Not to beat a dead horse, but this is big issue with army boxes.
I mentioned Epic Warpath, and their sprues are a bunch of core units together. You don't have to, and might not want, to field everything. From the reviews, the starter box is 1 sprue for each faction, repeated 6 times, and it's inf, elite, tanks/walkers, and fliers.
If you are buying a fast attack kit or whatever, then them being together makes sense.
If you're buying an army box, and (I'm going to make up numbers here) you get 1800pts in a box, but can only field 1600 of it unless you buy another kit if shady. And yes, this can be mitigated somewhat with kit stretching, like putting 3 or 4 guys on a base instead of 5. But a beginner shouldn't be expected to know that going in.
Sure but you're still missing part of the problem. Lets say fine, you did want the army box, got the 1800 points worth, can use 1600 points in a list that's not the end of the world, still need 1400. You look at the force org chart, decide you want a bunch of terminators jumping out of a couple of thunderhawks, totally legal. Buy 2 thunderhawks, fine. To get more terminators, you need to buy multiple copies of this box
Which features a bunch of shit you may not have wanted.
Then let's say you want a bunch of leviathan dreadnoughts to be super heavy walkers going into combat in drop pods? Cool, buy some dreadnought drop pods
And now to get the leviathan dreadnoughts, now you buy 2 copies of this box
Just to end up with a bunch of shit you didn't want. Having spent $100 to not be interested in 75% of the shit you just bought. Most of the models for the game outside of aircraft and larger vehicles(and in this case a leviathan dread isn't a large enough vehicle) are sold this way,
And this isn't even the army boxes, which like I said aren't sold all the time for the game. It's mostly bundled in the stupid infantry/support/fast attack boxes for space marines, mechanicum, and guard. So the problem is you can easily end up spending $800 on an army for the epic scale game, and have piles and piles of shit leftover you never wanted to begin with. This is what I mean by GW could have designed the sprues smarter, made the SKUs cost half as much, but let people more accurately buy what they wanted rather that be stuck with dozens of copies of shit they had no interest in. It's a massive failing of legions imperialis, and that's before getting to the larger issue of it focusing on HH(especially since they already had the molds done for eldar, ork, and necron aircraft stuff from aeronautica imperialis, which is where most of the aircraft for LI came from anyway) leaving a lot of people uninterested by default.
For 40k and HH, at least the army boxes aren't the only way to get the models, and a beginner can usually combine them with a combat patrol or something and get some use out of them. The problem is for people that already have armies, when 1/4 of the "value" of the box is occupied by the big centerpiece model that they already have... it's useless. But at least someone considering starting the army could still get the box and make use of it.
Any guesses when the battleforce and battllion boxes might be coming?
Has to be relatively soon IF they are planning 11th to drop mid-year.
Anything from the reveal stream should be due out during the next 3 months, before or right up to the next reveal show in April at their Netherlands event.
