Data Sphere

So I got a big box in the mail today.

I'm going to start out with the game as it comes in the basic starter box. You get 5 Valks, 2 Tomahawks, and 2 Defenders to go against one Glaug and a dozen Regults (plus a recon Regult and a recovery pod). The Zents are a bit worse than building plastic Space Marines, and some of those parts are fiddly and fragile. The Valks are pretty damn crazy. Valks have one model for each mode and a crapton of pieces. I started off with building a few of the Zent models, which are all molded in gray plastic (UEDF models are tan). You even get decals!

There's also a full-color glossy paper rule/setting book, faction dice (d6s), plastic artillery blast template and plastic command point counters. The unit cards are plastic/laminated that you can write on them directly with a dry-erase pen, no sleeves like with Warmahordes.

unfortunately, I sliced the hell out of my fingertip, so I had to stop after building the recon Regult, recovery pod, and the Glaug (aka Marauder to the Battletech players). Bad news for anyone intending to use the Robotech Tactics minis in place of Battletech Unseens, the minis are ~2.5"/67mm tall.

The Kickstarter backers got 9 Valks and fully double the number of Zents, plus 4 artillery battlepods. So I have a shitton of models to build...

Anyone else succumb to this?

I almost did. I grew up on all things Robotech.

But the minis just look awful to me. I saw Blue Table Paintings versions and that just made it 100x worse.

Loved the serie, and everything Macross. But no. Miniatures are average plastic and I wouldn't find a single opponent in a 200 Km radius.

Also, it was very naive chosing that absurd height. It didn't take a marketing genious to chose a size compatible with everything else. Expecially old Battletech fans would have been a potential market, for obvious reasons...

I picked this up on the kickstarter as well. The dozens of pieces per battleoid is pretty daunting given the scale of the models.

michel wrote:Loved the serie, and everything Macross. But no. Miniatures are average plastic and I wouldn't find a single opponent in a 200 Km radius.

You do get both sides in the box...

Also, it was very naive chosing that absurd height. It didn't take a marketing genious to chose a size compatible with everything else. Expecially old Battletech fans would have been a potential market, for obvious reasons...

They're kinda in a bind, since the Robotech vehicles do have defined heights. Palladium would have had to go to a smaller scale to get them down to the old Unseen Battletech size (and would likely have pissed off Harmony Gold in the process, HG more-or-less lost that lawsuit, not to mention presently has some interesting standing to try to enforce a claim on the designs of the mecha, which are presently owned entirely by Studio Nue and Big West, not by HG's co-copyright-holder Tatsunoko. ).

Then a later problem would come with a smaller scale, the Invid-era (? with the transforming bikes) models would be too small. As it is, even in 1/300 the transforming bikes are going to be tiny, maybe 15mm tall at the very biggest, and more likely ~12mm, which makes for a challenging build and interesting game between the bikes and full-sized Zents.

So it's really HG's fault for wanting all the mecha to be usable in the same game (and insisting on scale models instead of futzing the scale to make better gaming pieces like a LOT of companies do).

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I'm slowly getting things figured out for Valks. Looks like one VF1S, one VF1J flight leader, and 3 VF1As per starter box, and I have another set of 4 Valks courtesy of the KS freebies which will turn into another VF1J and 3 VF1As.

Gives me two Valk squadrons and the VF1S "big boss" upgrade plus 6 of each destroid, facing off against 2 Glaugs and a frackton of basic battle pods. The characters and the other stuff won't show up until 2015, but maybe I will have wave 1 finished by then...

I have it.

I have built "one" valkyrie. Each mode.

That was a daunting task.

I haven't been able to build up the gusto to build anything else. Some time from now I'll have everything built and painted, then I'll see if anyone wants to play. As it stands, I think I'm the only one nearby with the models/game.

I haven't started on the Valks or Destroids yet, I wanted to get the 'targets' erm, I mean Zentradis, built first. That and I was confused about unit groupings and upgrades. I may do some magnetizing for the Destroid Command sets and the Zent artillery sets, gotta take another look at the cards and another read-through of the rules.

I had to take a break after slicing the crap out of my fingertip while working on the recovery pod. Took until today before that cut actually closed up with a scab on it, blade went in on the fingerprint side and more or less stopped at the bottom of the fingernail bed (OUCH!!!)...

Painting will have to wait until I grind through another watching of the Macross DVDs with a notepad, figure out exactly which color schemes are appropriate for the actual battle of Macross Island.

I got mine a week or two ago, and at the moment the box and the extra bag are sitting in a storage box while I try to work through my Infinity model and terrain backlog.

At this point I'm more interested in seeing how the not-Orguss in wave two turn out.