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Very happy to have backed for all the factions and all the STLs, it's all looking amazing and can't wait for it to deliver!

The Mantic Universe Podcast latest episode is an interview with Ronnie.

EPIC:

Should be with backers in June

Retail launch July inc STLs

Unlocked factions at retail by October

Ongoing support including PRINT ON DEMAND for large support units

Ronnie also mentioned a new quicker to play version of Dreadball that will be going back to kickstarter at some point.

Dreadball: All-Stars, IIRC?

NAVARRO wrote:Its plastic so should be very simple to snip and repose.

Hypothetically, but sniping a 10mm plastic figure is likely to mar it pretty badly. Careful slicing and it should glue together will enough but it's the same kind of fun as gluing 28mm true scale ankles and wrists.

Or Mantic could have just paid the comparatively negligible cost for the sculpture to do some additional pose variations.

Pacific wrote:My thoughts on scale are that at this level you need some abstraction. The Mantic minis here are *far* less out of scale than the first editions of Epic (Rhinos in particular are hilariously small) and those things were sold in the hundreds of thousands. So, I really don't think it is going to be a deal-breaker for a majority of punters.

A good range of easy to assemble miniatures, reasonably priced, with a game that is straightforward to play .

Completely disagree. One of the advantages of a smaller scale is that you DON'T have to abstract the vehicles at all and you can abstract your structures and ground scale much less than 28mm.

No argument that this is a good value, but justifying the scale discrepancies as being an improvement on a game that came out 35 years ago is a very low bar to hurdle.

I adore the Kings of War rules. I really like the Mantic crew that I've interacted with over the years at Adepticon. Really nice people who want to do good games at a fair price. Halo and Walking Dead seem like proof they they can deliver the goods the same as other top tier companies.

However, -especially with their proprietary lines- they keep shooting themselves in the foot with this kind of malarkey. Compromises in products and sculpting and size choices (or mistakes?) that keep knocking them off the mark. It's a company I want to support more, but I feel like they keep doing silly things like this and giving me reasons not to.

 mattl wrote:
Dreadball: All-Stars, IIRC?

Hope this is not more of that Overdrive game/approach.

I hope not too, but I'm also sure they've realized that wasn't what people wanted given the sheer number of the miniatures from Overdrive I've received in crazy boxes.

The only teaser for Dreadball we got by now was a small gameplay and lore snippet, but this would confirm it is still Dreadball and not a different game

 mattl wrote:
Vehicles and infantry on the same frames is exactly what Space Marine/Epic 40,000 did.

I wish they'd used different colored plastic too.

Epic 40K did not.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

SU-152 wrote:
sad, same no-go as armoured clash: infantry and vehicles come in the same sprues and cannot get them separately...

Sounds like Legions Imperialis is the game for you.

What's wrong with keeping playing Epic Armageddon?

 kodos wrote:
The only teaser for Dreadball we got by now was a small gameplay and lore snippet, but this would confirm it is still Dreadball and not a different game

Thanks for that. Fingers crossed

Fingers crossed

Already got burned once with Dreadball Xtreme

SU-152 wrote:

 mattl wrote:
Vehicles and infantry on the same frames is exactly what Space Marine/Epic 40,000 did.
I wish they'd used different colored plastic too.

Epic 40K did not.

it did although marines got another sprue with bikes instead of Rhinos next to the infantry

 kodos wrote:

SU-152 wrote:

 mattl wrote:
Vehicles and infantry on the same frames is exactly what Space Marine/Epic 40,000 did.
I wish they'd used different colored plastic too.

Epic 40K did not.

it did although marines got another sprue with bikes instead of Rhinos next to the infantry

Depends on the edition, the later editions recut and resculpted those sprues a few times with infantry-only, but the early plastics were all mixed infantry w/ vehicles for Marines, Orks and Eldar sprues

I would have prefered Mantic do separate infantry-only sprues, but that's not a realistic ask for a small niche game like this, the mixed sprues were pretty much required. On the plus side, all the extra weapon turrets should make for fantastic Battletech weapon emplacements, just need some extra hex bases and some plastic automotive clips to act as platforms . Looking forward to the retail release for these sets

Dreadball suffered a lot from the 2.0 KS taking a long time to deliver and then being very different to the brief on delivery, requiring £80 of captain card packs to play fully if you'd gone all-in.

There wasn't anything wrong with the 1.0 rules ("the ball shatters" action card excluded), so the new edition felt like adding extra bits for the sake of changing things up.

Dreadball 1.0 is a much better game than Blood Bowl and a return to the more streamlined original approach would be great. I miss when it had an active scene and loads of tournaments.

It can be played in 30-60 minutes whereas depending on teams and player speed, I've had 3-4 hour games of blood bowl.

Ronnie said in TMU that he basically killed DB with Extreme and he genuinely regrets the decisions he made on it.

I dunno, I recall Faceless team basically making all other players get fed up of the league and we never bothered doing a second when 3 other players signed up on faceless.

RIP my teleporting Teraton Turtle Titans

 Tabletop_Magpie wrote:
Ronnie said in TMU that he basically killed DB with Extreme and he genuinely regrets the decisions he made on it.

Not sure what he means or how that looked like from his point of view

I saw it like this

I never played basic DBO

I backed Xtreme KS all in, thinking it was a new parallel way to play that seemed more exciting to me (prison rules, with bombs and shivs etc). I got all teams and two neoprene pitches so I could run events.

Mantic released the DBX box and a phoned-in team compendium

Then went straight back to using those models for 3 more seasons of DBO, each with its own book, web coverage, etc and never mentioning DBX again

DBX was just very overengineered packaging for 3 more seasons of DBO teams masquerading as a standalone game

Mantic put zero effort in it and dropped any support for it the day after it was shipped to backers

Soon after the leftovers were given away in crazy boxes

It was a bait and switch kickstarter and the most disingenuous thing Mantic had ever done, in a long history of weird cheapskate corner cutting releases

I think you've summed it up tbh mate. I can't recall verbatim but essentially:

DBO was a hit and they wanted to keep it going.

DBX had too much *stuff*, and arrived too late to keep the momentum going on DB, which had sort of withered away as there were no updates for it.

summed up - They should have released teams for DBO more slowly.

I have to be honest though, I was scrubbing through it looking for Epic chat so wasn't paying full attention to much else.

NVM. Curious about this new DB. Original DB was great. Only real issue was how jacks worked or didn’t. And they did get ahead of themselves about expansion teams. Really nice rules mechanics and the dice contested rolls were great.

Yeah, so... hoping to see the actual Epic Warpath rules soon!

I went all in on the armies and STL upgrades, and so far the sprues look great to me, but I'd love to start learning the game, you know...

The overview of gameplay might be helpful until the rules are released

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hLKyD-87jaQ&pp=ygUMZXBpYyB3YXJwYXRo

Mantic's video guy Andy just left, so I hope they keep up the quality of their videos. It has been very good in the last year or two when Andy was there.

https://www.youtube.com/@BlackJackLegacy/videos -- hoping he'll come back to his own channel now.

Huh. Hadn’t heard that. Good luck to him

As a side, does anyone know if Mantic is going release the plastic Rebs Sprue/Frame for Firefight/Deadzone this year?

Maybe
There is something coming to FF/Deadzone in summer, but I don't know any details.

As Rebs were already teased, a good chance it might be those

Has Mantic mentioned anywhere their roadmap for the Flood faction of Halo Flashpoint? I'm not so interested in the banished (coming July, I think), but the Flood figures may be neat proxies for plague infected minis. I'm very curious to see what they do with those.

 mattl wrote:
Mantic's video guy Andy just left, so I hope they keep up the quality of their videos. It has been very good in the last year or two when Andy was there.

https://www.youtube.com/@BlackJackLegacy/videos -- hoping he'll come back to his own channel now.

Did he make much content with Mantic? I enjoyed his YouTube channel quite a bit, then when he got hired by Mantic I never saw him again.

Andy was quite front facing and was on the Halo How to Plays, the Epic Warpath series, and pretty much every update with Ronnie.

I understand he was also corralling the Early Access YouTube/Twitter crowd but he never replied to my emails :(

Best of luck to him anyway!

 Shrapnelsmile wrote:

 mattl wrote:
Mantic's video guy Andy just left, so I hope they keep up the quality of their videos. It has been very good in the last year or two when Andy was there.

https://www.youtube.com/@BlackJackLegacy/videos -- hoping he'll come back to his own channel now.

Did he make much content with Mantic? I enjoyed his YouTube channel quite a bit, then when he got hired by Mantic I never saw him again.

He stopped making his own videos at that point, but https://www.youtube.com/@manticgames/videos has lots of videos he made and appeared in.

 Shrapnelsmile wrote:

 mattl wrote:
Mantic's video guy Andy just left, so I hope they keep up the quality of their videos. It has been very good in the last year or two when Andy was there.

https://www.youtube.com/@BlackJackLegacy/videos -- hoping he'll come back to his own channel now.

Did he make much content with Mantic? I enjoyed his YouTube channel quite a bit, then when he got hired by Mantic I never saw him again.

Pretty much every video of theirs he did as far as I saw.

On his last video they said moving on somewhere, won’t talk about where etc.
Just made me think oh moving on to GW