Empire: New Plastic Steam Tank Assembled

Hey guys, here are some shots of the plastic steam tank after assembly. All in all it's a cool model and you do get a plastic engineer (as useful as that hero is on his own). Nevertheless the problems of the steam tank's price bring what should be excitement over this new kit down quite hard. Comment away!

Empire: New Plastic Steam Tank in Hand

Hey Guys, Our LGS just got in a new plastic steam tank for the store which I get to assemble for them. This thing is on 2 sprues (likely to be 3 in the box - its one large one that can be separated into two smaller ones) and yet it costs the same as a valkyrie or landraider. This is absolutely ridiculous. There is less plastic in the steam tank kit than a freaking tactical squad of marines. This along with the goldswords is just bad all around. Your thoughts?

Yes, those three sprues are all there is to the plastic steam tank. A great model to be sure, lots of details, but let's be honest, there's just not much there, especially when compared to the following: plastic giant, plastic HE dragon, and especially the new plastic stegadon! Comment away!

News: New Terrain and Empire Battalion up for Preorder!

Just put up on the Games Workshop site are the Temple of Skulls scenery piece (doubles for 40K and Fantasy) as well as a new Empire Batallion (the batallion includes the new greatswords)

Empire Batallion

Temple of Skulls

Couple things here - the pricing on the temple is a bit weird at $29.75 - why not just go $29.99? Also, interestingly the Empire Batallion didn't have a price listed (at the time of writing) - perhaps the price on the new plastic Greatswords won't go up to over $40 for ten, or maybe they'll price this batallion much higher than other ones to match the increased price of the Greatswords... time will tell. The terrain piece certainly looks sweet and I'll probably pick one up, a little bit of conversion and it could work for Tomb Kings and/or Vampire Counts, possibly Dark Elves as well. Your thoughts?

Fantasy News: Empire 3rd Wave

This summer Empire generals are getting a splash of new releases including the first ever plastic Steam Tank, plastic Greatswords, plastic Archers (huntsmen), and a cool looking book dealing with uniforms and fluff of the Empire. As if that's not enough, there are a few new metal captains which look great, and a magnificent new sculpt of Marius Leitdorf!

Games Workshop has just put all of these up on the advanced orders page!


Check them out individually here:


Empire Steam Tank

Empire Greatswords

Empire Archers

Marius Leitdorf

Captain with hammer and pistol

Captain with sword and shield

Uniforms & Heraldry of the Empire



There is some good and some bad with all of these new releases. The good - it's nice to have the Empire at 100% plastic now. The Uniforms and Heraldry book will also be awesome, hopefully they do something like this for all of the armies! Now for the bad - The price on 10 plastic greatswords is $41.25! W T F?! This is another in a long line of bizarre GW prices. There was that huge blunder with the pricing of the modular gaming board, then the Valkyrie price going up from $50 to $58, and now just straight up crazy prices for this greatsword set. They're not much cheaper than a box of 10 metals at this point. Vampire Counts got plastic Grave Guard (another elite infantry unit, 10 per box) for $22.50. Plastic Greatswords are almost double that for the same amount of minis and they're roughly equivalent on the battlefield (I'd probably give the edge to Graveguard being undead etc). The box does come with a bunch of extra bits (including some extra variant heads etc) but that hardly justifies such a ridiculous price! The plastic Steam Tank is going for nearly $60 as well! I was planning on building up a unit of 20 plastic Greatswords, but not for $85. I might just get the heraldy book with the prices looking like they do. With another price increase coming in June, it looks like you can go ahead and tack on another $2-3 or so for a lot of box sets. Is GW pricing itself out of what the range of what people are willing to spend on the hobby (given the state of the economy etc)? I'm going to have to say pass on the new Empire plastics. What do you guys think?

Update: WIP Priest of Ulric

Small update. Here are some WIP shots of a priest of Ulric. I'm going to do a small Ulric-themed Empire army - none of that Sigmar stuff :)

Update: Some reinforcements

Picked up some small reinforcements in the form of a Helblaster/Helstorm. Parts will be going for Dogs of War conversion while the gun will go towards parts of an Empire army. I'm going to see if its possible to magentize the weapons so that I can switch between either version depending on the opponent :)