Has anyone in the U.S. received their Fleet Boxes?

archon96 said:
im not gonna buy a bunch of squandron boxes to make up for the fleet boxes.

You won't have to - the fleet sets have started to ship this week, and will soon be as plentiful as the squadron sets are now.
 
archon96, I can understand your frustration. As noted above Mongoose is getting the pre-ordered Fleet boxes out. As Matthew wrote, this is a bumpier ride than Mongoose and ADB anticipated and we hate that our good customers got caught in it. Please note that Mongoose listened to you and knows there must be improvements.

When we re-launch, it will be done right. We'll have the supply of minis we need to get you what you want -- enough ships that are high quality so that you can spend your time blowing up your friends' ships.

Jean
 
I guess I'm going to have to wait quite a while for my recently ordered Squadron box (not pre-ordered), and even longer for a couple fleet boxes (again, not pre-ordered). I had only bought a Klingon squadron, not wanting to invest too much into the game until I got to play a few game sessions and decided it was a keeper. Then I was going to go whole hog and buy another squadron (Feds) and 2 fleet boxes.

I've got several potential opponents lined up, but they signed up for Fleet boxes, and who knows when they'll get those.

What a crappy situation. I think it would have been much better to have kept the original February release date, and not tried for a Christmas launch. In my experience, Christmas launches tend to be messed up due to rushing things. It probably would have been better to have stuck to the Feb date and used the extra 2 months to produce more minis and clean up the rulebooks better.

But that's behind us now. I don't envy Mongoose in this situation; too much demand for product that can't easily be met. Better that though than too little demand I guess.
 
Well, this is a very disappointing turn of affairs. I hope you manage to turn this around but I suspect there are a lot of let down people who won't be lured back when the game does eventually launch or re-launch, or whatever. This is a shame as the game deserves better.
 
Matthew,

On one hand you are saying there is going to be a major delay and on the other it seems you are saying that the Fleet boxed sets are on the way. If I did not order from Mongoose, but rather from The War Store, when can I expect that they will get product?

I am sure you are disappointed, but it seems that these types of quality/quantity SNAFUs are always happening with Mongoose. I was a huge fan of ACTA: B5, and for a long time it was my #1 game. I became an avid Mongoose fan and was for many years.

However, when you lost the B5 license, I took a long hard look at things and I have to say that my disappointment in Starship Troopers, Gangs of Mega City One and Battefield Evolution (those minis...awful) made me re-think my position on your company and I stopped buying your products. I still believe you guys make a great game but your quality control is very bad and your customer service, while enthusiastic, is not great at producing results.

Yes, I decided to give you another chance with ACTA: Star Fleet....how could I not?

When you inked the deal to team with ADB on a Star Fleet game....how could you not know that you were playing in the big leagues? We are not talking B5 here...and trust me, I love B5. This is the "SOURCE MATERIAL" we are talking about here. My advice to you is to make this right, throw more $$ and personnel at this and make your customers happy. If you do, the fact is you will be making money off of this system for years to come.
 
Totenkopf said:
Glass half full :D

The engineers answer - Glass 50% bigger than it needs to be.

So when are people in the UK who pre-ordered actually going to get their fleet boxes?
 
Lawdog1700 said:
Matthew,

On one hand you are saying there is going to be a major delay and on the other it seems you are saying that the Fleet boxed sets are on the way. If I did not order from Mongoose, but rather from The War Store, when can I expect that they will get product?

I am sure you are disappointed, but it seems that these types of quality/quantity SNAFUs are always happening with Mongoose. I was a huge fan of ACTA: B5, and for a long time it was my #1 game. I became an avid Mongoose fan and was for many years.

However, when you lost the B5 license, I took a long hard look at things and I have to say that my disappointment in Starship Troopers, Gangs of Mega City One and Battefield Evolution (those minis...awful) made me re-think my position on your company and I stopped buying your products. I still believe you guys make a great game but your quality control is very bad and your customer service, while enthusiastic, is not great at producing results.

Yes, I decided to give you another chance with ACTA: Star Fleet....how could I not?

When you inked the deal to team with ADB on a Star Fleet game....how could you not know that you were playing in the big leagues? We are not talking B5 here...and trust me, I love B5. This is the "SOURCE MATERIAL" we are talking about here. My advice to you is to make this right, throw more $$ and personnel at this and make your customers happy. If you do, the fact is you will be making money off of this system for years to come.


Very well stated sir!
 
Lawdog1700 said:
When you inked the deal to team with ADB on a Star Fleet game....how could you not know that you were playing in the big leagues? We are not talking B5 here...and trust me, I love B5. This is the "SOURCE MATERIAL" we are talking about here. My advice to you is to make this right, throw more $$ and personnel at this and make your customers happy. If you do, the fact is you will be making money off of this system for years to come.

ADB? Big League?! :roll: On Another board, someone made an outrageous claim that SFB players make up most of the starship-gaming public. Perhaps by sheer volume of rules and errata... probably :D

That's all we need - gamers giving Business Advice :lol:
 
Krunk I think he meant that doing a Star Trek game is big league because it's one of largest Sci-Fi source material out there.
 
Well this makes me glad I got a refund on my pre-order when I did as there is no point in promoting a game that people cant get minis for. I would like to see the book fixed as the sheer amount of errors in the ship stats will turn some people away. I know that's probably not going to happen as it has been stated that the print run must still be sold but sadly it WILL turn some people away.

It would be nice for some better quality control on casting because out of the 6 minis I have seen close up they all had some detail ruining flaws.

On another note the rush on SFB seems to have had an impact on NA as well as new releases and the long anticipated FotFS has been pushed back till when?????Hell freezes over? At least you had a line of product that was being pushed along at a good pace and a game that plays very well. Now its left to languish?

Well Given that I have pretty much everything that has been released for NA whatever comes along comes along. Eventually. I am sure SF sill get off the ground at some point but for the moment it is an unpromotable novelty game.

What a mess.
 
Im also kinda confused here.. I know its late, and I'm tired, but people are talking about re-launches and fleet boxes and squadron boxes delayed, being shipped and being on time.

I am, at this point, 100% confused. There is no sticky topic containing the Errata that is *DESPERATELY* needed to even play the game. (HUGE mistake.. ) Now people are referencing information that quite frankly, I dont feel like digging around for. Something like your post should be at the very top of the page, where anyone and everyone can see it plainly. Along with any relevant information about a "re-launch", the problems with castings etc etc. People shouldnt have to go digging around a forum which is all mashed together with various gaming products *just* to find out critical/vital information.

All I want to know is this...

I live in Indiana, USA. *If* (and its a pretty big IF at this point..) , on Friday, Feb 10th, I order 1 Rulebook, 1 Klingon Fleet, 1 Romulan Fleet and 1 Fed Fleet.. when would they arrive on my doorstep? A week? A Month? Sometime before Christmas? I figure as head of the company, you would be the guy to ask. But I know for a fact its a question on *alot* of people's minds.

Barring a solid fleet answer, what about 1 of each Squad Box.
 
I agree with you on this one, and not just for folks in the US. A statement from Mongoose as to what is going on would be very useful in order to clarrify what the situation is with the release of the fleetbox's

I was considering putting an order in myself however all of this is confusing me as well.

However just taking a chill pill for a second, considering the store only has the fleet box's as a pre order for a february release i dont really see how this can be considerd a delay. Why were people expecting there fleets by now? has there been some kind of statement from mongoose with a tentative release date or somthing?
 
Nazgull2k1 said:
All I want to know is this...

I live in Indiana, USA. *If* (and its a pretty big IF at this point..) , on Friday, Feb 10th, I order 1 Rulebook, 1 Klingon Fleet, 1 Romulan Fleet and 1 Fed Fleet.. when would they arrive on my doorstep? A week? A Month? Sometime before Christmas? I figure as head of the company, you would be the guy to ask. But I know for a fact its a question on *alot* of people's minds.

Barring a solid fleet answer, what about 1 of each Squad Box.

Squadron boxes, right now. Order them on Friday, they will go out the same day or Monday (depending on the time you order them), then as long as USPS takes to get them to you.

Fleet sets, we are working through existing pre-orders now, so we are looking at around the three week mark for new orders, potentially a few days more for the Romulans (that is to do with new moulds but the advantage the Romulans have is that a few of their ships will already be done as Klingons, and many of their designs are one piece castings which speeds things up a _lot_).

After that point, the fleet sets will be as the squadron sets are now, pretty much our normal 24 hour turnaround.
 
Lawdog1700 said:
I was a huge fan of ACTA: B5, and for a long time it was my #1 game. I became an avid Mongoose fan and was for many years.

That is appreciated, thank you.

Lawdog1700 said:
However, when you lost the B5 license,

It is important to note here, we didn't lose the B5 licence. Sales and general interest in the property had declined (remember, this was just after the Legend of the Rangers) to the point where Warner Brothers (very) hefty minimum guarantees of revemnue were no longer sustainable.

Could we have done anything to increase sales? We had already brought out more than 40 books and something like 200 ships, spread across 13 fleets. Sure, there were other League fleets we could have looked at, but nothing that could have reversed the general trend of the line. Another edition of the game? You chaps would not have tolerated that :)

People _are_ still playing B5 and it turned out to be a very complete game. You have to go a long way to find another space combat game that had as much material support, and we were running tournaments and campaign days right up until the end. We even got Claudia down :)

When the end came, we gave six months notice _and_ reduced the price on everything across the board so people could finish their collections.

Given all that, I cannot look at B5 as a failure in any way. It was a good game, we did just about every possible ship, and gave good warning of its closure.

Lawdog1700 said:
I took a long hard look at things and I have to say that my disappointment in Starship Troopers, Gangs of Mega City One and Battefield Evolution (those minis...awful)

I'll give you BF Evo - though the second wave tanks I would argue were damn nice. Did you ever see the Warrior? Beautiful model. The infantry... well, as I said, I give you that. We should have done a sci-fi range and not attempted modern camouflaged uniforms.

SST was an odd one. Looking back, our mistake was trying to expand it into something it was not supposed to be - a complete alternative to 40k. What we _should_ have done (with hindsight), was keep it more or less to bugs and MI alone, with maybe a sprinkling of Skinnie and not put resources into further alien races in an effort to compete with 40k. However, that was not what killed it. That came from a dispute between the Heinlein Estate and Sony, which embroiled Mongoose and caused the shut down of any and all development whatsoever. When that was lifted, we were left with something like 18 months on the licence and no guarantee it could be renewed. We looked at doing something with it in that time frame, but it was just not realistic.

Gangs is still going in the guise of the Judge Dredd minis game, which is completely free and has a far wider range of game play.

Lawdog1700 said:
When you inked the deal to team with ADB on a Star Fleet game....how could you not know that you were playing in the big leagues? We are not talking B5 here...and trust me, I love B5. This is the "SOURCE MATERIAL" we are talking about here. My advice to you is to make this right,

Heh :) Again, hindsight.

On the one hand, you are right, it _is_ Trek. So, when projecting how well it would do, we could always take our figures on B5, assume a slight decline in the market, but also a bump because Trek has to be more popular than B5, right? However, we also knew that Star _Fleet_ had not been widely played or sold in the past few years, so we had to take that into account.

We also assumed (quite wrongly, it now seems) that existing SFB/FC players would not switch game systems in large numbers, that ex-SFB/FC players would come back to Star Fleet in large numbers, and that even if they did, they would continue to use their existing collection of 2400's.

It looks like we could have been wrong on all three of those counts. Added to ex-B5 players coming back to ACTA (we figured there might be a few of you), plus a large number of people saying 'hey, a 'proper' minis game for Trek,' all added up to more orders than we had ever expected.

That, at any rate, was what we were thinking.

Lawdog1700 said:
throw more $$ and personnel at this and make your customers happy. If you do, the fact is you will be making money off of this system for years to come.

If throwing money and men at the problem would solve everything, we would have done it already. We have sat down and spoken with other miniatures companies planning similar ranges, and we are finding they are all hitting the same problems we are, from those a similar size to us, up to the likes of GW with their resin launches last year. We know what the technical issues are, and they have to be resolved before we can properly move forward - unfortunately, because of the nature of Star Fleet ships, they were unavoidable.

What we can do is support this range in a slightly lower key before we move ahead with a proper worldwide launch. We will keep you all informed of what we are doing here but, in the meantime, we are working hard to meet all existing obligations.
 
Matt,

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate all of your responses, and I stand corrected on the B5 license. Combining the ACTA system with Trek will be huge IF you just support it properly. I look forward to having my fleet boxes in a few weeks, at least the Klingons and Federation I hope.

Just help us out here. For me, all I can say is I just want to get nice ships and play your game and I have paid a chunk of money for that.
 
MarkDawg said:
Matthew you said that orders were 3 times the demand forecasted why do you think you guys were so far off?

He explained that that just a few posts ago:

However, we also knew that Star _Fleet_ had not been widely played or sold in the past few years, so we had to take that into account.

We also assumed (quite wrongly, it now seems) that existing SFB/FC players would not switch game systems in large numbers, that ex-SFB/FC players would come back to Star Fleet in large numbers, and that even if they did, they would continue to use their existing collection of 2400's.

It looks like we could have been wrong on all three of those counts. Added to ex-B5 players coming back to ACTA (we figured there might be a few of you), plus a large number of people saying 'hey, a 'proper' minis game for Trek,' all added up to more orders than we had ever expected.
 
Lawdog1700 said:
Combining the ACTA system with Trek will be huge IF you just support it properly.

By now, even we have figured that out :)

We believe (and I hope you will all agree) that, given this potential, it is better for us to meet all our pre-order obligations as soon as possible and delay the worldwide release, rather than limp on like a wounded, well, Kzinti. It also has the advantage that things such as the tournament system will be up and running almost immediatly upon launch.

So, we are left with a situation where 'early adopters' as we shall call them, can get hold of the models they want and start playing immediatly, whereas the world as a whole will remain in the dark(ish) until we are ready to fill the shelves of all retailers with Star Fleet product.

The next few weeks and months will be all about getting our ducks in line to support this game in the best way we can.
 
But the fact that people will be out playing your game with the new improved minis you supplied means that there is a chance the game will have more interest at the relaunch. It will be an interesting relaunch to say the least.
 
Back
Top