View from the trenches to the Blood Red Skies above

I was reading a blog yesterday about some up and coming releases for Flames of War. Have a look here for yourself Miniature Ordnance Review  .

FoW has been going through a difficult period over the last couple of years and V4 was "not well received" by the player base. The reason was suggested as being the drive to shift the weight of product to plastic models over the more traditional resin\metal models that Battlefront had experience in, to all plastic, which they were quite slow to commit to. V4 was released with limited model range - the restriction being what they could provide in plastic. Players were used to a plethora of cool vehicle options now found their army lists restricted to three or 4 plastic product codes \ SKUs, and were "unimpressed". There is a similar issue with Team Yankee - the Cold War variant of FoW, where army lists were artificially restricted to only vehicles that BF produced. That also has restricted take up, which is a shame.

I was always in two minds about FoW - I'm a history snob and some of the tactics FoW encouraged were suspect to my mind. However right from the outset I was 100% convinced they were a very well written set of rules, and the things that made me uncomfortable with them, on table artillery, telescoped weapon ranges etc, are all things deliberately built in to the game at designer level rather than an unintended consequence of poor game design. I may not like it, but it works, and it undeniably boosted the profile and take up of WW2 miniature gaming dramatically. It also plays well.

So what has that got to do with Blood Red Skies and all that? The thing that struck a chord was the mention of plastic models and the long lead times they involve. In the case of Battlefront that seems to be about a year. Let that sink in for a while. Battlefront were not the first plastic producer, but now they have "seen the light" and they have amassed a lot of experience. Given all that experience they still take a year to produce a plastic model. When we look at Warlord, who make Blood Red Skies, they also have experience in plastic production, although they did make a very astute move in teaming up with Italeri to make the Bolt Action plastic models, and they have also done something similar to rebox the Zvezda Art of Tactic 1:200 models to make then usable for Blood Red Skies see Warlord Games  here. But even so, can they realistically shave that year down much? You could argue they are producing one piece models rather than kits, but even so I think a year is not a bad guesstimate.

It is also clear that BRS isnt the favoured child in the Warlord games stable. Clearly that position goes to Bolt Action, Black Powder, Hail Caesar etc that rightly claim high priority due to popularity and sales, and again I 100% understand that - in this scenario BRS is the little ginger kid who is always picked last when choosing football teams in the school playground. Basically BRS isn't top of Warlords priority list, and I can't blame them. They couldn't have predicted at launch, and we still don't really know how well sales have gone. I suspect the answer is well enough because they immediately commissioned Wave 2 once the main game hit the shelves, and they have been reasonably quick in producing supporting material - custom dice, dice trays etc. They also have a good track record supporting games once they have launched them - so going back to the playground analogy, our little ginger kid may not be first in the list, but he is certain that he will get to play.

The problem is the gap. Remember FoW and their year lead time? If that yardstick is correct we will be lucky to see Wave 2 this year. I get an inkling that Wave 3 has already been green lit and will probably be US fighters, but that will be 12 months down the line. I'm not sure where that leaves BRS. Without a regular release the game may stutter in popularity as people get fed up with just 5 planes to play with, in a similar way to FoW V4 on release. I suspect the answer will be user generated content, and I would hope warlord will support that to allow the game to grow while they flesh out the range. Lets hope so, because it is a damned good game.