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What the title says really. They had Starship Troopers, poorly pre-painted modern warfare stuff, but now nothing. What happen?

It was too much of a financial drain on the company,and was plagued with issues, so Matt Sprange ultimately decided that they were a ruleset manufacturer rather than a miniatures manufacturer, and sold off that part of the company.

They've just re-released the Judge Dredd ones...

Mick

chaos0xomega wrote:It was too much of a financial drain on the company,and was plagued with issues,

Ultimately, I think the latter was what led to the former.

The Starship Troopers range was a little inconsistent, but largely ok. But then they sunk a boatload of money into launching the Battlefield Evo range of prepainted miniatures which, after being billed as the next best thing in miniatures, turned out to be complete rubbish... something Mongoose only discovered when the shipment actually arrived from China.

After trying to put a brave face on it and convince everybody that the BF-Evo minis were, ok, not the best new thing ever but weren't, you know, that bad, and the Starship Trooper Pre-paints would be better, honest, they eventually realised that nobody was drinking the kool-aid, gave it up as a bad deal and scrapped their miniatures range entirely to focus on books for a while.



They're apparently trying to edge back into miniatures again now, with a re-hash of their Judge Dredd game.

A shame really, I wanted some of those STTA models and Neo-Dogs.

http://www.shopwiki.co.uk/_Starship+Troopers%3A+Pathfinder+K9+Squad?o=208731683&s=335624&

Seems there's a few boxes about still.

I picked up a few of those boxes when a FLGS was getting rid of the SST stock at 50% or less RRP. The MI became some of my Stormtroopers (with 4 different miniature ranges in the collection, I can have carapace vets, Stormtroopers AND Inquisitorial stormtroopers in the same army and not confuzzle folks).

Some of the neo-dogs are cool. Some are just silly. Little animated mop-like mobile dogfood.

I can see why they dropped the prepainted stuff it was mediocre at best, really too small and must have cost a fortune to produce. But the unpainted stuff seemed to be doing OK so I don't see why they killed that too, especially since they were supposed to have those sweet SST drop ships coming.

I would suspect that it was because the miniatures range wasn't particularly profitable for them, they pinned everything on the pre-paints turning that around, and when the pre-paints were such a dismal failure they just threw in the towel while they figured out what to do about it all.

tis a pity becaus eI love the star ship troopers stuff. Currently going to us eit as armoured rebel humans in 40k... would love some of the mechs to add character.

A better question would be. Why did they bin their rules sets? Starship Troopers re-released as a generic sci-fi rule-set would have been an awesome thing.

Hi GeorgeSpiggot.
I thought they did with the Battlefield Evolution series.
(But I could be confused, its my age you know.... )

TTFN

I think you could be right. That makes binning the Starship Troopers rules even more dumb.

My feeling is that a whole bunch of mosfortunes struck at once, so it became more trouble than it was worth.

The B5 minis were neat, but had a lot of poor sculpts that needed to be replaced, and the last attempt to expand the line was not well received.

(They did a new class of Armageddon-class ships, one for almost every faction. Most of which were really, really bad or at least didn't fit in to the established design themes very well. Also, for a game where ships are effectively 'pinpoints' (you measured ranges from the stem of the base) huge miniatures didn't make people happy.)

it's a pitty as a lot of the 'regular' ships were pretty cool.

The SST line had a number of issues. I believe they had to resculpt and reissue one small alien race as it was so poorly received, and I've heard their approach of melding all the SST canon (the book, movie(s), and cartoon) sometimes irritated fans)

All this, and the BF Evo game went through a lot of changes... I think Mongoose means well and tries, but they just weren't ready to do so much, perhaps.

Well, they binned a third miniature line, the Babylon 5 space ships. I am not sure if it was just before or just after they stopped Starship Trooper to relaunch it prepainted. But with Battlefield Evolution going down the drain as well, the community lost all confidence in any miniature line by Mongoose, three epic fails are just too much. Seems Mongoose now hopes that all this is forgotten.

Edit: Actually there was a fourth miniature line, something like Warmaster, but that one never got off the ground.

They were briefly talking about doing a B5 ground combat game, presumably based of the old AoG sculpts, but that was never really 'around' to die.

Kroothawk wrote:Well, they binned a third miniature line, the Babylon 5 space ships. I am not sure if it was just before or just after they stopped Starship Trooper to relaunch it prepainted. But with Battlefield Evolution going down the drain as well, the community lost all confidence in any miniature line by Mongoose, three epic fails are just too much. Seems Mongoose now hopes that all this is forgotten.

I think Babylon 5 was a slightly different issue, as the license was up for renewal, and was apparently quite expensive. So Mongoose decided to drop it and move the game into generic SciFi. Although to be fair, that decision was probably helped along by the downturn in their miniatures sales.

It was all down to extremely bad management, I was there when that all happened. They foolishly made the leap from regular models that weren't great to the really bad prepaints.

Matt was convinced that they could produce eavy metal quality prepaints and despite what me and a few others said he didn't listen. :(

In the end they screwed up by having far too much fan influence, they rebooted the original rules which were already fine and basically just messed up.

They took a fantastic opportunity and buried it and also managed to seriously upset a lot of us that had supported them ditching us in favour of battlefield evo. :(

In the end Matt made some stupid promises, bad mouthed his own product then abandoned the game altogether. Crowning moment for me was when he openly described the new resin brain bug as though someone had taken a cr*p on his desk on the forums then still expected people to buy it.

On the up side I did manage to buy the original pre-paint masters for the MI and Skinnies along with a fair chunk of the studio MI army along with it.

OFT

In the space of a month they went from having a game with a bunch of substandard minis in the skinnie line, to claiming that they were going to shell out prepainted plastics at "80% better then most people could paint." When they finally got the so called Prepainted plastics, they were abominations that were not fit for human eyes.

When called on all accounts, they tried the worst patch job in history as far as damage control. It went to the point where they pretty much shot the fanbase at the time in the face and pretty much told the lot of us, "We know best. You foolish chumps will do what you are told and like it."

They tried to come out with a fourth army for SST, unimaginably called, "the fourth", which we begged to rename.

As a matter of fact, there was a lot of begging at that time, from me, it was to just for them to stop the madness, and leave the game as was, and to stop messing with trying to be "the be all end all" of miniatures. They started out with the substandard fantasy game, then brought out the B5 game, then the SST game, then the Judge Dread game. Then they went down the toilet with that crap that was supposed to be the Battlefield 2 game, but then they found that they didn't have the rights, so ended up crapping out the "Battlefield Devolution" games.

Mongoose is a model for game companies "How to ruin a gaming company without even trying."

After the prepaint debacal, they totally gave the two finger salute to thier fan base and removed the offending sections of thier forums that they were called on the lies and intentional misinformation concerning thier miniatures, the SST game, and the whole prepainted seven demon bag that they tried to pull out of thier rabbit hat.

As a company, Mongoose cannot be taken seriously, and Matt Sprangs past attitude and his disrespect of the fans is probibly the main reason why.

As for rules and games, Mongoose is poor to substandard as far as supporting the final product, and staying consistant. The miniatures were poorly managed, with quantity being pushed over quality, and as far as thier sculp quality, it went from Excellent to Crap in the space of 1 year. Not just 1 line, ALL OF THEM.

They claim that they are a "Rules " company. As of late, It is really up in the air as to what sort of company they are, now.

I know 1 thing, though. They will never get another dime of my money.

Totally agree with you there mate. I have never seen a company treat fans in such a poor way when the majority of us were trying to help them.

I'll try and get some pictures of their pre-paints up later today because I don't think anyone ever saw the skinnies.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
These are the resin masters for the pre-paint prototypes that never made it into production.

Skinnies

This is one of the resin masters painted up to their studio quality. They expected all the pre-paints to be at this standard and were disappointed by the first shipment that they got back from china.



Mobile Infantry

These are the masters for the MI troops again again painted by their studio guy. The sculpt quality is quite amateur and cartoonish.