Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

This feels like uncharted pricing territory. GW did a made-to-order run for the old 3rd edition 40k starter set minis a couple of years ago: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/12/24/warriors-from-a-bygone-age-return-for-christmas-day-pre-orders/

I think they cost $100.

Apart from that I can't recall GW ever re-releasing minis of this age on this scale.

What's the most expensive army/starter box GW has ever released? I wouldn't be surprised to see this box rival that.

A lot of unknowns price wise as you say. It’s a specialist games release so AOS pricing doesn’t really apply. GW have never rereleased a discontinued model kit back into retail before so there is no precedent. This box may be priced aggressively like Age of Darkness, or not so much like Legions Imperialis.

MaxT wrote:
A lot of unknowns price wise as you say. It’s a specialist games release so AOS pricing doesn’t really apply. GW have never rereleased a discontinued model kit back into retail before so there is no precedent. This box may be priced aggressively like Age of Darkness, or not so much like Legions Imperialis.

What worries me about pricing is that these old sprues are very inefficient to cast. 4 skellies per tool and you need a separate sprue of bows and shields. The cav is a sprue per 4 riders, a sprue per 2 horses, and again extra bows and shields. Compare to a modern AoS sprue that's one tool for 10 dudes with all gear. ToW will be taking several times as long to manufacture by machine time alone, and packing is more complex too.

tneva82 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
to be fair we dont know what the pricing will be. I think most of us were surprised byhow generous the pricing on HH ended up being. How would we feel about the Tomb Kings box set if the price comes in at the same point as the Age of Darkness box?

Personally I probably still wouldnt buy it, price per mini might be highly competitive but I dont think I want those ancient as skeleton sculpts. The crocodragon isnt cool enough on its own to sway me otherwise.

I think you managed to talk yourself out of your own point by the end there lol but unless it's 40 skellies for £40 or otherwise £1 per mini at most then imo it'll be a bad deal when you factor in how bad some of these minis are by todays standards.

You also hit the problem that we do have current day points of reference. Night goblins are £27.50 for 20, which are presumably also going to be contemporary old world minis. So if tomb kings skeletons are also £27.50 for 20, that sucks. If they are cheaper, does that mean GW will be forced to make gloomspite gitz cheaper?

Price per model will be cheaper than gitz due to more models in box. We already know bret archers come in 32.

Like how stormcast became cheaper. Model count doubled, price upped but less than double.

So again, gitz/night goblins will very likely be in the old world at some point with the greenskins, either they have to sell gitz in bigger boxes, cheaper per head, or we have to accept that old world pricing will be... prohibitive.

That's a good point, and may result in TOW having a higher than expected price point owing to built in inefficiency in the tooling.

For those curious, the Bretonnian article is where the bit about box sizes came from.

These regiments and other future regiments are returning in boxes that contain enough plastic miniatures to make a full regiment, not just a rank or two. With the Peasant Bowmen box, you’ll be able to build a unit of 32 archers, complete with a command group and Defensive Stakes.

 Ohman wrote:
This feels like uncharted pricing territory. GW did a made-to-order run for the old 3rd edition 40k starter set minis a couple of years ago: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/12/24/warriors-from-a-bygone-age-return-for-christmas-day-pre-orders/

I think they cost $100.

Apart from that I can't recall GW ever re-releasing minis of this age on this scale.

What's the most expensive army/starter box GW has ever released? I wouldn't be surprised to see this box rival that.

I think that might be a tie between the Grand Master Adeptus Titanicus and Age of Darkness Horus Heresy boxes.

The latter, whilst carrying a £180.00 price tag remains really good value, as it’s positively stuffed with goodies. Certainly enough that buying one sets you well on the way to a proper army.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

MaxT wrote:
A lot of unknowns price wise as you say. It’s a specialist games release so AOS pricing doesn’t really apply. GW have never rereleased a discontinued model kit back into retail before so there is no precedent. This box may be priced aggressively like Age of Darkness, or not so much like Legions Imperialis.

What worries me about pricing is that these old sprues are very inefficient to cast. 4 skellies per tool and you need a separate sprue of bows and shields. The cav is a sprue per 4 riders, a sprue per 2 horses, and again extra bows and shields. Compare to a modern AoS sprue that's one tool for 10 dudes with all gear. ToW will be taking several times as long to manufacture by machine time alone, and packing is more complex too.

That's assuming they haven't retooled them.

 insaniak wrote:
That's assuming they haven't retooled them.

Why would they retool garbage models... And how would that even work, they're not digital sculpts.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Why would they retool garbage models...

Didn't you just comment on how they were inefficient to cast...?


Although I think you might be overstating it somewhat, particularly if the weapon sprues are shared between all of the TK models.

And how would that even work, they're not digital sculpts.

GW were making tools long before there were digital sculpts. They've retooled various pre-digital kits over the years. Just requires the master models. Or, these days, digital scans of those master models.

To be clear, I doubt they have bothered to retool them, as they would have wanted to put as much of the budget as possible into the shiny new models instead... but if they felt that a new tool would result in a big enough productivity increase to justify the expense, it's not out of the question.

It's unlikely "sprue efficiency" is a relatively important factor in pricing. And these products are not priced at a competitive formula that takes into account the cost of their material and cost of production, the way a family restaurant costs it's dishes. Those costs are negligible and the old style sprues probably aren't causing some great delay in their plastic injection molding schedule. It's more just a matter of how far corporate's willing to push it and risk strangling the whole project in the crib.

I have to say it would be hilarious in an "OMG" & "WTF" kind of way if they have re-tooled and redone the sprues, but still use the ancient models on those sprues

Though GW will have made the tooling themselves, I do wonder just how old the files are and what lengths they had to go to in order to get a more modern machine to work with them?

I don't know if there are ways they could repair an existing mould to reduce mould lines; otherwise I wouldn't expect them to retool or remake a really old mould. With digital sculpting GW could easily knock out a bunch of new skeletons.

The bottleneck would be the cost and time of preparing new moulds themsleves. So if they were going to remake the old ones they'd have just invested into new ones.

I'm still curious about the price points. It would be nice to get the old Bret minis for less than ebay recaster price.

But since this is GW, I'm expecting them to make the recasters look cheap in comparison.

I'd expect prices to be at the very least in-line with current releases for AoS or slightly more as we get constant trickle price rises now.

 frankelee wrote:
It's unlikely "sprue efficiency" is a relatively important factor in pricing. And these products are not priced at a competitive formula that takes into account the cost of their material and cost of production, the way a family restaurant costs it's dishes. Those costs are negligible and the old style sprues probably aren't causing some great delay in their plastic injection molding schedule. It's more just a matter of how far corporate's willing to push it and risk strangling the whole project in the crib.

Production efficiency on these kits actually matters a lot, it's not about material usage, it's about time. In the time it takes to produce 1 box of 32 skeletons, they can potentially have produced around 4-8 boxes of a more modern kit (depending on the kit). The machine can only be producing one set of molds at a time, so if you think about the machine staying on the Tomb king skeletons for a day, fo example, it might produce ~2,700 kits for sale (estimated based off my experience with industrial plastics manufacturing)... or you could produce something like 10,800 deathrattle skeleton kits or 21,600 black knights kits instead. When you put that into the context of the sales price of the latter two kits, it's frighteningly obvious that GW is basically leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table per day producing these older kits instead of more modern ones - and if the demand for them is as high as some assume, then that means those machines are going to be tied up producing these kits for a long time (and that alone might be why it's taken GW so long to get this game into production, because I doubt they'd want to to have anything more than the bare minimum of machines allocated to production of such an inefficient product). The only way to offset that inefficiency really is to hike the cost of the kits to offset the time losses, but you can't really price the kits 4-8x higher because then nobody will buy them.

Agree

And I add what I said in the very beginning, this is either much smaller or much bigger than most of us thinks

Maybe GW had the old moulds around, allocated the maximum possible machine time to be cost efficient (simple calculation on how many kits you can produce with old stuff until making new moulds that are better would have been cheaper) and this is everything we get and sold out in seconds

Or they made new moulds with a modern layout to produce like modern AoS kits but have chosen to use the old design for nostalgia reasons and because "original old" sells high on ebay and collectors are willing to pay (without ever playing the game), swarming the market with more than people can buy and attracting new players for the hobby

We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

We know the AoS prices. We don't know the repackaged TOW prices where they will probably be at least double the size.

Vorian wrote:
We know the AoS prices. We don't know the repackaged TOW prices where they will probably be at least double the size.

I'd expect closer to the Marauder price point than the Longbeard one.

Oke those skellys are maybe not the best models but they will go nicely whit my old skellys didnt buy enough when playing tk did have a lot of chariots, the only bret i need are some characters and those footknights. so will buy only the rules or the tk box if there is a nice price.

WorldEdgePlayer wrote:
We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

The Marauder price is a very good indication, as those are the oldest on that list. Some that were nearly as old, got their sprue changed in AoS.

So I think we can safely say that GW will be charging current prices for models that are over 20 years old.
, think the Skeletons are fro the back end of 5th edition WFB. They got a Khemri sprue added when Tomb Kings came out. It had Shields, Command group, skulls with head dresses, and bows & arrow quivers.

I was seriously tempted to start a GW Dwarf army for ToW, but of the prices are going to be what they seem to be, I'll just get the rulebook and use my current collection.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 skeleton wrote:
Oke those skellys are maybe not the best models but they will go nicely whit my old skellys didnt buy enough when playing tk did have a lot of chariots, the only bret i need are some characters and those footknights. so will buy only the rules or the tk box if there is a nice price.

If you want good skeletons, buy the Warlord Skeletons. Absolutely fantastic looking Skeletons. Kit comes with shields, hand weapons, Spears, bows, and arrow quivers. Only thing missing is command groups, bit thise can be made from spare parts.

 stonehorse wrote:

WorldEdgePlayer wrote:
We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

The Marauder price is a very good indication, as those are the oldest on that list. Some that were nearly as old, got their sprue changed in AoS.

So I think we can safely say that GW will be charging current prices for models that are over 20 years old.
, think the Skeletons are fro the back end of 5th edition WFB. They got a Khemri sprue added when Tomb Kings came out. It had Shields, Command group, skulls with head dresses, and bows & arrow quivers.

I was seriously tempted to start a GW Dwarf army for ToW, but of the prices are going to be what they seem to be, I'll just get the rulebook and use my current collection.

This is exactly why I can't see this new game taking off in a way that lasts. The launch sets are probably going to be good value, GW will want the rulebook out in the wild as it gives people with existing collections an excuse to pick something up at least and moves people away from playing the readily available (and free) old editions.

But once the launch kits are done, and we see such discrepancies between AoS and old world kits, which are essentially the same models for some forces, I don't think people are going to want to keep buying 2 €42.50 'aos' kits to make a single unit of old world models. Beastmen are the prime example- boxes of 10 models against the bretts 32. I do not see them shifting a double box of brett models at €85 to match the cost of the aos sets.

Now sure, maybe they will rebox the 10 man kits but then we will either need to see beastmen units completely rechanged in AoS to match, because we know full well GW won't lower the price.

It will be such a mess.

 stonehorse wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

 skeleton wrote:
Oke those skellys are maybe not the best models but they will go nicely whit my old skellys didnt buy enough when playing tk did have a lot of chariots, the only bret i need are some characters and those footknights. so will buy only the rules or the tk box if there is a nice price.

If you want good skeletons, buy the Warlord Skeletons. Absolutely fantastic looking Skeletons. Kit comes with shields, hand weapons, Spears, bows, and arrow quivers. Only thing missing is command groups, bit thise can be made from spare parts.

I love that skeleton kit. It got a bad rap due to some people crying about it on youtube, sure you do need a little more patience when putting them together but its a damn fine serviceable kit and looks properly in scale against WFB kits of the time. The tomb king skeletons are massive in comparison.

If the tomb kings were not getting a re-release then I'd have brought a couple of hundred more of the warlord ones and just used the old TK shields. But I'm happy with the TK ones being a bit bigger, as it separates my vampire counts ones (for which I am sticking with warlord games ones)

WorldEdgePlayer wrote:
We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

Yes. Now what does that tell when they double model count for tow boxes? Hint: it won't be double.

 Mallo wrote:

 stonehorse wrote:

WorldEdgePlayer wrote:
We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

The Marauder price is a very good indication, as those are the oldest on that list. Some that were nearly as old, got their sprue changed in AoS.

So I think we can safely say that GW will be charging current prices for models that are over 20 years old.
, think the Skeletons are fro the back end of 5th edition WFB. They got a Khemri sprue added when Tomb Kings came out. It had Shields, Command group, skulls with head dresses, and bows & arrow quivers.

I was seriously tempted to start a GW Dwarf army for ToW, but of the prices are going to be what they seem to be, I'll just get the rulebook and use my current collection.

This is exactly why I can't see this new game taking off in a way that lasts. The launch sets are probably going to be good value, GW will want the rulebook out in the wild as it gives people with existing collections an excuse to pick something up at least and moves people away from playing the readily available (and free) old editions.

But once the launch kits are done, and we see such discrepancies between AoS and old world kits, which are essentially the same models for some forces, I don't think people are going to want to keep buying 2 €42.50 'aos' kits to make a single unit of old world models. Beastmen are the prime example- boxes of 10 models against the bretts 32. I do not see them shifting a double box of brett models at €85 to match the cost of the aos sets.

Now sure, maybe they will rebox the 10 man kits but then we will either need to see beastmen units completely rechanged in AoS to match, because we know full well GW won't lower the price.

It will be such a mess.

This is entirely my stance and concern, I can't see them removing all these units into triple the unit size they're in now, or likely some bizzaro number like 24 bestigors or whatever (unsure if the sprues mean they can be made in 4s to be clear), but it totally undermines and devalues the sigmar boxes and likely they will need to cease to exist. But then Sigmar is based off a box = a unit, so if you suddenly only ever buy infantry at double/triple the unit size, they're making a convolution of that system.

In short, either sigmar is about to get cheaper or old world is going to be more expensive than people hope.

Don't forget chaos warriors are £37.50 for 10, I'm not really sure GW will do a 20 man box at a comparable price point to what is expected (I'd assume 20 for £50)

tneva82 wrote:

WorldEdgePlayer wrote:
We already know the prices of a few troops for the core factions.
-10 Ungors/Gors: 35$
-10 Bestigors 55$
-20 Chaos Marauders 45$
-20 Night goblins 45$
-20 Savage orcs 60$
.16 Dryads 55$
-10 Flagellants 35$
-10 Longbeards/Ironbreakers/Hammerers 55$

Some of these prices are insane. I used to buy a box of 16 dwarf warriors/longbeards for 22$. Now 10 of them cost 55$...

Yes. Now what does that tell when they double model count for tow boxes? Hint: it won't be double.

If they are cheaper for TOW, than AOS players will just buy them from the TOW site and nobody will buy them from AOS site. You cannot sell 20 Hammerers for 80$ and 10 Hammerers for 55$ on the same GW site. I do realize that one kit will have round bases and the other one square bases. But still, you are on hopium if you think they will be cheaper for TOW vs AOS.

You assume they will do 2 different boxes. What stops them from replacing one with other?

Oh wait gw never replaced box with new that has double models...oh wait they have. It's even been mentioned in this thread.

Some boxes going double size is no big deal for gw.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
It's unlikely "sprue efficiency" is a relatively important factor in pricing. And these products are not priced at a competitive formula that takes into account the cost of their material and cost of production, the way a family restaurant costs it's dishes. Those costs are negligible and the old style sprues probably aren't causing some great delay in their plastic injection molding schedule. It's more just a matter of how far corporate's willing to push it and risk strangling the whole project in the crib.

Production efficiency on these kits actually matters a lot, it's not about material usage, it's about time. In the time it takes to produce 1 box of 32 skeletons, they can potentially have produced around 4-8 boxes of a more modern kit (depending on the kit). The machine can only be producing one set of molds at a time, so if you think about the machine staying on the Tomb king skeletons for a day, fo example, it might produce ~2,700 kits for sale (estimated based off my experience with industrial plastics manufacturing)... or you could produce something like 10,800 deathrattle skeleton kits or 21,600 black knights kits instead. When you put that into the context of the sales price of the latter two kits, it's frighteningly obvious that GW is basically leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table per day producing these older kits instead of more modern ones - and if the demand for them is as high as some assume, then that means those machines are going to be tied up producing these kits for a long time (and that alone might be why it's taken GW so long to get this game into production, because I doubt they'd want to to have anything more than the bare minimum of machines allocated to production of such an inefficient product). The only way to offset that inefficiency really is to hike the cost of the kits to offset the time losses, but you can't really price the kits 4-8x higher because then nobody will buy them.

Added to that will be the fact that some of the older tools may not fit in some of the newer machines (and conversely some of the newer larger tools won't fit in the older machines) there will be a constant juggling act to try and make things as efficient as possible,

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
It's unlikely "sprue efficiency" is a relatively important factor in pricing. And these products are not priced at a competitive formula that takes into account the cost of their material and cost of production, the way a family restaurant costs it's dishes. Those costs are negligible and the old style sprues probably aren't causing some great delay in their plastic injection molding schedule. It's more just a matter of how far corporate's willing to push it and risk strangling the whole project in the crib.

Production efficiency on these kits actually matters a lot, it's not about material usage, it's about time. In the time it takes to produce 1 box of 32 skeletons, they can potentially have produced around 4-8 boxes of a more modern kit (depending on the kit). The machine can only be producing one set of molds at a time, so if you think about the machine staying on the Tomb king skeletons for a day, fo example, it might produce ~2,700 kits for sale (estimated based off my experience with industrial plastics manufacturing)... or you could produce something like 10,800 deathrattle skeleton kits or 21,600 black knights kits instead. When you put that into the context of the sales price of the latter two kits, it's frighteningly obvious that GW is basically leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table per day producing these older kits instead of more modern ones - and if the demand for them is as high as some assume, then that means those machines are going to be tied up producing these kits for a long time (and that alone might be why it's taken GW so long to get this game into production, because I doubt they'd want to to have anything more than the bare minimum of machines allocated to production of such an inefficient product). The only way to offset that inefficiency really is to hike the cost of the kits to offset the time losses, but you can't really price the kits 4-8x higher because then nobody will buy them.

Added to that will be the fact that some of the older tools may not fit in some of the newer machines (and conversely some of the newer larger tools won't fit in the older machines) there will be a constant juggling act to try and make things as efficient as possible,

If all this is true, wouldn't just making new kits be the more profitable option even from a cold, calculating, capitalist point of view?

Especially since GW designers aren't exactly paid a kingly wage.

 kodos wrote:
Agree

And I add what I said in the very beginning, this is either much smaller or much bigger than most of us thinks

Maybe GW had the old moulds around, allocated the maximum possible machine time to be cost efficient (simple calculation on how many kits you can produce with old stuff until making new moulds that are better would have been cheaper) and this is everything we get and sold out in seconds

Or they made new moulds with a modern layout to produce like modern AoS kits but have chosen to use the old design for nostalgia reasons and because "original old" sells high on ebay and collectors are willing to pay (without ever playing the game), swarming the market with more than people can buy and attracting new players for the hobby

There's no way of easily making new moulds of designs this old. They don't exist as digital designs and would have originally been produced as physical 3-ups, which were then pantographed to cut the steel mould. There are methods of making copies of existing moulds but not too easily digitise them and adjust layouts. These are almost certainly the existing moulds, with all the inefficiencies that likely brings.