Second Edition is Coming in the Year 3000

[japridemor]

Any news?

[PaulB]

I talked with Tyrel via email and said he was still plugging away at it but had a very busy summer with work. Hopefully things continue to fall into place.

[kilgs]

There was a blog post... now deleted from August 30th... close?

[BLHarrison]

Is there any new information on when the game will be released?

[sfsct3172]

....crickets, crickets....

[Tyrel Lohr]

Much delayed, but still alive. Not long after my optimistic appraisal of getting things finished in June, I ended up spending May and June working full time for a client (including weekends and holidays), and it's been a case of playing catch-up ever since.

I am currently more than half way through making organizational and integrating rule changes into the Playing the Game chapter. I then have to update the Optional Rules and Scenarios chapters, at which point the book will be done pending a bit of final testing.

I also received word in August that our existing osCommerce web shop could end up non-functional later this year once they switch off the old version of PHP that it requires to run. I took a week in August to put together a new version of the web site (shop and all) and get it ready so that I can swap it over when the time comes.

I wish I were farther along and had met that June date, but I need a good full week to sit down and work on the book to get it all finished. If I can make it though a work week without any major disasters to deal with that could be doable here shortly.

[japridemor]

I'll start saving my coin.

[darbycmcd]

I guess I will be saving also, but honestly, I am not feeling very positively disposed toward this company right now. It isn't the delay per se, although it has been several years for this product so it is probably a bit of the delay as well, but mostly it is the lack of good communication. I understand that everyone is busy, but seriously, the customers that have been here for years, literally, without any new material, keeping some hope alive, don't rate 5 lines more often than we get them? It is almost a total inversion of the normal way people think about doing business, we beg for product, offer to do free testing, some people do additional material (which is value added), and it is like they don't care. And maybe someday we will be lucky and be able to give them some money. It is just a bit off-putting. I don't think that they are going to be giving vbam 2 away for free right, so we are prospective customers, right?

[mwaschak]

we beg for product, offer to do free testing

That would be great as I could really use another set of eyes on this latest draft. Can you message me your email address?

Thanks!

[darbycmcd]

hahaha, ok, fair enough. PM on the way

[japridemor]

Bump. Any new news or expectations?

[mwaschak]

Yes, I going to be kicking off a public game in the next day or two based on a near final 2e. Tyrel sent over a new draft just last week and we are steadily rounding the book out.

-Jay

[OneMadOgre]

This pleases. Winter has come to the north lands, and I might have more time again to play with a play aid again.

[darbycmcd]

never mind, I forgot that I was not supposed to care

[Tyrel Lohr]

It's been about three weeks since my last update, but I wanted to check in and report that I took the week before Thanksgiving off of work and spent the time hammering out changes to the Second Edition Campaign Guide. Much of this time was spent combing through the rules to see what was working, what wasn't, and when in doubt integrating concepts from Jay's Federation Admiral drafts to fill in the gaps as needed.
What is becoming more clear in this version of the rules is that we're seeing a convergence of First Edition, Second Edition, and many elements of Federation Admiral all coming together into a single form. This isn't where I expected the rules to end up when I started out, but the reality is that to keep the rules accessible it was important to strip out some of the advanced rules that I had tried integrating during earlier periods of 2E's development and go back to making them optional rules. The end result has been fairly successful, as the "core rules" for playing the game are now back down to about 60 pages in the current draft. Given that at one point those rules were starting to blow past 100 pages, this is a step in the right direction.
Organizationally, I've moved back to the 1E format of Introduction > Getting Started > Playing the Game > Optional Rules > Source Materials. After experimenting with several different permutations, I found that while I liked front loading as much of the basic content into the front of the book as possible, it actually made it harder to parse the rules while you were playing the game. As a compromise, I have expanded the Basic Terms section in the first chapter and then adjusted the flow of the Playing the Game to (hopefully) make it easier to find what you're looking for as you're stepping through the sequence of play.
I am almost finished importing missing text in to the current draft manuscript from the previous iterations of the Second Edition rules. There are a few sections where I still need to finish resolving rules discrepencies (Supply and Raiding being the obvious ones), but once that is done I'll be down to finishing up the Optional Rules and putting some polish on the remaining sections that have text that is awaiting final review.
The last step in this process will be the finalization of the Force Lists for each of the included alien factions. I have got the unit creation rules locked down to a level that is playable and seems like a "best fit" for the rules. The systems is less robust than before, but still allows for considerable design leverage. When designing a unit, you choose a 'template' that gives you a starting Construction and Maintenance Cost and number of skill points to spend on abilities. You gain additional skill points based on the unit's Construction Cost as your Tech Year increases. An 8 EP heavy cruiser is going to gain 1 skill point every 3 Tech Years, for example. This puts tech advancement at a rate where you can still get appreciable bonuses over time, but it doesn't seem to lead to runaway tech growth as some previous iterations of the rules encouraged.
We'll be sending out updated playtest copies in the next few weeks so that players can take a look and check to see that we're not missing anything obvious. Meanwhile, I'll be doing some more testing of my own and get the rules converted back over into InDesign to start getting this ready for release. Depending on if I can get all of my outstanding projects taken care of for my day job, I should be able to take the last week of December off and get this project finished and (finally) out the door. I was hoping for the same amount of time in May, which didn't happen, but December is usually slower for me, which gives me more time to work on VBAM.