Secure the LZ
Update #98 · Jun 27, 2013 · 14 comments

With the survey deadline approaching on the 21st July and all of our sculptors working like crazy to get everything finished, we’ve got some new scenery sprue contents to show off!

First to be funded was the Landing Pad BattleZone:




The Landing Pad BattleZone contains 3 x Landing Pad sprue, 1 x Defence Line Sprue (see below) and 1 x 48-piece connector sprue.
The crane piece works as a 90 degree connector and can be put on any floor, wall or ceiling.
The small pieces in the top right corner are stair connectors, allowing you to combine staircase pieces and make a staircase as wide as you like.
The pillars work as 180 degree connectors, so are useful for strengthening any building.
This BattleZone is sufficient to make a complete Landing Pad raised up on pillars with a perimeter defence line, a gun turret and a staircase, with plenty of bits to spare!


You’ll notice above that the Landing Pad BattleZone features 3 Landing Pad Sprues and the Defence Line Sprue upgrade sprue funded at $1.15m that can be used to add even more variety to both the Landing Pad and Fortification BattleZones!

Defence Line Sprue (Part of Landing Pad and Fortification BattleZones):


The defence line pieces are designed to fit around the edges of the Landing Pad or along the top of a fortified wall or bunker.
On its own the sprue also creates a line of Barricades up to 29.5 inches long! The turret is standalone and can be used as a comms array or burst laser.
The 135 degree connectors are on both this sprue and the Landing Pad and can be used to join the defence line pieces at 135 degrees, or to angle them outwards around the edges of the landing pad.

NOTE: All sprue designs are awaiting final confirmation from our factory, so there may some slight tweaks still to come, but we will ensure that you can still build just as much with them!

We’re expecting final renders of the Fortifications and Ruins Sprue in soon so keep an eye out for them!!

Earth Dragon wrote:
I can't even really fathom how the Multihex models are gonna impact the game. With all the deaths in matches currently, it seems crazy that we'd have even more devastating Killers running around on the pitch.

I wonder if there is gonna be a slight rules mod to compensate for league play. Something like 4 damage miss the rest od the game and the next, 5 damage your killed, as opposed to kill with 4 damage.

Judwan hiring a couple of these guys just seems completely unbalanced to me as well, so I wonder what the restrictions might be. I know some refuse to play with Judwan involved as is, though I'm hearing more and more FFs match up against them as long as you don't play like a mindless slamming slow.

Can't wait for Season 3 in general. There will be so much variety at that point with 144 different possible match-ups of different teams, and that's before you account for free agents, mvps, and additions/deletions to the roster of each individual team. The variety is quickly matching that of Blood Bowl. I'm just hoping there are no joke/dud teams in Dreadball like the Goblins or Halfings.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
The sprue layout doesn't make much sense. You end up with 9 standard panels and 9 triangles, and you only need 5 and 4, respectively, to build the platform. If you scrounge up a spare square panel you can build two platforms, but the second one won't have barricade walls.

I guess both sprues will appear in other kits as well and Mantic is doing this sub-optimal layout to min/max the modularity in some way we can't see yet, but still...

Creator Mantic Games about 9 hours ago

Hi guys, thanks for the comments!
Ramps - we did actually have one made, but with the floor tiles a maximum of 5mm in thickness it didn't really look like a ramp - there was hardly a slope on it. It was effectively a half-tile with limited use due to only having connectors on one side. What we've tried to with all of our scenery is make it as flexible as possible and allow everything to have multiple uses so you can really use your imagination.
Defence Line - As I say, we wanted the flexibility, and this sprue is a fantastic addition to both the landing pad and the fortifications BattleZones. While we could have made the designs more like the shields in the concept, firstly we would have struggled to fit enough on the sprue, and secondly they would again have had very limited use. This way, you've got lots of options.
Gun - yes, there is one per Defence Line sprue, but there's only one of these sprues in the BattleZone. The gun is only a single component, so it can't be split over multiple sprues.
Stairs - each of the staircase pieces is 18.75mm wide, and enough to support a 25mm base on its own if that's how you want to use it. The most common staircase will use two of these pieces, giving a staircase the same width as a half tile. This can be connected to a wall or floor in various different ways.
Long Wall Sections - we tried many ways of fitting these in, but due to the size of the components they took up too much of the space on the sprue that could be used for pieces that were much more useful overall. As I say, what we were really going for was flexibility, and they went against that. While we could have sacrificed some of the designs (stairs, pillars, etc) to fit one in somewhere, it would have been of restricted use elsewhere. We're hoping to revisit them later and fully do them justice :-).
Surveys - you are free to change your mind any time between now and the 21st of July. Just fill in your survey again and we'll overwrite your previous one. We've cleared the backlog of confirmation emails on the server now, so your summary should arrive within a few minutes of completion now :-)
Thanks again for the feedback guys, much appreciated!

Mantic wrote:
Surveys - you are free to change your mind any time between now and the 21st of July. Just fill in your survey again and we'll overwrite your previous one. We've cleared the backlog of confirmation emails on the server now, so your summary should arrive within a few minutes of completion now :-)

Keeping the Peace
Update #99 · Jul 2, 2013 · 3 comments

Exciting news - we’ve just had confirmation that we’ve taken more than enough through the survey to fund the tooling of the hard plastic Enforcer Peacekeepers!



But there's more...



If we continue the way we’re going with the survey results, we think we’ll also be able to tool an additional scenery sprue...

Having read the feedback on the update last week, many of you have been clamouring for full height walls the length of the long edge of the triangular pieces (a tile 3" high by approximately 4.2" wide), allowing you to make buildings in far more interesting and varied shapes. There was also demand for ramps. Unfortunately these pieces simply didn't fit into the BattleZones - they took up too much of the sprue and significantly impacted the flexibility of the sets. However, we have a solution!

If enough comes in through the surveys, we think we can rectify this and create a brand-new sprue fully compatible with the existing kits, containing large wall pieces, a ramp, additional triangular sections and associated accessories, once again improving the variety and customisability of the kits!



This sprue will not be part of the BattleZones - these already provide fantastic building solutions as they are. If this sprue is funded, you’ll have the opportunity to add individual sprues of this new scenery on to your pledge during the second survey, and it will ship in the second shipment next year.

 scarletsquig wrote:
Quick bit of news - Mars Attacks will be 28mm and have a Kickstarter.

Might be the first one from Mantic I don't back, but I'll see how it goes.

I'd have preferred to see a Warpath Kickstarter first.

 Azazelx wrote:
They're very much using a shotgun approach to getting as much product out in the market as possible. Luckily, I share timetowaste85's level of interest in Mars Attacks, so I can't see it bothering me too much. Except for when it takes the company's energy, focus, effort and good sculptors away from their existing projects and commitments.

That could never happen with Mantic though, right?