netepic wrote:
With EW we have always tried to stipulate that 1mm = 1ft, but especially with the infantry it's hard to avoid the odd scale anomaly. The Khazari have to be doubly cautious. In theory the models should all be a uniform 5mm high.
Vehicles are easy to keep in scale though courtesy of CAD technology and the larger size in general.
That's fine, but with CAV it's a bit more complicated.
The original line came out with with Mech. There wasn't really a scale initially, but as infantry, tanks, APCs and aircraft were added, the game settled on 10mm, or N-Gauge, as the scale. Except that, like Epic, the aircraft and larger vehicles were made smaller to cut costs, and so these were considerably out of scale.
Later, Reaper went back and rescaled
some of the units - about 2/3 of the aircraft and about 1/2 the tanks. But, they use the same design, just bigger. This means that when you are buying online, you can't tell if the mini is old scale or true scale except for the price, and some don't have new true scale equivalents, leading to them looking out of place next to other aircraft, and to add further confusion, some later designs are only true scale. So, if you only see one type of aircraft, you can't always be sure what scale it is!
It was a similar issue to FW v GW Epic aircraft, except that both types were available for sale in the same place from the same company, and it was almost impossible to tell what scale they were by looking, and it would still be obvious when they actually arrived at your door.
Spin forwards to CAV:SO (third edition). Now, the announcement was that the CAV game and line is being sold to another company, which also produces a mech game, and these two lines will be merged into the new edition. Both sets of miniatures will be available from the Reaper online store, but the two ranges are at different scales and are very different aesthetically. On top of this, the CAVs will be rescaled to 8mm... but not all of them. Leaving aside the utter confusion about why 8mm (it's not even a recognised scale, doesn't fit with anything else and is yet another reason not to get into the game), this means that existing players will probably need to rebuy their minis to fit the new stuff and this will put them off, and new players are not likely to be hooked into a game that has already had two false starts, has been sold and is a minefield to actually buy.
The end result is a single range where the mech can appear at two scales - and you can't tell which is which - and the aircraft and vehicles can appear in two different scales.... but you still can't tell which is which!
If CAV were better managed, I honestly believe that it could challenge Battletech. The designs are just fantastic, the original rules engine was imaginative, fun and interesting, and it handled combined arms better than pretty much any other game out there.
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I think that Epic players know that GW won't support anything beyond the core games in the same way that Reaper fans know CAV won't be supported... experience. No matter how 'soon' things are supposed to be coming out.
