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Like or hate the plastics, I'd bet a lot of money they won't be coming back. Some years ago Paolo Parente did an online Q&A about dust and took a question about AT-43 as well.

He stated pretty flatly that the molds for AT-43 had stayed with the Chinese manufacturer after Rackham's liquidation and would be melted down. It doesn't talk about the Confrontation molds but I'd wager they ended up in the same boat. There was an earlier interview I can't find where he said that the Chinese company was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by Rackham when they folded and they tried to use the molds as leverage but that no one in the settlement wanted them enough to offer anything.

Here's a link to the Q&A:

http://darkfuturegaming.blogspot.com/2012/08/dust-warfare-interview-with-paolo.html

 streetsamurai wrote:


And I can understand defending the sculpt, but defending the material leaves me completely thunderstrcuk. The plastic they used was soft as butter. I usually prefer plastic to metal, bit no way was THAT plastic superior to metal.

To be fair, lots of their metal was ALSO soft as butter. I've seen pure lead from recasters that was stronger.

Resculpt the old stuff to modern standards and give me the skirmish rules back and I'll try it.

On the Confrontation-Haven forum, it's stated by a member of Confrontation EVO team that these new guys has the IP proper now.

No sure how that can be verified, but for the first time in a long time, I'm quietly optimistic that this Confrontation product isn't going to turn into vapourware.

If they really go to Kickstarter, I can see myself dropping an absolute ton on it, even more than I did on Kingdom Death. Depending on whether they keep the aesthetic true to form, and the material, of course.

gohkm wrote:
On the Confrontation-Haven forum, it's stated by a member of Confrontation EVO team that these new guys has the IP proper now.

No sure how that can be verified, ...

If they do have the IP they are not handling things correctly. They are putting a TM (unregistered trade mark) on "Confrontation" and "Cadwallon" and claim ownership, but they can not do that because those are already registered trade marks belonging to Cyanide.

Personally, I love all my armies for AT-43 and Age of Ragnorok. I would never sell them, and I liked both of the games' rules, too.

Loved Rackham's style. I hope it makes a real comeback this time.

The prepainted minis were not that bad. I get that they were not for the serious painter collector, but overall they were better than the DND prepaints or the current pathfinder prepaints. I have a ton of Wulfen and Lions and a lot of the other stuff I got cheap at Miniature market. I still use these in my Pathfinder games. The Wulfen in particular are pretty great for prepaints.

I think a big part of the problem was they were kind of expensive for the casual gamer. Which is who I think they were trying to target.

The real issue with the PPP isn't anything related to the sculpts or even the paint jobs (which were both good for the time, way better then wizkids the only real other company doing them) but that it's not what fans of the game wanted and they lost more people then they brought on with the change.

rwwin wrote:
Like or hate the plastics, I'd bet a lot of money they won't be coming back. Some years ago Paolo Parente did an online Q&A about dust and took a question about AT-43 as well.

He stated pretty flatly that the molds for AT-43 had stayed with the Chinese manufacturer after Rackham's liquidation and would be melted down. It doesn't talk about the Confrontation molds but I'd wager they ended up in the same boat. There was an earlier interview I can't find where he said that the Chinese company was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by Rackham when they folded and they tried to use the molds as leverage but that no one in the settlement wanted them enough to offer anything.

Here's a link to the Q&A:

http://darkfuturegaming.blogspot.com/2012/08/dust-warfare-interview-with-paolo.html

They're still around, at least some. Ludic Bazzar was selling a few as collectors items for several years and when Legacy got the rights for the miniatures they started cataloging things. CMoN with Legacy even released several sculpts that hand been finished but never released as limited editions years ago as well as resin releases of some of the common sets which was confusing as they weren't hard to find in metal for reasonable prices which is why no one bought them until CMoN had a confrontation clearance several years ago to get rid of all the Legacy stuff.

Team plastic, here. I gave away my Confrontation metals, but I kept my plastics.

I hope they are smart enough (if they go the same route) to sell painted and unpainted miniatures. Not sure if there will be metal as well as plastic miniatures.

I want to believe, Confrontation was one of my favorite skirmish games. I remember fondly actually finding some on a trip to France before I even knew what they were.

I still have a bit of the literature laying around somewhere, but it is hard to motivate people to play a "dead" system. I know it is difficult, but they should maybe try and stick closer to what people like myself so fondly recall, quality of sculpts and a setting that truly seemed inspired.

 Smokestack wrote:
The prepainted minis were not that bad. I get that they were not for the serious painter collector, but overall they were better than the DND prepaints or the current pathfinder prepaints. I have a ton of Wulfen and Lions and a lot of the other stuff I got cheap at Miniature market. I still use these in my Pathfinder games. The Wulfen in particular are pretty great for prepaints.

I think a big part of the problem was they were kind of expensive for the casual gamer. Which is who I think they were trying to target.

Maybe had they gone for roleplayers, like the D&D prepainted mini's, perhaps they would have fared better. Miniature wargamers, I think, expect to paint their miniatures, so anything prepainted doesn't add value to them,

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
I hope they are smart enough (if they go the same route) to sell painted and unpainted miniatures. Not sure if there will be metal as well as plastic miniatures.

It's obvious that they won't sell PPP. It would be completely insane to re-release the game with the same material that was responsible for its bankruptcy. The decision to switch from metal to PPP was probably the worst decision in the history of nerd hobby. It makes D&D 4th edition and GW blowing up the old world and putting 'joke' rules in AOS, seem like sound business decisions.

You think they'd be smart enough to take advantage of the cult following the pre Ragnarok and melted models had.

I'll keep an eye on this for sure, some of their original models were just amazing! And I'm with you streetsamurai, it seems pretty clear they won't be repeating the route that led to their demise...

Interesting. Would have been more excited about this a few years ago.
It's a tricky thing to relaunch. If you can't produce all the old models and are largely starting from scratch do you support all the old models with rules while you catch up with resculpts?
Do you start from scratch entirely and let people proxy their old models for whatever but with no 'official' support?
You don't want to just be producing a ruleset for people to use their old models with, that's not a recipe for success.

It was actually not the plastic miniatures that killed Rackham, it was the new mother company. (The legal action is even today not completly resolved). They were just recovering from some rough times, when the mother company folded and it was revealed that they had drained Rackham of all money while letting them at the same time order new stuff.

Rights are all over the place. There are at least 5-7 companies/people that own rights and legally it is still a nightmare.

The plastic big-boxes were quite decent prepainted miniatures

the switch to the PPP completely killed their sales. It's the main reason why they went bankrupt.

Perhaps. AT-43 seemed to be doing quite well. Mind you, that game had a higher quality of paint application than the Confrontation: Age of Rag'Narok minis, and wasn't a re-invention of a range that had a reputation for being "painters' minis".

I think Rackham simply didn't have the capital to do it properly - both AT-43 and C:AoR had huge supply problems - core units were unavailable for long periods, new models weren't introduced fast enough, that sort of thing.

Actually, given the choice, I think I'd rather have a new AT-43 game than a new Confrontation game.

AT-43 was really fun. I loved how shooting effectiveness was tied to the range of the shot (Age of Ragnorok has the same mechanic).

And does what 40k should have done (3rd ed was getting there, but they rolled it back in subsequent editions) - abstracted special weapon troopers and leaders down to simply properties of the squad in general, rather than worrying about exactly where each model was - you measure ranges to and from the squad leaders.

Hopefully this isn't going to try and be Confragnarok - a larger scale game - and hopefully it will be more Confrontation - a true skirmish scale game.

Well its confirmed, skirmish and board game coming soon.

http://www.sans-detour.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/communique-confresurrection-EN.pdf

the switch to the PPP completely killed their sales. It's the main reason why they went bankrupt.

Definitely not, I experienced first hand what happened and AT-43 went quite well. The switch for Confrontation was a bit too fast, but sales for Confro were decreasing already before the switch to plastic or even AT-43.

Yeah, I remember how people on the Rackham forums were clamoring for AT-43 material that Rackham couldn't keep supplied- even the models that were the first released for the game like Fire Toads and Star Troopers for the UNA. It was definitely more of a problem on the company side than noone buying the product.

I remember AT-43 beign really expensive. I think there was a specialist box that if you wanted multiples of one weapon/specialist you had to buy multiple boxes even if you didn't want to use the others. I'm pretty sure that's why it ever took off here.

A couple of units had wonky options like that if you wanted to min-max, but an AT-43 army of comparable size to a 40K one was about 75% the cost, pre-painted. And while the infantry was pretty basic quality (but better than any other prepaints I have seen since) the vehicles were amazing, with full decals and sometimes even wear-and-tear.

I would really like to see a visit back to Aarklash, though. It was a fun fantasy world, with samurai goblins, no less!

 Duncan_Idaho wrote:

the switch to the PPP completely killed their sales. It's the main reason why they went bankrupt.

Definitely not, I experienced first hand what happened and AT-43 went quite well. The switch for Confrontation was a bit too fast, but sales for Confro were decreasing already before the switch to plastic or even AT-43.

I won't engage in a session of rewriting history with you. The facts are there for everyone to see. Confrontation sales plummet badly after the switch to PPP. AT-43 is a different beast, since it always was in PPP and a large scale game


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Yeah, I remember how people on the Rackham forums were clamoring for AT-43 material that Rackham couldn't keep supplied- even the models that were the first released for the game like Fire Toads and Star Troopers for the UNA. It was definitely more of a problem on the company side than noone buying the product.

Yeah, Rakcham went bankrupt cause Confrotation was too popular And even AT-43 sales plummeted after Cnfrontation switch to PPP, cause a lot of customers and even stores had a lot of bad will toward the company.


To be honest, I'm pretty sure that neither of you read french, cause if you did and were following the saga at the time, you wouldn't be making such outlandish claims.

A skirmish game AND a board game?

Not sure how I feel about the divided focus right out of the gate, and I'd love more details on both but...

...so far so good.

I mean, at least this is happenig!