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Didn't they do something stupid, like use the metal goblin masters for the "3 ups" for the plastic sprue to save a few hundred pounds? I wonder how that worked out for them financially.

They really seem to be stuck taking little shortcuts that cost them tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Didn't they do something stupid, like use the metal goblin masters for the "3 ups" for the plastic sprue to save a few hundred pounds? I wonder how that worked out for them financially.

They really seem to be stuck taking little shortcuts that cost them tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.

I would say that would be the state of Mantic roughly one year ago when they rushed those plastic goblins to release.
Since then they've made over a million bucks from some successful Kickstarters, launched an incredibly successful game, and have hired on permanent sculptors.
And took an incredible amount of heat over those goblins.
I really doubt they'll make any more mistakes like that again.
I also wouldn't be surprised if we see a new goblin sprue in the future that has all weapon options on it.

I've yet to purchase a figure for Dreadball including MVPs that didn't go together using plastic glue. So in this area, I don't see Mantic regressing.

Something is stirring on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Corp_Central
https://twitter.com/six_alpha

 scarletsquig wrote:
Something is stirring on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Corp_Central
https://twitter.com/six_alpha

Also noticed:

https://twitter.com/Recon_N32

me thinks mantic realizes that KS has seen a lot of mini projects lately so it is really trying to drum up support so they can make an immediate splash

Need moar infos!

Especially if they plan to do an injection molded styrene enforcer kit.

~Eric

 Rolt wrote:
Going by the discription this kinda sounds like an necromunda/infinitiy style game, very interesting if true, lots of hobbying potential.

Agreed. Im not terribly interested in large model count army level games, but skirmish sized stuff is perfect.

 scarletsquig wrote:

In general, I'd like to see more ambition from Mantic... basically, the plastic moulds for the elves were really expensive and haven't made back their cost in sales.. they were a complete write-off for the company in terms of profit and it seems that ever since that happened they've avoided hard plastic like the plague to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen again. I'm just glad kickstarter is something that allows for them to dispense with that concern.

Kickstarters aside, they've been ultra-cautious and it'll probably be at least a year before they get back into hard plastic. They have 3-up greens already produced for certain units (orc archers are already 100% done) that have never seen the light of day due to the plug being pulled on hard plastic production at some point in late 2011.. since then a false start was made to make more (the ill-fated chinese goblin sprue), and now we're getting the KoW humans done as a sprue which will probably be a further "test" to see if their new tooling company sucks or not... and only after that has been delivered will we see more sprues start to trickle out.

It isn't just the tooling either, they've got a new digital sculpting workflow going on where Remy's sculpts get 3d-scanned and then cut up and arranged on sprues digitally for hard plastic production. So that's something that they're getting to grips with as well, using the same workflow as Malifaux, Dreamforge etc. instead of their previous non-digital methods.

Yeah, the high elves may have been a failure, but that's because they were/are sub-par sculpts as viewed by seemingly the majority of the fantasy wargaming population. While there will always be people who like anything niche, and personal aesthetics and so forth, there's clearly a big difference between sub-par sculpts (elves, dwarfs), half-arsed jobs like the Forgefathers and Orx and, well, original and quality sculpts like the Men-At-Arms appear to be or the Enforcers are. I feel that the Enforcers could make a lot of money if properly tooled in hard plastic as multi-part figures with a bunch of options and a Mantic price band.

I mean, I don't mind restic, but I don't exactly love it, either..

Yeah I would be all over hard plastic Enforcers. While restic is okay I certainly wouldn't want too much of the stuff, those mold lines can be a bit of a pain to clean!

 Commander Cain wrote:
Yeah I would be all over hard plastic Enforcers. While restic is okay I certainly wouldn't want too much of the stuff, those mold lines can be a bit of a pain to clean!

Amen to that!

 Azazelx wrote:
Yeah, the high elves may have been a failure, but that's because they were/are sub-par sculpts as viewed by seemingly the majority of the fantasy wargaming population.

I was one of those Mantic-elf-haters until I owned some. The level of detail on them is pretty damn astounding. They are pretty fantastic models, actually.

I can't understand the hate for them either. Is it really just because they're skinny? They're really well detailed little figures.

I can't wait for this Kickstarter to go live. Even if the figure are Restic instead of hard plastic they'll still be cool. I love the design of the regular Enforcers as it is, so I'm already all over this one. I hope we see some new varieties and maybe even some plastic/restic versions of figures that were previously only metal.

I'm hoping the big spiky Tyrant/ Onslaught- looking monstrosity is going to be appropriately gigantic.

That sucker needs to make my opponent start quivering in his boots when it lumbers on to to the table.

I've got my fingers crossed that we see a guest appearance by the teratons. Space needs more dino/ lizard men after all.

highlord tambulaine - I've got my fingers crossed that we see a guest appearance by the teratons. Space needs more dino/ lizard men after all.

@Mantic - Please for the love of all that is holy read this. Space Orcs being more common then space reptiles in all these IPs is really a crime against humanity. Please remedy this situation by including some Teratons in this game. I would pledge for those models alone if anything!!

 Barzam wrote:
I can't understand the hate for them either. Is it really just because they're skinny? They're really well detailed little figures.

I can't wait for this Kickstarter to go live. Even if the figure are Restic instead of hard plastic they'll still be cool. I love the design of the regular Enforcers as it is, so I'm already all over this one. I hope we see some new varieties and maybe even some plastic/restic versions of figures that were previously only metal.

I get the elf hate. The skinny is done right, but the heads (particularly the scout heads, which was the model sent out to people for free) are oversized, which looks odd. There's also the fact that the spearmen and the archers are pretty much the same model (and the scouts were variants of the same models). Early Mantic plastics were plagued by some poor sprue choices (eg, should have only had command sprue, and put more design into differentiating archers and spearmen). The undead were better models, but had similar redundancies between their two kits, and had the useless bits differentiating the command and troop sprues. That's 4 redundant large sprues, which is a lot of money being spent inefficiently by a start-up. The early Warpath models had similar issues - not enough put into the design side resulted in fantasy rehash models being done in hard plastic.

Another minor quibble is the 'snotlings' on the Orc sprues. If you look at the designs, the ones doing things like mooning are on the basic sprue, and the ones standing around are on the command sprue. Those should have been swapped. Once again - that should have been noticed in the design stage.

However, I'm a big fan of Mantic overall, but they made some mistakes in their planning early on. I'm sure they'll look at what was popular in their Dreadball campaign (sales on various races) and use that to base the races that they expand on for Warpath (and likely start this in Deadzone). I think that the KoW kickstarter showed that there's a lot of interest in races that aren't GW knockoffs. I'm really hoping they expand towards races like the nameless, the judwan, teratons and the robots rather than relying on rehashing GW archtypes. That would make people take the universe and the game much more seriously.

I know Heath said something about drawing more Teratons a few weeks back, it might have just been more Dreadball art.. but he has been working on Deadzone stuff for awhile.

http://www.deadzonethegame.com/

2 weeks before the kickstarter begins!

I hope they've synced the countdown to the right timezone

(I remember watching a countdown and waiting for a KS to start only to have it pop up 5 hours down the line as they'd not accounted for the timezone)

There might be some variance as they can't actually control the exact time a kickstarter goes live, only kickstarter themselves can do that by approving the project.

2 weeks? Awwwwwww... I don't want to wait!

Wait! Two weeks means this won't start until near the end of the month, which means that isn't going to fund until close to the end of May if not into June, WHICH MEANS MORE MONEY TO SPEND (and hopefully see my space reptiles).

I'm okay with this.

Dislike another KS beginning before the KoW stuff arrives.

 scarletsquig wrote:
There might be some variance as they can't actually control the exact time a kickstarter goes live, only kickstarter themselves can do that by approving the project.

Actually, as long as they are approved they can launch whenever they want.

I was hoping it was gonna be a little bit longer down the line just so I could get a little more green before this thing went live. Hoping it has a 45 day time frame. It will help me get a better pledge going if it dies in June.

Just remember, you're not charged until the end date. So you're better off pledging high at the start, then dropping the pledge down a bit once you start counting the pennies you've got, as opposed to waiting, then having to pay more.

Mantic's kickstarters have always run for 30 days. Maybe they'll stretch this one out for 45? Give us poor chaps some time to throw more money at them in June instead of May?

 Compel wrote:
Just remember, you're not charged until the end date. So you're better off pledging high at the start, then dropping the pledge down a bit once you start counting the pennies you've got, as opposed to waiting, then having to pay more.

I don't agree with this method. For the individual it works, but not on a large scale. It inaccurately portrays where the funds are at and becomes VERY frustrating to the company and other backers when multiple pledgers drop funds as soon as the stretch goal they were really waiting for gets met.

So for everyone's sake that's involved, please don't do this. Better to pledge what you have available and increase steadily throughout the kickstarter when funds become available, over suddenly dropping when you have second thoughts.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
I hope they've synced the countdown to the right timezone

(I remember watching a countdown and waiting for a KS to start only to have it pop up 5 hours down the line as they'd not accounted for the timezone)

The count down says 0 seconds for me !!!

 scarletsquig wrote:

In general, I'd like to see more ambition from Mantic... basically, the plastic moulds for the elves were really expensive and haven't made back their cost in sales.. they were a complete write-off for the company in terms of profit and it seems that ever since that happened they've avoided hard plastic like the plague to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen again.

The High Elf molds weren't that large, did they go with an expensive UK based plastic company? And what the heck! Written off? You can make a LOT of kits from a good plastic injection mold, no way should those things already be used up. If that's the case, someone at Mantic did something horribly wrong when they outsourced that production. I can also understand by the Mantic High Elves weren't as popular as say, their Undead. I can't believe their Undead line is unsuccessful. Honestly that sounds like a bunch of hogwash...

 scarletsquig wrote:

It isn't just the tooling either, they've got a new digital sculpting workflow going on where Remy's sculpts get 3d-scanned and then cut up and arranged on sprues digitally for hard plastic production. So that's something that they're getting to grips with as well, using the same workflow as Malifaux, Dreamforge etc. instead of their previous non-digital methods.

Mantic is joining the 21st century only a decade or so late...

Earth Dragon wrote:

 Compel wrote:
Just remember, you're not charged until the end date. So you're better off pledging high at the start, then dropping the pledge down a bit once you start counting the pennies you've got, as opposed to waiting, then having to pay more.

I don't agree with this method. For the individual it works, but not on a large scale. It inaccurately portrays where the funds are at and becomes VERY frustrating to the company and other backers when multiple pledgers drop funds as soon as the stretch goal they were really waiting for gets met.

So for everyone's sake that's involved, please don't do this. Better to pledge what you have available and increase steadily throughout the kickstarter when funds become available, over suddenly dropping when you have second thoughts.

I don't think it has a negative effect on kickstarters at all. If done en masse, you have a lot of support for the kickstarter, which helps reach stretches, which makes it a better deal, which draws in more backers. I think it's a fully legit thing to do, and even though you may not end up paying into the kickstarter, it does make the kickstarter more successful.