"Update the Squats!" Topic

You were asked – TMP link

Which 40K Race/Faction Needs Updating the Most?

24% said "Squats"
10% said "Slann"
8% said "Eldar"

Which they are doing. The first squat figure is already out, I have one painted, although it hasn't been used in a game yet. The new Necromunda supplement has a stat-line for squats in the Venator gang list. So if you want to see more of them, buy the one they have out now.

I still love the "reset the clock" video GW made for that. Bad Old GW wouldn't have done that in a billion years.

How will I know where anything is at if I clean off my desk?

They are called Forge Fathers now, keep up.

link

I do hope GW is paying TMP for doing market research for them.

They are called Forge Fathers now, keep up.

That is like telling your child to clean their room, them not doing it, and then you doing it for them. If we accept Not-Squats form another manufacturer, GW won't learn anything.

Wrong, in both cases.

You clean your kids Room and redecorate at the same time. Unless your boys into fairies or girls into horror, it will work well.

GW will learn that, if they don't make it for their fans to buy, someone else will. Money is all GW understands, and if you give yours to someone else, they will get the message.

They also loose out on popularity. Who is the go to big comp for space dwarves? GW or Mantic/other manufacturers? Only one has a full range available, thus are more popular to people buying these types of figures. Same with space rats and fantasy bad dwarves also and others.

I'll add that GW run the risk of looking like they are copying Mantic/others if they bring out new Squats, at least to many of the teeming masses of newbie gamers.

Most people dislike Lego "knockoffs", not realising Lego is a knockoff of Kiddicraft.

Anyone who says that Forgefathers are Squats, doesn't get it.

The proportions are totally different, as is the size and the character. It's like the difference between original Space Marines and the new Primaris Marines.

I doubt any new GW Squats will be the same as the old ones, probably no more similar than the Mantic version. Like the new space marines being so different, or Necrons, or Tyranids, or so on and on…

So die hard 80s GW Squat fans will still be disappointed if GW release new versions, just at a higher price than any disappointment served up by Mantic.

Probably no AK's for the new Runts.

Do people actually want Squats to come back, or is it just another one of those things GW haters cite as a reason to justify their continued grudge against the company?

You don't have to hate GW to be annoyed when they can your fav army or game. Again, even if they do bring them back, I doubt Squat fans will be happy with what they look like.

Does anyone even know why Squats were dropped in the first place? My guess is they did not sell well enough.

My take on it is this:

Squats in 40k were a bit of a hodge podge – some were biker gang inspired, some were Viking inspired, some were runty little short humans.

Squats were much more cohesive, form a design standpoint, in Epic – and probably sold (comparably) better in Epic than in 40k.

In the 2nd Edition era, the early multi-part plastic troop boxes were being replaced by blocky, easier to build, less customizable plastics – RTB001 Beakies replaced by "Statue Marines", Ork Boyz replaced by "Statue Orks and Grots"… and some – (IG and Squats) just disappeared (this is also when the Ork Battlewagon and SM Land Raider were discontinued). This means that GW would have to resculpt the Squats.
I have heard rumors (from people who were in a place to know) that some at the studio wanted to redo them in a "cowboy" style (which struck me as so ridiculous, that it must have been leg pulling). The play style of Squat armies also changed significantly from the Rogue Trader (v1)/Battle Manual (v1.5) era, with living ancestors suddenly becoming not only deadly psykers, but also butt-kicking combat heroes. Long and short of it was that the Squats did not get resculpted, were not given a Codex, and were left out of future editions.

Squats were not the only things to start disappearing around then – not only did the earlier mentioned Battlewagon and Land Raider cease production, the Imperial Guard/Army plastic box set was discontinued, and it became harder and harder to field IG armies.

There was also a significant delay in getting IG rescuplted in plastic – resulting in huge sales for the first new IG box set that did come out (Catachans) even though it was among the worst of the metal IG regiment box sets – and those sales numbers were used to select catachans as the first new plastic IG (smh) – GW later went with plastic Cadians (who were pretty much everyone's #1 or #2 choice of the IG regiments, and should probably have been the first plastic IG set).

Then, when ramping up towards 3rd edition, the "fringe army" sought by the player base was an army that had been mentioned in the fluff, but hadn't existed yet – Dark Eldar – and 3rd ed saw them finally being produced – even if most of those who had been most vocal about wanting them were not very happy with the initial DE releases.

Other lines which had not been fully developed – Star Slann, monsters (the Ambull), Zoats, etc. were also left behind around that period. It seems that, having removed the models form production, GW decided that writing them out of the rules was the best way to avoid people asking for them.

Good info. Thank you.

Sgt Harker says "Cheers" for the info…

This has been floating around for a while, but this is Jervis Johnson from Games Workshop on the demise of the Squats.

"I know I shouldn't get drawn on this… but… can't… resist
Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.

First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantities that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.

No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats – what *were* we thinking?!?!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realised what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regretted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.

Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by.
Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendency to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.

In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based on the Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more likely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain prejudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell…

I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with existing army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules…" Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.

Best regards,
Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic

If there had been a few people at the studio that pushed for Squats in 2nd ed to become what AdMech are now – Imperials with a lot of freaky tech, robots, etc. – they probably would have done fine.