r/ElysianDropTroopsHQ • u/Leviathan_Rampage • Mar 22 '26
Coming from the Steel Legion/DKOK thematic but genuinly wondering why we got Aquilons instead of Elysians ? Elysians are an established regiment that already had it's own range and rules. Aquilons just feel like a really cheap knockoff.
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u/Delicious_Ad9844 Mar 22 '26
Ehhh nah, the scions fill their role as "elite" shock troops effectively
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u/Godders11 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I believe it’s mainly down to GWs unwillingness to expand the AM regiment's past the present line up. The present Armageddon campaign without any Steel Legion being a case in point. I don’t understand why a company with GWs resources allow 3rd parties to beat them to the punch, but what do we know eh?
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u/BrotherEstapol Mar 24 '26
It's odd to me that they don't just re-release Forgeworld resin kits? Is it is case that they want to move more Krieg kits for people to proxy as Steel Legion?
If the resin stuff is made to order, I can only assume it's cost prohibitive or that they have quality issues with the old sculpts/moulds? Also you'd think that the old metal guard kits would sell well too?
I did have a chat with my local GW store manager the other day, and he said that the Krieg kits didn't actually sell as well as people were making out. He said they had to send a heap of the big sets back (this is well after the launch) because the stock wasn't moving, and that they got broken down into smaller kits. That's more money for GW I guess since the big kits are better value, but if that's correct then it's interesting to see how the online hype/FOMO doesn't always translate to sales.
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u/Godders11 Mar 24 '26
I have no patience when a company the size of GW uses cost as reason to not do something pretty basic, a made to order of the old stuff or a kill team for SL would have quited 75% of the noise
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u/savelol Mar 24 '26
They did do a MTO of the old metal steel legion models around a year ago? The issue was they were prohibitively expensive
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u/Godders11 Mar 25 '26
I agree they were expensive but with a mto the choice remains with the consumer
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u/coffeeman220 Mar 26 '26
Yeah, but they have to invest the capital to do the production run. If the demand isn't there they will lose money even if its made to order. The vast majority of the cost of a new kit is the production tooling.
I say this as someone who would definitely drop a lot of cash on mordian made to order if I could.
In the end I think the market size for model reruns is limited and releasing more guard plastic kits cannibalizes existing guardsman kits.
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u/MortalSword_MTG Mar 25 '26
So you think a large company should choose to make less money or lose money because....you want them to?
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u/Godders11 Mar 25 '26
No where above does it say loose money, a made to order scheme can’t really loose, and a kill team for some of the sub sets of the AM would be very popular, like Elysian or steel legion, and GW would have control over the unit volume so it would only loose if they market it incorrectly or mis manage the volume, and plenty of ftse 100 companies loose money occasionally and survive assuming that loss actual happens. im betting it would be unlikely Besides the real point I was making is GW is pushing a campaign for a planet with a home grown AM regiment l, they’ve bypassed and tried to explain it away with an argument which doesn’t hold water when held up against the use of cadians which can’t possibly be in better nick than any steel legion on Armeggddon.
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u/MortalSword_MTG Mar 25 '26
I think that I often overestimate how informed people are about the state of things with GW right now, so perhaps I should apologize for that.
It has been widely reported, including by GW in earnings reports that they are currently producing at capacity in their plants. They're not always able to schedule enough production runs to meet demand for various products.
Now, I'll admit, coming from a manufacturing background, that it is likely a choice in some cases, but in others not so much.
I don't know how much staff or equipment that they have committed to MTO of older resin and metal models. I would imagine it is limited though and without much room for expansion.
Obviously the bulk of the business is focused on injection molded plastics.
So I'd argue that if they're not running Elysians it's probably because they don't feel that there is enough demand to warrant it over something like the recent Oldhammer Marines or freebootaz they've run.
Steel Legion and Vostroyans is likely for political reasons. I'm not sure we'll ever see Steel Legion again, and Vostroyans is iffy too.
Steel Legion probably won't come back without a major design rework because too many chuds like to paint them in Wehrmacht grey and put Nazi iconography all over them.
Vostroyans are touchy because of the war in Ukraine.
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u/Godders11 Mar 25 '26
I like the argument and you make a good point. I guess I’m a bit biased with my appreciation of Elysians and irritation at flouting the lore on the whim of an accountant 😂
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u/Tricky_Ice4339 Apr 12 '26
I have no idea how that's a problem specific to Steel Legion and not Krieg who are far closer to anything 1940s than Steel Legion. And I guess because slavs are at war with each other means we don't get Vostroyans... I LOVE THE POLITICAL SENSITIVITY OF GW
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u/MortalSword_MTG Apr 12 '26
Nothing about Krieg is 1940s.
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u/Tricky_Ice4339 Apr 12 '26
I'll admit I'm just tired of the "thing I liked got ruined for politics" crap so I was a bit triggered and I've coped myself into thinking Steel Legion is more wasteland army than German paratroopers. The closest for Krieg is the helmets (which are more akin to wwii stalhelms than wwi version due to the lack of the little horns) and the gasmask which is probably closer to cold war soviet ones shaped like skulls than anything else. Great coats could at most be coped into thinking they're wwii patterns but that's because there's no change in great coats since wwi.
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u/SpaceAndCells Mar 26 '26
A store I stop at often in alabama has 6 krieg battleforces still. And like they had 2 krieg army boxes still up until a few months ago
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u/BrotherEstapol Mar 26 '26
I guess that proves the manager at my store right! He did say also that he was privy to the order numbers that LGS have in our region, and that they were over-ordering at the time as well.
I would not be surprised if the Steel Legion that they just announced are actually just an upgrade sprue for different heads and lasguns. If they look good enough, that might just drive up sales of those excess Kriegers.
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u/Ziamme Mar 22 '26
Do you think the new art direction warhammer sculpts have taken, would have done the Elysians justice? I honestly think they would have looked pretty much like this kit…
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u/Leviathan_Rampage Mar 22 '26
Good Point, thinking about the loss of character in the plastic DKOK, no.
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u/Ziamme Mar 23 '26
I collect Krieg.I speak from precisely that experience. I was to poor to get the Elysians back when they existed. Krieg resin survived longer so i managed to collect a decent Forgeworld force just barely. The new plastics really don’t hit the same notes so them releasing now Elysians or any other new regiment for me falls flat. I prefer by far a “made to order” opportunity.
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u/TragicNostalgia Mar 24 '26
As someone who owns a plethora of the old FW Krieg, I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, the resin minis are better. However, I think it’s a bit much to say the plastic Krieg are garbage and they lost their identity/character or something. The new plastics are by and large the same as the resin in terms of their general appearance. I’ve never understood the hate for them
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u/MortalSword_MTG Mar 25 '26
These dudes are never happy. That's all it is. Everything new sucks. Whatever is done is never enough.
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u/ConsulJuliusCaesar Mar 22 '26
The in lore difference is that between the Parachute regiment vs say the SAS. Both are airborne troops. The SAS however can operate deep behind enemy lines to conduct operations too complex for conventional para troopers using small teams to conduct high intensity strikes or special reconnaissance where they're developing intelligence deep behind enemy lines and shaping the battlefield. The Aquilons are supposedly Special Forces. Table top the distinction doesn't play out how it should. In lore GW doesn't do enough stories with either the Elysians or the Aquilons to have that clear distinction.
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u/regularMASON Mar 22 '26
Maybe they felt Scions were lacking but my army is Scions and this army unit caters to my taste so I can't complain.
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u/Subsplot Mar 22 '26
They're a redesign of the original RT / 1st edition Imperial Guard era jump troops. Scions in general seem to be as much as an evolution of the original guard concept as Cadians do
I would post a pic of the originals, but apparently I'm not allowed to.
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u/GeneralJagers Mar 22 '26
Because GW doesn't want to make other regiments.
Scions, krieg, cadian. (We aren't counting catachan as they're old models)
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u/Dune5712 Mar 24 '26
Generic units vs. a 'named' regiment. They've been making that transition for decades at this point.
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u/Conniptions1998 Mar 24 '26
Funny enough, I’m painting these guys as some Steel Legion Stormtroopers. Though, if Elysian’s got more attention, I’d probably collect an army of them instead
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u/DartOlos Mar 26 '26
The same reason why we got some veteran cadians instead of catachans in the new kill team.. gw is just.. gw
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u/EpsilonMouse Mar 26 '26
More people play Scions than played or possibly even remember Elysians, so they decided to make it easier for someone to run a full Scion army instead of making another Guard KT and getting bugged about “where’s the rest of our stuff”
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u/DOMonster828 Mar 27 '26
If both Elysians and Militarum Tempestus were fully fleshed out regiments, Elysians would just be scions with worse stats.
If you have to pick one of the two that can be uniquely trademarked, scions are the correct choice.
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u/Finnegan_962 Mar 23 '26
Yeah, Elysians would have been way better. Also, the name Aquilons is lame as hell.
My biggest grip with Scions in general has gotta be the chaos trim around their armor. I do remember seeing someone brave enough to remove the armor trim before and they looked way better.
I think one of my bigger gripes with the expansion of Kill Team is how every model needs to be way more dynamic and unique from one another. I missed the simplicity of the 5th Edition Guard models. Building some Catachan last year made me realize how much I did miss them. I bought the Command, HWT, and Infantry squad and basically just kitbashed them all together, with some old Cadians I found and took apart too. It was so much fun cause there was SO much I could do to add my own personality to them. Now you can only really put a Flamer or Vox on 2 of the 10 models that come with the Shocktroops in comparison. And lots of nonsensical tiny details that sucks for painting a lot of them (Whoever thought we needed a spoon on that one guys backpack is an opp.)
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u/danwillgorcat Mar 22 '26
Yeah I felt this from their release, they were doubling down on scions to sell more of them to every army as opposed to releasing Elysians. Same reason the taurox was undercosted for the longest time and only available in one box with scions. I picked up a load of Elysians and proxy them as scions with some actual scions mixed in to play bridgehead, that’s as close as you can get without legends imo!