Pok

The rulebook was available for a moment on release day...then it disappeared, zero clue why. As for availability, no LGS in my corner of the EU has them yet, one posted "we should have them...some time in February, maybe". It's not just Warcradle tho, it seems Evil Empire new releases are backed up too for the continent.

Shields not being random dice rolls but just "soak X hits" would be a welcome change imo.

They did say the Classics were not profitable in any way or form so it's almost certainly just reducing the inventory.

Most of the minor races had aesthetics so poorly defined or generic it's not really a big loss to start completely from scratch. I like those, they make me think of Evangelion and the hoopfish from Subnautica.

Oh heck, those veydreth and sorylian designs are so much more inspired than the previous sketches. I'm glad it's nearing testing phase for the possible release.

I don't think KS killed them per se, the KS was more of a last ditch attempt to keep solvent imo, but that's neither here nor there. I did like the old sculpts, but I do get why they don't want to just plop them back into production- the existing fans already have those ships. Existing fans will not rebuy basic cruisers again, regardless of scale, because they have armies/fleets already. I imagine it'd be more economically viable to never release a single new or old model if the old players were the only market they planned to sell to.

Why would trying to please existing fans work? There's absolutely no proof that by the end of SG there's been enough customers to make it worth the trouble. I don't remember the details by now, but didn't we find out that SG's entire customer database consisted of few thousand entries only?

Fairly sure that was part of the problem. I know I lost interest fast when they started releasing mecha-dragons and floating statues of liberty.

I did forget about the 2 bombers, mostly because they were not a full squadron and as such, annoying rather than helpful in a game where the only way to field anything was in max squad sizes. I would far more appreciate if the starter boxes included full squadrons, rather than more, but incomplete ones, such as Spartan liked to do. As for the tokens, my personal view is that tokens are the spawn of devil, and the fewer of them in any game the better, but yes ,a sheet of them would be nice in the starter too.

The initial Spartan starters consisted on 1 battleship, 3 cruisers and anywhere between 6 and 9 frigates. This is a little less, but honestly, they look bigger and chunkier too, the BB, to my eye at least, seems to easily be as big as Spartan dreadnought model.

As long as it's not boiled down to "Directorate is corporate, therefore the ships have to be freighters with guns bolted on" sort of caricature (which doesn't make sense, logically a corporation would produce something as cost-effective as possible, and purpose-built warship will be more cost-effective than freghter with guns), or aquan ships being literal dolphins with lasers, and there's enough continuity concept-wise I'll be happy to check it out.

There is nothing stopping you from "roleplaying" and moving the ship off the table when it's damaged. The fact is, making a game where not getting hurt is the way to win is going to result in turtle tactics. Getting a game in is a massive expenditure of time- you prepare the models, you paint them, you arrange a game in your precious time off work, and then it's over by turn 1 because Yamato got scared off by some torpedoes? Sure, it might be realistic, but I personally will not bother playing a game that simulates the most boring aspects of battle, and given that none of the mainstream games do so either, I imagine I'm not in minority on this.

On the contrary, I enjoyed 1.0 and 1.1 a lot. But that was very much despite the rulebook's best attempts rather than thanks to them. So yes, when I see that the new company took steps to amend what was in my opinion the biggest stinkers (SRS spam and boarding), I will gladly voice my opinion in it's defense.

I will ignore the fact that this was literally the Spartan games' reputation online, the game where whoever rolls more 6s wins (due to exploding D6 and bucket of dice attacks), but there is nothing non-abstract about how boarding worked. Nothing about the defender/attacker allocation was realistic, considering who won in which section of the ship had no result on what assault effects you got, and therefore made the whole thing a waste of everyone's time.

You mean killing the company? But yeah, this threat mostly proves there is no point in relying on "old fans" when trying to promote a revival of an IP, they just want the game that failed once already. As for the ever useful comment of "if you didnt like X just dont do X", guess what, opponents could've boarded me even if I didnt board anything, and then I had to play out the confused, slow, unexciting "boarding" process anyway. It was poorly written, poorly executed, and added no actual depth to the game.