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Old November 17th, 2022, 04:35 AM
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chaoserver chaoserver is offline
 
Join Date: September 21, 2009
Location: USA-MA
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Re: AoA:Vanguard Campaign Postmortem

The good:
The unit abilities and the creativity that went into them was excellent. The Pirates, heroes who could place glyphs, order marker shenanigans , and units with two life to name a few.

The models looked great from what we could see of them, once the sting of them being understandably unpainted passed.

Making flying a keyword, Definetley the right move.

The war council did a great job engaging the community throughout the campaign.

The AOA master set itself was an exciting package- The idea of playing against people just using that would have a very nostalgic feel but with all new scapes. It was also a very meaty offering so it would have given us a lot to play around with.

The nitpicks:
The new symbols for movement etc. are well intentioned, but personally not my preference. While I like the idea of keywords as mentioned with flying, the lack of uniformity here with old cards, and lack of intuitiveness was a bummer.

No Valkrill in favor of new generals. While it didn't diminish my excitement for the project, I found it weird that new factions were being introduced when we have Valkrill who is a general only fleshed out if you play with customs. I respect that the creatives might have had a vision, but between the existing generals I feel most bases are covered. Valkrill returning and one new general could work if they really wanted a new general, but to not have him at all felt silly.

The ugly:
The campaign and its advertising was abominable. If not for those passionate about it posting here, barely anyone would have known about it.This paired with the weird rollout of it, with a decent pre campaign hype, and then more or less radio silence for half the campaign made zero sense. There should have been a strong showing of cards from the onset, and then a drip feed of them. It's hard to expect people to cough up a lot of money when they don't even know what they're buying, so the fact that the card designs weren't even finalized by launch was ridiculous. I respect that they were polling the community on the preferred design, but if they were going that route it should have been a pre campaign launch poll to hype people up and spread awareness.

I would say the goal of two million was too high, and hen considering the many failures of the campaign it was way too high considering the whopping $250 asking price as the only way to buy in. While that is certainly worth it, that is a hard sell to new players and a smaller master set, or even the option to just buy figures or terrain would be essential to hit such a lofty goal.

The already giant goal having an even loftier stretch goal to even get the classic characters was just a slap in the face.
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