Listening in this afternoon, in between painting and other stuff.
Just a few notes, observations, opinions and frothing at the mouth -
As you say Battlefleet Gothic (BFG)
was designed from the ground up to include ground combat which Full Thrust didn't include until second edition with More Thrust. That seemed to be more to support BFG over the more popular games of 40K and Epic, it seemed to many players, and particularly in the case of Epic - At least in my area, Epic:Armageddon lost a large number of players
because the Orbital Artillery, Dropcraft and so forth
required an actual BFG vessel on table ( GW Players and most places they would play at being sticklers for WYSIWYG rules ), and by that stage, those ships were either unobtainable or costly as all hell. Can't help but think, however, that that drove the 3D printing of GW proxies for Epic and BFG myself.
Forge World. Ah yes, the great heretics of GW. Back in the day, they
literally had people say " Hey, look what I sculpted in 6mm/Epic scale on the weekend!" at the studio, and they would put them into production, much to the chagrin of the larger scale teams, though when they sold like ice creams in a Californian July, not the accountants
And to a lesser extent, they also put together some nice ships for BFG, especially the rather confused Tau ( or T'au if you prefer
) ships. There were at least two different ideas going for Tau ship styles, and that was partly due to FW deciding on one pattern and the main design teams looking at a more coherent high-tech almost Manga style. Of course that all went with the FW Purge in the early 2000s.
But people often forget; the first ships for BFG weren't
really GW; The initial ships were taken from the QT Models Starforce range, and even in the times when GW produced their own designs, the ships like the Castellan, the smaller Eldar ships, and the troopship and Goliath factory ship were from QT ( Which was enfolded into the Citadel Miniatures line ).
And I have to agree - BFG was supported
MASSIVELY by GW when they still had a gamer presence in the boardroom at the company, mainly because that was a cool game to play. Well, nowadays.....OK, there was a TV show on the BBC called "Working Lunch" where a group of the board members of a company would literally sit down with the compere of the show and they would talk about the company in question, combined with footage of the "shop floor" or the operations of the company. The episode with GW went a bit off the rails when the presenter asked if they could bring in a designer or sculptor to talk to . . . And to a roomful of shocked faces, one of whom said " But what about the smell?"
You
wish I was joking.
I am not.
The Beeb being a bit reticent about sharing stuff, I can't show you footage, but it happened.
You wonder why a supremely favored game, with lots of fans even today and still being played, isn't supported by that sort of management?
The idea of a reboot . . . Not impossible even with my last comment above. I would not like to see a scale change in the upward direction: Despite the idea shared by sooo many companies that "Bigger models, more detail, more painters buying them" they are already at what is known as "Spectacle Scale" among the gamers who hang around at Starship Combat News ( Yes, even today) or on the starship FB pages. . . . And most starship players collect fleets, not rules, so aim for compatible scales. The only other rules that use ships that large by default was and is (?) Firestorm Armada. Moving down a scale might be worthwhile, for once. As to plastics, well, many BFG ships originally had plastic components certainly in the
final edition, and as has been said in the Starter set; That would also be welcome and honestly natural given how the ships had so many variants in weapon and design changes.
Also , great to hear that a fan-supported new rules system is around. Like NetEpic , some of these communities are incredibly supportive and have some truly great ideas for the games they love.
And finally, really positive news about the USS Texas. Another great podcast, Guys!
