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chaos0xomega wrote:
Hell, im skeptical as to whether or not wave 1 has even shipped out yet, doesnt seem to br much in the way of people posting pics or reviews out there kt seems, just a couple here and there that say stuff without evidence to back the claims.

So you believe that Palladium has not shipped any Wave 1. Gotcha.


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I'm fairly certain it's been established that they're shipping simplest orders first - Battlecry by backer #, then Showdown by backer #, etc.

PB is definitely shipping. Just go look on eBay. Haters and PB apologist remain calm.


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Just found out Kevin refuses to pay one of their freelance writers. Allegedly.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/109218555808079?view=permalink&id=867226963340564

If Kevin can't afford to pay this guy how will wave two get finished? Not good.

 Cypher-xv wrote:
PB is definitely shipping. Just go look on eBay. Haters and PB apologist remain calm.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just found out Kevin refuses to pay one of their freelance writers. Allegedly.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/109218555808079?view=permalink&id=867226963340564

If Kevin can't afford to pay this guy how will wave two get finished? Not good.

meh, I doubt $150 is going to push any bars in either direction, more likely they butted heads over something stupid. I bet there is more to this than PB did not pay me my $150.

Either way his "business" decisions don't give me confidence when it comes to wave two. If the game flops in retail sales will he have enough money to finish wave two?

chaos0xomega wrote:
im inclined to agree with those that were of the opinion that they ran out of money for wave 2, seems more and more likely...

Hell, im skeptical as to whether or not wave 1 has even shipped out yet, doesnt seem to br much in the way of people posting pics or reviews out there kt seems, just a couple here and there that say stuff without evidence to back the claims.

I got mine in.
I just assembled these minis tonight. In fact, the fumes are killing my brain cells even as I post this. You're welcome.


I do have some comments and questions, though.

First: Aren't there supposed to be 7 veritechs and 18 regults in the box? Mine came with 5 veritechs (6 battloids) and 12 regults.

Anyway, they are much smaller than I had expected. They would be a lot less fiddly, fragile and frustrating for newbies to assemble if they were 50% to 100% longer (3.4ish to 8 times larger by volume). These minis will probably break if they see a lot of use.

On the positive side, they were a ton of fun to assemble. The ABS is as easy to clip, snip and scrape as HIPS, although you have to be careful because the plastic is much softer than, say, Mantic's new terrain sprue plastic, so it's easy to cut too much off. So easy. Mold lines were vanishingly small on most of the sprues I looked at, but not on all. Even if the mold lines are an issue for you, they are very easy to scrape off with the side of a knife. The material was fun and relaxing to work with for me, like HIPs and unlike Restic. An hour per veritech (per mode) and 20 minutes per regult seem like a reasonable amount of assembly time if you are trying not to be sloppy, but aren't obsessive about perfection.

Gluing was an issue. I used Plastruct Plastic Weld. The smell is terrible, but more importantly it doesn't work when I use it sparingly. If I do, the parts will 'dry' in about 2 seconds, before they form a good bond, and some pieces just fell right off. The bond was a lot stronger, working like plastic glue should, when I slathered it on both sides of any attachment point, but this led to a problem with melty fingerprints.

Over all, I'm happy with the minis. They are fun to assemble and fun to play with, but they will never win any award for boutique quality.

I'll probably end up buying more of certain destroids.



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I should add that these minis are about the same difficulty level to assemble as Wyrd's Malifaux plastics.


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Oh yeah, and the unlabeled feet on the regults must go with specific unlabled legs because I had to trim some of the tabs quite a bit to make them fit.

Really? An hour per veritech?

Depending on how thorough and careful you are and what heads or missiles you choose. A big part of it is also the gluing time. If you did several at the same time like an assembly line, it would be faster.

But, yeah, they do have a lot of tiny pieces.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I do have some comments and questions, though.

First: Aren't there supposed to be 7 veritechs and 18 regults in the box? Mine came with 5 veritechs (6 battloids) and 12 regults.

Nope.

The Core Box is 5 VT's and 12 Battlepods.

The "battlecry" tier added another 4 VT's and 12 more Battlepods, for a total of 9 and 24 per Battlecry respectively (so a Showdown is 18 and 48, etc).

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:


I do have some comments and questions, though.

First: Aren't there supposed to be 7 veritechs and 18 regults in the box? Mine came with 5 veritechs (6 battloids) and 12 regults.

I noticed the same thing as things that I thought were supposed to be in the box weren't. I was confusing the base battlecry pledge without the stretch goals with the retail box. In my package, the remainder were in the big plastic "extras" baggie. I got concerned about it so I went back to my gallery here and took a look at what was supposed to be in my battlecry pledge and it was all correct. Some of what I thought were the boxed game parts were in the baggie.

Update from Kevin.


Saturday was awesome – Mini-Update, November 9, 2014

Saturday was awesome. There was a palpable excitement and joy to be FINALLY able to ship out Robotech® RPG Tactics™ nonstop. With containers #4 and #5 in the warehouse, we can ship like crazy, and that’s exactly what we are doing, and it feels good.

We had five volunteers on Saturday: Jimmy B. Hill and Kyle Slayton from Ohio, Christopher Ing who has been an amazing help every weekend we have been shipping (and is becoming another fan pal), Mark Dudley and Chuck Walton. Of course, the entire staff (Wayne, Jeff, Julius, Alex, Matt and myself) was here working away and Kathy Simmons made us her delicious Sloppy Joe recipe for lunch. Yum.

The really cool thing was that even though everyone was working very hard, and pretty much nonstop, there was a lot of laughter and animated conversations – almost a party atmosphere. Nice. It’s also fun to meet and chat for a few minutes with the many Kickstarter backers coming in to pick up their rewards. We had 8-10 people drop by on Saturday, a few even hung around for awhile to help. Very cool.

After shipping ending round 6:00 PM, I spent a couple hours writing. When I stopped to eat dinner, Chuck Walton was getting ready to leave. I told him if he wanted to talk for 15 minutes while I ate he was welcome do so. The next thing we knew it was 10:30 PM!! Yes, we are crazy. But it was an outstanding brainstorming session that left both of us excited about a number of future project.

It’s Sunday morning and helpers should start showing up any time now. Our goal is to have 1,000 packages ready to ship Monday morning. We are right on target with 490 already packed, posted, skidded and ready for shipment. We should be able to a comparable number today. We’ll continue to ship out 100-200 a day and make another big push next weekend, November 15 & 16, 2014.

We’ve been getting a number of Kickstarter backers emailing us saying, “Hey, my buddy got his Wave One rewards, but I haven’t gotten mine yet.” Do not worry, your rewards will be coming SOON! And Canada and Overseas will follow after that.

The Packing Process

Please remember that we are shipping out to 5,000+ backers something like 8,000 packages! This is a big under taking and takes time. More importantly, until we received Containers #4 & #5 (both delayed in port for weeks) just last week, we would ship and then have to stop when we ran out of main box games. So frustrating. NOW we can finally ship, ship, ship!

But that takes more time than you might imagine. To build 1,000 boxes takes a 4 man team 6-8 hours. To unbox the main game (they come three to a case) it takes a 4 man team 6-8 hours. Btw, that's 9 pallets of games. To collate, pack, seal up, post and stack on skids for shipping, it takes a 5-6 man team 7 hours to do around 500 packages. I’ll try to remember to have Wayne post some photos in the next Weekly Update.

Meanwhile, work progresses on upcoming releases, sales have been strong, people are loving Graveyard Earth, and Christmas Surprise Package orders are coming in and shipping out fast. I’m having fun selecting goodies for the Surprise Packages, but having trouble keeping the total value under $100. I love giving back to our wonderful fans during the holiday season.

That’s it for now. Have a great weekend. We'll be thinking of you as we slave away. lol

Sincerely,
Kevin Siembieda
Publisher, Writer and a very tired Game Designer

© Copyright November 9, 2014 Palladium Books Inc. All rights reserved.

Rifts®, The Rifter®, RECON®, Splicers®, Palladium Books®, The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, Phase World®, Nightbane®, Megaverse®, The Mechanoids®, The Mechanoid Invasion®, Coalition Wars® and After the Bomb® are Registered Trademarks of Palladium Books Inc. RPG Tactics™, Beyond the Supernatural, Chaos Earth, Coalition States, Dead Reign, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, Minion War, Mysteries of Magic, SAMAS, Thundercloud Galaxy, Three Galaxies, Vampire Kingdoms, and other published book titles, names, slogans and likenesses are trademarks of Palladium Books Inc., and Kevin Siembieda.

Robotech® and Robotech® The Shadow Chronicles® are Registered Trademarks of Harmony Gold USA, Inc.

 Cypher-xv wrote:
PB is definitely shipping. Just go look on eBay. Haters and PB apologist remain calm.

I believe a blanket declaration that Wave 1 has not shipped - and that, in fact, people that have the models, have shown painted models, all of the blogs, posts on the FB group, on TMP, listings on ebay, discussions of rules, photographs of my games with the models - are all entirely fabricated.
I'm not sure if this is worse than the earlier paranoid hysteria that specific backers were getting their pledges shipped first due to having voting YES in the Gencon poll versus NO and that " PB is conspiring to delay shipments because of a personal vendetta."

Updated Google Drive Files on Link

Shipping notice received!!

I'm sorry, I'm still skeptical wave one has shipped. Maybe you're just a PB plant sent here to lead us astray?

:-P

Well, I'm still skeptical about it, considering that the tracking link provided has an invalid tracking number. ;P (when I say invalid, I mean invalid, as in I'm returned a message that says this number is invalid, not even the usual "no records found").

chaos0xomega wrote:
Well, I'm still skeptical about it, considering that the tracking link provided has an invalid tracking number. ;P (when I say invalid, I mean invalid, as in I'm returned a message that says this number is invalid, not even the usual "no records found").

That's normal. Once they receive it they send the email but UNTIL the first time it is physically scanned at the facility you will not show anything. Same thing happened with my last couple of KS's and their orders.

Yeah, it'll take a day or two to activate/kick in/whatever.

A bunch of people have been reporting that. Hell, I had it with a recent shipment a week ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was active tomorrow sometime, perhaps after the pickup. Tuesday even, but give it a little time.

Still nothing for me. Backerkit and KS Backer numbers are in the #2200 range. Got a Showdown with add-ons. It's really frustrating how they are shipping this stuff. out of the 4-5 people that I know that have pledged, they have all gotten their pledges, or notifications. One person pledged the same as me pretty close. Annnnnticipation......

Although I do have a BC pledge on it's way to me that I bought from someone. So there's that.

fruitlewps wrote:
Still nothing for me. Backerkit and KS Backer numbers are in the #2200 range. Got a Showdown with add-ons. It's really frustrating how they are shipping this stuff. out of the 4-5 people that I know that have pledged, they have all gotten their pledges, or notifications. One person pledged the same as me pretty close. Annnnnticipation......

Although I do have a BC pledge on it's way to me that I bought from someone. So there's that.

Does he know it is on the way yet......

Yes. You can prepare a shipment through UPS Worldship and it will assign / reserve a tracking number for you (based on your 6-digit shipper number, which is the 6 digits immediately following the 1Z portion of the tracking number). However, until the End of Day is performed with Worldship, it won't update UPS' main database servers. That's how you can be assigned a tracking number but have the UPS site say it's invalid. Only once an End of Day has been run, will it update UPS proper, and then it will provide no tracking information (until such a time as a UPS person picks up their shipment). One of the additional benefits of running an End of Day is that it will immediately insert the "received by UPS" tracking update on every package included in the End of Day, so the UPS person doesn't have to scan every single package during a pickup.

So on a weekend, they
- prepare packages
- scan them through Worldship
- which generates tracking numbers
- automatically sends emails

on the next business day, UPS will
- pick up the packages
- Worldship will generate an End of Day
- which will activate the tracking numbers from the weekend
- and the UPS person will scan one barcode on the physical end of day report at the location, then marking the first tracking update for every package that is part of the pickup

A few hours later the UPS truck will reach a UPS hub, and all the boxes dumped onto a big conveyor belt, and are hit from all sides by laser scans that will scan the tracking number and remeasure/reweigh the box and send it off to the correct sorting area dependent on UPS delivery zones.

Guess I bit lucky then not having problems with the tracking #. When I opened the UPS app it mentioned the tracking # from the email and gave me the info with no problems. Can't wait till Thursday to get it.

I think y'all are misunderstanding me... the number provided is INVALID, as in there aren't enough digits to it. Its not an issue of 'theres no record of this number' its an issue of 'the number you have provided is invalid, please try again'. I've dealt with UPS and USPS enough in the last 6 months (let alone the past 2 weeks) to know the difference.

Also, the number was provided in the form of a link, however the link was apparrently not formatted correctly and cannot be opened, meaning I have to copy/paste the tracking number manually, I have a feeling that whatever screwed up the link may have also caused an incorrect tracking number (or a partial number missing a few digits or something) to show instead.

Sounds like a data entry problem to me. I wonder how the tracking numbers are entered into the system for the emails that are sent to us?

Either way you'll know in a few days one way or the other. I'd give it 2 weeks and if no joy call PB.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I think y'all are misunderstanding me... the number provided is INVALID, as in there aren't enough digits to it. Its not an issue of 'theres no record of this number' its an issue of 'the number you have provided is invalid, please try again'. I've dealt with UPS and USPS enough in the last 6 months (let alone the past 2 weeks) to know the difference.

Also, the number was provided in the form of a link, however the link was apparrently not formatted correctly and cannot be opened, meaning I have to copy/paste the tracking number manually, I have a feeling that whatever screwed up the link may have also caused an incorrect tracking number (or a partial number missing a few digits or something) to show instead.

I'm interested in seeing it - would you mind forwarded the email to me? judge242 at gmail

From Wayne on Mike's page, in regards to a backer's estimate that US domestic shipping should be wrapping up shortly;

"Wayne Smith: You might be. I did a rough count this morning and it looks like we've got 500-600 domestic left. We should be able to finish those this week even though they're the biggest ones."

Hopefully the 200'ish Canadian backers that show up in the Backers list can get sorted out in a couple of days. Who knows, my gak might be in the mail come Monday, could be available for pickup within the next 2 weeks or so.

Of course, there's still a lot of caveats, If's and asterisks attached to those statements, but it could, yes COULD be a light at the end of the tunnel.

... of Wave One.


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More from Wayne:

"Today we finished single Showdowns plus extras EXCEPT for those with Battle Foam bags. We just started SD + BF bag, we've got about 20 packed and about 90 more to do. Then I think we'll do the small group of SD and 2+ BF bags, then probably Sean's group with 3 BCs / SD + BC. We might do the 48 or so plain Recklesses first, which Brett falls into, because they'd be very quick to do (they fit perfectly into the boxes we have for them, and they're all identical, so packing and processing will go fast). Then we'll get to the biggest ones, with Reckless or more + extras."

"I'm glad you guys like it, because now the bad news: We're taking tomorrow off. Partly because it's Veterans' Day, and US Mail isn't running anyway, but mostly because we worked our butts off this past weekend, and will work next weekend too, so we all just really need it. First, though, I'm going to get back to processing some SD + BF bag packages for a couple more hours. UPS has picked up for today, but they'll go out Wednesday."

Sounds like I've still got another week and half/ two weeks till I get mine...

If it's any consolation, I just ran into a major snag with mine.

The Guardian Mode. WTF is going on with the arm tabs? Sid they even do a test assembly before going on to mass production?? Is there some trick I'm missing?

Let me know when Reckless ships.

I'll begin to care again.

Got a new shipping number, should be here tomorrow

This might have been brought up before, and if so, then I apologize.

I was over on Palladium's website checking prices, and noted that the difference in cost between the starter set and the expansion packs seems unusually large. The starter goes for $100. If you tally up everything in the starter and get the equivalent expansion packs, then you're looking at an MSRP of $218. Additionally, the starter comes with one extra unit (an extra VF). In short, even if you're exclusively interested in one side of the conflict, I can't see any reason to do your initial force expansion by buying the expansion packs. It makes much more sense to buy more starters. Each side has three expansion packs (or more) of figures in the starter box, and those three expansion packs cost more than the starter.

The sole exception to the above buying strategy is the Phalanx/Defender Expansion Pack, as those are unavailable in the starter, and obviously need to be purchased separately.

I've heard of discounts for starters, but this seems unusually extreme. Has Palladium said anything about the starter set price, and why it costs so much less than the expansions do?