I really hate the method of the passage to N5 of the corvus belli. I can understand removing some units, but I can't stand the removal of the Tags. It would have been simple to distribute them among the sectors. The Jotum is on Svalarheima, the Seraph is MO, Maximum, the Squalo and the Tik are on Kestrel; so I don't understand why instead of leaving the tags that are already in Kestrel in vanilla pano they didn't simply leave the Cutter, the Dragao and the Uhlan in vanilla.
No clue, maybe they plan to reintroduce them later on, but not right now/ in the near future? The main issue is that they do not have a model and they made it clear they do not want to have units that have no models available to them.
Sad irony noises (from a webstore that inexplicably lacks dozens of models for units that should have them).
With respect, as @burlesford just said, there’s quite a few profiles that exist without a miniature. I’d also ask if that would mean that in this case the proxying of miniatures is relatively pointless? If a profile exists and has no miniatures then others of a similar size and weapon out-load can be used until a miniature is produced. If the profile is removed then there’s not much that can be done. I’m all for a return of my beloved uhlans. That TAG was a beast for my neoterra. But then I lamented the loss of the mk1 Squalo profile. So much was lost… I will remain hopeful that as you said @psychoticstorm that Corvus Belli may reintroduce them later on.
Just to be clear here though: We're not talking "new units that don't have a mini yet", nor are we talking out-of-production units or those with really old sculpts. We are talking units that are widely available, often across multiple factions, many of which have been made very playable this edition, and which have modern N3 or even N4 sculpts. I know that a bunch of them are Code One products that went away with N5 and await to be repackaged, but by far not all of them. Here's the complete list: Jazz & Billie Kunai Solutions NInja Wolfgang Amadeus Wolff Cadin Donn Gunnar Lundmark Qiang Gao Uma Sørensen Trisha N33 Treitak Anyat Zabuk Hasht Perseus Croc Men Zulu-Cobras Hunzakuts Asawiras Hortlak Janissaries Nahab Wild Bill Carmen & Batard John Hawkwood Posthumans Mk3 & Mk4 Desperadoes Umbra Samaritans Sogarat Motorized 112 Highlander Rifles Authorized Bounty Hunters Kaplan Djanbazan Cube Jägers Armand LeMuet Chaksa Longarms And those are just the units that have no sculpt available at all right now. There are also a bunch of quite critical/popular loadouts that have perfectly valid/up-to-date sculpts, but have (often inexplicably) gone oop as well, for example: Yan Huo ML Hac Tao HMG Al Fasid HRL Nisse HMG Tiger Soldier Hacker Grenzer MSR Ragik Spitfire Ryuken HRL Kempei BSG Fusilier ML Kriza Borac Mk12 Mukhtar Doctor Namurr Spitfire Haidao KHD Tuareg Hacker Azra'il HMG & Feuerbach Gangbuster KHD Psi-Cop MMR Strelok with K-9 Antipode All the while, Corvus Belli is still selling the HMG Mormaer, the BSG Fiday and Odalisques from N2, two different packs that both have the 112 in it, the same for the Chasseur, three different Warcor sculpts, and a Haqqislam Action Pack that you can neither play in vHaqq, RTF or HB. There are even more great sales decisions, like the fact that the only way you can buy a Ninja as a non-JSA player right now is in a pack with three JSA minis (Kitsune, Oniwaban, Shikami) the only way to get Liang Kai as a non-YJ player is in a box with two YJ minis (Shaolin) the only way to get Chung Hee Jeong as an IA player is either in a pack with an ISS and two CA minis (Adil, Ko Dali, Nourkias), or in another pack with two WB minis (Jujak) If you buy the Aftermath characters pack as a non-Bakunin player, you can't play two out of five minis (Uhahu, Extreme Zellenkrieger) If you want to buy either Rahman Rouhani or Leila Sharif as a non-RTF player, you can only get them in a pack with an RTF-mini (Hakim) If you want to buy a Vostok as a non-CJC player, you can only get her in an Action Pack with nine CJC models you don't need If you want to buy a Hac Tao as a non-WB player, you can only get him in a box with two WB models (Hundun, Ye Mao) ... and similar situations for many other minis. In short: Corvus Belli makes it extremely difficult for pretty much any player to just buy all the models of their chosen faction without having to go to the second hand market either for oop models or splits, or end up with a bunch of models from factions they don't play. Sorry for the long post. Ever since I have been making the model identifier sheets, this has been bugging me. Now that CB has deleted entire armies with the official reasoning being "we want people to be able to buy all the minis for their armies", it has been bugging me even more...
Furthermore removing a tag is much more serious than removing a simple s2 model. Both for the time and cost invested, and because with tags you can only proxy other tags, which are very few.
Completely agree. If I didn’t make that evident in my last post, apologies. It’s shocking to me just how vast the list is. I cannot fathom the decisions behind the removal of these miniatures, many that were relatively new whilst keeping much older sculpts. I shouldn’t be surprised that you’d know the extensive nature of this list, you did all the sheets for recognising each mini (which were of great use) after all. Shocking and not just a little bit. Also, please don’t apologise for such a well thought out and thorough post. Especially when it displays so much information. I have no doubt that the loss and unavailability of so many miniatures has upset a great number of players.
No no, it wasn't meant as a correction, just as a jumping-off point :) And thank you for those nice words!
No problem at all! I remain in shock at the sheer number of miniatures that have profiles that are unavailable or are at very best only available as part of a set you may not want the rest of. Very troubling.
Those at least are coming back in two months as an Essential re-release. Same reason I didn't count Scarface, I'm pretty certain his resculpt is scheduled for July as well.
The main issue we have is we do not know the planned release schedule and what repacks are planned ahead. I am hopeful that the new shift will address all these concerns.
I honestly have lost any hope in that regard years ago. With all my appreciation and sympathy for the CB and their product, they went through several paradigm shifts regarding how they release and package their products, how they do retire and re-release / resculpt them as well. It was never in my memory addressed in a way that was made clear for the customers. There seemed to be certain regularities, but they were never fully implepented into a coherent system that we could see - and they seemed to be abandoned every time well before getting implemented to apply to all the range. In fact, the only clearly communicated rule I recall was "you can expect for every faction to get something every three months" (or was it every other month...?), and this was abandoned quietly quite a while ago - I've checked the release schedule, and Haqqislam got its latest release (resculpt fo al-Djabel) in October 2024, 7 months ago. Not the first such a long hiatus in the faction's history, either. And we're talking about a faction with three sectorials playable and in-catalog. In my eyes, CB's release schedule was a mess, is still a mess, and there are no indicators it is going to change. That's how they tick. I've learned to live with it.
While I generally agree, at least recently with Bakunin, KCF, and Shindenbutai, they have been pretty good at releasing the major profiles really quickly. But man, it has been hard to be a Haqqislam player the last few years.
It doesn't feel like it's to anyone's benefit, either. New players are still getting confused about how to buy into the game and build up a collection since products seem to be disappearing and reappearing and old products are still on the market. Veterans are struggling because they can't fill gaps in their collections - assuming their collections are still valid in the first place - without rebuying a bunch of minis they already own because of how things are repackaged. I was planning on starting up Hassassins at the end of N4/start of N5, but it took so long for the Hassassin Action Pack to get released that I lost interest and moved on. There's also packs that seem to be soft discontinued? Some products, like the Tech Bee and the MO Headquarters pack, haven't been stocked at retailers in my country for at least a year, even though they're still listed as in catalogue. I appreciate that CB is willing to shake things up and try new things, but sometimes it feels like they're just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.
I'm hoping that because they NOW have a an actual Marketing person, he will look into the issue of what figures are done, when, and why. I love Infinity but CB has a very irritating habit of theirs to come out with the profile no one cares about, or stuck in a package with other figures you can't use or don't care about. They just need to ask the question to some of their game testers. They say they have testers but sometimes I'm not sure.
I'll be glad to see that, but I'm not going to hold my breath in expectation. I have a feeling I wouldn't live to see it in that case :P
However I don't think we have heard from the new marketing guy on any of the socials. He really should at least introduce himself. BTW I liked that they did survey recently. They should do more of those.
Me too! And they did two already. One about their webstore, the other about their lore books. The last one was only disappointing in the fact that they didn't offer any "got any more comments?" options. I would have loved the opportunity to tell Gutier to please, for the love of God, get an editor who knows how to write, or even better, a writer who knows how to write. He's been doing it for 20 years and he's still incredibly bad at it... Anyway, back to topic.
I would love to see a shake-up for the way Infinity's lore is written, particularly the unit write ups. There's a lot of interesting ideas in Infinity, but the writing makes it hard to appreciate. Speaking of, what would the Uhlan and Dragao look like if they were brought back to vanilla? I think the Dragao could pretty much come back unchanged to fill the role as a cheap main battle TAG, bridging the gap between Squalo and Cutter, particularly now that there's no Jotum or Squalo MkI to compete with. The Uhlan, however, I've always struggled with. I could never get past its cost and would either take a Swiss Guard or Cutter instead, depending on what I wanted the Uhlan to do.
