Dungeon Command: Heroes, Drow, and Goblins

[TerraDave]

They promised us a new minis game, and it looks like we are getting it, just as I was starting to have my doubts.

 

[Argyle King]

How many minis will come in each set. I really have no interest in the skirmish game, but I think it would be nice to be able to get a themed set of minis such as a pack of kobolds or orcs or something like that. I generally like to paint my minis, but being able to round out my collection with bulk amounts of commonly encountered creatures would be nice. Depends on the price though; I'm curious how many I'm getting for the price on the box.

 

[contraserrene]

And while the university I work for doesn't have the technology, my understanding is that colour 3d printing is available. Even so it wouldn't be impossible to produce the 3D printed product and then ship it off to Taiwan for painting, if it proved to be more cost effective.

I believe that it would certainly be cost prohibitive at this point though.

Color 3D printing does exist; I got to see some examples about a year ago while visiting an office that had such a printer. They were able to take models from video games and print them, in color. They had some 8-10 inch high figures created in this way, mostly as a test. They looked really good in a cartoony style.

The printer mixes dyes into the plastic powder where appropriate; the color goes down about 1/32 of an inch into the figure.

They were more resilient than I expected but you still had to be careful holding them- small details were often cracked and there were chips everywhere after a few weeks of people like me manhandling them.

I didn't get a cost breakdown as it was just a curiosity at the time, but I gather that while the expense is greater, the time cost is even more so- each color is effectively a separate material which the machine needs to mix and layer on.

 

[Ryujin]

Color 3D printing does exist; I got to see some examples about a year ago while visiting an office that had such a printer. They were able to take models from video games and print them, in color. They had some 8-10 inch high figures created in this way, mostly as a test. They looked really good in a cartoony style.

The printer mixes dyes into the plastic powder where appropriate; the color goes down about 1/32 of an inch into the figure.

They were more resilient than I expected but you still had to be careful holding them- small details were often cracked and there were chips everywhere after a few weeks of people like me manhandling them.

I didn't get a cost breakdown as it was just a curiosity at the time, but I gather that while the expense is greater, the time cost is even more so- each color is effectively a separate material which the machine needs to mix and layer on.

The products, of 3D printing, are not the sort of flexible plastic that you would find in a typical plastic mini. Because of this they are more fragile. On the other hand a great deal of complexity is possible, right down to the creation of moving parts. One of the test templates, that shipped with our Mechanical Engineering faculty's units, was a small adjustable wrench, complete with worm gear adjustment.

 

[Kelvor Ravenstar]

How many minis will come in each set. I really have no interest in the skirmish game, but I think it would be nice to be able to get a themed set of minis such as a pack of kobolds or orcs or something like that. I generally like to paint my minis, but being able to round out my collection with bulk amounts of commonly encountered creatures would be nice. Depends on the price though; I'm curious how many I'm getting for the price on the box.

I downloaded the playtest materials for the skirmish game when it was released, so I can comment on the numbers of minis, and the likelihood of new sculpts.

The playtest documents had 12 minis per pack, with 1-3 large creatures.

Drow:
Demonweb Spiders (x2)
Drow House Guard (x2)
Shadow Mastiff
Giant Spider (large, I think)
Drow Wizard
Umber Hulk (large)
Drow Priestess
Drider (large)
Drow Assassin
Drow Blademaster

Heroes:
Gold Dragon (large)
Earth Guardian
Dragon Knight
War Wizard
Elf Archer (x2)
Human Ranger
Dwarf Cleric
Halfling Sneak
Dwarven Defender (x2)
Half-Orc Thug

Pictures were not provided with the documents for the minis, so I can’t be sure which will be reprints. But going by the names, I’d say we’re likely to get 80-90% reprints for the first few sets, but of very good minis to be reprinting. I’ll be picking up these sets to get another drider and umber hulk, and the gold dragon and reprint of the purple dragon knight.

For the dungeon tiles, the ones in the playtest document were four 8 x 8 tiles, and four 4 x 8 tiles, so I think it’s likely that we’ll get two 8 x 8 and two 4 x 8 tiles in each box. There was some debate on the playest forums about whether they’d be compatible with the existing dungeon tiles, or interlock like the Adventure Game tiles (Castle Ravenloft, Legend of Drizzt, etc). I really hope the playtesters did convince them to keep them straight edged.