Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey guys,

I've noticed that since we made a dedicated Kings of War section, we actually have less activity here. I'm wondering why that is and if there's anything we can do to attract more KoW posters?

Right now, it feels like we have a lot of players on Dakka, but they're not reading and posting here.

Share your thoughts and we'll see what the best course of action is!

Cheers,
RiTides

Do they even know the forum is here? The end of the Mantic general forum, and shunting all the other games off to the Misc forum was rather jarring

I rarely go to specific forums, 90% of my visits = check subscribed threads then check recent threads.

So I guess my conclusion would be a single Mantic section would be better for that 10% of the time I think "maybe I'll just have a scan down all the topics in this section".

Dakka has a policy and made a final decision though, so I'm not sure there's any point trying to get them to reverse the split. Just have to figure out how to move forward.

Well right now I'm open to any and all ideas! I was primarily the one who pushed for a KoW forum, and would like to do all I can to get it vibrant and active.

We could consider switching back to mixed Mantic, but because other subfirums in this area are also low on activity (Warmachine even with a new edition hitting, for instance) I don't think it's just that.

I also really want high quality discussion, rather than just an area to complain about late Mantic KS deliveries for instance

I'm thinking about ways to run some contests, give away some swag, and generally point traffic to this area. But again, totally open to any ideas! We've got some good discussion of this going in the KoW N&R thread, too, which sort of illustrates the problem I'd like to tackle

Post up your thoughts!

A mixed Mantic subforum would attract more people, I feel. I don't go into the KOW section because all the conversation now is about specific battle reports, painted minis, and rules discussions. However, with a combined forum, it opens up possibilities to talk about where Mantic is going as a company, compare miniature ranges for fantasy and sci fi, TTgames and board games, trading, etc.

Unfortunately, almost all of the discussion moved to the News and Rumors threads, the Mantic threads most people are familiar with.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, the Dakka layout shake-up seems to have made it a lot harder for many long time posters to find or start the discussions they used o have. It will probably take some time and fine tuning to restore the site's perceived user-friendliness.

Maybe it is a question of content. Would everyone like to see fan fiction and artwork, or are we all interested in "how to shank your friends with a cheese blade" type of articles?

I have several friends that are all about narrative play, campaigns, fluff, and creative army composition. I would love to move those discussions to this forum, but would anyone even be interested?

I would love more discussion about the background. I probably won't read the fanfiction, but I would read the fluff discussions that spring up to support it. Artwork is also cool, although pictures of other people's painted minis just depress me at this point.

There is a 40k subforum, a "rest of GW" subforum including T9A, General SciFi Forum and "everything else" subforum.

Placing KoW together with Historical games is not the best to attract people.

There should be a general Fanasy part were KoW is together with the other mass battle fantasy games.

Ever since I stopped playing WHFB and 40k and switched to KoW (and waiting for Warpath) I mostly come directly to this forum. I only look at other forums if I am looking for something very specific, and that's mostly about painting, converting etc. I don't mind the switch to a KoW only forum, but it does reduce the different topics one would talk about in a general Mantic forum. For example, where would I ask the question "Are you going to play Warpath when it comes out, and which army will you choose and why?". (A perfectly acceptable answer to this would be "Forge Fathers, because DWARF SPESS MARHEENS!").
I care little for battle reports, but would love to read more fluff and background. How about throwing a poll in here just to draw some attention? I find I end up voting for polls more often than not, even in the aforementioned games that I am not playing anymore.

I guess I'll ask a general question first: are any of the non-GW forums doing well? One of the reasons Dakka is so popular for 40k is that there is no official forum. Mantic has their own forums, as odd as they are, with more direct contact with the RC. there's also a pretty vibrant Facebook group.

It may not be anything Dakka does wrong, but simply that Dakka isn't the premier place to discuss KOW.

 NTRabbit wrote:
Do they even know the forum is here? The end of the Mantic general forum, and shunting all the other games off to the Misc forum was rather jarring

Pretty much this. Didn't even know there was a KoW subforum until it was recently mentioned in the News & Rumors thread.

I check my subbed threads, Recent threads, and Popular threads. Rarely look beyond that unless I'm looking for something in particular like the Painting or Tactics threads.

I go to the Mantic forum to read/write about Kings of War.
I come here for the warhammers.

Going back to a single forum for Mantic games is a good start - there is a fair amount of crossover between games.

I, for one, was slightly annoyed with the split - it did not seem necessary, since the Mantic forum wasn't really being buried under too many posts. It was a fix for a problem that did not exist.

It didn't bother me too, too much, though - I am mostly a KoW player - but it just didn't seem like something that was needed.

More crossover with other Warhammer/Age of Sigmar alternative games would be good - I have no problem with reading about 9th Age, for example.

The Auld Grump

It seems like a lot of the problem lies in the fact no one really uses the forum index (what you get to when you click on the "Forum" link.) It seems like everyone either hits "My Subscribed Threads" and then maybe pops over to the relevant forum from there, or something similar. Those that do use the main index don't scroll down enough to see everything. I didn't know half the new forums were there, or how they were arranged, till just now, and I have been here for every single one of them, before their game even existed for the most part.

I don't know how to fix the Mantic threads issue, but I have ideas for helping the lesser forums get some attention.

1: Have a collapse/expand button for each major heading on the index page. That way I don't have to scroll down 2-3 (or more on a phone) pages to see all the forums.

2: Sort non-General forums by genre, then by manufacturer/game. Three or four big headings like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Historical, Other Games, then break it down to GW, PP, Mantic, Other, then by game, etc. Some games might exist in both lists, like Warmachine/Hordes might be in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but in general that would probably clean things up a bit.

3: Make the forum index a two column list instead of one. Drop the 'last post' and other counts, and just list what the forum is and what is in there. Again, cuts down on the number of pages to scroll down.

Those are just my ideas. If the problem really is one of having an official forum that is much more active and useful, then I don't know what to suggest. The Mantic forums though are not too active, and not too pleasant, so unless Facebook is really running the show, it shouldn't be impossible to pull over a lot of traffic.

Excellent ideas guys - and yeah, the Warhammer Legacy / 9th Age forum actually has less activity, so that's a good point.

Keep them coming! I'm reading everything and thinking on it, and will run it up the chain once I have worked out the best (and also feasible) suggestions to bring up

 CaptainLoken wrote:
Maybe it is a question of content. Would everyone like to see fan fiction and artwork, or are we all interested in "how to shank your friends with a cheese blade" type of articles?

I have several friends that are all about narrative play, campaigns, fluff, and creative army composition. I would love to move those discussions to this forum, but would anyone even be interested?

I'm not personally interested in fanfic or the world of Mantica, but I am interested in thoughts on narrative play, campaigns, creative/interesting/fluffy army composition, etc. I'd probably join in on that form of discussion. I'm fine with artwork and painted models.

Bring back the Mantic subforum, it's impossible to find any discussion about non-kow games, the new "other misc" forum is a mess of stuff that I don't want to have to trawl through to find 1 in 20 threads of interest. Zero discussion of warpath here, no point posting a thread that will get lost on page 3 of the general/misc melting pot. I've tried to come on here to find deadzone threads, but just found it to be scattered and frustrating.

There was actually quite a small, but good community there until the split. And it wasn't "just whining about late kickstarters" either, it was better-natured than the N&R threads and had a good variety of discussion.

SS is correct. I'm not always a happy camper in Mantic's N&R threads, but was happy to participate in more pleasant general discussion amongst fellow gamers in the Mantic subforum. I just don't bother going into the general/misc subforums.

I pretty much come onto Dakka for the 40K homebrew (which i havent been on in months cuz it was a mess last time i looked) and to the KoW section. I don't know why they split it off from the other Mantic stuff as it wasnt like we had crazy bloat or anything.

I'd be interested in reading both battle reports and fiction here, myself.

I've been contemplating writing a bit of fiction, but I've little idea how Mantica is affected by conflicts. Existing lore suggests that they're commonplace, and nothing short of cataclysmic clashes will have any real lasting effect on the fluff, but I'm wary of straying into the realms of too-important battles. Things like Dwarf holds coming under siege could easily be argued as either something that could happen fairly regularly, or something momentous and noteworthy.

I'm also wary about conflicts where the belligerents won't make much sense being there, because there are races in Mantica which have defined 'homes', and others which were vaguely given a direction they went in, or otherwise cover vast areas--such as the Neriticans; where would it make sense for a warhost of those to gather? All we know is there are 3 trident realms and they exist in the various oceans. We don't really know how they muster armies, or where they're likely to have enough forces to do so. Do they just answer the call of nature--...--to appear at X place, and then just converge from different areas?

I'd rather not step on Mantic's toes when it comes to writing fics, but it seems to be almost inevitable.

@Avatar 720: Pretty sure youd be fine with smaller scale stuff. Instead of the army of an entire established kingdom marching to war, have the host of prince X, out for vengeance, march on duke Y. A small outpost, attacked by orcs. A village or town on the coast whose fishers got too greedy, and are now attacked by Neriticans. That kind of thing.

Its how things worked in WHFB, shouldnt be too hard to translate to KoW.

I figured from what I've read that the setting is big and open enough to allowe for a lot of different approaches. Most of the factions have a kind of representative leader group, but they're otherwise described as being fragmented, with lots of independent people, which in turn allows for a lot of openness when making stories.

 Tyr13 wrote:
@Avatar 720: Pretty sure youd be fine with smaller scale stuff. Instead of the army of an entire established kingdom marching to war, have the host of prince X, out for vengeance, march on duke Y. A small outpost, attacked by orcs. A village or town on the coast whose fishers got too greedy, and are now attacked by Neriticans. That kind of thing.

Its how things worked in WHFB, shouldnt be too hard to translate to KoW.

It's easier with Humans because they tend to fragment. Races like Dwarfs, however, tend to stick fairly rigidly to their holds. They live in cities that are simply linked to farmland via underpasses, and don't really have named equivalents to human settlements. Hold = City is probably fairly close--though perhaps closer to fortress-city--but they don't really have towns or anywhere that could really act as the site of a battle that is anything more than a one-sided slaughter.

The reason I say that a dwarf hold straddles the line between 'fine' and 'too big' scale-wise is because we don't know exactly what a 'hold' means. Is it just a Dwarf settlement, and could mean anything from 'town' to 'capital city'? We don't really know. It could be that an assault on a hold might be perfectly reasonable, or it might be that a hold represents and too grand of a thing to assault without waging all-out war.

As much as I could simply limit myself to writing about humans, I don't particularly want to.

Eh, dwarves might have mining outposts, trading settlements, fortified farmsteads, watchtowers, forts... and of course, they could always be the aggressor if thats more to your liking.

Re: Topic, just had another idea - maybe have a topic of the week thing? Unit tactics, background, that kind of thing? Wed just need a knowledgable volunteer to start the topic and give some input... might be too much work though.

That's the thing, they *might*. Humans etc. *will*, but with Dwarfs, everything is *might*, which doesn't really help. They might have trading settlements or forts, and then there's the 'holds' thing again, where holds might simply be the name for any significant Dwarf settlement.

I'd much prefer to have a a minor Dwarf hold threatened, largely because it strikes my preferable balance of capability; it's defended, but its garrisons aren't vast and its troops aren't elite; it's an issue if attacked, but it's not large enough to not be a believable target.

To me, attacking a fort is a trigger, or a short thing. It's something that would happen early to cement the enemy as something worthy of being the 'bad guys', or for other reasons.

Let's say the Basileans lose a new forward fort to an attack by the forces of nature. That wouldn't be the story, it would be the catalyst that makes Basilea seek revenge, sending their own armies to torch forests and to set their own Gods upon the land itself, only to realise that they'd been drawn into a "trap"--to the FoN; to Basilea, simply overextended--to allow one of the forces of evil to assault somewhere else, and they must retreat to defend themselves.

The Basileans slay whichever force of evil to a man, but at great cost, not realising that this was what the Forces of nature wanted all along. The FoN sacrificed some of the land to rebalance the forces of good and evil. The Basileans cease their expansions to recuperate, and a great host of evil was prevented from snowballing.

I could definitely write just the first bit, where the FoN attacks the Basileans, but I want to write the rest of it, too.

My current idea follows a similar sort of pattern: there's a catalyst leading up to an eventual greater conflict that simply wouldn't be as good on a smaller scale. It's not a raid, but it's not an extended siege or lengthy war, either; it's somewhere in the middle, where the lines are blurrier. A hefty chunk of it relies on it being able to target a location of significance-but-not-too-significant.

@Avvatar. I've actually been writing a fluff piece about how my Warhammer army found it's way into Mantica as a way of explaining that for our gaming group which has transitioned to KoW in light of the Sundering and AoS debauchle. If you'd like I could post a thread for it here on Dakka so that you could see it, it's only about half way through the story, and it purposefully tries to avoid direct references towards GW's IP although it does use characters from my ET story I wrote (see my signature for a link to that). Let me know if that interests you.

@Try, I like the idea of a weekly discussion about certain aspects of the game, with a different theme each week, it'd definitely get me to check in more often!

 Avatar 720 wrote:
I've been contemplating writing a bit of fiction, but I've little idea how Mantica is affected by conflicts. Existing lore suggests that they're commonplace, and nothing short of cataclysmic clashes will have any real lasting effect on the fluff, but I'm wary of straying into the realms of too-important battles. Things like Dwarf holds coming under siege could easily be argued as either something that could happen fairly regularly, or something momentous and noteworthy.

I'm also wary about conflicts where the belligerents won't make much sense being there, because there are races in Mantica which have defined 'homes', and others which were vaguely given a direction they went in, or otherwise cover vast areas--such as the Neriticans; where would it make sense for a warhost of those to gather? All we know is there are 3 trident realms and they exist in the various oceans. We don't really know how they muster armies, or where they're likely to have enough forces to do so. Do they just answer the call of nature--...--to appear at X place, and then just converge from different areas?

I'd rather not step on Mantic's toes when it comes to writing fics, but it seems to be almost inevitable.

I passed this post onto Mantic because relevance [/cryptic]

If you want to do a multirace area, it's already in the fluff that young cities and kingdoms have popped up all over the areas on the map called the Successor Kingdoms, Dragon Teeth Mmountains, Ardovikian Plain, and Primovantor, and that these cities are human, elven, dwarven, halfling, and sometimes all of the above at once.

So they're all in contact, plus throw in the Ogres, Goblins, Ratkin, Nature, Herd, and Undead - who can all be anywhere - put it near a lake or river or sea and there's your Neritican and Varangur connection, and the only struggle you'd really have is "How did the Orcs/Abyssals/Abyssal Dwarves/Empire of Dust/Twilight Kin get here?", which is where you need to get creative.