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TLR - I will probably make a small pledge at the basic level.

^^ huh?

thanks for the update Scarletsquig.

i think more legs would make it look slow and be difficult to fit on a base without looking stupid or small. has anyone posted their thoughts over on the update page?

I was about to suggest they hunch the model a bit but someone had beat me to it! Guess I might as well go over there and agree with them though...

I agree though, more legs would make it look far less agile not to mention that they would never fit on the little round disc they come with!

I'm not sure what you mean by "stupid" or "small" there, they already look out of place on the concept as it is, the extra legs are just dangling from the hips.

The legs don't have to touch the ground, they just have to look like they belong on the miniature (also, wow, preying mantises have some really freaky proportions):



Still standing on the back legs, there, but with the middle set of legs in more of a supporting pose that suggests they could be used for climbing/ grappling or moving at speed, even though 2 legs are the default stance and are used for walking slowly.

That's what I mean by a more horizontal pose and making the middle legs look like they're a real and functional part of the alien.

Also, if they get made bipedal because the minis won't stand up correctly on their little round disc bases with a cooler and more dynamic design, then the correct solution is "Add hex bases to the zz'or box so that they can stand up" not "Compromise the design and style of the miniatures based on an arbitrary and easily-fixed manufacturing constraint".

GW hormagaunts stand up no problem at all and they only have have the tip of a single claw touching their bases.

On the plus side, I do really like the head, and the claws on the concept.. it's really just the middle legs and overall posing that need work.. the kickstarter comments are pretty unanimous on this point.

And are a nightmare to rank up or place near models.

^ All depends on how the miniature is weighted.

In the case of preying mantises, the abdomen is the largest part, so you could have the bulk of the "sticking out part" being at the rear as a counterweight and still have a mostly horizontal pose with the front rearing up to make sure that it isn't a complete nightmare as far as positioning goes. There are smart ways of designing around that issue that I'm sure Roberto/Remy can handle.

I'm a big fan of "rule of cool" dynamic minis in any game that doesn't involve ranking things up warhammer-fantasy style.

The Judwan are currently my favourite team simply because those poses are extremely cool and dynamic.

The Corporation Striker is brilliant for the same reason, there's a great sense of movement in that miniature, whereas I find the FF/ Veer-myn/ Marauder teams to be a little bit bland in their posing for such a high-speed game, a lot of them are just kinda standing around with their fists raised.

I'd like to see guards lunging to make a tackle, strikers running, that kind of thing. Throw in a hex base if they don't stand up, don't make them less cool just because they won't stand up without one.

Something like what is shown on the front cover artwork would be really cool as a miniature, with that big orc charging forward to grapple and the striker making a desperate lunge for the ball. It's that kind of dynamic posing that really makes things cool and gets across the speed of the game rather than just having a bunch of dudes standing around.

I rather like that mini as is - though perhaps that's just the Old School Kaiju fan in me glomming on to the 'man in a suit' comment!

Some good points there scarletsquig. Never realized how odd the proportions were on a mantis, very odd!

 Black Nexus wrote:
TLR - I will probably make a small pledge at the basic level.

^^ huh?

Ah, sorry. I was having a rambling morning. 'Basic' being the rules, board and two teams = Guard. Of course, it would be silly not to go up to Jack from there for a piddly £12!

Thanks to the OP for re-organising the first post.

I have to take issue with Hormagaunts balancing on one foot. Certain poses need extra weighting to keep them upright and they are a right pain to squish up when moving into assault. I agree that a more 'hunched' pose would be cool it would need to avoid straying into other model's hexes.

Quick questions: I take it the MDF boards will be available after the KS? Am I correct that the KS acrylic tokens are copies of the thirteen standard tokens? Thank you.

The Acrylic tokens are just more durable versions of the standards tokens.

They haven't said anything, to my knowledge, about the MDF boards being available after the kickstarter, but if they were, and I'd surprised if they weren't, I'd imagine they would cost significantly more.

We’ve now added:

1) the unlocked Season 2 teams to the list you can choose from in Guard ($30) + a free MVP in each!

Choose from: Trontek 29ers (Lucky Logan), Greenmoon Smackers (Slippery Joe), Midgard Delvers (Gorim Ironstone), Skittersneak Stealers (Reek Rolat), Female Corporation (Wildcard) and the Judwan (Mee-kel Judwan)!

2) 8 new players to Keeper – totaling 14 Corporation and 14 Marauders – to complete your team roster, plus a decal sheet.

3) 9 new players to Jack - totaling 14 Corporation and 14 Marauders – to complete your team roster, plus a decal sheet and a Female Corporation Player.

4) 12 new players to Striker – totaling 14 Corporation, 14 Marauders, 14 Veer-myn and 14 Forge Fathers, plus a decal sheet.

Amazing!
Right then, let’s talk more Season 2…

$265,000 – The Z’zor, Season 2 Insectoid Team


Early Concept Art – got an opinion? Drop it in the comments!

If we hit this goal we will produce the Z’zor team – a furious alien insectoid race. With all three player types available, a different bug performs a different role – from hulking four legged Guards to nimble Strikers. If we hit this goal we will:

1) Add 1 Z’zor Player to Jack

2) Add 2 Z’zor Players to Striker!

3) Add the Z’zor team to our list of our Season 2 Buy One Get Free Teams!

$272,500 – Coaches
Behind every great team is a great coach, and in the Season 2 rules you’ll be able to bring these individuals to the game.

If we hit this goal we will sculpt four Coaches to lead the Season 1 teams, and we'll create a bundle - buy 2, get 2 free for $15, meaning you’ll get all four different coaches in one fell swoop!


Yup – Orcy and his hammer (he must have snuck it into the arena...) have made it to DreadBall too!

Coaches for the Season 2 teams will come once we’ve got all of the teams unlocked!

There's more still to come including the Z'zor MVP, that silhouette and Robots - seriously cool Robots!

Right then - we're going to get busy updating all of the graphics on the front page. Enjoy and let's see how quickly we can break these goals down!

Substitution!
With the prospect of new Coaches models on the horizon, we’ve taken this opportunity to update our Free Agent reward level. Instead of being able to get involved in the creation of an MVP, we will instead add your likeness to a Coach model, sculpting him to look like you, kinda like this:


Coach Renton – Free Agent Concept Art. This could be you!!

See the resemblance to anyone? Well, this could be you with a pledge of Free Agent!

If you would like more details about our Free Agent or Man of the Match levels then please get in touch!




Automatically Appended Next Post:
And from the comments

Creator Mantic Games 13 minutes ago
We've done it - a massive boost in model count to everyone, well done guys!

To clarify on the concept art - the art is fairly static to show as much detail as possible for the sculptor to work from - this art is not posed.

We will get Roberto to work up a few poses for each player type shortly, and we'll make sure they are much more hunched and insect-like :-).

which is great to hear

I take back what I said about not wanting four legged Zzor, that guard looks great!

 scarletsquig wrote:

GW hormagaunts stand up no problem at all and they only have have the tip of a single claw touching their bases.

Bear in mind though that Hormagaunts have that claw tip riiiiight back at the extreme edge of the base, are light plastic, and still fall over a lot. With Mantic's figures having that central small base, it might be an issue.

The guard looks great, but I am not sure I like the sting at the back.

Zzor are great. I like the interpretation.

Lol master splinter.

Anyone else excited to have Master Splinter and the love child of Charles Xavier and Patches O'Hoolihan (from Dodgeball) as coaches?

Splinter yes, the other no, I would rather have Coach Renton

*sigh*

There goes more money. I may have to sell some stuff laying around to start funding my kickstarter fund.

Is it me, or is the dwarf couch the leader from Silverhawks?

^ they've said the dwarf is their own design the others i think are homages

rat - splinter
Orc - orcy
wheelchair guy - patches from dodgeball

Sure looks like Stargazer, with alittle bit of facial hair, and swapped which arm is robotic.

Really liking the new Zz'or Guard... "Mr. Snips" is the perfect name for him.

The value on this is getting really good now.

$200 of stuff in the $100 Jack level.
$330 of stuff in the $150 Striker level.

I can easily see those numbers rising to $300 and $500 by the time this is finished, for a 60-70% off RRP discount.

And the nice thing about this one is that you really can use all those figures, there's less "trade the stuff to get what you want/ have non-useful minis" factor than there was with either the KoW or Reaper freebies. Even if you just have 1-2 of a particular mini, the free agent rules still allow you to use it, and DreadBall Xtreme will feature mixed-race teams.

I really think this is one of the best things about this kickstarter, and why we're seeing so many people who want "one of everything" - it's all useful, it all adds to the game, and you can buy it all at a 50-70% discount.

A lot of people got chastised for moaning about free stuff in both the KoW and Reaper KS, but the point was entirely valid, one pack of minis that you want and can use is more valuable than 3 boxes that you don't and can't (since you have to go through the chore of trading to replace them).

I've suggested a "points" system for the Warpath kickstarter, where each unit counts as one point, and you can swap out one freebie for another of the same value freely. So, if it ends up with 100 free minis scattered around the 8 races, you could opt to just get a swarm of 100 zz'or instead of having to trade with people who collect the 7 other armies but don't collect Zz'or to get there.

I'd think it's better for them to have smatterings of all the different model ranges out there, so hopefully people then get tempted to complete armies using the models they have from the KS as a starting point.

Based on the insane degree of moaning during the Relic Knights KS, allowing swapping is not a smart move

Folk moan about it being complicated (Red Box Games had this problem too)
about not getting 'value' with the swaps,
about not being able to swap what they want
postage not changing if you swap out stuff
not being able to swap for postage costs

and I'm sure there were several other too

I think it would be more trouble than it was worth

I think you are right.

I like the new Zzor concepts a lot. The coaches...no...don't like he sketches and don't see the point.

(As an aside I might be a little more open to Warpath if it features aliens divergent from the standard bipedal humanoid model.)

I'm completely ignoring the relative levels of moaning in the KS comments and thinking about what would be good for the consumer, to encourage a higher amount of people to become backers.

Obviously, not for this KS, which is excellent, just something to keep in mind for the Warpath one.

They could even simplify it to offering simple "swap-out packages" for the freebies... 8 different options... pick one and all your freebies come from that race (a fixed selection of new KS units) instead of from all 8. Dead simple, rather than having to swap out each individual unit and probably much more manageable for the warehouse side of things.

That way, a pledge for a massive Zz'or army has the option to come with even more Zz'or as freebies, and the same applies to all other races.

That's the kind of thing I can see easily catapulting a WP Kickstarter into the $2m+ territory, offering the same great value as the Reaper Kickstarter, but also having excellent focus so that people can just get one huge Warpath army if they want.

I think there's a significant amount of non-pledgers who just aren't interested in a scattergun approach and having to mess around with loads of fiddly trades and sending/receiving packages to numerous different people to turn the models they don't want into models they do want. And if the kickstarter gives you 7/8th's models that you don't want, and only 1/8th's of the models that you do want, then the value just isn't there, no matter how much free stuff is being given away in total.

It would be so much more efficient from the consumer's perspective to simply have the models they want as freebies rather than all that messing around with post-KS trading even if that means a little more work for the warehouse sending things out.

The Dreamforge one was excellent because it focused on a single faction, there was absolutely nothing in that campaign that people didn't want.

Yeah, that's what has kept me out of a lot of these "category" of Kickstarters... I just don't know what I'd do with several models from numerous races I didn't plan to use.

I know lots of people love any kind of freebies, but for me untargeted ones don't add value, since I know myself too well by now to say "Oh, I'll sell them later". Nope, they'll just get squirreled away like everything else other than the single faction I tend to play for each game.

I should note that it certainly doesn't take away value- just doesn't add for me.

 scarletsquig wrote:


That's the kind of thing I can see easily catapulting a WP Kickstarter into the $2m+ territory, offering the same great value as the Reaper Kickstarter, but also having excellent focus so that people can just get one huge Warpath army if they want.

Well, it's a tricky balance.

Reaper (or, for a small variant, DreamForge) did really well by giving their KS focus. They used it, by and large, to give people one thing and one only: miniatures.

No T-shirts, no Dice, no plastic-upgrade-game-cards, no strech-goals for a nicer box or board, no mousepads or any junk of that kind. Just miniatures, more miniatures and miniatures with a vengeance.

I kinda doubt Mantic wants to go that way by the measure of their current and past KS. And it may not even be appropriate for a KS that also wants to put out a game, not just miniatures.

But you'll end up with a sort of dilemma. Those who just want miniatures will want to minimize to the "game-aspects" that come with it. Those that actually want the game to go with the miniatures, will be interested in getting a high-quality game with all the bling you can add to it.

Actually the KoW KS was quite literally Miniatures, Miniatures, Miniatures in it's last 2 weeks.

They tried doing dice and .pdf supplements for special characters as $15k stretches early on in the first 2 weeks of the kickstarter and it failed hard, with the pledges dropping like a stone down to only $400/day at the lowest point.

They've learnt their lesson as far as that goes, I think. This one is being extremely well run right from the start.

You're right that even including a rulebook in the pledge level makes some people annoyed... I remember seeing more than one comment on the KoW KS along the lines of "Don't want the rulebook, I only want cheap minis for my warhamz".

You'd be surprised at how many people want t-shirts though, it's almost become a kickstarter obsession to say "backed the kickstarter, played the game, got the t-shirt". As long as they aren't stretch goals, the bitching from non-t-shirt-wanters is minimal.

Scarlet, do you know when the Warpath Kickstarter is supposed to start? I have a couple friends who were kicking themselves for not getting in on the Kings of War Kickstarter, and they want to get in on the warpath one but want a rough idea when it'll be.