Jean Bart

Operational units are "supposed" to be new SA "personality/flavors" of a named ship that has already been done. It comes from RB's "Operation Rhienubung Bismarck and Sho-Go Yamato" from Set VI. They are not supposed to be a "card fix" of the original card.

RB did it because 1) he had to reuse existing molds for half the units in the last set and 2) set sales pretty clearly showed the "big iron" sold the sets and the Axis were running out of them.

We don't have the mold reuse problem, but we do have the same problem of the Axis not having anymore big capital ships. (And the Allies are almost out of them too now.) But they still sell decks. When I sell decks to my local club or to gamers at GenCon/Origins the first thing they do is shuffle through the cards and stop and look at the battleships. That is just the way it is.

However, the "operational units" slots have moved into some gray areas for sure. Although none of the Forumini cards are strictly "fixed" WotC cards, we have definitely targeted some the most extremely off-stat, off-cost units to get operational variants. This accomplishes much the same thing, but without replacing a WotC card. You still use either card.

I have opposed doing straight-up card fixes for this project and will always oppose that. Nobody on the original card deck team wanted to touch card redos with a 10-foot poll. There is no way to do it without making some subset of the board angry, and the card redo project of the land game clearly found out that it just sent a signal to the marketplace that the game must be broken. RB even led that effort. It was a marketing disaster.

By making Operational variants we are 1) keeping the number of capital ships up to a reasonable percentage of the decks and 2) have the flexibility to create a new flavor/personality of a ship without messing with the original card core stats.

So you can see why I dislike Akagi. That was an almost straight-up fix for the hull number stat and I am not happy about it all. Some of the members even wanted to keep the SAs the same! Someone besides me would have to make and print that card. Akagi is definitely walking on the fine edge IMO.

As for Jean Bart, I agree with mnn that we are closer to doing a refit variant than an operational variant with the proposal to make her a "what if" she had been completed in WWII. In that respect I think keeping the same stats as Richelieu (unless we can show the planned fit would have had something significantly different) and new SAs is the way to go. No muss, no fuss. She is Richelieu's sister ship for all practical purposes IMO.

So what is a "refit variant?" One of the earlier teams (I think for deck C) decided a sister ship (or repeat named ship) could be done as a unique card if the main armament was significantly changed. It was also decided that said ship would have a class limit of one unless more than one of the sister ships were rebuilt the same way. They would also get the year date of the refit. Overall, it was an evolution that I am also not very comfortable with, but that was the desire. I think we are getting too detailed and complicated with this stuff. I know we are running out of ships to do, but I think we are stretching too far and confusing people. It is beginning to look very arbitrary. Maybe because it is. At that point confidence in the project falls fast IMO.

The rest of the team and I had totally different dreams of the Akagi re-do. On the first or second page of the Akagi discussion I had to step away and let other people make the card.

I admit the two units I was okay with doing "operational redos" on were Hood and Bolzano. They were obsolete when they were printed. Even RB wasn't perfect. Every collectible card/miniatures game with multiple expansions has some bookmarks and some power creep. Intentional or not.  Jintsu was addressed by RB with Naka. He addressed several other early mistakes with sisterships. I was personally okay with making a new Hood and Bolzano because they were so off the track they were never going to be used and neither of them had a sister ship. Other than those two I was not crazy about getting into "redos." However, over cost/underpowered "bookmarks" are the easy ones to address. What do you do when you have an underpriced super unit like the Wildcat and Haguro? Just ignore them? Those units effectively block the creation of better fighters or IJN cruisers because they started out in the stratosphere of cost/power value. Even coming up with something "different but equal" gives one a twist in the gut since "equal" was already too high. There is no clean solution to that. We have tried to stay "just slightly under the curve" with IJN cruisers, but that is a very narrow space to try to hit. And we definitely have a spread of bullet holes around that little bulls eye. I have already written at length many times about the disaster that was the Wildcat. All I can say is that elephant in the living room has refused to budge. RB couldn't figure out a good solution and neither have we. We have all just made it worse IMO. But I don't have a good solution either or I would have pushed for it.

Using the jintsu over naka is like taking a 4point handicap on your fleet. Unless you really need night fighter and cant use agano at 6points less.

Theres no saving a unit that lays way outside of the curve. Either because of assumptions about the rules made by developers but proven wrong such as torpedoes, in overly simplistic interpretation of history such as the wildcat.

The japanese didnt have another historical large ship option. Akagi was the least in a field of bad options