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Earth Dragon.... DAMN YOU!

That single link has me simultaneously wanting to back the everloving CRAP out of that kickstarter, even though I have 14 battlezones coming.... AND throw out the last 60something custom bases I did to swap to clear bases.

I don't think I've ever seen well painted minis on clear bases on nice terrain. The combination is really striking. It also cuts a fair bit of work out of the mix and draws the eye to the model, while making it blend into it's surroundings better. Feck, I may be sold, gotta see where I can get some of those for my deadzone minis maybe.......

Definitely a nice paring with deadzone

 CptJake wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:
Anyone getting responses to their Dreadball messages to Mantic?

I wish I had.

I'm not sure what your trying to reach Mantic about in regards to Dreadball but if it's about the latest shipment, I know my friend received his today and we live in Southern California.

I got mine. I also used their web site 'Contact Us' form to try to figure out how to handle errors in the shipment. Several days ago.

Grimdork, I feel the same way about those clear bases. I may never do a custom base ever again after seeing those.

I'm still glad I bought all the BZs, this just adds a handful more scenarios for the campaign manager to add-in.

Earth Dragon wrote:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1621774283/battle-systemstm-sci-fi-modular-terrain?ref=banner

Stop the plague from escaping the planet!!!! This stuff looks great and could really add in some interesting scenarios. Even things like attacking Freighters where certain players are holding their base of operations. Already getting excited to plug this stuff into the scenarios.

(And just look at the video. It's all Mantic models lol)

Hm, this one looks like it has real potential. I could probably see going in for the double sweet-spot level. Unfortunately this time of year is pretty bad for money, so I'll just keep an eye on it rather than back it right now...

Where are the clear bases from?



edits - argh, my next post wiped out my previous post...

 kilcin wrote:

 CptJake wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:
Anyone getting responses to their Dreadball messages to Mantic?

I wish I had.

I'm not sure what your trying to reach Mantic about in regards to Dreadball but if it's about the latest shipment, I know my friend received his today and we live in Southern California.

Errors in shipment.

 scarletsquig wrote:

Which sculptor is this, out of curiosity? I remember seeing his blog a while ago and then some people on dakka bitching at me because I couldn't find a link or remember the sculptor's name when I said the trolls weren't Remy sculpts, all I knew was "some other French freelancer who did a lot of PP minis".

Damn, I blew it. Apologies to both sculptors, I mixed and matched here.

Sylvain, in-house Mantic sculptor, did both the Goblin snipers and the Plague 3rd gens. Clavilier Grégory did both the KOW trolls and the Marauder Hulk.

To be honest, both surprise me, as I didn't care for the 3rd gens but loved the snipers, and didn't care for the trolls but loved the hulk. Which I guess is why I conflated them into one mystery French sculptor.

As for Mars Attacks minis, I actually don't like all of them - I think some of the Martian grunts in particular could be better posed. But I do think the computer sculpted Mars Attacks minis have a higher success rate than Mantic's sculpted by hand stuff. Which makes me think that Mantic, and the wider industry, will soon be seeing traditional sculptors (all but the best of them) displaced altogether by computer sculptors.

 scarletsquig wrote:

As many have pointed out they'd have to go through exactly the same validation and QC process with any new company and KS timetables probably don't allow for that.

KS timetables?

I guess Mantic still takes those things seriously, eh? Good thing they haven't had any major quality issues as a result of that...


Seriously, I would have waited three or four more months for better MaA, and I can certainly wait a year or more for hard plastic enforcers. Hell, in this day and age, it's almost polite to delay your kickstarter. It's especially polite to do so if the quality would suffer otherwise.

Gallant communicates with his backers, explains that great hard plastic sprues will require some delay, and shows his backers plenty of pictures. Goofus cares so much for being able to use the line "never missed a deadline" on his next three kickstarters that he never bothered to check what his budget-grade sculptor sent directly to the manufacturers, nor did he care what the manufacturers sent sight-unseen to his backers.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

It boggles my mind that Mantic is willing to put a bullet in their future's head by marrying restic when the wargames market is experiencing the birth of the hard plastic renaissance.

I can't agree heavily enough with this.

While I like that Mantic has given folks some options for models in their various ranges by using restic, rather than waiting for the plastics, they seem to be willing to put speed-of-release ahead of price-per-model, which is very disappointing to me. Some models they have I love to death (Like the Forgefather Stormrage Veterans. Sexy, sexy beasts, the lot of them), but they're in restic and cost far more per model than I'm comfortable justifying as a purchase.

The issue is that their sculpts, while good, aren't as outstanding as they'd need to be to help the restic fly off the shelves. The slightly lower sculpt quality wouldn't be an issue if they were cheap from being in sprue plastic, but until Mantic starts knocking out Kingdom Death or Infinity grade restic sculpts, they would be vastly better off imo by slowing the release schedule down a tad so that the models they release are plastic in large part. Going from 12 restic models a year to 2 or 3 hard plastic ones is fine by me, and will probably net them more funding and a stronger fanbase than making restic for a while, then having to spend another chunk of money upgrading to hard plastic, versus doing hard plastic from the get-go.

Got a couple of questions. Not sure if anyone already has the answers or knows who to direct them to?

1. Does anyone know why there's the price difference in the acrylic counters? $20 in Kickstarter (approx £15) or £10 direct. Why's the Kickstarter batch more? More tokens maybe?

2. More of an aesthetic question. The colour schemes for Rebs. Do we know whether these are the defined skin tones for the various species, or is there variance? For example, GW Orks are all green, and Tau are all grey. Will all Yndij be reddish brown and Soraks purplish grey.

@Galgaroth, those races just got invented with the kickstarter as far as I know Seems like you could do as you want in those cases. I know I sure am! It will help alleviate my duplicate sculpts looking the same.

Can't help at all about the acrylic counters, I didn't want a set when the kickstarter ran, gonna make my own

The acrylic counters seem to have changed in spec from the KS I think the KS set was their best guess at what it would contain (the KS picture shows 45 counters the retail pack has 40 so I think the picture was for illustration only) and will probably contain all of the acrylic counters available for the $20 paid, the ultimate Dreadball set went through some changes before release as well - but that's my best guess!

I wouldn't get to hung up on colour schemes paint them how you want I know my plague won't be pinky/purple in colour

@Galgorath - I'm hoping/ assuming that both the plague counter set and the regular counter set will be provided for the $20.

Also, paint your minis however you like, there really is nothing set in stone and this is the position Mantic takes. There is a huge amount of variation just with human skin tone so alien skin tone you can do whatever you want with.

I pledged for the acrylic counters myself.

Just noticed the enraged counters are common to both packs so the only different counters in the plague pack are the 8 Mutation counters so I still think KS backers will get a combined pack but may be with not so many enraged counters.

Deadzone is on a different timetable. Plenty of people were asking to ensure it would be here for Christmas. So the base game pretty much HAD to go out early December.

As far as the individual pieces, I think even anyone worried about Christmas would rather get Wave 2 in Fall versus Spring if it meant stuff looked better.

I really hope mantic can get their plastic sorted out. I am not a fan of the stuff they are using for their martian game, I have the Gears of War board game. That plastic is weird, its like a 75 plastic 25 rubber. It has good detail but i still think its weird.
That said, their new restic mixture is far better than their old stuff, but plastic would still blow it away, because i would be able to use super glue alone to put the figures together, not a mixture of super glue and epoxy putty.

Thraxas Of Turai wrote:
I believe that to be the work of more than one painter, look at the bases to get an indication of who did what. For example the same painter did the Marauders, Rebs, Wrath and Nastanza.

Nope. I did the basing on some of the Rebs and so forth. I believe the models themselves were done by Golem. Definitely their sort of style.
All I painted for deadzone were the marauders (including the ripper suits).

Edit; but yes, definitely more than one painter. Pretty sure Dave at Mantic has done a few as well.

There I thought you did them all *sheepish* Still, crackin' job on the marauders.

Speaking of "KS timetables", I'm almost positive that there are still Ouya backers that haven't received a console, despite it being available at retail since late July.

I didn't think the problem with Mantic was the timetable? Thought it was the other way round - that they're rushing things to meet the deadlines, with people commenting that perhaps they would have preferred a bit of a wait, but then more of a hit-rate with the final sculpts..

 timetowaste85 wrote:

I wish more people liked the marauders. I know there's been a pretty big turn around and many more like them than originally, but I still feel like I'm in a minority when I say I really like them! I'll be ordering additional sets of them even.

I'm not a fan personally. I don't hate them, but I probably wouldn't use them without a bit of kitbashing with GW Orks.

On the other hand, you liking them doesn't make you a bad person or anything - minority or not. It's just personal aesthetics, after all.

Looks like deadzone weeks begun on the mantic blog.

http://www.manticblog.com/index.php/2013/11/04/deadzone-week-the-enforcers/

not really much new if you've be keeping up with the ks.apart from this pic

Oooh Deadzone week. Better include some production models ; p Really looking forward to the big chunky limited edition book, but iirc that's wave 2. Those enforcers do look damn fine...

Surely they should be doing MA week this week and DZ in a week or two?

I swear that I'm slowly turning into Kroothawk. I'll just keep my yap shut; I'm even getting tired of myself with my incessant negativity in regards to Mantic.

I've sent them an email and asked for a refund on my pledge. If they give it to me, we can happily part company and I promise to never visit another Mantic thread or Kickstarter again with my negative posts and non-stop badgering. If they don't refund me, I'll just try to quietly bide my time until the first shipment comes then hope I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality because I'm sure we won't be seeing any production minis before they ship.

Damn. I said it.

Ehh they did mars attacks week the last couple of weeks I think. They had a lot of stuff about MA leading up to the campaign. I think people who are subbed to Mantics newsletter all know about MA by now, and they're probably more concerned with managing expectations of their DZ KS backers, and drumming up sales to run out their limited Xmas run of retail deadzone.

 agnosto wrote:
I swear that I'm slowly turning into Kroothawk. I'll just keep my yap shut; I'm even getting tired of myself with my incessant negativity in regards to Mantic.

I've sent them an email and asked for a refund on my pledge. If they give it to me, we can happily part company and I promise to never visit another Mantic thread or Kickstarter again with my negative posts and non-stop badgering. If they don't refund me, I'll just try to quietly bide my time until the first shipment comes then hope I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality because I'm sure we won't be seeing any production minis before they ship.

Damn. I said it.

So you asked for a refund on a pledge whose miniatures you haven't really seen because you're not certain about the quality? And yet you backed a kickstarter anyway?

Half the updates the last month in Deadzone were really Mars Attacks updates anyway lol

Agnosto - you are SERIOUSLY asking for a refund when you know no less then you did at the time you pledged, and you know the money is spent -10% which they never received? I was on your side until you went over an inappropriate edge of self-centered rage. Pulling from MA would one thing, but it should be kinda clear that you are past the point of no return that was a risk we all took to get a perceived great deal.

Sining wrote:
So you asked for a refund on a pledge whose miniatures you haven't really seen because you're not certain about the quality? And yet you backed a kickstarter anyway?

It's more to do with expecting it to have been shown already, combined with knowledge of Mantics habit of not releasing pics when there's problems. I'll be dropping my MA pledge if I don't see deadzone production models before the end of the MA KS too.

 Yonan wrote:

Sining wrote:
So you asked for a refund on a pledge whose miniatures you haven't really seen because you're not certain about the quality? And yet you backed a kickstarter anyway?

It's more to do with expecting it to have been shown already, combined with knowledge of Mantics habit of not releasing pics when there's problems. I'll be dropping my MA pledge if I don't see deadzone production models before the end of the MA KS too.

And why is he entitled to get his money back and the rest of us, who are all in the same situation, should just take the loss?

Don't back the kickstarter if you don't understand the risk. That's why you are getting what you are getting at the price you are getting it at. Don't back future projects from this company or others if you don't trust them. But don't act like your money is the best of the 1.2 mil to where you should be entitled to get it back if you don't like the results well after the campaign. Next time wait for retail.