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decker_cky wrote:

 judgedoug wrote:

 Bolognesus wrote:
That's aside from the reportedly long waiting list for a time slot in their production lines though, isn't it?

Apparently not anymore. the 3 months is submission ('here's the 3ups, Renedra!') to completion ('thanks for the pile of sprues, Renedra!').

But they are expensive. Which is probably the overriding concern.

I wonder what the sales difference would have been if the goblins were well-tooled and the sprues a bit more full (let's say including the other two weapon options). Stylistically, I think the goblins are as good as anything on the market, and they would be the clear best hard plastic goblins (considering night goblins different) on the market.

I'm assuming they paid maybe a couple grand for the current sprues (milling steel is expensive no matter how crappy the final product is). Everyone has heard tales of Renedra's expensiveness, 20-40,000 GBP for sprues depending on size, but they do deliver quality.
Defiance mentioned at one point the UAMC sprue cost US$25,000 made at a place in Ohio or whatever. So I'd say that's about the correct price for a sprue in the US or UK.
Which is why Wargames Factory's ~$10k prices are appealing, what with Chinese labor and all.

I agree with you, their goblins are just the best designs, straight up. If they were to reinvest in them, get the sculptor to do a proper 3up and have a proper sprue, Fireforge-sized, with 5 bodies, say 8-10 heads, 5 spears w/arms, 5 swords w/arms, 5 bows w/arms, 5 left arms for shields, 5 right arms for bow dudes, 5 quivers, 5 shields, standard w/ 2 different toppers, horn and drums, and some greeblies (dead goblins? baby mawbeast?) to mirror their Elf/Undead/Dwarf sprues, jeez, I'd probably buy another 200 of them and I already OWN 200 of their current ones! lol

I agree with you completely, and it's not like its something that only large companies can do. You've already pointed out Fireforge, I've got a load of the Warlord plastics (their Hail Caesar range) and those are fantastic. Perfectly suitable level of detail, posable with a range of options, and fit/rank together well. I haven't first-hand experience, but I've heard Perry miniatures are the same.

What's disappointing here is that Mantic had a real opportunity to do something special, as there simply aren't that many fantasy ranges out there for mass combat systems. Things might not have come together (and I'm guessing they have to do a hell of a lot of balancing acts to maintain with supply, production, design etc... sure Ronnie had some more grey in his hair last time I saw pictures of him), but surely at some point they have to begin scoring higher?

The problem is that their current funding model gives them zero incentives to produce quality products. Everything is paid for upfront, and gamers seem remarkably willing to give somebody money for a model that "could be awesome." The MAA would never have seen the light of day if they hadn't already been pre-sold. People still dumped money into Deadzone even when it was apparent that Mantic produced about 50% slag for the KoW kickstarter. Mars attacks will be the same.

I seem to recall that the greens popping up for KoW when Deadzone was out looked promising. Maybe I'm blurring timelines though.
I do remember being pleasantly surprised by the initial ogre, troll and paladin greens in particular.

I can't imagine that they won't start to feel the reprecussions of "mixed" quality work, even in their crowdfunding. They can't be solely funded by Kickstarters, they need the kits that those produced to then sell for years to come.
Although Defiance games has been churning out incredibly late lumpy garbage for years and they'll probably pull in $50k for a grainy egg robot, so clearly gamers will throw money at anything.

On the other hand, part of me is thinking.

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now where's all the money they're making through their normal sales going?"

 Compel wrote:

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now where's all the money they're making through their normal sales going?"

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now are they making money through their normal sales?"

They seem to be quite proud of the number of dreadball sets they've sold compared to the kickstarter.

That's without mentioning the still strong undead sales, or the Imperial Guard players starting corporation armies.

 judgedoug wrote:

 Bolognesus wrote:
That's aside from the reportedly long waiting list for a time slot in their production lines though, isn't it?

Apparently not anymore. the 3 months is submission ('here's the 3ups, Renedra!') to completion ('thanks for the pile of sprues, Renedra!').

But they are expensive. Which is probably the overriding concern.

Well, we've seen what "cheaper" gets you. gakky models that they're uphappy with, not willing to show yet were willing to take people's money for, and excuses meted out third-hand on the internet. "Ronnie told me, but they swore me to secrecy - but it's totally not their fault." (that they shipped substandard models to people anyway, damaging their already-shaky reputation further, for years to come...)

Which one's the better investment in your business for the long term?

 Cyporiean wrote:

 Compel wrote:

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now where's all the money they're making through their normal sales going?"

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now are they making money through their normal sales?"

They do brag on their Dreadball numbers quite a bit. I seem to remember one of the updates (KS or Newsletter I don't recall) calling the Werewolves the hit of the summer too.

 Azazelx wrote:
Well, we've seen what "cheaper" gets you. gakky models that they're uphappy with, not willing to show yet were willing to take people's money for, and excuses meted out third-hand on the internet. "Ronnie told me, but they swore me to secrecy - but it's totally not their fault." (that they shipped substandard models to people anyway, damaging their already-shaky reputation further, for years to come...)

Which one's the better investment in your business for the long term?

They'll keep doing the cheap method if they think it will pay off in the longterm. The KS update talking about it said they weren't happy, but there had been improvements in the process. Deadzone stuff isn't organic shapes, but it does look very nice from what we've seen.

Of course, we haven't seen the hard plastic, excepting the terrain, which is pretty simple.

 Azazelx wrote:
Of course, we haven't seen the hard plastic, excepting the terrain, which is pretty simple.

I think the Zombies are going to be the only real 'test' sprues that will judge how well they'll be able to make fantasy stuff. All the other stuff is smooth shapes with hard edges.

However....a simple sprue done well is still a sprue done well. We hadn't seen that from this manufacturer yet.

I still want to know how the evil plastics baron managed to buy out the Mantic summer camp for orphans and forced them to eat the stomped-on snickers bar of releasing poor models. I bet there's a real scoop of a story there, especially if Mantic wins the high-stakes canoe race telethon to buy their Enforcers' tooling for grandma.

Assuming its at all true, I think it's a good thing that Mantics official line on the MaAs wasn't the sob story told several pages back.

^ Yes.

End consumers don't care about toolmakers or manufacturers or any of that behind-the-scenes stuff.

From the customer's perspective: Mantic minis = made by Mantic, their responsibility. The buck stops there and it is good that Mantic agrees.

It is the only properly professional line to have in this situation.

Definitely better that they keep quiet about the whole thing rather than going on a Tony-Reidy-esque rant, or like any of the Kickstarter creators who go "weh weh the big bad toolmaker" whenever delays crop up.

They've taken this silent "we need to deal with this ourselves" approach before when Dreadball had problems, although Jake Thornton ended up ranting about it on his blog so we got a little bit of an idea of the chaos that was going on behind the scenes.

My only concern is that they are still using this find-ways-to-screw-you-over-at-every-chance, have-already-screwed-you-over-multiple-times "have to fly over there for 2 weeks to supervise them and make sure they don't screw us over" Chinese toolmaker going forward.

Maybe it would instead be better to try out that local UK toolmaker who recently delivered on a kickstarter for hard plastic sci-fi minis and produced 5 different really high quality sprues with £11k of funding, in the space of 3 months, working in their spare time, that I got in the mail yesterday (they're really nice!), and is actively trying to find wargames companies who want hard plastic tooling done.

How did the sprues for that work out? Care to share some pics?

And if they are good, and can accommodate more intricate levels of details, what is Mantic's excuse from here on out?

 Cyporiean wrote:

 Compel wrote:

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now where's all the money they're making through their normal sales going?"

"They've sold a tonne of stuff through kickstarter, fair enough.... Now are they making money through their normal sales?"

The money is going where the money for most new(ish) companies go - back into the company.

Part of the reason WotC sold out to Hasbro - WotC was making money, but the folks that owned WotC were broke....

It'll take a while for Mantic to actually be totally in the black - and that is why Kickstarter is a godsend to new(ish) gaming companies.

Reaper is a mature company, and they needed Kickstarter.

The Auld Grump

@Fenris: Sure, here they are:


Won't gak up this thread too much, but my thoughts on it can be found in the PDC KS thread in misc. minis forum, and summarized as "super-happy, I should have spent 5x more on their KS".

They're not the only ones either, UKplasticmouldings and SK Engineering are another couple off the top of my head in the UK who also do regular high-quality client work for either the wargames or scale model industries. GW used to use the former (for digital tooling before they got their own stuff set up - stuff like the plastic BFG ships were made by them), Victrix and PSC use the latter for everything.

So in that case Mantic definitely has no excuse, except for the fact that it's probably a lot cheaper to get it from China, and that pleases the bean-counters more.

Thing of it is, even if it does cost less, it hurts them more in the long run. This kickstarter has soured me to Mantic's practices, and I was a massive fan of theirs. They can make short-term profits from their products, but in the end they're only hurting themselves.

The more painful thing for me is - Kickstarter is an nearly infinite source of seed capital. The higher quality/ lower-priced your product is (make both of those happen and ca-ching!), the more money you can raise, there is no need to scrimp and save and bean-count when you can instead push for quality, huge stretch goals and explain up-front why they are needed and ask people to get on board with your vision of very low-priced, very-high quality minis like the original elves and skeleton sprues.

I'd be really happy with just $50k per sprue stretch goals (or $75k or $100k, or whatever it is they need to get it done right, as long as the freebies are there and the product is shown off as sculpts or renders, people will back it) from Mantic in a Kickstarter and some miniatures that are really affordable and really good quality at the end (not this tooled in China crap where the end results depend on how much the toolmaker thinks it can get away with shafting you), rather than twice the quantity of minis that are neither.

If that means doing a Kickstarter just for the Nature army, and ignoring the Abyssal army until next year then fine, just do the Nature army to a top-notch standard and do the hard plastic gnomes, naiads, slyphs and salamanders... then centaurs, slyvan kin and elementals in restic and you have a wonderful army with 4 hard plastic kits all sorted from about $500k of funding. They could maybe start with the four sets of restic elements for the initial fund, then go nuts with hard plastics after that. I'm fairly certain they'd have a hard plastic funded on day one, possibly two.

They really need to stop underestimating their own potential and hamstringing themselves with poor bean-counting-based decisions when they're capable of so much more.

Warpath 1.0 release was killed by the bean-counter decision to re-use fantasy sprues when a couple of brand new hard plastic corporation and zz'or infantry sprues and a box filled with the things would have sold like hotcakes.

Recent (and rather odd) decisions can all be traced back to a bean-counter mindset, instead of a "we are creative artists pushing to be the absolute best that we can be" mindset that practically oozes from Kickstarters like KD, DFG, SW.
That bean-counter business mindset might be an asset for meeting KS schedules, but it's absolutely toxic when applied to the product itself in a "can we do 3 kits that might be crap and expensive instead of one kit that we know will be amazing?" manner.

That's my opinion on it anyway, I've been leaving feedback to this effect since there has been a lot of talk about the KoW 2.0 KS recently (I think it might be next after Mars Attacks from the sound of it).

I really hope with the next one they can get people back on board, since there's a lot of people (like you, Fenriswulf, and Gallahad) who I've known to be Mantic fans for a long time and who just weren't happy with it. And that bothers me a lot more than any amount of the casual armchair ranting that you tend to see on forums from people about products they have no personal investment in.

 scarletsquig wrote:
The more painful thing for me is - Kickstarter is an nearly infinite source of seed capital./
/huge snip
I really hope with the next one they can get people back on board, since there's a lot of people (like you, Fenriswulf, and Gallahad) who I've known to be Mantic fans for a long time and who just weren't happy with it. And that bothers me a lot more than any amount of the casual armchair ranting that you tend to see on forums from people about products they have no personal investment in.

I've been critical of your Mantic fandom in the past, but this post of yours is pure gold. Kudos.

Now if only Ronnie et al would read it and listen.

Yeah, an excellent post Squig, and right on the money too.

I really hope they switch to a local producer too. Even if the Chinese factory can potentially produce good quality stuff, they obviously can't without constant supervision of very basic stuff. I think the current contracts were signed before PDC started up so unless Mantic use their backout clause for the DZ stuff then it has to be with the Chinese Factory. Interesting that they didn't go with UKplasticmoldings or SK Engineering when the factory screwed up the goblins and M@As. I was under the impression that Renedra were the only ones who could do miniatures until PDC came along.

Squig, I think you've it the nail on the head regarding any future Mantic ks. People will back for quality sprues, although I do wonder if they've put of many potential customers by the response to their m@a.

I was nearly put off Mantic plastics for good after picking up some of the Goblins, it was only the fact that I really liked the look of deadzone and that it was restic models that I went in for as much as I did on the ks. Thought of getting some mangled Enforcers sprues does give me nightmares.

I think you're right, basically less is more. If they produce less figures in a ks but make sure their fantastic sprues they will be much more successful in the long run. At the moment many people are accusing them of being cash grabbers, sending out rubbish minis, not caring once they've got peoples cash. They really need to address this.

 scarletsquig wrote:
^ Yes.
Maybe it would instead be better to try out that local UK toolmaker who recently delivered on a kickstarter for hard plastic sci-fi minis and produced 5 different really high quality sprues with £11k of funding, in the space of 3 months, working in their spare time, that I got in the mail yesterday (they're really nice!), and is actively trying to find wargames companies who want hard plastic tooling done.

Yep. Agree. These guys blew the lid off of a lot of the general logic for tooling molds. once you do a certain bandwidth, it may make more sense to do tooling in-house, or at least locally.

When a small KS can do it, there is no valid excuse from a company who raised millions why they cannot produce the same standard.

Edit: and Sprues solves the 'tear from sprue' issue. Just stick the whole sprue in the box and let the consumer deconstruct it.

 Gallahad wrote:
The problem is that their current funding model gives them zero incentives to produce quality products.

Do you really, honestly believe what you just wrote? That they are such terrible businessmen that they're like, "let's produce inferior products maliciously and steal the customer money! Then we'll never sell another one of the kits again! muahaha!" *twirl moustache*
50% slag? so you participated and got all your free models and you declare that 50% of them are slag. okay, which ones?

they lost money on KoW Kickstarter. do you think they specifically purposefully engineered their business plan to produce a product that wouldn't sell? they want to not even break even? that's your thinking?

A Kings of War 2.0 kickstarter will be quite an interesting event. There is an awful lot of ground for them to make up in the fantasy realm, not to mention all the people who were left a bit soured by the previous experience.

I missed the original one, and most of the stuff they released for it is stuff I wouldn't have bought anyways with the exception of a hero or two.

Having seen what came out of it, I would really like to see the next one be very narrowed and focused, and I love Squig's idea of focusing on getting a hard plastic sprue or two made first and build up from there

Maybe a Abyssals vs. Nature mini kicker? Focus on a base infantry sprue for each army, stretch goal for ranged support, plastic command, restic specialty units, maybe some cavalry if things go well... wrap it all up in a two player starter box and call it a day.

Show off renders and sprue ideas before pledging starts to build up interest, put some 3d models up at launch time, maybe have some pictures comparing early prints to other Mantic figures... it can't be that hard!

Hell maybe some day I can have someone besides GW give me some hard plastic lizardmen.

 Azazelx wrote:

 scarletsquig wrote:
The more painful thing for me is - Kickstarter is an nearly infinite source of seed capital./
/huge snip
I really hope with the next one they can get people back on board, since there's a lot of people (like you, Fenriswulf, and Gallahad) who I've known to be Mantic fans for a long time and who just weren't happy with it. And that bothers me a lot more than any amount of the casual armchair ranting that you tend to see on forums from people about products they have no personal investment in.

I've been critical of your Mantic fandom in the past, but this post of yours is pure gold. Kudos.

Now if only Ronnie et al would read it and listen.

I told ya! I told ya! Squig's a Mantic fan in that he wants them to be awesome, not a Mantic apologist!

wrap it all up in a two player starter box and call it a day.

Wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

Slight problem is that abyssals and nature would both require two books, if you want the full paper versions for everything, but that's hardly insurmountable.

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:

A Kings of War 2.0 kickstarter will be quite an interesting event. There is an awful lot of ground for them to make up in the fantasy realm, not to mention all the people who were left a bit soured by the previous experience.

I missed the original one, and most of the stuff they released for it is stuff I wouldn't have bought anyways with the exception of a hero or two.

See, that's the thing - so many of the KS backers are just fine - despite the crappy men at arms - because most of the gak was free.

The $175 pledge netted you like $250 worth of pre-existing figures plus the rulebook. That was already a good deal.
Then the stretch goals hit - and you you got 15 units for free and like a dozen metal heroes due to the stretch goals and free dice and some restic KS exclusive miniatures.

So if you're like me and you only had use for about 6 of the stretch-goal free units, it was STILL an amazing deal because the initial pledges were discounted product.
And some of the sculpts were great, so again, if you were me, you bought several extra units of things you liked at a discount! (I've got like 60 fleabag riders I need to assemble and paint for my goblin army)

I thought the Men At Arms were garbage, I didn't like several sculpts of the new units, but I was still VERY VERY happy with the KS. It got me playing a fantastic rules set and got me started with a couple armies and I still got a bunch of free gak as stretch goals, some of which was useful, so I traded the other things to people for more of the useful things.