BattleTech: Clan Invasion Update

Catalyst Games zeigen neue Bilder der Minis aus dem Clan Invasion Kickstarter und geben ein Lageupdate.

Catalyst Games – Clan Invasion Update – ComStar Command Level II

• Kingcrab
• Highlander
• Black Knight
• Exterminator
• Sentinel
• Mercury

Greetings, Backers!

We know a lot of you are patiently waiting, and have faith in your Wave 2 product showing up. Someday. For you, we can report that everything is still moving forward, albeit slowly and with great frustration, and we hope to have more positive news very soon.

We also know that for a lot of you it’s all about information. What’s going on? Why are we still delayed? So we are going to do a recap and new update on the shipping issue below. Let us know if you have any questions.

Part One

Just to recap, when Covid hit, it caused a LOT of delays in China. Even though we had left a lot of extra room in our schedule, it apparently wasn’t enough. First, our factories delayed us until after Chinese New Year. That was frustrating. Then they rolled us back an extra few months as they supposedly reopened from CNY slower than expected. FINALLY, they declared us ready to ship at the end of May. A lot of our material made it onto ships, heading to our distribution hubs around the world. But not everything.

Part Two

Also during Covid, there was an issue of all shipping heading one direction, from China to the rest of the world. As the US also shut down all domestic distribution centers and warehouses, containers piled up for months. This has caused a global container shortage, with ships anchored in our waters here, waiting for empty containers to take back to China. Meanwhile, once China opened up again, they were producing product, even though there was less shipping than normal to carry it. We have had our product bumped off at least four different ships now, as all ships move to “premium service” only. And last week one of our regular port cities in China partially closed because of a new Covid outbreak, and the ship we expected to pick up our last two containers (on June 25) bypassed the port completely. Didn’t even stop. Abandoning thousands of containers–including ours.

All of this has caused an insane escalation in shipping rates as companies who can afford to do so pay extortionate rates to move their freight to the front of the line. A 40’ container cost about $6500 two years ago. Last year it bumped to $8-10,000.  Today, to rescue those two containers containing our Kickstarter product, we are paying something like $17,000. Per container! If you want the math on that…for something like A Game of Armored Armored Combat, that adds about 38% to our cost of goods. Or, put another way, eats away 20% of our gross margin. But we are paying it, because we believe we owe you the best resolution we can get.

FULFILLMENT DATES

Every time we think we have a handle on the schedule, the world shifts. All we can say is that we believemost product will be in hand by July 10th, and 100% of our product will be delivered on or around August 1st.

We are working with QML to determine if they have enough to begin shipping Wave 2 by the end of July, or if they feel they must wait for those final two containers arriving 8/1. At this moment, they believe that EU, UK, and AU shipments will begin earlier than the US, but the US will still get started no later than mid-August and delivered to backers before CGL heads to Gen Con in September. That’s a huge milestone, because if the backer shipments aren’t going out, we will NOT bring Wave 2 materials to GenCon, and that will also hurt the company, but less than it would if we were to break faith with you, who made all of this possible .

SHIP NAMES

We’ve had some backers asking about ship names so they can also track deliveries, and we’re happy to share what we know.

This is the best info we’ve been able to dog up about ships:

TAYMA V.0017W: Final ship to the EU

CAPE PIONEER V.888E: Wave 2 – Main Shipment to US

YM WITNESS V.030E: Wave 2 – Secondary shipment to US

???: Final Shipment to US, Rebooking

COMSTAR COMMAND LEVEL II

Time to show off another set of final production samples.

Link: Clan Invasion KS