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Man, I'm just not having the same problems. I got all my Deadzone stuff assembled with no problems within a span of a few hours while watching TV.

I can't figure out why the heads for some of these minis need to be separate pieces. They're fething tiny.

After 2 weeks of fooling around with Mantic's "restic" for the first time, I'd say it's my second favorite material for minis. A distant second (after hard plastic, obviously) but still second. I'd say about on par with good metals but noticeably better than PP's and Soda Pop's semi-plastic or any variety of pure resin.

Yes I think it's fine. The cast quality isn't up there with the best, but it's certainly what I would class as acceptable. For the amount these miniatures cost, once painted think they look pretty good on the tabletop.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I can't figure out why the heads for some of these minis need to be separate pieces. They're fething tiny.

Does this indicate one of HBMC's miniatures is now sans head?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I can't figure out why the heads for some of these minis need to be separate pieces. They're fething tiny.

lol. QFT. I've got got a solid coating of glue on my thumb and forefinger from trying to attach heads and arms that only fit one way. It puzzles me why most of these minis weren't made in one piece; is it to give the illusion of customization?

The material's fine and the quality is great. If these had been plastic, I'd be doing nothing now but singing praises. It's really too bad that Mantic got hooked up with such a shady Chinese manufacturer because I when I compare the Deadzone kits to Dreamforge's Eisenkern line, I just have to wonder how good it could have been. Mark did everything in plastic and with much less money. He's had extensive delays but the awesome quality thus far has made it well worth the wait.

Mantic seems determined to just churn out as many kits, regardless of quality, as it can in as short a time as possible. I keep seeing cost and comments similar to Pacific's but really how great of a deal are we getting? The Deadzone faction starter minis breakdown to about $3/each at a retail of $35. In comparison, I can get a copy of Zombicide for $71 at Walmart(?!?) or closer to $60 with a little google-foo. 71 models in the Zombicide box (also funded via Kick starter) comes to around 1buck per mini without considering other box contents. I'm not sure of the mini material but they look to be hard plastic. Another comparable example would be sedition wars box sets on Amazon for $42.50 and comes with 50 minis....

Thanks for pointing out how cheap SW is on Amazon... hope they still have that in the middle of next month they look neat.

Isn't zombicide like 13 scuplts for 70 some minis? Not making an arguement, just wondering.

Still only have like 4 proper dz models so I still can't put in much of a solid point.

Sedition wars minis are a similar material to Deadzone/Dreadball etc and have the same mould line cleanup & warping issues. Sadly the game has failed to find traction and is being heavily discounted (RRP is $80)

Zombicide's plastic is even softer (and to my mind) less good, although they still paint up well, and are much better for boardgamers as there's not the fiddly assembly to contend with

that said if mantic can get good quality polystyrene done it will be great (but don't expect it to be cheaper)

Aren't the Mars Attacks figures supposed to be in a new plastic? It will be interesting to see how they come out.

it's meant to be in whatever Loka was done is but I've not handled anything from that KS

(I think it's closer to Zombicide/boardgame plastoc type than anything else, but I could be wrong)

I believe its supposed to be like the gears of war plastic. I have a couple of LOKA pieces, it seems OK.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Sedition wars minis are a similar material to Deadzone/Dreadball etc and have the same mould line cleanup & warping issues. Sadly the game has failed to find traction and is being heavily discounted (RRP is $80)

Zombicide's plastic is even softer (and to my mind) less good, although they still paint up well, and are much better for boardgamers as there's not the fiddly assembly to contend with

that said if mantic can get good quality polystyrene done it will be great (but don't expect it to be cheaper)

Thanks for the info. I wasn't trying to say that I don't feel that the minis are a good value; I just don't feel that since they're not GW price they can be crap (not saying Pacific said or meant this). The warstore has Dreamforge's hard plastic at $33.99 for a 20-man box and these are outright amazing in quality and are true multi-part kits. That's $1.69/mini for hard plastic with no concerns of quality or missing pieces, mold lines, etc. Mark funded 34 new, hard-plastic kits with a $205,971 Kickstarter. Mantic accrued well over a million dollars and has trouble producing restic of consistent quality. Yes, Mark has had HUGE delays but he's also a one-man show, not a company with several employees (not saying Mantic's a massive conglomerate but there are definitely more than 1 person working there).

I'm just saying that a good deal is no reason to accept a low quality product and I certainly feel that Mantic is capable of doing better as other organizations are able to do so.

Oh I agree with you,

(Dreamforge is doing a great job no doubt about it, and clearly shows what you can do with a great digital sculptor and a great company doing the casting)

I really want the gears of war board game. Been playing the xbox games with my girlfriend and would love to try the board game.

Sounds a lot of fun to play too.

I think we can add Wyrd to the regrettably short list of companies with great hard plastic kits. And they managed to convert their range without a Kickstarter and for a game system where players are unlikely to need more than 1 of each kit.

Seeing that, there really is no excuse for anyone to still be using gak materials like Finecast, Restic, PP pseudo-plastics and the like.

 carlos13th wrote:
I really want the gears of war board game. Been playing the xbox games with my girlfriend and would love to try the board game.

Sounds a lot of fun to play too.

Wow, missed that one. The minis look great too.

I have the Sedition Wars miniatures, and they are made from a "restic" mix very similar to the one Deadzone uses. As I believe Scarlet Squig has mentioned, they're also the perfect scale to use with Deadzone figures.

Orlando is also right that Sedition Wars figs have the same clean-up and warping issues. The warping is easy to fix with hot water, but the clean up is often, if anything, much worse than the Deadzone figures, with mold lines frequently running down across faces and other high-detail areas.

If you're willing to do the work, though, the Strain figures make excellent additions to, or replacements for, the Plague. Keep in mind that the Strain are decidedly techno-organic, though, not just organic mutations like Mantic's Plague. (I might just do a little fluff work around with different Strains of Plague, get it? Wa ha ha.)

And although the Sedition Wars miniature troopers are too small to use with Games Workshop, they actually scale perfectly with Mantic's corporation / human Rebs figures, so pretty much the entire SW set is very useful. (Mantic's figures turn out to be a bit smaller than I was expecting.) The SW human heroes would make nice Rebs character figures.

Orlando's also right about Sedition Wars having troubles and being heavily discounted. If it were selling as intended, you'd never be able to pick it up so cheap, so not really a fair comparison with Deadzone.

I also have Gears of War, and the quality of the GoW figs is in my opinion much higher than what I've seen of the LOKA ones. With all the talk of Deadzone representing Mantic's best "restic" results yet, I'm wondering if they won't have trouble when Mars Attacks is released if the "softer" figures from that set aren't as crisp. Mantic have been very clear from the start that they weren't doing the MA figures in the same mix as Deadzone, but I could still imagine some backers leaping to that conclusion (and there's evidence of it in the Mars Attacks KS comments section) and being upset when they get their figures and learn otherwise.

Deadzone paid off, but I'm a little weary of taking risks with KS purchases at the moment. Since I liked DZ so much and it's a known quantity, I'm planning to shift the majority of my MA pledge towards the purchase of DZ battlezones and mats. The $15 I'm effectively putting towards the Mars Attacks base game with my early bird pledge isn't much of a risk, and should be easy to recoup if the figures don't turn out well. And the free Mars Attacks figures I'm getting for buying Deadzone scenery with my (already committed) Mars Attacks pledge make me love Mantic's cross-game merchandizing.

I'm kind of considering swapping support for MA to DZ as well. Depends on how much I love BZs. Would be hard though, I really really like a lot of the MA stuff. Like the giant robot, bugs, trucks, and so on.

 agnosto wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
I really want the gears of war board game. Been playing the xbox games with my girlfriend and would love to try the board game.

Sounds a lot of fun to play too.

Wow, missed that one. The minis look great too.

They really do look good. It sounds like a really fun game. £50 is a little steep for me though.

 agnosto wrote:
The warstore has Dreamforge's hard plastic at $33.99 for a 20-man box and these are outright amazing in quality and are true multi-part kits. That's $1.69/mini for hard plastic with no concerns of quality or missing pieces, mold lines, etc. Mark funded 34 new, hard-plastic kits with a $205,971 Kickstarter. Mantic accrued well over a million dollars and has trouble producing restic of consistent quality. Yes, Mark has had HUGE delays but he's also a one-man show, not a company with several employees (not saying Mantic's a massive conglomerate but there are definitely more than 1 person working there).

I think the difference is that Mantic owns their sculpts and tools and such and Dreamforge does not.

 judgedoug wrote:

 agnosto wrote:
The warstore has Dreamforge's hard plastic at $33.99 for a 20-man box and these are outright amazing in quality and are true multi-part kits. That's $1.69/mini for hard plastic with no concerns of quality or missing pieces, mold lines, etc. Mark funded 34 new, hard-plastic kits with a $205,971 Kickstarter. Mantic accrued well over a million dollars and has trouble producing restic of consistent quality. Yes, Mark has had HUGE delays but he's also a one-man show, not a company with several employees (not saying Mantic's a massive conglomerate but there are definitely more than 1 person working there).

I think the difference is that Mantic owns their sculpts and tools and such and Dreamforge does not.

Another thing is that WGF put money in too. The KS exclusive models were paid for by WGF.

Are you all sure about that? I don't see Mark going through all of that work just to sign over the rights of his years of hard work to WGF. My understanding was that they are the contracted middle-man, manufacturer, distributor.

Even if that's the case, I don't see WGF kicking in a million dollars which would be the difference between the two kickstarters.


Edit:

WGF Website:
In addition to providing the manufacturing of Dreamforge-Games kits, we will also be handling distribution of the product to stores. After we finish shipping all Kickstarter stage 1 orders, we're excited to release the kits for general distribution. Look for these amazing sets on store shelves in early 2013!

http://www.wargamesfactory.com/announcements/dreamforge-games-tooling-complete?A=SearchResult&SearchID=5901047&ObjectID=49668&ObjectType=7
Doesn't sound like they own anything to me.


Edit 2:
In KS, Mark says that WGF made the Shadowkesh warrior for backers, apparently gratis.

 agnosto wrote:
Are you all sure about that? I don't see Mark going through all of that work just to sign over the rights of his years of hard work to WGF. My understanding was that they are the contracted middle-man, manufacturer, distributor.

Even if that's the case, I don't see WGF kicking in a million dollars which would be the difference between the two kickstarters.

Getting off-topic a smidge here, but the information here is a bit buried:

From Mark



There were other comments to the effect that WGF was providing said credit, as this is not an uncommon practice in the industry. The molds are almost assuredly owned by WGF, hence the company name on each and every sprue.

For further corroboration, Adam Poots is all but confirmed to be working with WGF for KD:M, and he made this comment:

The mold cost for the Dragon King is outrageously high ( Est. $60K+) And committing something I am not totally and absolutely in love with just does not work for me. Thomas is amazing and his work is simply superb. I think if anyone else here had to make the call, they would do the same thing as me.

Now, the Dragon King is one of the larger models in that game, but do you think it's larger than the DFG Leviathans and APCs? It's likely not, and if something smaller costs that much then it becomes fairly clear that DFG did not pay for everything free-and-clear. Napkin math would say that the two scales of Leviathan at 60k each and the APC which Mark has referenced as having a similar number of sprues would put the costs well north of the money raised when you start adding in the infantry. That's fine for a one-man operation and honestly the results for Mark have been excellent (delays notwithstanding) and wouldn't have been possible any other way.

However, throw in that WGF is beset by a number of major projects and as a result many delays and you can see why Mantic might be leery of working with them, especially given Mantic's own luck with outside contractors and their desire to move quickly. WGF's work with DFG has been awesome, but you have to balance that against the fact that Mantic has started and then fully delivered one and could easily be three KickStarters in the time it will take the one to be fulfilled. Not using that to hand-wave some of the major gaffes that were made along the way by Mantic, but that is a point to consider as well.

In the main, I don't disagree that hard plastic is far superior and I look forward to the upcoming Enforcer plastics as a gauge of what interest I may have (if any) in WarPath. However, for a game designed to have a fairly low model count overall, I don't see where the restic plan was somehow a problem. It does sound like you may have gotten a particularly bad batch. For the ones I received, I've gotten far, far worse from GW metals and FineCast.

Krinsath, Sorry about off topic and all but I'm honestly interested. Credit and ownership are two different things. Credit implies a repayment whereas the previous posters were stating that WGF outright owned Mark's sculpts, tools and even kicked money in (though to be honest, they did if you consider that the Shadowkesh was a freebie they threw in to sweeten the pot).

I would hazard a guess that if all the cards were on the table, current Dreamforge sales are funding the tooling of the Wave 3 APCs. I would even postulate that WGF might have fudged the production schedule until Mark was able to pay back enough to fund the tooling for them. My experience with businesses in Asia sort of point in that direction but I have no first-hand knowledge.

Somewhat more on topic.
I agree completely with your sentiment; the plastic Enforcers will be my gauge of any future commerce I have with Mantic.

Part of the problem, and the reason for my angst, is that I have little experience wiith resin and next to none (except for KoW) with restic. Sure, I've been in the wargaming hobby for more than 20 years but in that time I've dealt more with metal and plastic than anything else and mostly plastic. I have very little hobby time so if I have to spend a great deal of time dealing with a flawed material, I become impatient.

I have sprue clippers and a complete set of files and until now, that's all I've needed. With restic the files don't seem to be taking the flash off as well, instead of just removing it, it bends the mold line or flash over and just seems to scrub it on the model until sheer friction rubs it off. I thought it was my files so I went out and bought a new set with the same results (GW file set).

This Deadzone batch is nowhere near as horrid to deal with as the KoW material was but still far less than the breeze that hard plastic generally is. In my correspondence with Ronnie, I told him the same that I'll put here; if I have to get a hair drier, soak something in hot water or otherwise waste my valuable time to correct your factory flaws, what the heck am I paying you for? It's bad enough that random bits turn up missing and/or entire parts are gone; a little QA is needed here.

Anyway, I'll shut up and let people enjoy their stuff.

And you certainly should be providing that feedback to Mantic; every company can improve and unless the customers tell them where there's a chance they might put efforts in the wrong places or, worse, no effort at all. FineCast shows that even the big boys make colossal mistakes at times with their product.

Restic is an odd beast, and I'll agree with that all day long as I eye a box of models needing a hot water bath. However, when I look at the whole equation of things I'm very satisfied with how most of it turned out. Then I pop over to GW and see what they want for 160 Tyranids in their bundle... ($1533 USD for those who object to visiting their site for religious reasons).

Model-for-model the Tyranids definitely have a leg up on most of the sculpts outside of the G1 Plagues and Plague Teratons and a few others. However, I paid noticeably less than that GW number for a larger number of models (when all is said and done; bear in mind I had a very large DZ order), multi-use terrain, rules for a fun game, mats and counters/dice. Yes, GW is insane with what they ask for, but I offer that more as a counter-point. I agree that Mantic has a long way to go in some areas (customer communication chief among them IMO, which is odd given that they do fairly well at customer service), but let's not forget that on the whole they've done a good job overall and, in general, are getting better over time.

That said, definitely offer the criticisms so they won't just be an "okay" company you'll look into from time-to-time and instead become a great one.

I'm not sure it's making any difference, the problems I had in Dreadball miniatures are the same with the Deadzone ones, despite being in a new mix.
I still haven't received my missing items from Dreadball.
After citing cast quality as the reason I dropped my Mars Attacks pledge I would have expected some kind of response.
Mantic have been the only kickstarter products I've received that have been disappointing.

I had a running email chain with Ronnie for a bit regarding my displeasure with the quality of KoW and my concern for Deadzone. I think that I've done about enough griping to them (and here too) to get my point across. As to value. Yes, Mantic is great value and I suppose that's why I've been so disappointed. They suckered me in with fantastic quality, low-priced plastic undead and then shove a pile of restic at me ever after.

I avoid GW like the plague (no pun intended) these days. I have plenty of money to spend on whatever I would like from them but the cost vs. my value of the product prohibits me from spending anything with them anymore. Forgeworld I stay away from completely after the block of resin I got from them that was supposed to be a Barracuda flier and I got the same talk from them that I got from Ronnie about hot water and such.

I guess I'll just keep waiting for some company to come along that will be reasonably priced, decent quality and believe in hard plastic. Really, I've got a pocket full of money to throw at any company that doesn't think $8/mini is a good price. I thought it would be Mantic but they seem stuck on restic for the now.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I think we can add Wyrd to the regrettably short list of companies with great hard plastic kits. And they managed to convert their range without a Kickstarter and for a game system where players are unlikely to need more than 1 of each kit.

Seeing that, there really is no excuse for anyone to still be using gak materials like Finecast, Restic, PP pseudo-plastics and the like.

Are the softer details, increase in model parts for monoposed models and dependence in a manufacturer outside their country worth the transition they did to plastic?

Plastic is not a panacea, despite the brainwash GW has done to the average wargamer and it is not a benefit for all companies, games, or sculpting styles.

Yes, mantic and their vision of how their games should be played (or models used) would benefit more from going to hard plastic, but then again only for their main range, what they did so far beyond KoW are not mass combat games and plastic is not what they should be looking for, the buildings, sure they will go on as terrain for a variety of game systems, that's why they are plastic.

If you want super sharp models for your display cabinet, that's fine. There's a slew of garage companies catering to that.

Anything else belongs in hard plastic, certainly for any company (Mantic, PP) that states budgetary concerns, not detail level, as their reason to use pseudo-plastic. Especially when all these pseudo-plastics are prone to horrendous mold lines, warping and brittleness that makes them an absolute pain to work with. Frankly, I don't even want to touch another PP "plastic" model in my life. Saying that it could be in any way superior to hard plastic is hilarious.

I have been a critic of mantic's restic. However, I think that there is room for more than plastic in budget gaming. Restic miniatures can be cast in one or two pieces. Naturally such models can be assembled quickly, and thus appeal to the nonhobbyist. They generally look better than one or two piece plastics, because restic allows undercuts. They are also much less costly to cast, and thus a variety of miniatures can be produced inexpensively. So, for the budget gamer who does not want to fiddle with plastic parts, and or wants a variety of sculpts, restic can fill the role.

In terms of cost, cheap plastic models are about 1 USD. Restic models are 2.50 USD. However, the kind of plastic models mentioned in this thread are 2.20 USD, which is only slightly cheaper than restic.

 spaceelf wrote:
I have been a critic of mantic's restic. However, I think that there is room for more than plastic in budget gaming. Restic miniatures can be cast in one or two pieces. Naturally such models can be assembled quickly, and thus appeal to the nonhobbyist. They generally look better than one or two piece plastics, because restic allows undercuts. They are also much less costly to cast, and thus a variety of miniatures can be produced inexpensively. So, for the budget gamer who does not want to fiddle with plastic parts, and or wants a variety of sculpts, restic can fill the role.

And yet many of my Deadzone figures are cast in way more than one or two pieces. And the tiny soft detailed pieces, fitting tabs that don't fit, lack of instructions for which of the tiny parts goes with what figure are not really going to appeal to the 'nonhbbyist'. Your points may be accurate in some cases, but they don't seem to apply to what Mantic delivered for the Dreadball or Deadzone kickstrters.