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 lord_blackfang wrote:

It has an impact because non-USD Kickstarters do not support Amazon Payments. That alone would be enough to kill it for me - if I were inclined to throw money at projects with nothing to show but some big names from 20 years ago in the first place, of course.

Maybe if the KS was for a Jervis Johnson product. He hasn't done anything useful in about 20 years.

OHHH, I see what you mean. Yes, they are the _biggest names of the past 20 years_, yes. You are correct. The only way this KS could be more amazing is if Andy Chambers rolled in and developed some absurdly brilliant mechanic.

Sigh, being as this one doesn't accept Amazon payment, and only uses Debit/Credit, I'll have to pass. My bank won't let me make any overseas purchases with my card unless I call them first and unlock the card for a period of time, due to worrying that it's being stolen. I'd rather not call my bank every time I want to adjust my pledge. Maybe at the tail end of the project, after I can see what I want, I'll go in for a number that won't change, but that's the only way-can't keep calling and adjusting every week like I did with Dreadball.

Also, as I said in the now-locked thread, I'd need to see more models anyway to back. The models are the big selling point for me.

 judgedoug wrote:


OHHH, I see what you mean. Yes, they are the _biggest names of the past 20 years_, yes. You are correct. The only way this KS could be more amazing is if Andy Chambers rolled in and developed some absurdly brilliant mechanic.

As in Fanticide?

 Zweischneid wrote:

 judgedoug wrote:


OHHH, I see what you mean. Yes, they are the _biggest names of the past 20 years_, yes. You are correct. The only way this KS could be more amazing is if Andy Chambers rolled in and developed some absurdly brilliant mechanic.

As in Fanticide?

Ah jeez, I hope so, Fanticide is brilliant - fun, quick to learn, lots of tactical depth. I was mainly thinking of Starship Troopers, which is hands down the best system I've ever played by far.

He did Dust Warefare recently.

And Jervis Johnson did also do quite some good stuff during the last two decades. Just think of Black Powder.

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:

And Jervis Johnson did also do quite some good stuff during the last two decades. Just think of Black Powder.

I was mainly being facetious in response to someone basically claiming the GoA design crew are has-beens.

PS I love Black Powder. I rub my War of Spanish Succession all over it.

Amazed how quickly people are attacking this project.

Yes there's little solid evidence of what we will eventually receive.

But it's got good ideas, has some good people in the background and might not be totally original in its ideas, it's trying to do something.

Give it a chance, I am and I personally am not a fan of KS.

Easy to knock, hard to create

Magnamaniac wrote:
But it's got good ideas,

Yeah, getting people to pay you for the privilege of doing your work for you is pretty neat if you can pull it off. Are there any other ideas listed? Oh yeah, percentile dice and a vague mention of an action/reaction system.

Not that seeking player input is necessarily a bad thing, of course, but usually the designers show what they have so far and ask for feedback, not ask for money with vague promises of letting you design the game.

There trying to bring an online feel to their game. I think they have lots of ideas, but they want to know what the public want.

When they get the feeling they'll start moving forward. If I had the cash I'd splash it.

No better no worse then most KS

First of all, great to see some official representation on here! Hopefully it can be a useful forum for ideas, and also a good place where people can give some feedback to the developers!

I originally wrote this reply for the other (now closed) thread, it raised a couple of important points so I hope no-one minds if I post it here!

 scarletsquig wrote:
It's going to be interesting to see how they handle the "faction which wins the most games gets bonuses and new weapons to use and gets new models sculpted first" thing.

Won't that make the faction which is already the most overpowered, even more overpowered?

Or possibly lead to widespread BS'ing of the battle reporting from players who want to see their faction get the new shinies first?

On the first point, as we all know game balance is an extremely delicate thing - I can't possibly imagine that they would let the results skew the balance of a game in any one factions favour, especially if one turns out to be quite effective anyway. Like you say it would lead to a snowball effect.

I'm not completely sure but I can imagine it having less of a directly tangential effect. The following is just my own idea, based on other people's comments and some of the musings on the official forums, but here we go! -

Imagine for a moment (Wayne's World style fade-in) that there is a campaign taking place for 1 calender month. Results submitted determine whether the invading force take control of the planet or not - the next month battles fought between the various factions then take place with one side perhaps having control of the 'occupying' forces - this means that they have certain force options opened or closed to reflect the make-up of their army. The 'survivors' then fighting over the next month form a kind of guerilla-warfare style army, again with certain army options opened or closed to them - they might also have missions that reflect their status (destroying communication nodes, freeing prisoners, that kind of thing), while the occupying force might have the opposite (destroy resistance pockets, etc.) - Characters in use might also be changed, in the same way that Infinity changed 'Ko Dali' in the background once she had been 'mind controlled' by the enemy forces, introducing a new miniature and rules for her (as well as changing sides!)
As I'm sure you could appreciate the scope for this kind of thing is absolutely huge - the system designers will be able to set the theme to an extent, but then you could end up with a kind of feedback where the setting changes over time according to the results. At the same time however this wouldn't necessarily make the actual gaming element unbalanced.

Regarding people BS'ing the system I think this is always going to be a problem. The most you could do I guess is to have some kind of dual-registration system, with players accounts linked to email addresses or some such like, which while not preventing fake results completely at least might make it enough of a bother that it will prevent most of it. You're never going to eliminate it completely, and there will always be losers who get a kick out of pointlessly cheating the system, but perhaps even if you achieve something like 90% accurate results then that should be able to give a close enough picture to the kind of results people are getting - rather than some kind of Russian election result.

 Pacific wrote:
Regarding people BS'ing the system I think this is always going to be a problem. The most you could do I guess is to have some kind of dual-registration system, with players accounts linked to email addresses or some such like, which while not preventing fake results completely at least might make it enough of a bother that it will prevent most of it. You're never going to eliminate it completely, and there will always be losers who get a kick out of pointlessly cheating the system, but perhaps even if you achieve something like 90% accurate results then that should be able to give a close enough picture to the kind of results people are getting - rather than some kind of Russian election result.

Also limit the number of 'official' submissions per email account per week. For instance, only one pairing of two email addresses per week (so I can play three different friends - submit three battle reports that week, as long as they do as well to verify that it happened, and only a maximum of those three reports since I played only those three friends)

Kickstarter has been updated with some concept sketches of various evolutions of Pnahuman within the galaxy at large, there is also a feature on the background of the BtGoA universe for flavour.

Here's something of the art, its not much for now but its a good indication of progress:



Hope this gets some more backers interested!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2037958218/beyond-the-gates-of-antares

Monkey people and cat people. Is this going to end up being a kitchen-sink setting like Rifts?

I feel like that first one should definitely have the voice of Shere Khan from the Jungle book

I really like the idea of 'pan-human' - makes me think of some of the sci-fi found in some of the Peter F Hamilton books (especially 'Fallen Dragon', with its world of post-humans who had modified all of their genomes to essentially change themselves into animals to live in the jungle )

Also, here is a question for anyone reading it: What kind of pan-human could be created on a high-gravity world, where the inhabitants have to mine in underground caverns, drink beer and ride on trikes?* Hint: Look at my avatar!

* (joke )

I dont get the term kitchensink sorry? Its a universe with a vast number of evolutions from humans to varying degrees of Panhuman (differently evolved, all those pictured are pans), Nuhu (Higher Humans) and Pansims (evolved from apes) aswell as other species. This gives a fantastic scope for potential.

I'm watching this with great curiousity. I don't know if I'll have the funds available to back this, and not sure if I'll want to until I hear a bit more.

Personally, in regards to the minis, I want plastics....ALL plastics. Hopefully that's something that can happen via the KS campaign. I just personally don't like metal, and I really don't care for plastic troops and metal special characters. So, if we can go all plastic....I'll strongly consider.

But I'm intrigued. Definitely intrigued.

Well, at least they didn't call the NuHu Therians and Pansims Karmans.

Just kidding, can't wait to see where this goes.

It's from the phrase "everything but the kitchen sink" when you talk about overpacking for a holiday or something. I'm basically starting to wonder if the setting ends up being one where anything goes and we'll see rabbit people and dwarves and demons and space knights and tentacle beasts and so on and so on. Though they all tremble before the combined might of the Squirrel People Consortium.

I believe the concept is to try and keep it as hard sci-fi as possible and still cater to a large amount of variety within the game. Bear in mind these are very early stage concept sketches and that it could be viable to change, I personally am not a fan of catman but like what seems to be a staff weapon he is wielding, the entire right hand column however look well done to me and something I am interested in.

There's some more background on the species located here too http://www.darkspacecorp.com/the-game/factions/panhumans-pans/ - you beat me to it Melcavuk!

There is actually a mistake in this pic which I've just noticed - heads will roll! - and the concept at the bottom right is actually a pansimian not a panhuman

We're exploring ideas for what they could look like at this stage, the artists have a remit of - read the copy, come up with some ideas. Once they've done that we talk about the same things as some of you've just mentioned above - what we like, does it fit within the universe etc - then start refining the concepts into better shapes and features that will form some of the style guide for that species. Only once we've done a number of iterations of that will we be happy that we're closer to something we could make into a miniature. The panhumans are at a very early stage in this cycle

I see something good and I spread it enough

 Melcavuk wrote:
I believe the concept is to try and keep it as hard sci-fi as possible and still cater to a large amount of variety within the game.

I just read the fiction on the panhumans/pans and there's so little in there that's hard sci-fi, I highly doubt that's really the goal. Hard sci-fi involves attention to scientific or technical detail and/or scientific accuracy and plausibility. Instead we have the modern world swept away with an untold passage of time and a mish-mash of evolution, genetic engineering, military experiments to create super-soldiers and any other explanation needed to hand wave in cat people and monkey people and whatever other kind of people you want.

If you are using technology to hand wave and justify or explain away, it's never hard sci-fi. "Transgenic engineering in the distant past" and "remnants of military experiments to create super-soldiers" are just magic words that can basically be replaced by "a wizard did it."

There's nothing wrong with space fantasy, but let's call a spade a spade.

30 minutes of sketch work unfortunately brings me no closer to supporting this $500,000 venture than the "it will be great, just donate money and YOU can help us make it!", $200 starter boxes, $100 rulebooks, or kickstarter page plastered with old models that will be "repurposed".

I thought the half million dollars being requested was supposed to create new models? How am I supposed to believe that I am an involved part of the design process if they are reusing old models? I'm mostly just flabbergasted by the combination of high costs, high goals, and compared to every other kickstarter, total lack of substance.

I hope they step up their concept art and greens sculpting over the next 60 days, because unless they can meet the bare minimum of "having products to show you" that every single other kickstarter seems able to bring, I would feel stupid giving them my money.

I thought the 're-purposing' meant that certain models would be resculpted to fit the sci-fi universe. E.g. primitive blatting stick replaced with Phased-Kinesis Carbon Tube.

It is an interesting project. The writers have good form and I like a lot of the sculptors previous work so I've backed it as far as my modest funds allow.

I just hope this is going to be fresh and interesting. Mantic seem to have moved away from playing at not-40k to come up with some interesting takes on the various sci-fi races. It is going to be very tricky to come up with anything completely original but here's hoping.

At the moment we don't have a lot to go on but almost two months to get information should be enough to get some firmer concept sketches and background ideas.

I really do hope this project ends up being a strong competitor that takes at least some of 40k's space fantasy miniature game market share away from GW.

Sorry, agustin what about genetic engeneering is not hard scifi?

We are living in an age where scientists are already mixing the human genome with the genome of animals.

It's about how it's being used. The presence of quantum entanglement in fiction doesn't make it hard sci-fi just because current science dealing with quantum entanglement is cutting edge. Same goes with genetic engineering.

If I make a fantastic fictional element and then explain it by saying "quantum mechanics!" in a spooky voice, it doesn't matter what the words inside the quotation marks actually are: "Genetic engineering!" "dark sorcery!" "gamma radiation!" "demon summoning!" "nano technology!"

For something to be sci-fi, especially hard sci-fi, the science has to matter. it has to have implications that are actually important. And in fiction that's just there to support a miniature game, that's no easy task. The panhuman section scratches on the surface of soft-sci-fi when it mentions how the different group accept one another (or not, in the case of the religious group), but we're no where near hard sci-fi.

It's a fun form of space fantasy though. And I hope it does well going head to head with 40k as I prefer my space fantasy to not be mired in grimdark.

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:

We are living in an age where scientists are already mixing the human genome with the genome of animals.

However, lets hope that any suggestions of the 'pan-human-ear mouse' army are rejected....

I can understand why some people have been doing a spot of eyebrow-raising, whilst others have decided to adopt a "Hulk, smash!" attitude...

Speaking personally (which I try to do occasionally) I am excited by the idea of the project and the possibilities it brings - including the distinct possibility that it might actually work, by NuJingo!

I've made my pledge to the cause and am very keen to get involved in the concept stage; specifically character design, environment design and - who knows - maybe even a spot of sculpting or terrain building...

I'm more of a designer/builder than gamer, I suppose...

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:
Sorry, agustin what about genetic engeneering is not hard scifi?

We are living in an age where scientists are already mixing the human genome with the genome of animals.

We use genetic engineering to make an organism produce particular chemicals, not to play Doctor Moreau.