I agree with this. Make them legacy lists that are no longer ITS legal. Make them a toggle in Army like mercs for those who want to continue using them. It would also stop new players from discovering a sectorial or game pieces that they can't realistically play anymore. I also agree with this to a point. I don't mind new stuff being continuously added to keep the game fresh, but things like releasing a second Uxia sculpt so soon after the first one when there are many profiles that have no minis to represent them at all is baffling.
I think the original plans for N4 were for the currently discontinued armies to be fully removed from the roster and only added back in when they had their remakes. Player outcry led to the current situation. At this point, it's a bit of a lose-lose situation for CB. If they cut out the discontinued stuff, they make people angry. If they don't cut they are left with a sub-par selection that also makes people angry. I do agree that some other decisions that are kinda bad only increase this problem though. Most of NA2 armies are just... odd.
Agreed, Corvus could just release miniatures for existing troopers that currently don't models, for several months in a row. Mix it with some resculpts and, after they are done, release new profiles if they are necessary.
I strongly disagree. While it would be nice for Army to mark that an army is OOP, the army should remain legal. People should not lose their force. Some people like playing with OOP armies. Just make it clear in Army that it is OOP. That should be enough.
Magister's knights got discontinued (instead of Teutons ;P) Technically Father Knights too but they got immidiete replacement in form of KoJ
Or they could just stop making new factions and focus on new sculpts, balance passes, and fixing their rules? Nah, that would be crazy to actually try and improve the QoL instead of just trying to sell us a new sectorial every 6 months.
Oh yeah, that does sound like crazy. Trust the customers' word to buy stuff they don't strictly need instead of new shinies? Let the creative team rework stuff again and again that they've already completed? Stepping back into the cool shade of obscurity in the algorithms because what you release is just recursions?
Yea, people would never buy updated sculpts of models they have... no hugely successful miniature companies would sell such a thing... wait, Horus Heresy pre-orders are huge...for more Space Marines, in updated sculpts of the same old armor. That's pretty par for the course in miniatures. Not that you need to buy models for Infinity other than one faction anyway with the proxy rules they have, so they already have that customers don't need to buy stuff issue right? I've pretty much stopped buying infinity because it's not models for the sectorials I play. Meanwhile I'm buying new 30k/40k because I can use them for armies I care about, even if I have more than enough already. Because the new sculpts are fantastic. I would kill for a an updated Wildcat box, or more Malignos and Shrouded, or a box of troopers that wasn't SWC weapons only...
We're going way off topic, but... yes people will buy complementary units or alternate sculpts (e.g. Joan is approaching 5 times as many minis as profiles). This does not mean it is a viable business model, as has been shown across far too many business segments too many times, to take a sabbatical from the type of releases that bring in new customers, the type of releases that can motivate old customers to buy into a new product line, or the type of releases that the company's creative minds feel inspired to work on. There is room to release another Joan, provided that does not come at the expense of moving forward with the stuff that keeps the business expanding. This means complementing stuff that already has a reasonable level of units is in a trickle feed manner, not wholesale do or die kind of thing, and regardless of which you can only get there by limiting the number of sectorials that a given faction can have active at a time.
Eh, not fully supporting lines can run you into trouble though. I dunno how much I trust CB's market research either. I hope they've gotten better than the "vanilla YJ doesn't use JSA units" debacle.
Well, CB is paying now their weird choices in late N3... N4 is fine as it is, minus ITS problems. The thing is that by the end of N3 they runned amok with their NA-2 non-sense and releases too much stuff for their (and our) own good, making N4 a bloated selection of NA-2 already amongst a few "nation" armies with less active sectorials almost. Given how accessible but large armies are, and how rules don't differ much as of today (ft duo being in vanilla too now), wise decisions at the time would have been: - remove some useless NA-2 armies - stop doubling sectorials within nation-armies that feels like playing two times the same thing with different skins - reinforce army identity by ditching vanillas completly, keeping those for C1 (given some armies don't even have their, or any proper, identity anymore game-wise when put together as a vanilla faction), specially some sectorials are already vanilla factions but with fireteams somehow
While I can understand the subject can be heated as it is heavily opinion based, I would appreciate a calmer discussion.
Especially the NA2 stuff, stop making NA2 forces just so you can combine the 2 player starter boxes. JSA, Druze, Spiral, good. Random mixes of other factions from whatever box set is being sold, bad. Finish the work on the existing factions. Update the models, actually make models for missing profiles, change the SWC boxes to have alternate arms allowing the basic weapons, make balance passes, and reduce some of the overlap and extraneous profile bloat.
They were replaced with Rodoks (ARM3, super jumpers), Fractal, maybe Maakep. Also Raiden and Haramaki.
We'll be running a Sectorial-only tournament on TTS later this year, this was an idea I came up with a while back--it really goes a long way to solving the problem of CA/Nomads/Ariadna etc being way ahead of the pack. Unfortunately, vanilla factions do still have some units that are only available in vanilla, and some people like building lists around them, so dropping vanilla from the game (which CB would never do) would require splitting some things up, like making mnemonica units Onyx-only, or whatever.
That could be quite interesting. Will it be house rules (as it’s sectorial only) or will you be using sectorials with ITS rulesets or even some combination of ITS/house rules?