Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

At this rate (unless theres a big jump with the terrain pledges tomorrow) I dont see the brood mother getting funded till tomorrow, and the jetbikes till the end of the week.

I was really hoping for plastic plague troopers before the end of this ks, but if they need a 25k goal it's probably unlikely.

Hopefully the terrain becoming available to add on and pledge for will give us a boost. I'm sure Mantic will shoehorn all they want to make in there somehow. A lot of the time it seems they just say "Hey! X is now available! No SG needed!" for some reason...

It seems every time Mantic runs a KS, people complain about a lack of value in the early stages. Give it some time. The value will be there.

overtyrant wrote:
Im finding hard to stay in on this one because of the value. But didnt Dwarf Kings Quest (or whatever the name is) start of like this and finish with tons of stuff? I'll wait till the end and see what occurs.

They dont really compare. For one, DS was faaaar faster. A stretchgoal per day even on slow days. DS is a boardgame, so you get a larger audience right away. Better yet, its a dungeon crawler, which promised things not common in DCs (ai heroes for instance). DZ:I in comparison really just seems to focus on people who already know DZ. The whole campaign feels kind of half-assed. They didnt start with hard goals, they didnt have a video, the value is still pretty bad, and the KS exclusives arent all that great either. DS had additional scenarios, additional heroes...
And it doesnt look like this one is going to blow up any time soon.

I was a Deadzone backer to the tune of $300-$400 or so between the KS and the surveys. A fair chunk of change, though certainly not as big as some.

I didn't, and won't back this KS. Mantic's lazy and sloppy ways since then have completely turned me off of them and their business model. If I pick up anything (doubtful), it will be at retail.

Don't play Deadzone, but this is the format I would've liked for their 2nd Dreadball KS.

Re-do the rulebook, streamline, clarify and iron out the odd balance-issues. Move selected teams to hard plastic. Offer one or two new shinies, a new mat/board. Don't try to push an entire new weird game on me.

Hopefully we can forget about DBX and get a Dreadball 2.0 KS in this format.

I still see Deadzone as a bit of a board game. It certainly isn't a full on skirmish/ tabletop game.

I don't know how to describe it. Complacency? Laziness?

Mantic's other campaigns, they were really trying to drum interest up. Thing like Deadzone week, video tutorials and how to plays, the scrambled twitter transmissions, interviews, unboxings... we didn't see a whole lot of that this time around, or at least not anywhere near as intense.

Which is an unfortunate way to start things off.

Rest assured- Mantic will have this campaign end where they want it to, and if that means piles of add ons, surprise stretch goals, crazy box bundles, we'll see them.

No matter how impatient all of us are- myself included.

I've a feeling with Ronnie being at Adepticon and most likely traveling right now this has been left on auto pilot to a plan they set out in the last few weeks and there is no one around to authorise a change. $3,000 today must show them something isn't right and the total is yoyoing around the same point without gaining much headway. I'd have expected the Brood Mother to have been unlocked today.

The prices being quoted in this KS are so far are little better than discounted retail and it has a lot of people questioning where the value is right now.

overtyrant wrote:
Im finding hard to stay in on this one because of the value. But didn't Dwarf Kings Quest (or whatever the name is) start of like this and finish with tons of stuff? I'll wait till the end and see what occurs.

Dungeon Saga did follow a similar initial trajectory. It didn't do much more than Infestation on its first day and then quietened down a lot. It's worth remembering it didn't break through the mean average daily pledge amount until the last 4 days when things when mental. It's also wroth remembering that initially DS attracted a lot of the same criticisms DZI is getting now.

Dungeon Saga had nearly $100k more after day 5 ($280,387) and never had a sub $10k day.

I'm sure it will all work out in the end

Wonderwolf wrote:
Hopefully we can forget about DBX

Good news, Mantic already has!

Personally, I like the much more violent and unpredictable nature of DBX. That's just me though.

Hopefully when Coach Renton gets home he can rally the team into whipping the crowds up into a fury.

I doubt Mantic want this to go huge, as entertaining for us as massive out of control kickstarters are, for a business regular smaller ones make more sense.

I may actually back down to just the enforcers I want for my enforcer army. I still have days to decide. But beyond things I can get piecemeal, I'm not really being grabbed either.

 dragqueeninspace wrote:
I doubt Mantic want this to go huge, as entertaining for us as massive out of control kickstarters are, for a business regular smaller ones make more sense.

They say they want to fund a sprue for each faction at least. And we're still on the first two factions, so my guess is we're behind their "we get money thrown at us just because" schedule.

I don't know how they'd fund sprues for every faction unless they wanted this thing to blow up big time- or just keep the pot at a steady boil?

Downer_debbie.jpg

We're at what? Three days? Give it a chance.

Really wanting to be wow-ed as I ended up giving a miss to Mantic's last two campaigns; I didn't really want yet another dungeon crawler and KoW just failed to convince me to go in for anything. DZ is a bit different though since I have huge piles of stuff from it and it slotted into a genre niche I didn't have represented. Heck, I'd think that I'd be in the target demographic since Scarletsquig talked me into spending a month's savings on the first campaign.

I just can't get thrilled about anything other than the bikes, and as has been pointed out that's not really a DZ-friendly thing in general even if they're fairly nifty. I'm not a fan of the rats at all, and the Pathfinders are merely "ok" as models to me. The dog is something that I'm not going to care about since i have something like a dozen DFG MULES around that look more the part. The terrain would be nice, but is it worth the money so far in advance when between this and fulfillment I know I'm spending tons of cash on other games?

Between the crowded KS season in March and the dropping of some rather major competition in the retail world (Armada, AdMech, etc.) this is really not the time to put forth a lack-luster effort in asking for money 9 months in advance, at least if they're aiming for my money (which to be fair, they may not...seems doubtful though). Here's hoping Mantic has an ace up their sleeve that they're saving for the last few days that makes something beyond the $1 "jerk pledge" seem like a good idea to me.

Mantic seems to be more concerned with backer count than money generated. Any time that someone mentions the slow funding they hit back with "The important thing is we gained X backers!"

I dunno. This is my first Mantic KS, but as a dakka lurker I guess I know how these things work. I tried convincing two friends to back as well, they are gamers but not really familiar with Mantic or KS in general. They looked at the price tag and contents of the box and demurred. I tried explaining to them how SG will increase the value but they just looked at me like I was crazy lol. "Dude I'll just buy Icestorm"

edit: guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think this KS would be very appealing (yet) to first-time backers / those not familiar with mantic's KS model

Hmm . . . guess this is how stretch goals will go. 1 free sprue of whatever gets unlocked goes into Quarantine. Meaning among other things that we can probably expect to get one Beast included at some point.

I think someone mentioned this earlier but the real issue with this kickstarter so far is that it seems like more of smaller pre warpath kickstarter rather than a deadzone kickstarter. We have large amounts of basic troops with few specialists, units like jet bikes that are impractical in a standard game early on and some of the specialists we have seen(such as the brood mother) are not included in the base pledge.

 rabidaskal wrote:
I dunno. This is my first Mantic KS, but as a dakka lurker I guess I know how these things work. I tried convincing two friends to back as well, they are gamers but not really familiar with Mantic or KS in general. They looked at the price tag and contents of the box and demurred. I tried explaining to them how SG will increase the value but they just looked at me like I was crazy lol. "Dude I'll just buy Icestorm"

edit: guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think this KS would be very appealing (yet) to first-time backers / those not familiar with mantic's KS model

Pull up one of the older KS projects and they'll have an example of what you'll get. It's that first Dreadball KS project that I used to pull about 12 people into the first DZ kickstarter.

Here's hoping they throw up some of the metal models that never hit retail like the Sorak Swordguy and the Enforcer Fusion Gun tomorrow.

Seems fairly uninspiring so far. I'd be interested in some terrain, bikes, maybe the new mats and a rewritten rulebook, but I can't see the value in this for me at this point, or on any of the above stuff at the prices given - especially for a KS. Better to pick them up from discount retail later. Or to paraphrase Bob - just not bother since I don't need any of it anyway.

I think one of the issues contributing to the poor value is that it's not a boxed game they're selling here. It's a book with a bunch of stuff next to it.

 Alex C wrote:
Mantic seems to be more concerned with backer count than money generated. Any time that someone mentions the slow funding they hit back with "The important thing is we gained X backers!"

I think I can guess a reason why. High backers and low money means that they pay the kickstarter fees on that lower amount of cash and then extend the pledge manager for 6+ months and allow for stretch goals to be hit then when the large number of backers add an extra $5 to $500 bucks to get the extra terrain or 16 jet bikes they always wanted.

If they can save a chunk of cash not going to Kickstarter by doing it this way, I figure someone is going to be happy. That someone is probably in Mantic rather than the target audience for this Kickstarter but...


Of course this is based on my understanding, so I might be missing something.

I'm thinking I'm not going to back this one. I'm pretty disappointed with pathfinder plastics, and the Veer-myn get a solid "meh," from me. That combined with not real specifics of the rulebook changes kind of leave me feeling cold on it.

In what way do you find the Pathfinder plastics disappointing? I'm just curious, because from the painted masters I think they're the best human minis Mantic has ever made - great details, interesting aesthetic, excellent proportions, and proper women minis with aggressive poses rather than cocked leg cheesecake.

 NTRabbit wrote:
In what way do you find the Pathfinder plastics disappointing? I'm just curious, because from the painted masters I think they're the best human minis Mantic has ever made - great details, interesting aesthetic, excellent proportions, and proper women minis with aggressive poses rather than cocked leg cheesecake.

Agreed!

Many people didn't even realise that 2 of the 5 Pathfinders are women. We're so used to boob armour that barely covers anything except the boobs, and cheesy poses, that when something more realistic comes along we don't always recognise it for what it is.

Good move by Mantic, imho.

The proportions are not excellent. Mantic still doesn't seem to understand that armour has to be broader than the body part it's wrapped around.

Yeah. Waists are ridiculous.