Is there a way for those of us who have gone through the late backer, to see the latest update, since it's locked down to Kickstarter backs only?
How to go from two weeks ahead to forty-five days behind in one easy phone callThe big question.Let’s get the big question out of the way right off: Will there be a delay in the BattleTech Campaign’s Wave 1 delivery?
Yes. Currently the date is looking like critical shipping out of China will commence on or about April 20th, which is 45 days later than we’d planned, with in-zone shipping running 2-4 weeks behind.
We’ll come back to shipping-by-zones and final delivery dates in a moment. In fact, we expect some people have already stopped reading and went right for the kerosene. Which is fair. But for those who want to know the exact state of various Wave 1 items, and what is causing the delays, we will dive right into that here.
What happened?Maybe we were too ambitious. Before the campaign ever kicked off several friends of ours (other game publishers who run large campaigns) told us we were crazy to offer anything less than a twelve month deadline for Wave 1. September 2020? That seemed ridiculous back in June and July when all this was pre-campaign and 12,000 backers seemed like a fantasy.
Still, we spoke to our vendors and added in some extra weeks for safety margins (and, yes, even took Chinese New Year into account). Our primary focus was the Clan Invasion box set and the ForcePack miniatures boxes. Those were (and still are) the core of the campaign. Most anything else could be shoved into Wave 2 as needed (as indeed a few things were). But we figured the CI Box and at least two ForcePacks were mandatory.
Guaranteed. Shouldn’t be a Problem, (paraphrasing) our manufacturer.
Of course, there wasn’t an actual “guarantee.” (When we asked for one recently, what we got was effectively: We don’t do that.)
In October our calendar looked even better than expected. Development of new art was ahead of schedule, 3D models were ahead of schedule. We were able to expand Wave 1 to four ForcePacks, plus the Legendary Set, plus Elementals…and an UrbanMech! All great news. (This also meant Salvage Box randoms would draw from a deeper pool of fifteen Clan ‘Mechs instead of five. Terrific!)
In November, we met again with our reps from manufacturing and checked the calendar. Allotted time for engineering, tooling, samples, and final production. Still, all good. Might brush up against CNY, but at worst all plastics will be done in January and we will finish the packaging in February. Things can still get rolling by late March. Okay! Thank God we had built in extra time.
And we felt pretty good about that through the rest of November and all December. Then in early January, we heard the bad news. The current tooling won’t give you the detail level we promised. We are going to upgrade your tooling, at our expense, but we won’t finish until after Chinese New Year. It was another week, around January 15th, when we found out how long after CNY. Everything will be ready to ship on April 20th!
This is for the Clan Invasion Box and ForcePacks, without which nothing else in Wave 1 matters!
At this point we had seven hardback rulebook reprints underway for the campaign and looking to ship right after CNY. Plus we had just reprinted the BattleTech Beginner Box (4th Printing) and Game of Armored Combat (3rd Printing), so we were feeling really good there! T-shirts: ready to print and ship before the end of CNY. Coins and Dice were always on a slipping schedule, but because we already knew we would fly them wherever they needed to go, we gave ourselves more time to make them better; but easily done right after CNY to remain on our original mid-March plan. Tukayyid maps… Posters… Patches… Still good! That is where we were. Mid-March might become late March only because we got such a late start on the Canon Characters, and we wanted to get one hundred of them into two of the Wave 1 MechWarrior Pilot Decks, but that was it.
All on target. Feeling really good about ourselves and laughing at everyone who said we should plan to ship Wave 1 next September!
But without the plastic miniatures, not going to happen.
We yelled a little. We twisted arms a little. And we know our primary rep at the factory yelled a little and twisted arms a little; trying to move that back up. This is unacceptable. That was the message we got in early-January, and why we waited an extra week (and more) to announce the delay, hoping… But then the message came down a week later: There is no choice.
April 20th.
F#@&!
So now what?It’s frustrating to know we could have made a late-March date for the beginning of Wave 1 fulfillment, and in the grand scheme of things being about 45 days behind—for the crazy size of this Kickstarter—still feels pretty good. There may be some backers who feel different, but we still remember having to cut off offering new ForcePacks and limiting other physical items during the campaign just because of the insane development and production time it would take. Putting pressure on our 3D modeling team. Trying to budget and schedule a suddenly white-hot BattleTech line.
But just because we have resigned ourselves on plastics not being ready until April 20th doesn’t mean we can breathe easy. We plan to stay on top of each vendor, making sure all other rewards remain on target. We can tweak a few last things into place from a quality standpoint. And we still need to close the pledge manager, get a final count on some of our more mercurial SWAG gear, and work with Quartermaster Logistics to prep one of the most option-heavy shipping plans ever.
Most items are scheduled (now) to ship toward the worldwide Quartermaster hubs between late February and mid-March. Everything will be in place by mid-April, waiting on the miniatures. Maybe we get lucky and the ForcePacks ship ahead of schedule. Maybe. With the coronavirus rampaging through China, we are really just hoping things don’t slip again.
When they do ship, we expect the hubs in Asia and Australia to receive those final pieces within two weeks. The EU will be about one week later. And the US and Canada a week after that. If there are reasonable options to expedite the freight, we will take them. It’s a big campaign with a lot of rewards, but we hope to see the end of all Wave 1 shipping on or about May 31st. That is an estimate, of course, and as we learn more from Quartermaster, we will keep everyone apprised.
As long as we are on the subject…There isn’t much more to say about the campaign schedule, but we can finish with some overall news on the health of BattleTech.
As mentioned above, the fourth printing of the Beginner Box and third printing of the Game of Armored Combat arrived at the warehouse last week. That’s over 40,000 box sets sold through and 15,000 more box sets just now heading out in the market place. All within less than twelve months! That is something we are very proud of, and a strong indicator of the market’s current excitement for BattleTech.
Also, the third printing of TRO: Succession Wars and second printing of TRO: Clan Invasion just hit our warehouse. The second printing of MapPack: Grasslands and a retailer-release of two Alpha Strike Decks (Succession Wars and Clan Invasion) are on a ship. And, finally, as you can see in the photo below, we’ve received proofs for the third printing of the BattleMech Manual, second printing of Alpha Strike: Commander’s Manual, second printing of the vintage cover Total Warfare (sixth printing over-all), second printing of a vintage cover TechManual, and the first printing of the twin, vintage cover Tactical Operation redesigns. These will all be shipping directly after Chinese New Year to be a part of the Clan Invasion Kickstarter.
Without a doubt, it’s the largest set of reprintings for BattleTech in twenty-five years, and might be the largest set of simultaneous reprints in BattleTech’s history.
