fritskuhntm wrote:
dear games workshop, you suck. greetings; One Ring
+1
On the positive side, GW's prices have encouraged me to get my butt in gear on my FoW army that has been sitting on my shelf for about a year. It's all metal troops and a mix of metal and (very high detailed) plastics on vehicles. Yes, they have a cost involved as well but let me give a quick comparison...
Posted above indicated how you would have to spend about $75 to get 6 trays worth of figures as each box contains a useless 1/2 tray of each pose. This would give you 4 trays of infantry and 2 trays of archers. To put this in FoW terms that's two platoons, one with 4 squads and one with 2 squads. No Heroes (command) and probably only about 120points if these were point-expensive models. That's not much of a starting army of itself.
Last year I invested about $75 in FoW to get a Panzergrenadier box set. With that box I can field the following (not all official FoW terms but simplified for example):
Command HQ ( 2x Officer squads and two anti-tank squads)
Combat Platoon One (1x Officer squad and three troop squads including one anti-tank squad)
Combat Platoon Two (1x Officer squad and three troop squads including one anti-tank squad)
Heavy Platoon (2x heavy machine gun squads)
Light Anti-Tank Gun Platoon (3x Pak40 gun squads)
Snipers (3x independent sniper squads of two models each)
That comes up to about 1140 points. Consider that a good size FoW game has point values relative to WotR, so typical games and events are played in the 1500 - 1750 range, but anything over 750 can be a fun game (game seems to balance out starting between 1000 and 1200, just like WotR, and continues well to 2000 which is as high as I've seen). So for $75 you can get an infantry army that will play well even against tank armies.
If you want to add some armor into that force then for about $40 you can get a box set of tanks that will add between 500 and 600 points (again, including a command squad). So you could pick up two such sets for $80 and have a decent start to a tank army of 1000 - 1200 points.
As in real live combined arms is usually the most effective so you can see that for about $160 investment you can have over 2000 points of combined infantry and armor. This isn't a perfectly balanced force obviously but it really is playable and fun and the price to get the specific squads you want in smaller sets doesn't come out any worse than it does getting these larger boxes and the boxes are easier for demonstration purposes.
What can you get from GW for $160, especially after this next change goes in?