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Agreed!

Remember the early WIP shots:

 judgedoug wrote:

I think we're seeing on of the more 'hunched over' poses here.

Overall, I'm impressed and VERY happy I went with Ogres as one of my BoGo choices!

 judgedoug wrote:
anybody else feel that the KoW and DB KS have made Mantic 'level up' as a company?

Seeing these new sculpts, I'm inclined to agree. I hope they continue to improve their product line and expand their sales. I'd love to see GW finally have some serious competition.

 Breotan wrote:

 judgedoug wrote:
anybody else feel that the KoW and DB KS have made Mantic 'level up' as a company?

Seeing these new sculpts, I'm inclined to agree. I hope they continue to improve their product line and expand their sales. I'd love to see GW finally have some serious competition.

IF Mantic can keep up this level of scultping AND 'good' pricing, I think GW will finally have the competition that will make them sit up and take notice.

But, I wonder if Mantic will be able to break free of the "I'll use Mantic's models in WFB/40K" track they seem to be in now...

I actually think continuing to use models that are all-but-explicitly implied to be fully compatible with GW models is a brilliant plan.

If they were to go the full-competitor route like PP did with WMH, they'd be in an uphill fight against GW for market share.

But by undercutting GW's profits on their models, when they finally do branch out more fully into independent and completely unique sculpts and models, they'll be doing so both with a massive base of people who either play their games or at least use their figures in other games, and they'll be up against GW who will have been losing sales (Hopefully a substantial number) and will be in a weaker position to contest the market. It will allow them to hit PP levels of market competition far more quickly, and will imo far lessen the risk of petering out and dying that many other small TT wargame companies have suffered from.

Don't like the ogres. Didn't like the concept art either and feel they are too similar to their orcs. Also the huge upper body to small lower body makes it worse. The sculpt is technically very good and follows the concept art well. Unfortunately the concept art doesn't appeal to me.

There's no competition for me, personally. I hate WHFB 8th and stopped playing. KoW is, to me, a superior ruleset. The last few months of playing KoW every Saturday (usually multiple games) has given me a sense of gaming joy I haven't experienced since my purchase of, and several years worth of playing of, Warhammer 6th edition.

I use my Empire, HE, and TK armies, and have gotten a Mantic Orc, Undead, and Goblin army. Actually KoW has made me go back and fill in some units for my WHFB armies since the games tend to be much bigger (two to three times as many troops, finished in half the time). It's a breath of fresh air in the wargaming community I haven't felt since Starship Troopers.

It totally looks like its the camera angle that's making it look bad. The legs are really stepping quite a bit forward and back and you totally lose that in the most recent pick, but in the older WIP shot, you can see that the legs look much better.

So these are back on the list. I'll probably be getting them to sci-fi up or perhaps to steampunk up.

What also doesn't help the model shown above is that it appears to be using the knock-kneed green (left hand side one) shown in the early WIP picture.

Stew (mantic staff) wrote:The {{Kickstarter funded}} heroes are: an elf, a dwarf, a human ... riding a cat, a Twilight Kin lord, and four more that I won't spoil just yet. No Undead though. Funnily enough, when we said "Would you like a rotting corpse that looks like you?" people for some reason said no...

the $8000 vampire pledge did, in the end, sell via paypal (and we're getting minis for it, yay!) though it's not going to be undead-based (see quote ).
also, since Stew mentions a total of 8 minis; 5 were funded on the KS project itself and 2 via the late vampire, it would appear they opened up an eighth slot in the end or something like that.

in any case, more minis for us - yay!

Another little piece of info.

It has been directly confirmed by the Mantic staff that the Celestian men-at-arms being produced in hard plastic will result in all quantities of them being doubled.

So, anyone who spent $25 on a buy-one-get-one-free set of Men-at-arms will receive 40 miniatures.

Hahah, nice! Won't say no to more miniatures! Are these going to be done on a sprue, or as restic miniatures?

 Fenriswulf wrote:
Hahah, nice! Won't say no to more miniatures! Are these going to be done on a sprue, or as restic miniatures?

When SS says "hard plastic" he means sprue

Heh ok, I've lost track of the terminology it seems to change so much. Good news though, means more weapon options available. Wonder how much of the new range is likely to be made into sprues rather than their restic. Be interesting to see.

Honestly, Im a little disappointed they will be hard plastic.

I just wasn't impressed by the quality of the plastic goblins i received from the KOW campaign a few months ago, the details were very soft and hard to make out. I actually compared the goblins to a sprue of Mantic skeletons i had lying around and the difference in quality was simply mind blowing.

Hopefully they will switch back to using Renadra (Or a company equally as good at casting.) to produce the Men-at-arms, because IMO the Chinese produced goblins were way below the quality i expect from the new improved Mantic.

Mr Gutsy wrote:
Honestly, Im a little disappointed they will be hard plastic.

I just wasn't impressed by the quality of the plastic goblins i received from the KOW campaign a few months ago, the details were very soft and hard to make out. I actually compared the goblins to a sprue of Mantic skeletons i had lying around and the difference in quality was simply mind blowing.

Hopefully they will switch back to using Renadra (Or a company equally as good at casting.) to produce the Men-at-arms, because IMO the Chinese produced goblins were way below the quality i expect from the new improved Mantic.

10x this. I got both undead and goblin armies and the goblin quality is really miles away from the undead one. Bad placed feed lines on the sprue, gigantic mould lines and loss of detail are my main complaints about them. I really wanted to love them because I loved the painted ones on the mantic site

I've just been checking out the Ogres on Mantic's Facebook page, they really do look splendid.

 mattyrm wrote:
I've just been checking out the Ogres on Mantic's Facebook page, they really do look splendid.

Picture for the ones not on FB:

I'll try and get you guys an answer about the hard plastic sprue thing, loads of people on kickstarter and the mantic forums have had similar thoughts.

It's a really difficult problem for Mantic to sort out for a whole host of different reasons, which is why we've seen restic take over as the main material.

EDIT: Got a super-quick answer from someone who asked Mantic directly about it.

Word is, they're well aware of the problems and are dealing with it, so we should see a much improved quality on the men-at-arms sprue.

Obviously, there's not a lot that can be done about the goblin sprue now that it's already tooled, but future ones will be better quality.

I think I skipped getting any extra Men-at-arms above the ones included at my level, since I figured I could just use Perry ones.

...I got three extra sets.
total of 150 incoming. Really, really considering contacting mantic about exchanging one (or even two!) set(s) for something else.
OTOH, 150 MaA is kinda cool, too
...but only 35 sisters really isn't much... gah, this is hard

edit and of course this is assuming they'll even let us exchange at this point!

I just want these guys with notRipper guns asap! preferably in some modern combat fatigues.

I'm eager to see how the Werewolves turn out. I've been wanting to run Werewolves as counts-as Crypt Horrors for my Vampire Counts, but the Forgeworld Skinwolves aren't quite what I was expecting. So I'm really hoping Mantics are up to par.

Also, does anyone know if the Undead Vampiress is a kickstarter exclusive or will see general release?

the vampiress is a KS exclusive; I think you can generally count on quite a few hitting ebay/swapshop though. I've got 3 incoming and I don't particularly like the model (will keep one, sell 2) and there's plenty of folks in a similar situation.

I didn't even realise there were shots available of it. I found some shots of the green, and to say I'm unimpressed would be an understatement. Holding out hope for those Werewolves though.

Not sure if you caught that little incident but there was a bit of a ruffle over Wildcard, a DB MVP model. The green looked rather horrid in fan pics just like those of the vamp, but pics of the model so far have gotten a much better reception - it's leagues ahead of where we thought it was gonna be based on such pics of the green.

I'll hold out until I see the finished product before commenting on the mini itself; I said it wasn't my 'thing' because I simply don't really like vamps in my undead army - I prefer necromancers

 Bolognesus wrote:
Not sure if you caught that little incident but there was a bit of a ruffle over Wildcard, a DB MVP model. The green looked rather horrid in fan pics just like those of the vamp, but pics of the model so far have gotten a much better reception - it's leagues ahead of where we thought it was gonna be based on such pics of the green.

No, the painted pics look just as terrible, if not worse. We just aren't bothering to point it out any more. For example, the picture of her sent in the latest Mantic email newsletter makes her face, the best part of the model, look deformed from the paint job, while no paint job on earth could make the pose look less awkward.

Is anyone able to post a pic? The only one I could find on a google search looks like a version of the green.

 Pacific wrote:
Is anyone able to post a pic? The only one I could find on a google search looks like a version of the green.

first result for "Dreadball Wildcard"

Yeah, that's pretty dire.

 Cyporiean wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
Is anyone able to post a pic? The only one I could find on a google search looks like a version of the green.

first result for "Dreadball Wildcard"

Yah. I am still puzzled why they went with that pose. For the not-Tron look they were going for, the straight lines you'd have had by doing more static sculpt along the concept art would seem to be vastly preferable.