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Has anyone started painting these? I am having horrible issues with mold lines on these models across important details which are making me sad. Especially the mold line across the Orc left hand and nail. I am hoping the smallness of the models will hide the mold lines or damage to detail from cleaning, but I am very discouraged. Sometimes paint makes the flaws go away...

These strike me as 'board game' tokens, not to the standard of other miniature models. Even Triszin's photos show some nasty mold lines across detail which will be hard to remove.

I will spend the rest of the week inspecting and cleaning the models to see how much of an issue it is before I assemble anything with glue. I would have gladly waited to after christmas if the rushing had anything to do with the quality issues of the models.

They look to be about the same quality as PP restics to me, so of course they are terrible. :V


Mine seem decent. Not perfect, but not as frustrating as my corporation models. Of course, I've only barely gotten started, so check back in a couple weeks.

Maybe you got a bad batch? I got my Corporation team cleaned and assembled in 30 minutes. Almost no flash.

I have not had good luck with restic. I often end up doing a lot of unbending, cutting down tabs or joins, and spend way too long trying to get it to glue right.

But Mantic's is still much better than PP's in my experience, even if I still have three corporate types I just can't get around to.

My most recent PP restic models (Mountain King and Lightning Troll) are absolutely excellent. But I feel like the material lends itself to larger models better. Hoping my Nameless turn out fine despite the scale.

Fairly sure that the Mountain king is resin, and not Restic.

Or at the very least its not the same 'plastic' as the starter boxes and seems much closer to Wehrcast.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I have not had good luck with restic. I often end up doing a lot of unbending, cutting down tabs or joins, and spend way too long trying to get it to glue right.

This also seemed to bother me, as while I was cleaning mold lines, I was noticing very sloppy 'breaks' from the sprue which left damage on the model which shows they were not done with 'snips' just broken and twisted off. Personally, I like removing models from the sprue as I can take care to make it clean. While most of the break points seem to be on the Base, it may not be an issue, but with a round disc which I will have to 'paint' already going on a clear hex base, the point of the clear base is defeated and awkward.

I have also noticed when I tried to dry-fit models with their parts, the tabs often did not fit. I cannot get any of the orc heads into the orc neckslot. Some of the arm tabs for the goblins and humans also do not fit. I will probably need to do lots of shaving down. It is as if the material expanded and now the parts don't fit.

I am getting really discouraged over the quality issues with these models and I have only scratched the surface. I hope maybe I just got a bad human/orc batch and the rats and dwarves and MVPs there are less issues.

Strange - all my tabs/connectors fit quite well. Everything's assembled and primed already and of all the small issues I had, the tabs and breaking points were not one.
Flash was another issue. Especially the veermyn had mold lines running parralel to each other (really, how many pieces did that mold come in ?!?) and I did have to take a lot of care to not obliterate detail when removing flash, yes.
...detail is still better than conventional hard plastic models would have had; what little detail I couldn't save would have been the detail which a steel mold wouldn't produce in the first place (eg. on the sides of the model etc.) I think.
Bending wasn't much of an issue; I repositioned our nameless mvp friend because I didn't like the look of himleaning back that muchbut that's about it.
Generally speaking yeah, there's a couple of issues. Nothing I didn't expect at, what is at msrp, ~$3/model. It might take a little work (and really mantic, those orc guards? A little consideration in mold line placement would hve been nice - those took ages to fix!) but generally it works, and it works well.
...for someone with modeling experience, that is. Selling this to a "I hate glue/paint" type of board gamer, well, I'd say it'd be a daunting task for him. Then again, that's the kind of guy who really wouldn't care about mold lines in the first place so maybe it'll all work out fine, I guess

 Bolognesus wrote:

...for someone with modeling experience, that is. Selling this to a "I hate glue/paint" type of board gamer, well, I'd say it'd be a daunting task for him.

Yeah, I would have to say this is going to blow the lids off 'non-modeling' gamers the way SDE did. And they changed their model to pre-assemble the models in future boxes. (not saying that is required or should be done, but it does depend on the audience)

nkelsch wrote:

 Bolognesus wrote:
.
...for someone with modeling experience, that is. Selling this to a "I hate glue/paint" type of board gamer, well, I'd say it'd be a daunting task for him.

Yeah, I would have to say this is going to blow the lids off 'non-modeling' gamers the way SDE did. And they changed their model to pre-assemble the models in future boxes. (not saying that is required or should be done, but it does depend on the audience)

Well, to be fair none of the assembly was actually 'hard' to do, nor would it have taken me either a knife, file, or clippers if I hadn't cared about flash etc, so it's not quite SDE level bad (I remember HBMC fulminating about how hard some of those models were to put together for experienced modelers; that's not something you'll find here.

And anyway, with some of CMoN's stuff the paradigm for 'premium' board games is shifting towards 'some assembly required' anyway.

...I still think Mantic would have done well to supply different teams in different colors of restic, though. Hell, we prime it anyway and the non-modelling/painting board gamers would have had a way easier time with the game that way.

Cyp- Maybe you're right! In which case I guess only the Storm Troll (not Lightning Troll, although I keep calling it that) is the only one that's relevant. It's Much chunkier than I expect the Dreadball models to be, though, so probably easier to get right.

Looking forward to pics from those of you who have received your models

Ah well , finally got my hands on my prezzie yesterday and everything is ready to go. Apart from some re-bending for the Vermyn - two were nearly fat - not much cleaning up except for where the figures were taken off the sprue - by twisting?. Everything went together in a straight fowardway and using a little grey stuff in the joints allowed for a little variation without to much pain.

Everything has just been washed in soapy water an ready to be primed when they have dried.

The figures are nice if not spectacular but I am tired of people saying they are small, no they are in scale its GW's horrible "heroics" that put everyone out. Once painted I know they will look fine on table

Still to fix up the MVP's but Wildcard is the one disappointment and I am considering an overhaul, either bending where possible or some resculpting of my own - sorry the pose just does not work. John Doe is nice but I might tweak the outstretched arms a little to have them clutching slightly as they look a bit static at the moment .

All in all I think DB is great value figure wise but the game is really what counts and having got a dozen games in now - thanks to my mate's set - it is everything I had hoped for fast tactical and exciting to the end - most of our games have gone down to the last one or two rushes so far.

Well, I guess my review will be much of the same stuff. I was a little disappointed with the plastic they used, it seems fairly low quality and is much like plastics in any other board game where they are merely playing pieces as a pose to good sculpted models.

Assembly was also a surprise, not everything is just snap-fit (which one would expect for a board game). Glue is necessary as are clippers which could be quite off putting to a non-wargamer.The lack of any kind of assembly guide also had even myself confused for a moment.

The box itself looks very professional with a nice shiny front, it did have a couple of serious bashes in the side but that does not bother me. Poster was nice, though a gloss finish would have really made it nice.

Overall, the game plays well, models are nicely detailed despite the mold lines which take a significant amount of effort to remove, even Wildcard looks really good in person, pose works for me anyway! All the freebies were great except the trophy thing which looks like it was sculpted in 5 minutes.

I think with a good lick of paint this can be a really great looking game!

wilycoyote wrote:
not much cleaning up except for where the figures were taken off the sprue - by twisting?.

I am super annoyed by this particular issue. This is quite possibly the most damaging and unreasonable way to get models off a sprue. You can leave a divet of damage on the model this way.

Can they really not afford 2$ snips to cut the plastic off the sprue?

The worst thing about the clear bases is that one of the edges has a giant destroyed mark from where some fo the bases were twisted off the sprue opposed to snipped.

I expect that from 'board game' tokens, not modeling miniatures. If they were going to be tokens, at least they could have done is make them in team colors so you can easily play without paint and treat them like tokens.

I finally finished cleaning the flash off the orcs and Humans, now I am on to my Veermyn which have horrible lines on the tails and are all in need of 're-bending'. I feel like I cannot repair the tails without losing detail which is making me upset.

I haven't even attempted to consider mold release agent. Can someone confirm if these need to be washed and to what degree?

I'd always wash anything before painting mould release agent or not as your fingers can put enough oil on things while cleaning them up to make painting less effective.

Just ordinary dishwashing detergant in warm water should be fine.

I found the tails on the veermyn responded very well to scraping with a SHARP hobby knife and easily cleaned up with no loss of detail

(although the degree of flash did vary and if your tails had as much as I saw on one of my Orx it wouldn't work)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
looking at the marks on some of mine I'm not sure if they were twisted off (except the hex bases),

I think the machine pulled/cut them off while the plastic was still not fully set

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I'd always wash anything before painting mould release agent or not as your fingers can put enough oil on things while cleaning them up to make painting less effective.

Good point, I usually don't wash plastic models, but I suppose it can't hurt 'post assembly' to give them a good wash before priming. As long as I know I don't have to wrestle with really extreme release agent, it is all good.

 Commander Cain wrote:
Well, I guess my review will be much of the same stuff. I was a little disappointed with the plastic they used, it seems fairly low quality and is much like plastics in any other board game where they are merely playing pieces as a pose to good sculpted models.

prime them and start painting. Really, both for mantic and PP their restic looks bad until you start painting. it holds quite a lot of detail - more than most polystyrene sprued kits from GW for example. It just has a nasty 'shine' to it which can be quite misleading in that regard!

nkelsch wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I'd always wash anything before painting mould release agent or not as your fingers can put enough oil on things while cleaning them up to make painting less effective.

Good point, I usually don't wash plastic models, but I suppose it can't hurt 'post assembly' to give them a good wash before priming. As long as I know I don't have to wrestle with really extreme release agent, it is all good.

Your best of washing every model before painting, its a good habit to get into.

 porkuslime wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Does the box naturally come with 48 hex bases? I ask because I bought a set of 48, and my box only had 48, but some of the posts here make it sound like the box is supposed to come with enough hexes for all your players.

EDIT: Also, would Proxie Models' hex bases work on the Dreadball Pitch?

Don't know yet.. just ordered a pack of Proxie hexes to find out.. will let you all know when I get them...

And.. I have the Proxie Hex bases in hand.. the Dreadball clear hex bases sit well right on top of the Proxie bases. There is a tiny lip to the hex bases, and the Dreadball clear bases fit EXACTLY inside that rim. It is scary how well they are compatible.

It will be a day or 2 before I can take a picture through.. sorry on the delay.

Looking forward to the pic, thanks for the info porkuslime

(And how dare you not be able to immediately take a pic over the holiday week )

For you, RiTides.. I stayed awake to take the photos..





I think I will be using a bunch of these hex bases to make my own custom pitches..

Sweet, thanks for the pics!

And using them to make a custom pitch is a great idea... at Proxie Models' prices, it's even one of the more affordable ways to do it

Alright, I'll own up to my mistake. I was ...mostly wrong about Wildcard. Mostly.

That's about as far as I'm willing to go on this apology.

The pose actually does look dynamic and make sense in real life, even if her left arm is still a little low. (I plan to fix it with hot water.) Her torso looks fine, with a fully functioning spine. The throwing arm is actually quite well done, and from the proper angle her pose looks like one Stan Lee himself would have approved. She's one of the few models with a pose as dynamic as I like, thanks to the book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way ruining me on "normal" and "possible" heroic stances.

Which just goes to show that Mantic needs a real photographer. And a better painter. The online photos of Wildcard misrepresented her sculpt on the same level as GW's 'Eavy Metal team's work on the Minotaurs. I'm talking "corporate wonders why this line was never successful" levels of failure here.

Anyway, I apologize for all the crap I've given the Wildcard sculptor over the months.

Now, I just need my Buzzcut model so these crazy kids can finally get their 'ship a-sailing!

Buzzcut and Wildcard forevez!
Buzzard!
Kawaii!
^__________________^

I know this is a Mantic thread for dreadball, but Cyp-- did your storm troll feel like it was made of a different restic than some of the previous stuff ? I also picked up a new restic pyre troll, and it definitely feels different.

Thanks to everyone for the updates on this. I was considering picking this up but some of the valid criticisms here are swaying me otherwise. Appreciate that :-)

Cincy, I'm the opposite- I was considering Not getting it, and the good reviews have swayed me some the other way...

I'm not sure if Cyp has the Storm troll but I do will compare when I get the chance.

 RiTides wrote:
Cincy, I'm the opposite- I was considering Not getting it, and the good reviews have swayed me some the other way...

I'm not sure if Cyp has the Storm troll but I do will compare when I get the chance.

I've read some solid reviews about the game, but I just keep seeing issues regarding the minis. :-/

Minis are really nice, just putting my humans and orx together now and they fit easily with very little flash or scraping needed - did pretty much the whole box in an hour and even did a little bit of chopping of arms so there would be a bit more variation in the poses

 Pacific wrote:
Minis are really nice, just putting my humans and orx together now and they fit easily with very little flash or scraping needed - did pretty much the whole box in an hour and even did a little bit of chopping of arms so there would be a bit more variation in the poses

Where are the pictures?

My orx guard have problems with their neck tabs. Clipping them off works, and lets me pose their heads differently, but it's still a bit weird how the tab and slot don't look at all alike.

The Forgefathers were great. They fit together beautifully and only the Jacks had any flash problems. Same thing with the MVPs.

I had no issues at all with assembly. Only wrinkle was the Orx have two nearly identical looking heads that go in completely different angles (one looks left, the other right). The rest of it was pretty much "only one thing fits here properly" so even without directions (which would have been nice mind you), it wasn't hard at all. The overall look of the models is nice, and they paint up about as well as GW plastics. Some clever modeling on the humans means that the Jacks and Strikers can all be subtly different from each other.

Some mould lines are troublesome, but as bad of a painter as I am, that will be the least of their issues. Overall I'm quite happy with the product.