If you have been following me for any amount of time at all, you know I complain about Games Workshop a lot. Not only are they holding Warhammer 40,000 hostage with at best 50/50 odds of any new piece of lore being garbage, they're also very averse to technological innovation.
Namely, Games Workshop didn't have an official army builder till the previous edition. At best, you could go on the website and have an army builder for Age of Sigmar that came without any of the unit stats.
An army builder that doesn't preview or printout stats is barely better than using pen and paper. So why make one like that? Because GW suits would blood eagle themselves and Goebbels their own family before releasing free army books.
This rant is powerful enough to have headings
I think the reason behind it is that GW just really, really loves selling books. There's some twisted sense in that: you may feasibly buy a Dark Angels army once, but you're not going to re-buy it every year. However, with rulebooks and army lists, and yearly balance sheets, and index astartes, and campaign books, you can make the players buy them again and again.
The way books reshape the meta may also lead to the players rebuying parts of their armies, which is a bonus. AMAs indicate that it had been a deliberate policy under Kirby when, say, Wraithknights very deliberately left undercosted, but I also believe that the flux in meta is due to GW being dogshit at writing and balancing the game.
It doesn't help that army books aren't all released at the same time when a new edition comes, so this sequential (rather than parallel) development leads to power creep like nobody's business. It got so bad that at one point GW just rolled back all the changes they had done to Adeptus Mechanicus since their book released out of powerlessness.
In fact, the rules part of 40K books become obsolete almost as they come out (that may have literally been the case with the Squat rerelease), but it all works out in GW favor because of their customer base:
This man pre-orders.
Now, the 10th edition launched with free (if incredibly boring) army lists and basic rules, with the Warhammer App updated to the point of actually being useful while it's free. The 9th edition introduction of said app was less than stellar, with the basic rules option opening a PDF on Google Drive and army lists only being available if you input the code for the book you purchased.
So what did people do before?
Community steps in
Suffer
BattleScribe is a free army builder app where the most massive nerdlingers on the web make army lists for basically any game under the sun. I mostly experienced it as a Horus Heresy player since Horus Heresy never had even a whiff of digital support.
HH list was maintained by some of the most beardy grogs around. It would go into some insanely awful design decisions, like splitting a Veteran Tactical unit down to where you had to equip each guy individually, or having a weapon option list where some options where tick boxes and others had a number write-in.
The HH repository mutated more than a Warp Spawn and at some point was too cumbersome to run on my phone.
Naturally, this meant that BattleScribe wasn't the only utility out there, with random Russians or whatever always trying to make their own web-based builders.
Now, speaking of entirely insane Russians: motherfucking Wahapedia
Wahapedia deserves its own H2 heading
Wahapedia is a project by a guy ostensibly named Vyacheslav Maltsev. That GW hasn't moved mountains to hire and extradite him from Russia shows that nobody running that company should ever be entrusted with anything more complex than a lemon stand.
Wahapedia is a hyperlinked and graphically friendly compendium of all the 40K, AoS and Kill Team rules. Every last profile or bit of rules spread over rulebooks, codexes, indexes, White Dwarf articles and Warhammer Community entries is there. Everything is linked and annotated with sources. Some common special rules have mouse-over pop ups.
It is both extremely functional and looks very good, all in the service of a bad game.
If GW could be finally convinced to stop killing trees for the extra buck and release rules digitally and for free, Maltsev would THE GUY to tap to maintain them.
Especially considered how dogshit the new Warhammer website revamp is or how many troubles they've had with any of their army builder apps.
<insert rant about how capitalism doesn't foster innovation, and that people have always done more impressive things without a profit incentive>
Lil' guys do it better
Of course, you may abloo bloo and ask whether GW is unique in all this garbage approach to gaming. And no, it is not:
- Notable garbage game Flames of War/Team Yankee has paid lists.
- WarMahordes may have it.
- Mantic's army builder limits you to 2 free lists per game, but you get all the units stats and shit.
However, at the same time, you have
- Infinity, which had a rules wiki since N2 and a free army builder that hyperlinked to said wiki. The understanding has always been that you buy the books to support horny Spanish weebs.
- Warlord Games heroically not going after EasyArmy, even if they do love publishing books.
- By Fire and Sword is some Poles making an early modern game nobody west of Polish-German border is interested in.
- Baron's War, an early medieval skirmish game for grogs.
- Conquest, the one game more expensive than GW and more complicated than WHFB.
In conclusion, fuck Relic for making Dawn of War in 2004 and thus making me fall in love with Space Marines and 40K as a whole.
