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Anung Un Rama wrote:I never understood what's so great about games scaled this small. You can hardly convert anything and you need a crapload of new terrain as well.

Though I have to admit, adding Star Wars to the mixture would prbably change my opinion on that.

The appeal is to have larger scale battles in a smaller space, with figures that paint up quicker. Also, a lot of people don't give a damn about converting - before multipart plastic kits were really prevalent, it wasn't that commonplace. It's also the primary scale for a lot of gamers.

Personally I love the customization and room for personality that converting gives me with 28mm models, but I'm down with 15mm too.

Brother SRM wrote:Also, a lot of people don't give a damn about converting - before multipart plastic kits were really prevalent, it wasn't that commonplace.

It was fairly common, just a royal pain in the ass.

Brother SRM wrote:The appeal is to have larger scale battles in a smaller space, with figures that paint up quicker. Also, a lot of people don't give a damn about converting - before multipart plastic kits were really prevalent, it wasn't that commonplace. It's also the primary scale for a lot of gamers.

That's why Epic is so popular and selling like hot cakes

Kroothawk wrote:That's why Epic is so popular and selling like hot cakes

Well how could it not? When you have a company like GW giving Epic reasonably-priced models and tons of support, it's naturally going to sell well.[/sarcasm]

In all seriousness, I think a 15mm Star Wars game could sell quite well. Obviously, Battlefront doesn't have the kinds of capital to market or produce it that GW or WotC do, but if they market the game well and give it good rules support, I think a Star Wars miniatures game focusing on large-scale battles over skirmishes could be very popular in an, admittedly, niche market.

I'm just mad that Battlefront is getting us all riled up about something that's probably not even going to happen. Though I gotta give them credit for the greatest April Fools' joke I've ever seen.

One of the biggest problems I foresee is the lack of factions. It's really just Rebellion vs Empire and Clones vs Separatists. It's a bit easier to pull smaller factions into it when doing skirmish level like WotC's game, but more difficult when you're talking army scale.

And I'm not sure about the whole capital thing. Yes, Battlefront is not as big as GW or WotC is. Not questioning that. But they have been very aggressive this last year in acquiring Wargames Illustrated magazine and Gale Force Nine. Something like Star Wars (or superheroes) would pop them out of the purely historical market and could give them a large stake of the fantasy/sci-fi miniature market as well.

Jack of all games wrote:One of the biggest problems I foresee is the lack of factions. It's really just Rebellion vs Empire and Clones vs Separatists. It's a bit easier to pull smaller factions into it when doing skirmish level like WotC's game, but more difficult when you're talking army scale.

I get what you're saying (and I'm sure that Rebellion and Clone Wars eras would be most popular), but the beautiful thing about Star Wars is that the continuity has 5000 years of history that are, most important, mutable. With something like Flames of War or a Napoleonic-era gaming, where historical accuracy is important, the combatants, units, and battles are pretty much set. You can't make up a new tank for the Americans to have or say that China fought in the European theater. For Star Wars, however, all it takes is a book written and that changes. You can introduce new weapons, combatants, units, etc. without much difficulty, as Star Wars has a longstanding history of the retcon. Combined with the fact that you can form units and platoons from different alien species (all with different rules), and I think that a lot of the monotony could be easily averted.

But I'm getting too hopeful and should probably stop checking this thread. Dang it Battlefront!

Paladin Blake wrote:I get what you're saying (and I'm sure that Rebellion and Clone Wars eras would be most popular), but the beautiful thing about Star Wars is that the continuity has 5000 years of history that are, most important, mutable. With something like Flames of War or a Napoleonic-era gaming, where historical accuracy is important, the combatants, units, and battles are pretty much set. You can't make up a new tank for the Americans to have or say that China fought in the European theater. For Star Wars, however, all it takes is a book written and that changes. You can introduce new weapons, combatants, units, etc. without much difficulty, as Star Wars has a longstanding history of the retcon. Combined with the fact that you can form units and platoons from different alien species (all with different rules), and I think that a lot of the monotony could be easily averted.

But I'm getting too hopeful and should probably stop checking this thread. Dang it Battlefront!

This is very true and would be awesome! After all, the Rebels would definitely need some filling in in the ground war area.
It would just require Lucasfilm giving Battlefront enough creative license to fill in.

During the Rebellion, the Rebels went incredibly out of their way to avoid pitched ground battles--explicitly because they didn't have the manpower or the weaponry to actually do them.
I could see the Rebels doing commando raids, or having lots of air cover from fighters like X/Y-Wings.

Now, what I'd love to see though in tabletop form?
"Legacy" era.

Paladin Blake wrote:

Kroothawk wrote:That's why Epic is so popular and selling like hot cakes

Well how could it not? When you have a company like GW giving Epic reasonably-priced models and tons of support, it's naturally going to sell well.[/sarcasm]

Agreed, I often wondered if GW deliberately attempted to kill Epic with its last release. It must have taken real talent to sell a game that poorly.

15mm scale AT-ATs? Yeah, I'm up for that.

GW killing Epic? The problem is that pretty much everybody who wanted to play Epic already had their armies, so there wasn't much in the way of follow-on sales.

Just like every other Specialist Games product. True skirmish games with small buy-in mean short lifetimes.

Jack of all games wrote:One of the biggest problems I foresee is the lack of factions. It's really just Rebellion vs Empire and Clones vs Separatists. It's a bit easier to pull smaller factions into it when doing skirmish level like WotC's game, but more difficult when you're talking army scale.

These are the Wizards of the Coast game's factions:

Old Republic
Sith (includes great Sith war stuff through Darth Krayt Legacy stuff)
Mandalorians (ancient comic book era through Boba)
Republic (pretty much prequel era)
Separatists
Rebels
Empire (episode III through Legacy's Roan Fel)
New Republic
Yuuzhan Vong
Fringe (neutral faction available to all others, includes Jabba, bounty hunters, ugnaghts, wookiees, and all kinds of other stuff)

There's lots of factions, but the ones that weren't in the movies got a lot less attention than the big four. It'd probably be like that again, since I bet most casual gamers don't know or care what the hell a Yuuzhan Vong even is.

The only problem I can foresee for a SW-based game is the same problem that every Rebellion-era SW-based RTS game has had - coming up with units for the Rebels.

Be it Force Commander, Rebellion, Empire at War or even the Age of Empire clones, the Rebels would always have their roster filled with made up tanks and hover vehicles that were never seen before (or since) in any other SW product.

It's the reason I never played those games as the Rebels. The Empire always had the iconic Star Destroyers the various ships based around that, the various AT-XX based vehicles, various types of Storm Troopers and loads of variant TIE Fighters, and the lesser escorts ships that have existed in various mediums and so on. The Rebels have their fighters and a couple of ships and... and... yeah... made up hover-tanks and ships that we've never heard of. It's hard to play a SW game - a universe so rich in imagery - and try to play a side that has unfamiliar imagery.

H.B.M.C. wrote:The only problem I can foresee for a SW-based game is the same problem that every Rebellion-era SW-based RTS game has had - coming up with units for the Rebels.

Be it Force Commander, Rebellion, Empire at War or even the Age of Empire clones, the Rebels would always have their roster filled with made up tanks and hover vehicles that were never seen before (or since) in any other SW product.

One possible antidote is making the rebels largely elite infantry based. They're spec ops guys who can jam up enemy tanks & walkers and have a lot of unique characters like Luke and Han who can kill big, sweaty fistfuls of stormtroopers on their own. That's actually how they play in the WotC game, though most powergaming squads for any faction are a bunch of expensive ($-wise) "very rare" unique characters who can alpha strike the enemy team.

Darth Badguy wrote:These are the Wizards of the Coast game's factions:

Old Republic
Sith (includes great Sith war stuff through Darth Krayt Legacy stuff)
Mandalorians (ancient comic book era through Boba)
Republic (pretty much prequel era)
Separatists
Rebels
Empire (episode III through Legacy's Roan Fel)
New Republic
Yuuzhan Vong
Fringe (neutral faction available to all others, includes Jabba, bounty hunters, ugnaghts, wookiees, and all kinds of other stuff)

There's lots of factions, but the ones that weren't in the movies got a lot less attention than the big four. It'd probably be like that again, since I bet most casual gamers don't know or care what the hell a Yuuzhan Vong even is.

And with two kinds of gravel you can proxy the epic fight Javas against Ewoks (led by Master Joda)

Darth Badguy wrote:These are the Wizards of the Coast game's factions:

Old Republic
Sith (includes great Sith war stuff through Darth Krayt Legacy stuff)
Mandalorians (ancient comic book era through Boba)
Republic (pretty much prequel era)
Separatists
Rebels
Empire (episode III through Legacy's Roan Fel)
New Republic
Yuuzhan Vong
Fringe (neutral faction available to all others, includes Jabba, bounty hunters, ugnaghts, wookiees, and all kinds of other stuff)

There's lots of factions, but the ones that weren't in the movies got a lot less attention than the big four. It'd probably be like that again, since I bet most casual gamers don't know or care what the hell a Yuuzhan Vong even is.

Even after that breakdown, there is potentially further you can go with it. The Old Republic faction covers over a thousand years of 'history'
The Sith faction incorporates the Old Republic Era (covering again a thousand years or so), the Clone Wars-ish era and the Legacy era
Mandalorians, as pointed out, includes several different eras.
And Fringe includes any number of races that could easily be fleshed out into stand-alone factions. As does the Republic faction, for that matter... at the very least, Gungans and Naboo could easily be separate armies from the standard Republic roster.

Wookies could be done too seeing as quite a few of their vehicles were created in Revenge of the Sith, you can also draw on both of the Clone Wars series, (best star wars series movies included was the original drawn animation Clone Wars series) and various comic books. That should allow for more factions fleshed out in a similar way to Lord of the Rings where the only really fleshed out movie/bookwise factions are Gondor, Mordor, and Elves.

JohnHwangDD wrote:GW killing Epic? The problem is that pretty much everybody who wanted to play Epic already had their armies, so there wasn't much in the way of follow-on sales.

Just like every other Specialist Games product. True skirmish games with small buy-in mean short lifetimes.

OT.. but Epic died from GWs "Pump and Dump" sales philosophy. For the first 2 editions of Epic, it sold very well. The figures kept getting better and better (for some jaw dropping detail see the most recent chaos marines). The problem was they released the game, splashed it in WD for a month… then nothing ever mentioned of it again (slight exaggeration, but only by the smallest margin). The dropped the game from their line up when times were lean and GW was being restructured.

Starwars models would be cool if they were well made.

Hutt faction would work

Also those ones who ride rancors around in battle, force witches or something, they'd look pretty mean on a tabletop.

These are the most likely six...

2. We have the rights to produce the Star Wars tabletop miniatures game now that the Wizards of the Coast license have expired.
3. A free Osprey book with be given away with every issue of Wargames Illustrated in June.
4. Early War has proved to be much more work than we expected and we have to move its release back by six months.
7. Having looked at the Pacific theatre, we have decided to make a naval game to go along with the Flames Of War books we are working on.
8. We have a World War Two aircraft game almost finished so you will be able to dogfight your way through the war.
9. As part of a new license deal we will be releasing themed dice and gaming sets for the greatest comic book heroes in the world.


I have my doubts about star wars being one of the 5. That is not a cheap license by any means, and GL is very protective about what is done with his license (meaining that it may prove difficult to come up with more/new factions for use in the game).

Also, after the clone wars, large ground battles seem to be pretty much nonexistent, and before that they haven't ever really been the focus of the story, so I have my doubts as to whether or not they will be able to pull it off.

Legacy era had some fairly large ground battles, as did the Yvethan and post-Galactic Civil War era.

Yeah, but post-Galactic Civil War (including Yvethan and Legacy) are known only to a smaller subset of star wars fans. Tabletop gaming is a very niche market as it is, setting up your business to appeal to an even smaller subset of that market is setting yourself up for failure.

Also, another thing to strike down the star wars theory, think about some of the recent star wars video games produced... specifically think about the titles... to me that just screams its an april fools joke....

I don't know. An Old Republic tie-in mini game would probably work, assuming TOR sells well. There's an entire setting of symmetrical fighting (soon-to-be) well-known to millions of gamers. Not necessarily likely, but plausible.

chaos0xomega wrote:and GL is very protective about what is done with his license (meaining that it may prove difficult to come up with more/new factions for use in the game).

I disagree. See Star Wars Galaxies(tons of Jedi running around during Rebellion Era), many of the novels, and pretty much every other SW VG, too.

Quite the opposite, Lucas seems to give everyone with the license pretty loose reins to do what they want as long as they don't mess with the story canon of the movies.

Platuan4th wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:and GL is very protective about what is done with his license (meaining that it may prove difficult to come up with more/new factions for use in the game).

I disagree. See Star Wars Galaxies(tons of Jedi running around during Rebellion Era), many of the novels, and pretty much every other SW VG, too.

Quite the opposite, Lucas seems to give everyone with the license pretty loose reins to do what they want as long as they don't mess with the story canon of the movies.

To be 100% fair to GL:
"Galaxies" wasn't his idea to let Jedi roam wild. That was Sony/Verant when the game started hemorrhaging players.

Kanluwen wrote:

Platuan4th wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:and GL is very protective about what is done with his license (meaining that it may prove difficult to come up with more/new factions for use in the game).

I disagree. See Star Wars Galaxies(tons of Jedi running around during Rebellion Era), many of the novels, and pretty much every other SW VG, too.

Quite the opposite, Lucas seems to give everyone with the license pretty loose reins to do what they want as long as they don't mess with the story canon of the movies.

To be 100% fair to GL:
"Galaxies" wasn't his idea to let Jedi roam wild. That was Sony/Verant when the game started hemorrhaging players.

I know, hence why I disagreed with his statement that Lucas is protective about it and why I stated that they pretty much have free reign over the license.

Once you have the SW license, you can do almost anything you want as long as you don't mess with the movie based story.

Misunderstood you then

From what I understand, at least in regards to how the "Force Unleashed" team talked about it:
Any idea has to go through George first. Provided he likes the basic pitch, he then gets involved and helps guide it along.

Kanluwen wrote:Misunderstood you then

From what I understand, at least in regards to how the "Force Unleashed" team talked about it:
Any idea has to go through George first. Provided he likes the basic pitch, he then gets involved and helps guide it along.

FU was a LucasArts game, not a licensed game, though.

Platuan4th wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:Misunderstood you then

From what I understand, at least in regards to how the "Force Unleashed" team talked about it:
Any idea has to go through George first. Provided he likes the basic pitch, he then gets involved and helps guide it along.

FU was a LucasArts game, not a licensed game, though.

True, but some of the members of the team had also worked on licensed games and mentioned it was the same.

Platuan4th wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:

Platuan4th wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:and GL is very protective about what is done with his license (meaining that it may prove difficult to come up with more/new factions for use in the game).

I disagree. See Star Wars Galaxies(tons of Jedi running around during Rebellion Era), many of the novels, and pretty much every other SW VG, too.

Quite the opposite, Lucas seems to give everyone with the license pretty loose reins to do what they want as long as they don't mess with the story canon of the movies.

To be 100% fair to GL:
"Galaxies" wasn't his idea to let Jedi roam wild. That was Sony/Verant when the game started hemorrhaging players.

I know, hence why I disagreed with his statement that Lucas is protective about it and why I stated that they pretty much have free reign over the license.

Once you have the SW license, you can do almost anything you want as long as you don't mess with the movie based story.

Having done hours upon hours of research on this very subject for my business management courses, I can tell you that you are entirely incorrect on your analysis of how things work. Your example is also a poor one. Lucas agreed to let the SWG team include playable jedi on the condition that access to them be limited so that they would be 'rare.' That is precisely what the dev team did, however it was done via a flawed concept.

As for how it became the way it is now, I have no friggin idea, but I'm not sure Lucas and co. have really been paying SWG much attention at all given how poorly its done.

As for whether or not its a lucasarts game or not... its a moot point. All SW games are published by Lucasarts, thus making them more or less a Lucasarts game. If Lucas and/or his IP managers see something they don't like they stop it or get it changed. Granted im sure they give a certain amount of leeway now and again, especially with the canon system they have in place, but Lucas retains a lot of oversite over his stuff. Thats pretty much how he got to where he is today.

And in case you guys didn't get it in my previous post, there is a video game known as Star War Battlefront (and a sequel, Star Wars Battlefront 2). Hence the reason why I think #2 is unlikely... its just a very clever pun (more or less)