@DrLarsen:
Hmm… while I do appreciate their aesthetic goals, I think I’d prefer pieces that were a little more realistic and which didn’t do the whole using one sculpt for all the powers thing… Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I’ll buy a copy when it’s available, but I still think a more AA-intercompatible style would have been fine, and I just have a hard time with games where my Germans look like Brits, etc. And with all of those cool-looking dreadnoughts available, to have one that looks so stylized… and it looks like it has single-barrel turrets, too! I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be, and I know my dreadnoughts…
So, on one level I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but I can’t help but think it’s another missed opportunity to create a game that fits better with what the market really wants, which is a more AA-like game.
I have to agree. In the early days, when the original 1999 A&A Europe and 2001 A&A Pacific were the only available games which provided a “sculpt upgrade” from the old Milton-Bradley plastic A&A pieces, I had to scrounge around to find pieces from other games which could supplement the small number of colours and unit types which came with those three A&A games. The limited array which came with the A&A games, and the limited number of alternatives on the market, meant that I had to accept buying games whose sculpts had great variability in their quality. The original Table Tactics sculpts came perhaps the closest to the genuine A&A sculpts in terms of size, colour compatibility, level of detail and general visual style. Then, working downwards through the Xeno Games A&A clone pieces and miscellaneous other sculpts I got from games here and there, I extended my purchases (of necessity) to pieces with whose design I was not happy at all, such as the ones in the Attack! and Attack! Expansion games. Mixed in with that, over the years, was the appearance of some games with pieces that fit my requirements perfectly in some respects but not in others (for instance The War Game: World War II, whose detailed hard-plastic naval pieces were very close in size to the A&A ones but whose land and air units tended to be too big).
Over time, as more and more new A&A games were published, the unit type and colour and nationality gaps that I had been plugging with miscellaneous other pieces from other games started getting filled by official A&A sculpts (for instance the cruiser piece that first showed up in Guadalcanal). The more this went on, the more choosy I became about what other games I bought. For instance I didn’t buy the last couple of expansions of Tide of Iron because the size incompatibility with A&A because something that I could live without. I didn’t buy Field Command: Singapore 1942 because I didn’t like the design of the sculpts and because the range of piece colours (three) was too small for me. By the time both parts of A&A Global were out – adding the French infantry, reinforcing the Italian and Chinese units introduced in Anniversary, and tossing in the ANZAC colour variation of the British pieces – I had virtually ceased buying anything which would not work seamlessly with the official A&A sculpts. The projected sets of FMG sculpts will meet that compatibility requirement, and I’m certainly planning on getting all of them, but the pieces from The Conflict don’t fit my current purchasing profile. They would have done so once upon a time, but not anymore; they’re too stylized for my taste. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that a major A&A-style game set in WWI has been published, and the pieces do seem to be of very high quality. They’re just not type of piece, design-wise, which interests me at the moment.