BREAKING NEWS: Points increase for models in 9th Edition, why it was done, and what that means for your game!

What are you up to Games Workshop? You've been playing the power creep game since Rogue Trader, and now you decide to scale things back. Is this about game mechanics? Is this about helping new players? Or is it something else...

Ask any of the boys in the boarding house, and they'll probably say I'm a deeply suspicious man. They'll also say that I'm very fair with my suspicions if they do come up. They'll also probably say that I'm scarily good at detecting contraband materials or general shenanigans in the house. And my little radar is pinging away at this news, because it strikes me as kind of strange.

First of all, the argument as to why it's strange.

Typically in tabletop games points values go down rather than up. This is usually an easier sell to players, as it means they can have more powerful units in their games, and allows them to show off new stratagems. It also gives incentive to take weaker units, and is the sole reason for the popularity of Guarsdmen at high level play. Sure they die when an ork looks at them, but you can pack 100 of them into 400 points, flooding the field with wounds the enemy needs to churn through to get to the tanks.

This is power creep at an army level. A 2000pt list from 2nd Edition is drastically smaller than what we have now. I remember a Space Wolf/Ork battle report which had, I think, 30 Space Wolf Infantry on the table total with no tanks, and about 60 orks. That's about a 1000 points these days, with some change to spend on vehicles. 

Typically this is a good thing. More variety of units are allowed within the points limits, and you get some excited match ups because of it. You also get more diverse match ups (metas permitting of course), meaning each game should be slightly different from the others. 

Thinking cynically, this is also really good for Games Workshop. If you need lots of models to field a tourney level army, then you sell lots of models to your players. Then of course the paints to go with them and such, the terrain pieces to make them all look cool and to hide behind (if you have more models you need bigger boards too!). Points can also be inversely proportional to price if you really wanted mess with people, as in the cheaper the unit the more it costs to buy. As a T'au collector I can say the one big turn off for me has always been the price of Fire Warriors compared to their points.

So you'd think that any reasonable company looking to make players happy and fatten their wallet would actually keep the downward trend in points costs. 

So... why go up?

Lets look at the positives to it: smaller armies have lower barriers to entry.

If it takes you three months hard graft to get an army to table for your first game, the likelihood is you will not finish it and will just quit then and there. If it takes 40 models to play even a small game of 500 points (my favourite size), then you'll never get started on the Path to Glory . Putting the points cost high, and therefore model count low, means you get to table faster, and in today's rapid pace culture that's a very necessary thing.

You also increase the pace of games.

Tell me if this sounds familiar; you agree to a pick up game with someone in your local shop. They say they play orks. Cool, you haven't battled against them in a while! They go out of the shop, and come in with luggage. They start pulling out try after tray of boyz, packing everything tighter and tighter into the deployment zone. You finished putting your Knight on the board half an hour ago, and they've just cleared their Troops choice.

And then the battle begins! In the first volley, you decimate three units. But wait! They all have Feel no Pain rolls from the Pain Boy, and you've been using D2 weapons! You'll need to roll every single one, because statistically some Boyz might survive. And you'll have to roll them individually, because no one has that many different colours of dice to keep track of everything all in one go. 

It gets worse if they somehow all have an invulnerable save.

And then the guy needs to pack them away in the luggage bit by bit, since there isn't enough table space in the shop to put the causalities whilst the game continues.

2 hours later, and you've only just cleared the first round of shooting in the first turn of the game. Wouldn't it be nice if there were just less models on the table to begin with?

An over the top example no doubt, but tell me honestly if you've never been there. 

But what about the cost to Games Workshop? Fewer models on the field means fewer models for them to sell. And that means they're basically taking a loss with their own policy.

Prices going up in June.

Ah. Paints also went up in price in January. 

Now a look at the pure maths of it all might actually work out in favour of Games Workshop for some models, and not quite in others. Looking at the price of the Intercessor box set, a similar increase in price as the 17% in points would put the box set at about £41. That coupled with the increase in price from paints might actually cover the loss of model sales from larger armies... and is also a little easier to manage since less product needs to move.

You might say that the cultist price is 50%, and that's not a reasonable increase to put on any box. Well, currently there are only mono-pose cultists coming in at £6 for 5. Double that for a full unit, and then add on the extra 50% and you end up at £18 for the unit. That's still fairly cheap considering what you'd pay for 10 models in the current Games Workshop model. It might also be paving the way for a new cultist kit, which would just be lovely but guaranteed to be priced at £30 minimum for 10. 

So put it this way; 40K will probably cost you more in the next coming years, despite needing fewer models. At least you can tell yourself that it feels like less because you've bought less. On the plus side, the actual experience of 40K will be more streamlined, and will certainly be a little less grindy. 

I actually don't mind. With eBay and carefully overthinking every purchase and list I make, this will not affect me too much. I tend to only buy that which I spend months on anyway, and with the number of times I strip paint and re-do colour schemes I certainly get my money's worth from purchases. 

I also think that in recent years Games Workshop has been putting much more effort into their miniatures in terms of both sculpting, rules progression and support for players. I don't know if anyone remembers the time before Warhammer TV, but the only way to get painting advice was to either buy the guide books, buy White Dwarfs or just spend hours searching the internet. Now you get hours and hours of advice for free, and the quality of the advice is (not to throw shade on any of the painting guides out there) way better than what we used to have.

That all costs money, and I'm happy to pay a little extra for models to keep up the sphere of entertainment around the core hobby.

... or go to Element Games through this link to get discounted prices on Games Workshop models and give me a 5% tip on all the purchases.

... go to Alchemist Workshop, who don' have an affiliate program but have cheaper prices and usually drop in a bag of Haribo with their orders. I get nothing for that, but their prices are cheaper and so I recommend them more highly. If you do go there then let them know on your order notes that you came from this blog. 

There's just one last thing to mention on this, and that's lower model count armies are also easy to dabble into to. Since you can throw together a 500 point list much more quickly, and probably just from one Start Collecting kit, it's a much easier way into a new line of obsession. This can quickly blossom into a full on 2000-3000 point list, something which I'm sure Games Workshop have considered. 

Gosh, that turned into a long article. I might film this one.

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Until next time!

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