Hi All,
Thank you to everyone who helped me out by completing the crusade survey. We got over 270 responses from every army and all types of players. I plan to distribute the results in a few articles. Today’s article will cover some aggregated results as well as include the gaming demographics of the respondents. Over the coming days we will look at the results for the Imperium, Chaos and Xenos factions. Without further ado let’s dive into the results!
As you expect the vast majority of the respondents (84%) had played in a crusade campaign in the past year. Of those that did not participate in a campaign, 56% expressed a desire to. The responses were pretty evenly divided between Imperium and Xenos players, which is hardly surprising given the lack of Chaos releases in the past year.
This is also born out by the average satisfaction rating (out of 4) for each faction’s special rules. We will break these down in detail in a future post. Note that these results exclude any army that does not have a codex yet. Given the already small numbers of chaos responses, their average is even more likely to be influenced by a few strong opinions.
On the positive side, on average players feel like their special rules (I probably should have specified Crusade-specific special rules, but it was heavily implied at this point) are both easy to understand and fairly balanced. I do wonder if I had asked them to rate other armies if this would also hold?
However it is a little concerning that almost a quarter of players feel their rules are under-powered. Diving into this number a bit of the 52 individuals who said their army’s rules were less powerful 23 were either vanilla space marine players or Necron players. These were the first two codexes released and seems to indicate they are not aging well. At the same time it might be hard to abstract these crusade-specific rules from the general army rules which could influence the results. Another interesting finding is that the vast majority of players felt like the Crusade rules possessed the right amount of complexity, something I found surprising.
Demographics
Before we dive into the results here is some data on the respondents.
Finally, I was also curious about what impact the Crusade rules have on player purchases. I was surprised to see (on the below chart) how much of an impact it had for army-related purchases. While not the majority by any stretch this result would indicate that it does play some role for almost half of the respondents.
Conclusions
So far there isn’t anything massively revolutionary here. It is somewhat interesting to see that the survey’s respondents are skewed towards an older player base. In my analysis, I noticed that after dividing up the responses by time spent in the hobby, the percentage reporting that the crusade rules made a major impact on their purchasing decision deceased as years played increased. This is not to say these players don’t enjoy playing in a crusade, there could be other factors such as the youth of the crusade rule set, more established players might be less likely to purchase new armies, etc. and does get murkier as you start factoring any impact. I will be curious to monitor this going forward and see if any trends start to emerge.
Some of the other results I found less surprising. I wasn’t shocked at the low Chaos turnout or their relative unhappiness with their crusade rules. I feel like Chaos is an army that is heavily incentivized to soup which doesn’t work well when most armies do not have any rules to leverage. This also combines with the relative weakness of most Chaos armies in the meta to make them a difficult choice for a crusade campaign. Again this compounds when looking at the number of armies the respondents have. 94% report having more then one army, and it is unlikely that all their armies lack crusade rules meaning that the Chaos forces have a lot of stiff competition.
This might be something to note for anyone running a campaign. There are a number of books that have special requisitions or rules when fighting Chaos so it is in the GM’s interest to try and find some chaos players. It may be necessary to incentivize them, especially if they do not have their own crusade rules.
Stay tuned as next time we dive in the Imperium results and see how these players are feeling!
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
