Was just curious if anybody had a scoop on what reprints might show up in the second half of the year. I’m fairly new to the game and missed out on a lot of the models. eBay has been great so far but a lot of the more rare ones go for insane prices.
Was just curious if anybody had a scoop on what reprints might show up in the second half of the year. I’m fairly new to the game and missed out on a lot of the models. eBay has been great so far but a lot of the more rare ones go for insane prices.
Don't hold your breath--much of the tooling was destroyed or damaged in shipping between subcontractors. With how Ares's cash flows work, reprints will have to wait until tooling budget is available, and that won't happen until they've generated enough funding from selling existing product or runs of intact tooling. It also bears note that, if memory serves, a typical production cycle requires factory time to be booked and paid for anywhere from nine months to a YEAR before the run even starts production--and the PTO theme we worked up that I researched for them was *very* reprint heavy, if the Wildcat and Zero tooling was among the losses that's On Hold until they can be replaced.
I suspect this is why boardgames are ruling the roost, no hard sculpting/tooling costs just graphics design and print layout.
Sounds like i may start taking vitamins to live long enough to see another airplane.
I'm hopeful we'll see something next year--but Ares has to get the money-train running again, and that's gonna start with WWI since they've had the longer dry spell.
The good news is that the fine people that made the Battlestar Galactica minis will now be making our airplanes. I can't wait (but have to) to see the first planes they release. Anything in the range of their BSG quality and they will blow away the planes we have gotten in the last 'fill in the blank' years.
Well one would hope there was insurance involved in the shipping of said products! So there shouldn’t be any outlay of money just time to reproduce the tooling.
It would not surprise me one bit--usual Chinese manufacturing practice is the tooling never leaves the original factory, which is why many figure lines see uncanny bootleg knockoffs slip out the back door--they use the tooling YOU paid for to make more under their own bran or for somebody else.
I heard a lot about Chinese factory practices from the guys at the Catalyst Games booth a few Origins ago, while discussing the return of Leviathan.
It's surprising so many gaming companies deal with them, though they probably mark it down to the cost of doing business, and to heck with ethics.
Karl
It is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he thinks he knows. -- Epictetus
They believe "China is literally the only place in the world that can make this stuff"--I've seen Hasbro and Mattel moving similar plastic+paper+metal "mixed media" lines to Vietnam though, admittedly that's toys not games but the manufacturing needs are the same. I bet there are plenty of Czech or other ex-ComBloc-country companies that could do it... heck, it'd be a step down from their usual but find a paper-side printing partner and Valom could easily do the models aside from the hand-assembly.
I don't know what tooling means, but if they lost forms for Albatross V (peg not centered) and Pfalz (tail is a part of the body and crooked), they have a chance to make it right now.
Tooling is the molds and dies that cast the individual plastic and metal pieces that make up each miniature. Some of the defects are at the 'CAD Model' level, and I don't see those getting fixed until the modelers can be made to see that there is a problem--denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
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