Postscript to Thoughts on the Afrika Korps Spoiler

Less than 12 hours after my previous post about the upcoming Afrika Korps book, WWPD posted a spoiler of its companion, Desert Rats. This was one of the three missing pieces of context that I felt made judging AK difficult, with the other two being design notes, so that we could have insight into Battlefront's intended scope for the book, and an understanding of how the roadmap of future releases is likely to play out.

Like AK, Desert Rats is notable for what is missing: Shermans, Deacons, portees, 2pdr anti-tank guns, Priests, and variety in armoured car choices. It too has a dubious inclusion in the form of the 17/25pdr anti-tank gun. My guess is that the Tiger was included in AK because Tiger, and the 17/25pdr then had to be added to try and restore game balance. But once you subtract those anachronisms, in my opinion the two books are actually a very good representation of generic forces from British and German armoured divisions in July 1942.

Seeing what is in Desert Rats, the thinking behind AK, and mid-war in general, has started to become clear. It's now obvious that V4 is a total reboot of the system as Team Yankee WW2, targeted at those who have never played FOW, because with the completion of the V3 lists for the entire war there is now little money in existing customers. The mid-war models will all be sold as platoon boxed sets, and the scope of each list will be set by production capacity and release schedules for those boxes.

In a world where V1 to V3 didn't exist, V4 would be huge. A (presumably) tight set of fast-play rules that (hopefully) look and feel like a WW2 game, nice miniatures conveniently packaged, the promise of expansion into other nations and list types, an arms race between gamers as new units were purchased. But that those earlier versions have been and gone, that experience is exactly what playing FOW was like in its heyday, and the people most likely to be attracted by WW2 gaming in 15mm already have been there, done that, and many of them have drifted away. Since they have multiple armies across multiple eras sitting in boxes, they might try a game or two of V4 out of curiosity, but they won't stick with it because the lack of variety in the initial releases. It will be a couple of years before the system is mature enough to run a native V4 tournament, and by the time the game gets to that point those veteran players may not be able to be enticed back.

So where will the target audience, these new players that V4 is going to attract, come from? You can't accidentally find FOW in New Zealand any more. I believe there are only three brick-and-mortar retailers of FOW left in the country, and the nearest of those is a seven hour drive from my hometown, which just happens to be the capital and third-largest city. Without the product having a ground presence, people will only find out about the game by seeing it played, either at conventions or clubs, and that requires the aforementioned veterans to be playing it. There may be a small amount of growth from second generation players who have access to their dad's old miniatures, who will try it and may end up getting some of their friends interested, but that's it. But in all honesty, I can only see further decline for FOW in New Zealand.

The unknown in all of this is the EW/LW conversion, with the questions being how it plays, how the V3 lists balance out under the new rules, and how long it will be before those eras are remade in mid-war's image? And most importantly, will it be enough to at least keep people playing the game while MW sorts itself out?

First Thoughts on WWPD's Afrika Korps Spoiler

WWPD has posted a preview of the contents of the new Afrika Korps book for FOW V4. To be honest, my feeling when reading the article was one of disappointment, and my initial reaction was a thought that I should cancel my pre-order of the new mid-war books. After further reflection, I'm still buying the books, but the disappointment remains.

I have played Flames of War since stumbling upon the public beta in 2001, and the Western Desert Campaign has always been my primary interest. I have seen the mid-war lists progress from the barebones versions in the 1st edition rulebook, through the Desert Rats/Desert Fox/Avanti Savoia supplements, to the Afrika compilation. I skipped over the release of North Africa until it was converted to V3 and re-released on FOW Digital last year. With each iteration the lists have increased in depth, flavour and historicity. In my opinion the lists in North Africa are very good: the splitting of the period into separate theatres guides themed list-building, and they give you a range of options for representing the unique units of the setting.

Based on the preview, it appears that Afrika Korps dispenses with all of that development. It very much feels like the first Team Yankee lists: cut back to bare basics, with precious few opportunities for variation, for players to take different paths to achieve the same outcome, likely leading to all armies created from it being almost entirely in common with one another. Gone are the odd units that made the theatre distinctive: the Dianas, the Bisons, the ex-Soviet 7.62cm guns, the reuse of captured British equipment. There are no FJ, no Pioniere, no Aufklärungen. And to cap it all off the book includes Tigers, completely dashing my hopes that the new books would give 1942 its moment in the spotlight.

I presume the reasoning behind sending screenshots of an upcoming book to a blog is to generate discussion and "hype" for the new product. Unfortunately for the moment the spoiler is out without any design notes being posted by Battlefront, without any information about the opposing Desert Rats book to provide a point of reference, and without any understanding of the roadmap to how additional lists are going to be released in future. This prevents the book from being seen in any kind of context, and results in the book being judged against customers' expectations rather than the scope and purpose that Battlefront had established for it. Those expectations have been established by the late-war books, and Battlefront shouldn't be surprised that this lack of a broader context has resulted in customers becoming upset about the mid-war lists being stripped back.

If I were to guess at the path that mid-war will take from here, additional lists will be released to cover the options missing from Afrika Korps, very much in the pattern of the Afgantsy and Panzertruppen expansions for Team Yankee.  This staged release is a let-down from the comprehensive V3 books that the community has become used to, especially so given that the NZ$18 price tag for a single one those TY lists is half the price of a LW compilation of two dozen lists. Looking further into the future, once a number of books and digital briefings have been out in the wild for a year or two, the familiar pattern from earlier editions will repeat as the lists are once again revised and combined into a larger compilation. This is unfortunate given that many veteran players will have purchased the same MW lists five times over, with Afrika Korps/Desert Rats being iteration number six, all in the 14 years since FOW was first published.

So, what does it mean for me? I'm definitely going to give it a chance, but based on my first impressions of a spoiler of the first two books of an as-yet unreleased new edition, my dream that V4 would bring about a local FOW renaissance lies in tatters.

Mi-24 Hind for Team Yankee

I'll post some more detailed thoughts over the weekend, but for now this is just a couple of quick photos of my first Hind, as I'm relieved to have finally finished it. Suffice it to say that, having spent a week's worth of evenings painting a single helicopter, I don't see a VDV list in my future.

Of course I still need to do one more to complete a minimum-sized unit, but I have a few T-72s that I will be working on before I attempt another one of these.