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I agree that KoW could use a boost. It's amazing what a window of opportunity they've had, but I'm not sure they've maximized it. I know the rules have sold like crazy, but I'd love to support them more. I was actually expecting a KoW Kickstarter for some more models / armies... and instead we've got things in completely different genres.

I know these other campaigns have likely been in development, but Mantic is small enough that they should be more agile. I'm all in on KoW, but AoS is picking up steam and they need to seize their chance while it's still there to get very established.

There's more stuff coming. In terms of models I don't know how and when (not that I could say if I did, but anyway) but there's a few bits and pieces that haven't been seen in public for sure.

There's multiple supplements in the works for KoW, first one (not news obviously) Historical in autumn and we've got briefs for 3 more books, each of which brings something different to the table.

The current kickstarter should be that KoW Mordheim/Deadzone game that's supposed to fund more plastic troop sprues for all the armies. NOT Dreadball Kickstarter 187: Ball Dreadier.

AoS just put out some sort of year-late points system. Mantic needs to keep striking this iron, and occasionally put it in the forge to keep it hot.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:

 ShireGuy wrote:

On a different note, is there any rumblings on what is on the horizon for KoW beyond the army list supplement? Or is the kickstarters for Deadzone/Warpath and Walking Dead gonna hog the rest of the year.

Speculation: Well, Deadzone is finished and things will be leaking out at retail. Warpath looks like they've done 'enough' to warrant finalising it all despite a lot of apprehension on backers' behalf on Firefight. It seemed a lot of Walking Dead was done before they got the license.
Dreadball KS is live now.

I hope Mantic spend the rest of this year making some non-KS figures for KoW to surprise us with. AoS seems to be finally catching on now and KoW needs a boost again to keep it at bay. I also hope that even if Warpath is done, the Firefight rules are worked on enough to get a fab game - even if it comes out late with the GCPS models.

I had meant that the Walking Dead/Warpath kickstarters hitting retail, but Baragash has said there's more KoW stuff on the way.

I do agree that Mantic should strengthen KoW with releases now AoS has found its footing.

Well, to be fair, they are about to release the T̶o̶m̶b̶ ̶K̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ Empire of Dust stuff which is a good example of both agility and striking while the Iron is hot when you take into account lead times on production. (And better yet, it's not kickstarted!)

Yeah, I mean this time last year, or just after the KS whenever that was, people were begging them to never run a KoW KS ever again, and just do a regular retail release schedule.

Mantic are going to keep running Kickstarters I think and if they are, one should be for KoW! I think this is a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity for them, and they should be throwing everything they've got at it (including a KS if it makes sense).

 RiTides wrote:
Mantic are going to keep running Kickstarters I think and if they are, one should be for KoW! I think this is a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity for them, and they should be throwing everything they've got at it (including a KS if it makes sense).

I'd like to agree, but they already had a great 'Once in a lifetime' opportunity with Warpath now that 40K is a mess and well...

I guess there could be a Twice in a Lifetime opportunity here though!

And I hope so - as AoS isn't for me...

The opportunity frittered away with Warpath is really disappointing.

Kings of war is still a growing game, it just needs a steady stream of models, or nobody is going to be interested in Mantic's armies.

What's the frittered opportunity with Warpath? The mass battles rules are really great, though I have not given the Firefight rules much of a glance.

 Polonius wrote:
The opportunity frittered away with Warpath is really disappointing.

Kings of war is still a growing game, it just needs a steady stream of models, or nobody is going to be interested in Mantic's armies.

There has been a steady stream of models though, there's been a bunch of non-KS stuff come out since 2nd launched, plus the entire Empire of Dust range, plus extra optional books like the WHFB refugee armies, the DS crossover campaigns, and some more being worked on. Proceeding pretty much as it ought to.

Indeed, there has been a kinda steady stream of models IMO.
I think many of the non-KS minis for KoW that Mantic has put out recently has flown a bit under the radar for many.

In addition to the recent empire of dust line there's been Zombie Trolls, Wights (monstrous infantry sized), Centaurs, Elementals, Treekin, a bunch of heroes etc.

I believe the increased attention that a KS campaign can bring is actually a significant part of the reason why Mantic is so reliant on using them.

I would not mind seeing a small Kickstarter with each expansion book for Kings of War, to, well, Kickstart any new armies in the books.

I love Uncharted Empires - and having the armies available for the Trident Realms and Night Stalkers could have brought in some customers. (I am facing a Twilight Kin/Night Stalkers army tonight - I have high hoped that I will lose.)

The Auld Grump

Night stalkers do seem really cool and popular, plus it is their own army and not an inherited one, so they can go nuts with it! I'd love to see some models for it, especially as they aren't many available elsewhere.

Hey guys, we need your thoughts here!

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/697875.page#8804166

I'll copy the post below as well, but please reply at the above link if possible - we need to figure out what to do about the KoW section on Dakka!

Thanks for any thoughts and ideas

 RiTides wrote:
Hey guys,

I've noticed that since we made a dedicated Kings of War section, we actually have less activity here. I'm wondering why that is and if there's anything we can do to attract more KoW posters?

Right now, it feels like we have a lot of players on Dakka, but they're not reading and posting here.

Share your thoughts and we'll see what the best course of action is!

Cheers,
RiTides

Once the Mantic subforum split I kind of stopped going to it.

Still appears to have an order of magnitude more activity than the vast empty expanse that is the Medge subforum.

That's why I'm asking - I was all for a KoW forum, but if I was wrong and it's better to have it be mixed Mantic we could change course!

However, I'm not sure that's it alone because the Warmachine section is very bare and there's absolutely tons to talk about for it with the new edition, and it still has its own section just like before (same might be said of MEdge but to a lesser scale, of course).

My thinking was that perhaps we should be driving traffic to these areas somehow, as for KoW we probably have one of the biggest playerbases on the net, but they're not reading/posting.

Any thoughts and ideas greatly appreciated - let's make things awesome so folks want to use it . Whatever that looks like!

Judging from the Kings of War facebook groups, a lot of the prominent posters there have negative feelings towards Dakka due to perceived anti-Mantic bias (Dakka is haven to anti-xyz bias, no matter what xyz is of course). Perhaps some sort of outreach to them by having a Dakka sponsored contest of some sort?

I wonder if a fair few of the contributors were people who were involved in a variety of mantic games, but not in a huge way,

so they'd pop in an post on something specific (eg why forge fathers are so easy to kill in dreadball when dwarves are meant to be tough), but then casually read/post on a number of other threads in the mantic section at the same time,

now it's all fragmented (or dedicated depending on you point of view) they just drop their post in the appropriate section and leave hence the lower overall usage

I also suspect a lot of the KoW people are still effectively WHFB refugees, so the supplementary chat about armies, world building, gods etc that would otherwise generate chat is still going on in the GW sections as that's what they're actually playing (just using KoW rules).

the few cases where Mantic has something different that people might want to chat about are either where they've gone most wrong in model quality (eg basilleans) or where it's just beginning to happen and there's not a huge amount to go on (eg nightstalkers)

I wonder if you might want to consider trying to pull in the painting/modelling stuff for KoW into the forum as that's something that there should be interest in and having their stuff in a slower moving section that the main painting section mght help pull in more viewers who would then stay and post

I honestly never scroll that far down on the page, so I forget that it's even there. Most things past the painting forums don't get seen by me.

I also mainly use the local FB group along with the main KoW FB page. It already has a community with members of Mantic involved in it, who reply and post fairly regularly.

It's just too far down, I only remember it exists when I'm scrolling to OT.

Thank you for the great ideas and thoughts guys - keep them coming! I really want to make this section awesome and more usable, and the very best way is to hear specifically what you want / what isn't working for you as it is. Cheers for the input so far

If a game system or company has its own sub forum should news and tumors pertaining to them go in their respective sub forum? I'm not on Facebook so I use Dakka as a news source so the KoW thread I'm most interested in isn't in the sub forum. I'll check the sub forum to see updates to the show off your army thread or if there is a rules or list thread that looks interesting or involves an army I'm building but that's driven more by happenstance.

 RiTides wrote:
That's why I'm asking - I was all for a KoW forum, but if I was wrong and it's better to have it be mixed Mantic we could change course!

However, I'm not sure that's it alone because the Warmachine section is very bare and there's absolutely tons to talk about for it with the new edition, and it still has its own section just like before (same might be said of MEdge but to a lesser scale, of course).

My thinking was that perhaps we should be driving traffic to these areas somehow, as for KoW we probably have one of the biggest playerbases on the net, but they're not reading/posting.

Any thoughts and ideas greatly appreciated - let's make things awesome so folks want to use it . Whatever that looks like!

Besides a combined Mantic subforum, maybe you can create a sticky thread with links to ongoing discussions or insert links in News and Rumors threads (opening post or during lively conversations) that point to relevant related threads. Not so much "take this conversation elsewhere" but maybe more like "as you can see here, Mantic has an issue with rules churn/marketing/art direction/lizard people." I'm not saying to truncate the conversations about new releases, rules or Kickstarter, but with Mantic a lot of old stuff comes up again and again in the News threads that could form the kernel of lively threads in their own right.

 judgedoug wrote:
Once the Mantic subforum split I kind of stopped going to it.

Same.

I have to third this.

Also, most of the current Mantic discussion tends to go on in their 2 (or is it 3?) N&R threads, since they're so heavily KS-dominated.

I think a more generic Mantic Games forum as we had in the past would be better than the status quo. Breaking off WHFB and 9th Age into their own forum separate from AoS seems to have worked, but notsomuch the Mantic stuff being scattered to the winds between a whole lot of different forums..

Another vote for recombining the Mantic forums. Together, they had enough traffic to be interesting. Seperately, you just lose too much traffic. Plus, theres all the overlap between games. Dreadball, Deadzone, Warpath, Firefight, they can all overlap. Same with DS and KoW, though to a lesser degree. Having them all together means its way less of an issue deciding where to post stuff. As it is, where would I put a campaign spanning multiple systems, for instance? Or just generic questions about the models? Its not a huge obstacle, but you dont need huge obstacles to prevent posts - quite small ones will do. :/

 Azazelx wrote:
I have to third this.

Also, most of the current Mantic discussion tends to go on in their 2 (or is it 3?) N&R threads, since they're so heavily KS-dominated.

I think a more generic Mantic Games forum as we had in the past would be better than the status quo. Breaking off WHFB and 9th Age into their own forum separate from AoS seems to have worked, but notsomuch the Mantic stuff being scattered to the winds between a whole lot of different forums..

I do find the KS angle to be very true, as from a basic viewpoint, once Mantic starts a new Kicksterter, all the other games basically have very little to no information till they are remembered again by Mantic.

I liked the single Mantic area; I could contribute to whichever threads I liked. Now all I see is KoW and nothing else, and I've kinda just not bothered; some days I wanna discuss KoW, some days I want to discuss DZ, other days WP. But having them altogether helped, fragmented feels disjointed. I didn't like the change. And it didn't grow on me.

Thanks for the great feedback guys! We're discussing more specifics in the thread in the KoW section linked to above Link

This is very helpful and I'm going to see if there's a few suggestions to run up the chain as a result. Stay tuned!