I’d like to add some comments to this discussion. I agree with DrLarsen that the more compatible your pieces will be with the existing set of A&A sculpts, the more appeal they will have among A&A players.
I got to appreciate just how tricky the issue of compatibilty is earlier this year, as I was impatiently waiting for Europe 1940 to come out so that France would finally get a sculpt set. As a little exercise until August 2010 finally arrived, I went through my large collection of non-A&A sculpts and tried to assemble a set of pieces which could temporarily serve as France. Even though I have lots of sculpts from all sorts of games (both current and out of print ones, and including supplementary pieces like the full line of Table Tactics sculpts which were released prior to the newest ones), I wasn’t able to settle on anything which was fully to my satisfaction when used with the A&A sculps. Here are some examples of the compatibility problems I ran into:
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The A&A sculpts are detailed and are made from hard plastic. This material gives the pieces a solid look, and it can be sculpted at a fine level. The vast majority of the non-A&A sculpts I have are made of soft plastic, which in most cases has a glossy sheen (or in some cases a translucent appearance) which makes the sculpts look less solid. Most of them are also sculpted with much less detail, though I don’t know if this is a limitation inherent to the material used or if it’s just due to less effort being put into the sculpting itself. A good yardstick to compare the level of detail is the face of infantry pieces: in some of my non-A&A sculpts, the face is quite rudimentary. Of all the infantry pieces I have, the only ones which are made of hard plastic and which have the same level of detail as the A&A ones are the troops from The War Game: World War Two…but they’re the wrong size (a point I’ll return to later).
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The A&A sculpts depict Second World War units. That eliminates a large percentage of my non-A&A sculpt collection (which includes pieces going all the way back to antiquity), though there’s some wiggle room at the margins. For example, the “War : Age of Imperialism” game from Eagle Games, which is set in the late Victorian era, includes some troop pieces whose costumes would make them acceptable as colonial infantry. They’re made of soft plastic, however, and the detail isn’t as sharp as I’d like, and they’re not quite the same height as the A&A troops, and they’re the wrong colour: they’re more of a dark indigo than medium blue. Another example: Table Tactics has produced some nice World War I “rhomboid” tanks and modern Abrams tanks, which both look great and which are exactly the same size as A&A tanks; because they’re from different time periods, however, they look too antiquated or too futuristic when used alongside A&A tanks.
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Also related to the issue of what the units represent is the question of nationality. I already mentioned that the infantry pieces from TWG, although they are very well detailed, are too tall compared to A&A infantry, but there’s the additional problem that they all represent German infantrymen (regardless of their national colour-coding). This contrasts with the long-standing distinctiveness of infantry in A&A. The A&A games published after the Milton Bradley edition have included mixtures of nationally-distinct sculpts and of sculpts shared by more than one country…but even going as far back as the Milton Bradley game, all the A&A games have had distinct country-specific infantry sculpts (the two marginal exceptions being the use of Russian pieces as Chinese infantry in the original Pacific game, and the use of British infantry as ANZAC troops in the new Pacific game).
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Colour-matching is tricky. The original Milton Bradley A&A pieces (of which I own quite a lot) had colours which were for the most part incompatible with the current A&A colour schemes. Furthermore, the shades used in MB for a nation’s infantry pieces didn’t even necessarily match the shades of the same nation’s equipment pieces (for example, Japan’s troop pieces were amber and its equipment pieces were butterscotch). And most of the MB colours were, in my opinion, rather dull and sometimes even nondescript: the U.S. pieces, for example, were a kind of brownish green that I find unattractive. TT did a good job of replicating these colours in its original expansion sets, but this means that those pieces share the same colour incompatibility with current A&A pieces as the MB pieces do. The “More Colors” TT release, on the other hand, matched well the sculpt colours in A&A Revised (although, ironically, the British lime green pieces were never used by A&A again), so the “More Colors” release achieved the prefect combination of providing correctly-sized sculpts depicting World War II era equipment at a good level of detail and in colours matching some of the current A&A colours.
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Differences in size can look awkward with equipment, but can be acceptable as long as the contrast isn’t too great. Note for instance that some A&A equipment sculpts of the same general type – bombers for example – do show some small size differences, but still manage to look fine next to each other. This works because, in real life, units are built in different models having somewhat different sizes, while still falling within a general size range. (For instance, fighters come in different sizes, but all are way smaller than bombers.) Even minor size differences in troop pieces, however, can be fatal because, at that tiny scale, only tiny differences in height (such as those found among the A&A troop sculpts) look believable, meaning that they look as if they’re just caused by a difference in posture or by one soldier being a taller man than another. My sculpt collection includes many types of WWII infantry pieces, but few of them come close to being the right size and many are quite different (including some which are about half size). Some also have a more “stocky” build than the A&A ones, so even if the height and level of detail matched, they’d still look incorrectly proportioned.
So, to end where I began, I’d like to concur with the board members who’ve been expressing a preference for supplementary pieces (both from TT and FMG) which are as compatible as possible with the A&A ones. Sculpts which vary considerably from the established A&A sculpt set (in the various categories I’ve described) could have great appeal to other board gamer (for instance people who play Tide of Iron have been mentioned a few times) – but for the A&A market, a high degree of A&A compatibility would be the preferable way to go.