Who Played Squats/Why were they retconned?

[Denzark]

Well, I did the OP the courtesy of a separate thread to argue why Squats were binned.

Firstly, I played Squats in 2ed. The army rocked. GW support went as far as the Dark Millenium Psychic add-on which had Squat Living Ancestor powers, but never stretched to a 2ed codex.

Were they unpopular? No idea. My gaming circle didn't extend all that far back then. Are they unpopular now? Well I sold my squat army about 3-4years back. 30-40 minis went for over £150. People would go for them in a flash.

GW had started to re-design the miniatures, to focus more on the Viking Warrior/Space Dwarf imagery - check in SOLegends. There was even 2 painted up on one of the 2ed rule books. I understnad that some of the GW wallahs (maybe Jervis?) didn't like the whole 'Bikers in space/John Blanche clone thing, and they didn't adequately translate from their fantasy equivalents - most armies did at the time. So hence they disappeared for 3rd.

Now I don't know but believe the story about tyrannid devouring them didn't come out until Jervis was p*ssed with people continuously asking aboout them and wanted a nuclear option to stop the questions -some point around 4ed. I believe the first official appearance of this in canon was in a map in the 4ed marine codex, although if you are a terrible pedant and know better please feel free to correct...

Just remember Black library still sells the 1993 Ian Watson book Space Marine, who has squats in it - the blurb on the site refers to 'the background to the Warhammmer 40000 universe still being in a state of flux' so probably is the inquisition trying to warp your young minds about the truth of Squats...

[Kirsten]

The problem basically was that they couldn't be worked into the game. They weren't dropped for third edition, they never got a proper second edition entry. The designers at the time stated that try as they might, they simply couldn't come up with a concept for them that was both interesting and in the character of the universe. So the second edition codex never got written, a few new models were made in preparation, but the project never got off the ground due to this lack of direction.

[Old_Paladin]

I never played them, but there were many, many reason for them being dropped.

They were a fun/joke-ish army (like orks at the time); dwarves in space (like elves in space and orcs in space), beer drinking bikers.
But as the worlds changed they didn't fit thoses changes. It went from fantasy in space to 40K proper.
Elves in space became Eldar; they still had common elements (downfall and split of their race, wars against chaos, etc.), but started to become their own unique peoples.
Same with Orcs in space becoming Orks.
Dwarves in space always stayed that; as other groups began to seperate from their fantasy parents and become more and more different, squats just stayed dwarves with boltguns.

It's like that Slann; they are now a faded part of the 40K background, but have grown as a very detailed part of fantasy.


We might see a 'squat-like' group develop more in the tau line (with the Demiurg); it touches upon dwarven traits and looks, but is more uniquely fitting to the current philosophies of 40K.

[CitizenZero]

Were they unpopular? No idea. My gaming circle didn't extend all that far back then. Are they unpopular now? Well I sold my squat army about 3-4years back. 30-40 minis went for over £150. People would go for them in a flash.Having played for around 16 years, frequented independent retailers, actually worked at 2 independent retailers, and most recently having worked for Games Workshop...I'll state again that I have never encountered a person who has actually played Squats. I've painted squat models and I know a guy who used to say he had a squat army, but later revealed that he didn't ACTUALLY have one...but that's the extent of it.

In truth, Squats are more popular NOW then they have ever been...because people like to collect models that are rare, and people like to feel as though they are unique. I've met many a beardy gamer who have grumbled once a codex was updated and all of a sudden you have people "jumping on the bandwagon." It's the same mentality. Squats are sort of trendy in the same way that liking a band nobody else has heard of is trendy.

People vote with their pocketbooks...if Squats sold, they would still be around.

[BlackKnight15624]

In truth, Squats are more popular NOW then they have ever been...because people like to collect models that are rare, and people like to feel as though they are unique. I've met many a beardy gamer who have grumbled once a codex was updated and all of a sudden you have people "jumping on the bandwagon." It's the same mentality. Squats are sort of trendy in the same way that liking a band nobody else has heard of is trendy.

People vote with their pocketbooks...if Squats sold, they would still be around.

What he said. Though a darker, more chaotic version such as the Demiurg (space miners!) would sound like a fairly interesting and workable concept. I will agree that the old squat models really weren't that great and didn't fit in well with what 40k became. If they were to actually find a concept that works, Squats/Demiurg would be a really great army.

[CitizenZero]

What he said. Though a darker, more chaotic version such as the Demiurg (space miners!) would sound like a fairly interesting and workable concept. I will agree that the old squat models really weren't that great and didn't fit in well with what 40k became. If they were to actually find a concept that works, Squats/Demiurg would be a really great army.Don't get me wrong, I think that the concept of Space Dwarves could be cool...as I said in the other thread, It would be cool to have sort of this clockwork/steampunk element to their design...

I wouldn't mind if they brought them back...but this outcry about them not being around is a bit overblown.

[HsojVvad]

People vote with their pocketbooks...if Squats sold, they would still be around.

I can't remember where I read this, maybe JJ himself, not shure. It was said that Squats were selling well, just like any othere non SM army. So it wasn't a $$$ issue for dicontinuing them.

As it was said before, they were just Dwarfs if Space. Drunk Dwarfs in space. They were a joke and they really really wanted to do them, but couldn't do them justice, so they were put off.

I think they would love to bring them back, but taking them so long they have other projects now and they want to update all other codexcii before they even think of bringing them back.

Sorry I can't remember where I read this.

[Hellfire]

If you have Elves in Space, Orcs in Space, and even Undead in Space (Necrons, obviously), you simply have to have Dwarves in Space. The Squats were my first army and my only army from the start of Rogue Trader until they were completely culled by GW with the start of 3rd. There is a small, dark, cold place in my heart for ol' Jervis.

I keep telling myself that I should pull them out of storage and play them as a 'counts as' list. I can't quite wrap my mind around playing my Squats as 'counts as' Orks...

[Warptiger]

I've been playing since 1st edition (rogue trader), and I've only seen a single squat army in real life. Saw a few on the internet later on, but only a single army actually owned by anyone I knew. Doesn't speak much to their popularity. Hell, I remember seeing three space skaven armies from that same period (space skaven on hoverboards rocked). Yep, I said space skaven.

Even the guy who owned the squats complained about the point costs of the models, and how slow the foot troops were. Sure, fast moving bikes were lots of fun, but I have two words that bring shudders from anyone who remembers 2nd edition: "Over Watch". For those who don't know 2nd edition, putting a unit into over watch state allowed you fire in your opponent's turn. He moves a model, blam, you kill it. Highly mobile armies sort of sucked a lot back then. You had really static games with little movement... I remember one game that reached turn 60+ because both players refused to move any really significant portion of their army (these two players were sort of idiots, so the entire game became a running joke for months).

I think another thing that helped kill the squats is, that in the 40k universe, the squats are just an offshoot of the human race. Like ogryns, or ratling snipers. They're not an actual alien race. And at some point GW began to phase out most of the human subspecies from the fluff. I remember when the artwork for imperial guard used to show detachments of beastmen. Goat headed beastmen in impy uniforms, with lasguns.

I think the only real interest in squats is because they were literally banned from the game. Several of the old school founding members of GW have repeatedly said that squats will never reappear. Shrug. Most of those guys are gone, or just figureheads now, so who knows what could happen.

[hungryghosts]

Here's the "official" explanation, from the link below the text. Plenty of Squats to see at my website, though they have fallen to Chaos...http://chaossquats.blogspot.com/

JJ Says:
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 % quantaties 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 regreted 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 tendancy 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 ont he 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 lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice 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...

The second point I'd like to make is about 'old moulds'. In the past, Mail Order in the UK and US used to be the place that we kept all of the retired moulds for Citadel Miniatures, and we used to offer a service where you could order any Citadel Mniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalogue' miniatures that it is simply impossible to keep all of the old moulds in Mail Order and offer this service. Instead, we pick and choose which back catalogue miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogues for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalogue with everything in it, while the UK has special 'collectors guides' that are themed round a race). Once we've ironed out the kinks in the way we deal with the range of collectors models we want to keep permenantly available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalogue for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalogue into three parts: a range of classic models that are permenantly available, a range of classic models we dip into and bring out for a limited release, and a range of retired models that will no longer be sold either because we've decided that they are embarrassingly bad, or because we are no longer allowed to sell them due to licencing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permenantly available, and its going to take several years to work through just those. The old Squat range is most likely to end up as retired models, I have to say, though there is a good chance that the Squat war engines they could simply into the limited release classic range. Once again, 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 exisiting 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


http://web.archive.org/web/20060129002420/http://forums.specialist-games.com/epic/forum_b/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=2532&whichpage=3

[eldargal]

They made the right choice, as far as I'm concerned. I was quite little when Squats were still in but it was really hard to take midget bikers seriously even then. My brother still has his squat army though, proxies it as Space Marines sometimes. Its still absurd.

[hungryghosts]

Some people out there consider them a bit less absurd than others...Space Dwarfs are still in production by a number of companies, and Bob Olley has made hundreds of variants, more than were ever produced for the GW Squats range.
(http://olleysarmies.co.uk/home.html#galleries)

I personally can't see how Space Dwarfs are any more absurd than Space Elves or Space Orks or whatever else, but agree that the problem was that the army couldn't really distinguish itself from being hairy little Guardsmen. But that's ok, they are happy to be hairy little infantry troopers, and have the advantage of getting painted faster because they have less surface area.

[eldargal]

Yes, armoured midgets in greatcoats helmets half their height named Scrunts aren't the least bit absurd.:P Sorry but if anything those models are even more hilarious than GWs Squats:
http://olleysarmies.co.uk/scifi/scruntdoghandler.jpg
Cry havoc, let slip the dogs of war!:rolleyes:


Some people out there consider them a bit less absurd than others...Space Dwarfs are still in production by a number of companies, and Bob Olley has made hundreds of variants, more than were ever produced for the GW Squats range.
(http://olleysarmies.co.uk/home.html#galleries)

I personally can't see how Space Dwarfs are any more absurd than Space Elves or Space Orks or whatever else, but agree that the problem was that the army couldn't really distinguish itself from being hairy little Guardsmen. But that's ok, they are happy to be hairy little infantry troopers, and have the advantage of getting painted faster because they have less surface area.

[DesertOfZin]

I had Squats for Epic. I had amassed as much Eldar as I ever wanted at the time and thought about something else. The Squats with their bikes, the land-train, the Leviathan variants and the airships were great fun to play.

All my epic is still at my folks. A wee trip back to dig them out may be in order...

[Denzark]

Its a bit harsh to write it (squat fluff) off as wholesale absurd. Actually I found it quite amusing and in keeping with the origins. Just think of the Catachan barking toad that killed off every one in a 2k radius.

I could call absurd on many things. Tau - the manga rip off and a concession towards one race who aren't xenocidally motivated. Necrons, the undead with crappy plastic green shiny stuff in them. Space Marines, who conveniently can act as Space Mongols, Space Vampires, Space Vikings, Space Romans and almost anything in between. DE, elves with teen angst, spiky heads.

If you think around JJ's comments posted earlier (I had seen that somewhere) then its not about sales, and they were happy with the epic range.

Just think. Now for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people I stumbled across BoLS looking for super heavy rules. What the hell could we do with Squat super heavies in plastic or from forgeworld? Land trains anyone?

Besides it is ridiculous to think that the entire race was in the Homeworlds and went down wth the ship facing Hive Fleet Retcon- Squats were well known for their wanderlust and would have been all over the imperium, including in army size formations.

I hope people don't go down the route of 'well it has to be grimdark and beer drinking P.O.R.G.s with leather fetishes just don't cut it'... That is lazy fluff in the same way every new fantasy thing at the cinema must have either vampires or werewolves, preserved in perfect teen bodies to sigh about how hard being undead is when you want to get your poke-on.

[Revarien]

A friend of mine at my local club plays a fully painted chaos squat army... he uses the bikers as oblits and the heavy exo suits as terms... kinda funny to see a little midget just plow through a tank, or an Oblit-biker plasma cannon an kroot squad.

Anywho... it's a fun army to see and fairly unique on today's tabletop.

[eldargal]

As they made 40k more serious and 'grimdark', the lighthearted and amusing Squats became increasingly incongruous and inconsistent with that, hence absurd. I do not mean it in a derogatory sense.:) They didn't fit in.

[the jeske]

didnt they get removed , because the guy who owned the name left GW ?

[RogueGarou]

I can certainly recall some anecdotal humor in the Squat background back in Rogue Trader and the bit of 2E stuff that was produced. I also recall that as late as the Imperial Guard and maybe even the Sisters of Battle Codex there were blurbs about using allies from the Squat and the Agents of the Imperium Codicii. Neither book was ever completed but an Assassins Codex was released and quickly ported to 3E.

I do know about three people with Squat armies, one uses his as an Imperial Guard army when he gets to play on weekends. Personally, I was interested in a Squat army but the models were tough to get when I really got into 40k so I was mostly waiting on new models and a Codex. Aside from that, I was always interested in some of the additional units from 2E. I had a squad of Grey Knight Terminators that I would ally with my Guard as well as Mechanicus and Inquisitor models, Arbites and Assassins. Having a handful of characterful models to ally into my Guard army made the army seem different every time I played it even if I used the same Guard build more than once but with different allied units. Those allies usually gave it a different feel on the table. I was always interested in using a handful of Squat models allied in, like an Ancestor Lord or some support weapons, maybe a bike squad. I would still enjoy seeing a small scale experiment take place with the Squats/Demiurg. Too bad White Dwarf is not worth buying anymore and they no longer produce the cool rules additions in it like they used to do but that is a rant for another thread. Having said that, it could be cool to have a small list with a few units to be used as an allied detachment to existing armies to try out some rules and to get a feel for how people would actually play and feel about the army being upscaled into a full list.

Personally, I never got the feel that the bikers were representative of the Squats as a whole. I always saw the bikers as a kind of deviant off-shoot of the mainstream Squats, kind of like the various Ork clans or the Cult of Speed. They were the brash, headstrong pirates of the Dwarves and most of the races from that era had similar units. The Eldar had their pirates, outcasts, Rangers, and Harlequins. Guard had the Penal troops and Rough Riders. Orks had the Freebooterz, Speed Freaks, and the militant Stormboyz.

To me, Squats were a proud people who had become stoic and hard as a result of having been cut-off from the rest of humanity by the warp storms. They had to retain a high level of technology to survive since they were isolated for so long. They also never fell into as much superstition and did not develop religions about the mysterious machines. A TechPriest sees a light turn red on a console and they begin their prayers and rites to clean or replace the component. A few hours later and the light may turn off. A Squat Engineer sees the red light on the console and he immediately replaces the faulty component and the light turns off in a couple of minutes. I saw the Squats as a very pragmatic and possibly the most grim of the races in Rogue Trader. There were stories of them entering into bargains and honoring the deal to the letter but if the other party broke the deal, woe be to them.

The Space Dwarves concept can certainly be done and revamped. I agree with Jervis that the name was more fitting in 1985 than in 2010, so the Squat name has to go. But it can be kept in the fluff as a derogatory nickname for the Squats. The background for them being miners, having great mineral wealth and technological superiority, physical toughness, and great mental tenacity and focus countered with smaller numbers can still be the basis for the racial background. The 40k equivalent of the Book of Grudges can also be present and pass along the traits of hated against a foe. The models have to be redone and I think the race having a rule against running or maybe a shorter move distance would be fitting for them. Shorter, stout models could be the norm and a revamped look but still keeping a handful of rough and tumble biker types for an assault unit. might be fitting.

Anyway, I see why the Squats were removed but I can not help thinking there is a problem when all of the creative talent on tap at GW could not come up with a revamped Space Dwarf race. Especially since that creative team could have almost free reign on crafting the race and direction of the army while having the benefit of a lot of ready-made fluff and ideas. If someone were to take on that task and do it in a way that the GW powers felt could be profitable then, who knows, maybe we could see some off-shoot Tyranids come back again in some fashion, like the Genestealer Cult or Zoats. Maybe one day we will see Demiurg and Zoats in the employ of the Tau, even.

[HsojVvad]

Here's the "official" explanation, from the link below the text. Plenty of Squats to see at my website, though they have fallen to Chaos...http://chaossquats.blogspot.com/

JJ Says:
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 % quantaties 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 regreted 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 tendancy 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 ont he 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 lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice 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...

The second point I'd like to make is about 'old moulds'. In the past, Mail Order in the UK and US used to be the place that we kept all of the retired moulds for Citadel Miniatures, and we used to offer a service where you could order any Citadel Mniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalogue' miniatures that it is simply impossible to keep all of the old moulds in Mail Order and offer this service. Instead, we pick and choose which back catalogue miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogues for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalogue with everything in it, while the UK has special 'collectors guides' that are themed round a race). Once we've ironed out the kinks in the way we deal with the range of collectors models we want to keep permenantly available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalogue for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalogue into three parts: a range of classic models that are permenantly available, a range of classic models we dip into and bring out for a limited release, and a range of retired models that will no longer be sold either because we've decided that they are embarrassingly bad, or because we are no longer allowed to sell them due to licencing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permenantly available, and its going to take several years to work through just those. The old Squat range is most likely to end up as retired models, I have to say, though there is a good chance that the Squat war engines they could simply into the limited release classic range. Once again, 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 exisiting 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


http://web.archive.org/web/20060129002420/http://forums.specialist-games.com/epic/forum_b/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=2532&whichpage=3

Yes this was the article that I was refering to. How did you fine it? Thank you for posting it.

[RocketRollRebel]

I've asked people about this in the past and I'm in the camp that Squats are simply popular now because they were eliminated and not all that many people ever played them back in the day. Not to say I personally haven't been tempted by them or wouldn't love to play them myself... I like stupid goofy armies. :o

[HsojVvad]

I've asked people about this in the past and I'm in the camp that Squats are simply popular now because they were eliminated and not all that many people ever played them back in the day. Not to say I personally haven't been tempted by them or wouldn't love to play them myself... I like stupid goofy armies. :o

Didn't people do this now with the Dark Eldar, because hardly anyone playes them? It looks once they come out and have awsome looking minis, lots of people will be picking them up.

[Lane]

While mentioned in the article Jervis wrote I have heard more about the Squats style and why they were dropped.

The Squats were not just Dwarves in space, or biker dwarves, they were Drunken Viking Biker Dwarves in space.
As the Space Wolf chapter gained form in the Fluf it created a duplication of style for Drunken Space Vikings. But Dwarves are so closely associated with the Viking style it would cause a problem if it was removed from Squats. The wild Biker gang idea, on it's own, does not fit Dwarves well either. What they were left with was Dwarves in space with nothing to distinguish themselves.

[CitizenZero]

Didn't people do this now with the Dark Eldar, because hardly anyone playes them? It looks once they come out and have awsome looking minis, lots of people will be picking them up.It's not really the same, I know more people who play Dark Eldar right now, than I have ever met in my life who played squats.

It wasn't too long ago that Dark Eldar were actually featured in a core set mind you...well...only two editions ago :P

[Lane]

I would have played Squats but there were cost and availability problems.

Some of their best, and unique, units were the bikers which were expensive for their point cost. A lack of basic troops. There were plenty of minis made for squats but the stores could never get them in. One store owner tried to get both the plastic set and the metal troopers blisters but the distributors always had them out of stock. They could get lots of bikes and heavy weapons troops but not the basic troops.

[Col.Gravis]

It's not really the same, I know more people who play Dark Eldar right now, than I have ever met in my life who played squats.


Strange I know more people who play Squats then who play Dark Eldar ;)

One of them has a gallery HERE (http://exeter-inquisition.org/gallery/ians-stuff).

You can't really base popularity on just one regional group, plus the thing is Squats are old and not many current players have been exposed to them or even know what they are, Dark Eldar - just about any current player will know what they are and most will have been exposed to them.