Atomic Mass Games wrote:After long and careful consideration, we are here today to announce the end of development on Star Wars™: X-Wing and Star Wars: Armada.

We are grateful for the community’s passionate engagement and support. Over the past few years, rising production costs, global manufacturing, and pandemic-related challenges have made it increasingly difficult to produce high-quality, pre-painted miniatures which ultimately lead to the decision to end development.

Although development is ending, we are not stepping away from these games entirely. Atomic Mass Games will continue to support tournaments and Organized Play for both games, with OP kits to be found in your local shops, culminating in the Open World Championship at AdeptiCon in March 2025.

Thank you for your continued support and dedication.

Link

Asmodee USA wrote:We would like to take a moment to express our heartfelt appreciation to the Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Armada communities. While development of these games is ending, and we will have a limited quantity of product available for purchase, while supplies last, the adventure is far from over.

We are here to support Atomic Mass Games through a farewell tour, culminating in the Open Worlds Championships at AdeptiCon in March 2025. This will be a fantastic opportunity for fans to enjoy these games to the fullest, with our full support every step of the way.

But that's not all- our dedication to the Star Wars galaxy remains stronger than ever. We are thrilled to bring you new adventures with ongoing expansions and developments in both Star Wars: Shatterpoint and Star Wars: Legion.

Thank you for being a part of our community.

Can't say as it comes as a surprise, they obviously had no interest in continuing both games from the moment AMG took over. Think there reasoning given is nonsense though.

This was long coming, but still awful to see happen. X-wing was so special initially and it is always healthy for the industry when someone (even briefly) gives GW a black-eye.

I wish this would've been sold to someone as both systems only needed modest reworks to again be great... a real shame.

I wonder if it might be relauched with unpainted ships. From what I hear the golden age of cheap manufacturing+cheap high quality labor has ended.

I'm surprised. It still seemed to have a committed following. Nowhere near it's peak of course, but I always saw a fair few people playing it - enough for me to guess it was probably the second most common 'minis' game after 40k.

Wonder if this is so AMG can relaunch their own "totally not X-Wing" system in the future.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I'm surprised. It still seemed to have a committed following. Nowhere near it's peak of course, but I always saw a fair few people playing it - enough for me to guess it was probably the second most common 'minis' game after 40k.

Wonder if this is so AMG can relaunch their own "totally not X-Wing" system in the future.

I'm going to guess, "no". Insider rumor has always suggested that Pagani, Schick, etc... at Atomic Mass actively disliked X-wing and Armada, and had it thrust on them by Asmodee corporate. Supposedly both have no interest in ship games, and that really shows. It is telling that their only two in-house games are about highlighting specific characters, and in interviews both really come alive when talking about games that zoom in and spotlight their favorite characters from IPs they love.

Not surprising, when AMG took over and they didn't reprint any of the OOP ships I figured it was just a matter of time.

I wonder if the community will be able to sustain the game, at least for a bit.

Zero surprise here. Neither game has seen real support in years.

As much as its on AMG, both games feel like they were sent to AMG to die. As great as X-Wing is and as much as I love what they did with 2.0, the first edition just wasn't designed as a forever product and really only lasted as long as it has due to its quality, accessibility and popularity all vastly surpassing expectations.

Ultimately, the game needed to transition to a long term design long before it tried. By the time 2.0 came around there was just far too much product to replace and far far too little iconic new content to produce. Had 2.0 launched with Episode 7 starter or even as far back as Scum and Villainy I think maybe things would be different, but realistically the game had already run out of gas before 2.0 was even announced. It has carried itself a LONG way on an empty tank on sheer inertia.

We started Armada half a year ago so this is very annoying. I'm just hoping they'll produce some last waves of long unavailable product like the rebel fighters.

I got into it early on and remember the huge tournaments (100+ tables) and massive support in London - it was a massive game for so many years.

The move to V2 killed it, literally overnight as they annoyed their fanbase with the need to buy multiple new card packs and released practically nothing new.

Sadly an inevitable end.

Not surprised especially about Armada. I love the game, but it was plagued with problems. For instance, I have been trying off and on to buy a second Arquitens for my Imperials since they were originally released, but they go out of stock quickly, and are scalped for high prices.

Can't say I have ever had the chance to buy a second Gladiator, either.

Such a bummer, seeing as I played the original pre-release demo at GenCon, and loved it immediately.

I have been thinking of using the ships and their bases to play Warfleets from One Page rules.

Once the movies stopped showing big battles, the game had little chance.
Those of us who grew up with the earlier films, we wanted a game like this. A pity the media didn't keep up the right kind of scenes to keep it going.

This is my shocked face.....





It was clear AMG never had any interest in it. How long until they make the same announcement for Legion?

 Easy E wrote:
This is my shocked face.....





It was clear AMG never had any interest in it. How long until they make the same announcement for Legion?

They have a three year roadmap for Legion including resculpting the core set PVC into HIPS, so I sincerely doubt it.

Not a surprise,

AMG didn't want the games (and even if the did they didn't have the staff to deal with them)

Asmodee clearly didn't want the games any more or they'd have paid for the extra dedicated staff AMG would have needed to do anything else with them

 Easy E wrote:
This is my shocked face.....

It was clear AMG never had any interest in it. How long until they make the same announcement for Legion?

I'm actually pretty surprised that Legion wasn't announced right along with X-Wing and Armada.

Such a waste as X-Wing was a big hit.

I was never successful at getting Xwing off the ground, something about ship/Fleet combat just doesn’t click for some people here.

So my Xwing ships ended up being RPG use.
Sad since I enjoyed the game a lot.

A shame, I played X wing a lot back around the lead up to the The Force Awakens release. Since then my interest in anything Star Wars has dropped off immensely.

AMG definitely didn't seem to care for either of these games. They seem more interested in designing games centered around heroic big name characters as opposed to ships and stuff.

I have a bunch of the X-wing and armada minis. i use them with the babylon 5 wars system. it works best for armada scale as it is a fleet battle system. for Xwing scale you have to reduce the fighters range penalties (increasing the effective range) by a factor of about 4 to be the right scale.

In addition to that Mel miniatures over on shapeways has all the X-wing and armada ships and then some, including ships from games, movies and the expanded universe. many of the rules for them exist in the B5 wars system.
I had to have the foot long bellator class SSD for my imperial faction. he also has pieces that make great scenery/objectives/terrain like shipyards, defense platforms, the scarif gate from rogue one etc... all compatible with Xwing/armada bases/stands

rules-
http://b5warsvault.wikidot.com/

Armada scale-
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/mel_miniatures?section=Armada+Ships&s=0
X-wing scale-
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/mel_miniatures?section=1%2F270+Ships&s=0

A couple pics for comparison-the bulk freighter is from mel,



As are the republic dreadnought, imperial police cutters and Corellian gunships

A sad day, but not exactly a huge shock. The writing's been on the wall for Armada from the moment AMG took it over and X-Wing's been in a similar position for at least a year or two.

The internal politics of the Asmodee/FFG/AMG situation definitely didn't help the game. Handing it off to AMG seemed like a weird move, especially when doing so caused a bunch of the developers to leave (probably the plan all along, to cut costs). AMG weren't given any extra support from Asmodee either.

That said, AMG were absolutely shocking custodians of the game. I've seen amateur business run in someone's spare time be more professional. Their communications were comically bad. They literally took two years to update their website to include the new Star Wars games. They announced new rules and upcoming product for X-Wing in hours-long painting streams for MCP. They went against the advice of the established playtesters when making changes to the game and it became something nobody was really asking for. The annoying thing is they put some amount of effort in to making changes, but almost every change was disliked by the established player base. That would be somewhat understandable if there was a push to bring new players in but that simply never happened. Their new points system was broken from the start and continues to be so, at a systemic level. They undid all of the good work FFG did on balance by arrogantly ploughing ahead with a system that was just bad. The fact they didn't even make one last cursory attempt to balance the points before cancelling the game, to maybe at least leave the game in a more solid position at the end is pretty telling.

The game had over 400 players at the last World Championships, just a few months ago. That's more than all the other AMG games combined, I believe. Popularity was not its issue. A lack of understanding from the developers is what killed it, IMO, allied to a terrible production chain and logistics handling that seems amateurish at best.

That said, the community is already pulling together to try to keep things alive. We were already basically running our own tournaments anyway since AMG have produced one Store Championships kits in all the time they've been in charge of the game. What's really frustrating is I believe if AMG had embraced the community instead of shunning them, we could have made their job easier but they always seemed to have this distant, arrogant demeanour about them.

I’m possibly being overly charitable to AMG, but keep in mind they’re a pretty small team, and didn’t actively bid, so far as I can tell, for X-Wing and Armada.

Good couple of years ago they confirmed No New Ships for…Armada, I think?

I suspect it’s less negligence on AMG’s behalf, and more a question of resources. After all, if you’ve say a dozen sculptors and designers producing everything AMG produces, and then tell them “here’s more work, for two existing games, hop to it”, that’s not entirely on AMG, at least not in the beginning. There is of course the question of “could you not have hired more people?”.

Not gonna bothering commenting on what I thought of the two games as frankly that doesn’t matter. Because I still have empathy and sympathy with those invested in the games who now have their bums out the window.

problem X-Wing has, indeed was always going to have is once you have done the fighters and ships people recognise from the films..

then what?

ok can use some of the more obscure stuff from the now obliterated back story

then what?

its got a finite life in terms of new models in a way a more sandboxed sci-fi game doesn't have

but even then its a clever but quite simple system, there are only so many tweaks you can make, no point bringing out a new fighter thats objectively worse than others, and can only "codex creep" it so often

then combined with the way its tied to bits of card which makes "simply" releasing a new edition as a book or two impossible (ditto correcting mistakes on cards, gets a lot harder to fix)

both were good and fun games, heck both still are, but from a commercial perspective they are basically done, they tried the new edition treadmill and just annoyed people

pity but its the way these things go, after a while you are just releasing new paint jobs and new slightly more generic "tournament optimised" models

never got that much for X-Wing here, two starters and a few more fighters from the original three films and left it at that, its perfectly playable. Armada I got a bit more for, but even then I've got enough and saw zero need to get more

not sure where it was meant to go at this point

It has to be based on sales. If most players have everything they want, and no new players are joining due to a lack of new film or TV material to spark interest, there's no money coming in.
And with no money, no development.

Every shop I went into that sold X-Wing (I didn't pay attention to Armada) had maybe 2 of most ships on a racks, with a starter or 2 on the shelf, with a huge ship or 3 (usually old stock).
The plastic dials and damage packs were sparce, and never the ones I wanted at the time.
They could have made plastic versions or accessories, mines, objectives etc, but they didn't. The range rulers are lumpy and, though thematic, were ugly.
even bases never got redone for 2nd ed. Only packs of small and large bases were made.

X-wing should have been so much more. But the sheer number of items needed on the wall may have made stockists avoid stocking it, and the change to 2nd ed really messed things up.

true, also its a game thats playable with a couple of fighters on each side and arguably best with only a couple on each side doesn't need the constant treadmill of buying more

especially when the "pay to win" card mechanic is very easily sidestepped with photocopies or paper records

For anyone seeking to complete collections or what have you, Dear Leader* of the Loot Group has declared all X-Wing and Armada stuff as Loot.

So if you’ve got gaps in your collection or fancy adding more? Might be worth giving the group a look. Link in my sig.

* I.e. Me.

The end of an era.

Sounds like AMG is run by manchildren, on top of being owned by corporate sociopaths, which we already knew.

leopard wrote:
problem X-Wing has, indeed was always going to have is once you have done the fighters and ships people recognise from the films..

then what?

ok can use some of the more obscure stuff from the now obliterated back story

then what?

its got a finite life in terms of new models in a way a more sandboxed sci-fi game doesn't have

TBF Disney spamming SW tv shows and movies is going to continue for a long time, every one has opportunities for new ships. In theory, if new releases are fairly regularly coming out it gives current players something to buy, and might attract new fans to buy some of their favourite ships from the existing range after getting their favourite ship from the latest media.

Yep, the Razor Crest was a recent addition, along with the Gauntlet.

bobthe4th wrote:

leopard wrote:
problem X-Wing has, indeed was always going to have is once you have done the fighters and ships people recognise from the films..

then what?

ok can use some of the more obscure stuff from the now obliterated back story

then what?

its got a finite life in terms of new models in a way a more sandboxed sci-fi game doesn't have

TBF Disney spamming SW tv shows and movies is going to continue for a long time, every one has opportunities for new ships. In theory, if new releases are fairly regularly coming out it gives current players something to buy, and might attract new fans to buy some of their favourite ships from the existing range after getting their favourite ship from the latest media.

new models yes, but ones that are essentially reskins of existing ones or very marginally different, becomes Malibu Stacy's new hat after a while

don't get me wrong I think its a cracking game but there are only so many combinations of stats that are worth putting on the table

The recent squad boxes were nice, as quick additions to a starter force. Paintjobs on ships do look nice on an otherwise army of grey.

Changing the ships and loadouts only goese so far, as you say. I have ships from 4 of the 7 factions, for this reason.
But scenarion/missions were lacking for a long time. AMG seems to have had a go at increasing them, in 2.5.
It's like Combat Patrol for 40k. There are usually only a couple of HQ abilities you can swap out in the list, no kit changes, but people near me play using them a lot of weeks on all sorts of table layouts.

I played a lot when it first came out, but gave up when the timing chart came out. A couple of my friends started playing again, and I looked at Droids (Separatist Alliance) but couldn't work out what boxes I needed to play them.

Armada is a fantastic game, I'm excited to see what the community does with it going forward. Screw AMG

Unsurprising.
A pity, but long in the making.
And to be fair, I have not followed anything closely since effectively the launch of X-Wing 2nd ed. I had done my rounds on the tournament circuit, but had limited intention to keep up indefinitely. I owned everything I wanted and needed for any fleet I was interested in, with no intention of adding dozens more to the collection. Just a few months ago, I was considering getting it out of storage to play with my stepson, who recently saw all the movies for the first time (though I did warn about the latest trilogy... ). Such a great game at its core: perfectly streamlined, quick to play and just.. fun! Personally won't mourn the loss of official support (such at it was), as it makes no difference at this stage to me, but it sure would have been interesting to see where the game would have gone under different management.

The pre-painted ships and (initially) low cost of entry made it such a great game to get non-hobbyists into a borderline wargaming system too, which was my main memory from the tournaments I attended - a bunch of local gamers who I've also played against in SAGA and LotR SBG tournies, combined with people who've never assembled a miniature in their lives. Good times.

leopard wrote:problem X-Wing has, indeed was always going to have is once you have done the fighters and ships people recognise from the films..

then what?

ok can use some of the more obscure stuff from the now obliterated back story

then what?[...]

It is at least a testament to the game's quality that, for me at least, unfamiliarity with the extended source material did not reduce my interest in buying a bunch of ships from it. Have a decent Scum and Villainy fleet just because I enjoyed the game, the ships looked fun, and having a bunch unlocked more variety in playing the game I loved. I don't know if/how they could have kept growing healthily over several more decades; but that's a question no game I know of has figured out really.

Skinnereal wrote:It has to be based on sales. If most players have everything they want, and no new players are joining due to a lack of new film or TV material to spark interest, there's no money coming in.
And with no money, no development.

Every shop I went into that sold X-Wing (I didn't pay attention to Armada) had maybe 2 of most ships on a racks, with a starter or 2 on the shelf, with a huge ship or 3 (usually old stock).
The plastic dials and damage packs were sparce, and never the ones I wanted at the time.
They could have made plastic versions or accessories, mines, objectives etc, but they didn't. The range rulers are lumpy and, though thematic, were ugly.
even bases never got redone for 2nd ed. Only packs of small and large bases were made.

X-wing should have been so much more. But the sheer number of items needed on the wall may have made stockists avoid stocking it, and the change to 2nd ed really messed things up.

From increasingly vague memories and limited knowledge of the situation, a big issue that felt particularly pronounced after the Asmodee takeover of FFG was just product availability. Don't know if it got worse as the range expanded and was similar for other product ranges. Don't know if it's major mismanagement or just popularity outstripping production capacity - I just recall continuously shifting shipping estimates, and much of the range being unavailable a decent chunk of the time, and the local store owner not being too happy about it all either...

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
and the local store owner not being too happy about it all either...

I heard that from more than shopkeeper. FFG and AMG didn't seem to work well with wholesalers, who had to pass on the ussies to the stores.

Good luck with Legion and whatever else they still sell.

 Skinnereal wrote:
Yep, the Razor Crest was a recent addition, along with the Gauntlet.

Both of these were released around 18 months after AMG took over. Given the lead time on this kind of stuff, I'd wager FFG already had them in the production pipeline. After that there seems to be no new sculpts and only repaints.

I'm guessing the squad packs that released later were largely a test to see if the game could find a new audience or if the existing playerbase had everything they were going to buy. The business model that had made it so popular had also burned itself out well before 2.0 and I think its just a situation where popularity and sales weren't necessary on the same page.

I definitely had everything I ever needed a long time ago and hadn't bought anything beyond the 2.0 upgrade boxes. Probably not alone in that.

I played a lot in v1 and simply never made the switch to V2. I had pretty much everything I wanted by then.

pgmason wrote:
I played a lot in v1 and simply never made the switch to V2. I had pretty much everything I wanted by then.

Same with my friend group, all of us were very casual looking at needing 2-4 conversion kits to solve a non-issue: we weren't using the gamebreaking combos. Decision was sealed when Miniature Market had those supersales on 1.0 ships, I bought enough extras to run Heroes of Arcturi Cluster and had the final 1.0 revision professionally printed and laminated. The game is a complete standalone game for us and has been for years, none of us have bought any 2.0 ships. I also noticed a SHARP dropoff in the number of players in the FLGS run tournaments when 2.0 hit, and they went from weekly organised play nights with monthly tournaments to weekly casual nights and bi-monthly tournaments, then only occasional tournaments. Obviously this is all anecdotal, but it tracks with what a lot of people's experience

I wonder if a softer 2.0 release that required far less re-worked cardboard and cards would have better served the game, even if the gameplay wasn't as good as it could have been. I know 2.0 was a better game, but the split playerbase feels like it hurt the game far more than it solved. Game was dead to us far before AMG took it over. Sad to see it go, but hardly a surprise.

 Kalamadea wrote:

I wonder if a softer 2.0 release that required far less re-worked cardboard and cards would have better served the game, even if the gameplay wasn't as good as it could have been. I know 2.0 was a better game, but the split playerbase feels like it hurt the game far more than it solved. Game was dead to us far before AMG took it over. Sad to see it go, but hardly a surprise.

The main issue was really just that by the time 2.0 released, they didn't have anything left to release for the Rebellion era that the entire game was built around. 2.0 didn't have any new ships for existing players outside of the Scum and Villainy stuff for players to continue to collect. I get the prequels hadn't hit their nostalgia bubble at the time, but about the time they were putting ARCs in the Rebellion they really needed to be adding the Republic to the game instead.

pgmason wrote:
I played a lot in v1 and simply never made the switch to V2. I had pretty much everything I wanted by then.

Yea same, the game needed a 1 page balance patch, not rebuying 200$ of cardboard. Unless you're GW, a pointless money grab like that will kill your product.

I think it needed something more than that. It had some pretty core limitations in the very simple design it started with. The dice curve being based almost entirely on the ability to take a single action gave them very little to work with, resulting in endless means of granting free actions that left early ships pretty outclassed. It was just a very binary game without a lot of design space. Infinite options, but very little room for variety. Simplicity was absolutely its greatest blessing, but it really limited the game's ability to run "forever" even with a finite number of ships.

Between the Corporate vultures who are still trying to kill FFG/Asmodee and Will Shick, Xwing and Armada never had a chance. I think Legion is hanging around because Shatterpoint didn't land quite as strong as they expected. Still annoyed about AMG saying the would reprint the Alpha Star Wing and not doing so.

I've seen rumours of Shatterpoint's sales actually being pretty terrible and AMG being unable to move the stock even at discount but don't know if they have any substance to them.

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
I've seen rumours of Shatterpoint's sales actually being pretty terrible and AMG being unable to move the stock even at discount but don't know if they have any substance to them.

Shatterpoint had terrible boxart and general art that suggested a cartoony digital art look (I think they were going for the modern "boardgame" and DnD demo in the US and to a lesser extent Europe with that look but that isn't your core demo for any kind of miniatures wargame.) but then you open the kits and they are hyper-realistic. (If not maybe a bit too leggy) The cover of the box needs to sell the box and it really didn't. That and the very high cost (Which may or may not be their fault, they aren't GW with massive economies of scale and probably didn't own their own manufacturing facilities either) for the starter set for comparatively few minis was a deal-breaker for most. That and the minis were too Clone Wars shifted rather than even live action prequels. There were only 2 Clone Troopers! (And Rex but he doesn't have a helmet.)

Honestly I think making a miniature line dedicated to kitbashing your own characters and making it a kind of TTRPG (Taking inspiration from Rogue Trader mayeb) might have gone down better and been more interesting since it would inject a modelling aspect that these more determined IPs don't tend to really allow. Marketing people would look at it worried but what they did make was never going to survive not when Legion had a better premise for wargaming at least. And it would get you interest from the TTRPG market which is much bigger. Given they are upgrading the Legion kits it looks like they understand that.

All the prpainted stuffs probably a pain to work with.

Shatterpoint is also the…I wanna say third?…kinda skirmish scaled Star Wars game, but with yet another change to the scale of the models.

You’ve got Legions, you’ve got Shatterpoint and you’ve got Imperial Assault.

As someone who hasn’t played them, I couldn’t tell you what each offers that the other one doesn’t, so my observation on relative merits is moot.

But it did strike me as “we’ve mildly repackaged. Pls buy again kthxbai”

Ignoring imperial assault cause I don't play it.
Shatterpoint focuses on fast pace character/character action, with shifting objectives and alot of on the fly thinking. It is also vert character and different iterations of character focused, with individual abilities shine.
Legion is focused on army wide battles with singular battles, aswell as action and resource management, and planning ahead. It also allows for iconic vehicles and units to be a part of if

The best thing about an old game- No one can kill it.

Time to get stuck in.

 Grot 6 wrote:
The best thing about an old game- No one can kill it.

No one can kill it, but the community moving on sure can.

No one can kill it, but no parent company means no centralised advertising nor physical product delivery. Plus unless the community gets a few REALLY well organised and networked individuals working together, you can easily end up with heavy fragmentation as everyone runs off to their own side projects/house rules and so forth.

Often as not it ends up being perhaps down to people who own two or three or more factions as complete armies and the complete rules running games locally with their own models against friends.


Now I will say I expect SW to survive better if just because of 3D printing already being a thing. But yeah after a long peroid of the parent firm slowly killing it; the game itself will be in choppy water.

Locally at least Shatterpoint has sold at least twice as much as Armada, Xwing, or Legion in the last twelve months here. Marvel Crisis Protocol has outsold all three as well, but not as much as Shatterpoint.

 Skinnereal wrote:
It has to be based on sales. If most players have everything they want, and no new players are joining due to a lack of new film or TV material to spark interest, there's no money coming in.
And with no money, no development.

Every shop I went into that sold X-Wing (I didn't pay attention to Armada) had maybe 2 of most ships on a racks, with a starter or 2 on the shelf, with a huge ship or 3 (usually old stock).
The plastic dials and damage packs were sparce, and never the ones I wanted at the time.
They could have made plastic versions or accessories, mines, objectives etc, but they didn't. The range rulers are lumpy and, though thematic, were ugly.
even bases never got redone for 2nd ed. Only packs of small and large bases were made.

X-wing should have been so much more. But the sheer number of items needed on the wall may have made stockists avoid stocking it, and the change to 2nd ed really messed things up.

leopard wrote:
true, also its a game thats playable with a couple of fighters on each side and arguably best with only a couple on each side doesn't need the constant treadmill of buying more

especially when the "pay to win" card mechanic is very easily sidestepped with photocopies or paper records

I don't buy it tbh, you can make a similar argument about almost any game in almost any established setting. Different eras, different subfactions, variant craft(lean in to SW's obvious WW2 inspirations, there were what 25 or so variants and marks of Spitfire alone, they could surely find enough room in the gameplay mechanics for a few X-Wing subtypes etc) - look at how STL creators for Legion produce not just the standard infantry but also wierd EU deep cuts or unique variant-sculpt versions of units. I think the real issue specifically regarding finding new stuff to make was the interminable Disney approval process everything that wasn't on-screen in the movies had to go through every time.

And there are always going to be "unproductive" customers, you make your money from a combination of a steady churn of new recruits and the Whale end of your established playerbase, the people who buy one "army" for your system and then sail the high seas for any additional content you try to sell them for it were always there as, if we want to be uncharitable, a bulking agent. Their spending on the product is incidental, their value comes from their contibution to Network Effect for your game; if there's lots of players to show off to Whales will spend more to show off more, and if theres lots of players to play with new people will be more likely to choose your system than someone else's.

bobthe4th wrote:
]
TBF Disney spamming SW tv shows and movies is going to continue for a long time, every one has opportunities for new ships. In theory, if new releases are fairly regularly coming out it gives current players something to buy, and might attract new fans to buy some of their favourite ships from the existing range after getting their favourite ship from the latest media.

Disney might be spamming 'em, but fewer and fewer people are watching 'em. And they've also slightly poisoned the well by making so much of the Sequel era's design language be "OT, but squished on one axis selected at random". The shows have given us a couple of bangers, but the two best fighter designs are iterations on existing ships(Mando's N-1 and the Merc fighter from the prison break episode that seems like an iterated Rogue class CIS ship), other than that it's been existing designs. The Fiends from Ahsoka than Shin & Baylan use I suppose. And a lot of the designs they have done only really get used as background set-dressing for spaceport scenes and can't be seen clearly.

I have seen LOTS of Legion stuff sold in my local area... but zero Shatter point stuff sold. My local store didn't even bother with Shatter point, but sold everything Legion they put on the shelves.

AMG might not have wanted the FFG Star Wars games, but their own hubris and arrogance with how they treated the staff willing to relocate to be a part of AMG, and how they fired the ones they decided to hire shortly after moving... made an almost universally despised "2.5" edition... and that 2.5 edition of X-Wing still had a greater tournament presence than Shatterpoint, I feel zero sympathy for anything coming AMG's way.

They may not have wanted these games, but they decided to throw away pretty solid streams of revenue because of their inexperience with space based games due to all of the core AMG team being Privateer Press refugees.

I would have never thought that Star Trek Attack Wing would run longer than X-Wing, but it seems while Wizkids have a very wonky release policy at least they care for their game.

That armada was dead was kinda obvious, they had released all the material from ep4-6, the poor attempt at adding material from ep1-3 just confirmed that the game was finished, from this point it was all about restocking the models and making balance changes.

But yea, cheap asian labour is no longer part of post covid world economy, so pre assembled and pre painted miniatures at a low cost is no longer an option for any company. In a way, that is a good thing for the world as a whole.
For that reason too, x-wing had to be dropped.

Good news is that now the REAL talents for both games can take over, aka we the gamers!.
3D print means there will be no issues to get models(will take time before someone dares to venture into the daunting task of designing the models, but in the end it will happend), and the hardcore fans will be able to correct any rules issues.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

3D print means there will be no issues to get models(will take time before someone dares to venture into the daunting task of designing the models, but in the end it will happend), and the hardcore fans will be able to correct any rules issues.

I can think of 3 designers who have done a large number of Armada ships and I wasn't even trying to find them.

The writing was on the wall for this honestly. Still kind of surprised but the nature of licensed properties means they always have a natural end date.

I'm sure something new will come along eventually.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
I would have never thought that Star Trek Attack Wing would run longer than X-Wing, but it seems while Wizkids have a very wonky release policy at least they care for their game.

And they haven’t even started on the new ship designs that fans are loving yet. If Wizkids ever stop tripping on their own feet, they could have a solid year of releases again.


Meanwhile in X-Wing…I guess it’s time for the TIE Dagger?

While I don't play Armada I had always thought about getting an Imperial Star Destroyer from Armada for my desk because it was reasonably sized but prices are already going up or is unavailable.

Armada was fun. As noted elsewhere, that this can happen with X-Wing, the top contender for the "reaching 40k levels of popularity" throne (but didn't) shows the eventual fate of all franchised IPs games.

I do think an interesting point has been raised here, though, and that is that there is a limited pool of easily recognizeable characters or ship designs in most franchises. The Z-95 Headhunter doesn't quite have the bang of the X-Wing and Frog-man isn't as recognizeable as Spider-man. So you run and, and eventually that means you start recycling. Is it 3 Captain Americas MCP has now?

The decicion to end these games isn't a surprise to me. Legion looks safe, though, as Shatterpoint hasn't really taken off. I do wonder who at AMG thought that releasing a game that thematically compete with your most popular title so much you have to change the scale to stop people from using the other game's models while simultaneously competing with your next most popular game in terms of game size and general gameplay size was a great idea.

well, AMG thought lets make a hero focused 10 model skirmish game that has better sculpts and gives the characters justice while also adds the named characters people want to see but FFG will never add to Legion because that game focus on platoons and not heroes
(and people demanding hero models for Legion no matter if it makes sense or not, like you cannot have a Rebels show strike force with 5 heros fighting someone else Storm Trooper army without massively changing the game)

they developed that game long before someone told them that they are now needing to care about Legion too

Don't know why people think that a 1-2 year lead time can be shortened to 3 months just because it is a small team that needs 3rd party machinery to produce the models


in addition, it works for GW, no one complains about different models size from Necromunda or Underworlds and that you can hardly use the models from the main games to play the skirmish games

I don't think Shatterpoint was in the works in 2020. Marvel had just launched, and even if it had been developed initially at Privateer, there was still a lot going on there for them at that time. They had to know getting the FFG lines was in the cards. They were both owned by Asmodée that very spesifically set up AMG as their miniatures wing. No surprise there for anyone outside AMG, at least.

Unfortunately, what works for GW has often been proven not to work for anyone else. Their customers are very forgiving, despite all the grumbling. Additionally, lot of GW cross-system models are meant to be exactly that.

At least local Legion players do NOT look on Shatterpoint as supplement to Legion. Instead they resent it and perceive it as the reason Legion has been receiving less attention. And from what I see online, they are hardly alone in that.

the local group switched to Shatterpoint because that games suits them more as they just want the heroes and always disliked Legion for the amount of troops needed to play said heroes

and a lot of people disliked Shatterpoint from the day it was announced, simply because it is another Star Wars game, for the very same reason people hated Legion in the beginning (because it was another SW game next to Imperial Assault.

and it might have been clear to others that Asmodee will shift the games around to the different departments, but it might not have been clear that the game developers won't follow (which is the reason why Legion did not get the attention, if someone else needs to take care about a game they never played while at the same time the released are already fixed by the Disney for the upcoming years)

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
I would have never thought that Star Trek Attack Wing would run longer than X-Wing, but it seems while Wizkids have a very wonky release policy at least they care for their game.

And they haven’t even started on the new ship designs that fans are loving yet. If Wizkids ever stop tripping on their own feet, they could have a solid year of releases again.


Meanwhile in X-Wing…I guess it’s time for the TIE Dagger?

There are also quite a few ships missing from the TNG/DS9/Voy era, most notably Ambassador class. It's quite obvious that wizkids never invested in models after Xindi and the Abramstrek-Faction-Pack. Which is a shame as the rules writing is actually better than in the golden times of the game.

I’d buy at least two copies of a Wolf 359 fleet with Cheyenne, New Orleans, and other rare classes.

I admit that might be a bit more niche than the Ambassador class.

OT Star Wars just doesn’t seem to have the depth of obscure ships representing iconic moments. Other than the shoe and the Star Destroyer with no hangar from ROTJ, of course.

I can't possibly imagine AMG believing that all designers would cross over. I mean, it involved a move. They are not that naive. And they're not that disorganized either - if people quit you hire more.

 Kaptajn Congoboy wrote:
I can't possibly imagine AMG believing that all designers would cross over. I mean, it involved a move. They are not that naive. And they're not that disorganized either - if people quit you hire more.

I doubt AMG had very much choice in the matter, both in getting the Star Wars properties and their staffing levels.

X-Wing was big, but died with the release of version 2. Everyone I know added up the cost of getting all the new card packs they would need for their collections, saw it was hundreds of pounds and simply walked away.

I liked the look of the clone wars era stuff they did, but had no reason to buy them other than to have the models.

I've been playing a lot of legion in the last couple of years, and now fear for its future. From the moment shatterpoint was announced Legion was at risk.

It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

To be fair, I'm not so different, I dropped Hordes years ago when I didn't like the new edition. Still have all my stuff though, and would play a game if I had an opponent. So when lots of people are doing that all at once you'd think maybe they'd just stay with the old community.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I’d buy at least two copies of a Wolf 359 fleet with Cheyenne, New Orleans, and other rare classes.

I admit that might be a bit more niche than the Ambassador class.

OT Star Wars just doesn’t seem to have the depth of obscure ships representing iconic moments. Other than the shoe and the Star Destroyer with no hangar from ROTJ, of course.

How about Lower Decks- with the California, Parliament, and Texas classes, the Titan, Pakled ships.

 Da Boss wrote:
It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

To be fair, I'm not so different, I dropped Hordes years ago when I didn't like the new edition. Still have all my stuff though, and would play a game if I had an opponent. So when lots of people are doing that all at once you'd think maybe they'd just stay with the old community.

It seems like a fomo thing, some people need to chase the meta to keep their interest. i don't understand it either.

i still play the editions of games i think have the best core rules. i just help build the communities in my area of other players who play it-5th ed 40K, N2 infinity, WM/H MKIII(no theme lists). original victory at sea, etc...

 Da Boss wrote:
It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

To be fair, I'm not so different, I dropped Hordes years ago when I didn't like the new edition. Still have all my stuff though, and would play a game if I had an opponent. So when lots of people are doing that all at once you'd think maybe they'd just stay with the old community.

I think a fair amount of people played X-Wing at local tournaments, and once those local tournaments went to 2.0 they didn't have a solid alternate gaming group to move to

Element Games says they’re getting restocks of some of the harder to find expansions for Armada, due for dispatch June 25th.


I went ahead and ordered some collection wants, if they get cancelled then so be it.

 MajorWesJanson wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I’d buy at least two copies of a Wolf 359 fleet with Cheyenne, New Orleans, and other rare classes.

I admit that might be a bit more niche than the Ambassador class.

OT Star Wars just doesn’t seem to have the depth of obscure ships representing iconic moments. Other than the shoe and the Star Destroyer with no hangar from ROTJ, of course.

How about Lower Decks- with the California, Parliament, and Texas classes, the Titan, Pakled ships.

Absolutely. I’m surprised Wizkids aren’t striking while the iron is hot by releasing some of these ships while the show is still on.

 Da Boss wrote:
It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

Yea not quite sure, but in part:

When you forfeit the obvious benefits of an officially supported game it necessarily means you're fortunate enough to have a tight group of like minded gamers you can sequester yourself with, away from the mainstream scene, who are cool with playing fringe unofficial rulesets ... and once you're there, there's better fringe unofficial rulesets to play than some corporation's write-offs.

Hah, that's pretty on the nose.

 Da Boss wrote:
It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

To be fair, I'm not so different, I dropped Hordes years ago when I didn't like the new edition. Still have all my stuff though, and would play a game if I had an opponent. So when lots of people are doing that all at once you'd think maybe they'd just stay with the old community.

While the pattern is certainly not unique to X-Wing, I do think that game might have been especially susceptible to it. The game's balance relied pretty heavily on new releases at times, which might strengthen underperforming ships or strategies, or provide means to effectively mitigate the strengths of overperforming ships or strategies. This was a logical result of the fundamental game structure of having cards for ships detailing their rules, and flexible upgrade cards available to many ships, instead of fixed profiles in updateable books. While the cards might not be altered to balance the game, new upgrades could be added that affected prior cards' impact. Without new releases, that whole system would stop functioning. This system also created rather a lively meta, and a lack of new releases would likely quickly feel stale in comparison to what people had gotten used to. Even if not ground(/game-)breaking, any new release for any faction generally meant new options for you, as some upgrades would be interchangeable with your faction's ships, making new releases quite anticipated from my experience.

Another relevant aspect might be that while people had invested money in the game, this was far less investment than the added time cost of painting an army for most other miniature games. I repainted a few of my ships, and at any event I attended, I'd be one of very few players to have done so. Pre-painted ships made it easy to get into the game, but perhaps also easier to walk away from?

 Da Boss wrote:
It's so interesting how often people will walk away rather than just continuing to play 1e. I mean I'm sure lots of people did and do play 1e, but I get the impression a lot of people also just dropped the game.

X-Wing had a really well-run competitive scene, supported by FFG, which I suspect had some effect on "forcing" people into 2.0. I'd also argue that the end of 1.0 was an absolutely miserable experience from a balance point of view. FFG basically admitted they were trying to break the game at that point in order to figure out what not to do in 2.0. I think they succeeded because 2.0 was a much better game, IMO. The business side of converting from 1.0 to 2.0 was the biggest problem they had. Even then, I never really thought it was all that bad. The individual conversion kits were relatively cheap and FG made an effort to make sure they were generous with the cards in them and the kits remained in production for a long time.

Interesting insights. Would I be right in assuming as well that X Wing drew in a lot of non-hardcore wargamers? The likes of us are used to edition changes and having to rejig things, buy new rules and so on. But if you're a star wars fan who is new to wargaming, it might have been a real shock to find out all your cards were now obsolete and you had to buy new ones. Maybe FFG misjudged the tolerance for the casual wargamer toward that stuff?

 Da Boss wrote:
Interesting insights. Would I be right in assuming as well that X Wing drew in a lot of non-hardcore wargamers? The likes of us are used to edition changes and having to rejig things, buy new rules and so on. But if you're a star wars fan who is new to wargaming, it might have been a real shock to find out all your cards were now obsolete and you had to buy new ones. Maybe FFG misjudged the tolerance for the casual wargamer toward that stuff?

100%; I'd be shocked if a starwars game wasn't bringing in people from outside the wargaming market. That's part of what a game developer wants when they reach out for a huge IP licence outside of the established market. You aren't just getting to make Xwing fighters, you are reaching a vast market of Starwars fans who are not wargamers. Tapping into a pool of potential customers who are not already invested in Warhammer, Warmachine, Infinity and others. Heck that's why GW are investing so much into TV and selling their IP out to Video games and the like. GW are doing their best to tap into those other markets and draw people into their own.

 Overread wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Interesting insights. Would I be right in assuming as well that X Wing drew in a lot of non-hardcore wargamers? The likes of us are used to edition changes and having to rejig things, buy new rules and so on. But if you're a star wars fan who is new to wargaming, it might have been a real shock to find out all your cards were now obsolete and you had to buy new ones. Maybe FFG misjudged the tolerance for the casual wargamer toward that stuff?

100%; I'd be shocked if a starwars game wasn't bringing in people from outside the wargaming market. That's part of what a game developer wants when they reach out for a huge IP licence outside of the established market. You aren't just getting to make Xwing fighters, you are reaching a vast market of Starwars fans who are not wargamers. Tapping into a pool of potential customers who are not already invested in Warhammer, Warmachine, Infinity and others. Heck that's why GW are investing so much into TV and selling their IP out to Video games and the like. GW are doing their best to tap into those other markets and draw people into their own.

Not just that, but X-Wing was vastly more accessible than any typical wargame (especially the widespread and popular ones). No stack of books with hundreds of pages of rules. No assembling and painting. If you know the basics, you could essentially rock up to a store tournament, buy some ships off the shelves, put them together and start playing 5 minutes later. As it turned out, the fact that every expansion was self-contained package of the miniature, accessories (tokens) and their rules was arguably a curse in disguise, making future updates to rules and ongoing cross-compatibility increasingly difficult to achieve. It would be interesting to think if things would have been different if some level of turnover (making older material obsolete) had been present in the system earlier, rather than a big gulf with the new edition. Whether or not it's normalized, paying to replace things you already have never feels great, and 2nd ed XW did not just replace a rulebook, but a lot of components too - which themselves felt as much part of your collection as the ships.

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
[Not just that, but X-Wing was vastly more accessible than any typical wargame

That's an often overlooked angle.

Wargaming as a whole is losing one of the most accessible entry points it's ever had.

 Da Boss wrote:
Interesting insights. Would I be right in assuming as well that X Wing drew in a lot of non-hardcore wargamers? The likes of us are used to edition changes and having to rejig things, buy new rules and so on. But if you're a star wars fan who is new to wargaming, it might have been a real shock to find out all your cards were now obsolete and you had to buy new ones. Maybe FFG misjudged the tolerance for the casual wargamer toward that stuff?

Yes. The Core Set was really good value and up until Covid the price of individual ship expansions was pretty cheap, especially for pre-painted models. The rules were simple and relatively intuitive at first. Add in the Star Wars factor, and the game drew a lot of non-wargamers into it. Many of the people playing at tournaments don't play any other wargames, or maybe played 40k briefly in the past, but it's pretty common to see hardcore X-Wing players who don't play any other wargames. Those people are probably not quite as exposed to the new edition churn as more seasoned gamers, and that probably didn't help the transition to 2.0.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
[Not just that, but X-Wing was vastly more accessible than any typical wargame

That's an often overlooked angle.

Wargaming as a whole is losing one of the most accessible entry points it's ever had.

At the same time they were wargamers but not hobbyists.

Prepainted armies are rare in the wargame world and most firms avoid it. I can see Mechwarrior teasing the waters with it right now (with an odd one mech in a pack is prepainted whilst the rest are grey approach - at least the last time I heard about it); but in general both because its costly and difficult, but also because GW sunk a fortune into making "The Hobby" part of the experience.

So I wonder how many got into the SW prepainted all in the box games and just never ventured out. Their first impression is that prepaints are normal; that the models come ready assembled and they can just play the game. They don't have to build or paint; they don't have to pay way more for someone else to do it for them etc...

so its a fantastic IP to draw new people in with a REALLY accessible game; but how many are going to want to invest time into learning new hobbies off the back of it to get further into wargames?



I'm not saying no one did, but just that its a barrier to it being the ideal gateway. Heck who knows perhaps we'll see it again without all the pre-done parts

So the big question? Will the models get cheaper from people dumping stuff? Or more expensive as people try to complete collections? Personally when I saw the box of FFG card needed to play I soured on it. But I always loved the little ships as display pieces or toys. So would love to get some more!

I was all set to swallow my cardboard and character card dislike for armada, but then the ships weren't in scale with each other and many ships were ridiculously up gunned or down gunned in order to allow the rebels and empire to play large fleet engagements with each other.

Currently they are going cheap on a lot of trade groups (unless they have been out of print for a while or never got rereleased) but they are guaranteed to get more and more expensive as time goes on.

Do you have an example of one of these groups for me to look at?

It's had a long "its dying" phase so I feel like a good few panic buyers might have bought out what they wanted already and whatever is left right now was the stuff that was either less popular; or popular but expensive or popular and actually got a few restocks to satisfy demand.

but I 100% expect prices to go up, esp once collectors realise that these are now finite.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Do you have an example of one of these groups for me to look at?

Look for the Mad Doc's Facebook Loot group. X-wing and Armada were listed as being in-scope for no-markup sales of stuff people find in local stores. Join and list your wants.

Sad to hear that X-Wing is dead, but it will absolutely remain an evergreen as far as I'm concerned.

In my experience, X-Wing plays closer to a board game than a wargame. I've had several occasions where a friend was visiting and we managed to play a couple of games without any prior knowledge on their part, which would never have been possible with other games like TOW or Infinity.

So while X-Wing had a large competitive community and the skill ceiling was quite high, I also believe that it also did fairly well on the more casual end of the spectrum, which is not an easy bridge to gap.

 Da Boss wrote:
Interesting insights. Would I be right in assuming as well that X Wing drew in a lot of non-hardcore wargamers? The likes of us are used to edition changes and having to rejig things, buy new rules and so on. But if you're a star wars fan who is new to wargaming, it might have been a real shock to find out all your cards were now obsolete and you had to buy new ones. Maybe FFG misjudged the tolerance for the casual wargamer toward that stuff?

The big issue with the 2.0 upgrade was how 1.0 worked. In 1.0 you had to buy multiples of EVERYTHING for every faction. Even if you didn't play Empire, the new Empire ship came with 1 copy of a card you needed 3 of to keep the A-Wing playable. The 2.0 upgrade boxes were perfectly reasonable.... for a faction, but everyone had 5 factions (2 of which hadn't been separate factions up to that point). It wasn't the cost of the individual upgrades that people rejected; it was the cost of upgrading their collection all at once that let people take stock of just how much the edition change really cost. If I recall, the new core set contents weren't even in the upgrade, so on top of that you needed to rebuy the most common ships in the game to retain the ability to play Luke.

 BertBert wrote:
Sad to hear that X-Wing is dead, but it will absolutely remain an evergreen as far as I'm concerned.

In my experience, X-Wing plays closer to a board game than a wargame. I've had several occasions where a friend was visiting and we managed to play a couple of games without any prior knowledge on their part, which would never have been possible with other games like TOW or Infinity.

Is there an available set of products one could pick up now that would deliver that experience? So 3-4 mostly balanced lists that are fun to play against each other?

The core sets had the rulebook and rulers, so FFG expected everyone to buy it anyway, preferred faction or not.
They did make it downloadable though and kept the glossary updated.

deano2099 wrote:

 BertBert wrote:
Sad to hear that X-Wing is dead, but it will absolutely remain an evergreen as far as I'm concerned.

In my experience, X-Wing plays closer to a board game than a wargame. I've had several occasions where a friend was visiting and we managed to play a couple of games without any prior knowledge on their part, which would never have been possible with other games like TOW or Infinity.

Is there an available set of products one could pick up now that would deliver that experience? So 3-4 mostly balanced lists that are fun to play against each other?

Not sure what is currently available, but all I got was the 2nd edition starter and a couple of additional ships for each side. I believe I bought a Y-Wing and a B-Wing to expand on the rebels and Vader's Tie for the imperials.

Don't think the cards were ever reasonable in X-Wing.

I brought my ships and a folder with some print out of the rules to an X-Wing tourment, and everyone demanded I have these silly little cards. And not even just once, but repeat cards with identical text for repeat equipment?

That is just dumb? What's the point.

People hate on Games workshop and such for fleecing people with Codexes, but not even there would I have to present two copies of a Dark Angels Codex just because I ran two Dark Angels planes with two identical upgrades or some such (assuming you even "need" the original rules to be present in hard copy).

The_Real_Chris wrote:
So the big question? Will the models get cheaper from people dumping stuff? Or more expensive as people try to complete collections? Personally when I saw the box of FFG card needed to play I soured on it. But I always loved the little ships as display pieces or toys. So would love to get some more!

I was all set to swallow my cardboard and character card dislike for armada, but then the ships weren't in scale with each other and many ships were ridiculously up gunned or down gunned in order to allow the rebels and empire to play large fleet engagements with each other.

Sold all off my small collection Xwing1.0 2xstarters a millennium and other ships for a fraction of the price about a year or so ago. Not sure if the prices will pick up or devaluate in the future.

deano2099 wrote:

 BertBert wrote:
Sad to hear that X-Wing is dead, but it will absolutely remain an evergreen as far as I'm concerned.

In my experience, X-Wing plays closer to a board game than a wargame. I've had several occasions where a friend was visiting and we managed to play a couple of games without any prior knowledge on their part, which would never have been possible with other games like TOW or Infinity.

Is there an available set of products one could pick up now that would deliver that experience? So 3-4 mostly balanced lists that are fun to play against each other?

The squadron packs and starter sets for Rebels and Imperials should be good for that, maybe add in an extra ship or two for theme (like the Falcon).

Sunny Side Up wrote:Don't think the cards were ever reasonable in X-Wing.

I brought my ships and a folder with some print out of the rules to an X-Wing tourment, and everyone demanded I have these silly little cards. And not even just once, but repeat cards with identical text for repeat equipment?

That is just dumb? What's the point.

People hate on Games workshop and such for fleecing people with Codexes, but not even there would I have to present two copies of a Dark Angels Codex just because I ran two Dark Angels planes with two identical upgrades or some such (assuming you even "need" the original rules to be present in hard copy).

Needing one copy of the official card is pretty standard for an official event, though I would be surprised if anyone enforced it. Needing multiple copies of identical cards though is bizarre and not covered by the rules either. No event I have ever attended or heard of required that.

Isn't that like 2nd edition. 40k? The wargear cards? How are upgrades for ships different? If I'm running 3 ships, with 3 upgrades, I'd supply the card or it doesn't have the upgrade.

Second edition 40k was a long time ago though. It certainly isn't a standard out there in war games at large. Though hopefully no one tells GW about it. Just think, want to run 3 units of something, better go buy 3 packs of dataset cards then...

 alarmingrick wrote:
Isn't that like 2nd edition. 40k? The wargear cards? How are upgrades for ships different? If I'm running 3 ships, with 3 upgrades, I'd supply the card or it doesn't have the upgrade.

Difference is some useful cards were locked to useless ships. Or worse, ships for a faction you don’t play.

As noted, not actually a big problem in friendly/club/casual play, where provided someone had a copy of the card, or a photo, you’re up and running. But as others have said, organised events insisted on having the physical card.

This could lead to stuff such as “I want to field a Y-Wing, so I have bought a Y-Wing. However, my strategy requires an Astromech only available in the E-Wing, and Torpedoes only available in the TIE Bomber. So when the game was billed as £12 a ship, why have I paid £36 to field a ship”.

Now I understand and take it in authority 2nd Ed dealt with this somewhat. Certainly no having to buy an Imperial ship to arm a Rebel ship. But Hunt The Card To Chase The Meta wasn’t ideal.

There's a reason 40k is in the rear view mirror.

What caused me to check out of X-Wing was having to buy an Epic Ship, something I might use on relatively rare occasion, to get the cards to stop Vader’s TIE Advanced being crap.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
What caused me to check out of X-Wing was having to buy an Epic Ship, something I might use on relatively rare occasion, to get the cards to stop Vader’s TIE Advanced being crap.

The predatory sales model was certainly a turnoff, I was lucky enough that a completionist friend just bought 1 of everything.

GW tried to pull that gak with Underworlds but I think mostly quit after season 1.

Forgive my ignorance, but I've been away from gaming for a bit. Ironically decided to pick x-wing back up and boom goes the game, lol.

The example given, do you have to have that card to use the ship in your example? Did they issue it and say to make this work you now have to buy this expansion pack too? Or are these combos people have figured out and need the card to work? If the latter, I'd say it's the price you pay to come up with the trick. I'd have 0 problem with proxies, personally.

 alarmingrick wrote:
Forgive my ignorance, but I've been away from gaming for a bit. Ironically decided to pick x-wing back up and boom goes the game, lol.

The example given, do you have to have that card to use the ship in your example? Did they issue it and say to make this work you now have to buy this expansion pack too? Or are these combos people have figured out and need the card to work? If the latter, I'd say it's the price you pay to come up with the trick. I'd have 0 problem with proxies, personally.

They were combos people figured out to make the ships perform at their peak and in some cases, to make the ships not just points you freely gave to your opponents,

 alarmingrick wrote:
Forgive my ignorance, but I've been away from gaming for a bit. Ironically decided to pick x-wing back up and boom goes the game, lol.

The example given, do you have to have that card to use the ship in your example? Did they issue it and say to make this work you now have to buy this expansion pack too? Or are these combos people have figured out and need the card to work? If the latter, I'd say it's the price you pay to come up with the trick. I'd have 0 problem with proxies, personally.

For official tournaments (which were very very popular), you were required to have an official copy of the card for each ship with the upgrade.

Notably, there wasn't really "errata" for the game. (There was some, but very limited). The goal was to fix things with upgrades. You would literally get packs that provide a card that's just a massive buff to a ship that was underperforming.

It was a requirement for many ships to work in v1 (it didn't happen in v2), the most notorious being the autothrusters expansion that comes with a free Starviper! Most ace style ships (like the TIE interceptor) needed autothrusters to be useable and if your list included 6 of them then some people needed to get 3 starviper packs...

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
What caused me to check out of X-Wing was having to buy an Epic Ship, something I might use on relatively rare occasion, to get the cards to stop Vader’s TIE Advanced being crap.

I will say, my favorite experience overall is Epic with both sides including a huge ship. It's not an experience FFG designed well and you have to put in a disappointing amount of effort to make it fun, but it can really hit a sweet spot between X-Wing and Armada that captures what the feel of space battles for me better than either. The way FFG undercooked the mode on release and badded it out with mandatory standard play upgrades absolutely sucked, but its really fun when it actually works.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
What caused me to check out of X-Wing was having to buy an Epic Ship, something I might use on relatively rare occasion, to get the cards to stop Vader’s TIE Advanced being crap.

The predatory sales model was certainly a turnoff, I was lucky enough that a completionist friend just bought 1 of everything.

GW tried to pull that gak with Underworlds but I think mostly quit after season 1.

At the very least, Underworlds left you with a complete Warband for every purchase. Hunt the Card is still sucky, on account there are TCG’s out there if I want to play one.

Honestly surprised they played pretend about this for so long after the handover.

im wondering, maybe its possible that we might get a new fighter game or larger scale game that includes plastic to build ships. something akin to Dropzone

Strange how so many games half-way between boardgame and wargame meet similar fates.

Accessibility is something wonderful our hobby needs, but whether it is X-wing 1.0's gross card-buying side game, or say Heroclix's disgusting predator blind-boosters, these games frequently scare those new players off by succumbing to corporate greed.

On the ease of getting into the game discussion: the ships also hit the right price point, at least here in the US. For $20 I could pick up a new small ship, with potentially new cards that might change how I play my existing stuff. That's the right amount that I'd be willing to drop the money when I'm in the FLGS looking for other stuff, or if I'm at a tourney and want to grab something on the way out etc.

As far as the limits of a SW game and IP - I think with the right hands on the wheel 2.0 could've been soft landed into a more stable tournament scene, with a cycling of ships, scenarios and the occasional new ships from shows. It wouldn't have been as lucrative, but it probably could've been sustainable.

Most likely....
Expense of renewing IP for those 2 games vs how much profit they bring in.
Decision made.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
Most likely....
Expense of renewing IP for those 2 games vs how much profit they bring in.
Decision made.

Correct. And the answer to "why now" is simply "because the contract wasn't up for renewal when FFG got reorg'd".

AMG being up for sale and being lumbered with 900m usd debt you mean? The licence was renewed last year.

Actually thinking about it; I doubt X-Wing and Armada have unique licenses, but there's almost certainly contracts with the manufacturer that are likely expiring.

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:
Strange how so many games half-way between boardgame and wargame meet similar fates.

Accessibility is something wonderful our hobby needs, but whether it is X-wing 1.0's gross card-buying side game, or say Heroclix's disgusting predator blind-boosters, these games frequently scare those new players off by succumbing to corporate greed.

I think it's a lot of factors.

IP is expensive
IP is finite, so you eventually run out of material (and run out of topline material even faster)
Preassemblled minis can be pricey, prepainted are even more so
Labor and shippiing from China have gotten way more expensive since COVID

I'm wondering if AMG was looking at one or both of these games and wondering if they wanted to pay for another production run or pull the plug. My guess is that given the increased cost of production and with no marquee ships left to release, they didn't have the passion to keep it going.

Most of the time its creatives working within the limitations of the business they're a part of. Blind boxes are mostly a way to provide a limited SKU to make a product viable for large retail chains to get enough volume to make prepainted plastic viable. X-Wings cards were a response for people's demands for rebalancing in an era when digital solutions weren't seen as viable.

Of course, how these systems are used matters quite a bit and we've certainly seen greed push things too far. Increasing chase rarity that's intentionally imbalanced or putting patch cards in risky high priced huge ships for an otherwise niche mode and the like. Noble intentions, but bad outcomes.

X-Wing 2.0 always felt like the nobelist of intestions to me, but it paid for all the greed of 1.0.

It increased in popularity to be the second most sold wargame behind 40k...

I am surprised so many people here are objecting to or just realizing that these games are CCGs with miniatures. That's how they made money.

Personally, if I was AMG I would have moved X-wing to be a Squadron based game instead of what we have now. I.e. you need to make groups of 2-4 of the same ship type as a core i.e. a squadron of Ties, X-wings, A-wings, Defenders, Z-95s, etc. Then, made some of the one-offs purchasable as singles to "match the fluff".

That would encourage folks to buy multiples of the same fighter for their lists. Like in early editions you had the Tie swarm as a viable tactics and build.

Instead, it played like this strange mish-mash of ships and pilots all scrambling around independently doing "stuff".

 LunarSol wrote:
Most of the time its creatives working within the limitations of the business they're a part of. Blind boxes are mostly a way to provide a limited SKU to make a product viable for large retail chains to get enough volume to make prepainted plastic viable. X-Wings cards were a response for people's demands for rebalancing in an era when digital solutions weren't seen as viable.

Of course, how these systems are used matters quite a bit and we've certainly seen greed push things too far. Increasing chase rarity that's intentionally imbalanced or putting patch cards in risky high priced huge ships for an otherwise niche mode and the like. Noble intentions, but bad outcomes.

X-Wing 2.0 always felt like the nobelist of intestions to me, but it paid for all the greed of 1.0.

The objective for the game from a business point of view is important too. We as wargamers tend to assume longevity is beneficial and desirable - in that context X-Wing was essentially a failure. But if the business objective was to make a metric ton of money over a few years, ride it hot then dump the IP to move onto the next thing, it was a massive success. Not for consumers ofc, but who gives a toss about them.

Honestly considering customers had issues getting hold of game stock and how powerful the SW IP is you could argue its still a failure because they could have ridden that high profit high success margin for a LOT longer if they'd made some improvements.

They could even have continued by dropping pre-painted (or charged a premium) and then sold brushes and paints with branding on them or paired up with an existing paint brand etc...


Of course when your IP is held by another party there's always the issue that you can invest and reinvest and build for the future and then have the whole thing swept out from under you for doing nothing wrong; but the firm wanting more money or taking so much it cripples reinvestment and so forth

I wonder what’s to come now.

Not pooping on the land based Star Wars game, for me it’s always been the space battles that made Star Wars, especially the battle over Endor, the super cut of which I can watch again and again and again. Spesh due to the galaxy’s most destructive “bug on a windscreen” inadvisable interface.

And X-Wing, once you were up to speed, absolutely replicated that really nicely, giving the feel of a dogfight, with preset moves for each ship giving each a potential edge. A newcomer just needed a friendly group willing to walk them through it and go easy the first few games, because the learning curve is steep. So steep that without a guiding hand to talk you through it, you’d get your arse kicked so fast and so squarely, I found myself unable to learn anything.

Also doesn’t help I couldn’t roll for toffee 🤣🤣🤣

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Not pooping on the land based Star Wars game, for me it’s always been the space battles that made Star Wars

Could just be you've never seen the land game done right



This is my local club!

That does look cool! And would certainly make me want to give the land based Star Wars games a try.

Slipspace wrote:

X-Wing had a really well-run competitive scene, supported by FFG, which I suspect had some effect on "forcing" people into 2.0. I'd also argue that the end of 1.0 was an absolutely miserable experience from a balance point of view.

I stopped playing X-wing near to the end and switched to Armada precisely because of how gross the meta was.

FFG basically admitted they were trying to break the game at that point in order to figure out what not to do in 2.0.

Hadn't heard that. It was my understanding that part of the problem was the lag between development and release so that FFG were never playing the same game as us out in the wild. So we'd get these six month gaps of broken mess followed by a different broken mess with fixes coming well after the meta has shifted.

I think they succeeded because 2.0 was a much better game, IMO. The business side of converting from 1.0 to 2.0 was the biggest problem they had. Even then, I never really thought it was all that bad. The individual conversion kits were relatively cheap and FG made an effort to make sure they were generous with the cards in them and the kits remained in production for a long time.

Yes, 2.0 was a much-needed reset. I thought the conversion kits were brilliant and the concern about converting large collections overblown. I only had a large collection of 1.0 stuff because of having to buy out of faction ships to get the cards I needed for my preferred faction. I didn't actually play most of it and so I didn't bother to convert most of it. Even I wanted to it wasn't like I had to convert everything all at once. Not having to buy out of faction for upgrades was a big enough upside that I think would have made 2.0 cheaper in the long run.

 Easy E wrote:
I am surprised so many people here are objecting to or just realizing that these games are CCGs with miniatures. That's how they made money.

Personally, if I was AMG I would have moved X-wing to be a Squadron based game instead of what we have now. I.e. you need to make groups of 2-4 of the same ship type as a core i.e. a squadron of Ties, X-wings, A-wings, Defenders, Z-95s, etc. Then, made some of the one-offs purchasable as singles to "match the fluff".

That would encourage folks to buy multiples of the same fighter for their lists. Like in early editions you had the Tie swarm as a viable tactics and build.

Instead, it played like this strange mish-mash of ships and pilots all scrambling around independently doing "stuff".

The Epic Battles Multiplayer Expansion did that. Squadrons and Wing Leaders are a thing.

You are a wing leader.
Your wingmates must be 2, 3, 4, or 5 other ships of your ship type.
While you defend, up to 2 of your wingmates in the attack arc may suffer 1 Hit or Critical Hit damage to cancel a matching result.

That didn't seem to sell well, and I never really heard anything about anyone playing using it much.
And the marketing didn't push it at all.

Well, I was not following super-close but sounds like I missed it then, Skinnereal.

I am still pretty convinced that trying to design a competitive game is a bad idea. Short term it works great, but mid to long term it is a flop.

As the developer, you run out of design space, can't keep up with the Meta, your design to production window is too long, and the Comp players have 0 loyalty to your game. As soon as they perceive it as broken, they are onto the next "Great" thing.

Meanwhile, basement and Non-Comp gamers keep on chugging along and buying stuff because they like the idea of playing games in your setting better than actually playing the games. Ultimately, as a Developer I would prefer that steady income stream and profit margin to plan with.

 Easy E wrote:
Well, I was not following super-close but sounds like I missed it then, Skinnereal.

I am still pretty convinced that trying to design a competitive game is a bad idea. Short term it works great, but mid to long term it is a flop.

As the developer, you run out of design space, can't keep up with the Meta, your design to production window is too long, and the Comp players have 0 loyalty to your game. As soon as they perceive it as broken, they are onto the next "Great" thing.

Meanwhile, basement and Non-Comp gamers keep on chugging along and buying stuff because they like the idea of playing games in your setting better than actually playing the games. Ultimately, as a Developer I would prefer that steady income stream and profit margin to plan with.

There’s a reason that every game or company that is successful in this niche is because the understand the churn.
As much as you might think that the basement dweller can sustain a successful company, there’s a reason why those kinds of companies remain small.
My buddy did that exact thing and I’ll tell you right now, it’s not enough to sustain making a living for a single proprietor let alone a profitable game.
That’s why every large company keeps the churn going with new games, models and editions.

One can’t turn a healthy profit and remain sustainable otherwise.
The gaming niche has always had the aspect of chasing the new shiny.
I honestly doubt that will ever change.

I don’t think he’s saying what you think. Chasing new shiny models and rules are different from chasing the tournament scene and catering to meta-chasing gamers. One churn is adding to the whole experience while the other only adds crunch for the crunch fans while making the game less enjoyable for the casuals and narrative players.

Frostgrave has its 17th expansion released or something, and you can hardly get more narrative than Frostgrave.
So I think Easy E is up to something. But I don't think that's the main problem of X-Wing, or it wouldn't have to be. Star Trek Attack Wing always strongly supported the narrative side and stopped official support for tournaments at some point, Armada has two narrative campaigns to work with and both are similar games.
All of these would do better with stronger support from the companies producing them, you could churn out X-Wing scenarios for years if you wanted to. (Did they ever? I haven't been really following X-Wing that much, all I heard back in 1st edition was that people saw Attack Wings narrative approach as a plus compared to X-Wing).

Yeah, somehow Attack Wing is still around but X-wing/Armada is dead. Interesting.



All that said, for a product line/business to last more than 5 years is unusual. Something like 95%+ fail before the 5 year mark. The fact that these lasted as long as they did is an outlier.

Has Attack Wing gotten any better with the scaling issues? I remember they were pretty extreme

If I was really cynical person, I should release a Castle in the Sky PDF booklet that stats up Armada ships for use in Castles in the Sky rules system.

Hmmm.... Sorry, I have to go; right now!

 Hulksmash wrote:
Has Attack Wing gotten any better with the scaling issues? I remember they were pretty extreme

Unfortunately not, they just continued to produce their Heroclix models that were all over the place, even the Xindi ships they produced for STAW specifically and were within one faction had a different scale.
They're doing Into the Unknown now in a different but apparently consistent scale.

I don’t get the scale problem. The ships are all sized to put on a board, whereas in scale, fitting the Defiant and the 5km Dominion battleship on the same board would be a pain. And think of the cost.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I don’t get the scale problem. The ships are all sized to put on a board, whereas in scale, fitting the Defiant and the 5km Dominion battleship on the same board would be a pain. And think of the cost.

Well, most ships would fit in the 1:7000-9000 scale good enough. From the reactions I read and have also seen in real life when showing the game to people the scale is really what's putting people off. You want to recreate scenes from the shows but when that Bird of prey is larger than the D it breaks the immersion for many. Imagine an imperial knight having the same size as a Space Marine. Personally I've rescaled my collection on the extreme ends, yes, that Dominion battleship cost me more than 100$ in pre-3D printing times and needed shipping and taxes from the US, but it's a beauty now and not smaller than the bug ships

 Ghool wrote:

There’s a reason that every game or company that is successful in this niche is because the understand the churn.
As much as you might think that the basement dweller can sustain a successful company, there’s a reason why those kinds of companies remain small.
My buddy did that exact thing and I’ll tell you right now, it’s not enough to sustain making a living for a single proprietor let alone a profitable game.
That’s why every large company keeps the churn going with new games, models and editions.

One can’t turn a healthy profit and remain sustainable otherwise.
The gaming niche has always had the aspect of chasing the new shiny.
I honestly doubt that will ever change.

Well you have two models - product churn to keep customers buying, and customer churn to keep new people buying. A company like GW plans for both. Long term historical traditional wargame companies (often 1-3 man bands) will rely on a churn of customers as new people get into their period and scale, but only a few are stalwarts and the rest part time.

I do think it's unlikely we won't have any Star Wars space combat game out there. And maybe we'll see the core of the game end up back with FFG, and sold under a board game model instead.

(So a big box with a full game for two people, fixed lists, and future expansions that add scenarios and new lists with their attendant ships).

 ingtaer wrote:
It increased in popularity to be the second most sold wargame behind 40k...

For a brief period when they had the Force Awakens Starter in conjunction with the Force Awakens movie release and that starter was available in stores like Walmart and Waterstones and such at the peak of nu-Star Wars anticipation.

Ironically, GW tried to tap into that with very basic 40K-/AoS-themed board games that could also go through these big chains alongside stuff like Monopoly and Codenames, rather than traditional hobby stores. But it was more a blip of Star Wars than a genuine long-term strategy for hobby/wargames (even X-wing).

Sunny Side Up wrote:

 ingtaer wrote:
It increased in popularity to be the second most sold wargame behind 40k...

For a brief period when they had the Force Awakens Starter in conjunction with the Force Awakens movie release and that starter was available in stores like Walmart and Waterstones and such at the peak of nu-Star Wars anticipation.

Ironically, GW tried to tap into that with very basic 40K-/AoS-themed board games that could also go through these big chains alongside stuff like Monopoly and Codenames, rather than traditional hobby stores. But it was more a blip of Star Wars than a genuine long-term strategy for hobby/wargames (even X-wing).

During 2nd edition.

On a more positive note?

Is there a community effort starting to emerge?

Aren't the cards free to print nowadays?

And for sure most of the ships are available as STL, even if they need to be rescaled. I know I printed myself an Assault Gunboat (what children nowadays call Star Wing) before they even released a model for it and it had the correct peg for X-wing bases and everything.

I imagine the dials will be by far the most annoying bits to make, unless someone makes bespoke STLs with engraved icons for each ship.

Dials could be replicated with cards for a low tech solution? Make one card listing all the ship’s dial options. And one card corresponding to each option. Place chosen card face down next to the ship.

Not as neat and tidy I’ll grant you, but seems practicable in a pinch, and just a little trust your opponent has been honest about the original dial’s actions.

I've seen producers make generic plastic dials with all the maneuvers on them. You'd just need the appropriate card that shows you the allowed maneuvers of the ship in question. Not the best solution maybe, but it also means you don't need unique dials for all the ships.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On a more positive note?

Is there a community effort starting to emerge?

Pretty much all of the big name community leaders have banded together to announce they are keeping the game going, including tournament support.

From what I've seen in Armada circles the community leaders are all saying they won't back any community balancing/homebrew efforts until at least 2025, when the final (US only) Worlds competition is over. I don't love it, it's wasting all the momentum for the sake of one tourney scene. There's stuff in need of balancing and work now that won't happen til then (and likely won't at all, as interest dies off).

Billicus wrote:
From what I've seen in Armada circles the community leaders are all saying they won't back any community balancing/homebrew efforts until at least 2025, when the final (US only) Worlds competition is over. I don't love it, it's wasting all the momentum for the sake of one tourney scene. There's stuff in need of balancing and work now that won't happen til then (and likely won't at all, as interest dies off).

X-Wing is the same. It's brilliant to see the community take over so quickly, but really disappointing to stick to the current status quo for the next 9 months. AMG may call the current GT system "official" but the whole tournament scene has continued in spite of them, rather than because of them, over the last few years. X-Wing in particular has some balance issues with the current points. Putting aside the systemic issues of the lack of granularity in a 20-point system, there are a lot of Standard Loadout cards that are too cheap, mainly because they provide far too much health per point. I don't really understand not making some changes there within a reasonable timeframe as a stopgap to improve the health of the game before potentially bigger changes later.

Well, at least there’s something brewing in these earlier days. That has to be a positive?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well, at least there’s something brewing in these earlier days. That has to be a positive?

Absolutely. It's a pretty diverse group of people from all over the globe, too. Some big US people there, good UK representation and a decent number of people from the rest of the world. If they can figure out how to work together effectively but avoid "death by committee" it's looking good.

Glad to hear it. Despite a not entirely undeserved rep for being pro-GW, I don’t want other gaming communities to lose what they have.

I hope they get around to undoing all the terrible changes AMG made. Can we get back to 200 points, please?

 Arschbombe wrote:
I hope they get around to undoing all the terrible changes AMG made. Can we get back to 200 points, please?

This is going to be the biggest challenge. AMG messed things up so badly, even them abandoning the game has caused problems because there's a splintered community. Nothing's been confirmed yet, but early indications seem to suggest something closer to 2.5 than 2.0. Personally, I think the changes to obstacles, ion, tractoring and ROAD were very good. The bumping rules were mixed, and designed to solve a problem I rarely actually saw in practice. The points changes were demonstrably stupid and I really, really hope we don't keep the 20-point set-up we have now. I'd be happy as a first pass to revert to 200 points and modify the scenario rules to account for it.

 Arschbombe wrote:
I hope they get around to undoing all the terrible changes AMG made. Can we get back to 200 points, please?

Just multiply everything in 2.5 edition by 10 Tweak it afterwards.
Or, the old points are still on FFG's site.

There has heen an active community on discord doing 2.0 and rebalancing everything released since 2.5 came out, they do a fairly good job of it too.

Slipspace wrote:

 Arschbombe wrote:
I hope they get around to undoing all the terrible changes AMG made. Can we get back to 200 points, please?

This is going to be the biggest challenge. AMG messed things up so badly, even them abandoning the game has caused problems because there's a splintered community. Nothing's been confirmed yet, but early indications seem to suggest something closer to 2.5 than 2.0. Personally, I think the changes to obstacles, ion, tractoring and ROAD were very good. The bumping rules were mixed, and designed to solve a problem I rarely actually saw in practice. The points changes were demonstrably stupid and I really, really hope we don't keep the 20-point set-up we have now. I'd be happy as a first pass to revert to 200 points and modify the scenario rules to account for it.

I am real interested to see how the community addresses the bungling AMG did with the game, because man.... those 2.5 changes were pretty darn rough.

Billicus wrote:
From what I've seen in Armada circles the community leaders are all saying they won't back any community balancing/homebrew efforts until at least 2025, when the final (US only) Worlds competition is over. I don't love it, it's wasting all the momentum for the sake of one tourney scene. There's stuff in need of balancing and work now that won't happen til then (and likely won't at all, as interest dies off).

Yeah, you'd think sane thing to do would be to announce this one tournament will keep current rules and in meantime write/release beta version of community changes so it's playtested and ready for final pass ASAP

 kodos wrote:
in addition, it works for GW, no one complains about different models size from Necromunda or Underworlds and that you can hardly use the models from the main games to play the skirmish games

You wot?

I can play Warcry and Kill Team with main game models just fine, OK, not all models but most of them have rules and funnily enough GW keeps all of their game ranges at the exact same scale (ancient 54 mm Inq experiment excluded) instead of doing ultra-blatant cash grab of 3 scales in 3 game systems depicting the exact same characters/units. Yes, there are dumb memes about this or that GW range being 1-2 mm taller but all these 'differences' are well within natural human height variance and it looks fine on table sooo...

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m possibly being overly charitable to AMG, but keep in mind they’re a pretty small team, and didn’t actively bid, so far as I can tell, for X-Wing and Armada.

Good couple of years ago they confirmed No New Ships for…Armada, I think?

I suspect it’s less negligence on AMG’s behalf, and more a question of resources. After all, if you’ve say a dozen sculptors and designers producing everything AMG produces, and then tell them “here’s more work, for two existing games, hop to it”, that’s not entirely on AMG, at least not in the beginning. There is of course the question of “could you not have hired more people?”.

Not gonna bothering commenting on what I thought of the two games as frankly that doesn’t matter. Because I still have empathy and sympathy with those invested in the games who now have their bums out the window.

The sculptors are for the most part freelancers, you can always get more of those, they are budgeted separately from typical personnel costs.

Rules designers are a different matter, but it helps when you don't fire them all (for the record, AMG offered the existing FFG staff the opportunity to interview for their jobs, those that did so grumbled that the process was somewhat degrading and AMG only accepted one of them, who was fired within 6-12 months).

 LunarSol wrote:

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
Most likely....
Expense of renewing IP for those 2 games vs how much profit they bring in.
Decision made.

Correct. And the answer to "why now" is simply "because the contract wasn't up for renewal when FFG got reorg'd".

Unlikely, the license isn't for a specific game, it's for a category of products. As they are still producing legion and shatterpoint, they most likely still have the license.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Correct. And the answer to "why now" is simply "because the contract wasn't up for renewal when FFG got reorg'd".

Unlikely, the license isn't for a specific game, it's for a category of products. As they are still producing legion and shatterpoint, they most likely still have the license.

Realized this almost immediately and corrected myself after

chaos0xomega wrote:

Rules designers are a different matter, but it helps when you don't fire them all (for the record, AMG offered the existing FFG staff the opportunity to interview for their jobs, those that did so grumbled that the process was somewhat degrading and AMG only accepted one of them, who was fired within 6-12 months).

I'm fairly sure this was all part of Asmodee's plan. Why bother firing people when you can give them the "option" to relocate to another state working under a studio that has no experience with your game?

Maybe, but having interacted with Will Schick on numerous occasions, I'm more inclined to thi k that he's an egotistical snob and either overestimated his ability and/or underestimated the capability of his peers at FFG.

 LunarSol wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Correct. And the answer to "why now" is simply "because the contract wasn't up for renewal when FFG got reorg'd".

Unlikely, the license isn't for a specific game, it's for a category of products. As they are still producing legion and shatterpoint, they most likely still have the license.

Realized this almost immediately and corrected myself after

It makes it interesting when that contract comes up again. Armada & Xwing gone, Shatterpoint sales poor, Legion sales ok ish. Will it be worth the cost of renewing?

People keep saying "Shatterpoint sales poor", but the stuff is constantly out of stock on the web retailers I've looked at?

May be country related - last couple of times I’ve been in element games there’s a wall of the stuff that doesn’t look to have changed much.

Yeah, its probably the most popular non-GW game locally.

Like everything in our hobby, outside the GW bubble you can't gauge sales at a glance.

If I drive an hour East, Shatterpoint is 100% dead... An hour West and it has a playerbase almost equal to 40k...

... both are terrible barometers for sales. :-p

MaxT wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Correct. And the answer to "why now" is simply "because the contract wasn't up for renewal when FFG got reorg'd".

Unlikely, the license isn't for a specific game, it's for a category of products. As they are still producing legion and shatterpoint, they most likely still have the license.

Realized this almost immediately and corrected myself after

It makes it interesting when that contract comes up again. Armada & Xwing gone, Shatterpoint sales poor, Legion sales ok ish. Will it be worth the cost of renewing?

It'll be interesting if Disney even gives them the option. Having seen Disney's licensing requirements in the past, Asmodees financial situation (the debt, specifically) might make it a nonstarter for the mouse, provided that they hold existing license holders to the same standards as new ones.

Just in general? Please be wary of making claims about sales volumes for any game.

To the best of my knowledge, GW are the only player that has to publish its 6 and 12 month results. And even then, they don’t break it down by game system, let alone army.

I think Asmodée is similar from memory, but under French jurisdiction rather than UK, as I’m somewhat sure that’s where Asmodée is incorporated.

But just looking at GW? We’ve seen many, many, many, many 4chan type claims they’re just about to go under in recent years, despite the publically posted, and independently verified, 6 and 12 month results.

Anecdotally, Shatterpoint hasn't sold locally at all, even at clearance. One shop has it, you just have to ask for it as the floor space was better served for lines that move.

Players were already committed to Rebel Assault and Legion, so a third version of Malibu Stacy wasn't a hot ticket.

 Easy E wrote:
If I was really cynical person, I should release a Castle in the Sky PDF booklet that stats up Armada ships for use in Castles in the Sky rules system.

Hmmm.... Sorry, I have to go; right now!

Go for it!! I have always been planning on someday using my Armada ships and squadrons with the One Page Rules Warfleets game. Especially in the previous edition, which had profiles that matched right up with Armada ships for the Alliance and Empire fleets.

We can't say for sure, but one can apply a little common sense to the evidence we do have. Doesn't seem to be a big presence on Youtube. 40K may be the only thing that really moves battle reports, but there's just not much of it being mentioned, just the odd comment of someone being excited about a new release, or wondering what a rumored box set will be. When Legion was hot new releases for would sell out that weekend on Miniature Market, Shatterpoint doesn't seem to. Forums don't seem to buzz with a tremendous amount of energy about the game. STL makers are not really jumping on it like there's a gold mine waiting for them if they do. Just comes across as tepid, and it would be surprising if a tepid exterior hid a sales behemoth underneath.

 frankelee wrote:
We can't say for sure, but one can apply a little common sense to the evidence we do have. Doesn't seem to be a big presence on Youtube. 40K may be the only thing that really moves battle reports, but there's just not much of it being mentioned, just the odd comment of someone being excited about a new release, or wondering what a rumored box set will be. When Legion was hot new releases for would sell out that weekend on Miniature Market, Shatterpoint doesn't seem to. Forums don't seem to buzz with a tremendous amount of energy about the game. STL makers are not really jumping on it like there's a gold mine waiting for them if they do. Just comes across as tepid, and it would be surprising if a tepid exterior hid a sales behemoth underneath.

Miniwargaming 467k Subscribers.
Marvel crisis protocol battle report 4 days ago, 1878 views.
Ravaged star play test battle report 7 days ago, 3318 views.
Warhammer the old world battle report 9 days ago, 8907 views.
Age of sigmar battle report 2 weeks ago, 7374 views.

Aegisbrand studios 5k subscribers.
Star Wars shatterpoint battle report 5 days ago, 1201 views.
Marvel crisis protocol battle report, 6 days ago. 1323 views.
Star Wars shaterpoint battle report, 12 days ago. 964 views.

Honestly from a little look, it seems to be drawing views. From community standpoint I think that’s fairly ok.
The reddit pages seem to also be getting regular traffic.
I also didn’t bother looking at 40K since we know that wins. And 10 mins of work.

The only xwing battle reports I could find this month didn’t even break 100 veiws together, this news was all that come up that seems to be drawing attention.

I'm late to the party as I just noticed the thread but wow... I'd be lying if I said it wasn't expected given the (seeming lack of) support since the switch over though. I bought at least two of everything other than the bigger ships (one each of those) for the first couple of years as I had gone gaga over playing starfighter games at gencon in the 1990s with repurposed Micro-Machines and this was my chance to get my own even better minis but the switchover to very obscure (even for me by my standards!) EU ships eventually led me to just occasionally buying a ship I still liked. My last purchase/gift was a U-wing from Rogue One and 2nd edition with its mandatory buy in for a game I was no longer playing weekly was the final nail.

Ironically, this news might get me to pick up the last few ships I liked from the past 5+ years before they become even harder to get.

A soon as the announcement was made, my FLGS was mostly wiped out of Armada (just a couple of wave 1-3 ships left) and about half of X-Wing is gone.

 MajorWesJanson wrote:
A soon as the announcement was made, my FLGS was mostly wiped out of Armada (just a couple of wave 1-3 ships left) and about half of X-Wing is gone.

I believe it. I can't be the only one thinking the same thing...

 warboss wrote:

 MajorWesJanson wrote:
A soon as the announcement was made, my FLGS was mostly wiped out of Armada (just a couple of wave 1-3 ships left) and about half of X-Wing is gone.

I believe it. I can't be the only one thinking the same thing...

Yeah, looked for the rebel ships I'm still missing and they went out of stock in most places. Guess I'll never see the rebel fighters 1 as they've been unavailable everywhere even before the announcement.

It is mildly amusing that the week before I was going to finally post up my X-Wing stuff for sale it gets announced the game is being discontinued.

It is the absolute Wild West in the Star Wars minis games buy/trade/sell groups right now, and a huge pain to try and sell what have.

 frankelee wrote:
We can't say for sure, but one can apply a little common sense to the evidence we do have. Doesn't seem to be a big presence on Youtube. 40K may be the only thing that really moves battle reports, but there's just not much of it being mentioned, just the odd comment of someone being excited about a new release, or wondering what a rumored box set will be. When Legion was hot new releases for would sell out that weekend on Miniature Market, Shatterpoint doesn't seem to. Forums don't seem to buzz with a tremendous amount of energy about the game. STL makers are not really jumping on it like there's a gold mine waiting for them if they do. Just comes across as tepid, and it would be surprising if a tepid exterior hid a sales behemoth underneath.

ICV2 has shatterpoint at #4 in the market currently, behind 40k/DND/Battletech and just ahead of Marvel.

https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/56556/top-miniatures-lines-fall-2023

I can't imagine I'll ever get the Onager that I had been pondering buying. At least I console myself that I have a relatively large collection of Rebels and Imps (pretty much 1 of everything and multiple of a couple of the small ships), and there's always Etsy for some really nice 3D printed ships (like Dreadnoughts/Rebel Assault Frigates).

I'm hoping that as my sone gets a bit older(he's currently 9) and now that he's into Star Wars, I can get him to play in the near future. We just started Rebels, and maybe as we get nearer to the end of the series maybe I'll start him with some Rebels-themed Task Force Battles.

I want to get more republic/seppy stuff, and maybe a second starhawk/onager/ssd for funniest, but I'll wait til things settle and see if there are any good deals on ebay

A pox upon AMG for their handling of X-Wing and Armada, though the troubles did start with FFG's bungling of 2.0.

It really was a fun, but I haven't touched my models since a few months after v2 dropped. I did pick up the clone side of the prequels but only played them once before everything sort of got put away and I haven't gone back to them. AMG's changes to points and squad building certainly didn't help matters.

Sadly, Armada just didn't ever seem to catch on. Too slow, expensive (compared to X-wing) and the unpainted starfighters I don't think helped. Luckily, the only thing I'm lacking from that is the always-out-of-stock hammerheads (and the SSD), and I'm an imperial player anyways.

I wonder if FFG regrets how the edition swap over was handled or if they were just phoning it in at that point in favor of newer games. From what I remember, they always seemed to have (at least from the RPG side of things) an attention deficit game design business style quickly switching to the new thing. Obviously X-wing got ALOT of attention from them given the massive (and unexpected per them) success but I wonder if they felt that it had run it's course from a design view and refocused their attention elsewhere.

The 2.0 edition was probably just the "least bad" or "rip the bandaid off" solution FFG came up with for an edition change that was probably needed to fix balance issues and add some new mechanics. I don't remember any issues about the new rules, the biggest complaint locally and personally was how much of existing card/dial collections were invalidated when the first edition pushed buying all the ships to get those components.

There was probably a better way to handle the transition than how they did it. They could've probably sold sticker sets for a fraction of the price as a lower cost alternative, and then done a more expensive upgrade for those that wanted a "premium" full upgrade to the new standard.

 MajorWesJanson wrote:
The 2.0 edition was probably just the "least bad" or "rip the bandaid off" solution FFG came up with for an edition change that was probably needed to fix balance issues and add some new mechanics. I don't remember any issues about the new rules, the biggest complaint locally and personally was how much of existing card/dial collections were invalidated when the first edition pushed buying all the ships to get those components.

Yeah, it was getting pretty obvious that something *had* to be done to clean up 1E, but I think they let it get too long in the tooth before they did so. The game model being that you got the ship and models was great for selling the individual ships as self-contained packages, but it put the brakes on when all of a sudden you had to buy this big chunk of cardboard to convert over your ships - but there just wasn't going to be a way around it. I think they could have reduced the sting if they hadn't had to redo the dials (and tokens) and limited it to just the ship & equipment cards - but there was still no getting around it.

I do think Wizkids handled it a little better by selling just the updated card packs at one point without the ships - that might have eased the transition.

Also would have helped if it didn't feel like the line stagnated for so long as we got just repackaged and more expensive copies of existing ships. And non-functional software that was the only way to figure out what options your ship could have and what points it was supposed to cost.

Almost entirely an issue of letting it go on too long before making the change. Not only did it result in a bloat of things that had to make the transition, but it also resulted in a total absence of new things to entice players to switch.

There were 4 brand new ships announced before the conversion kits were released and 2 new factions just after.

All Star Wars games suffer from lack-of-factions.

In the Rebellion era you have Rebels, Criminals, and Empire.

In the Republic era you have Separatists, Criminals and Republic.

There is not enough to work with there unless the license gives you free range to make gakk up, which it doesn't.

they would just need to do it like GW with 40k and split the factions up

in 40k you have Imperium, Chaos, Orks, Eldar, Tau, Necrons, Votan and Tyranids, so 8 compared to 6 factions in SW, but GW just split some of them up to make more

and at least for Imperium and Separatists you could split them the same way as the Imperium is split in 40k

it is just not done as this won't go well with fans

 ingtaer wrote:
There were 4 brand new ships announced before the conversion kits were released and 2 new factions just after.

How many releases for Empire and Rebels after?

The issue is getting existing players to buy into the new edition. When the two factions that were for quite a while the only factions are given absolutely no reason to buy new releases anymore, there's just not a lot driving them to the new edition.

There’s always the Ssi-Ruuk and Yuzhan Vong.

What? Why are people laughing?

 Easy E wrote:
All Star Wars games suffer from lack-of-factions.

In the Rebellion era you have Rebels, Criminals, and Empire.

In the Republic era you have Separatists, Criminals and Republic.

There is not enough to work with there unless the license gives you free range to make gakk up, which it doesn't.

Eh, dunno. It always feels like they suffer of it as much as WWII games.

It's less a lack of factions and more just that at the time the prequel fans weren't old enough to drive product. There's a reason the ARC launched as a Rebellion craft after all and even Legion took a while to get away from the OT despite it being a game FAR better suited to the Clone Wars. Now that the animated series has largely defined the prequel era in place of the films, you see a lot more including elements of multiple eras successfully.

 Easy E wrote:
All Star Wars games suffer from lack-of-factions.

In the Rebellion era you have Rebels, Criminals, and Empire.

In the Republic era you have Separatists, Criminals and Republic.

There is not enough to work with there unless the license gives you free range to make gakk up, which it doesn't.

that is ALOT to work with
like 6 factions is pretty well
you then get into sequel era
and then get into possibly high republic now
people that say they will run out of stuff lack imagination and forsight

 Easy E wrote:
All Star Wars games suffer from lack-of-factions.

In the Rebellion era you have Rebels, Criminals, and Empire.

In the Republic era you have Separatists, Criminals and Republic.

There is not enough to work with there unless the license gives you free range to make gakk up, which it doesn't.

In theory, I'd agree that it's a paltry amount of factions for a game... but it never seemed to bother anyone in my local playing groups (I played in two stores with some but not much overlap). Because Star Wars used to be so beloved and iconic, we were all just fine with Imps vs Rebels and mostly ok with adding the third criminal faction (though two of the guys playing were full on mando-fans building armors at home for their version of the 501st and they were ecstatic about it).

Man, life is a trip. Around 7th edition Warhammer was absolutely in the doghouse while everyone fawned over Infinity, WarmaHordes and X-Wing. Where are they now? I don't wish ill will on any of those systems, but I guess there is such a thing as companies being too big to fail.

GW/40k is just an order of magnitude or two larger than those other games. It takes a lot more for them to collapse or hit real trouble. There's also an advantage to GWs corporate bureaucracy- it moves glacial and isn't subject to an individuals whims, whereas you can point to xwings collapse as being partially caused by will schicks hubris and trying to impose his design philosophy onto an established game amd community and having it backfire, or warmachine falling apart because Matt Wilson doesn't know how to run a business and thinking that privateer press hit a level of scale where momentum would carry it forward amd there was no need to continue investing in organized community building.

you can compare them as the collapse of X-Wing won't kill AMG/FFG/Asmodee, neither will it kill the Star Wars game franchise and if anyone launchers another SW ship game it will sell the same way as a new 40k game will sell and the same way GW won't be hurt by a single game collapsing

the big advantage GW has with 40k is that the fans are happy with a new game under the same name every 3 years and the disadvantage of other companies is to think that all games work like that

GW also doesn’t carry much, if any, debt. And its debts being called in which tends to do for companies. So even if their income was closer to their running costs, slight dips in takings wouldn’t overly query their pitch.

Again somewhat defending AMG, or at least its staff, because it’s not their fault or within their control that Asmodee bought another company and then dropped two or more game systems into their lap, seemingly without properly hiring new staff.

I still remember when they did their live stream for new stuff. It felt embarrassing to me. Products not kept in shot, few if any close ups. Just someone clearly not comfortable being on camera in an office doing their best in a bad situation. Again, I’m not knocking the persons involved in that live stream, and it would not be fair to do so. But it smacked of “GW are doing it, you will do it, what do you mean proper resources”. So again feels like Asmodee or AMG bigwigs leaving others in the lurch.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
GW also doesn’t carry much, if any, debt. And its debts being called in which tends to do for companies. So even if their income was closer to their running costs, slight dips in takings wouldn’t overly query their pitch.

Over the last few recessions/economic downturns it more and more highlights how insanely lucky/smart GW were because not taking on debt meant they never grew half as fast as they "could have"; but at the same time its left them in such an insanely robust position in the market. When you consider how insanely niche wargaming is and yet GW have stores on most major UK settlement highstreets. Granted they are main-highstreet any more but they are still in the decent bit of town in most places.

It's perhaps a very "old school" approach to business, but its weathered the storms every single time because, as you say, there's no big investor or debt holder calling it in suddenly or draining funds so much that the firm has no investment/growth/safety net. Heck GW appears to really hate debt, I think they paid their covid money back to the government in a very short span of time (and I've no idea how many firm actually even managed that)

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Again somewhat defending AMG, or at least its staff, because it’s not their fault or within their control that Asmodee bought another company and then dropped two or more game systems into their lap, seemingly without properly hiring new staff.

I still remember when they did their live stream for new stuff. It felt embarrassing to me. Products not kept in shot, few if any close ups. Just someone clearly not comfortable being on camera in an office doing their best in a bad situation. Again, I’m not knocking the persons involved in that live stream, and it would not be fair to do so. But it smacked of “GW are doing it, you will do it, what do you mean proper resources”. So again feels like Asmodee or AMG bigwigs leaving others in the lurch.

Asmodee definitely take a lot of the criticism for how things were handled. That said, AMG's approach to marketing, sales and communication is embarrassing. I get that they weren't keen on X-Wing, nor did they get any say in having it dropped in their laps, but their attitude when they did get it was deeply unprofessional and at times borderline insulting to the X-Wing community. They also decided to shack up with Asmodee rather than staying independent, presumably for the various advantages that gave them, so it seems a little churlish to then complain about having to answer to your paymasters. That's the deal they made, whether they realised it or not.

 Overread wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
GW also doesn’t carry much, if any, debt. And its debts being called in which tends to do for companies. So even if their income was closer to their running costs, slight dips in takings wouldn’t overly query their pitch.

Over the last few recessions/economic downturns it more and more highlights how insanely lucky/smart GW were because not taking on debt meant they never grew half as fast as they "could have"; but at the same time its left them in such an insanely robust position in the market. When you consider how insanely niche wargaming is and yet GW have stores on most major UK settlement highstreets. Granted they are main-highstreet any more but they are still in the decent bit of town in most places.

It's perhaps a very "old school" approach to business, but its weathered the storms every single time because, as you say, there's no big investor or debt holder calling it in suddenly or draining funds so much that the firm has no investment/growth/safety net. Heck GW appears to really hate debt, I think they paid their covid money back to the government in a very short span of time (and I've no idea how many firm actually even managed that)

There’s definite luck to GW. For instance, the LOTR bubble burst rapidly, and that had a significant impact on their income. That kick started a restructuring of staffing (not quite to One Man Stores, but the beginning thereof) and organisation. And just as they’d more or less righted the ship on that? Along came the global financial crisis. With GW having already trimmed significant fat, and perhaps hacked a limb off, they were ready to go on that.

There are other examples of “you lucky sods!” of something bad happening, GW addressing it, and then something bad happening to everyone else but not GW, because their previous fix continued to work in those changed circumstances.

Another example is making a half way decently received new edition of 40K, just as WarmaHordes detonated its own mudflaps. Didn’t make that edition excellent, but it did allow them to hoover up disenfranchised WarmaHordes players, just as WarmaHordes once hoovered up disenfranchised GW players.

~Oh very true that was a crazy year seeing Privateer Press making bad choice after bad choice and GW seem to make all the right choices.

It was like both firms swapped CEOs

 Overread wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
GW also doesn’t carry much, if any, debt. And its debts being called in which tends to do for companies. So even if their income was closer to their running costs, slight dips in takings wouldn’t overly query their pitch.

Over the last few recessions/economic downturns it more and more highlights how insanely lucky/smart GW were because not taking on debt meant they never grew half as fast as they "could have"; but at the same time its left them in such an insanely robust position in the market. When you consider how insanely niche wargaming is and yet GW have stores on most major UK settlement highstreets. Granted they are main-highstreet any more but they are still in the decent bit of town in most places.

It's perhaps a very "old school" approach to business, but its weathered the storms every single time because, as you say, there's no big investor or debt holder calling it in suddenly or draining funds so much that the firm has no investment/growth/safety net. Heck GW appears to really hate debt, I think they paid their covid money back to the government in a very short span of time (and I've no idea how many firm actually even managed that)

It has more to do with being a company that is reliant on physical production. Most of the new school business nonsense that churns and burns so rapidly is in the tech industry because you can "grow" by hiring or buying people and then dump them freely if it doesn't work out because most of your expense is in payroll. GW has quite a bit of cost in things that aren't so easy to flip so their growth is more bounded by reality and they have to make more cautious decisions to expand.

FWIW, this is what holds back almost all the competition. No matter how "big" they seem, crossing the bridge from things like metal or resin to HIPs requires a huge investment that even if you can afford it, is effectively betting the entire company. Most of the games that people treat as competition aren't nearly profitable enough to come close.

 kodos wrote:
you can compare them as the collapse of X-Wing won't kill AMG/FFG/Asmodee, neither will it kill the Star Wars game franchise and if anyone launchers another SW ship game it will sell the same way as a new 40k game will sell and the same way GW won't be hurt by a single game collapsing

the big advantage GW has with 40k is that the fans are happy with a new game under the same name every 3 years and the disadvantage of other companies is to think that all games work like that

I mean, no, I think it's more that X-Wing being killed off is a symptom of Asmodee's death spiral as Embracer uses the company as an escape pod for all the debt they just took on, in order to dig out of the hole they got themselves into to try and court a Saudi buyout.

GW also benefit from their own, wholly owned, chain of high street stores.

Sure, not every country has one, or even a proportionate distribution of them. But they’re still the reason GW grew from tiny to medium in the early years, and so came to dominate and redefine the industry.

Because even if GW don’t have stores near you, or even in your country? The historical legacy of those stores has meant GW are the best known wargame company out there. So even online? You’re most likely to be exposed to a GW game.

Though why they, and indeed others, haven’t tried to recapture HeroQuest and the impact that had on my generation I couldn’t tell you.

Just to rub salt into the wound: Lego announced today they're doing a set with 2 different Uglies: an X-TIE with 3 Death Seeds.

Slipspace wrote:

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Again somewhat defending AMG, or at least its staff, because it’s not their fault or within their control that Asmodee bought another company and then dropped two or more game systems into their lap, seemingly without properly hiring new staff.

I still remember when they did their live stream for new stuff. It felt embarrassing to me. Products not kept in shot, few if any close ups. Just someone clearly not comfortable being on camera in an office doing their best in a bad situation. Again, I’m not knocking the persons involved in that live stream, and it would not be fair to do so. But it smacked of “GW are doing it, you will do it, what do you mean proper resources”. So again feels like Asmodee or AMG bigwigs leaving others in the lurch.

Asmodee definitely take a lot of the criticism for how things were handled. That said, AMG's approach to marketing, sales and communication is embarrassing. I get that they weren't keen on X-Wing, nor did they get any say in having it dropped in their laps, but their attitude when they did get it was deeply unprofessional and at times borderline insulting to the X-Wing community. They also decided to shack up with Asmodee rather than staying independent, presumably for the various advantages that gave them, so it seems a little churlish to then complain about having to answer to your paymasters. That's the deal they made, whether they realised it or not.

AMG was never independent. It was founded as a design studio under the auspices of Asmodee from the getgo, after Will Schick and co had a disagreement with Matt Wilson of Privateer Press over developing a Marvel miniatures game. I forget the circumstances, but IIRC Asmodee wanted to contract Privaterr Press to develop the game for them, and Asmodee would publish it (Alternatively, PP was pursuing the Marvel license themselves). For whatever reason, whatever negotiations fell apart or there was a disagreement. From what I was told, Schick, Pagani, and the third guy (Dallas Kemp?) approached Asmodee and pitched setting up AMG with them in charge to do the design work, etc. to cut PP and Matt Wilson out of the equation. The plan worked and they quit PP to pursue MCP under Asmodee.

You are right though, their attitude was insulting and unprofessional, very "papa knows best"

 Easy E wrote:
All Star Wars games suffer from lack-of-factions.

In the Rebellion era you have Rebels, Criminals, and Empire.

In the Republic era you have Separatists, Criminals and Republic.

There is not enough to work with there unless the license gives you free range to make gakk up, which it doesn't.

Yeah, no. In the Rebellion era you can add Zaarin's uprising (which was actually more dangerous to the Empire than rebels and all the high tech BS that came with it) and Corporate Sector, neatly slotting into cooperation with Criminals range as they hired a lot of mercs, and can also have access to older, deliberately weakened Imperial tech. Then expand that into early New Republic vs Thrawn - 7 big factions not enough for you?

In the Republic era you not only have multiple factions in the Separatists range, each big enough to support its own fleet, Republic can be split into Jedi/Clones/local defence forces, both with possibility of cross allying but also allowing to field 'pure' armies. Then you have Katana Fleet project, Stark Hyperspace War (add to criminals if not big enough on its own) and various Rebellion era ships that had stripped down, advanced variants later but now can be made as pristine, still covered in panels Y-Wings, Dreadnoughts, Corellian Gunships, etc, etc, etc.

Plenty you can release without needing to make any new ships up, and we haven't even touched any of the old gak in WEG rpg games, Decipher CCG game, X-Wing/TIE fighter PC games, Star Wars: Rebellion strategy game, Dark Forces series, Dark Empire, Marvel, like really, I can make 20+ ranges with all that gak, and paid professionals couldn't?

chaos0xomega wrote:

AMG was never independent. It was founded as a design studio under the auspices of Asmodee from the getgo, after Will Schick and co had a disagreement with Matt Wilson of Privateer Press over developing a Marvel miniatures game. I forget the circumstances, but IIRC Asmodee wanted to contract Privaterr Press to develop the game for them, and Asmodee would publish it (Alternatively, PP was pursuing the Marvel license themselves). For whatever reason, whatever negotiations fell apart or there was a disagreement. From what I was told, Schick, Pagani, and the third guy (Dallas Kemp?) approached Asmodee and pitched setting up AMG with them in charge to do the design work, etc. to cut PP and Matt Wilson out of the equation. The plan worked and they quit PP to pursue MCP under Asmodee.

Thanks for the clarification. I knew there was some sort of ASmodee deal to get MCP released but hadn't realised that's how it worked out. The point still stands, though. You shack up with corporate overlords for the benefits and security they provide, you usually have to give something in return.

chaos0xomega wrote:

You are right though, their attitude was insulting and unprofessional, very "papa knows best"

Yeah, they basically fired the playtesters when they unanimously told them the changes to points were a terrible idea. Then all "playtesting" was in-house, which is a terrifying thought given they barely understood the game.

 Irbis wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
.

Yeah, no. In the Rebellion era you can add Zaarin's uprising (which was actually more dangerous to the Empire than rebels and all the high tech BS that came with it) and Corporate Sector...

etc
etc

...and (I assume, haven't seen any of them in the main movies)none of them would have the instantly recognisable vibe and archetypes of, say, Orks, Tyranids or Necrons (or Trollbloods, Khador and Cryx, or Wulfen, Dwarves of Tir-na-bor and Acheron, or...you get the gist.) that create their appeal.

I absolutely agree with Easy, having basically two (boring and same'y) factions is one of the main reasons I've never even considered playing a SW wargame.

This is, btw the exact same thing I don't get in Horus Heresy. Wanting to play a game with such faction "variety" defies my comprehension. The moment I learned Legions Imperialis are set in HH, my interest evaporated instantly.

Sometimes new has it's own appeal. I think it's hard to speculate how they would do, and your probably right, but there is something they could have used/done.

There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

There's a fairly substantial number of X-Wing players who don't really care about the history and exact details of every ship in the game, so I'm not sure how important the canon/non-canon nature of ships are, or the specific eras they were part of (other than placing them in a certain faction).

Plenty of people were happy playing with the K-Wing or Jumpmaster, without knowing anything about where they came from, for example.

I don't think the "lack of facitons" was a problem for X-Wing. When it was most successful it only had 3. It's more important that players have options for different styles of play, rather than strictly having lots of different factions, IMO. I'd rather have 5 factions with 3-4 distinct archetypes available within them than have 10 factions that are all railroaded into 1 style of play. It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

 LunarSol wrote:
It has more to do with being a company that is reliant on physical production. Most of the new school business nonsense that churns and burns so rapidly is in the tech industry because you can "grow" by hiring or buying people and then dump them freely if it doesn't work out because most of your expense is in payroll. GW has quite a bit of cost in things that aren't so easy to flip so their growth is more bounded by reality and they have to make more cautious decisions to expand.

FWIW, this is what holds back almost all the competition. No matter how "big" they seem, crossing the bridge from things like metal or resin to HIPs requires a huge investment that even if you can afford it, is effectively betting the entire company. Most of the games that people treat as competition aren't nearly profitable enough to come close.

In further defence of GW (my how this isn't a normal Dakka thread ) they didn't do the new business equivalent to the surge/contract staffing model - the outsourcing of production. Every consultancy ever would recommend concentrating on their IP and outsourcing factory production to another company. Now there are downsides, GW models aren't that hot compared to comparable things like gundams, but that in house control is incredible compared to virtually every toy company on the planet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think the whole number of sides isn't an issue for a wargame, but its an issue for a large company. The modern board/model game market is incredibly release driven. It is all about that splash. Traditional historical wargames don't have that (and sides that have been the same for decades), but you have all those companies who when totaled up have far less turnover than the big board/model guys.

I guess you could do all those great things with factions that people have pointed out, but for some reason no one does.

Probably because the license may be limited to what you see on a screen. No idea myself, but I am sure someone closer and more interested in this thread will know for sure.

Yes GW's financial policy is incredibly healthy, they don't have side hustles in weird real estate speculations or stock market tricks, they just make their core product in the factory they own and this lets them weather all sorts of crises that bury more... creative... businesses.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

To be fair when I first approached Star Wars I assumed this would be true, but it's not. They're actively reprint Old EU novels and comics as "Legends", even producing new audiobook versions in some case. Though they resolutely refuse to commission anything new in that version of the universe, which is quite strange.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s always the Ssi-Ruuk and Yuzhan Vong.

What? Why are people laughing?

* Hides sledge behind back *

Come closer ...
--------------
X-Wing was/is helluva fun, it is mind boggling that it is being outlasted by the likes of Star Trek Attack Wing and shown up by GW's method of release (unpainted, unassembled, rules sold seperately and regurgitated often - really, how is this viable?).

Just on factions, it has astounded me how little they did with the Old Republic era (well the super Old Republic since the thing lasted like 10k years). Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 gave tons of depth to a specific flashpoint in the timeframe, which was also quite close to other points in time. Obviously its now 'legends' but you could easily have Republic, Sith, Mandalorians, post Revan Sith from kotor2, and for characters stuff like Jedi Revan and Malak, Sith Revan and Malak. And hell, the whole Exar Kun stuff is within living memory of the era as well, it was only what, like 40 years before the events of the game and also had a bunch of previous lore build on it. Heck for a full extra faction there was the gak-heels of the Czerka Corporation that had its own personal military force and had such fun projects of providing logistics for the Sith as well as trying to weasel their way into reconstruction projects after the main war ended.

The entire era had tons of designs for specific characters, trooper uniforms, ship types etc that could have worked super well for a war game but just never got implemented.

The Old Republic was always a weird era. Half of the material for it is writers trying really, really hard to make Dune with lightsabers that never really took off while KoTOR went with something a little more familiar but basic.

I think ultimately what really crippled KoTOR was creating one of the most iconic and memorable characters and plot points in the franchise in the form of a build your own story. There was never a way to continue Revan beyond the first game because everyone had a very personal vision of Revan that couldn't really be expanded on and nothing else in the universe was so unique that it needed to be so far removed from the Rebellion era.

Slipspace wrote:

It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

That's at least partly due to the release model. You had to buy out of faction to get the cards you needed. I wouldn't have bought any rebel stuff if it had been possible to avoid it. 2.0 was supposed to fix that.

 Arschbombe wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

That's at least partly due to the release model. You had to buy out of faction to get the cards you needed. I wouldn't have bought any rebel stuff if it had been possible to avoid it. 2.0 was supposed to fix that.

And largely did; that just didn't help all the players who already owned all 3 (now 5) factions that needed to upgrade to keep playing their collection.

It's a shame. 1st Edition of X-Wing was a huge hit with our group. 2nd Edition ended up killing the momentum and we haven't really played since. The bigger shame is mostly just that this is another well-designed game that will be largely lost to time like so many others.

I'm also lamenting never getting in to Armada. Sadly, after the demo one of my friends ran, I think I was the only other person interested, so that one died on the vine. Given how many fleet-scale games my group already plays, Armada was always going to be a hard sell. Still, would have been nice to own a bunch of small Star Destroyers. Oh well.

Sad to see the family of games finally pass, many of them were well designed and deserved to live on, but that's always a hard ask of a licensed game. Unless both parties are on to keep the relationship going indefinitely, eventually they will die and fade in to obscurity.

Might have to drag out the 1st Edition stuff again and have a game for old times' sake.

Worth noting they did draw on EU stuff for X-Wing - I'm pretty sure they released the TIE defender a few years before it returned to Canon in the rebels series (and with pilot names going back to the TIE fighter PC game!).

Plus IIRC the Raider was a new design that FFG made up - which also made it into other media (the last Battlefront 2 game I think?).

So there was definitely more they could have done with the model range in both games and precedent for it too.

I was really glad that they hit the old 90s EU ships and loved that I have some quality models for them now. The only one that I really hoped would make it but knew that it wouldn't was a TIE Predator from the comics. Fortunately, it's 2024 and 3d printing is a thing and almost as good as official support and I could just count it as a sequel era trilogy TIE fighter with shields.

The EU stuff was all pre-Disney releases (or stuff authorized in advance of the Disney acquisition). Once Disney took over there were no further non-canon releases.

Honestly, leave the EU in the past where it belongs
There is so much CURRENT star wars we dont need to worry.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Honestly, leave the EU in the past where it belongs
There is so much CURRENT star wars we dont need to worry.

the problem is there is not a lot of new star fighters in the current star wars, so lot of current star wars not a lot of current xing material means that drawing from the eu appeals to players that want new ships. also some of us grew up reading about those ships and having them in minature form would be awesome. that being said the problem that x wing was running into either way Long term is that even with access to the eu there are only so many ships to adapt.

I do agree the new stuff needs more ships. I get the real world analog of updated designs, but it’s not as visually exciting as “whoa, what is that!”. The prequels gave us a nice mix of course, with early glimpses of the Star Destroyer family of ships.

But…the Old EU has some bloody awful designs. Mouldy Crow looks cack, as does the K-Wing.

So swings and roundabouts really.

Moldy Crow is my favorite ship of all time, but its definitely a relic of the "this has EIGHT whole polygons!" era of video games.

The K-Wing is just wildly overdesigned. I know its trying to go back to the WWII aircraft design template, but it just comes out with too many random bits added on. The overall design is salvagable though.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I do agree the new stuff needs more ships. I get the real world analog of updated designs, but it’s not as visually exciting as “whoa, what is that!”. The prequels gave us a nice mix of course, with early glimpses of the Star Destroyer family of ships.

But…the Old EU has some bloody awful designs. Mouldy Crow looks cack, as does the K-Wing.

So swings and roundabouts really.

Not liking the Moldy Crow?

When they announced the official death of X-Wing I went and bought one for cheapo to put on my shelf next to my Kyle Katarn figure. Need to do the same with a few other ships I love.

Honestly post Mando EU had been just as bad if not worse than the old EU, and I can’t for the life of me think of any new designs besides Ahsoka’s T-6 shuttle. I’m not touching The Acolyte to see if there’s anything new in it thought, I’ll let people with more patience for the insufferable than I handle that.

chaos0xomega wrote:
The EU stuff was all pre-Disney releases (or stuff authorized in advance of the Disney acquisition). Once Disney took over there were no further non-canon releases.

That is a good point, hadn't really factored that in. But I wonder if that may have changed over time, given the way we've had old concept brought to life and into canon like the imperial cruiser in Andor?

And there is some cool new-EU stuff like Luthen's shuttle or the Mantis from the Fallen Order game/s both of which would have been ideal for X-Wing I'd thought.

Yeah, Luthen’s ship was cool, and had some unique capabilities that would have translated well into game mechanics.

Ultimately, X-Wing had several issues that it struggled with. Most of them have been discussed in this thread already. To those, I will add that the gameplay suffered from excessive card combos, which detracted from what was a very fun and intuitive core gameplay loop of trying to anticipate your opponent’s maneuvers and setting up your own.

I didn't play 2e (was their a name for the major rules revision that came out with the TFA film core box revamp? 1.5e?) but even at the trailing end of 1.5e we started testing out simpler games with limits on the number of cards you could use beyond the core ship cards (both in terms of per force as well as per individual ship). There were three major benefits... made things simpler, made things look cooler (mainly via more ships on the table without resorting to TIE spam), and made it more new player friendly so they didn't feel as disadvantaged since they didn't already have multiples of everything to drawn their cards from.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

You'd be surprised, pretty much all the broadly-agreed "good bits" of the EU(and much of the rest) are either being reprinted under the Legends brand or are still widely available as new-old stock. I've been slowly picking up all the EU stuff I missed as a kid or only read once from a library and apart from one or two of the *really* old ones I've been able to find everything up to the Vong War in brand new paperbacks. It's only really the original 90's print runs of the "technical sourcebooks" like the Essential Guide series, the older RPG books, or the old comics that you'll have trouble finding physical copies of, and in the latter case they're available online both legitimately and otherwise.

Disney may want to pretend they wiped the old EU away for their glorious new future, but given how abysmally their "nuEU" auxiliary media products sell even they have to acknowledge reality and keep selling the products that actually bring in revenue.

deano2099 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

To be fair when I first approached Star Wars I assumed this would be true, but it's not. They're actively reprint Old EU novels and comics as "Legends", even producing new audiobook versions in some case. Though they resolutely refuse to commission anything new in that version of the universe, which is quite strange.

I suspect we might have gotten the occasional pity-story in Legends continuity eventually if Disneywars had been the massive success they planned for it to be, but given they possibly still haven't even made back the money they spent on the acquisition(and before anyone posts That Article, do recall that gross box office takings are not the same as net profits, and that the listed production cost doesn't account for marketing spend that can be as much as the same amount over again) and the increasingly...controversial reception to their own efforts, the people who make that decision are going to be living in a seething cauldron of offended egos and panicked executives worried about "diluting the new Star Wars brand" etc, so I don't think the lack of new Legends content is surprising.

I can only speak for myself, but my own interest in X-Wing dried up immensely when it became clear that there wasn't going to be any more EU ships coming to the game.

I know not all of the EU was of equal quality but it was pretty fun from a collecting perspective to wait and see what might come out next, and there was still a wide pool to draw from.

I had my fingers crossed that the Cloakshape and T-Wing might make it into the game and I'm sure they would have eventually based on the output of EU ships they were adding to the game at one point. I know others had their own favorite ships they wanted to see make it into the game like the Skipray, Chiss TIE, etc. Disney Star Wars going their own way and pretty much abandoning the EU (even if stuff like the E-wing have slowly been trickling back into Disney canon) really hurt the game IMHO.

When half the ships already had an uncertain future where their continued support was in question, it didn't really instill a whole lot of confidence in the game, particularly if you were an EU fan. IMHO of course.

Didn’t seem to stop FFG going into the EU for ships?

As noted, the sequels really didn’t bring many new ship designs into play for X-Wing. Quad Jumper, modernised TIE and X-Wing, and that’s about it for TFA. Oh, and that bloody awful looking Resistance transport ship.

TLJ had the TIE Silencer and updated A-Wing, then the Resistance Bomber.

ROS just the Final Order TIE, which itself was just a slightly different Interceptor.\

But it’s in Rebels and other media we see old EU stuff recanonised, bit by bit, with the very occasional new ship (Razorcrest, various Scum fighter designs).

Now for a possibly unpopular opinion, but hear me out in full before replying.

A criticism I’ve levelled at X-Wing may in fact not be entirely fair. And that’s it not being a particularly cheap game in its first edition, as there was a lot of “find the lady” going on with upgrade cards, which meant you may need to buy another faction’s ship to kit out your favourite.

Now, “find the lady” is absolutely true, but was addressed in 2nd edition.

But where I think I’ve perhaps been unfair on FFG in particular is the cost of the game. I say that as thinking on it? That may have been a community thing, and not FFG’s own line.

It was pretty true in the beginning, when you had maybe half a dozen ships per side. At £12 or so, that was affordable. Pretty much pocket money prices for a ship a week, with just a bit of saving for bigger stuff like the Falcon.

But as more ships were added along with desirable upgrades, you could quite quickly end up spending a lot of money. And so the “it’s cheap” didn’t remain accurate for terribly long.

In hindsight, it seems clear “find the lady” was an important part of the sales strategy, and it certainly worked. For sure it did little to curtail 1st Ed’s sales and popularity. But because, to the best of my knowledge, FFG never marketed as a cheap game? I don’t think we can fairly use that part of the stick to beat this dead horse.

In terms of Armada news, a group of players that have blogs and youtube channels have formed an "Armada Ruleset Collective" and struck a deal with Adepticon to manage another "worlds" (read: America) competition in 2025, so have positioned themselves as the de-facto stewards of competitive Armada play going forward. There are some token Europeans on the list too but it's overwhelmingly a Murica thing. Link to the announcement below.



It's all a little fawning for my taste, with language like this:

"We are striving to maintain everything within the guidelines of the Atomic Mass Games IP Policy, and it is important to us that this is done right."

Who cares about AMG's IP policy if they're not going to produce the game anymore? It's not like you're monetizing this thing, do what you want.

 zend wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I do agree the new stuff needs more ships. I get the real world analog of updated designs, but it’s not as visually exciting as “whoa, what is that!”. The prequels gave us a nice mix of course, with early glimpses of the Star Destroyer family of ships.

But…the Old EU has some bloody awful designs. Mouldy Crow looks cack, as does the K-Wing.

So swings and roundabouts really.

Not liking the Moldy Crow?

When they announced the official death of X-Wing I went and bought one for cheapo to put on my shelf next to my Kyle Katarn figure. Need to do the same with a few other ships I love.

Honestly post Mando EU had been just as bad if not worse than the old EU, and I can’t for the life of me think of any new designs besides Ahsoka’s T-6 shuttle. I’m not touching The Acolyte to see if there’s anything new in it thought, I’ll let people with more patience for the insufferable than I handle that.

It was nice to see the E-Wing in Ahsoka, wish it had gotten more screen time, but at least it establishes it's existence as canon.


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Billicus wrote:
In terms of Armada news, a group of players that have blogs and youtube channels have formed an "Armada Ruleset Collective" and struck a deal with Adepticon to manage another "worlds" (read: America) competition in 2025, so have positioned themselves as the de-facto stewards of competitive Armada play going forward. There are some token Europeans on the list too but it's overwhelmingly a Murica thing. Link to the announcement below.

Spoiler:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yh6uxzwc4es0klfs51s3w/ION_PR_240628final.pdf?e=1&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2ZnlRZSN4yOO3Vs8LzuevAaAClL9DfJYwWplrPvkrIplOka-BvBquOfdA_aem_N6Rm1GQDlwX6paZC0_calQ&rlkey=flb126oa2vkgdcpolqr0i8ylp&st=fuxomenx&dl=0

It's all a little fawning for my taste, with language like this:

"We are striving to maintain everything within the guidelines of the Atomic Mass Games IP Policy, and it is important to us that this is done right."

Who cares about AMG's IP policy if they're not going to produce the game anymore? It's not like you're monetizing this thing, do what you want.

People don't like getting sued for IP infringement (art, text, characters, ships, etc.), especially when you involve the House of Mouse (go ask that Florida Daycare Center about it).

AMG just doesn't want to upset Disney. They'll say whatever and players are free to ignore them both.

 Stormonu wrote:

People don't like getting sued for IP infringement (art, text, characters, ships, etc.), especially when you involve the House of Mouse (go ask that Florida Daycare Center about it).

If it's a non profit fan effort what's there to sue for?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Now, “find the lady” is absolutely true, but was addressed in 2nd edition.

One notable issue is that while this was addressed in 2nd edition, it wasn't addressed very quickly. Ships took years to get 2nd edition packaging and the nature of the upgrade made the 1st edition stuff pretty useless for new players. It's a bit of an outlier, but the TIE Bomber didn't get repackaged properly until last year.

Billicus wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

People don't like getting sued for IP infringement (art, text, characters, ships, etc.), especially when you involve the House of Mouse (go ask that Florida Daycare Center about it).

If it's a non profit fan effort what's there to sue for?

Still got to defend it. I guess one argument is that if a retired game based on a valuable IP is still being maintained by fans, any replacement game based on that IP is having to tempt those players to shell out.

Not saying it’s a good or even valid argument, but it is one off the top of my head.

 LunarSol wrote:
One notable issue is that while this was addressed in 2nd edition, it wasn't addressed very quickly. Ships took years to get 2nd edition packaging and the nature of the upgrade made the 1st edition stuff pretty useless for new players. It's a bit of an outlier, but the TIE Bomber didn't get repackaged properly until last year.

How did they address it? I'm genuinely asking as I didn't follow it. Were there no new cards in ship packs and all the cards were in the faction/update packs? Or did they just get rid of the rule that you had to have a legit card to play in their events?

Cards a ship could use could be found with ships of the same faction. Which did deal with the main criticism of Find The Lady, as you were no longer lumped with a model you wouldn’t necessarily used.

Billicus wrote:
It's all a little fawning for my taste, with language like this:

"We are striving to maintain everything within the guidelines of the Atomic Mass Games IP Policy, and it is important to us that this is done right."

Who cares about AMG's IP policy if they're not going to produce the game anymore? It's not like you're monetizing this thing, do what you want.

Why would it benefit them to be needlessly aggressive as a fan organization with no real monetary benefit towards not one but two multinational billion dollar companies (one of which is notoriously litigious when "protecting" their IP while simultaneously grounding it into the dirt themselves)? I think it's wise for them to abide by what I call the Revised Wheaton Rule: Don't be a dick like Wil. Why risk having to personally spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars defending yourself personally and the organization from an overreach by one of them if you can avoid it?


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cards a ship could use could be found with ships of the same faction. Which did deal with the main criticism of Find The Lady, as you were no longer lumped with a model you wouldn’t necessarily used.

So you basically only had to pokemon/catch'em'all your own faction as opposed to all of them? That is admittedly an improvement but I wouldn't call it an overall fix personally but YMMV.

I don't really know what you're talking about to be honest, I said they probably don't need to worry about "abiding by AMG's policies", you've come in saying "how would they benefit from being needlessly aggressive", I just don't really get what you mean by that or what you think I'm suggesting they do

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cards a ship could use could be found with ships of the same faction. Which did deal with the main criticism of Find The Lady, as you were no longer lumped with a model you wouldn’t necessarily used.

I don't know how much a big factor that really was. Would have only really been an issue for tournament play I suspect. For those of us who were collecting everything we could get our hands on, it didn't make a difference and for those who "had to have the card" for play, they probably went the e-bay route for the single card anyway.

Well, it was designed to fleece people. So it definitely was an issue.

But even if it wasn't the cards are just dumb from a logics perspective. Just make a nice book with the rules for "Rebellion" and "Empire" and what not. Make it shiny hardcover and colour or whatever if you wanna price it at a premium like GW does, or make it a black-and-white one if you want low entry to the game, and have all the rules that could possibly be used for that faction be in there and be the only rules-reference I need (including for official tournament play). Than you also don't need to bundle cards with the ships, making them cheaper to produce (and thus increase your profit if you keep selling them at the same price).

Codex: Rebels was never an option, faction books with army lists goes completely against everything FFG ever did with X-Wing. Most players I knew liked that it was self contained, even if you had to go card-hunting (or in our case, just print your own cards). Setup could be annoying, but having everything on the table in front of you at a glance was a huge selling point

 Kalamadea wrote:
Codex: Rebels was never an option, faction books with army lists goes completely against everything FFG ever did with X-Wing. Most players I knew liked that it was self contained, even if you had to go card-hunting (or in our case, just print your own cards). Setup could be annoying, but having everything on the table in front of you at a glance was a huge selling point

Exactly, the rules were a little booklet and even that I generally left at home unless I was going to a tournament. I liked the game because I didn't have to carry a pile of rulebooks around.

A codex format wouldn't work at all.

Bound books are just terrible from a play perspective. Even worse in a game where you use such a small percentage of the pilot options available and your upgrades would have to be in a totally different section of the book. Just constant flipping around searching for rules.




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 warboss wrote:

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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cards a ship could use could be found with ships of the same faction. Which did deal with the main criticism of Find The Lady, as you were no longer lumped with a model you wouldn’t necessarily used.

So you basically only had to pokemon/catch'em'all your own faction as opposed to all of them? That is admittedly an improvement but I wouldn't call it an overall fix personally but YMMV.

They actually did start releasing card packs for upgrades. Legion started doing something similar around the same time. I wasn't following the game closely enough at this point to tell you how effective this was as a solution though.

 Kalamadea wrote:
Codex: Rebels was never an option, faction books with army lists goes completely against everything FFG ever did with X-Wing. Most players I knew liked that it was self contained, even if you had to go card-hunting (or in our case, just print your own cards). Setup could be annoying, but having everything on the table in front of you at a glance was a huge selling point

Why not both.

Sell
a) the ships
b) "Codexes" for people that prefer that
c) Card packs for people that prefer that

Everyone's happy?

FFG were a board game company, so they were never going to go with a printed codex. Much of X-Wing's broader appeal was in the board game space. People picking up the core set and occasionally extra ships as an "expansion".

(GW has that "broader appeal" category in terms of people who buy product just to build and paint, and don't engage with the games themselves hugely)

I wouldn't have appreciated them going the GW codex route (but more specifically in terms of rehashing 90% the same rules every 2-3 years with a new codex replacement). I was fine with the card upgrade system they brought over from the board game space but I'd also have been fine with a single thicker rulebook with the card option rules there as a single source and just referenced on the model card as optional upgrades. There are downsides to each choice though.

In defence of 2.0, FFG did address the issue of chasing individual cards pretty reasonably. There were no equivalents to the Autothruster upgrade pack (otherwise known as the Starviper) in 2.0. Needing the cards was obviously part of the business model, even in 2.0, but having a massive pool of cards at the start of the edition meant there were fewer new ones coming out with each wave of releases. In 1st edition, a new release wave would often contain 80%+ new cards, often not in large numbers per pack. In 2.0 they did a better job providing multiples of new cards in multiple expansions in the same wave.

The cards theoretically had a useful gameplay purpose in keeping all the rules you were using physically on the table, so you didn't need to refer to anything other than those when playing. In practice it wasn't always that simple, depending on the number of cards in use. Ironically, AMG made that much, much worse in their quest to make the game accessible, which is just another example of how much they didn;t understand the game.


Also, the "Codex" route wouldn't work so well, given how the game was basically in constant development and no faction was ever really "done" as they are in 40k. Sure, you could make it a living ruleset and keep adding to it, but given that the cards generally came with the ships that needed them in 2.0 I'm not sure how that would have been better. All but the most serious of tournaments I've ever attended were usually fine with printouts of your squad lists without needing all the cards. The rules for everything being freely available online meant it wasn't a problem to double-check a specific card if you were suspicious of a printout. That said, X-Wing has a much, much better competitive community than 40k with barely any of the cheating and related dramas that seem to pop up fairly regularly in 40k.

The app they released with version 2 listed all of the cards. There didn't need to be any books, especially when errata replaced the text on them.

But, having the codex book at least would give an opportunity to find it quickly, alongside the appendix of many keywords.

 LunarSol wrote:
Bound books are just terrible from a play perspective. Even worse in a game where you use such a small percentage of the pilot options available and your upgrades would have to be in a totally different section of the book. Just constant flipping around searching for rules.

Never had any problem using bound books for wargames in 30 years of playing them, even the original Aeronautica Imperialis which was based on the same ancestor as X-Wing and existed exclusively as two big hardbacks. It rather depends on the game system; a lot of "modern" design focuses on providing a dizzying array of stacking, comboing, overlapping auras and buffs and abilities and you win or lose based on how competent you are at "deckbuilding" your army and setting off those abilities & combos in the right order, and sure referencing all that in a book would be a pain, but plenty of games take a different approach and once you've learned the core rules you'll only be referencing the rules occasionally when memory fails or to resolve a disputed interpretation, from which perspective the CCG/everything on the table approach would be detrimental and limiting.

EDIT: And another thing comes to mind now I think of AI - people can still go and buy that book now on ebay and get everything they need to play the game(sans models obviously, but you could use paper chits if you were that desperate). Games that have a lot of "accessories" or spread their rules out over endless cards and dashboards etc inevitably become a right pain in the backside to collect often even while technically still in-print, but especially once they go out of production.

So, shapeways is down and word on the street is they have declared bankruptcy, laid off theor staff and are going out of business as a result of sime controversy which resulted in their investors pulling out days after they announced they were going public.

Big blow to those who were trying to get 3D prints of Mel's Miniatures designs, hopefully he makes his catalog more widely available through more affordable avenues

While I'm sad to see them go, I have to admit their business model post-introduction of the first gen affordable resin printers (Anycubic Photon and Elegoo Mars) was a bit bonkers. The quality was on par with what you'd get with 50um layer heights regardless of what the material said and the prices (even before their quite high UPS shipping was added) were not particularly affordable for the literal magnitude of product you were getting. Once I stopped 3d printing myself, I wanted to place an order there instead and noticed that the model I uploaded was SEVERELY downgraded in terms of detail automatically by their software even at the FUD highest level they were offering which was an added disappointment.

When I looked on ebay a while later, I saw alot better deals from people operating print farms in their homes on ebay than what they offered for the subset of models that I wanted printed that were unchanged from patron/MMF; those models were already pruned from their supports, cheaper with shipping than the base cost Shapeways wanted to charge, and I didn't have to wait literal weeks for them to be made/shipped like my three orders with Shapeways. They were a great option before the introduction of those resin printers but the value they offered dropped like a rock and they didn't adjust their business model the last time I checked (admittedly around a year or two ago most recently).

chaos0xomega wrote:
So, shapeways is down

It's working for me (in the UK), and the only place I can see reporting on it is Spikey Bits so I'm taking it with a bit of salt - but I agree it should have gone away years ago.

beast_gts wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
So, shapeways is down

It's working for me (in the UK), and the only place I can see reporting on it is Spikey Bits so I'm taking it with a bit of salt - but I agree it should have gone away years ago.

They've disabled the checkout system, so you might want to check that?

 warboss wrote:
While I'm sad to see them go, I have to admit their business model post-introduction of the first gen affordable resin printers (Anycubic Photon and Elegoo Mars) was a bit bonkers.

Yea Shapeways was obsolete 5 years ago, I assume any artist still using it to sell prints at this point must be psychotically afraid of STL piracy, you can literally buy a home printer capable of better prints for the cost of 5, maybe 10, 28mm models done by Shapeways. Them going bust (if this is even true) can only be good, at least for our niche, as commercial sculpts move to cheaper printers with better tech, which is literally every garage printing service.

chaos0xomega wrote:
So, shapeways is down and word on the street is they have declared bankruptcy, laid off theor staff and are going out of business as a result of sime controversy which resulted in their investors pulling out days after they announced they were going public.

Big blow to those who were trying to get 3D prints of Mel's Miniatures designs, hopefully he makes his catalog more widely available through more affordable avenues

Website is up, but looks like they are in financial trouble, selling off assets/hardware:

https://investors.shapeways.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/98/shapeways-announces-definitive-agreement-to-sell-software

And as of May 22, 2024 they have 180 days to file paperwork with NASDAQ or they'll be delisted as an operating company:

https://investors.shapeways.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/99/shapeways-receives-nasdaq-notice-regarding-late-filing-of

Hope nobody's waiting on minis from there....

Yeah, websites up but checkout ain't working, and staff have been laid off. There's discussion on pop goes the monkeys Facebook page about it, including some commentary from people w firsthand knowledge.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Yeah, websites up but checkout ain't working, and staff have been laid off. There's discussion on pop goes the monkeys Facebook page about it, including some commentary from people w firsthand knowledge.

Ah, bother, they still owe me like $10. (being one of those too lazy to upload my STLs to other sites for sale).

Given their market position, it is possible that someone else will take the Shapeways name on, and dump the actual production aspect.

 lasgunpacker wrote:

Ah, bother, they still owe me like $10. (being one of those too lazy to upload my STLs to other sites for sale).

Given their market position, it is possible that someone else will take the Shapeways name on, and dump the actual production aspect.

The production aspect is their core business; what other markets do you think the name would benefit them in out of curiosity?

 warboss wrote:

 lasgunpacker wrote:

Ah, bother, they still owe me like $10. (being one of those too lazy to upload my STLs to other sites for sale).

Given their market position, it is possible that someone else will take the Shapeways name on, and dump the actual production aspect.

The production aspect is their core business; what other markets do you think the name would benefit them in out of curiosity?

.stl marketplace

Can someone start a new thread on Shapeways, I think it will be of more general interest.

Thanks.


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Thanks Mad Doc!

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/814132.page