Flames of War

[Leon]

Yet...

"This time next year Rodders..."

[Hertsblue]

I recently aquired Flames of War second edition for £2 off Ebay, I plan on using it with, drum roll maestro please.......................... Pendraken minis.

You think my rulebook will object?

Mine started to fall to bits after the first game. As a book-lover that really cracks me up. 

[GordonY]

Yeah its a lovely book too, just like Black Powder, excellent eye-candy but not very good rules.

[Luddite]

Yeah its a lovely book too, just like Black Powder, excellent eye-candy but not very good rules.

You have a talent for extreme understatement GordonY.   

[Hertsblue]

Which is a shame since their information books are pretty well researched and well presented. What shoots it in the foot is the tendency for pages to start falling out after you've used them for a while. 

[Derek H]

Which is a shame since their information books are pretty well researched and well presented.

Usually.  But there are some major errors in some of them as well.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Topic is up to page 30! 

[sultanbev]

This doesn't come as much of a surprise unfortunately, this was the only direction left for their business model to maintain sales."

Surely they should see the way the wind is blowing and embrace the competition by officially allowing their models in, but then go ahead and invest in their own plastic injected range. The tooling for such is expensive and time consuming, but production is cheap and quick once set up, there is no way PSC and Zvesda can do everything needed. A "Budget Battlefront" range would be a more progressive and popular solution surely? And given the money they have already made, I'm sure BF could invest in more plastic injection moulded items than their rivals put together.

Banning other people's models is just petty, some gamers mix manufacturers on bases, imagine having to prize off non-BF figures from your infantry bases   I hope as many people pull out as to make any tournament pointless!

Mark

EDIT: Quote fixed.

[ciaphas]

i have been saying to the kids at our club that 10mm is the way and the rules should make no difference, a 10mm sherman individually based can fight FoW or rapid fire game with no problem only the based infantry is different but the expiediant of adding a dice to the table to mark casualties solves even this problem, but with the vast difference in cost even doubling up infantry would still work out cheeper, but you can only make the suggestion, they are certain that FoW can only be played in 15s as that is the scale in the book.

must be getting too much pocket money.

jon

[Steve J]

Seeing what kids spend on GW products, you know they have a lot of money. I was talking to a friend a couple of years ago, and friends of her son are given £100 to go and spend in town on a Saturday afternoon .

[Leon]

Surely they should see the way the wind is blowing and embrace the competition by officially allowing their models in, but then go ahead and invest in their own plastic injected range. The tooling for such is expensive and time consuming, but production is cheap and quick once set up, there is no way PSC and Zvesda can do everything needed. A "Budget Battlefront" range would be a more progressive and popular solution surely? And given the money they have already made, I'm sure BF could invest in more plastic injection moulded items than their rivals put together.

A switch to plastic would make more sense to me as well.  Tooling for the plastic 15mm vehicles we're seeing on the market at the moment is around £8-10k I believe, plus the cost of the 3-up masters.  I think BF are paying somewhere in the region of $1500-2000 for their vehicle masters from speaking to ex-designers, so god knows how much they'd be paying for a '45mm' master model as it were.  Still though, with their kind of budget, it wouldn't be a problem at all for them.

An interesting perspective may be the perceived lower cost of plastic to the consumer, so they couldn't charge the same pricing?  With resin, they can claim any kind of custom resin excuse, ala Finecast, and keep the pricing up?

[NTM]

The plastic 15mm tanks are CAD designed rather than 3 ups IIRC. The Perrys and Warlord use 3 ups on their 28mm figs though. Apparently BF are trying out CAD, 3 ups and another method for their plastics. Ironically perhaps they are using Renedra for the tooling and moulding.

[Leon]

The plastic 15mm tanks are CAD designed rather than 3 ups IIRC.

That would make a lot more sense actually!

[Squirrel]

The plastic 15mm tanks are CAD designed rather than 3 ups IIRC.

It's the way pretty much every other industry designs plastic mouldings, the CAD file is fed straight into the machine to cut the tool. With something like a vehicle it can be drawn more accurately quickly than sculpting.

Organic shapes, ie figures are more realistic if sculpted hence why the Perry's use 3 ups.

Cheers,

Kev

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Back track and compromise has been announced by BF:
http://www.flamesofwar.com/Default.aspx?tabid=57&art_id=3380

Sounds like they are listening... 

[Steve J]

They will definitely be 3D CAD as opposed to 3 Ups. The fit on the Zvezda kits is amazing and could not be achieved any other way.

[Leon]

Back track and compromise has been announced by BF:
http://www.flamesofwar.com/Default.aspx?tabid=57&art_id=3380

Sounds like they are listening... 

Well that was quick, kudo's to them for actually listening to people.  They're still calling it the 'FoW hobby' though, which has an unnerving ring to it...

They will definitely be 3D CAD as opposed to 3 Ups. The fit on the Zvezda kits is amazing and could not be achieved any other way.

I've always wondered how much it costs for a CAD designer to draw up the designs.

[Steve J]

Our CAD designers are charged out at about £800 + per day. If you had good 2d reference drawings, they would take a few days to model up. You could probably get reasonable freelance designers cheaper, but you need ones with injection moulding experience.

The problem comes with scaling stuff up to allow the plastic to flow through the mould. This is where the experience element comes into it. You can get simple tools made for anything between a few hundred pounds up to a couple of thousand.  Runs would then be up to about 10,000 units before you had problems with tool wear etc.

[sebigboss79]

Just to clarify my doubts about Flames of War and Battlefront (insert GW/Finecast here):

It is the modern way of doing bussiness to tell your customers where to buy, what to buy and charge them insanely for prodcts of questionable quality?

It is OK if a big company bullies smaller competitors, its retailers and customer base with "rules" and "guidelines" and re-inventing rulebooks whenever they feel like it?

It is cool to segment markets and tell retailers to whom to sell and to whom not?



Lets just say I am glad I can still choose who gets my money and that Pendraken (and others) still do business a bit more the oldfashioned way....

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

What's interesting is sevel of the 'Old Guard' have completely unsubscribed from the Forum...

Including one each of the US, UK and Antipodean big  hitters!