State of the Blog Address (2019 in Review)

I have to say that this year passed by quickly!  It's basically a blog tradition that I go over what I did and didn't accomplish over the past 12 months and this year is yet again a bit of a mixed bag.  I'm the traditional hobby front, 2019 wasn't unfortunately much different than the prior year.  I managed to finish what I thought would be my final Winged Hussar (link here) as well as four figs for basically the same rpg character idea.  Why so many?  Well, the character changed as well as my ideas of how to portray him.   The first fig (link here) was printed on shapeways for a previous defunct campaign attempt whereas the others were done at home on my only big hobby project purchase, the Elegoo Mars 3d printer.

I had previously thought I was done with my hussar project but the upcoming release of Master Lazarus for 40k as well as a free 3d model from Artel W might convince me to dip my toes back into that pool later this year.  In the meantime, I've taken a stab at samurai inspired space marines instead with some success (link here) that I have yet to paint as well as a Space Wolf that at least I finished (link here).

Too big...too small...just right!

On the Star Trek front, I made a few entries to my SHIELD UP! house rules section.  While I didn't end up revising my Fasa STSTCS ship manual, I revised the existing D-15 FASA ship (link here) as well as added the Atlas dreadnought to my STA house rules (link here).  I also decided to test out a theory regarding whether you could noticeably improve prepainted heroclix minis with a quick wash and/or drybrush (link here).    Finally, I  came up with some more nuanced rules for playing STA in the Enterprise/NX era of trek (link here).  In that same update, I previewed a 3d version of my old NXL ship design which later got a test print or two (link here) but I never did more with them.  It's not alot but I suppose an optimistic way to look at it would be that I put out at least quarterly trek updates if averaged out for the year.  I don't have any ambitious plans for the trek side of the hobby but I do hope to revisit printing my NXL design now that I'm more experienced with supporting prints as well as coming out with a short Klingon D-7 update for FASA.  I generally need a direct motivation for my hobby work and the lack of any real chance of playing anything trek related locally unfortunately hampers that.

 Cactus Trek!

Ending the recap on a positive note, I was finally able to find a relatively stable rpg group this past year.  While I'm not enamored particularly with the ruleset (review link), it works for me as a player and we've been managing a monthly game since the summer.  It's because of that campaign that I've been focused more on my Krogan miniatures than the others.  I'd love it if we were playing longer than the 3-4 hours per session we average as well as playing every two weeks as originally planned instead of monthly but it's a good group of easy going players and I'm glad to have them.  With that, my yearly TL;DR hobby therapy session post is over and I wish everyone a happy 2020!

 

Another upcoming Krogan RPG character mini!

What's in a blog's name? The Phoney War blog...

I've got a few different things to talk about this week on the blog that will probably result in a few smaller and varied posts on the blog.  If they were in any way related, I would put them together in one longer post but they're realistically not.  The first thing that I'll cover is the origin and meaning of my blog's name... SITZKRIEG!  Over the years, I've been asked one or twice how I came up with the name (usually with some implied dread).  I figured I'd finally address it in a quick post given the ridiculously volatile nature of politics here in the US right now and the penchant of certain people to use labels like "fascist" and "nazi" at the drop of a hat.

I'll start with the origin of the word.  Sitzkrieg, aka the Phoney War, was an eight-month period at the start of World War II, during which there was only one limited military land operation on the Western Front following the invasion of Poland.  It's a mashup of the German words "to sit" (sitzen) and "war" (krieg) and means "Sitting War".   It was a word play on blitzkrieg created by the British press to make fun of the Nazi war machine in WW2, not to glorify it.   When I was trying to figure out a name for my blog, I figured that a "sitting war" was a good way to describe what we as wargamers and rpgers do when we enjoy our hobby; we literally sit on our butts and make war with tiny soldiers.  The first version of this blog actually was started under the mechablog name and only switched to this once it became available a year or two later.   As a Pole who grew up on first hand stories of my own family's suffering at the hands of both Nazis and later the Communists, I'd never support either hateful ideologies.  Hopefully that puts to bed any potential thoughts that I'm some sort of wehraboo.  :) 

Starfinder RPG and Dead Suns Campaign First Impressions

We had our first game and it was... interesting.  We played the introductory Dead Suns Part 1 adventure path by Paizo with a party of 5 players and a decent mix of races/classes/abilities (two soldiers, one operative, one envoy, and one mystic).  About the only core role/class we were missing was a technomancer i.e. space wizard equivalent.  The setting and rules are so so and what you'd expect from Golarion in space overall but the balance in the adventure path was off (even factoring out mistakes made by the GM that artificially inflated the difficulty).

First off I'll comment about the general overarching game mechanics.  They're pretty much what you'd expect from a D&D3X style system and it's easy to catch on to the basics if you're familiar with the older variants.  That said... there are many significant changes like being able to multiattack with penalties as a full round action without having to first unlock the second attack at high levels.  There are also minor changes like diagonal movement costs and magic missile not scaling with level.  For vets of multiple prior related editions, remembering whether the second diagonal costs normal or double movment (which seems to flip flop between various editions).  All in all, it's familiar and comfortable but certainly not revolutionary or groundbreaking in any way.  It's D&D3X in space for better or worse. 

The art in the books though is full color and top notch assuming you like the style (which I do).  The races introduced feel different and are most certainly not just the old fantasy tropes with a "space" adjective added in front of them.  If you do want to play those legacy fantasy races, the core rulebook does include them later on in the rules but I'm glad that they're not the focus.  Each class is unique and varies enough from the old fantasy equivalents to feel like they're their own thing. 

Unfortunately, I find the setting to be a bit of a let down despite the above.  It's basically an advancement of the old Pathfind Golarian setting which admittedly I was never a fan of it but neither was I critical of it.  There are new races and planets like I mentioned but the core setting and default start is basically just a big space station right above Golarion (or more correctly where it should be as it disappeared) and there are other planets that are just fantasy tropes in space (like the planet of space undead ruled by space lich overlords).  Maybe it's just me but I kept finding myself thinking "oh, that's just the space *fill in the blank* equivalent".  That's due in large part because of the actual Golarian/Pathfinder parts ported directly over as well as those just heavily influenced by the fantasy setting.  I would personally have preferred a completely independent setting but I recognize the obvious potential business benefit of leveraging a previous industry sales leading game (Pathfinder) for easy conversion into your new project.  While that gives the game relatively easy access to a large playerbase right out of the gate, I can't but help feel that the setting and game will suffer for it in the long run.  YMMV.

Finally we come to the Dead Suns adventure path.  In short, as an old 3.X GM and player for years, I found the balance in the adventure path to be suprisingly off but a large part of that was because of two big mistakes by the GM that inflated the difficulty unncessarily.  The first encounter after the players introduce themselves to each over is CR4 (and that's assuming you think that rating is accurate..see below).  Your first interaction before any real roleplaying with NPCs is to get your feet wet with an "Epic" difficulty level encounter for 1st level characters and presumably new players to the game.  The GM was supposed to only attack us 1/6 of the time but he must have missed that part in the setup (and combined based on common sense two encounters into one the next time). 

Regardless of his mistakes, the CR 1/2 (as in one half) street level gang thugs we were facing had the equivalent stat wise of dex 18 weapon spec and focus shooting.  No big deal, right?  Just use some social skills to beat the encounter nonviolently, right?  Yeah, they also had the equivalent of Cha 20 and full class skill rank in intimidate to boot.  Their actual stats were nothing close to that but their end bonuses for both attacks, damage, and some skills were significantly higher what was possible for us as 1st level player characters.  They were markedly better than CR1 opponents should have been let alone the CR1/2 individually they were listed as.

The GM commented that his main group had a very hard time with the scenarios as well.  I asked another Starfinder GM and he said that Paizo does that with most of the official encounters and that he personally actively encourages his player to NOT fight but find away around combat.  That wasn't an option for us in the first encounter as it was literally scripted that the shooting started right as we arrived and we were caught in the crossfire.  That trend continued throughout the game and the Deus Ex NPChinima had to save us yet again later that night in the next big encounter.

I'm willing to give the game another try (and will actually be Gm'ing next time as we convinced the GM to join us for a single game only).  Although we didn't reach 2nd level yet, I forwarded the group a "loan" of 300 xp to reach 2nd level to see if the equity between characters and published encounters is more balanced later on.  I suspect I'll still have to adjust on the fly some of the crazy bonuses down a bit though but we'll see.  All in all, at best the experience overall was mediocre although I will admit that it was nice to sit down at a table with fellow gamers and do anything for the first time in years.  I'd give the game overall 2 1/2 stars so far but the Dead Suns campaign only 2 stars due to the perceived lack of balance for a supposedly introductory 1st level adventure.

State of the Blog Address for 2017

It's that time of the (new) year so I'll recap the past year's progress on the blog moreso for myself but hopefully might be useful entertaining or informative for any readers as well.  Looking over the past year, it was more productive than 2016 largely due to digital hobby work as opposed to physical models painted.

I caught the Star Trek bug again back in 2016 and started doing a few FASA style sheets for some of my favorite fanships.  I continued that in 2017 with many more ships as well as some house rules and even counters to use them on the tabletop.  This culminated with my publication of a fan ship pdf collection under my SHIELDS UP! label.  While I definitely needlessly reinvented the wheel by using MSPaint for interior and cover art and Open Office for publishing, I was quite happy with the end result linked below.  I can't thank enough the various artists who let me use their fan created ship art on my sheets as without them I'd have some pretty bland stat lines and nothing else!

After putting out the above supplement for a long dead game from the 1980's, I decided to focus on the exact opposite and publish a few ship stat sheets for the then upcoming Star Trek Adventures RPG from Modiphius games.  Just like with the above FASA sheets, the company and fan artists were kind enough to use their art yet again.  I eventually decided on releasing two four packs of ships that likely would never otherwise see themselves officially written up for the RPG, one set of fan ships and the other of FASA classics.

 With the release of Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition this past summer along with the Primaris marine models, a tiny bit of my 40k interest resurfaced.  Largely due to the horribly unbalanced army construction rules of the previous 6th/7th editions, my interest in the property (models, novels, game rules, etc) dropped down to almost zero during those years.  While I don't have any definitive opinions on the new edition, my first impression is that, while they did address my biggest complaint in returning some semblance of sanity/balance to the construction rules, they also made the game more bland with bucket'o'dice mechanics at the expense of some common sense and variety in the ruleset.  Similarly mixed is my reception to the new Primaris style marines.  Whereas I really like the actual basic intercessor models themselves, I wasn't a fan of their introduction into the backstory of 40k and the likely replacement of "normal" marines both figuratively and literally (in terms of models) down the line.  I'd have strongly preferred introducing them just like every other model kit and fluff development for the past 30 years but there was no doubt that I preferred the more truescaled proportions and poses.  I picked up a few models here and there on ebay and decided to finally start my long awaited Winged Hussar chapter of Space Marines.  With some trial and error, I decided on the paint and modelling scheme on the left below.

 

Yup... my entire 2017 completed physical hobby effort amounted to the two models above along with a third prototype marine.  I do hope to continue to paint a few more with the same scheme (including a larger 54mm Inquisitor scale variant) but it was always meant to be a small project of a few models largely for potential future wargaming or RPG characters rather than a full army.

Additionally, I posted a few other one off updates about topics such as finishing my Heavy Gear Rafm scale force with some head swaps thanks to Ashley from Paint it Pink, tweaking some images to make a bucket filling version of the Primaris Coloring Book from GW, and commenting at length about the closure of several gaming companies (most notably Spartan Games whose line of Halo Fleet Battles miniatures I covered here extensively).

Looking forward to what I hope to accomplish in 2018, I hope that I'll strike a more even balance between virtual hobby work (like house rules) and phsyical ones (painted models).  While I've got several other house rule ideas at various stages (like advanced rules for Star Trek Attack Wing, rules lite intro Shadowrun, and mass battle LRB HG Blitz modifications), I don't have any concrete plans to publish them at this time.  With my slow return to physical painting, I'd like to instead finish a few more models from previous years such as my last remaining Tau Broadside battlesuit, the Logan Grimnar conversion from the Primarch Horus model, as well as a single Deathwatch model which happens to be my first hobby purchase of the new year.  There are some more substantial hobby projects dancing around my head as well (like a small force of Adeptus Custodes for 40k or finishing up my Rafm scale Heavy Gear force) but, in the interest of keeping myself honest, I won't be counting those chickens before they hatch and instead keep my sights a bit lower/more realistic.

Thanks again to my readers for sticking with me for another year and I hope to post some interesting things in the 12 months to come!

The Recent Games Company Cull (Part 2)

In my last wall of text, I related my personal experiences as a gamer/customer in trying to support a Spartan Games product.  In this post, I'll go through some of the pitfalls that Spartan both could have avoided as well as those that were out of their control; if Monday morning arm chair quarterbacking isn't your thing then it might be best to skip this post. 

Halo, being a big licensed IP, was likely quite expensive to acquire as well as maintain.  Additionally, to my knowledge, the Halo Fleet Battles product line was the first to feature outsourced styrene plastic models instead of the traditional resin in house manufactured models in their wholly owned game lines which likely also required a significant initial cost.  That large amount of money needed upfront likely way over and above what Spartan was accustomed to made me wonder why they chose to do a space battle game as their initial foray.  The Halo games absolutely feature some impressive space battle set pieces (one or two of which were playable in fighters) but the game focuses on small unit combat with special characters.  Even in the multiplayer, the largest battle typically seen in most of the games was big team battle wtih 16 v 16.  In a universe that seems to be tailor made for 28mm skirmish combat on the tabletop expandable to the occasional vehicle, Spartan instead chose to do yet another space battle game.  Now I'm a fan of the genre who played my fair share of those types of games from FASA Star Trek (my first ever tabletop hobby game) to Babylon 5 (Wars and Fleet Action) to Full Thrust and even X-wing (albeit that last one is fighter centric and not capital ship focused).  I had tried Firestorm Armada a couple of times and didn't find the bucket o' dice mechanics to my liking nor the resin brick models either.  I was excited that the Halo line would include ship designs that I actually liked in a better IMO material but I always wondered despite my own bias why they decided to not only go with the obvious to me skirmish genre choice but also to cannabalize their own Firestorm Armada sales with a second space ship combat game.

Additionally, I was worried that Spartan's well established reputation of only focusing on one game at a time and switching focus before it was properly taken care of would continue.  I hoped that they would not do this with such an expensive licensed IP but that sadly did not appear to be the case.  The rules had issues that remained unaddressed for months and previewed follow up ships took months to arrive and when they did had serious casting issues that the company tried intially to dismiss.  Without even a proper and critical look at the rules as well as the release of already shown ships, Spartan announced in less than 6 months the next Halo game in yet another genre (15mm mass battle) that wasn't well suited to the IP and yet again competed with another of their existing product lines (the 10mm Firestorm Planetfall) released a couple years earlier.  Worse yet, the Halo Ground Battles products were deemed overly expensive by many gamers compared with other 15mm offerings with sales likely suffering along with perception.  This of course was in addition to their Steampunk Dystopian Wars ground and naval ship game lines that had been languishing for a while seemingly at the time.  Simply put... Spartan Games were seemingly living up to their reputation as a games company that couldn't properly focus on and support their existing lines before adding more to their plate.  Additionally, both genres had increased competition throughout the industry with games like Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander as well as other new kickstarted IPs in both genres as well as the first inklings from GW that specialist games like BFG and Epic might be making a return as well. 

On top of the issues above of their own making, it appears from the announcement that the owner, Neil, had some sort of serious health issue that precluded him from being as active in the company and it doesn't appear that anyone either was allowed and/or capable of acting in his stead so that the work flow suffered.  Additionally, their big and expensive Halo IP had actually become less popular in terms of raw sales with the buggy Masterchief Collection and followup Halo 5 significantly underselling compared with previous titles overall on top of the overall decline of the xbox as a platform due to poor choices with Xbox One marketing and design.  As I mentioned before, the expected (by me as well as my local store owner) local interest in the game simply never materialized and the poor choices by Spartan quickly eroded support that did come in.  Since my departure in 2016 from regular Spartan community contact, they've hit the reset button again on their other two lines via Kickstarter.  Dystopian World funded last year but was only partially delivered at the time of Spartan's closure.  Firestorm Armada which had just gotten its 2nd edition in late 2014 a couple months prior to the Halo Fleet Battles announcement was getting a third revamp in the ongoing Galaxy Kickstarter when the closure was annouced.  I'm not sure if any of their other lines got revamps as well in the meantime but I think that in the span of less than 3 years (late 2014 to mid 2017) that coming out with two completely new IPs and revamping two existing ones is quite a lot to do for a medium sized gaming company especially when those games directly compete with each other for the same gaming dollars.  Finally, the sudden closure of *everything* Spartan literally overnight meant that fans were yet again left in a lurch as years worth of fan made and even official but optional rules and scenarios disappeared along with many hobby blogs hosted on the official forums with no backups.  My own Halo hobby work here was simultaneously cross posted there and would be gone forever with no notice if I didn't also have a google blog. 

I'll end this 2nd part the same way that I started the first.  I wish the employees and owners of Spartan the best in the upcoming trying times as well as hope that their games and the fans that supported them land on their feet as well.  Regardless of my thoughts on how the company was seemingly run (I can only go off of speculation, common sense, and my own experiences.. no insider info here!), there were likely dozens of folks living their dream jobs in the industry and thousands more enjoying the fruits of their work that will now be affected in some way or the other.  I've toyed with the idea of selling my painted fleets but I think I'll keep them for use in some potential future game system or even a return to the agnostic Full Thrust rules that I previously enjoyed.  Thanks to any potential readers out there for bearing with me on this likey typo ridden wall of text as I put down my thoughts on the subject. 

The Recent Games Company Cull (Part 1)

Ashley over at the Paint it Pink Blog posted an article about the closure of Spartan Games last week and I figured I'd add my own thoughts (likely a two part series) on the subject as well given that I had (unsuccessfully) supported the Spartan Games' Halo Fleet Battles line in the past on this blog.   Before getting into the specifics on my experience with Spartan, I'd like to also add that it's been a particularly bad week for mid to small sized games companies with the closure of Tor Gaming last week as well as the prior closure of On the Lamb games as well that wasn't publicized as much.  I had never ordered from either company as their niche products didn't really scratch any of my own hobby itches but I have interacted with one of the owners of OTL on dakka in the past as was sad to hear about the closure.  In any case, the following will probably be a semi-stream of consciousness wall of text so consider yourselves warned.   The following blog posts/thoughts/guesses are my opinions going largely off of my own (occasionally flawed and admittedly biased) memory and experiences as well as publicly available information as I have zero insider knowledge of the behind the scenes happenings at Spartan.  I'd normally quote more sources to back up some of my comments but all hands (including the official news blog and forums) went down suddenly with the Spartan ship last week with no backup on waybackmachine.  In this first part, I'll start off with my own personal experiences and then later in the second post go over what I suspect lead to that downfall.

First off, I'll say that regardless of my thoughts that I'm never happy to see fellow gamers leaving the dream so to speak lose their job (some probably permanently in the industry).  There were indeed some talented and dedicated folks at Spartan games and I wish them well in their future endeavors.  That said... I fully believe that a large part of the failure of Spartan Games falls squarely on the shoulders on its leadership.  When I first considered getting into Halo Fleet Battles shortly after its announcement, these are some of the responses in the dakka thread that greeted me from their current and former customers:

"Spartan Games is branching into yet another game?"

"They will only drop it six months down the line. Give the license to a company who will support it."

"Maybe they'll have a special clause in the contract stating they should at least show some effort and give it a full year?"

"I'm not surprised... but I do think it means they'll spread themselves even thinner right when Planetfall needs (and deserves) full-time nurturing to get it established."

"This announcement does leave me with mixed feelings, as I want to like what Spartan has done recently in improving themselves, but I'm doubtful they could support a 5th game/3rd universe already. Time will tell."

 

"I am looking forward to Halo 2.0 (which will really be the 4th iteration of the same book and the 25th iteration of the same ruleset) in 18 months' time."

 "I believe the sentiment is more about Spartan's somewhat lack of attention span when it comes to their rules. Their first few years were a never ending cycle of revisions and half measures and starting up new games only to neglect them or other games. The new 2.0 rules mark a change where they've finally sorted out the problems and more or less established their 'core' products. "

Dakka has a rep for being a bunch of grumpy grognards (largely amongst unscrupulous small companies and their white knights) but I've found that alot of truth is found in posts on independent forums since other locations like facebook and company specific forums truly give companies a pass (and clamp down on anything else) too often despite objectively consumer unfriendly moves.  Obviously given the above comments (and this was NOT the first time I had heard about Spartan's reputation regarding long term support for their games), I can't claim to have gone into Halo with anything but my eyes open.  I simply hoped that with such a likely expensive IP that they would treat it right.  I was a bit surprised that they decided to take a video game that was almost exclusively about skirmish level combat focused on special characters and lead with a ship battle game but my own interest in the genre made me hope that it would be a success.  Unfortunately, I was wrong on both accounts.

After buying into the game with the core set and later some ship add ons, I found out that no one else bought anything from the line at my store including the friend of mine who initially was supposed to be buying his own core set and splitting the contents with me (with one of us getting the humans and the other the aliens).  That small initial shipment the owner ordered sat there on the shelf untouched until the store closed down the next year.  When the local Spartan game demo reps showed up the month after the release of the game, I came to the store hoping to get in a demo as my own minis were as of yet mostly unassembled.  The two company reps (two brothers) basically responded quite unprofessionally and angrily that they had zero interest in the game.  They were firmly fans of the existing OTHER Spartan games spaceship game (Firestorm Armada) and had no plans to demo, support, or even try the game when I offered to bring in my own minis.  They backtracked a bit later that evening with some more diplomatic "clarifications" of their earlier statements but their true feelings were quite obvious and were another warning sign for me.

Still mostly undaunted, I finished painting and assembling my minis now for both fleets as I fully expected that I'd have to bring both painted to realistically get anyone to try the game.  I found the actual minis to be of high quality and very intuitive to assemble.  I did have some issues with the packing leading to some damaged ship pieces and Spartan was VERY generous in replacing the damaged parts.  I had expected them to send me just the damaged individual pieces but instead they sent the entire sprues.  During the time it took me to build and paint my minis, I was active on the Spartan forums and kept hoping for more new ships to come out and both bolster my fleets as well as more importantly add some variant playstyles.  Unfortunately, the half dozen upcoming ships previewed both at the pre-release Salute convention as well as at the big GenCon premiere (hinted as future plastic releases) mostly didn't materialize in that first key 6 months.  Instead. the same three ships for each faction fromthe starter set were repackaged a myriad of times in different quanities and combinations with occasionally some minimally variant rules.

Finally around Christmas post release, the first of the ships previewed earlier finally came out in resin (instead of rumored plastic) and unfortunately had serious QA issues.  The large ships were obviously 3D printed and Spartan hadn't even bothered to clean up any the 3D printing lines on the ships so they showed very obvious stepping from the prototyping process.  When complaints were raised about those $85 (55 GBP) large centerpiece ships, the intial response on the forums and social media was to delete the complaints instead of addressing them.  Obviously that did not go over well with folks who paid so much for those products and the complaints increased.  Forum white knights started berating their fellow customers with the usual buck passing responses only further fanning the flames but eventually Spartan did the right thing and said they would address the situation.  Ultimately, they were very generous in their resolution again just shipping full new replacement ships to customers who complained but the damage was already done.  Folks like myself who witnessed the quality issues had already decided to wait and see what future ships would look like in person (or at least on the web post release) before ever ordering any of their resin products.

Over the next couple months, more ships were previewed but actual new releases were still a trickle (and strangely NOT the ships previewed almost 6 months earlier).  Issues with the rules were largely ignored until they started dominating the conversation about the game at which point they'd get a quick one line fix for that single issue.  Youtube channels that had covered the game previously either fell silent or announced they were dropping coverage of the game.  At that point, I sold most of my remaining unbuilt ships leaving myself with only the damaged parts sprues that I had gotten replacements for as well as those I had painted and I put my follow up fighter/bomber stands project on hold (I had hoped to replace the tokens with tiny miniatures instead).  This was in part a response to the worsening general tone of the conversation surrounding the game as well as my own personal inability to convince even a single person to just try the game when bringing two painted fleets to the FLGS.  More resin ships were finally making some progress in the pipeline to arrive early next year when Spartan made the annoucement that mostly killed my remaining enthusiasm for the game and proved the dakka grognards correct... after 6 months and only two flawed and expensive new followup product releases, Spartan was pleased to announce the release of the NEXT Halo game... the 15mm Halo Ground Combat.  At that point, I largely said my goodbyes on the official forums (and I certainly wasn't the first) but kept my painted ships just in case I had a future use for them in a generic ship combat game.  Over the next couple of months, I saw some news about them finally releasing the ships previewed the year before as well as announcing a Second Edition of the game rules less than a year after the release of the game (another bulleye for the dakka crowd).

With the next blog post, I'll go over some of the issues that I think contributed to the failure of both the above Halo Fleet Battles game as well as that of the company that made it.