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.

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.