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 scarletsquig wrote:
The core of the game is the same, but it plays in a much faster and more enjoyable way. Unfortunately, on the whole, v1 was not a successful game at retail, and people did find the rules to be too long-winded and over-burdened with rules bloat.

The rules were primarily burdened with the sort of crap-ass editing and imbalance that's an inevitable result of every book being a rush job by a single man also juggling 3 other projects (and having a bit of an ego when confronted with criticism).

What needs fixing is the process, not the mechanics.

 judgedoug wrote:

 scarletsquig wrote:
I would be very interested in seeing what people think of the v2 campaign rules, since those are the main part where the RC has had input (basically re-writing it from scratch).

You certainly won't get that from here. Everyone's enjoying showing off how impressive their tinfoil hats are.

I bought a tin foil hat, but they shipped me aluminum.

If we can't have a sense of humor about being screwed over for the nth time, then Mantic is the least of our problems. They certainly aren't the worst when it comes to kickstarter. Prodos and Palladium are so bad they aren't worth joking over. Defiance Games screwed over the backers in a blaze of glory that took out an entire second Kickstarter as collateral damage and nearly put two more game companies out of business, spending all their money on booze and strippers. Ronnie's really going to have to work to top that.

But feel free to dictate how we should feel when a company takes our money and breaks it's promises.

I checked my emails, and they got (and pretty quickly shipped, IIRC) the hardback KOW books in August of 2012, and they had a download for the mini-rulebook in June of 2012. The second edition was not officially released until September 2015, so First edition KOW lasted at least three years, and that's if you're only counting the time between hard copy releases, as KoW had free rules well before 2012. I'm not sure if I'm misremembering, but I also though Mantic actually sold out of physical hard copy books, and decided to revise the books rather than reprint old rules, which shows a real ethic, IMO. (GW, of course, expects its employees to hard sell a codex everybody knows will be replaced in a week)

New editions don't bother me when they are substantive improvements. KoW 1st was a good game, but the balancing of the army lists made competitive play pretty unfulfilling, although certainly better than, say, 40k.

While I pledged for DZ1, I never actually played the game as a game, so I never really got feel for it. From the comments I'm seeing, it looks like they're changing some core mechanics, which to me indicates that the first release was pretty flawed.

Either way, gaming companies run into a serious problem of addressing broken or unbalanced or just plain bad rules, in that if they do nothing, people won't play the game, but if they release new rules, people complain about spending money on rules that are now obsolete. The easy answer is to say that they should write better rules, which for KoW they really did. I'd argue that they could have created a tournament pack that would have balanced KoW enough to limp it through another year. DZ seems to be a pretty flawed game, so maybe burning it down for the insurance money was the best bet.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: while Mantic shows an alarmingly amateurish approach to running a games company, nothing to be indicates that they are in any way cunning or manipulative.

I am genuinely surprised that Deadzone was a retail failure. I thought it was an overall good product at a fair price. I guess that it was maybe a bit too involved modelling wise for the important board game crowd?

Plus somebody must be playing it as I just sold all my painted Deadzone factions to a US buyer for £320/$480 odd.

Where did you hear Deadzone was a retail failure?

ScarletSquig said it a few posts back and as he/she is on the rules committee I assume they have a bit of insider knowledge.

Edit: the actual quote was "not a success at retail" so maybe not quite a retail failure just somewhere inbetween?

That is surprising. I wonder if it wasn't a success in that the customers didn't buy enough from retailers or if it wasn't a success because retailers and distributors didn't buy enough from Mantic. Considering how successful they made Mars Attacks out to be, I find it surprising that they seem to be burying it quietly by the side of the road while pushing Deadzone on every passerby.

 Polonius wrote:
I checked my emails, and they got (and pretty quickly shipped, IIRC) the hardback KOW books in August of 2012, and they had a download for the mini-rulebook in June of 2012. The second edition was not officially released until September 2015, so First edition KOW lasted at least three years, and that's if you're only counting the time between hard copy releases, as KoW had free rules well before 2012. I'm not sure if I'm misremembering, but I also though Mantic actually sold out of physical hard copy books, and decided to revise the books rather than reprint old rules, which shows a real ethic, IMO. (GW, of course, expects its employees to hard sell a codex everybody knows will be replaced in a week)

Weren't their beta WIP rules for download for the year prior? I suspect alot of folks playing KOW during that time were using those so I'd personally start the countdown at the kickstarter for 2nd edition; YMMV. Either way, thanks for the correction. The wiki has the hardback listed as 2013.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: while Mantic shows an alarmingly amateurish approach to running a games company, nothing to be indicates that they are in any way cunning or manipulative.

Agreed. They're more Steve Urkel ("Did I do thaaaaat?") than Dr. Evil for sure but regardless they both hit the pocketbook just as hard no matter what the underlying reasons. If a game edition doesn't last 4-5 years before being replaced (as opposed to errata'd or being added onto with increasing scope) then they didn't do a good enough job initially and should extend an olive branch. At 3 years, I'm fine with a free PDF of the full final product. Retiring an edition at 1-2 years like GW/DP9/Mantic's Deadzone is never appropriate without a suitable free offer to existing customers for the screw up (like the FOW mini-book even though they didn't pull their editions early).

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That is surprising. I wonder if it wasn't a success in that the customers didn't buy enough from retailers or if it wasn't a success because retailers and distributors didn't buy enough from Mantic. Considering how successful they made Mars Attacks out to be, I find it surprising that they seem to be burying it quietly by the side of the road while pushing Deadzone on every passerby.

Or despite Mantic's vigorous propaganda to the contrary, they've been cutting their own throats with the Kickstarters. The Kickstarters fill up most of the demand for the product, leaving it dead on arrival at retail. Stores have likely seen this and won't come near Mantic product now, and even in the early days were feeling alienated by Mantic's heavy use of Kickstarter. I'm sure the 'release and forget' policy as far as their rules support doesn't help. While I hold Jake Thornton somewhat responsible, he is a contractor, not a Mantic employee. Mantic accepts and publishes his half baked ideas, then leaves the games to die. Or in the hands of forum users to try to fix all the junk and make something presentable out of it.

 totalfailure wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That is surprising. I wonder if it wasn't a success in that the customers didn't buy enough from retailers or if it wasn't a success because retailers and distributors didn't buy enough from Mantic. Considering how successful they made Mars Attacks out to be, I find it surprising that they seem to be burying it quietly by the side of the road while pushing Deadzone on every passerby.

Or despite Mantic's vigorous propaganda to the contrary, they've been cutting their own throats with the Kickstarters. The Kickstarters fill up most of the demand for the product, leaving it dead on arrival at retail. Stores have likely seen this and won't come near Mantic product now, and even in the early days were feeling alienated by Mantic's heavy use of Kickstarter. I'm sure the 'release and forget' policy as far as their rules support doesn't help. While I hold Jake Thornton somewhat responsible, he is a contractor, not a Mantic employee. Mantic accepts and publishes his half baked ideas, then leaves the games to die. Or in the hands of forum users to try to fix all the junk and make something presentable out of it.

It's not just Jake's ideas.. they have set up a "council" of people who have no business as anything other than Mantic customers. Somehow though, these people get to decide what is and is not going into the games we all are looking at. These people get to just walk away from it and claim they were just helping or they did their best or whatever but for Mantic to rely on amateurs and go directly to finish product from that.. yeah.. well.. its' very telling. I know that might strike people wrong but frankly I don't care. When Mantic came along they had a lot of great ideas and the more I watched this community driven BS take hold the more I watched that glimmer of hope go down the toilet.

 MLaw wrote:
It's not just Jake's ideas.. they have set up a "council" of people who have no business as anything other than Mantic customers. Somehow though, these people get to decide what is and is not going into the games we all are looking at. These people get to just walk away from it and claim they were just helping or they did their best or whatever but for Mantic to rely on amateurs and go directly to finish product from that.. yeah.. well.. its' very telling. I know that might strike people wrong but frankly I don't care. When Mantic came along they had a lot of great ideas and the more I watched this community driven BS take hold the more I watched that glimmer of hope go down the toilet.

A designer, supported by a steering committee, backed by large numbers of private and public playtests with feedback, per title. Utterly disgusting behaviour, I hope they all catch a vigorous strain of fire squirts for doing that. I mean, who do they think they are, utilising their community to help develop games? That sort of behaviour ought to be stamped out right now, so they can go back to locking three designers in separate rooms with no communication, collating all their work into one book with no editing, and releasing without any kind of playtesting.

 NTRabbit wrote:
A designer, supported by a steering committee, backed by large numbers of private and public playtests with feedback, per title. Utterly disgusting behaviour, I hope they all catch a vigorous strain of fire squirts for doing that. I mean, who do they think they are, utilising their community to help develop games? That sort of behaviour ought to be stamped out right now, so they can go back to locking three designers in separate rooms with no communication, collating all their work into one book with no editing, and releasing without any kind of playtesting.

That dang rules committee making KoW 2 the finest mass battles game ever published! Get off my lawn!

KoW2 is the only Mantic publication, to my knowledge, that was "designed by committee". It's also the only one I would call truly polished.

And while I agree that exploiting volunteers doesn't paint Mantic in a great light as a business, claiming that the product somehow suffers for it is misinformed at best, as is the notion that "amateurs" are somehow less competent and accountable than hired writers.

Jake Thornton is a professional, yes? And apparently Deadzone 1 was a complete mess and a failure of a ruleset and a commercial flop, according to Mantic, but they still hired the same author to do the new edition. It's hard to imagine the rules committee being even less accountable than that.

Whilst the discussion itself is fine, it'd probably be better if this tangent was taken elsewhere, so we can keep this thread less cluttered.

Thanks.

 MLaw wrote:

 totalfailure wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That is surprising. I wonder if it wasn't a success in that the customers didn't buy enough from retailers or if it wasn't a success because retailers and distributors didn't buy enough from Mantic. Considering how successful they made Mars Attacks out to be, I find it surprising that they seem to be burying it quietly by the side of the road while pushing Deadzone on every passerby.

Or despite Mantic's vigorous propaganda to the contrary, they've been cutting their own throats with the Kickstarters. The Kickstarters fill up most of the demand for the product, leaving it dead on arrival at retail. Stores have likely seen this and won't come near Mantic product now, and even in the early days were feeling alienated by Mantic's heavy use of Kickstarter. I'm sure the 'release and forget' policy as far as their rules support doesn't help. While I hold Jake Thornton somewhat responsible, he is a contractor, not a Mantic employee. Mantic accepts and publishes his half baked ideas, then leaves the games to die. Or in the hands of forum users to try to fix all the junk and make something presentable out of it.

It's not just Jake's ideas.. they have set up a "council" of people who have no business as anything other than Mantic customers. Somehow though, these people get to decide what is and is not going into the games we all are looking at. These people get to just walk away from it and claim they were just helping or they did their best or whatever but for Mantic to rely on amateurs and go directly to finish product from that.. yeah.. well.. its' very telling. I know that might strike people wrong but frankly I don't care. When Mantic came along they had a lot of great ideas and the more I watched this community driven BS take hold the more I watched that glimmer of hope go down the toilet.

Actually the Deadzone RC hasn't seen large parts of the rules until very late in the process, a fact that is evident by the campaign rules (our only contribution at this point) having a whole "army selection pending update from Jake/ Mantic" placeholder in it.

The rules are being developed by another person within Mantic after Jake developed an initial version.

Anyway, we are gathering feedback and the rules will be modified based on that, if anyone wants to contribute they are welcome too, the RC will put forward a suggested list of changes based on what the community wants, if it gets accepted by Mantic, great, if not we did our best.

At the moment we're working out how to add a form of Blaze Away back into the game, this is a point I agree with and thought the lack of it didn't feel right in my own playtest games last month.

re: BA.

Immediate options I see are:

1. Have more weapons with the Suppression rule (this is where BA has gone to it seems).
2. In conjunction with the point above, have some weapons able to fire for suppression OR to kill (alternate modes).

 scarletsquig wrote:
Actually the Deadzone RC hasn't seen large parts of the rules until very late in the process, a fact that is evident by the campaign rules (our only contribution at this point) having a whole "army selection pending update from Jake/ Mantic" placeholder in it.

The rules are being developed by another person within Mantic after Jake developed an initial version.

Regarding feedback, I'm hearing a lot of chatter regarding the weapon lists, such as: they appear fiddly to execute and keep track of, are oddly costed, are by any reasonable standard so various that they are impossible to fully test / balance in time for publication, and are so unrestricted at the moment that pretty much any model can field any weapon.

Some are against this new weapon list being kept at all, others think at least reigning in which models can have access to which weapons (so you don't have Zees walking around with Polaris cannons) makes good common sense, reinforces the narrative fluff of the Warpath universe, and hopefully makes the game easier to balance out.

And if it is primarily there for the campaign rules, which people seem to like on the whole, maybe alternate weapons should be kept there separate from one-off gameplay? From the outside looking in, it does seem like it could get confusing, involved, and problematic for a game that wants to streamline itself and lead to faster set-up / play.

As far as the major changes coming from an unnamed person within Mantic rather than the rules committee - and the rules committee not even getting to see most of the major rules changes - my hope that we'd get an improved, balanced, and tested Deadzone ruleset is diminished. It's hard to put out a balanced game of this complexity in the first edition as it is; so many issues only come out after players have at them over the years. So I was hoping Deadzone 2.0, even though its coming a bit early, would really clean up the game in a positive way. I'm not necessarily against Mantic changing the 1st edition rules and making the game radically different in principle, but this is clearly no longer about a rules committee vetting ideas that the original designer has put forth. Instead, a second designer is making sweeping changes the rules committee doesn't get to see until it's late in the game. Particularly if Mantic intend to release the new rules in February, I fully expect that whatever the new virtues of Deadzone 2.0 are, it will be as in need of repair and balancing as the current Deadzone.

I'm staying in regardless, because even if the rules are poor, I want my space ratmen, and the ratmen I want will never be this cheap to obtain again - at least, not when bought directly from Mantic. (Clearance in a year or two at Miniature Market is another story. But one does wonder how long Miniature Market will be willing to continue stocking Mantic at all, with their clearance of Mantic products at firesale prices being almost a guaranteed yearly event now. And if Miniature Market ever stops stocking Mantic products altogether, good luck counting on getting Mantic product reliably at good clearance prices in the USA. It can happen at other stores, but not with as good a discount, and not as reliably.) With shipping going up appreciably for US customers as of the Warpath KS, I'm much better off getting the new Veer-myn and Forge Fathers via my US-shipping-subsidized Deadzone Infestation pledge. Put that in your woogambas, tlingtz, and hopay salay and smoke it, rest-of-the-world-US-shipping-price-increase-Schadenfreuders. And if you don't even know what any of those are, maybe you shouldn't be accusing the USA of being insular and ignorant about the rest of the world, as you clearly have some studying to do. Or maybe I just made those words up. In which case, feel free to feel superior.

That said, there do seem to be more people on the KS pages rage-quitting / asking for a refund based on the rules changes than normal. (Assuming a good number are actually following through, of course.)

Not liking these new rules. Blaze away made pinning a key concept of the game, and the two different levels of pinning added further importance and tactical consideration to it. That's now gone. The doubling/tripling rules for dice tests also added extra excitement when you made a really good roll and made for some very cinematic moments. That's now gone. The command cards were flawed in their implementation, but were immensely satisfying to use, and there was a lot of variety. They're now gone, and the command dice are pretty limited in comparison. I feel like the things that made DZ unique and cinematic, the things I enjoyed the most, have been removed or diminished, which is very disappoint, seeing as I love the original rules so much. Command-moving a Sniper onto a roof and taking a clear shot using a Headshot card, burying a Plague Stage 1 under a torrent of dice, stopping the enemy in his tracks with some well-placed blaze aways... that gak was awesome. They needed some reworking, and there was some convoluted stuff, sure, but I felt that the core was sound. The new Campaign system seems better, and I like some stuff (speed stat f e), I'll have to play v2 obviously, but I'm not as excited as I thought I'd be, not by a long shot.

The game looks to have been stripped back. However, that's not to now say that the things that made DZ for people cannot be layered back on to the new core mechanics. What's needed I would suggest is lots of batreps and balancing and then feedback on where things need adjusting and work still.

 Mymearan wrote:
Not liking these new rules. Blaze away made pinning a key concept of the game, and the two different levels of pinning added further importance and tactical consideration to it. That's now gone. The doubling/tripling rules for dice tests also added extra excitement when you made a really good roll and made for some very cinematic moments. That's now gone. The command cards were flawed in their implementation, but were immensely satisfying to use, and there was a lot of variety. They're now gone, and the command dice are pretty limited in comparison. I feel like the things that made DZ unique and cinematic, the things I enjoyed the most, have been removed or diminished, which is very disappoint, seeing as I love the original rules so much. Command-moving a Sniper onto a roof and taking a clear shot using a Headshot card, burying a Plague Stage 1 under a torrent of dice, stopping the enemy in his tracks with some well-placed blaze aways... that gak was awesome. They needed some reworking, and there was some convoluted stuff, sure, but I felt that the core was sound. The new Campaign system seems better, and I like some stuff (speed stat f e), I'll have to play v2 obviously, but I'm not as excited as I thought I'd be, not by a long shot.

Got to highly disagree with most things here.

Blaze away was horrid. Most of the time unless you were a hgh AP weapon or an amazing weapon like the sniper, you always blazed away as it was better. No tactics here. It didnt suffer the penalties as shooting did for whatever dumb reason (such as range)

Two levels of pinning made the game drag on horribly long. This was made to be a fast skirmish game, not everyone massivly pinned and nothing happening. Plus spending all your time getting up just to be pinned again.

Double tripple was a neat idea. But to speed up the game I accept and understand why it was removed.

The cards were also terrible. It was a counterspell fest. Oh +1 shooting? I have +1 def, over and over. Not to mention the first turn auto activate a enemy model for the round.

Id rather the rules stripped down and more simple so the game is a fast paced skirmish then drawn out and boring with no one dieing.

^ Agree. Liked the concept of Blaze Away, but it was very poorly implemented. If it comes back it will not be anything like the previous version with the "double range with no negatives" "1 success v 0 success = tripled", "everything in the cube is hit" stuff.

Like I said, the rules certainly weren't perfect, but they didn't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

that said the rules are wip, and my friends and i read them and a had few games we find them fun, and about the retail not selling, a lot of people were put off by the fact you had to buy multiple rules ad the ks exclusive characters

How long do your games take now? and how many points you play?

Warpath update very wordy but saying very little in short
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/warpath-the-sci-fi-battle-game/posts/1427007?ref=backer_project_update

Pledgemanager

The pledge manager is about to enter testing tomorrow. No release date yet

The Rules

The mass-battle game - needs more feedback and balancing to get the points and power levels correct.

Firefight has a set of core rules but they can't cater to everyone's taste so they want comments on what people want it to be. Reads very much like they don't have a great deal done or ready to show yet.

The Miniatures same list as DZ:I going to PVC with a caveat "Figures not included in this list will remain in the material originally stated for now, but there may be a couple of changes to other models later in production." Still no word on price changes or extras due to the change from resin to PVC.

Hacker Half Tail

Drill train is kind of awesome. Didn't really take much else away I didn't already know from dz:I.

We do about hundred points, it's great. As a rebs player ive won quite a few games,
Ok no blaze away or overwatch has caused some issues from time to time but nothing changing tactics doesn't help.
we've had a few fast games and a couple of really long ones too. oO average between 45 mins to about two hours

Choo-Choo nice-nice

 warboss wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:

KoW by comparison was May 2012-Nov 2014, so 30 months. Twice as long as DeadZone.

What came out in 2012? The hardback that replaced the previous version and was significantly revised from it was in 2013. The KOW2 kickstarter that was to replace it was in 2014 and the final product was delivered in 2015 so that hardback version lasted as little as a year and change before they started coming out with rules to replace it (albeit PDF). That seems to correspond to Deadzone pretty well. Mantic seems to just like that 1-2 year lifecycle of usefulness in their rules before they're devalued. It's up to customers to decide whether a can of soup should last longer than an entire game edition.

Those were the KS dates for both. I don't recall when fulfilment was, or when they hit retail, but it still felt a decent chunk longer than DZ, which didn't even last a year.

Kickstarter <no-reply@kickstarter.com>
14 Jan

to me
Kickstarter
#167
Keeping the peace
Posted by Mantic Games
On Friday 16th January we will have completed shipping the Deadzone Kickstarter.

I'll agree that the second KS cut short KoW's lifespan, since I did stop bothering to play KoW at the end of 2014 though, since it felt like there wasn't much point becoming more familiar with rules that were about to be superseded, but it was still longer than DZ1 which had a lifespan shorter than a mayfly. I think the problem is that Mantic don't playtest properly/enough/thoroughly enough and so we can count on most of their "new" projects having the holes picked out of them in the year or so following release - and hence a second edition. I imagine the same will happen in a year or so with a re-release KS for a rewritten DKQ.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Polonius wrote:

New editions don't bother me when they are substantive improvements. KoW 1st was a good game, but the balancing of the army lists made competitive play pretty unfulfilling, although certainly better than, say, 40k.

While I pledged for DZ1, I never actually played the game as a game, so I never really got feel for it. From the comments I'm seeing, it looks like they're changing some core mechanics, which to me indicates that the first release was pretty flawed.

Either way, gaming companies run into a serious problem of addressing broken or unbalanced or just plain bad rules, in that if they do nothing, people won't play the game, but if they release new rules, people complain about spending money on rules that are now obsolete. The easy answer is to say that they should write better rules, which for KoW they really did. I'd argue that they could have created a tournament pack that would have balanced KoW enough to limp it through another year. DZ seems to be a pretty flawed game, so maybe burning it down for the insurance money was the best bet.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: while Mantic shows an alarmingly amateurish approach to running a games company, nothing to be indicates that they are in any way cunning or manipulative.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

The rules were primarily burdened with the sort of crap-ass editing and imbalance that's an inevitable result of every book being a rush job by a single man also juggling 3 other projects (and having a bit of an ego when confronted with criticism).
What needs fixing is the process, not the mechanics.

I'm quite happy to give the credit for KoW V.2 (3!) being as good as it is because of all the hard (unpaid) work that the Rules Committee put in, as well as their ability to open the rules up to the community for proper playtesting. Even so, I thought the time allowed for playtesting was woefully short, and I suspect that the two additional armies in the Not-Ravening Hordes book will suffer from a lack of public, open playtest and feedback like most of Mantic's other "closed" rules have.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I bought a tin foil hat, but they shipped me aluminum.

If we can't have a sense of humor about being screwed over for the nth time, then Mantic is the least of our problems. They certainly aren't the worst when it comes to kickstarter. Prodos and Palladium are so bad they aren't worth joking over. Defiance Games screwed over the backers in a blaze of glory that took out an entire second Kickstarter as collateral damage and nearly put two more game companies out of business, spending all their money on booze and strippers. Ronnie's really going to have to work to top that.

But feel free to dictate how we should feel when a company takes our money and breaks it's promises.

Well put, Bob. I used the last of my aluminium hat up this morning while frying up some bacon on the grill. Delicious!



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MLaw wrote:

It's not just Jake's ideas.. they have set up a "council" of people who have no business as anything other than Mantic customers. Somehow though, these people get to decide what is and is not going into the games we all are looking at. These people get to just walk away from it and claim they were just helping or they did their best or whatever but for Mantic to rely on amateurs and go directly to finish product from that.. yeah.. well.. its' very telling.

I agree with you insomuch that I think people like Matt and Daedle should be paid for their work like any other freelancers. There's no "magic touch" that transforms someone from a normal member of the gaming community (or "amateur") into a "professional games designer", and to suggest that people who are skilled at something (for example, rules writing) can't do so with any skill or talent while holding other jobs is silly. Did you know Nigel Stillman is a postman these days? JudgeDoug has written some decent wargame rules. (that I never had time to feedback/critique properly - sorry Doug!)




Automatically Appended Next Post:
edit - Sorry Red. Just saw your Mod stuff when I turned the page just now. Please don't delete it though - anyone who wants to reply can quote me and start a new thread in Discussions.

A postman? Well I hope he's happy, but I'd call that a net loss for the industry. I still remember his wonderful articles about the ethos of army building!