I'd really like to have more heavy stormtroopers and snowtroopers (particularly snowtroopers).

I don't suppose people think there's any chance of these ever getting an expansion pack like the regular stormtroopers.

It seems quite wasteful to have to buy the full Twin Shadows and Hoth just to get the troopers, particularly since duplicate heroes, Wampas, etc. don't have a lot of value.

I think it's a fine idea.

The main issue is, unless they come packaged with some real goodies, there wouldn't be much incentive for campaign players to pick them up, so you're diluting the demographic of an already pretty fringe (but obviously fun) community. Maybe, for instance, the heavy stormtrooper pack could come with a cool mission that utilizes both Chewbacca and the Royal Guard champ duking it out on Kashyyyk, and has a tier 3 rocket launcher item card.

Overall, I just kind of wish we'd get the max deployment groups from now on. Kind of frustrating having two regular and one elite cards for snowtroopers when we only have enough minis for two groups (and in skirmish, could technically field 5).

I'd be quite fine with FFG releasing packs for them (and Jet Troopers, too), but I wouldn't count on it happening. I don't have much to back that up with, aside from the fact that we've only gotten one such pack in the past. The bright side is you *might* be able to find Snowtroopers at a decent price on the secondary market if people have picked up second copies of Hoth for the HK Assassin Droids. Heavy Stormtroopers are probably less likely, because they're probably the thing in Twin Shadows people would want extras of (unless they really wanted a Tusken theme list).

I haven't found any snowtroopers available on the U.S. secondary market at all or I would have purchased them.

I would think trooper expansions would be very good sellers given how popular army building and painting are in this hobby. I'm surprised they only released the stormtrooper expansion. I mean, they already have the molds done.

But I'm pretty skeptical we will ever see these. I wish there was a secondary market for the hero minis if you have to order the whole box expansion to just get the troopers.

Ah, to dream...

@jscott991 I'm super new to IA, but for the sake of at least playing the list that you want to, couldn't you proxy the cards you need and have a stand in figure or other token to represent the Heavy & Snow troopers?

I understand having the official game pieces & cards would be best, but until there are stand alone packs for those figures or you break down and buy another copy of the T.Shadows/Hoth set, it would be one solution.

I definitely have used regular stormtroopers as "heavy" stormtroopers in one test skirmish using Twin Shadows pieces. It's not a bad solution at all.

At the moment, I'd like more snowtroopers because my painting abilities improved dramatically between my first one and my sixth one and I'm not confident I can strip the paint off the first one.

1 hour ago, subtrendy said:

The main issue is, unless they come packaged with some real goodies, there wouldn't be much incentive for campaign players to pick them up, so you're diluting the demographic of an already pretty fringe (but obviously fun) community. Maybe, for instance, the heavy stormtrooper pack could come with a cool mission that utilizes both Chewbacca and the Royal Guard champ duking it out on Kashyyyk, and has a tier 3 rocket launcher item card.

I understand that in that they obviously want to sell as much of any given product as possible, but the flipside is that campaign players might feel like they're being tricked into buying expensive plastic that they don't need just to get a couple of cards or something. I have zero interest in another pair of heavy stormtrooper figures, but I'd probably still want that rocket launcher and I'd feel pretty bad paying 15 euros for it. I'm no marketing person, but it seems to me like more specialised packs would be the more customer friendly solution.

1 hour ago, Villakarvarousku said:

I understand that in that they obviously want to sell as much of any given product as possible, but the flipside is that campaign players might feel like they're being tricked into buying expensive plastic that they don't need just to get a couple of cards or something. I have zero interest in another pair of heavy stormtrooper figures, but I'd probably still want that rocket launcher and I'd feel pretty bad paying 15 euros for it. I'm no marketing person, but it seems to me like more specialised packs would be the more customer friendly solution.

I guess it could go both ways. The nice thing about a snowtrooper pack is that, unlike the stormtroopers, they're plastic that could actually go to use in campaign (we're technically still one group short. Same goes for Heavies, wing guards, and jet troopers.

I don't know if it's necessarily fair to see it as "tricking" players. It's not like you'd be expecting a pack of Zabrak Assassins and end up with Snowtroopers. Rather, it's an incentive, much like how in X-Wing, the Imp Raider included Palpatine much as an incentive for even players who might not be totally interested in the main event of the Raider release. I guess what it comes down to is, how much is Palpatine/a rocket launcher worth to you?

I want my Zabrak Assassins!

@subtrendy Nailed it.

Skirmish expansion packs for figures that cannot be used due to campaign limitations makes these packs a tough sell.

The stormtrooper pack is the one expansion pack I wish I had skipped. Poses are far too similar and the agenda reward, while nice, hasn’t seen any play yet.

I’ve mentioned this in a ton of other posts, but seriously, including item cards in the Greedo/Inquisitor/Obi-wan packs was brilliant.

Expansion packs independent from boxsets (Hird guns/ISB enforcers) are way more appealing because they can easily be selected as an open group.

Expansion packs containing deployment cards from a boxset need to have way more general goodies. Item cards, alternate class decks for core heroes, new damage tokens, damage tracking wheels/cards, etc.

I honestly think these things would sell just to people who want to paint and display them, in addition to everyone who would like to use the full deployment groups included in Twin Shadows and Hoth (I don't have Jabba, but I think the issue is the same there).

3 hours ago, subtrendy said:

I guess it could go both ways. The nice thing about a snowtrooper pack is that, unlike the stormtroopers, they're plastic that could actually go to use in campaign (we're technically still one group short. Same goes for Heavies, wing guards, and jet troopers.

I don't know if it's necessarily fair to see it as "tricking" players. It's not like you'd be expecting a pack of Zabrak Assassins and end up with Snowtroopers. Rather, it's an incentive, much like how in X-Wing, the Imp Raider included Palpatine much as an incentive for even players who might not be totally interested in the main event of the Raider release. I guess what it comes down to is, how much is Palpatine/a rocket launcher worth to you?

Yeah, "tricked" was a poor word choice. Incentive is closer to what I meant, but I'm still not a huge fan of it and I'd rather see these as a dedicated skirmish expansion. I've never found myself wanting to simultaneously run three groups of heavies or snowtroopers in campaign, and chucking a juicy campaign card in an expansion that's mainly valuable for skirmish feels to me like a bit of a dodgy move. Maybe that's just me, and I can definitely understand that.

I guess I just don't entirely get why they would be so afraid of catering a product to a particular subgroup of their customers. Then again, I'm probably the least business-oriented person in the world so that could well be where I went wrong in the first place.

The cost of the ally/villain packs are INSANELY high, they make even Games Workshop figures look cheap. You should almost be glad they don't offer these packs. Most of the time you can simply proxy the figures, or even buy figures from some of the old miniatures games. They tend to be $0.25-$0.75 per figure. For the price of one ally pack of 2 heavy storm troopers you could get 30 proxy figures.

18 minutes ago, Union said:

The cost of the ally/villain packs are INSANELY high, they make even Games Workshop figures look cheap. You should almost be glad they don't offer these packs. Most of the time you can simply proxy the figures, or even buy figures from some of the old miniatures games. They tend to be $0.25-$0.75 per figure. For the price of one ally pack of 2 heavy storm troopers you could get 30 proxy figures.

By this logic, I could just use tokens.

11 hours ago, jscott991 said:

I'd really like to have more heavy stormtroopers and snowtroopers (particularly snowtroopers).

I don't suppose people think there's any chance of these ever getting an expansion pack like the regular stormtroopers.

It seems quite wasteful to have to buy the full Twin Shadows and Hoth just to get the troopers, particularly since duplicate heroes, Wampas, etc. don't have a lot of value.

Actually, I have some extra Snowtroopers that I would be willing to part with. They're already primed white for painting purposes. Or I could sell you a group of my painted Snowtroopers (they're obviously not professional quality but they're good for tabletop standard and I'm happy with how they turned out). PM me if you're interested in either option (the primed ones or the fully painted ones).

While they might sell, I don't think they would sell enough to make them viable (without 'incentives', but that just makes people feel exploited if they are buying something they don't want the actual figures).

Consider, it costs FFG time and money to design the packs, even with the figures already done. It costs them production capacity to release them, something they already seem to struggle with. It costs retailers shelf space, that could be used on other IA products. And what percentage of IA players are really going to want more? 5%? 10%? I'd say for the vast majority of players, they are happy with what we've got (if they use them at all), or are willing to proxy.

The only way I could really see this working is being able to order specific minis directly, and that doesn't seem to be something FFG wants to do (or is capable of doing?).

yeah, they'd never make their money back. And the cost of the set is really not that much if you shop around and maybe resale the items you don't need. Im way more interested in them helping build the skirmish community than re-releasing/re-packaging items we already have access to and frankly don't really need IMO. I've always wanted to run 2 elite tusken raiders and a bantha rider, but it's not enough for me to purchase another twin shadows box, since I'd probably only play it once, can print the card out if I'm that desperate or borrow the card from a friend and really there is nothing in that box that isn't probably overpriced point-wise or that great to begin with, heavy storm-troopers included.

I think they'd make their money back easily. But there's no way to really know that (of course, if stormtroopers weren't popular, you wonder why every expansion includes some silly variant of them).

I always assumed that they didn't make enough figures to represent all the deployment cards because they intended to make expansion packs, but the packs for the heavy troopers and snowtroopers never came, so I guess I was wrong.

they don't make as many figures because by design, you never use that many in a campaign. the game started and for some reason is driven by the campaign, which is a very limited market IMO, if skirmish drove the market and was the intent of the game or a stand alone game, everything would be available in the smaller figure packs and you'd get even distribution of deployment cards to figures.

They might make their money back if they made just the figure, but the printing of the various cards and having multiple figures in a pack and the cost of packaging = less profit margin. Look at the Reaper Bones miniatures (similar quality) they sell $3 a figure but there is only a figure, thin cheap plastic and a cardboard cardback with limited color. The packaging alone is a lot more expensive, there are 1-3 figures, multiple molds for some of the figure sets (R2, C3PO = less profit margin) and then multiple sized, texture, full color cards and instructions that are included. There is less profit margin there then you imagine.

6 hours ago, jscott991 said:

I think they'd make their money back easily.

Interesting to note that corebox developer Jonathan Ying wasn't overly optimistic about the stormtrooper pack:

Quote

Favorite mission? Ha, I think I've got two, and they are not often played unfortunately: Bunker Buster, which has a sort of payload objective (from the Stormtroopers Pack, which is a tough sell since we already give you nine of the buggers in a core box.)

Ask IA Developer

And he posted this about 6 months ago (post-stormtrooper pack release).

Can't help but wonder if the "tough sell" comment was based on known sales numbers or just a personal opinion.

37 minutes ago, buckero0 said:

Look at the Reaper Bones miniatures (similar quality) they sell $3 a figure but there is only a figure, thin cheap plastic and a cardboard cardback with limited color.

Unrelated to this discussion, but aren't the Reaper Bones minis smaller (25mm v. about 30mm) and much less detailed?

I don't own any, but that's always been my impression.

I can't help but think that FFG knows packing in great figures within the box sets will help them sell better. For example, the Rancor is a great draw for the Jabba box. If FFG had a precedence of releasing packs of figures from the boxes, it may cause people to be less interested in pre-ordering the boxes and wait to buy the figure pack later.

I'm not advocating that they move things like the Rancor out of the box to a single pack. But it seems to me that things like the stormtroopers should always be available as an expansion pack.

I don't think anyone would skip on Hoth or Twin Shadows if the Snowtroopers or heavy Stormtroopers were also available as a 3 pack.

11 hours ago, buckero0 said:

they don't make as many figures because by design, you never use that many in a campaign. the game started and for some reason is driven by the campaign, which is a very limited market IMO, if skirmish drove the market and was the intent of the game or a stand alone game, everything would be available in the smaller figure packs and you'd get even distribution of deployment cards to figures.

The reason the game is driven by the campaign is that the game IA is based on (Descent) is only campaign based. You have to remember that skirmish was the unknown risk for them, would it be popular? They obviously thought it might be, but had no idea, therefore the campaign has always been the driver for product releases (I guess, apart from the stand alone waves like the upcoming droids) because that is the sales model they know worked for Descent.

Don't be dismissive of the campaign as a market, I have found that most of the people playing it near me (London, UK) are either both campaign and skirmish, or predominantly campaign. Just because they don't blog about army lists (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean there aren't that many of them!

I've always found it weird that the boxes contain tokens for uniques that come in expansions. But not the non uniques.

Wouldn't it have sold better if the boxes came with all the unique figures (ie, you have more reason to buy the box, for the maps AND to be able to play with Leia or whoever) and tokens for all the non uniques like troopers. And then sell them all in figure packs so you can buy as many as you want. Now you'd usually never buy more than one copy of a blister pack, but forced to by two copies of a box full of components you don't want additional copies of, just to get an extra Trandoshan or something.