Bonus Video: Thunder Running the Milk Run (Patreon)

This week, we're going back to Mission 6 of the Semper Fi Syria campaign. I thought the Syrian defence in this mission had a pretty good setup but it didn't really get a chance to do anything because I methodically peeled it apart.

So the question is... how well will the Syrians do if I take a much more aggressive approach?

That's the Combat Mission mechanical side, on the video production side this is a bit of test of whether or not I can up the production rate. Generally speaking, although the time per video obviously varies depending on the content, I am consistently getting one out a week.

These are all heavily scripted and edited videos though. Simply sitting down and recording while I play with minimal editing (usually just glossing over interruptions and, inevitably, the dog) is an order of magnitude faster: hours, rather than days.

So I want to see if I can start generating some bonus content: alternate playthroughs like this one, missions with a twist (I've got an interesting one with leadership tests already done) or more straightforward general commentary (suppression in games?).

Incorporating an extra 'quick' video a month into the schedule should be pretty straightforward and give me a slowly expanding stock of bonus videos I can feed into Youtube when I get a gap.

It's also an opportunity to slot another tier in on Patreon (and on Youtube, come to think of it). Both platforms are pretty adamant about having multiple tiers and while I want to keep things as simple as possible, the channel is going to be switching over to monthly billing at some point (Patreon is dropping support for per video billing- don't worry, there shouldn't be any meaningful differences) and it seems like an opportunity to give it a go.

A final element I'm giving a go here is the video upload. Vimeo is really good, but the main reason I went with when starting out was that I needed somewhere to host videos that wasn't Youtube. You can now upload videos directly to Patreon, so we're trying that feature out this week.

We'll see how it compares to Vimeo: if Vimeo is superior, then we'll stick with that. If Patreon is not meaningfully different then it makes sense to keep everthing in one place, not least because Vimeo isn't free.

So, a pretty big chunky experiment this week (some holiday this is!), but I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys think.