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I had edited my post a bit . No disrespect for 9th Age, just noting a lot of us want to buy your stuff even though we don't play it (the strength of fantasy minis in general!).

I missed the edit tbh, doesn't change what I wrote though. Your opinion is respected like any other wargamer's and I'm sure others share it, I didn't challenge that, I just wrote that to our knowledge people vote among the candidates and these three are what they decided to play (hence "more popular").
Who knows, maybe in a few years people will drop T9A and play AoS for ETC. In that case I am sure Citadel Miniatures can sponsor that on their own and we'll get back to developing War is Coming. I have my reasons to doubt all that happening, but we'll see what time brings... :-)

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
Looks awesome, but other than 40k I'd be careful characterizing those as the "3 most popular games worldwide"! X-wing, Malifaux, Infinity, Kings of War, etc...

The ones you mention (to my knowledge) are side-events and I think the games popularity is decided by voting; there was also Age of Sigmar from Citadel Miniatures and Kings of War as you pointed out by Mantic Games. Both of which didn't receive any particular warm welcome by the voters.
Again, I may be mistaken but I think that's what happened on the forum where the countries partecipating voted. A forum which we rarely visit however, so take this with a small pinch of salt.

X-Wing is huge. Also worth pointing out, when I saw the mention of "SWM", I thought of Secret Weapon Miniatures first, not Shieldwolf. I legitimately wondered if you guys were working together for a moment there.

 Azazelx wrote:
X-Wing is huge. Also worth pointing out, when I saw the mention of "SWM", I thought of Secret Weapon Miniatures first, not Shieldwolf. I legitimately wondered if you guys were working together for a moment there.

X-Wing is absolutely huge these days, but the tournament scene is managed by FFG, both directly and by tourney packs, so the players are probable already catered to.

@Azazelx @Albertorius
OK, I stand corrected then, I genuinely weren't following X-wing and drew conclusion judging from the partecipants in ETC, apparently a wrong judgment as two forum members pointed out how large this game currently is :-)

We just came back from the venue, got to rest a bit as the day was long and filled with excitement -which is quite energy draining after the adrenaline wears out it seems!

Today is one of the Team members (Dimitrios) birthday, so the day is still long...

 Azazelx wrote:
[...] Also worth pointing out, when I saw the mention of "SWM", I thought of Secret Weapon Miniatures first, not Shieldwolf. I legitimately wondered if you guys were working together for a moment there.[...]

Corrected it to SwM then :-)

Also, a brief interview with Angelos at the ETC held these days in Athens, if you look carefully there are two spoilers in it!

 Shieldwolf Miniatures wrote:
@Azazelx @Albertorius
OK, I stand corrected then, I genuinely weren't following X-wing and drew conclusion judging from the partecipants in ETC, apparently a wrong judgment as two forum members pointed out how large this game currently is :-)

We just came back from the venue, got to rest a bit as the day was long and filled with excitement -which is quite energy draining after the adrenaline wears out it seems!

Today is one of the Team members (Dimitrios) birthday, so the day is still long...

Best wishes for Dimitrios. But never mind the slightly snarky "apparently", or what "two forum members" pointed out. There's hard data to back it up. We're not pulling numbers out of our arses or going by what a local tourney or store says in isolation.

http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/35145/top-5-non-collectible-miniature-games-spring-2016

TOP 5 NON-COLLECTIBLE MINIATURE GAMES--SPRING 2016
From ICv2's 'Internal Correspondence' #90
Posted by ICv2 on August 1, 2016 @ 2:55 am CT

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This chart of the Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines (hobby channel) reflects sales in Spring 2016. The charts are based on interviews with retailers, distributors, and manufacturers.

Top 5 Non-Collectible Miniature Lines – Spring 2016
Title Publisher
1 Star Wars X-Wing Fantasy Flight Games
2 Warhammer 40K Games Workshop
3 Star Wars Armada Fantasy Flight Games
4 Warmachine Privateer Press
5 Star Trek Attack Wing WizKids
These bestseller lists are from ICv2's Internal Correspondence #90. For more information on the game market in Spring 2016, see "Hobby Games Market Nearly $1.2 Billion."

Now these numbers come from distributors and independent retailers in the US - so it does not include GW's own direct sales via the web or their own stores, nor does it cover other regions outside of the US (maybe .ca as well?) - but it's still a pretty decent metric. You'll also note that AoS is absent - (which is reportedly selling about twice as well as WHFB was when it was axed) - about 30% of GW sales - info from GW Annual Report - discussion elsewhere on this site in Dakka Discussions. Hordes is absent (despite the same, compatible system, they are different SKUs and counted separately.

Here's the thing - AoS is WHFB's replacement and is absent from this list. It's selling roughly twice as well as WHFB which is (was) the "big dog" that Shieldwolf, Mantic, AoW and all the other smaller companies were hitching their carts to. X-Wing fething dwarfs AoS which is double what WHFB was. 9th Age is only a segment of the fractured WHFB playerbase - some stayed with WHFB 8th or other editions, some went to KoW, some went to AoS, some to T9A, some set their armies ablaze (NSFW language) and a significant number sold off and quit. There is of course crossover between those still playing Warhammer-descendants, but T9A doesn't have nearly the numbers that 8th had, and is therefore nowhere near the top 3 most popular games worldwide.

You should know by now, Angelos - I might be opinionated, but I do know what the feth I'm talking about.

BTW, no disrespect to T9A or the ETC tournament. I think what the T9A guys are doing is fantastic and I support their efforts wholeheartedly even though I play KoW instead.

@Azazelx
It wasn't snarky if it came that way, tbh we looked up x-wing and to our surprise not only are they really big but they are now even entering the mass army fantasy rank n' file area!
For a video that got posted 1 day ago and already has 12K views in 24 hours, I think it's mighty impressive how many followers FFG has.
Here's some free advertisement to the colleague ;-)


They are coming out with a generic starter set "humans vs skeletons" and I am pretty confident more will follow to build on. This is happening early 2017 according to them. Very interesting :-D

Yep, it's being discussed here:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/698624.page

Looks interesting. I'll wait and see what the price is like. A few here dislike the models, but I don't mind them at all. I could find a use for both factions' models, even if I never play the FFG game...

 Azazelx wrote:
Yep, it's being discussed here:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/698624.page

ninja'd... (!) :-/

 Azazelx wrote:

Looks interesting. I'll wait and see what the price is like. A few here dislike the models, but I don't mind them at all. I could find a use for both factions' models, even if I never play the FFG game...

On the link they provided it's 99$ for the set.

Well... what price I can get it for. Between US>UK>AU currency fluctuations, local markup if I go that way or international postage if I don't, I won't know the actual price (for me) until it's out and available...

@Azazelx
Argument... valid! Hopefully it will be priced very competitively in order not to penalize anyone out of the US! :-)

Now that the ETC has finished in Athens, we would like to announce our next (smaller) KS project: The Forest Goblin Army



In an effort to augment faster the large range we need to support both our own game and T9A community, we have been working on a smaller Q3 project, now always pitching with a new hard plastic multi-part kit. We hope you will like what we have created and we would be honored to have your support once again! :-D

This is a small teaser of one of the things we have designed as a Stretch Goal, but we would be happy to fund the basic kit alone!



Thank you for reading,

The Shieldwolf Team.

forest goblins




you have my money come kickstarter time

Awesome, will definitely be backing this!

Is the plan for a single or dual kit? Spearmen/archers?

Noooo mah wallit!

Hmm... I'm not super into goblins, but I'll be wiling to check this out.

At the very least a pledge ought to net me a good amount of goblins for skirmish games, right?

How many do you imagine fitting in one box? 20? 30? 40?

I'm super interested to see what the reptilian toe belongs to as well though!

I'm also hopeful we'll get to see an Icecrusher sculpt soon!

Goblins aren't exactly uncharted territory to say the least, but forest themed ones should be a good niche to fill. And of course, hard plastic is a always a selling point.

I know people waited for GW to make plastic versions of the old metal forest goblins for decades (i know they eventually did spider riders and a the aracnaroc but never any basic infantry), so you should have a market ready.

That cropped photo looks like it could be squiggoth material.
Pretty neat if that's the case. You could get quite a lot of cross over sales to 40K players.

I will happily sit this one out. If the goblins looked a little more monstrous and less goofy, like the Minion or even Mantic gobbos, I might be in, but the tree bark sunglasses gobbo is not welcome in my collection.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I do wish you the best of luck and much success, though.

If there's one thing I've learned about goblins, it's that there are often Trolls or some other larger (hungry?) creature hanging out with them.

This has potential. What's the projected turnaround time looking to be?

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
Hmm... I'm not super into goblins, but I'll be wiling to check this out.
At the very least a pledge ought to net me a good amount of goblins for skirmish games, right?
How many do you imagine fitting in one box? 20? 30? 40?

Our Infantry is planned for 20 per box and our cavalry for 10 per box. For the Goblins due to their size it is currently being discussed/debated whether it will be 20 or 25 per box.

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:

I'm super interested to see what the reptilian toe belongs to as well though!

It's a BIG thing... :-)

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:

I'm also hopeful we'll get to see an Icecrusher sculpt soon!

Projected date is either September or October Update for the Icecrusher :-)

willb2064 wrote:
Awesome, will definitely be backing this!
Is the plan for a single or dual kit? Spearmen/archers?

This will follow our last succesful KS model, i.e. we fund the main kit and the more the project funds, the more stuff gets packed on the sprues. Yes, both spears and short bows are planned for. After which we move on to the other kits in HIPS we have planned for, i.e. their cavalry and if it reaches that high, warmachines/monsters.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I will happily sit this one out. If the goblins looked a little more monstrous and less goofy, like the Minion or even Mantic gobbos, I might be in, but the tree bark sunglasses gobbo is not welcome in my collection.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
I do wish you the best of luck and much success, though.

Thank you, I know it's a genuine comment and I appreciate it. Who knows, maybe you won't be finding them so 'goofy' after all... :-)

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
If there's one thing I've learned about goblins, it's that there are often Trolls or some other larger (hungry?) creature hanging out with them.

:-)

 Azazelx wrote:
This has potential. What's the projected turnaround time looking to be?

It will launch 1st or 2nd week of September. Project will end in September regardless, so the sooner we launch this, the more days available. :-)

 Gallahad wrote:
While my personal preference would be for a minotaurs mini ks, I think the most likely, (and my official guess) is Goblins.

Ah, sweet victory!

I am not a big goblin fan, but I'll see what I can do to support this. I like the bark mask on the little guy. I'm going to guess that the toe shown is for a big triceratops type dinosaur.

So cavalry will definitely be a thing.

Probably safe to assume in resin, or are you going to try and go all out in plastic?

Not that we know what it is...

My personal preference for cavalry is wolves over spiders, but there has been a precedent set for both. Maybe something new?

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
So cavalry will definitely be a thing.

Probably safe to assume in resin, or are you going to try and go all out in plastic?

Negative, when all additions to the main infantry sprue have been done, then it's cavalry in HIPS. And if that happens, then it's HIPS again for warmachine/monster.
After which, another infantry kit.

The nice thing about Goblins is you need... well, gobs of them for regiment type games. So I hope we can at least get spears and bows out of the box, and some fun accessories. Cavalry on top of that would be very nice, though I think it'd be hard to decide whether to go wolves, spiders, or something else. Maybe some sort of gazelle type thing, or badgers or the like?

Regardless, I like that concept, though I can see the argument for having some heads that are less goofy and some that are more so.

This looks promising, I'll check out the Kickstarter once it's live. I can always use more Goblins!

A couple of questions, which are a little silly perhaps because I think I know the answers.

1: What scale are they? Are they going to be more like the pretty bulky GW gobbos, or a little smaller and skinnier?
2: Are they all going to have the jungle/voodoo theme going on with the bark masked fellow there?
3: Are the goblins going to be fairly lightly detailed? I guess another way of asking that is "Is the goblin shown the norm for the rank and file in terms of business, or is he a special one and the rest are more bare?"


I ask because I would prefer smaller/scrawnier gobbos than GW, with less little fiddly bits to detail paint. The ideal gobbo would be scaled at nearly 25mm and be easy to airbrush the skin and just have to do a handful of little details on, on the expectation that I would need like 200 for an army, just for the infantry.

All in all, even if I don't need the gobbos I will be looking for fun things to add just to help out!

Good to hear there's a chance for plastic cavalry. Will be interesting to see what it is.

Another question- for those of us who are more prone to skirmish games, any chance of getting round bases as opposed to square ones?

I know we can do skirmish stuff with square bases, but it never hurts to ask.

 greenskin lynn wrote:
forest goblins




you have my money come kickstarter time

And my axe.


Seriously though, you have no idea how much I want proper Forest Gobbos - I spent ages on eBay hunting down enough Arachnarok crew models to make my Mordheim warband. With these I can make a good size Dragon Rampant warband as well

One wee smidge of feedback on that image though - I hope it's still slightly WiP, as I prefer feathers and other such details to have the texture already defined rather than having to try painting the strands by hand.

 Wehrkind wrote:
A couple of questions, which are a little silly perhaps because I think I know the answers.

1: What scale are they? Are they going to be more like the pretty bulky GW gobbos, or a little smaller and skinnier?
2: Are they all going to have the jungle/voodoo theme going on with the bark masked fellow there?
3: Are the goblins going to be fairly lightly detailed? I guess another way of asking that is "Is the goblin shown the norm for the rank and file in terms of business, or is he a special one and the rest are more bare?"


I ask because I would prefer smaller/scrawnier gobbos than GW, with less little fiddly bits to detail paint. The ideal gobbo would be scaled at nearly 25mm and be easy to airbrush the skin and just have to do a handful of little details on, on the expectation that I would need like 200 for an army, just for the infantry.

All in all, even if I don't need the gobbos I will be looking for fun things to add just to help out!

For the record, newer GW goblins are much titchier than the gigantor mutants used in the old plastic infantry/wolf rider kits - the post BFSP Night Goblin and Forest Goblin plastics are pretty much the scale you're asking for and which I prefer as well, so hopefully they come close to that.

I can't agree on the detail front, however, Forest Goblins really need to have a few feathers, bones etc dangling off them, even the rank & file, it's the main way you can tell them apart from common goblins who just forgot to put their jackets on before going out


As for the mounts - I will vote Spiders all day, every day. The GW models are actually a pretty poor example of a cool concept, and while wolf models are pretty commonplace, finding good spider miniatures, especially in plastic is pretty difficult. I'd love a box of plastic spider-cavalry with actual separate legs that use socket joints so you could pose them. EDIT: I could *maybe* be persuaded to accept millipedes or some other similar creepy-crawly, but for the love of jeebus don't do something like deer, they're Goblins not pansy Elves

 Wehrkind wrote:
A couple of questions, which are a little silly perhaps because I think I know the answers.
1: What scale are they? Are they going to be more like the pretty bulky GW gobbos, or a little smaller and skinnier?

They stand on 20mm square bases and will be slightly bulkier than the more recent Citadel Miniatures goblins. These are warrior goblins!

 Wehrkind wrote:
2: Are they all going to have the jungle/voodoo theme going on with the bark masked fellow there?

They will have the primitive/forest/jungle theme. Not all of them wear the bark masks.

 Wehrkind wrote:
3: Are the goblins going to be fairly lightly detailed? I guess another way of asking that is "Is the goblin shown the norm for the rank and file in terms of business, or is he a special one and the rest are more bare?"

I ask because I would prefer smaller/scrawnier gobbos than GW, with less little fiddly bits to detail paint. The ideal gobbo would be scaled at nearly 25mm and be easy to airbrush the skin and just have to do a handful of little details on, on the expectation that I would need like 200 for an army, just for the infantry.

We comprehend the need to keep it simple, but can't be too simple. The amount of detail shown above is going to be the norm for all of them.

 Wehrkind wrote:

All in all, even if I don't need the gobbos I will be looking for fun things to add just to help out!

That's highly appreciated and we will try our best to earn your pledge then by perhaps an interesting add-on or something like that! :-)

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
Another question- for those of us who are more prone to skirmish games, any chance of getting round bases as opposed to square ones?
I know we can do skirmish stuff with square bases, but it never hurts to ask.

It doesn't hurt to ask, but our game uses only square bases I'm afraid.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 greenskin lynn wrote:
forest goblins

you have my money come kickstarter time

And my axe.

Seriously though, you have no idea how much I want proper Forest Gobbos - I spent ages on eBay hunting down enough Arachnarok crew models to make my Mordheim warband. With these I can make a good size Dragon Rampant warband as well

One wee smidge of feedback on that image though - I hope it's still slightly WiP, as I prefer feathers and other such details to have the texture already defined rather than having to try painting the strands by hand.

At that scale overdoing it with the detail will probably do more harm than good. The goblins will still have ample detail to make sure we deliver a truly beautiful product that dominates the said niche market for many many years to come :-) We still have to make our own money back once put in retail after all...

 Yodhrin wrote:

For the record, newer GW goblins are much titchier than the gigantor mutants used in the old plastic infantry/wolf rider kits - the post BFSP Night Goblin and Forest Goblin plastics are pretty much the scale you're asking for and which I prefer as well, so hopefully they come close to that.

I can't agree on the detail front, however, Forest Goblins really need to have a few feathers, bones etc dangling off them, even the rank & file, it's the main way you can tell them apart from common goblins who just forgot to put their jackets on before going out

If you color the feathers in some lively colors (e.g. orange, pink etc) compared to the green skin and combined with the leather clothing, I trust it should be a very distinguishable force on the table :-)