Mantic’s Battlezones Are Getting Industrial With A New Set!
June 14, 2016 by brennon
Mantic are adding to the terrain you can use within your games of Deadzone and Warpath. Here we have the Industrial District which comes with a fantastic set of different terrain pieces as well as pipes, and a conveyor belt allowing you to create some fantastic set pieces...
There are various sets for this which allow you to create different sized structures. You can see that as well as the big buildings they come with a nice bit of scatter terrain too which is nice for breaking up line of sight.
I think this would be great for all of those Veer-Myn armies that you'll be picking up to play games with. There are also plenty of neat sniper spots on the tops of these buildings where you could poke rifles through the fans.
Of course like with Lego this stuff mixes with the rest of the Battlezone terrain so you could create some interesting landscapes. I'd love to see what people could do with this if we designed another BIG challenge.
What do you think of this set?
"There are also plenty of neat sniper spots on the tops of these buildings where you could poke rifles through the fans..."
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This looks really good, very useful for 40K. Lots less skulls.
Does look like the perfect setting for an industrial music gig for sure. Now Mantic just needs to start producing 28mm scale miniatures of industrial bands…
Bow down before the one you serve! And all that…
Ah ha!
Of course!
I thought that it looked familiar – it’s a Rammstein stage set. Just needs some flamethrower equipped troops.
I like the ramps, and the scatter terrain, and to a lesser extent, all the gubbins attached to the buildings.
However, I’m not sure on the buildings themselves; they just seem to be “slabs” that block los, and don’t seem to add say any verticality to the proceedings
That said, I’ve no idea on Deadzone’s rules, so perhaps this is an unfair criticism when looking through the scope of other games which benefit from being able to put troops on higher positions; eg: Infinity.
The battlezones are modular – you get 3″ x 3″ wall/floor/ceiling sections that link together, so you can build terrain that benefits stuff like inifinity etc.
@onlyonepinman just put some together on the @unclejimmy thread. Looks to be quite versatile.
I put a bit of a review below
Deadzone is very 3D. Height gives you an advantage when shooting and the scenery reflects that.
They add as much verticality as you are prepared to build. There’s nothing stopping you building a single very high tower, if that’s what you want. A two story building is around 6″ tall, there’s nothing preventing you from doing a 3 or 4 story building. Well, aside from your own patience.
Niice 😀
Very shiny. Would go well with the Technolog stuff I bought a ton of.
looks great & more adaptable to make unique terrain.
I have huge amounts of the standard Mantic terrain and KS will be getting me some of the pipes and gubbins from this industrial stuff. It’s not quite there yet in my honest opinion. Somehow need to disguise the square panels more to reduce the blockiness of the larger buildings eg. Corner piece strips and ledges to stop the square flat panels being so obvious perhaps. Maybe a few exotic larger panels to breakup the pattern of connectors etc.
I think what I’d really like to see is the ability to buy single panels or multipacks of the same panel
I backed this on Kickstarter so got it early and recently assembled it. Here are my thoughts.
I’m going to start with the bad, that way if you read the whole post you will still feel positive when you get to the end.
Assembling this stuff is a royal pain in the arse. The clips, that are supposed to make it modular, and presumably reconfigurable, actually make the whole process very difficult. Some of the panels are mis-cast which causes two problems; the sockets for the clips used to connect pannels are either slightly enlarged, causing clips not to stay connected, or mis-shapen causing clips not to fit at all. If you discover one of these panels and you have already connected it to another panel, the pressure required to add more clips or the work required to clean up the panel means that in all likelihood the pieces you have assembled will likely come apart. It’s also very difficult to tell whether or not the sockets need and clean-up just by looking at them, you have to try a clip in them to check. Most of the clips however fit well, if a little tightly, so once you have clipped them together you will need a tool to separate them – if you pull them out by hand you will snap them. Using a tool to separate them is a sure fire way of scratching any paint work so the kits definitely aren’t re-configurable; once you have built something it pretty much has to stay that way. All in all the clips make assembling this more difficult but do not actually add any benefit. The kits would be better if they had flat surfaces and were intended to be permanently glued together. I’ve found I’ve had to glue everything together with poly cement to prevent the models from disintegrating under the pressure required to attach clips and accessories to panels.
Also, be prepared to get a box of components with no instructions. This might sound a little weird given that the intention is that it’s modular and you can build what you like and on the surface it is quite straightforward. You insert the clips into the sockets on the panels and connect panels, you will probably have a few fall apart on so you will rebuild and then glue the clips in place. Then you will decide to add some accessories such as computer terminals, pipes and security lights only to realise that these accessories are intended to be used instead of clips, the clips you just had to glue in place and now can’t separate. When the author of the article compares it to Lego, he forgets to also compare it to Buckaroo – tnis stuff will spring apart on you at the worst possible moment if you don’t glue it.
One final point. The large pipe way comes legs you can use to raise it up off the ground that don’t actually work unless you cut a lot of plastic off them. This is really a design flaw, there should be more feet so you don’t have to trim the bottom and the pieces that connect to the pipe are simply not the right shape.
Now onto the good. Assuming that you have struggled through the assembly process the final product looks great. It’s very versatile and would suit many sci-fi games such as Infinity and 40k as well as the Mantic games. You also get a lot for your money – I combined my set with an Urban District kit (which cost me £25) and the result is enough scenery to fairly densely cover a 2’x3′ area, including walkways and some fairly decent height and it is highly likely I will buy more.
This is how much I have managed to build using an Industrial Quadrant set and an Urban District set.
http://www.beastsofwar.com/wp-content/uploads/forumfiles/rps20160613_113549.jpg
That sounds like an awful lot of hassle despite the cost tbh.
Maybe. I guess you have to decide for yourself whether the end justifies the means. Personally I’m very happy with the final result, despite the frustrations involved getting there and will probably buy more, especially now I have a better understanding of what it’s all about and how all the components work. I can see it being very unforgiving for beginners
I think in terms of what you get for your money it’s worth it, especially considering how versatile it is and possibilities it presents. Just don’t believe everything you have read about it because most of it doesn’t paint an accurate picture.
I guess it depends how much spare time you have; I don’t really have much in the evening as I spend it with my little girl and read her stories at night.
I’m not sure tackling something that sounds that frustrating in the evening would be a good thing for my mood tbh.
For me, I’d rather pay a little bit extra and get something that looks nicer / is easier to put together.
Well, they will look as good as you construct and/or paint them I guess.
And no skulls! 🙂
That Stuff really lacks instructions. I have it on my table for a few days now and have for instance no clue how the ramps of the conveyor belts are supposed to be put together.
Haven’t found anything for that on the net.
The conveyor belts aren’t too bad. You should have some supports (about 1.5″ long) that gave the same pattern of plugs at each as the standard clips and you should have some feet (about 1″ long) that contain sockets to plug the legs into. The conveyor belt pieces are connected together using the legs in the same way as the wall sections. To build the ramps you should have 3 special pieces: two very short sections (about 1cm) and a regular length section that does not have sockets for clips on the underside. The two short pieces will have a rectangular peg at one end which is near the top on one and near the bottom on the other. These pegs fit into the regular length piece and the short piece that has the rectangular peg near the bottom is the top of the ramp. I’ll post some pictures tonight to help explain a bit more.
It looks like the smelting company I was at yesterday 🙂
having spent some time to build / dismount mantic scenery, i fully agree with onlyonepinman analysis : the clips are a pain to assemble.
my thoughts after much testing is that this scenery is to be used 2 ways :
1 – build buildings : you have to go the glue way or use lots of connectors to have something sturdy. it takes time to build that way.
2 – build scenery that needs to be dismounted :
– first learning : never use clips if you can help it. the accessories are to be used as clips and can be used to quickly connects panels
– use pillars / poles horizontaly to connect 2 panels : just requires 3 pieces (2 panels / 1 pole) to have 2 walls standing
– build bridges and walkways independently so that you can just put them on top of the buildings
– big pipes can be used to make barrels (of chemicals)
finally the industrial scenery is far better than the original : the plastic seems less brittle and so far they fit better being a little more elastic than the early scifi version
I have found that when combining the industrial set with an older Urban set, the panels from the Industrial set went together much more easily. I also noticed that the plastic is slightly different and the new industrial stuff seems to be a better quality; a fact possibly related to them being slightly easier to assemble.
They seem to have made a lot of improvement