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I've changed from cautioning people about the new release to just telling them flat out Do Not Buy. Just inexcusable behavior from TTC.
Dude is from my local play group, but the first I learned of his misfortune was him crossposting in the AT18 Titanicus facebook group and I'm shocked at the level of "toxic positivity" (or just plain corporate simping) there.
The old meta is dead and the new meta struggles to be born. Now is the time of munchkins.
He cross posted it a bunch of different places, and I count at least three other people that have received a box with only 5 buildings. So far none of the corp-simps have a rebuttal for that one.
Makes me sad to see so many people struggling to defend and excuse what is obviously just a shoddy packing job. TTC gave bad instructions to their minimum wage untrained warehouse staff, and then decided the profit margins were better to just slap a 'randomized' label on the box instead of fixing it. It's that simple. And just perfectly in character for those bastards.
Having interacted with the two brothers that own Troll Trader (and by extension TTCombat), it's really as simple as they're lazy greedy bastards. The most callous disdain for customers I've ever seen, and I've spent 15 years working for a university with a business school famous for arguing an ethics credit requirement would make their graduates less competitive with their peers.
slyphic wrote: Having interacted with the two brothers that own Troll Trader (and by extension TTCombat), it's really as simple as they're lazy greedy bastards. The most callous disdain for customers I've ever seen, and I've spent 15 years working for a university with a business school famous for arguing an ethics credit requirement would make their graduates less competitive with their peers.
It's no surprise considering that at one point they had the entire "epic" scale game market and spaceship game market pretty much all to themselves. 3D printing wasn't big; GW wasn't doing anything; Privateer Press had upped and died and Warcradle would take another 5 or so years to just get Dystopian Wars back on the market. And yet Dropzone and Dropfleet never really grew in that timeframe at all. If anything they feel like they shrunk. I still can't honestly work out why or how they managed that, but then again considering their resin quality control has been spotty and they appear unable to retain staff its no shock.
Heck I suspect their random card stock set might just be down to them having such a rotation on staff that they cut corners on training cause why bother lots of training when the staff will be gone so fast .
Dropgames languished because they made no investment into distribution or marketing. People wont buy your product if they cant find it, and they wont go looking for it if they dont know or remember it exists.
CoALabaer wrote: Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
I've changed from cautioning people about the new release to just telling them flat out Do Not Buy. Just inexcusable behavior from TTC.
Are the starter sets the same way? The cardboard buildings I got from the DZC starter sets are some of my favorite terrain.
I saw in one of the Reddit posts that customer service had refused to help and was rude, and there was speculation that the terrain CS was different from the DZC/DFC customer service team. Any indication this is so? I’ve had no issues getting replacement resin parts from TTCombat. I just received a replacement part last week, and I only had to send one email with a photo, receiving no arguments or back-and-forth hassles.
The Battlezone starter from the KS was supposed to come with paper terrain, right? Did they mention in any small print of the selection was going to be randomized?
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Overread wrote: For every step they take forward they make one to the side and two back it seems with TTC
Heck their new plastics for Dropfleet are awesome - however for some reason the went from really high end bases to honestly pretty rubbish ones
The laser cut acrylic ones? Those they can manufacture in house, where the old plastic bases were not.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2025/03/20 17:42:43
Are the starter sets the same way? The cardboard buildings I got from the DZC starter sets are some of my favorite terrain.
... speculation that the terrain CS was different from the DZC/DFC customer service
The laser cut acrylic ones?
The 2 player starter set has no buildings. It has two folded single sided 3x4 foot posters. The paper terrain set has the same folded posters, the old double sided city block tiles are gone. Between Reddit, Discord, and a couple forums, I've talked to 6 people now that had boxes with only 5 types of buildings in them. And three people that got a reasonable mix, at least half unique. So I am even more certain that this whole problem is because they gave some minimum wage kid from rural England a table full of boxes to stuff and never checked his work. And then refused to put the effort in to fix their own inventory.
The dude speculating about different CS people pulled that out of his ass. It's all the same few office people at their warehouse. TT/TTC is a small company, like 20 people, and most of them are doing different jobs. The CS queue is just a shared mailbox whoever is on desk duty that day clears. There's not different teams, different managers, it's a very flat place. There's a bunch of employees, and the owners.
The new clear bases aren't actually circles, it's like a 40 sided polygon. Which is bizarre because they have acrylic signs for their Infinity line of terrain that are perfectly smooth cuts.
A polygonal not quite circular base seems be when when they wanted to do a circle but did a half-arsed job of it. I have seen this with cheap, but unusable, 'round' bases from ebay.
It's not just the "not really cut right" the actual way they marked them also looks really crude. It's so strange to see them turn around and spend a lot of money clearly on improving plastics considerably and then cheap out on the bases so much so.
Still at least flight bases are something you can find elsewhere
There have been some cool 3D printed bases shown in the Facebook group. I still have a bunch of the old plastics, but I also don’t tend to have all my ships on bases at the same time.
All 3 of the new battleships up for pre-order today, and showing off all the variants which is really nice. Particularly for me as I wasn't sold by the PHR one they previewed, and not a massive fan of the "super battleships" in general, but there are some nicer alt builds for this one including a PHR uber carrier interestingly. Much prefer the resins for the Heracles/Minos though, shame the new version has lost the 'under bite' IMO.
Spoiler:
Super-heavy carrier?
And I think this is the best of the Bioficer options IMO...
I've a very similar thought to you on the PHR - I think the new plastic is a design evolved from the Sarpedon style of ships and is a big step up from them in style.
On its own I think its a great plastic kit perhaps hampered only by the fact that the super-versions don't appear to be much bigger/more grand than the regular (whilst the UCM and Bioficer super designs really stand out); however that might just be a photo thing and real world models will stand out all the more.
But yes I do agree that the original Heracles design really has a lot of great icon parts to it - the underbite; the recessed missile tubes on the hull and all.
Of course right now whilst TTC have resins and plastics alongside each other its not a problem you can mix and match whatever you want into a fleet and the plastic kit covers all ground so its only a visual loss if they pull the resins one day and focus on only the plastics.
The new Bioficers look awesome - my only nit-pick is that they feel a bit simple in weapon choices in that the supers don't really bring any "new" weapons or variety that the regular don't have. It would have been neat to see something fresh for the fleet appearing; but we still have the dreadnought class for that ^
Also that kit should be really visually adaptable because of their hull design and panel placement so that's going to be a LOT of creative fun!
My only worry is do I risk placing an actual order - if I do I know that right after GW will suddenly unleash the Soulblight that I've been waiting on them to do for ages!
The plastic PHR BBS are a huge improvement over the Sarpedon type. Unlike UCM and Scourge, I find their new plastics similar enough to the resins to make resin vs plastic a hard decision. Same with the Shaltari plastic battleship.
Assembling a plastic UCM or Scourge plastic battleship as a standard BB rather than the super feels like a waste.
For the limited editions, I love that they finally made a “KS exclusive” style BC for Resistance and Bioficers. The resistance KSBC is really cool looking.
Yeah esp considering that Bioficers only have one style of Battlecuiser hull the exclusive one is a great way to add some variety for that hull type. Although I'm very tempted to take the ones I've got and swap the core hull from resin to plastic so I can use some of the sensor parts on the top mount spot for the hull.
My gut feeling is that at some point the resins might vanish. The plastics just WORK whilst TTC has never really managed to build itself the right resin working system to create reliable supply.
They are in that bracket where quality control is just bad enough to be offputting to many and where some things - like gates - can be super thick or oddly placed.
So basically I feel like the long term goal would be for them to pull the resins at some stage.
When that stage is would be hard to tell - right now they are happy for side by side. Perhaps when all core ships are plastic - light, core, battlecruiser, battleship - stations. Leaving pretty much just the dreadnoughts
Then we might see them retire the older sculpts either outright or shifting them to "event only" or other limited print runs.
We've already seen them shift them to direct only products so 3rd parties won't really profit from stocking them at all.
But considering the roll-out speed of plastics I'd wager there's at least a year or two before we hit that stage. Unless they nail expansion soon or they accelerate shutdown of their resin capacity
Theyve said they want to support resins as a direct sales item as they can make them to order. Dont see them going anywhere so long as TTC has other resin products on offer.
CoALabaer wrote: Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
Getting rid of the resins would be foolish and detrimental to the look of the game. The plastics are really nice, but the resin battleships look superior in most cases.
Oh I don't deny they look cool - heck the new PHR battleship kit I think loses a lot of the charm of their 1st battleship kit and is more an evolution of the 2nd style.
