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Nomad Investments – the major shareholder – really have done a job on what used to be GW, haven’t they ?
As for ‘mass battle’, that’s always been kind of a sticking point. It’s pretty much impossible to produce a true mass battle look with miniatures bigger than maybe 20 mm (such as Airfix plastics) on a tabletop, unless you’re playing at a convention and have 2 or more tables pushed together to form 1 huge surface.
A guy I used to play with – who was unbelievably good at Wood Elves and had an uncannily lucky set of caramel colored dice – said the way he got around it was to imagine his army as the personal retinue of some local lord, while most of the rest of the battle happens all around what we’re doing on our 6×4 table at the local game store.
I get around it by multiplying the guys in my head. That’s not 20 spearmen but 200 – or even 2000 – that’s not 1 treeman but The Last March of the Ents, that’s not 1 Hero on a Griffon but the Hero, Griffon and the hero’s personal body guard regiment.
There’s a limit to how many miniatures in scales above 20 mm you can reasonably put on your average gaming table and still have some room to maneuver, in the case of 28-32-something minis on a 6×4, I’d say the maximum number is around 100-15o per side, beyond which things get VERY crowded.
There’s also a limit to how many figures of any particular type your average wargamer is willing – or able – to buy and paint. How many Uruk-Hai were at Helm’s Deep ? 10,000 ? Scaled down my way, the Orc player would have to buy and paint a MINIMUM of 100 basic Orcs and even that would look a little sparse on a 6×4 table – see above. It wouldn’t look like the movie.
Cost will, of course be an issue, I STILL don’t understand why plastic minis cost more than maybe US$ 1 per infantry guy, maybe $ 2-3 cav. If the basic box set ends up costing $ 300+ like Horus Heresy – which I would have bought for $ 100 – and the rulebook $ 85 by its’ lonesome, I’m going to say screw that and just continue my fruit- and pointless attempts to get people interested in other game systems.
Alexander fought in India because he had, by that time, expanded the Greek empire that far. If the Empire could do that, why would they have to be afraid of Chaos….?
The battles the Spanish and Portuguese fought in South America were mostly a few dozen guys with horses and muskets vs. thousands of natives with rocks and sticks who were afraid of the mail-clad foreigners and thought of them as Gods…..
