It's not based off Junta....its just a "SimIsland" style game that has rebels/Soviet/US invasions if you screw up.

Tropico 2 was set in the Age Of Piracy and you could get invaded by the Spanish/French/English if they found you. Also, voodoo skeleton haulers...

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Sunday, November 26, 2017 - 07:41 pm: Edit

It's not based on it, just inspired by it. It is more Sim City than it is Junta.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Sunday, November 26, 2017 - 09:29 pm: Edit

I think the silly humor may be derived partially from Junta but the situation is different.

Saying this as someone who loves both.

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 04:18 pm: Edit

Yes, Mike was right, Tropico is a lot more Sim City than it is Junta. Many games have influences from many different things that came before them.

By Mike Strain (Evilmike) on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 06:19 pm: Edit

I'd love to have a mod for Tropico where you play El Presidente of a backwater planet and you had to worry about the Feds, the Klingons, and the Romulans, plus the usual treachery from your Orion 'business partners' and Feddy 'do-gooder' agencies.

heheheh

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 06:27 pm: Edit

That would be cool, the "Feds" could even demand their "piece of the action". Haha!

"I think 40% would be sufficient."

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Sunday, December 03, 2017 - 06:47 pm: Edit

Wow! From Larry Harris. Phased turns, bidding oil for initiative/turn order, secret and simultaneous orders... this looks AMAZING! I can't wait to play this. There is a series of videos on You Tube if you want to see more about it.

https://www.nightingale-games.com/

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Sunday, December 03, 2017 - 08:22 pm: Edit

And the title War Room will lead to endless quoting.

"Gentlemen you can't fight in here. This is the war room."

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Sunday, December 03, 2017 - 11:12 pm: Edit

I just finished watching the videos on it. This game is amazing. It's the iconic representation of Axis & Allies blended with both Avalon Hill and ADB inspired rules. It runs on phased turns, resources reminiscent of Supremacy, cards like Risk, with secret & simultaneous orders and has pinning rules straight out of F&E.

War Room really looks unbelievably good.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Monday, December 04, 2017 - 01:36 pm: Edit

It is tempting. I just doubt I could ever get a group together to play it.

By Steve Zamboni (Szamboni) on Monday, December 04, 2017 - 07:42 pm: Edit

I've been drooling over that game for a few days now, but I don't see it ever coming out of the box outside of game cons. (I had to pass on the World in Flames set, too. Glorious, but useless.)

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Wednesday, February 21, 2018 - 01:28 pm: Edit

According to a recently-posted interview with BattleTech's current lead developer, the upcoming "IlClan" sourcebook - aimed at wrapping up the late Dark Age era and priming the Inner Sphere for what lies beyond - is being split into two separate volumes. The first of these books, Shattered Fortress, may be out sometime this summer.

There is a precedent of sorts for this with the two Historical: Liberation of Terra volumes; there was simply too much going on during the Amaris Civil War to fit neatly into a single sourcebook. So if the events which were to be covered in IlClan alone are better served this way, well and good.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - 09:29 pm: Edit

Well, it's official. Kevin Siembieda and Palladium Books took a whole bunch of money from me and other gamers and we're never going to see the rest of the product ($400 worth, in my case).

It's been over 3 years since the Kickstarter campaign, so it's not like this is any surprise. Still aggravating though, given their pattern of silence/false-promises/silence/false-promises.

Robotech RPG Tactics Announcement from Kevin Siembieda, President of Palladium Books

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - 10:17 pm: Edit

I read this Kevin S thing. One thing in it that is just wrong is his, probably misunderstanding, that "dimensional weight" is a new thing in shipping. It's not, that has always existed. It's nothing even remotely new. If you ship a giant Styrofoam statue, for example, that takes up half of the truck/container you will be charged for the minimum weight for those dimensions. Shipping is charged by weight, or space, whichever is greater. Large, light things have always been charged by "dimensional weight".

I also couldn't help but think as I was reading this... "Wow, SVC would never get himself into a situation like this."

By Steve Zamboni (Szamboni) on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - 10:45 pm: Edit

That sort of stuff is why I want to see print-on-demand succeed as an alternative to conventional send-everything-to-China manufacturing.

Interesting reading that they outsourced everything. All that time and money spent on parts they couldn't afford to make and couldn't afford to ship with no fallback plan, and they ended up losing the IP to top it off.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - 11:16 pm: Edit

This sort of thing is a big reason SVC is making absolutely sure his ducks are in a row before starting Klingons vs Tribbles.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 12:14 am: Edit

ADB will actually know what they are paying other people to do. Palladium just blindly wrote checks and did no oversight at all and didn't put any kind of reins on the size of the campaign.

Siembieda whines about how much of a surprise the costs for doing hard-tooled injection-molded plastic parts is, how the 3D printable CAD files aren't usable by tooling engineers, yada yada yada. All because he didn't do one lick of research *before* starting a Kickstarter campaign that had a $70,000 goal (more than some folks' houses cost). Then, when it started becoming a $1,000,000 campaign, he didn't engage and make sure he understood what he was getting committed to.

People make legitimate errors, have life-events, etc., but this was just inexcusable willful ignorance and his trying to throw Ninja Division under the bus just makes it all the more vile.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 12:28 am: Edit

Will, did you mean "Ninja Division" or "Ninja Magic"?

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 12:52 am: Edit

Ninja Division. Fixed.
(I'm far more used to typing "Magic" - too many ninjas)

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 10:56 am: Edit

Mixed feelings. On one hand I loved the Palladium RPGs back when I was a teenager but Siembieda does not seem to be good at planning. His publishing date estimates have always been 'pie in the sky' and he tends to drive off talent. Many skilled freelance writers refuse to work with him because he tends to give little to no feedback when sent work but when the final product arrives he often throws a fit.

His announcement did a good job of throwing their subcontractor under the bus and the financial explanation looks really sketchy. Classic Siembieda.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 10:57 am: Edit

This is not the place to discuss Tribbles, but I can say from all the research I did that only part of the extra expenses that Mr Siembieda mentions could have been anticipated. (I do not know the gentleman. I have probably sat in a room full of game publishers with him but I cannot recall shaking his hand and saying "Oh, yeah, you're the guy who did XYZ.") His stories of unexpected expenses, costly do-overs, unreliable partners, and someone somewhere neglecting to mention a huge chunk of cost are more common than not. Lots of Kickstarters never reached deliver and lots of the ones that did lost money.

Those Chinese contracts are written in ways that no matter what went wrong and no matter who screwed it up, Mr Siembieda ends up financially responsible. That's just one of the reasons Tribbles has yet to happen. Every dollar figure they give you is their guess and YOU (the game designer/publisher) pay when it's wrong. The contract says "this number 123,456 is a guaranteed fixed price but doesn't cover the following list of estimated expenses and assumes that we, in our sole discretion, don't decide you need to pay us to do something over." Some of the problems could have been prevented by research, but the research is hard to do and the results are unreliable and more likely to be wrong than right, and some of the things could not be predicted.

Not the place, but we didn't build that $300,000 new office for ADB because of horror stories by other companies that build buildings and ended up with 50% cost overruns and law suits against the contractor.

Buried in a very long press release is the salient fact. The game didn't sell very well and there were no profits to plow back into it. Now they want to pay off the Wave 2 promises with extra copies of Wave 1 stuff they cannot sell. I don't think that's evil, I think it's just the way things end up when the stars are aligned against you.

That's one the risks of this kind of production. I think Tribbles is a cool game and I'm determined to print it even if only as a PDF the day before I die of a stroke, but we would be betting the company on it and if the "outside the wargame grognards" don't buy it, we'd be gone.

By Vincent Solfronk (Vsolfronk) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 11:32 am: Edit

I have participated in KS where the product took much more time to be produced and sent, but I haven't yet to be burned like investors in this. The KS Robotech Saga is a classic and maybe there will be more investigating reporting about the experience. Maybe some writer could turn it into a Netflix series even.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 11:55 am: Edit

I suspect this was more than bad luck. Palladium has had some rocky situations through the years. They bought the license for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to make an RPG shortly after the comics started thinking they could make a gritty combat game about mutants. Then the cartoon came out and it was 'kid stuff'. Back in 2006 (I think) there was a big problem where they lost a ton of money to an embezzling employee.

I remember there was a big plan to do a Rifts movie that fizzled. Probably a good thing. Gygax almost killed D&D trying to make a movie and when one was made many years later it was a bomb.

This has a good possibility of killing Palladium if the financials are that bad and if a lawsuit crops up. I have my doubts about that. A lawyer would be unlikely to do this on contingency and I doubt they could get enough backers onboard to fund a lawsuit. I think you would need at least $20k to even get started. On the other hand if there is an experienced class-action lawyer backer it might happen anyways.

If Siembieda set his company up wisely the IP for Rifts and their other in-house non-licensed lines will be untouchable in a separate company and he can restart again with those product lines. Maybe.

By Marc Michalik (Kavik_Kang) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 03:30 pm: Edit

The Palladium TMNT game was AWESOME!!!

By Jamey Johnston (Totino) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 - 03:31 pm: Edit

Kavik:
SECONDED! I *still to this day* use the Bio-E system (modified as necessary) for various Anthropomorphic animal races in other Role-Playing systems, as it is essentially an independent system generally agnostic to the Palladium system.