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Well miniaturemarket.com is clearance going out all their spartan stuff at 20-80% off now, so grab what you still need before the gouging.

Sale here:

https://www.miniaturemarket.com/deals/clearance/table-top-miniatures.html#/?_=1&filter.manufacturer=Spartan%20Games&page=1

Darn I missed out on the Windsor again



I have no use for it but it is so pretty!

Arg missed the Ottomans too!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I still feel for those stiffed on the Kickstarter.

It's hardly Warcradle's fault. Just sucks to have had your money taken and get nowt in return.

Unfortunately this is still the potential risk for KS's (although admittedly not usually ones which were run at the scale of Spartans)

I've been fairly lucky and only had one that didn't deliver at all, and won't do now, as well as what has become the running joke of AvP delivering everything that it promised.

Having said that it would be nice if Warcradle could put together something as a good will gesture for those that lost out.

Some analysis of the crumbling of Spartan on this bloc by former "Spartan Alex"

https://mannmomo.blogspot.co.uk/

As Warcradle have already demonstrated competence in turning an unplayable mess of a game that fell foul of its creator's ego and lack of focus, in the form of WWX, I am very hopeful that they can do the same for the Spartan games they have acquired.

Spartan Games had a healthy underlying product - good models and a basically good game engine. The problem was always Neil, who couldn't set his ego aside long enough to determine what would be truly good for the business, instead of just running with the latest pipedream. It was the classic example of a game company set up as a hobby project by the founder, which then floundered as soon as it started to make money because the owner didn't really know what to do beyond continuing to indulge his own hobby. Add in what seems to have been gamer-ADHD and a ridiculous inability to finish anything, and they ended up where they did.

Wayland/Warcradle have the business chops needed to turn the game around and make the difficult decisions required to "kill their darlings" as and when necessary, so I am very optimistic that a truly great game will come out of this, that will stand the test for the long term.

Could we dispense with calling out and blaming individuals for the demise of Spartan Games?

Interesting blog.

I didn't realize all that about the personalities behind Spartan Games, but reading that does provide some background to explain how staggeringly bad their rules were. Dystopian Wars still holds the honor of being the worst rule book for any pf the 100s of games I've ever played (well, OK, tied with Magic Realm)

Good luck Warcradle, I'm pullin' for ya

It would be interesting to hear where miniatures market suddenly got loads for stock from to put on sale. A bunch of the stuff wasn't available a couple of weeks ago when I placed an order with them.

 Tamereth wrote:
It would be interesting to hear where miniatures market suddenly got loads for stock from to put on sale. A bunch of the stuff wasn't available a couple of weeks ago when I placed an order with them.

They might have temporarily removed items from stock until they knew what was happening with the company. They also could have received stock from distributors warehouses. Some warehouses could still have stock, that stores aren't really ordering and given the news could have reached out to 'known customers' to give them a deal. My LGS has gotten calls from their distributors to say give them a good price on product, they know is 'dead' usually because a store has folded or they have decided to stop carrying it or doing business with that publisher.

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/#

Warcradle appear to have control over the website now! So no need to update your bookmarks for the moment, though I'll assume that they'll rename it and the address and setup a redirect (since its no longer spartan games)


Also I've no idea if distributors will ever take back dead-stock from retailers for a refund or not so that might have been another source of product for distributors to redistribute.

 Tamereth wrote:
It would be interesting to hear where miniatures market suddenly got loads for stock from to put on sale. A bunch of the stuff wasn't available a couple of weeks ago when I placed an order with them.

They buy pallets of dead and damaged stock from distributors. Most likely these were sitting in a distributors warehouse and finally was marked down enough for MM to buy it and sell it cheap.

Yeah, it's not surprising. They know they can sell most of it off realitively easily for 50-60% off so they can turn a quick profit on it if they got it cheap enough.

Heck depending on how Warcradle handles things the value could go up by next year. Miniature people tend to favour metal/resins over standard plastics. If Warcradle redoes models in plastic those resin classics could go up in value for collectors. Of course that means sitting on the stock for a long while and who knows Warcradle could decide its not worth their investment (their other game could suddenly start selling like crazy and sap all investment); or could go belly up (it happens!); or might take even longer than a year to come to market. etc..

From the Dystopian Wars FB group

I've read the Adminstrator's Report and Statement of Proposals.

Key takeaways.

No one is getting any money.

There might be as much as £8k available for unsecured creditors (including all 1,000 of the Kickstarter backers and pre-order customers). Unsecured creditors are owed about £610k. From this £8k the cost of making any payments to those creditors has to be deducted. The Administrator thinks this will leave pretty much nothing for unsecured creditors. The best possible potential repayment is about 1 penny for every pound you paid the Kickstarter, less fees.

The Adminstrator thinks it will cost more to send these small sums to the unsecured creditors than is available and is proposing to apply to the court to not have to spend the time and money telling people that they are not getting anything.

(NB, if you email the Administrator to complain or enquire about this the cost of answering your email comes right off the amounts available for unsecured creditors at a charge out rate of between £32 and £285 per hour.)

So, unless the Administrator concludes that the Directors committed fraud, none of the Kickstarter backers are getting any money.

Paragraph 2.4 of the Administrator's Report also makes interesting reading

"In October 2016 the directors, in the face of a considerable reduction in trade sales, sought advice from Tim Close of Milsted Langdon LLP. At the time of this meeting the Company was in the process of launching a Kickstarter campaign that it believed, if successful, would enable trading to continue. It was concluded at this meeting that if the Kickstarter was unsuccessful then an insolvency procedure would most likely be required."

That is the owners of Spartan Games talking to an insolvency practitioner *before* they launched the Kickstarter.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/dystopian.wars.and.legions

Make sense - most resolutions to companies bleeding money and steadily falling further into debt often require investment in order to provide capital to allow them to enact change that isn't just related to cutting services/staff.

Sometimes that's reached through taking on new investors; sometimes its about liquidating assets that the company holds to provide that lump sum; sometimes they do cut staff to safe on wages. In Spartans case they went with a KS - which is the least damaging to the company in terms of assets held at the time; and the nature of KS investment means that they don't them have to make a return on that investment.


Sadly it seems that it didn't work. It does seem that Spartan tried the second KS in a hope that it would limp them over for another period of time; but it was launched badly and at the wrong time and was only very slowly gaining ground. It wasn't a run-away KS that could have secured enough funds to let them get over the hump they were in.



The lack of money to repay all debts also makes sense; very few companies that go into administration are able to clear all debt; its about clearing what can be cleared as best as possible to lessen the hit to other companies; whilst also ending the company life so that it no longer continues to bleed/drain money.

It looks like the old spartan forums are up again. I don't see any posts since August, but I was able to go in and poke around.

http://community.spartangames.co.uk/

Also a big update video 0 Dystopian Age

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iVueg6W674


Summary from my listen - its a little waffly at the start so I might have missed a few things; but this is (in their own words) the tip of the iceberg of news!

Wild West Exodus being blended in with Dystopian Wars

Sounds like they are focusing Dystopian Wars on the Sea and Air aspects; land battles "might" be at a latter point or expanded later (purely going on how they focus on talking about the battles being on the high seas).


Armourd Clas 10mm scale set in Africa - essentially it sounds like they've story scripted a land war in Africa - over which the major powers will be fighting for. Basically factions fighting ove the colonies.

New miniatures to come and a few are shown.
Reassurance that they are going to try and keep within the themes of original models; plus they are going to produce a PDF for how to use existing land units in the new game (so existing owners will be able to use all old models)


It sounds like they are fully splitting sea/air and the land games into two distinct entities rather than mixing the two. This sounds sensible as it lets both be their own thing without trying to squeeze sea and land together (which I think did throw up some odd probablems with balance as things like ships typically have VERY powerful weapons compared to most land units).


Overall sounds really exciting and that they are really throwing a lot into this in fully reworking the land and likely reworking the sea/air as well potentially.



I didn't hear anything about materials during the video (might have missed it).


WW Exodus are losing two armies (Crown and Celestial) which will be moved to other games as a result of this change. This is likely because they crossed over with Dystopian factions being brought in (and since Dystopain had models and fans it made more sense to keep them). That's the only major change for WWE being made that they've mentioned.

There's also a live-stream coming up - theyasked for questions before the steams so that they can prepare answers.

Probably a smart move to merge the two steam punk games into one universe.

I don't know WWX well enough to tell how well they'll blend, both had aliens IIRC but didn't WWX have magic too?
Renaming is also coming.
I see Britannia becoming Crown, China Celestials. Perfectly fine. Sounds like Dystopan Legions is dead unless the models would work with WWX, there's some nice models there but no great loss.

I think its a good move too. Dystopian Legions never really got itself off the ground in a huge way before it hit the "spartan moves to something else" problem. So it got a niche market and then held onto it but never really pushed itself forwrad as much as it could.

Merging their two systems into one means the Dystopian can piggyback off the success of WWE.

As for magic chances are they can write that in fairly easily; the fuel sources for Dystopian were already kinda nearly magical in their output and high-technology could also be used to explain some magics away. Almost like how in the film Laputa the castle with its swirling vortex and robots was almost akin to magic to the peoples of the film.



I also like how they are splitting the sea and land battles; I think that will let them have more powerful ships and airships without the land battles feeling like they are just trying to build land-ships for every faction to get the land balanced to sea.


I think they've got a good grasp on the overall themes and strong points so I'm really hopeful at this stage for a good launch.

I'm also impressed how much they are investing into this. I'd have thought they'd just relaunch with what was made already; but making not only a few new sculpts but full re-designs into new scales and such is a big investment for them and shows how serious they are with making Dystopian Wa..Age a thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:


Look at that!

More details from https://blog.wildwestexodus.com/blog/2017/12/1/unveiling-the-dystopian-age

Also check this daka thread
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/708649.page

Wow, that new battleship is beautiful!

In general I feel like the DW community is not thrilled about this. I agree: It feels like DW is being forced into the WWX setting and losing a lot of it's interesting ideas, even if those ideas were'nt always amazing.

There's also a concern that 'Celestial" is apparently considered an ancient racial slur by some, and generally that the Warcradle staff have been a bit tone-deaf in handling US Civil War issues (compared to Spartan, even).

It'll be interesting, but I'd say my interest in the game has definitely cooled.

Existing Players can upgrade to 3rd edition for free (social media & current book required)

https://blog.warcradle.com/dw-free-rule-book

So, you want to know how to get a copy of Dystopian Wars Third Edition rules for free? Great, let's get you registered!

You will need a copy of the Dystopian Wars rules in order to register for Third Edition.

How do you get the Third Edition and what will you be getting?

What you get

The current plan is for us to send a beautiful colour softback rulebook to your local FLGS for you to collect or to your home address. It will contain all of the rules for Third Edition, along with some background and hundreds of photos/artwork.

Registering for this promotion also registers you for the New Edition of Armoured Clash. This rulebook will be released at a later date and you will receive more information about this addition at a later date.

How you get it

1) Share a photo of yourself with a Dystopian Wars Rulebook (at least one, but more is great).

2) Post your photo publicly on social media and tag us in the photo with @warcradlestudios and @dystopianwars, make sure to use the #dystopianrules.

3) Tag in your local gaming store where you would like to collect your book from (if you have one). No FLGS? No problem, we will send it directly to you.

4) Fill in the form below with links to your social accounts where you have posted your images.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
they did this apparently successfully with Wild West Exodus,

and the social media requirement is clearly intended as advertising to offset the cost of the exercise (for those who will complain they don't do social media but do want the free book why not make a 'junk' account, you don't have to give much real info and certainly don't have to keep using it)

Sounds like a great idea!

Free book for you; marketing for Dystopian Wars and local retailers as well as getting Warcradle in contact with more local stores to supply them.

Plus going this way chances are most of the local games stores did stock Dystopian Wars at least once so even more outreach chances to existing/former fans.

Unfortunately the only copy of the rules I have is the 2.5 PDF that squeaked out of the Kickstarter just before Spartan went defunct. Already tried looking for a copy in the discount bin, no dice. Retail it is, eventually.

That is kind of cool.

Wonder if I can find my old DW 1st edition book.

 NTRabbit wrote:
Unfortunately the only copy of the rules I have is the 2.5 PDF that squeaked out of the Kickstarter just before Spartan went defunct. Already tried looking for a copy in the discount bin, no dice. Retail it is, eventually.

A picture of your fleet or your digital rules is an excellent replacement for an *in-hand* rulebook

~ Samantha


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Sounds like a great idea!

Free book for you; marketing for Dystopian Wars and local retailers as well as getting Warcradle in contact with more local stores to supply them.

Plus going this way chances are most of the local games stores did stock Dystopian Wars at least once so even more outreach chances to existing/former fans.

^ Hole in one, my friend!

~ Samantha

Did anyone ever receive their free copy of the WWX 2nd edition rules? My mate and I never got anything through.

Looks like Dystopian stuff is already starting to sail!
http://www.waylandgames.co.uk/dystopian-wars/50063-prussian-imperium-ice-maiden-super-carrier

The massive Ice Maiden is coming! Well next year but already up for preorder!


Also Warcradle - any news on when you'll start using the Spartan Website for news/updates again or will you close it down and move it over to another site?

Wayland games is taking preorders for the Prussian Iceberg Super Carrier 75UKP

http://www.waylandgames.co.uk/dystopian-wars/50063-prussian-imperium-ice-maiden-super-carrier

I'm stunned... Is that price correct? 75 GBP (about $100 US)??


For one ship? It is big, 260mm or about 10 inches... But... I ...

Wow.

It's a very big ship!
I forget the dimensions but it was about the biggest resin model Spartan made. So yeah its a huge warship - er iceberg!

It's akin to picking up a knight or a warmachine colossal/gargantuan