Reply To: The issue of the "elite" army (and finding opponents)….

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Really interesting observation, thanks for raising this one. I wonder if painting time is also a factor that guides players towards a less numerous ‘elite’ force? Similarly, does the proportion of elite armies perhaps correlate with the increase in scale? Ie for 6mm/10mm are we more likely to see a higher proportion of ‘regular’ or ‘horde’ forces as price and storage become comparatively less of a barrier?

With a caveat that I am coming form a fantasy background I’ll say that my personal preference has always been for large armies of regular infantry rather than more compact and elite forces. While they may not win as many games, they do, I feel, look much better on the tabletop and do have something of a ‘shock and awe’ quality when fully deployed. So I guess it might also be influenced by how ‘competitive’ the player is. If the tricked out small elite force with access to the better equipment is going to win a greater proportion of the time then the more competitive players may be drawn to those forces, whereas players who just play for fun/crits and giggles are probably more likely to field whatever they enjoy.

Getting back to your original questions, I think that the producers of the miniatures will be focused on getting as much of their product into the hands of gamers as possible, which will generally mean selling those minis to wholesalers/retailers or through their own independent distribution channels as cheaply as possible. Consequently I don’t know that they would have capacity to carve out any more of their costs to make the ‘horde’ army a more appealing price point acquisition, save perhaps combining slightly more minis in the equivalent packaging to try and claw back some packaging/shipping storage costs (Ie selling Panzer IV’s in a box of 3 and T34’s in the same size box but with 5 tanks with a moderately higher price that equates to a slightly cheaper price per tank or something similar). The idea of charging a premium for elite units could be worth considering, but the issue with historicals is, given the absence of IP patents, and (quality of sculpts/posing aside) the homothetic nature of the miniatures, an increase in costs for an elite unit may simply cause gamers to switch to an alternate (cheaper) manufacturer for that particular unit type – to work it would need to be a coordinated push by all producers, sort of like OPEC but with lead figures I guess… 🙂

I personally find asymmetric games, narrative battles and historical recreations much more entertaining that head to head pitched battles, so I’m with you on the idea of trying to encourage more of these through promotion in wargaming media.

Fielding guards or elite units in a one off game is a less threatening proposition for a player when they know that the game is a one-off. If playing a campaign serie s of games they may be less likely to commit elite forces and risk losing them for the rest of the campaign. I know campaign games aren’t always an option but it’s worth considering.

Finally, for ‘points buy’ games, if the elites are too attractive a proposition when collating an army list, maybe it’s simply a matter of having the game designers revisit the resource point allocations of each list and rebalancing the cost in favour of more ‘regular’ units?

Ahem, sorry for the block of text…