity to do something completely different for a change.

you fellas are killing me with the cutaways.

back for seconds. didn’t think i’d have time to write this, turns out I do.
I think you are mistaking my point about shinny syndrome and its effects on the complexity of gameplay with the point I was making about the depth of your experience of a setting. even though they are linked in a way I used the example of the games of old to carry the sentiment of the later not the former. but i can see how you have linked the two given the complexity of the old systems.
the old systems on this point though do not qualify. it is more a question of probabilities and viable options. streamlining can cause games to become too obvious. people play the probabilities. then tactics and lists become not much more than going through the motions.
a good example of a streamlined system with a large amount of tactical options would be mythic battles pantheon. you also have infinity that has vast layers of tactical options but requires a time investment on the part of the player in order to familiarise themselves with a complex rules set. there is a massive payoff in terms of tactical options and its complexity makes it very difficult to play by numbers. i have seen Justin this year work out probabilities on the fly and figure out game systems very quickly, to the point where he holds his own against the games designers or just outright breaks the game and now and again holds back. not so with mythic battles or infinity though.
i would also say that it is the trend in games design to live by words like streamlined and accessibility. which is in large part about selling more games than outright producing better ones. for every genuine break through there are one hundred imitators traveling in its wake feeding off its success. so beware of trendy buzz words by games designers who are following market treads rather than the few who set them and coined those words to describe what they did to produce the ground breaking games they made. and so we come to the crux of the matter. the point i was originally making was is jumping from gaming system to gaming system masking and further perpetuating the fact that many of the games we’re seeing lack any real tactical depth. golden age of gaming? in some respects sure. but maybe all that is gold does not glitter.