Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm personally prepared to cut Spartan plenty of slack. My group of friends just play the original rules and haven't really had any problems. But then we're pretty much the antithesis of your stereotypical, fat-beard rules-nazi tournament-gamers so YMMV. (I have to admit here that we are pretty terrible when it comes to rules - we'll come across a situation and if both sides agree as to what seems like it *should* happen we'll go with that rather than even bothering to look up the rule... we're lazy that way! Only if we disagree, which doesn't happen often, or genuinely don't have a clue - which happens more often - do we bother checking the book. If we still can't work out what to do we'll flip a coin and get on with the game.)

They're a small company, surprised by demand (their moulds have worn out and had to be recut far in advance of expectations) and learning as they go. I understand that they also had a horrendous computer crash a month or two back, which set them back while.

For us, in our group, we just ignore the forums and play by our own interpretation of the original rules. I appreciate for some who like official rulings on everything, trying to navigate the labyrinthine maze of the Spartan forums can be a trial, but ... each to their own I suppose.

I am irritated in having to wait for the Dwarf submarines and for Firestorm, but that aside, my nerd-sense isn't tingling with much irritation.

Give them another decade, and once they are multi-national corporation with a £multi-million "development" spend, then maybe I'll be less forgiving! As things stand, with a pretty solid printed rulebook and downloadable pdfs for most "important" tweaks (anything that hasn't made it to PDF should be discounted as de facto unimportant IMHO) they are still streets ahead of *some* large wargames companies I could name...

I've held out as long as I can.... but I think you have finally pushed me over the line into playing 40k. Well that and seeing all the 40k armies this weekend at the game castle.

Ugh. This means when I start showing up at the store on Tuesday's there will hopefully be some players around to teach a WHFB convert.

Thanks again for the wonderful show, it still impresses and amazes me to see how far the podcast has come.... 4 hours!

Uncharted seas is wonderful if you don't have the Internet or the knowledge the forums exist. They are getting better about promising things that might not happen, they have stopping giving a definite date for Firestorm Armada.

Uncharted Seas: Craig and I are still very much fans of the game, and I'm with blazepoet & Osbad. I still like playing by the original rules in the rulebook.

Where Craig and I run into problems isn't because we simply MUST play with the latest and greatest rules, it's because we want the latest and coolest model for our fleet.

So when Craig picks up the new Dragon, or I pick up a new Ork boat, I have to go online to get the rules. No problem.

But the rules for the new stuff is not compatible with the old stuff (point values change, etc.) so you really HAVE to upgrade the rules for your old stuff to use the new stuff. Which is where it starts getting confusing when it changes too often.

I'm sure they'll work it out. But in the mean time I'll stick with my old stuff and wait on the new stuff until they dust settles on how things are gonna work going forward.

I like the idea of maintaining rules via regular updates and such but it has a couple problems.

One is that it hurts the book market, which a lot of game publishers like. I don't know the exact economics on if books are usually a 'win' or not, but they can be a good seller.

The second is that the writers need to learn how to do things, and the tools to do it 'right' might not be quite there yet.

I think game developers who might be interested in doing a frequent update like this might take a cue from the Open Source software community: The game should have 'milestone' releases (I.E. locked-in releases that can be used for published books) and daily releases (I.E) the most recent in-development grabbed from a website.

It's possible to do, but I will say that it's hard to keep all the numbers and rules revisions in sync when doing a full release of a game line.