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Jbuckmaster wrote:
L&L was .... NOT what I wanted to release. I was halfway through dev on a brand new system to actually bring us up to squad-based gaming so we could have 5-6 squads plus extras per army without it taking forever and a day.

I'll be blunt there. That system would have killed HG just as much as L&L did, if not more so. A great part of the charm of HG was that the system was not squad-based, which left the player free to decide what kind of spacing/etc. was best, and which did not turn models into glorified and expensive wound tokens.
From everything I heard you say about where you wanted to take HG, well, you did not want HG. You wanted 40K. And, if I wanted to play 40K or something like it, I would play 40K.

mrondeau wrote:

Jbuckmaster wrote:
L&L was .... NOT what I wanted to release. I was halfway through dev on a brand new system to actually bring us up to squad-based gaming so we could have 5-6 squads plus extras per army without it taking forever and a day.

I'll be blunt there. That system would have killed HG just as much as L&L did, if not more so. A great part of the charm of HG was that the system was not squad-based, which left the player free to decide what kind of spacing/etc. was best, and which did not turn models into glorified and expensive wound tokens.
From everything I heard you say about where you wanted to take HG, well, you did not want HG. You wanted 40K. And, if I wanted to play 40K or something like it, I would play 40K.

I'll partially disagree there; it's "partially" because I really would have preferred blitz to be sold and marketed as the skirmish game the rules actually supported.. It would have been nice though to have a game ecosystem that wasn't bipolar with a manic sales focus (buy 5 gear squads!) and a depressive rules mechanic (games take way too long with that!). Supposedly that cohesive goal is the main focus of the current push with the rules supporting higher model count and the prices and plastic switch over supporting it as well. We'll have to see how it turns out. My gears are foamed and shelved in the meantime.

Jbuckmaster wrote:
Thanks for the reassurance, but I still feel like I laid the egg that grew into a monster. Both with Paxton getting revised so I could move the story to where I needed it and with the unique designs.

Would anyone actually be interested in hearing what we were wanting to do with the storyline and such, or would that be opening a can of worms?

-John

YES.

Well, I for one am always interested in discussions of the timeline and setting ^_^.

As to the Cat... well, I've said it before, but the problem was never really the Cat.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mmmpi wrote:
I have a problem with Paxton. They're an arms dealer that doesn't sell to anyone. Can't see the badlands buying enough stuff from them to support such a large army, or robust R&D branch, and the fluff says the Polars prefer their own equipment. Now with Nucoal building their own stuff (Including a brand new state of the art gunda...gear strider) taking away at least a third of their badlands market.

AKA: HOW DOES PAXTON STAY IN BUSINESS?!??!?!?!!!1/?

Setting wise, Paxton sells to everyone, and if you went to the old vehicle books you'd see just how many of the polar vehicles carry Paxton weapons (hint: a whole lot ^^). The problem with Paxton has never been the actual weapons. The problem with Paxton is that they are Johnny come-lately's to the Gear manufacturing field by... well, centuries, and they never got an actual foothold on it. But somehow, for some reason... they're the best there are at that nowadays. Because REASONS. And they're manufacturing more Gear chassis designs nowadays than both polar powers combined. Which, taking into account that this is AFTER they got their main manufacturing centers blown up to kingdom come (along, I might say with basically all their air force). But they got around to not only designing but building a whole lot of new Gear chassises. And new abomin- pardon, "gearstriders".

But hey, it's the faction that makes the main playtester's hard, so...

And don't make me talk about NuCoal, now. You won't like it.

I remember reading the part where they sell weapons to both sides, but not chassis. My big WTF is the supporting whole armies, and a better than anyone else R&D, all with a budget from selling refrigerators and auto cannons.

I actually like the idea of Nucoal. Still trying to figure out how they got their own indigenous arms industry up and going so fast, with hover gears and everything so quickly, especially as none of the city states involved were known for R&D (though a few seem to have some factories). Their military can't be "that" great though if one of their founding cities is still occupied by the south. This is definitely not a faction that should have gotten a gear strider though.

And completely forgot Nucoal has access to the Humanist Alliance stuff.

 Mmmpi wrote:
I remember reading the part where they sell weapons to both sides, but not chassis. My big WTF is the supporting whole armies, and a better than anyone else R&D, all with a budget from selling refrigerators and auto cannons.

I actually like the idea of Nucoal. Still trying to figure out how they got their own indigenous arms industry up and going so fast, with hover gears and everything so quickly, especially as none of the city states involved were known for R&D (though a few seem to have some factories). Their military can't be "that" great though if one of their founding cities is still occupied by the south. This is definitely not a faction that should have gotten a gear strider though.

And completely forgot Nucoal has access to the Humanist Alliance stuff.

NuCoal is, essentially, self-insert fan fiction. And they don't just "access to the Humanist Alliance stuff", no, the entire Humanist Alliance, with all that made it interesting, was sacrificed to the NuCoal gods.

As for PRDF, the original version was supposed to be, essentially, on par with the technology of the polars. That's not incredible, BTW. Having centuries of experience is not worth that much.
Peace-River had a good industrial base, which is what take the longest to establish. The idea was that the proportion of "high-tech" was larger in the PRDF than in the polar armies, but not the absolute numbers.
I always used to describe the difference in number with "Assemble the entire PRDF in a firing line. Then, take all the Jaguars in the northern armies, removes their weapons and tell them to go stomp (literally) the PRDF. The Jaguars win."

I can't really talk about the current iteration of the PRDF, but from what I heard it is pretty dire.

Let's just say that I disagree quite a lot with a lot of Jbuckmaster's design decisions, and have some serious issues with his actions during and after the playtest of L&L, but I think he's kilometres ahead of his successors.
At the very least, he was not favouring one faction voluntarily, and the fluff part of the books did not read like self-insert fan-fiction.

Nucoal is another troublesome one but IMO not as bad as Paxton in terms of balance after the Gear Up TV adjustments pdf. They both got artifically speed grown to turn them i to full factions purely for sales. If nucoal had only developed the two related hover gears, I'd have said that was fast but doable by Terra Novan standards but instead they added another 4 to that. The original chasseur was a Southern TA design using alot of Jager parts that was sold to a city state (prior to nucoal) when the SRA couldn't work out the kinks. The Mk 2 was a refinement/development by Nucoal that still used alot of parts from the former. If the former had been the trooper, the latter the elite gear, I'd be fine with that level of advancement in conjunction with them using light hovertanks (including one new chassis) instead of firesupport gears.

NuCoal's fine. I like NuCoal. Port Arthur was a neat concept.

NuCoal having enough unique chassis to field an army in-game is absolute BS.

For me, NuCoal's models marked the beginning of the end. They get a buttwheel and a gearstrider. The South gets a gearstrider. Paxton gets a buttwheel. NuCoal's addition ruined the distinctiveness the armies once visually had. Yes yes, a real military is going to look mostly the same as any other.

But thankfully these are space robots so we don't have to care about that.

On that same note, the recent trend towards giant wheel feet, totally rad visor heads, extreme crash bars, and round bodies for everyone is really, really ruining the look. If they had confined all the new designs to one faction or manufacturer, it might not have been so bad, but a LOT of the new stuff just doesn't fit. (Lynx, Salamander, etc.)

Paxton also got ANOTHER gear strider, better stats for free, a hover gear, and literally stole a strider model from the north (as in the concept art was yanked from the north pdf AFTER playtesting ended and the entry was dropped completely to shoehorn in a gear stridern while the strider art placed into the ALREADY released paxton pdf). Grumble...

We are kind of veering way off of smilodon's original topic of what makes a gear a gear. We still have the general HG discussion thread for complaints.

mrondeau wrote:
NuCoal is, essentially, self-insert fan fiction. And they don't just "access to the Humanist Alliance stuff", no, the entire Humanist Alliance, with all that made it interesting, was sacrificed to the NuCoal gods.

And that for starters...

As for PRDF, the original version was supposed to be, essentially, on par with the technology of the polars. That's not incredible, BTW. Having centuries of experience is not worth that much.

And I was on board with that (hell, I'm even mentioned in the Shinobi's fluff, FFS). The problems came when they passed the "on par with polar tech" point full speed ahead and into the "bs" level of tech, when they added to that attack (as in, actual direct fire weapon effect) EW equipment, monowheel bikes, honest-to god power armors, a crapload of new super gears (capabilities-wise), another fething gearstrider, and stole the basically only new norther strider design from them. They got too much "we get this instead of you because feth you, that's why" for me to take them seriously anymore.

Peace-River had a good industrial base, which is what take the longest to establish. The idea was that the proportion of "high-tech" was larger in the PRDF than in the polar armies, but not the absolute numbers.

Yeah... and that "had" is the biggest problem. Being optimist, they lost half their industrial base and development teams at Peace River... and they still went on a golden age of discoveries and mass manufacturing, just because.

I always used to describe the difference in number with "Assemble the entire PRDF in a firing line. Then, take all the Jaguars in the northern armies, removes their weapons and tell them to go stomp (literally) the PRDF. The Jaguars win."

Pretty accurate, yeah.

I can't really talk about the current iteration of the PRDF, but from what I heard it is pretty dire.

Well... see above for a tiny bit of that.

Let's just say that I disagree quite a lot with a lot of Jbuckmaster's design decisions, and have some serious issues with his actions during and after the playtest of L&L, but I think he's kilometres ahead of his successors.
At the very least, he was not favouring one faction voluntarily, and the fluff part of the books did not read like self-insert fan-fiction.

Being a setting nerd, that last part is the one that stings me the most.

 Firebreak wrote:
[..] On that same note, the recent trend towards giant wheel feet, [..]

I saw what anime series that was copied from here the other day on a Google image search, but can't recall the title now.

But yeah, overall IMHO the Pod artists are getting about as uninspired nowadays as what was done for the original non-walker vehicle designs.
There essentially isn't a distinctive faction aesthetic anymore really, which was discussed previously in other threads as being a bad thing for a miniatures game, a type of game that is largely dependent on look driving sales.

Quite neat - Tutorial: How to Build a Bot, by Marrekie (dA; NSFW site)


Some points of interest similar to this thread topic that I saw today when searching for something else; Poll: Battletech vs Heavy Gear vs Gundam vs Robotech. (Escapist Magazine site)

And these too:
"Giant Robot Withdrawal" (The Burning Wheel forum)
"What's Your [Current] Favorite Mech/Robot?" (Mobile Frame Hangar forum)
"What is your preferred "Mech" aesthetic?" (The Miniatures Page)


Front Mission 'Wanzers' seem to be similar to VOTOMS & Gears as well, only perhaps a bit more skewed to the Gundam side of things IMO, without being as fanciful as the Armored Core models.
There is definitely a wide range of foot styles on the 'Wanzers,' but the overall heft seems about right: not a game I've ever played though on a console or PC, nor is Armored Core.

_
_ .... ah, links, /grumble ....

Just took a peek at the DP9 forums... can someone who remembers their password post the real reason for the first gear strider as quoted by john buckmaster over in the gearsstrider wtf? thread there? It would be eye opening and likely much appreciated (even if we never hear the rest of his story).

That could be fun

Indeed it would be especially for all the folks that have been filling in the blanks with why those gearsstriders make so much "sense".

Talk about going full circle though...

 warboss wrote:
Just took a peek at the DP9 forums... can someone who remembers their password post the real reason for the first gear strider as quoted by john buckmaster over in the gearsstrider wtf? thread there? It would be eye opening and likely much appreciated (even if we never hear the rest of his story).

Done ^_^

Cool and thanks. Anything that spreads the truth about gearstriders is for the greater good.

Storyline tentative plans and such will be up later. I just got hit with a butt-ton of work and then got sick.

Hoping things quiet down after we secure the extended contract from Dell for the Datacentre Servers this aft.

-John

 Mmmpi wrote:
I have a problem with Paxton. They're an arms dealer that doesn't sell to anyone. Can't see the badlands buying enough stuff from them to support such a large army, or robust R&D branch, and the fluff says the Polars prefer their own equipment. Now with Nucoal building their own stuff (Including a brand new state of the art gunda...gear strider) taking away at least a third of their badlands market.

AKA: HOW DOES PAXTON STAY IN BUSINESS?!??!?!?!!!1/?

Hmm. Didn't Peace River get blown up by terrorists using an antimatter bomb? Could have put a little crimp in the manufacturing business of Paxton.

IIRC, Paxton Arms is secretly building the Black Talons, so the funding for them should be coming from both the North and South. That means while Paxton is pretty much only building PRDF Gears for the PRDF publicly, secretly it's the Black Talons keeping them afloat. Modern day equivalent would be the Skunk Works. Kelly Johnson starts a secret, black ops funded organization within Lockheed Martin back in the '50's that keeps the company afloat all the way up into the 1990's when the company got bought out/reformed/whatever they call it. Commercially, Lockheed Martin built the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, the P-3 Orion "sub-Hunter", the F-16 fighter, and Trident ICBM's. These only accounted for about 1/2 the income of Lockheed Martin up through the 90's. Everything else came from Black Ops funding. The Skunk Works built the U-2, SR-71, and other "spy/secret" aircraft. John Q. Public will probably never know all the stuff the Skunk Works built or worked on. DARPA has given them a ton of money for a lot of black projects.

Anyways, I look at Paxton Arms as the Heavy Gear equivalent to Lockheed Martin with the Black Talon project their Skunk Works.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 warboss wrote:
Just took a peek at the DP9 forums... can someone who remembers their password post the real reason for the first gear strider as quoted by john buckmaster over in the gearsstrider wtf? thread there? It would be eye opening and likely much appreciated (even if we never hear the rest of his story).

Hmmm. I haven't been to those forums in a long time. Would probably need the password recovery feature.

I could see a purpose built Strider for like, mounting a large gun or missile on- a mobile weapons platform, but the things they have now just make little to no sense to me. The biggest example that pops in my head is the NUCOAL transforming tank/strider thing. Looks great in "gear" or tank mode, but the idea that it transforms is a bit of a stretch for me. And why is it called a strider?

Clearly the definition of strider as applied to Heavy Gear seems to have multiple meanings.

Jbuckmaster wrote:
Storyline tentative plans and such will be up later. I just got hit with a butt-ton of work and then got sick.

Hoping things quiet down after we secure the extended contract from Dell for the Datacentre Servers this aft.

-John

Thanks for the update. To be honest, I figured an ancient NDA monster had gobbled up the idea so I'm glad to hear we'll still be getting the "what if?" story whenever you get a chance.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tamwulf wrote:

IIRC, Paxton Arms is secretly building the Black Talons, so the funding for them should be coming from both the North and South. That means while Paxton is pretty much only building PRDF Gears for the PRDF publicly, secretly it's the Black Talons keeping them afloat. Modern day equivalent would be the Skunk Works. Kelly Johnson starts a secret, black ops funded organization within Lockheed Martin back in the '50's that keeps the company afloat all the way up into the 1990's when the company got bought out/reformed/whatever they call it. Commercially, Lockheed Martin built the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, the P-3 Orion "sub-Hunter", the F-16 fighter, and Trident ICBM's. These only accounted for about 1/2 the income of Lockheed Martin up through the 90's. Everything else came from Black Ops funding. The Skunk Works built the U-2, SR-71, and other "spy/secret" aircraft. John Q. Public will probably never know all the stuff the Skunk Works built or worked on. DARPA has given them a ton of money for a lot of black projects.

Anyways, I look at Paxton Arms as the Heavy Gear equivalent to Lockheed Martin with the Black Talon project their Skunk Works.

I suspect that exact comparison is what they were going for. The difference is that the skunk works didn't prop up the entire military industrial complex of the US during the cold war and pay for the rebuilding the country from utter devastation. It would be like if Lockheed were able to single handely rebuild all of Germany AND turn it into a first rate world military power AGAIN by 1960 on the back of the Skunk Works funding profit. It was a stupid ham fisted way to turn Paxton in the fluff into a "full" world power faction when there was no justification for doing so either in the fluff or the existing model line. The same thing pretty much happened with Nucoal to a lesser degree but they didn't have to rebuild almost everything (rather just a fraction with the HA portion they got).

 warboss wrote:


I suspect that exact comparison is what they were going for. The difference is that the skunk works didn't prop up the entire military industrial complex of the US during the cold war and pay for the rebuilding the country from utter devastation. It would be like if Lockheed were able to single handely rebuild all of Germany AND turn it into a first rate world military power AGAIN by 1960 on the back of the Skunk Works funding profit. It was a stupid ham fisted way to turn Paxton in the fluff into a "full" world power faction when there was no justification for doing so either in the fluff or the existing model line. The same thing pretty much happened with Nucoal to a lesser degree but they didn't have to rebuild almost everything (rather just a fraction with the HA portion they got).

That was actually one of the big reasons I reworked the storyline in Blitz. Paxton had variable tech levels, was involved WAY too much in the back end storyline stuff (harbouring a superspy everyone thinks is dead and who knows "the truth"), bounced between being an evil police state or an being naively altruistic... and being incompetent on both ends... and then they get blowed up real good and bounce back without any issues.

Yeah, that don't work very well.

-John

Bit of a necro, but had a thought;

 Firebreak wrote:

Jbuckmaster wrote:
Thanks for the reassurance, but I still feel like I laid the egg that grew into a monster. Both with Paxton getting revised so I could move the story to where I needed it and with the unique designs.
Would anyone actually be interested in hearing what we were wanting to do with the storyline and such, or would that be opening a can of worms?
-John

YES.

Jbuckmaster wrote:
Storyline tentative plans and such will be up later. I just got hit with a butt-ton of work and then got sick.
Hoping things quiet down after we secure the extended contract from Dell for the Datacentre Servers this aft.
-John

If you're about again at some point John, I think this would still be of interest to myself and other folks.

 Smilodon_UP wrote:
- What distinctive thematic elements set walker vehicles in Heavy Gear apart from the endless cycle of pseudo-copied Appleseed, Gundam, Patlabor, Robotech, etc etc etc [insert other manga/anime setting here] mechanical designs?

A lot of people mentioned the v-engine as being a distinct feature of what makes both Gears and HG, but what do y'all think about the manner in which that engine is powered.
Does relying on internal combustion fueled by hydrocarbons define HG as a setting, or does fossil fuels being the literal driving force contribute significantly to the 'WW2 vibe'' and take focus away from sci-fi elements of the setting?


This is one of the stickier points about the setting for me, because of the distances involved in any kind of travel on Terra Nova; there are a lot of workable alternatives that could have been written in just as easily without needing so much industry to start up in the first place.
While fuel alcohol, or refined fossil fuels in those locales that have them, would probably still be adequate for most ground vehicles those types of fuels seem to need too much volume and mass that a walker or mount just does not have to spare.



Also, Paxton and NuCoal, what should (could) their relatively distinctive visual aesthetic be (or have been) as a faction.

_
_

 Smilodon_UP wrote:

- What distinctive thematic elements set walker vehicles in Heavy Gear apart from the endless cycle of pseudo-copied Appleseed, Gundam, Patlabor, Robotech, etc etc etc [insert other manga/anime setting here] mechanical designs?

A lot of people mentioned the v-engine as being a distinct feature of what makes both Gears and HG, but what do y'all think about the manner in which that engine is powered.
Does relying on internal combustion fueled by hydrocarbons define HG as a setting, or does fossil fuels being the literal driving force contribute significantly to the 'WW2 vibe'' and take focus away from sci-fi elements of the setting?


This is one of the stickier points about the setting for me, because of the distances involved in any kind of travel on Terra Nova; there are a lot of workable alternatives that could have been written in just as easily without needing so much industry to start up in the first place.
While fuel alcohol, or refined fossil fuels in those locales that have them, would probably still be adequate for most ground vehicles those types of fuels seem to need too much volume and mass that a walker or mount just does not have to spare.

At the time for me as a kid, it felt more realistic and gritty having it run on a scifi futuristic fossil fuel engine but latter on I would have preferred something a bit more advanced personally. I realize that most of TN is the boonies and that the advanced tech that brought humans to the planet is impractical to use there on a day to day basis for common folks... but I grew to very mildly prefer the idea of a micro-fusion reactor instead as a powerplant ala the space marine backpack. I'm still ok though with the relative lack of advanced energy weapons both in the fluff as well as to allow the CEF to have a different feel (and I really liked their justification for their use with them). YMMV.

I didn't mind the fossil fuel thing, it allowed less questions that tend to arise when other methods are used, especially reactors. Though I'd be fine with decent capacity batteries or fuel cells.

My problem with Nucoal in general, they didn't really have anything unique model wise, it was all rips of other factions models, but only the good/popular ones, and then strips out and updates them so they basically had all the good options, none of the bad of other factions.

I mean, the Cuirasser is a straight rip of the Mamba (even stats)
Jerboa is a Ferret (though i can't recall if the stats deviate)
Chassuer is a Jager with Hover.

It felt kind of like Black Talons all over again, on a slightly less obviously overpowered scale.

I could almost get over the Chasseur, especially if they had the guts to let the Chasseur MKII be the only elite gear, instead of the Mamba clone. As a polar faction with hoverwalkers is somewhat unique.

I think a faction with a heavy reliance on light Tankstriders might've been interesting. Though the more I look at the Coyote, the more ugly I think it is, I'd prefer it if it didn't have a head on it, and was more of a turreted IFV that had four wheeled/tracked legs like something out of Ghost in the Shell. (and I hated the Tankstrider with a torso and arms that nucoal did get, that thing looks terrible)

I'd almost go farther and call for a faction that is almost entirely conventional tanks & mobile infantry, but that probably wouldn't sell, and the pod cant' sculpt tracked vehicles very well either.

I... really should not get started on the NuCoal, myself ^_^

The petrol engines is an interesting idea, but I don't think that it's particularly fundamental; obviously it drives the look of the Gears, with the V-engine backpacks, but it's only that visual appearance that's important - the V could be explained totally differently and I don't suppose most people would care.

On the subject of forces using "conventional" vehicles, that's sort of why I picked CEF; OK, the tanks fly, but they're still tanks (and when I started with 2nd edition, they were so expensive, especially after the multipliers for GREL skill and morale levels that I couldn't afford any Frames anyway).

I would have thought that Gears would be more useful for the polar powers, due to the increased preponderance for dense jungle, urban or rocky mountainous terrain, but in the equatorial plains and deserts, tank warfare would be more common. That might have been a way to differentiate Paxton's military; mostly tanks, GEVs and low-altitude hovering vehicles such as helicopters, with a small range of Gears developed more recently (partly for use in special conditions, partly as export models), and have most of their arms exports being heavy vehicle weaponry repurposed for larger fire-support Gears.

The tankstriders to me looked like goofy ideas ported back into the setting from Gear Krieg. They worked in that slightly silly pupl WW2 setting, but Heavy Hear always at least pretended to be plausible, and they're just the wrong side of the line for me.

Aww, though I do think their is a fine line, I thought Gear Krieg was awful. But I tend to hate super science in WWII in general, people seem to forget just how low tech things were back then, so the idea that they'd somehow make walking vehicles just breaks my brain.

My definition of Tank strider is different than what it's become in Heavy Gear. Not a half tank/half gear, but a turreted vehicle that just happens to have legs and treads/wheels for locomotion. (A more exaggerated version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIzU4bU9DcA, or something like the Scorpion from BT)

My impression is that conventional would probably not have sold well, considering that many folks on the forums tended to want to play without infantry or vehicles at all. Which was a shame, I thought the game looked better with both of those in play for a better idea of the scale, otherwise the gears might as well have been space marines. Though maybe I'm wrong and it would've brought in a new audience of folks who like sci-fi tanks.

(And totally agree, CEF tanks are awesome looking)

 warboss wrote:
[..] I'm still ok though with the relative lack of advanced energy weapons both in the fluff as well as to allow the CEF to have a different feel (and I really liked their justification for their use with them). YMMV.

True, energy weapons like lasers would probably have somewhat less rather than more effective range compared to advanced ballistic cannons or missiles, which is in turn offset by the various HT models mounting compact particle cannons.
When you delve into the underpinnings of the technology, even in our near future HEAT-based weaponry will probably go away simply due to so many advances in materials technology reaching a point of practical manufacture and cost effective distribution.

A lot of materials resistant or proof against overpressure-based effects would in turn have some deleterious effect on energy weapons whose penetration ability is dependent on using the best not absorbed by an atmosphere wavelengths.


I've always thought Terra Novan particle cannons should look more like and be comparable in size to the different types of bazookas, and that the LPA on the Kodiak & KC is how lasers might look in the setting.
Although the blocky pulsed lasers on HTs and the Fire Dragon seems like something that ''looks right'' too.

ferrous wrote:
[..] Jerboa is a Ferret (though i can't recall if the stats deviate)

The Ferret & Jerboa are an odd case, and probably something that works better as a miniature than in fluff.
IIRC, as fluffed the Ferret was specifically sold to an industry in one faction because it was so old and underperforming, but then in game most all Northern factions could and did have an option to take it anyways unless they had access to something better by combat group/overarching swaps.
But then the design got retconned as also having been sold to another faction, then subsequently ''upgraded'' to become their primary scout and EWAR model in game....

I think one thing in the pro column for the two models is both are visually distinctive on the table, even though copying a primary feature into multiple factions.
It also seems to be the source of NuCoal having a ''nosecone'' aesthetic in their faction, until a piece of art either got re-purposed or misused to become the Drake.


Leaving a faction like NuCoal/Port Arthur or Peace River able to still easily mix polar models, from both a fluff standpoint and gaming reasons, is probably a concept that should have stayed in Blitz.

ferrous wrote:
[..] I think a faction with a heavy reliance on light Tankstriders might've been interesting.
Though the more I look at the Coyote, the more ugly I think it is, I'd prefer it if it didn't have a head on it, and was more of a turreted IFV that had four wheeled/tracked legs like something out of Ghost in the Shell. (and I hated the Tankstrider with a torso and arms that nucoal did get, that thing looks terrible)

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
[..] The tankstriders to me looked like goofy ideas ported back into the setting from Gear Krieg. They worked in that slightly silly pulpy WW2 setting, but Heavy Hear always at least pretended to be plausible, and they're just the wrong side of the line for me.

ferrous wrote:
[..] My definition of Tank strider is different than what it's become in Heavy Gear. Not a half tank/half gear, but a turreted vehicle that just happens to have legs and treads/wheels for locomotion. (A more exaggerated version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIzU4bU9DcA, or something like the Scorpion from BT)

I've always wondered why the HAPF did not become that Strider-based faction, as it would have been distinctive yet complementary (albeit equally expensive) with the direction the Pod took Caprician Mounts.
It was also a thing mentioned once or twice in actual fluff for the Humanist Alliance; as I've commented before somewhere, the unused ''bug-walker'' designs from the various Caprice books also look like designs the HA might've come up with for the protectors.

Except that for the HAPF players would've been able to mix in Gears or vehicles, providing another visual distinction from Caprice/Eden/CEF on the table.

ferrous wrote:
[..] I'd almost go farther and call for a faction that is almost entirely conventional tanks & mobile infantry, but that probably wouldn't sell, and the pod cant' sculpt tracked vehicles very well either.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
[..] On the subject of forces using "conventional" vehicles, that's sort of why I picked CEF; OK, the tanks fly, but they're still tanks (and when I started with 2nd edition, they were so expensive, especially after the multipliers for GREL skill and morale levels that I couldn't afford any Frames anyway).
That might have been a way to differentiate Paxton's military; mostly tanks, GEVs and low-altitude hovering vehicles such as helicopters, with a small range of Gears developed more recently (partly for use in special conditions, partly as export models), and have most of their arms exports being heavy vehicle weaponry repurposed for larger fire-support Gears.

ferrous wrote:
[..] My impression is that conventional would probably not have sold well, considering that many folks on the forums tended to want to play without infantry or vehicles at all. Which was a shame, I thought the game looked better with both of those in play for a better idea of the scale, otherwise the gears might as well have been space marines. Though maybe I'm wrong and it would've brought in a new audience of folks who like sci-fi tanks.

If any faction on Terra Nova were to be using drones in the numbers Utopia gets them, Paxton should definitely have been the one.
I think drones and more numbers of vehicles along the lines suggested would also have required less whole cloth additions to the Riveran lineup, and probably have prevented a lot of the power creep and ''just because'' that has generated so much controversy around that faction.


Had the PL and combat group matrix combination worked better or been done differently there could've been a lot more opportunity for primarily conventional forces and factions being constructed by those so inclined.
But then yes, the whole bit about $$$ per individual vehicle, lack of variety of types (many of which are then almost exclusively usable by a single faction), and generally disappointing sculpts or resculpts comes into the picture.

I agree though, especially given the popularity of new games such as Planetfall and Dropzone Commander, that the ability to create (or play as a faction designed to do so) enhanced conventional forces could easily have brought in larger numbers of folks.

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I saw HAPF as more the standard striders: chicken walkers, eight legged walkers, etc While tankstriders, something sort of like this: http://spinner-vision.deviantart.com/art/walking-tank-169479752 or http://www.serenadawn.com/GITS-Vehicles_clip_image007_0000.jpg

I agree that mounts and striders have some overlap.

Utopia was a nice idea that had two major problems. Overly confusing rules, and terrible looking models. Most of the armigers are just sorta blah, and the drones all looked like eggs with legs/treads/fans stuck on. Didn't help that they got a massive nerf bat by random rules revisions that weren't even targeting or thinking of them. (The old defense mod revision and the stun revision)