One of Kevin's biggest problems is that he is a micro-manager in the truest sense of the word. He runs an operation where ultimately, every single decision must go through him, and frankly, that's too much for one person to do and still keep up a company whose primary asset is a steady stream of new intellectual property. He's still living this fantasy where he thinks he can oversee everything himself and still go home and bang out a great minis game complete with mouthwatering plastic miniatures in seven months. Do you see the folly in this? You do? Well, bully for you, because Kevin sure doesn't.

This is where another big problem of his comes forth and compounds his first problem: Kevin simply cannot accept the fact that sometimes he is wrong or might have fallen short in something. Work with the guy long enough, and you'll see this is the case. He never, ever accepts responsibility for something bad that has hapened to the company. Or if he does, he couches it in terms of how he's too much of a nice guy and gave Idiot Ninja #23 a break when he should not have, or he was too open a boss and Treacherous Scumbag #44 stole his artwork, and so on. His fault, but not really his fault.

As a result, he surrounds himself with people that he can shunt blame to, ignoring all the while that you can't really shunt anything away from yourself in a company where you are the one guy who ultimately approves every single thing that happens. But, he does it anyway, which is why when an order gets boggled, it's one of his worker's fault. When he can't get writing at home done, it's the fault of somebody in his family. When he assigns miniature designs to be created, has fully crystallized views on what that sprue layout ought to be but does not share them with the modeller, and gets a sprue layout he didn't expect, why, that's the modeller's fault. When the distributors don't order 8,000 copies of his latest miniatures which are two years overdue, it's the tough marketplace's fault.

(IMO, this explains why Kevin holds some measure of disdain for pretty much everybody in his life -- the way he sees it, everybody he comes into contact with lets him down at some point or another. For a guy who feels like he's propping up the efforts of a bunch of halfwits and marginal talents, he still can't see that without all those people, he wouldn't have a company.)

These things have a nasty tendency to pile on top of each other and create vicious circles of which Palladium's goofy production schedule is a great example.

It starts with Kevin receiving a proposal for the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter. Kevin likes the pitch and greenlights the project. Whatever the partner's ideas for the game and their own share of the responsibilities are, Kevin gets jazzed over the concept of the project and develops all on his own what the project ought to be and who will be responsible for what. Only, this is going on while poor Ninja Division is writing the rules and designing the miniatures, so surprise, surprise, when the project gets turned in, it's not what Kevin wanted and they don't want to do more than agreed upon. This is a classic case of somebody hating Black Hawk Down because when they went ot see it, they were in the mood for M*A*S*H and Inglorious Basterds double feature. So, Kevin does what he does best, he writes his corporate partner a patronizing letter on how excited he was when the project was first pitched and how disapointed he was that all that promise never materialized and they didn't pull their weight. Sometimes, the partner doesn't take this well, and they go off on Kevin, which is never a good thing because then it prompts Kevin to call his other freelancers, read to them the letters he and Angry Ninja traded back in forth and lament about how sad it is that there are so few professionals in this business.

But back to work. We now have a Robotech RPG Tactics that is not to Kevin's liking, but he wants to put the game out, both because he wants his vision of it realized and because he needs new product. Objectively speaking, it might, in this case, be smart to write off Robotech RPG Tactics and instead put out the minis game with model designs and rules he's been working on himself. Only he can't, because he hasn't been working on a minis game or model designs himself. He's been busy running a company by chewing out the guys in the warehouse, shutting down a helpful fan over preserving his right to sell colored fist dice he'll never produce once the kickstarter is fulfilled, and calling his other freelancers and writing murmurs for his fan friends to bitch about how difficult his life is.

Thus, as the revised earlier shipping day looms, Kevin has no Robotech RPG Tactics, and no UEDF Marines in Space, exclusive backer objective markers or whatever he really ought to have been working on all this time. But he's got bills to pay, so he must produce something. And, since he got all fired up about the very idea of Robotech RPG Tactics way back when the project was first introduced, he started pimping the game thirty-two seconds after he received a signed copy of the contract from the partner company. So now the pledgers expect Robotech RPG Tactics whether its ready or not. And what's more, he put the game and minis on a release schedule that would only be met if every stage of the project's production goes entirely according to plan.

There are (surprise!) a few problems with this. One, by now Kevin ought to know full well that unless he's got a dependable full-time project manager working for him he hits his schedules a fraction of the time. So, until he goes a year or two hitting every single release date on the nose, he ought to budget 50% more time for his projects than he does. Or at the very least, he should have the decency to not get bent out of shape when his unrealistically planned project goes overdue by several years, further cementing his company's reputation for having one of the most unreliable production schedules in the business.

The second problem at this stage of the game is that Kevin never actually looks at the finished game rules or prototype minis until it's a few weeks away from its schedule production date with the factory in China. This, my friends, is akin to a flight crew performing a pre-flight check on a plane that is taxiing down the runway. If Kevin were smart, he'd give all incoming manuscripts and 3D files his full attention the moment they hit his desk a) to see if they are any good and b) to speed the production process along. Kevin's partners and employees would certainly do a better job of making sure the project is what Kevin wants if Kevin molded it a bit himself to begin with.

But no, what happens is Kevin gets the rules and digital model files, often holds on to it for a period of time, then drops it on Jeff or Wayne, who he routinely criticizes for not really being able to edit. Then, 12 days before the estimated Kickstarter delivery date, he expects to be able to do a quick brush-up edit himself on a the rules and 3D models that by his reckoning, shouldn't need it anyway. This particular recipe for disaster, in comparison, makes mixing buckshot, nitroglycerine and pistachio ice cream together in a Slurpee machine seem like the next big thing in frozen desserts.

Thus we come to the best part of the process, where Kevin -- already disgruntled because he feels obligated to rewrite the Robotech RPG Tactics rules and redesign the 3D model files into what it should have been compatible with the factory in the first place, and even further disgruntled because he feels this is pulling him away from the projects he really wants to be working on (even though he really wasn't working on them anyway) -- undergoes a commando revamp of the project. He's got about two weeks to do it in, a vision of the finished project and about three half-decent ideas ot get him there. Obviously, Kevin can't get blood from a stone, so he writes up some half-strength filler Kickstarter updates, knocks about some copy paste material for the weekly update , and takes what he likes from the original Robotech RPG Tactics contract with pledgers, giving himself co-credit for having the wisdom to give it a second chance. If he's really hard put, he'll take a look at the promises he made and modifty them unilaterally till they're convienent again. ("Hmm...this promise about backers getting minis first costs me money but it sounds cool, so I hereby declare that it'll be "first" in their area. Nobody will mind if I ship to distributors who then ship themselves to those regions, especially once I copy paste the new promise and scribble a few more details about respecting backers myself..."). If he's got a white knight who he trusts, he'll call them up and ask for an aggressive series of posts on the forums defending the decision by the end of the weekend.

What's that, you say? When does he play test any of this stuff? That's a good question. Too bad it's got a bad answer. For starters, he's only got a few days between when he finishes the project and when he gets it out to the Chinese factory, so there's no time for a proper shakedown. Not that any of this needs one, don't you know, because the Palladium project management style works, it's rock solid, the fans like it judging by the number of pledges that came in two years ago, and all those jerkoffs over at Dakka Dakka who keep telling him to revamp the parts count of the minis can kindly take a flying feth at a rolling doughnut. Third, when I was still working for the man, Kevin didn't ever play a minis game in his life. He was too busy running a role-playing game company. (Some poor saffron-clad Tibetan is up in the mountains right now trying like hell to wrap his brain around that one.)

Once Kevin's ready for layout, he throws the mess of 3D printed pieces out on the table and pops open his super glue because he still puts these damned things together from sheer memory. What's that? Accurate assembly instructions? Naw, he's faster without it! To his credit, he assembles the minis in fairly decent time, but he also illustrates why all prototype minis have awkward poses and a hodgepodge of mismatched bases. Kevin isn't going to buy matching bases for GAMA or line up all those large seams on the front of the minis because he might have to spend more than 45 minutes or more assembling each individual miniature, and when he does, all those minis look like they posed while running with their legs asleep. Where this really makes you want to bang your head against the tip of an artillery shell is when he approves 80% of the parts layouts, discovers that he'd like to rework the design of the sprue to get more mouthwatering detail and decides that it would be too much work to do so while keeping the poses dynamic. You know how every time in a Robotech RPG Tactics booster box you'll have a series of sprues or something and all of them have small parts that are split into way too many parts? That's why. I used to think it was because Kevin wouldn't assemble a 30mm tall model himself. Now I know it's because he's truly, madly, deeply in love with breaking down each model into so many split pieces that even Monty Burns would decry as old-fashioned and overly complicated.

Voila! He's finally got Robotech RPG Tactics in the bag and off to the factory. And all it took was him not sleeping for a year (after he already skipped two years' sleep handling the Northern Gun Crowdfunding sourcebooks fiasco), telling a fresh fan friend turned employee who allegedly stole from him to go take a hike, calling up his other workers to say that somehow this might be his best work yet, executing a slapdash sprue layout job, recycling old rpg rules into a minis game and telling himself over and over again that nobody does it like than he does. In that regard, he's dead on, because 1985 ended way back in NINETEEN EIGHTY fething FIVE.

This is the crazy way in which Kevin Siembieda produces a minis game. I don't really know exactly how he handles the precise details of managing the rest of his operation, but I always felt that his minis game production methods set an ominous precedent.

If any good comes out of it, it is all thanks to him. If any bad comes out of it, well, then it's your fault and my fault and that guy's fault and her fault and the industry's fault and the fault of that fether who sold him a soggy pierogie yesterday and...you get the picture.

What really keeps this vicious cycle going, however, is that for a long time, Kevin was extremely successful working this way. So successful, in fact, that it reinforced all those nasty elements I've outlined so far, proving not only that Kevin was right all along, but that the way he does things is practically the Gospel According to Kevin, patron saint of keeping it real in the miniatures industry, and that he just got inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame. Only the GAtK doesn't really work that well anymore. Sales are slipping because the company's only minis game has come out two years late and counting, its other planned minis games haven't materialized yet and -- get this -- the new stuff coming out before the kickstarter is fulfilled is largely recycled designs from a 6mm metal minis company and are supposed to work with the stuff he hasn't actually made yet. (There's a Tibetan monk working on that one, too.) And of course, taking the fans' input into consideration for what they'd like to see, such as a simplified parts count or a consistent scale for all three eras, is simply out of the question. Maybe he's too busy writing up 19 page kickstarter updates about how he gives his fans what they want or something.

But the bottom line is that all is not well, and that some major changes ought to be made to keep the business dynamic and thriving. But those changes keep getting ignored while it gets harder and harder to sell product that is already coming over in smaller containers and half filled tournament attendance. Times are tough, no doubt about that. And you know what? Maybe, just maybe, it's not the industry's fault or some custom broker's fault or the weather's fault, or his pet goose's fault. Maybe it's Kevin's fault.

Naaaaah.