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 Moola since you don't have PMs, where can a Bulbasaurus hit you up?
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Dec 13, 2016 07:43
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moolapie at gmail
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Dec 13, 2016 10:22
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Not a viking posted:Re: FFG vs GW: They probably realized the money invested in the GW license didn't generate a comparable high enough revenue compared to Disney's license. I don't see why the comparative costs of the licenses would be a factor, the GW stuff might turn a smaller profit than Star Wars stuff but it's still profitable work for FFG. And presumably there's a diehard GW fan market segment for the GW licensed stuff. I'd love some insider to spill some beans on the whole thing, like I want to believe GW thinks their MAGNUS DICK-SHEATH THE ARMOR MAN poo poo is worth more than loving star wars but it's just unbelievable, even for them.
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Dec 13, 2016 11:20
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Vitamin P posted:I don't see why the comparative costs of the licenses would be a factor, the GW stuff might turn a smaller profit than Star Wars stuff but it's still profitable work for FFG. And presumably there's a diehard GW fan market segment for the GW licensed stuff. Comparative costs would matter if they have finite resources and thought they could turn a higher profit margin by using that money for something else, like investing in their own miniature factory and miniature battle game.
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Dec 13, 2016 11:26
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Given that deadzone is about the have Mantic-Totally-Not-Guard added as an army choice (and possibly for the warpath thing also?), can I get away with playing the game using any of my GW-Guard that I still happen to like the sculpts of, using them as the GCPS standard army guys in Deadzone, seeing as I'm not a fan of the GCPS "Not Marines" lookswise and I'm not sure (yet) how I'll feel about the aesthetics of the GCPS "Not-Guard"? In wargame startup talk, costs wise, Battletech is currently a mixed bag. The "current box" set gives you 24 plastic minis (plus two "bonus" minis). At launch, whenever they do a run, the official price is something like $50 for the minis, some gaming mats to play them on (hex based), dice, rulebooks, record sheets for recording the damage your little plastic robits take, and some flavour stuff. Pencils are on you to get, but that's not exactly going to kill you. As usual, when these box sets run out, the prices get hiked to stupid levels, so you're stuck waiting around until the next run of intro boxes. In the meantime, they sell 'em at 4 minis a box, at $20 a set (on amazon.com - it's a little pricier for me on .co.uk ). The lance packs (usually stuff like a "pursuit lance" or whatever) are usually okay. Basic game rules are free to download, and there's plenty of 3rd party software that even allows you to check out the rules and abilities of all these minis before paying a penny. Megamek, SolarisSkunkWerks, MegaMekLab. Heavy Metal Pro if you want to pay someone for something that's kind of outdated for anything beyond x ingame date. (something like anything beyond 3067 I think). Rules you only "need" Total Warfare, which is about 30-40 freedom bills, but I'd suggest waiting as a new rulebook is currently in development, and you can have plenty of fun playing just with robots using the free rules, rather than worrying about infantry, tanks, VTOLs, aircraft, space-aircraft (aerospace), spacecraft, armoured infantry, WiGEs, artillery, etc etc etc. So, at a core "40k-equivalent, what do I need for a 'tournament' standard fight to play the full game" level of buy in, that's some free rules for just robots only, and $20 for one of the lance packs, and you're good. Above this basic buy in level, most mechs are around $8 average, sometimes less, sometimes more (usually hitting a ceiling of about $15) for a single metal model. This allows you to buy specific sculpts if you really need to go WYSIWYG (you don't, most battletech players don't care, as long as it's obvious what it represents, and you have the correct record sheet for your imaginary robot). There are additional rulebooks - big books for beating people to death with continue to be about $30-40 or so, while smaller stuff is often as not in e-book form for about $15, and occasionally some more for DTF (that's Dead Tree Format). This is a game where the current game devs are still paying for setting changes from the old Dark Ages/Age of Destruction clix that came in with WizKids, and have been working to try and bridge the gap to make the background shifts marginally less terrible. This done, and with fantastic artwork from some people (Xarbala, this includes you, you make me want to buy Marik robots and it's all your fault specifically for being so good at drawing stompy robots), the company is now advancing the timeline again into about 3150 onwards, and from my perspective it looks pretty good. This is what recovering from a lovely End Times looks like when somebody who isn't GW does it. Of course, CGL has its own problems (I hear the CEO is/was an (accused?)embezzler? And there have been issues of people (like fiction writers) not being properly paid?), but management stories are universally lovely anyway. The Battletech computer game coming in 2017 faces none of these issues, however, and looks like it will be cool and good fun times, and is being made by a company/management that appears to have a good track record of delivering on promises, and making things that appear to be good and/or fun. This is a good business strategy apparently. Who knew? It should also be noted that there is a larger, fast paced game - Alpha Strike! which is basically less 40k-Necromunda, and more 40k-3rd edition in terms of pace to play, and Xarbala has often said it is a good and fun rules set - I have yet to play it myself, and I don't know what the buy in is like - the rulebook maintains the usual CGL pricing strategy of about $30-40 for the DTF, and about $15 or so for the e-book copy. Not sure how much it would cost for a suitable miniatures buy in to play it at a suitable (tournament??) level. I'd like to get in a game to test it out sometime, but I'm not sure when that will happen, as the battletech footprint in the UK isn't exactly what I'd call big. EDIT: I forgot. This exists: https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/collections/battletech/products/battletech-touring-the-stars-butte-hold-pdf mcjomar fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 13:05
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mcjomar posted:Given that deadzone is about the have Mantic-Totally-Not-Guard added as an army choice (and possibly for the warpath thing also?), can I get away with playing the game using any of my GW-Guard that I still happen to like the sculpts of, using them as the GCPS standard army guys in Deadzone, seeing as I'm not a fan of the GCPS "Not Marines" lookswise and I'm not sure (yet) how I'll feel about the aesthetics of the GCPS "Not-Guard"? Yes, not-Guard aka GCPS are already in the book for Warpath/Firefight, it's just Deadzone that they're starting to beta test a list for now. And yes, you can easily use old guard minis instead of new Mantic ones.
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Dec 13, 2016 13:13
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mcjomar posted:Given that deadzone is about the have Mantic-Totally-Not-Guard added as an army choice (and possibly for the warpath thing also?), can I get away with playing the game using any of my GW-Guard that I still happen to like the sculpts of, using them as the GCPS standard army guys in Deadzone, seeing as I'm not a fan of the GCPS "Not Marines" lookswise and I'm not sure (yet) how I'll feel about the aesthetics of the GCPS "Not-Guard"? The answer is a resounding yes. Mantic don't give a poo poo whose models you use in their games. mcjomar posted:Battletech stuff The current intro box, if you are lucky enough to get it at MSRP (I did last year), is also one of the best deals in wargaming, and I'm pretty sure they actually lose money on each one sold. 24+2 minis of decent quality (if you bought the 2014 rerelease of the box and not the 2011 one with the ugly whatevermech on the cover), two huge double-sided thick as gently caress cardboard maps, the basic rules book, a fairly big setting/lore book, a painting guide, and (I believe) two six-sided dice. Considering a lance is only 4 mechs, and most people don't play anything bigger than single-lance games unless they've added infantry/tanks/aero to it, it gives you a huge range of lists that you can build. IIRC they hinted at MechCon this year that a new Intro Box is in the works, but no idea how long that'll take / if it'll even happen. It should also be noted that Battletech is a miniatures game that doesn't really require miniatures at all, and for a good chunk of its lifespan as a game, mechs were cardboard cutouts mounted atop their hexes. I love Battletech bunches, but it's also got its huge flaws when compared to modern games -- its design is still throughly 1980's simulationist in nature, being probably one of the crunchiest wargames out there. It can be daunting for a new player to get into, at least without having an experienced person teaching you or without playing exclusively via MegaMek. Alpha Strike apparently remedies this quite a bit and modernizes a lot of the monolithic crunch, but I haven't yet had a chance to play it. And the community is really small, which makes something like MegaMek necessary for actually sustaining the game as a hobby. CGL suffers from being a tiny-rear end company (I think I read somewhere that they have less than 10 actual employees?) and as such can't really push stuff out like more focused wargame companies like Hawk, Corvus Belli, or Mantic can. But they're doing pretty well given the barely-existent resources they have to work with. Something Awful is a bit spoiled in that we have goons who are devs on the upcoming PC game from HBS, and a guy who works for CGL on actual Battletech. And an amazing years-long LP by PoptartsNinja that has probably done more to attract goons to the setting than anything else in recent memory. Drone fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 13:21
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Disney doesn't charge obscene amounts for the Star Wars licence as getting the IP out everywhere in every imaginable format is part of the marketing strategy.
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Dec 13, 2016 13:35
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NTRabbit posted:Yes, not-Guard aka GCPS are already in the book for Warpath/Firefight, it's just Deadzone that they're starting to beta test a list for now. What do their new guard look like?
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Dec 13, 2016 13:36
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Atlas Hugged posted:Comparative costs would matter if they have finite resources and thought they could turn a higher profit margin by using that money for something else, like investing in their own miniature factory and miniature battle game. This is why GW killed Fantasy, Sisters of Battle etc. Comparative to Space Marines and Space Marine accessories, those lines weren't worth anyone's time.
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Dec 13, 2016 13:37
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   These are taken from the new Firefight rulebook for Mantic's Warpath universe. The biggest issue with the sculpts are their derpy Halo helmets. Some people have been turned off by the placement of their kneepads because it makes their legs look weirdly proportioned, but that's actually where you wear kneepads on your leg. They also come with female heads. The story I heard with Catalyst is that someone in the company suddenly had a new porch and there was a bunch of money missing, very Palladium style, but they've more or less recovered since then. Randy seems like an alright dude who really loves stompy robots.
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Dec 13, 2016 13:43
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sassassin posted:This is why GW killed Fantasy, Sisters of Battle etc. Except GW doesn't have to continually pay to reuse their own sculpts. The molds are already paid for and they've never had qualms about adjusting prices if they felt the profit margin wasn't high enough. This is also combined with the fact that we have no idea how much Fantasy was making. There have been no solid reports on how their income breaks down by line. Plus, we saw the first new Sisters sculpt in years sell out in literally minutes. GW also has no debt and doesn't invest or diverse like other businesses do, so trying to draw parallels of normal business practices between GW and other companies is completely meaningless.
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Dec 13, 2016 13:48
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Atlas Hugged posted:
They also come with closed helmets, and though you can make them any way you want, the closed helmets - and arms with a different kind of rifle - are meant to be Rangers.  GCPS also has three vehicles - the Mule Transport, the Hornet Dropship, and the Lancer MBT, though the Lancer doesn't have a model yet.    Without and with the transport pod NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 13:53
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Isn't cutting the heads off and replacing them with cooler ones pretty trivial though?
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Dec 13, 2016 13:57
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supposed explanations for any of GW's actions that aren't 'GW dumb and poo poo' are almost universally baseless bollocks. those Mantic models are pretty nice but have the same offputting lankiness as a lot of their sculpts, it's hard to pin down...they seem like a sort of undecided midpoint between heroic/cartoon scale and realistic proportions?
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Dec 13, 2016 14:00
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Atlas Hugged posted:
Yeah the heads aren't wowing me.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:04
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Saint Drogo posted:those Mantic models are pretty nice but have the same offputting lankiness as a lot of their sculpts, it's hard to pin down...they seem like a sort of undecided midpoint between heroic/cartoon scale and realistic proportions? It's because of the helmets. You're mentally processing the helmeted head as being just the head, which gives a bobblehead optical illusion, but if you made the helmet the size you'd expect the head to be, the head inside it would be tiny.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:04
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NTRabbit posted:GCPS also has three vehicles - the Mule Transport, the Hornet Dropship, and the Lancer MBT, though the Lancer doesn't have a model yet. Any concept art of this, or anything?
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Dec 13, 2016 14:06
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spectralent posted:Any concept art of this, or anything? All there is so far, lifted from the rules  It's a hovertank. Has a Leopard 2 by way of Merkava feel to it in that drawing. Not sure what's going on with that turret, but feedback should knock some sense into it. NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 14:08
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Drone posted:Isn't cutting the heads off and replacing them with cooler ones pretty trivial though? It's more that you don't have to glue on the ones you don't like. NTRabbit posted:All there is so far, lifted from the rules It's very Battletech.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:10
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Atlas Hugged posted:Mantic pictures These looks pretty okay. They actually look more detailed (and in a way more believable) than the GW equivalent. Okay, sure the heads are a little derpy, but otherwise they're kind of cool. I think I could maybe get used to them? The vehicles also look unterrible. Honestly, if Mantic Warpath/Firefight/Deadzone takes off, I'll totally buy in on these guys as my army for that stuff. I guess I should grab a deadzone rulebook, and maybe a warpath rulebook (when they release it? Have they released it in DTF? and firefight?) as Mantic looks like my not-GW choice right now when I'm not playing with robots.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:13
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mcjomar posted:Honestly, if Mantic Warpath/Firefight/Deadzone takes off, I'll totally buy in on these guys as my army for that stuff. Mantic have their own digital distribution. Deadzone 2.0 is available, Warpath and Firefight are not yet - backers only just got their copies this week, probably waiting til a few more backers have boxes in hand before going to retail. Deadzone is good and should be taking off.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:16
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I think those Mantic models look like rear end not good rear end, bad stinky rear end!
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Dec 13, 2016 14:17
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Yes I agree so bad rear end.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:25
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They are ok.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:27
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Moola posted:I think those Mantic models look like rear end How do you feel about Mantic Scrunts?      Too Scrunty? Not Scrunty enough? NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 14:28
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there is one scrunt there try and guess which one!
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Dec 13, 2016 14:45
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Is it the Steel Warrior with the open faced helmet displaying his beard?
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Dec 13, 2016 14:46
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nope
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Dec 13, 2016 14:52
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It's the brokkr with the goggles and the remote.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:56
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winner!
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Dec 13, 2016 14:57
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Vitamin P posted:I don't see why the comparative costs of the licenses would be a factor, the GW stuff might turn a smaller profit than Star Wars stuff but it's still profitable work for FFG. And presumably there's a diehard GW fan market segment for the GW licensed stuff. FFG has figured out that anything with the Star Wars brand will sell like absolute crazy, so a huge portion of their resources are devoted to cranking out material for all the board, miniature, LCG, CCG, and role-playing games in the lineup. Also, the word around town (near FFG headquarters) is that GW was getting fed up with FFG's licensing agreement tomfoolery. If rumors are true, the GW license was granted on the agreement that FFG wouldn't make straight up miniature war games of the likes to compete with WHFB/40K/AOS/Whatever. When X-Wing came out, the argument was it was a "vehicle game", so didn't count. Then when Imperial Assault hit, FFG told Hasbro it was a miniatures war game, so didn't violate their ownership of the license for SW board games (Hasbro didn't buy it, threatening letters and stink eyes ensued and now Hasbro gets a slice and distributes the game), but told GW that it was a board game, so didn't count. Once Asmodee bought FFG, the writing was pretty much on the wall that they'd break from GW. We may never know who actually cut the cord or what their exact reasons were, but FFG had already dicked GW over some and GW let them roll with it without ever taking their toys and going home, so I'm inclined to believe that this is just more Asmodee world domination of wanting to be the everything in every corner of the tabletop hobby. Enter Rune-X-Wing-Wars.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:13
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I'm awaiting the day when FFG turns and isn't the beloved underdog anymore but, being part of Asmodee, will be considered the "EA" of board games. Let's hope it doesn't happen, but 
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Dec 13, 2016 16:18
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The argument that FFG is just exploiting the Star Wars license by pumping out waves and waves of stuff with nothing but dollar signs in their eyes would hold more water if pretty much a single one of their Star Wars games were bad. Pretty much all of the Star Wars games that FFG has released have been objectively good, well-designed games. They aren't without their FFG-style eccentricities (sometimes questionable technical writing and an over-reliance on cardboard chits/funny dice), but they are also definitely not awful shovelware.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:22
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Chill la Chill posted:I'm awaiting the day when FFG turns and isn't the beloved underdog anymore but, being part of Asmodee, will be considered the "EA" of board games. Let's hope it doesn't happen, but A lot of FFG's horribleness gets glossed over because Star Wars nerds will forgive anything as long as they're getting hosed with something that has a Star Wars logo on it. I say this as an admitted Star Wars nerd, though even I won't take X-Wing's distribution model up the rear end.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:23
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Drone posted:The argument that FFG is just exploiting the Star Wars license by pumping out waves and waves of stuff with nothing but dollar signs in their eyes would hold more water if pretty much a single one of their Star Wars games were bad. Pretty much all of the Star Wars games that FFG has released have been objectively good, well-designed games. They aren't without their FFG-style eccentricities (sometimes questionable technical writing and an over-reliance on cardboard chits/funny dice), but they are also definitely not awful shovelware. Shadin posted:A lot of FFG's horribleness gets glossed over because Star Wars nerds will forgive anything as long as they're getting hosed with something that has a Star Wars logo on it. I say this as an admitted Star Wars nerd, though even I won't take X-Wing's distribution model up the rear end.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:27
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Chill la Chill posted:I'm awaiting the day when FFG turns and isn't the beloved underdog anymore but, being part of Asmodee, will be considered the "EA" of board games. Let's hope it doesn't happen, but
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Dec 13, 2016 16:28
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Chill la Chill posted:They started shoveling waves at us this past year. Doesn't look like it's slowing down. But it's for a game that's good. You can divorce the quality of the game and its gameplay from its distribution model.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:30
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I dig those Mantic sculpts. If the price is right and the rules are as good as Kings of War I might be convinced to try a sci-fi battle game again. But most likely I'll just get into Kings of war because I actually like a bunch of their fantasy sculpts, and multibasing dioramas would be a sweet change from painting solo minis for Infinity. Or maybe get some Perry miniatures to use as a human army, and then some bones as monsters that are supporting them. I dunno, whatever man - that's the beauty of Mantic.
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Dec 13, 2016 16:36
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Chill la Chill posted:They started shoveling waves at us this past year. Doesn't look like it's slowing down. They can keep shoveling as long as the ships remain cool that U-Wing looks rad!
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Dec 13, 2016 16:36
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