Hey guys, managed to crawl back to this board after many years a little wiser and lot more jaded. Following along your conversation here, I think the real problem is that if we want to continue to do projects like BTSD or other alternate timelines set in early Succession Wars period, we have to ignore a lot of the canon that has been written on the subject. No offense meant to the authors of all the Historicals covering the period from 2764-2864, but those books managed to destroy a lot of mystique of the subject matter they covered. Not only did a lot of those works manage to contradict earlier source material (a retcon by any other name), they were very dry in how they covered a conflicts, and the order of battles for the armies were very unimaginative. I remember reading a comment by Herb many years ago along the lines that this only made sense because the Star League was as 'boring as a church', and those units were only as interesting as when they finally were destroyed. It was something along those lines, very condescending in tone and made me wonder why so much ink was split if that was the view of the creative staff.
Okay, maybe I do mean some offense to those guys. It's been a hard year.
Let's put it in these terms. In the past decade, BT has gone from a setting that went from 'quirky, but functional' to desperately needing a reboot to make the setting work again on any level. Official BT is simply not much fun these days, and anything we could come up with could not be much worse than the bland, heavily regulated product that manages to jettison all of the cool little features that gave the story its charm while seeming to maintain illogical rules that even the developers themselves hate but will not overturn.
What I'm saying is, if we were to try something like this again we need to do something because it broadly fits into what made old-school BT awesome, but works for us with all of the developments we have experienced in the past couple of decades.
As an aside, my opinion is Empires Aflame was the best product put out by CGL in the past decade in part because it played with the rules a little more loosely, and even the writers seemed to have more fun with it. Too bad they seemed to not have really learned anything from it and if anything doubled-down once they went back to canon.
