techsoldaten

Were it not for the equally obscene laws around copyright and intellectual property, I would share the sculpts I did in Blender. The test prints for Vheren Ashurhaddon and Little Horus are very faithful to the originals, but sculpting faces is not my strong suit and shields are hard to get right. Ongoing effort...

While my first instinct would be TN, the cost of freight is a concern they'd be considering. The cheapest way of moving stock through the US is by water. Putting a factory near the Mississippi means they could move stock north to regional distribution hubs much cheaper than they could by land. Dayton, OH is experiencing a renaissance as a distribution hub, in part, because there are overland routes that can reach anywhere in the Continental US in under 24 hours. There are other towns that enjoy just about the same accessibility that are even less expensive to operate from. Just speculating based on what I know about the company's real estate strategy and labor costs in Southern states, they would want to remain east of the Mississippi and close enough to a major waterway that they don't need to leverage rail for shipments. Picking a distribution hub where they can warehouse product separate from production likely involves a rustbelt state.

Glen Burnie MD is lacking in many ways. There's not an appropriate venue for handling a large event, transportation is solely by car, and there are not nearly enough hotels for this to work. There's nothing old school or OG about it, the first GW stores in the DMV were in College Park and Laurel. The NOVA Open takes place at a hotel in Crystal City, VA which would be more than sufficient to handle Warhammer World. But the place that might be the best option is the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor, MD. Ample space in the convention halls, it's on the water, room rates are reasonable for the area, plenty of nearby restaurants, there's even a casino with all kinds of other attractions. If they want to keep it a little more intimate, there's a convention center in Rockville that would be appropriate (but people would have to do a lot of walking.) There's also a ton of other hotels which would be happy to host the event, there's always something going on in DC. The Convention Center in DC is probably too expensive for this event and, while Baltimore is an option, the convention center there is oversized for the size of Warhammer World. It would be hard to cover 10% of the space. There are a lot of FLGSs in the DMV along with competitive players who don't necessarily participate in tournaments but might show up for this. Amongst the local community, there's a weariness of the drama the comes with competitive environments. Most of the people I know just want to play the game, see friends and enjoy the lore. Maybe this could be what reactivates some of the old timers and rekindles an interest amongst the youth in competitive play. Regarding the talk about Americanizing Warhammer - made me chuckle, the game always seemed to be lampooning the US military's focus on high technology. The setting has become more serious in a lot of ways, but it's never completely broken from those roots. With regards to the talk of factories - I know about the one in Tennessee but think it's more of a distribution center. From what I understand, the impact of tariffs is a marginal cost for GW and probably not sufficient to move manufacturing over here. If they do, it would probably be because of the cost of energy and access to inputs. Polystyrene is a lot less expensive in the US than it is in Europe and there are many, many other material options available. I would be surprised if a production factory was actually set up in the US. The USMCA means printing the sprues in Mexico and boxing them in the US would count as Made in America.

I get the economics of it. 40k is going to outsell HH by some double digit multiplier. GW really wants to support the game, but it's niche, therefore there must be higher prices. Feels like it might benefit them to encourage heavy conversion work to create your own Force Master, Medicae, Tank Commander, etc. Anyone who's not a named character, they might go farther by encouraging a little creativity. The reason I say this - I have all these HH boxes and more marines than I could use in a single army. There are some characters where I would pay for the official model, but I want to do something else for the others so I'm not spending $1k for HQs.

AUS and NZ - it does seem like everything costs twice as much in these places. After careful consideration, decided this is a no win situation. Even eBay auctions for the models cost as much / more than buying direct from GW (new and used.) Going the Blender route. I've done MkII / MkIV / Mk VI / Terminator proxies in the past and already have armatures for posing them. It will take some work to create suitable stand-ins, but I'm not paying that kind of money for single models on principle. Regarding GW stores and tournaments - I avoid tournaments and have never had any issue with proxies at any of the local GW stores (there are 4 near where I live.) HH seems to mostly be played at hobby shops if at all.

Malgohurst and maybe Little Horus I could see paying for because they are iconic characters. The rest I would rather convert myself from existing characters. I could also do them up in Blender and print them in resin. There's probably bits floating around that would let me do conversions at a tenth of the cost. I don't usually get sticker shock looking at anything GW, but this really hit me the wrong way. That's a huge gate keeping people out of the hobby.

My Sons of Horus army has not had any major additions since adding Horus, Abbadon and Garro several years back. Recently received the Saturnine boxed set, was considering adding characters. Maloghurst the Twisted, the Warmaster's Equerry $61 'Little' Horus Aximand – Captain of the 5th Company $61 Vheren Ashurhaddon – Master of the True Sons - $61 Tybalt Marr – Captain of the 18th Company - $61 Sons of Horus Legion Command - $61 Legion Champion and Master of the Signal $56 Sons of Horus - Legion Cataphractii Praetor $55 That's $416 dollars total for 8 models. It cost more than the Betrayal at Calth and Burning of Propsero boxed sets I originally paid for, which had like 80 models total. Maybe I'm just an old man shouting about the high prices, but this seems excessive.

These are aimed at people looking to get started with cult armies, not for anyone with an existing collection. Not that that's a bad thing, it just doesn't add anything beyond what most collectors already have. The Thousand Sons box might be more impressive were it not for the Mutalith Vortex Beast. Most people are going to look at that and think they'd rather have Rubrics.

Something that occurred to me: it might not be possible for B&C to comply with the law. Read this page very carefully: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/consultation A manual verification process might not comply with that provision. It's specifying technological approaches, which are going to cost money. Notice they do not specify the age assurance technology, or the frequency with which it should be applied. Currently, the cost to spoof an identity is negligible / zero. It takes maybe 5 minutes to create a realistic image of an identity card for any country using Stable Diffusion, there are models tuned specifically for this purpose which include all nations. As stated before, VPNs can disguise the country of origin for any user. Possible to go much further than that with automated OPSEC and INFOSEC tools that interact with identity providers to track down real world names, addresses, etc. It's not safe to assume a verification system based on identity cards is reliable. There are multiple platforms for providing age assurances. Uniformly, they tie an otherwise anonymous online identity to a real world person, and most of them check every online interaction. Most of them are multiparty tenants, meaning they don't just check the identity of the user, they check who the identity of the person the user is interacting with. Some of them also monitor the nature of the interaction, using NLP for sentiment analysis. You can find a detailed explanation of the nature of these platforms and the methods of verification currently being used here: https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/age-verification-the-complicated-effort-to-protect-youth-online/age-assurance-and-age-verification/ Don't consider that link comprehensive. It leaves out / obfuscates some of the most important features (active monitoring is referred to as social graph age estimation, for example.) Any time the frequency is not mentioned, consider it to be constant and not a gateway through which verification is passed. It does not discuss behavioral, contextual inference models, steganographic age verification methods which are also being considered, which would be used to address account hand offs and would require constant monitoring. In all likelihood, complying with this law means subjecting all users to some form of de-anonymization and ongoing monitoring. If not today, in the near future. I have not seen model legislation that puts the costs anywhere but on the website operator. Identomat, Sumsub, Veriff, Yoti, AgeCheck, and some of the custom AWS / Azure / Google Cloud solutions I've seen are all metered services. These are just the ones that come to mind, there are others that are popular in India / Pacific nations that are more encompassing (will alert authorities when content triggers are passed.) Just things to consider.

Seems like a massive overreach with long-tail consequences. With regard to impact, I prefer my time spent talking about painted army men to be anonymous. I would probably not submit proof of age, thus I would no longer be able to post here. Pretty sure this law is designed to curb online interaction, or at least to de-sensitize people to having interaction extremely curtailed. You might want to consider the direction this is headed and whether it's actually the best move for the site.

GW's claims about Unfair Competition are sinister manipulations. Article 2598 was meant to protect against companies labelling counterfeits as authentic. It's for the Louis Vuitton's of the world to have a means of going after knock offs labelling themselves as the real thing. The statue was not supposed to be used to avoid copyright lawsuits. GW could absolutely claim the models are making use of their intellectual property. Instead, they're claiming the product could be mistaken as genuine, which is hard to see. Looking at the models in the first few posts, the differences are not hard to spot - angles are different, key details like helmets are different, etc. The standard is if something is 25% different from the original, it's a novel design. I think Ghamak models meet that threshold. Were GW to prevail, they could easily monopolize the entire 28mm sci-fi miniature market - anytime someone sells a model, just say it looks like something they did in the 1980s and could be confused with their product. While I suspect this case will go away because Ghamak does not ship a physical product, the legal interpretation has to be challenged.

Happy someone is glad about it. Skulls was a disappointment. I guess I was expecting more than some remastered games, new content for existing ones, and updates. DOW 1 was great and all, but I don't really want to replay it endlessly. Maybe if they improved the multiplayer.

Not understanding the concerns about Terminators in the new Codex. I get the point about cost, they are expensive. They are also durable, move 7 inches, get rerolls to charge and have Rapid Fire on their bolters. 10 Berzerkers in a Rhino will outperform them in melee, so will 3 Eightbound. But it seems like they're here to do a different job, which be hard to kill and take objectives.

This is exactly what I thought when I first saw it: the designers could have gone armored scarab, instead they went desiccated Hyena. The design fails to satisfy the #1 design rule for Chaos models: all damage dealers must be imposing and tyrannical. These just look like stiff, stripped down husks of secondary importance.

While I generally agree with the sentiment expressed in the OP's post, there are several specific historical references and characters that spring to mind when I'm thinking about the Iron Warriors. The Battle of Arras , 1914 - Fought between the French and the Germans, this battle seemed to embody so much of IW lore. The early stages of WWI were not characterized by trenches, it was better characterized in terms of large troop movements, city sieges and attempts to grapple with the significant innovations in German artillery. The French and the German armies were trying to outmaneuver each other in a series of actions called the Race to the Sea, which eventually came to a head at Arras. Arras was the first place the French really put their foot down. Until this point, there was a lot of talk the French armies would collapse within a month or two. At Arras, they set up within heavily fortified areas and basically dared the Germans to come get them. The Germans obliged. While the battle was bad for both sides, the Germans suffered horrendous casualties and began to feel the pinch of supply lines. Until this point in the war, they were using as much artillery each day as Germany could produce in a month. When the stockpiles ran low, it meant battles became infantry affairs. The frontline units on both sides hadn't taken massive casualties or fought against any entrenched foe (much less a veteran force.) The casualties at Arras were substantial and this phenomenon started taking place, where troops from the rear were being marched up to the front having to look at the casualties from the last assault. As far as I can tell, this battle in particular is where the talk about the "horrors of war" in that conflict really started. The Battle of Arras lead to the first fixed trench systems being set up and the first immobile front lines coming about. The 2 German Generals - Rupprecht and von Bulow - were published saying things that would be recognizably Peturabo. Also, if you read about the battle, the way the German soldiers are described, with their shining helmets and regimented formations, is very reminiscent of the Iron Warriors. The Battle of the Somme, 1916 - This was the longest battle of WWI. The Allies were assaulting German defenses in an effort to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun. The idea was to break through the lines and open a new front. This was the biggest and most costly battle of the war. The Germans, poorly supplied, pursued a war of attrition, deadlock and entrenchment that cost the Allies 60,000 casualties on the first day. It went on like this for months, total casualties were over 1 million. It included some of the first uses of tanks along with endless hellscapes of craters, shell holes, bodies that could not be retrieved, barbed wire stretching for miles, and the like. The German's strategy, in a nutshell, was to bleed the allies white, and it's very recognizable as something the IW would pursue. German General von Falkenhayn, in particular, was know for the elastic defense, where Allied armies would be allowed to penetrate the trench network to be drawn into a killing zone with artillery and machine guns positioned in the back. This made success and retreat impossible. von Gallwitz, another German general, was very concerned with defense and counterattacks. He maintained a system of fortifications along the line that were extremely difficult to break, even with artillery and masses of men. He was basically creating fortresses that allowed him to launch counterattacks whenever he wanted to, similar to the fortresses Iron Warriors are known for putting up. There's a lot of great literature from the era available for getting into the mindset of the Iron Warriors. I can't think of them without thinking of what must have happened at these 2 battles.