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chaos0xomega wrote:

AMG was never independent. It was founded as a design studio under the auspices of Asmodee from the getgo, after Will Schick and co had a disagreement with Matt Wilson of Privateer Press over developing a Marvel miniatures game. I forget the circumstances, but IIRC Asmodee wanted to contract Privaterr Press to develop the game for them, and Asmodee would publish it (Alternatively, PP was pursuing the Marvel license themselves). For whatever reason, whatever negotiations fell apart or there was a disagreement. From what I was told, Schick, Pagani, and the third guy (Dallas Kemp?) approached Asmodee and pitched setting up AMG with them in charge to do the design work, etc. to cut PP and Matt Wilson out of the equation. The plan worked and they quit PP to pursue MCP under Asmodee.

Thanks for the clarification. I knew there was some sort of ASmodee deal to get MCP released but hadn't realised that's how it worked out. The point still stands, though. You shack up with corporate overlords for the benefits and security they provide, you usually have to give something in return.

chaos0xomega wrote:

You are right though, their attitude was insulting and unprofessional, very "papa knows best"

Yeah, they basically fired the playtesters when they unanimously told them the changes to points were a terrible idea. Then all "playtesting" was in-house, which is a terrifying thought given they barely understood the game.

 Irbis wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
.

Yeah, no. In the Rebellion era you can add Zaarin's uprising (which was actually more dangerous to the Empire than rebels and all the high tech BS that came with it) and Corporate Sector...

etc
etc

...and (I assume, haven't seen any of them in the main movies)none of them would have the instantly recognisable vibe and archetypes of, say, Orks, Tyranids or Necrons (or Trollbloods, Khador and Cryx, or Wulfen, Dwarves of Tir-na-bor and Acheron, or...you get the gist.) that create their appeal.

I absolutely agree with Easy, having basically two (boring and same'y) factions is one of the main reasons I've never even considered playing a SW wargame.

This is, btw the exact same thing I don't get in Horus Heresy. Wanting to play a game with such faction "variety" defies my comprehension. The moment I learned Legions Imperialis are set in HH, my interest evaporated instantly.

Sometimes new has it's own appeal. I think it's hard to speculate how they would do, and your probably right, but there is something they could have used/done.

There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

There's a fairly substantial number of X-Wing players who don't really care about the history and exact details of every ship in the game, so I'm not sure how important the canon/non-canon nature of ships are, or the specific eras they were part of (other than placing them in a certain faction).

Plenty of people were happy playing with the K-Wing or Jumpmaster, without knowing anything about where they came from, for example.

I don't think the "lack of facitons" was a problem for X-Wing. When it was most successful it only had 3. It's more important that players have options for different styles of play, rather than strictly having lots of different factions, IMO. I'd rather have 5 factions with 3-4 distinct archetypes available within them than have 10 factions that are all railroaded into 1 style of play. It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

 LunarSol wrote:
It has more to do with being a company that is reliant on physical production. Most of the new school business nonsense that churns and burns so rapidly is in the tech industry because you can "grow" by hiring or buying people and then dump them freely if it doesn't work out because most of your expense is in payroll. GW has quite a bit of cost in things that aren't so easy to flip so their growth is more bounded by reality and they have to make more cautious decisions to expand.

FWIW, this is what holds back almost all the competition. No matter how "big" they seem, crossing the bridge from things like metal or resin to HIPs requires a huge investment that even if you can afford it, is effectively betting the entire company. Most of the games that people treat as competition aren't nearly profitable enough to come close.

In further defence of GW (my how this isn't a normal Dakka thread ) they didn't do the new business equivalent to the surge/contract staffing model - the outsourcing of production. Every consultancy ever would recommend concentrating on their IP and outsourcing factory production to another company. Now there are downsides, GW models aren't that hot compared to comparable things like gundams, but that in house control is incredible compared to virtually every toy company on the planet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think the whole number of sides isn't an issue for a wargame, but its an issue for a large company. The modern board/model game market is incredibly release driven. It is all about that splash. Traditional historical wargames don't have that (and sides that have been the same for decades), but you have all those companies who when totaled up have far less turnover than the big board/model guys.

I guess you could do all those great things with factions that people have pointed out, but for some reason no one does.

Probably because the license may be limited to what you see on a screen. No idea myself, but I am sure someone closer and more interested in this thread will know for sure.

Yes GW's financial policy is incredibly healthy, they don't have side hustles in weird real estate speculations or stock market tricks, they just make their core product in the factory they own and this lets them weather all sorts of crises that bury more... creative... businesses.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

To be fair when I first approached Star Wars I assumed this would be true, but it's not. They're actively reprint Old EU novels and comics as "Legends", even producing new audiobook versions in some case. Though they resolutely refuse to commission anything new in that version of the universe, which is quite strange.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s always the Ssi-Ruuk and Yuzhan Vong.

What? Why are people laughing?

* Hides sledge behind back *

Come closer ...
--------------
X-Wing was/is helluva fun, it is mind boggling that it is being outlasted by the likes of Star Trek Attack Wing and shown up by GW's method of release (unpainted, unassembled, rules sold seperately and regurgitated often - really, how is this viable?).

Just on factions, it has astounded me how little they did with the Old Republic era (well the super Old Republic since the thing lasted like 10k years). Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 gave tons of depth to a specific flashpoint in the timeframe, which was also quite close to other points in time. Obviously its now 'legends' but you could easily have Republic, Sith, Mandalorians, post Revan Sith from kotor2, and for characters stuff like Jedi Revan and Malak, Sith Revan and Malak. And hell, the whole Exar Kun stuff is within living memory of the era as well, it was only what, like 40 years before the events of the game and also had a bunch of previous lore build on it. Heck for a full extra faction there was the gak-heels of the Czerka Corporation that had its own personal military force and had such fun projects of providing logistics for the Sith as well as trying to weasel their way into reconstruction projects after the main war ended.

The entire era had tons of designs for specific characters, trooper uniforms, ship types etc that could have worked super well for a war game but just never got implemented.

The Old Republic was always a weird era. Half of the material for it is writers trying really, really hard to make Dune with lightsabers that never really took off while KoTOR went with something a little more familiar but basic.

I think ultimately what really crippled KoTOR was creating one of the most iconic and memorable characters and plot points in the franchise in the form of a build your own story. There was never a way to continue Revan beyond the first game because everyone had a very personal vision of Revan that couldn't really be expanded on and nothing else in the universe was so unique that it needed to be so far removed from the Rebellion era.

Slipspace wrote:

It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

That's at least partly due to the release model. You had to buy out of faction to get the cards you needed. I wouldn't have bought any rebel stuff if it had been possible to avoid it. 2.0 was supposed to fix that.

 Arschbombe wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

It's also pretty rare that an X-Wing player only plays a single faction.

That's at least partly due to the release model. You had to buy out of faction to get the cards you needed. I wouldn't have bought any rebel stuff if it had been possible to avoid it. 2.0 was supposed to fix that.

And largely did; that just didn't help all the players who already owned all 3 (now 5) factions that needed to upgrade to keep playing their collection.

It's a shame. 1st Edition of X-Wing was a huge hit with our group. 2nd Edition ended up killing the momentum and we haven't really played since. The bigger shame is mostly just that this is another well-designed game that will be largely lost to time like so many others.

I'm also lamenting never getting in to Armada. Sadly, after the demo one of my friends ran, I think I was the only other person interested, so that one died on the vine. Given how many fleet-scale games my group already plays, Armada was always going to be a hard sell. Still, would have been nice to own a bunch of small Star Destroyers. Oh well.

Sad to see the family of games finally pass, many of them were well designed and deserved to live on, but that's always a hard ask of a licensed game. Unless both parties are on to keep the relationship going indefinitely, eventually they will die and fade in to obscurity.

Might have to drag out the 1st Edition stuff again and have a game for old times' sake.

Worth noting they did draw on EU stuff for X-Wing - I'm pretty sure they released the TIE defender a few years before it returned to Canon in the rebels series (and with pilot names going back to the TIE fighter PC game!).

Plus IIRC the Raider was a new design that FFG made up - which also made it into other media (the last Battlefront 2 game I think?).

So there was definitely more they could have done with the model range in both games and precedent for it too.

I was really glad that they hit the old 90s EU ships and loved that I have some quality models for them now. The only one that I really hoped would make it but knew that it wouldn't was a TIE Predator from the comics. Fortunately, it's 2024 and 3d printing is a thing and almost as good as official support and I could just count it as a sequel era trilogy TIE fighter with shields.

The EU stuff was all pre-Disney releases (or stuff authorized in advance of the Disney acquisition). Once Disney took over there were no further non-canon releases.

Honestly, leave the EU in the past where it belongs
There is so much CURRENT star wars we dont need to worry.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Honestly, leave the EU in the past where it belongs
There is so much CURRENT star wars we dont need to worry.

the problem is there is not a lot of new star fighters in the current star wars, so lot of current star wars not a lot of current xing material means that drawing from the eu appeals to players that want new ships. also some of us grew up reading about those ships and having them in minature form would be awesome. that being said the problem that x wing was running into either way Long term is that even with access to the eu there are only so many ships to adapt.

I do agree the new stuff needs more ships. I get the real world analog of updated designs, but it’s not as visually exciting as “whoa, what is that!”. The prequels gave us a nice mix of course, with early glimpses of the Star Destroyer family of ships.

But…the Old EU has some bloody awful designs. Mouldy Crow looks cack, as does the K-Wing.

So swings and roundabouts really.

Moldy Crow is my favorite ship of all time, but its definitely a relic of the "this has EIGHT whole polygons!" era of video games.

The K-Wing is just wildly overdesigned. I know its trying to go back to the WWII aircraft design template, but it just comes out with too many random bits added on. The overall design is salvagable though.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I do agree the new stuff needs more ships. I get the real world analog of updated designs, but it’s not as visually exciting as “whoa, what is that!”. The prequels gave us a nice mix of course, with early glimpses of the Star Destroyer family of ships.

But…the Old EU has some bloody awful designs. Mouldy Crow looks cack, as does the K-Wing.

So swings and roundabouts really.

Not liking the Moldy Crow?

When they announced the official death of X-Wing I went and bought one for cheapo to put on my shelf next to my Kyle Katarn figure. Need to do the same with a few other ships I love.

Honestly post Mando EU had been just as bad if not worse than the old EU, and I can’t for the life of me think of any new designs besides Ahsoka’s T-6 shuttle. I’m not touching The Acolyte to see if there’s anything new in it thought, I’ll let people with more patience for the insufferable than I handle that.

chaos0xomega wrote:
The EU stuff was all pre-Disney releases (or stuff authorized in advance of the Disney acquisition). Once Disney took over there were no further non-canon releases.

That is a good point, hadn't really factored that in. But I wonder if that may have changed over time, given the way we've had old concept brought to life and into canon like the imperial cruiser in Andor?

And there is some cool new-EU stuff like Luthen's shuttle or the Mantis from the Fallen Order game/s both of which would have been ideal for X-Wing I'd thought.

Yeah, Luthen’s ship was cool, and had some unique capabilities that would have translated well into game mechanics.

Ultimately, X-Wing had several issues that it struggled with. Most of them have been discussed in this thread already. To those, I will add that the gameplay suffered from excessive card combos, which detracted from what was a very fun and intuitive core gameplay loop of trying to anticipate your opponent’s maneuvers and setting up your own.

I didn't play 2e (was their a name for the major rules revision that came out with the TFA film core box revamp? 1.5e?) but even at the trailing end of 1.5e we started testing out simpler games with limits on the number of cards you could use beyond the core ship cards (both in terms of per force as well as per individual ship). There were three major benefits... made things simpler, made things look cooler (mainly via more ships on the table without resorting to TIE spam), and made it more new player friendly so they didn't feel as disadvantaged since they didn't already have multiples of everything to drawn their cards from.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

You'd be surprised, pretty much all the broadly-agreed "good bits" of the EU(and much of the rest) are either being reprinted under the Legends brand or are still widely available as new-old stock. I've been slowly picking up all the EU stuff I missed as a kid or only read once from a library and apart from one or two of the *really* old ones I've been able to find everything up to the Vong War in brand new paperbacks. It's only really the original 90's print runs of the "technical sourcebooks" like the Essential Guide series, the older RPG books, or the old comics that you'll have trouble finding physical copies of, and in the latter case they're available online both legitimately and otherwise.

Disney may want to pretend they wiped the old EU away for their glorious new future, but given how abysmally their "nuEU" auxiliary media products sell even they have to acknowledge reality and keep selling the products that actually bring in revenue.

deano2099 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also the issue of Old EU vs New EU.

If you’ve not read the Old EU, those books are now out of print. So models and factions based on them may be more limited in appeal to you.

To be fair when I first approached Star Wars I assumed this would be true, but it's not. They're actively reprint Old EU novels and comics as "Legends", even producing new audiobook versions in some case. Though they resolutely refuse to commission anything new in that version of the universe, which is quite strange.

I suspect we might have gotten the occasional pity-story in Legends continuity eventually if Disneywars had been the massive success they planned for it to be, but given they possibly still haven't even made back the money they spent on the acquisition(and before anyone posts That Article, do recall that gross box office takings are not the same as net profits, and that the listed production cost doesn't account for marketing spend that can be as much as the same amount over again) and the increasingly...controversial reception to their own efforts, the people who make that decision are going to be living in a seething cauldron of offended egos and panicked executives worried about "diluting the new Star Wars brand" etc, so I don't think the lack of new Legends content is surprising.

I can only speak for myself, but my own interest in X-Wing dried up immensely when it became clear that there wasn't going to be any more EU ships coming to the game.

I know not all of the EU was of equal quality but it was pretty fun from a collecting perspective to wait and see what might come out next, and there was still a wide pool to draw from.

I had my fingers crossed that the Cloakshape and T-Wing might make it into the game and I'm sure they would have eventually based on the output of EU ships they were adding to the game at one point. I know others had their own favorite ships they wanted to see make it into the game like the Skipray, Chiss TIE, etc. Disney Star Wars going their own way and pretty much abandoning the EU (even if stuff like the E-wing have slowly been trickling back into Disney canon) really hurt the game IMHO.

When half the ships already had an uncertain future where their continued support was in question, it didn't really instill a whole lot of confidence in the game, particularly if you were an EU fan. IMHO of course.

Didn’t seem to stop FFG going into the EU for ships?

As noted, the sequels really didn’t bring many new ship designs into play for X-Wing. Quad Jumper, modernised TIE and X-Wing, and that’s about it for TFA. Oh, and that bloody awful looking Resistance transport ship.

TLJ had the TIE Silencer and updated A-Wing, then the Resistance Bomber.

ROS just the Final Order TIE, which itself was just a slightly different Interceptor.\

But it’s in Rebels and other media we see old EU stuff recanonised, bit by bit, with the very occasional new ship (Razorcrest, various Scum fighter designs).

Now for a possibly unpopular opinion, but hear me out in full before replying.

A criticism I’ve levelled at X-Wing may in fact not be entirely fair. And that’s it not being a particularly cheap game in its first edition, as there was a lot of “find the lady” going on with upgrade cards, which meant you may need to buy another faction’s ship to kit out your favourite.

Now, “find the lady” is absolutely true, but was addressed in 2nd edition.

But where I think I’ve perhaps been unfair on FFG in particular is the cost of the game. I say that as thinking on it? That may have been a community thing, and not FFG’s own line.

It was pretty true in the beginning, when you had maybe half a dozen ships per side. At £12 or so, that was affordable. Pretty much pocket money prices for a ship a week, with just a bit of saving for bigger stuff like the Falcon.

But as more ships were added along with desirable upgrades, you could quite quickly end up spending a lot of money. And so the “it’s cheap” didn’t remain accurate for terribly long.

In hindsight, it seems clear “find the lady” was an important part of the sales strategy, and it certainly worked. For sure it did little to curtail 1st Ed’s sales and popularity. But because, to the best of my knowledge, FFG never marketed as a cheap game? I don’t think we can fairly use that part of the stick to beat this dead horse.

In terms of Armada news, a group of players that have blogs and youtube channels have formed an "Armada Ruleset Collective" and struck a deal with Adepticon to manage another "worlds" (read: America) competition in 2025, so have positioned themselves as the de-facto stewards of competitive Armada play going forward. There are some token Europeans on the list too but it's overwhelmingly a Murica thing. Link to the announcement below.



It's all a little fawning for my taste, with language like this:

"We are striving to maintain everything within the guidelines of the Atomic Mass Games IP Policy, and it is important to us that this is done right."

Who cares about AMG's IP policy if they're not going to produce the game anymore? It's not like you're monetizing this thing, do what you want.