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Like the look of those boxes, are they the retail packaging for the product?

$24 for 20 is a good price, slightly less than Mantic.

So, after the $60k stretch that's 140 miniatures for $100?

This is the best value miniatures Kickstarter I've seen in a very long time.

Very interested in Shieldmaidens for use as Varagnur for KoW. And the orcs could be used as demons for my Abyssals too.

I'm in for $100, lets see where this goes!

Edit: Somehow managed to grab a $95 early bird too! Awesome.

Campaigns slow down towards the middle. It happens. No need to restart the whole thing!
Also, if the value is really good and people still aren't backing, that's not a problem with what is being offered, it is a problem with marketing and possibly timing.

Not many people have heard of the company, or the KS, I only noticed the Ks 2 days ago.

Also, it's January, most people don't have much money left.

Does seem more like a case of the stretch goal amounts just not being enough to fund the KS.

If I had any recommendations for the re-launch it would be to really focus on a *single* army, with the base pledge being as much hard plastic as you can fit in there + a few resin characters.

Also, you can replace kits rather than add them as you make the campaign if you want to make it great value from the start.

For example, the base $100 pledge could be 120 plastic "Infantry models" + 3 resin characters. People can see the value there right away, and put money down for that. All 120 of the infantry would be shieldmaidens to start with.

Then, for the $60k stretch goal, replace 40 of the shieldmaidens with warmaidens, leaving every backer with 80 basic infantry, 40 elite infantry and 3 characters, a very solid army.

All of the other resin monsters, dragons, mammoths and things can be add-ons.

If a plastic kit needs $30k, and that's what you need, be clear about that and really focus on it.

Or, if you really want to simply do a campaign with a $60k goal for a single army with 2 plastic kits, make that as the starting goal, load it up with a ton of minis in the base pledge, plenty of add-on options to choose from and leave it there, once it hits $60k don't worry too much about stretch goals.

skarsol wrote:

There's also a bit of a problem setting the goal for $30k and then cancelling it a week in having achieved $40k, or 33% over. I imagine that a few bridges have just been burned there and certainly impacts on trust in terms of the next campaign. It kind of makes the initial pledge target as well as everything we saw into worse than "fake stretch goals" but "fake targets" instead. Was the actual target $80k? $100? $150? $200? Whatever it was, backers will now have uncertainty about whether a future funding target is a real one, and others will have enough of a bad taste on their mouth to skip it entirely.

So much this. Cancelling after funding because you didn't explode like some of the banner miniature Kickstarters (that, incidentally, had way more breadth than yours) seems super disingenuous. I'm curious what your true goal was.

Yeah, canceling after funding is just odd, and is a bit of a bummer. I was excited at having just backed the KS and grabbed the last open EB, now, eh, I don't know if I'll back it again, will it just get cancelled again or what? Might check in the last few days to see if it's definitely not cancelled again and then pledge.

If they reboot quickly, they'll keep a lot of their previous backers, but it is a ticking clock kinda thing.

Shieldmaidens only, aim for $30k - $60k - $90k with 3 plastic infantry kits and see where it goes.

TBH, the original campaign was still gaining a solid $1-2k per day when it got cancelled, it was on track to have reached the $60k goal before the final few days, at which point the boost at the end could have easily got them to $90-$100k.

No idea what the expectations were but if it was canceled because it was clear it wasn't going to get $250k+ then that's really not so good.

Miniatures Kickstarters don't do as well as board games, fantasy doesn't do as well as sci-fi, mass-batlles doesn't do as well as skirmish. New companies don't do as well as established ones. All things considered, $40k after a few days of the KS was actually a huge achievement for shieldwolf, their first KS only got $30k total, no idea how getting a third more than that in a quarter of the time counts as a failure.

The only conclusion is that they ran the maths and realized they couldn't deliver the KS without putting the company into debt. Not quite sure what the point was about them losing money on the mammoth at $50, but if that's a problem, then surely the solution is to raise the price to $80-$100 (still a really good price for a gigantic mini?).

At least 20 people play KoW at my local club, with a few very rare games of WHFB (not many holdouts left), even had a 20k points mega battle recently. Fantasy gaming with large armies is still alive. GW simply decided to focus more on the 8-16 year old market with their AoS rules (which are simple to learn, fast to play and don't require the painting of many models, it suits their physical retail store business model better), rather than veterans.

They've probably lost me as a returning backer at this point, if a company doesn't have confidence in its own product or if I catch a hint of anything like "the KS money wasn't actually enough to create the product so we cancelled", I get nervous about the product not delivering.

I can always buy them at retail, anyway.

I'm back in for $1, it has been an expensive month, but I should have some money for the pledge manager.

Think I can definitely find a use for 100 or so of these as a KoW Varagnur army, or as Fleshlings for my Abyssal army.

Original designs and concepts looked best to me, the redesign based on a minority of backer feedback looks more like a knight/ paladin or holy nun than a wild warrior tribe.

They both look good, but are very different models. The originals are something I'd use for 9th Age chaos barbarians or KoW Varagnur, the full plate armour redesign is something I'd use for Sisters of Sigmar or KoW Basileans.

Just my two cents, I only threw in a token $1 to support the project due to lack of funds, so the end result doesn't matter much to me either way. Will probably buy some either way, once they're done.

It's one of the reasons why I'm increasingly taking the approach of waiting for retail rather than backing Kickstarters if the end result isn't fixed in stone, I like to see what I get before paying.

Getting bogged down in a morass of demands and trying to please everyone isn't good for a small company trying to become established, this was the reason given for the first KS being canceled, but the same thing is happening now that it's in production.