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I like the ability to go either cheesecake or non-baremidriff personally. I would think it would be better to make the 70k goal just to have a box of Rangers. Dual Kits are going to increase their cost per box meaning retail the dual kits are going to cost more to sell in all likelihood than if they had two individual units.

That said I'll be glad if it gets there for them. I'll probably be going back in because my Varangar KoW army isn't going to be a real project for at least a year between my lizardmen, beastmen, and dwarves.

I don't see how the expect this to do any better than last time. It's pretty similar, except with no chance of unlocking that second kit that they almost had unlocked last time. Adding crossbows and stuff to the kit at 70k is nice, but making it a combined kit seems likely to mean that it won't work well, because none of them will be posed like the might be firing a crossbow.

This was an issue with, for example, the GW Savage Orc box. It came with bows as an option, but the only way to assemble the models made it look like the orcs were going to use the bows to hit their opponents. There wasn't any way to make it look like they might consider actually using the bows to fire arrows.

The Frostgrave soldiers boxes solved the bow and crossbow issue pretty well.

re the image of the warrios - I think quite a few people - partly inspired by the Shieldmaiden bust they made hoped for something along these lines:



There are not many female warriors like her around and certainly not in plastic - I have "cheescake" / "Skyclad" warriors in my armies - be they Vikings, Nymphs or children of Bast - so the (lightly) armoured warrior in this theme appealed to me.

 Nostromodamus wrote:
The recent Oathsworn KS proves there is much demand for ladies in appropriate attire for combat. It would be a good route to take.

Yup. 1000 backers pledging for roughly 30£ on average.

Of course the market for RPG minis and plastic regiments is somewhat different but I'd think it's fair to assume at least half of those backers would have had an interest in putting in a slightly bigger investment for twice the number of models (with the majority being modular plastic) provided that the design appealed to them.

Not sure I like the concept of stretchgoals adding variant torsos and weapons to the sprues. Doesn't that mean that there are room on the sprues for these things no matter what, so if those stretchgoals arent reached, will there just be big empty sections? It feels kinda like day-one-DLC in videogames.

Tooling will be more expensive for those added parts, though - I don't think it's like day-one DLC at all! Having a packed sprue would be awesome, or a secondary sprue to add more weapon / head / torso options.

 RiTides wrote:
Tooling will be more expensive for those added parts, though - I don't think it's like day-one DLC at all! Having a packed sprue would be awesome, or a secondary sprue to add more weapon / head / torso options.

That's true.

It does make more sense to have the add-ons be separate sprues though. Otherwise you can't start designing the sprue layout until after the KS is done and you know what's supposed to fit on them.

Yes, odd they'd make halfway absurd shieldmaidens and then what appear to be way over the top warmaidens. Why not make the one completely boring while the rest of us have the warmaidens? Instead they go partway and offer sort of apology concessions? As stretch goals?!

Could be wrong, mebbe they've struck the perfect balance and this makes enough moneys that they won't throw another temper tantrum, take their ball and go home. Hope this lasts long enough to see what they're planning with the warmaidens.

I guess we won't know how "boring" or "exciting" these ones will be until we see actual unit previews, instead of that single and rather static render.

KS 2.5 will be launching on the 16th of Feb.


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1273312680/375078872?token=683d3e0f A link to the current "draft" of what it will look like, so if you have any constructive feedback let them have it!

It will be interesting to see how this one goes.

I'm still undecided on whether or not I'll back this one - again.

I'm leaning towards 'no' though.

Pass. I don't have faith in a company that doesn't have faith in their products.

I have a few hundred set aside for this..............

My body is also Ready!

I might be able to pitch 50$ or so. Since the last campaign some of my gaming funds went to buying other things, so cash is a tad tighter.

They announced the relaunch 3 days ago elsewhere, you'd have thought they would have announced it here as they were so active previously.

Think the guys have been working pretty much nonstop on the draft making sure it looks as good as they can. ill try my best to keep people informed but they spend most of their time on the comment section.

AdamBridger wrote:
I think when/if they relaunch they should just stick to funding 1 army at a time and try to get as many plastic kits out of it as possible. They should also with the stretch goals not go overboard with too many free rewards (not saying I wouldn't have wanted them if they were there) and maybe just have unlockable add-ons of individual characters or smaller units (monsters, cavalry etc) on the whole. Also maybe don't have non-model stretch goals back to back would help maintain interest. Having the stretch goals laid out 3-4 in advance would also help in keeping the total ticking over and give people something to aim for even if they next goal isn't to their liking.

overtyrant wrote:
They need to leave aside their ruleset for now and focus on getting there HIPS kits out, even if they have to do it one KS at a time. This way you can have market saturation with their lovely HIPS kits (hopefully better then Mantics offerings). And then when enough kits have been produced then you'll have your freedom to produce your own ruleset.

And that's what was decided at the end :-)

 scarletsquig wrote:
I can always buy them at retail, anyway.

This product will never make it through retail without crowdfunding. We will simply lose the investment we made.

 Azazelx wrote:
I know that Angelos feels that his resin figures are better then Mierce and AoW and even there we've politely agreed to disagree.He's hardly able to be objective, after all.

Fair enough, no? :-)

 Azazelx wrote:
The Mammoth is pretty special, though even I don't see the value in +50% for the howdah.

The howdah takes 3x times casting and 4x times packaging. The +50% is a fair cost in our opinion. :-)

Binabik15 wrote:
The polar bears woud've been 15$ a pop. If they come close to JAG's "Kraan on bear" for Mierce...droool.
Canceling this campaign, sigh.

They still are, we have pulled one of the bears much earlier on the campaign for you to judge for yourselves! :-)

 Theophony wrote:
Wonder if it really comes down to needing xxx money by xxx date and not having enough time to do a 30 day campaign?

Yes it does, funds must have been collected by mid/end March at the very latest, so we must also have time to sculpt + 3d print + mail the 3ups to Renedra for our production slot to move forward. Simple as that.

 Mymearan wrote:
It's hard to get an overview of what's available without scrolling down the whoooole page. Needs a smaller list with smaller pics of all the options at the beginning, like Mierce always does.

We have made two pics ("Pledge" and "Goal Stretch" Maps) available, it should make it simpler and easier...? :-)
(hopefully it's enough)

ArtIsGreat wrote:
Options are nice. Boring options less so.

Fully clothed warrior women fill a niche and that's one of the things people were complaining about during KS-2. We think we have found a way to make everyone happy.

Albino Squirrel wrote:
I don't see how the expect this to do any better than last time. It's pretty similar, except with no chance of unlocking that second kit that they almost had unlocked last time. Adding crossbows and stuff to the kit at 70k is nice, but making it a combined kit seems likely to mean that it won't work well, because none of them will be posed like the might be firing a crossbow.

This was an issue with, for example, the GW Savage Orc box. It came with bows as an option, but the only way to assemble the models made it look like the orcs were going to use the bows to hit their opponents. There wasn't any way to make it look like they might consider actually using the bows to fire arrows.

Fair question, only the kit you are referring to IIRC has bodies that don't have the modularity ours will offer, in this case the arms. We will post even more pictures during the next updates, this is a *very* modular kit and the reason we went with the 3D sculpting and sculptors who have worked for the giant manufacturer and have loads of expertise and personal will to make this an awesome product!

ArtIsGreat wrote:
Yes, odd they'd make halfway absurd shieldmaidens and then what appear to be way over the top warmaidens. Why not make the one completely boring while the rest of us have the warmaidens? Instead they go partway and offer sort of apology concessions? As stretch goals?!

Could be wrong, mebbe they've struck the perfect balance and this makes enough moneys that they won't throw another temper tantrum, take their ball and go home. Hope this lasts long enough to see what they're planning with the warmaidens.

We have listened to backers and decided this is a manner of pleasing more people and offering more to everyone, this time only in miniature rewards however.
People weren't interested in our rulebook, but we won't give up on it, simply we need to lay low for a while (couple more years apparently). A rulebook has costs (translator, editor, artists etc) and that's something we didn't get across, since some people insinuated we were doing it to stretch the funding. Absolutely false!

Did we drop the ball and go home to fast? Perhaps we did, but same thing happened to our KS-1, we held tight and delivered all the same. You didn't live through it and won't be able to understand how hard it was for us, making a mistake and relaunching ASAP was the best solution in our opinion. Time will tell I guess...

 Azazelx wrote:
If the campaign is relaunched with an expectation that it'll fund two full armies, or even one full army, it's going to fail again. And by "fail", I mean (probably) reach the initial funding goal but not everything that SW expects.. and possibly get cancelled again? That'll be in people's minds. It'll be a harder road next time as they've damaged their reputation and trust with people by cancelling a funded project. There were some very unhappy people and burnt bridges in the KS comments when I was following them during the immediate aftermath.

That's not the intention/expectation this time however. And the chances are ZERO as stated in our update #6.

 Nostromodamus wrote:
They announced the relaunch 3 days ago elsewhere, you'd have thought they would have announced it here as they were so active previously.

We wanted to do so earlier, but first we had to work on the draft itself, we are also responding to multiple messages and pm's and emails (all of which cannot be seen from the outside).

 Hulksmash wrote:
I like the ability to go either cheesecake or non-baremidriff personally. I would think it would be better to make the 70k goal just to have a box of Rangers. Dual Kits are going to increase their cost per box meaning retail the dual kits are going to cost more to sell in all likelihood than if they had two individual units.

Yes, but it also helps and minimizes storage and packing.
It will also reward more those who jumped in during the KS for obvious reasons :-)


And finally, the version of the twin-headed Dragon as one last thing before leaving, we will be back later tonight to answer any questions/comments you might have.




Thank you.

The Shieldwolf Team.

Isn't the dragon 28mm scale also? It says 54mm scale?

I imagine the 28mm one is smaller? I really have no clue lol

 Theophony wrote:
Isn't the dragon 28mm scale also? It says 54mm scale?

28mm scale and 54mm scale, the one shown above is the 54mm scale one we hadn't revealed.
They are the same sculpt and only change in size (thanks to 3D technology which we have started using) and we have posted it mostly to show what the miniature really looks like (mainly for the pm's we received about not liking/wanting the particular Dragon). Hopefully this will help them change their minds, otherwise we now have one more Starter Army (for a total of 3) + the Garrison Armies added to allow people selecting what they like without us having to do switches to their pledged rewards.

The 28mm version is already available & uploaded on our website
http://www.shieldwolfminiatures.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=93
while the 54mm will be made available in the next couple of months :-)

You misspelt mammoth as 'mamooth' in the pledge picture, shieldwolf.

 Ketara wrote:
You misspelt mammoth as 'mamooth' in the pledge picture, shieldwolf.

Errr.. I did and thank you for pointing this out, but the "misspelling" is done on purpose ;-)
We have secured IP for MammoOth as the wording of our unique miniature (we didn't know but others have secured Mammooth as their brand name for other things too!), so while everyone understands it's obviously Mammoth we can point out it's not the same and thus protect ourselves legally easier from any aspiring copy-cat casters.
I can't explain it any better and we don't know much about legal stuff but our lawyer here insisted, so...*shrugs shoulders*

If you notice anything you think wrong on our draft, please don't hesitate to point it out, we really appreciate the support! :-D

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:

Albino Squirrel wrote:
I don't see how the expect this to do any better than last time. It's pretty similar, except with no chance of unlocking that second kit that they almost had unlocked last time. Adding crossbows and stuff to the kit at 70k is nice, but making it a combined kit seems likely to mean that it won't work well, because none of them will be posed like the might be firing a crossbow.

This was an issue with, for example, the GW Savage Orc box. It came with bows as an option, but the only way to assemble the models made it look like the orcs were going to use the bows to hit their opponents. There wasn't any way to make it look like they might consider actually using the bows to fire arrows.

Fair question, only the kit you are referring to IIRC has bodies that don't have the modularity ours will offer, in this case the arms. We will post even more pictures during the next updates, this is a *very* modular kit and the reason we went with the 3D sculpting and sculptors who have worked for the giant manufacturer and have loads of expertise and personal will to make this an awesome product!

That a good point. If I remember correctly, the major problem with those GW Savage Orcs was that the arms could only be attached in one position, which I suppose was necessary because they weren't wearing anything and the muscles on their arms and shoulders needed to match up.

Will you have some images of the posed models during the campaign? Or the additional pieces to create the rangers? I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more pictures.

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:
Errr.. I did and thank you for pointing this out, but the "misspelling" is done on purpose ;-)
We have secured IP for MammoOth as the wording of our unique miniature (we didn't know but others have secured Mammooth as their brand name for other things too!), so while everyone understands it's obviously Mammoth we can point out it's not the same and thus protect ourselves legally easier from any aspiring copy-cat casters.
I can't explain it any better and we don't know much about legal stuff but our lawyer here insisted, so...*shrugs shoulders*

If this is not a joke at GW's expense, your lawyer appears to be giving you bad advice. Your specific sculpt is protectable, and already was, but the idea of a War Mammoth is not. Even if you do succeed in making sure any copycats call theirs a "Mammoth" while only yours is a "Mammooth", what benefit does it give you if someone searching for a 28mm scale mammoth finds everything except your model?

@AlexHolker
I honestly don't know, the agreement we have signed with the firm is that as long as we do what we are told, then for any penalties/issues the firm is going to be liable for all of them.

I will make a note to re-look into this however, as I said we know nothing of legal matters but asking another lawyer/firm can't do much harm, can it? :-D

@Albino Squirrel
We will be posting additional images to show how well these fit and the augmented modularity the kit(s) are going to offer, yes :-)

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:
Errr.. I did and thank you for pointing this out, but the "misspelling" is done on purpose ;-)
We have secured IP for MammoOth as the wording of our unique miniature (we didn't know but others have secured Mammooth as their brand name for other things too!), so while everyone understands it's obviously Mammoth we can point out it's not the same and thus protect ourselves legally easier from any aspiring copy-cat casters.
I can't explain it any better and we don't know much about legal stuff but our lawyer here insisted, so...*shrugs shoulders*

If this is not a joke at GW's expense, your lawyer appears to be giving you bad advice. Your specific sculpt is protectable, and already was, but the idea of a War Mammoth is not. Even if you do succeed in making sure any copycats call theirs a "Mammoth" while only yours is a "Mammooth", what benefit does it give you if someone searching for a 28mm scale mammoth finds everything except your model?

Much as I hate to agree with Alexholker, he's right. You were already protected against any form of recast, and 'Mammooth' just makes it look like you've misspelt it whilst excluding yourself from search results.

If it was some kind of separate concept, or strong IP you were out to protect, I'd understand. But a war mammoth doesn't really qualify there, it's been done plenty of times.

Just my two cents. I've no doubt you'll prioritise the lawyers opinion over this one (heck, I would if I'd paid for it), but I'm really not seeing the logic I'm afraid.

EDIT

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:
@AlexHolker
I honestly don't know, the agreement we have signed with the firm is that as long as we do what we are told, then for any penalties/issues the firm is going to be liable for all of them.

That makes more sense. So the law firm is going above and beyond in order to ensure that they're not held liable for any sort of legal fees. Doubtless they googled 'war mammoth', saw other companies have made them, and in order to pre-emptively head off any legal issues (with no understanding of how minuscule the odds are somehow would file over the name 'war mammoth') are making sure the odds are zero.

Usually that would be a good strategy with regards to IP, but by labelling it such, I fear it may actively hurt sales of the model when it hits the market, by pure virtue of the fact that anyone searching for a war mammoth won't see yours.

AdamBridger wrote:

The Heavy Skeleton Infantry and Death Deceivers were really disappointing. They are made out of some kind of white resin that is really rubbery and flexible. They are just so flimsy and breakable. Was expecting much better from these models.

Their newer resins (Orcs, Shieldmaidens, Mammoth) are far better quality than those early kits, so their resins in this KS would have been made from the better stuff. I noticed that Mierce has a gigantic Mammoth (or is it a War Elephant? howdah or not?) in their latest KS, which can only hurt SW due to their decision to cancel.

(deleted response to moronic "SJW" tangent)

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
The Mammoth is pretty special, though even I don't see the value in +50% for the howdah.

The howdah takes 3x times casting and 4x times packaging. The +50% is a fair cost in our opinion. :-)

Here's the thing. As a retail customer/end user/KS backer of a product, I don't actually care how much it cost you to produce X versus how much it costs to produce Y. I only care about value, quality and service. It seems that the howdah is something that's not going to provide very good margins at all compared to the mammoth, because the perceived value at the pointy end of the stick isn't there compared to the mammoth. Especially when we can make out own howdahs out of plasticard or balsa that might not look as good but will cost cents on the dollar. We can't sculpt our own Mammoth, on the other hand (generally speaking).

Or to put it another way. I could buy two mammoths with howdahs, or three mammoths and make my own howdahs. Or one mammoth and a whole lot more models (and make my own howdah.) Which one do you think people would prefer?

 Azazelx wrote:
If the campaign is relaunched with an expectation that it'll fund two full armies, or even one full army, it's going to fail again. And by "fail", I mean (probably) reach the initial funding goal but not everything that SW expects.. and possibly get cancelled again? That'll be in people's minds. It'll be a harder road next time as they've damaged their reputation and trust with people by cancelling a funded project. There were some very unhappy people and burnt bridges in the KS comments when I was following them during the immediate aftermath.

That's not the intention/expectation this time however. And the chances are ZERO as stated in our update #6.

That may be so, but as consumers we get lied to all of the time. Just ask Mantic. The fact is that by cancelling KS2 that had met (and more) of its target goal, you did lie to your backers, so a "fool me once...." reaction is inevitable. I've been a supporter of yours for some time, as you know, and I feel deceived and misled. I understand the logic of a funded campaign being more likely to attract more backers, etc, but the fact is that it was already funded and cancelled once, so...

Now if I'm feeling this way - someone who has been a supporter and someone who understands the "funded!" issues, then I'm sure others will be even less understanding. I guess we'll see next week. Or whenever.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:
Errr.. I did and thank you for pointing this out, but the "misspelling" is done on purpose ;-)
We have secured IP for MammoOth as the wording of our unique miniature (we didn't know but others have secured Mammooth as their brand name for other things too!), so while everyone understands it's obviously Mammoth we can point out it's not the same and thus protect ourselves legally easier from any aspiring copy-cat casters.
I can't explain it any better and we don't know much about legal stuff but our lawyer here insisted, so...*shrugs shoulders*

If this is not a joke at GW's expense, your lawyer appears to be giving you bad advice. Your specific sculpt is protectable, and already was, but the idea of a War Mammoth is not. Even if you do succeed in making sure any copycats call theirs a "Mammoth" while only yours is a "Mammooth", what benefit does it give you if someone searching for a 28mm scale mammoth finds everything except your model?

Alex is absolutely correct here. On all points.
If China or Russia recasts your Mammo(o)th, it's not going to matter how it's spelt, just as it doesn't matter whether GW call it an Elf or Aelf.

AdamBridger wrote:

I noticed that Mierce has a gigantic Mammoth (or is it a War Elephant? howdah or not?) in their latest KS, which can only hurt SW due to their decision to cancel.

Nah, we've seen the product. Comes more expensive (even at the KS discounted price) and doubt they can stock more detail than ours, at best they'll match it.
Concept wise we prefer ours but YMMV so no argument there. Also, no howdah version and (if KS-2.5 works out fine) no crew either.
That along with a couple more things... yeah, no worries :-)

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:

I understand what you are saying and I'm sorry you feel this way, honest. We however feel we have maintained a 100% transparent stance; because if what you say is true, then in the same line of reasoning we must have also horribly lied during our KS-1, claiming 5 whole armies instead of 2 this time, and the funding target there was 6 times lower (5K compared to 30K). The fact not a single person complained about that reassures us we kept our word and people knew what they were pledging for but we do assume responsibility for the miscommunication which (undeniably) did exist.
Confusing this however with the attitudes of other companies is unfair imo, we never promised anything to anyone and failed to deliver it, whether that concerns materials, communications, final aspect of product and anything similar to that. No, not even close.

No, the reasoning is quite different:

The difference is that the KS1 campaign wanted to fund 5 armies. While it didn't get there, it did allow itself to finish and provided all of the content that was unlocked. There's no lie or deceit there because when was funded got produced.

KS2 wanted to fund 2 armies. It funded the first kit, and was on the way to (probably) fill the second kit. It would still have only funded part of one army, but Orcs backers would still have gotten a bag of toys, and if allowed to complete, the campaign would have provided all of the content that was unlocked. Except it was cancelled suddenly. Well, suddenly to all of your backers. Therefore, what was funded was not produced for behind the scenes reasons - not meeting your backstage/hidden expectations while the existing backers felt that they had collectively achieved the main thing - the SM kit. Cancelling a $30k campaign while it was on $40k (funded at 133%) because it wasn't likely to make $150k or $160k by the end of the campaign is actually quite deceitful, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. That really is a promise that failed to deliver. You can disagree with me, but read through the comments on the KS page and even in this thread once the campaign was cancelled. It hurt your reputation, no question.

Speaking for myself, I was happy with the day 1 value, and I was happy even if it only funded the one kit.
On the other hand, I think the stretch goals were badly handled as I wrote several pages ago, as was the "treatment" of the Orc backers - in getting less than Shieldmaiden backers. Even if it would have evened out at $120k, that doesn't matter when a campaign is at $35 or $40k or $55k.

The other thing is that comparing you to other companies is just something that's going to happen, especially on Kickstarter. You actually delivered (mostly) on time for the first KS, but the "golden age" of Kickstarter is over. People are more cynical now. People are more cautious now. People have been lied to too many times. People have been burned too many times to take the promises of a new company on face value, and you are a relatively new, unknown company.

Look at CMON who can actually be relied on to deliver. Black Plague was supposed to arrive in December, then before CNY, then they missed CNY, which you'd think would cause a month's delay, and now the new guesstimate is August or some such instead of March-April. There's some dishonestly going on there with regards to fulfilment, no question. Mantic... well, despite the fact that you'd like to make much closer to their totals, look at how well their current "million dollar, one pledge level only, one shipping wave, no add-ons" is doing. So even the "big boys" aren't always truthful, and in Mantic's case, fail to make their targets (spectacularly in this case since they've gone to the damage control solutions of multiple pledge levels, add-ons, multiple shipping waves). Obviously I don't need to give examples of Mantic changing their minds, breaking promises, changing materials, providing garbage quality items, etc.

Regarding the impact of the Mierce Mammoth/Elephant. The fact is that most normal people (not me, then) probably only have space for 1 or perhaps 2 giant pachyderms in their armies. The point I'm making with that is that with your KS2 being cancelled, that would have cancelled some SW Mammoth customers that would now be buying the Mierce ones right now - because despite Rob Lane, Mierce have built a top-tier reputation for models over the past 3? 4? years that is way beyond SW's reputation...